I gave the money to my mother. Sometimes she would say that I should keep it all but ended up giving me five and taking the other five. She pinched my cheeks and said, “Figlio mio.” And “my little man of the house.”
Aerograms. Romeo and Juliet
The Bronx, Pelham Parkway North, circa 1948–1949
All summer long I thought of Marilyn. I couldn’t wait to get home from work to write her. Her letters, in a perfect script that filled the page, told me about the street musicians, about the houseboats along the always-blue river that ran through the center of Paris. “I love speaking French!” she wrote. “You should learn it and we can parler together.”
Because there was nothing but the routine of my delivery routes to recount—because I felt ashamed of my life as a butcher boy—I wrote about how much I missed her and couldn’t wait for her to return. I threw in some other details to make it vivid: “You are my sky and my stars.” I regretted how sugary those words were the second I slid the letter into the corner mailbox, but it was too late. In a less syrupy note I said that I was saving money every week so that one day we could live together in Paris. That was not true—there were no such savings—but I wanted to remind her we had a future.
In late August, I dreamed of the quick return of fall. In just a few more weeks it would be Labor Day and, right after, school, when Marilyn would be home and the big, wide, deep, empty space in my heart—so I wrote—would be filled. I heard nothing for nine days and wondered if she was ill or had fallen into that Paris river or, worse, that she did not love me anymore.
An aerogram arrived two weeks before school opened. The news: Marilyn’s parents had gotten jobs teaching at a high school in Los Angeles and they were not coming back to New York. It all happened in a big rush and they were flying to Los Angeles directly from Paris. “I have been crying all week,” she wrote, drawing little teardrops along the margins of the page. She loved me and would always love me. “Fred, we will still be in Paris ensemble one day.”
We continued to write each other, frequently at first, then, on her side, less frequently and less fervently. One rainy November day I received a rather curt letter of four pages. It was filled with descriptions of her trip to the Mojave Desert, where she and her parents and a next-door neighbor, a boy her age named Eugene, camped out under the blackest sky filled with the brightest stars. “You will love the desert, Fred. Maybe you can come out and visit me one day.”
She was slipping away. I wrote: “I wish I was there with you instead of Eugene. I will try to come see you one day soon. Is there any hope you can come here?” Then I made a list of what I was reading and of the paintings I loved in art books from the library. I quoted a passage from a letter of Van Gogh to his brother Theo, from another book I got from the library: “I want to paint the heat of the sun.” And I ended with a flourish: “I love you more than books and paintings.”
Her letters came less frequently and were briefer. Now a week or two would pass before I got even a postcard. I tried not to think of her. But the more I tried, the more she filled my thoughts. After dinner, when my mother went to bed, I spent my evenings at the kitchen table and read books like The Portrait of a Lady, books that were beyond my comprehension but that I knew were considered classics and enriching. I drank pots of Earl Grey tea because I liked the way it made my heart race and pound; I believed that drinking tea was sophisticated and that it distinguished me from simple, ordinary coffee drinkers and elevated me into the sphere of genteel high culture and good taste; tea was the elixir for intelligent people. I had learned that from the Sherlock Holmes movies, where the brilliant Holmes and Dr. Watson were always having tea brought to them by their kindly housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson.
I had tuned the radio in the kitchen to WQXR and other classical music radio stations. I was sure that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet was the most profound music in the world. Competing for depth was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, whose melancholy sweetness enriched my missing of Marilyn, but it also enlarged my sense of my life as very small and eventless. I imagined myself in a vast sea, in a little sailboat riding the swells to the colors of the music and seeing, waiting for me there in the distance, the outlines of a magical island.
With music staging my background, I made colored-pencil drawings of my kitchen with my teapot in the foreground, the rest of the space filled with the stove and the fridge, the window that opened to a small courtyard with untrimmed hedges. One day I would show Marilyn my drawings and she would see in them my yearning for her and for our future life as artists together in Paris.
In the spring of 1949, when I was six months over thirteen, her letters stopped. I wrote again and again with no reply.
One night, my mother walked to the kitchen hours after she had already gone to bed. She was in her fluffy worn nightgown and pink slippers, and I saw that she was distressed.
“What’s wrong, Mom? Is the radio on too loud?”
“No.”
“Does the smoke bother you?” I had started smoking a pipe, for effect. It went with the tea and the scarf that I wore only in the apartment.
“Not that. I’m worried about you. You are sad all the time.”
“It will go away, Mom,” I said, not believing it. I did not want it to go away because I knew my love would disappear with the sadness, and what would I be left with then?
“Is it that girl you write to?”
“Yes. But we don’t write anymore.”
“Maybe you both will write again.”
“When, Mom, in heaven?”
“If it is in your and her destiny to be together, one day you will.”
I resented her useless good cheer, resented her for invading the house of my sadness. “And what about you and my father, Mom? What is destiny doing for you there?”
“We will be together again. It’s in our stars.”
“Oh, Mom,” I said, my heart hurting for her, for her delusions and her helplessness in life. “I’m sure you’re right.”
The Last Radio
The Bronx, Pelham Parkway North, circa 1952
My grandmother grew very old very fast. She stayed in her cot all day and barely came to eat with us in the kitchen. She grew weaker and thinner, bones in an old, frayed housecoat. Dr. Marcuccio, who had treated my rheumatic fever, made his weekly house calls and recommended she drink thick Guinness stout to “put some meat on her bones.” It didn’t.
Francesca slept through her Italian programs. She was too weak to go to Sunday Mass. My mother had to help her go to the bathroom. She slept most of the day, and when awake she wanted me to sit by her and hold her hand; she would hold mine tightly for a moment, then let it go slack. I was frightened she would die and never let go of my hand. One spring afternoon in 1953, I opened the window to bring fresh air into the room which stank of stale sheets and tarry medicines. I put my chair close to her cot.
“Grandma, tell me about Sicily.”
“La Sicilia, è molto lontana.”
“Yes, I know it is very far.”
“Non ti sposare quando sei ancora giovane. Aspetta. Vivi ancora un po.”
“I have no plans to marry anyone, Grandma. I love only you.”
She smiled, fell asleep. I drew the blinds against the sunlight coating her eyes.
My Sicilian grandmother, Francesca, and me when I was about five, some five years before my world collapsed.
One Saturday, Uncle Umberto and Aunt Sadie arrived. We all sat in the living room watching my grandmother sleeping and wheezing and gasping for air. My mother had called the doctor on our newly installed party-line phone, and he promised to come over right away. He was a northern Italian and, he joked, he liked my mother even though she was a Sicilian. He adored my grandmother and he would talk with her after his official visit. He laughed. They shared a world I would never know. Once I heard her give him a recipe for making codfish with capers.
“It will help your memory,” she said.
“You will live forever,” he said, winking at me.
“I hope not,” she answered. “My husband is getting tired of waiting for me.”
My grandmother had her eyes closed. She was breathing in short bursts and sometimes let out a moan. My mother was crying; my aunt, too; my uncle lit his third cigarette. My mother had forgotten she was brewing coffee until we all heard it overflowing on the stove. She rushed into the kitchen. I answered the doorbell.
The doctor pinched me on the cheek like I was still a kid. We huddled in the kitchen while he examined my grandmother, which didn’t take long. He still had his stethoscope around his neck when he joined us in the kitchen.
“I’ll stay here awhile longer, finché non è finita.”
I understood that. Did he think I did not know Italian? He would stay until it was finished, he had said. I wanted to cry.
My mother offered him a glass of Fernet-Branca, which he accepted readily. I heard rattling sounds from the living room and everyone stopped talking. My aunt sobbed.
The doctor turned to me: “Go outside for a half hour. It’s too crowded in here.”
“I want to see my grandmother.”
“When you come back.”
My mother said, “Please leave.”
I walked to the park playground. Five kids were shooting hoops; two were James and George, the Charon brothers, who lived in a building adjacent to mine. They were in their baseball uniforms; they lived in them, even came to school in them. No one asked me to join in. I watched, but all I was thinking about was when I could go home.
George called out, “Why aren’t you home boiling some worms?” It’s a line he had used since I was ten, calling the snails we ate “worms.” Then James joined in: “Where’s your book, little girl?” What they would have liked was another fistfight; another like all the fights since forever, since I was eight. I never won even once.
“Very funny!” I shouted back. I was not sure I’d been away long enough to return and I knew that if I stayed much longer we would fight. The problem was that they’d both attack you at the same time, two against one, and they did not care if you said that was unfair. Finally, I decided I could not wait anymore and ran back home. One of them shouted, “That’s right, run home, you fruit.”
The doctor had gone. Everyone was in the kitchen weeping. I was not sure they knew I had come back, and I went into the living room and went behind the screen and pulled back the sheet covering my grandmother’s face. She had a beautiful smile. Now I could go to the kitchen and cry with the others.
• • •
My mother and I took the long subway ride to Saint Raymond’s Cemetery, where the priest and my aunt and uncle were already waiting. Soon a hearse from the funeral parlor drove up and men in black suits drew out a casket. Its golden handles looked plastic. Our parish priest from the church on Gun Hill Road intoned: “Her soul is in heaven now.”
I was glad her soul was there. But what did that matter? Francesca was going into the earth forever and I would never see her again.2
* * *
2FRANCESCA AND THE FUNERAL
Francesca Scelfo (1874–1952)
An old man appeared just as the casket was being lowered into the grave. I was the only one who seemed to know who he was. I remembered him coming to visit my grandmother years ago, maybe when I was eight. He was very poor, my grandmother later told me, and had come all the way from Brooklyn to tell her about a dream that had haunted him for months. He wore an iron-gray suit that looked like the outfit convicts in 1930s movies were given when they were released from prison. He was even thinner than my grandmother, and frailer. He limped; one shoe needed laces, the other had a raised heel and huge thick sole.
We sat in the kitchen, where my grandmother poured him a full glass of cold water from a pitcher in the fridge. My grandmother was polite but not friendly, which surprised me, since he had come to see her.
He was silent for a few moments, looked about the kitchen.
“Signora Lepare, mi perdoni, ma posso avere anche un piccolo pezzo di pane?”
He looked pained, and I felt sorry for him, a grown man asking for a piece of bread. My grandmother went right to work and made fresh coffee and heated the milk and broke two huge chunks of semolina bread we had bought on Arthur Avenue. All the while he ate his eyes grew fat with tears.
They spoke too quickly in Sicilian for me to follow, and I was glad to leave them. I went to sit by the window in the living room to read, but their voices distracted me: my grandmother’s steady, firm; the old man’s choked. After a long pause, I heard my grandmother say, “Alfonso, I’m sure Giuseppe is glad you came to see me and I’m glad he said he has forgiven you.”
“Oh, Francesca, lei è un angela.”
Maybe another hour passed when my grandmother brought him to me to say good-bye. I was a good boy, and I should love my grandmother, he said, kissing me on both cheeks. Unlike my uncle Umberto, who smelled of Old Spice, he reeked of old rags kept under the sink.
“It will be too dark to walk back,” my grandmother said, giving him a knotted handkerchief. I could see the outline of some coins. He protested; he would not think of taking any gift. It was he who owed her gifts.
“Non viene da me, Alfonso. E da parte di Giuseppe,” she said.
We watched from the window as he limped to the subway, and when he was at last out of sight, my grandmother sat in her chair, sighed three times, and shut her eyes.
“Pace, pace,” she said, “finalmente.”
At dinner she told us the story. Alfonso came from the same region where she and my grandfather Giuseppe had lived, some miles from Palermo, in the hills. A year before they fled to America, Alfonzo came to borrow money, which they gave him, even though they themselves had very little. But he was her husband’s cousin. She added, “One must feed the sparrows in winter, even if it is your last crust of bread.”
“But one day, when we needed every penny to come to America, my husband went to Alfonso who said, ‘Certo, I will bring the money tomorrow.’ He did not, and in fact he went into hiding.”
“Why did you even let him in the house?” I asked.
“He’s a poor devil. And he came all the way from Brooklyn. Also, he brought me a message my husband sent him in a dream from heaven.”
“Don’t make me die waiting. Tell me,” I said.
“Giuseppe said, ‘There are no vineyards in heaven.’ ”
“Was that all?”
“The rest were the special things that pass between a husband and a wife,” she said with a youthful smile I had never seen before.
Paint Tubes and an Easel
The Bronx, Pelham Parkway North, 1953
The snow mounted high along the sidewalks and covered the roads; cars crawled and slid and one, a wheezing black Ford, skidded through a red light and crashed into a tree. I didn’t mind the storm; I put on my galoshes and bundled up with two sweaters under my coat and went out to give myself a present for my fifteenth birthday. I made it to the shop near the Pelham Parkway subway station that sold greeting cards and stationery and rented, for two cents a day, the bestsellers and the romances that my mother read. It was there that I had bought my colored pencils and drawing pads and where, in the back room behind a blue curtain, like porno, the art supplies were stashed.
Seymour, the owner, looked surprised. “Warm enough for you?”
I had no ready joke answer, focusing on why I had come there.
“Plenty warm enough.”
“I was just going to close. No sane person is coming out today.”
“I won’t stay long,” I said, worried he could get rid of me before I had gotten what I wanted.
“Sure, but go outside and brush off your coat: it’s dripping snow all over the floor.”
We went to the back room, where I chose a few small tubes of oil, the bare essentials, all by Grumbacher: a zinc yellow, medium tube (I liked the French name for it, jaune zinc); a large tube of zinc white (I knew this was i
mportant because it blended with and toned down all the other colors); a cerulean blue, for the skies I would one day paint en plein air, like Van Gogh; a jaune citron for the sunflowers I would come across somewhere. A large tube also of noir d’ivoire that I would need for outlining, for boldness, as did Gauguin. Because it was the least expensive, I took a red with no name in French; it was simply a Grumbacher Red, with whose purchase I felt I had lessened my artistic credentials.
“You’ll need a tube of green.”
“I have a few at home,” I said, knowing that I could make a green by mixing blue and yellow and save some money.
I also took a bottle of turpentine, a jar of linseed oil, and one of glaze, to protect the colors from aging and fading in the sunlight: I had longevity planned for my paintings. I read in an artist’s manual that I would also need a painting knife, but I thought my kitchen butter knife would do just as well.
For the last, I bought a large wooden palette with a thumbhole that I could use to paint while standing up before a sunny hayfield or a grove of cypress trees in a night of hills and moons.
Seymour said, “You’re over eighteen, right?”
“Of course,” I said. I was tall and looked older and had, I was told, a mature air.
“I guess I can show you, then. If you want a book on how to draw a nude, I’ll make you a good price.”
I turned the pages. “Another time, maybe.” I did not like him to think I wanted the book for dirty reasons, though I was disappointed that the black-and-white photos of the models, obscured in artistic shadow, showed little frontal nudity.
As I was leaving, Seymour said, “Look at this,” and pulled out a skinny wooden easel. “It was my daughter’s. She’s married now and got a husband and a kid to take care of and she doesn’t need it. Let you have it for six dollars.” He let me have it for five.
My Young Life Page 3
