Under the Rose. Flavia Alaya

had seen and will never forget seeing my grandfather dead. The parlor he’d been waked in had been closed off for more than three years now, until they decided to brave superstition and open it up for the wedding, redoing it with fancy draperies as a honeymoon suite.

      But the honeymoon ended rapidly, as perhaps under those auspices was only likely. Richard, her husband, was a ruddily pink and attractive Irishman. Otherwise he was unremarkable and ambition-free, as well as who knows how spooked by the strange mores of these Spagnola women. In the end, he seemed to prefer spending his nights out on Third Avenue to coming home to his neurotic little wife and (eventually) their amazingly pale and poorly baby boy, also named Richard, who was always caterwauling with earache. Or he came home only by the time poor sad little Anna, glum and long-suffering, had long been in bed, eating her heart out. Anna, more passive-aggressive than Bea, finally obliged herself one day by having a nervous breakdown. By the time she was back from the hospital, under heavy sedation, Richard was gone.

      Uncle Joey may have had something to do with this.

      Seriousness was perhaps not the same kind of issue with the two Spagnola men as with the women, though it was not much of a sampling to go by. Joey was the younger of the two Spagnola brothers, the only one to come to live at 230 after he married, taking an apartment on the third floor, the one under May and over Bea. That was after V-J Day in August of 1945 and all the homecoming fuss that followed the end of the war, when he got back from the Navy. What a block party! What nights and nights of block parties! You could hear the music all over the city, way into the night. The one on our street made us kids mad with envy as we watched from our fifth-floor perch, wishing we could have been just a few years more grown up.

      The stories about Joey, from wildest motorcycle days to audacious exploits in the Navy, would curl porcupine quills. He was renowned for having crashed into an El pillar on East 116th Street when he was eighteen and lived to tell about it. Just the sort of story, when the family was gathered around the table and the wine was low, to make someone sigh, “Aaaah, I could write a book,” at which everybody else would nod as if autobiography were the family business. But Joey had finally settled down with his beloved Concetta to wife, found a union construction job in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, then got his own plumbing license and worked independently on the side. Hardcore down-and-dirty, he could fix anything—exactly the kind of “real man” Spagnola women seemed destined never to get in a husband.

      Concetta, who called herself Mary in still another case of Italian-girl cosmetic name-surgery, was a very pretty woman—Uncle Joe would have tolerated nothing less—with the deepest, most soulful, big Kewpie-doll brown eyes I ever saw. Not even my mother’s were set in such lush penumbras of soft purple. So intensely mortal were they, even tragic, they seemed to draw all attention from the small, perfect nose and little Cupid-bow mouth. And yet all these features were bound together with a flint will and uncompromising intelligence. Joey, you could tell, had been tried and toughened in the crucible of eight sisters, at least six of them smart.

      Once settled into married life, Joey began little by little to define for himself a semiserious role as paterfamilias to this vertical community of women. Even had he still harbored old Sicilian standards of female virtue, which is doubtful, he knew there was no saving the sum of it his sisters had already thrown away marrying jerks. But he could protect the few still-remaining rags of family honor by making sure Joan and Elena were properly bought and paid for by decent, respectable guys before anybody took them to bed. And he could try, as best he could, to settle disputes across the halls and up and down the stairs.

      I used to think it strange that Uncle Tony, who should have worn this mantle, didn’t. Besides being number one of the ten, you’d have thought he had just the peaceable temperament for it, more so than Joey, who had always been the one with the short fuse. And yet here was Joey—the maverick, the trickster, the risk-taker, the guy who broke the rules and pushed the boundaries and fell on his face and picked himself up with a raunchy joke—taking charge. Joey, with the vaguely unsavory reputation as a hustler, a fixer, somebody who could always get it for you wholesale. You’d think he lacked the moral authority to boss all those bossy women.

      And yet maybe that was why he could. The odd thing is that his big-talking, self-inventing sisters could never have admitted to themselves that for all the piety about their darling Papa and the lip service they paid to Duty as defined by the patriarchal culture they’d been steeped in, they had actually been liberated by their father’s death and by their coming-of-age into a wartime, Eleanor Roosevelt culture, where women were being chancily slipped a license for independence. And because he somehow understood this and they weren’t ready to, he still got that begrudgery of respect when he pulled rank. They would have made mincemeat of a big innocent, fair-eyed lummox of a guy like Uncle Tony. Maybe they already had, before I was there to see it.

      Uncle Tony reminded me of an unfunny Popeye, tough and gentle. Family folklore had it that he’d been a forceps delivery, which accounted for his being a bit slow and a bit deaf, and maybe for a comedically challenged sort of crusty solemnity somebody I knew later used to refer to as a damaged laughing-string. You could not have dealt with Bea and Anna and Joan and Elena without an intact, catgut, cable-strength laughing-string.

      But Tony was not stupid, and maybe actually had the whole thing figured out, having married a comfortable widow somewhat older than himself, an Irishwoman named Helen with two grown children, who was perfectly happy to stop right there. They had taken her apartment several blocks away, and once Joey moved in at 230, they divvied up the work. Tony took the job of keeping the old family building under repair and collecting the rents. He tried to make his job look hard, and muttered about it a lot, buffed the brass on the front-door hardware till you could see yourself in it, and kept the stoop and areaway so swept no bum scrounging around in it could have turned up a single used cigarette butt. An ice cream kid-finger-smudge never lasted on the big glass doors for more than half an hour. But nobody would ever doubt who got the better deal.

      Through all the three years we were there and beyond, 230 remained the spiffiest and most beautiful building on the block. Uncle Tony saw that the stairwells were washed and the cornices painted, and the boiler always in tiptop repair, so that even the nonfamily tenants on the top floor wouldn’t have to bang the pipes for heat. He made sure all the bolts on the window grilles were secure so nobody could blame him if their dumb kid fell out and got spiked on the areaway railing, sixty feet down. The tradeoff was beyond the workday: no kids under foot, no catfights, no getting caught in the middle.

      But, as for me, I think Tony lost out, missing pastacicede in the kitchen with the girls, or sitting out in the parlor around the radio, glued to the Hit Parade and singing “Mairzy Doats” at the tops of our voices.

      And because they weren’t his windows, he never got to lean out of them, as we did, grilles or no, to get all the news of the war—or the peace, when the peace finally came—all the news you’d ever want to hear, straight up from the street. Never got to watch as the tall sculpted image of Our Lady of Mount Carmel floated drunkenly below on a sea of worshippers every sixteenth of July, her cone-shaped body covered with fluttering gray-green dollar bills, like a woman-tree made out of pure money.

       4

      The death of FDR had been announced in ten-foot-high letters on the street pavement beneath our tenement windows, letters meticulously painted by neighborhood boys, in a deep, reverential silence. The shock itself was stunning, and the convergence of the sudden passing of this larger-than-life being (and the only president I had ever known) with the end of the European war barely weeks later, as if he had died for it, burnished his image into temporary sainthood. Yet all of it, all of the imagery of the fatherly leader with the deeply ringed eyes, all the relentless movie iconography of patriotic sacrifice and the endless trumpeting of war bonds and victory gardens and the soothing caramel harmonies of the Andrews Sisters at the USO—all the bittersweet stuff our lives till then had been drenched in—was utterly burnt off by what we came to see within the span of that same year, as spring became summer, as summer fall, in Life and Look and Associated Press newsphotos and Pathé newsreels, that the war had ended twice in unspeakable carnage,