Contents
About the Author
Also by Gay Talese
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Author’s Note
Bibliography
Copyright
ALSO BY GAY TALESE
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
Honor Thy Father
The Kingdom and the Power
The Bridge
Fame and Obscurity
New York—A Serendipiter’s Journey
The Overreachers
UNTO THE SONS
Gay Talese
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Epub ISBN 9781409007258
Version 1.0
Published by Hutchinson 1992
© Gay Talese 1992
Gay Talese has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in Great Britain in 1992 by Hutchinson
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-09-177162-5
For my daughters,
Pamela Frances
and
Catherine Gay
The ambitions of people who never became very rich, who founded no dynasty or long-lasting company, and who lived in the middle and lower ranks of the business world, are difficult to write about, because they are seldom recorded.
But the character of a society is greatly influenced by the form the ambitions of such men take, and by the extent to which they are satisfied or frustrated.
—THEODORE ZELDIN,
France, 1848–1945: Ambition and Love
1
THE BEACH IN winter was dank and desolate, and the island dampened by the frigid spray of the ocean waves pounding relentlessly against the beachfront bulkheads, and the seaweed-covered beams beneath the white houses on the dunes creaked as quietly as the crabs crawling nearby.
The boardwalk that in summer was a festive promenade of suntanned couples and children’s balloons, of carousel tunes and colored lights spinning at night from the Ferris wheel, was occupied in winter by hundreds of sea gulls perched on the iron railings facing into the wind. When not resting they strutted outside the locked doors of vacated shops, or circled high in the sky, holding clams in their beaks that they soon dropped upon the boardwalk with a splattering cluck. Then they zoomed down and pounced on the exposed meat, pecking and pulling until there was nothing left but the jagged, salty white chips of empty shells.
By midwinter the shell-strewn promenade was a vast cemetery of clams, and from a distance the long elevated flat deck of the boardwalk resembled a stranded aircraft carrier being attacked by divebombers—and oddly juxtaposed in the fog behind the dunes loomed the rusting remains of a once sleek four-masted vessel that during a gale in the winter of 1901 had run aground on this small island in southern New Jersey called Ocean City.
The steel-hulled ship, flying a British flag and flaunting hundred-fifty-foot masts, had been sailing north along the New Jersey coast toward New York City, where it was scheduled to deliver one million dollars’ worth of Christmas cargo it had picked up five months before in Kobe, Japan. But during the middle of the night, while a number of crewmen drank rum and beer in a premature toast to the long journey’s end, a fierce storm rose and destroyed the ship’s sails, snapped its masts, and drove it into a sandbar within one hundred yards of the Ocean City boardwalk.
Awakened by the distress signals that flared in the night, the alarmed residents of Ocean City—a conservative community founded in 1879 by Methodist ministers and other Prohibitionists who wished to establish an island of abstinence and propriety—hastened to help the sailors, who were soon discovered to be battered but unharmed and smelling of sweat, salt water, and liquor.
After the entire thirty-three-man crew had been escorted to shore, they were sheltered and fed for days under the auspices of the town’s teetotaling elders and ministers’ wives; and while the sailors expressed gratitude for such hospitality they privately cursed their fate in being shipwrecked on an island so sedate and sober. But soon they were relocated by British nautical authorities, and the salvageable cargo was barged to New York to be sold at reduced prices. And the town returned to the tedium of winter.
The big ship, however, remained forever lodged in the soft white sand—unmovable, slowly sinking, a sight that served Ocean City’s pious guardians as a daily reminder of the grim consequences of intemperate guidance. But as I grew up in the late 1930s, more than three decades after the shipwreck—when the visible remnants at low tide consisted only of the barnacle-bitten ridge of the upper deck, the corroded brown rudder post and tiller, and a single lopsided mast—I viewed the vessel as a symbol of adventure and risk; and during my boyhood wanderings along the beach I became enchanted with exotic fantasies of nights in foreign ports, of braving the waves and wind with wayward men, and of escaping the rigid confines of this island on which I was born but never believed I belonged.
I saw myself always as an alien, an outsider, a drifter who, like the shipwrecked sailors, had arrived by accident. I felt different from my young friends in almost every way, different in the cut of my clothes, the food in my lunch box, the music I heard at home on the record player, the ideas and inner thoughts I revealed on those rare occasions when I was open and honest.
I was olive-skinned in a freckle-faced town, and I felt unrelated even to my parents, especially my father, who was indeed a foreigner—an unusual man in dress and manner, to whom I bore no physical resemblance and with whom I could never identify. Trim and elegant, with wavy dark hair and a small rust-colored moustache, he spoke English with an accent and received letters bearing strange-looking stamps.
These letters sometimes contained snapshots of soldiers wearing uniforms with insignia and epaulets unlike any I had seen on the recruitment posters displayed throughout the island. They were my uncles and cousins, my father explained to me quietly one day early in World War II, when I was ten; they were fighting in the Italian army, and—it was unnecessary for him to add—their enemy included the government of the United States.
I became increasingly sensitive to this fact when I sat through the newsreels each week at the local cinema; next to my unknowing classmates, I watched with private horror the destruction by Allied bombers of mountain villages and towns in southern Italy to which I was ancestrally linked through a historically ill-timed relationship with my Italian father. At any moment I half expected to see up on the screen, gazing down at me from a dust-covered United States Army truck filled with disheveled Italian prisoners being guarded at gunpoint, a sad face that I could identify from one of my father’s snapshots.
My father, on the other hand, seemed to share none of my confused sense of patriotism during the war years. He joined a citizens’ committee of shore patrolmen who kept watch along the waterfront at night, standing with binoculars on the boardwalk under the stanchioned lights that on the ocean side were painted black as a precaution against discovery by enemy submarines.
He made headlines in the local newspaper after a popular speech to the Rotary Club in which he reaffirmed his loyalty to the Allied cause, declaring that were he not too old for the draft (he was thirty-nine) he would proudly join the American troops at the front, in a uniform devotedly cut and stitched with his own hands.
Trained as an apprentice tailor in his native village, and later an assistant cutter in a prominent shop in Paris that employed an older Italian cousin, my father arrived in Ocean City circuitously and impulsively at the age of eighteen in 1922 with very little money, an extensive wardrobe, and the outward appearance of a man who knew exactly where he was going, when in fact nothing was further from the truth. He knew no one in town, barely knew the language, and yet, with a self-assurance that has always mystified me, he adjusted to this unusual island as readily as he could cut cloth to fit any size and shape.
Having noticed a “For Sale” sign in the window of a tailor shop in the center of town, my father approached the asthmatic owner, who was desperate to leave the island for the drier climate of Arizona. After a brief negotiation, my father acquired the business and thus began a lengthy, spirited campaign to bring the rakish fashion of the Continental boulevardier to the comparatively continent men of the south Jersey shore.
But after decorating his windows with lantern-jawed mannequins holding cigarettes and wearing Borsalino hats, and draping his counters with bolts of fine imported fabrics—and displaying on his walls such presumably persuasive regalia as his French master tailor’s diploma bordered by cherubim and a Greek goddess—my father made so few sales during his first year that he was finally forced to introduce into his shop a somewhat undignified gimmick called the Suit Club.
At the cost of one dollar per week, Suit Club members would print their names and addresses on small white cards and, after placing the cards in unmarked envelopes, would deposit them into a large opaque vase placed prominently atop a velvet-covered table next to a fashion photograph of a dapper man and woman posing with a greyhound on the greensward of an ornate country manor.
Each Friday evening just prior to closing time, my father would invite one of the assembled Suit Club members to close his eyes and pick from the vase a single envelope, which would reveal the name of the fortunate winner of a free suit, to be made from fabric selected by that individual; after two fittings, it would be ready for wearing within a week.
Since as many as three or four hundred people were soon paying a dollar each week to partake in this raffle, my father was earning on each free suit a profit perhaps three times the average cost of a custom-made suit in those days—to say nothing of the additional money he earned when he enticed a male winner into purchasing an extra pair of matching trousers.
But my father’s bonanza was abruptly terminated one day in 1928, when an anonymous complaint sent to City Hall, possibly by a rival tailor, charged that the Suit Club was a form of gambling clearly outlawed under the town charter; thus ended for all time my father’s full-time commitment to the reputable but precarious life of an artist with a needle and thread. My father did not climb down from an impoverished mountain in southern Italy and forsake the glorious lights of Paris and sail thousands of miles to the more opportunistic shores of America to end up as a poor tailor in Ocean City, New Jersey.
So he diversified. Advertising himself as a ladies’ furrier who could alter or remodel old coats as well as provide resplendent new ones (which he obtained on consignment from a Russian Jewish immigrant who resided in nearby Atlantic City), my father expanded his store to accommodate a refrigerated fur storage vault and extended the rear of the building to include a dry-cleaning plant overseen by a black Baptist deacon who during Prohibition operated a small side business in bootlegging. Later, in the 1930s, my father added a ladies’ dress boutique, having as partner and wife a well-tailored woman who once worked as a buyer in a large department store in Brooklyn.
He met her while attending an Italian wedding in that borough in December 1927. She was a bridesmaid, a graceful and slender woman of twenty with dark eyes and fair complexion and a style my father immediately recognized as both feminine and prepossessing. After a few dances at the reception under the scrutiny of her parents, and the frowns of the saxophone player in the band with whom she had recently gone out on a discreet double date, my father decided to delay his departure from Brooklyn for a day or two so that he might ingratiate himself with her. This he did with such panache that they were engaged within a year, and married six months later, after buying a small white house near the Ocean City beach, where, in the winter of 1932, I was born and awoke each morning to the smell of espresso and the roaring sound of the waves.
My first recollection of my mother was of a fashionable, solitary figure on the breezy boardwalk pushing a baby carriage with one hand while with the other stabilizing on her head a modish feathered hat at an unwavering angle against the will of the wind.
As I grew older I learned that she cared greatly about exactness in appearance, preciseness in fit, straightness in seams; and, except when positioned on a pedestal in the store as my father measured her for a new suit, she seemed to prefer standing at a distance from other people, conversing with customers over a counter, communicating with her friends via telephone rather than in person. On those infrequent occasions when her relatives from Brooklyn would visit us in Ocean City, I noticed how quickly she backed away from their touch after offering her cheek for a kiss of greeting. Once, during my preschool days as I accompanied her on an errand, I tried to hold on to her, to put my hand inside the pocket of her coat not only for the warmth but for a closer feeling with her presence. But when I tried this I felt her hand, gently but firmly, remove my own.
It was as if she were incapable of intimate contact with anyone but my father, whom she plainly adored to the exclusion of everyone else; and the impression persisted throughout my youth that I was a kind of orphan in the custody of a compatible couple whose way of life was strange and baffling.
One night at the dinner table when I casually picked up a loaf of Italian bread and placed it upside down in the basket, my father became furious and, without further explanation, turned the loaf right side up and demanded that I never repeat what I had done. Whenever we attended the cinema as a family we left before the end, possibly because of my parents’ inability or unwillingness to relate to the film’s content, be it drama or comedy. And although my parents spent their entire married life living along the sea, I never saw them go sailing, fishing, or swimming, and rarely did they even venture onto the beach itself.
In my mother’s case I suspect her avoidance of the beach was due to her desire to prevent the sun from scorching and darkening her fair skin. But I believe my father’s aversion to the sea was based on something deeper, more complex, somehow related to his boyhood in southern Italy. I suggest this because I often heard him refer to his region’s coastline as foreboding and malarial, a place of piracy and invasion; and as an avid reader of Greek mythology—his birthplace is not far from the renowned rock of Scylla, where the Homeric sea monster devoured sailors who had escaped the whirlpool of Charybdis—my father was prone to attaching chimerical significance to certain bizarre or inexplicable events that occurred during his youth along the streams and lakes below his village.
I remember overhearing, when I was eleven or twelve, my father complaining to my mother that he had just experienced a sleepless night during which he had been disturbed by beachfront sounds resembling howling wolves, distant but distinct, and reminiscent of a frightful night back in 1914 when his entire village had been stirred by such sounds; when the villagers awoke they discovered that the azure water of their lake had turned a murky red.
It was a mournful precursor of things to come, my father explained to my mother: his own father would soon die unexpectedly of an undiagnosed ailment, and a bloody world war would destroy the lives of so many of his young countrymen, including his older brother.
I, too, had sometimes heard in Ocean City at night what sounded like wolves echoing above the sand dunes; but I knew they were really stray dogs, part of the large population of underfed pets and watchdogs abandoned each fall by summer merchants and vacationers during the peak years of the Depression, when the local animal shelter was inadequately staffed or closed entirely.
Even in summertime the dogs roamed freely on the boardwalk during the Depression, mingling with the reduced number of tourists who strolled casually up and down the promenade, passing the restaurants of mostly unoccupied tables, the soundless bandstand outside the music pavilion, and the carousel’s riderless wooden horses.
My mother loathed the sight and smell of these dogs; and as if her disapproval provoked their spiteful nature, they followed her everywhere. Moments after she had emerged from the house to escort me to school before her mile walk along deserted streets to join my father at the store, the dogs would appear from behind fences and high-weeded yards and trail her by several paces in a quiet trot, softly whimpering and whining, or growling or panting with their tongues extended.
While there were a few pointers and terriers, spaniels and beagles, they were mostly mongrels of every breed and color, and all of them seemed unintimidated by my mother, even after she abruptly turned and glared at them and tried to drive them away with a sweeping gesture of her right arm in the air. They never attacked her or advanced close enough to nip at her high heels; it was mainly a game of territorial imperative that they played each morning with her. By the winter of 1940, the dogs had definitely won.
At this time my mother was caring for her second and final child, a daughter four years my junior; and I think that the daily responsibility of rearing two children, assisting in the store, and being followed, even when we children accompanied her, by the ragged retinue of dogs—a few of which often paused to copulate in the street as my sister and I watched in startled wonderment—drove my mother to ask my father to sell our house on the isolated north end of the island and move us into the more populated center of town.
This he unhesitatingly did, although in the depressed real estate market of that time he was forced to sell at an unfavorable price. But he also benefitted from these conditions by obtaining at a bargain on the main street of Ocean City a large brick building that had been the offices of a weekly newspaper lately absorbed in a merger. The spacious first floor of the building, with its high ceiling and balcony, its thick walls and deep interior, its annex and parking lot, provided more than enough room for my father’s various enterprises—his dress shop and dry-cleaning service, his fur storage vaults and tailoring trade.
More important to my mother, however, was the empty floor of the building, an open area as large as a dance hall that would be converted into an apartment offering her both a convenient closeness to my father and the option of distance from everyone else when she so desired. Since she also decorated this space in accord with her dictum that living quarters should be designed less to be lived in than to be looked at and admired, my sister and I soon found ourselves residing in an abode that was essentially an extended showroom. It was aglow with crystal chandeliers and sculpted candles in silver holders, and it had several bronze claw-footed marble-topped coffee tables surrounded by velvet sofas and chairs that bespoke comfort and taste but nonetheless conveyed the message that should we children ever take the liberty of reclining on their cushions and pillows, we should, upon rising, be certain we did not leave them rumpled or scattered or even at angles asymmetrical to the armrests.
Not only did my father not object to this fastidiously decorative ambience, he accentuated it by installing in the apartment several large mirrors that doubled the impression of almost everything in view, and also concealed in the rear of the apartment the existence of three ersatz bedrooms that for some reason my parents preferred not to acknowledge.
Each bed was separately enclosed within an L-shaped ten-foot-high partition that on the inside was backed by shelves and closets and on the outside was covered entirely with mirror. Whatever was gained by this arrangement was lost whenever a visitor bumped into a mirror. And while I never remember at night being an unwitting monitor of my parents’ intimacy, I do know that otherwise in this domestic hall of mirrors we as a family hardly ever lost sight of one another.
Most embarrassing to me were those moments when, on entering the apartment unannounced after school, I saw reflected in a mirror, opposite a small alcove, the bowed head of my father as he knelt on the red velvet of a prie-dieu in front of a wall portrait of a bearded, brown-robed medieval monk. The monk’s face was emaciated, his lips seemed dry, and as he stood on a rock in sandals balancing a crosier in his right arm, his dark, somber eyes looked skyward as if seeking heavenly relief from the sins that surrounded him.
Ever since my earliest youth I had heard again and again my father’s astonishing tales about this fifteenth-century southern Italian miracle worker, Saint Francis of Paola. He had cured the crippled and revived the dead, he had multiplied food and levitated and with his hands stopped mountain boulders from rolling down upon villages; and one day in his hermitage, after an alluring young woman had tempted his celibacy, he had hastily retreated and leaped into an icy river to extinguish his passion.
The denial of pleasure, the rejection of worldly beauty and values, dominated the entire life of Saint Francis, my father had emphasized, adding that Francis as a boy had slept on stones in a cave near my father’s own village, had fasted and prayed and flagellated himself, and had finally established a credo of punishing piety and devotion that endures in southern Italy to this day, almost six hundred years after the birth of the saint.
I myself had seen other portraits of Saint Francis in the Philadelphia homes of some of my father’s Italian friends whom we occasionally visited on Sunday afternoons; and while I never openly doubted the veracity of Francis’s achievements, I never felt comfortable after I had climbed the many steps of the private staircase leading to the apartment and opened the living room door to see my father kneeling in prayer before this almost grotesque oil painting of a holy figure whose aura suggested agony and despair.
Prayer for me was either a private act witnessed exclusively by God or a public act carried out by the congregation or by me and my classmates in parochial school. It was not an act to be on exhibition in a family parlor in which I, as a nonparticipating observer, felt suddenly like an interloper, a trapped intruder in spiritual space, an awkward youth who dared not disturb my father’s meditation by announcing my presence. And yet I could not unobtrusively retreat from the room, or remain unaffected or even unafraid as I stood there, stifled against the wall, overhearing during these war years of the 1940s my father’s whispered words as he sought from Saint Francis nothing less than a miracle.
2
QUITE APART FROM his patriotic activities with the Ocean City shore patrol throughout World War II, and his pro-American speeches to the local Rotary Club, which would soon elect him its president, my father was silently terrified by the Allied forces’ successful invasion of Sicily in 1943 and their inevitable plan to move north up the Italian peninsula against the Nazi and Fascist troops who were encamped in and around the southern region of his birth.
His widowed mother still occupied the Talese family’s ancient stone house in the hills with most of my father’s kinfolk, except those who were soldiers at the front, associated with the Germans against the advancing Allied ground units and bombers.
The southernmost part of Italy was virtually indefensible, my father conceded to me at breakfast after reading in The New York Times about the fall of Sicily; it was the fragile toe of the Italian boot, an exposed area where the slanted farmlands and jagged hills descended from the higher northern peaks and were surrounded almost entirely by unguarded bodies of water. To the east was the Ionian Sea, to the west the Tyrrhenian, and to the southwest was the Strait of Messina, which scarcely separated the southern tip of Italy from the island of Sicily.
Although my father’s village—Maida—was sixty-five miles north-east of Messina, it was precariously situated. The curving coastlines of the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas cut deeply into the mainland, so deeply that Maida’s population of thirty-five hundred people was clustered in beige stone houses on the rocky interior of the narrowest part of Italy. The distance between the two coastlines here could be traversed by a motorist in little more than an hour; and adding to Maida’s vulnerability to invasion, my father said, was a wide plateau below its western slope that could serve as a passageway or attacking ground for great numbers of troops traveling with heavy equipment. Indeed, this land had already been the scene of a brutal battle between the soldiers of France and Britain during the era of Napoleon Bonaparte.
It happened on a hot July morning in 1806, said my father, whose recounting of history was always accompanied by precise details; it happened after the surprise landing of more than five thousand British troops on the shingly shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea along the outer edge of Maida’s plateau.
The British troops were led by a bold American-born officer who was a native of Georgia—General John Stuart, whose property-owning parents in the American South had remained loyal to the crown during the American Revolution. After they had returned to England, young Stuart received a commission as a British officer in 1778. In 1780 he participated in the siege of Charleston, South Carolina; then the invasion of North Carolina and, finally, Virginia, where, severely wounded, he and other red-coated units under Lord Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown in 1781.
After recovering his health and returning to England, Stuart resumed a military career that during the following decades would see him leading British regiments, brigades, and divisions between Flanders and Alexandria in almost constant conflict with the French—culminating, after sailing with his troops from Sicily past the rock of Scylla northward toward that plateau, in the battle of Maida in 1806.
The Italian mainland in 1806 was largely influenced by the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, a fact that was not displeasing to a large percentage of Italians. As my father often said, the Italians considered Napoleon more Italian than French because he was descended from a family that had emigrated from northern Italy to Corsica when that island was ruled by the Italian republic of Genoa—which, over the protests of many Corsicans, ceded it to the French shortly before Napoleon’s birth in Corsica in 1769.
Among the anti-French Corsican agitators during this time was Napoleon’s father, who became resigned to the French occupation of the island only after the leader of the Corsican resistance movement had been forced to flee. As a result of his father’s subsequent cooperation and politicking with the French administrators, the younger Napoleon was able to leave Corsica and receive the benefits of a higher education in continental France. And yet during his school years and swift rise through the ranks of the French army, Napoleon continued to spell his surname in the Italian style, “Buonaparte,” even after he had been appointed a brigadier general at the age of twenty-four in 1793.
It was in this same year that the British officer John Stuart became a lieutenant colonel at thirty-four; but as my father pointed out, it was much more difficult to move up within the British officer corps than the French because France was then involved with its Reign of Terror, and there were frequent vacancies created at the top of the French military establishment because of the many defections, expulsions, and even executions of aristocratic French officers.
It was during this very same year of 1793, in fact, that the French beheaded King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette. The act shocked royal rulers around the world, but it was mourned with more personal passion in the palace at Naples, the capital city of the southern Italian kingdom, where the throne was occupied by Queen Marie Caroline (sister of the guillotined Marie Antoinette) and the Bourbon king Ferdinand, a member of a branch of the same dynasty as the fallen French king.
In addition to the sadness and anger in Naples there were grave feelings of insecurity among the ruling elite throughout the Kingdom of Southern Italy, because they were aware that in Maida, as in dozens of other villages, secret revolutionary societies were scheming to overthrow the privileged families who had ruled over the hills and farmlands since the Norman conquerors had brought feudalism into southern Italy in the eleventh century.
A Norman castle built in Maida in that century was still standing in the early twentieth, my father told me; and despite its decrepit condition, it was sometimes used when he was a child as a place of incarceration while the accused awaited transfer to a larger prison elsewhere. But the castle’s dungeon also served to remind my father how deep-rooted was the medieval mentality of his native land, how enduring were certain of its archaic methods. Indeed, the Maida valley that would be the battleground between Napoleon’s musketeers and Stuart’s invaders in 1806—the British won the conflict after four ferocious days, and subsequently memorialized it by naming a West London district Maida Vale, after my father’s village—had undoubtedly absorbed the blood of two thousand years of warfare, going back to the days of Roman chariots and Hannibal’s elephants, of savage Magyar horsemen and Saracen pirates who, sailing toward southern Italy with clarions and trumpets blaring, filled the sunny sky with darts of poison.
While I was always impressed with my father’s vivid depiction of history, my attention sometimes wandered during these long and frequently repetitive lectures conducted after dinner amid the soft but often distracting sounds of Puccini and Verdi rising from the scratchy glass records of my father’s old Victrola. And yet his intensity made me aware of his almost obsessive need to tell me about himself, to explain and perhaps justify himself as he described his past and traced his odyssey along the Tyrrhenian Sea to Paris and later across the Atlantic Ocean to the Jersey shore, where he now had me as his captive audience. To me he could confess his anxiety and, possibly, guilt, or at the very least expose a side of himself that his tailor’s taste for appearances would prevent him from revealing beyond the walls of this mirrored apartment.
Ironically, while I was failing an American history course in parochial school—where I was also subjected to ethnic slurs hurled by a few Irish Catholic boys whose older brothers had just participated in the conquest of Sicily—I was becoming, under my father’s tutelage, a reluctant scholar of the history of the southern tip of Italy, which, if my father’s worst fears materialized, would soon be blown off the map.
Perhaps that accounted for his determination to enlighten me about it, so that I might survive, as he had, to keep its obscure history alive in the retelling—and to take pride, as well as solace, in associating Italy with the rich chronology preceding its alliance with Nazi Germany.
3
TO HEAR MY father tell it, and I have heard it often, the south of Italy flourished long before the rise of the Roman Empire and the birth of Christ, and in his native village of Maida and its surrounding region—which extends south of Naples down through ancient hills and valleys to form the toe and heel of the Italian boot—there occurred historical spectacles and scenes that constituted many centuries of human experience at its worst and best, its most barbaric and aesthetic, its most destitute and luxurious.
A word synonymous with luxury and sensual gratification—sybaritic—derives, my father told me, from a pre-Christian city north of Maida called Sybaris, which was founded in 720B.C. by enterprising Greek colonists who combined a thriving economy with a penchant for self-indulgence and comfort: Sybaris’s bright streets were shaded with awnings; its leading citizens regularly bathed in saunas tended by slaves; and its women appeared at sumptuous banquets wearing gold circlets in their hair, high-heeled shoes imported from Persia, and low-cut gowns that revealed part of their breasts.
South of Sybaris on the eastern shore of southern Italy was the more cerebral city of Crotone, populated by such intellectuals as Pythagoras and by a restrictive administration that became so envious and contemptuous of Sybaris that in 510 B.C. it attacked and looted it, set it afire, and, after diverting the course of the Crati River, submerged the entire city under water and mud.
My father’s own hillside village was assaulted and plundered several times during the pre-Christian era, once by the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus—a man best remembered for annihilating many thousands of Romans in the Pyrrhic victories that destroyed most of his own troops as well. Spartacus also passed through the territory of Maida in his clashes with the Romans, and the anti-Roman campaigns and rebellions joined by most southern Italians later brought about cruel Roman retaliation upon the south: temples were demolished, women were raped, farms were torched, and so many trees were cut down for Roman shipbuilding and other purposes that the southern hills were eventually denuded. Rocks and mud began to slide, lakes became stagnant, and the water became malarial.
The water was still malarial at the time of my father’s birth in Maida in 1903, and this fact, in addition to the villagers’ eternal fear of seafaring invaders, probably contributed to the hydrophobic tradition that persists in my family and was transferred to the New World by my immigrant father, who, oddly, settled along the south Jersey shore near the sea that he shunned. And it was there that I grew up in the late 1930s, watching the waves with trembling fascination, but never in my entire life did I dare learn how to swim.
That my father had crossed the Atlantic Ocean to come to America had at first seemed to me an extraordinary triumph of courage over timidity, until he confessed one day that he had been terrified and seasick during the turbulent voyage and had prayed constantly to Saint Francis for survival. Although none of my father’s three brothers had followed him to America—they remained in Maida with their hydrophobic mother and sister—my father’s father, Gaetano Talese (whose name I inherited after my birth in 1932, in the anglicized form “Gay”), was an atypically fearless traveler, although his five trans-Atlantic voyages had less to do with his love of the sea than with his contempt for the land he was doomed to inherit in Maida.
Gaetano Talese, according to my father—who rarely saw him, knew him only slightly, but idealized him always—was a handsome, wandering man of six feet with a lean, sensitive face, large brown eyes resembling my own, and a slight scar over his right temple that was inflicted during his bachelorhood in Maida. One night while he stood under a young woman’s balcony, he engaged in a conversation that seemed perhaps too intimate by the standards of her jealous suitor who, after eavesdropping in the shadows, suddenly leaped upon Gaetano from behind, slashed him with a knife, and escaped into the night.
While such fierce possessiveness of women had long been a male custom in Maida—as it was in other southern villages with a history of invasion by foreign men, and domination at times by feudal barons who presumed first-night privileges with the brides of villagers beholden to the barony—Gaetano Talese abhorred this lingering manifestation of primitive emotion, regarding it as symptomatic of a backward society in which he saw no future for himself. All that he saw in his village seemed impervious to change, too deeply rooted in rock, as stagnant as the malarial lakes left by the Romans.
In Maida the countrywomen still walked with clay pots balanced on their heads, and the dust rising along the sun-scorched roads of the valley behind the horse-drawn carriages and farmers’ oxen was possibly the same dust kicked up ages before by Hannibal’s elephants, by the Norman knights who galloped through the eleventh century, and by the elaborate caravan of King Frederick II, the thirteenth-century German conqueror of Italy, whose traveling retinue included Arab dancers, acrobatic jesters, and black eunuchs who hoisted curtained palanquins containing the reclining figures and veiled faces of his royal harem.
Most of Maida’s hillside homes leaned against one another at bizarre angles, standing crookedly on oblique foundations, and the narrow cobblestone roads leading up and down the hill between the irregular rows of houses and shops were so curved and jagged that they could be traversed gracefully only by mules and goats.
The people of Maida usually walked as if they had drunk too much wine, and yet despite their lurching, listing, and shifting of weight as they walked, their facial expressions never suggested that they were discomforted by the difficult footing. Perhaps they did not even know that they lived in a lopsided town; it was, after all, the only town most of them had ever seen.
And so except for such adventurous young men as Gaetano, who frequently rode off on horseback down to the sea to watch the ships sailing back and forth between Naples and Messina, and dreamed of his escape, Maida’s citizenry seemed content to remain perched up in the village where they were accustomed to all that was away—although they did hope and pray they would be spared another earthquake that might further alter the deformed shape of their hill town, which in the past had often been subjected to God’s fickle nature.
Maida exists in Italy’s seismic center of uncertainty. Situated between two great volcanoes—Mount Vesuvius to the north and Mount Etna to the south—the inhabitants of Maida and its neighboring villages were ever aware that they might at any moment be flung into obscurity by a calamitous convulsion. Perhaps this is one reason why southern Italians have always been very religious, dwelling, as most of them do, on perilously high ground dependent for its stability on the goodwill of the omnipotent force that periodically reasserts its power by shaking people up and bringing them to their knees.
One day, many decades before Gaetano’s birth, as dark clouds and cliffside vibrations moved along Italy’s southwesterly coastline toward the village of Paola, north of Maida, it appeared that a vengeful God might be anticipating the desecration of the shrine of southern Italy’s most idolized native son, Saint Francis of Paola—a prospect that panicked the villagers and led the priests to guide them to the hill site of the large statue of Saint Francis and urge them to prostrate themselves and beg God for mercy.
Within an hour, as the desperate crowd remained huddled in prayer around the trembling base of the towering statue, the black clouds began to lift, the sky became brighter, and the earth tremors seemed to subside and then to expire entirely—having finally no effect on the landscape except that the statue of Saint Francis, which had overlooked the sea, had been slowly spun around by vibrations and now faced the village.
The large beige stone house in which Gaetano was born in 1871 had cracked walls, slanted floors, an eroding façade, an exterior staircase that was almost scallop-shaped as a result of the countless contorting eruptions that had struck Maida through the centuries. This house, and the two tottering lodges that flanked it, were remnants of a sixteenth-century feudal estate purchased from an impoverished nobleman by Gaetano’s father, Domenico Talese, who, by the modest standards of Maida in the late 1800s, was a relatively affluent and influential figure.
In addition to his large farm in the valley—which contained part of another man’s olive plantation that had flown through the sky during an earthquake and, having landed intact, was successfully acquired by Domenico after a court dispute in which he argued that the airborne olive trees had been entrusted to him by the will of the Almighty—Domenico owned a wheat mill and a percentage of the local aqueduct, and operated a thriving business on the side as a moneylender. Strained by Domenico’s high interest rates, the people of Maida equated the occupation of moneylender with that of middling cutthroat—or, to use their word for it, strozzino.
Although Domenico was married to a genteel woman named Ippolita who was descended from a large titled family in a neighboring village, her parents’ branch of that family was almost destitute; yet in Maida the people continued to address her, with a respectful bow, as “Donna Ippolita,” whereas her husband, the moneylender and new owner of an old barony, was never approached deferentially as “Don Domenico” but was referred to instead, behind his back, as “Domenico the Strozzino.”
His awareness of such an unflattering appellation greatly rankled Domenico’s prickly pride. He smoldered within himself while maintaining his stringent business standards, and remained remote from his fellow villagers except for his once-a-year walk with them on the feast day of Saint Francis of Paola, when he helped carry the heavy statue through the narrow winding roads down toward the sloping stone sanctuary which, four centuries before, the saint himself had blessed.
Other than this annual procession, and his attendance each Sunday at Mass—wearing a flowing cape and polished boots, and carrying his feathered felt hat with his missal—Domenico always appeared alone in public, whether on foot or horseback, coming or going from his row of stone houses on the hill that he occupied in baronial presumptuousness with his large extended family, whose affection for him rarely exceeded their sense of indebtedness. All of them worked for him—on the farm, or at the wheat mill, or at the aqueduct—and he ran his family as he did his businesses, in the autocratic tradition of a medieval lord. The fact that the feudal system of masters and serfs was now outlawed in postrevolutionary Italy did not discourage Domenico Talese from trying to extend the past into the present for whatever advantage he could take of it; and much advantage could still be taken in isolated places like Maida, where the distant past and the present were barely distinguishable.
Here the ancient superstitions and religious traditions extended through timeless days and nights, and my grandfather Gaetano—Domenico’s first son—grew up often feeling as rootless and displaced as the trees and rocks of his village. Each morning he awakened to the blacksmith’s thrice clanging anvil that beseeched the Blessed Trinity, and he half believed, as everyone claimed, that the moths fluttering through the early-evening air were representatives of the souls in purgatory. On certain holy days, and on Tuesdays and Fridays, which were days of bad luck, Gaetano watched the flagellants in crowns of thorns as they crawled up the rocky roads on bleeding knees. He was also affected, much as he sought to be different from his antiquated father, by such superstitions as the dreaded jettatura.
The jettatura was a vengeful power said to exist within the eyes of certain strangers who, although they journeyed through the countryside with words of goodwill and courteous manners, possessed within their mesmerizing glance the glint of a curse that presaged disaster, or death itself, or some unimaginable vexation that would surely victimize the villager unless he carried an amulet to neutralize the threat of jettatura. The women of Maida, in addition to always wearing protective charms, would attempt to thwart jettatura when they perceived it in a stranger’s eyes, by placing their hands within the folds of their long skirts and pointing their thumbs, which they would tuck under their forefingers, toward any potentially perilous individual. When the men of Maida sensed the closeness of cursecarrying strangers, they would usually place their hands deep into their pockets and quickly touch their testicles.
If the farmlands were under attack by locusts or other crop-threatening pests, the village priest was summoned to read from a book containing certain prescriptive conjuring words that constituted a curse, and if the spring rains were excessively late, or during any prolonged period of treacherous drought, the statue of Saint Francis of Paola was taken from the church by the farmers and paraded slowly through the fields.
In this hazardous hill country, ruled for centuries by a remote aristocracy that seemed too often irresponsible and inadequate if not always evil, the villagers were conditioned to petition heaven for comfort and support. From elderly fanatics like Domenico to younger skeptics like Gaetano—and to Gaetano’s son Joseph, my father, who made the transition from the Old World to the New—there existed a bond of belief in the God-appointed prowess of Saint Francis of Paola, the fifteenth-century mystical monk credited by eyewitnesses with resuscitating the dead, giving voice to the mute, realigning the malformed, multiplying food for the famished, and, during droughts, creating rain.
One day, after discovering a parched valley south of Maida that demanded irrigation, Saint Francis was said to have walked a mile to the nearest spring and, with his staff, traced a line along the ground that led back to the acres of dryness. Soon a stream of water was following him along the line that he had drawn.
On another occasion, after a ferryboat captain at the Strait of Messina, along the southernmost tip of Italy, had refused the saint’s request for a ride to Sicily, Francis had simply removed his large cloak and laid it flat on the sandy shore. Then, after hooking one end of the fabric to the edge of his staff and holding it up in the air like a sail, he was suddenly thrust forward by a gust of wind and placed softly on the sea, atop his raftlike cloak with its billowing improvised bow, which he then guided calmly across the four-mile strait onto the island of Sicily.
TWO HUNDRED YEARS earlier, in Sicily and southern Italy, the guiding force over the people was a papal loyalist named Charles d’Anjou, who had been urged by the Pope to eradicate from the land the last vestiges of the irreverent influence of the thrice excommunicated German ruler of Italy, Frederick II, whose hedonistic involvement with his harem, and halfhearted participation in the Church’s Crusades against Muhammadanism in the Middle East, had established him in Rome as a spiritual outcast.
Brother of the devout King Louis IX of France (later canonized as Saint Louis), Charles d’Anjou came to Italy with pious credentials, which are exemplified in the large heroic painting of him that my father as a boy saw hanging in the Maida church where the Talese family worshipped. In the portrait, Charles is presented as a benign figure, almost enshrined in heavenly sunlight, being blessed by the Pope. According to my father, however, Charles d’Anjou’s thirteenth-century invasion and conquest of Frederick Il’s dominions in southern Italy and Sicily was—quite apart from Charles’s building many splendid churches that pacified the papacy—more accurately characterized by the activities of his soldiers, who burned the crops of farmers, extorted money from men whom they later murdered, and abducted and raped women.
Several years of such behavior finally led to a people’s rebellion, an eruption of such magnitude that it culminated in the death of two thousand French soldiers of occupation and quickly diminished the size and influence of Charles d’Anjou’s dynasty in the Kingdom of Southern Italy.