Unto the Sons (47 page)

Marian did not attend the funeral. Whether it was to conceal the welt, or whether it was her own resentment at his striking her, Joseph would never know. Although his mother did begin to wear black in the house, and a long black veil to the memorial services that his grandfather Domenico arranged to have said in church every Sunday evening for many weeks after the funeral, Joseph never saw his mother shed a tear, or carry flowers to the cemetery, or complain of missing his father. Many of her late husband’s relatives were bewildered and offended by her behavior, and even blamed her for being absent during the final hours of his life. This information was passed on to Joseph years after the funeral by his mother’s younger sister, his aunt Concetta Rocchino, who also told him about his father’s gambling problems in America. While Concetta did not intend to demean the memory of Joseph’s father, she was eager to defend her sister against the criticism that she assumed was widely circulated on the Talese side of the family.

Concetta insisted to Joseph that his mother mourned his father in her own private way, and was very uncomfortable with the public display of grief that had been carried out by Domenico and his dutiful daughter, Maria. This pair of religious zealots, Concetta suggested to Joseph, tried with their use of church bells and burning incense to endow the deceased with a spiritual essence that Gaetano during his lifetime neither had nor wanted. In an attempt to prolong the memory of this wandering man whose family did not know him sufficiently to have much memory of him, Domenico and Maria had also hired professional mourners to wail each night at the grave site and to sprinkle dirt each Friday night with the
fiori da morti
, crushed geranium leaves; and at the weekly Sunday services in church, which even Gaetano’s nonbelieving mother Ippolita felt compelled to attend, Domenico and Maria led the family clan through endless litanies and even recited death chants composed during the Dark Ages. Father and daughter both fasted every weekend in the autumn of 1914 and on into the following year, and they kept the interior of their homes glowing dimly with burning candles instead of gaslamps, and decked the outside of their doorways and windows with black bunting and ribbons that remained there until, years later, faded and worn, they were carried away by the wind.

Concetta reminded Joseph that at the funeral his aunt Maria had become Gaetano’s self-appointed “widow” after Marian had failed to attend. Maria had accompanied the priests behind the casket, had not combed her hair in several days, conforming to ancient custom, and had not allowed cooking in her home for many weeks. Relatives and friends had brought food during this time to the Cristiani household as well as to Joseph’s mother, Concetta recounted, adding that these kind gestures had not gone unnoticed by village gossips and that the awareness of much unpleasant talk exacerbated the awkward situation between Joseph’s mother and Maria. It was difficult for Marian to represent herself in public on the day of the funeral as a bereaving wife, Concetta said, particularly while she still bore the sting of her husband’s hostile farewell. It was no wonder, Concetta concluded, that Marian soon began to avoid Sunday church services in favor of spending weekends with her three youngest children at her family’s farmhouse in the valley. There she was surrounded by relatives and friends who ignored the time-honored practices of mourning and allowed her to retain some of the independence she had become accustomed to during her nearly twenty years as a white widow.

What Joseph most remembered of his mother’s first days of true widowhood was that, despite being withdrawn and virtually speechless,
she was extremely active and efficient around the house, accomplishing tasks during September—which had begun with her husband’s death—that she usually delayed doing each year until October or November. She preserved great amounts of food in jars for the winter; mended and altered the younger children’s winter clothing; took stock of the leftover supply of logs and charcoal and dispatched Sebastian to get what was needed for the frosty weather ahead. She also purchased a new set of wheels for the carriage, anticipating the additional use she would be making of it: one month after the funeral she began dividing her time almost equally between her marital home in town and her girlhood home in the valley.

It was her oldest son’s responsibility to drive her and the younger children back and forth at prearranged times, usually during the midday siesta, when Sebastian could spare an hour or two from his job as the junior foreman on Domenico’s farm. It was also Sebastian’s duty to look after the village house during his mother’s absence. Sebastian Talese, a strapping boy of fifteen, more than four years older than Joseph, was now the nominal head of the family.

Soon Sebastian was occupying his father’s chair at the dinner table, and becoming more active in disciplining the younger children. He would have tried disciplining Joseph, too, but within a week of Gaetano’s death Joseph had more or less moved out of the house, thanks to the efforts of Antonio, who had returned to Maida and convinced Marian that since Joseph was attending school and working in the tailor shop each day, his daily routine would be best maintained if he ate and slept at the Cristianis’, and went back and forth with them each morning and night between the town square and the family compound. Joseph would be only three doors away from his mother’s home in the compound, and would be within easy reach whenever she wanted him under her own roof.

Disregarding her strained relations with Maria Cristiani, Joseph’s mother complied; it was as if she were honoring her husband’s wishes expressed in the previous year, his desire to break up the family and take Joseph with him to America. Now that this was impossible, Marian seemed to be doing the next best thing—releasing Joseph to the care of her late husband’s sister, and allowing the boy to begin living a more separate life. She had already sensed increased independence in his nature and foresaw much conflict in the near future between Joseph and Sebastian—and recurring scenes of the sort she had witnessed two nights after the funeral.

The younger children were in bed at the time, and her older sons had been helping her—polishing the floors, beating the rugs outside with willow
swatters, and carrying a heavy chest that had been filled with her husband’s things down to the carriage shed, to be stored in a corner near his padlocked steamer trunk and the unpacked suitcase he had carried home from Naples.

“I think we should take your father’s clothes from the suitcase and trunk and deliver them to Cristiani’s shop,” she had said. Sebastian immediately reached for the keys that were hung on a nail and proceeded to look for the one that would open the trunk.

“Put those keys away,” said Joseph in a quiet voice that surprised his mother but that Sebastian seemed not to hear.

“Put those keys away!” Joseph said again, louder. “I don’t want you to touch those clothes!”

“Joseph!” his mother said. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t want those clothes given away,” Joseph repeated. “I want to keep them.”

It was a strange thing to say. Nobody in Maida ever kept the clothes of a deceased family member. It was considered unseemly, morbid, surely an inducement for bad luck.

“Why don’t you go upstairs?” Sebastian demanded, still not looking at his younger brother, but having now opened the trunk for his mother’s inspection. Without replying, Joseph turned around and ran up the staircase. A few minutes later he came down, brandishing in his right hand a heavy poker he had taken from the kitchen fireplace, and quickly he headed toward the crouched figure of Sebastian who was pulling clothes from his father’s trunk. Sebastian fell back as he saw Joseph coming toward him, and he watched as Joseph stood over him, waving the rod menacingly in front of his face.

“Stop, Joseph!” their mother protested.
“Stop!”

“I said I didn’t want these clothes touched,” Joseph said, looking down at his brother. “Now give me those keys you’re holding, and get away from those clothes.” Sebastian dropped the keys on the floor and slid backward, never taking his eyes off the poker. “And now
you
go upstairs,” Joseph ordered. Sebastian looked at his mother momentarily, then back at Joseph, bewildered by the crazed manner his younger brother had suddenly manifested. Then he got to his feet and walked upstairs.

“Joseph,” his mother said quietly, walking toward him. “What is the matter with you?”

Joseph stood silently for a few moments, lowering the poker, and then said: “I don’t want the clothes to go to Cristiani’s. I don’t want them to be given away for other people to wear. I want to keep them.”

Without waiting for her response, he put his father’s suits, both summer and winter ones, back into the trunk and lowered the lid. He also refastened the suitcase that Sebastian had opened.

He locked the trunk and the suitcase, and then placed the keys in his pocket.

23.

D
uring late 1914 the funereal atmosphere of the Talese household seemed to permeate the entire village, oppressing the population each day with premonitions of disaster and death. The
passeggiata
was now more like a cortege, a procession of slow-moving men lamenting the fact that their draft-age sons had received notices stating that they would be summoned soon for military service. Although the government leaders in Rome still proclaimed their neutrality in the war in Europe, in which untold numbers had already been killed, there was little doubt that in the near future Italy would be involved in the bloodshed.

The Fiat automobile company in Turin was producing military vehicles as fast as possible, and the Ansaldo shipbuilding and armaments firm near Genoa had doubled its labor force and would recruit an extra eight hundred women to meet the needs of its assembly line. Small factories throughout the peninsula had hired mechanics, blacksmiths, carpenters, and other artisans to forge and fabricate various military products and spare parts; and vast amounts of cotton and wool had been requisitioned to make tents, blankets, and uniforms for the Italian military contingent of nearly nine hundred thousand men. Among the hundreds of clothing manufacturers and tailor shops that were approached by military authorities to make uniforms for the soldiers was Francesco Cristiani’s shop in Maida.

Joseph had been alone in the front of the shop on the day that two officers from the quartermaster corps in Catanzaro had paid a visit. It was a late afternoon near the end of October, nearly eight weeks after Gaetano’s funeral. Joseph’s cousin Antonio, who had worked irregularly after returning from Paris, was not in the shop. He had been feverish and depressed ever since receiving his draft notice earlier in the week.

“Is the proprietor available to speak with us?” the older and larger of
the two officers asked in a polite voice, while the younger man, an emaciated, almost weasel-like individual with a long nose and thick glasses, squinted around the room at the stacks of material piled on the shelves. Both men wore gray-green uniforms with stars on the collars and insignia above the peaks of their hats that Joseph could not identify. The larger man wore boots and carried a holstered pistol on his belt, while the other, who was unarmed, wore puttees and carried a leather briefcase under his arm.

As Joseph turned to go back to the workroom to get Mr. Cristiani, he saw him coming forward, frowning. Joseph also caught a glimpse of the other tailors in the back room, gathered behind a table, whispering among themselves. They had observed the entrance of the officers, and seemed even more upset than Mr. Cristiani.

“Good afternoon, I am Captain Barone,” the larger man called out as Cristiani came closer; and then, gesturing airily with a hand toward his bespectacled companion, he added, “And this is my adjutant, Lieutenant Faro.”

Cristiani quickly shook hands with both men, told them his name, but said nothing more. He had only recently resumed shaving after weeks of ignoring his whiskers in accord with the custom of mourning, and in the past week he had become aggrieved once again by the arrival of his son’s draft notice. Twice during the previous evening he had awakened in terror after dreaming of Antonio’s death in distant trenches and swamps; and the very sight of these two military men standing before him in their gangrene-colored uniforms made him both nauseated and caustic.

“We bring you greetings from the quartermaster general himself,” Captain Barone went on blithely, oblivious to Cristiani’s mood. “He is quite familiar with the high standards of your workmanship, and it has been suggested that you and your fellow tailors might be able to produce fifty uniforms for the Forty-eighth Infantry Battalion, now being assembled in Catanzaro, by the end of this year. Do you think you can do this?”

Before Cristiani could reply, Lieutenant Faro had removed from his briefcase a cardboard brochure from which folded out a tailor’s pattern for the uniform, and on which was pasted a tiny swatch of the gray-green material to be used; he waited for Cristiani to take the brochure and examine it. But the tailor, letting the brochure remain in the lieutenant’s outstretched hand, turned toward Captain Barone and slowly shook his head.

“I am sorry,” he said, “but I lack the manpower to fill this order. And besides, I may soon lose a few of my tailors to the draft, including my very best tailor, who has been trained in Paris. He is to be called any day now.”

Captain Barone nodded and remained silent for a moment. Then he raised an eyebrow and gave Cristiani a little wink.

“Perhaps something can be arranged,” the captain said, with a knowing smile. “Making uniforms for the army is essential to the war effort, is it not?”

Cristiani, catching the drift of his thinking, felt a surge of excitement rising within him, but he remained silent.

“Yes,” the captain went on, “it is possible, it just might
be
possible that a deferment could be arranged.”

Cristiani was unable to restrain himself, and his grim facial features, characteristically so since the death of Gaetano, burst into an expression of relief fast approaching elation.