And it was then that my father’s Italy became a place imprinted on the platen of my soul. Forever after this, to go there meant a return somehow to a place already known and loved, a place we might have danced to on the airs of his cherished operas. His lessons were not always harsh. Sometimes he would forget to drill us and fill an hour instead with tales of home. He was a storyteller born. In a single sensual gesture of language or a hand lightly playing on the air, he could catch just that icy freshness of spring water in the heat of summer, the cool of overhanging chestnut trees, the burst of a succulent fig on the tongue, the scorch-scent of pinecones tossed on the fire to release their pearly nuts, the majesty of a long, snaking processional to the shrine at Montevergine as the village begged the Blessed Mother to intercede in illness or war. He could remember climbing the well-ribbed flank of Vesuvius to peer into her churning mouth, and he laid his boyish fear and courage on our hearts.
He would tell us about how it had been to be the first of fourteen children, run out of fingers counting them. Fourteen! I could not imagine being one of fourteen, when to be one of four already seemed so many. And he had not even been the first. Two infants had died before him. The wise women of his village had told his mother, the beautiful grandmother we had never known, that she’d lost them because she was too tender and hovering, too protective. “Lascialo andá!”—“Let him go!” they’d admonished her whenever he pressed his rubbery baby legs into her lap, eager to fly. And so, he said, she had finally “tossed him into the road” as soon as he could crawl, and he laughed, as if to say, “And so you see, now!” And so we saw.
And how proud he was of me, his smartest girl, when I said my Italian vowels roundly, and rolled my rs (and yet it came so easily to me!). How enchanting he was when he wasn’t angry or dull or withdrawn into his grief, or boiling with some scheme that would pave his way—and ours—with gold. So I could not separate him from Italy or from love, the unresisting love of a girl-child for her father’s sorrowing eyes.
But fuse that love with fear, even fear of love—a fusion like those wax images sealed between two disks of glass one sometimes sees in collections of Roman antiquities, the mysterious art that once welded them together now completely lost.
I am eight, and in love. It is dinnertime; the family is gathered around the table. Outside our house, in the yard, I know there is a desert wind rustling the cottonwood trees, but I can barely hear it because my brothers are taunting me, demanding that I tell the name of the boy I love. They do not mean this to torment me only. My father is already scowling. We cannot tell which of us is wounding his dark olive eyes.
The boy I love is not dark. He is as white and gold as moonlight on sand. Even his name is white: Charlie White. I tell it over to myself secretly, like a spell.
My father calls me to him after supper. “Who is this boy you love at school?” he asks, with just that crucifying touch of scorn on the word love. But the name fights back. It is as though there is a danger in my mouth, and only the whitest white silence can protect it.
“Tell me his name,” he says. All gentleness has been emptied from his voice, and he says, “If you won’t tell, you must never speak to me again.” I know this is a game. I look at him, astonished, trying to find the playful message in his face, in a twitch of mouth or eyebrow. But I am thinking, I cannot tell, and you cannot mean to shut me away with your silence—not for such a little thing! His indifference is enthralling. Near him in the dark, I read every curve of his body hungrily for a sign. I wish I had his pen now; I could so easily draw the face outlined by lamplight, the sinuous line easily embracing the fine, sad profile, the black hair silvering above the shapely ears.
A half hour goes by. It is made of thirty separate and unbearable minutes, I have counted them, and they are forever enough. I go to him, not daring to touch even his sleeve. When he lifts his head and turns it toward me his faraway glance is tender, and a delirious sense of salvation catches at my throat.
I ask him what he is writing. He shows me a letter in Italian, to his sister Irena in Striano, a village near Sperone. I think of Italy, the village, the aunt, his sister, I have never seen, her children, my cousins. But he has not forgotten his warning. “Now you have spoken,” he says, with dark and terrible finality. My brain is blinded with disbelief. More than ever now I will not tell him. I am stunned by this new power my father’s love has over me, dazed by the superb and violent cunning of his jealousy.
“Write it,” he says calmly.
I take the pen from his hand, meaning to resist, but the tip presses itself to the white sheet. I tell myself it is a name, a silly name, Charlie White, but in the wind I can hear it fall and see it break into dust and scatter and lose itself among the trees.
Perhaps less guiltily than I later thought he should have, my father began to leave a book about the house, face down to mark his place, a book with a green baize library binding plainly imprinted in white and a straightforward title like Managing the Squab Farm, full of line drawings of various pigeon breeds and poor-quality photos exhibiting the layouts of sheds.
All this seemed to go from print to reality like the swift turning of a movie page. We moved from our little bungalow into a bigger one on a rather bald and dusty road, oddly named Fair Oaks Drive. The house itself seemed clattery and somewhat the worse for wear, but it had a pebbled horseshoe driveway in the front, bordered with great, green, shaggy rhododendrons and oleanders that lent it a sheltered look, and in the back, shading the barn and two long rows of tin-roofed pigeon sheds, a majestic phalanx of cottonwood and eucalyptus trees.
Soon enough we children learned of the miracle of bird and egg and how they did increase and multiply, and how suddenly and ruthlessly they died, got plucked, and on the third day were sent off to be eaten. And then it wasn’t long before the pigeons were joined by ducks and chickens and turkeys, making an only slightly profitable enterprise slightly more profitable. And since, unlike the pigeons, these forlorn creatures wandered about the yard pecking at the gravel and playfully attacking us, and were as often accused of misdemeanors as we were, we inevitably endeared them with names and made them our friends.
But it was not a playful business. Squab farming was hard and dirty and demanding, and Lou and Carlo were soon recruited into the feeding and cleanup when they were not at school. Eventually the slaughter, too. At first they may have thought it a perverse adventure. But it was brutal work to break the necks of baby birds, and it didn’t take long for the ugliness to spread itself, dreary and awful, on their souls. I am amazed to remember how the fall of a single infant sparrow from its nest in the porch roof was a catastrophe the four of us rushed to like a battle-field medical-surgical unit, how we would take turns wrapping it in warmed towels and nursing it with an eyedropper, and when it died, which it always did, bury it in the garden with a little Popsicle-stick cross, every one of us weeping, my brothers no less than my sister and me. But this childish reparation could not lift the stone of guilt from off their daily little murders. Denial soon passed into sullen resistance, and when this roused my father’s anger to sterner discipline, the two boys began to scheme how they might run away.
I would not have known this except that I had taken refuge one afternoon in a favorite spot of mine for reading, a comfortable crotch in a branch of a great cottonwood tree at the back of the yard. Like some Nancy Drew storybook heroine, I simply overheard them, hunkered down together behind one of the pigeon sheds, conspiring. Their plans seemed already far advanced. They’d built small wagons out of old wooden crates and discarded baby-carriage wheels, crammed them with cereals and tins