Unto the Sons (97 page)

Antonio could not understand much of what the mayor was saying, for he stood directly behind him and heard mostly sounds echoing off the nearby buildings, interrupted occasionally by municipal employees applauding in the front row. Antonio made use of his waiting time by trying to pacify his mother, who had expressed irritation after greeting him, because he had once again come to Maida unaccompanied by his wife and children.

Since the Germans had invaded France, Antonio had preferred that Adelina and the children remain with her family in Bovalino, which was well south of Maida on the Ionian shoreline facing Greece, and which Antonio considered a less likely spot for military invasion than that part of the toe that practically touched upon Sicily, and
especially
that most narrow part of the toe on which Maida protruded. He and his mother had quarreled often in the past year over his insistence that there were safer places in the world than Maida, notwithstanding her conviction that it was under the constant and personal protection of Saint Francis. What Antonio did not have the heart to tell his mother at this time, a day prior to his going on to Bovalino, was that he planned to take his wife and children out of Italy altogether and bring them back with him to Paris. If the Axis forces failed to halt the Allies in North Africa, it was reasonable to assume that the Allies might soon cross the Mediterranean into Sicily, and ultimately
invade southern Italy. With all due respect to Saint Francis, Antonio now preferred Paris.

As the mayor droned on behind his megaphone, Antonio shifted his attention out to the people in the crowd who were also looking around, talking among themselves, and sometimes yawning. More than a few of these people wore articles of clothing that, before the success of the friars, had been restricted to his father’s dead-storage vault; and Antonio began to notice some garments that he himself had brought earlier from Paris, most of them now looking rather old-fashioned. The frock coat that Antonio studied on the back of the mayor, for example, dated back to World War I and might well have been worn by a diplomat attending the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. But then Antonio reasoned that
nothing
was really out of fashion in Maida, a village that had been out of fashion for centuries, and had nearly made a fashion of timelessness. The old palazzos that faced the square—these outdated domains where as a boy at Christmastime he had feasted with the likes of this crowd at the musical open houses the aristocrats used to sponsor—had themselves played host to receiving lines linked to the distant past and faded fashions of Baroque Bourbons, Lord Nelson’s admirals, and the effulgent reign of Joachim Murat. But there were signs of the New World too on the backs of those gathered around the bandstand—clothing that Antonio recognized as clearly American-made, some of it no doubt sent to Maida by his cousin Joseph. He recognized, on the shoulders of one of Joseph’s Rocchino uncles who had been deported from Ambler during the Depression, a raglan tweed topcoat with extrawide lapels that Joseph himself had been wearing in a snapshot he had once sent to Antonio in Paris. He spotted one of Joseph’s Rocchino nieces, an unmarried woman in her early thirties, wearing a fur coat Antonio had never seen before; but it, too, had probably come from Joseph, who had recently written that he was clearing out abandoned garments from his fur storage vault in Ocean City and shipping some furs to Maida. This particular coat was of leopard skin.

Finally
the mayor stopped talking and turned the megaphone over to Antonio. Antonio refused it, as he always did, for the crowd moved in closely whenever he spoke, and he was known to be mercifully brief.

“Thank you for your warm welcome,” he began, nodding as they applauded, “and please know that I’m doing everything I can to remain worthy of your trust. As I look around, I see that some of you have honored me by wearing the clothing I have provided. And as you’re probably aware, I’ve come here today with many more things from Paris. There’s a
limit to what I’m allowed to carry on the train, so please forgive me if I’ve been unable to bring something for you. The next time, I assure you, I will.…”

Antonio went on to thank the mayor for his generous introduction, and the monsignor for his benediction, and the prefect for guaranteeing to deliver personally the parcels to those addressees who were not in the crowd. Then he gave a final wave and made a quick exit with his parents down a narrow road behind the fountain, before the portly head friar of the mendicants could catch up with him.

That night, in the home of the late Domenico Talese, Antonio had dinner with many of his Maida relatives. Joseph’s mother, Marian, was there, and so were her two brothers who had been deported from Ambler, as well as Joseph’s next-to-youngest brother, Nicola. A trim, lean, fine-featured man in his mid-thirties, Nicola bore a striking physical resemblance to Joseph—so much so that Antonio (who had seen very little of the soldiering Nicola in recent years, and whose impressions of Joseph now came from photographs) had at first believed that it was Joseph who stood waiting to greet him on this occasion from behind the tottering gate of their grandfather’s property. Nicola’s dark wavy hair was beginning to gray in the same places as Joseph’s, and in addition to their deep-set dark eyes and their erect postures, the brothers shared a pride in their appearance: Antonio noted that Nicola, who had been trimming the wall vines when Antonio arrived at the gate, was wearing a jacket and tie and cotton gloves, presumably to protect his hands from scratches. But what Antonio had noticed most was Nicola’s tempered manner of greeting, his tentative touch as he had embraced Antonio, his kiss on each cheek so slight as to be hardly felt. This sense of unfamiliarity even within the family was one of Joseph’s qualities that Antonio remembered well and had always accepted as part of his uncertain upbringing, his absent father and the presence of a mother who favored her son Sebastian. Antonio had no explanation to offer about Nicola, who had been only six years old when Antonio had run away to Paris. And during Antonio’s subsequent visits to Maida, it seemed that Nicola had always been elsewhere—on military duty in northern Italy, or Africa, or Albania. Or if he
was
in Maida during Antonio’s visits, Nicola for some reason had kept his distance, as he had earlier on this particular day, not coming to the station or the square, and apparently feeling no obligation to explain why.

“Come,” Nicola had said, lightly taking Antonio’s arm after placing
his gardening shears and gloves on the ledge of the wall. “They’re all inside waiting for you.” Antonio would have liked to spend a few private moments with Nicola outside, but his cousin clearly shared no such desire. Somewhat troubled, Antonio let Nicola guide him into the house.

Antonio’s parents were already with the other guests—Francesco was talking to one of Antonio’s elderly uncles, from the nearby town of Nicastro, who stood with the aid of a cane, while Antonio’s mother, having removed her black veil and gloves, was in the kitchen with the other women preparing dinner, among them Joseph’s mother and only sister. Now thirty-four, with her husband a prisoner of war of the British in North Africa, Ippolita nonetheless looked as youthful and pretty as Antonio remembered her; she lived in a house nearby with her three young children, and they frequently accompanied Antonio’s mother to early-morning Mass. Antonio’s mother had written him often in Paris urging him to do what he could for the captured soldier, whose name was Francesco Pileggi (he was a distant cousin of the Brooklyn musician Nicholas Pileggi), and Antonio’s return letters to his mother and Ippolita promised that he was doing everything possible and was in contact with the Italian Foreign Ministry. What he withheld from his letters was an unconfirmed report from the ministry that Corporal Francesco Pileggi was dead.

When he heard his name called by the elderly uncle and others who had spotted him with Nicola, Antonio hastened toward them and embraced them; and for the next several minutes he made his way slowly around the room, greeting people whose surnames were mostly Cristiani or Talese or Rocchino or Pileggi, and whose first names he readily recalled except in the cases of some of the children—who remained shyly in the background, or ran gleefully around their tolerant elders. The guests stood close to the flaming fireplace, where Nicola was now placing more logs; or they sat on the old threadbare brocaded chairs in the far corner of this anteroom, which was between the dining room and the open door to the kitchen, misty with steam rising from the cast-iron caldrons that released an aroma of blended sauces and herbs that was a pleasant contrast to the damp and chilly breezes sweeping through the drafty stone house. It seemed to Antonio that, despite the heat from the kitchen and fireplace, the room was no warmer than it was outdoors; indeed, most of the guests kept on their coats, their capes, and, in the instance of the talkative Rocchino spinster, her leopard-skinned gift from America.

But the uncomfortable conditions inside were understandable; except
for occasional reunions such as this, the house was rarely used and obviously had not been properly maintained since the deaths of its last full-time occupants—Antonio’s grandparents Domenico and Ippolita Talese. It was not merely a lack of materials and labor that caused deterioration, but also a reluctance on the part of family members to touch or change in any way what had brought contentment and familiarity to the departed couple. And so except for the deepening dust that had now settled over Ippolita’s objets d’art on the shelves, and on her mauve-colored draperies, and on the wall painting that had once clearly identified the cliffside manor built in Vibo Valentia by Ippolita’s ancestors in the Gagliardi family, Antonio saw this place as completely unchanged from the time of his boyhood visits—when he would occasionally slip away from the adults and indulge his curiosity upstairs in the room with the four-poster bed and the moving-eyed statuette of Saint Francis lodged in a candlelit niche above his grandfather’s bureau. During Antonio’s last visit to Maida, he had peeked into that bedroom to see if the eyes still moved, but they were so laden with dust it was impossible to tell. Curious, he moved toward the statuette with his handkerchief in hand, then paused as he recalled from childhood his mother’s admonishments against his ever touching a holy object—or any object, for that matter—in this house. She herself had grown up here, and had no doubt been similarly warned by her devout and dictatorial father. But in fact one thing
had
been touched and even removed from the house since the death of his grandparents. It was the ornamental bronze jewel box that Antonio always used to see resting on his grandmother’s bureau, the one that held the Gagliardi jewels remembered from the story of Domenico and the gypsies. Antonio’s father had first told him the story during his days as an apprentice in Maida, and Antonio had enjoyed retelling it to his friends in Paris; but after his grandfather’s death, Antonio’s mother begged him to cease repeating it, for Domenico’s spirit would not be amused by reminders of that devout Christian’s greed. And the day after Domenico’s death, Antonio’s mother had taken the bronze jewelry box and, without opening it, gave it to the church.

Antonio now saw his mother coming in from the kitchen, followed by his aunt Marian, who pointed out where everyone was to sit at the long table in the dining room. As Marian’s daughter, Ippolita, and daughter-in-law Angela, Nicola’s wife, carried in plates of pasta and vegetables, Marian urged everyone to begin eating immediately while the food was hot. Marian was a petite, handsome woman in her late sixties; her softly braided gray hair was still thick and shiny, and with her maroon shawl
tossed back over one shoulder and her arms akimbo, she struck a pose that Antonio saw as both feminine and commanding. Her posture was as erect as those of her sons on whom she had imposed it; and in all the years that Antonio had been in her presence, she had never appeared to him more composed and self-assured. Of course the family-rearing responsibilities forced upon her during her youthful years as a white widow, and her subsequent years as a true widow, had developed her capacities as a decision maker; but even so, Antonio was especially impressed by her as he took his honored place at the far end of the table, and then watched as his aunt sat down at the other end, in the high-backed chair always reserved for Domenico.

Dinner lasted until midnight, with the conversation centered around the war, the subject of increasing anxiety if not fear. Antonio tried to assure the family that southern Italy would not become a major battleground, arguing that it lacked the industrial centers and key military targets that would justify the Allies’ difficulty in trying to penetrate mountains even now controlled by Axis artillery. The Rocchino brothers disagreed, saying that the Allies would invade along the indefensible southern coastlines, and that whatever Axis artillery was perched on the upper cliffs would soon be negated by the Allied aircraft that already flew freely over Sicily and much of the Mediterranean. Antonio’s mother interrupted the discussion once to ask them all to pray for Ippolita’s husband in the POW camp in Africa, and for Marian’s youngest son, twenty-eight-year-old Domenico, who was now believed to be with the Fascist–Nazi forces on the Russian front. Then the youngest of the Rocchino men added a prayer on behalf of his nephews in the
American
army. The two nephews, both born in Ambler, had reached draft age and been conscripted.

Marian’s oldest son, the almost forty-four-year-old veteran of World War I, was not at dinner tonight. Though dependent on his mother, Sebastian occasionally asserted himself, and on this night, as his mother explained to the others, he would not get out of bed. Sebastian now lived in his mother’s house next door, occupying a room on the ground floor that opened into a yard where some farm animals grazed—a few of them the offspring of animals Sebastian had cared for as a teenaged foreman on old Domenico’s farm. Sebastian was well enough to wander through the village on his own, although many villagers, often failing to understand his garbled speech, thought he was demented, a hopeless victim of shell shock and poison gas. But on previous visits Antonio had found him quite lucid as they spoke about the childhood experiences they had shared. Sebastian would not, however, speak of the war, and he spent many solitary
hours whittling wood into delicately carved figures, not always separated, of animals and humans. There were times when Antonio wondered whether Sebastian’s possible madness had not freed him from a life of drudgery and given him the chance to use a gift he otherwise would not have discovered.