An Invisible Thread (10 page)

Then, during one of Pasquale’s visits, Maria became pregnant with their seventh child. Now she needed her husband more than ever. When she was in her eighth month, in early 1917, she hitched up a horse and wagon, left Pietro in charge of the others, and took the long trip to military headquarters in the town of Bari. There, she sought out the commanding officer, barged into his office, and demanded her husband be discharged.
He has six hungry children at home
, she told him.
He belongs with his family
. The officer felt pity but could do nothing to help. The best he had to offer was a promise to keep Pasquale away from the front lines so he’d be safe until the war was over.

Maria, distraught and exhausted, steered the horse back to Gioia del Colle on rutted dirt roads. Along the way, she felt a great pain in her stomach. She made it home just in time to give birth to her seventh child, Annunziata. Now things were tougher than ever—but they would get even worse. In Bari Pasquale’s commander broke his promise and shipped him to the Italian front in Gorizia, where the army sought to seize Austrian land along the Isonzo River. Nine times before, the army had tried securing this territory, and all nine times they had failed. The tenth campaign fared no better.

Two months after giving birth, Maria got word Pasquale had been shot and killed in action.

Now that she was a widow with seven young children, the local authorities finally took notice and stepped in. What they decided to do was declare Maria unfit to care for all of her children and take two of them away.

Young Luca was sent to a state school for boys, while Giustina was packed away to the Instituto Femminile di Maria Cristina di Savoia—a boarding school run by nuns. They were kept there, away from their family, for several years. Maria was allowed to visit them once a month.

And then, in the summer of 1917, Maria’s mother fell ill. Maria left Pietro in charge of his sisters Rosa and Ana and his brother Donato while she trudged to her mother’s home in the nearby hills, her infant in tow. One day, after finishing their chores, the children were playing in the field, skipping and running and throwing sticks, when young Ana, then five, came upon the family’s well. It was a hole in the ground surrounded by slabs of white rock with a larger white stone moved on and off to seal the hole. Maria, in her haste, had left the big stone off. And now young Ana tried to tiptoe around the edge of the well, just for fun.

She tripped and fell, tumbling down the hole.

Rosa ran one mile to her grandmother’s house to get help, but it was too late. The child drowned at the bottom of the well.

Local authorities investigated the incident and deemed Maria unfit to handle her family. Now young Rosa, not yet eight, was sent away to the Maria Cristina di Savoia.

Society had come up with a solution to Maria’s problems. The solution was to take her children away.

But there was nothing Maria could do, and she found some solace in knowing her daughters were enjoying their time at the school. Still, Maria could not get over the pain of losing her family. She vowed that one day she would bring all her children together again, and she wrote to her brother Pietro who, with the help of her brother-in-law, had emmigrated to America. She asked them for help in moving her family there, too. They sent her enough money to make the trip to America, Maria pulled her children from their schools, and, in January 1921, boarded a boat called the
Duca D’Aosta
docked at a port in Naples. The boat met hellacious storms in the Atlantic, and a sailor had to save Rosa from being hurled overboard.

On February 19, 1921, the
Duca D’Aosta
docked at Ellis Island in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, and Maria and her family set foot on American soil. They were quarantined on the island for several weeks because Annunziata had measles, but eventually they were free to go. They took a clanking subway ride uptown and moved into a cramped tenement apartment on East 112th Street with barely enough room for all of them. However, it had a sink, a stove, an icebox, and indoor plumbing—things they’d never had before. They lived their lives in America, with all of its glories and hardships, and their children’s children lived good lives, too, and even their children, and even theirs.

I know this to be true, because Maria Giuseppe Benedetto was my great-grandmother.

Little Rosa, one of the daughters taken from Maria—and who she took back—was my grandmother. I’ve heard stories about how playful and clever Rosa was. When she was young, she was put in charge of cleaning the supper dishes. She watched the family dog lick his plate clean and got an idea. One by one, Rosa gave the dinner plates to the dog until he licked them all clean. Her mother was impressed with how quickly and thoroughly she’d done her chore—and she’d have gotten away with it if her sister Annunziata hadn’t ratted her out.

In elementary school Rosa discovered she had a beautiful singing voice. She sang in the church choir, and the family even saved enough money to buy a secondhand piano for her lessons. But the joy she took from singing would not last long. In her teens she met a man named Sebastiano Vito Procino—dark, handsome, and ten years older than her. Sebastiano’s life, from an early age, was one of hard, uncompromising work. When he was an eight-year-old boy growing up on a farm in Gioia del Colle—the same poor town where Rosa was raised—he was taken out of school and sent into the fields to shepherd a large flock of sheep. That meant rising before dawn, packing some food, and tending to the sheep as they grazed on the hillside for twelve hours. He spent his days alone, with only the sheep for company.

This experience shaped the person he became. After serving in the elite Bersaglieri Corps in the Italian army for five years and coming to America in 1923, Sebastiano worked as a laborer for the Erie Lackawana Railroad, and then as a building supervisor, and then as a skilled plasterer—demanding, backbreaking jobs. The guiding principle of his life was to provide for the family he started
with Rosa—seven children in all—and to instill in them the value of hard work and sacrifice. To Sebastiano, being a man meant always being vigilant, never being soft, and refusing to tolerate anything frivolous.

One thing Sebastiano could not tolerate was singing.

Sebastiano forbade his wife from singing in a choir or anywhere else. He believed her beautiful voice made her more attractive to other men, and so, the dutiful wife that she was, she never sang in public again. I would like to think that in private moments my grandmother sang her heart out, away from her husband’s ears, but I do not know for sure that she did.

Another frivolous thing for Sebastiano was affection.

Sebastiano was not a tyrannical father; some Sunday mornings he’d take his children to the bakery for fresh rolls and walnut rings, and in the summer he drove them to Carvel for ice cream. But he had been raised by an abusive father who showed him no affection, and he did not believe a parent should ever show any feelings for his children. Being demonstrative was a sign of weakness, and Sebastiano was anything but weak. He believed children should be raised not with love but with discipline and, if warranted, physical punishment.

At suppers, he kept a strap across his lap for his children to see. They knew to never talk during meals, lest they get a sharp strike across the hands.

My grandfather Sebastiano witnessed few moments of love and affection between his own parents, and so he avoided them with his own wife and children. No one ever taught him how to show and share his love, or even that such a thing was permissible. He came to
believe that it wasn’t. “
Il solo tempo lei dovrebbe baciare i suoi bambini in quando dormono
,” he would say.

This means, “The only time you should kiss your children is when they are asleep.”

The children all had complicated relationships with their father, and one of them—Maria, my mother—realized at a very young age that she needed to flee his brutal control. And so, when she was just nineteen, she fell for and married a man she believed could take her away from her old family and into a new and happy one of her own.

But sometimes we are not drawn to that which is different from what we know and fear.

Sometimes we are drawn to that which is exactly the same.

My father, Nunziato Carino, was nineteen years old when he lost his own father, Francesco, to a brain tumor. Francesco was from Calabria, the southern region right in the toe of the Italian boot, and he was, like so many immigrants, a fiercely hard worker. He was a laborer for a snow removal crew in Long Island, where his family had settled. One particularly snowy day, he fell off a truck and fractured his skull. Seven years later he started getting headaches, and doctors discovered an inoperable tumor. I know very little about my grandfather Francesco because my father almost never spoke of him.

What I do know is that he taught his eldest boy, Nunziato, the value of hard work. Nunziato’s first job was at age twelve: shining shoes. He never stopped working from that day forward. After his father died, he went into the army and became an aerial gunner, flying fifty-five missions. While in the service he faithfully sent fifty dollars each month to his mother. He was twenty-seven when he
met my mother at a party; she was shy and quiet and exceedingly lovely, and he walked right up and told her so. She demurred at first, but he persisted and soon swept her away. My grandmother Rosa, now called Rose, used the skills she had learned at Maria Cristina di Savoia to sew a wedding dress for Marie: a brocade satin creation with long sleeves, a fifteen-foot train, a mandarin neckline, and tiny buttons all down the front. Marie and Nunziato wed in St. Hugh’s Roman Catholic Church in Huntington Station, Long Island; they had what was known as a football wedding, named for the thick Italian hero sandwiches wrapped in cellophane for the reception. They were a young, beautiful couple, sprung from the immigrant experience and poised to start a new American adventure of their own.

Their first daughter, Annette, was smart and thoughtful and mature beyond her years. She was rational, reserved, a straight-A student. Their second daughter was different: a rebel, a jokester, carefree, and questioning, so stubborn and argumentative her parents dubbed her “chatterbox.” She had to have the last word, to the point where her mother and sisters would beg, “Please stop talking.” She demanded answers, and she never left well enough alone.

That daughter was me.

Our childhood in Huntington Station was not one of material deprivation. We had plenty of food, comfortable beds, clean clothes, and toys we loved. In our first home, a brick ranch house my father built, Annette and I shared a corner bedroom with a double bed, rosebud wallpaper, crocheted comforters, and curtains with floral trim. Down the hall Frank had his own room, while Nancy, still a baby, slept in a crib in my parents’ bedroom. We went to good
schools, had good friends, and enjoyed a good measure of stability and routine.

And, like most families, we had pets, though the history of our animals is ramshackle at best. My father loved little creatures, starting with the Chihuahua he brought home from the war that he took with him everywhere. However, our family pets seemed to come and go at an alarming rate. One of our earliest cats, Casey, got leukemia and died young. A Yorkie terrier we named Michael got away and was hit by a car. We had a one-eyed black Persian cat that seemed happy enough to be with us, but when we got new furniture, the cat’s shedding became a problem and he was given away. We also had a cute little golden Pomeranian who went missing during a snowstorm; when the snow finally melted a few days later, we found the poor thing frozen to death by the back door of our house.

I never expected the pets we loved would be around for long. It was just another thing I couldn’t control. Looking back, it’s not surprising the pets were never safe in our house. The truth is, none of us were.

My father liked to drink, and drinking changed who he was. I don’t know precisely what happened when alcohol passed through his stomach, into his bloodstream, and finally hit his brain. I know alcohol dulls your senses and your mental sharpness. I know it affects alertness and coordination. And I know in some people it causes anger and agitation. But what happened to my father was something different. Alcohol utterly transformed him.

When my father was sober, he was one of the loveliest men you’d ever meet. Funny, generous, warm with loved ones, welcoming
to strangers. To this day people come up and tell me how wonderful he was. People I grew up with say, “I wish my father had been more like yours.”

But every day after his shift as a bartender at the Picture Lounge, it’s as if he’d swap clothes with some other man and send him home in his place. My father liked scotch whisky—Dewar’s on the rocks—and he would drink during his shift and stay afterward and drink some more. When he got into the car to drive home, what we called the dark cloud would come over him. His eyes got squinty, and his face grew tight, and his normal, natural smile disappeared into a hard frown. The demons inside him would stew and percolate and rise to the surface, awaiting the slightest trigger to explode. The trigger could be anything, even nothing. We never knew what it was that made him so angry on those car rides home or what would set him off when he walked in. All we knew was that once my father’s rages had started, they could not be stopped.