Unto the Sons (46 page)

Working day and night during the fall into the early winter of 1912, Antonio had no time to attend the opera, concerts, or the other cultural entertainment that had been provided by the
chef de claque;
and when he had some free time he usually lacked the funds and energy to go out at night, denying himself as well the Folies-Bergère even though it enticed him every time he passed its glittering archway. During the Christmas
holidays of 1912, however, when Damien’s and other shops were closed for a few days, he did accompany his roommate one night to a dance hall called Magic City.

“Shortly after we arrived and had gotten ourselves a drink at the crowded bar,” Antonio wrote to Joseph, “my friend Lauri spotted two young women who were alone at a table. They seemed to be smiling in our direction. Lauri went over and introduced himself, and then waved me over to join them. They both were friendly and seemed to be wealthy. They wore fur coats and had on good jewelry. Lauri and I thought that we had gotten lucky and had fallen in with a pair of rich women. But when we asked them to dance and they had taken off their gloves, the skin of their hands was hard and rough. They were working girls, servants who had borrowed the fur coats and jewelry from their mistresses to wear to Magic City on this night during the Christmas holidays. The girls were actually as poor as we were. Paris is filled with masqueraders.”

Still, there was nothing about Paris that Antonio did not find wondrous and stimulating, and in the letters that he continued to write Joseph throughout 1913 he constantly reminded him that he, too, had a future in Paris if he wanted to consider it over America. Within a year or two, Joseph could enroll at the École Ladaveze, Antonio said, and subsequently get a job at Damien’s. Antonio had recently received a number of salary increases and added responsibilities, and now had sufficient funds to pay for Joseph’s travel expenses to Paris. But he urged that Joseph apply soon for a visa so that he could cross the border legally and avoid dealing with the smugglers in Naples. There was a room reserved for Joseph in Paris, Antonio wrote in late 1913; Lauri had decided to return to Rome, and Antonio would occupy the apartment alone until Joseph’s much-anticipated arrival.

Shortly after the Christmas holidays, in January 1914, Antonio received a short letter from Joseph thanking him but saying that his father had finally returned to Maida. Joseph said that Gaetano was ill, however, and made no reference to when he might be returning to America. Midway through the summer of 1914, Antonio’s letters to his father and to Joseph began to reflect changes in the atmosphere of the city, changes that seemed to occur within a very short time, and Antonio confessed that he was becoming confused and concerned. In one letter to his father, he described the festivities surrounding the annual Bastille Day celebration—all-night dancing in the streets, a balloon pilots’ competition in the Tuileries Gardens followed by a homing-pigeon race involving five thousand birds; but in the next letter to his father, Antonio told of hearing police whistles
and bomb explosions in the streets, and of hostile demonstrations by Serbian and other Slavic students outside the Austro-Hungarian embassy on the Rue de Varenne.

Antonio had read in the Paris newspapers weeks before that the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, together with his wife, had been murdered by a young Serbian radical in Sarajevo; but it had seemed to Antonio that this remote incident, involving hostilities only between Austria and Serbia, did not interest the people of Paris for more than a few days. But in late July 1914, a full month after the murder, political demonstrations began to proliferate throughout Paris, and in Damien’s shop many of the customers said they were taking their money out of their banks and leaving the city. On July 28, after Serbia had rejected an Austrian ultimatum that would have terminated Serbia’s status as an independent country, Austria declared war. Russia mobilized on behalf of Serbia; Germany, supporting Austria, delivered an ultimatum not only to Russia but also to France, demanding French neutrality in the event of a German-Russian war. Failing to get this from the French, Germany declared war on France on August 3.

“You must return to Italy immediately,” Monsieur Damien told Antonio, stopping him as he appeared for work after lunch on the day of the announcement. “My carriage is waiting to take you to your apartment, but you must hurry. It has just been announced that all foreigners must leave Paris without delay.” He embraced Antonio and slipped an envelope into his pocket, then guided his disbelieving young employee out to his carriage and ordered the driver to take him first to his apartment for his luggage and then to the Gare de Lyon.

The streets were crowded with people rushing in all directions, and Antonio heard people singing the “Marseillaise” and shouting
“Vive la France!”
and
“Vive la Russie!”
At his apartment, Antonio packed one suitcase and left everything else where it was. His landlord, in saying good-bye, promised that the apartment would be retained for him until his return. Antonio locked his door and ran out without making his bed. (His bed would remain unmade for the next five years.)

At the Gare de Lyon, Antonio stood for ten hours with several hundred people on a long, slow-moving line, unsure of his destination. No rifle bullets or cannons had yet been fired upon the French nation, and he remained hopeful that a last-minute solution by world leaders could bring the belligerent governments to the peace table.

Italy had declared its neutrality in this conflict, but most of the Italians
Antonio overheard talking in the crowd favored the French, British, and Russians over the Germans and Austrians. Nearly everyone was especially hostile toward the latter. Austria was Italy’s hereditary enemy. Italian unity had been achieved only after three wars with Austria, and many believed that another war with Austria was necessary to complete the goals of the Risorgimento, to wrest from the hated Hapsburg kingdom certain Italian-speaking seaports and alpine villages to the north and east of Venice. Antonio voiced no opinion in these discussions, which were conducted largely by older men who were natives of northern Italy. He merely listened and inched his way up in the line. When he finally got to the ticket window he impulsively gave his destination as Turin. Of all the major cities of northern Italy, Turin was the closest to the border of the French nation that he was reluctant to leave.

He rode all night in a noisy and crowded train, standing most of the way. By midmorning he had arrived in Turin. After checking into a small hotel near the railroad terminal, he wired his family in Maida that he had departed safely from Paris. Then he went out to a square and stood among the throngs of bystanders waiting for the latest bulletins to be posted on the billboards, and for freshly printed editions of newspapers to be delivered by cyclists to the kiosks in front of the terminal. Many speeches were being made, by both antimilitarists and interventionists, and there was loud cheering and booing as some people began singing the “Internationale.” Police carrying rifles and clubs separated the demonstrators who were shouting and swearing at one another. When demonstrators began to throw fruit and even bottles at the speakers, the police fired shots in the air and restored order. Antonio stood among the crowds watching quietly at the bar of an outdoor café, remaining as far as possible from those making speeches and throwing things.

He spent all of August in Turin, still believing there was a chance that the mobilizing nations were bluffing one another and might yet back away from plunging Europe into a massive and bloody showdown. But each day the headlines announced the escalation of threats and the hostile declarations of increasing numbers of nations. As the German army marched into Belgium, presumably headed toward Paris, Britain joined France in the war on Germany. Montenegro and Serbia declared war on Germany. Days later, as troops from Britain crossed the English Channel to ally themselves with France, both nations declared war on Austria. In late August, Japan declared war on Germany and Austria, and Austria declared war on Belgium. The Germans by this time had entered Brussels. The German warships
Breslau
and
Goeben
, allowed to pass through the
Dardanelles by the friendly Turks, would soon be in a position to bombard Russian coastal cities. Russia would later declare war on Turkey, as would France and Britain. In the first weeks of September, the German army, having advanced through Belgium, became militarily engaged with the French in what would be the first battle of the Marne. Antonio conceded that he had no choice but to make his way back to Maida.

With newspapers tucked under his arm, he went to his hotel to pay his bill and pack his belongings. There the concierge handed him a telegram. It was from his father:

“Come home quickly. Uncle Gaetano is dead.”

22.

Y
oung Joseph Talese did not understand his father’s death any more than he had understood his father’s life. His father had died suddenly and inexplicably, in the bedroom of his home in Maida, in the middle of a sunny afternoon, on the first day of September 1914.

Joseph had been out of the house at the time, working at Cristiani’s tailor shop, to which he had gone directly from school. He had been happy all day, reveling in his father’s rare presence in Maida. Gaetano had been away in Naples for more than a month and had returned unexpectedly the night before. When Francesco Cristiani had abruptly decided to close the shop early, shortly before five p.m., for reasons unexplained, Joseph hastened home with the hope of having some time alone with his father before the evening meal. But once he had run through the square and down the curved road toward the family compound, and had climbed the staircase on the side of his house and entered the living room, he knew immediately that something was wrong.

The room was crowded with people, some of whom he did not know, and others, including his mother’s Rocchino relatives, whom he knew slightly but had never seen in the house before. They sat in small groups within the bare walls shaking their heads and looking at the ceramic floor. Whatever was being said was softly spoken. Joseph’s grandmother Ippolita stood by herself facing a window that overlooked the cliff and the distant shoreline. Her usually braided white hair seemed longer, and its wispy ends were visible in the light streaming through the window. Hearing
the door close, his grandmother turned toward Joseph, but she did not seem to recognize him. One of his mother’s aunts reached out to him and smiled encouragingly. He ignored her and hurried toward his parents’ bedroom, confused, looking for his mother.

When he entered the doorway, Joseph saw a priest standing at the foot of his parents’ bed, his arm consolingly around the slim shoulders of Joseph’s aunt Maria. Joseph looked toward her for some explanation, but she remained quiet and still, her face shadowed within her black mantilla. Sitting at the near side of the bed, staring across it, was his mother, wearing the same pretty maroon dress and yellow shawl she had worn that morning at breakfast. She had cheerfully prepared breakfast for Joseph alone, after his brother Sebastian had left for the farm. Gaetano had still been in bed, exhausted after the long train ride from Naples. The suitcase he had brought with him was still downstairs, locked where he had left it in a corner of the carriage shed, on top of the big wooden trunk he always carried to America and back.

Joseph’s mother had been in a pleasant mood for days prior to his father’s return from Naples, spiritedly reminding Joseph and the other children of their father’s impending arrival while she implored them to be tidy. She filled the house with fresh flowers, and polished and repolished the silverware at the head of the table where Gaetano had last sat weeks before, coughing and wheezing, his face thinner and paler than it was in the framed photograph on Marian’s bureau.

Now as Joseph stood next to the bed and touched his mother’s shoulder, Marian turned around to face him; he noticed that she held a handkerchief over part of her face and that a reddish welt rose puffily on her right temple. Her yellow shawl had fallen from her shoulders, and as she continued to look at him she tightened her lips. Trembling, Joseph turned away from her and looked at the bulky white covers of the bed; the figure stretched out underneath seemed huge. Then Joseph felt his grandfather Domenico’s hand on his arm, gently but firmly pulling him away; and after guiding him out of the bedroom into a corner of the crowded living room, his grandfather said in a kindly voice: “Joseph, your father is dead.”

Not that afternoon but much later, years later, Joseph would hear from one of his mother’s sisters that his father had not come directly home to Maida after his final overseas crossing in the summer of 1913; he had gone instead to a hospital near Naples, where he received the first in a series of new medical treatments that would be repeated during subsequent visits in the final months of his life. On the afternoon of his death
he had been seized by a delirious fit, and had angrily swung out his hand and hit Marian.

Joseph also learned that his father’s last years in America had been unhappy ones. A financial recession had interrupted America’s building boom despite optimistic forecasts, and Gaetano had been irregularly employed. He had also gotten himself into debt through gambling, and in order to meet his expenses and support his family in Italy, he had begun working a double shift in the Keasbey & Mattison asbestos factory. Soon he had difficulty breathing; his ailment, first diagnosed as a mild case of bronchopneumonia, had continued to worsen.

Marian was not aware of the extent of her husband’s illness after he returned from America in 1913. On the afternoon of his death, as was her custom, she was paying a visit to her father’s farmhouse with her three youngest children. When Gaetano woke up in the early afternoon, feverish and shaking, he began to call to his wife. When she did not come, he began to call louder, berating her for being away. A neighbor who was passing in front of the wall of the compound, and who paused to listen, thought she was hearing a domestic quarrel and continued on her way. Later in the afternoon, when Marian returned home, she found her husband gasping for breath, the pillows and blankets tossed out on the stone floor while he twisted and turned on the damp sheets in a cold sweat. As Marian tried to comfort him, he became even more uncontrollably irrational, blaming her for not being with him; and then one wildly flailing arm struck her, causing the welt on her temple. Within moments he had become unconscious, and then suddenly he was dead.