Our Roots Are Deep with Passion

by Lee Gutkind

  My sisters and I looked at each other with dismay. For this was just the Derby. Ahead of us lay the Shecky Greene Preakness. And the Shecky Greene Belmont—a race that went on for a grueling full three minutes. How would we survive the Triple Shecky Crown without doing the unthinkable: telling our father, “Please, Daddy: stai-zeet! Shuddup, already!”

  Fortunately, Shecky Greene lost the Derby. To one of the most famous horses of all time: Secretariat. As we left the living room (leaving behind The Dad to bemoan the outcome of the race), I whispered to my sister, “If I ever start shecky-ing like Daddy, shoot me.”

  Thirty years later, Shecky Greene (the horse) has probably gone to the glue factory. Shecky Greene (the comedian) is dead of cancer. Paperboy Curly has probably hunkered down in Sun City Center, Florida, in some double-wide trailer park. My father is eighty-nine years old. And I am a writer, doing what writers do to avoid doing their real work. I am sitting on my dirty dog-slobber-covered couch perusing not the Curly-delivered New Haven Register, but the Tampa Tribune (delivered by someone named Tammy who lives in Zephyrhills, whom I have dubbed “Zephyrhills Tammy”).

  Unlike my father, I never look at the sports page. But today the photograph of a gleaming brown horse catches my eye. “Hey Bee Bee,” I say to my daughter Celeste. “Bee Bee. Bee Bee. Lookee here. The horse who won the Kentucky Derby is called Smarty Jones!”

  My comment elicits only a bored adolescent yawn.

  So I say it again: “Smarty Jones!”

  “I heard you the first time, Mommy,” she says.

  She may have heard me. But I am not done repeating it. Even though I have vowed never to curly or shecky, I like the sound of Smarty, which reminds me of those beloved pastel-colored sour candies of my youth, and the cropped tones of Jones, a beautifully bland all-American name if ever I’ve heard one (never mind its Welsh origin). So I say it again. “Smarty Jones!” And again, with a British accent: “Smah-tee Jones requests the pleasure of your presence at high tea—oat scones shall be served.” Followed by a Texan accent: “Got me a hoss here named Smarty Jones that oughta rustle up a few hundred cattle.” Then with a Boston accent: “Smahtee Jones pahked his cah in Hahvard Yahd to take in all the ahtwork.”

  Over the next few days, I cannot let Smarty Jones go. My daughter gets an A on an algebra test and I tell her, “Great job, you Smarty Jones!” My golden retriever catches the tennis ball for the twenty-fifth time in a row and I tell him, “You are such a Smarty J.!” One of my students turns in a paper with his own last name, Barnes, spelled wrong at the top. No Smarty Jones are you! I feel like writing in his Barn-margin. By the time the Preakness arrives, I have smarty-ed and jones-ed so much that my daughter informs me, “You’re getting just like your father, Mommy.” This is second in insult only to “You’re getting like your mother.” But what do I care? My beloved S.J. wins the second race!

  On the evening of the Belmont Stakes, my husband and daughter drag me out to dinner. It is their downfall that they choose to dine at Red Lobster—which has at least four TVs posted above the bar—and my downfall that we arrive during 2-for-1 Happy Hour. After one too many a Bloody Mary/Bloody Mary, I hear the Belmont bugle blaring. I rush up to the bar. And it is there, peering over the shoulder of a fat guy downing Stolichnaya, that I watch Smarty Jones lose the third and the longest and the toughest race of the Triple Crown to a horse whose name I cannot even remember.

  “Birdstone,” my father later reminds me. “Yup, Birdstone. Birdstone took the prize. Birdstone was the one. Birdstone stole the crown from Smarty Jones. Smarty Jones. Smarty Jones!” His gray eyes grow wistful. “How’d you like to have a nice, American name like that?”

  RITA CIRESI is the author of five award-winning novels and short-story collections, including Pink Slip and Sometimes I Dream in Italian. She directs the creative writing program at the University of South Florida.

  Bitter Herbs?

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  SANDRA M. GILBERT

  The Spices of Life

  A few days ago I started to write a piece that I was going to call “The Spices of Life,” and it was of course going to be a culinary memoir and one that, like so many works in that overworked genre, would be full of contradictions—savory with celebration though salty, too, with some of the sorrow that often flavors memories of menus past. What I find myself writing, though, is more elegiac than I’d expected it to be, not just salty but bitter with what I think I recognize as the alienating taste of loss that accompanies cultural displacement, the mouthful of bitter herbs that immigrants swallow as they journey from the known to the unfathomable, from the table of the familiar to the walls of estrangement.

  Beginning the writing again, I’ve put a question mark after my new title, hoping that as I remember more deeply, the bitter will turn sweet, or at least bittersweet. “You had a happy childhood, Sandra,” my schoolteacher-mother used to say in her most authoritative classroom voice when she read some of my poems. “So why must you be so morbid?” And it’s true that as a child, raised in times and places that must have been at least intermittently harsh for my elders, I rarely recognized the tastes and scents of loss. I thought the flavorings were always happy, frequently festive.

  But I myself was often sad, for reasons I couldn’t understand, as if now and then I too had dipped into a dish of bitterness.

  Tarragon

  In the summer of 2002, I was in the kitchen of David’s Paris apartment—“my” kitchen, in a way, because although David, my bien aimé, is the sole owner of the place, I’ve organized all the stuff in the cuisine—and David was napping in the bedroom around the corner, and I was making—what was I making, some sort of chicken salad maybe, or a sauce for fish?—but when I opened a new little vial of dried estragon and held it to my nostrils, its aroma flooded out and into and all around me, and just as if I were Proust, I was overcome. Tears pricked at my eyes, not, like Marcel, for a town unfolding its roads and roofs out of the past, but for just one person: my mother—Angela Maria Caruso Mortola, dead at 97 in January 2001—who seemed to me to spring like a genie from that small bottle. She alone, or rather she and her long, lonely life in Jackson Heights, Queens: her widowhood; her isolation; her ambivalent loyalties to Sicily, the land she barely remembered; and to America, the country whose company she so much longed to keep.

  It’s sometimes said that we know our ethnicity and its history through the foods we inherit from our families, the scents and savors of what was once the quotidian. And certainly we hyphenated Americans have produced so many recipes for and of nostalgia that any memoirist must now fear her ancestral kitchen can no longer yield much more than kitsch: Nonna’s marinara sauce, Zia Teresa’s inimitable polpette, or for that matter Grandma Molly’s gefilte fish.

  But my weepy memories of my mother were different. My tears didn’t well up, as I sniffed the estragon, because I was reminded of some specialità of hers. Rather, they came because she mostly couldn’t and didn’t cook, not at least during her thirty years of marriage to my father. When, throughout the more than thirty-five years of solitude she endured after he died, she was obliged to cook for not just herself but for me and my family on our intermittent visits to New York, tarragon was the rather unlikely herb she chose to use as seasoning for most salads, soups, and sauces—maybe because, along with oregano, it was one of the first dried herbs to appear on the shelves of supermarkets in Jackson Heights. So the distinctive, not especially Italian (but instead rather Frenchified) aroma of tarragon perfumed all her “company” meals, though by “all” I mean just a few concoctions that she labored over: a quite nice preparation of breaded (and herbed with tarragon) chicken cutlets, a kind of veal stew with a light (tarragony) sauce, and a salad of (tarragon-flavored) marinated artichoke hearts.

  To be sure, my kitchen-phobic mother came from a Sicilian household with quite a culinary tradition, and there were many family stories centered on food, most notably, perhaps, the tale of my father’s trial by sausage. The son
of a Russian mother and a Niçoise father whose ancestry was ultimately Ligurian, my father wasn’t really used to things Sicilian when he first came a-courting my mother. So the older sister with whom she lived felt free—indeed, obliged—to test his love. It was New Year’s Eve, and she offered him a ferociously hot sausage, along with whatever else she’d prepared (the story doesn’t include the menu, though I could reconstruct it if I had to, but never mind). All innocence and love, the skinny young man who was destined to become my dad bit right in, for this was long before the days when you could buy a package of standard issue hot Sicilian sausages in your local Safeway, and he had no reason to be suspicious.

  Thinking it was just an ordinary sausage, he took a big bite. And manfully chewed as tears came to his eyes.

  “Sandrina, we knew he really loved her,” my Aunt Frances would assure me, with each telling of this tale.

  “You should have seen Uncle Al’s face,” a cousin would chime in. “But he never said a word!”

  And my father, listening, would beam and flush with delight, even twenty years later.

  Maybe my mother was daunted by the complexity of a culinary heritage that included trials by sausage along with magnificent pasta infornata (the family name for what, I later discovered, was also called lasagna) along with miraculously orange arancini, the incomparable Sicilian rice balls whose recipe is, I suspect, genetically transmitted to a select few citizens of Persephone’s island. Or perhaps, as a proto-liberated woman (a flapper and a free spirit, she always told me), she scorned the humdrum drudgery of the stove. Or perhaps—a corollary of this—she thought cooking would turn her into a stereotypical Italian mama, redolent of garlic and olive oil and basilico. Because in our two-bedroom, gray-carpeted, genteelly furnished Jackson Heights apartment, with its “Duncan Phyfe” table and chairs, its quasi-Regency sofa, subdued Chinese prints, and Lowestoft lamps, my father cooked and she mostly washed dishes or scrubbed floors, tasks that, oddly enough, seemed more simpatico to her than hovering over the stove.

  Well, there was at least one distinctively Sicilian dish that she did now and then make for me. When my father went off by himself to a meeting of the local Democratic Club or the Society of Civil Engineers, she would once in a while assemble a dish she remembered fondly from her childhood: escalore in brodo, with spaghetti. This was a preparation my father heartily disliked, and so, for that matter, did I at that time, though now I can vaguely appreciate its merits, or what its merits would have been if my mother had cooked it with more true Sicilian abandon and less would-be-WASPish restraint. Done right, escalore in brodo might mean sautéing lots and lots of crushed fresh garlic and maybe a little hot pepper in good rich fruity olive oil, then adding big handfuls of rinsed escarole, squeezed almost dry, to the garlicky oil and sautéing some more, and finally uniting the vegetables with several quarts of broth into which, after a while, one would introduce a half pound or so of cooked spaghetti. The whole would then be served piping hot with lots of freshly grated parmigiano, romano, or pecorino. And many traditional cooks would probably also dress the dish up with little meatballs, some white beans, and/or some slices of cooked Italian sausages, hot or mild.

  But it pains me, now, to write these words, remembering as I do that my mother’s humble and conflicted version of this recipe was usually as bitter as it was watery—not enough garlic! overcooked escarole! not even a bouillon cube to simulate chicken broth!—even while it was the most elaborate effort she made in the kitchen, at least until Daddy died and, for thirty-five years, she took up tarragon.

  Of course, my mother didn’t really need to linger alone in Jackson Heights for all those years. When my husband and I moved to northern California with our three young children two years after my father succumbed to the long-term aftereffects of boyhood rheumatic fever, we urged her to join us, first in the little Sacramento Valley town of Davis, then in more sophisticated Berkeley. Installing herself with, or near, her daughter (I was an only child) would have been the old-fashioned Sicilian modus vivendi for widowhood. It was what her sister Frances did when her husband died, and what all her sisters-in-law did when their husbands died. But to my determinedly “modern” mother, with her memories of free-spirited flapperhood, such a solution was utterly unacceptable. Just as she’d scorned the aromatic Italianità of the Sicilian ghetto in Brooklyn where she grew up, she renounced the role of aproned Nonna, nor did she want to seem to depend on me, her professorial daughter, despite her all-too-often-reiterated pride in the academic achievements she had herself trained me for. No, she too was a professional—a retired schoolteacher, a would-be clinical psychologist, an avid reader of the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, a theatergoer, a restaurant connoisseur, a would-be independent woman-about-town. No pantry theatricals for her, no perpetual second bedroom in someone else’s home, and no diminished quarters around the corner from the daughterly Big House either. She would manage on her own, thank you, like any other up-to-date American.

  And for a while she did. She had a few friends nearby, and, for maybe a decade, a number of relatives. But gradually the friends moved away, south to the sunny retirement homes of Florida, or west to be near their kids, and gradually, too, the relatives who hadn’t already moved in with their children began to die, until my mother, surviving into her late nineties, was left almost entirely alone for the last fifteen or twenty years of her life, except for our intermittent visits: alone and still stubbornly refusing to budge from her “beautiful” apartment, the gray carpet, the lyre-backed chairs, the elegant lamps, the shadowy Chinese prints.

  Perhaps it was then that the scent of tarragon became, for me, the perfume of her loneliness, the scent of a solitude into which only the voices of successive Late Show comedians brought something resembling company. For my mother passed her nights with Johnny Carson (of whom she said “he’s my best friend”) and then Jay Leno (though she didn’t think him a worthy heir of Johnny) as well as a series of news announcers whose tidings of urban violence filled her waking and sleeping hours with dread. Yet paradoxically, it was in these last years of widowhood that she enthusiastically rediscovered the ethnicity she’d so roundly repudiated as a young woman fleeing the Sicilian ghetto of her girlhood. Indeed, in these years she kept a file of clippings from the restaurant reviews that ran in the New York Times and would take us excitedly to Italian restaurants recommended by Mimi Sheraton or Ruth Reichl, places whose proprietors treated her with exactly the deference due the nonna she now was but had never (she thought) wanted to be. And in another of life’s little ironies, she repeatedly congratulated me, my husband, and our children for our attempts to replicate not just her sister’s and mother’s Sicilian recipes but even my paternal grandfather’s Niçoise-Ligurian achievements in the kitchen.

  Oregano

  My father’s father was an artist manqué, born in Nice, who had, he said, come to the United States from Paris toward the end of the first decade of the twentieth century to study, of all things, painting. Like Rick in Humphrey Bogart’s most famous role, who claimed that he’d gone to Casablanca to “take the waters,” Grandpa was obviously “misinformed.” So he became first a waiter and then the co-owner of a restaurant on Franklin Street, in the heart of New York’s market district. As I recall, his establishment was what T. S. Eliot would call a “sawdust restaurant with oyster shells,” a lunch or supper place for truckers hauling vegetables to town and for buyers or sellers of produce. Well, to be frank, I don’t remember oyster shells, but I do remember a black and white ceramic tile floor sprinkled with drifts of sawdust on which stood tables surrounded by what would no doubt now be extremely expensive, authentic, early twentieth-century bentwood chairs. And in this form the restaurant prospered for more than thirty years. But chairs, tables, and sawdust alike vanished into the shadows of history when Grandpa and his partner decided to “modernize” the restaurant in 1948, replacing the old accoutrements with shiny new linoleum tile floors, “leatherette” banquettes, and chrome-
edged vinyl-topped tables, the best that mid-century America could offer, so that the place looked like a vintage Hopper.

  Then there was a labor dispute: the longtime, old-fashioned waiters didn’t want to join some union or other that tried to organize them, the union threw a picket line around the restaurant, the truckers—all, of course, card-carrying Teamsters—wouldn’t cross the line, and so the restaurant itself went the way of the bentwood chairs, the sawdust, and the old black and white ceramic tiles. Grandpa and his partner declared bankruptcy. The only money left to Grandpa’s family was what my grandmother had saved from her household allowance. This was in fact a decent sum, for my Russian-born grandma was raised in the ways of French thrift. As a girl, she lived in Paris, where her mother worked as a housekeeper for the Orthodox priests at the Cathedrale Alexander Nevsky, so when Grandma and her husband emigrated to America she built herself a fairly substantial bank account through patient domestic calculations. Yet Grandpa was as unmanned by her money as by his loss of the restaurant, never recovering from the calamity that had left him, as he evidently felt, utterly at the mercy of his wife and of his daughter, my father’s unmarried sister, who together kept the household going in something like its former prosperity, Grandma with her savings and her thrift, my aunt with a dreary job as a personnel manager for General Electric.

  Throughout this complex history, however—whether his restaurant succeeded, faltered, or failed—Grandpa kept on cooking. When he was in the money and when he was out of it, he managed his personal kitchen, perhaps more than his professional one, with such dexterity and dedication that in my family he founded a patrilineage of cooks, passing on recipes not just to my father (who kept sauces simmering in our Jackson Heights kitchen) but also to my husband (a non-Italian who replicated some of Grandpa’s recipes better than I did) and my son (who learned them so well from my husband that he became head chef in his own family).