Unto the Sons (91 page)

The children adopted at the turn of the century by the doctor’s childless older brother, Asher, and Asher’s wife, Hulda, had been part of the neighboring Ely family, who had been struggling to support the offspring of one female relative who had died in childbirth after producing twelve children. A male child from this family, Reuben P. Ely, was raised in Asher and Hulda’s home, and he remained on the property as their adopted son after he himself had married and had two children of his own. But with Hulda’s death in 1935 (Asher had died in 1922) there was some question as to the legal entitlement of the Ely family to the Mattison farmland, since the doctor and
his
heirs in an earlier will had also been recognized as having proprietary claims to the Bucks County land. During Hulda Mattison’s lifetime, the doctor had ignored this matter, knowing how much she disliked him—she had never forgiven him for allowing his guards to block her and Asher at the castle gates that day when they tried to visit. But on the morning of October 6, 1936, he told Gus Rowe to dust off and gas up the old Packard, which had not been driven in weeks; they would be taking a few hours’ drive out to Bucks County to see what was left of the thousand-acre tract that in 1682 a maternal ancestor from England, the Quaker yeoman George Pownall, had acquired from William Penn.

Only eighty-two acres were still under family control in 1936; and while the stone house and the porch furniture looked exactly the same as when he had sat at the feet of his aunt Martha while she read him Gothic tales, he was somewhat saddened by the endurance of its simplicity, and he wished that somehow more had been made of the place, that the walls
of the house and the porch deck had been spruced up with fresh paint and a few new floorboards, and that the soil had been better cultivated, and that perhaps some of his own energy and vision had flowed through the veins of his late brother. But as the doctor strolled around the property, accompanied by Reuben and Virginia Ely, and their children and visiting nephews, who respectfully called him “Uncle Doctor,” he suspected that the only hope for improving this land lay with these young people who now occupied it—people who,
if
they owned it outright, would take personal pride in developing it beyond the limitations of tenant farmers and squatters. So he impulsively turned to his traveling companion and onetime castle employee, Charles Hibschman, whom Gus Rowe had also brought to Bucks County, and discussed the idea of bequeathing the whole estate to the Ely family for a single dollar. Hibschman conceded that this was a most generous act, and Reuben and Virginia Ely—and the inheritors nearby—could barely express their gratitude.

In the car on the way back to Ambler, the doctor was clearly a happy man; the old homestead would remain in the “family,” it would remain true to its original intentions, enriching the earth while nourishing its cultivators—it would not fall prey to land developers who might pave it out of existence and destroy its natural function. (Which is what
did
happen; the Ely offspring would one day sell the property to developers, who would in turn pave it in anticipation of the population growth that might make the land suitable for a shopping mall.)

But Dr. Mattison went to his grave never thinking this likely—no more than he could have thought, after he had purchased the Mattison family burial land within the Laurel Hill Cemetery in North Philadelphia, selecting a scenic spot overlooking the Schuylkill River, that this would in future years be blocked by a grand highway bordering the river below.

44.

B
eing an Italian in Paris had been a pleasurable and profitable experience for Antonio Cristiani, but in the fall of 1937, during the week in which various examples of his tailoring had been placed on display at the Paris International Exposition of Arts and Technique in Modern Life, he
was uncharacteristically morose. He had recently had premonitions of disaster; the light autumnal breezes that whipped the flags atop the exposition’s many pavilions carried a touch of eerie calm that reminded him of the atmosphere in Maida hours before an earthquake.

Early in the week, feeling chest pains and vertigo, he had hastened to his doctor; but after an examination, he was pronounced in good health for a man of forty-three—and that opinion only made him feel worse. Either he had been struck by a malady that was eluding detection, or, like so many of his Italian countrymen whom he had mocked in the past, he
too
had fallen victim to the curse of southern pessimism, to his village’s time-honored habit of inventing illnesses about which to complain.

But there was nothing imaginary about his nightmares. They invaded his sleeping hours and sent him bolting out of bed, waking up not only his wife but their three children; and yet in the morning he was reluctant to discuss with Adelina what was bothering him, partly because he himself was not entirely sure, and partly because what awoke him was too alarming to reveal.

In his nightmares she was always dead, along with their children and dozens of other people and animals, all of them piled in a pyramidal heap cluttered with skeletons, with a few squirming arms and fingers reaching toward the sky; and always Antonio was separated from them, prone, powerless, but alive. In his diary he had tried to describe it, each time crossing out what he had written; and then, one afternoon, while walking around the exposition grounds, Antonio was stunned to confront his nightmare in a painting. He recognized and identified with the artist’s rendering of a man who lay at the bottom of a pile of people victimized by calamity: the fallen man’s arms were outstretched, his eyes and mouth were open, and he held a broken sword in his right hand next to the hoof of a horse and near the bare feet of a stumbling figure whose posture resembled that of one of the bleeding penitents Antonio had seen decades earlier in Maida. What Antonio saw was Pablo Picasso’s
Guernica
in the pavilion of the Spanish Republic, the painting named in memory of the Basque village that had recently been bombed by Hitler’s fliers in the civil war in Spain. Hitler was allied with the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, as was Mussolini; and some of Antonio’s relatives were now soldiers in Spain, including his twenty-three-year-old cousin Domenico Talese, Joseph’s youngest brother.

As an Italian citizen in Paris, where every day demonstrators in the streets protested the war and condemned Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini, Antonio felt uneasy about his future, but he managed to repress these
fears until he saw them boldly presented by Picasso. Antonio felt again the sweat and terror of that day long before when he and thousands of others had fled Paris on the eve of the Great War, but that was in 1914, when he had been a young bachelor with few possessions and few cares beyond his own welfare. Now, he was a father of three children born in Paris, the youngest less than five months old; and if he were forced to go he would have to leave behind his spacious apartment, his business, and the many associates and friends he and Adelina had collected during a decade of married life in Paris.

Although a Francophile for more than twenty years, Antonio would not renounce his Italian citizenship, much as he might disagree with some of the contemporary policies of Fascist Italy. World opinion had begun to sour on Italy after Mussolini’s troops had invaded Ethiopia in 1935, but Mussolini’s joining Hitler in 1937 had further damaged Italy’s relationship with its World War I allies France, Britain, and the United States; and while these nations had remained officially neutral during the Spanish Civil War, there was antipathy among their citizens toward the Spanish, German, and Italian dictators. Nowhere was this more prevalent than in Paris, where left-wing factions had asserted themselves within the labor unions and the national bureaucracy, and on the boulevards and side streets of the city, waving red flags as they denounced the dictatorial triumvirate and fomented strikes protesting the French government’s resistance to joining the fight in Spain against the forces of Nazism and Fascism.

The French people’s hostility toward Mussolini at times grew into an anti-Italianism that touched Antonio and other Italian residents of the capital as it challenged their loyalties and dared them to choose between the two nations they loved. The French customers who now avoided Antonio’s shop, and the French veterans who had become uncharacteristically cool to their aging former Italian trenchmates who stood next to them at commemorative ceremonies honoring the battle victims of World War I, were in Antonio’s opinion hardly representative of the friendship that a majority of ordinary Frenchmen felt toward Italians. But he could not avoid the fact that the strong French–Italian bonds that had been forged on the frontlines were now in jeopardy of being buried with their wartime comrades
unless
the leaders in both nations quickly altered their policies and restored the harmony that had once existed between these two Catholic nations.

In the privacy of his fitting rooms, Antonio diplomatically urged both the French and the Italian statesmen who were part of his clientele to
strengthen the weakening ties between the two countries; and in his role as president of the Italian Economic Federation of France and leader of the Paris-based Italian war veterans’ association, he reiterated this theme in the presence of other nations’ ambassadors and ministers with whom he came in contact as a frequent guest at official dinners and receptions. Antonio saw Mussolini as a man with more bark than bite, an egotist with a perhaps neurotic need to gain other people’s attention; yet he thought that the Duce could be reasoned with,
must
be reasoned with before he embraced Hitler as his single strongest ally. Mussolini was a dictator, but, Antonio believed, only a dictator could have restored order in Italy during the strike-ridden 1920s, perhaps saving the country from Communism; and to excoriate Mussolini for invading Ethiopia, as the French and British were doing, seemed somewhat hypocritical when one considered these two nations’ own history of colonial conquest. Worse, insofar as French–Italian relations were concerned, was France’s compounding its disapproval of Italian colonialism in 1936 by removing its ambassador in Rome, an individual who enjoyed Mussolini’s friendship and trust, Count Charles de Chambrun, and replacing him with Count René de Saint-Quentin, who on behalf of France refused Mussolini’s demand that he acknowledge Victor Emmanuel III as King of Italy
and
Emperor of Ethiopia. The Frenchman was unwilling to do so, for it would indicate official recognition of Italy’s recent African acquisition, and that prompted Mussolini to block Saint-Quentin’s transferral. Consequently, from October 1936 through October 1938, the years in which Mussolini and Hitler were engaged in foreign policy discussions affecting Europe and the Mediterranean, the French government was without the benefit of an ambassador in Rome. Not only Antonio but many Frenchmen saw this as a major diplomatic blunder—one made worse when Mussolini followed by pulling
his
ambassador out of Paris in 1937.

The French official most identified with the rift with Mussolini was a onetime customer of Antonio’s who, in early June 1936, had ascended to the premiership of France. He was Léon Blum. At sixty-four, Blum became the first Socialist and first Jewish premier in French history. Coming two months after Hitler’s militarization of the Rhineland—at a time when pacifism and the emancipation of the working classes seemed to represent a higher political calling in France than the clamorings by Colonel Charles de Gaulle for more tanks—the election of a nonmilitaristic, left-wing Jewish intellectual was infuriating to the French radical right; and even some Jewish leaders in France were discomforted by Blum’s success. They saw in his ascent a possible rise of French anti-Semitism
to the level it had attained in the previous century during and after the Alfred Dreyfus trial, in which the Jewish French army officer had been unjustly accused of spying for Germany. An important rabbi in Paris urged Blum to resist the honor of leading the French government, and the rabbi’s concerns were perhaps realized when, on the very first day Blum was installed as premier, the right-wing deputy Xavier Vallat declared in the national assembly: “Your arrival in office,
Monsieur le President du Conseil
, is incontestably a historic date. For the first time this old Gallic-Roman country will be governed by a Jew.” Immediately called to order by the supervising official, Vallat would not be silenced. “I have a special duty here,” he insisted, “…  of saying aloud what everyone is thinking to himself: that to govern this peasant nation of France it is better to have someone whose origins, no matter how modest, spring from our soil than to have a subtle Talmudist.” Again Vallat was admonished by the official and others in the chamber, none of whom was more enraged than Blum himself.

But Blum had experienced far worse in Paris earlier in the year. In mid-February, while riding with Socialist friends along the Boulevard Saint-Germain during a week when he and his party colleagues had held publicized pre-election meetings with their Communist associates, Blum was recognized by a group of right-wing ruffians who, after smashing the windows of the car, pulled him into the street and beat him so badly that he had to be taken to a hospital. Photographs of the battered Socialist leader that appeared in the press, and the public outcry against such violence, were generally believed to have influenced many voters to shift toward Blum’s Socialist–Communist coalition, the Popular Front; but the sympathy and concern for Blum’s well-being quickly subsided after he had moved into the premier’s office at the Matignon Palace.

Antonio Cristiani’s opinion of Blum had nothing to do with the latter’s religion (despite whatever failings might be attributed to the Italian people, their inherent individualism seemed to guarantee that anti-Semitism would not flourish in Italy); it had more to do with the fact that Blum had ceased being his customer. Exactly why he stopped ordering suits remained a mystery to Antonio, who recalled the many compliments Blum had paid him in past years, and Antonio could now only wonder, in the privacy of his diary, if Blum’s disenchantment with the expansionist colonial policy of Italy’s increasingly aggressive right-wing regime might have influenced his attitude toward his Italian tailor. Antonio continued to mail his brochures to the premier, but he received no more business from Blum.