Don't Sing at the Table (11 page)

She didn't want anyone to find alternative treatments or call in favors. Viola had done that years earlier when she took her husband to the Mayo Clinic, and now, twenty-nine years later, she wasn't going to go down that road again. Viola was going to deal with her illness
her
way.

Whether it was her faith, or the confidence that comes from wisdom in the face of the inevitable, she didn't fight what was happening inside her body. Viola was almost relieved to know
how
her life was going to end, and knowing now, for certain, how it would end, she could prepare.

It was then, in her acknowledgement that she was dying, and in her anticipation of the salvation she believed was guaranteed, that Viola became her most beautiful.

Chapter Seven
Sex and Marriage

Viola and Michael on his 50th birthday.

T
he shoe shop at 5 West Lake Street was a hub during the day, my grandfather repairing shoes, and Lucy sewing for hire. The kids were at school, and vendors would stop in for coffee and chat, and to sell my grandparents supplies. It was a very social work life, made interesting by the characters who frequented the shop.

At night, after supper, the children went to bed, and the Progressive Shoe Shop turned into a social club for my grandfather and his friends. The men played cards, laughed, told jokes, and had a ball. They got loud and raucous, and occasionally the parties went until dawn.

One night, Lucy came down to do some finishing work in her workroom while the card party was happening in the shop. She overheard one of the men saying something off-color about a woman who lived in Chisholm. The men were having a good laugh when Lucy appeared in the doorway. She said plainly to the men, “I will have none of that talk. You are to respect women and their reputations in this building.” And then she left. I can imagine my sheepish grandfather and his buddies, caught in the act.

Lucy did not engage in gossip, nor did she judge anyone's behavior. She had her standards, but she never imposed them on anyone outside of her family. When it came to her children, she raised them with boundaries to build character, and led them by example.

Lucy was widowed so young that there was certainly an expanse of years to have another romantic relationship. She never did, and she explained why she wouldn't. Lucy felt that all she had in the world besides her ability to work hard and care for her children was her reputation. She knew, living in a small town, that everything she did would become fodder for conversation and affect her children. She never wanted to be the subject of any conversation she wouldn't have wanted her children to hear.

You are your good reputation.

When my grandfather died, Lucy took in alterations from the local department store—men's suits and coats—to earn additional income. The store wanted to send the customers over for fittings. Lucy asked the store to do the measurements there, chalk-mark and pin the garments, and deliver the work to her, and she would return it to them on a timely basis, complete. She did not want to have men in the shop because she felt that it could be construed that she was entertaining men at her place of business. The store happily complied with her wishes because she was the best seamstress around.

Lucy told me, “You only have one reputation. When your good reputation is gone, it's
gone
.”

Some wisdom Lucy shared with me about romantic love:

• There must be a powerful draw to one another in the beginning.

• It isn't how long you know someone, but how well you can read them, that will guide you going forward.

• Similarities in background and an understanding of where someone comes from give you a good foundation as the relationship grows.

• Do not be afraid to be clear about how you see yourself in the relationship. Do not agree to live in a place that doesn't appeal to you, do not take up work that you don't like just to please him, and make sure that your voice is honored, that you are heard.

• From the start, full disclosure, emotional, financial, spiritual, will help you define your goals as a couple, and help you know when it will be the right moment for you to start your own family.

After Carlo died, Lucy kept a drawer in her room with his things—some photographs, notes, and his clothing. After she put the children to bed (her twin girls often slept side by side with her after my grandfather died), she would open the drawer and cry. Her grief was so all consuming, she worried that she might not make it through. She told me she survived it because she had no choice.

Each night, after supper, she and the children walked to the cemetery to visit his grave. The social custom of
la passeggiata
, carried with her from her hometown in Italy, was a walk after dinner to visit friends and have conversations. Lucy's version had an entirely different meaning in Chisholm.

After about a year, she cleaned out the drawer and began to visit the cemetery on Sundays, instead of walking there every evening. She said that one day, she realized that her grief would never leave her, so she decided to walk with it instead of letting it take over her life. The loss of a happy marriage is one that never leaves you. I can only imagine the glorious reunion my grandparents had when she died. Lucy had waited so long for it.

Lucy would remain a romantic all of her life, but she was never restless for new experiences. For Lucy, there was no such thing as sex without true love, and no romance at all without her husband. The power of one love was enough to fill her heart for all of her life.

I grew up in a different era, when sexual experience was as expected of an adult woman as her ability to drive a car. Religious constraints had lost their teeth. Women felt as deserving of a satisfying sex life as men, and justifiably so. The changes weren't apparent only in the expectations of a woman's personal conduct, but in the family structure as well. As I write this book, the U.S. government just released a report that 41 percent of the babies born in our country in 2008 were born to single mothers. The old order has been replaced by something altogether new.

It's interesting to note, that for all the advances we have made, we still struggle with romantic relationships. American women have been enlightened in every regard, or at least the opportunity for education exists, and yet we still have a difficult time with personal choice, sussing out good apples from the bad, and figuring out how to make love stay after a few months, or a few decades. Maybe indecision and uncertainty are part of the human condition, but we also need to look deeper into our own expectations, and our own definition of what we believe we deserve.

I learned from Lucy that abiding attachment and commitment sustain you. Sex is a gift, not a right. When you find true love, you only have two things to offer: the gift of yourself, and of your time. And the truth is, that's all he has to give you too. If you find yourself dissatisfied, constantly angry, agitated, frustrated, and emotionally spent, if he does not bring out the best in you, no matter how much you love someone, no matter how many lovely moments offset the low points, if you are exhausted, you are not being fed. And if you are not being fed, you will not
grow.

Self-respect is the most important respect of all.

Look out for yourself. A man who cares about your feelings, roots for your limitless future, and plans to guard your dreams as his own is a person that will make a good life partner. You should not accept less. For Lucy, this meant marriage, in all its breadth and scope. Marriage should make us better, stronger and more focused in all aspects of our lives.

So, with Lucy's moral template before me—and believe me, it often seemed more like an ideal than a version of reality—I began to shape my own opinions on the matter. I read a lot; I figured that if I could find instructions on how to build a canoe in a book, surely there was some writer out there who could help me navigate the tricky waters of dating, relationships, and perhaps marriage. I didn't want my values to be a piano on my back, but rather a bunch of bright balloons that I could clutch for liftoff.

After all, the gift of sex is one of God's very best ideas.

I found the book
Why Love Is Not Enough
, written by the wise and astute Dr. Sol Gordon. In the book, when a young woman asks him, “How will I know when it's true love?” he answers, “True love energizes you, all the other kinds exhaust you.” With that revelation in mind, soon I could tell a crush from the real deal, or lust from actual connection. I learned that what intrigued me didn't necessarily sustain me. I learned that attraction was a canapé, and you can't live on those.

It takes time to observe someone who might be worthy of you, and when you've gathered the facts, it's not fair to
you
to pretend that they aren't true. If the man, his world, and his beliefs depleted me, or the life he had built before meeting me left me wizened, I learned to go in the other direction. Sometimes it was easy, and other times it wasn't. I learned from my grandmothers that I had better honor that inner voice. If I didn't, I had only myself to blame.

Soon, it became apparent that to find
one
man in the world in my lifetime whom I could honestly say energized me and made me believe anything was possible wasn't going to be a search yielding a lot, a few, or even
two
possibilities. The world could not possibly be that generous in my regard. The truth was and is, I would find only
one
man who energized me. And I married him.

Lucia and Carlo on their wedding day in 1920, in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Where Are Your Beaus?

Viola didn't understand my generation's approach to romantic relationships. We had platonic friendships with the opposite sex, didn't dress up, and in general, it seemed we didn't make a fuss over “boys.” We called them, asked them out, paid for dates. Viola wondered, “What are they thinking?” She felt young women my age were killing romance. “It was so nice when I was a girl,” she said wistfully.

When Viola was eighteen, there was a social order to dating. Various Venetian families in the area would come and visit on Sundays, ostensibly for coffee and cake, with the side pursuit of offering up their sons as potential suitors for Viola. In the telling, I imagined the farm fields turned into parking lots, with hundreds of young men vying for her attention, like a long line at the OTB that snakes around the block on double-down race days.

Viola made it sound that way.

However, Viola was indifferent about most of the potential matches. She juggled their interest in her nonchalantly, remaining cool and aloof as they turned cartwheels and lined up their roadsters to get her attention. One ardent suitor had pushy parents who wanted their son to marry Viola because they had roots in the same village in Italy. The Perins' eighty-acre farm added to the luster of a match with Viola. The young man became vehement about marrying my grandmother.

This fellow became so obsessed that one Sunday afternoon, when she told him for certain that she was never going to marry him, he announced that he was going to hang himself from the tree at the end of the lane.

All hell broke loose. Viola begged him not to do anything dire as her parents and his calmed the young man down. Eventually they did, but it was a source of pride to my grandmother, years later, that a fellow thought he couldn't live without her.

The young man went on to marry happily and have eight children, so evidently he figured it out.

While talk of the relations between men and women with Lucy was centered around romance, the same conversation with Viola was clinical. I had graduated from college and moved to New York City in the early 1980s, so my youth had been defined by the frightening epidemic of herpes (as chronicled on the cover of
Newsweek
) and the tragic discovery of the HIV virus and AIDS. Throw the veil of my Roman Catholic upbringing on top of health risks, and I had every excuse to fear romantic relationships.

As a young playwright who was also part of a comedy troupe, I was losing my friends and coworkers to AIDS as Viola was losing hers to sickness and old age. Our mutual grief bound us together. I was her insight into a modern epidemic that she did not understand.

At first.

Viola would come into New York City when I was working on the cabaret circuit. An enthusiastic audience member, she embraced show people. It was astonishing to watch her mix and mingle with the Village crowd, totally at ease in the cabaret world which included transgender and gay performers, as well as straight kids with Broadway chorus aspirations. She was completely at home with folks who made their living on the stage. I couldn't believe it. Nor could I stop her when she confronted a man who openly criticized my play after a staged reading at the Pennsylvania Stage Company.