by Lee Gutkind
How do you sell a house when you have “the sta’ casa gene”? Furtively, and with considerable angst. I have the sta’ casa gene, the stay at home gene, I like to call it, which I cannot identify anywhere on a strand of DNA but can recognize in myself and others: the tendency to stay in one house for years and years and decades and decades—and to come from generations that have stayed in one house, so atypical of our America. This is my story.
My parents married on July 4, 1942—a patriotic gesture in a time so far distant that, although I can place it in relation to World War II, I can’t really feel and touch it, save through the memory of the apartment they moved into that day, which became, some years later, the place where I was born and grew up. Curtains and bedspreads would change with the season; furniture would come and go; the landlords who owned the house would change at least three or four times. But the apartment remained a constant—a stable place that was the only one my parents ever lived in as a couple.
They stayed married for almost fifty years, until my father’s death (longevity in marriage being linked to the sta’ casa gene). It was a happy marriage but, even if it had not been, anything else would have been, culturally and perhaps genetically, unthinkable for them. After my father’s death, my mother continued living at their original place in Bensonhurst. Then, at age 89, amidst events that constitute a separate drama but one related to my own, she moved one flight down and next door into an apartment that looks, feels, and lives almost exactly like the one that she had rented for nearly sixty years.
“The neighborhood,” Bensonhurst, was changing, as it had not for decades, and my mother’s modest move was a concession to that. The house had been sold to non-Italians, more specifically to “the Chinese”—a stereotype in this context and not people like you and me—and “the Chinese,” as has become folkloric in Brooklyn, want empty houses when they buy. The move triggered a major crisis for my mother, marked by many tearful phone calls and much indecision until she bit the bullet and made the move, albeit into a place next door almost identical to the old one.
My mother’s consort, Joe, lived in her building too but lacked the protection long-term tenants like my mother have under New York’s rent-control laws. (Rent control is sacred in New York and no one ever gives it up.) Rather than lose Joe’s companionship and undergo the trauma of his eviction, my mother chose to move next door into the two bedroom apartment they now share. With sixty years at just two next-door addresses, she may be the origin of my sta’ casa gene—though I expect that my ancestry is laced through and through by attachments to houses, long-term residences, and anxieties about moving that go beyond the usual uneasiness anyone feels about transitions and change. I envision women in black washing windows and sidewalks in Sicily or clinging to that one room shack in Calabria. Partly out of affection, partly from necessity, my ancestors no doubt stayed in place until the fateful day they were forced to move.
My father’s family’s day came after my grandfather, a labor union organizer, ran afoul of the Mafia in Sicily. I never knew my mother’s family’s reasons for immigration but I do know that they, unlike most others, had kept the farm back home in Calabria so that, illogical as it seems, my American-born mother was sent back to Italy as a baby with her mother and the other kids and only returned to the United States when she was sixteen. Economic necessity may have been another name for the sta’ casa gene or its reluctant subversion in the old country. But I suspect that needy people without the gene can and often must move frequently from place to place (migrants, we call them). And I know that economic necessity does not explain my own tendency to stay in one house—quite the contrary, in fact.
That house—soon not to be my house—is a beauty. It has gracious, flowing rooms, green trees and plantings all around, including hundreds of azaleas, and—what counts most, I think—an abundance of happy memories. My older daughter was an adorable 14 months when we moved into the house, accompanied by my parents, who drove down with us for the occasion: my daughter all chubby, wobbly legs and dark brown curls, cascading around the place with her favorite bottles in hand; my parents serious about the household details when they were not focused on my daughter’s every move. My younger daughter was born while we lived in the house and my parents took the first airplane they had ever flown immediately after her birth to see the baby. Perhaps as a result, my younger daughter has an even worse case of the sta’ casa gene than I do. The night we told her our house was going on the market—an event we’d been anticipating for years—she tried to be stoic but then broke down on the phone. She wouldn’t be able to show the house to her own children, she said; she would never, ever see us all together in a place that she had first seen with a toddler’s eyes. No porch would ever seem so special; the wallpaper in the bathroom would never be so dazzling; the cardinals in the trees wouldn’t seem, somehow, quite as red. The past would be lost and no amount of searching would ever bring it back. All true. Her sobs made me realize fully why I’d seen my father in the living room; they made me understand why I’d been thinking for days about things associated with my parents in my house.
I might be driving along in my neighborhood and see, almost as if they were really there, my parents, wheeling my older daughter in her stroller, into which they had packed groceries from the store a mile away since, like many New Yorkers, they did not drive. Teasingly unhappy with the load, my Kate would toss things to the ground and my father, with good-humored mock-scolding very typical of him, would say, “that’s enough now,” and mug a look of pride toward my mother at his granddaughter’s feistiness—though I hasten to add that she was usually quite well behaved.
In my kitchen, I saw in my mind’s eye my father washing pots and pans with the attention he paid to such things, never having owned a dishwasher of his own and unwilling to use ours. He would scour our pots and pans for hours, his tongue protruding just a jot between his lips, forgotten in his concentration. Afterwards, he’d display the results for me, often with remarks I did not like about my husband’s and my lesser standards.
Yes: the past had been a thing of richness and plentitude and I was not eager to shed it. I told myself that my past and my memories did not reside in any meaningful way in the house. That they resided in people, and in me. But was I lying, or at least not yet telling the whole truth about the reasons for selling the house?
For, of course, and perhaps inevitably, the very markers that tie my daughter to the house were the reasons it was time to leave it. My older daughter got her bachelor’s degree in 2002; my younger daughter finished college in May 2004. Our beloved cat, Spiral—she of the gentle wisdom and gloriously soft dark tortoiseshell fur—died in my arms on the deck of the house that July. Both my daughters now live in New York—the older one permanently, the younger, perhaps not permanently—it’s still possible, though unlikely, she’ll return to Durham.
The wallpaper my daughter so admires has been hanging for more than twenty years; like the bathroom it adorns, it could use a renovation and is, quite simply, on the verge of getting shabby. The same can be said for the kitchen and for some of the windows, not to mention the decks we built and love but which, one year within the next five to ten, will surely need replacing.
That sprightly cardinal flitting in and around our one acre plus of land is, truly, one of the glories of the place, a sight that never stops thrilling some part of me. But from time to time, and sometimes dramatically, our land, like any land, needed trees removed, shrubs trimmed, lawns reseeded and so forth, not to mention regular maintenance. Some years the expense can be dramatic: once, Southern pine beetles ravaged forty trees and removing them cost almost ten thousand dollars.
Let’s face it, as we try to do: our house is glorious but maintenance-intensive. Is it nice for two people? Yes indeed. Looking way ahead, would it make a great retirement house and take us into old age? Yes indeed once more. Could we keep the house if we wanted to badly enough? Yes, though it would mean some adjustments. But is it neces
sary for two people? No. Is it sensible for people with our current lifestyle? No, and emphatically no again. For here, life has dealt me a delightful twist, but one I am only now coming to terms with in the form of selling the house.
For the last few years, I have taught for my university for five months each year in New York, doing committee work and the like from afar before returning to North Carolina to teach during spring semesters. It’s been a wonderful and fortunate arrangement—one I love—an unexpected mid-career adjustment beyond my wildest dreams. Because finding a new place to live in New York each year is unthinkable for anyone who knows the crazy New York market, let alone for someone with the sta’ casa gene, I maintain an apartment in New York—and I love that place too, though it is (and will always be) too small and too new to be anything like “home.” The problem, not surprisingly, is that it no longer makes sense to maintain a large and elegant place in Durham for only part of the year, especially a place where things often happen in the yard and to the house when we’re away. And even if it did make sense, we could not really—read: comfortably—afford to do so. I have the sta’ casa gene, no doubt about it. But I am also an all-American woman and a briskly professional one at that. It might have taken a feud with the Mafia to motivate my grandparents’ generation to pick up stakes and move; it took the threat of dealing with a foreign culture new to Bensonhurst, one she found scary, to move my mother from her Brooklyn apartment of many decades. Me? I stayed put for twenty-four years, no mean feat in these United States. But, finally, I had the luxury and the flexibility (sort of) to sell the house, not out of necessity but for pragmatic reasons.
So where does that leave me? With the need, the real and practical need, to sell the house and downsize in rooms, in maintenance, and in price. But conflicted, torn—far more so, I suspect, than most other downsizing Americans.
My story to this point has been particular to me and to my family, even, perhaps, peculiar to me as the daughter of my parents and a bearer of the sta’ casa gene. The actual process of selling the house was, well … exciting and boring all at once. In March, when the house went on the market, we learned how to be prepared, at any moment, for a “showing”: house clean, desks clear, flowers out, candles lit, and all the rest. In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy says that paravans (untouchables) in the old days were required to sweep away all evidence of their footsteps in the dust as they walked. Getting ready for a “showing” is like that—the art of making yourself disappear in the place where you live, making it as close to a neutral, model house as possible. For Italians, always aware of la bella figura, the process is, perhaps, a bit easier than for most. But let’s face it, being “shown” is uncomfortable, unsettling—a bit like living in a whorehouse.
As mid-April approached without a sale, my husband and I set a deadline or, in Italian American terms, made what I call a fate-bet: if the house had not sold by April 17th when we returned to Durham from New York following my mother’s 90th birthday, we would take it off the market and rent it during my upcoming sabbatical year. We had, we simply had, to be in Venice (oh, the difficulty! It sounds so spoiled to say it!) by May 20th for me to teach a summer school semester. Once in Europe, we would be away for ten weeks—hence the time limit beyond which we felt we could not sell the house.
But April, to my surprise, turned into a frenzy of real estate madness. First, my older daughter, Kate, found a very small but extremely cute and well-located studio in excellent condition. After first losing the apartment, she got it, so we were off on one round of helping her with lawyers, mortgages, deposits, and the rest.
Then, precisely on April 17th, a far-too-low offer on our house turned into one we could consider and within a week the house was sold. Over the next month we endured: a North Carolina ritual called “the inspection,” which lists the faults of your house (a disgrazia), right down to trivial items such as a two-inch strip of paint on the hidden upper inside of a door that the painters skipped; the removal of an old oil tank we did not know we had (not so trivial—messy and fairly costly); arranging for storage; and, truly horrible, clearing out a 1600 square foot basement that had accumulated stuff for twenty-four robust years.
In the nooks and crannies of time, we looked for a new house, setting a deadline here as well: we had to find one by May 1st or we would wait, perhaps even for the year after my sabbatical. We found the house precisely on May 1st, and almost exactly what we wanted: small enough to be easier to maintain, inexpensive enough to make sense, in a heavily wooded neighborhood we liked, with trees, greenery, cardinals—in fact, a smaller version of our original house, but not so similar that it felt like moving just next door. It’s a house that still might strike my father as fit for movie stars but would more likely remind him or anyone else of a solid middle-class house on a sitcom.
By moving day, utter exhaustion ran interference with so many other emotions that it checked any impulse to feel sadness, even though, when I began this essay, the tears came quick and plenty. I’d always thought that our things and perhaps our renovations had made our house so lovely. Now, cleared and cleaned, the house revealed its secret, the secret that my father knew: it always was a beauty, with high and well-proportioned ceilings, great light, good bones, good vibes. Gleaming hardwood floors that we had installed and that I had always, always loved made it shine. I thought of my father, evoked his vision one more time, bid the house farewell, and that was all.
Except, as is only fitting, that wasn’t all. Perhaps responding to the house’s strong sense of family (we and, before us, the Hollers, had been its only owners since 1963), perhaps even sensing the sta’ casa gene in the aura of the house, our buyer—who loved the house as we had—offered to let us store some large paintings and our children’s many things, so difficult for us to sort while they were in New York, in their rooms downstairs until our return from Europe.
I’d like to end with a vision of my father, bestowing a blessing on my new house. But it’s early June of 2005 and we won’t move in until August. So that ending just won’t be.
I am in Venezia now as I write. The apartment we have rented—small, but comfortable, with windows that get lots of light and participate in the ebb and flow of our Venetian campiello—seems, very oddly, like home and is the perfect place to be in between houses. It reminds me of places my parents knew by instinct: lively street life, great vegetable and fish markets nearby, and friendly banter with the people all around. Like the parts of Sicily I’ve seen, the beauty of Venezia is evident; poverty is not—so that the place seems paradisal, idyllic. As in Sicily, I wonder why anyone born there would leave the place but am aware—as would have been the case in my grandparents’ Sicily and Calabria—that economic factors can still prevail. For many modern Venetians as for many Sicilians in the past, work would be elsewhere: on the mainland for the Venetians, across the Atlantic for the generation that emigrated in the 1900s. In Southern Italy, early in the twentieth century, poverty and its grinding needs would have been as evident and perhaps more evident than the splendor of the Sicilian landscape. Contemporary Venetians move to gentler rhythms but rhythms also largely financial. Housing has grown very expensive in the city, largely because of those who purchase vacation houses there, or long-term renters like me and my students; those born in Venice may still want to live there, but roughly 1500 leave each year, a significant number in a population now under 60,000.
Still, right now, as I write, it’s the atmosphere and now the statistics about Venice that prevail. It’s late morning. The flowers are all out in the stand beneath our kitchen: a riot of oranges, purples, and yellows. The earlier quiet—just neighbors afoot, shopping and talking—has given way to the daily cacophony of tourists making their way to Piazza San Marco. Soon, the tourists and the heat will be at their height. Soon, but not yet.
I look through some photos I have brought along—of my daughters and my parents, of my father at his 80th birthday party, glasses glimmering, smiling into the camera. I tel
l myself that the people make the home, the feelings, and the memories that travel with them. The very thought makes me feel grounded and certain—but anxious as well. Like my family before me, I knock on wood.
MARIANNA DE MARCO TORGOVNICK is Professor of English at Duke University and Director of Duke in New York in the Arts and Media. She is the author of the American Book Award-winning memoir Crossing Ocean Parkway as well as acclaimed works of cultural criticism such as Gone Primitive and Primitive Passions. Her newest book is The War Complex.
Italian American: The Next Generation
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CHRISTINE PALAMIDESSI MOORE
We squeezed past the gray Vespa, parked in the entry, into dizzying sun and another day of a June heat wave. The air smelled muddy. At the end of the vicolo, we circled Piazza Trilussa to the Lungotevere. On our left, the pea green Tiber sliced the Centro Storico in half. The shade from the plane trees near the river stretched halfway across the street. We could see the Ponte Sisto and a small curve of St. Peter’s Basilica.
I was with my nine-year-old daughter—a very affectionate child—on one of our semi-annual holidays in Rome. Our usual route to the bus stop twisted through the old Trastevere neighborhood, along a cobblestone path, past a bakery, a bookstore, and several cafés. Although the Lungotevere, the busy road that paralleled the curving Tiber River, was the shorter route, I usually avoided taking it because of the soldiers.
But that morning we were in a hurry—nearly late—to meet a friend. I opted for the busy road along the Tiber. Three olive drab armored tanks were parked on the sidewalk like ugly intrusive shouts in this city of beauty. A dozen steel-helmeted special force carabinieri in thick black boots surrounded the tanks.
Ruby balked, half-embarrassed to be approaching tanks and soldiers, and both scornful and confused that tanks were in her way.