Unto the Sons (35 page)

Ippolita now felt that she had no choice but to yield herself to her neighbors’ attention, to give them daily reports on her condition, and sometimes to join them on their shopping excursions, for to do otherwise would seem rude and unresponsive to their expressions of goodwill. She even became receptive to her sister-in-law in ways she had vowed she would never be: she politely welcomed Carolina on her daily visits and accepted with thanks her offerings of herbs and special soups deemed ideal for the health of expectant mothers (the forty-year-old childless Carolina considered herself an authority on motherhood), and also allowed
Carolina to make the arrangements for the child’s christening, on the condition that there be no black ribbons or bunting, or other symbols of mourning, displayed in the church.

A baby boy was born in the late summer of 1871. Cheerfully ignoring his customary abstemiousness, Domenico shared a barrel of wine with his farm workers and friends. Later, in the church, where the christening was witnessed by a larger and far more festive crowd than had attended Ippolita’s wedding, tradition was adhered to and the boy was named after his paternal grandfather—in this case, Gaetano. During the pouring of the holy water over the child’s head, and the enunciation of his name, the pastor dutifully honored Ippolita’s request to refrain from memorializing the tragic death of the child’s namesake.

After Domenico and Ippolita had taken the baby home, and had gradually become engrossed in the involving duties of child care, she realized that her maternal obligations now provided her with the perfect excuse once more to avoid socializing with her neighbors. She was able to feign fatigue when they sought her company, and, since her husband had employed a farmer’s daughter to do the shopping, Ippolita could politely refuse their willingness to help with that. Although she felt misanthropic at times, she recognized as rarely before her need for privacy—not only as a guard against her well-meaning neighbors, or out of a desire to become the devotional mother that her own ailing mother was unable to be, but rather because she wanted in each day a prolonged period of solitude that she could selfishly call her own.

During her son’s first year she was able to find this time; while her child napped and her husband was out on his business rounds, she could read and embroider, and let her mind wander in ways that had been habitual since her early youth as the introspective only child of an elderly father and a melancholy mother.

But when a second son was born the next year, and a third the year after that, and then a fourth child, this time a daughter, the luxury of quietude ceased to exist for Ippolita—suddenly she was overwhelmed by her duties, exhausted from lack of sleep, unnerved by the complaints of the overworked servant girl, who threatened to return to the farm. It was then that Ippolita’s sister-in-law and another woman from the neighborhood knocked on her door one afternoon with flowers and a basket of fruit, and asked if they could be of help. With tears of gratitude, the young mother of four welcomed them into her house.

In time Carolina had become especially fond of Ippolita’s dark-eyed infant daughter, Maria. After the child had been weaned, Carolina frequently
took her to her own house, where she played with and cared for her; and in the years that followed, Maria began regularly to accompany Carolina and Domenico to church. She followed the motions of the priest with interest and joined in the communal prayers with a fervor that, as Maria approached her teens, suggested to Carolina a possible religious vocation. But Domenico did not want this. Maria was his only daughter and favorite child, and he liked having her close to him. She was obedient and modest without being timid. She also possessed a serene comeliness that Domenico knew was not going unnoticed by the young men who saw her in church.

When she was fifteen, one of these men, twenty-one-year-old Francesco Cristiani, a tailor in the family firm that made Domenico’s clothes, privately approached Domenico in the shop one day and acknowledged an aspiration to have Maria for his wife. Domenico had known Francesco since his early youth, had been impressed with his devotion to the Church, and knew that he was hardworking and reliable. Francesco’s family had little land, and the tailoring trade was not a lucrative business, but Domenico had never heard of any scandal attached to the Cristiani name, and he admired young Francesco’s forthrightness in coming to him directly, rather than relying on an older male relative, as was the custom, to broach the sensitive subject of taking away a daughter. And yet Maria was too young for even a preliminary agreement to be arrived at, Domenico told Francesco, although he promised to discuss the matter again within a year. At that time, Domenico said, he would also meet with Francesco’s father and uncles. If all went well at this meeting, Domenico said, he would then invite Francesco and his entire family over to his house for a Sunday luncheon at which young Maria would also be present.

The attention and affection that characterized Domenico’s relationship with his daughter did not exist in the case of his sons. The two younger boys, Giuseppe and Vincenzo, were good-natured but lethargic, inattentive in school and greatly spoiled at home by their adoring mother and the neighborhood women who fussed over them, indulged them, and never made any demands upon them. Slow to walk as babies, and unadventuresome as young men, Giuseppe and Vincenzo grew up to become barely competent as the employees of their father, who sullenly supported them but extended to them little responsibility or respect.

Domenico’s oldest son presented a different problem. Lively and intelligent, Gaetano was initially perceived by his father as a worthy successor, until he began to reveal during his early adolescence a streak of
stubbornness and independence. As a baby Gaetano had quickly learned to walk, and it seemed to his mother that he was precociously disposed to leaving home. She saw him change from a contented child accustomed to receiving her undivided attention, to a restless and roving child once his younger siblings had been added to the household. Whether he had been unable to adjust to the more crowded circumstances, or simply was incapable of sharing her affections, his mother did not know; she knew only that if she did not keep an eye on him, he would soon disappear from her sight.

Gaetano loathed the farm, and constantly escaped his father’s efforts to keep him there. He seemed not content to remain in the village, either, preferring to wander off by himself to the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea and to stare for hours at the passing steamships. There were now many trains running along the shorelines of southern Italy, and one night during the early autumn of 1887, after Gaetano had turned sixteen, he followed two older companions through the open panel of a train stock car and rode all the way into Naples.

The police were summoned, notifications were circulated throughout the regional precincts; but his whereabouts were not traced. Gaetano’s traveling companions, both natives of another village, had been sought by the police earlier that year to answer for their role in political riots that occurred the previous spring in the provincial capital of Catanzaro. In the south there were now constant protests against the rule and policies of the new centralized government. One large group of dissenters was led by radical Catholic laymen who opposed the reduction of the Pope’s temporal power by the politicians who had already dislodged him from the Quirinal Palace and were now running the nation from the once saintly city of Rome. A second group of dissenters was against the Pope
and
the government—they were, in fact, internationalists who were inspired by such leaders as the late Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist and pamphleteer, who had admirers in cities throughout Europe, including such southern Italian cities as Naples, Palermo, Cosenza, and Catanzaro. The two men with whom Gaetano had jumped on the train were revolutionary Socialists and adherents of Bakunin; and when Gaetano’s father learned of this, he felt great embarrassment and humiliation in the presence of his fellow churchmen and villagers.

When Gaetano returned home in November, with an unsatisfactory explanation and little contrition about his absence, he received a thrashing from Domenico and was tied up in a barn for two days, subsisting on water and stale bread. Gaetano’s mother and the rest of the family were
upset by this punishment, although they were not critical of Domenico for imposing it; but Gaetano himself accepted it uncomplainingly, as if he were a martyr strengthened by some noble cause that transcended pain and suffering.

What this noble cause might be was unknown to Domenico, but from the political jargon that came out of Gaetano’s mouth in subsequent weeks during their sometimes heated discussions, Domenico guessed that his son had been smitten by revolutionary Socialism, which was currently spreading in popularity throughout the land. A few Socialist proselytizers had recently visited Maida making speeches, and Domenico was familiar with their slogans and rhetoric, although he preferred to believe that their appeal to his impressionable young son was sparked more by his youthful impetuosity and personal rebelliousness than by any reasoned conviction. For this was indeed a period of youthful bravado in southern Italian history—the bright promise of General Garibaldi’s revolution had drifted with the dust of the Redshirts’ horses; and the political and economic decline of the autonomous southern kingdom was accompanied by the decline in the power that the fathers had over their sons. Even a devoted son would not follow a father forever along a path that led only to continuing poverty and subjugation. In Gaetano’s case, however, his estrangement from his father was attuned not to the economy but rather to the personal nature of their relationship, an imprecisely expressed but deeply felt divisiveness that would only harden unless there were some compromises and a deeper understanding on both sides.

Hoping to improve the situation, for he still regarded Gaetano as his most capable heir, Domenico tried to see Gaetano as his prodigal son, and in a rare display of affection and forgiveness months after Gaetano had returned home, he embraced his oldest son one day and offered to step aside and let him exercise authority over the daily operation of the farmlands and mills. But Gaetano responded, as tactfully as he could, that he was not interested. He would soon be leaving for America, he said. He had spoken to an agent in Naples who was recruiting workers for employment in Philadelphia; and he had been promised that his travel costs would be advanced in the spring. When his reasoning failed to convince his son to change his mind, Domenico’s rage, which until now had been kept tightly under control, suddenly erupted. He vowed that if Gaetano went, he would never speak to him again, nor would he ever wish to see him.

In the spring of 1888, Gaetano left for America. He was not yet seventeen. He took a mail boat from Pizzo to Naples, signed the documents that the agent presented to him, and with forty other young men began
the twenty-day crossing that would take him eventually to Philadelphia. He said good-bye to his mother and his siblings, but not to his father. Domenico had remained behind the closed door of his bedroom, ignoring Ippolita’s pleas that he wish his son a safe voyage.

Gaetano stayed away from home for the next six years. During that time he wrote often to his mother, describing his work and what he had seen in the New Land. He said he was being trained as a stonemason and artisan. He sent a photograph of himself posing in front of City Hall in Philadelphia, wearing a suit that Francesco Cristiani had made for him, and a second photograph showed him in work clothes, standing with other men in front of a fountain they were building in the Philadelphia suburbs for the renowned asbestos manufacturer Dr. Richard V. Mattison, who was their primary employer and had sponsored their trans-Atlantic crossing. Gaetano also occasionally sent from Wanamaker’s new store in Philadelphia small gifts for his mother, his brothers, and his sister; and in 1892 he sent a wedding present to Maria on the occasion of her marriage to the tailor Francesco Cristiani.

Maria had half expected that Gaetano would return to Italy for the wedding, for he had been informed that in the years since his departure his father’s attitude toward him had greatly mellowed, partly because of the appeals and persuasive reasoning of Ippolita and, until her death earlier in 1892, of Domenico’s sister, Carolina. But Maria learned from her husband that more than discord with Domenico was keeping Gaetano in America. Gaetano feared that if he returned he might be arrested for questioning about certain radical Socialists in Naples he was known to have befriended, especially those who had helped him obtain a berth on the overcrowded ship that carried him to America.

The conservative authoritarian government in Rome was not opposed to the fact that each year many thousands of Italians were leaving for America (it actually welcomed the exodus because it reduced the nation’s economic burden, particularly in the overpopulated unindustrial south, where most of the departing passengers had come from); but the government
was
opposed to the network of Socialists and anarchists who had somehow gained enough influence within the Naples seaport—conspiring no doubt with Mafia-connected dockworkers and crewmen—that they managed to obtain cabin space for their political associates and their friends on ships where no space was listed as available.

The network also concealed the identity while at sea of political fugitives and other individuals in trouble with the law, and when necessary it could supply falsified traveling documents and employment papers. In
addition to booking the passage of the American-bound migratory workers they had recruited (using funds advanced to them by American employers eager for cheap labor), members of the network sometimes loaned money to the workers that their partners abroad later collected with interest. Most American bosses, speaking no Italian, entrusted to them the workers’ salaries and relied on them to distribute it fairly.

In Gaetano’s case, the network not only provided him with a berth on a steamship and an American job that would enable him to reimburse his travel costs, but also arranged for his lodging in a boardinghouse owned by an Italian immigrant. The house was near Gaetano’s first job site in the outskirts of Philadelphia. The owner of the boardinghouse, who spoke English, was named Carmine Lobianco, and he was a cousin of two of the men who had helped Gaetano sail out of Naples; Lobianco was friendly with most of the other men who operated out of offices in the terminal building along the Bay of Naples. Like his cousins, Lobianco was a radical Socialist. A few of the others were anarchists.