Beware the wish granted, by gods or presidents. Unlike Michelangelo, Mario was steeped in a dense bath of chemical solvents and paint fumes. Within six months he was deathly ill.
He wandered about the house at first, perplexed at the willful refusal of his own body. He worked intermittently, when his strength came. He sought out healers who were baffled by his illness, and got slowly thinner and weaker.
The chores of the pigeon farm had to go on without him. My brothers told me secretly that Lou had devised a way to anesthetize the birds before killing them, with a thin needle inserted behind the skull. It was no more than a kind of delusionary triage. Even if he could get to the infant birds in time, the hapless chickens and ducks couldn’t be spared, and at holiday market time dozens of them still squawked, in brutal scenes of madcap slaughter, headless and bleeding about the yard.
The most terrible death was that of a spangled Japanese Bantam rooster, whose dawn crowing had become as familiar a part of our lives as the cooing of the pigeons at twilight. We called him “Nip-on-knees” because if you got too close to his hens he would sneak-attack you with his beak at what it was funny to think of as the Pearl Harbor level of your anatomy. When his time came to die for somebody’s fricassee, my sister and I suffered so vocally that my mother declared all Bantam-slaying over. She could make such ultimatums now, though she’d never have admitted—in deference to my father, would never have dared think—she ruled the roost. But he had taken to his bed, and though he still gave orders from his closed and unapproachable room, we could tell he was growing less and less able to police how well they might be filled.
Probably in response to a gloomy epistle of my mother’s complaining that everything that could go wrong had, my Aunt Mildred, Spagnola sister number four, wrote us that winter. “I’m coming,” she declared, and she did, arriving from the East one day like a sunrise. Maybe she was having her own life crisis, or had reached an impassable plateau in her career. Or maybe she had simply, selfishly, imagined that any visit out here, to the land of eternal sunshine, had to be a vacation. But that was Aunt Mildred; you could never tell, as she unpacked her seventy-seven halter tops, what she did to please you from what she did to please herself.
Like all her sisters, Mildred was in the fashion trades. Or like and unlike them. They say the eldest, May (really Gandolfa, the same who had never quite forgiven Maria the injury of catching a husband before her), had already destroyed her eyes beading by the time she married Dante, that improbably named pretty-boy of hers—a man I remember from my later years in East Harlem as always mysteriously pale and well-shaven, and never to be seen on the tenement stairs before noon on weekdays in his trademark soft fedora and silk tie. Next came my mother, Maria—called Mary at home—with her promising berth at Bergdorf before Mario carried her away. And then Teresa, who had followed Mary into a similarly promising career before she’d met and married her fine, patrician-looking cousin, Louis.
But Mildred, who had slapped a kind of movie star moniker over her own original Carmela and effectively passed, had outshone them all, going into fashion design and making it at the Seventh Avenue cutting edge. Not black-haired and Arab-African-looking like all the others, but sandy red–haired like Papa Calogero and hazel-eyed like nobody (in that anciently mixed-up, who-knows-what-you-will-get way of the children of Sicily, an island trod by every race since time began), she even had the high cheekbones and air of cool command that could put you in mind of Dietrich in the right light. She knew what to wear, and how and when to wear it. On her own sewing machine, fitted on her own dressmaker’s dummy, she made things rich women died for. And she was still single and flaunted it.
The relatively recent buzzword for this particular form of cool was glamour, which had begun to denote something, some irresistibly feminine, Coco Chanel sort of something that even women who were powerful and career-oriented could have—or maybe that only women who were powerful and career-oriented could have. I knew she had it, whatever it was, the moment she stepped down off that transcontinental express in Tucson and set her open-toed sandals on the station platform. And I wanted it, too.
She also had a certain starry look in her eyes. My first thought was that the glamour and the starry look went together, not understanding that they were actually antithetical, as things often are that follow one another as cause and effect and so for a single confounding moment show up in the same place. We kissed and hugged and cried for joy, and Mildred said how amazed she was to see what a pack of four little Indians her sister was raising, and so on. But it wasn’t long before she let out that she had met her dream man on that train, someone by the totally southern American name of Ferril Dillard, a tall, blond, beautiful Alabama soldier-boy coming west with his platoon to be trained for combat in the Japanese theater of war.
If there was one being in those mid-war days who was even more glamorous than a Seventh Avenue fashion plate, it was a man in uniform. And this Ferril Dillard turned out on sight to be really delectable, a kind of blond Elvis before there was an Elvis, with baby blues and a crooning sort of drawl and a funny joyous fatalism that was such a contrast with the rather dark kind we’d grown up with that I fell half in love with him myself. He came to visit on weekends before going overseas, and brought us things, and courted and cuddled up more and more to Aunt Mildred, and she, who was so tough and smart and self-possessed when he wasn’t around, turned into a kind of backlit American Beauty rose at a garden show, and just smiled and smiled.
My father, I’m sure, had his dark doubts about what was afoot, or what might actually come of this whirlwind courtship. But he was already too sick and bed-bound to raise a fuss over somebody who had actually shown up to give Maria a hand. And if he didn’t like to encourage marriage to this totally un-Italian Alabaman, even less did he like the idea of Mildred’s having a fling without it. So he played resident patriarch as best he could, and Aunt Mildred, not especially chafed by his watchdogging, settled into Tucson “for the duration,” as they said, or as much of it as it took.
There were moments of total misty absence of eye contact when you could tell she was thinking about him. But she not only loved us kids, but truly adored my mother, and most of the time Mildred was with us she was actually with us, a kind of celebrity big sister, dolled up and ready for her public, prancing around in shorts, showing off the trademark family good legs in bobby sox and platform heels. It was she who taught me about making a statement with lipstick, of which she had at least nine equally brilliant shades in expensive cases. And when she wasn’t lending a hand with the shopping or the wash or the cooking, or conspiring with my mother over some fine seam on the sewing machine, she would slather herself all over in cocoa butter (the smell of it can still pull the memory of her, like a genie, out of a jar) and throw herself down in the sun in her glamorous red bare-midriff swimsuit for a good hour’s tan.
And whenever Ferril had a short furlough, she dazzled him, and he dazzled her, and before you know it she was pinning together a cream-colored satin dress on the mannequin, and they were married in a quick and simple ceremony that was part of what came in those days with men going off to war. And then he went off to war, and they had a baby on the way.
Mildred never had another child. Thinking back, I can understand why. I was much too protected to be let in on the medical aspect of her condition when I was a girl, but I know she went a terribly long time giving birth. And I remember my sister and I being steered away from her until well after it was over.
She’d gone into labor the night before the night before Christmas. When we were finally allowed to see her, her face looking drained—and astonishingly lipstickless—there was all the same such a lustrous glory in her eyes that I thought her delight in her child must at least be proportional to her difficulty in getting it out of her body. It was a girl, a very tiny girl, born deep in the night of Christmas Eve, sleeping in a bassinet off to the side of her bed when we came enchanted and whispering into the room.
My mother and she had spent months playing with names, but Mildred threw it all over and
