Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family

by Louise DeSalvo

  Even on ordinary days, my grandfather wears a solid gold watch chain; carries a hand-hemmed linen handkerchief in his pocket; douses himself with expensive cologne. He wears handmade Italian leather shoes. Tweed. Cashmere. Silk. Knee-length socks held up by elaborate and colorful garters. But not a hat. My grandfather thinks that if you're Italian and wear a hat, you look like a Mafioso.

  Next to him, my grandmother looks like a drudge. She spends most of her life in work dresses, or house dresses, covered with neat aprons. Her few good dresses are black. She seems to be in perpetual mourning. And, of course, she is. For all the babies she's aborted. For the family she left behind. For the happy life that has eluded her.

  "Grandpa is going back to Italy to see his girlfriend." We say this whenever our grandfather goes to Italy. We test these words far away from the grown-ups, who sit in strained silence on the sofa and folding chairs in our grandparents' living room.

  "That no-good son of a bitch thought the world owed him a living," my father says. "That's why he married my mother. So that he could have a servant to work for him, to cook and clean for him, to raise his kids, while he took his trips to Italy, gallivanted around, wearing his fancy clothes, playing the big shot, always pretending he was something he wasn't. He was a real shithead, my father. The happiest day of my life was the day my father died."

  My father and I are having lunch at Amarone's, our local Italian restaurant. Fried calamari for him; roasted vegetables and battuta for me. I have asked him to tell me about his father, about when he came to America, about his life here, about how he and his family moved back to Scafati, a town just down the road from Pompeii, when my father was a little boy. My father is nearly ninety now. These days, we meet weekly to share family stories. I want to find out as much as I can about my family before he dies.

  He's happy that, after years of indifference, I finally want to know about his past.

  I am startled by the vehemence of my father's anger. I never knew that my father hated his father, wished him dead; never imagined that the congenial grandfather who handed me five-dollar bills whenever he saw me, who took me to the Metropolitan Opera and to Ebbets Field to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play ball, wasn't as generous to his own children as he was to me.

  "The first time he went back to Italy and left us to fend for ourselves, I was three, maybe four years old," my father says. "We're living on New York Avenue in Union City. He's supposed to be going to Scafati, to see his mother and father, but who the hell knows where he went or what he was doing over there. By that time there were three of us, my two older sisters and me. The other girls would come later.

  "All I remember about the first time is my mother crying, my sisters grabbing onto my father's pants, him swatting them off, kicking them away as he left. 'But what will we do?' my mother cried. The neighbors open the doors a little to see what's going on.

  "That son of a bitch turns around on the landing, looks back at my mother, and says, 'Don't worry. You'll manage.' Imagine saying that to a woman with three kids: 'You'll manage.' But I have to hand it to my mother. She stops crying, calls him a bastard, looks her neighbors in the eye, slams the door, goes inside.

  "So my mother has to find work and fast. All that no-good father of mine has left her is fifty cents on the kitchen table. That's all. Fifty cents to tide her over until she can find work. Fifty cents was a lot more in those days than it is today, but with four mouths to feed, and the rent to pay, and everyone that we knew just scraping by so that we couldn't count on anyone else, fifty cents would last her maybe a day.

  "My sisters are in school all day. But I'm too little to go. So my mother dresses me, takes me to one of the factories where she has relatives working, and gets a job.

  "This one, thank goodness, is piecework. This one, she can do at home so she doesn't have to worry about what to do with me. It's an artificial-flower place. My mother has to make dogwood. There's this thin piece of metal; you wind some brown material around it; then you put on the petals. My mother teaches me how to do the stems.I'm not too good at it, and I'm not too fast, but it keeps me busy while she's working. Anyway, I have no toys, nothing else to do. I like being with her. Because no matter how bad things are, my mother is always good to me.

  "When she's finished, she goes back to the factory, picks up some new materials, comes home. Naturally, I have to go with her; she doesn't have anyone to leave me with.

  "All I remember is walking and walking and walking and wearing out one pair of shoes after another, and her not being able to carry me because she's either carrying all the stuff for the flowers or all the flowers she's made or she's gone shopping and has a couple of bags of groceries that she's carrying along with everything else. We don't have enough money for a carriage, and she can't hold my hand because she's always carrying something, so she tells me to hold onto her skirt when we cross the street.

  "One time I don't listen to her, and I'm not holding on to her, and I take my sweet time crossing. Before I know it, I see this horse-drawn carriage bearing down on me and I get so scared I lie down right in the middle of the street. There are two horses; they're going at a nice clip and they pound along, one on each side of me. Then the wheels of the cart, the first set, then the second. I can see it all happening. In slow motion, like they say. I can hear my mother screaming. I can hear a whole bunch of people screaming. They thought I was dead.

  "So I'm in the middle of the street. My mother drops her bundles, makes the Sign of the Cross, runs over to me. She thinks I'm dead. But I'm all right. Right in front of all these people, my mother starts slapping away at me as fast as she can. She calls me a strunz, asks me if I'm stunod. This is the only time she hits me, but I deserve it. From then on, I always hold onto her skirt, and I don't go anywhere near any horses.

  "Every time she gets paid for her dogwood branches, my mother gives me a few cents because I help her. This is my first job. I'm about four years old. I keep a penny for myself, give the rest back to her because she needs it.

  "When my mother shops at Mr. Romano's grocery store, I take whatever I've saved. We never get cookies; never get candy. Only struffoli, which my mother makes at Christmas. But me, I have a sweet tooth, even when I'm young. At Mr. Romano's store, they sell chocolate-covered graham crackers. There's a big tin of them. They're a penny apiece. You pay your penny, you take your cracker.

  "I wait until Mr. Romano is waiting on my mother, until his back is turned. I put my penny on the counter. I take five or six crackers, whatever I can fit in my hand, and I shove them up under my shirt and run outside. In summer, by the time I get home, all the chocolate has melted onto my chest and my shirt's a real mess. But I want to give a cracker to each of my sisters, and one to my mother. This is when I start stealing."

  My father laughs at the memory of himself as a four-year-old thief. He's told me before about how, when things got really bad, and his mother couldn't find work, he joined a gang that stole copper pipe and wiring from construction sites. Without her knowledge, of course.

  He was still a kid, about nine or ten years old, and his father was away in Italy. His older sisters were working— they had to quit school to go to work when they were about thirteen or fourteen; they put on a lot of makeup and lied about their age to get work. But they were just starting out in the garment industry and weren't making much money. So my father had to do something. Only, he was far too young to work at a legitimate job.

  The other gang members, all cousins of his, were older than he was. But they let him join because he was family, and because he was small enough to sneak through tiny openings at construction sites and hand out whatever materials he found. They also figured he'd be the one caught with the goods, and that the cops couldn't do anything to him because he was so young.

  It was a good racket, for a while, my father said. But once they all got caught, got taken to jail. They lied to the cops; they gave them false names. One of his uncles found out and bailed them out. Probably paid someone of
f, my father said, because the case never came to trial.

  His uncle told his mother. Which made her cry. She didn't want him to become a criminal. She told him that one good-for-nothing son of a bitch ("sonnamabitch" was the way she said it) in a family was enough. That made him stop.

  "I had my first real job," my father tells me, "after my mother lost her job making artificial flowers. Soon after, she found work as a presser in a place that manufactures shirts. At this time, the garment industry is going strong in Hudson County, and everyone's finding work.

  "I'm still too young for school. So when the whistle blows, and all the women crowd into work, my mother pushes me between her and a big fat friend of hers with huge bosoms, and they kind of push me along into the factory along with them. As soon as my mother and her friend get to her station, she pushes me under the counter where she does her ironing. That's where I spend my days, listening to the whoosh of the gas-fired iron, seeing the arms of the shirts dangling off the ironing board, watching my mother sidestep right, sidestep left, as she irons one shirt after another. Usually I fall asleep. And when I have to pee, there is a cup on the floor.

  "For a long time, nobody notices. They're paying piecework, so whether you work fast or really fast doesn't concern them like the other sweatshops where women are paid by the hour. As long as you're doing your work, keeping your station clean, not fighting with anyone, my mother says, no one pays any attention.

  "But one day, the floor manager sees me sitting on the floor. My mother thinks she's going to lose her job for bringing me to work. But instead, the guy pulls me onto my feet and tells me to make myself useful, buttoning the buttons of the shirts my mother irons.

  " 'How much are you going to pay me?' I ask. I already know the value of a dollar. 'Five cents a dozen,' the floor manager says. From now on, I start helping my mother put food on the table. It doesn't really matter what my father does or doesn't do; I'm the man of the house now. I'm about five or six years old.

  "My father's father always wanted to be a big deal, always wanted to be a uomo rispettato, but without doing anything to deserve anyone's respect. He was a barber by trade in Italy and earned enough to get by. And when he came to America, he earned money cutting the hair of the people he knew. He saved some money; got married so he'd have someone to cook and clean for him; started having children because that's what men did, not because that's what he wanted; set himself up in a barbershop with the money he saved. Then he hired some barbers to work for him.

  Because he really didn't want to be a barber. He wanted to be known as a man who had other men working for him as barbers. He wanted to be the barbershop kingpin of Hudson County, just like, back where he came from, there were tomato kingpins, fruit and vegetable kingpins, citrus kingpins, fish market kingpins, construction kingpins, waterworks kingpins, cattle kingpins. The way things were done there, he thought, was the way things should be done here.

  Only, as soon as he found a shop, bought it, fixed it up, hired a few barbers, started to make a good living, started to save money, he'd either stop working or go back to Italy, leaving one of the barbers he'd hired in charge of collecting money, paying salaries, and giving the profits to his family. Which, of course, never happened. The business, my father said, would go to pot.

  When my grandfather was away, my father went to the barbershop on his way home from school or work, to collect money from the day's work.

  Every day, it was the same story.

  "Business was bad," they'd say. "As soon as your father left, everyone stopped wanting to have their hair cut. They've all started going to Luigi's around the corner." The barbers would shrug their shoulders, raise their eyebrows, open their outraised hands. "What can you do?" It wasn't their fault. Meantime, my father says, they're stuffing their pockets full of money, giving him a few miserable dollars at the end of each day. But he doesn't blame them; he blames his father. "It's human nature," he says.

  "And so," my father says, "there wouldn't be enough money to pay the rent. So we leave. My mother finds us another place to live. But she always finds something a little better. My God, in one of those places we left, you could see through the chinks in the bricks to the Meadowlands, and the wind would come roaring through the apartment. We'd pack up all our belongings in bedsheets and pillowcases, hire a cart to take us to our new apartment. Sometimes, we didn't even have the money for a cart, and we'd walk there, the six of us: my four sisters, my mother and me.

  "We moved all the time. We lived on Fourth Street in Union City, on Ninth Street, we lived in North Bergen, and in West New York, in Brooklyn, and all over Hudson County. I went to so many schools, I stopped counting. I got left back so many times; I was always the oldest kid in the class. I was sixteen years old in grammar school when I decided to call it quits.

  "Of course, my father, the big shot, was always telling his cronies and me that somebody he knew would pull strings and get me into West Point. West Point? I couldn't even add and subtract without using my fingers. I never got beyond the seventh grade. I was working all the time after school, before school, so I couldn't do my homework.

  "My father's well fed, showing off. I'm skinny as a rail. I'm working for peddlers before and after school, making maybe fifty cents a day. I'd run up the stairs to the fifth floor of an apartment, take an order, run down, tell the peddler what the customer wanted, run up the stairs to deliver the fruits and vegetables, take the person's money, run down the stairs to get change, run up the stairs to give their customer change— those sons of bitches never trusted me with money to make change, so it was up and down, up and down all the time.

  "If my father wanted me to go to West Point, wanted me to make something of myself, he should have stuck around.

  "I left home when I couldn't take it anymore. During my first tour of duty, I saved some money, sent most of it home to your grandmother. Until I left home, I didn't have a bed to sleep in— I slept on the sofa, on two chairs pulled together. When I came back, my mother said I was too old to sleep on chairs. So she took some money she saved and bought me a folding cot. But I still didn't have a room. I slept in the living room.

  "Just after you were born," my father tells me, "I happened to see your grandfather walking down the street with all his cronies. Me, I'm hustling back to work after checking on your grandmother during my lunch hour because she's been sick. He's walking down the street as if he doesn't have a care in the world.

  "He waves at me, stops me, calls me over, introduces me to his cronies, none of whom I care to know, because they're all as worthless as he is, and he tells me, in front of all these men, that he is going to stop working and that, from now on, as a sign of respect to him, I will have to support him.

  "He's at it again. Trying to make an impression. " 'Support you?'" my father says. " 'I have a family to support. Why should I support you when you never supported me? I helped support Ma when I was a kid because I had to; I help her now.'

  " 'You should support me,' your grandfather said, 'because that is the duty you owe your father as a sign of respect.'

  " 'Respect, my ass,' " my father says. " 'I spit on your respect.' "

  HOLY OIL

  When my mother was seven or eight years old, my father told me, she had St. Vitus's Dance. When the symptoms first appeared, her father and stepmother didn't know what was wrong. My mother had had a bad sore throat some weeks before. After she was better, when she was walking up the stairs to their apartment after school, she collapsed and fell down the stairs. She wasn't seriously hurt. But after that, she collapsed a few times on the sidewalk on her way to school. Her parents, both superstitious, feared she was visited by the devil.

  Soon after, her hands started shaking, her body started shaking. Eating became very dangerous for her. Once, she stabbed her hand with her fork. Another time, she cut herself instead of cutting the food.

  Her father started to think she had St. Vitus's Dance, which was not good, but better than being visited by the devil.
It was an affliction well known in the South of Italy.

  My grandfather had heard stories of how people afflicted like my mother lost all reason. They stopped eating, and died. Or they threw themselves into rivers or off precipices. Some believed that the only cure was to dance and gyrate until you lost consciousness.

  My grandfather did not want to lose his daughter. He was not a religious man, but he believed she could be cured if they made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Vitus in Eboli. That wasn't possible. Instead, he went to church and lit a candle to St. Vitus, patron saint of the afflicted, to save his daughter, the only person he loved, from this terrible disease. It was the fourth time he had been in a church since coming to America, and he went reluctantly, from necessity. He hated the Church because the clergy in Italy helped the landlords quell rebellions of the poor. So, after his weddings, and the baptism of his daughter, he vowed never to enter a church again.

  My mother's stepmother was more practical. She contacted a doctor who spoke Italian. Paid him with her savings. He prescribed complete bed rest for six months; there was no known cure for the disease. During this time, my mother was not permitted to walk or play or feed herself. My grandmother, who had no maternal feelings for my mother, had to watch her continuously, had to wait on her, feed her, massage her body with olive oil so she wouldn't get bedsores. Knowing my grandmother's attitude to my mother, I am sure that she performed her duties grudgingly, if not with outright hostility.

  When she returned to school, my mother needed to use both hands to bring a glass of milk up to her mouth in the lunchroom. Careful as she was, she often spilled the liquid, and once she threw it over her shoulder, dousing another student. At her desk, she would try to shape her letters carefully. But she penned unrecognizable hieroglyphs, for which the teacher chided her. She was forbidden to run or play, and so the few friends she'd had before her illness abandoned her.