Reading these signs years after, Maria’s daughters, too, still young and unwise, wanted to live for Love. We imagined Maria our sister somehow, rising from that sickbed with her faith renewed in the image of a Love as imperious as Tosca’s, a Love Dante had made so commanding that the beloved could never withhold her own in return.
And so we imagined Maria wrapping her shapely figure in thick woolens again, sacrificing day after day again, on her feet in the chill-cold North Avenue market, in that market filled with the fragrant stinks of cheeses and salt meats and damp sawdust, with its dark pinecones still clutching their nuts like fists, with its intoxicating scents of oranges in winter and of Christmas anise. She helped lift the huge, steaming sides of beef onto storage hooks in the icebox. She candled eggs in the back room till her eyes seemed to melt into her head. At the front counter she forced herself to smile the shopkeeper’s winning smile. And, oh, it was a sweet smile, they said, none sweeter, so winsome and large it transformed her melancholy face.
But still there were ominous forecasts about her breaking health. In the mornings she wept, we could hear her weeping, her arthritic joints ached so, and the limited safety of the child who knows fear seemed to have been made more fearful.
Surely from the baseline of my infancy there had been some intuition of the mysteriously twining roots of love and pain, even love and death. Hadn’t I been marked for both when I’d been named for my mother’s mother, who had died the year before I was born? In a family that deeply respected the age-old privilege of the father to name the first girl-child after his mother (in this case, Immacolata, the grandmother living in Italy), such encoding of the memory of my dead Sicilian grandmother into my life bore almost unintelligible significance. It also happens to have spared me a lifetime symbolically blazoned with the inviolate sex of the Madonna—a name which, in any case, was decorously tacked on at my christening. Of course even “Flavia” was a cross for an American child to bear, and after about eleven years of it I cried bitter tears, begging my mother to let me give myself another name. My father had changed his—he had told us so—when as a young officer his true first name of Salvatore had made him a hayseed to the more genteel of his comrades. But my mother had told me then about her mother, how good she had been, if stern, and wise and clever besides, and said, “You will come to love your name.” And I did, if not entirely for her sake.
But I had also been only five when my grandfather, my mother’s father, died of a stroke, a bitter wound to the heart of child love. He was Calogero, a name even more comical to the ear of Italian fashion than my father’s Salvatore, and as distinctly Sicilian as the sweet wine he made every fall and drank through a winter of Sundays with his card-playing cronies, keeping an ever tighter grip on the bottle and the deck. He had made much of us, his first grandchildren, and we had adored his dry and wistful humor, doled out with mysterious pennies in a cunning sleight-of-hand and accompanied by tickles of his peppery handlebar mustache, which he wore wickedly curled and waxed to a fine arabesque.
His death had been sudden, and catastrophic. Their Mamma gone, he had become everything to his girls. They held his wake at home, as families did then, on the parlor floor of the very tenement that stood as the congealed sweat of his stonemason’s brow. He had been foreman, my mother loved to remind us, on the construction crew of the Saw Mill River Parkway—one of the country’s first grand, tree-lined parkways, which ran through the Bronx and Westchester. He had stood up to the mafiosi in the protection racket when he ran a grocery store on East 106th Street, and she, his Mary, who had thrown herself in the way when they shot him, the bullet just whizzing past her shoulder—who in that moment had become his most precious treasure—had never wanted him out of her sight.
What useless flotsam we four children had suddenly become on the flood of his daughters’ primitive, tidal grief. Years later, as often as I read of the women of Troy mourning Priam in the fiery collapse of the ancient city, I would see a darkened front room eerily lit with flaming candles and enwrapped in a velvety embrasure of white flowers, a father’s poor work-worn body lying still and straight amid the waving silhouettes of his daughters, their shrieking voices strung into one great piercing wail of anguish. I can still hear them, still see myself sobbing, in empathy and terror, in the room where the dark winter coats are mounded, until some pitying aunt takes me in her arms. To this day the scent of gardenias makes me want to faint.
Her father’s death seemed to have become a turning point for Maria, who, sick in heart and body, had for a moment felt the meaning of her family gone. This was true for Mario as well. The terrible war had just begun, abruptly cutting off everyone here who still felt rooted in Italy from everyone still left behind. No one could go there, no one could leave there. One day, they said, Immacolata had delayed getting away. One little day!—someone was sick, she could not go so quickly—and the gate had shut like iron. Husband and wife, mother and children, were condemned to live out the war apart.
It was a moment of cruel poise between past and future. Or so it seemed, for how else could we explain the mystery of this sudden wrenching change, this cruel tearing apart of everything to go thousands of miles across the continent? If, as time went on, we began to understand it differently—to see something perhaps more ominous than beautiful at the passionate heart of those old photographs, something less unasked for than death in the urge to fly, less liberating than the will to take courage and move on—it was not because what we believed then and still in part believe was less believable: that the east seemed cold and insidiously full of hurt, that the west seemed bright and beckoning, that each of my parents, out of tender deference to the other, longed to seek the cure of the sun like amputees cauterizing each other’s wounds.
But whatever it was to them, this is what it was to me: the journey that altered, ever after, the way I read the universe.
2
Mario stayed behind to sell the fixtures in the North Avenue market; Maria packed us four for the scouting trip westward, and we headed to Tucson by train to search out a place to live. I remember my sister and me hugging the window seats, watching the states unroll beside us like a vast cloth on which the feast of America was spread, cupping our hands at night against the glass until our eyes ached, sleeping curled together in our plush seats (which felt like little rooms and smelled close and spongy) as the hum and click of the track set the rhythm of our heartbeats. I remember stepping off the train four days and nights later into the freshness of early morning Tucson amid a sweeping surround of sun and cactus. I felt as if I had been suddenly given the sky.
But Maria did not see sky. Faced with the four of us amid the stark green walls of a room in a motor court, she had discovered the limits of her bravado. Stopped in full flight, she lay plunk as a sopped towel in an armchair, the tears bleeding silently down her face, while we stood with our stupefied big-baby eyes frozen beside her.
Within days we were rattling again across the prairies, switching in Chicago to the Rock Island Rocket, blazing like a railroad movie into Grand Central Station, where Maria and Mario, in whose orbit of passion we lived and moved, turned the roar on the platform into a crescendo appassionato, and fell into each other’s arms.
But for Mario there could be no stopping now, no changing, no turning back, whatever Maria’s misgivings. He had never turned back, not since he’d left Sperone, not since the day in 1921 when, in a driving rain, he had stepped onto the ship in Santa Lucia, his beloved Naples behind him, drenched in the national grief of Enrico Caruso’s funeral. Within weeks, we were packed and ready, on the road like Okies, all the stuff we could fit piled into an old Dodge and a pickup. And still my mother amazed us, driving a truck. We had never seen a woman drive a truck.
Spelling