| Just briefly - forgive me reader for the personal note - my own Italian grandmother was a gentle soul who had nine children, none of whom except my mother, stood with her during the depression when she lost her home. She died in the Chicago projects, with my mother and a four year old impressionable, bright grandchild with the "pullmotor squad" there in a noisy, charged atmosphere. My mother was inconsolable - I was manic, running and bumping my head against the couch again and again until a kind fireman took me away to the kitchen and sat me down at the kitchen table with a soft touch and told me to stay there. I don't remember much more except my mother frightened me as she began cursing her brothers and sisters who were absent. Ah, the opera! Ah, the staged movement of the officials in the guise of firemen and the hysterical woman! Ah, the sick feelings now present in the child - so unsettling and foreign - physically affecting the child at the table but she kept the emotions down. It was a necessity and gesture to the two women in the small bedroom. And so a quiet but deadly rage moved into the child where it keeps house today, and depending on the day's drama - in either a desultory fashion or crazy, gerbil-like dance. Something else moved in that day - shame. The shame of loss of status and poverty. Yes - enough said.
So, shall we say - this is one of my deeply personal reads. Oh yes, I'll duke this one out with the Boomers in my Club. Already one of them said she didn't like Lucia who was too emotional and who suffocated her children. But they grew up in a magic time in America - and are even still somewhat protected though economic plunder is in full chorus. (They will learn, says the tight lipped Xanthe like her own mother who often used the phrase to the child.)
Lucia Santa who came to New York from the mountain farms of southern Italy, was not gentle. She was a formidable soldier in the daily battles in New York pitting her children and herself against the movement of history outside her door.
She had two husbands who are peripheral to her story - they are in effect sperm donors. One is killed in an accident and the second goes mad and dies in an asylum. She has three children by each. Lorenzo, Octavia and Vincent by the first. Gino, Sal and Lena by the second. Octavia is by far the strongest of the children and does battle with her mother each and every day. She is fierce in her devotion to the children and an intelligent, shrewd woman. Lorenzo is handsome, feckless, a Lothario, but gives the family money from an early age to survive. He becomes a member of the mafia. Vincent, sweet, lost in a way, born after the death of the father which in Italy is a curse. Gino, wild, selfish (Puzo himself) smart, the one child that pulls from the family as is necessary in an immigrant son. Sal and Lena, a unit, who observe their mother and family quietly from the corners of the house.
Lucia is a member of the black-clad chorus that spends every evening outside on their chairs bemoaning their lives. Lucia's chair is backless - Puzo mentions it often. For after all, why should anyone with Lucia's spine need a chair with a back!
Each in turn told a story of insolence and defiance, themselves heroic, long-suffering, the children spitting Lucifers saved by an application of their mothers' Italian discipline...And at the end of each story each woman recited her requiem. Mannaggia America! Damn America! But in the hot summer night their voices were filled with hope, with a vigor never sounded in their homeland. Here now, was money in the bank, children who could read and write, grandchildren who would be professors if all went well. They spoke with guilty loyalty of customs they had trampled into the dust.
The truth: These country women from the mountain farms of Italy, whose fathers and grandfathers had died in the same rooms in which they were born, these women loved the clashing steel and stone of the great city, the thunder of trains in the railroad yards across the street....As children, they lived in solitude on land so poor that people scattered themselves to search out a living....They were pioneers, though they never walked an American plain and never felt real soil beneath their feet. They moved in a sadder wilderness, where the language was strange, where their children became members of a different race. It was a price that must be paid.
Lucia is proud and watchful always. The outside world is a dangerous place for mothers as herself. She is not wrong - even in this day. This novel is an opera and should be read as an opera is heard. Pay attention to the trains here. They are a character in the novel. As in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, the train signifies the movement of status in the new world, bringing with it noise, heat and speed but also a heady excitement of change. The sweet child, Vincent, who is too malleable and subject to the mother's rule does not rebel and works in a stultifying, constricting job at the railroad, dies in a train accident which may in fact be a suicide.
Lucia is proud. Pride - called the first sin, is in fact the savior of many souls. Because of pride, Lucia takes Octavia to a private hospital when she becomes ill. Though the doctor for instance and neighbors call her foolish. Who does she think she is taking her daughter to a private hospital - the public hospital is not good enough for her? No it is not! As well, she takes all of her and Octavia's savings from the postal office that they blood-squeezed from their lives to pay for that stay. She leaves the neighborhood with her poor English and status fears to take her daughter to this hospital and talk to the wondrously clever and upper class doctors. For her children, she is fearless. A public hospital! To Lucia
It has been said of this great hospital that its professional staff is the finest in the world, that its nurses are more efficient and hard-working than any other nurses and that its medical care for the indigent is as good as can be had. But for Lucia Santa these things mattered little....To her it seemed, Bellevue was the terror of the poor, the last shameful indignity they suffered from life before they went to their death. It was filled with the dregs, the helpless of humanity, the poverty-stricken....The senile aged lay unattended except by visiting relatives....In some wards, were those enraged by life, God's humanity, who had swallowed lye or done some other terrible injury to themselves. Now with physical agony to relieve their other sufferings, they clung to life. Lucia Santa reflected that whatever else you might say of the place, it was a hospital of charity. It owed her and people like her nothing and would receive nothing from them....It was a factory for the human vessel to be glued together without pity, tenderness or love. It was a place to make an animal take up its human burden.
Oh, where is our Puzo today - No, she would not take her daughter to the charity hospital. Pride can be an armour - especially for the poor.
And Octavia does come home well and joins her mother in the war of survival. Here is Octavia at her finest. Her mother must with great sadness ask for financial help from the city without Octavia's paycheck. A puny character, a sniveling bureaucrat visits the home and tells Lucia that he can get her help but she must give him a few dollars each month since he has to twist the truth to get her that money. Lucia understands but treats the man with great courtesy, giving him coffee and sweets when he comes with the money - handing him over the cash with deference. Oh he hates to take it, he says, but he must with his expenses and his low salary. But one morning, Octavia is there when he comes in and sees the transaction. Mr. LaFortezza makes the mistake of asking Octavia to join him at the theatre some evening - making a great gesture of showing Octavia the outside world:
Octavia had been to the theatre with her girlfriends many times. The dressmaking shops got cut rate tickets....But this stupid, starving guinea college kid thought he could screw her. Her eyes began to flash and she spat out shrilly in answer to his invitation: You can go shit in your hat, you lousy bastard. Gino, in a corner with Vinnie said: Ooh-oh, there she goes. Lucia Santa looked around dazedly as if wondering where to run. Mr. La Fortezza was petrified. For there is nothing more petrifying than a young Italian shrew. Octavia's voice in a high, strong, soprano note berated him. (You see Puzo's operatic theme here no?) "You take eight dollars a month from my poor mother, who has four little kids to feed and a sick daughter. You bleed a family with all our trouble and you have the nerve to ask me out? You are a lousy son of a bitch, a lousy, creepy sneak. My kid brothers and sister do without candy and movies so my mother can pay you off, and I'm supposed to go out with you?" Her voice was shrill and incredulous. "You're old fashioned, all right. Only a real guinea bastard from Italy would pull something like that. But I finished high school. I read Zola, and I have gone to the theatre, so find some greenhorn girl off the boat and try to screw her. Because I know you for what you are: a four-flusher full of shit."
Mr. L flies out the door. Like mother, like daughter. Pride has its place. They get a new social worker without the payoff. (As I said, where is our Puzo today.)
A word about poverty, their living conditions. Puzo does not call attention to it. Only when an outsider mentions it, is the reader jolted. As when the doctor mentions cockroaches in the icebox - It is as clean as they can keep it. As my friends used to say in Chicago's west side. My mother's house is so clean, you can eat off the floors. And you could. This area was considered a slum by outsiders.
When war comes, the family's fortunes rise. Gino enlists to get away from them all. Whether he will ever reappear is left to the reader. Finally, the real dream. The family moves to Long Island. But Lucia becomes less - she is leaving her realm and will live in the realm of her son Larry and his family. It is left to the two children, Salvo and Lena to escort their mother to the limousine. For they have watched her do battle for many years and they have a better understanding of her than the older children. She is truly blessed to have these two. Yet, she is leaving the world where she has ruled, battled and joining the others in their new world. Yet, another new world, as America keeps reinventing itself.
Addendum: Octavia is a product of New York's public schools. She is always reading in the novel and could have gone to university and done well. But she had to help at home. Obviously, she received a good education and to graduate high school was a feat in the 1930s. My companion, who grew up in New York, always says when New York is dissed. New York gave. It always has. People forget that. Public education - it's a good thing. Are you listening, President Privatization.
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