Someone requested “La Tarantella” which caused Sam Ryan to stare in goggle-eyed bafflement at his saxophone player, who shrugged and turned to the accordionist, an Italian who had been hired especially for this ethnically oriented outing. The accordionist nodded that he knew the rune, and he began playing it while the Irishmen faked along in less than spirited fashion. “La Tarantella” is a Neapolitan dance that presumably had its origins in the fitful gyrations of southern Italians “taken” by the tarantula spider. Attempting to expel the poison, the poor souls thus bitten by the hairy beast danced for days on end (or so legend holds), often to the point of complete exhaustion. A nice Italian idiom is “aver la tarantola” which literally means “to have the tarantula,” but which translates in the vernacular as “to be restless.” Those picnickers who got to their feet as the accordionist began “La Tarantella” and the sidemen hesitantly joined in really did seem to have the tarantula, did seem to have a hairy spider in their collective britches as they twisted and turned and rattled and rolled to the amazement of the Irish musicians and the calm acceptance of the accordionist, who kept whipping his dancing fingers over the blacks and whites, and squeezing the bellows against his belly, and dreaming of a time when he was back in Positano dancing this very same Tarantella up and down the steps carved into the steep rock walls of what was then a quiet fishing village.
Into the midst of this snake pit on the bright green lawn, into this maelstrom of writhing bodies and sweating faces, there delicately walked an angel sent from heaven, side-stepping the frenzied dancers, a slight smile on her face, walking directly toward (no, it could not be true), walking in a dazzle of white, long white dress, white lace collar, white satin shoes, walking toward (he could not believe it), white teeth and hazel eyes, masses of brown hair tumbling about the oval of her face, she was smiling at (was it possible?), she was extending her hand, she stopped before him, she said in English, “Are you Francesco Di Lorenzo?”
He was sure he’d understood the words, his grasp of English after all these months was surely not so tenuous that he could not hear his own name preceded by only two words in English, he was sure he had understood. But did angels address men who worked in the subway mud? He turned to Angelina for translation. His eyes were filled with panic.
“She wants to know if you are Francesco Di Lorenzo,” Angelina said in Italian.
“Sì,” he said. “Yes, Sì. Son’ io. I are. Yes. Yes!”
“I’m Teresa Giamboglio,” she said in English. “Our parents are compaesani.”
My grandfather had met my grandmother.
I’m not a writer, I don’t know any writer’s tricks. At the piano, I can modulate from C major to G major in a wink and without missing a beat. But this ain’t a piano. How do I modulate from 1901 to 1914 without jostling your eye? I know how to soothe your ear, man, I simply go from C major to A minor to D seventh to G major, and there I am. But thirteen years and four children later? Thirteen years of longing for a tiny Italian village on a mountaintop? (I can only span an eleventh comfortably on the keyboard.) Thirteen years. If I play it too slow, you’ll fall asleep. If I rush through it, I’ll lose you, it’ll go by too fast. I once scored a film for a movie producer who told me it didn’t matter what the hell anybody put up on the screen because the audience never understood it, anyway. “It goes by too fast for them,” he said. There’s something to that. You can’t turn back the pages of a film to find out what you missed. The image is there only for an instant, and then it’s gone, and the next image has replaced it.
He wanted to go back, young Francesco. He was married in December of 1901, and his plan was to take Teresa back home within the year. But in October of 1902, Teresa gave birth to their first daughter, and the voyage home was postponed; you could not take an infant on an ocean trip in steerage, and besides, money was still scarce. My grandfather had quit his job on the subway a month after that fateful Fourth of July picnic, and had begun working as an apprentice tailor to Teresa’s father, who owned a shop on First Avenue, between 118th and 119th Streets. When you talk about modulations, try moving gracefully from holding a pick to holding a needle. Teresa’s father had studied tailoring in Naples, following a family tradition that had begun with his grandfather. He was quite willing to take Francesco into his thriving little establishment — he had, after all, known Francesco’s father back in Fiormonte; they were compaesani. And besides, Francesco was soon to become his son-in-law, no? Yes. But Francesco, in the beginning at least, was a clumsy, fearful, inartistic, and just plain stupid tailor. Tailor? What tailor?
Old Umberto would show him how to trace a pattern onto a bolt of cloth, and Francesco would either break the chalk, or tear the pattern, or trace it onto a tweed instead of a covert — impossible. He was terrified of a pair of scissors; he opened them as though prying apart the jaws of a crocodile. Invariably, his hand slipped and he cut the cloth wrong. But even when his hand was steady, his eye was inaccurate, and one trouser leg would turn out to be longer than the other, a dress would be cut on the bias, a sleeve would not quite make a complete circle around a customer’s arm. And his stitches! Very patiently one day (keeping his rage in check, reminding himself that this clumsy oafish dolt of a grape farmer was now married to his youngest daughter, his single most prized possession before she’d been spirited away by this ditch-digging greenhorn), Umberto told Francesco that with stitches such as these, spaced as they were, wildly crisscrossing the cloth as they did, with stitches like yours, Francesco, it would do better for you to pursue a career in the chicken market on Pleasant Avenue, where the task is to divest the bird of its plumage rather than to adorn it, to create a thing of beauty, a garment for a customer of this tailor shop to wear with pride! Madonna mia, do you have sausages for fingers? (My daughter could have married a lawyer, he thought, but did not say.)
Teresa Giamboglio Di Lorenzo could indeed have married a lawyer. She was some sweet lady, my grandmother. Not as beautiful as Angelina, the pride of the neighborhood and the recent bride of Pino Battatore (who’d married her the month before Francesco tied the knot with Teresa), she was nonetheless strikingly tall for a girl of Neapolitan heritage, and she carried herself with the dignity of a queen. She could silence an argumentative customer in her father’s shop with a single hazel-eyed stiletto thrust that might just as easily have stopped a charging tiger. She spoke English fluently, of course, having been born in America, and she was aware that the Italian both her father and her new husband spoke was a bastardized version of the true Italian language, the Florentine. Her father had hand-tailored all her clothes from the day she was born, and she was still the most elegantly dressed young lady in the ghetto, coiffing her long chestnut brown hair herself, following the styles prescribed in the fashion magazines she avidly read each month — Vogue, Delineator, McCall’s, and The Designer. She was quick-witted, short-tempered, and sharp-tongued, but I never heard her raise her voice in anger to my grandfather as long as she lived. Whenever she spoke to him, her voice lowered to an intimate, barely audible level; even in the midst of a crowd (and there were some huge crowds around my grandfather’s table when I was growing up), one got the feeling that she and Francesco were alone together, oblivious of others, a self-contained, self-sustaining unit. I loved her almost as much as I loved him. And I’m glad she didn’t marry a lawyer.