Under the Rose. Flavia Alaya

yet here was another sign of some original pentimento beneath the fresh skin of paint. Perhaps it had been expedient not to rush to sell during the radically changing housing market of the early war. But in what curious haste to leave was so much left behind (as we later discovered)—old store and family stuff, photos, memorabilia, my father’s sketches and drawings—the archeology of an entire epoch, stashed in cartons and chests and an old steamer trunk in the basement?

      They reclaimed the house over the winter of 1947, and we moved back into it a bit at a time, slowly fitting and furnishing the stone cold rooms, with their tangy smells of freshly stripped wood and wallpaper paste topped up at each visit with the heady perfume of coffee, freshly, quickly brewed to drive out the chill the moment my father unlocked the door. That winter was indeed so frozen, so bitter and severe, that it is still used as a weather-almanac baseline. The snow relentlessly fell and fell, and then clung on, deep and hardened, through and beyond the weeks of our protracted moving. Up Third Avenue and through the Bronx my father would take us after he had shut down the store, often with the wipers on our new Plymouth churning against a light new fall of snow, past brightly lit shops pleading with January shoppers to brave the icy sidewalks and the sky-high snowpiles at the intersections. The drive grew darker and less intense along Bruckner Boulevard, and for the half hour up the Hutchinson River Parkway Ann and I usually fell asleep, curled together for warmth in the back. When we finally entered Sickles Place, layered with so much frozen snow that it crunched out loud beneath the tire chains, we would come suddenly, dreamily awake.

      The rooms had shrunken, of course, as rooms one returns to after earliest childhood do. Yet it may be to this brief time, before the space of memory was refilled with rugs and lamps and chairs and all the necessary bric-a-brac of Italian American household life, that I owe my queer passion for the aesthetic of the empty house, when I felt and reclaimed its bare, precious instant of vacancy, and it was to my wondering eyes as if a cavern from a forgotten romance had been restored to me out of a frozen dream.

      We were barely settled when my brothers took charge of the snowbound frontyard slope and constructed a daredevil sled jump. Lou, born leader, construction genius, ordered everyone to work who intended to use it, first bringing snow to pack, then water to pour over each carefully mounded snow layer, until it was compacted as solid as granite. Since the volunteers included not just Carlo but every neighborhood kid with half a grain of testosterone, the result was an instant circle of new friends and a jump that rose off a downhill sled run to about thirty inches high. They’d have gone higher except the slam landing after that exuberant takeoff might have shattered even the sturdiest Flexible Flyer, and eventually did a few of the less sturdy.

      I helped build the jump too. So did Ann. In the end she had the good sense not to risk it. I loved the rapture of speed and the breathtaking flight into the icy air. But I quit after a try or two, before the jump had reached its full height, when the shudder that shook me as I hit the downslope racked my body with primal memories of my infant fall from that second-story window. And so the two of us, from the safe, warm, Tudor-framed tower of our bedroom above, looked down on every boy in the neighborhood—tall, short, fat, thin, black, white—risking life and limb in the service of a mad, blind, hilarious daring, not sure whether to envy or despise them.

      At least I wasn’t sure. But at going-on-thirteen a girl knows there are other risks at hand, other mysteries to attend to. That spring, beneath the same high window, where the northeast side of the house shaped itself to the steep contour of the Sickles Avenue hill, there blossomed over that once icy slope the white cascading glory of a huge and insanely fragrant juniper orange bush—a little draggled at the bottom skirt where the boys had nicked it taking the curve of the sled run, but my mother said it had become all the more bountiful for the depth of the snow that had buried it that winter. It took over the air. You could not be near it without a deep, almost delirious drinking of your breath.

      It was my mother’s favorite. She always called it jasmine, and the freight of all that is lovely and exotic and fragile was in the word. Ten years later, a friend and colleague in Greensboro, where I spent my first year of teaching, told me its proper name, and since then, juniper orange is what other such opulently endowed bushes are called. The one below my girlhood window—gorgeously fragrant, at once delicate and wildly louche in its June-day glory, with its soft aureole of bees and its fatal snow of petals in a matter of weeks—will always be jasmine. It loved to come into full bloom on my mother’s wedding anniversary, in mid-June. I have seen in her bridal pictures a reminiscent spray lying across her lap.

      I can still smell it. I can still feel the enchantment it evokes of something like a love of my own, of the many loves that had begun to stir me more and more in books, I can almost hear the scent rushing like noise each spring through the green fuse of my adolescent heart. To think of that jasmine now is for it to be then again. I am lying abed in the full moonlight of a June night, alive, alive, in a state of soft, obedient, liquid surrender, the window ajar, and the incense of that drunken perfume rising up to me like a lover.

      Vissi d’art, vissi d’amore. I lived by art, by dreams of love. What else was there to live by, except, for a while, those old movies, and the recorded operas that made music like gods out of a machine? My father, true to form, when television sets first began to be marketed in 1947, broke the bank to get one, a big-screen Dumont framed in a walnut console the size of a coffin, creating a whole new geography of desire. From the moment it was set in its place against the living-room wall it absolutely defined the space, commensurable with nothing. Its primitive children’s programming—the playschool of a new idiom for the children of the new age—fleetingly absorbed us. But it belonged to a foreign country compared with opera. Opera, ringing in ecstatic exile through the house, or pouring its fantastic heart out over the Saturday radio, signified some lost paradise regained. Bohème and Tosca for my father—and by a powerful circuitry my mother too, who swooned over Mario Cavaradossi out of an essential fidelity to her own Mario—were the very breath of cultural memory, center of a veneration more sublime and compelling than religion. I loved them, with a baffled and conflicted energy. I did not understand the words, only the sound of them somehow, and the stories were complex and inscrutable. I loved them, I think, because I did not fully understand them and yet their foreignness was my own and seemed to belong to me as a birthright. They entered me, less as sound than as imagery, darklit landscapes of incomprehensible passion, swelling the house of my mind with an idea of devotion tragic and terrible.

      By now I had been enrolled in seven different schools in seven years of schooling, and in spite of being thought of by all my teachers as bright and gifted, in spite of having been trusted, while we lived in the city, to roam all over the East Side with my ready subway nickel to music lessons and art classes as well as to school, I had become rather a oddly skewed and introverted child, self-absorbed, peopling my school notebooks with faces and dancing bodies and disembodied eyes, suffering what I can describe only as a near-pathological indifference to my own visibility, as if the plumpish flesh of the body I inhabited were a kind of capsule in which I could float through the world seeing but unseen.

      I had been in the first of two years at Hunter College Junior High when we moved back to New Rochelle. As schools went, it was a good place for me, a glimpse into what it meant to be a creative child while still somehow anchoring me in the real world. Hunter College was still a teacher’s college for women then. It had designed this prestigious little two-year junior academy for girls as a prep school for the even more prestigious Hunter College High. Like a handful of other special public high schools in New York, it had a selective citywide admission policy, each applicant having to pass through an intense battery of IQ and aptitude tests, personally administered over the better part of a day.

      I had gone there from Mrs. Streicher’s sixth grade at PS 102. It was less a sign of her preference, perhaps, than of my own wavering sense of the reality of school that she had passed me over for the entrance exam and recommended instead my classmate Connie Colandro—bright, sweet, compliant Connie. But my mother was indignant. In one of those seizures of righteous fury for which she was famous, she marched me straight down to East 69th Street on her own, and when the results were posted I was in and Connie wasn’t. Pity Mrs. Streicher, who also happened to be a customer in Alaya’s Market. The next time she stopped at the store, crow was the special of the day,