Core ‘Ngrato

My father seldom bought anything for himself. A bag of candy, perhaps – he liked those orange sticks covered in dark chocolate. And once he went to Little Italy and came home with a couple of Italian records. One of them was Renato Carosene singing silly tunes like Tu Vuo' Fa' L'americano and Io Mammeta e Tu. He got a kick out of those. Another was an LP by Luciano Virgili, songs with names like Piccola Santa, Core ‘Ngrato, and Addio Signora, sentimental songs about love -- love that was always unworthy, unrequited, or ill-fated. He would have scoffed at this, but I believe those songs were his true essence. How could it have been otherwise?

He was the eldest son, the one expected to tend to his younger brothers and their ailing mother while Pop took to the road on mysterious business trips that lured him from New York to incongruous destinations like Kansas City, which may as well have been on the moon. At eleven years old, he became the family scribe, sending letters in care of General Delivery about progress at school, unanticipated household expenses, and a baby brother who toddled into the front room calling for his poppa. Written in a neat fledgling cursive and signed with his nickname, “Sonny”, the letters inevitably went unanswered, but they must have mattered – two of them survive to this day, more than eighty years later, in a safe deposit box.

The pattern of his being the responsible one continued for the rest of my father’s life. Following his own brief Army stint during World War II, he took it upon himself to write daily letters to his youngest brother Joe, who was then stationed in the Philippines. I am currently in the process of reading and transcribing these letters; in addition to their being a testimonial to my father’s profound sense of duty and love, they also provide a revealing glimpse into the historical context. There is talk of the election, for example -- it looked like Dewey had it sewn up, but it turned out to be FDR again.

“Whoever it is,” my father wrote, “let’s hope for a speedy end of the war.” Later that month, there was word from my grandfather’s impoverished relatives in Italy.

“Almost expected to hear they were all wiped out, but so far the only complaints are food and clothing,” he reported, “and we’ll send some right away.”

The cycle of rationing at that point was on sugar, beef, and unofficially, cigarettes and matches.

“One store dealer put it this way: ask me for my wife, but not cigarettes,” wrote my father. The letters are filled with references to naval battles with Japan, the impending fall of Germany, furloughs, family news, women, and dreams deferred.

Through these letters I have become familiar with the young man that my father was. I love the rare moments when he seems to enjoy life – a dip in the saltwater pool at the St. George Hotel; basking in the satisfying aftermath of a “whirlwind housecleaning”; or a Sunday drive out to Jersey to watch his friend Harry play golf. “You and I will take up that sport after the war,” he promised his brother, “It distracts the mind from humdrum routine.”

One letter describes a Sunday afternoon when he had just dropped his mother off at Aunt Mary’s and his brother John at the movies, and returned to the apartment for a few hours of solitude to listen to opera and write. He describes this as his favorite kind of time. He wanted to be a writer…in fact, he clearly WAS a writer…but this was a secret desire that had no coinage in the real world, and no one would have taken it seriously. He also hoped to someday practice medicine, and he would have been good at that. He had a brilliant mind and a demonstrated willingness to work hard. He was the kind of person you would want around in any problem situation, the kind who would instinctively look after everyone else and somehow know just what to do.

In the meantime, he painted houses, just as he did later when his children were growing up. He came home dirty and exhausted in his paint-splattered overalls and transformed himself with a shave, a bath, and a change of clothes into the first-class gentleman that he wanted to be. He could only relax when one job was finished and another lined up, when bills were paid, and duties attended.

He contained contradictions. Though he described himself as a cynic and often spoke like one, he burned with passion, ambition, and desire. “My God damn mind insists on analyzing, weighing, thinking, scheming…” he declared, yet elsewhere he wrote about “the heart that sings its wild poetic song” -- so plainly his own.

The woman who was to become his wife and my mother makes an entrance in these letters, all the way from “the wilds of Corona.” His ambivalence is explicit and disturbing, and yet he is drawn to her despite his better judgment. The collision of cultures, disparity of intellect, and dissonance in values and worldview are already apparent in 1944. I want to warn him from the future what this marriage will mean, but my own existence results from this unhappy pairing, and everything he taught me has by now distilled into loyalty, love, and forgiveness. He was destined to endure tragedy, discord, and cruel disappointment, and he always bridled against the frameworks that bound him, but he never let anyone down.

The marriage took place, and the man who wrote the letters in time became Daddy to six children (I was the third), and continued to support us by painting. His specialty was murals: Roman ruins, leaf sprays, idyllic fantasy scenes to accommodate the whims of his clients. (I grew up in a house with peacocks and clowns on the wall, flowers on the ceiling.) In the 1950s, he attended night school and became a chiropractor, a proud achievement that earned him the title of “doctor”, but he was never able to focus on developing a successful practice. (In fact, it was an era when chiropractors were derisively referred to as quacks.) He could have attained great heights nonetheless, but, as he often put it, when you mount a tiger, you can’t get off. He had no support, was both father and mother to us, and there came the added sorrow of a congenital disease that afflicted two of his children.

It’s a terrible thing to watch a great soul ebb over time, to see how pounding disappointments tamp out the flames, how even then there are those firefly sparks that could ignite but finally just disperse into the night or die of indifference.

A memory comes to me of a winter day with my father in Manhattan. How is it that I had him to myself that day? There is a jangle of traffic, city noise, gray sky, gray buildings, the marble steps of an imposing façade, maybe a bank. We are hurrying, and it’s cold, and he buys a small paper bag of hot steamed chestnuts from a vendor on the street and I hold the bag up close to my face and feel its warmth. I am a gap-toothed girl in a red and white striped scarf and a blue coat missing two buttons, my ears are cold and my nose is running, and there’s a sense, as always, of worry and hurry, but the chestnuts beneath their hard brown skins are buttery and satisfying, and I am here with Daddy, safe and loved. I wish we didn’t have to go home, where this glorious day will end in a fight, where the best in him will be misunderstood, where all the proclaimed turning points will take us in circles and the patterns will repeat themselves into hopelessness. I wish we weren’t heading for the things I know about now.

“Your object is survival,” he wrote to Uncle Joe, “not merely within the strict limitations of the word, but more -- survival in the best manner possible. Not to emerge a sad sack, forlorn and beaten into submission by adverse circumstances. Not to come back an unreasoning savage, wild and hostile to each and all, eager and ready for revenge of the innocent and guilty alike. But to come back with balance, with a reasoning mind, to hate your enemies and to be on the alert for them, to respect your friends and appreciate them, to love those who love you...”

Maybe these words brought heart to my uncle reading them so faraway. They certainly resonate with me.

He wrote to me directly, too. Some of those letters sting because I know I let him down, and that fact is painfully apparent in every sentence. Oh, I held great promise, and he loved me very much, but I became the most ungrateful heart of all, selfish, stupid, and stubborn, as young people often are --- and then he suddenly died. I didn’t get a chance to make amends.

“In the end, nothing matters but who loves you, and how they perform in this,” he wrote to me not long before his death. I’m not even sure I fully understood these words at the time. He was disappointed in me, and I probably thought he was trying to make me feel guilty. I was in my twenties then, still childishly accepting any help he could provide, while arrogantly rejecting advice, criticism, or expectation. He was right about all of it.

I’ve come a long way since then. The fact of missing my father has become such a fundamental part of my being I don’t know who I would be without it. But I am living a life he would have surely loved, and I try to do good things in his memory. No one lives in vain who has changed someone else for the better.

And the story has not ended.