Under the Rose. Flavia Alaya

Violent playground riots made my brothers’ Benjamin Franklin School infamous. There were ugly turf-war clashes on the side streets, terrifying sidewalk confrontations. A boy could turn a street corner and find himself face-to-face with a switchblade. This had actually happened to Carlo. My parents truly feared for his life. He was tinder to a match, let alone a blowtorch.

      And yet he had seemed to become so much more tractable while my father was gone, only to flare up and be restive and difficult again as soon as he was home. I am sure my mother saw this and felt helpless, just as my father saw it and felt affronted, defied. But where could they go for help? Not to professionals—this would be vergogna, disgrace—yet my father refused to be helpless. He was resolved. It didn’t matter if Carlo were set back a term at school, or how a boy so high-spirited might feel, trapped in a strange culture under his father’s constant surveillance, or he overruled such thoughts as womanish. He knew what was right for his son. And he meant well—he did—he meant to take an absentee father’s full if belated responsibility. And he would teach him, finally—teach him as only he could—the lessons that must come from the great book of travel and of life.

      I wrote to my brother almost the moment he left. Of course I could not see him there; I could see only myself in his place. “It must make you giddy,” I said, thinking how excited I would be. And he shot back, as soon as he could put pencil to paper: “I am not ‘giddy,’ you dumbbell. Don’t tell me how I’m supposed to feel.”

      The months passed swiftly after all, and the two of them came back not much later than promised, soon after the New Year. My father looked as if he had been home. He had finally stopped smoking and put on more weight. My brother looked worse, more scowling, more passive and victimized.

      Grateful as I was to see my father again, I still wanted my Italy out of this, and hungered selfishly for its secret. I scanned everything they brought back with them, stood expectantly at the lip of each trunk, leaden with the weight of deeply embroidered linens and great lengths of Italian silk, watched the raising of every treasure as if it had come up out of the sunken Titanic and had some great revelation trapped in its folds. And they were treasures, gorgeous to the eye, silken to the hand. Yet even in my hunger I could sense something vaguely repellent beneath the aura of magic in those beautiful objects, as if I knew too well from the world of my mother and my aunts—most of them half-blind from close sewing and beading—what it meant to do elaborate, fine ricamo on a tablecloth twelve feet long. And so, instead of Italian hillsides abloom with oranges and light, I found myself perversely imagining aunts and cousins, girls like me, straining their eyes against the fading winter daylight to finish these lenzuoli and serviette in time, so that Mario could take them back with him and make everyone rich.

      My father had bought a camera just before he’d left for Italy, this time for making eight-millimeter movies. That old itch, the photographic passion that is as much a part of him as his eyes—and it must always be the best, the latest, the technological cutting edge, like the magical timer he used to set at our picnics at Indian Lake and Sabino Canyon, so that he himself could be in the snapshots with us. He had dredged up all his old and beautiful still equipment before the trip and spread it restlessly on the table, hungering for something new. And now, one day, soon after he is back, he picks me up after school and takes me with him to the offices of Bell & Howell to buy his first projector. He converses with men who wear ties, yet roll up their shirtsleeves to their elbows like butchers; he laughs and talks shop with them as if they are his comrades. At home again, he takes out the reels he has filmed abroad and sets them up and we turn down the lights and run the silent flickering images late into the night.

      He calls these places by familiar names—Sperone, Striano, Napoli—but they are like no Italy I have ever imagined. And they are all alike, all alike mean, war-devastated places the winter rains have left sodden and muddy. My impatient cousins pass in obligatory procession before the camera’s patronizing stare, their mouths moving in soundless messages. The camera starts into a rough courtyard where the same cousins are chasing a huge, thrashing sow maddened with fear in a seasonal ritual of slaughter. They seize her and bring her screaming to the knife. She is screaming but you cannot hear her. And then the film stops and starts again, and she is hanging from a post, her blood is dripping into a pail, and we cry out.

      My sister and I cry out. Carlo is silent, and I look for his eyes, near me in the darkened, flickering room, but he seems unmoved. How is this possible? What enemy of all the beauty I remembered had he met and conquered there, to be so still, so complacent? Where had it gone? What had he seen that I couldn’t see, what meaning of this hideous mystery of war and after-war that I couldn’t understand? He suddenly seems smaller, smaller even than he had seemed dancing there in the courtyard and flicking his handsome, wicked little face across the screen, here, now, gripping the armrests of his chair, staring arrogantly away.

      Movies, suddenly, became threaded with our lives now as if they had never been forbidden. My father, the same father who had barely let them across the threshold once, threw open the door and invited them straight into the house. The metaphor is exact. First he turned the movie camera on us and made it the passion still photography had been a decade before. It seems almost too disparaging to call this premeditated orchestration of images “home movies.” They were veritable cinema verité, his way of putting “home” at an aesthetic and emotional distance and re-creating it as art.

      My mother humored him in this steel whim, satisfied merely that he was alive and well and back in her bed at night. She humored him even when he determined one day that he would sink even deeper into the belly of the beast, that he would beat the Hollywood film racket he had despised by joining it. He had by this time established a rather fawning friendship with the pastor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on East 116th Street—perhaps pressed on by my mother, whose sense of the debt she owed the Madonna del Carmine for the response to her novenas could be a force. This friendship flowered, eventually, into a scheme to get parishioners to church and to the movies at the same time, movies vetted by the pastor as well as approved by the Code.

      It became an East Harlem Cinema Paradiso, my father in the equivalent of the choir-loft projection room. Movies could be rented at a special sixteen-millimeter rate, and the church, to help recoup the expenses, would apply a small admission charge for stepping down to the basement entrance of a Sunday evening. Perhaps my father received a fee, perhaps not, but since the projector was his own, he simply took the movies back home with him, and there in our own living room we could see them for ourselves, as often as we wanted, before those round silver drums the size of pizzas had to be returned to the devil’s devil they came from.

      We saw movies. We saw every Bud Abbott and Lou Costello ever made, every Road to with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour swishing around in her discreet sarong, everything ever made with the Andrews Sisters in it. No Wizard of Oz, or, God forbid, Gone With the Wind, which couldn’t be got for love or money. Even Bogart was dicey, and the pastor was picky about anything with Rita Hayworth, let alone Garbo. But he let by the Bela Lugosi Frankenstein—plus Astaire and Rogers, Lana Turner, Claudette Colbert (nothing too smoldering of course), Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine in Jane Eyre. We had Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman’s Joan of Arc, eventually Saint Bernadette. We laughed, we cried. Postwar war movies like The Five Sullivans were killers. The living room ran with tears for days.

      I fell in love with the women Paulette Goddard and Katharine Hepburn played. Someday I wanted to have all their tomboy bravado and still look as steamy as Linda Darnell. There was only one male star I loved who did not look like my father, an Irishman named Brian Aherne. The square jaw, the open, smiling face, the soft Irish eyes and burled hair seemed to possess some archetypal otherness I craved. Seemed to promise a safety and joy I had forgotten.

      But I kept this love darkly to myself, my secret this time.

       5

      I think I must have known, at least from the time we lived in East Harlem, that my parents still owned the house in New Rochelle and had merely rented it when we left for Arizona. It had not felt that way. The break