(and with arrogant, cruel intention would frequently repeat to my sister) that our mother had bled for weeks, that she had nearly died. Thus the pleaded intercession of St. Ann and the elevation to household saint, the rosaries, the novenas, the reverence of naming.
And now, oddly, out of the memory of these pictures, like the sudden opening of a shutter, vivid and black, springs a glimpse out of my earliest and most elusive childhood memory: a big, cold house where my brothers and I are briefly in institutional care—a misery of children, a distant pond, a few pale and unfriendly ducklings, a gigantic, white-tiled washroom in which I am somehow unaccountably alone, a sense of something overwhelming in the hugeness and strangeness of its seeming abandonment.
Surely these pictures had been taken then, when she was too ill to care for us herself. Perhaps the doctors had told my father she was dying. It seems very Italian—almost a cliché of Italianness—to think of the camera as a kind of window standing in death’s way. I see a lifetime of family funerals, a gallery of memorial card photo images, each with its gauzy airbrushed halo, and it defines a sense scored so deep that even now a part of me knows mortality to be the true, secret meaning of pictures.
But these were not clichés, and I think now that in this way, as in many others, Italy had marked Mario differently. For he once told us that he had been trained to use his first camera as a soldier in the field, imaging the carnage of war, and now, perhaps, in the face of this possible death—this mortal life bleeding itself away—he was utterly beyond any cliché of mortality as defined by the burial crypt. Here the lens that sees also holds, refuses to let go. It is become his own prosthetic will, obsessive, prurient, probing a deeper mystery than fear, even than death, taking my mother’s body at curious, artful, languorous angles, revealing her, carnal and silken and voluptuous even in the surrender of her suffering. These are pictures of Maria, shameless declarations of renewed passion, and the very violence of their intimacy transcends death, as does their willful insistence that the camera transmute her pain into beauty. Against the pallor of her cheeks he has chosen to see her ever-sad soft dark eyes as smudges of wet charcoal, her hair like Salome’s, streaming black blood upon the pillow.
Accidental voyeurs, we could not refuse the messages of secret sin and penance that had been coded into these images. Nor could we unravel them. Why our mother would have wanted to die we didn’t know, but there was something—a dumb withdrawal, a recoil even in her acquiescence—that said to us she did. And yet what might these same images we were looking upon now have said to her when she first saw them? What life-affirming passionate obsession did she read into the urgency with which Mario took them in such relentless and unaccountable numbers? Did they make her want to live, the warrant of something still lovely she thought she had lost?
Reading these signs years after, Maria’s daughters, too, still young and unwise, wanted to live for Love. We imagined Maria our sister somehow, rising from that sickbed with her faith renewed in the image of a Love as imperious as Tosca’s, a Love Dante had made so commanding that the beloved could never withhold her own in return.
And so we imagined Maria wrapping her shapely figure in thick woolens again, sacrificing day after day again, on her feet in the chill-cold North Avenue market, in that market filled with the fragrant stinks of cheeses and salt meats and damp sawdust, with its dark pinecones still clutching their nuts like fists, with its intoxicating scents of oranges in winter and of Christmas anise. She helped lift the huge, steaming sides of beef onto storage hooks in the icebox. She candled eggs in the back room till her eyes seemed to melt into her head. At the front counter she forced herself to smile the shopkeeper’s winning smile. And, oh, it was a sweet smile, they said, none sweeter, so winsome and large it transformed her melancholy face.
But still there were ominous forecasts about her breaking health. In the mornings she wept, we could hear her weeping, her arthritic joints ached so, and the limited safety of the child who knows fear seemed to have been made more fearful.
Surely from the baseline of my infancy there had been some intuition of the mysteriously twining roots of love and pain, even love and death. Hadn’t I been marked for both when I’d been named for my mother’s mother, who had died the year before I was born? In a family that deeply respected the age-old privilege of the father to name the first girl-child after his mother (in this case, Immacolata, the grandmother living in Italy), such encoding of the memory of my dead Sicilian grandmother into my life bore almost unintelligible significance. It also happens to have spared me a lifetime symbolically blazoned with the inviolate sex of the Madonna—a name which, in any case, was decorously tacked on at my christening. Of course even “Flavia” was a cross for an American child to bear, and after about eleven years of it I cried bitter tears, begging my mother to let me give myself another name. My father had changed his—he had told us so—when as a young officer his true first name of Salvatore had made him a hayseed to the more genteel of his comrades. But my mother had told me then about her mother, how good she had been, if stern, and wise and clever besides, and said, “You will come to love your name.” And I did, if not entirely for her sake.
But I had also been only five when my grandfather, my mother’s father, died of a stroke, a bitter wound to the heart of child love. He was Calogero, a name even more comical to the ear of Italian fashion than my father’s Salvatore, and as distinctly Sicilian as the sweet wine he made every fall and drank through a winter of Sundays with his card-playing cronies, keeping an ever tighter grip on the bottle and the deck. He had made much of us, his first grandchildren, and we had adored his dry and wistful humor, doled out with mysterious pennies in a cunning sleight-of-hand and accompanied by tickles of his peppery handlebar mustache, which he wore wickedly curled and waxed to a fine arabesque.
His death had been sudden, and catastrophic. Their Mamma gone, he had become everything to his girls. They held his wake at home, as families did then, on the parlor floor of the very tenement that stood as the congealed sweat of his stonemason’s brow. He had been foreman, my mother loved to remind us, on the construction crew of the Saw Mill River Parkway—one of the country’s first grand, tree-lined parkways, which ran through the Bronx and Westchester. He had stood up to the mafiosi in the protection racket when he ran a grocery store on East 106th Street, and she, his Mary, who had thrown herself in the way when they shot him, the bullet just whizzing past her shoulder—who in that moment had become his most precious treasure—had never wanted him out of her sight.
What useless flotsam we four children had suddenly become on the flood of his daughters’ primitive, tidal grief. Years later, as often as I read of the women of Troy mourning Priam in the fiery collapse of the ancient city, I would see a darkened front room eerily lit with flaming candles and enwrapped in a velvety embrasure of white flowers, a father’s poor work-worn body lying still and straight amid the waving silhouettes of his daughters, their shrieking voices strung into one great piercing wail of anguish. I can still hear them, still see myself sobbing, in empathy and terror, in the room where the dark winter coats are mounded, until some pitying aunt takes me in her arms. To this day the scent of gardenias makes me want to faint.
Her father’s death seemed to have become a turning point for Maria, who, sick in heart and body, had for a moment felt the meaning of her family gone. This was true for Mario as well. The terrible war had just begun, abruptly cutting off everyone here who still felt rooted in Italy from everyone still left behind. No one could go there, no one could leave there. One day, they said, Immacolata had delayed getting away. One little day!—someone was sick, she could not go so quickly—and the gate had shut like iron. Husband and wife, mother and children, were condemned to live out the war apart.
It was a moment of cruel poise between past and future. Or so it seemed, for how else could we explain the mystery of this sudden wrenching change, this cruel tearing apart of everything to go thousands of miles across the continent? If, as time went on, we began to understand it differently—to see something perhaps more ominous than beautiful at the passionate heart of those old photographs, something less unasked for than death in the urge to fly, less liberating
