Unto the Sons Page 2

  One night at the dinner table when I casually picked up a loaf of Italian bread and placed it upside down in the basket, my father became furious and, without further explanation, turned the loaf right side up and demanded that I never repeat what I had done. Whenever we attended the cinema as a family we left before the end, possibly because of my parents’ inability or unwillingness to relate to the film’s content, be it drama or comedy. And although my parents spent their entire married life living along the sea, I never saw them go sailing, fishing, or swimming, and rarely did they even venture onto the beach itself.

  In my mother’s case I suspect her avoidance of the beach was due to her desire to prevent the sun from scorching and darkening her fair skin. But I believe my father’s aversion to the sea was based on something deeper, more complex, somehow related to his boyhood in southern Italy. I suggest this because I often heard him refer to his region’s coastline as foreboding and malarial, a place of piracy and invasion; and as an avid reader of Greek mythology—his birthplace is not far from the renowned rock of Scylla, where the Homeric sea monster devoured sailors who had escaped the whirlpool of Charybdis—my father was prone to attaching chimerical significance to certain bizarre or inexplicable events that occurred during his youth along the streams and lakes below his village.

  I remember overhearing, when I was eleven or twelve, my father complaining to my mother that he had just experienced a sleepless night during which he had been disturbed by beachfront sounds resembling howling wolves, distant but distinct, and reminiscent of a frightful night back in 1914 when his entire village had been stirred by such sounds; when the villagers awoke they discovered that the azure water of their lake had turned a murky red.

  It was a mournful precursor of things to come, my father explained to my mother: his own father would soon die unexpectedly of an undiagnosed ailment, and a bloody world war would destroy the lives of so many of his young countrymen, including his older brother.

  I, too, had sometimes heard in Ocean City at night what sounded like wolves echoing above the sand dunes; but I knew they were really stray dogs, part of the large population of underfed pets and watchdogs abandoned each fall by summer merchants and vacationers during the peak years of the Depression, when the local animal shelter was inadequately staffed or closed entirely.

  Even in summertime the dogs roamed freely on the boardwalk during the Depression, mingling with the reduced number of tourists who strolled casually up and down the promenade, passing the restaurants of mostly unoccupied tables, the soundless bandstand outside the music pavilion, and the carousel’s riderless wooden horses.

  My mother loathed the sight and smell of these dogs; and as if her disapproval provoked their spiteful nature, they followed her everywhere. Moments after she had emerged from the house to escort me to school before her mile walk along deserted streets to join my father at the store, the dogs would appear from behind fences and high-weeded yards and trail her by several paces in a quiet trot, softly whimpering and whining, or growling or panting with their tongues extended.

  While there were a few pointers and terriers, spaniels and beagles, they were mostly mongrels of every breed and color, and all of them seemed unintimidated by my mother, even after she abruptly turned and glared at them and tried to drive them away with a sweeping gesture of her right arm in the air. They never attacked her or advanced close enough to nip at her high heels; it was mainly a game of territorial imperative that they played each morning with her. By the winter of 1940, the dogs had definitely won.

  At this time my mother was caring for her second and final child, a daughter four years my junior; and I think that the daily responsibility of rearing two children, assisting in the store, and being followed, even when we children accompanied her, by the ragged retinue of dogs—a few of which often paused to copulate in the street as my sister and I watched in startled wonderment—drove my mother to ask my father to sell our house on the isolated north end of the island and move us into the more populated center of town.

  This he unhesitatingly did, although in the depressed real estate market of that time he was forced to sell at an unfavorable price. But he also benefitted from these conditions by obtaining at a bargain on the main street of Ocean City a large brick building that had been the offices of a weekly newspaper lately absorbed in a merger. The spacious first floor of the building, with its high ceiling and balcony, its thick walls and deep interior, its annex and parking lot, provided more than enough room for my father’s various enterprises—his dress shop and dry-cleaning service, his fur storage vaults and tailoring trade.

  More important to my mother, however, was the empty floor of the building, an open area as large as a dance hall that would be converted into an apartment offering her both a convenient closeness to my father and the option of distance from everyone else when she so desired. Since she also decorated this space in accord with her dictum that living quarters should be designed less to be lived in than to be looked at and admired, my sister and I soon found ourselves residing in an abode that was essentially an extended showroom. It was aglow with crystal chandeliers and sculpted candles in silver holders, and it had several bronze claw-footed marble-topped coffee tables surrounded by velvet sofas and chairs that bespoke comfort and taste but nonetheless conveyed the message that should we children ever take the liberty of reclining on their cushions and pillows, we should, upon rising, be certain we did not leave them rumpled or scattered or even at angles asymmetrical to the armrests.

  Not only did my father not object to this fastidiously decorative ambience, he accentuated it by installing in the apartment several large mirrors that doubled the impression of almost everything in view, and also concealed in the rear of the apartment the existence of three ersatz bedrooms that for some reason my parents preferred not to acknowledge.

  Each bed was separately enclosed within an L-shaped ten-foot-high partition that on the inside was backed by shelves and closets and on the outside was covered entirely with mirrors. Whatever was gained by this arrangement was lost whenever a visitor bumped into a mirror. And while I never remember at night being an unwitting monitor of my parents’ intimacy, I do know that otherwise in this domestic hall of mirrors we as a family hardly ever lost sight of one another.

  Most embarrassing to me were those moments when, on entering the apartment unannounced after school, I saw reflected in a mirror, opposite a small alcove, the bowed head of my father as he knelt on the red velvet of a prie-dieu in front of a wall portrait of a bearded, brown-robed medieval monk. The monk’s face was emaciated, his lips seemed dry, and as he stood on a rock in sandals balancing a crosier in his right arm, his dark, somber eyes looked skyward as if seeking heavenly relief from the sins that surrounded him.

  Ever since my earliest youth I had heard again and again my father’s astonishing tales about this fifteenth-century southern Italian miracle worker, Saint Francis of Paola. He had cured the crippled and revived the dead, he had multiplied food and levitated and with his hands stopped mountain boulders from rolling down upon villages; and one day in his hermitage, after an alluring young woman had tempted his celibacy, he had hastily retreated and leaped into an icy river to extinguish his passion.

  The denial of pleasure, the rejection of worldly beauty and values, dominated the entire life of Saint Francis, my father had emphasized, adding that Francis as a boy had slept on stones in a cave near my father’s own village, had fasted and prayed and flagellated himself, and had finally established a credo of punishing piety and devotion that endures in southern Italy to this day, almost six hundred years after the birth of the saint.

  I myself had seen other portraits of Saint Francis in the Philadelphia homes of some of my father’s Italian friends whom we occasionally visited on Sunday afternoons; and while I never openly doubted the veracity of Francis’s achievements, I never felt comfortable after I had climbed the many steps of the private staircase leading to the apartment and opened the livi
ng room door to see my father kneeling in prayer before this almost grotesque oil painting of a holy figure whose aura suggested agony and despair.

  Prayer for me was either a private act witnessed exclusively by God or a public act carried out by the congregation or by me and my classmates in parochial school. It was not an act to be on exhibition in a family parlor in which I, as a nonparticipating observer, felt suddenly like an interloper, a trapped intruder in spiritual space, an awkward youth who dared not disturb my father’s meditation by announcing my presence. And yet I could not unobtrusively retreat from the room, or remain unaffected or even unafraid as I stood there, stifled against the wall, overhearing during these war years of the 1940s my father’s whispered words as he sought from Saint Francis nothing less than a miracle.

  2.

  Quite apart from his patriotic activities with the Ocean City shore patrol throughout World War II, and his pro-American speeches to the local Rotary Club, which would soon elect him its president, my father was silently terrified by the Allied forces’ successful invasion of Sicily in 1943 and their inevitable plan to move north up the Italian peninsula against the Nazi and Fascist troops who were encamped in and around the southern region of his birth.

  His widowed mother still occupied the Talese family’s ancient stone house in the hills with most of my father’s kinfolk, except those who were soldiers at the front, associated with the Germans against the advancing Allied ground units and bombers.

  The southernmost part of Italy was virtually indefensible, my father conceded to me at breakfast after reading in The New York Times about the fall of Sicily; it was the fragile toe of the Italian boot, an exposed area where the slanted farmlands and jagged hills descended from the higher northern peaks and were surrounded almost entirely by unguarded bodies of water. To the east was the Ionian Sea, to the west the Tyrrhenian, and to the southwest was the Strait of Messina, which scarcely separated the southern tip of Italy from the island of Sicily.

  Although my father’s village—Maida—was sixty-five miles northeast of Messina, it was precariously situated. The curving coastlines of the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas cut deeply into the mainland, so deeply that Maida’s population of thirty-five hundred people was clustered in beige stone houses on the rocky interior of the narrowest part of Italy. The distance between the two coastlines here could be traversed by a motorist in little more than an hour; and adding to Maida’s vulnerability to invasion, my father said, was a wide plateau below its western slope that could serve as a passageway or attacking ground for great numbers of troops traveling with heavy equipment. Indeed, this land had already been the scene of a brutal battle between the soldiers of France and Britain during the era of Napoleon Bonaparte.

  It happened on a hot July morning in 1806, said my father, whose recounting of history was always accompanied by precise details; it happened after the surprise landing of more than five thousand British troops on the shingly shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea along the outer edge of Maida’s plateau.

  The British troops were led by a bold American-born officer who was a native of Georgia—General John Stuart, whose property-owning parents in the American South had remained loyal to the crown during the American Revolution. After they had returned to England, young Stuart received a commission as a British officer in 1778. In 1780 he participated in the siege of Charleston, South Carolina; then the invasion of North Carolina and, finally, Virginia, where, severely wounded, he and other red-coated units under Lord Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown in 1781.

  After recovering his health and returning to England, Stuart resumed a military career that during the following decades would see him leading British regiments, brigades, and divisions between Flanders and Alexandria in almost constant conflict with the French—culminating, after sailing with his troops from Sicily past the rock of Scylla northward toward that plateau, in the battle of Maida in 1806.

  The Italian mainland in 1806 was largely influenced by the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, a fact that was not displeasing to a large percentage of Italians. As my father often said, the Italians considered Napoleon more Italian than French because he was descended from a family that had emigrated from northern Italy to Corsica when that island was ruled by the Italian republic of Genoa—which, over the protests of many Corsicans, ceded it to the French shortly before Napoleon’s birth in Corsica in 1769.

  Among the anti-French Corsican agitators during this time was Napoleon’s father, who became resigned to the French occupation of the island only after the leader of the Corsican resistance movement had been forced to flee. As a result of his father’s subsequent cooperation and politicking with the French administrators, the younger Napoleon was able to leave Corsica and receive the benefits of a higher education in continental France. And yet during his school years and swift rise through the ranks of the French army, Napoleon continued to spell his surname in the Italian style, “Buonaparte,” even after he had been appointed a brigadier general at the age of twenty-four in 1793.

  It was in this same year that the British officer John Stuart became a lieutenant colonel at thirty-four; but as my father pointed out, it was much more difficult to move up within the British officer corps than the French because France was then involved with its Reign of Terror, and there were frequent vacancies created at the top of the French military establishment because of the many defections, expulsions, and even executions of aristocratic French officers.

  It was during this very same year of 1793, in fact, that the French beheaded King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette. The act shocked royal rulers around the world, but it was mourned with more personal passion in the palace at Naples, the capital city of the southern Italian kingdom, where the throne was occupied by Queen Marie Caroline (sister of the guillotined Marie Antoinette) and the Bourbon king Ferdinand, a member of a branch of the same dynasty as the fallen French king.

  In addition to the sadness and anger in Naples there were grave feelings of insecurity among the ruling elite throughout the Kingdom of Southern Italy, because they were aware that in Maida, as in dozens of other villages, secret revolutionary societies were scheming to overthrow the privileged families who had ruled over the hills and farmlands since the Norman conquerors had brought feudalism into southern Italy in the eleventh century.

  A Norman castle built in Maida in that century was still standing in the early twentieth, my father told me; and despite its decrepit condition, it was sometimes used when he was a child as a place of incarceration while the accused awaited transfer to a larger prison elsewhere. But the castle’s dungeon also served to remind my father how deep-rooted was the medieval mentality of his native land, how enduring were certain of its archaic methods. Indeed, the Maida valley that would be the battleground between Napoleon’s musketeers and Stuart’s invaders in 1806—the British won the conflict after four ferocious days, and subsequently memorialized it by naming a West London district Maida Vale, after my father’s village—had undoubtedly absorbed the blood of two thousand years of warfare, going back to the days of Roman chariots and Hannibal’s elephants, of savage Magyar horsemen and Saracen pirates who, sailing toward southern Italy with clarions and trumpets blaring, filled the sunny sky with darts of poison.

  While I was always impressed with my father’s vivid depiction of history, my attention sometimes wandered during these long and frequently repetitive lectures conducted after dinner amid the soft but often distracting sounds of Puccini and Verdi rising from the scratchy glass records of my father’s old Victrola. And yet his intensity made me aware of his almost obsessive need to tell me about himself, to explain and perhaps justify himself as he described his past and traced his odyssey along the Tyrrhenian Sea to Paris and later across the Atlantic Ocean to the Jersey shore, where he now had me as his captive audience. To me he could confess his anxiety and, possibly, guilt, or at the very least expose a side of himself that his tailor’s taste for appearances would prevent him from reveal
ing beyond the walls of this mirrored apartment.

  Ironically, while I was failing an American history course in parochial school—where I was also subjected to ethnic slurs hurled by a few Irish Catholic boys whose older brothers had just participated in the conquest of Sicily—I was becoming, under my father’s tutelage, a reluctant scholar of the history of the southern tip of Italy, which, if my father’s worst fears materialized, would soon be blown off the map.

  Perhaps that accounted for his determination to enlighten me about it, so that I might survive, as he had, to keep its obscure history alive in the retelling—and to take pride, as well as solace, in associating Italy with the rich chronology preceding its alliance with Nazi Germany.

  3.

  To hear my father tell it, and I have heard it often, the south of Italy flourished long before the rise of the Roman Empire and the birth of Christ, and in his native village of Maida and its surrounding region—which extends south of Naples down through ancient hills and valleys to form the toe and heel of the Italian boot—there occurred historical spectacles and scenes that constituted many centuries of human experience at its worst and best, its most barbaric and aesthetic, its most destitute and luxurious.

  A word synonymous with luxury and sensual gratification—sybaritic—derives, my father told me, from a pre-Christian city north of Maida called Sybaris, which was founded in 720 B.C. by enterprising Greek colonists who combined a thriving economy with a penchant for self-indulgence and comfort: Sybaris’s bright streets were shaded with awnings; its leading citizens regularly bathed in saunas tended by slaves; and its women appeared at sumptuous banquets wearing gold circlets in their hair, high-heeled shoes imported from Persia, and low-cut gowns that revealed part of their breasts.