A Freewheelin' Time (6 page)

I began to wear black most of the time and I had my ears pierced at an earring store on West Eighth Street in the Village. After my ears healed I removed the little gold hooks and made a pair of earrings out of copper wire and bits of leather. I cultivated a French accent and used it whenever anyone I didn’t know spoke to me or if I was in a store buying something. One day when I was riding home on the bus a young man sat next to me and attempted to start a conversation. I knew he thought I was exotic. This was Queens in the late fifties, after all. Maybe he thought I was French. Maybe
he
was French. I didn’t dare use my accent, in case he was. When he stood up to get off at his stop, he smiled at me and said, I could have sworn you were French.

My closest girlfriend outside of the red-diaper baby/Kinderland group was Genie Zeiger, who passed around petitions with me at school and came to picket Woolworth’s on Saturdays and to Washington Square on Sundays now and then. She read poetry and listened to folk music, too. We spent a lot of time together at each other’s apartments. Her mother was always very welcoming; it never made a difference to her parents what the Rotolo family believed or didn’t believe. When my father died, they had a tree planted in Israel in his name.

It was hard for Genie to take a detour from the path of the more middle-of-the-road friends in her Hadassah club, but she was always attracted to the nonconformity of my family. She was intrigued that my mother didn’t go to beauty parlors and that my father built our furniture and painted the walls in our apartment different colors. After high school she went away to college but then left to marry and have children. She came to the Village to see me on a school break when I was house-sitting an apartment on Waverly Place, but by then we didn’t have much in common anymore. She was living the life of a college girl in upstate New York while I was on my own at the university of Greenwich Village. We found each other again, though, not too many years later.

During the summer of 1956, I had been a mother’s helper, or nanny, for the family of the ear doctor my mother worked for. The Rosens lived in Katonah, New York, in a wonderful house with a pool that was constructed to look like a real pond, and filled with water from a nearby spring. Sam and Helen Rosen had dinner parties with many interesting people coming and going, the great Paul Robeson among them. Two years later, after my father’s death, Helen invited my mother and me to Robeson’s historic concert at Carnegie Hall. We went backstage afterwards and when the physically imposing and charismatic Paul Robeson smiled down at me and shook my hand, which disappeared in his huge one, I was awestruck.

My job that summer was to take care of the Rosens’ two grandchildren, a boy and girl. A cook named Odette ran the household. Tall, wiry, probably in her forties, she was funny, warm, and also a bit of a scold. I spent a lot of time with her.

At meals I was expected to sit at the table with the family and the company, if there was any, while Odette ate in the kitchen. Her job was to serve each course to each person and clear away the empty plates. Having grown up working class, bohemian, and schooled by my Marxist parents in equality for all, I felt very uncomfortable being waited on. It was beyond my comprehension. To have Odette treat me formally embarrassed me. It wasn’t the way things were between us the rest of the time. I would get up from the table in an attempt to help her clear plates and she would say, Sit down, and give me a look.

After dinner Odette and I would usually go for a walk along the quiet lane that circled the houses. I told her I wanted to eat in the kitchen with her since I was not at ease with being treated like a guest. She made fun of me, saying I didn’t know my place as a white girl, and had a good laugh. She told me that I’d better make up my mind fast and figure out what color I was and where I belonged in the world.

During the summer of 1959 I had another nanny job, for family friends who had two young girls who were older than the Rosen grandchildren and quite a handful. This family was middle class, and the only hired help was me. There was always something to do, and I was the one to do it. I had no one to share “after hours” with, but at least by then I knew my place as a working white girl.

Leaving Home

During my last year of high school,
theater class was my refuge. There was something wonderful about becoming someone else that eliminated my natural shyness. I also liked making scenery. A friend I had met in Kinderland, Sue Zuckerman, lived on Long Island but would cut school and come to the city to go on auditions for plays in Greenwich Village theaters. When she won a part in one, she was over the moon.

Her parents would not let her miss high school, and she had to turn down the part. It was terrible. We decided to do summer stock together the following summer, after high school graduation. We chose the Massapequa Children’s Summer Theater, near where Sue lived. I went to live with her family for a month.

In a production of
Peter Pan
I was Tiger Lily, and in
Hansel and Gretel
she played the witch. After a great summer together, she went off to college in the fall, as did all of my close friends. I got a job at a convenience store while I thought about what a loser I was and how scary things were at home. My sister was rarely there and eventually went to live with someone in the Village. My mother was working part-time for Dr. Rosen, but she was drinking an awful lot. I had pretty much been without parental guidance since my father had died. This did not make me wild and carefree. On the contrary, I was always careful and fearful because I knew I had no one to depend on. Now and then in the evenings, my mother would talk about her life, about death, and about philosophical issues. These occasions frightened me profoundly. I felt she was speaking not to me but to my father—or maybe to no one at all.

I felt fragmented; I had no mirror to see myself in a context. It never dawned on me to say anything to anyone about what was going on. What could be said and to whom would I say it?

My mother had had a rough life: At forty-seven she had already been widowed twice and had survived breast cancer. My father had just died of a heart attack, and her first husband had drowned in a freak storm off Boston harbor after she had been married only six months. They had been together with a friend on a small sailboat when the storm struck. Only her husband, who couldn’t swim, died.

She was a beautiful woman, with big brown eyes and straight dark hair dramatically pulled back in a bun at her neck. Her name was Maria Teresa, but she was always known as Mary. She was born in 1910 in Boston, the next to the youngest of four surviving children out of eight and the third child that her parents had named Mary. The first Mary had died of diphtheria and the second in a scalding accident. The family had temporarily moved back to Italy to live and the second Mary had died there.

When I was an adult with my own child, my mother lent me a small leather-bound diary her father had written after the death of the first Mary at the age of three. I read it, thinking I would translate it. Both the prose and the handwriting were florid and the content was heartbreaking as he described the devastating effect his daughter’s death had had on him. He didn’t mention anything about what his wife must have been feeling, however.

The largest emigration of Italians to America began in the late 1880s and continued nonstop into the early part of the twentieth century. The majority of immigrants were unskilled and uneducated. Italy before Fascism was an agricultural society under a monarchy; for the peasant class conditions were little different from those under feudalism. Unless you came from a family that had a profession or were part of the aristocracy or royalty, life was hardscrabble. This was especially the case in southern Italy and Sicily. Some Italians who emigrated were skilled workers, as was my Sicilian grandfather, or had a profession, as did my maternal grandfather, Sisto Pezzati, from Piacenza in the north of Italy, an area of family farms not far from Milan. He chose to come to America to check out this great new land of opportunity where jobs were plentiful.

Cesarina and Sisto Pezzati left Italy right after they were married, living initially with his sister in Boston. Sisto was a well-educated man who had studied to be a land surveyor. I believe he worked as a salesman and clerk for his brother-in-law when he first arrived.

After my grandfather Sisto was diagnosed with tuberculosis, everything changed. He could no longer work, and there were medical bills to pay. The family moved to a less expensive apartment in another neighborhood. And so it went until he died of the disease, when my mother was five. Peter, the oldest child, was thirteen, Josephine nine, and the youngest, Albert, three. Their mother, Cesarina, who unlike their father spoke little English, was left a widow with four children to raise alone.

My mother’s stories about the years after her father’s death are tales out of Charles Dickens. The family moved from one place to another, always with worse conditions. The sleeping drunks in apartment doorways, the smell of urine in the halls, the Irish kids in the neighborhood chasing down and beating up the Italians. My grandmother took in laundry and cleaned houses. The older boy became the head of the family at thirteen, leaving school and going to work.

My mother and her younger brother went out to the railroad tracks to pick up bits of coal to heat the apartment. They chased after the ice wagon for ice chips to keep the food cold in the icebox, a precursor of the refrigerator. The older sister made soup by boiling water and throwing in bits of vegetables. Polenta, the cornmeal today offered in restaurants as a refined dish, was what they lived on. My mother was never able to eat it later in life as a result.

The family went from relative respectability to grinding poverty in a time when Italians were lower in the pecking order than the Irish, who had suffered horribly when they first arrived as immigrants and were now finally able to take it out on somebody deemed even lower than they were. So it seems to go. Along with polenta, my mother had trouble digesting the Irish.

The older brother and sister were able to remember a better time. They could pass on their father’s love of literature and the arts to their younger siblings—at least they had that. Their big brother taught them to recite Dante and Petrarch, to help them understand that they came from a great culture. That saved them all, even though they each took it in different directions and came to different conclusions. They were, and remained, a volatile bunch.

My mother and her younger brother, Albert, were very close their whole lives and eventually joined the American Communist Party to fight for the underdog. The oldest, Peter, in addition to gaining success as a portrait painter for the Boston upper classes—he was able to earn a living and support a family as a painter his entire life—believed in Mussolini and the Fascist idea of cultural supremacy. The other sister was a liberal and a practicing Catholic. Their mother, Cesarina, was calm and even-tempered. Despite a very difficult life, she always managed to maintain relative harmony at family gatherings. Fortunately all four siblings agreed on one thing—the love and respect and fierce loyalty they had for their mother. This was the unshakeable bond that united them, and in her presence they did their best to keep the peace.

Cesarina was the daughter of a peasant family, a delicate and beautiful girl. My mother said that Sisto’s family did not approve of their marriage initially because he was educated and had “prospects” and therefore shouldn’t marry a farm girl.

A young farmer who lived nearby named Ludovico Rossi had also courted her, but he lost her to the man with prospects, education, and what she said she admired most—his intelligence. Many lifetimes later, when Rossi found Cesarina in America, they were both widowed with children. He wanted to marry her, but she refused him; she had to
sistemare i figli,
wait until all her children were settled. It was a mentality left over from the old country: She was responsible for her children and had to see each one of them established with husbands, wives, professions, homes of their own, before she could think of doing something for herself. When she was sixty-five, she finally accepted his proposal and went to live with him on his dairy farm outside of Torrington, Connecticut. Pop Rossi was the only grandfather any of Cesarina’s grandchildren knew, and we loved him dearly, as did all four of her children.

A
fter my father’s death, my mother saw no light at the end of the tunnel—the future held no prospects—not then anyway. I couldn’t talk to her friends, sister, or brothers about her drinking and the stress I felt; they had their own lives, children, jobs, and troubles. I would not have told them in any case. And I never said a word to my friends, ever. We all complained about our mothers, but I didn’t know how to complain about my situation—so alien from the typical bitching a teenager does.

The solution for an escape came about rather surprisingly. My mother’s younger brother, to whom she was close, had left his wife for another woman. I went to live with my aunt Val, who was to become his ex-wife, and my cousin, who was a few years younger than me. They lived at 158th Street and Riverside Drive in Harlem. Val was originally from Seattle and had been a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall. She was a beautiful, willowy blonde, and sang in a full, clear soprano. She and my father, who had a baritone voice like Ezio Pinza’s, would sing together at family gatherings in the days when things weren’t so bad. They sang everything from show tunes to opera, as the other grown-ups argued politics and the kids drank the wine left in the bottom of the adults’ glasses. That was a long time ago.

I found a job as a clerk at the Book-of-the-Month Club way downtown on Hudson Street—my introduction to the nine-to-five world. I worked in a big classroomlike space with rows of women sitting at typewriters with earphones on. All day long they typed letters dictated to them over a machine called a Dictaphone. There was a supervisor who sat at a big desk in the front, where the teacher in a classroom would be.

My job was to collect the finished letters with addressed envelopes and add whatever inserts were necessary. These letters would be put in a big basket to be picked up by the mail clerk. My desk was at the head of the classroom opposite the supervisor/teacher’s desk. Next to me was a tall gray metal closet filled with pamphlets and folders advertising the books offered by the club. I taped to the closet doors, outside and in, Book-of-the-Month Club advertisements that had reproductions of paintings or photographs I liked.

The women typists, who were creeping up in age and had been working at the company for years, thought I was very daring and warned me that the higher-ups would disapprove. They wanted to help me learn the ropes and offered to teach me to type. I was like a pet for them, and I relished the attention. I would make drawings, and they would tape them to their desks. The place was looking less austere.

One day the supervisor told me with some reluctance that I had to take down the pictures, or at least the ones on the outside of the closet, and then keep the doors closed. I agreed, but after a while I stopped closing the closet doors. Nothing more was ever said. One of the women told me to forget learning to type (I had never even considered it; filing was much easier) and go to art school instead.

It was a long commute to my job by subway from one end of Manhattan to the other, but it was easier than the tedious subway and bus trip from Queens. Weekends in the Village—which didn’t involve coming home to my mother’s rages or to her profound, low-voiced soliloquies—were also a lot more bearable. I think my mother was relieved to see me go. She needed to be by herself and sort things out.

Compared with my mother, Val was in great shape, and my cousin and I had fun together. Their apartment—with only one bedroom, where my cousin and I slept—was on a low floor in a large, ornate apartment building. The living room had a big, freestanding floor-to-ceiling bookcase that served as a wall to create a bedroom for Val. The place was fine, but it was overrun with cockroaches. When you turned on a light, the kitchen seemed to liquefy as the roaches scurried away en masse. They didn’t mind the cold, either, living comfortably in the refrigerator.

My friend Pete Karman had a car and would often come pick me up in the evening. He was like an older brother at a time when I was very much in need of that kind of relationship. We would drive up and down the West Side Highway for hours on end talking about everything and anything and listening to the car radio, which picked up stations as far away as West Virginia late at night. Weekends we would head for the Village and sometimes meet up with my sister and go to parties or music clubs. As a newspaper reporter, he read a lot, remembered everything, and liked to talk. He was a big part of my schooling back then. I have always been grateful to him.