I suppose that every son thinks that his father is one of the strongest men he’s known. But I’m sure that it’s true of John Benedetto. My father died when I was just ten. Yet I still have vivid memories of his strong arms holding me close. I’d be rocked in his arms and stare into his deep, dark eyes until I fell asleep, knowing that those strong arms and that wise man would protect me in this world. I still feel that way.
My father was sick for just about all his life. He probably had rheumatic fever as a child, which would have damaged his heart. But there were no doctors, as we would use the term today, in Calabria in 1895, when my father was born, and no hospitals. People went to the old folks of the village if they were sick. Their “diagnosis” was often some kind of folktale and the prescription some kind of folk cure.
Like a lot of children who have health problems, my father learned early how to keep himself amused and interested. I know that he loved music and would often hike up to the tops of mountains in Calabria and sing, hearing his voice fill the valley. It must have made a sick little boy know that really he was very strong, in all of the important ways.
I am sure that my love of music runs back through my father. He sang for everyone—our family, our friends, and strangers who passed by our house. He had a lovely voice and would sit on the stairs in Astoria and sing opera, show music, and current pop hits to my brother and me in a fine, clear voice. I like to think that you can still hear my father’s voice in me. I know I do.
My father was thoughtful, sensible, and sensitive. He was the man whom everyone in our family, and even in our neighborhood, sought out for advice, I think because he would listen, treat the other person with respect, and try to reply with sympathy, even if he or she didn’t always take the advice he gave.
People didn’t see psychiatrists in those days, and they didn’t want to be seen seeking out the advice of a priest. So they went to John Benedetto, my father.
Anyone who was down on his luck and needed a place to stay—if they’d just come to America, just lost their job, or been thrown out of their house by an angry spouse—knew that my father would make room for them in our place. I was always coming out of the bedroom I shared with my brother to see a relative or a stranger sleeping on a sofa, staying for a few days or weeks. My father never asked for favors in return. He figured that the people who came into our home made our lives richer, too.
One night, we heard a commotion in our family grocery store downstairs. Some man had gotten drunk and tried to break in but was too drunk to know quite how to do it. My father crept downstairs and found that the man had slipped and knocked himself out cold, tripping over some egg crates. Some master thief.
We called the police. They told my father that if he pressed charges, they’d have to put the failed robber in jail. My father sighed and walked over to the man.
“Do you have a job?” he asked.
The man shook his head no, too embarrassed to speak.
Then my father told him, “Well, you have one now. You can work for me if you want to.” And he did.
My father didn’t do it out of pity. He truly felt that we had been blessed in America and were obliged to share our blessings with those who were less fortunate.
After all these years I can still trace how my father’s love of the arts, music, and justice made their way into me. I remember how once he took me by the hand and we walked along the East River. We looked up into the sky and saw a dazzling display of soft colors, bright lights, and perfect, delicate, wavy shapes against the deep blackness. My father explained that it was something called the aurora borealis, and it was the greatest show on Earth. But you could see it only at certain times—it depended on the rotation of the planets and the weather—and it was therefore a great event to see it. It was the universe, lifting the flap a little to let us see how it worked, and the aurora reminded us that we are connected to the stars.
I’d have a dream in my childhood, too: that I was walking through tall green mountains, my hand in my father’s, when we beheld a valley that brimmed with bright colors, like the ones we had seen in the sky. I felt at peace and at one with a huge world.
I like to think that dream motivated me to become a painter. I know it made me see that I shared a special view of the world with my father.
He’d read to us at night from some of the great classics of the time. The one I remember best is Somerset Maugham’s 1915 novel Of Human Bondage, about a child born with a clubfoot who must make his way in life over ignorance and bigotry. Looking back on it now, I think that the books and arts my father loved best carried the theme of social justice and humanism in which he truly believed and by which he tried to live his life.
My father read about and admired Mahatma Gandhi and the movement for independence and peace he led against the British Empire, as well as Paul Robeson, an eloquent artist and advocate for justice in the United States. Our neighborhood in Queens was home to Italian families like ours but also to Irish, Italian, Jewish, and African American families. My father taught us that people were people, and all deserved respect.
My father loved show business. He’d take my brother, John, and me to movies, where we first saw (and learned to sing along with) Al Jolson. We’d finish dinner and settle in by the radio for hours to listen to Jolson and the great Eddie Cantor. My father had taste. He applauded anyone’s effort to entertain. But he taught us to appreciate the professionalism of a Jolson or a Cantor, performers who kept going year after year, learning more as they went along.
But year after year, my father’s health grew worse and worse. It hurts me to recount his pains now. His damaged heart valves might be easily repaired these days, but in Astoria, Queens, in 1936, there was not much more doctors could do than look on and tell our family to hope for the best and be brave.
My father spent a lot of time in the hospital on Governors Island. His heart would swell and crowd against his lungs late at night, trapping fluids inside his chest, which would make him gasp and moan. It is frightening for a little boy to see the man he knows is the strongest in the world, the man put on this Earth to protect and look out for him, wheeze and cry out in pain.
I’d cry out myself, asking, “Oh, God, Ma, what’s happening?” My mother would be with my father, trying to ease his pain, and tell me that he would be all right and I certainly would. But I’d fall back to sleep, shivering.
I remember one night when my father got up from his bed with sheer willpower and stepped toward the bathroom with dignity. I was in the hallway, eager to see him. He took one laborious step after another to come over to me and put his arms around me.
“I love you,” he said softly. “I love you.”
To this day, I remember the caress in his arms and in his voice. He told us all how he loved us all the time. But that night, he must have known it was important for us to hold his love close.
My father was often so sick that by the time I was nine and ten, he’d have to be rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night. But one night, the hacking and wheezing and weakness were worse than ever. My father was rushed to the hospital, but this time they said he’d had congestive heart failure and pneumonia. He slipped into a semiconscious state.
I’d go to the hospital to visit my father every day. The nurses would have drawn the shades so that he could sleep. I’d sit by my father in the feeble light of a darkened room and hold his hand, hoping and praying that my touch could give him some strength, as his arms had given peace and protection to me.
Amazingly, he regained consciousness after three days. He suddenly grew so alert and alive that the doctors told us he would be able to come home the next day. We went home in a state of elation. We put new sheets on his bed and prepared for his homecoming.
But when we arrived at the hospital the next morning, the nurses took us over into a corner of the vast waiting room. A doctor came out to tell us that my father had died in the middle of the night. He’d suffered another bout of congestive heart failure, and nothing they could do could free his lungs of the backup of fluid or the pain. My father was gone at the age of forty-one—a sensitive soul, a beautiful man, a lover of life and his family, gone from our lives forever.
Except, of course, no father ever is. Death doesn’t do away with the connection you feel or the influence a parent has on you. In fact, I think it makes you cherish and treasure who they were and what they tried to tell you even more. Their death can make you seek out the lessons they have to give you, because you know it’s your legacy.
My father taught me to love art, respect all kinds of people, strive for justice, and greet life with a song. I think he also showed me, in the short time he was with us, how to grow into a man: work hard, keep your word, care about others, and be interested in the world.
Once I could see I might have some talent worth pursuing, I decided to become a singer so that my mother would never, ever, have to sew another dress, run a needle through her thumb, and lug bags of dresses in her arms on long train rides to support us. Looking back on my ninety years now, I think I also became a singer to try to care for my mother in the way my father wanted to himself.
Over the decades, I’ve often tried to imagine my father as the young Giovanni Benedetto, climbing a mountain in Calabria and singing out into the valley. A few years ago, on a visit to Calabria, I was inspired to pay him a kind of tribute with that thought in my mind. I stood on the side of a mountain that looked out over a gorgeous green valley and I began to sing, “O sole mio . . .” I heard my voice bounce from hill to hill and spread through the valley, and heard the words come back from the hills into my ears. I thought of the young boy, weak with sickness but filled with courage, grace, and love, who sang those same words into those same hills, sailed across an ocean to America, and filled a family with his love. My father gave me his voice, and I’ve tried to use it well.
Puerto Rico