My mother was not yet forty, but she acted and dressed like a middle-aged woman already. She was thin, with frail, sloping shoulders and no bust to speak of. In proportion to her top, though, her hips were considerable. Finding ready-made clothes for her was next to impossible. They were either too big at the top or too small at the hips.
“What do you want me to do?” she would plead whenever I became impatient with her shopping. “You know I’m built crooked.”
And whenever we found something that fit, she always seemed to find it too colourful, too low-cut or—as with the fall coat—too expensive. Then, she would expect me to translate and bargain for her, which I usually did, sometimes arguing with her first, when her demands were unreasonable. But she always relied on me to finish a sale. This time I let her do her own bargaining in her broken French.
What irked me the most about my mother was that, thin and delicate as she was, with the right clothes and a little care, she might look as pretty as the American mothers on TV. But she purposely chose her clothes to make herself disappear—to look so inconspicuous that she’d never even make it as a scarecrow. It didn’t help that she kept her sparse, thin hair pinned back with plain black bobby pins around her head. She was very conscious of the bald spots on the top of her crown. Most of the village women of my mother’s age who used to carry heavy loads over tightly braided hair suffered from the same hair loss. Her only hints of vanity were her efforts to cover up these smooth, irregularly shaped patches by keeping her hair pinned flat. She was particularly concerned that the bossa, the French forelady at the factory, might notice the premature bald spots when she looked down at my mother’s head, bowed over the over-lock machine. Her tiny head and face, made to appear even smaller by the severe hairstyle and the absence of make-up, made her look rather like a naked sparrow that hadn’t yet grown its feathers.
As we reached the corner at Saint-Zotique, we crossed the street and turned back, as if on cue. This was as far as we could walk and still return to the factory on time. My eyes followed the window display of school clothes on the mannequins—plaid skirts, navy blue pullovers, grey flannel pants. These all made me think of the pictures in my first English reader, in which two wide-eyed, freckle-faced children run excitedly, red hair flying in the wind, to their first day of school. This time of year always filled me with the expectation of something new starting, rather than anything dying, but this particular season promised me little.
I walked slowly. I was in no rush to get back to the factory, though I could sense, from my mother’s quickening steps, that she was afraid to be late for the bell that would have us all scattering to our posts like a flock of pigeons. It had already been four years since we crossed the ocean and yet we were still scrambling for crumbs.
Our co-passengers and their families were all faring much better than us. Lucia and Pasquale had bought a big bungalow in Laval. Full-page ads for Alfonso’s housing projects were plastered all over the Italian community papers, while Nicodemo’s pictures as Nico Demon, the wrestler, appeared regularly in the French tabloids. However, the Ville Verte project was still in limbo, while Father made monthly payments to repay the bank loan.
As we reached the factory, my mother made a last effort at conversation, trying hard to cheer me up. “Don’t think that you’re going to cut threads all the time. I’m sure they will let you work on the over-lock machine soon.”
I punched my time card and joined the fat Syrian ladies. We all sat silently, and snipped at loose threads for the rest of the afternoon. I dreaded getting home, where the question of school still lay hanging, suspended in the humid air of our apartment. I was afraid to cause any more outbursts, but the longer I kept quiet, the more I was giving the impression that I had given in to my father.
When the factory bell rang, everyone in unison proceeded to brush off the fine nylon dust that infiltrated our hair and clothes and covered our faces, legs, and arms.
On our way home, walking toward the bus, Mother broke the ice. “Your father is not himself these days. He hasn’t been feeling well either. He needs to go see a doctor. Don’t be so hard-headed with him.”
“He’s the hard-headed one. I only want to go back to school. It’s not as if I’m asking to go out dancing on Saturday nights.”
“That’s all we need,” sighed my mother. “What exactly did they tell you when you called for the card?”
“What card?”
“The social insurance card.”
“I couldn’t get one because I wasn’t fourteen yet.”
“If you’re too young to get a card, then you must be too young to leave school,” she said.
I hadn’t thought of that.
“Look, don’t make it seem as if you went around asking, or he’ll get upset again. Maybe if he hears from someone else that you should stay in school, he’ll give in. Don’t let him think that you’re stubborn, though.”
“And what about when I turn fourteen?” I asked.
“Think about today,” she answered, “and God will think about tomorrow.”
At the 92 bus stop, a messy queue of people, mostly other Italian women, inched their way aboard. I was ready to say, “What good is God to us, if we have to worry about each day?” But Mother was pushing her way up into the full bus already. I had heard Mother’s answer about God countless times before. I had also heard it from other village women. It had never meant anything to me; it was a stock answer they repeated to each other. Though I was crowded in the midst of all those working women in the bus, a small crack of space seemed to be opening up for me, and I felt as if I could start breathing again. I saw a subtly different take on the blind faith in destiny that had irritated me most about the women from the village. If we take control of each day as it comes, whichever way we can, then we don’t really need to rely on God for miracles. Maybe, I thought, the women have always known this, and they’ve only paid Him lip service out of generosity, to make Him feel good.
Two days later, Johanne, my friend Antoinette’s neighbour, called. She worked as a secretary at my school and spoke Italian very well. She asked to speak to my father, wanting to know why he had not sent in a form confirming my attendance at school. He didn’t know of any such forms, he told her. And in any case, I would not be attending school anymore.
She replied that, by law, I was required to be in school till the age of sixteen—we added the two extra years for good measure. The school, she explained, could alert the police if a family refused to send an underage student back to school.
My father was impressed that the school secretary spoke such good Italian, and he was very polite with her. He said that he would respect the law, and I would return to school.
“You’re going to school, but watch your step, and come straight home every day,” he told me.
I knew that he still thought of me as too obstinate and unreasonable, but I didn’t care. I could already taste the pleasure of going to the Syrian boss to inform him that I would stop working at the factory to go back to school. I felt confident that the small deception we had devised would buy me an extra year, maybe two. What would my father and the world be like after that? Already he was not the man I had known as a child, nor was I the same child that he had left behind long ago.
36. NOVEMBER 1961
MY MOTHER CALLS NOVEMBER the month of the dead. The month begins with tutti i santi or All Saints’ Day, followed on the second by tutti i morti, the Feast of the Dead. The fourth is the Day of the Fallen Soldiers, and then nature takes over with its inexorable course towards the obliteration of summer. She still sets rows of photographs of dead relatives on her dresser and lights as many candles as possible, as though wanting to lighten up the gloomy period that follows.
On a bleak, late November afternoon in 1961, a group of people gathered on the outskirts of Mulirena, on the road across a ravine—the spot where people came to see others off, or w
aited impatiently for someone to arrive. The bare details of this scene were described to me when I returned to the village a few years later. I imagined the mood as if I had been there.
It was a sombre gathering. The older ladies, still dressed in the remnants of the pacchiana costume, let their long, heavy, black skirts down to the ground, black shawls covering their heads. The weight of the heavy winter shawls made their heads tilt to one side, giving them the appearance of addolorate—women destined for sorrow and mourning.
The younger ladies, dressed in ordinary clothes, were also in black. The men wore black ties and black armbands. The village band—carrying tubas, trumpets, and clarinets under their arms—was clearly not in a festive mood. This group was waiting for someone to arrive.
Across the ocean, the vapid songs of Ricky Nelson, Frankie Avalon, and Fabian ruled the hit parade. Elvis was still away in Germany doing his military service, and a younger set of teen singers had taken over his territory.
Things had completely turned around that summer between my father and me. Even though I’d gotten my way about school, we hardly ever spoke to one other.
On the day after Labour Day, I had started my first year of high school at Saint Pius X, the newest and largest of the English Catholic High Schools in Montreal. Boys were taught by the Christian Brothers and girls by the Sisters of Saint Anne; we were segregated into two separate buildings, connected by the administration offices.
“If I hear reports that you are hanging around with boys, it will be the end of school for you,” my father threatened me. As if I needed this admonition! I used to turn scarlet when I so much as saw a boy from the other side of the building. I had been placed in 1A, the class with the highest marks, yet I still mumbled self-consciously in highly-accented English when answering questions from my teacher. My Italian girlfriends had all changed their names from Maria to Mary, Antoinetta to Tonie, Giuseppina to Josie, but I still gave my name as Caterina.
After the first few weeks in class, I was puzzled when Sister Mary Rose returned my first composition assignment with a question mark.
“Sister, I didn’t get a mark … like the others,” I said shyly.
“I don’t believe you wrote it,” she said.
The topic of the composition had been “The Autobiography of a Car,” and I had written about an old American Chevy used by a teenager and his friends. A humourous story had just flowed naturally, without much effort, and I had had fun writing it. But I just looked at the teacher and my unmarked composition, not knowing what to answer.
“You don’t talk like that, so how can you write like that?” she asked.
I was mortified. “I can write better than I can speak,” I told her. “I need time to think about words.”
She looked at me with a frown, not quite sure what to make of me. I knew that she could not understand the kind of battles that had been fought in the language department of my brain, leaving behind casualties. Calabrese dialect had resisted Italian, and before Italian had had a chance to take the upper hand, it had been invaded by French, and then by English. Unfortunately, no one language had won complete control, and no matter what I spoke, words did not flow easily off my tongue. They often failed me, left me stranded in mid-sentence, flushed and embarrassed. So I spoke up as little as possible.
My brother was growing impatient with school and had finally convinced my father that he didn’t want to pursue an academic education. In the summer, he enrolled in a private hairdressing course with a friend. My father was still trying to convince me that I would be better off working at the factory.
By the middle of November, though, things were looking up. My hair was being styled almost every day by my brother, who used me as his mannequin. I was the first girl in class to sport a teased-up hairdo—a bouffant, he called it. Sister Mary Rose joked that she wanted her hair styled just like me and Jackie Kennedy. I had joined the Sodality of Mary. I had also auditioned for the glee club, and had been given a singing part in the musical Porgy and Bess. My brother reaffirmed his suggestion that I study music seriously and take voice lessons so we could put on shows together. He had a stage scene he called “Staircase to the Stars” all worked up already. I’d come down a long lit up staircase singing “Summertime,” a tune he had been practicing since I got the part, while he played the trumpet below the stairs, on the sideline.
“Why do you want to stay behind the scenes?” I asked him.
“The trumpet is loud enough. It doesn’t have to be seen,” he answered. He kept on practising while I memorized the lyrics from his music sheet.
On the first parents’ night, in mid-November, Sister Mary Rose praised my efforts to my mother, and to show that she finally believed me, had my first composition printed in the school newspaper, The Sartorian. Tenth Avenue had sparkled in the vibrant colours and soft warmth of Indian summer, but that too was coming to its end.
About a week after that parents’ night, my aunts Rosina and Maria, and their husbands Giuseppe and Giuseppe—both called Peppe for short—along with my cousins Pat, Luigi, Joe, and Sal, came to visit. My father’s name, Giuseppe, had instead been shortened to Joe. At such gatherings, there were always two Peppes, two Joes, and two Luigis. When called, their names had to be qualified by the wife or mother’s name.
On this Saturday evening, my relatives came with an unusual surprise. My paternal grandfather had sent, via a paesano, a recording of his voice with a message to all of us. An Italian radio station had sponsored a project to have parents’ voices sent to their immigrant children. Everyone was so anxious to hear the recording that my mother hardly had time to make and serve coffee before my older cousin Sal set up his portable record player on the kitchen table. We all gathered around the machine, almost expecting to be transported to my grandparents’ black, smoke-filled kitchen, where we used to sit around the fireplace as they cooked over a tripod. As soon as my grandfather uttered the first word, my aunts, who were very emotional, started crying. As for my brother, my younger cousins, and me, we could not help but snicker at my grandfather’s grandiose manner of speaking. It was his style to talk as if giving a political speech. Addressing his family on a recording machine, he sounded like a pompous Roman orator, sending us all his saluti and good wishes. Then he addressed my father, his only surviving son.
“My dear son, I am speaking to you from our small and poor Italy. Always remember that once we were great and that we will be great again. Destiny has been cruel to us and to our country. Italy fell because we were betrayed. The past is like a wound in my heart. How can I forget the pain of seeing your return?”
At the mention of this incident, my aunts became almost hysterical. My aunt Maria said, “Oh, I can still see you, as if it were today. What a sight, what a sight!”
I couldn’t understand the reference to my father’s return and the pain it elicited.
My father also broke down as my grandfather went on. “But times are changing here too, and those black days are over. I hope that I will live to see you come back to Mulirena in luxury and glory.”
“What luxury, what glory?” answered my father, wiping his tears. “Do they know that, here, we can’t work almost half of the year because of the weather?”
“Joe, don’t complain. At least here, when you work, you get paid at the end of the week. Did you forget the summer that we worked in Cassino—like beasts!—and they never paid us a lira?” asked Aunt Rosina’s Peppe.
“Things have changed there too, now. It’s not the same anymore,” said the other Uncle Peppe. “Even Don Raffaele drives a Fiat now. Christ rode on a donkey but our priest now drives a Fiat. How do you like that?”
“A Fiat Topolino!” exclaimed the older Uncle Peppe. “You call that a car? Compared to a Chrysler or a Pontiac, it’s a tin toy. Don’t kid yourselves. Nothing has changed there.”
“For things to change they need to burn the city hall again—w
ith everyone in it,” Aunt Maria’s Peppe said. “And the government in Rome too. It’s always the same crooks who run everything there, from the church to the government. We forget too fast.” He had had communist leanings back in Italy, and had been refused a visa to the States because of it.
“You can say whatever you want, Pe’, but in Mulirena, with a few lire a day, you feel like a king,” my father said. “Here, it’s never enough. I’m going back, one way or another, I’m going back.”
“You’re talking nonsense,” replied my mother. “With two children growing up here, where are you going?”
“The children will be old enough to fend for themselves, like I did. They won’t die of hunger anymore.”
Aunt Rosina’s Peppe said, “You tell them what Mussolini used to tell us: ‘Chi mi ama, mi seque.’”
“Eh! If you knew how many times I’ve told them that,” Father said.
“Eh, you and Mussolini! Is it possible we always end up talking about Mussolini?” asked my aunt Maria, and everyone laughed.
There was nothing unusual about the bantering. It was always like this when we got together. My mother had warned my uncles not to mention the Ville Verte project or make fun of my father for his gullibility in investing in it so readily. She hadn’t believed in it from the beginning, and didn’t think it would ever fly again, but had stopped pestering Father about trying to get his money back.
When everyone had left and Father had gone to bed, I asked my mother: “Why was his return remembered with pain? Weren’t they happy to see Father?”
“Well, there are two returns that your grandfather may have meant. Once after the war, and the other after your uncle died in Milano,” Mother said sighing.
I had heard about Father returning from Milan after his younger brother died in a construction accident under his supervision. He didn’t have the courage to give the news to his mother so he had one of his friends do it for him. My grandmother never recovered from that death and wore black for the rest of her life. I didn’t know of his other return.
The Women of Saturn Page 18
