A Brief History of Italians in America, 3 Perimeters

Perimeters

Every man, woman and child on the planet lives their lives within a series of concentric circles, growing ever wider as they move forward in time. And then, at some point, they meet a stop, and the circles begin to contract, at which point the wanderer arrives home again. These circles only seem to embrace geographic areas; but they mark a spiritual territory that has little to do with geography and much to do with the life of the spirit, which knows only the frontiers of the heart. In what we sometimes mistakenly call “real life,” the mind retains all the circles we have passed through during our brief hour on the stage, and we may visit them whenever we like. Occasionally, like persistent angels, they crash into our reality unbidden. When William Faulkner said that the past was not over – “It is not even past” – he was thinking of these message bearing angels who affect our lives sometimes more powerfully than the reality that lies directly under our noses. Man is a considering, thought bearing being. Like Odysseus, who bore his father out of burning Troy on his shoulders, he carries the past with him wherever he goes. And as a father speaks to his son of serious things, the past solicitously pours its wisdom into his ears. Remember, my dear nephews and nieces, God whispers in the whirlwind. You must pay close attention.

World War II ended in Europe about 1945-46, in May and June as it happened, when the Rose of Sharon bush outside my mother’s window at One Suffield Street, had put forth its fragrant flowers. What followed the war – what always follows decisive wars – was, discounting the Korean “police action,” a protracted peace and the consequent alarming growth of a rededicated America. Though he still woke up at night turning in the iron mechanical jaws that had ripped the bodies of his fellow soldiers in the Marshall Islands, Charlie healed. The Mandirola brothers were together again. They married, and ever after were called by twos: Charlie and Mary, John and Nell, Tom and Dotty, Ray and Leatrice.

Clay Hill – so called because if you drove a spade into the ground, you would hit unforgiving clay about one foot down – marked one border of our family’s various concentric circles. It included the whole of our immediate neighborhood, the access to Main Street, the houses of most of my fast friends: Dave Sheridan, Phil Lombardi, Mike Grady, Mac McConnell, Fudzie Fuller, Con O’Leary and many others. My brother and sister’s friends and enemies also were Clayhillers. Ella (Tambussi) Grasso, later to be elected governor – the first woman in the United States who won the governorship in her own right – was a Clayhiller. Drive a spade into her and, just beneath the skin, you would have hit adamantine clay, the sort of clay God molded in his hands before he made Adam and then pulled Eve from Adam’s rib. Salt of the Italian earth was she.

Most of Ella’s biographers either do not know or will not mention that before she launched her political career, Tambusi was a Republican. It was Dr. Carniglia who drew her aside one day and said to her, “Ella, if you are serious about winning office in Windsor Locks, you had best re-register as a Democrat.”

Nearly the whole town – with the exception of a few brave holdouts such as my father and a handful of other Alamo-like Republicans – were ardent Roosevelt-Truman Democrats. As my father, a political visionary, explained, “It’s all they knew.” The political tide in Connecticut, following the death of Saint Roosevelt and the accession to the presidency of “Giv’em Hell Harry” Truman, clearly favored Democrats. It would be a mistake to think my mother was indifferent about politics, but she was less fiercely attached to political parties than my father or some few other molecular Republicans in town. Frank did not mind at all swimming against the political stream. In fact, he found it exhilarating and would have appreciated G. K. Chesterton’s remark, had he been familiar with it, that it is never a trouble to float downstream: Even a dead body may float with the current, but only a live body can swim against it.

Truman was the first President I saw in the flesh. I cannot remember the year or occasion. He was passing through Windsor Locks on his way to some important political function in Massachusetts. I recall walking with my father to the train station, a building now in disarray and unused, within sight of our house. A small crowd of fervent Democrats was milling about, waiting for the train to inch by the station at a speed slow enough so that the audience could see and applaud the president. So it happened: The train slowly ambled along as it approached the station, and there on the caboose, with two men in dark clothes bookending him, was Truman, dressed in white and wearing a white hat, smiling at the crowd and waving placidly as the train moved away from the station, a figure growing smaller and smaller, finally disappearing as the train got up speed. My father had hoisted me on his shoulders.

“Did you see the president?”

He unhoisted me, put me on the ground, knelt before me so that our eyes were level. The last dying hoot of the train faded away. His eyes were flames, and my own eyes sympathetically caught fire.

I was nine years old, two years beyond the Age of Reason, when “I love Ike” was persuaded by a group of Republican panjandrums to run for president. General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower’s sleeve had been tugged by both Republicans and Democrats, but he had adroitly escaped their claws. After considering a Shermanesque denial of interest in the presidency – "I will not accept if nominated, and will not serve if elected” – Ike yielded at last to importunate Republicans. His campaign was the first successful presidential draft of the 20^th century that did not involve an active politician.  In 1952, Ike defeated Democratic nominee for President Adlai Stevenson and became the 34^th president of the United States. Of the two, Stevenson had been the brainier and wittier. In the 1952 campaign, Stevenson reminded a New York audience that “Laws are never as effective as habits.” Democrats in New York habitually voted for Democrats. And in Denver, Colorado, Stevenson told his appreciative audience, “Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.” It would have taken God and the Devil working in tandem to the same purpose to wring such witty favors from Ike.enson But Ike had won the war, and Stevenson didn’t. Americans were determined to show their appreciation. My father was equally determined to help install Ike and Dick Nixon, a Vice Presidential candidate Eisenhower chose to mollify conservative Republicans stung by Ohio Senator Robert Taft’s questionable loss to Eisenhower during the 1952 Republican National Convention in Chicago.

And so it was that sometime that year my father showed up in the driveway with a battered truck. My mother, peering out the window, let out an Amazonian like scream that shivered the timbers of the house on One Suffield Street.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, your father has bought a DUMP TRUCK!

We all ran to the window to see. And true enough, there was Dad in his business attire exiting a Ford truck, the bed of which, I could not help notice, was severely scarred and rusted. He slammed the door, which squeaked and gave off a screaming sound of metal being pounded on an anvil. If my mother had been an Italian Marquesa of the preceding century, she would at this point have fainted and fallen cautiously to the floor, a lace hanky pressed to her fluttering nostrils. But she was Rose, who had survived a half dozen children not her own, as well as the births of both James and the TWINS, one of whom – me – she had given over to my Aunt Nell to preserve her sanity.

Rose rushed to the back door to intercede with my father and persuade him to return this dilapidated trade-in and retrieve his less than two year old car. In the hallway leading to the kitchen, much Italian passed between them. As they entered the kitchen, the Italian verbiage trailed behind them in whispers and disappeared like the jet streams one sometimes sees melting into a cloudless blue sky.

Dad had not bought the truck, we learned later. He had borrowed it and left his Buick at the home of the truck’s owner, so that the gentleman who was kind enough to lend my father the truck could go about his daily business, while my father attended to his. The owner of the truck was the supervisor of the local dump who my father once – and only once – had invited over the house to take coffee one Sunday when he thought my mother would not be at home. He had miscalculated. My father first met Alfeo during one of his dump picking jaunts.  Introducing himself, he learned their families had come from the same province in Italy. Dad told Alfeo he was in the market for house shutters.

Alfeo pressed his palms to the side of his head in mock astonishment.

“Come on, you knew, eh?”

Someone only ntroducing himself, he learnedrtains dispite her unfalling efort ame directly from the dump  He had miscalculated. My fathertwo days earlier had dropped off a load of shutters, used but serviceable. They needed a good wire brushing and a couple of coats of paint. Dad secured the shutters on the spot and attempted to press ten dollars – these were 1952 dollars, remember, real money – upon a reluctant Alfeo.

“What,” Alfeo demurred, spreading his arms to indicate his domain, the king of all he surveyed, “You father from Piedmonte, no? My father too.”

Frank could not deny it; he would have to accept the generous gesture of friendship, and he did, inviting Alfeo over for some refreshments the following Sunday. Alfeo soon became acquainted with two of the Mandirola brothers, the inseparable Tommy and Charlie, who proved to be faithful and frequent customers. They all did a flourishing business with each other.

Unfortunately, Alfeo had not dressed up for his Sunday meeting with my father; he came directly from the dump and carried with him in his clothes odors of burning leaves and tires mingled with the usual smorgasbord of dump smells, which clung to my mother’s curtains despite her unflagging efforts to rid the house of Alfeo’s shadowy but pungent after-odor. Following their friendly meeting over dark coffee and Budino di Ricotta, Frank was advised never, NEVER EVER, to entertain Alfeo in the house, unless he could assure his wife that he had been hosed down first.

Dave Sheridan’s sniffer was sharper than my own or Phil Lombardi’s. These were two of my close friends and neighbors from Clay Hill whom I, at my father’s bidding, had recruited to plaster Windsor Locks and parts of Suffield with “You Win When You Vote For IKE AND DICK” posters.

Once in the bed of the truck, Sheridan’s nose began twitching. Sucked through his nostrils, the odor finally crashed headlong into his brain cells.

“What’s that?” he asked no one in particular, suddenly alarmed.

Lombardi put his snout under his left arm pit and sniffed.

“It’s the truck,” I offered. “Dad borrowed it from the dump guy.”

This settled the mystery of the vagrant odors to everyone’s satisfaction. It wasn’t one of us.

Part of the morning was spent fending off Democrats and their vicious dogs, neither of which took kindly to political proselytizing. Dad kept the dump truck for two days, during which time we littered the town with fliers, returning home smelling like festering lilies. Dad switched the vehicles with the dump guy, and my mother suffered the Buick’s foul odor until Elizabeth Grady, who lived across the street in what we called the peninsula, a triangle-shaped piece of real estate that included the Grady-Lombardi duplex, once a barn, and Juni Quagaroli’s gas and auto repair shop, brought over a spritzer bottle containing a purifying fragrance – frankincense, I surmised, once used by the Wise Men to purge the original crèche of sheep and cow odor during the First Noel. My mother liberally aspersed the car interior, the kitchen chair where Alfeo had reposed munching his Budino di Ricotta, and finally her curtains, cesspools of musty dump odor.

Such was my introduction to politics, about which my mother had often said, “Never discuss religion or politics at the supper table,” where, of course, both were discussed, particularly on festal occasions such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the entire extended family could gather to violate my mother’s proscriptions.

My father insisted on probing his children, and he would not take “I dunno” for an answer to any of his questions.

Dad: So then, what were you all about today? Jim, anything special?

Jim: The usual [It was a weekend].

Dad: Don?

Don: No, Dad. Just stuff.

Dad: Donna?

Donna: Part of the day I spent with Maureen Carniglia. She has a pretty extensive doll house now. It wasn’t always a doll house. It’s a converted building that was once, I think, a garden shed used by her grandfather. He kept rhubarb in there, and some veggies. Maureen’s father is very good at carpentry, and so he made it over for her. Because he likes her, you know. He likes her a lot. You could tell. Anyway we were fixing it up, making curtains…

She went on this way for a few minutes. After a while, it became obvious to everyone – especially Jim, who was making groaning faces with his eyes – that Donna was preparing to goose Dad for a like favor, though on a smaller scale. Maureen, like Susan Beltrandi, was a big, go-for-broke thinker. Donna was more pragmatic. When she finished, Dad said he was pleased that at least one of his children had some exciting and fresh news to report.

What a pity Dad had never question Jim on the occasion of the great hair bonfire. It would have been a splendid interrogation, as I sometimes imagined.

Dad: (to Jim) So, how did Levio Curti’s hair catch on fire?

We all would have been astounded, but for my mother, who nearly always had the advantage of inside information.  Donna’s eyes might have popped ever so slightly, and on her face would be written, as if on a billboard, THIS SHOULD BE GOOD.

Waves of fearful anticipation would have swept over me. How did my father know these things, almost immediately after they had happened? Were any of us safe from his omniscience? Was there no privacy in this chattering town? Was the town itself a public confessional in which sins imparted to priests sworn to a holy secrecy were instantly broadcasted to every nosey neighbor on the street? In the present case, Jesuitical dissimulation was impossible. The trial had been heard; the verdict was in; the judge was staring at the, as yet, unrepentant co-conspirator, patiently awaiting an answer. Would Jim be able to handle this interrogation diplomatically, safely extracting himself from the drama?

Jim likely would have rambled hurriedly through the story. He and cousin Bill Mandirola and Leo and Livio Curti were examining some of the old machinery, now discarded, that laid about the grounds just outside the lumber yard in the woods in back of our house. The rusted machinery had long since been retired from service. Leo or his brother wondered whether any of it was still useful. Bill and Jim watched them from afar expostulating with each other. You cannot imagine how surprised they were when Livio, the less accomplished of the two brothers, uncapped a gas tank on what appeared to be an old harrowing machine and, unable to penetrate the blackness of the tank, fetched in his pocket for a match. The first match revealed nothing, the second nothing, the third nothing. But he struck luck with the fourth. Throwing it into the tank, the old machine responded by burping up a fireball that ignited Livio’s once abundant hair. Leo grabbed his brother, hustled him to the brook and plunged his head underwater – once, twice, three times. Here, Jim and Bill intervened, pulling the enraged Leo off his dripping, half drowned, scorched brother who, lacking gills, had been having difficulty breathing underwater. Leo’s hair was sizzled and much shorter; his eyebrows had all but disappeared.  Perhaps they would be able to pass off the self-immolation as a bad home administered haircut and so save themselves a wupping from their father. Their father usually beat them outside, so as to avoid damage to his furniture.

And Donna might have remarked, with a slight wink, "Just the usual, Dad."

My father, of course, was not omniscient or omnipresent. But the neighborhood was -- full of scores of eyes, ears and wagging tongues. My mother was of two minds about the wagging tongues, some of them more reliable than others. She was fiercely protective of her children on the one hand; on the other, she knew gossip was poisonous, even as she, and much of the neighborhood, feasted on it.

This feasting was done over coffee and cigarettes in my mother's kitchen. When later my mother went to work in a mill on the canal bank -- The Montgomery Co. Est. 1871 Decorative And Electric Tinsel --  both the audience and the cast of characters grew larger. The gossip that floated around the milling machines at Montgomery's was of a rare quality. My brother and sister regarded  the mill as a sinister font of gossip, some of it much more reliable than the items one found in newspapers. My mother took her gossip with tons of salt. The danger was that there were people in the town who could not distinguish between gospel truth and kitchen tripe.