I take my mother and her sister to lunch in the city recently. I want to hear more about their mother, my grandmother, who died two weeks before I was born. I had gathered bits and pieces over the years but never all at once. When I was a child, my sister and I couldn’t ask my mother about our grandmother. She was unable to talk about her. Years later she would sometimes say, “My mother used to make it like this,” usually referring to pie crust or meatballs or sauce or, “I learned how to sew from my mother.” Little clues that I would gather and hold close. If I were ever to press a bit further she would become emotional and change the subject. So I never did.
I thought about my grandmother though, Lena was her name, often when I was young. The dead can be so much more interesting than the living. This woman who had died so close to my birth. Would she have liked me? I was certain I would have liked her. In my mind she was perfect. My mother had lost her father the year before her mother, so by the time I was born she was an orphan. It’s not exactly Dickens but it was still sad. And yet it made my mother that much more fascinating to me. There was nothing to compare her against. Nobody to tell us stories of when she was young. No opportunity to see her defer to someone else. What would that have been like? To see her with her mother? Strange, now it would seem to me. I liked having her all to myself. (Big surprise, the gay child wants all their mother’s attention. My earliest memory is my father taking my sister to see The Sound of Music when I’m two years old and after they go turning to my mother like, “I thought they’d never leave.”)
My grandmother came from Italy when she was a little girl. At lunch, my mother and my aunt Santa tell me the story of how she came to America.
“Her mother, our grandmother,” Aunt Santa tells me, “was waiting for her husband to send money to Italy for them to come over. But she found out from someone in their village that her husband, our grandfather, was living with another woman in America. So she sold their farm and with the money she got they crossed over on an ocean liner to New York.”
She was pissed. You do not fuck with the women in my family. Apparently, she showed up with their two children to where he was living with his mistress and kicked the mistress out. This was my seven-year-old grandmother’s introduction to America. My mother, while picking at her salmon, remembers that their mother had talked to them about the crossing to America. “Oh, she had a great time on that trip.” How desperate they must’ve been to take such a gamble. To leave everything forever. What was my great-grandmother thinking on those long days across the ocean? As she sailed toward nothing certain except an unfaithful husband.
But this is how my grandmother comes to this country. Holding the hand of a woman who came here to fight for what was hers. For what had been promised to her children. A future. And this woman who grabbed her two children by the hand, who leaves behind everything she knows, everything she had, is also grabbing me by the hand and dragging me to today. To New York, to Los Angeles, to this computer.
My grandmother Lena gets married when she is young. And my mother tells me that when she and her sister are children they find in a box a marriage certificate between their mother and someone who is not their father.
“She had been married before,” my mother tells me. Now I had heard this story already, that my grandmother had been divorced but never really talked much about it. Italian-Americans do not get divorced. Certainly not in the 1930s. It was incredibly taboo, almost unheard of. My grandmother left her husband because he physically abused her. I knew that had been the reason, but the enormity of what that must have meant at the time had never really sunk in. Leaving her husband was a scandal. She was scandalous. And yet she never looked back. How extraordinary. Everything around her was built to tell her she must stay. And she didn’t. And eventually she met my grandfather, who was recently widowed and had two children of his own, who were being raised by his deceased wife’s parents as he worked as an icebox man and saved money. But once he married my grandmother, his in-laws wouldn’t let him have his children back. His own children. They did not want them raised by a divorced woman. She was considered less than by them. Unfit. There was a custody hearing and my grandfather lost.
“One day Mom took us to their house, do you remember, Felicia?” Aunt Santa asks her. My mother says yes but looks less sure of the details than my aunt. My mother is the younger of the sisters. “But you were too afraid to come to the door with us,” Aunt Santa continues, “so I went with Mom. And one of the sons answered, I don’t know which one. And he wouldn’t let us in. But Mom tried to convince him to see his father and he took our number and promised he would call but never did. I’m sure they’re both dead by now.” And this is how my mother sees her half-brother for the only time in her life. Glimpsed through a cracked door from the sidewalk.
Nothing so exciting ever happened in our immediate family. I would’ve killed to find out one of my parents had a secret child. Unfortunately for me all the best drama had been poured into the previous generation.
“Everyone loved our mother,” my aunt continues. “The whole neighborhood.” Sometimes, in the way somebody tells you something, you know it’s true.
They grew up in a railroad apartment on East Eighty-Second Street without any heat. This is something I did not previously know. “Oh, you were poor,” I say. They both look at each other considering, then: “We weren’t poor,” my aunt says.
“You didn’t have heat.”
“Yes, but we always had food.”
My mother and her sister went to Catholic school, and the convent where the nuns lived was across the street from their building. “When the nuns wanted us to do something they would clap through the windows for us and we had to come down and do whatever they asked,” my aunt tells me. They were close with the other children on the block. Two of them eventually married and became my godparents, Pat and Vinny (my middle name is Vincent). One of the nuns took a dislike to my mother. Sister Letitia. My mother makes a sour face when talking of her almost seventy years later:
“Whenever we saw her or one of the other nuns we had to bow and say, ‘Praise be Jesus Christ, good morning Sister Letitia’ or whoever it was. She’d be doing hard time today for some of the crap she pulled, slapping kids around.”
When my mother was a young girl Sister Letitia had accused her of doing something she did not and made her do push-ups in front of the class. When she giggles (because the other children are giggling at her because she doesn’t know how to do push-ups) Sister Letitia calls my grandmother at work (my grandmother took outside sewing jobs to bring in money) and told her to come to the school. My grandmother arrived and Sister Letitia told her what my mother had done. And my grandmother said don’t you ever call me at work to come down here for nothing again and with that left.
“She was the sweetest person in the world but she didn’t put up with nonsense,” my aunt says. And as lunch goes on and on and we now sip our teas they tell me stories about their mother. About how she took care of people in the neighborhood. How she watched out for everyone. Was kind to everyone. There are stories of taking in lost children, breaking up street fights, the sewing she took in for her friends and did ill from her bed the last months she was alive. And then my aunt asks my mother if she remembers Tommy. My mother thinks and then does remember.
“There was an old woman who lived in our building who had no family except for a nephew,” my aunt explains. “And her nephew, Tommy, used to come once a week and take care of her. Nobody else came to see her. Well, Tommy danced in a gay revue, wore makeup—”
“Wait,” I say, interrupting. “He was a drag queen?”
Again, they consider. “I guess,” she says. “I guess it was something like that. Well, one day Tommy comes to see his aunt while we’re outside with Mom and these kids came up to him and started calling him names. They were going to beat him up. And Mom started yelling at them, told them to get out of here, do you remember, Felicia?” My mother nods. “She didn’t like that,” Aunt Santa continues, her tone serious. “Tommy was the only one who took care of his aunt. He was a good person. Our mother would not tolerate him being treated like that. She liked Tommy.” This must’ve been the early 1950s. There was very little tolerance for gay men, much less gay men who wore makeup, when I was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s. I can’t imagine what it was like then, in the early ’50s. My aunt tosses off this story, it’s one among many, but I don’t know if she realizes how much it means to me. I hope it happened exactly as she says it did. It feels like the most concrete message I’ve ever gotten from my grandmother. Like all of my instincts were right all along. That not only would she have accepted me, she would have fought for me, celebrated me even. Sometimes there is a strength inside me and I don’t know where it comes from. But perhaps it was a gift. Something she gave to me. Something passed between us as she was exiting this world and I was entering it. At least that’s what I’d like to believe.
After lunch I walk my aunt to the car that waits to take her back to New Jersey. I continue walking with my mother to Macy’s. It is spring. And it is beautiful.