After Victor left in the morning, the days were long and lonely, and often I felt desperate, but when he returned and it was time for dinner, my culinary achievements were greeted with encouragement so tender, and the food I had cooked brought us so much joy, that as I think back on that time, daunting though it had been, I am nonetheless filled with happiness.
I had never before taken any interest in professional sports, but that first autumn in New York, I became a baseball fan. To be specific, I became a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and there could not have been a better year to be one than 1955, when they became the champions, beating the Yankees in seven World Series games. Victor was distressed over the long hours I was spending at home by myself and kept looking for anything that would keep me occupied and make me feel less lonely. “Have you ever seen a baseball game?” he asked. “No.” “There are some very exciting games going on right now, with a team from Brooklyn that may win the championship. If I explain how baseball works, will you watch it?” “Sure,” I said. He drew a baseball diamond on the top of a white shoebox to help me understand the different positions while he explained the structure of the game. Soon, I had learned the meaning of “pitcher,” “batter,” “ball,” “strike,” “hit,” “walk,” “out,” “home run,” and many other terms. The vocabulary of baseball instantly became the largest part of my English vocabulary. I even learned the names of the Dodger players, a startling accomplishment for someone who never remembers names. Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella—I loved them all, but my favorite was Carl Furillo, in part, no doubt, because he was Italian, but also because he made such beautiful, timely hits and such amazing throws from the outfield.
On the Cristoforo Colombo, I had shared a cabin with a svelte, black-haired young woman from Rome who had taken a doctor’s degree in chemistry. Luli was on her way to Charlottesville, Virginia, with a grant from one of the tobacco companies to work at the University of Virginia on a research project involving nicotine. Unlike me, she spoke English fluently. She was spirited, straightforward, outgoing, well read, altogether molto simpatica, very likeable, and we quickly became friends. Before parting, I gave her our address in Forest Hills and our phone number, and we agreed that as soon as she could come up to New York she would visit us. To prepare for her coming, Victor bought an army cot that we put into what had been his room when he had lived there with his parents.
Luli stayed with us for a long weekend in October, and she and I probably talked the entire time that we were awake. She described Charlottesville as a charming town and the people she had met there as warm and hospitable. She had spoken about me to a couple she had met at the university, saying she was hoping she could get me to come down to stay with her for a few days. They suggested that I come down for Thanksgiving so that I could experience my first Thanksgiving dinner; they would invite both of us, and on that same morning, we could witness a foxhunt that they were hosting.
Victor laid out all the reasons why I should go: Thanksgiving was a unique American family celebration, and this would be a fine opportunity for me to become acquainted with it; I would again be enjoying Luli’s company, escaping for a while the silence and loneliness of Forest Hills; I would get to see a beautiful part of America; and perhaps I would begin to make some headway in my effort to learn English. “But how will you manage so many days by yourself?” I asked. “I do not mind at all to be by myself, but when my parents find out that you are going away, they will take advantage of the opportunity to have me over for dinner.” “Well,” I thought to myself, “perhaps that will begin to make a few cracks in the wall of ice between us.”
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Victor put me on a bus for Charlottesville. He was smiling and relaxed, trying to make me feel at ease. “You have nothing to worry about,” he said. “Luli will be at the bus stop when you arrive, and you’ll find me here when you get back.” I could hardly believe that I was doing this, but Victor was so reassuring that I just let it happen. It didn’t take too long, however, after the bus pulled away, for my usual apprehensions to break to the surface. What if I didn’t find Luli at the bus stop? What if the bus was seriously delayed? How would I get word to her? What if, during the long trip to Virginia, I felt ill or needed some help? How would I make myself understood? In any undertaking, my thoughts always turn to what could go wrong. I try to check that inclination by reminding myself of another of the sayings that Victor picked up in Italy and is wont to use: “Non ti fasciare la testa prima di essertela rotta”—don’t bandage up your head before you break it.
My dire expectations to the contrary, everything went smoothly. I stepped off the bus into a warm embrace from Luli. The following morning we went to see the hunters off after the fox. It was so beautiful. The horse is my favorite animal, and they were magnificent, as were their riders in scarlet jackets and black caps. Everything shone in the sharp light of a cool November morning. The vast lawns were a deep green. I had never seen such lawns. To the country eyes of an Italian girl, it seemed incredible that there could be so much good land without anything edible growing on it. Someone blew a horn. The dogs were irrepressible in their excitement, and mine, although manifested differently, was no feebler than theirs. I felt that I was living in a fable.
Thanksgiving dinner was at two, and we showed up punctually at that time. I had had nothing since early morning but a few sips of terrible instant coffee in Luli’s apartment, and I was achingly hungry. I was eagerly anticipating the arrival of the huge turkey that Luli had explained would be the centerpiece of the dinner. The house was festive: There was a fire going, a beautifully decorated table at one side, and many people standing, milling around. I was offered a drink, which I declined. It’s no secret that I enjoy a whiskey or two after dinner, but never on an empty stomach. Mine was worse than empty, it was cavernous. From time to time, little nibbles were passed around, but they made no impression on that ever-larger hollow in my middle.
So much time was going by that I was becoming light-headed. No one was sitting down. People would kindly come up to me and try to make conversation, but all I could do was smile. I never smiled so much as I did in the two bewildering hours it took before a monumental turkey was brought out and set on the table. The host, who must have become aware of my befuddlement, and probably of my lame arm, picked up a plate, came over to me, and offered to serve me. I understood the gesture, if not the words; I flashed a smile once more, and I think I said thank you, although it may have been “grazie.” He cut two magnificent, steaming slices for me and spooned a bright red sauce over them. I thought it was a kind of peperonata, the sauce made from red peppers and caramelized onions that we sometimes dollop onto meat. He also put on the plate a long potato, whose orange flesh startled me when I cut it later, and some other vegetables. I took a place at one of the small tables that were scattered around the room and lost no time in propelling a piece of sauce-laden turkey into my mouth. I had to draw deeply from my diminishing reserves of self-control to refrain from spitting it out. There it was again, that cloying, sweet taste laid over meat, jarring and alien. I have since learned to use a touch of ketchup on hamburger, but I have never been able to make my peace with cranberry sauce. I ate the vegetables and the potato, which, although sweet, did not taste altogether strange to me. It strongly reminded me of zucca barucca, a pumpkin we use in Italy. Many years later in New York, when I made cappellacci, the ravioli-like pasta from Ferrara whose stuffing is made with zucca barucca, I substituted red sweet potato for the zucca and called them Cappellacci del Nuovo Mondo, New World Cappellacci.
At the end of that winter, Victor saw an announcement from Columbia University offering an intensive course in English for foreigners. It was a six-week course, with classes every day from ten A.M. to five P.M. I had not added many new words to my baseball vocabulary, and he thought the course might help me break through the language barrier. Predictably, my thoughts went immediately to the terror of the long subway ride
from Forest Hills to Columbia, which involved a complicated transfer of trains. What if I got lost? How would I ever get back home?
Victor insisted. I couldn’t have a life in America without understanding and speaking English, and this seemed to be the most promising way to start. He enrolled me in the course, and the first two or three days he escorted me, showing me the trains to take, at which station to get off, and how to reach the school building. The first few afternoons he was there to pick me up and show me the way back home. The first week on my own, I was very careful and successfully negotiated the itinerary both to and from class. I probably became complacent, and one morning during the second week, I got on the wrong line. When I reached the street from the station, I found myself someplace that I had never seen before, where nearly everyone was black. I stood paralyzed, and I must have looked out of place and desperate, because after a while, a woman came up to me and spoke to me in Spanish, seemingly wanting to help. I showed her the card with the traveling instructions that Victor had written out. I couldn’t understand very much of what she said, but she was kind and friendly, and motioned for me to follow her back down to the subway. Evidently, and fortunately, she must have been going in the same direction that I had to go, because eventually she led me to the right stop on upper Broadway. When I related my adventure to Victor that evening, he said, “That’s wonderful! You got your first look at Harlem.”
There were about twenty students in the class, most of them young, of different nationalities. There were several Russians, but not one Italian. All of them, except for me, already knew a little English. I completed the course, but it is evidence of my hopeless lack of an ear for languages that I left Columbia with only slightly more English than I had before I started. I still could understand only very little of what people said to me, let alone carry on a conversation. It was not a total loss of time, however: Whereas at the beginning of the course I had been hearing the language as one continuous, unvaried sound, at the end I was learning to detect the presence of separate words, each with a beginning and an end.
Even when he was much younger, Victor had yearned to live in Manhattan. He wanted, moreover, to live closer to his work, where he was spending long hours. He was directing his creative energies to bringing greater notoriety to his father’s business, having done away with his dreams of living and writing in Italy. He had persuaded his father to produce an exclusive couture line of furs, and he had found in Italy an immensely gifted young couturier, Roberto Capucci, to design it. We found a place and a location we liked, the third floor of a brownstone on Sixty-fifth Street, between Madison and Park avenues, and late in the spring, we moved in. It was a walk-up, but we were used to stairs in Italy, we were young, and besides, I was glad to dispense with elevators. Many years later, when we lived in Venice and visited New York, we sometimes stayed on the same block, at the Mayfair Hotel, whose manager was then a Venetian, Dario Mariotti. We stood at the window of our room and looked at the street where we had passed what seemed like another life. The memories came flooding back, great joys and indelible pain riding upon them.
One of the immediate benefits of our move was felt in the kitchen. There were so many ingredients I couldn’t get in Forest Hills: olive oil, real Parmigiano, pancetta, and such fresh vegetables
In the kitchen of our brownstone flat on Sixty-fifth Street, in 1957
as artichokes and fava beans. While we still lived in Forest Hills, Victor had shown me the way to Ninth Avenue, where the Italian food stores were, but that involved subways and buses and the carrying of heavy packages up and down many steps and through crowds. In Sixty-fifth Street, I kept a special piggy bank for taxi fare, and periodically I rode over to Ninth Avenue in comfort. Not that my expeditions were always a success. For one thing, the olive oil was a coarse imitation of what we used to call olive oil back home. And the grocers and vegetable men did not respond with the warmth I had expected when addressed in Italian. Not infrequently, they slipped into a dialect corrupted by dialecticized English that was incomprehensible to me. One of the men was so irritated by my failure to understand him that he ended by insulting me: “Ma vai, non sei mica italiana, tu” (“Go on, you are not Italian”), he said, offensively using the familiar “tu” form of address. If there was another good reason to improve my English, it was to speak to those oafish men in a language they could understand. I also made blunders of my own. I once thought I had found Jerusalem artichokes, which Victor adores, and I asked the man to give me two pounds of them. “Two pounds? What are you going to do with them?” he asked. “Let me worry about it,” I said. “I know how to cook.”When I got it home, I found I had bought two pounds of ginger. It would take me another decade, and a course in Chinese cooking, to learn what I could have done with it.
Aside from cooking, which I enjoyed, the role of housewife did not fit me well. I decided it was time for me to look for work. I would have liked to go back to teaching, but my English, although improved, was not yet equal to it. I thought about working in a laboratory. I was strong in scientific theory, but gravely lacking in
In the lab of the Guggenheim Institute for Dental Research, Bellevue Hospital, New York
practice. When I was going to university, the labs had so little equipment that we had to take brief turns at using it, and some instruments we saw only in books. I took a course in histology at New York University that gave me the opportunity to practice on many different instruments, while at the same time, I was acquiring the English terminology related to their functions. As soon as I finished the course, I started going to interviews. My first two were at Jamaica Hospital and at Helena Rubinstein. I had to walk away from them because I couldn’t understand what the interviewers were asking me. I then had an appointment at the Guggenheim Institute for Dental Research, at Bellevue. The doctor in charge carefully read the curriculum vitae that Victor had prepared for me, and after a brief conversation that I was barely able to follow, he said, “Well, do you want to work here?” That much I managed to understand and I promptly said yes. “Now I have a job,” I thought to myself, “but how long can it be before they find that they have made a mistake and fire me?”
I was very lucky. The technician who worked at a table next to mine, a young woman from Argentina, immediately took a liking to me and, with inexhaustible patience, helped me get started. We were doing research on pyorrhea by provoking it in the gums of laboratory rats. Here again, I benefited from generous help, that of the man in charge of the animals, who taught me how to hold them and anesthetize them before injecting them. The director of the laboratory, Dr. Sigmund Stahl, was also very kind, and very patient as I struggled with my English. The long hours I spent there, where only English was heard and spoken, were the decisive ones that opened a way for me into the language.
We used the pauses in our work to exchange looks into each other’s lives. Dr. Stahl called me Marcella and wanted me to call him Siggy. For someone coming from a hierarchical Italian background where no title could be ignored, that was impossible. He was always, and in my memories continues to be, Dr. Stahl. We talked about food, which had already become a load-bearing pillar of my happiness. My colleagues were surprised that every evening at home we had a freshly cooked dinner and that when I left the lab at the end of the day, I rushed back to my kitchen to prepare it. Dr. Stahl had never heard of the dishes I was making. He had never tasted such things as eggplant, or artichokes, or finocchio, nor had he any acquaintance with olive oil or Parmigiano. And when he learned that we usually drank a bottle of wine at table, he was stunned and troubled.
I was busy and happy, at work and at home. Victor too, for the first time in his life, found satisfaction in his work. The high-fashion line of furs he had introduced into his father’s business was getting attention from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. He was working with Richard Avedon and other prominent photographers; important private customers such as Doris Duke, Marjorie Merriweather Post, and Patricia Lopez-Willshaw placed orders; and he tra
veled with the collection, showing it in some of the greatest specialty stores in the country. It appeared that we had got off to a good start and that our lives would continue to roll on a smooth track. Not too long after came the derailment.
In the spring of 1958, I became pregnant. We decided to take our two-week vacation that summer in Woodstock, where we enrolled in a drawing and painting class. Coming down fast, one afternoon after class, on a steep, unpaved Catskill road, Victor lost control of our car and we crashed into a tree. My face was covered in blood when they took me to a hospital in Kingston, but it was only from a superficial cut to my forehead. Victor, who was otherwise unscathed, had smashed his kneecap. He was transferred by ambulance to a hospital in Manhattan not too far from the lab, where I continued to work. He would not touch the hospital food, so I cooked his meals at home in the evening and brought them in large thermos containers to the hospital, where I spent my lunch hour with him. Warmed-over pasta was not for Victor, no matter how desperately hungry he might have been, but he loved my zucchini stuffed with meat and cheese, and my meatballs. Fifty
I am expecting Giuliano
years later, I am still making them, and they have lost none of their power to satisfy him.
A stubborn infection established itself in Victor’s knee, and it was many discouraging weeks before they could operate to repair the crumbled kneecap. The operation touched nerves that, to a degree, are sensitive even now. At that time, the pain was ago-nizing,
1958, Victor recovering from his knee operation
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