My mother’s face fell naturally into a smile. She had high cheek bones, buck teeth and dark slanting eyes. She was her father’s favorite; he kept her from the heaviest work in the fields. She loved school and she sailed through the three grades of the one room school house in the village.
She stayed on for two extra years, helping the younger students while the teacher gave her extra assignments. In old age, she remembered words, fragments of the saga of Orlando, which must have been the Italian version of the tale of Roland.
I have a letter my mother wrote to her sister in Sicily about forty years before she died. In it, her third grade prose, strewn with errors, tugs at my heart.
My mother insisted that her boys go to school, at a time when many of my friends went to work at sixteen. That’s why she worked, to keep her sons in school, perhaps go on to college. She won two of her bets; my middle brother became a jazz musician, but Steve and I did go to college.
My mother was a machine operator who worked in a factory. The machine, of course, was a sewing machine. She worked only in silk, one dress at a time. High end stuff. When I was twelve, and my oldest brother was in the Pacific, and my middle brother was at a Boy Scout camp, my mother gave me, and herself, a treat: lunch in center city, Philadelphia.
We ate at Lit Brothers, the modest department store at Eighth and Market Streets. Lits was the store we normally patronized. Afterwards we walked to John Wanamaker’s, the high end store at Thirteenth and Market. We found our way to the exclusive Tribout Shop on the third floor, where expensive women’s clothes were displayed and sold. We found the racks that held the dresses made by the manufacturer for whom my mother worked.
A machine operator of my mother’s skill could complete about one dress per day, depending upon the complexity of the dress. Every operator faintly initialed the labels of the dresses she completed. We couldn’t find any that my mother had initialed but my mother pulled a dress from the rack: $79.95. Very big bucks in 1944, but there was plenty of money around during the war years. To make that dress, a day’s work, my mother had been paid about $13.50.
My mother wanted her sons to marry educated girls, girls worthy of her sons. She hit the jackpot with my wife. Look at that smile. In the photo, my mother is leaving the reception hall after my wedding. She is thrilled that I was finally married, to an educated girl, whose relatives and friends were so tall! So American! Margie was far better educated than I but my mother was ignorant of distinctions. To her, college was college.
To entertain me, my son Stephen scours the Internet to find old photographs depicting neighborhood scenes of my childhood. Broad Street at Snyder Avenue was an important hub. Snyder Avenue was then the subway’s southern end of the Line, which runs north and south on Broad for miles. Later the subway was extended farther south, to afford access to the new sports stadiums and to the Navy Yard on the Delaware River, William Penn’s old boundary.
Broad Street is really 14th Street in the city grid. We lived on 17th. For three years I walked daily to Southern High School which was on Broad and Jackson streets. Then, for four years, I attended Temple University, a forty-five minute subway ride to Broad and Susquehanna. Temple was surrounded by a vast slum, not dangerous just poor.
Looking north in the photo, the first tall building on the left is the Broadway movie theater. It was large and stately, suitable for Saturday night dates.
Next door was the Electric Company. Once a month, on a Saturday morning, my father walked to the Electric Company to pay the bill, cash on the barrelhead. We didn’t have a checking account, few working people did. After Electric came the Telephone company which was a block farther north, and finally, four blocks north, at Broad and Tasker Street, the gas company.
These transactions were social encounters among paisanos. Everyone liked Whitey Perrone, whose hair had turned white in his mid-thirties. He was a good listener. His itinerary included Giovani’s barber shop, a sure stop even if he didn’t need a haircut. Giovanni was a paisano, my mother’s relative.
Tricycle
I remember that trike. I was riding it when Spike, my brother Steve’s friend gave me a big push from behind. My foot flew off the pedal right into the wheel’s spinning spokes: SNAP! My leg broke with a sound heard all the way to Fifth Street. They rushed me to the Mt. Sinai Hospital emergency ward where I was well known. Please, I’d say, no white bandage, and no red medicine so my mother won’t notice. I was old enough to wash myself by then.
This time I end up with a cast from my hip to my toes. Everybody in the neighborhood signed it, and some strangers too. Of course Spike signed it: “Get well soon Chaps!” Weeks and weeks later, when they removed the cast, my leg looked like a giant white larva. I wish I had kept that cast which was covered with graffiti, like an Egyptian sarcophagus, but I think it was whisked away to some museum. Years later when I looked into it, I found a large empty lot where the hospital had been.
St. Agnes Hospital
I was never an overnight patient at St. Agnes. In old age if my father didn’t feel well, without telling my sleeping mother, he would walk the three blocks to hospital and check himself in through the Emergency ward. My mother was terrified the first time it happened, until they found him comfortably ensconced in a side bedroom of the Emergency Room. It soon became routine: The nuns were very kind. Several of of them knew a little bit of Italian.
Once when Jimmy, their diabetic next door neighbor entered the hospital for a week or so, Jimmy’s wife would visit, carrying a large handbag secretly enclosing Jimmy’s beloved little dog, who would jump out and snuggle under the covers. The dog’s presence soon became an open secret. In short, Saint Agnes hospital was a very humane place. The sidewalk fronting St. Agnes was a good place to watch the New Year’s parade because all the string bands and the ornate dress-acts paused to do their thing for the patients, nurses, aides who crowded the windows of the hospital.
Inside, the hallway wooden floors were grooved and highly polished by years of foot traffic. The windows were tall and let in lots of light and were difficult to clean. It was a worn, humane place – like some of the old hospitals I knew in 1955 Italy. Ultimately, St. Agnes could not compete with the bigger, modern Methodist Hospital a few blocks away. St. Agnes became a rehabilitation facility. It lasted a few years before closing. I don’t know what it is now, perhaps a plaything of the real estate market. The market always trumps humanity.
Fireplugs
Most city blocks had corner fire hydrants which we called “fireplugs” or plugs. The plugs had collars over the on-off valve to discourage the public from turning on the fireplug on, and wasting water. And a turned-on plug depleted the water pressure in the system, pressure which was needed when firemen had to direct powerful streams toward upper storey fires. Still, most blocks had someone who could turn on the plug.
A really hot day would call forth the neighbor who had the wrench. He’d turn on the plug and he’d crouch, with his back toward the gushing water. Like placing his thumb over the spout of a gushing hose, the neighbor would instead press a buttock against the water surging from the plug, seeking to block its flow, Impossible! but the effort sent a riotous shower of water over the street. Sometimes it reached the opposing sidewalk, to the dismay or delight of people standing there. We kids would play under the dripping arc of cool water. It was heavenly. “Jiggy, the cops!” We would scatter. Within seconds a red car would turn into our glistening street. The cops would turn off the plug.
Southern High School
The half-windows along the sidewalk looked down into the Industrial Arts shops: Plumbing, Electrical, Machine(with giant lathes), a small foundry(!) for welders etc. We lost the entire industrial arts program when they built Bok Vocational High School on 8th and Mifflin. What a shame to lose those guys, just after my time. The school no longer represented what was out there.
Inside the front door was the broad staircase of the School upon whose height stood Mr. Nelson, the Physics teacher, on that terrible snowy day in my freshman year. “Congratulations, Perrone,” he said, shaking my hand, “You’re the only boy who’s showed up.” A few others straggled in as the morning progressed.
The basketball gym was under the peaked roof where there was barely enough room for an arching set shot. Students and fans had to climb four flights to get there. Nobody complained.
The class rooms were tall with ornately embossed metal ceilings. The windows were tall and we opened them on the hot days of Spring and Fall. We lined those windows the day the big, open car drove by bearing FDR and Mrs. Roosevelt returning from the Navy Yard where they had baptized a new battleship. He smiled famously and waved his arm.
The stately granite building was replaced by a yellow brick one whose first floor windows are barred. The front door and the exits are guarded.
TastyKake
I worked for TastyKake one summer. Their factory was in South Philly, just off Passyunk Ave, near Tasker street, I think… I, and another, collected with a handtruck the returned stale products that had not been sold in the days, the week, before, from across the whole city. A large mound – a small truck load. I would take this stuff to a first machine that removed the paper wrapping. Next to what looked like a giant tub with revolving paddles that ground the cakes to a rough consistency. Thence to another large tub where the the stale cake “flour” was mixed with gallons of chocolate syrup.. This was mixed to a kind of dough which then filled hundreds of cake pans on a slowly moving belt, which slowly moved through the ovens. What emerged were the famous TastyKake Chocolate cupcakes which were popular everywhere.
Linton’s Restaurant
I ate at Linton’s many times, after the college games at Convention Hall. One was located on Snyder Ave. around 23rd St. Linton, or the owners of Linton’s, were Philadelphia Quakers whose children attended Friends’ Central during mother’s tenure. They were much smaller than Horn and Hardarts. I preferred the food there.
My notorious friend Billy Nugent ate there frequently with poor Ray. Nugent would have a full meal and he would buy Ray a cup of coffee. When they got to the cashier, Nugent would hide his bill and pay only for a cup coffee saying Ray had had nothing to eat. After a few weeks of this, Linton had a plainclothes cop waiting at the cash register who searched Nugent and found the true bill in his pocket.
Linton, Quakers that they were, made a deal: no jail for Nugent if he agreed never to enter a Linton’s Restaurant again. Of course, Nugent agreed. Linton’s went out of business a few years later.
Like babes, entwined without desire, A gentle warmth devoid of fire
I wrote this couplet months ago but I didn’t know what to do with it, where it would lead me; to my retirement community where some octogenarian couples team up, perhaps not yet devoid of fire.
Campbell’s Tomato Soup and Us
Marilyn and Ken Docker moved to Moorestown in the late 1960s. He was a vice president at Campbell Soup’s, whose main office was in nearby Camden, about ten miles away. At that time most of Campbell’s tomatoes were grown in and around south Jersey.
Margie met Marilyn at a meeting of the local chapter of the American Association of University Women. The Docker children were grown and out of the house.
The Dockers were nice enough: he was conservative and she was bright and lively. Ken joined the golf club which in Moorestown is called the Field Club. Marilyn played tennis and they were avid bridge players, accomplishments which torpedoed the likelihood of a deep friendship with us.
Still they had us over for dinner. Printed menus bearing the Campbell Soup’s logo were by our dinner plates. The evening’s soup was Campbell’s tomato. Margie and I had not eaten Campbell’s tomato soap since we were first married. It had been a staple of ours then.
Ken joined the Moorestown gun club. He fired away, and he collected his and all the club’s spent cartridge shells, like shiny amulets. I seldom had occasion to speak to Ken but Margie and Marilyn occasionally saw each other at the meetings of the AAUW.
The Dockers had us over for dinner again, together with another Campbell Soup executive and his wife. Again, printed menus bearing the Campbell Soup logo appeared by our plates. And again, we ate a Campbell product. Our names appeared prominently on the menu as guests.
We had the Dockers over for dinner later that month. We didn’t serve a Campbell soup.
Margie helped Marilyn find Charlene, a cleaning woman who lived in Willingboro, a housing development near us. Ken would have preferred an older woman, but Marilyn liked Charlene and she trusted Charlene’s boy friend, who sometimes collected Charlene when she was through working at Marilyn’s house.
Ken put his trash out, as we all did, the night before trash collection day. He aligned the cans neatly along the curb but without their lids. He tamped down the trash in his trash cans, and over the smoothed-down surfaces, Ken scattered handfuls of spent cartridge shells. The shiny shells were highly visible to passersby and, of course, to the trash collectors.
About a year later, the Dockers moved into a bigger house in a grander neighborhood. Our lukewarm friendship languished. The Docker’s never invited us again and we didn’t have them over. Margie saw Marilyn at AAUW meetings and I saw Ken only from afar, a friendly wave from his car window. Two or three years later the company sent Ken to Indiana, and the Dockers left town. We never saw them again.
The Contemplatives Say
The contemplatives say silence speaks No. Silence sorts: an ordering instinct Finds the hush where the voice is heard Always there but obscured by restive noise Which is ourselves forever sorting In heroic efforts doomed to fail. Silence takes the deck, Our life, in a crazy heap, sorts it out And plays the hand flawlessly. And the dark night of the soul? The Joker, Constantly turning up, in every hand.
The Important First Paragraph
To induce me to read Shirley Jackson’s novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), a friend recommended I read the first paragraph of the novel:
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers of my hand are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita Phalloides, the death cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers of my hand are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita Phalloides, the death cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”
The ideal first paragraph should set the tone of the story. A good first paragraph is the hook that draws the reader in. Sentences I and 2 in this paragraph are merely descriptive. Sentence 3 sets the tone of the story and it introduces the main character. Mary Katherine is self deprecatory, and she is content with what she has, so she says. She is strong. She will guide us through the world of werewolves. Katherine’s attitude sets the tone of the story.
Katherine dislikes washing herself. Does she dislike the sight of her naked body? She dislikes dogs, she likes werewolves. Dogs are loving, they don’t lead to death. She likes her sister and she likes Richard the Lion Hearted. She likes the poisonous mushroom, Amanita Phalloides, the death cup mushroom. Mature examples of Amanita Phalloides resemble the phallus, an erect prick which issues not life, but death. “Everyone else in the family is dead.”
Here is the first paragraph to Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, The Gate of Angels (1990):
“How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors at peril? This was on the way into Cambridge, up Mill Road past the cemetery and the workhouse. On the open ground to the left the willow trees had been blown, driven and cracked until their branches gave way and lay about the drenched grass, jerking convulsively and trailing cataracts of twigs. The cows had gone mad, tossing up the silvery weeping leaves which, were suddenly, quite contrary to all their experience, everywhere within reach. Their horns were festooned with willow boughs. Not being able to see properly, they tripped and fell. Two or three of them were wallowing on their backs, idiotically exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature to be always hidden. They were still munching. A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason. “
Becoming Carlo. 1958
Some students grumbled as we sat in our sweaters and in our overcoats, in the frescoed classrooms of the Palazzo Gallenga. It was March, 1955. This baroque palazzo housed the Universita Italiana per Stranieri di Perugia, the Italian University for Foreigners in Perugia. I did not grumble because I was being reborn: a South Philly kid mingling among young people from all over Europe and the world.
I had been an indifferent scholar at Temple University but I had read voraciously on my own, to the detriment pf my studies. Thank goodness! because the South Philadelphia bookworm found a perch among the butterflies gathered for a season in Perugia. I kept my mouth shut until I discovered that we speakers of English had read the same books
Gina Mallet, barely five feet tall, was born and bred to command. Her grandmother had been a lady-in waiting to Queen Victoria. Her uncle, Sir Victor, had been ambassador to Italy.
“Gina Mallet, a well-known Toronto theatre and food critic known for her trenchant style, died Thursday afternoon after a lengthy battle with cancer.
“She was one of the Star’s greatest ever critics. She was . . . on par with her two predecessors as drama critics, Nathan Cohen and Urjo Kareda. She was an absolutely brilliant writer who wrote compelling features and reviews,” Bawden said.
“She (Mallet) was obviously an opinionated person. She was very, very bright and one respected that. She was absolutely passionate about the theatre, she loved the theatre and understood the history of the English theatre,” McHardy said, adding Mallet loved both the Stratford and Shaw Festivals “deeply.”
Obituary Toronto Star, July 19, 2013
Her father Arthur, a naval man, served in both wars. He was wounded at Jutland, and in WWII, he was the British naval presence at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. When the Vanderbilt’s donated their 175 foot yacht to the British Navy, Arthur Mallet, with a small crew, delivered it. The yacht was perhaps too fast for the German U boats.
Gina had reached out, the second day in Perugia, to pull me next to her on the bench seat. She liked my brown fedora. I had crushed its crown like a gangster’s, and, I discovered, like that of an upper-class Englishman. Gina picked up on that. She was nineteen years old. She was articulate, she was bigoted, she was nasty unless she liked you. Her manners were impeccable.
Gina was convinced, that is, she liked her friends to think that I was a gangster. At the family New Year’s party in London Gina asked me to run a crap game for the younger guests. She was annoyed when I confessed my ignorance of the odds. What? A gangster unfamiliar with a dice game?
She winced when I’d say hayend instead of hand). The next time around I said hahnd. My layff (laugh) soon became Mayfair’s lawff. Weekend became week end. Back home in Philadelphia, my brother Frank snapped at me: “Stop putting on airs.” Shortly after, I moved to New York City. where a coterie of ex-Perugini had gathered, a group which included, not Gina Mallet, but her older sister Lynn.
The jackhammer team arrived at our courtyard to break out a portion of our cracked sidewalk. The sidewalk didn’t look that bad but the front office is touchy about our appearance.
I opened my front door to greet them. Two young men were lowering the heavy jackhammer from the backend of a flatbed truck. The truck drove off, leaving a generator off to the side and the two men standing by the hammer. My sudden appearance at the door surprised them. (I cannot resist the sight – and sound – of heavy duty equipment in action.) “Good Morning,” I said. I decided to speak English, at the last instant.
The two young men turned to face me: Mexicans, about twenty five years old. I never learned their names. One held a heavy broom and a wide-mouthed shovel. He said good morning and we spoke briefly, in English, his speech lightly accented. The jackhammer man nodded and said a word which I lost, He wore a light scarf. They had a long day ahead of them and I let them at it. The jackhammer soon roared.
He stopped the jackhammer the moment I opened the door to leave my apartment. Their faces and clothes were already white with concrete dust. The man with the broom collected the broken concrete and the dust, loaded the wheelbarrow and he dumped the contents of the barrow into the waiting truck. They were still at it when I returned two hours later.
By now they looked like white sculptures. Their eyes were shiny black holes; their nostrils dull black ; their wet pink mouths seemed obscene. I slipped by, unsettled by these stark white statues. These were not boys playing games.
They were still at it when I emerged in mid-afternoon. They had washed their hands and faces and had smacked their clothes clean, but a new layer of dust was already spreading across their bodies.
“Hola, che tal, che pasa,” I said, straight out of my high school Spanish grammar.
“Hola”, the broom man answered.
Off to the side, the jackhammer man, a twenty year old, really, lifted the lower front edge of his T- shirt, stretched it between his hands and he wiped the sweat from his brow, from his face, from his chest and from the bronze flesh of his belly.
Love for sale
They’re playing it again, not that they’ve ever stopped playing it. WRTI Radio Philadelphia, plays it regularly, even after my exchange of letters with the stationmaster (a woman). She agreed that the lyrics to Love for Sale are despicable. Would she, I asked, consider banning the worded versions of the song from her station? No reply. The song has been a jazz standard since Cole Porter wrote it in 1930. No need to warn your young ones about the “dangerous” lyrics; they’ll laugh aloud. Here they are:
Love for Sale
Appetizing young love for sale
Love that's fresh and still unspoiled
Love that's only slightly soiled
Love for sale.
Who will buy?
Who would like to sample her supply
Who's prepared to pay the price
For a trip to paradise
Love for sale
Let the poets speak of love
In their childish way
I know every type of love
Better far than they
If you want the thrill of love
She's been through the mill of love
Old love. new love
Every love but true love
Appetizing young love for sale
If you want to buy her wares
Follow me and climb the stairs
Love for sale
Italian Election
Last week I received a fat envelope from the Italian Consulate in Philadelphia. It was addressed to Il Signore Calogero Perrone. That’s me. The envelope contained “una votazione per assente”, (an absentee election ballot). The purpose of the vote was whether or not to give the right to vote to Italian prison convicts, and to ex-convicts.
Of course! It’s about time!
I filled in “SI” (for Yes block) with a neat X and I mailed the ballot to the Italian Consulate in Philadelphia in the envelope they supplied.
Stephen called this evening from California to tell me that he, Il Signor Stefano Perrone, had received his Italian absentee ballot. “What’s it all about?” he asked.
He knows little Italian but he has voted before. I explained the issue; to give Italian prison convicts the right to vote.. “Got it,” he said. He traced an X in the Yes block, the SI block, that is, and he returned his ballot to the Italian Consulate in San Francisco.
Hunchback
My son was home for Christmas. He gave me a big hug, massaging my back with his strong fingers.
“You’re touching my humpback for good luck!”, I said quietly.
“What are you talking about?”
My hump has come on slowly. I’m reminded of it only when I sit in a straight-backed chair or when I lie on my back. Has my sweater, has my pajama top bunched up? Has that little pillow I place between my knees when I sleep wandered up to my back? I reach back (no easy maneuver) to confirm the hump. It’s there, I think.
I’ve known for years that the hump was coming– a family thing. Aunt Jennie was bent in two, her nose to the ground. Who in the family was next? My mother escaped. My brothers escaped. No escape for me.
By my mid-seventies, the upper tip of my spine had drifted an inch from vertical. X rays of my back since then look like aerial photographs of a curving river – my spine – whose looping descent has stolen inches from my height; well, maybe an inch.
But my curving spine, a hitherto irresistible force, met an immovable object, my coccyx. The spine, thwarted in its twisting descent, has pressed outwards, forming a hump.
“Dad, are you sure about that?”
“Not yet. I’m not a doctor. But it is, after all, my spine.”
Gobbo
Hunchbacks and their humps, have been revered and reviled ever since the days of the Pharaohs. Here’s The Encyclopedia of Superstition, p.136: “To play a hunch means to act on your gut feelings or intuition. Originally it meant to touch a hunchback to ward off evil or bad luck. This derives from an ancient belief that anything deformed …. is potentially evil. Consequently when you touch anything “evil” you are transferring any possibility of bad things happening to you onto the object you touch. For best results, it was important to touch the hunchback’s hump without his realizing it.
In Italy, small plastic figurines of hunchbacks, called gobbos, are sold as luck charms. (Gobbo is also the Italian word for hunchback.) Rubbing a gobbo’s back is believed to provide luck whenever needed”
“La Gatta” is a poem written in Sicilian dialect by Ignazio Buttitta. I translated it into English. Please follow the link below to see a video of me reciting the poem.
The filming of this reading was conceived , produced, directed and shot by Cecil. B. Bartram. The English subtitles were created by Erica Jordan.
La Gatta
Even she has gone Even the cat Now the house is empty
And what was she? Just a cat Skinny tail Scraggly black mustache Two shining eyes And a lamenting miao, miao Always underfoot!
Her hose in air Four stiff legs and A low slung belly Just a cat
But only she could rid the chill, Lift the darkness from the corners, The shadows from the walk,
She gave life to things That are still: spidery cracks in the ceiling, The ink stain on the windowsill
She lives in me tonight: my tear filled eyes My heart sunk deep in a dark well, A cordless battered bucket And not a bit of sky to light the way
The children played with her, tossing scraps of paper, my youngest nodding with sleep The fire flared, their faces glowed And mother, children, fire, and love were one
My house, now, Is a cold empty oven And I am stranger Who trespasses within
Early mornings I’d lie in bed, watching Margie nurse the baby as she sat in the rocking chair next to the bed. When the baby had had her fill, Margie would place her on the bed: “Dada, Dada, Dada.” She’d climb onto my head, over my face, onto my chest, straddle my neck. We’d talk.
(I’d flap the clean bed sheet with a vigorous flick of my wrists. At the other end of the sheet Margie knew to hold on tight. With our arms extended forward, the sheet hung between us like a flag. To make the first fold of the sheet, we’d step once toward and a half step sidewise, as in a dance. At the top of the repeat step, I’d surrender the sheet to Margie who’d make the final fold.
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Tweezing Nose Hair
Nose hair is an important part of your body’s defense system. It helps keep dust, allergens and other particles from entering your lungs. Removing too much hair makes your nose more sensitive to those kinds of debris. Plucking your hair can also lead to irritations, infections and ingrown hairs.
(www.healthline.com)
“Debris? Up my nostrils! Into my lungs!” I cast aside my tweezers.
But, I have never suffered these afflictions – never a chunk of debris in my lungs. I reach again for my tweezers. A pinch, not quite pain not quite pleasure, the kiss of a hummingbird.
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Hay Fever Season
Nasal corticosteroids such as Prednisone appeared on the market in 1955. Antihistamines appeared about seventy years ago. Cromolyn sodium (Spectrum, Intal), seventy three years ago. At the first sneeze we reach for something that will help us.
Before 1955, the the advent of the hay fever season struck terror among the allergic. Here’s how Helen Headley Ridge, my mother-in-law, dealt with hay fever in the 1930s. I found her handwritten note in one of her books, a bookmark:
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Trucking in Williamstown, New Jersey
My cousin, Joey Genova, lives in Williamstown, New Jersey. Joey’s mother was my first cousin. His father was my father’s godson. Joey owns the sole remaining trucking business in town. The business had been founded by his father in the 1930s.
Now Joey’s son runs the southern terminus of the company in Tampa, Florida, and Joey’s daughter runs the office in Williamstown. Joey looks in two or three days a week. If you eat a pizza in Tampa, or a dish of pasta, the tomato sauce very likely has come from Williamstown.
Joey grew up in the trucking business which his father had run from the big house on the family farm. The truck yards, located well behind the house, had been carved out from the farm fields. At thirteen years of age, Joey was already re-positioning the big 18-wheelers around the truck yards.
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Mount Laurel, Mount Holly, Mount Ephraim and Arney’s Mount are the names of old towns in Burlington County, New Jersey. These Mounts are modest, of note only in flat New Jersey. Still, the locals climbed them, for the view, for the air, and to launch the Fourth of July fireworks. Today, Burlington County has sanitary landfills which are taller than the Mounts.
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Cursive Handwriting
In her email, she apologized for her tardiness in answering her grandmother’s hand written letter. She said she could not easily read cursive.
Poor child. She’s never known that gentle regimen, tracing line after line A’s and B’s, and C’s … the perfect O’s, the little tail on the O that made it a Q.
My father kept a copy of his handwritten name in his wallet. On Friday evenings, at the kitchen table, he’d laboriously copy his name onto the back of his paycheck.
Signatures are rich in allusions: letters home, birth certificates, mortgages, deaths. I am reborn whenever I write my name. Her typescript name is not truly hers. My signature is uniquely mine.
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On the Serengeti, On the Medford Leas
A lioness, flat on her stomach in the sparse tawny ground cover, observes the herd of wildebeests from about two hundred yards away. Then, keeping flat to the ground, she very slowly approaches the herd unseen until she is about thirty yards away. She makes her move! She can run fast but not for long. Wildebeests can run fast and forever.
The wildebeests spot the lioness and they flee toward the center of the herd, which is not as tightly packed as it seemed. The perimeter bends inward and a concavity appears, like a bite out of a pizza. A wildebeest panics and darts out laterally. The lioness veers toward it, lunges, mounts it for a a few yards before bringing it down. She claws her way to the wildebeest’s throat. The lioness is exhausted but she holds on.
The fleeing wildebeests slow down. Surprisingly, with the lioness and the fallen wildebeests only 50 yards away, the large pizza bite in the perimeter of the herd fills in quickly and its symmetry is restored. The wildebeests soon graze peacefully even while the spent lioness and the fallen wildebeest are very near. The danger has past, for today.
On the Medford Leas
Two residents stand before that part of the bulletin board that is trimmed in black. “Josephine! I saw her two weeks ago.” A man approaches. The woman turns,“It’s Josephine!” “Josephine! I can’t believe it. She seemed fine.” Others arrive, forming a semi-circle around the bulletin board. The news spreads.
“When’s the memorial service?”
The caterers have prepared a long table along the back wall of the room: coffee urn, cold drinks, and piles of party food, The Lounge is crowded with members of Josephine’s family and her many friends on campus,. A nine year resident, Josephine was popular.
Her grandson’s tribute is eloquent, lightened with humor. Many of her friends speak up, remembering the good times. Soon her family members blend among the residents. It’s a party!
The server at the food table is busy. A lively hemisphere of guests forms in the center of the room. Soon little mention of Josephine is heard. The immediate family members depart first; some have come a long way. Many residents persist; it’s a party. Then they too thin out, some walking with canes, some with walkers, a few with electric scooters. Soon the room is empty. The memorial service is over.
It Dropped
“It dropped,” Margie’s mother would say, more perplexed than annoyed at the betrayal of her fingertips. She was 90 years old.
“It dropped” The baby aspirin fell to the countertop. I pushed it to the edge with my fingertip, into my hand, into my mouth with a swallow of water.
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Flotsam and Jetsam(Reprise)
Did you ever see your parents kiss?
Did you ever see your parents embrace?
Did you ever hear them say, to each other, I love you (ti amo)?
Yellow mealworms, the larvae of the Tenebrio Moliter beetle, were approved for human consumption by the European Union’s food safety agency. Harper’s Weekly Magazine.
Although cheaper I no longer buy my vitamins in the large bottles, which hold 500 pills. At one pill per day, that’s a year, three month’s and fifteen days worth of pills.
We Sicilians say idda instead of ella, the Italian pronoun for she and her. Idda is pronounced eeda. “Chi lu fici?” “Eeda.” “Who did it?” “She did it.”
We never saw the dialect in print, it scarcely existed. We learned it from lullabies, from family lore and from ordinary conversation round the kitchen table. How else could we have communicated with our parents and with our adult relatives?
“Neno, Neno lu picuraru. Quattr’ e cinco lu panaru, peh nna vascedda di rigotta ci pizzamo u beddu picciottu. Ne ne ne. ne ne ne – ne ne ne.” I never saw that in print. Neither did my parents. It was a folk song my mother sang as she washed us or dressed us.
Neno neno (nay no, nay no) replicates the sound of a bag pipe, and the sound of a bleating sheep. The Italian version of the song looks like this: Neno neno Il pastore, Quattro e cinque il paniere. Per un vascello di ricotta abbiamo perduto un bello giovane. The song laments the death of a shepherd boy who is murdered for a pot of ricotta.
The Italian il becomes becomes the Sicilian lu; pastore (a shepherd in Italian), becomes picuraru – from pecora, a sheep. Paniere becomes panaru; vascello becomes vasceddu(vash shed doo), abbiamo perduto becomes ci pizzammo, and un bello giovane, becomes un beddo picciottu. The refrain, Ne, ne, ne, is the lamenting sound of the bag pipe.
Panaru (paniere) is a small basket of woven reeds which contain and form rounds of freshly made ricotta. The C in ricotta becomes in Sicilian almost a G. Vasceddu (Vascello) is a small basin or a pot. Pizzammo is idiomatic; it means ‘was lost or was sacrificed’. Beddu, of course, is bello, and u picciottu (pitch oat too) is a young boy.
In English the song says “Nay-no, Nay-no, the shepherd boy – ricotta at four and five cents the pan. For a pan of ricotta we have lost a beautiful young man. Nay-no, nay-no, nay-no.)
We took them for a drive. In the front seat, Zio Calogero and I spoke Sicilian. In the back seat, Margie, my father Leonardo and my mother Giuseppina spoke pidgin English. We rounded a bend in the road and we came upon some sheep in a meadow.
My father and my uncle, pre-1900 shepherd boys, bleated out: “Ne,ne, ne. I joined in: “Neno, neno lu piccuraru, quattr’ e cinco….” and then loudly, Nay! Nay! Nay! “Nay, Nay, Nay,”
Whenever it snowed, my mother would warn us: “Nna cura, e sciddicusu foru.” “Be careful, it’s slippery outside.” Foru is fuori in Italian, in English it means outside. In Italian, slippery is scivolevole. Sci is pronounced shee, as in sheedeecoosoo. A passing neighbor might call out, “Stat’attend’ piccilliddri! “Attenzione piccolini.” Be careful boys! Can you see the word piccolini hiding in piccilliddri? “Nnah coora, peecheeleedree, eh sheedeecoosoo.
Cervello, the Italian word for Brain, becomes ciriveddru in Sicilian.. I was baffled when I first saw ciriveddru in print, but I knew the spoken word. If I did something foolish, my uncle would admonish: “Calidu, doon eh toh ciriveddru?” (“Dov’ e il tuo cervello. Calido?” “Where’s your common sense (your brain), Calido?”)
Calido is the diminutive of Calogero. My uncle was Calogero lu grannu (il grande). I was Calogero lu nicu (the younger), di Leonardo my father, to distinguish me from two other Calogeros, my cousins Calogero di Matteo and Calogero di Giuseppe. We were all third sons, named after the same eldest uncle. Nicu also means physically small. If you were very small, like me, you were nicarreddu.
Minna (meen nha) comes from mammella. which is the Italian word for an animal’s breast, a sheep’s udder, or a goat’s. In Sicilian, minna also signifies a woman’s breast, whereas Seno is the Italian word for the human breast.
My mother breastfed her sons for as long as she could, my brother Steve until he was two plus. She said it was safer that way. In her mind, we sons lived in constant danger of disease and physical harm. (Her father and her eldest brother were murdered in Agrigento in 1926.) We brothers, by no design, ended up living within thirty miles of our mother, close to the minna that had nourished us, that had protected us from harm.
Pruvvulazzu,which comes from the Italian polvere, means Dust in English. Zio Calogero knew a man he called Petru Pruvvalazzu because Dusty Peter wasn’t very clean. There was another man he called naschi lurdi. Naschi, from the Italian narice, means nostril. The Italian word lordo is the English word Dirty. U naschi lurdi, is a snot nose.
Sazeech is an American corruption of the Sicilian word sasizza which is a corruption of the Italian word salsiccia, which in English means sausage. “Who ordered the sazeech?” cries out the server in your local pizza joint .
My rediscovery of the dialect was triggered by a birthday gift: two novels by Andrea Camilleri, in the original Italian. Andrea Camilleri, a Sicilian, was born in Porto Empedocle, a small port on Sicily’s southern coast, just below Agrigento.
Inspector Montalbano is the hero of Camilleri’s popular whodunit series. His books have been translated worldwide and they have been made into movies and TV serials. In 2003 the town fathers added Vigata to their city’s name: Porto Empedocle Vigata. Porto Empedocle is the fictional Vigata and Ispettore Montalbano is Vigata’s chief of police and it’s chief detective.
You can buy packaged tour to Vigata, you may stay at the Vigata Hotel. You may retrace Montalbano’s steps, from the solitary jetty where he consults with the seagulls, to his favorite restaurant whose chef, the owner’s wife, spoils him with exquisite daily specials. If Montalbano, working late, does not show up for dinner, she will slip the day’s special into his fridge on her way home from the restaurant.
The novels are heavily larded with Sicilian dialect, with no explanatory notes. Camilleri is pitiless: sink or swim he dares his readers and they love it! A glossary of Sicilian-to-Italian words in Camilleri’s books is available on the Internet. It”s thirty five pages long. My secret is to read the Sicilian expressions aloud; thus I recognize the words. How had Camilleri’s English translator rendered the Sicilian expressions, I wondered? Did my public library own any Camilleri’s?
“Ro,” I asked, “do we have any books by Andrea Camilleri?”
“We must have forty of them!” she said off the top of her head.
Where have I been all these years? Certainly, not with Camilleri. His books are shelved in MYSTERY, a vast section of the library, set apart from the regular FICTION shelves. Had Camilleri’s books been in FICTION, I might have encountered them.
“Ro, can you tell me exactly how many?” A pause: “Thirty-seven: twenty three titles, plus fourteen duplicates.” Next day I went to the library to pick up the English translation. There it was, standing tall in the MYSTERY section !
“Buttatavi! (Boot taht tah vee!), The Italian verb buttare means to throw out, to throw away, to dive in! Gettare (jettare) is a synonym of buttare. Sicilians change the G in gettare to IE: Yeht tah tah vi! Dive in, dive in!
“Buttatavi! Ietattavi! L’acqua nah billizza eh!”
In English:
The Other End of the Line
“Forgive me for asking, Inspector, but what can you tell me about the murder of poor Elena?’
“Did you know her?”
“I did, Inspector. If only there were more women like her.”
“In what sense?”
“First of all, she was so cheerful and open, and always smiling. And so friendly. And what an appetite! You know Inspector, nowadays women don’t eat anymore. A little salad here, a bit of chicory with oil and lemon there. But not Signor Elena. She would sit down and order an antipasto, first course. Second course, dessert. And you have no idea how much coffee. All of it sprinkled with good wine. And since she would sometimes come alone but didn’t like to eat alone, she would ask me to sit down with herand we would chat. And you know what? Often, when she would come late in the evening and all the other customers had left and I was starting to close up, we would play tressette when she was done eating. And if she won, she didn’t have to pay.”
Andrea Camilleri, The Other End of the Line. 2019, Penguin Books. Translated by Stephen Sartarelli.
In Italian:
“Dottore, mi perdonasse la domanda. Ma che mi puo dire dell’ammazzatina della povera signora Elena?”
La conoscevi tu?
“Sissignore Dottore. Magari ce ne fossero piu donne cosi’”
“In che senso?”
“Prima di tutto era una creatura allegra, aperta. ridanciana, amichevole. E aveva un appetitto! Sapete dottore, che ormai le donne non mangiano piu. Una insalatinella, una cicoria con olio e limone. La signora Elena no,. Si sedeva, se faceva servire antipasto, primo, secondo, il dolce e ammazzcaffe (moltissimo caffe, tanto da ammazzarti) Tutto rallegrato da un vino buono. E siccome certe volte veniva senza compagnia domandava che io mi sedessi con lei e chiacchiuariavamo. La sapete un cosa? Spesso, quando veniva tardo la sera, ch non c’erano piu clienti e io stavo per chiudere, alla fine della mangiata ne gioccavamo il conto a tressette. Se vinceva ella, non pagava.”
In Sicilian:
Dottori, mi pirdonassi la dimanna . Ma che mi po diri dell’ammazzatina della povira signura Elena?’
“L’ acconoscivatatu?”
“Sissi, dottori. Macari ce ne fussiro di fimmine accussi!”
“In che senso?”
“In primisi era ‘na criatura alligra, aperta, ridanciana. ‘N’amiciunara. E aaviva un pittito! Sdapi dottori che orama’ le fimmine non mangiano cchiiu’. ‘N’insalatateddra, ‘na cicoria con olio e limoi. Sa signura Elena no. S’assittava, e si faciva serviri antipasto, primo, seccuno, duci e ammazzacaffe’. Tutto ralligrato da un vino bono. E siccome che certe vote viniva sula e non le piaciva mangiari senza cumpagnia m’ addimanava d’assiittarmi con lei e chiacchiariavamo. La sapi ‘na cosa? Spisso, quanno viniva tardo la sira, che non c’erano cchiu’ clienti e io stava per chiuiri, alla fini della mangiata nni jucavamu il cunto a trissetti. Si vincia iddra, nun pagava.”
Andrea Camilleri, L’altro capo del filo, 2016, Sellerio editore Palermo. pp. 153-154.
“Take some cod liver oil”, says my son, from California, “it’s good for your immune system.” Next day I ask the young woman who is stocking the shelves of drug-related products: “Where can I find the Cod liver oil, please?”
“Cod liver oil?” She replies blankly. “What’s that?”
How do I answer that? “Cod liver oil,” I repeat dumbly.
“Oh, fish oil!” she says, “That’s in Vitamins, near Multivitamins.”
I find a vast selection of fish oil, in soft-gel capsules. I see nothing like the tall bottle of Cod liver oil my mother would hold in her hand when, every morning, she poured a tablespoon each into Frank and me: “Prestu, giu, giu. Vi fa bene, contru lu raffreduru.” “Quickly, drink it down. It’s good for colds.” Frank complained about the taste, but he complained about everything.
He’d complain whenever my mother served a leafy vegetable, or something like broccoli or cauliflower. She would have got the broccoli from the huckster, who would have bought a wagon-load of produce on Dock Street very early that morning. Dock Street was the noisy emporium into which, in the wee hours, scores and scores of trucks would have converged with produce, picked the day before on family farms across the river in New Jersey.
“Ma,” Frank would cry out triumphantly, “C’e nu cimice nei vruccoli.” “There’s a bug in the broccoli!” We called bed bugs cimice too, and sometimes, disparagingly we called people cimice, In English too: “he’s a bedbug”.
“Non e nu cimice.”, my mother would say sharply, having rinsed the broccoli many times before she cooked it. “E solo un po’ di spezi.” “It’s just a bit of black pepper.”
“Sta spezi ha gambe!” Frank would hoot. “This black pepper has legs!”
I chose a small box of the fish oil capsules and I was delighted to read, in very small print, that the oil in the capsules came from anchovies. I love anchovies! I love the whole family: anchovies, sardines. herring, mackerel. In 1937, my mother tilted spoonfuls of cod liver oil into my mouth every morning “Contra lu raffreduru.” In 2020, my son – from California – insinuates a capsule of anchovy oil into my mouth every morning, to bolster my immune system. Someday I’ll bite into a capsule just for the taste. I never thought the oil in my mother’s bottle tasted all that bad.
TAKING CHANCES
I climbed my first roof when I was nine years old, up the alley walls, like a lumberjack climbing a big tree with spikes on his heels. Instead of spiked boots pressing inward against the trunk, I was wearing sneakers whose soles pressed outward against the opposing walls of the alley. I’d brace my arms and the palms of my hands against the opposite walls to take the weight of my body, momentarily freeing my feet to hop up the wall eight or ten inches.
When I reached the top of the wall I tucked its ledge under my left arm like a large book and I brought my right foot across the void, hooking its heel onto the ledge inches ahead my left hand, my right arm and hand instantly crossing over to to join my foot. With all limbs engaged on the left wall, I pulled myself up and over it’s ledge onto the roof like mounting a bareback horse and sliding off on its other flank. The people who lived on the second floor of the house across the street watched me climb.
I climbed the alley walls to retrieve the half balls we’d hit onto the roof during our games. We made the half balls from the white, dimpled ones we bought at Mrs. Silver’s for a dime. We cut the balls in half – hiss – with a single-edge razor blade. A broom stick served as our bat.
The pitcher stood on the sidewalk facing the batter who waited, bat poised, on the opposing sidewalk. Unleashing his hand with a snapping flick of his wrist, the pitcher would send the half ball sailing, dipping, swerving toward the batter. One strike and you were out. Foul tips were forgiven.
If the batter clipped only a piece of the ball, it might flutter across the street like a wounded bird, to be caught for an out by the pitcher or by the fielder, or else it dropped to the pavement for a single. Ground balls hit past the fielders to the wall were singles. Line drives – splat! – hit vigorously off the building’s first floor facade, were outs if caught on the rebound, doubles if they dropped to the ground, triples, if uncaught off the second floor facade, and homers if they cleared the roof.
Climbing down was tricky. I’d sit lightly on the ledge of the left wall oozing over its edge on the lateral of my left thigh while holding on with my left arm, and reaching across to the opposing wall with my outstretched right foot making contact and digging my sneaker into the bricks.
Hanging between the walls with my left arm hooked over the ledge and my right foot thrust against the opposite wall, in one swift motion I would unhook my left elbow from the ledge and slide the palm of my left hand down the left wall to about 20 inches above the sole of my sneaker; at the same time thrusting out my right arm, I’d jam the palm of my hand against the opposing wall about twenty inches above my right foot. Spread-eagled, I’d let myself down with the palms of my hands pressing hard against the opposing walls with my hands my arms and my shoulders doing the real work while my feet, letting then holding, stepped down the walls 12 inches at a time. Halfway down I’d slightly relax my feet and I’d skid to the ground – showboating! – my sneakers barely gripping the the powdery old bricks and the crumbly mortar in between.
I climbed the alley walls of a three story building just once, not to retrieve half balls but just because it was there. I reached the top ledge but before I hooked my arm over it to pull myself on to the roof, I glanced between my spread-eagled feet down at the alley walk below. It was a long way down. I descended straight away, carefully.
Sometimes, in summer, I’d climb the big Buttonwood tree whose tall bole was hard against the shafts of the eight-feet tall iron spears that made up the schoolyard fence. The lowest branches of this mature tree were well out of reach unless you climbed the shafts of the spears, and stood on the horizontal support that held the spears together. Standing there with my feet between the spear heads, I’d pull my self onto the lowest horizontal branch. I’d lie there, out of sight, looking down at passers by whose conversation I’d hear in snatches as they passed.
I never climbed high into the tree because the middle branches engulfed the power lines that were strung along the telephone poles that lined the streets.
Joe Greene has died, suddenly, just short of his ninetieth birthday. We first met at the Universita di Perugia in 1955. He was an ex-GI like me but he remained in Perugia only a month. He knew what he wanted to do with his life: international banking.
He returned to Philadelphia to work in a local bank for about two years. Then he applied for a job with the Bank of America – an international bank – a kind of internship that required maybe two years at the Bank’s New York city office.
He got the job. The Bank knew what it was getting: an honor student at Haverford College, where he had read War and Peace, in Russian. He had read Proust, all of it in French. He learned some Japanese in the Army, while stationed in Japan, monitoring Russian radio broadcasts. He completed a master’s degree in Far Eastern Studies at NYU while he worked at the Bank by day.
I returned from Italy, about nine months before Joe left for Singapore. I took a job with Pan American Airways and settled in Brooklyn. I took a Spanish course at NYU. It fell on the same night Joe had a class. We’d meet sometimes before class, at Chock Full ‘O Nuts, for soup and a sandwich. After class we’d go to the Cedar Tavern for a beer, a mingy hamburger and french fries. Individually, these meals were not sufficient to sustain life.
We’d see each other at Lynn Mallet’s monthly soirees. One night Joe and I were partners at Charades. The clue was a Broadway play. I began to push my hair down over my forehead. “Caligula” Joe cried out almost before I began.
We were great walkers, lean as wolves. One Sunday, we walked from Lynn’s apartment on McDougall Street in the Village, down to Battery Park, then back uptown to the Guggenheim Museum at 89th Street! Joe walked, I trotted a half step behind, for he was 6’1” tall, I was 5’4”.
Joe worked for the Bank of America in Singapore for many years, during the years of that city’s economic miracle. He moved hundreds of million dollars. In the Spring of 1968 the Bank sent Joe to Saigon, just in time for Tet.
When China opened its borders up to the West, the Bank sent him to Beijing, a dream come true. Joe, alone, was the Bank of America in China. He lived in the former British Embassy compound. His food was cooked in a separate building of the compound and delivered to his rooms. His office was in the compound too. The Chinese government supplied an English-speaking secretary and they assigned a man, who sat at a desk behind Joe’s, whose job was to watch Joe all day long.
The English-speaking colony in Beijing during those early years, sometimes entertained itself by sitting around a phonograph player. Not Joe. He went to Chinese opera, to Kabuki theatre. He walked the neighborhoods, he’d eat street food.
He retired from the Bank after five years in Beijing. He was fifty-eight years old; the best thing he ever did he said. He reoccupied his apartment in Brooklyn Heights which he had been renting out.
Every January we’d receive Joe’s annual letter listing the twenty or so best Broadway plays he’d seen that year; the thirty or so best movies he’d seen; the thirty or so best books he had read.
He haunted the art galleries in Chelsea and on 57th Street. He was a regular at the Sotheby’s auctions, but owned only the few prints and and scrolls he had acquired while was in the East.
Margie phoned Joe every week to discuss the Sunday Time’s crossword puzzle. Joe did the puzzle in pen and ink, with his handsome fountain pen. Margie would turn the phone over to me when they finished. We’d meet for lunch four or five times a year, alternately in Brooklyn and New Jersey. I’d cede the bill to Joe when it arrived at meal’s end.
A joint bill was child’s play to a banker. He’d add the tip to the total, divide the new total by the number of diners and announce what each of us owed. He always tipped twice the amount of the tax. He’d hand the bill to me together with the amount of his share.
We were having lunch on 57th Street, in the days before cell phones. I needed to make a call. “Joe, please lend me your pen while I use the phone in the lobby.” He handed it over. “Don’t lose it,” he said, “It’s solid gold.”
He abandoned Brooklyn for two months every summer because the air conditioning in his pre-war building wasn’t up to the job. At first he’d rent a house in a New Jersey for a month or two in Ocean City. In July or August we’d get a page of the calendar with our date filled in.
When he grew tired of beaches, so he sought out cities with cool summer climates. We received a calendar page one year from San Francisco, with our week filled in. He knew we’d be visiting my son that summer.
He tried Seattle one summer and he liked it. He tried Vancouver and he was bored: “It’s beautiful but it’s a one weekend city.” Fortunately, there was good walking there.
He went to Ireland twice. and he went to London two or three years running. He’d rent a spacious apartment in neighborhoods that afforded good walking.
Two years ago he took the Queen Elizabeth on a leisurely transatlantic crossing. He stayed in London for a couple of weeks where he visited old friends, especially his godson, Mowbray Mallet Jackson. Mowbray was his last connection to the Mallets, the family that so enriched his life after he’d met Gina and Lynn Mallet in Perugia in 1955.
He traveled First Class on the Queen Elizabeth. The food was excellent and he walked the decks. He said it was easy to pack for First Class. All you need is your tuxedo. Joe, being Joe, washed his socks in his cabin’s sink.
He took the Queen last year too; he stayed in London for a while, then boarded another Queen for a seventeen day cruise to the Norwegian fjords, to Helsinki and to Saint Petersburg. He planned to take a Queen cruise this summer.
I’d call him or he’d call me every week, sometimes twice a week, but never on weekday evenings between 7:00 PM and 7:30 PM. That’s when Joe watched Jeopardy. He hadn’t missed a show in decades.
Around mid-day on February 11, I left a message on Joe’s answering machine. He always returned my calls promptly. He didn’t answer that evening – strange – so I called next morning. When he failed to call by noon I knew something was wrong.
I knew no one in Joe’s building, and the number of the front desk was unlisted. I called Stephen who somehow got the building’s superintendent who told him that Joe had suffered a stroke and was dying in the hospital.
Next day I received an email from Hayden, Joe’s Houston friend, saying that Joe had died, and that he, Hayden, was executor of Joe’s will. He said Joe wanted no religious ceremony, but that he, Hayden, was going to arrange a get together of Joe’s friends in Brooklyn Heights. Would I attend? Of course. Then came Covid19.
Days later Hayden emailed again: The lawyer has requested your mailing address; please send it. I called Stephen. He’d got a similar email. We were named in the will.
“What do you think you got, Dad?” I have no idea. The gold fountain pen would be nice. What about you? “I can’t guess.” I think you’ll get the Krugerrands.
Joe was a social liberal but a financial conservative; he feared a collapse of Wall Street and the Stock Market. But come the crash, he had a survival plan.
His apartment was a five minute walk to the train to Forest Hills; from there a direct train to JFK: at JFK he’d jump onto the first plane to Dublin, or to London, or to Stockholm – or to any other city with a cool summer climate.
Joe kept a small suitcase in his closet, packed and ready to go. In it he kept a drawstring pouch containing the 10 Krugerrands, coin of the realm, in any realm he might choose to alight.
(Margie wrote her mother often after she moved from Philadelphia to New York City in the 1950s. Her letters, artlessly exquisite, read like the synopsis of a novel: the halcyon years between college and marriage. )
The Apartment on 31st Street:
“Well, we moved. And I will never forget it. The good Lord and He alone is responsible for our success. He provided two things that we couldn’t have done without and that we didn’t arrange to get for ourselves. The first was Harvey, the superintendent of our new apartment, a huge, kindly gent who loves flowers and plants and is a sometimes moving man. He picked up Joan’s desk and carried it upstairs on one shoulder. The second gift from heaven was a hung-over Mexican named Carlos who arrived with Annie’s Scott on Saturday morning driving a really big station wagon. He was very large, but so hung-over that all he could do was drive and moan and squint through his dark glasses, but without his car we could never and moved the sofa.
After hard work on the part of Peter, Scott, Harvey and nous trois on Friday night and Saturday we finally had all the furniture in. It couldn’t have looked worse. The men hated us for getting them into this mess, we hated each other for imagined slacking and weird ideas about where furniture should be placed, and everyone hated the apartment which was MUCH too small and painted all the wrong color. Then at about 4 o’clock, in dropped the Atkinsons and all sat around drinking beer. The guests seemed really and truly to think the place was lovely (and the afternoon sun was streaming through the windows, etc, etc) so people began to perk up. And then IT happened.
Crissy, sitting in the window, happened to look down into the garden and saw what she thought was Armageddon. Great flames were shooting up from a tarp and painting drop cloth Harvey had left on the garden furniture below.. Someone had thrown a match out the window and whammo. After a good bit of aimless hysterical rushing about and bumping into each other, we discovered there was no way to get into the garden to put the thing out. Nobody home downstairs. Harvey disappeared. Joan called the fire department and Peter set off in search of Harvey. I was sunk. I knew the firemen would burst through the doctor’s office, breaking doors etc, and by then the fire would have burned itself out. How much damage would we have to pay?
Well, the firemen (all very young and Celtic) arrived in no time flat along with Harvey who’d been dug out of the corner bar. Also arrived three policemen (more Gallic, but most courteous and considerate). And everyone behaved beautifully.
The firemen, admitted by Harvey to the garden, decided to use materials at hand – blue and white ornate flower pots, water from the little pond (“Geez there’s goldfish in this water.) and the garden hose. By this time heads were sticking out of all the windows up and down the block, and everyone was laughing (some of them a bit uncontrollably) at the sight of burly firemen in helmets and great rubber coats, daintily carrying water in those ridiculous pots and dumping it on the remains of the garden furniture . The firemen just grinned happily at us and waved goodby, while the policemen tried to figure how to report it to bring the least trouble to everyone. We are now rather well known on 31st street.
P.S. We don’t have to pay for anything but two slings for the modern chairs, and that not until next Spring. The landlord has been a peach about the whole thing.
The next day, I just walked out on the mess (Joan hasn’t moved in yet) and went with Peter to the Great Danbury Fair. (No, we didn’t go to Gettysburg.) And by now everything has fallen in place and we love our home, we really do, although Joan and Annie are at each other’s throats over the matter of Japanese prints for the living room. Come and see us soon.”
First Months in NYC
“All of a sudden the big city lived up to all the tales I’ve heard. Wednesday at lunch I found my way to the part of Bryant Park (behind library) where they give recorded concerts every noon. There, under big trees, sitting on benches, steps and walls, were about a thousand people of every description. Most of them were from the Bronx but there was a generous sprinkling of Ivy-Leaguers and assorted tramps and drags. The audience is better than the music which squawks through what Paul would call a most inferior sound system. Still, it’s a most pleasant way to spend lunch hour.
Sunday Ed and I planned to go to the beach, but it rained and the muffler had fallen off his car.Instead we had lunch at some posh place on Fifth Avenue, went to a French movie, and then back to the apartment to listen to Iolanthe.
Even without the muffler (therefore sounding like a hotrod) Ed’s car makes me feel like something out of a New Yorker ad, and to go skimming down Fifth Avenue in such a chic conveyance was almost to much for me. Lunch was delicious and I wish I could duplicate it at home. Have you ever heard of green noodles?
They’re some kind of Italian noodles,, not tubular but flat and very skinny, that have been cooked with spinach so that they’re a repulsive green and have a spinacy taste. Over this you have garlic and butter and onion sauce and oooh yummy, but you taste the garlic all day. Anyway the day was perfect and Ed and I seem to be buddies.
Wednesday night Norman and I went out to dinner and to Saratoga (the musical based on Saratoga Trunk). His rich(est) aunt had given him the tickets. It was very lavish indeed, with Cecil Beaton sets; in fact so luxurious was it that you paid little attention to the story and the music which weren’t much anyway.”
Margie the Literary Agent
(Margie writes to her mother about a prospective client, Joan Bennett, the movie star):
“And I have spoken to Joan Bennett! She is, to an extent, a client of ours. Unfortunately she is living with an actor named Donald Cook and they do everything together. But, since they are not married, we underlings must pretend that they aren’t living together (Herb is a friend, so he can know), which necessitates all sorts of elaborate circumlocutions which fool nobody – but offend nobody either. Ah me, what would Ma (Margie’s grandmother) have thought? Or even Daddy? I sometimes wonder if, could he have known what his Petunia (what he called Margie) was exposed to, he wouldn’t have felt obliged to load his revolver and fare forth to defend my innocence. How nice that you turned our so worldly.”
Dissension in the Apartment
“Apartment life is pretty stressed these days and the villain is Joan who is just bound and determined to find fault with Crissy. I am go-between and peacemaker and will probably end up hated by all. Chief bone of contention is, of all things, Bill (Crissy’s boyfriend) Atkinson’s laugh. It’s loud, I must confess, a little grating and can be heard distinctly from living room to bedroom. Joan has taken to going to bed early and wants quiet after 10:30PM. She’s been behaving very badly about it indeed – I’m surprised at her – so Crissy isn’t as cooperative as she might otherwise be. This morning I managed to secure a temporary cessation of hostilities by appealing to Joan’s pity for me as being in the middle, but oh dear.
And last night somebody didn’t clean the bath tub. Believe it or not, there are young girls of good family who are sloppier than your daughter. Much!”
A New Room Mate
“Well, I think we have a new roommate, and while I’m not overjoyed with her, I’m sure she’ll do and probably liven up the place. Her name is Annie (yes, Annie) Steinert; she is a Boston post-deb, very intelligent and well informed, although she went only to a junior college. She’s just moved from Boston to NY where she has a job in a public relations firm. What I don’t like about her is a kind teen-agish boy craziness and an affected manner of speaking (she’s been heard to use “whoopsie-poo” and “not ruddy likely” in the same paragraph – she always talks in paragraphs) which is too bad because she’s warm, likable and would be very entertaining without trying so hard.. She has a signed Picasso etching.”
Gloria Swope, Classmate
“Some night this week I’m going to see Gloria Swope, who lives in a luxurious apartment, has a high-powered job, and by her own admission spends the day and most of the night hoping someone will ask her out. This seems ridiculous to me, especially for someone with Gloria’s potential. Still, I’m looking forward to seeing her; we had a long gossipy talk on the phone and I think we can pick up right where we left off at Swarthmore.”
A Suitable Attachment?
“I think, also, that I have arranged for a ride to Philadelphia with Joe’s attractive friend. The problem now is to avoid Joe and have this paragon to myself for two and a half hours.”
Calogero lu Nicu, 1929
chasperrone 