Under the Rose. Flavia Alaya

relied on my father’s father, who owned a pork store just below the 116th Street station of the Third Avenue El. For a place to live she relied on her Sicilian family, moving into a fifth floor railroad flat in the old 114th Street tenement on whose stoop I had first learned to climb stairs, in the giggling aura of my young aunts.

      By now these same fecund Spagnola girls had burst like novas into galaxies of family, filling the building, rattling it with the noise of children clattering and howling, of all eight of the sisters baying to one another up and down a stairwell that echoed like a silo—Terrreeee-saaa! Carrrmeeee-laaa!—tearing it apart with screaming family fights and sulking, neurasthenic silences and seaming it together again with the paradisal smells of eggplant and fennel sausage and red bell peppers darkly roasted over a gas flame.

      It was a strange two-year matriarchate. I remember it as a wonderfully liberated time—though freedom for a prepubescent Italian girl-child, even senza padre, is a very relative thing, and we lived after all on the topmost floor, up (or down) four steep and daunting flights, past the doorways of all my aunts. And yet at ten years old I traveled the New York subways unchaperoned, attending theory classes at the Manhattan School of Music (because my mother, bless her, thought I was a piano prodigy), going to libraries (because she said I could read anything in print), visiting art museums (because I was already so amazingly clever with pencil and brush, clearly an artist, like my father), all of it on my own; and finally, just before we moved back to Westchester, beginning seventh grade at a rather toney junior high school to which (she would announce proudly to her customers) I had been selectively admitted by a very competitive entry exam, all of it her doing: she had taken me by the hand and trotted me down there, to the tests.

      Even amid this curious freedom I sometimes think I took a kind of room with me, a room of my own, wherever I went—a safe, dark, inner space from which I peered unseen. Then, however, this inner room seemed much less tower than sanctuary, rather like the tiny room my sister and I shared in that top-floor apartment, one of five strung out, front to back, just like the railway cars such flats were named for—or better, as we thought, like beads on a rosary. It, too, had its little inner shrine to Motherhood, mirroring our matriarchal real-life, an imago that stood watch on the horizon of my daring but did not stand in its way. Their common symbol was a framed holy picture that hung on our bedroom wall, not a traditional Mother Mary with her boy-baby Jesus, but an icon of Mary’s own mother, St. Ann, patron saint of childbirth (for whom my sister had been named), with a young Mary, still a girl-child and still the apple of her own mother’s eye.

      It was not a lovely work of art. I am amazed, as I recall it again, not to have been alarmed by the cadaverous pallor of St. Ann’s face or felt my nascent artistic conscience disturbed by the acid green of her gown. But I was not alarmed or disturbed by these any more than by the drooping eyelids and elevated fingertips of her too-teacherly style of mothering. Maybe I saw myself as the absorbed and enchanted Mary, her child face and eyes turned softly upward, grateful to be chided by such a mother. And yet who knows what secret ambition might have tied me to the mother and her power to chide?

      Why do I love to remember this time, this symbolic little room, this cell, so spartan and small, and, because it was next down from the front bedroom where my mother slept, so utterly lacking in privacy? Not only did it place us under her eye as we slept, but she could, and did, pass through it at will, at any hour. It had steel-frame bunk beds, a single chest of drawers my sister and I shared, and a small vanity table and mirror. Before this mirror we plaited our thick Italian hair, when she, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, too overstretched at last, admitted that taming its copious, insurrectionary masses was something we must do for ourselves. Hair, after all, had to be disciplined, at least as much as our budding girlhoods did, perhaps (if measured against unchaperoned subway miles) more. And so Ann and I learned upon each other the fine art of weaving braids: the two small braids along the side, first, out and away from the temples, and then, swiftly, lest these shoot recalcitrantly back into stray hair, the small braids folded into two long, large braids at the back. Gleams of gold and russet threaded our dark brown girlhood hair in those days, both of us having had three years’ bleaching in the desert sun. But mine was always coarser and darker than Ann’s, and as we grew older, darker still. We can still tell the difference between the braids we cut off when we were finally bobbed, which both of us have preserved like surrogate virginities ever since.

      They say our mothers, no matter how loving, elude us. They say it is the reason there is desire. I know there were times I reached for mine and caught air. She had once, of course, defined what someone has called the semiotic fluid of pre-Oedipal childhood, the very force field of life—life without definition or boundary, open, exposed, a meadow, a street, a door, a window into the sky—when experience still had no other place than She, no sacred space shielded from her passion or hurt or kisses or rages, which were all the daily bread and trespasses we understood; when Mother was no separate She but the Mamma who trembled between life and death if you had a fever and swooned if you fell and cracked a millimeter of skin; when She was in fact not even she alone but the collective Mater Dolorosa of motherly aunts and cousins, shrieking and weeping and biting into the fat of their thumbs when you were bad, as if they could punish your infant crimes on their own flesh, out of their own salt.

      I speak now of the after-Mother, the woman herself, the woman I knew and did not know and would never know, who seemed always in flight—working, making, finishing the forever-unfinished—always doing some relentless god’s or sorcerer’s bidding, darting and flashing like an Ariel or a hummingbird. One memory print of her survives where she is still—fixed—and my own eye is the camera: Arizona, our first brief foray, and she is merely paralyzed with lonely grief to be there without my father.

      Otherwise there remains nothing but photographs to read her fugitive meaning by. Cleaning house once, probably in the years when we were both in college, my sister and I discovered a cache of them, buried for so long and in such seeming secrecy we had to read them like archeologists. We guessed that my father had taken them soon after Ann was born, my mother’s most difficult birth. It had been part of the family lore my brothers knew (and with arrogant, cruel intention would frequently repeat to my sister) that our mother had bled for weeks, that she had nearly died. Thus the pleaded intercession of St. Ann and the elevation to household saint, the rosaries, the novenas, the reverence of naming.

      And now, oddly, out of the memory of these pictures, like the sudden opening of a shutter, vivid and black, springs a glimpse out of my earliest and most elusive childhood memory: a big, cold house where my brothers and I are briefly in institutional care—a misery of children, a distant pond, a few pale and unfriendly ducklings, a gigantic, white-tiled washroom in which I am somehow unaccountably alone, a sense of something overwhelming in the hugeness and strangeness of its seeming abandonment.

      Surely these pictures had been taken then, when she was too ill to care for us herself. Perhaps the doctors had told my father she was dying. It seems very Italian—almost a cliché of Italianness—to think of the camera as a kind of window standing in death’s way. I see a lifetime of family funerals, a gallery of memorial card photo images, each with its gauzy airbrushed halo, and it defines a sense scored so deep that even now a part of me knows mortality to be the true, secret meaning of pictures.

      But these were not clichés, and I think now that in this way, as in many others, Italy had marked Mario differently. For he once told us that he had been trained to use his first camera as a soldier in the field, imaging the carnage of war, and now, perhaps, in the face of this possible death—this mortal life bleeding itself away—he was utterly beyond any cliché of mortality as defined by the burial crypt. Here the lens that sees also holds, refuses to let go. It is become his own prosthetic will, obsessive, prurient, probing a deeper mystery than fear, even than death, taking my mother’s body at curious, artful, languorous angles, revealing her, carnal and silken and voluptuous even in the surrender of her suffering. These are pictures of Maria, shameless declarations of renewed passion, and the very violence of their intimacy transcends death, as does their willful insistence that the camera transmute her pain into beauty. Against the pallor of her cheeks he has chosen to see her ever-sad soft dark eyes as smudges of wet charcoal, her hair like Salome’s, streaming black blood upon the pillow.

      Accidental