by Rita Ciresi
“I asked for Italian,” Mama said.
“This is America,” Lina said. “Americans eat white bread.”
Mama squeezed the loaf of Sunbeam as if she wanted to wring the neck of the smiling blond girl in curls on the plastic bag. “And where's my friselle?” Mama demanded.
“I shouldn't deign to spend thirty-five cents on dog biscuits,” Lina said.
Mama stuck out her lip and looked about as threatening as Muhammad Ali. Lina ducked out of the kitchen just as Mama reached for the wooden spoon. Mama used a Sicilian word for spanking, which I don't know how to spell to this very day. The sound of polly-odda would have been pleasing to my ear if the actual spanking hadn't been so stinging on the back of my thighs. The aftereffects of a good polly-odda could last for days.
Although our goal as Wolverines was to promote the American way, our main pastime was listening to Lina's Italian language records, which she brought back from junior high school, neatly packaged in a burgundy box. Listening to the records proved that we needed to learn Italian, just like the Irish girls who called Lina names. We did not speak Italian naturally, like our parents; we were Americans and it was a foreign language.
The voices on these 45s sounded crisp and continental.
Buon giorno, Giovanna. Come stai?
Non c'è male, grazie.
Dov'è la stazione?
È cerca del museo.
Come si chiama il ragazzo?
Si chiama Paolo.
Ascolta e ripeta. Listen and repeat. One Saturday while we were doing just that, Babbo made an extremely rare appearance in our bedroom to paint the radiator, which was peeling gray flakes all over the carpet. Lina rolled her eyes at the effrontery of this man, this you, who could interrupt such an important session. She kept the 45 spinning on the record player for just a few more seconds before she yanked up the needle.
Beppino è di Texas.
È vero che tutti gli americani siano cowboys?
Babbo cocked his ear as he put down the paint can, then grumbled, “What kind of Italian is that?”
Lina looked knowingly at me and repeated the words of her teacher, Signora Testa. “Real Italian,” she said. “Tuscan Italian. Italian pure as extra virgin olive oil.”
Babbo grunted. “I don't understand a word of it.”
Lina lovingly placed the 45 back into its jacket and slipped it inside the box. Downstairs, she told me the kind of Italian Babbo spoke sounded like somebody talking with their head stuck down a flushing toilet. Too many false sh sounds. Too many sucked-up syllables. Too many gargly, incomprehensible exclamations at the end that the listener had to interpret any way he or she saw fit.
Babbo was impossible, Lina said. An absolute paesano. If we couldn't have an American father, she reasoned, we could at least get ourselves an impostor. That afternoon, as Babbo nursed a headache from the fumes of the metallic radiator paint, Lina and I swiped his wallet and marched down to Fontina's. Lina knew the owner's son. Through some odd language that went beyond my ken of American, Italian, and Wolverine, she wheedled him into making a false driver's license, based upon Babbo's real one, for a Charles Patrick Wolf. When Fontina Junior came out of the back of the store and handed the laminated card to us, we slipped the real license into the usual slot in Babbo's wallet and put the false one behind, more as a sort of talisman than anything else, positive that Babbo never would find it.
Then Lina went into the back of the store, alone with the boy, while I waited.
Aqueduct, Belmont, Yonkers. These names sounded as magic to us as bar and whorehouse, forbidden places we would never be allowed to visit. So we sulked when Babbo went to the track, although we liked to eat the hot dogs that Mama invariably cooked for us. We appreciated that Babbo did not come home until far past our bedtime, so we didn't have to acknowledge him when we said good night. Lina and I stayed up late in our room, whispering, until we heard Mama turn in. Then we crept back downstairs and helped ourselves to the fudge ripple ice cream that Mama kept reserved for guests.
The next day we knew how Babbo fared at the track—usually by how fast and furious Mama's scissors flew through the Sunday paper, clipping the cents-off coupons for groceries, or (much pleasanter) by the arrival of a big truck in our driveway, which delivered something fancy to our run-down house: a used washing machine for Mama, or for Babbo, a brand-new La-Z-Boy recliner.
One night the phone rang just as we were finishing our ice cream, and Lina grabbed the receiver and said hello. The man on the other end of the line asked for Mrs. Carlino Lupo. “This is the Wolf residence,” Lina said, and hung up, to my great amusement. The man called back again, and Lina repeated the same line, which broke me up even further. I don't know why, but I found the whole thing a real bladder-buster, and after three or four calls Lina and I had to push and fight our way to the bathroom so we didn't pee our pants in laughter.
The next morning the phone rang during breakfast, and when Mama finally got off she came into the kitchen and gave us a look that froze us harder than a fudge ripple ice cream headache. “Did you answer the phone last night?” she said to Lina, and when Lina hotly denied it, Mama came over and slapped her face. “Did you put a false driver's license in your father's wallet?”
“No,” Lina cried, which earned her another crack across the puss. I thought it prudent not to mention Fontina Junior.
It turned out Babbo had been pulled over by a cop for speeding on his way back from the track. When he surrendered his license to the policeman, the fake license from Fontina's fell out. Unable to explain why he was carrying a fake ID, Babbo had been taken in for questioning. He had used his one allotted call to phone a cousin who was friends with a lawyer, and when the lawyer called our house, Lina gave him the line about the Wolf residence. The lawyer, confused about who Babbo really was, decided to wait until morning to clear up the situation. Babbo had to spend the night in the police station, and now Mama had to pay a lawyer good hard-earned money to clear Babbo's reputation. We had ruined his name, sullied it, and we would never hear the end of it.
“Wolf!” Mama kept hollering at us. “That's a Jewish name. Don't you tell a soul you made your own father into a mata-Christ. Don't you never tell nobody nothing about this.”
Omertà, I later would learn this was called: keeping quiet to protect the family. And so, years later—just to be perverse—I would tell this story in intimate, whispered tones to my lovers, sometimes just to make them laugh, other times to make myself sound more interesting. But Lina kept the story close to her chest, and when I teased her husband once about going up to play the horses in the Green Mountains, I sensed Lina had never even mentioned the racetrack incident to Phil, although she had complained bitterly enough to him about everything else from her childhood. Did Lina keep the story under wraps because she would have to admit she had gone behind the curtain with Fontina Junior? Or because she truly was ashamed that she had changed Babbo from Lupo into a Wolf? Or was it because Phil and Lina had not been getting along with each other and Lina knew that someday she would have to leave him and reassume her maiden name?
“Didn't you tell him?” I asked.
“Tell me what?” Phil asked.
“Aren't you going to tell him?” I asked, and while Phil sat there, expectant—the air quivering with the tension of their impending divorce—Lina spoke the first word in Italian I had heard her say in years. “Mai,” she said, breaking one of Mama's cardinal rules.
“Don't ever say never!” Mama scolded us about a year after the false ID incident, when she came home with a twenty-pound ham, rippled with white fat, which was all hers for standing up and hollering G-49 at the Easter bingo. The next week her name, spelled with two typos, appeared in boldface type in the parish newsletter, right beneath the marriage banns. She stabbed the newsletter with her finger to express her glee. Nothing made her happier.
IT WAS DRIZZLING. Lina and I stood next to the bright red Salvation Army Dumpster, stomping our feet from the cold and touchin
g our tongues against the minuscule drops of water that clung to our black wool mittens. The Church of the Holy Redeemer needed a paint job, so along with half the parish, we were shivering in the A&P parking lot, waiting for the bus that would take us on a fund-raising trip to New York City.
Uncle Luigino—Zio Gigi for short—had organized the trip. Gigi was our father's older brother, but unlike Babbo, he was a handsome man, with a thin, mischievous face and a prominent nose that crinkled upward when he smiled, which was often. People said he had a light in his eye. Mama said he shined it on nothing but girls. He was in his forties. Never married. After the war he had gone to college for two years on the GI bill. Now he worked in a bank processing loans, an occupation both Mama and Babbo found shifty. A real politico, Mama called him. He got too involved in the Knights of Columbus. “Every time you look at him,” she said, “he's got a clipboard in his hand.”
Anything that had to do with the written word made Mama suspicious, but it thrilled me. Zio Gigi seemed so sophisticated compared to my other relatives. They had three topics of conversation: death, money, and bowel irregularities. Gigi, on the other hand, was always putting his arm around me and Lina, quoting the great thinkers or telling us something about history. “Eaah,” Babbo said, dismissing Gigi's brand of knowledge. “So he goes to the barber shop once a week and reads all the magazines.”
Because Gigi was behind the trip to New York, Mama and Babbo were reluctant to go. Babbo stood on the edge of the crowd in the parking lot, his eyes shaded by his wide-brimmed brown hat and his hands sunk in the pockets of his tan raincoat. He jingled his keys. Next to him stood Mama, in her flat black boots and black coat. On the lapel she had pinned an uncharacteristic touch of whimsy—a rhinestone-studded Scottie dog with a fake emerald eye that she had won last year at bingo. In her arms she clutched a big brown paper bag that announced in red, I Got It Cut-Rate at Railroad Salvage! Inside were seeded rolls, a wheel of Auricchio provolone cheese, a foot-long stick of pepperoni, a serrated knife, a box of Ritz crackers, Band-Aids, aspirin, a flashlight, spare batteries, moistened washcloths wrapped in wax paper, a box of Kleenex, a bottle of fish-white suppositories, a roll of toilet paper, and complete changes of clothing for Lina and me.
Gigi pointed to the bag. “Planning to recross the ocean?” he asked.
“Laugh now,” Mama said. “Eat on Staten Island later.”
Gigi wrinkled his forehead. “We're going to the Statue of Liberty.”
“On Staten Island,” Mama insisted.
Gigi knocked his hand against his head. “What boat did you come on?”
“Same kind as you,” Mama said.
“Don't you remember?” Gigi asked. “There was Staten Island, where the Americans lived. You got off at Ellis Island. And then, on the other island, was the statue.”
“Staten Island, statue island,” Mama said. “It's all the same to me.”
Gigi turned to Babbo. “You remember, don't you?”
Babbo grunted. “I remember what I want to remember,” he said.
Gigi took off his gloves and pinched Lina's cheeks with his cold fingers. He patted my head. “When we came over, your father was just a bimbo, smaller than you two,” he told us. “He was scared to get on the boat.”
“That was a long time ago,” Babbo said. “When are these buses getting here?”
“Patience,” Gigi counseled. He put his arms around our shoulders and squeezed us tight against his pant legs. “Your father said the same thing thirty-five years ago. He stood on the deck yelling, Dov'è l'America? As if America was going to burst through the ocean right before his eyes, like some lost continent resurrected from the bottom of the earth.”
“Eaah,” Babbo said. “What do you remember?”
“Plenty,” Gigi said. “The name of the ship was The Florida.”
“I thought it was The America,” Babbo said.
“No, The Florida. I remember, because it caused a big commotion before we boarded. Some people refused to get on. The captain had to come out and tell them it was going to New York and not Miami.” Gigi gestured around the crowded parking lot. “You think this is a lot of people?” he asked us. “Believe me, there were hundreds, thousands more that day. Your grandmother found a piece of rope on the dock and tied me to her, like I was a dog. I held your father's hand. What a scene when he wandered away.”
“What kind of stories are you telling now?” Babbo asked.
“One minute he was right by my side, clasping my hand,” Gigi continued. “The next minute we were on the deck of the steamer and he was gone. Mama started wailing that he had fallen overboard. Papa shook his fists. We had been waiting a week, you see, for the boat to come in. What if we missed it?”
“Don't listen to him,” Babbo told us. “It's nonsense.”
“You never heard such screaming and crying and carrying on,” Gigi said. “I was so ashamed of the way my mother and father were acting that I untied the rope from my belt and stood a little bit off to the side. I didn't want people to think I belonged to such a matta family. That got Papa even angrier. He yanked me by the hand and we walked up and down the deck, searching the crowds. Finally, we found your father high above everyone's head. He sat on the shoulders of a sailor, wearing the sailor's bright white hat. He had vomito, throw-up, all over his shirt— seasick before we even put out to sea. He was howling. Papa took him down from the man's shoulder and gave him a huge hug before—pow!—he cracked him a good one right across the bottom.”
Lina and I giggled at the thought of Babbo getting a spanking instead of doling one out.
Babbo jingled his keys and looked away.
“You see,” Gigi said. “I remember plenty.”
Mama shifted the Railroad Salvage bag in her hands. “I remember a few things myself,” she said. “I was five years old. We waited for hours in that big hall. Did you go into the big hall too? The one with the wooden railing that ran all around the top and the huge flag hanging from the ceiling?”
Babbo shrugged.
“The noise in that hall was louder than any noise I ever heard,” Gigi said.
“And the smell of the people's sweat—enough to knock you over,” Mama said.
“I saw some Gypsies,” Gigi said. “They had bells on their skirts and packs on their backs.”
“I saw a colored woman for the first time,” Mama said. “She had rotten teeth. Outside, I saw horses much finer than donkeys.”
“I saw balloons,” Gigi said. “And smelled hot dogs. Everything seemed so wonderful!”
Babbo grunted. “That's because it all cost money,” he said.
Mama shook her head. “I had my first taste of lemonade for free. Some Red Cross ladies handed my mother a cup. It was steaming hot that day and my mother was thirsty, but she gave the cup to me. All the sugar had floated to the bottom and it tasted sour. But I kept on drinking, and by the time I got to the bottom it tasted sweet as candy.” Mama clutched her bag with a start. “That reminds me. I forgot to bring the jug of Kool-Aid.”
“Too late,” Babbo said, pointing. Two buses, so splattered with mud I could hardly make out the name BLUEBIRD on the side, pulled into the driveway. Mama surged forward, hustling past the other people who were gathering up their things. She clasped her shopping bag and solidly stood her ground where she believed the first bus would stop. When it overshot her by six feet, she pushed forward and positioned herself in front of the doors. Then she rapped on the doors with her knuckles until the driver, a gray-haired man with bulldog jowls, yanked them open.
“Where's da fire, lady?” he asked.
Mama didn't condescend to answer. She muscled her way up the steps and placed her bag on the two seats behind him, then planted herself in the middle of the other two seats directly across the aisle. As the other parishioners boarded, she pointed out, “These seats are saved.” She found herself in an uncomfortable position when Father Angelosi got on. Father was seventy-nine and had some kind of white fungus growing like mushroo
ms in his ears that had left him almost totally deaf. The fungus made him a popular priest. People from other parishes flocked to our church for Confession, because you could tell Father you had murdered your mother and for penance he would give you only three Hail Marys. Mama had to holler, “SAVED, Father, RESERVED, Father,” four or five times before he caught her drift and moved toward the back of the bus.
“What do you mean, yelling at the priest?” Gigi asked when he got on.
“If you don't yell, he don't capisce,” Mama said.
“Let him sit up front, why don't you?”
“Let him sit with the nuns,” Mama said. “Better yet, he can sit with you. Two peas in a pod, both bachelors.”
Mortified by the way Mama was acting, Lina and I tried to walk right by her and snag a seat at the back of the bus. But she caught us by the collar and pushed us down in the first row. Then she held up the line for two or three minutes while she stood in the aisle, positioning her shopping bag on the floor before she finally sat down next to Babbo directly behind the driver.
A sign posted on the bus reported that our driver, Vinnie Viscusi, was safe, reliable, and courteous. Mama suspected he was none of the above. As Gigi walked up and down the aisle, checking people's names off on his clipboard, Vinnie held a dirty green thermos to his lips and tilted it back. “I've heard about these crazy New York drivers,” Mama said. “That better be coffee.” A loud, wet belch was Vinnie's reply. Mama leaned over and sniffed until she was satisfied that it was only Chock Full O’ Nuts that he was swilling. When Gigi finally gave the go-ahead, Vinnie put the bus in gear and took off with a jerk. Mama clutched her seat. “Watch out,” she called. “We want to get there alive.” Vinnie stopped the bus. He turned around, glared at Mama, then reached up and pulled down a green shade that separated him from the passengers. Then he burped and farted all the way to New York, causing Mama to recommend less pasta e fagioli and a lot more prunes. “I got a brother-in-law who's a plumber,” she said to Mrs. Fenilli, who sat kitty-corner from her across the aisle. “Good as a doctor. And cheaper. He can tell you all the ins and outs of the bowel system.”
