Rage. I know it now. I can hear its unmistakable roar. It is a sound like that of something happening in the street, something that comes slowly to your awakening senses with the choking smell of smoke, until you realize that it is the whole neighborhood clamoring to your benighted ears that your house is on fire.
I wondered how I had not seen it sooner, how it had happened that in all the overdetermined, multilayered authorized versions of the family story it had only been allowed a surrogate place. And yet it was there again and again, scored on each body as illness: that same self-postponement, the same surrender that leaves the deeper desire ungratified, the true invisible worm, eating her body as well as his.
Yet remember, as you read this, how it was for me then. For all these baffling signs of his rage, I too adored him, as she did. He was a force field, a powerful black hole into which one’s love might be endlessly poured. He seemed to create and consume it like God.
I adored him. He had disappeared into a train compartment, and I thought I had lost him. And for two more years, although he was there, a shadow on the well-carved Victorian porch of the Woodlawn Nursing Home, my father remained as elusive to me as an imploded star.
It was then that my mother’s family took her back into the tenement in East Harlem, she and her four sunburnt, fatherless Amerindian savages, to become Mary again, as she had always been to her sisters. And as if to do some further perverse penance, she returned to work not in dressmaking, but toiling long hours at the butcher block in Grandpa Luigi’s store, just as my father would have done.
Our squadron of aunts, wild with children and drudgery of their own, struggled to confine our afterschool mayhem to the limits of our fifth-floor walkup. It couldn’t have been easy, and they were not always pleased with an arrangement that meant they would sometimes have the lot of us on their hands when my mother was kept late at the store, but God knows they understood it. It was opera—La Bohème, Tosca; it was soap opera, all the soap operas they knew, Helen Trent, The Guiding Light, Grand Central Station. Mario, doomed to a lingering illness, swept away as by some act of God into the healing hands of the physicians at Mount Sinai, swept into the countryside of the Bronx to be cured, beautiful, dark-eyed Mario, stand-in for all the adored and evanescent men in their eternally love-besotted lives.
I ought to make an exception for my Aunt Teresa and Uncle Louie, her husband, whom she did of course adore, with an unswerving passion. But Louie, though gentle and gently spoken, was anything but an evanescent father to my four cousins, one of them so curiously a Flavia like me. His was an affection so physical you could see it turn on like a refrigerator lightbulb when he came home at night, the instant Teresa opened the flat door. And he came home, like clockwork, though sometimes he might have to pick his way through the eight of us, bivouacked on Teresa’s well-scrubbed linoleum. Still, Louie belonged to his family, not to us. He gave us the sight of what real fathering looked like—no small thing—but we remained spectators to this daily shower of affection. Teresa herself overflowed with the kind of endless, easy, big-breasted abbondanza that could not exhaust itself on eight children at a time. She tried to fill the gap, to be mother-surrogate for the sister she loved and pitied, but she could not be father too.
Our own apartment was, as I have said, at the top of the house, right under the roof, convenient to laundry-hanging and tar-beach summer afternoons. To compensate for the climb, my mother would congratulate us regularly for having “nobody walking on our heads.” Once we were allowed to be on our own after school for a few hours at a time, we got to know the unmistakable sound of her swift, eager steps up that last flight. It was a wonderful, terrible sound: wonderful, because she was the lodestar of our lives; terrible, because her expectations of us were high, and her accountings stern.
It was as though as the second daughter she had received at least the second most sizable dollop of whatever made Sicilian women serious women—donne serie. May had the most, then Mary, Teresa next, Mildred after Teresa, and so on, as if the serious juice had run lower and lower as each girl had come up the line.
As the war came to a close and the post-war began and the younger sisters were marrying themselves off, this gradation grew more and more obvious, and the family house at 230 came to seem more and more a kind of allegory, with the stories set out floor by floor like something out of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Just below us on the fourth floor, side by side with Teresa, were Aunt May and her Dante—she the eldest daughter, he the well-combed, finely hatted shadow on the stairs. I have said that no one seemed to know how he made his living, or if he made a living and wasn’t simply sponging off May’s crucifying beadwork. But May was dour, silent, and uncomplaining. They had two little girls named Libby and Adele, prim and pale, who never seemed to play with other children, let alone with us, and whose trademark sound was the tap-tap of their patent leather shoes as they came and went from their apartment hand in hand with May, or with both May and Dante on Sundays.
Now and then we might hear May’s ringing voice through the floor, like a muffled bell, raised to someone in rebuke. Was it him? Otherwise, a reclusive and hostile family silence, appropriate to a very serious woman, and the vision of her, perhaps once a week from June through September, leaning out over the fire escape off the apartment kitchen just beneath ours, silently drying her long, full, silvering hair in the slant rays of the afternoon sun.
But two more stories down, a single flight up from the street, lived Aunt Bea and her dandified husband Sonny with a big, white-toothed smile and the sweetest sweet-talk in New York. Bea was daughter number five. She had been baptized Rosina, and, following the lead of her older sister Mildred, had had the name surgically removed, like a mole. But just as a name, “Bea”—or as they sometimes called her, “Bee-bee”—fit her, like a new nylon stocking with a plumbline seam. She was a honeymaker with a sting, or an existential declaration of presentness. She could have been a piece of steel shot. She had those perky, supergroomed looks that were the epitome of prettiness in wartime women. “Which of us is the prettiest?” she asked dumb little me one night, after I’d followed her and her three younger sisters, Anna, Joan, and Elena, into the galley kitchen and sat gazing in stupefied enchantment as they schmoozed and smoked over coffee after work. She knew I’d say she was, and then she’d smirk and toss her head as I blushed at being euchred into her little scheme.
But I loved to hear her boast. “Daawrhling,” she’d say, addressing all her sisters in the singular (and in a drawl that was classic highfalutin NooYawk), “my Sonny was baawrhn to dance.” This would be followed by a comparison of herself to Ginger Rogers on the dance floor, while Elena, the youngest, laughed her big ringing, cynical, make-me-believe-it laugh, and Joan, eyes faintly sidelong and voice tinged with annoyance, would comment that (with her round face and bottle-exaggerated blondness) it was she people said looked like Ginger Rogers, and Bea would have no trouble granting her that. “But I’ve got my Fred Astaaayah,” she’d remind her, meaning Sonny, her dancing fool of a husband. And then she would raise those perfectly plucked black eyebrows above those perfectly curled black eyelashes, fire up a Chesterfield, toss the match deftly into the sink, adjust her snooded aureole of black hair with her free hand, blow two plumes of smoke through her nostrils, and turn her smile beatifically on me.
But that was until Sonny gambled or otherwise squandered away every hard-earned dollar she made on Seventh Avenue faster than she could have had it printed, plus who knows what else he’d done that she wouldn’t talk about. So she simply upped one fine Sunday morning (as we children, drawn by the garbled sound of quarreling, watched awestruck from the top of the stairwell), emerging from her apartment in a dramatically floating, beige satin peignoir, and cried out in that wonderful Spagnola contralto made more lush by good cognac and cigarettes that he was a sonuvabitch bastard! Nobody could shout the word bastard like my Aunt Bee-bee—BA-A-STA-A-RRD—as well-ventilated as Gramercy Park. Then she threw him out and all his bow ties down the stairs after him.
Aunt Anna, next down from Bea and also next to get married, lived with Joan and Elena (what a ménage, when you think about it) across the hall from Bea