And I say what you do to her, mister?
And he says I bandage her finger.
You touch her? I say. You put hand under her dress? You cover her eye?
He says no. He shake his head. He says no again.
Ralphie says you a no-good lying bast, and he hit the man.
Then everybody is hit him, me too. And we go upstairs.
Ignazio, I don’t know. I get very sick in my heart. I think, what is this America? A man’s daughter is no safe two doors away? And to beat a poor man like myself? When maybe he is tell the true, but she swears on the cross? I decide to go home. This time I go home. This time I take Pino and his baby with me, there is no thing here for them, not no more, this time we go. I am thirta-four years old, it is enough. I promise you, Ignazio, this time I go home because I have been no more I wish to have this terrible things that happen, where in Italy, no, it does not, I will go home. I will tell Tessie, I will tell you grandma, I will say no, Tessie, we go home, you hear me, Tessie, I take you home now, I leave here, this place, we go home now, we go.
Grandpa, you might have made it. You just might have made it. If only the whole damn world hadn’t decided to go to war the following week.
It is to be remembered, by those who choose to ponder the ironies of alliances, that Italy was on the side of God (our side) in World War I. Japan was, too. And so was Russia, that dear good friend with whom we joined hands in a common cause again, less than thirty years later. War may be hell, and stupid besides, but that’s not the point of this book, so let’s not belabor the obvious. My grandfather recognized it as idiotic from the very beginning; as far as he was concerned, the world was conspiring to keep him from going home. When Italy entered the war in 1915, he shook his head in disgust and spat on the sidewalk outside the tailor shop.
But if Stella was undeniably American to begin with, she became even more so during World War I. It’s easy for a girl entering puberty to become excited about all sorts of things, but war is the biggest thing going for pubescent girls and boys of all ages in any age, and World War I was the hugest spectacle that had come along in a long while, certainly the most extravagant (and onliest) since Stella’s birth. For Stella, everything following World War I was simply old hat. Word War II? So what? (Until she lost her eldest son in it, which senseless murder she justified with the words “He died for America.” You poor stupid woman, he died for nothing. And he was killed by a fucking wop; how did that sit with you, Mom? Did it make you feel even more American and less Italian?) Korea? Bush-league antics, and besides, they were killing Chinks, which served them right. Vietnam? Who ever heard of Vietnam before everybody started making such a stink about it? As wars go, Stella lived through the very best of them,
And for the first time ever in the history of warfare, the full-scale use of — heavy artillery, high-explosive shells, machine guns, barbed wire, poison gas, automobiles and trucks, armored cars and tanks, airplanes, and... SUBMARINES ! ! !
Now that was some war. That was a war you could follow with keen interest, even before America became involved in it. At times, Stella found it almost too exciting to bear. Now that the mundane events of her childhood were safely behind her — little everyday occurrences like walking in on the iceman and Filomena; or being in that kitchen when Angelina gushed out her life in the next room; or seeing Angelina laid out in a coffin in the front room of the Battatore apartment, Pino sobbing uncontrollably, a fresh burst of theatrical moans coming from the women in black whenever another relative entered the flower-bedecked room to pay respects; or watching Angelina’s coffin being lowered into the ground in the Long Island cemetery, the day clear and bright in contrast to the solemn ritual, the priest from Mount Carmel intoning his elegy in Italian; and then just a few days later the Chinaman trying to get into her pants (dirty old Chink!) — why, my goodness, it had been a tumultuous and terrifically exciting couple of weeks that seemed to summarize and encapsulize all the fun and adventure of growing up in a healthy, violent land that was beginning to test its muscle and gird its loins, stretch a bit, move out of its own childhood at just about the same time Stella moved out of hers. But now? Oh, good Lord, holy Jesus, Mary mother of God, here was a war! And what a war! Wow, you could follow that thing day by day in all the newspapers, and you could begin to take sides even before America itself began to take sides. You could study the maps and the battle lines as they shaped up, and wonder what it was like to be over there with bombs exploding all over the place and machine guns chattering and people screaming on the barbed wire and all. Wow!
During World War I, Stella’s imagination soared. Cold print translated itself in her mind to the most vivid pictures in full color, Germans slicing off the hands of Belgian babies and raping nuns, and the English doing their own dastardly deeds, like putting strychnine in the coffee they served to German prisoners of war — it was almost impossible to imagine all the things going on over there, but Stella sure tried. She began to menstruate at the age of twelve (in the south of Italy, they sometimes start at eight), and this, too, was terribly frightening and exciting, unprepared as she was (Tess was too involved with going “to business” to notice that her eldest daughter was developing tiny little breasts, or to realize that if winter came, spring could not be far behind), and here it was — a virgin spring indeed, bubbling up out of the wells of her womanhood and scaring her half out of her mind. She ran to her Aunt Bianca’s corset shop and told her she was bleeding to death like Angelina had, and Aunt Bianca calmed her (that dear, lovely, worldly woman) and introduced her to the mysteries of menstrual pads and the cycles of the moon. Stella must have felt enormously relieved when she left that shop, knowledgeable now, secure and somehow different. Being Stella, she probably felt more American as well, and undoubtedly walked a lot taller. For Christ’s sake, she must have felt like John Wayne! (Stella Di Lorenzo, today you are a man!)
She wasn’t John Wayne, nor was she even William S. Hart, his 1915 screen equivalent. She was just a little girl growing up, and the business of growing up was somehow connected in her mind to the ideal of growing up American. The ideal was, in many respects, pure and unsullied for her. It had a lot to do with the things she was being taught in the public schools of New York City, fantasies about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, or Paul Revere riding his midnight horse through the streets of New England, or Patrick Henry knowing not what course other men might take, but as for him, baby, give him liberty, or Nathan Hale regretting that he had but... whack, the Englishman pulled the stick, and the trap door opened, and old Nathan was left hanging there in midair, kicking and twitching without ever having got out his last few words. Pop history. Who the hell knows if half those guys ever said a third of the things attributed to them? Can anyone imagine, for example, Jesus Christ himself, sitting before his disciples and spewing forth, nonstop, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand”? (Maybe you had to be there.) Stella never quoted much from Jesus Christ, though she was learning her catechism three times a week at Mount Carmel on 115th Street in preparation for her First Holy Communion and her confirmation to follow. But she did quote a lot from the likes of John Paul Jones and Thomas Jefferson and Stephen Decatur and Abraham Lincoln. I got my first clue as to how she was taught when she recited two catch phrases that had been drummed into her head by Mrs. Pamela Frankel in the junior high school course on American History: