Under the Rose. Flavia Alaya

always been, to me.

      I had not always lived in a tower. Rather, in the manner of some of those fantastic invented tales, I had been somewhat thrown out into the world—a world whose ever-widening rings started from the little earthly paradise of New Rochelle, third stop on the commuter rail lines through the Westchester suburbs of New York City. Third child, first girl, born not in hospital but in an apartment above my father’s North Avenue meat market, I had been given to the light (as Italians say), all eight pounds of dark flesh and thick, curling black hair, on a burning day in mid-May 1935 that my mother always remembered as first sign of an insufferably hot summer.

      My father, his macho secured by the prior birth of two figli maschi, made me his darling. They tell me that the love I returned nearly cost me my life. One day, thinking I heard the sputtering sound of his truck in the driveway and passionately eager to see him, I leaned out the window against an unhitched screen and fell two stories to the graveled pavement. My parents guessed that my fall had been broken by a cable about twelve feet from the ground, otherwise there was no imagining how I had survived it. Like Ancient Mariners they told and retold this story, astonished that the gods had not punished their neglect, astonished at my remembering nothing of it, and even more by what followed—that while the doctor, who had taken them aside, was hushedly informing them that I might never walk again, I clambered down off the examining table and limped into view. The story was meant to illustrate the arrogant simplicity of medical men in the clear presence of miracles, but telling it again and again also had a way of confirming for them that I was still alive, with every promise of leading a charmed life.

      I was then two and a half years old. Six months later my sister was born, and the family set was complete. For several years we had been moving in that clambering way of immigrant strivers from apartment to bigger apartment to rented house, until we settled at last into mortgaged possession of a semidetached stucco on that oddly pointed corner, which seemed to nose its way gingerly out of New Rochelle’s sprawling Little Italy, hurry past a rather interesting black neighborhood of setback houses with great Victorian porches, and tend vaguely in the direction of Scarsdale, which our Italian neighbors described very simply as “where the rich people live.”

      My two older brothers, Louis (whom my parents called Luigi or Luigino and we kids called simply Lou) and Carlo, had been born in Italian East Harlem, my newlywed parents having rented their first apartment from Grandpa Spagnola, my mother’s father, who owned flanking buildings at 228 and 230 114th Street, just east of the Third Avenue El. My mother, Maria, born on Cherry Street on the Lower East Side, was already a veteran of several successive Little Italys before she met my father, Mario—she leaning out of the parental window one fine Mother’s Day Sunday, he passing below, one single smoldering glance firing a romance that lasted nearly seventy years.

      Like me, she had also been a third child, but third of ten, eight of them girls, the second daughter, but first to marry—so deep a violation of Sicilian protocol that it required the formal dispensation of her beloved father, who could refuse her nothing. But what a catch Mario must have seemed: flagrantly, darkly handsome, very Valentino, a decorated former officer in the Italian army, veteran of the Alto Adige campaign in the First World War, who had fought among Gabriele D’Annunzio’s handpicked company of arditi—“the ardent ones.” She, for her part, was an Arabian princess. He had been caught unwillingly in the dark thickets of her hair; her steady unwavering black eyes had bewitched his soul. But, truly, her love for Mario was master, and it was she who had been bewitched, she who was opening the long saga of Spagnola women and their fatal need for beautiful men.

      And yet neither the mastery of that love, nor, when they finally left Harlem, the distance up the Boston Post Road to Westchester, could keep her from her father, and from the familiar Sicilian noise and grand passions of her home place and its glorious community of women, still everything to the girl in her. And so her world opened to me on Sundays, as we made our way back to East Harlem to visit, filling the afternoons with street music and Italian ices and stoop game pleasures overseen by a bevy of protective young aunts, until we turned sleepily homeward, blanket-wrapped, at night. Other Sundays belonged to the satellite of my father’s family, who came together in the tiny rented flat of his adoring younger sister, Carmelina, on East 78th Street, above their own market. Somehow, even as children, we knew the difference between the two families with a deep tribal knowledge—that they were Napolidaan, not Zeechilyaan like my mother, and that darkly hinted hostilities lay between them, so unfathomable, so natural and perfect, so ancient, as to preclude any search, then, into their origin.

      Aunt Carmelina—Zi’ Carme’—was married to Uncle Sam, a sour, reclusive hulk of a man. There was this paradox about him: that though he spoke little English, there seemed to be no Italian version of his name, only that ironic appropriation of this essence of his adopted America. A boyhood hunting accident in Italy had left him with a disfiguring puncture scar in his throat, just below his jaw, and seemed to have taken a piece of his soul. He drank silently, heavily, broodingly. Yet he had an uncanny gentleness with children, like some cowardly Italian lion, and we forgave him his wound and his brutish misery. My aunt was his first cousin, a fact as normal to our kinship consciousness as the mountains of cutlets and plump, homemade ravioli on the dinner table. Their two daughters, Gloria and Gioia (whose names I think Sam had had no part in choosing), were close in age to my sister and me, and our ritual visits in good weather usually began with Carmelina lining the big iron grid of the fire escape like a birdcage with stretches of wrapping paper from the store and setting the four of us good little girls amid the basil pots, twelve feet up from the boys’ noisy ball games in the street, to dress and undress our dolls.

      To us it was in its way a wild zone—an outside place perilously free—and at the same time a private box on a secret family opera playing inside. Against the big window frame hung a real birdcage, my aunt’s bright yellow canary catching and trilling the breeze. In the near distance, her bedroom was paved almost to the walls with a single and enormous letto matrimoniale whose intricately knotted white chenille bedspread we were warned never to mark with our shoes. And beyond the bed, from out of the dim interior light of the parlor, drummed the deep voices of the men hunched over the dining table, two wine carafes set in the midst of its embroidered linen expanse, the table so leafed-out to capacity that there was barely space to pass through the room. The women exploded at intervals from the crowded galley kitchen like tambourines, and then the murmuring drums would start again, adagio, and then the deep clunking sound of large pots, and then another high-pitched explosion, molto allegro, bringing up a grand finale of laughter and ringing glass. Out of this rolling musical noise would now and then come a warning burst in the direction of the window—“State attente!”—sign that we were, after all, being watched. And always, out of the heart of that little inner room, out of the very heat of their bodies, they seemed to pump an exquisitely killing perfume of wine and food, the scent pouring out to us on the interchange of air and driving us mad with hunger.

      These few rather surreal flashbacks of early childhood memory divide themselves irrevocably from almost everything else I remember about the house in New Rochelle—the sequestered girlhood, the room like Bluebeard’s tower—all of which comes from a later time. For abruptly, when I was not quite six, in the most extraordinary, sequence-rupturing episode of my mobile young life, we moved for three years to Tucson, Arizona, forsaking all grandfathers and uncles and sisters and cousins and aunts—with one, single delicious exception, which I shall save for its place.

      I call attention to this zigzag of my narrative not just because disruption—displacement—became part of the essence of its meaning, but because out of these jagged and episodic fractures of my childhood there arose mysteries of self-making only to be recaptured by piecing them more curiously together. For this first rupturing move west was followed, about three years later, by another rupturing move east again, creating in its turn another two-year interim when we actually lived in East Harlem, before we reclaimed our New Rochelle house.

      Or five of us did, which made it perhaps not just an interim but an interregnum. My father had been taken seriously and rather mysteriously ill out west, had been carried east by train only to be shifted from hospital to hospital and nursing home to nursing home in what seemed to my child mind an endless, baffling captivity. These were hard