by Joan Silber
SOME MEN LOVE holding babies and swinging and bouncing them—Piddu had been one of those—and some men don’t want to be too close to the smells and the mess. Umberto was a little afraid of our tiny, red-faced, beautiful son, but he sat and talked to him for hours. Not for my ears, but what I caught was nonsense. Umberto singing silly syllables! I would have liked to name the baby for Piddu, but he had to be Calogero, for Umberto’s father. To me he was always Beddu, handsome boy.
My sister sent him a little navy blue coat with a cap like one a grown-up would wear. She said America was very interesting (which did not sound good) and they were living in New Jersey, which was not the same as New York but was near it. Her husband was driving a bus. Nobody knew Antonello could drive but now he could.
My mother helped me every day with Beddu, but who would help Vincenzina? My baby was growing nicely fat. I was rounder than before too, plumped with milk. I liked my shape, and when they let me nap, I woke up delighted with everything. My father carried the baby up and down the street while I slept. He said he was teaching Beddu to play cards and smoke cigarettes.
One evening when I came back from my mother’s I found Umberto reading a book with lessons in Latin. “I’m married to an ancient Roman,” I said. But it wasn’t Latin, it was English. I didn’t even know he had such a book. “Ow are you? Fine-a, dank you,” he read. And why was he doing this? But I knew why before I asked. He was thinking we should go to America.
IT DIDN’T MATTER what his reasons were (he wanted our boy to have more chances, he wanted more chances himself) or how I argued my sobbing opinions. This is how it is, my father used to say, the donkey eats oranges but shits corn, which meant: Whatever you expect, something else happens. Why did I think I knew Umberto? I didn’t know anything. It wasn’t any use to make trouble with my husband. Everything was already happening.
Not that we left right away. It took months and months. I had time to think: If Piddu’s bones were buried in the town, it would never be possible to leave. If the Americans didn’t care that my brothers shot at them, why should I care? If other people were happy leaving their parents forever, why wasn’t I? I was born in the wrong body: that was what I really thought. But I loved my husband, didn’t I? It was my job to catch up to that piece of truth.
WHO KNOWS WHAT LOVE IS? On the boat the baby was sick to his stomach and I was sick too. We were animals stinking up the tiny cabin. Umberto came with cool, wet towels to put on our faces. I gave myself over to his way of helping. When I was better, we went up on deck and the other women talked to me. I had hardly ever talked to strangers before. I was shy, and I leaned against my husband. The women admired my baby, the sea air had a very good smell.
When I saw Vincenzina at the pier, she was wearing a hat like a prune. Antonello and she were standing right at the front of the crowd, as if they knew what they were doing. I turned and saw from Umberto’s face, which was trying to smile, that he was afraid. Words about bravery that we had sung during the war—“the valor of your warriors, the courage of pioneers”—came into my mind to rally me, and I waved much more gaily than I felt.
I DIDN’T LIKE America at first, how could I? We lived in a room in the half of a house my sister and her husband rented, in Hoboken. The first few months I stayed mainly inside. The currents of air in the cold seasons were too chilly for the baby and I didn’t know how to act outside when people were speaking English. It scared me to be so stupid. Vincenzina took me shopping in stores run by Sicilians or by Pugliesi and I didn’t say a word there either. I stood wrapped in my heavy coat and told her what I wanted and heard her repeat it in Sicilian or grammar school Italian. Then we went home to her kitchen with its stove with its own gas inside and her bathroom where you pissed on white china and pulled a chain to make water rinse over it. In our town we had electricity but not these things. I hated to be stupid.
But I tried to make things nice for Umberto. At midnight he went with a friend of Antonello’s to clean out all the buses; he slept in the day and went to classes in the evening to learn English. In between he played with the baby and ate meals with all of us. I never said, Why did we come so you could sweep up dirt? I never said, Why do we have to learn everything over? What was wrong with what we knew before?
I might have stayed indoors forever if it hadn’t been for Beddu. I wanted him to know English from Americans, so when the weather got warmer we went out to a park. He played in a sandbox and he chased the other children around and he screeched whatever they screeched. When Vincenzina wasn’t with me, I picked up words from the other mothers.
Umberto learned much faster than I did, and I was ashamed to try any words in front of him. I was proud the first time I asked a woman what her boy’s name was. (The woman looked like a doll with bangs—you couldn’t guess from women’s faces that they’d just been through the same war.) Beddu, who was Calogero really, was Gerry in this country. Sometimes I was Nancy. I didn’t mind, but Annunziata was my grandmother’s name and Nancy had no history. My sister said that was the good part—no mean gossip from a hundred years ago, no beliefs based on some ancestor’s pigheaded ideas, no old enemies.
Throughout the first year, Umberto was too tired to talk much, but in the late afternoons we would lie in bed with Beddu and be company for each other. I had our old linens on the bed and on the dresser a brass cup that Piddu had won for soccer, which I filled with straw flowers. These rests with Umberto were what gave me strength to go outside. On the street, I couldn’t make the man at the drugstore understand what I wanted, and I got lost trying to find my way back, and I had to ask strangers and not know what they meant. It was humiliating to have Beddu see me like this, little though he was.
I didn’t really want to get better at knowing Hoboken things—deep in my heart they didn’t interest me—but I learned them, inch by inch, in spite of myself. I didn’t have to be reminded of all that we had here that we didn’t have at home: hamburgers with ketchup; Mickey Mouse; a trip across the river to New York City, where I walked on the avenues as good as anyone; a son who could sing “You Are My Sunshine.” But I would have gone back to Sicily in a minute except for my husband, I never would have stayed except for him.
I HAD MY second baby in a hospital. I didn’t like the weird odors or the nosy nurses, but I liked being asleep for the pain. I was carrying big in front, which meant a boy, but I woke up with a girl! We named her Anna, a name Americans understood. By this time, Umberto was driving a bus and we had our own half of a house to live in. I missed my mother very badly. We had more room but I had to do everything.
Vincenzina said that in order to learn English you had to practice all the time back and forth, but Umberto had somehow managed to learn without opening his mouth. He was not sociable or hearty like some of the other drivers, but he watched and he picked things up. Not just phrases—after the second year even I could say a few slangy things like “How’s tricks?” or “What is cookin?”—but also the way things worked. When the fat man from Messina who ran the bus company couldn’t get a permit for a new route, my Umberto knew what to do. Someone had to be paid—anyone knew that—but Umberto knew which one and how to find him. It was the policeman side of him that knew these things.
My husband believed he wasn’t going to stay a bus driver always, and this was true. Just when Beddu started going to kindergarten, Umberto was given a job in the bus company office, something he wore a necktie for. This made everyone say, God bless America, and on Memorial Day Umberto put a big flag in the front window like other people on our street. Vincenzina said that all the flags were for dead soldiers, American ones, but we both knew it didn’t matter. Our dead had opinions, but they turned their heads if we were doing well.
I had an easy life. My snuggly Anna was a timid little thing who hardly got into trouble at all, and my gorgeous Beddu was noisy but he listened when you told him things. What did I have to do that was hard? Nobody was born with worms or burning up with cholera. Umberto was fine when you did w
hat he wanted and I guessed better than anyone what he wanted, so he was almost always tickled with me. When I got pregnant again, I was so grateful I made a donation to the church building fund out of household money. I just wanted the Virgin to know I didn’t take any of this for granted.
So what did it mean when I began spotting blood? What didn’t want me to have this baby? Something didn’t. At home my mother would’ve given me teas and washes and leaves to sprinkle on the sheets—in America nobody thinks a grown woman needs her mother. I went to a doctor, and I had to describe personal things and let him handle me. And the next day I miscarried. My body’s joy oozed out as a puddle of horror. Everybody said, “There’s more chances,” but I was already sick of starting over.
And in fact I miscarried two more times. My sister Vincenzina gave birth to two daughters during this time, and my brother Enrico in Sicily finally married and had twins right away. After a while I stopped making complicated promises to saints, because it’s not good to quarrel about what happens. In our town in Sicily there were poor women (we were not poor) who made vows to the Virgin and licked the church floor to thank her later. Now I understood these women, triumphant with their bleeding tongues, but I didn’t say that to anyone.
ANNA WAS ALREADY ten and Gerry was twelve when I found that I was pregnant again. Everybody said I had to stay still and lie down all day like a snake in the sun. I didn’t like it. I dreamed on the sofa with my kids’ voices around me—I never knew what work it was to stay still—but from this work I had my baby girl. Umberto named her Viviana, for his favorite sister, and we called her Viana from the first.
I didn’t think we spoiled her, but maybe we did. Even Umberto let her crayon all over his newspaper. And she had a sweet nature. When I was so afraid that Gerry was going to be sent to Vietnam, she would bring me her best doll so I wouldn’t cry. I cried anyway, but as it happened, my handsome Gerry got his nice girlfriend pregnant. He married her at the end of high school and got out of the draft with a fatherhood deferment. I knew that God had a different sense of fairness than humans did, but still I thought He had saved me from another war out of fairness.
We were careful with the girls. We never let Anna go on dates. Boys had to come to the house and visit with us. A serious one liked her right away, so it wasn’t a big problem. We were more modern by the time Viana was in her teens. She was taller and bustier and prettier than her sister, so we worried, but then she picked Mike, a neighborhood boy, and he was always in our house, praising my cooking and drinking Averna with Umberto and telling us his long opinions about everything. Umberto was very angry when Viana took up with Eddie DiFranco instead. He said things to her I didn’t want him to.
But the years with just Viana at home were very good for me. She went to college nearby, and then she got a job in some office that helped immigrants get settled. (Who helped us? I said.) There were always boys buzzing around, coming to take her places. She liked them up to a point and no further. She’d help me cook big dinners on weekends, with my wild monkeys of grandchildren running around, and the two of us would stay up late over the dishes and do imitations of the in-laws and she’d sing to the radio. I’d think, This is why we came, and I’d picture all those immigrants from her job—from Africa, from Mexico, from who knew where—standing at their white American sinks and being glad they had Viana to be so nice to them.
She had that blooming freshness that young girls have, and it wasn’t so bad that she wasn’t married yet. I knew we didn’t know everything about her, but I admired the way she managed for herself. For all her gentleness, no one could make her do what she didn’t want to. I was glad for her that she had this time without a man, this spell of independence.
I ALWAYS THOUGHT there were boys we didn’t meet. Who knew what she did with her friends? They went down the shore, they went to New York City. One summer they drove all the way to Massachusetts to hear an orchestra outside. And whose idea was it to go skiing? None of us really saw the point of skidding down a mountain with slats on your feet, but Viana loved it. She kept going to this place in Vermont they all liked, and then, just before Lent, she fell in the snow and twisted her leg and came home on crutches.
It was terrible to see my Viana as a cripple. Umberto had to drive her to her office every day. And even when the cast came off, she didn’t walk right. She went to one doctor and another and it still hurt her to bend her knee. And then she went to see this new doctor with a long, unpronounceable name, and right away her knee got better.
WE MET HIM a few times (though not, it turned out, anywhere near all the times they saw each other). What did we know about Muslims? He looked like a Chinaman, only darker, and he came to pick her up wearing a short-sleeved shirt—he looked like a kid, not a doctor. He brought us a box of chocolates, as if we were the date! Umberto asked him questions about the buses in Bangkok—the boy knew a lot, and we could mostly understand him through his accent. He was polite but not shy, and he was going back to Thailand in two months. I could see he liked Viana, and I thought he was going to go home with a broken heart.
AFTER HE LEFT, she sent him all sorts of items through the mail—a pile of Superman comics, a CD of this Bruce Springsteen she liked, a T-shirt that said DON’T MESS WITH JERSEY. And a whole carton of nonstick gauze pads (how much did they cost?) for some clinic he worked in. “Viana,” I told her, “don’t lead him on. It’s not kind.”
Maybe they were engaged before he even left. Maybe she wanted him out of sight when she told us. She was probably afraid of what Umberto would say, of the way his face would tighten itself into a knot and his mouth would look as if he’d eaten bleach and he would wait a whole minute before he whispered, You don’t know what you’re saying because you’re a cow without a brain, and I didn’t even know it. He would say, The man is a crooked thief and a fag of a coward, and A daughter who could do this hates her family. She’d wanted to keep her Niwet away from all that.
This was when Umberto banned the letters. He did try, in his way, to explain what everyone anywhere knows: you can’t trust someone who’s not from the world that’s your world. Such a person has no reason not to cheat you. Maybe not now but later. You’d think you could guess, but how could you?
VIANA WENT OFF TO WORK with red eyes, she sniffled in her room at night. “See,” I’d say, “see what he’s let happen to you. Does he care what he’s done, this man?”
I didn’t want her to suffer. “This will go away,” I said. I’d bring favorite sweets to her room—chocolate-chip ice cream, pignoli cookies—and she’d look at me in amazement.
“To ruin your life for love,” I said, “is for idiots.” She thought I didn’t know anything because I’d only known Umberto.
And she thought we were bigots who lived in the Middle Ages. “Everything isn’t narrow anymore,” she said. “You think your own tiny corner is everything but it isn’t. I just wish so much you had more imagination.”
As if I’d never been anywhere but my nice yellow New Jersey kitchen, my living room with the fat brocade chairs, as if I’d never had to stir myself at all.
“You don’t even know how sorry you’ll be,” I said, “if you leave your family.” She didn’t believe me. She thought all of us were nothing.
I didn’t like to inflame Umberto by saying too much, even when we were alone, but the pain of it brought us closer. “We never should’ve let her go skiing,” he said. He was looking for the turn that could take us back to where we were before.
I liked to lean against him from behind and rest my head between his shoulder blades. Only Umberto knew how hard it was, how tired we were from fighting to keep our child away from the cliff she was so set on jumping from. Only Umberto was weary in his bones the way I was.
Viana said the word Islam meant surrender to God, what was bad about that? I wasn’t opposed to other religions for other people. Viana hadn’t gone to Mass for years, but that was another problem. She told us everything in all religions was the same. When Muslims
prayed, they just said, “There is no God but God.” Umberto said the Koran said to cut the hands off of thieves and that men could have four wives.
In our town in Sicily, the men who painted donkey carts had written in huge letters on the wall of their workshop, DIO SOLO È GRANDE. I always thought this meant, don’t get carried away with yourself, remember Who’s looming over every horizon.
And in the end, after all the fighting and silence and obedience and disobedience, only God was great, and He had His own ideas. If blood won’t keep people tied, there’s nothing to hold them.
BUT I NEVER THOUGHT Viana would leave, until she left. I thought she would send the cab away, when the cab came to take her to the airport. I thought she would go to the airport and turn around and come back. She was always sensible and mild, never a dramatic person.
Umberto said that as far as he was concerned, from now on he no longer had a second daughter. He said it to her from the doorway, and he said it to me more than once. After she was gone, Umberto would not talk about her at all, except when he forgot. Sometimes he said, “Where’s the salad set Viana bought us that time?” or “That’s worse than that singer Viana liked.” He hated those slips, the backhanded torment of them. And perhaps he was right not to have us talking about her. She sent letters, to let us know she was fine, to give us her address, to tell us about her wedding. They were stiff little messages that didn’t sound like Viana. They were from a stranger who lived with strangers.
I knew why she believed—with all her heart, it seemed—that she couldn’t live without this man: it was because we had protected her from everything. If her life had been harder and harsher, she never would have wrecked herself for love. The idea would have been ridiculous. She would have known better without even thinking.