Someday, oh, someday, Mother Church was going to get her sweet revenge in the shape of my own mind-numbing seizures of a religious passion, but I would never again set foot as a student inside a parochial school. Had I been able to foresee the finality of the break at the time, it would have been fine with me. I regretted only that Ann, whom I wanted so desperately to protect from all harm, had to stay behind me at the Angels, and that, now, not only was I scarily alone, but so was she.
From my mother’s point of view, I suppose, Ann was still her baby, too small to make the trip she could let me take, overriding her other fears, to this farther-away school across Second Avenue and down three blocks to 111th Street. Or maybe it was some superstitious dread, some deference to the power of the Franciscans and what they might do if they got really mad enough at you. Or even a simple compromise, arrived at with my father on a Sunday visit to Woodlawn. She took such problems to him, I know, and pondered his advice, if he gave advice, or followed his orders, if he gave orders.
But personally she held no special quarter for Catholic schools, unable to stomach the child-bullying and all the endless, drumming, hectoring indoctrination. Most of all she hated the whining pleas for money. “Non finiscono mai,” she’d grumble. “They never stop. It’s a racket, like everything else.” And yet she was a devout Catholic, in her way, prayerful to the bone, and a good Catholic mother who wanted us—especially us girls—to have our white-dress first communions and confirmations and look for all the world like good little Catholic girls.
She herself had been educated to the sixth grade in public schools. She had thought school wonderful, and had longed to stay and go on for her diploma. It was the dream she would confess to us those nights when she was not too tired to talk, sitting at the side of our beds in that little train compartment of a room with the eerie green picture of St. Ann and the Virgin on the wall.
Smoothing her work-roughened hands with lotion as she spoke, working the cream into her fingertips, she would take our soft, small hands between hers one at a time and pretend to polish them, telling us about her life, about her dream of someday becoming a teacher. Then she would unroll her thick dark hair, beginning now to have the odd streak of gray in it, from the stiff net cylinder that held it in a smooth corona at the back of her head, and let it fall wavily down, and brush it and then braid it slowly and deftly for bed.
But Grandma Flavia, she said, had told her it was just too bad, there was a family to feed, and sixth grade was as long as she could wait to send her daughters to work. So Mary had had to go to work, and then to turn over her paycheck every week, untouched, and make a good case for getting any of it back over carfare. You could tell she was never going to let any such holding back happen to us. And every last bit we could get out of school, from the book report on the presidents to the topographical maps of Brazil with the little cotton balls on them, was to be got for her as well as for ourselves.
She was such a strange medley, fear and softness in her dark eyes, daring in her hands! We’d beg her to repeat the little story about the job she’d got when she was twenty, after the interviewer had said she’d write and she had snapped back that “she was looking for a job, not a correspondence.” How we loved the boldness of it! And yet now she seemed to have been born to worry, as if her secret sense of the world’s danger had been touched too many times since her father’s near brush with the bullet. As if the blow of my father’s illness, the intuition that it was meant as a reproach for some wrong she had done, had permanently darkened a part of her heart, overlaid some wellspring of natural joy in her with a stern, legislated anxiety. When she took off her glasses and rubbed her tired eyes and then looked up again, you could just catch that look, that tremulous look, flickering between courage and fear.
She worried about us, about Carlo especially, and the spite that lay like a thin glass wall of faked bravado on his childish heart. How would he survive? How would all her overachieving little brood make it through this flinty world, which seemed to grow more unbearably flinty and cruel every day? She had created a shrine of her own on the highboy in her room. She would light candles and get down on her knees before the blessed blue Virgin, or with eyes squeezed passionately shut murmur earnest prayers to Saint Anthony, he of the bare-chested and be-aureoled baby Jesus on one arm and pure shaft of lily on the other, the only true male mother of the canon. As soon as devotion to the Infant Jesus of Prague spread after the war, she purchased her own little statuette and gave away several to her sisters, lighting candles to him, too, buying all the protection she could get. Our innocent prayers were credit in the bank. On Sunday nights we were brought to our own knees to murmur the rosary together. I was hypnotized by the humming sound, the sensation of the smooth pearly beads slipping between my fingers, the sense that we were braiding our prayers as surely as if they had been the warm strands of my sister’s recalcitrant brown hair.
We prayed for my father, but for ourselves as well, body and soul, since for her there was no telling them apart. I think she may have prayed for me in a special way, seeing me headstrong (“like your father”) and out in the world on such a long lead. She sewed garlic cloves into my underwear. She placed a scapular around my neck and under my sweater before she sent me off to school in the morning, crossing herself at the window as I took the turn into Second Avenue and disappeared around the corner.
•
My father, she would say (she seemed never to tire of saying, with a sigh, like a hope continuously deferred, even though it might be true), was getting well. Every time she visited him without us she would bring our latest prizes with her, our gold-starred reports on the heavenly constellations, our little drawings and poems, and come back and tell us how proud he was, and how much stronger he looked. When we saw him ourselves, those spring Sundays among the apple blossoms and tulip trees up at Woodlawn, alongside the cemetery stones, he still looked limp and thin and alien, not quite ready to face us, let alone the world, but his face was growing fuller, his eyes brighter and steadier, and the tide of color seemed to be rising. Surely he felt the daunting strangeness of our having done so much growing up without him.
He had begun to write. It was something he did well and gracefully, like drawing, and had always done, but dismissively—as if it were a road not taken once and now revisited with pain. We saw none of it, except for a quip that appeared in the nursing-home newsletter. I wonder he even told us of it, it was so slight and silly: “Mario to Vinnie: ‘I lost a fortune overnight.’ Vinnie: ‘How’d you do that?’ Mario: ‘I went to bed feeling like a million dollars and woke up feeling like two cents.’” I was a child. It made me laugh. Now I think it may have been for him something like that little sliver of an olive branch in the beak of Noah’s trial bird after the flood. The Old Nick, the devil of the Neapolitan in him, was still there, that dry, faintly bitter and cynical humor that had once made him feel alive.
And it had a subtext, after all, didn’t it. For the loss of a million dollars overnight might be sharper than a serpent’s tooth. But there was such a thing, perhaps, as taking the venom in jesting, homeopathic doses.
It must have been that same spring of 1946 that I cracked my lip in Van Cortlandt Park, on a rare Sunday outing, a splendid day suddenly turned catastrophic. My own stupid fault. My mother couldn’t stop me. “Headstrong—just like your father,” she wept, exasperated. In this case the word headstrong applied literally, my head having led my body where my body had thought better of following. I had not lost my mimetic impulse for doing just what my brothers did, and after lunch they’d decided to take a walk along the top of a wood rail fence. But with their lean and boyishly arranged bodies they could almost float, like acrobats on a wire, balancing with a wave of their arms. I was rounder, full of wobbles, no plumper than I had ever been, but the weight was beginning to move downward onto my hips. As I felt myself fall I must have drawn my mouth in over my teeth. My chin struck the fence post just as my feet landed, driving my upper incisor straight through the soft, yielding mass of my upper lip.
“You’re lucky you got no worse,” said the doctor at the first aid station as he put in the stitches. My chin was sore, but amazingly