(Red-a, for sure.)
Three kilometers away across the Strait of Messina was Villa San Giovanni, home of foul-mouthed, dog-kicking punks. But on that day, Dominick Ferrari held a telescope to his eye and saw a vision: a Nereid combing tangerine locks. For centuries people on both sides of the strait had claimed they’d spotted the Pining Nereid, one of fifty sea women who helped the Argonauts navigate through those monster-strewn waters. Forty-nine had returned to the Aegean, but the red-haired one stayed behind for the love of a Calabrian who, though smitten, could not return her affection. Undeterred, she paddled those epic waters for so long that eventually her lower half evolved into that of a silvery fish. Through the years, thousands of men claimed to be the descendants of that original Calabrian, each avowing he was the one who would at last fulfill the nymph’s heart’s desire and thus restore her legs.
“I am the one!” Dominick said, so captivated by his own importance that he dropped his telescope and walked into the strait—six-headed Scylla and whirlpooling Charybdis be damned. The water rose to his knees, waist, neck, and finally he started floating, and then began swimming as fast as he could, lungs laboring as he tried to reach the Sicilian side, home of slow-thinking, humpbacked, feral gnomes.
(No gabbo! Ptt-ptt-ptt.)
Sorry, Padre. I forgot about the cursed humpback, or gabbo, jettatura extraordinaire.
Grandpa’s feet touched the mucky sea floor, and he trudged up the coast, water streaming down his five-feet, four-inch bricklayer’s body, his own locks dripping, briny water stinging his eyes. He had to blink to clear his vision to see if the Nereid was still there. She was. But she wasn’t a sea nymph. Neither was she a humpbacked, feral gnome. She was a girl, a beautiful, finless, rose-lipped wonder as glittery as her name, which he would soon learn: Diamante. She sucked in her breath when she saw her own marvel: a man rising from the sea. When their mismatched Sicilian and Calabrian eyes met, they forged a pheromone-torqued bond that no parent, topographic snobbery, or watery strait could dissolve.
Nicky’s version of their courtship was less romantic and involved dear Nonna getting knocked up behind a dry-docked fishing boat. I reject this account.
(It’s-a no true!)
As does Nonna.
In my fantasy, the couple had a few good years of cooing and cuddling before Nonna’s spell wore off. Maybe Dominick’s love for her faded along with the color of her hair. Perhaps the red luster was her hypnotic totem, her portafortuna. Or perhaps, like Samson’s strength, Grandpa Ferrari’s allure and good nature were rooted in his hair, and he had a mop of it, as evidenced by the few photos we have of him as a young man.
But by the time his first child, my uncle Dom the Mighty, was born, Grandpa had only a Capuchin monk’s fringe, and seven years later, when his second and last child, my father, Angelo the Lesser, was born, every hair on Grandpa’s head had been blown away by the wind, picked up by birds to weave into their nests. His pate was shiny and bald as an onion, a phrenologist’s dream, which was why he always wore that dumb newsboy cap, though he neither delivered newspapers nor read them.
When Nonna and Grandpa paddled the pond to America, Grandpa smuggled out in his coat pocket a clipping of a Gaglioppo grapevine from Calabria. Nonna’s valise was packed with the Old Religion and a jumble of evil-eye remedies. She is always on the lookout for a squinty-eyed jettatura who might rob good fortune and health from her loved ones. Over the years she has pointed out likely culprits. Anyone with a hawk nose or unibrow was suspect. Beware of leers, direct stares, or compliments. Barren women were the worst—so envious. Barren women with an eye affliction—ay-ay-ay.
Enter Aunt Betty, the Mighty Dom’s wife, sporting a too-black bouffant and sweaters so tight you could see her white bra through the strained knit. Unable to conceive, her first husband dead when she was twenty-two, Betty also had a spectacular walleye. (It still leaves me wondering if she is talking to me or the island of Malta on my left earlobe.) Her left eye not only drifted like a disconnected orb but also had a keyhole pupil, a lethal cocktail. If all that weren’t cross enough to bear, Betty was forced to raise her dead husband’s son by his first wife (also dead): my only cousin, who is no cousin to me, Ray-Ray.
We often heard Nonna muttering, “Why you marry this girl, Dominick?” It was clear to us all, even if it wasn’t to Nonna: two double-D reasons perched above a narrow waist and, as Uncle Dom bragged, “an unimpeachable ass.”
Betty was such a gross disappointment to Nonna and Grandpa that Angelo the Lesser’s pick for a wife could only be an improvement—or so they all hoped.
Just last week, after I plied Aunt Betty with a pint of peach schnapps, she described the day Dad brought Mom home to meet the folks.
In anticipation, Nonna had scrubbed the entire house for that girl Angelo met up in Massachusetts. It was 1948 and one of Dad’s former army buddies had gotten him a six-month construction job at Wellesley. Working on a new wing of a library, perhaps. A vault for all those blue bloods’ tiaras. I could imagine Uncle Dom’s barb. This is your last chance to go to college, bucko, even if it is a girls’ school.
Grandpa Ferrari’s one paternal mandate was that his sons should attend college so they would die with the uncallused palms of aristocrats. Grandpa had barely scrounged up enough tuition for Uncle Dom, so he’d muscled my father into the army, not to topple Mussolini, but for access to the GI Bill. Thus, it was a colossal disappointment when Dad got out of the army and then flunked out of Vandalia U., a state college less than an hour from Sweetwater. He preferred to spend his days fiddling with Grandpa’s furnace and water heater or sawing tree limbs that didn’t need pruning.
The saw was Nonna’s only inheritance from her father, a man her two boys had never met. Nonna wept when she pulled the thing from the packing crate, Dad and Dom rubbing the foreign postmark. Grandpa harrumphed. “Pah! I no want that Sicilian crap next to my American tools!” When he stomped off, Nonna called my father to her side. “It’s a-yours,” she whispered, handing it over. “But find a safe place for it.” Dad raced upstairs to carve elaborate curlicues into the handle with an ice pick. He hid the saw under his bed, and from that day forward, his dreams were filled with the construction of ever-grander estates built by his own hands.
Fifteen years later Dad flew to that Wellesley job just to get the hell away from his torture chamber of a fam-i-ly who never let him forget his academic failure.
Up in Massachusetts, Dad was lectured on appropriate behavior toward those women of a higher caliber than the dinette and hat-check girls back home. He kept his whistles to himself the day he spotted Mom with her Mayflower-descended Episcopalian nose tucked in an English literature book. He did, however, scoop up her notebook and The Faerie Queene when she dropped them as she slipped on an icy patch while crossing campus. There was an injury of some sort: a scraped knee, a sprained ankle. She rested her arm on his three-inches-shorter-than-hers shoulder as they hobbled to the infirmary. Father was immediately smitten with this blond beauty who also penned poetry—sort of. Marina, her name, was shorthand for aquamarine, the blue-green of Mom’s eyes when the sunlight hit them just right. They certainly hypnotized my father—that lump of earthy clay—whose heart immediately dropped anchor in the blue-green harbor of her name.
Mother, however—hmm. I know she was smitten with his wavy pompadour, but it’s also possible she had just returned from a tense visit home to Charlottesville, a city in a state much higher up the social scale than West Virginia, regardless of the conjoined-twin-separation scar. Maybe Grandma Iris had invited some hand-picked beau for Dom Pérignon and cucumber sandwiches and made sweeping references about his and her daughter’s rococo-decorated futures.
I imagine Mom back at Wellesley, her five-carat irises glowing brighter and brighter as Angelo spilled the glass marbles of his life: a flunked-out, blue-collar, West Virginia–dwelling Catholic. A toxic brew that would kill Grandma Iris, or so Mom hoped.
Six months of threadbare dates ensued. (Ea
ting hamburgers at lunch counters. Feeding ducks on Lake Waban, where Mom could stare into her reflection. She was always staring into her reflection and not for the reasons you might think.) Mom’s semester ended at the same time as Dad’s job and that’s when he took her home to meet the folks, with one detour first.
It was a Sunday afternoon, Aunt Betty said, and she, Dom, two-year-old Ray-Ray, and Nonna sat in the living room with their hands on their knees, waiting. Grandpa was in the backyard pruning his Calabrian grapevine, which he loved more than his Sicilian wife.
Nonna kept popping up to straighten lampshades, recenter doilies, and stir pots in the kitchen. She also kept running next door to Celeste Xaviero’s house, because Nonna was cooking in her oven too. Celeste was a lock-picker of family secrets, a pastime made easier by the scant space between houses and her propensity to leave her windows open even in winter. I imagine Celeste prodding, Is she here-a yet? What’s she like? An improvement over Walleye, no? Betty confessed that everyone had high hopes for this girl, thought that maybe Angelo had found the virginal one, hopefully not a deflowered, castoff widow like Betty.
Finally the happy couple burst through the door with their luggage and a bottle of cheap champagne. The family was captivated. Never had five feet, nine inches of such breeding crossed that humble threshold. Uncle Dom practically licked her hand. Nonna kept brushing Mom’s cheek. “Bellisima! Carina! Bella!” She fawned, no doubt envisioning bassinets full of beautiful heirs, not like wailing Ray-Ray, a booby prize of a nongrandchild who was increasingly harder to love.
Grandpa Dominick came through the back door wearing his most tattered dungarees—I no have to get slicked up for some girl—his mud-caked boots, and his number-two newsie cap (number one reserved for special occasions), which Grandpa rarely removed, not at the dinner table, not in the presence of women, not even during Mass—when he went.
He entered the living room mashing dirt clods into the rugs that Nonna would have to pick out for weeks. “Where is this ragazza?” He looked up and saw my Anglo mother towering over my dad, my father’s arm wrapped around her waist as if she were the best prize he’d ever won. Grandpa shivered from head to foot. “Ragazza immagine,” he said with a sigh, meaning “cover girl,” because in those first sublime moments, even Grandpa could not deny her beauty. Grandpa looked at Angelo as if he had finally done something right, and he had. Years later, Nicky and I would stumble upon a hidden stash of girlie pictures taped beneath Grandpa’s workbench in the basement. Like my mother, all the women were blondes: Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe.
(I no see what’s a-so spesh about the blondie hair. Red is a much-a more rare. And-a lucky!)
(Indeed, Nonna. Indeed.)
Dad heaped one more scoop onto the virtual sundae he was assembling. “She’s a college girl. Just finished a year at Wellesley.”
A low wail erupted from Grandpa’s lips. Suddenly solicitous, he waved his arm toward the dining room. “Come,” he said to my mother. “Humble food, but what is ours is a-yours.”
Grandpa excused himself as the fam-i-ly scooted around the table. When he returned, his face and hands pink from a brisk scrubbing, he was wearing his best shirt and his number-one newsie cap.
They all rammed their napkins into their collars. Except Mother, who draped hers across her knees. When Grandpa saw this refined gesture he tugged his napkin from his collar and flattened it across his lap.
“Angelo,” he said. All eyes bounced from Angelo to Grandpa and back. “You do the fam-i-ly proud by bringing home such a jewel. You should marry this girl.”
Dad and Mom looked at each other, then at Grandpa, and Dad announced, “I already did!”
Yup. During that short side trip on the way home, Mom and Dad had exchanged for-better-or-for-worse vows that they both probably meant at the time.
“What?” Nonna said.
“Yes!” Mother held up her hand to flash a modest gold band. Dad hoisted his champagne glass.
Betty jumped up and hugged her new sister-in-law. Mom remembered that hug. She said Betty clamped on to her as if my mother were a life preserver someone had thrown.
Grandpa sat there grinning, tears in his eyes, as if he couldn’t believe his good fortune, until Nonna uttered the phrase that collapsed everyone’s bliss.
“Who was-a the priest?”
“The priest?” Mom said.
“Who perform the Wedding Mass?” Nonna asked.
Dad really should have warned Mom. He should have taught her a few lines of Latin, trained her to genuflect, drilled her with the name of a made-up Catholic church: Saint Prosciutto’s. Saint Mortadella’s. But he didn’t.
So Mom blurted out, “We eloped. Went to a justice of the peace in the middle of the night. He was in his pajamas,” Mom bragged, as if it were all just too corny. “My father would have loved it,” she added, making him seem a suspicious character, a shadiness only slightly lessened by the fact that he was already dead. “Of course, Mother would have a stroke,” she said, eyes sparking.
“No priest?” Nonna’s hands clapped the sides of her face. “Then you no married.”
My mother looked utterly perplexed. “Well, of course we are.” She again held up her ring finger. “And we didn’t need a priest, because I’m not even Catholic.”
I’m sure the walls in that room bowed inward from the mass sucking-in of breath.
Nonna stood up, sat down, stood up. “A Protest-ant? You married a Protest-ant?”
Celeste Xaviero’s sentiment drifted through the open window. “Dio mio!”
Dad grasped at denominational straws. “She’s Episcopalian. They have priests. And incense.”
Mother, used to shock-value candor with her own mother, said, “Oh, I’m not Episcopalian anymore. I no longer believe in all that God hooey.”
The roof should have blown off, Betty said, from the sheer volume of howling and railing. Nonna nearly fainted, and Betty had to bring her a glass of Marsala to calm her nerves.
(I no drink-a too much.)
(I really and truly do not care, Nonna.)
Grandpa stood up, his forgotten napkin sliding to the floor. He strapped his arms across his chest and offered his own direct bluntness. He walked over to stand in front of his once-again failure of a son, now also standing. “Have you consummated this?”
Angelo opened his mouth, but Mom wedged herself between father and son. “Don’t you dare answer that, Angelo. That’s none of his business.” She looked at her father-in-law. “That’s none of your business.”
Grandpa scowled at her, teeth bared. She wasn’t beautiful to him anymore. “Angelo. Tell this puttana—”
Dad’s fist flew up to strike his father for calling his new wife a whore, but Grandpa grabbed Dad’s wrist in his bricklayer’s grip. He slapped his son across the face, leaving a red handprint on his cheek, a different kind of port-wine stain that vibrated deep into my father’s wrenched body and settled into his sack of seed, into one feisty sperm that would one day beget me, born with my grandfather’s hand slap tattooed on my face.
At that exact second, after only two days as a five-foot, six-inch husband, my father started shrinking in my mother’s eyes.
“You bring shame on this fam-i-ly.” Grandpa dropped Dad’s wrist and left the room, dragging behind him a trail of words that mortified my father. “You are no son of mine and you are not welcome in-a my house.”
Oh, the dejection. Oh, the misery . . . for about three months.
Our fam-i-ly is no melodramatic Italian opera filled with decade-long feuds and deathbed reconciliations. Okay, maybe we are, but not at that moment, because Mom and Dad were back in Grandpa’s house not twelve weeks later and all because of three words spoken over the phone that held more power than Grandpa’s decree: “Marina is pregnant.”
TAPE THREE
Nonna’s Mojo Risin’
Archangel Archie:
It’s Tuesday evening and I’m reclining on a settee in the hall outside the
den—a room from which I have been banished. Nonna is in there indulging in her weekly trifecta of extravagances, beginning with her Barcalounger that could seat four Nonnas—those squat legs dangling a foot from the floor. On the table beside her is decadence number two: a bottle of Marsala. And in her lap, number three, a Whitman’s Sampler that will hold nothing but empty slots and a hint of remorse by the eleven o’clock news. I have been banished because it’s TV night, and I have an annoying habit of chattering too much during her favorite program—
(Hush-a you mouth out there!)
—Maude. Of course, Nonna rants at Maude’s liberal views. You should no speech to your husband so mouthy! That’s a-no way for a wife to behave! Look! Walter is wearing an apron!
It’s a good time to tell you about Nicky’s charmed birth. I wouldn’t dare if Nonna were beside me. It might propel her into a ritualistic tizzy—all that misplaced guilt—a weird Catholic-malocchio blend that I also shoulder. Before Nonna’s only grandson surfed into the world on a salty wave, she guaranteed a sound delivery by insisting that Angelo and Marina move out of that garage apartment Dad’s day-laborer salary afforded and into Uncle Dom’s boyhood bedroom—much larger than Dad’s, which was the size of a porta-potty.
Before they moved in, Nonna painted the walls red. Red curtains, red throw rug, red bedspread. Dad made a bassinet that Nonna slathered red too. Then she unpacked her valise of good Sicilian magic—branches of rue, horn-shaped (penis-shaped) coral amulets, silver crescent moons, horseshoes, ankhs, blue-eyed glass beads—lucky talismans that she tucked in drawers, nailed over doors and onto walls, and sewed into drapes. Nonna also slid a four-tooth chisel that held special powers beneath Mom’s mattress.
You might be wondering where Mom’s mother, Grandma Iris, was during this prenatal hullabaloo; this was her first grandchild too. Mom was practicing her own preventive hoodoo by keeping her marriage and pregnancy a secret for reasons best known to her.
The Patron Saint of Ugly Page 3
