The Women of Saturn

by Connie Guzzo-Mcparland

  By the beginning of our first summer, the owner of the building, a tall, broad Polish man who liked our family—or so he said—offered us the third-floor apartment, which had a balcony. Sometimes in the evenings, I would sit on the balcony with my parents, who watched the homeowners fuss around their little playhouses. My mother admired how meticulously the men worked, while my father thought they were fools.

  “Il polacco—the Polish man—now he is smart,” my father kept saying about the landlord. “He has lived here maybe less than twenty years, and he owns an apartment building. These people have lived here all their lives, have gone to war, and all they have is a wooden box. They can play all they want with their little flowers but they still live in a box. Their flowers don’t even have an aroma.”

  I wanted to speak up for the lilacs, but with Father there was no point, since I could guess his response. “The lilacs, you smell them once and they are finished, not like the oleanders that grow everywhere and last all summer long.” He was always comparing. Whether he spoke about the weather, houses, food, or flowers, Father always weighed Montreal versus Milan.

  My father, whom relatives and friends now called Joe for short, had also gained weight. Working as a bricklayer, he had the ruddy complexion that comes from exposure to the sun in the summer, frost and wind in the winter. In the summer, he played with a musical band at all the religious feasts on Dante Street, and when we went to a family gathering, he brought his trumpet with him just in case someone asked him to play.

  “Joe, give us a Carnival of Venice,” someone would inevitably ask.

  With his large, sweaty forehead and his puffy, red cheeks, he looked like a white Louis Armstrong, blowing his horn to the applause of his friends. Now he practiced his scales more out of habit than necessity. The band he had formed with Francesco had played at only a few Italian weddings. They played the Latin American tunes that were popular then. They wore silk shirts with puffy sleeves and took turns playing the maracas. When practicing in our living room, my father always seemed self-conscious and unenthusiastic about shaking those brightly painted wooden balls to the rhythm of “Tico-Tico” and “Besame Mucho.” He argued with Francesco and refused to move in unison with the others in choreographed fashion.

  “We look ridiculous, all jumping up at the same time, like grasshoppers,” my father complained. But the demand for their type of music slowly dwindled.

  “We should be playing more rock-and-roll,” Francesco argued with father, who wouldn’t hear of it.

  When we first came over, Father still surprised me with little presents when I least expected them. Once he bought me a watch from a travelling salesman. Another time, on the first warm day after the first long winter, he came home with a Bat-a-Ball.

  But, as time went on, he became sullen and easily upset, especially when he had no work. Then he stayed home, ashamed to be seen by his friends. The more time passed, the more he seemed to lose the sense of humour he was known for, and even when he tried to be funny, he sounded angry. So I learned not to argue with him and I spoke to him less and less. My mother was my go-between when I needed to ask him anything important.

  Of our English neighbours on Tenth Avenue, he’d say, “They think they live in a palace. These people haven’t seen real palaces!”

  My mother’s spin on palaces was that she never wanted to live in one. “People who live in palaces have bigger problems than we do. I’d rather be healthy and happy in a small home.”

  We didn’t associate much with our neighbours, except for an Italian family who lived on the second floor, and then later, with two other families who arrived the summer after us and who lived on the other side of Belanger Street, above a movie theatre, The Montrose. To me, the English people who lived in the little houses were like the American families I saw on TV: not totally real. I imagined their daughters attending proms and school dances in crinoline dresses with flower corsages wrapped around their wrists, which their fathers placed on them with a proud smile and a “Have a good time, Betty.”

  But neither did I feel close to the Italians I saw on Dante Street on religious holidays. The street was festooned with little Italian flags and people ate cold tomato pizzas and granita, while the band played “Faccetta Nera” and other Italian marches. The dignitaries and community leaders that surrounded Councillor Di Principe and spoke on stage were mostly second- or third-generation immigrants. Their parents, who mostly lived around Mile End, had come to this country long before us, and some of them had been interned during the war for their fascist leanings. They spoke Italian with a mixture of French and English. The more recent arrivals, like us, lived mostly around the newer Italian church, Notre Dame de la Consolata, or north and east towards Saint Michel and Saint Leonard, and attended English school.

  My father had insisted that unless we went to English school, we would never learn the language. French, he told us, we could learn on the streets of east-end Montreal. In September, after our arrival, he walked us to Saint Brendan’s School on Fourteenth Avenue. I was put back two grades into grade three, and my brother, who should have been in high school, was put in grade four. We teased him for looking as old as the teacher. Some of the other Italian boys were even older than my brother. They smoked and shaved. Mr. Foster, the fourth-grade teacher, fresh out of teacher’s college, had probably less experience than they did.

  “Maybe you can teach him a thing or two,” my father joked with the boys.

  As for me, school was no struggle. My first English reader had lots of pictures with a few words in large print: “ANN RAN, DAVID RAN, ANN AND DAVID RAN.” I ran as fast as I could to catch up to them, while my brother was too impatient to even try. He said he didn’t like school at all. He asked Father to give him trumpet lessons and I had to listen to both of them practice every night. At the end of the first school year, my teacher recommended I skip fourth grade, and then, once in high school, I would skip one more grade, and graduate with my age group.

  I spent most of my Sundays watching hordes of teenagers lining up in front of the Montrose Theatre, with Elvis staring at me in life-sized movie posters from across the street. I used to beg my mother to let me go to the movies, but she never once gave in. It’s not as if I was fanatical about Elvis, like Heather, my friend at school, who wore an Elvis button on her coat and carried a small picture of him in her mittens. My father felt, in no uncertain terms, that Elvis and his success stood for everything stupid and incomprehensible about this side of the world, which was disappointing him more and more. But I still wanted to see what the excitement was all about.

  After the Sicilian grocers on Belair Street sold their store to expand their cheese factory, my father stopped going there, and Mother started shopping at the A&P on Belanger Street. My imagination was fueled by True Confessions and Photoplay, magazines I read as I followed Mother with a cart around the aisles of the store, and then slipped back onto the shelves at the checkout counter. I also kept up with the Italian counterparts to Photoplay: the fotoromanzi and Sorrisi e Canzoni, in which I followed the antics of the European jetsetters on the French Riviera, in Monaco, and San Remo. At school, my Italian friends who had arrived most recently argued constantly that Elvis and company could not hold a candle to Claudio Villa and Luciano Taioli. Since I liked to keep a foot in both camps, I wasn’t always sure which side had the most merit. Without a doubt, the Italians had it on the voice, but Elvis and Pat Boone were easier to look at

  At school I made a best friend, Antoinette, who lived in Saint-Michel, which was a bus ride away. I wasn’t allowed to travel there by myself, so I spent most Sunday afternoons listening to the endless trumpet exercises, watching my mother perform her household chores in her church clothes, and reading or talking on the telephone with Antoinette. My brother insisted I also take music lessons, maybe the accordion, so we could form a duo. Father taught me solfège for a few weeks, but I wasn’t as committed as Luigi and he ga
ve up on me.

  Instead, for the first year or so, I wrote diligently to my girlfriends from Mulirena, but eventually the writing dwindled until it stopped completely. I often dreamed of Mulirena. And when I wrote about it, I wondered whether things had really happened as I remembered them, or whether I was confusing memories and dreams.

  Tenth Avenue was real, though.

  Nothing much ever happened there on Sundays, but I still slept in hair rollers every Saturday night and wore my best clothes to church—in eager expectation. Wishes and dreams were tender crocuses that dared, bravely, to spurt out of the ground in spite of the frost and trampling feet. While I lived there, the multicoloured neon lights of the Montrose Theatre marquee blinked on and on with endless possibilities.

  32. VILLE VERTE, 1960

  MOTHER WARNED FATHER NOT TO get his hopes up too high. After buying a lot from Lucia’s husband, Pasquale, Father often met with him to discuss job opportunities for when the development project in Laval went through.

  “He talks too big,” Mother said.

  But Father said there was no harm in trying. Pasquale and Lucia paid us a few visits, usually on Sundays. She had started working in the same factory as Mother and Tina. Her husband, she confessed to Tina, was jealous of the men who worked there, and had ordered her to stay home. But she wanted to work, if only to get away from the whiny renters at the duplex her husband had bought in St. Michel.

  Lucia lost no time sponsoring her brothers and by early 1960 both had settled in Lucia’s duplex basement unit. With Pasquale’s financial backing, they set up Calabria Foods, importing salami, cheeses, and olive oil from Calabria. It was also through Pasquale that the brothers befriended Nicodemo, Jack Russo, and their circle of friends, which included the contractor Joe Vaccaro and the smooth-talking Venetian Alex Di Principe, who dabbled in municipal politics.

  The well-dressed and suave Alfonso, and the strapping Nicodemo, frequented bars and nightclubs together with the French girls that flocked around them. The food business took off well, thanks, in part, it was rumoured, to Nicodemo’s strong-armed tactics in convincing restaurants to buy Alfonso’s food products. But Alfonso had set his sights elsewhere. He delegated the food business to his younger brother, Pietro, and spent less and less time in clubs, especially after he started courting Joe Vaccaro’s daughter, Dominique. Vaccaro helped fund Di Principe’s political campaign until he was elected city councillor in Laval. Alfonso quickly moved in very different circles than my family and we didn’t see much of him.

  “How did they get rich so fast?” my mother asked of the people around Alfonso and connected to the Laval project.

  Nicodemo’s star was connected to Jack Russo and his contacts in the entertainment business. He spent his days in body building gyms and his evenings in nightclubs, and he was quickly groomed as Russo’s bodyguard. Through Russo’s connections, he became a professional wrestler and changed his name to Nico Demon. He set up a café in St. Michel under that name that soon became a hangout for Russo’s cronies. Nico would often be seen driving his large Chevrolet Impala with its sweeping tailfins along Jean-Talon, close to the factory where Lucia and Mother worked. Pasquale sent him to spy on Lucia, Tina had surmised, but Mother had a more suspicious streak.

  “He’s circling the factory too often, at all times of day. Doesn’t he ever work to pay for that boat?” Mother said once.

  Father wanted to keep up his friendship with Pasquale because of his work. He showed him the papers that proved he had studied masonry in Milan and even brought out the thick books from which he had studied. But whenever he asked Pasquale about the Laval project, he was told that they had to wait until all the lots were sold before they could plan for construction. Then one evening Pasquale and Alex Di Principe showed up with a briefcase and some official-looking documents and offered Father shares in the construction company if he had at least five thousand dollars to invest. Father was at first cold to the idea, since he didn’t have the money, but after Di Principe showed architect’s plans for the Ville Verte, with colour drawings of the homes, parks, a piazza, and even a bocce court, he became obsessed, against my mother’s warnings, with somehow securing the money to become connected to the project.

  He pestered my uncles to go in with him, but they all declined. “If you don’t risk you never get anywhere in this country,” he kept repeating. After much arguing with Mother, he and Di Principe met with a bank manager and Father beamed with delight when he returned home with a ten thousand dollar loan and documents that made him a partner in Aménagement Ville Verte.

  33. THE WEDDING DANCE, SPRING 1961

  OUR FIRST WEDDING INVITATION IN Montreal arrived on one of those slushy spring days when sewers can’t keep up with the flow of dirty, melted snow forming little streams down city streets. It was to attend Alfonso and Dominique Vaccaro’s wedding in a new reception hall in St. Michel. I remember opening the pearly white, embossed card gingerly on my return home from school. My clothes had been drenched in muddy water by a speeding car on Belanger Street. I was excited about attending the wedding that had been the talk of all my paesani for months, but I dreaded Father’s reaction to the invitation. His mood turned foul anytime Lucia’s family was mentioned.

  The Ville Verte project was not advancing as planned. Pasquale’s partner, Joe Vaccaro, had problems having the zoning bylaw changed from agricultural to residential, Pasquale kept telling Father. Yet Di Principe had reassured Father that the zoning change was only a technicality, and that, being part of the civic administration in Laval, he would make sure the deal would go through. Nevertheless, Pasquale seemed really distressed by the slow pace of developments, and Father didn’t know whom to believe. According to Pasquale, Di Principe was meeting stronger resistance to the proposed plans from the non-Italian city councillors than they had anticipated.

  “They’re jealous of us Italians buying so much land,” Pasquale complained.

  “Bunch of ignorants,” Father said of Pasquale and his friends. “In Italy, they only knew how to feed pigs. Here they’ve all become mastri and big businessmen, but can’t convince a bunch of farmers to turn a useless parcel of dirt into a model city.”

  “No need to panic,” was Di Principe’s response to Father’s demands for an explanation. Meanwhile, a friend informed Father that Vaccaro had bought lots of other underdeveloped land in Laval and together with Alfonso started A&V Construction.

  Father seethed at the news and called Pasquale. “How come they had no problems with those lots?”

  “It’s a smaller project in a different municipality,” Pasquale told him. “Let’s be patient.”

  Father threw the opened wedding invitation in the garbage, but I retrieved it to show Mother when she returned home from the factory.

  “Don’t lose your head and health over this,” she told Father. “We go to the wedding, and then if nothing happens after that, you tell them you want your money back. Let them hustle like gypsies and let them keep their big houses and cars.”

  A scurry of shopping on St. Hubert Street followed for me and my mother. We had to look for the right dresses and particularly for the hats, which my aunts told us we had to wear in the French church where the wedding would be held.

  A week before the occasion, I had my long hair cut short and curled into a bob. In my new dress and my first pair of high heels, I looked ten years older than my age.

  At the reception, I sat bored at my family’s table watching everyone dance while father berated the excesses of the lavish party. We watched as Lucia danced with the best man, Nicodemo, and anyone who asked while her husband sat alone drinking wine.

  “Poor Pasquale, he never even got to dance at his own wedding,” Mother said.

  “He’s a lackey for Alfonso and Vaccaro and a bigger cornuto than I thought,” Father bristled.

  On my way to the washroom, I stopped at Lucia’s table. She commented on how gro
wn up I looked and invited me to sit with her, and we chatted for a while. Just as Nicodemo came toward our table, another man pulled Lucia from her chair to the dance floor. Nicodemo took me by the arms and twirled me around in a fast dance. I was taken by surprise and couldn’t keep in step with the music and tripped on his toes, but he asked me to dance a second and a third time after which I excused myself. I felt uncomfortable with the way he stared into my eyes as we danced. I could see my father looking at me sternly. When I returned to my table, my father snapped, “If you don’t know how to dance, just sit and stop making a fool of yourself.”

  “How can I know how to dance when this is the first time I’ve ever gone to a party?” I snapped back.

  “Well, well, you should send her to dancing school, so she can go out dancing on Saturday nights,” one of my aunts said laughing.

  I sat out for the rest of the evening.

  As soon as we got home, my father slapped me hard across the face. “Today you showed me what you’re really like. You behaved like a puttana, hand in hand with your friend, Lucia.” It was the first time, my father had laid hands on me and the slap left me numb. My mother remained silent. From then on, I hated attending Italian weddings.

  34. HEAT WAVE, SUMMER 1961

  THE SUMMER OF 1961 TURNED out to be especially oppressive—the most humid in years, the weatherman said. Walking along the city sidewalks on my way to work, I could feel the sun’s power hitting me twice: first, as it dropped its heat down to the pavement; then, as it radiated it right back up, smothering my body with sticky wetness.