A Brief History of Italians in America, 2 Into the Wicked World

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.”

That desk was a memory sieve, my mother a deep well of memories. Struggle and gratitude were the characteristic marks of the Mandirola boys. Charlie drifted after the death of his mother; then, when my father welcomed him into his house, all the doors opened for him. Frank Pesci, who had himself overcome a load of adversity, had his feet firmly planted in the New World, which had been good to him and his family. When he married my mother, the sun had just begun shining through the Depression. He had put himself through trade school. After completing courses in drafting, a job presented itself in the photography department of Travelers Insurance Company, and he seized the opportunity.  Rose having marked the day on my father’s calendar when the two were to be married and the nuptials having been completed, she and Frank took up residence at first in a house on the Fuller compound, later moving to Spring Street in Windsor Locks. My mother had rescued her brother from the depressing daily struggle he had been used to in his father's house; his heart opened like a flower to the liberating sunshine.

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.”

But of course, the street was alive much before six o’clock. Italians are early risers. Mr. Root, the milkman, already had left his bottles on the back porches of every house on Suffield Street. A few days after my mother had delivered the news to Charlie of his impending employment, Mrs. Jeffrey, who had known Charlie all his life, said a prayer to the Virgin on his behalf. And when on Monday morning Charlie glided past Mrs. Bianchi’s house, he did not see her finger parting the chintz curtain. Mrs. Bianchi, whose son owned the restaurant my grandfather frequented nearly every day, crossed herself as Charlie moved up the street, brushing aside his demons as he went.

A Brief History of Italians in America, 1 A Little Knowledge

Dedication -- To My Nieces and Nephews

A Little Knowledge

I want to warn you from the very beginning: A memoir is very much like a confession, and you must be wary of people who write confessions. They are rarely sincere about their failings or themselves in their narratives because they cannot bear to be sincere about themselves in their lives.

Everyone quotes Socrates’ famous apothegm: Know thyself. Few are willing to trace his self-knowledge to its bitter end in forced suicide, and fewer still practice what he preached. In the 21^st Century – Your century, my dear nieces and nephews – it may not be necessary to know oneself at all. In any case, perhaps it is better to concentrate on others. My century – the 20^th, the bloodiest in the history of the world, full of introspective maniacs – had its fill of self-regarding “men like gods.”

Most of this godly introspection led, in one way or another, to oceans of spilt blood, concentration camps, revolutions patterned after the French Revolution that swallowed its children. Hitler wrote his confession, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), early in his career; he was, you will have noticed, a jihadist. In our day, if you call a jihadist a Hitlerite, he will acknowledge the compliment with an inscrutable smile. Most of Hitler’s “struggle” was nonsense and lies tied in a pretty bow of self-pity, but he found armies of men willing to take him seriously. A hearty belly laugh early on would have blown him to bits. Stalin, “Breaker of Nations,” was as bad as Hitler and Mao as bad as Stalin. Communist totalitarians ruthlessly murdered between 85 and 100 million souls – not to speak of their own souls – in this the cruelest of centuries. But just try to uncover from their contemporaries a hearty condemnation of any one of these three mass murderers when they were on the up-swing, slaughtering the competition and sending men and women better than themselves to early graves. Good luck with that.

All memoirs are confessions. This is a memoir; therefore, it is a confession; therefore, let the reader beware.

You ask me to provide some useful – by which I assume you mean objectively correct – information about our family.

This is difficult. We know too little about our roots. Too little was said by my father and mother about their fathers and mothers. And you know as well as I that once a subject touches the brain and the memory, it is marvelously transformed. I will tell you what I know, but I cannot vouch for its undiluted accuracy, mixed up as it is with additions supplied by the imagination, that imperious imp that “improves” the accounts of those historical sources even serious historians draw upon – in this case, mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters, all of whom WILL have their laugh. This yearning for the last laugh is a characteristic of both sides of our family. Everything here is second-hand, as the lawyers say, and inadmissible in a court.

Keeping in mind the tendency of the imagination to further guild an already gilded lily, here we go…

In Beginnings Endings Lie

Rose Pesci, my mother and your grandmother, was born in 1912 and died in 2007. My father, Frank Pesci, born 1907, died earlier in 1976, and my mother missed him dearly.

After my father died, my mother asked what I wanted of his. I took a watch, an old Timex I still have with me. Timex, you will be happy to know, is still very much alive; though, of course, watches are much more expensive in our day, owing to inflation, than was my father’s inexpensive, thoroughly practical Timex. When my mother died, I asked for the pictures of Grandfather Umberto and Grandmother Enrichetta that hung on the living room wall of the homestead at 1 Suffield Street in Windsor Locks.

I do not know how my father came by these photographs. There is no studio mark on the originals. They hung over an old desk that contained, I was later to discover, a few rare treasures, enticing clues that would tell me what little I now know of Grandmother Enrichetta’s early life in Italy. The photographs were lovingly enhanced by my father, who was for many years the head photographer at Travelers Insurance Company in Hartford.

My father’s love for his own mother is present in this picture of her. He enhanced his mother’s photograph with charcoal, touching her hair lightly with lines that embellished her curls. He did the same with his father’s hair and mustache. He used charcoal to edge his mother’s double bow that hung loosely around her slender neck. The pictures are black and white, and so there is no note of color in the hair. However, I will mention that my two aunts on my father’s side, Concetta (Connie) and Richettina (Henrietta), had flaming red hair. And looking at the pictures displayed on the living room wall beside the window that opened on a carefully tended lawn and a sugar maple that in fall gave forth colors that would have astonished Monet, I often wondered if either grandparent had red in their hair. What color were my grandmother’s eyes? Her eyes in the black and white photo hint at a transparency. Possibly, they were hazel. Could they have been blue? I never asked my mother or father, because I was content to wonder over it. I was like that, a wondering, wandering boy. Also, neither my mother nor my father was forthcoming concerning the history of their parents, which had much to do with a desire for assimilation on their part.  History among the Pescis was parceled out in offhanded remarks, and here no Italian was spoken. I don’t recall my father mentioning his father or mother frequently. For all we knew, our parents crossed a bridge from nowhere; before them lay uncharted territory. My father was born in Casalnoceto, Italy, and arrived here when he was two years old. My mother was born here. Her father, Carlo Mandirola – “Carlo The Fox” -- was twenty one when he arrived.

My father told me some few stories about his father, one of which concerned a clubfooted man, another concerned a stillborn brother.

The history of a town like Windsor Locks can most easily be read in the way tombs are displayed in cemeteries. The patriarchs of the town, many of whom were settlers from Windsor – rumored by those who live in Windsor to be the oldest town in Connecticut, though the claim is hotly disputed by some who live in Wethersfield -- have an honored place in the cemetery. They occupy the high ground. Following the English, came the Irish, who built the canal and Locks after which the town is named. They were followed by Poles, Italians and others.

My grandparents arrived in Windsor Locks from northern Italy just after the centennial clock was inching towards 1900. Carlo Mandirola, my mother’s father, came to Windsor Locks by way of Agawam, Massachusetts, where his sponsoring sister had settled.

Umberto Pesci owned a small shoe and boot making factory in Windsor Locks. One blustery winter’s day, when the snow was piling up in the still unpaved Main Street, he looked out his window and saw a familiar sight, a clubfooted man, the subject of some raillery in the town, painfully making his way through the snow. The man – let’s call him Julio – was terrified when, passing the Pesci boot making shop, the door opened and he was collard by Umberto, who dragged the astonished Julio into a large, warm room.

Umberto quieted Julio’s fears and made him sit down in a wonderfully wrought chair that my father later painted white and put on the Pesci’s porch, where it remained until the house was sold. That chair had cradled all my uncles and aunts, as they sat on the porch talking up a storm – This was before the advent of television, which destroyed interpersonal communication – later moving into the kitchen, where they played cards until midnight and beyond. My bedroom wall and the kitchen wall were the same. I recall leaning my cheek against the cool plaster wall, straining to make out what was being said, but the plaster and the lathes behind it captured and muffled the sound, so that it reached me on the other side of the wall as an indistinct angelic murmuring in which I could hear the laughter of my aunts nesting in the baritone voices of my uncles. Ever since that time, I have been consoled by the sound of the human voice.

Julio trembled. Had he done something wrong? My grandfather was a big man for his time, five foot nine, with powerful arms. Tenderly, he loosened Julio’s shoes and pulled away from his twisted foot the right shoe – if such a mess of leather could be called a shoe. Julio turned his face away in embarrassment. Umberto bathed his misshapen foot. When Julio several times struggled to pull his foot away, Umberto gently told him to be still.

He was going to make him a shoe that fit.

There was something else the matter with Julio that did not come through the story told by my father as he sat in the very chair that years earlier had held Julio prisoner to his father’s kindness. Was Julio also dumb? Could he have been simple-minded? Or was he just one of those poor souls that life had clawed and clawed and frightened to his frozen bones?

Umberto made a cast of Julio’s misshapen foot, from which he made a boot. A few days later, he chased Julio up Main Street, caught him in front of a pub and steered him back to his shop, where he fitted the new boot on Julio’s foot. Before he left the store, Julio, who was poor and could not afford new boots, pulled out of his pocket what little money he had, which he pressed into Umberto’s bear claw. He bowed three times and ran – HE RAN – up the street.

I never exchanged a word with Grandfather Pesci, who died before I was born. I never knew his wife, my grandmother Enrichetta, who died in Saint Francis Hospital in 1921 at an early age, a tragic 38. In the photo my father lovingly adjusted, his mother’s eyes seem transparent -- blue, they MUST be blue. I will have them blue. It is a thing I wish to share with her, though my eyes are dark blue. Her eyes, I imagine, were like spring cornflowers.

Grandmother Enrichetta was with my father in the last dream he dreamt before he died. I went to see him in Hartford Hospital and found him strangely excited.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I had a dream… so beautiful. Everyone was there at the seashore: mama, my two sisters. They were laughing and playing.”

I thought of my aunt’s red hair whipped by the wind, like a cantering horse’s mane.

 “And the sky…” His own eyes widened to swallow all the joy in one gulp.

“What about the sky?”

“It was SO blue.”

Red hair, laughter crashing like tambourines, his mother elegant on a beach, his father also present though out of the frame, and above everyone a blue sky embracing all in its wide arms, its mother’s caress. It was my father’s last and most perfect picture. During his life, he had taken hundreds of pictures. I knew this would be his last dream.

What’s that? Oh yes, the stillborn.

My father and I were lounging in the grass, in the cemetery among the tombs, both of us, I’m sure, glad to be alive. Camus says somewhere that it is better to be than not to be. Even if he had entered the world as an insensate rock lying in the sun; it is still better to be something than nothing. In this regard, Camus differed from other French thinkers, most notably Sartre, and this difference over existence was at the root of a painful separation. There is no need to rehearse forgotten friend-crushing quarrels among French philosophers, though every man and woman during his life, however spare, must sooner or later answer the question put by Hamlet to himself: “To be or not to be…” The answer to this question lies at the root of all love and crime. I point it out here only to stress that Camus was in this quarrel on the side of the angels, while Sartre was, in my somewhat prejudiced opinion, of the Devil’s party. My father, a philosopher in small matters– the only matters that matter – would have taken Camus’ part and defended his position vigorously. Everything that is – is good, and the evil men bring on themselves is a result of their flight from the greatest good. Better to be something than nothing. By affirming being, we accept, if we are theists, God’s creative acts. Or, if the thought of a creator dashes you too much, I suppose it might be said that in choosing life we affirm the dignity of ourselves and all good things in the world.

It was Veteran’s Day. A schoolboy had just finished reciting Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address near the towering cross in the Spring Street Cemetery, people had dispersed, and my father and I were taking our ease. He pointed past the circumference of the cemetery, towards a gully through which Kettle Book ran on its way to the Connecticut River more than a mile us downstream. Close to the cemetery was a fish hatchery. Unwanted trout were let loose in the stream, and my friends and I were able to catch the larger of them with our bare hands. The brook was so narrow it could easily be jumped. Taking a few trout, we would carry our trophies to Main Street, where strangers would marvel at our catches.

“Over there,” my father said, “we buried my brother, my father and I,” apparently under a cloak of darkness.

He said his brother, whom his father had not named, was a stillborn. His father had asked the officiating priest of the parish whether he could bury the boy in sacred ground, the answer to which question was a firm “No.” So, his father had made a small coffin of orange crates, commandeered his son, and on a dismal, rainy night, they buried the stillborn as near the cemetery as possible. Who knows what was in my grandfather’s mind; perhaps he thought the sacredness of the cemetery extended beyond its geographical limits. Mercy would extend it. Nearby might be good enough.

“Over there,” my father said, “by a small stream,” by the brook from which we pulled trout.

My father in his devotions paid special attention to Mary, the mother of Jesus. In this, he was like other strong Italian men – Carlo, my mother’s father, being the exception – who, plumbing the depths of their own fallen nature, looked to the Virgin for mercy, miracle and succor. Carlo, by his own accounting, was sinless, pure as a rose; what need had he of salvation?

In the earlier years covered by this – What shall I call it? – retrospective view of my sometimes mystic young years, there were two kinds of Italians.  And the difference between them comes forth most powerfully in Puccini’s “Suor Angelica,” in which a nun seeking repentance is counterpoised with her sinless aunt for whom repentance would be redundant.

This is the story of sister Angelica, who is placed by her family in a convent after she has had an illicit birth. For seven years her family does not contact her, and one day she is visited by her aunt, who wishes her to sign some legal papers. Angelica's sister is to be married, and the nun must now sign a document renouncing her claim to her inheritance. Angelica, her heart warmed by memories of her son, mentions the unmentionable: Is my boy’s hair still yellow, are his lips still like rubies? The aunt condemns her and coldly discloses that her son, for seven years Angelica’s spiritual raft, had died two years earlier. Angelica is an herbalist; she has just provided a successful herbal cure for one of the sick nuns. In her grief, she wanders into the forest and makes a death posset of herbs, which she takes. Now, it must be understood that suicide, despair without hope, is the sin that CANNOT be forgiven. Before she dies, Angelica begs the Virgin Mary for mercy and intersession. Puccini’s Mary steps on stage directly from the 12^th century: She is the QUEEN of heaven. In the 12^th century, and for some years beyond, if you were of the Queen’s party – if you were HER man or HER woman – nothing would be denied to you. In one early mystery play, Satan, who appears as God’s counselor, the tester of men, storms Heaven and lays before God his just complaint: If the mother of God is allowed to proceed recklessly in this manner, she will, sooner or later, overthrow all the laws of Heaven and earth; she plows laws under her feet for those who petition her in the name of her Son. THIS virgin now steps into Puccini’s operatic frame. In answer to Angelica’s prayer that she be allowed to see her son in Heaven, a miracle occurs. Mary appears holding in her arms Angelica’s son, whose hair is golden and whose lips are red as rubies. The Virgin, herself a mother whose Son was tortured and murdered LAWFULLY, hands the child to its mother in a welcoming sign that her prayers have opened the doors of Heaven to her, a sinner spurned by all. The other nuns witness the miracle and rejoice at the throne of Mercy beneath the feet of Mary.

My father was born in 1907, in Casalnoceto, Italy; his father was born in 1880 in the same town. Umberto arrived in the United States in 1909 with his wife and his son Francesco Augusto, then two years old.  My father Frank and his father were of the Virgin’s party. They knew, as heirs to joy and sin, that they need the merciful intercession of a Queen. That is why, I imagine, Grandfather Umberto outfitted Julio with a shoe he fashioned from scraps of love, and that is why he thought the mercy of Heaven would reach his stillborn son where he rested in peace beside Kettle Book.

The What?

Oh yes, the desk.

Things were filed away in it and forgotten. A desk is very much like a memory box. I recovered a few relics some years before my twin sister Donna had cleared the house following my mother’s death. There is nothing as desolate as a house, once brimming with life, from which a family has fled. Every memento left behind is precious. Most precious of all are the living memories of those now irretrievably gone. You try to recall everything: the curl in your mother’s hair, which probably came to her from her own mother on the Mandirola side, known familiarly among Italians in the neighborhood as “Ricci” (curly); the color of your red-haired aunt’s eyes (hazel); the ages of your ageless uncles; who was the eldest, who the youngest – and then you give up and return to the daily rut of your own life. In my father’s time, it was not uncommon to give up one male in the family to the church, which is why there are so many Irish and Italian priests. My brother’s brother-in-law, Father Dick Bolea, was the family priest. Families now are smaller, the heads of households are less willing to part with their human treasure, and – you may have noticed – the wide world itself is gradually losing all understanding of the sacred in life, which is not the way Jesus wanted things to go when he cautioned against becoming conformed to the world, about which he had ambivalent feelings.

Your great grandmother Enrichetta Pesci was taken from her family in northern Italy by the Contessa Teresa di Gropello Tarino (nata Marchesa Dal Torro) who lived in a big Palazzo on the Mediterranean. The little girl, given up by her father to be a playmate for the Contessa’s daughter after her own mother had died in childbirth, was treated right royally. I was surprised to hear my grandmother was sent to college. Her manners, as well as those of her husband, were exquisite. Whenever a woman entered a room, her husband Umberto rose and bowed; he did the same when a woman left the room. When Enrichetta married Umberto in Casalnoceto, she was, I was told, given a dowry that included a parcel of land in northern Italy. After my father died, my aunt Concetta (Connie) traveled to Casalnoceto to dispose of the property. All the Pescis, Connie said, had been living on it, apparently rent free. They could not have been too happy to see her.

Before Aunt Connie left for Italy, I entrusted her with a mission: Find out, if you can, who the most famous Pesci was in Casalnoceto. At a young age, I thought: perhaps a local saint, or a pirate. The young are stupid, but bold in their thoughts. I knew nothing of geography and supposed every place in Italy, because of its shape, was in easy reach of the high seas. Casalnoceto is a small, landlocked, northern Italian town midway between Bologna on the Ligurian Sea and Milano, a large city that lies in in close proximity to the Alps. Further back, the Pescis were alpinisti, mountaineers. One Pesci was a silkworm farmer who plied his trade in the very shadow of the Alps.

Connie was a scamp, as were all the Beltrandies – especially Susan, Connie’s daughter. Life bubbled up in them; they laughed at adversity, scorned solemnity.

When Connie had returned, I asked her, “So, did you ask in the village who was the most famous Pesci?”

“I did.”

Here her hazel eyes began to roam over my head, to the left of me, to the right of me, and a suppressed smile crossed her lips. She seemed unable to focus. Now she was looking at the wallpaper, now the floor, now vacantly out the window.

“And?”

“He was a bear tamer.”

Her eyes swept over me. A bear tamer; I was unable to process the surprise.  Her hand went to my cheek. I felt the warmth of her palm penetrate my eyes.

My father, Connie told my sister, was a tall man, strong and vigorous. The circus that came to Casalnoceto offered money to the men of the village who chose to wrestle the bear. Umberto accepted the challenge and stepped forward. The circus owner studied him and was heard to mutter, “Please, do not hurt the bear.”

Connie, after an exhaustive church search, brought back with her a rudimentary family tree:

·         My great grandmother, Rosa Fantone, born 1845, married my great grandfather Giusepe Abbiati, born 1842.

·         Rosa Fantone died giving birth to a daughter, Enrichetta Abbiati, my father’s mother.

·         Enrichetta Abbiati, born 1881, married Umberto Pesci, born 1879, on March 23, 1905.

·         They had three children: Frank, Concetta (Connie) and Richettina (Henrietta).

·         Following the death in childbirth of his wife Rosa Fantone, my great grandfather remarried and took to wife Bonadeo Santina.

·         They had three children: Constanza, Giovanni and Teresa. Giovanni married but had no children Teresa never married.

·         Costanza married Cuerci Levi, who was Jewish, and they had two daughters, Irma and Natalina, both of whom were still living when Connie visited Italy.

Susan Beltrandi was Connie’s daughter, a sort of female Huck Finn, ever intent on storming my father’s heart, which was easy enough to do. She knew she could get round my mother, with a little help from my father. He was a castle easily captured, particularly if you were assaulting in the name of his sisters, whom he loved inordinately. My mother Rose – who rarely held back when her comments were wanted – thought Susan was full of (expletive deleted) and vinegar. My mother’s most frank comments on people or her time and place always sounded loftier in Italian, which none of her children could comprehend. Knowing they could not get at the meat of such comments, Rose felt free to let loose. As her children grew older, she dropped the Italian mask and astonished them with the clarity and moral acuity of her sometimes ribald presentations. Of everyone in the family -- and remember, in the pre-television age, nearly everyone a child met was a living library -- she was the best story teller. She embellished, but her embellishments underscored the golden nugget of truth in her narratives. Much of what I shall say here concerning a time I could not have witnessed came from her.

And so we come to the heart of the matter: Rose Pesci.

She told me that Frank Pesci – not the aging Frank of his last years, but the man in his vigor, the one she fell in love with -- was “the most eligible bachelor in Windsor Locks.” She met him at a dance and found she had to brush aside a rival, who had been competing for his affection.

Timidly, during a first dance, she had placed a flower in his button hole. Her rival discarded it when she was dancing with Frank, but he broke off the dance, tenderly picked up the flower – We can only hope it was a rose – replaced it in his buttonhole, walked over to Rose and asked her for a second dance. It is at moments like these that cupid lets loose his arrows.

They all went into my father’s heart at half shaft, and from that time on, he pursued her.

The pursuit was relentless and eventually successful. There were, however, frustrations along the way.

My father, deeply wounded by cupid’s arrows, had been asking my mother to marry him for a while. Each time he asked – be still my trembling heart! – he was put off, not decisively but puzzlingly and ambiguously. Naturally, he was frustrated.

One day, he showed up at the Fuller’s with a calendar in hand, which he placed before my mother. And he said firmly, but not so as to alienate my mother’s affections, “Rose, here is a calendar I will leave with you. I want you to choose on this calendar a day when you will marry me and then mark it. Not now, not now, but later. I will come once more. If no date is marked, I will not ask you again.”

When he was gone, Rose rushed in tears to Mrs. Fuller, who had so often plied advice from her.

“Frank has asked me to marry him. I am to pick a day on this calendar for the wedding. If no day is chosen when he returns, he has told me he will not ask me again. I don’t know what to do.”

Mrs. Fuller’s response was instantaneous, which was unusual for her,  for she was the kind of woman who like to chew on the various possibilities before she swallowed one. “Rose,” said Mrs. Fuller, who had already taken the measure of my father, “marry him.”

“But there is the problem of my brother.”

“Tell him.”

Before her mother Louise had died of bone cancer, she had called my mother to her bedside.

“Rose,” she said, “will you promise me something?”

“Of course, Mama.”

“I will have your promise?”

“Yes.”

“Take care of Charlie. Promise me.”

“Yes, mama.”

Charlie was Rose’s ten year old brother, and the apple of his mother’s eye – for very good reasons. I have from Charlie a story of his mother, when she was in the bloom of health. It is his first and most persistent memory of her. She had taken him to a wooded area near Bradley Field, there to find the illusive porcini mushroom. She had placed him, a very young child, on a dirt road beside the edge of the wood, and he was entertaining himself by stirring the dirt with a stick she had given him, when he looked up and saw his mother in a crescent of the morning wood, dressed all in white, gleaming in a sudden sunburst, lean over a log, fetch a porcini and hold it up triumphantly before him, a bright smile kindling her face, which he could see, as if in a close-up, a rare and tender moment of blissful, unmerited happiness. She poured out her love to Charlie often, because he was tender to her, and his love was a secret coda between them.

My father returned and asked for the calendar, which was blank.

 Then, he asked the right question, “Rose, what’s the matter?”

It came out of her like a storm swollen stream. She had promised her mother – whom my father knew well – that she would care for her brother Charlie.

“How could I burden both of us, at the beginning of our marriage …”

“Rose…” he interrupted, and then flashed his world-conquering smile, “Charlie will come and live with us.”

And so he did. Charlie was ten when he entered my father’s house.

                                               

It is almost impossible at this remove to capture either of them as they were in, say, 1926, the year of the dance. Nearer memories – in our case, the only ones we have – displace reality. In the early 30’s, my mother was a very fetching young woman. I had, but since have lost, a picture of her when she was working a governess to the Fuller children in Suffield. It shows her with short hair, in a second row behind the children and the sometime austere and forbidding Sam Fuller and his wife, Amos, who was not above conspiring with my mother to overthrow Mr. Fuller’s more imperious demands. Mr. Fuller was an unswerving tea-totaler, for instance; Mrs. Fuller liked to spice gatherings at her house with a spot of wine, which my mother insisted to Mr. Fuller, on one occasion when he had come home early from his business and found the house cluttered with women, was grape juice.

At fourteen years, Rose Mandirola was robustly independent, throbbing with youth, a child of stress and struggle, trying as best she could to escape the tyranny of her father, a cruel man sometimes when he had too much whiskey in him. And yet, surrounding her was a protective shield of cautionary innocence. It was in adversity that she took the measure of truth; some solid thing there was in her that MUST have the truth. At fourteen, grown up already, she had put her fantasies away. That rock hard appreciation of “what is” was so firm you could have placed an Empire State building on it and it would not have buckled. The same was true of my father, though there was in him a compensating romantic streak. What Rose did with the truth after she had found it out was no one’s business but her own. She was, during the time she spent with the Fullers, the most grateful woman in Connecticut.

I pressed her one day on her father. What was life on Center Street like?

“My father? He was a man who cared for his children,” she told me. “They had the freshest food. Down in the basement of the house, he kept a garden; so there were fresh vegetables the whole year round. He had the greenest of thumbs. He could make roses grow from rocks. He made sure that his children and my mother had the best medical care. But…” and here a wall went up between us.

I knocked on the wall, “But what?”

“I was coming home from the Fullers, walking towards the house. When I was still far from it, I heard the screams… my sister Lena. I ran in, and there he was with his belt, beating her. I pushed him. He was shocked, maybe embarrassed – no, shocked. I tore the belt away from him, ran out of the house, up Center Street. Boiling, I was boiling.  I thought I heard more screams and stopped. The screams had been coming from me. I ran into the woods and tore the ground with my hands. And I buried that strap in the ground. I stomped on the ground, covered the spot with leaves. He would never find it. If he beat me – though he had never done that to me; it was always Lena – I would NEVER tell him where that belt was. When I returned to the house, he had gone. John [her brother] was sitting in the living room. I said to him, ‘You are a man, bigger than he is. How can you let him treat my sister like this?” John said nothing. Later my father returned. He was drunk. John grabbed him by the neck, hauled him into the kitchen, threw open the door to the cellar stairs. All the while, he was slobbering, 'No John, please, no…' John held him over the stairs. 'Do you see down there?' he said. 'If ever you touch my sister again, and if you mistreat my mother, I will throw you down these stairs.' And that was the end of it. Something broke in him. From that day on, he was less fearsome.”

The Depression had hit the Mandirolas hard. Both Carlo, the padrone, and John had lost their jobs, and the inflow of money for a family of seven was severely diminished: Carlo, his wife Louise, who was sickly, Rose’s three brothers – Johnny, Charlie and Tommy – and her sister Lena. A butcher, whose name has not come down to us, knew both the Fullers and the Mandirolas. When Sam Fuller asked his butcher if he could recommend a girl to help in his house with his children, Rose’s name spilled out of his mouth. She was hired on the recommendation of the butcher, and a new world opened its doors to her. In the midst of a depression, Sam Fuller had persuaded the Suffield Country Club to hire both Johnny and Carlo as grounds keepers. My mother mothered the Fuller children and in their hearts became a refuge and a delight. Much later, when Sam Fuller Jr. wrote his family memoir, “Breaking Away,” he interviewed Rose. Age had weakened her body by then, but to her last day her mind was bright.  My copy of the book contains a handwritten note from Sam:

To Donald,

Your mother, Rose, is one of those saints that should appear in everybody’s lifetime. She appeared in mine and it made such a difference in my life. Hope you enjoy reading on pages 193-248 [these pages contain a transcribed interview with my mother] about what a wonderful person she is.

Sam Fuller 13/22/02

Your father, she told the Fuller children on this occasion, loved his children, however severe he had been with them. The children were afraid of him and so flocked to Rose – young Sam called her “Rosen” because, for some reason, he could not pronounce “Rose’ -- for succor and comfort, which they found aplenty. She was a confidant of Mrs. Fuller, who had entrusted her children to her. My mother thought of her time among the Fullers as her university. She was young; she had her mind set on a future brighter and certainly more successful than the bleak days that crowded in on her on Center Street in Windsor Locks. She knew nothing of finances and cared nothing for money.

One day Sam Fuller took her aside and told her she should be investing her money.

“But I have no money,” she confessed.

“You have your salary.”

“I give that to my father. So do all his children, when they are working.”

“All of it?”

“It’s a large family, and they want necessities.”

Mr. Fuller proposed a plan. From that day forward, he would give her two salary checks – one for her father, and the other for her, which would be deposited in an account about which her father would know nothing at all. She learned quickly, eagerly and gratefully.

Mr. Fuller knew she wanted to fly; this independent account would be her wings. He was the kind of man who could not help helping others -- with one proviso: that his aid would led to independence -- and what help he gave was given out in such a way as not to bruise the self-respect of those he aided.

The year of the dance may have been around 1928; the date is a faithful estimate and probably accurate. I am working within a speculative time line. My mother became a caretaker for Mr. Fuller’s children when she was 14; this I know for certain. She was with the family for more than 10 years, and the strong bonds of affection between her and the Fuller children lasted to her final breath. They visited her often. On one occasion – Could it have been the party we threw for her on her 90^th birthday? – Sam told me, “You know, she was a mother to me.”

Love whirls outward. There are few things in life that, given away, return to the giver sevenfold. When my father died, Charlie Mandirola would tell me, “He was my father.”

Mr. Fuller had hired a girl who could beard the lion. Sam Fuller was a roaring lion who in his private affections for his children was solicitous but insistent.  Though he ran a tobacco farm, drinking and smoking for him were devils incarnate.  He was intrepid and fearless. His children trembled at his roar, but Rose managed him diplomatically.  And this is no wonder. She had spent the previous fourteen years in the lion’s den.

Carlo Mandirola came to the country when he was twenty one. He landed, we learned much later, at Ellis Island. But for a while there, his arrival point was in doubt, and there was much speculation among his grandchildren from what route Carlo had arrived, tempest tossed, in Agawam, Massachusetts, where his sponsoring sister lived. My brother searched the records at Ellis Island and found no indication that Carlo had arrived in the usual manner. Had he come up from Mexico, or down from Canada? What whips and scorns had driven him here? Was he fleeing from some brutalizing menace or rushing towards some fugitive hope?

It was because we knew nothing about his past that everything seemed possible. We knew HIM. He was tough, gristly. He was Carlo the fox.

When he arrived in New York, my mother told me, Carlo had in his pocket some money he had saved while in Italy for the trip over. That money was supposed to have been shared with his sister who, while kind, had no intention of rearing in a land new to her a brother who was dependent on her and her husband. Carlo was born in 1880. His wife, Louise, was born in 1882 and died of cancer of the bone in 1934. The Ellis Island Immigration Station had opened in 1892, only a few years before Carlo lost his swag during his very first card game in the New World. His sister was not pleased and batted him about the ears when he arrived penniless in Agawam. This may have been the last time Carlo lost most of his assets gambling, though it was rumored that Carlo later had won and then lost in a card game several lots on Elm Street.

I recall my mother wringing her hands when she told me this.

“Think of it. We might have been rich.”

However, Windsor Locks was full of rumors of this kind. Chasing them down and wringing the truth from them is an exhausting affair. After a few runs around the block, people of the town simply accepted as true all rumors that did not tell against them or members of their families.

Carlo brought a piece of Italy – or at least that portion of the culture that benefited him – to the America when he arrived. He soon was self-supporting. He married and began raising a large family. All the Italians in Windsor Locks minded their pennies. Ben Franklin’s maxim, “a penny saved is a penny earned,” came effortlessly to their lips, along with other more rustic folk sayings they brought with them in the crowded cargo ships that carried them from the Old to the New World. These were imprecations – thunderbolts you hurled at your enemies – that did not translate easily into English. And so they were left, by my mother and others, dressed in homespun Italian. If any of us asked for a translation, we were asked in turn whether we hadn’t something better to do OUTSIDE.

“Outside,” for a boy growing up in the early 50’s, was a sort of borderless, limitless liberty.

Windsor Locks was easily navigable. We – my father, mother, brother and sister – lived in a modest house on One Suffield Street, a route that connected Suffield, where the Fullers lived in relative splendor, to South Main Street, which trailed into Main Street, the heart and soul of the town. Main Street overlooked the Connecticut River, my sun-spangled river. The river was to boys in the town what the Mississippi was to Huck Finn, a water road of liberty leading to the territories, that portion of the country not yet “civilized” by governors, school teachers – nuns, in our case -- or overly cautious parents, worry warts troubling their children with the spurious and frightening news that the water in the canal, where we used to swim on the sly, would cause cancer in little children. Of course, we believed all this because we were credulous children, but there were heroes among us brave enough to take the risk. The canal and its Locks, after which the town was named, were on the far side of our one-sided Main Street.

The other side of Main Street was studded with pubs: the Polish pub, the Italian pub, the Irish pub, this last being the liveliest and noisiest. A young boy in the early 50’s did not have enough fingers to count all the pubs that lined Main Street, from Charlie Ten’s (Tennero) in the south, at the beginning of the canal, to the Brown Derby in the north.

That Irish pub was formidable. In Windsor Locks, when my father was yet a small boy, he and his father were passing the Irish pub one night after a storm. My grandfather was used to the catcalls that poured forth from the pub when he passed it, for the Irish in the town and the newer arrivals, the Italians, were competitors for jobs and status. Generally, he ignored the insults hurled in his direction. But this time, his son was with him, and Mr. Dowd had been unusually boisterous. My father was surprised when his father dropped his hand; it all happened so quickly. His father strode over to Mr. Dowd, seated in a chair on the pub’s porch, lifted Mr. Dowd and his chair in his arms, carried both into the rain streaked Main Street, threw both down, and with the large mitt of his right hand rubbed Mr. Dowd’s face in the mud. Umberto could not bear it that Mr. Dowd’s curses had scorched his son’s ears. Those who frequented the pub were more judicious in their insults after that, and Mr. Dowd son later befriended my father.

My guess is that my father was about seven when this happened. When I was seven, the sharp edge of prejudice that had separated the Irish and Italians in Windsor Locks had all but disappeared, blunted by familiarity, which does not always, as the maxim has it, breed contempt.

I was born a twin on July 15, 1943 and could say along with William Blake, as I later learned, “My mother cried, my father wept; into the wicked world I leapt.”