The Curtain Pulls Back
Chapter 17
ARMED WITH THE translations of the letters Mary Grace went to see
Aunt Maggie. Aunt Maggie sighed. “Uncle Paul, he lived in Italy with the family
to work.”
“What does this have to do with my mother?”
“
Aspett
, listen, you want to know? Yes?”
“Yes, Aunt Maggie, I want to know.”
“Uncle Paul went to Italy, he was a careless young man, sent to
the
famiglia,
to Papa Maschere’s older brothers, made to work long hours
in the quarry, to
d
iventae un uomo,
tobecome a man
.
He had grown
strong, and he had found love. He had met the
beauti
ful Caterina.”
Mary Grace remembered Uncle Paul’s sketches.
“They were
come per la magia insieme
, this is like magic,
special together. Uncle Paul, though, he had to return to America because of
the war. It was coming and he had to get out. Everyone thought that by
returning he’d be able to later bring Caterina to him.
Capisci?
He had
to leave Caterina there.”
“Okay.” Mary Grace noticed Aunt Maggie was
shak
ing.
“When he could, he would come back for Caterina, but during the
war she had gone with her family and met a bad end.”
“What do you mean, Aunt Maggie?”
“Ah, for such a smart girl you know nothing. Their family, her
parents, Caterina and a younger brother all were killed in an accident fleeing
the bombings.” Mary Grace saw the pain in Aunt Maggie’s face about these people
she didn’t even know, but she knew that they meant so much to Uncle Paul. They
sat quiet for a while.
Mary Grace saw Aunt Maggie’s eyes were full of
sad
ness
for Uncle Paul. But, still, what did this have to do with her mother?
Aunt Maggie continued, “Giuseppe, your mother’s
brother also worked at the quarry. He and your Un
cle
Paul had become friends. Uncle Paul had to come back here. Giuseppe kept
connected with our Maschere family in Ravello, a small town above Amalfi, which
is where Papa came from.”
Uncle Paul and Giuseppe Giordano?
Mary Grace tried
to absorb this new information. She could remember that there were times that
Uncle Paul disappeared for a while.
Now she realized her mother knew where Uncle Paul had gone on
these trips and that he had known all about her. Somehow, he was a threat to
Teresa. It wasn’t these letters from
cugina
Rosalie; it was Uncle Paul
who connected the families? It was so much to think about.
Plus, Mary Grace was still trying to absorb
that
Uncle Paul had had his own life, and a now this con
firmed love and
loss in Italy.
The next time Mary Grace went to see Aunt Maggie she brought one
of the sketchbooks from the attic, but Aunt Maggie pushed it away.
“Your mother, Teresa, came here because she was no happy in Italy.
That is her family story. Find the letters from your mother’s sister.”
“What? What letters? Other letters? Aunt Maggie, what are you
talking about?”
“Teresa lived in Boston with
cugini
when she came, and
thought she would be a big fashion designer, but she was seamstress in the
factory.
“She was at a wedding that your father and Uncle Paul go to
because Giuseppe set up that they be invited. I always thought Giuseppe wanted
Uncle Paul to like your mother, but instead it was your father that felt she
was a
tesoro
(treasure) and he wanted only to marry her.
“She wanted romance, love letters, fancy, fancy.
“Your father he was a simple hard-working man, a good family man.
So, now you know about the letters. She married your father so she don’t have
to go back to crawling on her knees to her own father.”
Aunt Maggie sighed. “Coming to America and not being the designer
she thought she would be was one thing, but being disowned by her own family,
by her
own father, for being involved with a
man whose fam
ily, although now in America, came from the
sud
,
below Napoli, came from
niente
, nothing, had left her no choice to go
home to Italy.”
Her mother had come here, wanting to be something more than a wife
and mother? Once she married into the Maschere family did Teresa regret it?
Aunt Maggie hesitated then, and was quiet for a while. “We were
not good enough for them. That is what she believed. Her family, her brother
Guiseppe, and her sister Elena–they know.” Mary Grace noticed Aunt Maggie tense
up, sighing, and shaking. She should just stop this right now, but Mary Grace
was realizing that she did need to know, as here it was again, missing pieces–
why
were the Maschere’s not good enough?
“What are you talking about not good enough? You said her brother
set it up? Did my mother even talk to her family about me? I don’t understand
Aunt Maggie. What did you do? What did your family in Italy do?”
There was nothing but questions and more ques
tions, or maybe
just one. “My mother was so miserable. Was she always so miserable?”
Or was it only after having me?
This thought Mary Grace did not
voice, could not say out loud.
Gaining or Losing Ground
Chapter 18
MARY GRACE SPENT another evening drinking two glasses of wine and
then another, and finally a fourth.
This is terrible, just terrible. Nothing
about this family is any good! Family? Were we even a family or were we just a
bunch of misfits?
She spoke out loud to no one. She spoke into the walls of
her apartment. She went over and over in her head Aunt Maggie’s stories.
I have to stop. I’m so sick of these ghosts haunting me. Why can’t
I just accept that my mother didn’t love me? But, why?
It was her lowest
point. She stayed in bed for the next two days.
Oh,
Gracie, when was the last time you were happy?
The lake.
Into her mind surfaced the last time just she and her father had
gone up to the lake.
Dad, you
didn’t just
work and drink, you really liked to fish. Re
member how you liked to sit
by the water. To sit where it was quiet. Remember, I would draw pictures,
pictures of the ducks and geese on the edges of the lake. I liked to draw every
detail, like how their feet sunk into the muck where the ground was soaked,
draw their feet and beaks, and the distinctions among them. Dad, you were next
to me, fishing, we were quiet together.
She smiled remembering her father
asking her what the names were of each of the animals she had drawn. Together
they had named them—stretch neck, crooked beak, and bean head—the last one in
Italian—
testa fagioli
.
It was so long since she had thought of it, that she did draw,
that she and Luigi had laughed together.
Dad, help me. I did what you asked.
I took care of her. And now I am taking care of Aunt Maggie, but there is so
much I didn’t know!
I’m not going crazy. Maybe I do need to know who my mother was,
and what made her so miserable all her life. The past doesn’t go away. Didn’t
Aunt Maggie find that out even though she tried to bury her past, it didn’t go
away until she finally exposed it?
Was Aunt Maggie talking about the love letters or the letters from
Italy to her mom? She kept insisting to Mary Grace about letters from her
mother’s sister, but Mary Grace had yet to find any other letters. She had
searched in Aunt Maggie’s apartment and there was nothing in her dresser
drawers, nothing in the trunk up the attic, nor in the many boxes she found in
the cellar.
Maybe Aunt Maggie was confusing the letters,
mix
ing
them together in her mind.
Part III
Records from Pistoia, Italy
Chapter 19
MARY GRACE READ about the Tuscany hills be
tween Lucca and
Florence where
Pistoians
made their home. This is where her mother was
born and her mother’s family still lived. Would this help in her quest to know
her mother? She was in a state of suspension,
and
her life, as she knew it was on hold. She had a con
stant gnawing in the
pit of her stomach.
The records she requested from the
Comune
di Pis
toia
finally came. They included a note from a man, a clerk who worked
there, who claimed to be a
cugino
, and who wrote that he would guide her
through all the records. It was like he had been expecting her requests for a
long time. She started to look at the papers, many of them were hand-written.
Her mother’s birth certificate read, born 1908 to Giovanni and
Elenora Giordano. Mary Grace couldn’t imagine her mother as a baby or as a
child.
There were certificates for her siblings, two boys, one who died
in World War II, and then twin sisters born
eleven
years after her mother in 1919, Maria and Gra
ziella. How could this be?
How could she be named for them and never know they existed? Why? Why name Mary
Grace for them? She looked more carefully and saw they had lived for only two
years and died of scarlet fever.
“
Maria Graziella, Maria Graziella.”
Her head was spinning,
hearing her mother call her over and over.
“
Va bene
?” her father would always ask her mother after she
had received a letter from Italy. “Are you okay, is everything still okay?”
Mary Grace flipped through different papers, trying
to focus. She saw that her grandmother died from
com
plications soon after giving birth to the twins. What did it all
mean? Her mother had lost her own mother, and gained and lost two sisters.
Then, she had
a child who couldn’t fill
those losses? Mary Grace won
dered what her mother ever thought of her.
She looked at other documents, paying attention to the dates, and
saw that her grandfather remarried barely three years later. So, it was the
second wife, Christina that wrote to her mother and called her daughter. There
were two boys born to this woman, and years later, the daughter, Elena.
Mary Grace was exhausted by it all. She had spent all day reading
and trying to make some sense of it. She feared the recurring nightmare that
she had since her mother’s death, of her mother calling out to her from the
wheelchair, “
Maria Graziella
,” but was she calling Mary Grace, her
daughter, or was her mother calling back to her lost sisters?
Following the records was a first of many letters from Elena, her
mother’s younger sister. The
cugino
in the record room must have given
her Mary Grace’s address. Elena talked about her brothers, and Mary Grace’s
mother’s younger brother Giuseppe and coming with him to America to see their
sister, Teresa. She remembered meeting Mary Grace who was seven years old and
Elena was eleven years old then.
It was difficult to believe that they had once met. Mary Grace had
no recollection of that meeting.
Back to the nursing home and more questions for Aunt Maggie. “I
have been trying to find out about my mother’s family. This sister, Elena, she
came to America to see my mother?”
“Yes, it is all in the letters. Your mother, I forgive her now,
she should rest in peace, but then I hated her. You learn, Gracie, when you
slap someone back, the slap on
your cheek
doesn’t sting any less. We did it for you, Gra
cie, Uncle Paul begged me
to write to her family.”
“What? You wrote to my mother’s family? Answered the letters my
mother received?”
“No, your mother turned her nose to those letters.”
“That’s not true, Aunt Maggie. I saw her read them, I saw her
cry.”
“Gracie, she was cold, years before she was dead, she was a
pesce
morte
. I wrote to the sister and she wrote to me. Somewhere, somewhere in
the house are those letters.”
Mary Grace went back to the house. Where? Almost everything was
emptied out. She sat in Aunt Maggie’s living room that had so often been a
refuge for her. She looked in her bag and took out the information from Italy,
and a second letter that came from Elena, written mostly in English.
Elena talked about “our beautiful village above the town of
Pistoia,
casa en
Pescia
.” She sent photos of the
Piazza del
Duomo
, and the
San Zeno
Cathedral.
How much did Mary Grace need to know from this woman, this Aunt
Elena?
Elena was born when Mary Grace’s mom was twen
ty-six years old,
and Mary Grace was born when her mom was thirty years old. Mary Grace tried to
get it straight
in her mind. Elena was her
mother’s half sister, her aunt,
born about four years before Mary Grace
was born.
There were also photographs of each of the
eight chil
dren of Giovanni Giordano, living and dead, Giovanni’s proud
brood.
The one of Teresa must have been taken before she left for
America. She was standing at the door of their house, her head tilted to one
side, and she was squinting into the sun. Mary Grace thought maybe she looked
uncertain. Her hair was long and wispy around her face. Mary Grace had never
seen her mother’s hair not cropped short and combed flat. She had on a long
patterned dress and pumps. She wished the picture was in color, not in black
and white, and yet she could tell this dress was not the dreary black that she
always knew her mother to wear.
She pinned that photograph above her desk and looked at it for a
long time.
Che cosa fai?”
What are you doing? She could her mother’s voice.
Mary Grace heard the words so many times. “
Che cosa fai
? Go
sweep the steps.” or
Che cosa fai
? Go wash the socks in the sink.”
Always commands mixed with words she never really understood.
Che cosa fai?
I’m finding out who I am mother.
Mary Grace de
clared to herself.
She felt strengthened by the way Elena spoke in her letters, and
awkward about the way Elena encompassed her as if they had been always been
connected. The way Elena spoke about her own mother, Momma Christina,
with such love and respect, in some strange way it
consoled Mary Grace, and in other ways it was so for
eign to her this
show of love. This was not a concept comfortable to Mary Grace.
A new set of letters arrived from Elena’s younger
brothers Francesco and Giovanni, Jr. They were in
Ital
ian and from what Mary Grace could decipher they were welcoming her
into the family, as if it had only been too long since they had spoken, not
that they had never met her before.
The photographs included the family house with the
Colline
Montalbano
rising behind it. There were two other photographs of the inside
of the house showing the open living room and kitchen. And, a poor copy of
an old black-and-white photograph of Momma Chris
tina
as a young woman, and on the back she, or the brothers had written “
Benvenuto—sei
famiglia
.”
It all made Mary Grace feel anxious, the way
that change drives you to new places and brings fear of those new places that
tries to pull you back. It was like she waiting for someone to catch her, “
Maria
Graziella
how dare you talk to my
sorella
?” Of course it would be
her mother warning her not to engage. Mary Grace reverted to being
an observer, taking in the details from these new exchang
es, but not participating emotionally. Using a magnifying glass, she
looked at the photographs, moving around the room seeing modern and old mixed
together. There were flowers, squashes, and herbs, hanging upside down from the
beam in the kitchen over a worn butcher
block. On the walls were beautiful tapestries, and on in
laid wood tables were stunning vases and other
ceramica.
What an amazing and beautiful place, so well kept. Mary Grace was
challenged by the warmth and brightness of this place. She was struck by the
feeling of family in the letters and even in the photographs. Could Mary Grace
ever feel a part of this family?
She had to admit she did look forward to
their let
ters.
With dictionaries and
translators she spent hours
poring
over them. They told her about Papa, their fa
ther, and her grandfather,
long deceased. They told
her they tried to
reconnect with her mother, Teresa, af
ter he was gone. They called her
Maria
Graziella
. She still shivered at the name.
Mary Grace even started playing the piano again in Aunt Maggie’s living
room, remembering how it was to sit there and play “On Top of Old Smokey,” and
how easily it came back to her as her fingers played on the keys. It comforted
her again. All this uncertainty suddenly felt like it was leading somewhere,
like she was close to understanding something about her own life, by
understanding her mother’s life.
Then an unexpected letter arrived, from Giuseppe, written by
Elena. She had gone to visit him and as he dictated, she wrote, “I am happy, as
so we all are, to know you are well, we had worried for you.”
Mary Grace lingered over those words, wondering what they meant,
that they worried for her? She was doodling on a pad by her bed, thinking—her
mother was one of eight siblings. She was doodling the number eight. She thought
about the precision of compensatory movements in figure skating, the continuum
line that curves and crosses forming 8.
She fell asleep to the motion of the figure eight, and she saw the
salt timer on the kitchen stove, thrown at her by her mother, the eight
breaking apart–her mother
had split the
family. She awoke confused. Had she fall
en to sleep–or was she
remembering—her mother had spilled the salt, but that wasn’t what she just
heard in her mind–her mother had split the family. Why? Why had her mother been
so angry with her? Mary Grace only knew that she had cleaned the salt from the
floor, and then brought a salt timer from one of her childhood games and left
it in the kitchen for her mother.
It seemed everyone tread softly around Teresa,
ev
eryone
tried to appease her. Maybe Teresa was more like her father than she would want
to know. And Mary Grace was getting obsessed with the fear she was like her
mother.
This was a restless night for Mary Grace. So many people, and
names, and stories crashing together, like waves pounding the shore with the
unexpected undertow ready to take you down at any moment.