by Vikki Warner
One gray afternoon I finally see Fiorella. She’s leaning over the porch railing, looking out toward the street.
“Fiorella,” I call out. As she turns to me, my worry bubbles to the surface as I blurt, “Is everything okay?”
She looks at the ground. “Angelo died.”
I guess I knew it already.
I hurry over to hug her and cry with her and to offer help. She’s dressed in black. Her eyes are dull. She seems to barely recognize me. Her English is limited, and I have three phrases in Italian, none of them useful in this situation—but we speak a little, we get as far as we need to. “He very sick and it get worse a little, a little, a little,” she told me. He’d been a heavy smoker for decades. I’d seen him carted off in an ambulance a couple of times. He often told me about his visits to the doctor and the medications he was on, always ending the conversation with a wave of dismissal and an “eh, what you gonna do?”
Our brief interaction seems to have drained Fiorella. With another hug and a promise to stop in soon, I retreat to my apartment. The street looks different.
How to quantify Angelo’s legacy? He didn’t need much. He reveled in his privacy and stayed close to home. He never made money—didn’t seem to care for it. He didn’t travel further than across town, at least in his older years; as long as I’d known him, I rarely spied him leaving the little compound he shared with Fiorella. In those days just after his death, I decide not to try to think him through. Instead, I dedicate my garden that summer to his memory. I decide that every time I get tired of pulling weeds or stringing up trellises, I’ll keep going a little longer, with him in mind. When I’m out there pulling garlic out of the ground, a breeze flipping the brim of my floppy hat, I’ll meditate on him. He wasn’t sentimental about his garden the way I am—he tended it solely for food, not to indulge some mystical longing of the soul—but I think he would forgive my maudlin tribute. He was not a meddler.
Over the following weeks, Fiorella lets me into her life, her home. I drop in to see her, bring her food, and help her decipher the mail. I make phone calls on her behalf. In the midst of one call to clear up some business with the government, I find out that she is eighty-four years old and that he was seventy-four, a rare age difference for an old country marriage of the early 1960s. I’d love to learn more about this one tantalizing detail, someday, but I can’t imagine her talking about it. Some widows find comfort in journeying back to the beginnings of their long marriages; others would rather have a visitor stick to practical matters—the bills, car repairs.
Her apartment is comfortable, full of stuff but neat enough. She shows me where she banged her knee and the enormous dark bruise that resulted. She shows me the place where a pipe burst on the second floor last winter; the ceiling in her bathroom had to be taken down due to water damage and had never been fixed. She’d fallen on her way out of church, she said, but it was no big deal. Her roof leaked badly. Her car didn’t always start. “I no have money,” she said. I go home after these visits wondering how long she can stay in the house on her own, while at the same time registering her formidable strength. She is in pain, but she keeps moving. She isn’t intimidated by the sudden realities of her life without Angelo. She works capably, knows her limits, knows where to go for support. She asks for help from her church community. Soon there are guys patching her house’s chimney and siding and fixing the weak spots in her roof. A couple of her fellow parishioners bring groceries.
Eventually she catches up on her plantings, putting seedlings in the ground just in time for the season—and then quickly schooling me by producing a glorious variety of meaty tomatoes in large volumes.
I’ve guessed that some of Fiorella’s helpers have inquired about whether she plans to move out of her house now that Angelo is gone. I thought about asking her that question myself, in those early days after her husband’s death. The house is so much to handle. I decided to simply observe her and let her know that she can call me any time she needs help. I imagined a need to keep her safe, to find her an assisted living setting where she could live among many other people, to make sure she isn’t alone. In Fiorella’s situation, though, some people chuck safety and sterility in favor of the home and life they’ve spent their years building. A guarantee of supervision doesn’t compare.
I’d love to talk with Fiorella about the neighborhood; she’s part of a dwindling few who know from daily experience how much has changed in the last fifty years on Penn Street. I’d planned to talk more with Angelo about it, too, though it always amounted to an uncomfortable conversation. They stuck around when many of their Italian neighbors left—but why? Was it a choice? Were they constrained by finances? Did they love it here, or were they just stubborn? Do they have other family here? Kids? But whenever I engaged them even slightly in this line of questioning, Angelo and Fiorella offered one or two small nibbles and then shut me down. Perhaps there is something painful in their past that they didn’t talk about. Or maybe they don’t have the energy to find the words for it, to translate it for a different language and a different time. The secrets of Federal Hill are locked up tight. I’m ambivalent about the overworked stories of mob bosses and their henchmen; I want to know how ordinary people got by in those days.
Is there a comfortable place between the old Federal Hill of intimacy and calm criminality and the new Federal Hill, which is—like so many neighborhoods ravaged by the Great Recession—hurriedly turning its pockets inside out looking for money? A familiar frenzy is cranking up. A small two-family house around the corner from PennHenge went on the market on a Saturday and was sold by Monday. It’s beautiful from the outside, but heavy with wood paneling and grim carpeting on the inside: a flip in the making? These hyperactive sales now dot the map; then the contractors’ vans start pulling up, the sounds of sanding equipment and nail guns permeate. When I talk with others who own houses on nearby streets, the question is always the same: “Who are these people?” Who, indeed, are the people buying in, chasing an iffy gravy train in Providence, a city that makes tentative gains every decade or so, only to find itself unable to sustain them?
Also: aren’t we, along with the rest of the country, supposed to be in housing rehab right now? We did have that pretty bad crisis about a decade ago, and that kind of felt like a rock-bottom moment, but here we are again, so soon. Americans are so enamored of housing as a way to get rich and look rich, though, that we cannot stay away. Those new rules we made after the last crash? We can push ’em a little; we’re smarter now. No way are we going to make those same mistakes again.
I wonder what Angelo would think of the old Italian social club on Courtland Street, less than a block from our houses, which was vacant for many years but is now being renovated, soon to reopen as the Courtland Club, according to its website (as of early 2017), a “meeting place for artists, tradespeople, thinkers, small business owners, and their guests and benefactors to gather, discuss ideas, and birth collaborations.”
Putting aside that creepy jargon, the concept is not terrible. The ethnic and gender rules of the traditional social club were exclusionary by design. If we’re going to resurrect social clubs, the model should be freed from those biases. On the face of it, a community idea-generating space sounds cool, even if it’s just a glorified bar where self-defined “thinkers” are encouraged to gather. But there are still rules of exclusivity at work here: being a private club, applications can be rejected for any reason; if one is allowed to join, there is an annual membership fee of one hundred dollars. That doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but many in the neighborhood don’t have discretionary income. The club’s original website mission statement makes it sound like a kind of philanthropic endeavor: “We are dedicated to the responsible and inclusive improvement of this neighborhood and the city of Providence.” But this is a restaurant and bar—a business—and this business, I presume, will want to make money. Perhaps it will also turn out to be a shining example of inclusiveness and a champion of the average Fe
deral Hill dweller, and I hope it does, but its message has a pretty bad case of tone deafness.* I understand that the proprietor believes that the club will be improving this little area in the heart of the Hill, but installing a neighborhood amenity that the neighbors themselves must pay to set foot in—an amenity that will naturally cater to more influential people driving in from tonier areas of town—seems duplicitous. Talk of improvement feels like a ruse, and anyway, people have varying definitions of that word. Months after construction on the club was underway, the owner began buying and renovating several of the multi- and single-family homes that surround the club, which when complete will likely result in higher rents and prettier facades to round out his personal village.
It is into this uncomfortably cold sea of economic lows and highs that Federal Hill is now thrown. A tide of unforgiving money is rising. Once a place finds a certain level of desirability, money works as an automaton to flood every space with its own unstoppable motion. It happens here not in the wildfire-like way it spreads in big cities, but nonetheless it’s impossible to ignore. Rundown houses are gutted and modernized, made squeaky clean. Corporate entities grab foreclosures. Rents creep up; people are displaced. Buying a house or finding a stable long-term apartment in the neighborhood floats further out of reach for most of the people who want to live here.
Well-meaning acquaintances helpfully counsel me, a twinkle in their eyes, that the west side of Providence is a real estate “hot spot” right now. Guys drive around in pickup trucks pointing at houses, prospecting, taking pictures; amateurs and experts buy battered houses, fix up the apartments, flip them. When I get irritated by their entitled presence, I remind myself that I did the same thing. I came floating in, a newbie if ever there was one, when the housing market was way up; without educating myself I bought a house that was more than I could manage. I have only hoped to atone by sticking around, neither selling nor buying again, and I’ve outlasted my original expectations by doing just that.
It’s a strange thing to live in somebody’s hot spot. I feel a little like a neighborly display, a not-psyched representative, as potential investors look at a house on the block. I don’t wave; I don’t smile or speak. I would prefer to disregard them entirely, along with the swings of the economic pendulum that brought them here.
Choosing a neighborhood is a political statement; so is staying in one. At twenty-seven, I thought my neighbors and I were on the same socioeconomic footing just because we lived on the same streets. I used to spend time shutting out my surroundings; I expended mental energy blotting out the noise and commotion, annoyed at people rather than choosing to try to know them. Many years ago, I called a perhaps twelve-year-old kid a “piece of shit” for dropping candy wrappers in front of my house as he walked down the street. In this unkind moment—even as the words were leaving my mouth—I knew I was entering dangerous territory. I was not seeing this kid’s humanity; instead I was allowing his minor infraction to taint his very existence in my eyes. In general, too, I was letting the small irritants of my environment poison my connection to the people of the neighborhood, and I felt the wrongness of it. I had to stop there, to study and reject my insolence.
I—the white, college-educated, continuously employed lady whose still-married parents constantly opined about the value of a dollar—have unfathomable advantages over many of the people living around me. My privilege contributed to making me an owner here and not a renter. That I ever glossed over that fact isn’t an easy admission. But having been here well over a decade, seeing the advances and the setbacks, the calm and the crazy, I know I’m now a better neighbor. I watch out for my neighbors; they do the same for me.
This is no manicured cul-de-sac. There is no veneer of faultlessness in Federal Hill; we neighbors do not pretend perfection. Nonetheless, the place has its beauties and its lessons.
With Federal Hill’s lurid past subdued to a whisper, and a varied rush of people filling the vacuum left by the Italian American exodus, the neighborhood has no representative face. It certainly isn’t one that looks like Angelo’s. He never seemed bitter about that—about being the only Italian guy left on the block—but he was angry about people breaking into his car and hiding from the cops in his yard. He took a lot of pride in his modest home—I think because he felt that owning it was what truly made him part of his adoptive country. There’s a faded, peeling “Proud to Be an American” sticker on his front door; I take this to be an immigrant’s statement of solidarity with his chosen home. It’s a pure and moving declaration in Angelo’s hands, whereas in some bloviating Trump-lover’s hands it reads like a boast of national supremacy. Every household in the Hill used to celebrate the same days, worship the same God, employ the same rhythms to mark their routines: Catholic mass, big Sunday meals, factory jobs, festivals, Dean Martin albums. I know Angelo missed this sense of unity (which some would call homogeneity). He believed that Federal Hill should be more conservative, stick to the classic edicts of church and family. Simple living. He didn’t like the noise or the parties (some of which regrettably took place right next door at my house), and resented feeling that his home was at risk. When he caught young men in his yard or near his car, he told me, “I just say to ’em: fuck you!” It was the only time I ever heard Angelo swear in English.
Angelo was my anchor to the old neighborhood; I understood it in some measure only because I could look at him, hear him speak. With his death, I had some kind of internal proof that the old institutions of this place were ending. I was despondent for Angelo and doubly for Fiorella—two beloved individuals—but I finally felt sure that I would do best to leave behind the conflicted customs of Federal Hill’s past, rather than pining for them as if they held some ethereal romance.
* A later iteration of the website dropped the rhetoric about benefactors and neighborhood improvement, instead touting the renovation’s “contemporary and inclusive mindfulness.”
Record Odds
My most recent dip into singlehood has brought on a crisis of self that has me oscillating between loud, psyched-to-be-single, fuck-all-y’all bluster and weak, aimless, what-have-I-done-with-my-life blubber. It’s tiring and pathetic. I sense that I look haunted, like my own life just exploded in my face. I’ve used up a lifetime of goodwill with my friends, who listen to my endless complaints and justifications and help me deconstruct the breakup again and again.
I work from home now; with no office to go to, I’m a singular outlier in the publishing industry and that’s only intensified the isolation. I pity the coworker who calls me with a simple question, because I am a talker, and I will keep that conversation going until it no longer serves a purpose.
I’ve started doing a fair amount of yoga to give myself a break from an irritating what do I do now? thought cycle. It works; while I’m in class I stop thinking, let myself be light and powerful, let my mind be an empty room with an open door. Later, of course, the room floods again, with all the junky questions I ask myself about dating and love and the future: How can there be anyone dateable out there whose variables align with mine? A single person nearing forty who is not gunning toward having kids, who finds me funny, likes my brain, and can handle my all-or-nothing dating style? Whose humor, intellect, and face I can admire? Whose plans for the immediate future might somehow fit with mine?
Being at home all the time is stifling, so I go out. As raw and on the surface as my emotions have been, people piss me off, but I seek them out anyway. Happy couples are problematic. Men are revolting, a bunch of self-absorbed babies who seem to think I should be competing for their interest.
I know it’s unhealthy and futile, but I fret about getting old. I think of Seth, still in his twenties and living free, and feel jealous, like he sponged up the best I offered and left me to stagger, purposeless, into my forties. But whatever it was I offered, I did so freely, maybe blindly. Now my job is to extricate myself from the circle of regret I’m treading.
I picture a possible alternative to this c
onsternation: Someday, when PennHenge and I go our separate ways, I’ll buy a tiny bungalow not too far from the beach or on some alpine lake and hide out there for another twenty years. I’ll hang up my landlady uniform and go off to this new place, luxuriantly stretch out on a lawn chair in the yard. I’ll do yoga on the porch. I’ll run trails with my dog. I’ll garden like a maniac. I’ll happily ignore the latest technology. I’ll travel. I’ll ride a rusty bike around my neighborhood and be that nice lady who lives alone and says “Hi” to everyone, even though no one says “Hi” anymore.
I can see the house on its pad of green grass rolling out in front of me, and it looks wonderful. I climb the stairs and step onto the porch, knock on a window, shade my eyes to look inside. It’s sparse but warm, colorful, dotted with art. Flowers. Patterns. Plants. The older me is in there, writing, reading, or taking my time while cooking something labor intensive, just out of sight. I imagine those quiet, unscheduled days stacked up and waiting. Having time to linger in my own existence, relaxed into the aloneness.
