“Will she be . . . disfigured, doctor?” my mother asked, probably wondering even as she said it if I knew what “disfigured” meant. I knew. It marked a leap in my consciousness to think what it might mean to me now. He said, “Not if she can keep these stitches in long enough to close the wound.” But the lip is a tender place. He couldn’t make the stitches very close or very tight. And how, I thought, as the days went by, if you have to eat and drink and smile and brush your teeth, can you possibly keep stitches in your upper lip from coming loose? I worried about this. A babysitter, once, had told me my mouth was already too big.
But the little threads tickled my tongue and slowly unraveled on their own. I didn’t even have to go back to have them removed. Little by little, the tender puffiness of my lip receded into a slightly off-center little pad of fullness. Looking in the mirror, more and more as girls did, I could never bring myself to love it, though in time I found it might be lovely in a certain light, and especially tender to a kiss.
I cannot remember my father’s coming home. Strange, when everything about his being home again is so vivid. He seemed to slip imperceptibly back into our lives as if the space he’d left had never been allowed to close. I don’t remember even being glad, although I must have been. There was something secret and yet convulsive about the change he wrought in our lives—about the change he wrought in me. I felt him as a newfound love, of whom I thought present or absent, toward whom I was abject in my tenderness. But I also felt him as a new and phallic presence, a vigilant gaze, which seemed to be trained on me to a degree both lovely and unbearable. I can remember his holding up my chin to examine my still-puffy mouth wound, looking at it sad-eyed, and making that familiar old, heart-sinking tsk-tsk sound of his between his tongue and his teeth. I had almost forgotten that sound and the ache it gave my heart.
I can remember awakening rather abruptly to a sense that even in your own familiar house there could be a new and unprecedented division of space, here, in your own doorless railroad flat where everything lay open to the world and where, apart from the bathroom, privacy was mythical. And yet on a hot day that summer, as I scurried from bathroom to bedroom in my underwear, I felt his eyes on me, and that dark, desiring, yet hurtful look of his, that tsk-tsk of disapproval, followed by that even more stinging shame of a reproach directed not at me but at my mother, as if I were no longer his child, as if I were a stranger. And perhaps I was—perhaps we were both strangers to each other.
Mario resumed his place working at the side of his father, Luigi, in the pork store on Third Avenue.
How little I have said of Grandpa Luigi, for all that he was our benefactor through those troubled East Harlem years. And yet he was the only grandparent I knew past my earliest childhood memories of my mother’s father. Of course, the time we spent with him outside the store was small, our four steep flights too much to ask of his poor old legs. And as for Sundays, what would they have been like for my mother without Mario, surrounded by all the Neapolitan in-laws who only pretended to love her?
I can imagine her ansia about this, nevertheless. And I know while she worked with Grandpa she often invited him home, and that we loved his visits—the good, genial, round, unassuming old man whose wheezing chest we could hear long before his beamish face appeared above the last flight of stairs. Chubby and chapfallen, he seemed a wonder of the world to me. His teeth were gone and he had refused to replace them with dentures. He chewed his food with his hardened gums and laughed bigly out of that amazingly toothless mouth. I marveled at his life, which seemed to me simple as a monk’s, and at his depths of salty good humor for dealing with the malign fate of war that had kept him stranded in the United States until it was over, unable to get back. For his children had made family lives here. He was alone.
He knew no English, or little. Relying on my mother at the shop had not improved it. But he had memorized a rollicking dictionary of affectionate Italian body language for kids, and could sit my sister and me on on his knees and sing us Neapolitan rhymes, and let out that big, heaving laugh that shook his empty chaps, and leave us squealing and giggling with a stinging rub of his day’s growth of grizzled beard on our tender cheeks.
He could not have been more different from my father, whose superbia came straight from Nonna Immacolata—or so I imagined from the unsmiling pictures I had seen of her—she who had declared back in 1929 that she would not celebrate her son’s wedding to a lowly, swart-skinned Zeechilyaahn, and vigorously denounced any member of the family who did. I’m not sure how I came to know this of her. Perhaps it had been one of my mother’s lonely confidences, those nights when she had turned over the darkest earth in her heart’s garden. I can imagine her being sorry she had told us, as if it had been a betrayal of him, one of those memories to lay away in the mortuary of denial, perhaps to be opened when we were grown, perhaps never ever to be opened at all. But, once told, how could it be untold? And now it strikes such a solemn chord in me that it is difficult to recover even what I must have felt in pity for my father and grandfather when those soft, black-bordered letters arrived from Sperone saying that Nonna Immacolata had died.
It had been almost ten years since Luigi had seen her. I am tempted to wonder just how deeply he felt the loss—surely less than my father, whose grief I expected to be what it was, horribly dark and solemn. And yet having only such a standard, or the remembered melodrama of my Spagnola aunts to measure my grandfather’s sorrow by, how could I tell? He sorrowed. Perhaps he was mortified that he had missed her passing. He seemed to long for home more than ever. He seemed to be thinking more than ever of his own mortality. Satisfied, now, that he had seen my father through his transition, he signed over the lease to the store, and we took him to the steamship pier and waved him off.
And now from across the sea poured more letters than ever, a whole new transatlantic revival of famiglia, soft, sepia photographs wrapped in their fine, almost diaphanous airmail paper—who had died, who’d been born, who’d survived, who’d grown up, who’d suffered, married, miscarried. Brothers, sisters, cousins, second cousins, second cousins twice removed, with names that reclaimed all the territory of naming abandoned by my American aunts—Rosina, Raffaelo, Michelina, Irena, Rosetta, Clementina, Filiberto, Alfonso, Cenzina. New letters came from Grandpa Luigi, fired up to merchant again, eager to get into the booming postwar export trade. The iron is hot, Mario is well, no? Now he should come home. Home, they said. And he had been in America since 1921!
He promises my mother a brief visit only, a month or two, till Thanksgiving, Christmas at the latest. But it doesn’t seem possible to me. My father has just come back into my life, how can he be leaving? Until it is real I refuse to accept it, until we go to that same pier again on that gray September morning and I actually see him, slumped among the massed bodies along the deck rail, searching for us in the roaring, weeping crowd on the pier, tipping his dark fedora as the S.S. Vulcania disappears into the mist. I could have drowned in the aching sound the ship bellowed as it pulled away. They found me hunched in a corner of the girls’ bathroom at school later that day, sobbing inconsolably.
What I haven’t said is that he had taken my brother Carlo with him. Because I couldn’t bear it. Carlo, still undersized and baby-faced at fourteen, with a devilish shock of brown hair that got into his eyes, eyes that otherwise crackled with mischief. He had not wanted to go. Why should he? I loved Italy. It should have been me.
Yet it wasn’t, and I knew why. Not just because it would have been awkward, difficult, absurd, but because in the twisted moral vocabulary of the Italian family, this was not a gift, not a reward, but a punishment. Not that they would have admitted it. No, no, no. It was protection. It was to take him out of danger, remove him from the war zone of our East Harlem neighborhood. And they were right. It was no longer just another ghetto of tough-guy Italians but the epicenter of radical ethnic change. Always a feisty neighborhood, contested turf for southern paesani of every dialect, for years the working-class politics of a brilliant labor congressman named Vito Marcantonio had mellowed the strife and even forged a peace between Italians and the blacks in Harlem proper, along the great Park Avenue divide. But great new migrations of southern