And to tell them.
Great-Aunt Camilla found her stories in foreign countries. Since she enjoyed traveling alone, she was a mystery to my family, but I liked mysteries, liked picking her up at the West Side docks, where the water was dark green and murky with oil slicks and trash, where the air smelled of tar and hot dogs, and where I got to see ocean liners when she returned with her faraway stories and faraway presents. One day, Great-Aunt Camilla gave me a tour of the Mauretania. Four other ocean liners were tied to the docks, and a barge with long rollers was alongside the Île de France, painting the hull. When my mother bought me a hot dog, I tossed the end of my bun to the seagulls, and as they fought over it, the horn of a tug-boat shut them out. It had a big M on its stack. “That means ‘Moran,’” Great-Aunt Camilla had told me, and I’d wished she would take me on one of her trips.
My favorite story of all was how my grandmother had saved my grandfather from drowning. My mother had named her Riptide. If it were not for Riptide, none of us would be alive. Not that she had rescued all of us, but she had rescued my grandfather when he was not my grandfather yet, not her husband yet, but just Emilio Amedeo, standing in the surf at Rockaway Beach up to his waist.
“The first day I saw him, I rescued him.” That’s how she always started the part of the story that was hers, the part where she’s sunning herself, wearing her new white swimsuit, when this young man suddenly topples and is pulled out to sea. One of his arms shoots up, then his face, open-mouthed. While she leaps up, races toward the water, dives in, and swims out to where he’s drowning. “Hold on to me,” she shouts and reaches for him. She’s swimming on her back, one arm around him as if they were hugging, and he floats with her, resting on her body. “If we fight against the current, it’ll tire us,” she tells him. “All we need to do is wait…let the tide take us to where it weakens…then swim out of it.” For a minute or so my grandfather floats with her, but when the tide sweeps them out farther, he panics, because it’s obvious she’s some rare kind of water-being, a manatee, or a siren, luring him deeper into her territory. As he struggles to free himself, she flips from beneath him, emerges behind him, grasps him around the middle. “I’m going to save you,” her woman-voice shouts into his ear, “you have no choice there. But you…can make it easier for me to save you…if you quiet down. If you can’t do that…I’ll knock you out and…drag you to shore.” He feels her breath against his left ear, against the left side of his neck, breath that rides on her shouting. “But save you I will. The one…choice you have is to make it look like we’re swimming back…together. And then you don’t have to admit to anyone that a woman saved you.”
But it’s my grandfather who revealed the story of his rescue. Who still liked to tell it, urged on by us.
“Let Emilio tell that part.”
“He does it so well.”
He’d wait till Riptide finished and then he’d continue the story from the moment when he quieted. Against all panic. Because, out there, in this woman’s fierce embrace, he understands that she’ll make true on her promise to save him. In her fierce embrace, he understands that he’ll ask her to marry him—water-being or woman—once they’re back on shore. And because he’s afraid of her slipping away from him forever once they reach the sand—more afraid than he is of drowning—he asks her name, Natalina, relieved to hear that she, too, is Italian, and then proposes to her while the tide is still pulling them out.
It has become the story of their marriage.
And it was not long before they had their first child, Victor, named after Victorien Sardou, who’d written the play that my grandfather’s favorite opera, Tosca, was based on. And since my grandfather loved Puccini’s operas above all other operas, it only followed that the girl, born two years after Victor, would be called Floria.
My father and Aunt Floria liked to tease their parents about that first swim, how they had made it last because they got to touch each other in ways that would have been inappropriate had they just met on land.
“It would have destroyed Natalina’s reputation,” my grandfather would say.
Riptide continued to swim, one mile every morning, in the pool of the building where her sister, Camilla, shared an apartment with Mrs. Feinstein. Both worked as teachers in Manhattan, but Mrs. Feinstein didn’t travel and saved her money for a Persian-lamb coat and elegant furniture. Their apartment had a fireplace and was two blocks from the East River on 86th Street.
Sometimes I’d wear my swimsuit instead of underpants to Sunday mass, and afterwards Riptide would take me to Manhattan. I liked being on the Jerome Avenue El because it went by apartments and I’d see people cooking or sleeping or watching television. Whenever there was a game at Yankee Stadium, people on the El would stand up and lean toward the windows on the right, catching a moment of the game.
Uncle Malcolm liked to take me to baseball games. Usually the twins would skutch, and he’d tell them, “No girls allowed at Yankee Stadium.”
“I got us the best seats in the house that Ruth built,” he said the first time he invited me.
Everything was exciting that afternoon: coming into the courtyard, where Uncle Malcolm bought me a program; going through the turnstiles, where he presented our tickets to the ticket takers; following him up steps so steep I really had to climb, steps to the top bleachers up in heaven; and squeezing into seats that were grimy and sticky from stale beer.
“From here we can see everything that’s going on, not just part of the field—” He motioned to the box seats close to the third-base line. “—like those poor schmucks over there, who have to keep moving their heads.”
I loved being this high up, loved the noise, the scoreboard with the numbers lit up, the vendors yelling: “Hot dogs, peanuts, soda, here.”
Uncle Malcolm showed me how to fill out the program with a pencil, play by play, who got a strike, who got a ball. A couple of times he tapped the shoulder of the man in front of us. “Could I just borrow your binoculars for a second for my kid here?”
He bought us peanuts and Coca-Cola and beer, nudged me so I’d shout whenever he shouted. Such noise…I’d never heard such noise before, shouting and fighting and vendors yelling, while I sat in our best seats, feeling hot and stuffed and thrilled.
Great-Aunt Camilla’s pool was in the basement, across the hall from the trash room, and the lockers were rusty and stank of chlorine and rotting swimsuits that people had forgotten. Riptide and I would dive into the murky green water, chase each other’s toes, shriek with joy when we’d startle each other by surfacing unexpectedly.
My father laughed when I figured out one day that, by swimming one mile a day, Riptide could swim to Italy in nine years.
“She’s the kind of woman who might just do that,” my mother said.
“I’d rather take an ocean liner,” Great-Aunt Camilla said.
Now and then Great-Aunt Camilla and Mrs. Feinstein would join us in their pool and swim like real grown-ups, their bodies long and narrow, so that they looked more like sisters than Riptide and Great-Aunt Camilla. Together, they’d do smooth and fast laps at the far side of the pool so that our splashing wouldn’t frizz their curls.
I’d try to prolong our swim because I dreaded the men’s locker room, where roaches and silverfish scurried when you turned on the light. According to Mrs. Feinstein, silverfish ate anything, even the glue in book bindings; and she’d point out dead silverfish in the light of her elevator when we took it up to the apartment for lunch.
The brim of my father’s hat filled the rearview mirror. “At least instruct me how I am depriving my own and getting my feet wet at the same time, Leonora. Have you and the boy ever gone hungry? Without coats? Without crossword puzzles, God forbid?”
“Without the damn car heater.”
I tugged the brim of my hat forward, then back. Forward again. Still, its rustling against my ears was not enough to smother my parents quarrel. They often fought about money. About not being poor. About not looking poor. W
hich meant keeping things clean and mended, saving scraps of leftovers for another day.
“I said I’ll get the heater fixed.”
“When?”
“When, she wants to know.”
“Don’t talk about me in the third person.”
“Sorry.”
I wound a piece of wilted lettuce around a button of my wool coat. We always had a few lettuce leaves or shriveled string beans on the seats, since my father used the Studebaker to transport crates with carrots and beets and lettuce and beans from the Bronx Terminal Market to Festa Liguria on East Tremont Avenue.
“People can get frostbite in this car.” When my mother raised her thin shoulders, her back seemed half the width of my father’s.
“I’ll get the heater fixed once those chiropractors pay me for their convention.”
“I rest my case.”
“A lawyer in the family. All our troubles are over now.”
“I promise not to use much of the wax,” I said.
Why did the grown-ups always get to decide what was bought? Why should a car heater be more important than a stencil kit? Or a frying pan when the old one wasn’t broken? I folded my hands and prayed to St. Anthony, my namesake saint, to let me live with the television girl and her parents. They never argued. I pictured the glass-wax girl, the glass-wax mother on the screen, shown from outside their window as they decorate it while someone high up in a tree—maybe an angel—is pointing a camera at them. In their living room is a fireplace, ready for Santa to arrive.
“We don’t even have a fireplace,” I said.
“Santa knows the route down our fire escape.” My mother drummed the tip of her silver crossword pencil against her front teeth. “Light. Seven letters. A word for light…”
“I don’t enjoy fighting with you,” my father said.
“Now you want to fight and enjoy it, too?”
He let out an exasperated laugh.
I pulled off my itchy wool mittens and let them dangle from my sleeves on the cord Riptide Grandma had crocheted between them. The last time I’d heard my father laugh like that was when my mother had wanted to yank me out of Catholic school. She said it was bad practice to mix religion and school. But my father and grandparents said the nuns gave a better education, and I wanted to stay at St. Simon Stock because Kevin and my other friends were there.
Though I was sure I’d filled Frogman’s leg with baking soda, I popped the metal cap off his leg. Some days, being sure only meant you had to double-check, because if you didn’t, everything else would come undone. And I wanted to show my cousins how Frogman swam up and down when baking soda bubbled into water.
“Seven letters. Glow…too short.” My mother reached up to fluff the speckled feathers on her red hat.
“Are you quite settled?” my father asked.
“Flicker…No, the fourth letter has to be M.…”
“If my sister hadn’t married Malcolm,” my father said, “we wouldn’t even know the bastard.”
I sat there, stunned, and for years from then on I would believe that—without marriage—men simply were not there. My father certainly proved that, because my mother kept him real during his absences by cooking his favorite meals, washing and ironing and mending his clothes, and, above all, talking about him when she picked me up from St. Simon’s after school, so that, when my father came home at night, I’d feel surprised he’d been away at all because all day he’d felt nearby. Women were there without marriage, even Great-Aunt Camilla, who didn’t have a husband. Women I saw all the time. In my mother’s kitchen; at the beauty parlor, where the stink of permanents tickled my nostrils; at the Hebrew National Deli; at Joy Drugs; or in Ce’Bon, where a sprayer above the window filled the air with perfume. But men I only encountered when they were married to women I knew. What would happen if I couldn’t get someone to marry me? Would I just disappear? And where would I be then?
I sat up tall. “Can I marry the twins?”
My mother turned and smiled at me as if I were still in first grade. “Both of them?”
“Maybe just Bianca. Belinda is funny, but I don’t like her ugly boogers.”
“I have asked you not to say ‘ugly boogers,’” my father said, though he, too, knew to get away from Belinda when she sneezed because chunks of snot burst from her. “It is called a sinus problem.”
“Marrying one’s cousin is not a good idea,” my mother said.
But if I married Bianca, she would have to let me wear her Superman cape. She used to leap off furniture with a bedsheet knotted around her neck, shouting, “Suuu-per-mannnn,” until Aunt Floria sewed a cape from satin remnants with straps for Bianca’s arms to fit through so she wouldn’t strangle herself.
“Why is it not a good idea to marry a cousin?”
“Last week you wanted to be a bishop,” my father reminded me.
“I can be a bishop first and then get married.”
“You can’t do both.”
“Besides,” my mother added, “you’re too young to think about marriage.”
My father slowed our car at the corner of Southern Boulevard, where the orange roof of the Howard Johnson glistened in the downpour, and the neon boy pointed to the tray of neon pies that the neon pieman offered him.
“Twenty-eight flavors,” I read aloud.
“Always out of season,” my mother said.
“Coffee is their most disgusting flavor.” Whenever we went there, they’d just have vanilla, chocolate, coffee, and strawberry. Any other flavor we’d ask for was out of season.
“It’s disgusting, all right.”
My father glanced at her. “Malcolm probably considered those stamps another fringe benefit.”
Fringe was the slinky stuff around the edges of my Ossining Grandma’s piano shawl. She was my mom’s mother. Rough and loving, she was sorry as soon as she slapped me or yelled at me, and she’d pull me into her arms; but it was the sting of her palm that lasted—not the kiss on my forehead. We didn’t see her often, but when we did, I liked driving past Sing Sing, where my Ossining Grandpa had worked as a guard till he died from a burst appendix when my mother was ten. My Ossining Grandma prayed a lot for her dead husband. Each prayer, she said, was a parking voucher for God. She got one extra parking voucher for each votive candle she burned in the red glass by the picture of Mother Cabrini, a new saint who got to be a saint by working with emigrants from Italy.
But ever since last summer, my parents hadn’t driven past Sing Sing. Because of the Rosenbergs, my mother said. She felt sorry for the Rosenbergs’ little boys, who were orphans now. “I’m not that sure the Rosenbergs really were Russian spies,” she’d say. “The one thing I am sure of is that McCarthy is a liar, a bully. Even President Eisenhower is scared of him.”
“Malcolm considers the world his very own fringe benefit,” my father said.
I couldn’t imagine the world with a fringe. My second-grade teacher, Sister Lucille, had a map of the world above the boys’ coat rack, and my hook was beneath Africa, with the most crosses for missions. During one of our air-raid drills, Maria Donez had cried, and Sister Lucille had told us Maria was sad because her family was going home to Guatemala. I forgot the name of her country, and when I told my mother that Maria was going back to Palmolive, she said Palmolive was soap, not a country. The following morning I’d asked Sister and she’d shown me Guatemala on her map.
“What’s fringe benefit?” I asked my parents.
“Remember now, Anthony—” my father said, “—whatever the Amedeo family talks about in the car, stays in the car. And whatever the Amedeo family talks about in the house, stays in the house.”
I mouthed the words along with him. I certainly heard them often enough.
“Fringe benefits,” my mother explained, “is what people get in addition to their pay when they work. Like vacations. Or paid holidays.”
“Or stamps?”
“Never stamps. Never office equipment. Never tires or—”
; “And never shingles?”
She started coughing, but it sounded fake.
“You’re fake-coughing,” I said. “You’re really laughing.”
She winked at me.
“Didn’t I tell you the boy hears too much?” my father asked.
My mother leaned toward him to whisper into his ear, her lips as red as her hat.
Last summer Uncle Malcolm had been in trouble—“deep-shit trouble,” my mother had called it—for selling a shipment of asbestos shingles he’d stolen from Quality Roofing, where he worked. The two brothers who owned Quality had waited for him one evening after dark in an alley off Webster Avenue, near Papa John’s Diner. Both arms and hands in casts, Uncle Malcolm did much of his healing on the striped couch, opening his mouth for the pasta e fagioli and linguine that Aunt Floria fed him fork by fork, hunkering over him like a black-feathered mother bird.
One Sunday, while we visited, he made the twins stand in front of the couch and hold his bulky accordion between them. It glittered like the mother-of-pearl crucifix that Kevin’s father had tied to the rearview mirror of his cab. Kevin’s father used to drive a bus until he was blacklisted.
“Those Quality crooks stole the music away from your dear papa,” Uncle Malcolm said. “Forever. Now the accordion is your legacy, girls.” Usually he talked like the rest of us, but when he got dramatic, his British accent expanded, though he’d left England when he was sixteen and got fired from his apprenticeship with a roofing company.