But my honor was never put to the test, my father never dreaming I could be part of such a heinous plot. I lay in my bed on the screened porch, listening to the caravan creakily depart in the dark before dawn with my heart pounding so loud in my chest I thought it could wake the house. But the boys were miles away before my father missed them, and they were miles farther on before he understood what it meant. My mother begged him to be calm, but she was no match for his bellowing rage. She herself was caught between fear of his wrath and the plain, crushing truth that her sons had also left her. Billy’s father was drawn into the search. They headed the old pickup into the Catalinas along the route he and the boys had taken the previous Christmas, when they’d braved snow to cut trees to sell on city street corners, guessing now that this was the familiar road the boys would trust. And sure enough, by nightfall they found them, huddling around their campfire high in the mountains, some twenty miles away.
Lou was thirteen, his voice just beginning to break, Carlo only ten, shy, undergrown, with a sickliness that left him still a kind of baby. I could hear the small, uneven duet of their strangled sobs even as the truck crunched into the drive in the deep of the night, and my father pushed them out into the yard and into the barn. Then their howls of pain, punctuated by his choking staccato monotone of rage. He whipped Carlo first and sent him into the house, then tied Lou to a post and flogged him again and again, until the sun rose and lay full and plain over the desert and all one heard at last was the silence, even of the birds.
I had lain through the night in a stupor of disbelief, struggling to understand. How could he inflict a pain of which he seemed never to get enough? How could he bear it? How could my mother, who would flinch at the sight of a splinter in the palms of our hands? She must have drugged herself, stoned herself to death with prayer, devised some lie of the mind, some mercifully self-annihilating belief that this was happening to her, that she was merely surrendering blindly to her own punishment. How did I bear it? You could not drive the sobbing sound out of your head, no matter how much noise you made crying into the pillow, no matter how you stopped your ears with the sheets. It was as if I were there with them in that dim-lit barn, had seen it happening. It wasn’t possible, he would never have let me, and yet I think I still see them there where we were not allowed to go, not even to bring them water. I see her, whispering into her rosary, her throat tight and dry with exhausted grief, the crystal beads wedged between her thumbs, and her heart a lump of volcanic ash still too hot for the tears she wept to be wet.
When you are a child, when you are told to step over and around the corpse on the carpet, you do it. The corpse in this case was not just my father’s cruelty but his misery, the livid bestial frustration and selfish panic at who knows what world lost, darkened still more by my mother’s complex of self-sacrifice and guilt at somehow having dealt him this fate. The moral bearings of all these things escaped me. I needed to love my parents. I needed to forgive them. I began faintly to grasp at a solacing if still bewildering truth that there was a link between our family’s lives, which had in earlier days seemed for all their tumult so much our own, and that mysterious, dim other universe of wars and national hatreds. This world, which came at us in wonderful alliterative warnings like “loose lips sink ships” and bloodthirsty jingles about Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo blithely sung in the school playground, in hearty exhortations to do your part for the war effort—which we kids translated into fishing through dirt heaps for scrap metal and turning in our brown copper pennies for white ones—had just that airy false optimism and dark undertow I still connect with the comic radio of Jack Benny and Fibber McGee. We didn’t know enough to call it history, but whatever its name was, we knew we lived in it. It did not forgive. It did not explain. But it said, You don’t understand, my dear little girl, because there is so much, so much, to understand.
And it seemed to speak sometimes in the nasally voice of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for even if he had not replied to my father’s letter in his own person, there appeared the sudden fact that something in the war had changed, Italy had joined the Allies, and that the same Italians who’d been scorned on Wednesday were back on Thursday in the good graces of the American government. If with equal suddenness a place for Mario’s fine Italian hand was found on the defense equipment finishing line in a plant just outside of Tucson, it did not seem so entirely amazing or far-fetched to think the president had personally interceded. Mario, vindicated, took his place painting insignias on warplanes, spending much of his day on his back or squirming around on elbows and hips, like Michelangelo under the Sistine ceiling.
Beware the wish granted, by gods or presidents. Unlike Michelangelo, Mario was steeped in a dense bath of chemical solvents and paint fumes. Within six months he was deathly ill.
He wandered about the house at first, perplexed at the willful refusal of his own body. He worked intermittently, when his strength came. He sought out healers who were baffled by his illness, and got slowly thinner and weaker.
The chores of the pigeon farm had to go on without him. My brothers told me secretly that Lou had devised a way to anesthetize the birds before killing them, with a thin needle inserted behind the skull. It was no more than a kind of delusionary triage. Even if he could get to the infant birds in time, the hapless chickens and ducks couldn’t be spared, and at holiday market time dozens of them still squawked, in brutal scenes of madcap slaughter, headless and bleeding about the yard.
The most terrible death was that of a spangled Japanese Bantam rooster, whose dawn crowing had become as familiar a part of our lives as the cooing of the pigeons at twilight. We called him “Nip-on-knees” because if you got too close to his hens he would sneak-attack you with his beak at what it was funny to think of as the Pearl Harbor level of your anatomy. When his time came to die for somebody’s fricassee, my sister and I suffered so vocally that my mother declared all Bantam-slaying over. She could make such ultimatums now, though she’d never have admitted—in deference to my father, would never have dared think—she ruled the roost. But he had taken to his bed, and though he still gave orders from his closed and unapproachable room, we could tell he was growing less and less able to police how well they might be filled.
Probably in response to a gloomy epistle of my mother’s complaining that everything that could go wrong had, my Aunt Mildred, Spagnola sister number four, wrote us that winter. “I’m coming,” she declared, and she did, arriving from the East one day like a sunrise. Maybe she was having her own life crisis, or had reached an impassable plateau in her career. Or maybe she had simply, selfishly, imagined that any visit out here, to the land of eternal sunshine, had to be a vacation. But that was Aunt Mildred; you could never tell, as she unpacked her seventy-seven halter tops, what she did to please you from what she did to please herself.
Like all her sisters, Mildred was in the fashion trades. Or like and unlike them. They say the eldest, May (really Gandolfa, the same who had never quite forgiven Maria the injury of catching a husband before her), had already destroyed her eyes beading by the time she married Dante, that improbably named pretty-boy of hers—a man I remember from my later years in East Harlem as always mysteriously pale and well-shaven, and never to be seen on the tenement stairs before noon on weekdays in his trademark soft fedora and silk tie. Next came my mother, Maria—called Mary at home—with her promising berth at Bergdorf before Mario carried her away. And then Teresa, who had followed Mary into a similarly promising career before she’d met and married her fine, patrician-looking cousin, Louis.
But Mildred, who had slapped a kind of movie star moniker over her own original Carmela and effectively passed, had outshone them all, going into fashion design and making it at the Seventh Avenue cutting edge. Not black-haired and Arab-African-looking like all the others, but sandy red–haired like Papa Calogero and hazel-eyed like nobody (in that anciently mixed-up, who-knows-what-you-will-get