The Right Thing to Do

by Josephine Gattuso Hendin

  Unlike what Werner Sollors calls the “classic American idea of the newcomers’ rebirth into a forward-looking culture of consent” (4), Nino’s immigration experience permanently wrenched him away from what he imagined was a better place in his Sicilian village. Like many immigrants who left the old world as children, Nino maintains an unmediated vision of Ventimiglia, thus contributing to his tendentious beliefs about the culture of his heritage. Immigrants and their children lived in different internal landscapes, often refusing to respect each other’s separate worlds. As Robert Orsi explains, immigrant Italians used the memories of southern Italy “against their children as an instrument of discipline. . . . ‘Southern Italy’ was always cast as a reproach to the younger generation’s emerging sense of the world” (136).11

  Nino’s need to reinforce the “right” ways to Gina escalates as his health deteriorates. Incorporating an illness narrative allows Hendin to portray the family conflict in extremis: Nino will fight to the death for his vision of family solidarity. But his successive illnesses ultimately defeat him in his quest to control and dominate his family. Nino suffers immensely in this novel; as he lies bedridden, Nino remembers the “sun-warmed juniper, the sea spray, the homecoming place” of his Sicilian village (178). He knows he is destined to die far from the place that remains, to his mind, his cultural and emotional home. Although she feels sympathy for her father’s suffering, Gina has learned to protect herself from his anger and disappointment. Early in her adulthood, Gina has had to reconcile herself to a harsh fact about her father’s behavior: “[he] never meant ill, but he always did harm” (52).

  Nino’s violent and obsessive response to Gina stems from her insistent association with a world he cannot understand or share. Nino retains a fierce sense of regionalism, and his feeling of loss (of his hometown in Sicily, of his community in Astoria, of his daughter, who yearns for Manhattan) illustrates what Toni Morrison has described as the missing quality in urban fiction: “what is missing in city fiction and present in village fiction is the ancestor” (39). The last of his generation, Nino is unable to function as a wise seer for the immediate members of his family or the subsequent generations. Without the support of other family members or a neighborhood of relatives and paesani engaged in shared cultural properties–language, cuisine, religion–Nino feels as though he has failed miserably in his role as the upholder of family codes. Nino’s idealization of l’ordine della famiglia has unfortunately facilitated his belief that “the outside world will remain hostile” (Belliotti 36). In the city, Nino cannot survive.

  “Per me si va nella cittá dolente” (Through me one goes into the mournful city) reads the inscription upon the gates of Dante’s hell, imagined as a walled city.12 While the city in literature has been described as a kind of hell, snaring and alienating its victim, it has also been imagined as a place of liberation for young people breaking away from their restrictive families and communities, and in particular for women. In contrast to Nino, Gina finds “the city” vitally important. In discussing novels of development that depict travel from country to city, Marianne Hirsch explains that the narrative rhythm is characterized by “a series of crises . . . the city itself speeds up the maturing process” (305). The city compels its female protagonist to make quick decisions based on an increasing feeling of desperation. Despite its potential horrors, Manhattan gives a working-class woman like Gina Giardello a means by which to develop an identity that can accommodate the world of which her father despairs. Describing the city as an expression of individualism, Joyce Carol Oates explains that the city yields the “gift of anonymity, the promises of wages for work . . . [which] makes the individual possible for the first time in history: the individual woman, one might say” (18).13

  When Nino follows his daughter on the subway, Gina’s intention to gain her freedom is abetted by the urban milieu itself, as she transfers with ease from one train to another, maintaining a comfortable distance from her father. When the train, which rides on elevated tracks through Queens, plunges into the tunnel that will carry it under the river and under the streets of Manhattan, Gina recalls the myth of Hades and Persephone, reinforcing the connection between the city and hell. Gina’s thoughts focus on Hades’ kidnapping of Persephone, a story that stays in her mind “like the image of Nino in the next car” (77).14 That the mother-daughter relationship between Demeter and Persephone is completely absent in Gina’s ruminations suggests the way in which the father’s excessive domination has prevented both women from firmly establishing a relationship based on their own bonds. With fear, Gina remembers the “wreckage [Nino] made with his words and his cane” (76). Wounded by her father’s verbal and physical assaults, Gina’s flight to the city is her defense against being vulnerable.

  Hendin deftly reverses a scene of hunter and prey in which Gina ultimately hides from her father in order to reverse roles and follow him. To reinforce the deadly nature of their conflict, Hendin employs images of warfare, entrapment, and illness. Gina realizes that her father will remain committed to his pursuit of her “to the last drop of blood,” his sense of onore (honor) springing from his Sicilian culture (75). Getting off at Eighth Street, Gina hopes that her father’s crippled legs will allow him enough time to exit the train and follow her. Because Nino is exhausted from the “ravenous sun” of the hot summer, Gina slows down for him; she wants to give her father a chase he’ll never forget (76).

  Although at cross-purposes, both father and daughter act perversely in concert, describing their feelings in similar language. Gina feels a “faint dread, a sudden exhaustion that paralyzed the will to cross him (76).” Nino’s legs are numb from the hurried walk in the heat; limping forward, he eventually leans against a window of a pasticceria, “[d]izziness and exhaustion roll[ing] over him in waves” (84). Gina’s war with her father has made her precisely what he does not want her to be. Wily, experienced, streetwise, and unemotional, she will become an optimum candidate for the very culture that Nino so detests. The chase gives way to confrontation when Gina reaches for her father’s arm and invites him inside the pastry shop for iced coffee. Gina has gained the upper hand in this scenario.

  Not to be outdone, Nino later barges into Alex’s apartment to find his daughter partially dressed. He hits her with his cane and the next day locks her in her bedroom. Although Gina agrees to invite Alex to her parents’ house for dinner, she realizes that neither Nino nor Alex is interested in or respects her desire to achieve independence. Feeling as though “she were watching an ancient ritual of sacrifice,” Gina realizes that Nino is using this family meeting as a way to humiliate her (100). Nonetheless, Nino’s truculent nature contrasts strikingly with Alex’s fundamental indifference toward marriage vows and family loyalty.

  Before Gina can achieve a sense of authenticity, she must learn to define herself as an acting subject. Her decision to move away from the parental home is one sign of her determination to think for herself. Once outside the home, Gina critically assesses her relationship with Alex, but not before she gets hurt by him. Nino correctly, though only partially, describes his daughter’s form of rebellion when he cynically observes “[w]ith girls, rebellion always means the same thing,” by which he means sexual license (72).

  Having carelessly risked pregnancy, Gina recognizes that her defenses against such vulnerability need to be raised. Alex’s response to Gina’s use of birth control parallels her father’s response to her desire for autonomy: both men punish her for making a decision without their permission. Gina may have erroneously believed that she was jettisoning the Old World cargo of her father, but she in fact has traded one set of prohibitions for another. Her choice of Alex as a boyfriend reveals the extent of her wounding by a tyrannical father. Alex enjoys being in control; in fact, he earlier had retrieved the key to Gina’s new room in the Bristol Residence Hotel. Now, climbing on top of her, he murmurs, “Princess Persephone” recalling not only the myth of Hades and his abduction of Persephone but also Gina’s associ
ation of this myth with her father. Gina’s earlier dream of being chased by six men with a coffin is revelatory in light of her problematic relationship with selfish and controlling men. She very much fears that they may cause her death.

  “‘You couldn’t have figured this out yourself. You wouldn’t have known how,”’ Alex pronounces when he discovers that Gina is using a diaphragm (123). His angry response sounds alarmingly like Nino’s criticisms of women in general. In disgust, Alex pulls out Gina’s diaphragm and threatens to end the relationship if she leaves his apartment. What ensues is a scene of sexual activity that leaves Gina with welts on her back and purple bruises on her buttocks, the fabric of her blouse feeling like “barbed wire for days” (125–26). Gina realizes that her sexual desire gives her boyfriend power over her: “what had turned him on, she could see, was her being susceptible, vulnerable, unprotected” (127). Having spent a good portion of her young adulthood protecting herself from being hurt by her father, Gina comes to realize that her boyfriend “was far more dangerous in an unfathomable way” (125). Gina does not resolve her feelings about her boyfriend during the novel, but Hendin suggests that Alex’s lack of suitability as Gina’s partner far exceeds her sexual need for him. Unable to complete anything he has started (including college), Alex will also leave unfinished the story he has begun for Gina, “Princess Persephone.” This lack of completion bodes well for Gina, for she is determined to be the creator of her own story.

  Throughout The Right Thing to Do, Hendin employs images of opera heroines to convey the potentially dire nature of Gina’s entrapment by men. In fact, both mother and daughter reflect on the tragic fate of women in opera, who “had to die before the men would even realize their mistake” (70). Operas such as Madame Butterfly, La Bohéme, Turandot, and Rigoletto incorporate plots that feature women’s “undoing,” to use Catherine Clément’s word. In these operas, Clément explains, “the innermost finality” is the death of a woman, whose lament is uttered in the words “lasciatemi morir” (let me die) (22). Undoubtedly, Gina’s fear that “[f]ather, daughter, lover–they all seemed cast into the roles of an Italian opera” has been intensified by a familial pattern of dominance and submission (96). That such a pattern is repeated in Gina’s relationship with Alex is not surprising, and it raises serious concerns regarding Gina’s ability to heal from her father’s harsh ways. But Gina ultimately resists this role. Before she leaves home, Gina articulates her gendered position in the family: “She was determined that no one should die in the last act. Especially she herself” (96). Aware of the operatic woman’s function, Gina refuses to be cast into a role that would require her defeat, and she struggles to liberate herself from repeating the same narrative in her relationship with Alex.

  Toward the novel’s end, Gina begins to come to new terms with the nuances not only of female identity but also of her ethnic and class identity. Hendin portrays Gina as ultimately accommodating herself to an identity shaped in part by an Italian American ethos: personal responsibility for the good of the family. Such an ethos parallels features of the working-class bildungsroman in its emphasis on the self “in steadfast relation to her immediate habitat of family, work, geography, politics, and culture, rather than in isolation” (Zandy 177).

  While Gina’s separation from a home dominated by her father helps her gain self-knowledge, her father’s prolonged illness prepares Gina to accept her responsibilities. She has determined, for example, to protect her family against Alex. When he offers to marry Gina in front of her parents, Gina realizes that he is neither sincere nor honest about the proposal. Moreover, Gina is troubled over the fact that Alex would “turn Nino into the stuff of anecdotes,” were he to enter the family (103). Gina may have tolerated Alex’s mistreatment of her, but she will not allow her family to be misrepresented, patronized, or narrowly stereotyped by him. Nino’s death liberates Gina from the immediate threat of his verbal and physical attacks and allows her to move from a posture of defensiveness—which often resulted in speechlessness—to a position of autonomy. Gina’s changed consciousness stems not only from her shift in physical location but also from her recognition of the importance of origins to satisfy her conception of self. After visiting Alex’s wealthy parents, Gina discerns one difference between her working-class Italian American and his upper-class Anglo-American value system, embracing the former: “For Nino, if you did the right thing, that was sufficient success. It was what you were that mattered, not what you became. Here [Alex’s household] you had to be a star at something to retain your position in the family” (146–47).

  In those operas that end with the death of the woman, there is always a man left standing and singing (Clement 47). Yet both male characters are absent at the conclusion of Hendin’s novel; Nino’s death and Alex’s absence clarify Gina’s new position as the “author” of her own life story. Unlike the sacrificial victims in the operas with which she identifies, Gina is able to “write beyond the ending” of the punitive plot reserved for women who have failed to abide by patriarchal proscriptions of behavior (DuPlessis 14–16).

  The seeds for Gina’s transformation were planted by her father. Of the many operas to which Hendin refers in the novel, only one is of preeminent concern to Nino: Verdi’s Nabucco. Verdi’s own commitment to the Risorgimento (Italy’s struggle to emancipate itself from foreign oppression) is highlighted in the most famous piece in the opera, the Hebrews’ choral lament, “Va pensiero,” which “represent[s] the yearning and homesickness of Israelites lamenting that they must live under Babylonian rule” (DiGaetani 35). Nino’s own yearning for home is made palpable by his use, on his deathbed, of his hometown dialect.15 Despite his iron rule as a father, Nino’s respect for those ancestors who struggled to liberate themselves from foreign despots ultimately supersedes his personal need to control his changing family. The legacy he bequeaths his daughter is complicated by his own personal depression, but Nino completes the story he tells Gina and expects her to do the same in her adulthood.

  Functioning much like the cantastorie (history singers) of his Sicilian village, Nino draws on a narrative tradition that uses stories as moral exempla to convey a particular point. His “memories” are calculated and deceptively simple like folktales. On his deathbed, Nino tells Gina a cautionary tale: he recounts a childhood memory in Ventimiglia in which the community’s decision to do the right thing is blurred by emotional attachments. The story recalls a dying daughter’s request to be buried with her beloved father. Nino’s belief that the community should have buried the child alone signals to Gina his realization that a child’s autonomy is necessary for it to discover “its own road back to where it belongs” (190). Nino neither entirely releases his daughter nor requires her unquestioning submission. Rather, he conveys both his knowledge that she is like him and his fear that she will suffer because of that.

  At her father’s wake, Gina realizes that defying her father means defying a family code that has become provincial and destructive over time. She knows her father believed he was doing the right thing as he tried to save her from what he perceived as ruin—and at the same time, she knows it would have destroyed her if he had succeeded. At last she knows the difference between the baneful aspects of her father’s restrictive moral code and the positive aspects of Italian American engagement in community rituals. Gina’s triumph rests upon her discernment.

  But what of Gina’s mother? Is her lens a hopeful one through which to view a commitment to family? Laura maintains her self-possession, her furberia (shrewdness), throughout her husband’s failing health, despite the fact that he has belittled her to the end: “She has never been bitter, Gina thought, watching her. No matter what he did, or how they fought, she has never turned sour. Gina felt a rush of tenderness for her mother” (209).

  Gina will not live her mother’s life because she has fought for the freedom to experience a world outside the narrow confines of Queens’s Little Italy. To signal her successful transformation into an Italian America
n adulthood, Hendin portrays Gina leaving her father’s wake alone, but content. She will return tomorrow for the funeral. Wistfully, Gina had observed her relatives tucking letters to the dead inside Nino’s coffin, wondering what she might have written to her father. Gina’s final spoken words are uttered, appropriately, on the walkway of the Queensboro Bridge and are a promise of reconciliation with her father—in her own time and on her own terms: ‘“someday I’ll write you a letter’” (211).

  The accomplishment of Hendin’s novel is that this promise makes sense, despite all the anguish Gina has experienced at her father’s hands. Walking away from him toward “the city” gleaming in the moonlight, Gina paradoxically raises the possibility that distance may bring reconciliation. Forgiveness and even love might be possible “someday” when Gina is so firmly independent that memories of Nino’s efforts at control no longer undermine or sting. The Right Thing to Do has the complexity of all good fiction, showing how what is “right” for Gina Giardello may change from resisting her father’s claim upon her to honoring it in her own way. Hendin’s novel examines with clarity and vision the uneasy ties between father and daughter wrapped up in the fate of the Italian American family.

  The Right Thing to Do illustrates how issues of gender and ethnicity can destablize simple considerations of class, and vice versa. The novel reflects the forces behind the current fascination with ethnicity and the burgeoning interest in constructing a new sense of American identity. It offers a very contemporary awareness of the potential power of an ethnic past to provide a compass in an increasingly pathless world. Nino Giardello leaves his daughter, Gina, with this awareness as a mandate to create a new ethnic identity.

  Mary Jo Bona

  Gonzaga University