Into The Wicked World
My mother was lying in a hospital bed. She was nervous and in
desperate want of a cigarette. Most of the female movie stars she knew and liked,
among them Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo, reached for a cigarette whenever they
were anxious or in love, which was often enough, Hollywood being Hollywood.
Her hair was unkempt, she had no lipstick on and she had
just given birth. She was beginning to resent the whole business, including the
metal night stand by her bed, a dull battleship grey. Everything was remorselessly
dull. It was hot on July 15, 1943, near 90 degrees. My mother was thirty one
years old.
The door opened and Dr. Carniglia entered. A small town
doctor from Windsor Locks, he was known in Connecticut, and especially in
Hartford Hospital, as a masterful diagnostician. He had been making an
intermittent effort to quit smoking – for the moment, nothing very serious. In
order to quel the temptation, he had taken up drinking soda,
sometimes coke and, when he could get it, Moxie.
Moxie makes you foxy.
Rose was glad to see the usual butt hanging from the scar
below Dr. Carniglia’s nose, wagging out of a moustache.
“Before you say anything, I need a cigarette.”
He gave her a Chesterfield and was polite enough to light
it. She thought of the intensely alluring Garbo and then, with growing
disappointment, of herself.
“I must look awful.
“You look like the last rose of summer.”
His voice sounded as if his vocal chords were in his nose,
high pitched and nasally.
“I hate this night stand.”
You’ll be home soon.
Was he smiling? It was difficult for her to tell. But she
knew him well and, if the news were bad, he would have given it to her straight
up and right away. Still, there was a tremor in her voice, uncharacteristic of
her, when she asked, after having filled her lungs with a painful balloon of
smoke, “Is it a boy or girl?”
Before he replied, he counted the seconds to himself: One,
two … the smoke curling through his moustache. He wanted to relish the moment.
“Both.”
“What?”
Of the twin babies, a boy and a girl, I was, it pleases me
to think, the more handsome and debonair. Of course my sister Donna will
forever tirelessly assail this view. However, my father was, at that time and
for a half century later, the chief photographer of Travelers Insurance
Company, and so there is an ample photographic record to support my considered opinion.
It is true that neither Donna nor Donald – THE TWINS for short -- were
photographed as often as James, the golden boy of the family who had been
launched seven years earlier. But the evidence is there and, as movie critics
sometimes say, compelling.
On a winter’s late afternoon, when the front porch was full
of skin rasping wind blasts, my mother would package us both together in a baby
carriage, and there we would lie, brother and sister, well insulated with
blankets, objects of curiosity to any passers-by. My mother had heard from one
of the Italian grey-heads up the street, likely an herbalist or a witch, that
exposure of this kind was good for the health, provided the mother did not
leave the babies in winter weather for long periods of time. Since One Suffield
Street was the center of the Pesci-Mandirola operation, frequently visited by
neighbors, aunts and uncles, postmen, a cop or two, my mother’s multitudinous
friends, my father’s numerous friends, and pretty much the whole Italian
street, we were often solicitously regarded; some ventured to brush a cheek or
pat a forehead. Much of the time, especially when my mother was in attendance, the
enraptured onlooker would coo, pointing to me – and I quote – “Isn’t she
beautiful.”
And I was. I had long curly blond hair, dark blue eyes, rosy
cheeks, owing to the blasts of winter wind cascading over them, and a
bewitching and enchanting smile. My sister was less happily endowed; her hair
was short, choppy, boyish. At two months old, it never disturbed me that the
appreciative onlookers had gotten the gender wrong, nor did my sister make any
loud objection.
If I remember correctly, she was demur, hardly a peep out of
her. I was the Caruso of the baby carriage, a torment to my mother, who may
have been suffering from post-partum depression or, more likely, shock and awe.
She had not expected twins, and whatever did not fit into the small and
delicate box of her expectations, threw her for a loop, as she might have said. Of course, in the days of Crawford and Garbo, PPD was little
understood, probably because the psychologists had not yet put a name to the
disorder. Or if it had been named, the science of PPD had not yet trickled down
to Dr. Carniglia, whose view of psychoanalysis was primitive.
“Load of crap, that’s what.”
A medical man, Dr. Carniglia was opened to the possibility,
as were other men of the Greatest Generation, that Karl Kraus may have been
right about psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud. “Psychoanalysis,” said Kraus, “is
the disease it purports to cure.” Crawford and Garbo were not readers of Die Fackel,
the public journal Kraus kept up for half a century, nor was Hollywood, a
swarming mess of psychological unease. In any case, Dr. Carniglia would not
have given a thumbs-up to Crawford or Garbo movies: Ingrid Bergman and Lauren
Bacall were more to his taste, and both of them appeared to be, like him, wary
of psychoanalytic snake oil salesmen.
Dr. Carniglia’s remedy for my mother’s distress was to
recommend that Donald be put in the care of his Aunt Nelly; this would give my
mother a slight vacation from Carusoism. She was smoking too much, fidgeting
too much, too often allowing the dark night of her thoughts to snuff out the
daylight.
“You should try to give up smoking for a while. Drink
moxie,” the good doctor advised, the usual Chesterfield jutting from his
mustache.
“You’re telling me to give up smoking?”
Back in the nest, a wayward ash wafted to the floor. My mother’s eyes followed
it critically. She had just washed the floor and scrubbed the sink and
rearranged the curtains in the living room and stared for the nth time at a one
inch edge of wallpaper that had come loose from its moorings. My father, a non-credentialed
handyman, had papered the room for her, without consulting her beforehand
concerning the kind of wallpaper she might have preferred. He had selected a
flowery motif; he loved flowers. When the two newlyweds had first moved into
the house, he planted beside the kitchen window a Rose of Sharon tree that
someday, far in the future, he had hoped would put forth fragrant blossoms year
after year and grow, like the mustard seed in the bible, into a large tree-like
bush in which the birds of the air would make their homes. So large had the rose
of Sharon become in only five years that it threatened to overcome Rose’s
view out the kitchen window. And she was sure its branches were clogging the
gutter.
The decision was made; my mother breathed a sigh of relief,
and so I was delivered into my Aunt Nell’s fragrant hands. They smelled of
lilac. It was love at first sight, love abounding. Later, when I had reached
the Age of Reason – seven years old in the Catholic Church – I made it a
practice to visit my Aunt Nell and Uncle John nearly every Sunday at the
Mandirola homestead on Center Street, a five minute walk from Suffield Street,
the Grand Central Station of the extended family.
Grampa Carlo, whom age had softened and chastened, lived
happily with John and Nell, their son Bill, and several cats. Carlo was partial
to cats and dogs. They understood him.
He especially liked hunting dogs. Carlo went for rabbit and
squirrel, which was served at the Pesci household with heaps of polenta or
risotto, whenever Carlo left a wrapped rabbit corpse on the back porch. Sometimes,
these favors never reached the table, having been carried off by stray dogs in
the neighborhood. My mother was not a fancier of dogs, or cats for that matter,
or any form of domesticated wildlife. She tolerated parakeets for short periods, later
– so we all thought at the time – liberating them out the back door.
My father would come home, notice Pete was gone from his
birdcage, search the house and think to himself – we children easily translated
his thoughts; whenever his brain gears whirred, his eyebrows moved rapidly,
like a conductor’s baton – “Where in Heaven’s name is Pete?”
Pete had been missing in action for more than twelve hours. Eventually,
he would ask one of us, sadly supposing that my mother had now liberated her
third or fourth parakeet, “Where’s Pete?”
And we would all say, one after the other in sepulchral
tones, “I dunno…”
Translation: Out in the wide world, “turning and turning in
the widening gyre.”
My father, the polar opposite of my mother, loved the whole,
multifaceted universe: cats, dogs, stray nieces from Agawam, warm July
evenings, best enjoyed on the front porch with an Avaniti cigar, snowy white Winters,
Falls full of scarlet sumac, starry skies and russet sunsets, many of which he photographed at Bradley Field, where he used to take his sons and
daughter to watch the planes lumber off.
He was especially partial to any new technological trinket: cameras,
radios and later, when they became available in the neighborhood, televisions.
He traded in his car every two years and found himself in auto heaven around
1953 when trunks became much larger, because he then could hide from my mother in
a cavernous space the size of a small whale all his technological wonders.
Carlo had been in my field of vision for several
years before I noticed him. On his daily trek from Center Street -- across
North Street, past Balboni’s grocery store, down Suffield Street to Main Street
where, after buying a side of meat at the A&P, he would deposit himself at
Bianchi’s Restaurant, there to enjoy the company of his cronies – Carlo, a slow
moving schooner, would pass his daughter’s house, study it for a moment and
decide he needed a coffee and some morning cheer. So regular was his course
that, when I saw him glide by, I knew it was time to be off to Saint Mary’s
grammar school. In the fifties, I rarely consulted clocks. I fancied I could
tell the time adequately by the position of the sun in the sky. This got me
into no end of trouble, because my accommodating father made only one inflexible
demand of his children: that they present themselves at the kitchen table at
precisely 5:30, soon after he had returned from work, so that the family could
begin supper with all hands aboard. The family that meets together to eat stays
together for good. If you were missing in action at 5:30, you did not eat. I
had no watch, but this was never excuse enough.
Occasionally, Carlo would stop in to have a chat with my
mother, invariably warmed by a coffee royal, a concoction of black coffee, a
sprinkling of sugar or anisette and a generous dose of whatever whiskey my
mother had hidden under the kitchen sink, usually Jim Beam or Seagrams. His
visits waxed and waned in accordance with the amount of whiskey that remained
in the bottle; they tapered off as the whiskey diminished.
Carlo sat on the bench beneath the kitchen window, the same
place I perched on Christmas morning, watching that spot just before Bunker
Hill where, shortly after the train whistle sounded on Main Street, the Pertusi
cousins, John and Anthony, would magically appear, and anticipation would burst
inside me like a spent soap bubble. The morning sun raking Carlo’s face, I
could study it closely, as if through a magnifying glass.
His short hair was spotted with grey. He also was short; I
would guess five feet and a couple of inches. His eyes were lustrous. When he
smiled, he looked a bit crinkled, like Abe Lincoln after the Civil War that
leathered his skin and carved hollows in his cheeks. Carlo did not speak the King’s
English but managed to make himself understood. I hardly paid attention to what
he was saying; I wanted to drink in his presence. Occasionally, he dropped into
Italian, and it seemed my mother understood him readily enough. He patted the
bench, called me to his side, where I looked and looked, hoping to penetrate the
mystery of him. He smelled of soap and cigars. When he gripped your hand in a
friendly clasp, you felt an iron bolt stab your arm.
This was my grandfather, a working man for all seasons, a
mystery to me but not, apparently to my elder brother Jim. Carlo had labored in
a bake shop. For a time, he was the boss of the canal bank. Jimmy said his
ambition was to send his sons, all three of them, off to work, to collect their
salaries, and to live a life of semi-retirement in the lap of luxury. He was
fearful of no one but Mr. Ellsworth Cutler, who lived several houses up on
Suffield Street in a house dwarfed by two large and shaggy blue spruces.
Mr. Cutler was one of a few people on the street who, having
reached his mid-years, never seemed to grow older.
“He played the piano,” my mother said, “so beautifully that
everyone flocked to his house. We’d all
sit on his lawn and listen to him play. Then his mother died, and something
happened to him inside. He rarely went out.
One summer, he destroyed his piano,” a deed done, she thought, in a fit of
suppressed rage.
Mr. Cutler, who wanted watching, watched everyone else. When
he passed you on the street, he would stop as you progressed forward, slowly
turn around, like the turret of a tank, and study your back. Carlo had only
once to hear him cursing under his breath when he had passed him and, ever
after, he crossed the street when he saw Mr. Cutler approaching. Better to be
cautious and seem foolish than to be brave and dead. Carlo the Fox was not the
sort of person who would ride into battle, his chest expanding to meet the
bullet. In the struggle between prudence and valor in Carlo’s soul, prudence
usually won the contest. Carlo did not relish fighting loosing battles, which
is why, come to think of it, we called him Carlo the Fox.
Aunt Nell and Uncle John cuddled me for as long as it took
my mother to recover from the anxiety of having given birth to twins, and when
they re-deposited me at One Suffield Street, I had been – my mother’s words –
“spoiled rotten.” She was determined to fix this and set me various tasks:
Window washing was the worst, because she insisted that I wash BOTH sides of
the window, inside and out. Aunt Nell would not have been so persistent. She
would have given way and sent Uncle John off to wash the outside of the
windows, a perilous undertaking for a boy who had just reached the Age of
Reason. Uncle John would have climbed mountains for me. He would have torn the
stars out of the sky so that I could kiss them good-night.
Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese,
President Franklin Roosevelt had been diffident concerning what then was
considered a European war, although the
United States had been supplying
Great Britain, free France, Russia and China with war material on a Lend-Lease program.
Sentiment on the war was sharply divided in the US. After the attack on
Pearl Harbor, “dilly dallying,” as my mother might have put it, was no longer
an option. Once war had been declared, Tommy found himself serving as a cook
in Hawaii, on an island that once had been a leper colony. Charlie eventually
was dispatched to the Marshall Islands, a dangerous assignment. Ray had
arranged to meet with Tommy in Hawaii and, without telling his brother, also had arranged
to bring Charlie along.
Ray wrote to my mother at length, detailing the meeting of
the three Mandirola brothers just before the war in the Asiatic Pacific theater
had begun to pay dividends to the good guys.
“You kept the letter?”
“I did. I read it over and over. I kept it in the desk for a
long while.”
“May I read it?”
“It’s gone.”
While in High School, Charlie began to date Mary Meade,
brought her home, showed her off to my mother and father. Perhaps because of
the love he bore towards his own mother, my father began to imagine a future
between the two. Charlie had asked Mary to the senior prom, and she had
accepted.
My father bought a new car every two years. Somehow, he knew
at a very early age that, far from owning property, it is property that owns
men, because ownership carries with it the obligation of attendance and
maintenance. Property, unattended and unimproved, degenerates. Adam rented
the garden from God, the real landlord of Eden. A car, my father knew, was
primarily a means of transport. The essence of a car lay in the mileage you
could wring from it without the addition of maintenance costs. The utility of
the car therefore could be extended if the car were traded in every two years.
The owner of the car simply had to disabuse himself of the notion that he
“owned” rather than “rented” his vehicle. Then too, there were other
compensating advantages, one of which Charlie was about to enjoy.
Days before Charlie’s prom, Frank drove a new Buick into the
driveway. My mother had gotten used to this. My father never announced when a
new car would appear. Without any warning, Frank simply showed up in the driveway
with the new Buick, stepped out of it, the new car odor still wafting through
his nostrils, glanced at the window – where, no doubt, he saw Rose looking
dubious – and entered the house as usual.
When Charlie saw the car, his hearty sank. He turned to my
mother, despair frosting his features.
“Oh no,” he said, “and the prom is this weekend. How can I
tell Mary we can’t go?”
“Better discuss it with him.”
Gratitude, which is the appreciation of gifts unmerited,
carries with it certain obligations. Charlie never expected to receive favors –
ever -- and for this reason his gratitude was innocent and authentic. The
ungracious expectation of a favor murders gratitude.
By mid-meal, Charlie had worked up his courage.
“Frank, I asked Mary to go to the prom with me, and she
accepted. But now you have a new car, and the prom is this week end.”
“Well then,” Frank said, “what better way to take a girl to
a prom than in a new car?”
Charlie earlier had gotten his license, but prying
permission from Carlo had proven to be an ordeal. Carlo, it seemed, was
unwilling to accept the liabilities that would be heaped upon him should
Charlie get in an accident. Once an idea had entered Carlo’s head – sometimes impervious to sweet reason – it laid there in rags forever, like a
prisoner condemned and awaiting death in his cell.
My mother, who had earned her spurs in the Suffield School
of Soft Knocks humanizing Sam Fuller, conceived a plan. My father drew up a
document that appeared to the unlettered eye to be a legally binding contract
so unimpeachable as to withstand Supreme Court scrutiny. It said that in the case of any
accident, however serious or slight, my father would assume all legal and
medical responsibility. My father had gotten a notary friend to stamp the
thing, and the document was letter-headed with a fake firm. My mother very
firmly pushed the impressive document under her father’s nose, having read it
to him first. And Carlo the Fox – outfoxed for once – signed it. My father took
Charlie out to the hinterlands around Bradley, where as a boy he had recalled his
mother in hot pursuit of the porcini, taught him to drive and then drove him to
Suffield where he received his license tout
de suite from a court official who was a friend of a friend of the family.
Since my father was prodigal in doing favors for others, very few people he
knew did not owe him repayment.
On July 28, 1943, a little less than two weeks after my
sister and I had leapt into the wicked world, more than 1,500 vessels of the
United States naval forces, at that time the largest amphibious operation in the
history of warfare, landed in Sicily. Charlie earlier had arrived in California. Among his other war responsibilities,
most of which involved assisting engineers in creating airfields, Charlie was assigned to recover dead bodies
lost after fierce fighting in the Marshall Islands. American forces transformed
one of the islands into a major airbase from which Navy pilots might penetrate Japan’s
over-extended perimeter. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Empire swelled to included Manchuria, a large chunk of China, Korea, Burma, Siam, French
Indo-China, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, most of New Guinea,
the Solomon Islands off the coast of Australia and, furthest north, the
Aleutian islands off the coast of Alaska. After lightening attacks on American
and British naval forces, Japan had landed 4,000 troops on the Philippine
Islands and seized Guam, an American held territory. After Japanese aircraft
sank the British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse, Winston Churchill lamented, “We
have lost control of the sea." It was the business of US forces to recover
maritime control of the Pacific.
Charlie had been awarded a bronze star, the fourth-highest
individual military award and the ninth-highest by order of precedence in the
US Military. The Bronze Star is generally given out for acts of heroism, acts
of merit, or meritorious service in a combat zone. None of the sons or
daughters of the First Family knew that Charlie had been awarded the metal until,
at his funeral, an obligatory notice was publish in his obituary.
“He called us from California,” my mother said. “Frank
telegraphed money, and he flew to Bradley Field, where we picked him up. He was
sick. He was so sick.”
Charlie became a snail, the house his shell. He closed all
the blinds in his room. For him the searching sunlight piercing a room was a
sword that cleaved the heart. He withdrew deeply into himself in an attempt to
placate the roiling demons of war. If he was quiet and still and did not antagonize them, perhaps he would not be torn to bits. He became a leper, untouchable. When anyone – my mother, father or even Mary – came near, the drawbridge
was raised.
After two weeks had passed, my mother put in a call to Joe
Balboni, who ran a small grocery store on North Street, a three minute walk
from Suffield Street.
“Charlie is home from the war. I want you to hire him.”
“Alright. When do you want him to start?”
“Three days. He needs someone who can be patient with him.”
“Alright Rose, three days.”
Quietly, she opened Charlie’s bedroom door. Frank had
removed the bolt. Charlie was sitting at his desk, his back turned to her.
“I've talked to Mr. Balboni, and he has agreed to hire
you.”
“Please, no.”
“You will begin on Monday. He expects to see you at six in
the morning. At that hour, no one will be on the street.”