28 July 1949
For two nights now, no sleep. I long to forget but weep to remember those strange days when my brother Pasquale became not the simplest, but the most puzzling of men. . . . Omertà, omertà, the Sicilian in me whispers. Silenzio! In the Old Country, the code of silence is a stone dropped into a pond. Its rings expand and encircle all. Siciliani remember but do not speak. And yet my brain hungers to understand—to crack open a brother’s secret and look inside. Pasquale, I speak not to dishonor your name, but to try one last time to understand and forgive. . . .
Mama and Papa’s secondborn son was not blessed with my superior intelligence or my desire to embrace destiny. Unlike our amorous brother Vincenzo, Pasquale did not tempt women and women did not tempt him. His gifts were for simple labor and stubbornness and hearty eating. Each week, he paid Signora Siragusa seventy-five cents for the extra things she packed in the dinner pail he carried to the factory: a half-dozen of boiled eggs, a whole loaf of bread instead of half, a generous slab of cheese, a ring or two of the signora’s hot salsiccia.
Sometimes, the signora included a special treat in Pasquale’s dinner pail—a jar of her pickled peppers, my brother’s favorite. Pasquale’s custom was to eat the peppers with his fingers—a kind of insalata improvvisata—and then wash the rest of the food down with gulps of the pickling brine. “That brother of yours has the appetite of three men!” the signora would often remark to me, always with a cackle of motherly approval. In his years at the mill, Pasquale became famous amongst the workers for those big dinners and valued by the bosses for the hard work the food fueled. Flynn, the agent, once stopped me and told me that Domenico Tempesta worked like a well-oiled machine and his brother Pasquale labored like a plowhorse!
He did not talk much, my brother. Was it his years in the sulphur mines as my father’s caruso that made him so private and singular? His was a childhood spent underground in filth and toil, so different from my own sunny youth at the convent school, where I had been sent because of my natura speciale and because the statue of the Vergine had wept in my presence. By the age of fifteen, I had eyed the sights of Palermo and Potenza! I had swum in the Adriatico, stood amidst the relics of Rome! But my poor, simple brother had known only the rock and darkness of the earth’s bowels, the stink of sulphur in his nose. . . .
And yet, I remember Pasquale as a happy boy. Each Sunday when our family reunited, he laughed and ran through the village and the hills with his friends, fellow carusi—those boys as pale as mushrooms enjoying their one day a week in the Sicilian sun. A pack of young dogs they were, with their pranks and giuoco violento. The village wives would scold and chase them with brooms, frowning from one side of their mouths and smiling at the boys’ mischief from the other side. The leader of these naughty carusi was Pasquale’s best friend, Filippo, whose pale, pointed face and dark eyes my memory still sees. The terrible collapse that took Papa’s life also took the life of Pasquale’s beloved friend, Filippo. On that day, the happy part of Pasquale was buried in the mine forever.
* * *
It was Drinkwater, that goddamned lazy Indian, who ruined things for Pasquale at the mill. One night, he snuck whiskey into the plant and got my brother drunk. When Flynn came out of his office to investigate the source of the agitazione, he caught Pasquale singing and pissing into the dye vat while the spinning girls screamed and peeked between the fingers they held to their faces.
Flynn fired Pasquale but not that no-good Indian, an injustice that fills me with anger to this day. Under other circumstances, I might have protested Flynn’s actions or even quit the mill in the name of dignità di famiglia. Ha! I would have gladly left Flynn to explain to Baxter, the mill owner’s son-in-law, the loss of his two best nighttime workers. But a man who vows to seek his destiny must be ready when opportunity arrives! Earlier that week, the newspaper had reported a transaction between the city of Three Rivers and old Rosemark’s widow. At long last, the old farmer’s hill property would be divided into city lots and put up for sale. A road was planned, the paper said, and a street name had been chosen: Hollyhock Avenue. The lots would be sold later that spring for five, six hundred each. By then, I had saved twelve hundred dollars. I would need all of that and more if I was to become the first Italiano in Three Rivers, Connecticut, to own his own land. Despite the injustice done to my brother Pasquale by American Woolen and Textile, I could not afford both family honor and a home of my own.
Luckily, my brother’s firing occurred during the spring. Pasquale found work immediately as a roofer for the Werman Construction Company. One night, drunk at a tavern he visited with fellow workers, Pasquale bought a monkey from a sailor who had just returned from Madagascar. No bigger than a house cat that scrawny thing was, with its orange fur, its human eyes and fingers. Pasquale named the monkey Filippo in honor of his boyhood friend and built him a cage which Signora Siragusa allowed Pasquale to keep on her front porch. The monkey soon became a neighborhood attrazione both because of its exotic species and its delicate conditon. That goddamned thing was pregnant!
Filippo quickly became Filippa. Several of the young West Side girls knitted and sewed hats and dresses for that foolish little creature. Another of Signora Siragusa’s boarders, a piano tuner with a gold tooth (name forgotten), went so far as to write a song about her titled “La Regina Piccola”* This strombazzatore performed his song, basso profondo, on the boardinghouse porch all that summer. Each performance brought tears to the eyes of neighbor women. As for me, I held my hands to my ears and slammed the window shut.
In August, Filippa’s baby came out of her stillborn. She cradled that dead, shriveled bambino for two, three whole days and, when she finally gave it up, cried tears which I saw with my own eyes! My brother Pasquale shed tears, too—cried as he had never cried for Papa or Mama or Vincenzo or even for his friend Filippo. He buried the dead baby in the backyard of the boardinghouse and held its grief-torn mother in his lap, stroking and rocking her for hours and hours and humming “The Little Queen”—not in the operatic style of that show-off of a piano tuner, but as a comforting lullaby, a sad but soothing lament. My brother hardly ever spoke and now, for that goddamned little scimmia, he wept and sang! Pasquale grieved as if Filippa’s baby had been his own. . . .
Omertà, I tell my moving lips! Omertà! And yet I am an old man with stool like zuppa and a head burdened with memory. . . . I speak not to bring shame on you, Pasquale, but to understand why.
Why, Pasquale? Why? . . .
My brother began opening Filippa’s cage and taking that smelly monkey of his to work with him. Each morning, the two would head off from the signora’s, Pasquale on foot and Filippa riding on his shoulder. Pasquale would spend his day hammering and hauling shingles and whistling, half the time with a stripe of monkey shit drying on the back of his shirt or his coat. Sometimes as my brother worked, Filippa would sit on the peaks of new and half-built buildings or in nearby trees, removing bugs from her fur and eating them without care or notice as she stared and stared at Pasquale.
When the cold weather came, Pasquale made an agreement with Signora Siragusa. In exchange for the privilege of allowing Filippa to come inside and live in the signora’s coal cellar during the winter months, Pasquale would tend the stove and carry his own bed to the basement, freeing space upstairs for another paying boarder.
That winter my brother seemed happy, living once again the underground life of the caruso, emerging from the signora’s cellar only for meals or trips to the tavern. His foolish monkey accompanied him there, buttoned up inside his coat, its scrawny head poking out of a gap between the buttons.
La lingua non ha ossa, ma rompe il dorso!* By springtime, the Italian women began to gossip, chuckling and wondering when Pasquale Tempesta and his pretty little “wife” would be expecting another bambino, ha ha ha. Signora Siragusa herself whispered to me that she had seen Pasquale and that little furry witch holding hands and whispering into each other’s ears, even kissing each other on the lips! The men talked, too. They were no better. Colosanto, the baker, stopped me on the street one day and asked me, with a laugh, was it true my crazy brother had taught that monkey of his how to undo his pants and “play the pipe” for him?
“Bah!” I told him, pushing past. “Go stick yours in a loaf of dough and bake it in the oven!”
Another time I was at Salvatore Tusia’s barbershop, getting a shave and minding my business, when Picicci, the ice man, came in. “Hey, who’s that whose whiskers you’re taking off, Salvatore?” Picicci asked Tusia. Picicci was always a wise guy with a smirk on his faccia brutta.
Tusia told Picicci that he knew very well who I was. I was Tempesta, the dyer at American Woolen and Textile.
“Oh, it’s Tempesta, is it? The monkey’s uncle himself!”
Every man in that shop had a laugh on me that morning, even that goddamned barber I was paying to shave my face. I stood up half-done and told them all to go to hell in a handbasket—walked out of there with the soap still on my face and Tusia’s cloth hanging from the front of me. On my way back to the boarding-house, I wiped my face and threw that goddamned cloth down the sewer rather than give it back to Tusia. Let him pay for another one and have a laugh about that! I fixed Picicci, too. The next week, downtown, he called across the street to me and asked why my landlady, the signora, bought her ice from Rabinowitz the Jew instead of from a paisano. It was crowded in the street that day, I remember. Picicci had a line of three, four customers. I called back that Rabinowitz’s prices were cheaper and that Rabinowitz didn’t piss in his ice before he froze it. Two of those customers walked away from Picicci’s cart and he raised his fist and cursed me and kicked his horse. If that goddamned son of a bitch was going to call me “monkey’s uncle,” then he was going to pay for it in his pocketbook!
But a family’s honor is a heavy burden to bear if all the lifting falls to the father’s firstborn son.
My brother Pasquale continued to smile and parade Filippa around the town, his ears deaf to the jokes and taunts of paisani. Each day when I got back from the mill, I would lie in my bed and close my eyes, make fists, grind my teeth. I could hear all of Three Rivers laughing at the name Tempesta because of Pasquale and his goddamned monkey. Once again, I was called upon to clean up the mess a brother had made.
My first thought was to sneak down to the signora’s cellar in the middle of the night and wring that animal’s skinny neck! But I had learned in my sad dealings with Vincenzo, a buon’anima, the mistake of trying to force my will upon a hard-headed brother. Now I took a craftier and more practical path, one which called on my patience and my considerable talents as a planner. I refined my plan all that winter, always with old Rosemark’s property in my mind.
On 13 February 1914, I purchased a quarter-acre city lot on the hilly west end of Hollyhock Avenue for the sum of three hundred and forty dollars. I was shrewd enough to realize that two brothers working steadily could build a home twice as quickly as one and that a casa di due appartamenti*ld give its owner both a roof over his head and a rental income. I was now thirty-six years old. Though I was not a billygoat with a frozen cazzu as my brother Vincenzo had been, I did have male urges and a strong desire to pass on the name of Tempesta to Italian-American sons! I assumed that my brother Pasquale had these urges and desires, too, no matter how much that goddamned monkey had managed to turn his head, and I wove that supposizione into my plan. A two-family house, after all, required two families.
I wrote to my cousins in Brooklyn, inquiring about eligible young Italian women, preferably siciliani. I wanted no city-born wives for my brother and me—no fancy northern ideas. Siciliani are the simplest of women and simple women make the best wives. As a property owner, I insisted on strict requirements. They must be virgins, of course. For this reason, I had disqualified the eligible signorini of Three Rivers. Who could tell which ones had been soiled by Vincenzo? All of them, probably! The wives of Domenico and Pasquale Tempesta must also be pleasing to the eye and talented cooks and housekeepers. In addition, they must carry themselves with dignity and be devout and humble. And most important, the dowries their families provided must be large enough to furnish two large appartamenti.
God granted me an early spring that year. By March, the ground had thawed and by Easter, Pasquale and I had cleared and stumped my land and begun digging, shovelful by shovelful, the foundation for my vitrified brick duplex house.
My house would be magnifico—American in front and Sicilian in the back. Each apartment would have seven rooms, two floors, indoor plumbing. Nothing less than a palace for the first siciliano property owner in Three Rivers, Connecticut! And out back, a flight of cement stairs would lead to Sicily! I would plant honeysuckle, peach trees, a small grape arbor, a little tomato garden. There would be herbs growing in stone urns, a chicken coop, rabbit cages, and perhaps a family goat to graze the small yard and give a little milk. In the yard behind my big house, I would be home again at last!
As Pasquale and I labored side by side that summer, I spoke about all these plans and about our happy Sicilian childhood and our loving and unselfish mother. In poetic words, I talked of the beautiful renewal of life. We would be the happiest brothers alive once our new home echoed with the giggles of bambini—once the aromas of baking bread, simmering sauce, garlic and onions frying in olive oil floated from the open kitchen windows of the home we shared, one brother to a side. And now that I was on the subject, wasn’t it about time for us to find wives?
Pasquale shrugged and shoveled. He said he could still hear Mama’s screaming in his ears but that he had forgotten her face.
I told him I had recently communicated by letter and telegramma with Lena and Vitaglio, our Brooklyn cousins. The cousins’ neighbors, the Iaccoi brothers—did Pasquale remember those two plumbers from Palermo? The Iaccoi brothers had big news. Their half-sister, Ignazia, age seventeen, would be arriving that summer from Italy along with a female cugina, Prosperine, age eighteen. Both girls were devout and eager to serve husbands. Good cooks, too! And beautiful in faccia and figura—plump and just ripe for picking!
All that afternoon, I talked of children and natural male urges and the joys of owning a home and a wife of one’s own. At sunset, as we two walked back to the boardinghouse carrying our shovels, I made a generous proposal: Pasquale and I would take the train to Brooklyn at Christmastime, visit our cousins and the Iaccois next door, and decide whether or not we liked what we saw. It would probably make more sense to match the older bride to the older brother, and viceversa, but that could be decided upon at a later date. What did it matter, anyway—when both of the young women were beautiful virgins in the prime of their childbearing years? Both could equally satisfy male urges, eh? If my beloved brother were to take the Iaccois’ half-sister for a wife, the couple would be welcome on the left side of the duplex. I would charge no rent for an entire year. After that, Pasquale could negotiate a year’s rent, at a modest rate, of course—a sum to be decided at a later date. Why rush things, eh? Pasquale needn’t worry about the dowry, either. As the eldest Tempesta brother and a property owner with a shrewd business sense, it would be my honor to take care of those negotiations for him, ha ha. Get him a nice little bundle. If Pasquale needed some help with wedding expenses, I would be glad to assist there, too. A boss dyer, after all, made more money than a roofer. That was merely a fact of life—ha ha! And once the house was built and our young brides were hanging their bloodstained sheets on the backyard clothesline, Pasquale would want, of course, to rid himself of that foolish, goddamned monkey.
Pasquale let go a mouthful of tobacco juice and shook his head.
Pasquale Tempesta, a buon’anima, could sometimes be as mule-headed as his brother Domenico Tempesta was clever! I did not wish to awaken the mulo in him that day. Fine, fine, I told my brother, patting him on the back and wearing a smile that showed all my teeth. The monkey can live in a cage in the backyard until its natural death. But while we were on the subject, I said, Pasquale should really stop his foolish practice of bringing Filippa to work with him. People said unkind things, made ridiculous jokes. He would see soon enough: with a beautiful young wife to distract and provide pleasure for him, Pasquale would quickly have “little monkeys” of his own to play with. He would soon forget about that furry little long-tailed rat of his.
That stubborn mule of a brother threw his shovel aside with a clamor and told me he would work no more on a house where Filippa was not welcome inside.
“Inside?” I shouted. “Inside?”
The negotiations went on over supper and well into the night, at one point so loudly that several of the other boarders complained and Signora Siragusa descended the staircase in her long braids and untrussed bosom and demanded that Pasquale and I either whisper or be evicted. My brother, that stubborn jackass, sat in the signora’s parlor chair and shook his head like a metronome. Whatever I may or may not have promised the Iaccoi brothers, he said, he was not interested in a wife and that was that. He would break his back helping me build my house. He would even die for me. But he would not give up his little Filippa for some wife and he would work no longer on a house where his monkey was unwelcome.
When Pasquale and I rose, finally, from Signora Siragusa’s parlor chairs in the middle of that long and difficult night, I was hot in the face and soaked with sweat. I swore and spat into the signora’s spittoon and then reluctantly shook my brother’s hand. Ha! Should I say I shook that stubborn mule’s front hoof? In exchange for his labor on my casa di due appartamenti until its completion, Pasquale had secured for himself two of the seven rooms on my side of the house, free of rent not for one year but for all eternity! One room would be his and Filippa’s to sleep in, the other a playroom dedicated solely to that goddamned shitting monkey’s ricreazione! But what could I do? Pay two or three lazy workers to do what my brother would break his back doing for free?
After a night’s sleep, I was calm again. Already, a new plan had hatched inside my superior brain. I would continue in private my negotiations with the Iaccois, marry the beautiful cousin, and bring the beautiful half-sister to Three Rivers to stay with us. Nature would take its course. As a happily married husband, I would, as usual, be my younger brother’s good example. The half-sister would surely awaken Pasquale’s sleeping male urges. At long last, my stubborn brother would come to his senses.
1 August 1949
All that summer and fall, I worked in the mill by night and labored on my new house by day, stopping only in late afternoon to eat and sleep. Pasquale roofed houses for Werman until four o’clock each day, then worked on Hollyhock Avenue until dark—always with that goddamned monkey chattering nearby or shitting from her place on his shoulder. My brother and I ate cold suppers together in the signora’s kitchen before he went down to the boardinghouse cellar to sleep and I walked to the mill for work. On Sundays, Pasquale and I labored side by side on my house. These were the best days: two strong, young brothers bringing a dream to life, board by board, brick by brick. . . .
When winter froze the ground that year and stopped construction until springtime, I went with Pasquale to the taverns where the builders drank—not to waste my money on beer or whiskey, but to sit on stools and at tables and pick away at the brains of the workers. Installatori, elettricisti: I got those hibernating builders to talk and draw pictures on paper napkins, to share with me the details of their past victories and mistakes. All that winter, I asked, listened, and learned what I needed to know. And none of it cost me a penny!
Sometimes, after a night of dyeing wool at the mill, I would walk the long way back to Signora Siragusa’s, up Boswell Avenue and Summit Street to Hollyhock Avenue, where the early morning sun shone on the brick and wood and stone of my half-built house. I would think of Papa’s lifetime of labor in the hot, filthy sulphur mines of Giuliana and imagine him standing beside me in this clean, cold Connecticut air. I would imagine him seeing what I saw—shaking his head with pride and disbelief. But it was not Papa’s blood I felt rushing inside of me as I looked at my house and my land. I felt Ciccia blood—the blood of my mother’s people—landowners like me, Domenico Tempesta, who had been conceived while a volcano rumbled and readied its spew! Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, whom the Vergine herself had selected!
In December of that year, I received telegramma from the Iaccois in Brooklyn. They wondered when we Tempesta brothers would be coming to claim our brides-to-be. “Our sweet young relatives wait patiently,” the message said, “but it is only a matter of time before ‘Mericano influences begin to turn their heads.” The garment industry in Manhattan cried out for female laborers, the brothers wrote. It was only fair that one or both of the young women begin to bring money into the house, unless Pasquale and I were planning to act soon.
I sent back telegramma urging the brothers to send both girls to work, by all means, and to put half or more of their wages aside to increase the price of their dowries, which remained to be negotiated. I felt no sense of urgency. I was, after all, a boss dyer and the owner of a spectacular and half-completed casa di due appartamenti. I was also a man who—if the full-length hallway mirror in Signora Siragusa’s front hallway did not lie—cut a dashing figure in a three-piece suit. What was the point of false modesty, after all? It did no harm to keep women waiting; it let them see who was the boss and who was not. Waiting was good for a woman’s constitution. Good for the Iaccoi brothers, too. It would make them better appreciate the gifts Pasquale and I would bestow on their women in our own time. A little nervousness might, besides, raise the price of the dowries. I would ask for seven hundred dollars in exchange for marrying Prosperine and four hundred for Ignazia on my brother’s behalf. (Of course, I would have to negotiate my reluctant brother’s marriage without his knowledge.) The Iaccoi brothers would no doubt balk at the price, but I would remain firm. With all the indoor toilets being flushed in America, those two plumbers could probably afford three times as much.
In the early spring of 1915, Pasquale and I resumed our work on my palazzo, laying the brick tiers of the second story and hauling into place the granite windowsills, the stoops of Sicilian marble, front and back. We hammered window and door frames and joists, bricked the chimney, partitioned rooms. High into the house’s second-story front wall, I laid brick diagonally in the shape of two three-foot-high T’s for all of the town to see! This I did to honor my father and to raise high the proud name of Tempesta. By the fall of that year, the house’s brick, stone, and wooden skeleton was complete. The roof would be on before wintertime.
Throughout that building season, other Italians in Three Rivers stopped by to visit and congratulate me on my nearly finished “palace.” Pasquale and I were presented with cakes, cheeses, and jugs of homemade wine for good luck. Ha! Everyone wished to be in the good graces of a successful man.
I weep to remember what happened next. On 12 October 1915, tragedia struck at 66-through-68 Hollyhock Avenue!
I was mixing cement in my wheelbarrow for the front sidewalk. Pasquale was seated on the porch steps, finishing his lunch-for-three-workers. “Look, Domenico, two crows,” he grunted, pointing with his chin toward the road. Monsignor McNulty and his little monkey, that skinny Father Guglielmo, stood staring at us in their black robes. Best to ignore them, I told myself, and continued my cement-mixing. If that old monsignor had uncovered another bastardo of Vincenzo’s, what did that have to do with me? Vincenzo was dead and gone, a buon’anima. Whatever brats he had left behind were not my responsibility.
The two approached; the old priest began with compliments. The building of this impressive house, and my status as a factory boss, had made me a leader in the Italian community. Did I realize that?
Yes, I realized that, I told him. All my life I had served as a good example for others to imitate. My brother Pasquale chewed quietly on a heel of bread and nodded in agreement.
Yes, yes, yes, Domenico Tempesta was a man both respected and emulated, the monsignor agreed. He covered his words with so much sugar that the bitter thing he said next took me by complete surprise.
McNulty came close enough for me to see the veins in his cheeks, the pockmarks in his nose. “Therefore,” he whispered, “yours is the greater sin—this flagrant ignoring of Sunday Mass! This failure to honor the Lord on His given day! This flying in the face of holy law.” Here, Pasquale belched up liquor from his pickled peppers—a long, slow rumble that climaxed like a clap of thunder as it traveled up his throat and out. Little Father Guglielmo’s eyes widened with fear at the distraction and he put a silencing finger to his lips. Attendance at church by the “Eye-talians” of the parish had fallen off, the monsignor said, and both he and God Almighty held me personally responsible. McNulty told me my failure to attend Mass on Sunday had left me with my own sins and the sins of all nonchurchgoers on my overburdened soul. I must put the Holy Spirit before a pile of bricks, confess my transgressions, and return to Mass as a communicant the following Sunday for all to see. At this juncture, Pasquale rose from the steps, walked to the side of the house, and pissed a river. Then he made a kissing sound at Filippa, and prepared to go back to his work.
At first I tried to be respectful to that dog-faced man of the cloth. I smiled and promised I would return to Sunday Mass as soon as the four doors of my house were hung, my twenty-two windows were glazed, and the roof was completed. I pointed a thumb at Pasquale, who was now climbing the ladder to the half-completed roof, Filippa riding atop one shoulder and a bundle of wooden shingles balanced on the other. “And now that Pasquale has his lunch inside of him,” I joked, “he’ll probably have that roof shingled by nightfall, as formidable in size as it is. It is often said that I work like a well-oiled machine and my brother works like a plowhorse. Ha ha.”
Monsignor McNulty said that pride was perhaps the greatest sin of all and that my revering of worldly possessions over things spiritual was shocking and sacrilegious. He told me he hoped and prayed there would not be some terrible price for me to pay. Then he dropped his voice and made a comment about men and monkeys that made Father Guglielmo blush.
I stopped my cement-mixing. In my hand, the trowel felt like a weapon of murder. “Vai in mona di tua sorella!” I told him.
“Translation! Translation!” the old priest demanded of the meek but earnest Father Guglielmo.
In his stuttering fashion, the nervous young priest said that I had asked them both to please leave now.
“I told you to get the fuck out of here!” I shouted to Monsignor Dog-Face, this time in English. “I said to go home to your sister’s cunt!”
Father Guglielmo put up both his hands and attempted to negotiate a peace, but the monsignor reached over and hit him on the head. Then he marched to the road, ordering Guglielmo to follow. When the little priest had joined him, McNulty pointed his finger at me and called back in a public voice meant to dishonor me and all my countrymen. A house from which a man of God was ordered to leave, he said—and ordered in terms only an Italian would be vulgar enough to use—such a house was a Godforsaken place, damned from its peak to its foundation! “You wait and see, Tempesta!” the old monsignor shouted. “You mark my words!”
As he turned his back, I scooped a clump of the wet cement onto my trowel and flung it. It landed against the monsignor’s back, dripping down his cassock like monkey shit. The old and young priests scurried down the hill, McNulty screaming and striking his little assistant several more times, and kicking him once as well.
To have my house cursed by a man of God was no small thing, but Pasquale had no understanding of the seriousness of what had just occurred. Up on the roof, his laughter boomed and carried into the trees.
“Shut up your mouth and go to work!” I yelled, and flung a trowelful of the wet cement at him and Filippa. My action frightened that little monkey-whore of Pasquale’s, and the creature jumped off her master’s shoulder, scurrying along the peak of the roof. With a leap, she hid in the big maple tree.
Along with his formidable lunch on that horrible day, my brother Pasquale had consumed the better part of a bottle of good-luck wine from Pippo Conti, a fellow roofer who had visited that morning on his way to Sunday Mass. Pasquale was whistling and laying down a row of shingles when he heard, over the sound of his hammering, Filippa’s cries for help. She was seated high in the nearby tree, plagued, suddenly, by angry bluejays. Pasquale rose and ran to the animal’s defense, forgetting about the gap in the roof between himself and the tree.
He fell.
I saw it with my eyes.
Hammer in hand, he fell through the stairwells to the foundation below.
I saw it all and heard the terrible breaking of my brother’s bones against the dirt floor of my cellar. When I ran to him and cradled his head in my lap, it wobbled like the head of a broken doll. “Dio ci scampi! Dio ci scampi!” I shouted, over and over. If only I had held my tongue with the old priest! If only I had not thrown cement!
Filippa, who had now rid herself of the bluejays and hurried down the tree, sat huddled on Pasquale’s chest, curling the hair on his head around one small pink finger. Pasquale mouthed, rather than spoke, his last words, “Filippa . . . Filippa.”
As I watched the precious gift of life leave my brother, mine was the greatest anguish possible! “Filippa . . . Filippa,” his lips kept saying, and I pledged to my dying brother, on the lives of our ancestors and descendants, that I would care for his little monkey. Then Pasquale convulsed and vomited blood and his eyes took on the gaze of holy statues.
Now, I was alone. . . .
Pasquale was waked for three afternoons in the boardinghouse parlor. Signora Siragusa wailed for my brother as a mother wails. My position of respect in the town, as well as the scope of the tragedy, brought out most of the Italians of Three Rivers. Flynn, the mill boss, came with his wife to pay respects. Werman, who owned the construction company where Pasquale had worked, showed up with his two sons. At the celebration of the crowded funeral Mass at St. Mary of Jesus Christ Church, that dog-faced monsignor assumed a disdainful attitude that deeply offended me. After my brother was laid to rest in the ground beside Vincenzo, I sat and wrote a letter of complaint to the Pope in Rome. (Never a response.)
3 August 1949
Trouble with my bowels since Tuesday. Arthritis afflicts my joints. My body fails me, but not my memory!
Despite Father Guglielmo’s counsel—the little priest visited me several times after Pasquale’s death—I did not return to church when the snow flew. I vowed never again to cross the threshold of the house of God as long as that no-good monsignor was alive. And I am proud to write that I kept that promise!
In the wake of her master’s death, Filippa, the spoiled “little queen” who had doomed my brother, sat shivering in a corner of her cage on the boardinghouse porch. Sometimes at night, through the opened window of my room, I heard her strange, chattering lamentation—the agitation of her cage as she threw herself, violently, against it.
Signora Siragusa, that most superstitious of old women, began to see il mal occhio—the evil eye—in the monkey’s gaze. Young children and grandmothers began to look away from the creature and make the sign of the cross upon entering or leaving the boardinghouse. The signora insisted that I remove the creature’s cage from the front to the back porch. There, the older boys spat at her and poked her with sticks as she sat, hissing and shivering. Americo Cavoli, the signora’s nephew, made a hobby of tormenting that godforsaken creature. I knew this went on, but what could I do? Quit my work? Interrupt my sleep to play policeman for that goddamned monkey?
As a boss dyer and property owner, I, of course, embraced modern ideas, dismissing as women’s foolishness the growing suspicion of il mal occhio. I regarded Filippa not as a witch but as a nuisance—one more expense in a sea of financial obligations that swirled around me because of my new home and my brother’s funeral expenses. On practical grounds, I began to realize how unfortunate my hasty promise to my dying brother had been. For the sake of economy, I cut back on the expensive mixture of bananas, grain, and honey that Pasquale had provided for her, feeding her now, instead, potato peels and other garbage from Signora Siragusa’s kitchen. The signora began to complain about Filippa’s lice and about the foul-smelling diarrhea with which the monkey’s new diet had afflicted her. Winter was coming. The signora didn’t want that unclean little she-devil living down in the coal cellar, dispensing trouble and bugs up through the heating grates. Soon, the boarders in her house would all be scratching themselves, or packing their bags, or meeting with tragedy like my poor brother! She owned a boardinghouse, not a giardino zoologico. I would have to do something, she warned.
That same evening, as I reached into Filippa’s filthy cage to dump her nightly swill, that goddamned monkey bared her fangs and bit me savagely on the wrist. I cursed the thing, sucked my hand at the point of the wound, and made a plan.
The next Sunday morning, I paid young Cavoli a nickel to run to Hollyhock Avenue with a burlap sack, line the bottom of it with broken, discarded bricks, and lug the bag to the Sachem River Bridge. I instructed the boy to wait for me there. Cautiously, I opened Filippa’s cage and leashed the balking monkey.
We two walked toward the river. At several points, I was forced to drag the creature, who seemed somehow to understand the fate that was about to befall her. And when we arrived at our destination, Filippa held fast to the bars of the footbridge railing and screamed.
I grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and young Cavoli held open the sack. Between us, we managed to force her inside the brick-weighted bag and cinch the top. Filippa had scratched and bitten us both in the struggle and now she poked and battled with unnatural strength to free herself from the bag. Somehow, we managed to lift that goddamned screaming monkey over the railing and let go.
The bag sank efficiently.
What had to be done had been done and now it was over.