A Writer's Life (11 page)

“All right, let us proceed,” she then said with a sigh, although she seemed to continue to look at me. “It's a sad but obvious fact that we have someone among us today who is unwilling to assume responsibility. But let this be a word of warning to all of you. If I
ever
catch anyone whistling, it will lead to your instant expulsion. Am I making myself clear?”

There were nods and murmurings of agreement from myself and the rest of the students, including the football players.

“This is a
classroom
,” she continued, “and here we
will
maintain proper standards of behavior.…”

After more nods from the students, she stepped toward the desk at the front of the room, introduced herself after she had taken her seat, and then proceeded to outline what subjects we would cover in this English composition class that in the ensuing months would bring me so little joy.

T
HROUGHOUT MY HIGH SCHOOL YEARS AND DURING MOST OF MY
boyhood, my parents made our home in an apartment above their store. The conversations my mother and father had upstairs usually involved things going on downstairs, and the ringing of the telephone and the doorbell was simultaneously heard above and below. The extra mirrors from the store that my father installed in our living quarters multiplied everything we saw, deflecting rather than reflecting any sense of intimacy and domesticity.

While the apartment did have an adequate kitchen and dining area, I do not recall ever sitting down and enjoying a relaxing and satisfying home-cooked meal. This was due not only to the interrupting phone calls from customers but to the fact that my preoccupied parents rarely made the effort to shop properly for food even when they had the time to do so on weekends. My mother was one of the few Italian-American women of her generation who disliked being in the kitchen.

She was a businesswoman, an entrepreneurial individual whose best customers were her best friends, and she entertained them in her boutique (dispatching me to get them sodas, tea, or ice cream from the corner drugstore) as if they were guests in her true and only home. Here she held private conversations with them, earned their confidence and trust in a way that sooner or later inclined them toward buying most of the dresses she recommended. The merchandise my mother featured catered to decorous women of ample figures and means. These were the ministers' wives, the bankers' wives, the bridge players, the tale bearers. They were the white-gloved ladies who in summer avoided the beach and the boardwalk to spend considerable amounts of time and money along the main avenue in places like my parents' shop, where, amid the low humming of the fans and the attentive care of my mother in the dressing rooms, they would try on clothes while discussing their private lives and the happenings and misadventures of their friends and neighbors.

The shop was a kind of talk show that flowed around the engaging manner and well-timed questions of my mother; and even when I was hardly taller than the counters behind which I used to pause and listen, I began to learn much that would be useful to me years later when I began interviewing people for articles and books. I learned never to interrupt when people were having difficulty in explaining themselves, for during such halting and imprecise moments (as the listening skills of my patient mother taught me) people often are very revealing. What they hesitated to talk about told much about them. Their pauses, their evasions, their sudden shifts in subject matter were likely indicators of what embarrassed them, or irritated them, or what they regarded as too private or imprudent to be disclosed. However, I later overheard many people discussing candidly with my mother what they had earlier avoided—a reaction that, I think, had less to do with her inquiring nature or sensitively posed questions than with their gradual acceptance of her as an individual in whom they could fully confide. My mother's best customers were women less in need of new dresses than the need to communicate.

Most of them were born of privileged Philadelphia families of Anglo-Saxon or Germanic stock, and they were generally tall and large-sized in a way typified by Eleanor Roosevelt. Their suntanned, leathery, handsome faces were browned primarily as a result of their devotion to gardening, which they described to my mother as their favorite summertime hobby. When one of these women came into the store, my mother was unavailable for phone calls, relying on my father or one of the employees to take messages, and while there were one or two women who abused her forbearance as a listener, droning on for hours, I was interested in most of what I heard and witnessed there. In fact, in the decades since I have left home, during which time I have retained a clear memory of my eavesdropping youth and the women's voices that gave it expression, it seems to me that many of the social and political questions that have been debated in America since then—the role of religion in the bedroom, racial equality, women's rights, the adulteries of public officials, the advisability of films and publications featuring sex and violence—I overheard in my mother's shop during my elementary and high school years of the 1940s.

My mother, born Catherine Di Paola on Mulberry Street in Manhattan's Little Italy to parents originally from my father's native village in Calabria, moved as a young girl into Brooklyn with her large family after her father had found steady work as the chauffeur and general factotum of a real estate developer in that borough. When my mother was twenty-one
and employed as an assistant buyer in the dress department of Abraham & Straus, a store that had hired her after her graduation from high school, she met my father at a Brooklyn wedding in the mid-1920s that united one of her sisters to one of his cousins. Within a few years she and my father were married and residing in Ocean City, beginning a relationship of more than sixty years that combined their love and compatibility with their shared interest in wearing and selling fine clothes and their capacity to cover up their lives in ways that I might prefer to call mysteriously romantic but that as a youth I found troubling and confusing.

There is such a thing as having parents who are too much in love, whose essential needs are so completely met by each other that no one else is essential to their well-being, including their own children. As a Catholic couple, they produced only two children, my younger sister and myself, and we grew up thinking we were in the way of our parents' relationship, that our main function was merely to complete the picture of their completeness, to accompany them to Sunday Mass and then stand beside them on the sidewalk, smiling while being introduced to their fellow parishioners, and later in the day to stroll with them on the boardwalk in nearby Atlantic City among the casually dressed crowds and roving photographers who usually mistook us (with our fine clothes and familial formality) for a family of visiting dignitaries from abroad, which is, I think, precisely the impression my parents wished to convey. After my mother had left Brookyn and my father had severed his ties to Italy, they reconstructed their lives together in a place where the social atmosphere differed greatly from anything they had previously known (an island mandated by prohibitionist Protestants who disallowed the sale of even a glass of wine), and yet here my parents were at liberty to associate with mainstream Americans without being surrounded by masses of immigrants who might confirm the worst early-twentieth-century stereotype of their countrymen as clannish, garlic-smelling laborers with dark-garbed wives and lots of aggressive children who were delinquent in school and destined to prosper only in the realm of organized crime.

This island was my parents' point of departure from all traces of Ellis Island, a midway point before melding in, and here they carefully walked hand in hand on weekends and were inseparable during the week in their store and after hours in our home, which was more or less an annex of the store. They had earlier bought a white cottage by the sea on the northern end of the island, but after my birth in 1932—in the fourth year of their marriage—my mother did not want to be so far away from the store during those hours she was caring for me, and so she encouraged my father to
move the business into a building that had an upper floor. This he did almost immediately, renting a two-story commercial property on the main street for a few years until he was able to purchase a large brick building two doors away that had been the site of the town's second weekly newspaper, an enterprise that had recently gone bankrupt and that my father acquired on excellent terms during the years of the Great Depression.

Mirrors are what I most remember about living in that spacious apartment, large—ten-by-twelve-foot—mirrors that covered the portable partitions that concealed the bedrooms in the rear area, which had once been occupied by linotype machines, and smaller mirrors that had been mismeasured or otherwise found inappropriate for the store below and were affixed to the walls upstairs in various places, reflecting every feature and piece of furniture existing in that wide and high-ceilinged hundred-foot-long room that we called home but could have been better utilized as a dance studio. In fact, my parents occasionally used it as that, and perhaps my earliest consciousness of the harmony and interiority of their relationship occurred one evening when, as they heard waltz music coming from their favorite classical radio station in Philadelphia, they suddenly interrupted a discussion they had been having with me to stand up and embrace each other, and then to begin dancing around the room for ten or fifteen minutes without ever once turning to look in my direction, to wave or wink or otherwise acknowledge that I was in the room, next to the coffee table, where they had left me, sitting on one of the red leather chairs that matched the ones used by my mother in her shop. I was then eleven or twelve, and while I do not wish at this late date to try to revive and interpret my emotions of more than a half century ago—other than to concede that I would never in my life feel comfortable on a dance floor, nor would I ever accept an invitation to a dinner dance—I do recall feeling miserable at the time and being misty-eyed when my parents paused to turn off the radio and the room lights, and, before heading toward the rear of the apartment together, to call out and remind me that it was well past my bedtime, that my sister had been asleep for hours, and that tomorrow was a school day.

One might assume if one were unlike myself that I would have used the remoteness I felt from my parents to my own advantage, that I would have gone off and done as I pleased, would have cultivated my own separateness, would have disappeared for hours and maybe even run away from home—would they even have noticed?—or that at the very least I would have a boyhood history that would venture well beyond parental
reflections in the mirrored room by which I measured myself. But I was captivated by the two of them, was in awe of them; they were the romantic leads in my ongoing interior movie. My slender and stylishly brunette mother was a stand-in for my favorite actress, Gene Tierney, and my custom-suited, rather exotic father was a second Valentino. I also felt captured with my parents in the confining complexity that prevailed in our household during the World War II years, when my father's homeland was allied with the Nazis and his brothers were armed to confront the Allied invasion.

In public my mother and father always behaved patriotically in the politically conservative community in which we lived. Like the other merchants on the block, my father each morning carried an American flag on a twelve-foot pole out to the sidewalk in front of the shop and inserted it in a hole near the curb. My father also joined a local citizens group that surveyed our coastline around the clock for signs of enemy submarines, performing this task at a time when great numbers of Italians in America were declared enemy aliens and when many were interned at a camp in Montana. Other Italians living within coastal communities were sometimes forced to move inland and surrender to the Coast Guard any fishing boats they had. One who relinquished his boat and temporarily vacated his home along the northern California coastline was the Sicilian-born father of the baseball star Joe DiMaggio.

While my father's commitment to America was never openly questioned in our town as far as I knew, he nonetheless always spoke in public with the same care as he dressed and comported himself, and this remained equally true after the war. My father never discussed the war with me directly, and in this case I welcomed his aloofness. I had learned enough about the war from the Saturday-afternoon newsreels and from two of my tough Irish classmates in parochial school. After one of their uncles had died in action as an American infantryman while attacking the Anzio coastal area, the boys began referring to me in the school yard as “Mussolini” and “dago bastard,” insulting me in voices just quiet enough to be unheard by the nuns; one day they followed me home and beat me up behind a vacant summertime hotel, slashing my left wrist with a long nail, which left a scar I can see today.

I remember running frantically through my parents' shop, dripping blood on the rug, alarming my mother and her customers, and not stopping until I had reached my father back in the alteration room, where, after examining my wrist and hearing my account of the incident, he comforted me while washing my wound and then wrapping it with strips
of basting cloth. My mother was soon there as well, leaving her customers to be attended to by the salesgirl she had originally hired as a baby-sitter. Although the doctor's office was only two blocks away, my mother and father took me there in their car, and during my week of recovery and my absence from school, my parents bestowed upon me the attention they usually reserved for each other. At the same time, however, my father did not want to hear me complaining any more about my wrist or the boys who had attacked me, nor did he file charges against them with the school.

“Just forget about it,” he said; “you've only got a scratch.” And more than once he emphasized, “Don't be a sissy.”