One Saturday morning, when I am fifteen, she summons us all to what she terms “the Formal Dining Room.” She has spent the last few months redecorating it, during which time we have been banned from going in there. I assume she is about to unveil her latest decorating feat to us. While my siblings aren’t exactly clamoring to view the new and upgraded dining room, I, at least, am slightly curious about the results. I just hope that Joan doesn’t expect me to applaud her efforts, because insincere applause isn’t yet part of my repertoire. That will come later, on the many occasions when I sit through one of my sister’s movie performances and don’t want to hurt her feelings.
Consequently, I find it difficult to mask my reaction when we file into the Formal Dining Room. Moss-green shag carpet, strips of stained wood on the walls, tiles in between them that Joan describes as “antiqued,” one of her favorite words. I know it’s the seventies, but nonetheless, my design instincts have already begun to form and I am far from overwhelmed.
But Joan hasn’t summoned us to the Formal Dining Room so we can admire her decorating prowess, but because one of us kids is in deep trouble. In Judge Dredd mode, she announces that the angel food cake she’s only lately bought for coffee with her friends is missing, and she wants the culprit to come clean.
“You’ll sit here all day, until someone confesses,” she decrees.
None of us says a word. She puts an Andy Williams album on the turntable. I think to myself, Torture by music? I fix my eyes on the Asian landscape—a fall scene of junks sailing along a river—that our father has brought back from his recent L.A. trip and mentally repaint it myself.
After an hour, Joan leaves the room. We sit around the table in silence, examining one another’s sheepish faces, each of us secretly trying to guess the identity of the culprit. Although I don’t openly accuse her, I mentally finger Madonna for the crime, simply because I know that although angel food cake tastes too bland for her, she may like the name. Besides, filching it would be another notch in the gun that—figuratively speaking—she has continually pointed in Joan’s direction. Half an hour later, Joan returns and announces that a neighbor has come forward and says he witnessed the theft through our kitchen window. Moreover, he has identified the thief: me.
I am innocent, but have no way of proving it. Besides, my friends are waiting for me in our tree house. They’ve just received the latest Playboy in the mail, and I am dying to get out of the house and sneak a peek at it. So I confess to having stolen the angel food cake. I am duly punished for my transgression: grounded for a week, without any TV. Many years later, the true culprit is unmasked when Paula confesses that she took the angel food cake, but by then it was far too late, as I had long since been punished. My own fault, of course, for having confessed to something that I didn’t do. The birth of a behavior pattern, I suppose, and a harbinger of things to come.
Since Joan married our father, one of the pleasanter rituals she’s established is that each of us can select our own birthday cake. Madonna always picks strawberry shortcake. My choice is always pink-lemonade ice cream cake.
Soon after the angel food cake debacle, I am on tenterhooks as to whether Joan will still make me my favorite cake. To my relief, now that I have been punished for supposedly stealing and have paid the price for my crime, Joan has forgiven me. And I get my pink-lemonade ice cream birthday cake after all.
Making cakes is Joan’s greatest culinary accomplishment. But in general, she was an abysmal cook back then. She makes Spanish rice, but forgets to put in the rice and often serves us a massive bowl of stew from the freezer and, with a self-satisfied smile, says, “I just cooked this fresh.”
“Freezer fresh!” we all chant under our breaths, careful that our father doesn’t hear us because we don’t want to make him mad. He demands that we treat Joan with the highest respect and insists we call her Mom. All of us struggle with the respect mandate and, for many years, practically gag when we obey our father and address Joan as Mom.
MY NATURAL MOTHER, who was named Madonna, died when I was just three years old. I have only one clear memory of her. I am running around the green-grass backyard of our small, single-level home on the wrong side of the railroad tracks and step on a bee. As I cry my eyes out, my mother gently places me on her knee and soothes the sting with ice. I feel safe, protected, and loved. For the rest of my life, I will yearn to recapture that same feeling, but will always fail.
The sad truth is that I was too young when my mother died to ever really know her. For me as a child, the only way in which she existed was through pictures. One of the many I loved was taken of her sitting astride a buffalo—she is so vibrant, so charismatic, so alive, such a star. Looking at her then, I couldn’t believe she was dead, that I would never see her again. Nor could I reconcile her joie de vivre with her extreme piety.
I only learned about my mother’s intense religious devotion twenty years ago, when my father sent all of us a bundle of her love letters to him. She wrote those letters when my father was away in the air force, and he and my mother were courting.
I read just one of these romantic missives written by my mother. After reading it, I couldn’t bring myself to read any more as I am not a very religious man, and the extremism of my mother’s religious sentiments is difficult for me to grasp. Although her letter is loving and sweet, to me it seems a bit fanatical. All about how God is keeping her love for my father alive, God this and God that. I am unable to read any more because I have quite a different picture of my mother in my head and don’t want to distort it.
My father sends Madonna copies of those same letters, and I imagine that she also reads them. Nonetheless, we never talk about the letters, or about our mother. We avoid even mentioning her name.
We Ciccones may be afraid to confront our emotions, but little else fazes us. After all, we have pioneer blood in our veins and are proud of it. In 1690, my maternal ancestors, the Fortins, fled France and sailed to Quebec, then a complete wilderness, and settled there. Quintessential pioneers, they wrested a life for themselves and their families out of that wilderness.
More than two hundred thirty-five years later, my grandmother Elsie Fortin, and my grandfather Willard Fortin, marry and honeymoon in splendor at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. Although Elsie will spend a lifetime denying it, the family tree confirms that she and Willard are, in fact, distant cousins. Maybe that explains why Madonna and I, along with our brothers and sisters, are such intense human beings, our personalities and characteristics, our strengths and weaknesses, so magnified.
Our Ciccone ancestors, too, are unconventional and enterprising. At the end of World War One, my paternal grandfather—Gaetano Ciccone, then just eighteen—was forced to dig ditches high up in the Italian Alps and nearly froze to death. Convinced that the Fascists, whom he hated, were about to take power in Italy, he quit the army and returned to his home in Pacentro, a quaint medieval village in Abruzzi about 170 kilometers east of Rome.
There, a match was made between him and one of the village girls, Michelina, whose father paid him a $300 dowry to marry her. With that money, in 1918, he bought a ticket to America, got a job in the steel mills in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, then sent for Michelina.
My grandparents had five sons, which is surprising, given that as far back as I can remember, my grandmother and grandfather don’t sleep in the same room together. Even in old age, each and every night, my grandmother assiduously bolts all seven locks on her bedroom door.
My grandparents live in an old, two-story yellow-brick house with creaking floorboards, a dank basement, and a dark, gloomy attic where bats sometimes fly around. Grandmother Michelina’s taste in furnishings is austere in the extreme. The large, imposing burgundy mohair living room set is uncomfortable, and I don’t like sitting on it. All in all, the house is dark and brooding, much like my grandparents.
My grandmother spends most of her time in the kitchen, cooking Italian specialties such as gnocchi. When she isn’t cooking, she is cons
tantly in her pale yellow bedroom whose wood floors are all worn away from her continual pacing. Rosaries hang all over the room, faded Palm Sunday fronds are affixed to the wall, candles constantly burn, and pictures of Jesus are on every surface. If ever I go into the room, I find my grandmother on her knees, praying to the Virgin Mary, probably that my grandfather will quickly die and quit bugging her at last.
All I remember of my grandfather is a heavyset, hunched-up old man who drinks too much and only lightens up when he shows us how he can peel an orange in one try. After he dies, my grandmother continually moans that he is haunting her.
Generally, we don’t like visiting our father’s parents. Luckily for us, we only spend part of the summer with them. We do like our Ciccone uncles, though, in particular Uncle Rocco, after whom Madonna named her son.
As children, we favor our Fortin family, in particular our mother’s mother, Grandma Elsie Mae, whom we call Nanoo. She always tells me that I was my mother’s favorite and that she used to call me the “Show Me!” kid, because I always used to point at things and demand, “Show me!”
In many ways, Nanoo is a second mother to all of us. She was widowed a year before my birth, has soft, curled brown hair, arranged in the style of the fifties, kind brown eyes, generally wears pastel-colored dresses, very classic, never flashy, and always smells of L’Air du Temps, her favorite perfume. She is a lady in every sense of the word.
Nanoo’s husband, our late grandfather Willard, a timber merchant, was relatively wealthy. Pink is Nanoo’s favorite color, so one birthday he gave her an all-pink kitchen: a pink stove, pink refrigerator, pink dishwasher.
Nanoo’s home is elegant, just like Nanoo herself, and is furnished with all things comfortable—such as the burnished yellow leather davenport on which I always love playing. In her basement, there is a wood-paneled barroom, shuffleboard, and an incinerator—which fascinates me.
Nanoo is quite liberal. Her sons smoke pot in the basement. She calls me Little Chris. I love going to her home because she loves us unconditionally and gives us all equal amounts of attention. When she finds out that my favorite candies are Circus Peanuts, orange marshmallows in the shape of peanuts, she starts keeping them for me in a chicken-shaped ceramic dish on her kitchen counter.
She lets us eat as many desserts as we want and cooks us our favorite foods: savory meat pie and chicken soup with thick noodles, a special recipe from northern France. To this day, I still make both recipes and always think of her. In fact, two months ago I spent a few days with her in Bay City.
Nanoo is ninety-eight in 2008, and the second part of her life has been sad: Her husband died before his time, and she lost four of her eight children when they were young adults. She also had to stand by and watch as many of her remaining children struggled with alcoholism—an ongoing problem with many of my aunts and uncles, one that continues to haunt our family—but she has always been incredibly stoic. A few years ago, she was hit by a car and needed two knee replacements. Now she is almost blind and living in reduced circumstances, and fifteen years ago she was forced to move into a smaller house.
Nanoo’s home was a haven for us Ciccone children, a place where we were all equal and Madonna wasn’t the star, the way she was at home. Nanoo’s refusal to deify Madonna may, in part, be an explanation for the following scenario: When Madonna first became wealthy, I suggested she pay off Nanoo’s house, buy her a car, and engage a full-time driver and cook for her, anything to make her life easier. After all, aren’t rock stars who hit it big supposed to take care of their families? But my sister—who in 2008 is worth in excess of $600 million and who has reportedly donated an estimated $18 million to Kabbalah—opted at the time to send our grandmother just $500 a month and to pay her monthly household bills, for Madonna, a drop in the ocean. When I think of Madonna’s wealth, I can’t help but think she’s being stingy with the grandmother who helped raise us.
Nanoo, however, doesn’t think that way and is grateful to Madonna for helping her and would never for a moment expect or ask for anything more.
DURING THE KOREAN War, my father, Silvio—“Tony”—is stationed in Alaska. There, he serves with my mother’s brother Dale, and they become fast friends. Soon after, my father is best man at Dale’s wedding, where he meets my mother. They fall in love and on July 1, 1955, are married in Bay City, Michigan.
My parents move to Thors Street in Pontiac, a satellite city to Detroit. The neighborhood is opposite a large, empty field that will later become the site of the Pontiac Silverdome. Subsequently, Tony, Marty, Madonna, Paula, me, and Melanie are born in that order. Our parents have chosen to live on Thors Street because it is in a planned community that is one-third Mexican, one-third black, one-third Caucasian, and they hope that living in such a multi-racial community will foster racial tolerance in all of us children. Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video, featuring her kissing a black saint—which she conceived to highlight her belief in racial equality—is one of the many proofs that they succeeded.
Our backyard is right next to the train tracks, beside a big chain-link fence. Right near our house is also a massive electrical tower, which continually emits a buzzing noise that drives us crazy. Behind the tracks, a slope drops fifteen feet down into the sewers. When we are old enough, we climb down the manhole next to the tracks and follow the sewers wherever they go. This is our version of playtime.
Although our father isn’t really allowed to tell us because his job is so top secret, he works in the defense industry, designing firing systems and laser optics, first at Chrysler Defense and then at General Dynamics. One day, when I am in high school, he comes home with a revolutionary night-vision telescope, plus a photograph of a tank. After he shows them to us, he warns us never to talk about it. We all promise not to. But now I know what my father does for a living, and I think his profession is cool.
He feels he can trust us to keep our word because, from the time that we were small, he has drilled us in the importance of honesty and ethics. The early loss of our mother may have put a combination of sorrow and iron into Madonna’s soul—as it did in mine—and may well have contributed to her insatiable craving to be loved and admired by the entire world. That craving helped catapult her to stardom. But if the untimely loss of our mother indirectly drove Madonna to become a star, it is our father who instilled in her the tools that maintained her stardom: self-discipline, reliability, honor, and a certain stoicism.
Our father’s stoicism comes to the fore when, on December 1, 1963, our mother dies at the age of only thirty. Madonna is old enough to remember our mother’s death and has spoken to the media many times about the days before she died, her death, and the aftermath. “I knew she was sick for a long time with breast cancer, so she was very weak, but she would continue to go on and do the things she had to do. I knew she was very fragile and kept getting more fragile. I knew that, because she would stop during the day and just sit down on the couch. I wanted her to get up and play with me and do the things she did before,” Madonna remembered.
“I know she tried to keep her feelings inside, her fear inside, and not let us know. She never complained. I remember she was really sick and was sitting on the couch. I went up to her and I remember climbing on her back and saying, ‘Play with me, play with me,’ and she wouldn’t. She couldn’t and she started crying.”
Our mother spent a year in the hospital, but, according to Madonna, strove to put a brave face on her suffering and never betrayed it to her children.
“I remember my mother was always cracking up and making jokes. She was really funny so it wasn’t so awful to go and visit her there. I remember that right before she died she asked for a hamburger. She wanted to eat a hamburger because she couldn’t eat anything for so long, and I thought that was very funny. I didn’t actually watch her die. I left and then she died.”
Although I was only three when my mother was on her deathbed, I remember nestling in her warm and comforting arms. We are in a strange white room wi
th hardly any furniture. My mother is lying in an iron bed, and my father and all my brothers and sisters are standing around the bed in front of us. They start to leave the room. I snuggle closer to my mother. My father lifts me gently out of her arms. I struggle against his strong grip. I don’t want to leave my mother. I start wailing pitifully. The next thing I remember, we are in the car and I cry all the way home. I never see my mother again. Nor am I taken to her funeral.
I have few memories of my life in the first few years after my mother’s death. All I remember is that afterward, a series of women look after us, and that Joan is one of our nannies.
Joan, our “wicked” stepmother—is the woman whom I now, of my own volition, call Mom. She’s certainly earned the title. With the passing of time, I’ve grown to love her and, in retrospect, believe that only a slightly crazy woman, or an extremely romantic and brave one, would marry a man with six children.
But when she first comes into our lives, we all simply despise her. The seeds are sown by the Fortin side of our family, who—after our mother’s untimely death—dream of our father marrying one of her close friends. He dates her for a while and then decides not to.
When our father marries our nanny Joan instead, the Fortins are incensed and forever after refer to her as the Maid. I prefer to think of Joan as the Sergeant Major, because as soon as she marries our father, she sets about organizing his unruly children according to a timetable, rules, and regulations. Rather like a five-star general. Ironically, although Madonna won’t like the comparison, as she has grown older, the one person in our family whom she most resembles is Joan. Much as hearing this will drive her crazy, in recent years she has become more and more like Joan, insisting that everything has to be done her way, according to her timetable, and that life must be lived by her rules.
Whenever Madonna and I live together for any period of time, I am automatically subject to her stringent set of rules, which include banning me from smoking in the house, and her insistence on maintaining perfect tidiness. Sometimes, her decree that I stick to her rules leads to a battle of wills between us. The truth is that I sometimes feel the need to assert myself and rebel against the hold she has over me. Moreover, I am not fond of rules, and often tire of obeying the ones Madonna sets so stringently. I know that I’m being the little brother, kicking against my big sister’s rules and regulations, but I cant’t help it.
Life with My Sister Madonna Page 3