My father reads: “Catholics who attended the luncheon that Friday in Dallas were given a special dispensation and were allowed to eat meat.”
My father reads: “The presidential office was being redecorated in red and white. The change was planned months before. The red carpet was being laid down when the news of the death was received.”
My father reads that Jackie put her wedding ring on her dead husband’s hand but, unable to get it past the knuckle, she left it there, halfway down his stiff finger.
My father reads that Caroline has broken a few small bones in her wrist in a fall from her horse Macaroni, a gift from President Johnson.
I am frightened when my father reads me these things.
“There are questions about the assassination that have not been answered to my satisfaction,” he says to my mother over dinner one night. “I’m just not convinced.” He sits there without eating for a long time and draws something with his finger on the table.
“Maria,” my grandfather said one day long ago, “today your name is Mary. Today I change my own name from Angelo to Andy. Today we are real Americans.”
I am forever grateful that I was not there to witness the scowl that must have appeared on my grandmother’s face at this news. It must have been terrible. Of course, she never once called him Andy and the name, unused, faded. And when she refused to answer to Mary, my grandfather sadly returned to Maria, for he missed my grandmother too much. She would not look at him or say one word; he was addressing a stranger.
“I was given a name at birth and I will die with it, Angelo,” she said.
“We could call the baby Mike. What do you think?”
She frowned.
“Oh, Maria, your whole family wears that frown,” he said on the day he finally gave in. “Such stubbornness!” he cried. “I am sure it has ruined more than one good idea.”
The evening of their second day here, my grandfather registered both of them for English classes at the local school. Right from the start he was a model student, staying late, trying to improve his pronunciation, persevering.
“I leaf in New Hope, Pencil-bannia,” he said hesitantly, concentrating impossibly hard on every syllable. “I live, I live, I live in New Hope, Pencil, Pencil-vay-knee-a in the United State of America.” I’m sure mv grandfather smiled when he got to the America part, for he could sav it perfectly. He had been saying it his entire life.
“America begins and ends w ith the letter A. America. See you too-marr-ah, too-morr-row,” he said to the pretty young teacher, “American redhead. Thank you very much. Good-bye.”
“The accent must go,” he said each night before bed. “The accent must go,” he said in the morning to his small son, Michael. “An accent is no good in this new country.” Maria sighed, exhausted by so much enthusiasm. He was a teacher’s dream, not a wife’s. She felt lonely. The village where she was born and had lived her whole life welled in her stomach; she had to eat a lot of bread to keep it down; she had to sleep under heavy blankets.
“We need new clothes for a new country, Mary,” my grandfather said. She was not answering, especially to Mary. “If you’d like to come with me, I’m going into the downtown.” Still she did not answer. Meticulously my grandfather observed the dress of the people on the neighboring farms before going out to get his own blue jeans and work shirts and boots. He especially noted the dress of the Negroes whom he considered the most authentic Americans. They were new and exotic like America itself. And above all they were not Europeans. Europe became “for the birds.” “Oh, Mary,” he would say, “haláis for the birds. In America there is jazz music, Charlie has told me, in a place called Harem.” “Harlem,” Charlie would correct him. “Yes, Harlem,” my grandfather would repeat, “where women wear flowers behind their ears and the music is hot.
“I’d like to go there,” my grandfather said in his halting way, something I imagine he picked up from Charlie.
“That’s cool,” Charlie said.
Hot and cool, my grandfather thought. “This is some country, Mary,” he said, hugging her. “Hot and cool, at the same time,” he said to his small son, Michael. This wonderful place, America, beginning and ending with A.
He felt the wind against him on the mountaintop and praised it, praised the Great Spirit, the wonderful, incomprehensible one. He looked at the stones, knelt down and touched their smooth, flat heads. He knew the oldest gods lived there in stone. He lay on the sacred earth for a long time, and listened to the stones that spoke.
“Welcome to Savannah, that sleepy southern city, that city of azaleas, lilies, camellia, dogwood, and cherry, that langorous town of balconies and secret gardens, its avenues lined with gray-bearded oak. Spanish moss. That beautiful trader’s city where one can watch the oceangoing ships come up the river right beside the downtown. The City of Hope, founded in 1733 by the British general and idealist James Oglethorpe.”
“Read more,” the children whisper, “oh, please read more,” they say, growing sleepier and sleepier.
“Wisteria and pillars…mansions, verandas…and the sea, the smell of the sea.”
“The redwoods of California are the tallest living things on earth,” the fat man reads in the fading light. “They live from 400 to 2500 years and may be the descendants of trees standing thirty to forty million years ago.”
“I dreamed of you, of this place,” my grandfather said, and he told Two Bears what he had seen. “I am here to learn.”
Grandpa must have been exhausted after his bus trip. He still carried the lunch my father had packed for him days ago, uneaten.
“Speak the truth,” Two Bears demanded of this little white man, and my grandfather repeated the dream.
“It is very unusual,” Two Bears said, looking at him closely. “You are here from Pennsylvania because of your dream? Most white men have grown far away from the life in their sleep. They cannot remember their dreams and, if they do, they do not know what they mean.”
My grandfather nodded, mesmerized by Two Bears, the music of his speech, the language of his hands. I’m sure Two Bears did not know at first what to make of this little Italian man, come all the way across the ocean, then across the country to this place.
“This is the white man’s trick,” he said to himself, but he invited the Italian grandfather to sit down and smoke with him anyway. And they spoke in the language of hands, my grandfather fluent from the moment he raised them.
“Maria,” Grandpa said, “today your name is Wonderful Thunder.” The Indians not only taught my grandfather about the secret of rain, the dances of the sun, and the earth’s songs but also, after some discussion, the proper Indian name for my grandmother.
“A song from the Ohlone,” my grandfather said to us, smiling:
“I dream of you,
I dream of you jumping.
Rabbit,
Jackrabbit,
Quail.”
“All the trees,” Grandpa said, motioning to the horizon, “and all the grass and all the stones are talking.”
My grandfather, nearing seventy, was quite pleased with his version of the afterlife and took every opportunity to share it with us. As far as we children were concerned he could not tell a story too many times. We always heard something new in it or thought of something we hadn’t before.