Unto the Sons (42 page)

Having borrowed one of his father’s horses, but without informing him of the purpose, Gaetano followed Carlo Donato’s directions to the Rocchino farm three miles downhill, only to discover that no one was home, and learn from a neighbor that Marian’s parents were away for a few days in the provincial capital of Catanzaro, but that she and her
youngest brother were staying at the home of family friends in the village, down the road from the Talese family compound.

It was siesta time when Gaetano located the house, and so without knocking he left the letter with a note of his own, saying that if Marian was agreeable to meeting him he would be standing in front of the balcony of her friends’ house at seven o’clock that evening.

When he returned and saw her waiting for him, he at first thought he was again seeing the young woman from the train station in Amantea.

Gaetano was in bed for several days from the knife wound, feverish, dizzy, and scarred. Ippolita cried when her son was carried home by the police, but after the doctor had reassured her of his complete recovery, she devoted herself to his daily care, changing the bandages as the doctor had instructed. His father did not visit his bedroom after the first day. Domenico regarded the situation as scandalous and could not help wondering whether Gaetano, or the woman he had been talking to, had not somehow provoked the violence that had transpired.

Domenico knew the Rocchino family slightly, and understood them to be simple but honorable people, although he knew nothing of Marian. He had spoken to her father, who was more remorseful than angry, acknowledging that the incident might impede his daughter’s chances of marrying anyone in the village. But Marian seemed concerned only with Gaetano’s recovery. Against her parents’ advice, she insisted on visiting him every day. She was as her cousin in Philadelphia had described her to Gaetano—stubborn but very attractive. Gaetano liked her more each time he saw her.

When his bandages had been removed and he was feeling better, he began to take walks with Marian in public. This was in February 1895, some weeks after the stabbing, and nearly everyone in the square nodded and smiled as the young couple passed. Their budding romance was obvious to all in Maida, and Gaetano was very pleased and proud as he escorted his petite twenty-year-old
innamorata
home each day before twilight, his three-inch scar plainly visible to all since he had decided not to wear his customary wide-brimmed fedora—partly to avoid scraping the hat’s inner edge against his wound, and partly to flaunt the wound in defiance of his attacker. While he hoped there would never be another confrontation, there was a new boldness, an intensity and watchfulness, about Gaetano. When he found himself face to face with other young men on the road, and properly returned their acknowledgments, he made it a point to look directly and probingly into their eyes. He also carried a
heavy malacca walking stick, which, if necessary, he intended to use as a weapon.

At the end of the month, Gaetano proposed marriage to Marian. She was at first reluctant, suggesting that they should wait until they had known one another longer. But his enthusiasm and romanticism about marriage were persuasive; and soon it was she, more than he, who was pressing their families to complete their prenuptial discussions, which involved everything from the dowry to the church date. It was now a foregone conclusion on her part that the marriage itself was inevitable, and was not a subject for debate by the families of either party.

Of all the relatives, Gaetano’s father was, surprisingly, the most positive about the union. Domenico saw the marriage as perhaps a solution to the mysterious waywardness of his oldest son; and so he demonstrated uncommon warmth toward his future daughter-in-law and ingratiated himself as well with her parents and brothers. He also promised as one of his wedding gifts to the couple the deed to the two-story house located next to his own. Privately he hoped that Gaetano would show his gratitude by withdrawing from America and assume, at long last, a modicum of filial responsibility.

At this time Domenico had no idea, nor should he have had one, given Gaetano’s persistent vagueness, that his son was committed to living in America. Unbeknownst to anyone in the family, Gaetano had received a wire at the post office from Mr. Maniscalco extending his time in Italy, because of the circumstances of his injury, but he expected Gaetano back on the job no later than the end of July. Gaetano had also received a letter from Marian’s cousin Carlo Donato, with the pleasant news that he had accepted a high-paying foreman’s position with a construction company in Delaware, and as a result he would be leaving the Philadelphia apartment entirely to Gaetano for the foreseeable future. Without consulting Marian, Gaetano determined that this would be their future home. He booked their passage on a ship that would get them from Naples to the United States within the time limit that Maniscalco had imposed; and in so doing, Gaetano spent most of what was left of his savings on the sea voyage that he saw as their honeymoon.

Two days after the wedding, held in early July 1895 in the Maida church where his own parents had been married, Gaetano informed his wife of the travel plans. She responded in a tearful manner that in no way diluted her decisiveness that she was not going. She argued that, in accepting Domenico’s wedding gift of a house, her husband had allowed
her to assume this would be their home; much as she loved him, she reminded him, she was acutely hydrophobic and could never travel anywhere by sea. She also recounted certain sad tales she had heard about the living conditions of immigrants’ wives in America, and nothing Gaetano could say or do in the days ahead could dissuade her. He finally understood what her cousin in Philadelphia had meant when he said that Marian had a mind of her own.

She was fundamentally a woman of the provinces, a woman who would always be wed more to her village than to a husband who was abroad. And so after three more days of futile effort, Gaetano angrily left Maida without her, sailing from Naples on choppy waters under an ashen sky. Wearing a new suit that had been a wedding present, and his favorite fedora over his now healed wound, and holding on to the brass rail within a glass-enclosed stateroom of the second deck, Gaetano stared at the waves and watched his native land recede in the distance. As far as he was concerned, the marriage was over.

For five months, the couple did not communicate. Then one Saturday evening after Gaetano had returned to the Philadelphia apartment from Ambler, a messenger arrived to say that an important letter from Italy awaited him at the home of a Philadelphia mortician named Francesco Donato, a distant relative of Carlo, his former roommate. Gaetano knew of the mortician but had never met him, and from the worrisome look on the young messenger’s face, he assumed that the letter would inform him of the grave illness or death of a member of the family. Gaetano had never given anyone in Maida his new address in Philadelphia, and he thanked the messenger for the efforts taken in locating him. Then, after donning a dark suit and following the messenger’s directions to the funeral parlor on the other side of South Philadelphia’s Italian section, Gaetano found himself standing on the white marble floor of a reception room, surrounded by flowers and empty open caskets, shaking hands with Mr. Donato, a portly, balding man wearing a black suit and a white carnation, and large diamond rings on both pinkies. There was a jovial expression on his round face.

“I have good news,” Mr. Donato said. “Soon you will become a father.”

He handed the letter in the opened envelope to Gaetano and smiled while Gaetano read it, anticipating a joyful reaction. But Gaetano’s long face and somber dark eyes remained unchanged. Then he put his wife’s letter back into the envelope and, remaining silent, handed it to Mr. Donato,
who frowned with disappointment. It then occurred to Mr. Donato that perhaps Gaetano was unable to read; and so he asked softly, “Would you like me to read it to you?”

“But I have just read it,” Gaetano said, looking at him curiously.

“Well, then,” Mr. Donato continued, after a pause, “when will you be returning to Italy for the birth and the christening?” Mr. Donato was a travel agent as well as a mortician, earning almost as much from the first business as the second.

“I have no plans for returning,” Gaetano said, in a manner that Mr. Donato found odd and irritating. Having taken the trouble to locate him, Mr. Donato now saw no guaranteed reward in the sale of a steamship ticket. “But when I do get my plans in order,” Gaetano went on, more sociably, “may I contact you?”

“Yes, thank you,” Mr. Donato said with a smile. And when Gaetano offered to reimburse him for the expense involving the letter, Mr. Donato waved his right hand in the air in a grand gesture of dismissal.

He was confident that Gaetano would soon return to buy his ticket.

Three years passed before Gaetano returned to Maida. But during this lengthy separation, aided by the exchange of several warm letters and Gaetano’s generous financial support of both mother and child, a marital rapprochement was established that was perhaps more harmonious than if the couple had tried living together in the same country—as they never would during nearly twenty years of marriage and the birth of seven children.

Gaetano did what he liked to do best—he worked with stone, and traveled extensively, sometimes to Italy, sometimes around the United States—while his steadfast wife, joining the ranks of the white widows, remained firmly in the home of her choice, in the familiarity of her village, where she had more than enough income for her children and herself, and an unusual yet romantic relationship with an enigmatic husband whom she never knew well enough to find predictable. She idealized him when he was away and quarreled with him when he was home (which was rarely more than a few months every two or three years)—just long enough to guarantee that, after he had gone back to America, he would receive a letter saying that she was again pregnant.

While Gaetano always promised to return to Italy in time for the birth and christening of a new baby, he invariably failed to do so, and his offended wife soon found ways to retaliate. No longer following the village tradition of naming infant boys in honor of their father’s kinfolk (Marian
had done this once in naming her first son Domenico; he would contract a fatal case of meningitis, and she would similarly name her last son Domenico), she proceeded in the absence of her husband to supply her other sons with names from her own family. Her second son, born in 1899, she named Sebastian in honor of her father, with whom she was exceedingly close and whom she visited almost every day at his farm. More than three years later, after her unpredictable husband had again failed to be on hand for the birth of the third son, Marian named the child Francis, after her father’s younger brother—a decision that so insulted the Talese family that many of them absented themselves from the child’s baptismal ceremony. One member, however, who did appear in church was Gaetano’s devout and superstitious sister, Maria, who begged Marian to rename the child, hinting that her obstinance could invoke the wrath of God; but neither the entreaties of her sister-in-law nor those of the parish priest who had married her persuaded Marian to change the new child’s name. When she finally did agree in 1904 to rechristen the boy Francis Joseph, it was at the urging of her father, who implored her to do so as a loving favor to him. But two years after the birth of Francis Joseph (whom the Talese family would address only by his middle name, the same as that of one of Gaetano’s younger brothers), Gaetano would again disregard his promise to be with his wife when the next child was born. This would occur on December 6, 1905, and there would be twin boys, one of whom died at birth. The twin who died Marian named after her husband’s second younger brother, Vincenzo; the one who survived she named Nicola, in honor of the saint whose feast day coincided with the birthdate.

When Marian bore her sixth child, a daughter, in 1908, Gaetano was ill with pneumonia in America, and was forgiven for his failure to be present for the birth and christening. But he sailed home unaccountably during the winter of 1908–1909, arriving with presents for the entire family and especially for his first and only daughter, Ippolita, named, of course, after his mother. He remained away from the United States for the next five months, not returning until the spring of 1909. But much of his time in Italy was spent outside Maida. Often he was said to be receiving medical treatments at a respiratory infirmary in Naples. At other times he was known to be in Rome, and as far north as Bologna, for reasons unexplained. He was restless, and often unhappy, while he was in Maida, and twice he was involved in unpleasant scenes in the town square.

Early on a spring evening, as Gaetano was playing cards for small stakes in the back of Pileggi’s butcher shop in the square, his father appeared
unexpectedly and asked that Gaetano return home with him. Gaetano, who was now thirty-seven, looked up from his cards and frowned at his white-haired father. As Gaetano looked down to reconsider his cards with seeming concentration, Domenico took hold of the tablecloth and jerked it, sending several cards and glasses of wine to the floor. Without apologizing to the other men at the table, Domenico turned and walked out, ignoring the puzzled protests of the cardplayers. Caught in a silent struggle of indecision, Gaetano stared around the room without expression for a few moments; then he stood up and followed his father home, seething with anger.

Several days later, during the Sunday-afternoon
passeggiata
, as Gaetano, in suit, white starched collar, sprucely knotted polka-dotted cravat, and homburg, walked arm in arm with a male friend, he was aware of a group of elderly men looking at him and speaking in what he sensed were hostile tones. They were gathered on wooden chairs around a table outside the café, and as he circled toward them with his friend a voice was raised toward him contemptuously: “Who do you think you are? You’re not a gentleman.”

Taking a few steps forward, Gaetano recognized a wizened and slightly intoxicated member of the Bongiovanni family, who years earlier had forfeited much of their baronial estate in an enforced sale to Gaetano’s father. Enraged, Gaetano charged toward the man, but his friend held him back. A few men in the café, mumbling words in Bongiovanni’s behalf, got up from their chairs, while other passersby stopped to watch. As Gaetano turned away from Bongiovanni, he knew that he was no longer in the right place. He had to return to America.