Overjoyed, I rushed out into the hall to look for Victor. He was no longer there. I ran down the steps hoping to find him at the building’s entrance, but he wasn’t there either. What I did find was the bouquet of roses, all mashed up in a trash bin. I sat down on the steps sobbing, unable to understand what might have happened. When I felt calm enough to face him, I went to the hotel where he was staying. I found him sitting at the café; his eyes, which I was used to seeing sparkling like sunlight, were ice-cold with anger. I approached him with more terror in my heart than I had felt when standing before the panel examining my thesis. “What have I done wrong?” I asked. “If you don’t know there is no point my explaining,” he said, a phrase I was to hear many times during the fifty-three years that followed.
Quietly I began to tell him about my freshly awarded degree, about my presentation and the panel’s questions, about having to step outside to wait for their call, about my return into the examination room, about my rushing out to give him the news but finding in his place the battered roses. I saw the brightness returning to his eyes as he once again began to look at me with tenderness.
He explained that when I had stepped out of the room the first time, he thought I was finished and that, even though I had seen him, I had preferred to stop and chat with the other students. Every time I think back to the day on which I obtained my second degree and left the university, I remember how, in a short time, I experienced great joy, followed by despair, followed by relief and contentment.
After New Year’s, we were at table in Cesenatico when Victor announced that he was going to marry me and that he wished we could have the wedding later that week, if possible. He was very matter-of-fact, as though he were calling off the time of day. Papi choked on something he had been about to swallow and started to cough violently. I couldn’t speak, but as Victor put his arm around me, I thought I might be dreaming. As soon as Papi collected himself, he said, “You can’t do that so quickly in Italy. You must publish the banns, and only three weeks after that you can marry.” With a twinkle in his eyes, Victor looked at me and said, “We can wait, can’t we?”
His parents were violently opposed. They were Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had lived in Spain until, in 1492, Queen Isabella expelled all the Jews whom the Inquisition had failed to convert to Catholicism. The Sephardim, as they were called, settled in the countries of the Mediterranean basin, in the Balkans, in Greece and Turkey, in North Africa. They were an extremely clannish group, speaking and writing, as Victor’s parents still did, the fifteenth-century Spanish of their ancestors, mingled with a few words borrowed from the languages of the countries to which they had repaired. Not only did they not marry outside their group—to them the Yiddish-speaking central European Jews were another race—they often didn’t even marry outside the family. Victor’s maternal grandmother was the sister of his paternal grandfather, which made his mother and father first cousins.
Victor’s father flew to Italy to persuade Victor to change his plans. Unsuccessful at that, he tried to convince my parents that it was an ill-considered match, that Victor would be incapable of supporting himself and his wife, and that in their daughter’s best interest, they should withhold their consent. Having failed at that too, he flew back to New York and broke off with his son. We were married the following month, on the twenty-fourth of February.
We had a civil wedding at City Hall, with two old friends of mine, Gianni and Marcello, as witnesses. They were also the only guests at the simple wedding lunch Mother had prepared: tortellini in capon broth, followed by both the capon, which Victor skipped because he doesn’t like fowl of any kind, and a platter of messicani, Victor’s favorite veal roll-ups. A local baker provided the pastries.
Immediately after the wedding, we went to Tuscany, spending our last night in the place where we had taken large draughts of love and beauty. In the morning, we packed Victor’s things, the antique furniture and lamps he had collected, his copper pots, his books, his nude painting, and a damigiana—a twelve-gallon straw-covered glass container—of Pasquale’s wine, and shipped them to Cesenatico. Victor no longer had an allowance and had little immediate hope of getting a work permit and a job; I had been earning just enough in Rimini for my train fare and panini; and Papi, long since retired, was eking out a scanty income from the small farm and the summer rentals. Our financial outlook at that moment was, if not ominous, at least unpromising.
We used a small gift of cash from Papi for the briefest of honeymoons. We spent a single winter night in Sirmione, a narrow peninsula at the southern end of Lake Garda, a tonguelike extension of land impudently stuck into the underbelly of the huge lake. Sirmione has long since been devastated by tourism and the cheap shops and souvenir stalls that thrive on it, but it was deserted that February, a beautiful and romantic place. In the morning, we clambered over the ruins of a Roman bath, past a grove of olive trees planted before the birth of Christ, to reach the lake’s icy edge, our exhalations dissolving in the wintry mist as we gaily chucked stones to see who could send them bouncing farthest over the water.
On the evening of our arrival, we had leek and potato soup, which I have made many times since, partly for the nostalgia, partly for the invariably comforting taste. On that cold February night, in the poorly heated dining room of a modest hotel, when we were exhausted from the long trip to Tuscany, when our hearts and backs ached from the dismantling of a place we loved and the melancholy labor of packing, when we were astonished at what we had done and baffled by what might befall us, that steaming soup, so earthy yet so gentle, seemed to us miraculously reassuring. To this day, Victor recalls it with almost more warmth than anything else that took place during our stay.
On to the New World
1955-1962
SIX AND A HALF MONTHS after my wedding day, I was on the S.S. Cristoforo Colombo, traveling to America by myself. It was a warm and hazy September day when the great ship sailed up the Hudson, and I remember thinking, “What if Victor isn’t there when I disembark?” I was about to land, for the first time, in an immense country of whose language I neither spoke nor understood a single word, and of whose millions of inhabitants I knew only one, my young husband. Ten days earlier, in Genoa, I had been leaning against the railing of the liner, waving good-bye to my mother. She was smiling bravely as she waved back from the pier, although the previous evening she had wept as she wondered whether she would ever see me again. Papi had stayed in Cesenatico. He could not face seeing me off on the boat that was taking me to America, presumably for good.
Victor’s parents had broken off all contact with him when we married, but after a few weeks they began to correspond, and by early summer Victor had flown back to New York to work again in his father’s fur business on Fifty-seventh Street, in Manhattan. I had
My mother, in the white blouse, standing at the rear, waving good-bye to me on the S.S. Cristoforo Colombo, about to sail for New York, September 1955
stayed behind in Cesenatico until summer’s end, drawing close to my parents, who were bewildered by the changes in my life and fearful that the ocean that would soon separate us would forever thereafter keep us apart. It was not yet the age of jet travel, of cheap flights, of direct dialing, of global television. I was going to New York, but in their hearts, it could just as well have been to another planet.
Victor was on the pier, alone. It would be quite a while before his parents could overcome some of the hostility that my marrying their son had generated and bring themselves to see me. When I had gone through immigration, collected my bags, and cleared customs, we climbed into a taxi that took us to an address in Forest Hills. All I knew about Forest Hills was that we were going to live in an apartment that my in-laws had taken when they came to America shortly before the Second World War, the same apartment that Victor had grown up in and lived in until he left for college. His parents had moved to Manhattan while he was in Italy, but the prewar, rent-controlled place in Forest Hills cost so little that they contin
ued to hold on to it.
The taxi drove across Manhattan, going east on Fifty-seventh Street, as Victor had asked, so that I could get a quick look at the windows of his family’s store. By the time we were on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, I was in awe of the huge city, of the two majestic rivers that embraced it, of the height of its buildings, of the waves of cars that flowed down the boulevards, of the crowds thronging the vast sidewalks. I had never seen anything like it. “Could I be dreaming?” I thought. When the driver came off the bridge, he took a road with several lanes of cars that Victor said was called Queens Boule-vard.
With some of the other passengers on the boat for New York. I am the second from the right in the second row.
“Have we come to another city?” I asked. “Oh, no, we have left Manhattan, but we are still in New York. This is called Queens.” It
The apartment was on the fifth floor of a six-story brick box of a building that was completely innocent of any architectural aspirations. When I stepped into the elevator, I felt seized for the first time by the suffocating grip of claustrophobia, which I have since experienced every time an elevator’s doors close in before me. My in-laws had left very little furniture in the apartment. There was a large bed and Victor’s old bookcase, painted green. There were two items that were new to me: a television set, and in the kitchen, a large refrigerator. We had never had a refrigerator at home. We had an icebox that, in warm months, we kept cold with the blocks of ice we bought from the iceman who came around once a week. In the winter, we kept a box made of wire netting outside a north window. The television was to become my private tutor, tuning my ear to the sound of English.
More than fifty years after that time, I can feel the anxiety in my breast stirring again as I recall how I found myself cut off from everyone who had inhabited my world up to then, my parents, my friends,
With Victor, shortly after arriving in New York
my colleagues and students at school, our neighbors, the shopkeepers of our town, our chatty mailman. Except for my husband, who was away at work the whole day, every day but Sunday, in this new world of mine I knew no one and could speak to no one. If I had taken a vow of silence, my lips could not have been more buttoned up. It was a world whose newspapers I couldn’t read, a world where the look of the streets, of the buildings, and of the people was different from any I had known, a world of an unending procession of cars and not one person on a bicycle!
Victor would dream up errands for me so that I could become used to going out alone. He had shown me where the newsstand was, and on a Sunday morning, he suggested I go there and buy a copy of the Times. On the way over, I saw a man holding what seemed to me to be a large bundle of newspapers. “What luck,” I thought. “I no longer have to go all the way to the newsstand.” I approached the man, pointing to the papers he was holding, offering him money, and saying, as clearly and confidently as I could, “Please, New York Times?” He looked at me, dumbfounded at first, and then irritated. I didn’t understand what he said, but he held on to his papers and pointed in the general direction of the newsstand that I had originally been headed for. How was I to know that the Times needed scores of pages to print the news? The Sunday edition of our local paper, Il Resto del Carlino, was just twelve pages, doubled on Monday with the addition of the sports section.
The paramount problem quickly became that of satisfactorily feeding my husband and myself. We could not afford to eat out, and those first occasions when we tried it were not successful. Victor had taken me to a coffee shop where he ordered what he called the national dish, hamburger. He poured some red sauce from a bottle over it and encouraged me to try it. “It’s called ketchup,” he said, “and it’s tasty.” I was not prepared for its cloying flavor and I found it inedible. (That sweet taste over meat was an experience that I would be subjected to again, bringing me grief at my first Thanksgiving dinner.) The coffee tasted as though I had been served the water used to clean out the pot. I thought to console myself with dessert. I was able to figure out what the words “coffee cake” on the board meant, and that was what I ordered. It was stupefyingly sweet and loaded with cinnamon, which I loathe, yet with not the slightest trace of coffee flavor. “This must be a mistake,” I said to Victor, “there isn’t any coffee in here.” “Oh, it’s only called a coffee cake because it is served with coffee.” To this day, I am mystified. A chocolate cake has chocolate, an almond tart has almonds, an apple pie has apples; why doesn’t a coffee cake have coffee?
I had never cooked anything, save for the mush I made for our pig during the war, and I couldn’t negotiate the purchase of ingredients from the greengrocer and the butcher and the other food shops in Forest Hills, because I didn’t speak English. To overcome my lack of kitchen experience, Victor pulled out for me his old copy of Ada Boni. To mitigate my language handicap, he introduced me to the Grand Union, a supermarket that was just around the corner from our building. I had heard descriptions of American supermarkets, but I had never seen one. At home, we bought our fruit and vegetables from the verduraio, the greengrocer—or the frutarol, as he is known in Venice—and the fish from a pescivendolo, a fishmonger. Their place of business may not have been anything more permanent than a market stall, and sometimes something even more mobile, as when a woman would pedal past the houses hawking, out of the baskets on her bicycle, the produce and fresh cheese from her farm or the fish her husband had caught. For meat, we went to the macellaio, for milk and cheese to the lattaio, for dry goods to the droghiere. We didn’t just buy something; we had a conversation about it. At the Grand Union, it was all replaced by display shelves and refrigerated counters, with produce and meats already measured out in plastic-wrapped portions. Fortunately for me then, no conversation was necessary or expected. I had not been acquainted with frozen foods, and these left a disquieting impression that stayed with me when, nearly twenty years later, in my first cookbook, I described deep-freeze lockers that looked to me like “cemeteries of food, whose contents are sealed up in waxed boxes marked, like some tombstones, with photographs of the departed.”
Not only did I not know how to cook, I had no idea what to cook. To look for ideas, I began to turn the pages of my Ada Boni. As I did so, I was awakened by sensations from another time and other places. I saw, I smelled, I tasted dishes that, until recently, had been commonplace in my life. When I read some of the instructions I said, “I understand that. Yes, sure, I remember, that is the way my mother used to do it, or Nonna Adele, or Nonna Polini, or Papi, or Anna, Lucia, Marta, Bruna, Giovanna, any one of the succession of farm girls who, from time to time, used to clean and cook for us. I think I can do it too!” You do talk to yourself when you have no one else to talk to. It was true, though; I knew that I could do it. My taste memories were being released, and attached to them, mysteriously, was an intuitive understanding of how to produce those tastes. Cooking came to me as though it had been there all along, waiting to be expressed; it came as words come to a child when it is time for her to speak.
Soup was one of the first things I started to cook, and remembering the one that we had so enjoyed on our honeymoon, my first soup was potatoes and leeks. I also made cannellini-and-parsley soup, one of the two irresistible soups that Papi used to make. The other was his masterly fish soup. Both are now in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. And I produced many a minestrone. Our dining table was an old bridge table whose top sagged precipitously in the middle so that I could never fill more than a portion of the soup bowl at a time. We had to have multiple servings of soup, which I chose to attribute to the merits of my cooking rather than to the shortcomings of the furniture.
I soon discovered a natural inclination for frying. I learned to make pastella, a light flour-and-water batter that produces the crispest and freshest-tasting of crusts on virtually any vegetable. Sliced zucchini fried in that batter has forever been one of our favorites, and our son once got a job as chef at an Italian restaurant in Portland, Oregon, on the strength of a platter of
those zucchini. I tried frying soles because we did that often in Cesenatico, using our incomparable, small local soles. I wasn’t too successful because the flesh of the sole from Long Island was too flaky. I also made Milanese-style breaded veal cutlets. I once served them with a side of peas sautéed in butter with diced ham. I used peas from a can because they were tiny and beautiful. At that time, canned vegetables were already salted, but not having read the label, I didn’t know it, and I added lots more salt. The peas were inedible, my first failure. Victor doesn’t eat chicken, or I would have cooked it often. I sometimes made it for myself, when I was alone, because I adore it, but I had to wait for our son to come along before I could put it on the family table.
Whenever I produced a dish for the first time, Victor and I lifted a bite to our mouths circumspectly, even apprehensively, but with ever more rare exceptions, the taste was satisfying, and apprehension gave way to celebration. Our conversation was largely about what we were eating. I described how I made each dish; my husband complimented me on the ones that were successful and consoled me when they were not. When my efforts proved to be especially triumphant, he would leap out of his chair and throw his arms around me.
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