So the obvious question is, what the hell happened to mom? No human acts the way she did without cause, and she certainly didn’t arrive from the womb as a malicious, deviant creature. God creates us as lovable and loving beings. Unfortunately, the brokenness of humanity gets in the way.
Let’s start with what I know, or what I thought I knew. Growing up, Mom was always vaguely obtuse about Grandpa. She never seemed to like him much, but he remained a figure in her life. She would talk on the phone to him from time to time in a mix of broken italian and broken english. We would stop by the house once in a while, and my brother and I looked forward to raiding the cookie jar for stale vanilla sandwich cookies. Once in a while there would be the family gatherings of aunts and uncles and cousins. The old folks would play cards into the night, and we’d head to the basement to fly paper airplanes, or more accurately, grind them up in the pencil sharpener and burn them in the incinerator. Amazing how we had access to large flames yet somehow never managed to hurt ourselves or burn the house down.
There was never any time with Grandpa alone. The only time I remember staying at his house was when Grandma was still alive and my sister was being born. Not sure where my brother was, perhaps he was there too, but I don’t remember him being around. I remember sleeping in the basement and thinking that the flower arrangement looked an awful lot like Frankenstein’s head. And that it was really dark down there. I remember the old people smell from the bathroom; an odd aromatic mixture of heavily scented soap and, well, old people.
Grandma died when I was 9. The most vivid memories I have of her involve shaved heads, hospital beds and the smell of death. Going to my uncle’s house where she lay fighting the good fight in the living room, waiting for the cancer to consume her.
But Grandpa always seemed dangerous, and odd. He had the Italian POW medal hanging above the TV in the living room, a remnant from his time fighting in the old country. The story goes that he was a spy, complete with a camera. Supposedly, he escaped and walked some ungodly amount of miles across treacherous terrain to his freedom. As with most stories that were told to me, I’ve since learned not to believe it.
Grandpa made bad puns, spoke with a heavy accent despite decades in this country, and smelled bad. It was boring being at his house, the only fun being the weird little perpetual mirror cabinet he’d built in the basement, and later, the nudey German biker magazines that I discovered in my uncle’s long discarded basement stash. Had I been of a different mind, I might have started swilling the homemade wine that was perpetually fermenting in the basement. But perhaps I suspected even at a young age how awful those rotted grapes might taste.
Grandpa was always off, but he seemed relatively harmless. He never really interacted with me, other than to pull a quarter out of his pocket when it was time to leave. Regardless, I always got the sense that mom never trusted him, and simply did her duty to tolerate and appease him. After all, that’s the Italian way — family first.
As I got older, I started to hear more stories, some of them quite fantastic. There was the one about how Grandpa’s dad married the daughter of the Don of the Sicilian mafia. My great grandfather didn’t join the family trade, but he was given dispensation as long as he kept his nose clean and his mouth shut. Grandpa always new that his grandfather was a big deal, but he didn’t know why. One day, as a young hoodlum, Grandpa steals his buddy’s bike. He takes it home, and several hours later there is a knock on the door. It’s his friend’s father, who is obviously none too happy about his kid’s bike being stolen. The dad asks Grandpa his last name. Grandpa, being the shrewd kid he was, knew that to divulge that information would spell certain doom, so he gave the guy his grandfather’s last name instead. The dad blanches and backs out of the doorway apologizing. “No problem, keep the bike.” And that’s when Grandpa began to realize his grandfather had some clout in town.
There was yet another yarn mom spun about Grandpa being a teenager and bringing a friend over to his grandfather’s house. Only with his buddy there, Grandpa was embarrassed to kiss the ring like he always did. That earned him the back of a hand and the knowledge that disrespect was the worst offense he could ever commit.
I’m guessing mom read these stories in a bad mafia novel somewhere and eventually they collided into real memories in her fractured little brain. I was always skeptical, but at least they sounded cool. It was only after mom died that my uncle (her brother) officially dismissed such talk as utter nonsense. Worse, he started to paint the picture of who Grandpa really was.
Leave a Reply