Our Roots Are Deep with Passion

by Lee Gutkind

Tony especially grew fond of his new home. The staff was deferential, the residents were kind, and everything was spic and span. He liked to sit in an inner courtyard, where he’d made friends with the resident cat, a tabby who wrapped her tail around his legs while he stroked her head. He would sit in the dining room, his plate heaped with food, and aides serving all the iced tea he wanted. The chairs were soft, the carpet plush.

  After a few months, I flew in from New York and went to lunch with them. He looked at me with wonder and said, “Jimmy, chi paga per questa roba? Who pays for all this stuff around here?”

  “È free,” I said.

  Unfortunately, my grandfather did not live to enjoy it long. He died just before Christmas. We had done a few tests that suggested lung cancer and called everything to a halt. It wasn’t worth putting him through the pain and anxiety of a biopsy. It was his time to go.

  The day of his wake was brutally cold. The daytime highs hovered around nine degrees. We bundled up Desolina and brought her to the funeral home. The moment she saw her husband laid out, she broke away from my father and rushed up to the casket. She gripped the sides and began wailing.

  Tony and Desolina had outlived all their friends and hadn’t made any new ones in Kalamazoo. To fill the void, my father had invited some of his friends and former business colleagues, but they hadn’t arrived yet. Desolina wailed and wailed, drowning out saccharine music being piped in on ceiling speakers.

  My father tried to escort her away, but Desolina wouldn’t budge. She jammed her palm in her mouth and bit it. She looked up at the heavens and wailed.

  A funeral director haltingly approached me to make sure everything was to our satisfaction.

  Yes, I told him, everything was fine. Tony looked good in his favorite Barney’s suit, bought long before the store became chic, in an era when suits came with two pair of pants.

  We finally coaxed my grandmother to a couch, where she made an occasional dash for the casket. I could see my father praying that she wouldn’t explode in the presence of his guests. When they began arriving, her face lit up. She grew calm and was quite charming.

  After they left, she returned to her husband. In the end, we had to wrench her away.

  In the months afterward, she continued to mourn her husband but, at heart, Desolina was a survivor. One afternoon while my brother was visiting, she cried, “My poor husband. He was such a good man. And now he’s gone … povereto.”

  My brother put his arm around her and let her spill her grief. Finally, she looked up at a military photograph of Tony in his Bersagliare uniform in 1917 and sighed, “Ah, well, better him than me.”

  Tony’s passing set my father and grandmother up for a showdown. In his quiet but forceful way, Tony had run interference between the two of them, keeping them on their best behavior. Now he was gone, and feelings long suppressed could crack through their relations like lava through rock.

  At first my father was encouraged by Desolina’s widowed status. Without her husband around, she might be more willing to try new things. Maybe now he could pay off some of that debt. He spent a lot of time with her, taking her around Director’s Hall to show her art classes, the card room, and an outdoor patio.

  At an exercise class, she watched residents raise and lower their arms, try to touch their toes, clap—anything to get the blood moving. After two minutes, Desolina turned to my father and remarked, “What the hell are these people doing? They look like idiots.”

  One afternoon he took her to a church service. Desolina believed in God but like many peasants had little time for organized religion. As they left the service, my father said he thought it was a good way to pass some time, to which Desolina, folding her hands together to imitate the minister in prayer, responded, “Blah, blah, blah, blah.…”

  His final hope was to help her make friends with some of the other widows. My mother even hunted down one woman who spoke decent Italian, but Desolina had no interest in a new acquaintance.

  “Tutti nasone qui,” she muttered to my mother. “They’re all nosy busybodies here.”

  My father stewed over her intransigence. It seemed like Desolina was shutting everything out so as to make her only option moving in with him. On my occasional trips to Kalamazoo, when my father and I went for a visit, I could tell he was near a breaking point. Resentment had built up. He deflected everything she said, whether she was trying to hook him in or not.

  Then she broke her hip. I believe my father could smell an imminent showdown. As he and I went to visit her that day in the solarium, he seemed to have the vulnerability of a boy. He drove nervously, silently. He walked quickly into the nursing home. He wanted to get whatever was going to be said or done over with. Would the power she had had over him as a child—roiling for forty years—now rear its head and overwhelm him?

  He was torn in half. The voice from the Old Country told him that good sons knuckled under to their mother’s demands; the voice of the New World insisted that she was responsible for her own life.

  After we wheeled her into the solarium, she began complaining: the food was awful, the people were pathetic, and she didn’t want to have to walk again.

  “Che cosa vuoi che faccio?!” my father cried. He was daring her to ask him to let her move in.

  Desolina knew that if she asked outright she was likely to be turned down. She hated the thought of being alone. Would her son actually slash the apron strings?

  “Che cosa vuoi che faccio?!” he repeated.

  She didn’t want to risk the question, so she worked him from other angles.

  “I have no friends here!”

  “I’m a tired old woman!”

  And finally, “If your father was alive he’d be ashamed of you,” she said, “leaving me in a place like this. Maybe you just want his money!”

  It was her last broadside—an attempt to deflate his honor, not to mention his masculinity which, poor woman, was how her overbearing love also affected him. He stood up from his chair with the clearest of eyes.

  “You don’t wanna walk again, Mama? You don’t have to walk again. As far as I’m concerned, you can stay here for the rest of your life!” he yelled, gesturing toward the slumping souls in their wheelchairs. “It’s not my fault that you’re here. You broke your hip. You can get up and go back to Director’s Hall or I’ll visit you here for the rest of your life—while you stare at the walls!”

  She looked up at the two of us with hate-filled eyes and then, in a kind of Old Testament gesture of futility, stuck a hand in her mouth and bit it.

  We turned around and left. Wiping tears from our eyes, we got into my father’s Cadillac. He jumped on the gas and screeched out of the parking lot. As we turned onto the main road, we passed the solarium. In a picture forever frozen in my mind, Desolina was sitting in her wheelchair with her face buried in her hands.

  Desolina walked again and returned to Director’s Hall. She refused to attend jazzercise or the new ecumenical Passover service for Jews and Christians. She made no new friends, but she didn’t have to. Her shortterm memory, already on shaky ground, slowly failed, and she retreated into the distant past. She forgot about Astoria and Hell’s Kitchen. Her mind increasingly filled with images of her youth. She spoke of her brothers and sisters and noted the dates of their births and deaths. She began singing love songs in Italian, one of which was bawdy.

  Had she even tasted the satisfaction and freedom of forcing herself to get up and walk? Who can say?

  My father’s outburst in the solarium, combined with her retreat into the Old World, had broken her gravitational pull on him. He was more relaxed with her; she was less manipulative with him. He cut down the number of his visits, which made them more enjoyable. Most surprising and beautiful to me was his response to her death: it was one not so much of relief as of sorrow.

  Two months before her ninety-seventh birthday, Desolina broke her other hip. She survived the surgery, but not her recovery.

  Her funeral was attended by immedia
te family, my father’s cousin, and my mother’s cleaning lady. Desolina was the last of nine siblings. We called a niece back in Italy and told her to spread the word.

  She was laid out in a favorite dress. Strung around her fingers—by the funeral director, who knew nothing about her indifference to the Catholic Church—was a rosary. We invented our own service: a string of reminiscences and a few readings from—of all things—The Book of Common Prayer. We brought her to the cemetery and laid her next to my grandfather in a location she would have loved: on top of a hill, backed by a forest, and within sight of a tranquil pond.

  It is strange to see their plot among the descendants of Dutch colonists, whose tombstones have interlocking hearts and greeting-card poetry. Desolina’s and Tony’s is as they lived, square and simple:

  VESCOVI

  ANTONIO DESOLINA

  1899–1993 1900–1997

  After her funeral, my father took me aside to thank me for caring for his parents.

  Had I paid back a debt? If so, it was not difficult to discharge. I played a role as the grandson who could do no wrong. Moreover, I was fortunate that a gulf, with modern America on one side and medieval Italy on the other, did not separate my father and me. Consequently I held a currency that, in his eyes, was more valuable than gold.

  My father, while mostly at peace, still has days when—no matter how you try to convince him—he wonders whether his parents knew what he gave and tried so hard to give them.

  JAMES VESCOVI’s unpublished collection of stories, from which this essay is excerpted, is called Eat Now; Talk Later. He lives in New York with his wife and three children.

  Italian Bride

  . . . . . . . . . . . .

  MARY BETH CASCHETTA

  When I am 12 years old, my mother starts dragging me off to the back pews of dark churches to watch perfect strangers get married.

  “Someday that’ll be you,” she whispers, pinching me.

  I’m supposed to want to be the bride but picture myself more the priest, holy and disinterested. I like his crisp white collar, asexual demeanor, and his purported closeness with God, but have learned to keep my mouth shut. I have a typical Italian American mother who is obsessed with marrying me off, a mother for whom weddings are the ultimate sport. There’s no room in her agenda for fantasies of priests. She trains me hard: double sessions, field trips to St. Anthony’s, St. Michael’s, St. John’s.

  Each time a new bride stands at the ready, my mother cries into a wadded Kleenex. “So beautiful,” she says.

  It isn’t true: some brides are scrawny, with beaky noses. Some are heavy, with wire-like curls sprayed into a nest. Other brides are just plain homely.

  Still, my mother can detect the beauty in any girl about to be given away to a man. And we both know that it’s me she sees in that long white dress with matching veil and shoes. Not a stranger, but her daughter. Me, flanked by a line-up of broad-shouldered attendants clad in taffeta and men in rented shoes.

  In Italy, as in my corner of Rochester, New York, wedding receptions are a birthright: soggy macaroni and chicken thighs. D.J.’d music and an open bar.

  My mother can’t wait to show me off to the crowd of whiskery gumbas, my great aunts, who magically appear at every reception. “That’s who knows about marriage,” my mother says, when the old women from Calabria stand en masse to dance the tarantella. This is their blessing on every bride, their warning for every groom, the promise of what awaits him. Watching from a distance, I can feel the weight of their swollen stomping feet, their arthritic clapping hands.

  Long ago, they let me in on the secret of matrimony: that a man (my father, say, or one of my brothers) could be so stoonad as to believe he is king, when everyone knows that women rule. Italian women.

  The youngest of four, the only girl in our family, I nod and smile, as if I’m interested.

  Aunt Peppie points a gnarled finger. “You too.”

  I believe her. I have seen her perform magic: she and her sisters, my grandmother included, can make headaches go away by dripping oil into water and saying mal’occhio, the evil eye. (Mumbo-jumbo, my father calls it.) Any one of them can snap a rabbit’s neck in half, skin it, and fry it with greens, conjuring up the most delicious dinner imaginable. Probably they are witches—Italian witches, of course, the good kind. Any prediction they make is likely to come true.

  Unable to shake off Aunt Peppie’s words as I walk the halls of junior high, I find myself agreeing to go out with a boy who’s been pursuing me since seventh grade. Not Italian. It might not actually matter, I decide, since for years I’ve resigned myself to an eerie certainty that nuptials (like train wrecks and cancer) are what await other people—my cousins, my brothers—not me. At the time, anyway, my secret emergency back-up plan is to join the nuns, but somehow I end up a lesbian.

  Imagine my surprise, twenty-five years later, when Massachusetts, a state in which by utter chance I am living, makes it legal for people like me to marry.

  “Are you sure?” I ask my partner, Meryl. We watch the news on New England Cable. “Do you think it’s really going to happen?”

  I never figured on becoming a modern bride.

  Something Old

  I come of age in the early ’80s, an era of acquiescence and yuppies. Mornings, my mother curls my hair with a hot iron, picks out pastel clothing, and talks at me until I have no desire that isn’t hers originally. This includes becoming a cheerleader. Forced into lacy anklets and patent leather shoes long after other kids are wearing jeans, I lurch haltingly out the door each morning, the first of many surrenders toward my long, illustrious career as a heterosexual.

  My mother is happy at first, elaborately dressing me up for Friday night dinners with my pimply boyfriend, his doughy parents, and a sister who’s as blonde as he is. They are Episcopalians from Maine, practiced at eating fish dinners without ever once breaking out into a quarrel, unlike the nightly brawls at my house. Their whispery voices alone are like miracles.

  Studying my boyfriend’s Teutonic family, I learn to speak low and order salad with buttermilk dressing. It feels like a science experiment, gaining access to this strange planet where no one belches at the table. In time my mother will grow to fear them, these un-Italians, and yet I love them. They talk to me, never once mentioning marriage, my hair, my odds for landing the title of homecoming queen. They are teachers, who know things; they discuss nuclear weapons, the economy, saving the environment, our entering high school. Their sole agenda is their son’s happiness.

  For adults, they seem remarkably unafraid.

  “He’s not good enough for you,” my mother says, when it finally dawns on her that I’ve been adopted by this kindly Anglo tribe. In her mind, I am Jacqueline Kennedy with princes and presidents en route for my hand. But she is wrong about Chris.

  Nerdy and sweet, he is endlessly patient with my hesitancy about romance. “You don’t have to,” he tells me, “it doesn’t matter.” Whenever I’m near him, I listen for the blood pumping through his body, striving to open the clenched fist of my own heart, to feel what other people feel. I spend the summer doing research, lying on the front porch reading Anna Karenina, wondering if love has to be that hard. Every night I get on my knees and pray to Jesus: “Please let it happen tomorrow. Amen.”

  At last Jesus answers. I fall in love.

  From the age of 13 until I am about to turn 22, Chris is my one-and-only, my heartthrob, sidekick, my entire world. He and I grow up together, navigating our stormy adolescent emotions and dreams, exploring the electric thrill of our bodies together. We take a trip to California to visit his grandmother. We are easy socializing with adults and our friends, but steal away to be alone whenever possible. We laugh. To my mother’s great pride, we are actually voted Homecoming King and Queen. He is the only boy I can ever imagine loving—and, as we move toward adulthood at Cornell and Vassar, the only man.

  Freshman year, Valentine’s Day, I take a humiliating bus ride from Poughkeepsie to Itha
ca, with a freshly minted diaphragm in my overnight bag. Going to a Cornell hockey game, we walk around the campus, drinking a bottle of pink champagne. For the first time I get drunk, and we have sex on a single cot in his dorm room. Afterwards I cry, because he’s dating other girls but pretending not to, because I’m no longer a virgin. When I throw up in a toilet in the girl’s bathroom, Chris waits for me in the hall. He walks me back to his dorm room, apologizing miserably.

  Years later, it occurs to me that his parents might have been the ones who wanted him to date other girls. Likely, he was only trying to please them; possibly, they were even right. But because we’ve made no arrangements to include other people into our twosome, I am stung and bitter, and he is unprepared for my unhappiness.

  In time Chris becomes more careful about hiding his infidelity, or maybe he decides to lie to his parents instead of me and stops it altogether. There’s no discussion on the matter; he simply becomes more attentive. Eventually we master the art of intercourse, and I begin to trust him again, determined to maintain my devotion. Even later, when I find a letter from a girl he is sleeping with, I try to break it off, but somehow I only fall in love with him more deeply. It’s as if Jesus has answered my prayers in one direction: forward. I imagine Him looking down on me with a patient face. Be careful what you pray for.

  “Date someone,” my friends back at school advise. I do. I go to dinner with a couple of nice guys. I even have lackluster sex with one of them, while shoring up my plans for the nunnery. Then, on a lark, I go with my bisexual roommate to see a couple of movies offered by the American Culture Department.

  “You only come to the lesbian films,” mentions my writing professor and mentor, Paul Russell, who teaches Queer Studies. “People are going to talk.”

  I am the straightest, squarest person on campus, but I have a versatile mind and a bold imagination. As I am standing there, laughing at his joke, it hits me who I might really be.