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.