The painstaking effort to put as many stories on my blog written by my father, continues, ever so slowly. I think by now, it is close to 100, and I cannot tell you how many more are, in my eyes, so good, so evocative of times and places in his life, that I still want to add. No matter. I will do what I can, when I can in the middle of distractions of (my) life.
There was a deep streak of cynicism in my father. And belief, especially in a religion, the one he was vouchsafed upon his birth, Greek Orthodoxy, and the one he was received into at age 85, Catholicism, the faith he conceded to me at the behest of my mother, was always resisted and always tinged with an unbeliever's sarcasm--at least to my mind. Did he become a Catholic because he believed? I will never know. Perhaps my late pastor and friend Monsignor George Parnassus had insight into that, and perhaps, since he received dad into the Church, he saw belief. I do know my father's practicality, and he always said that he wanted to make things "easier for" me. It was certainly easier to bury my father out of a parish and have him interred in the Holy Ground of a Catholic cemetery. Now that I am old(er) myself, and he has been gone over 16 years, I have realized how much he sought and achieved to make things easier for me. Because I see that now, in a way I did not (though if I really thought of it, was right in front of me) when I was young, I more than a little guilty that I often felt he did not hear what I felt I needed as a child, giving me entirely what he thought I needed. Now I see the overlap in the two, though I still think he often missed the point of my all too often objections to his parental style, which persisted right up until the day he died. In any case, this preface is prelude to a story that like him, circles religiosity, and critiques it, all at once, in a way that I often found a tad, shall I say it, dear dad, smug, spectating God and finding Him wanting. I suppose that is part of what doubt is. And the realities of the world do engender doubt.
MATER DOLOROSA
If someone asks me where I am going, I do not know; and yet it cannot be by pure accident that I find myself in the old neighborhood. Today it is the feast of the Madonna, Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It is very festive, but not like in the days of my memory. Long ago the streets are lined with the stands of the peddlers. One buys the watery but ice-cold lemon sherbert, the inevitable pizza. There are the stalls that stock the disembodied facsimiles of arms, hands and other body parts, which the faithful keep in memory to the Saints' ordeals of penitence. One sees again the massive candles that accompany the sculptured effigies of the Madonna and a pantheon of those saints. Yes, it is very festive, but not like in the days of my youth.
How strange. You walk for hours along familiar streets searching for lost memories, and the years impose themselves, initially inexorably resistant, then suddenly a smile, a face like one you used to know, an old familiar air, a simple cooking aroma.
Yes, this is the house. It is the same, though perhaps a little shabbier. Though it is hot outside, the halls are cool and dank I would like to walk to the top floor, but the years weigh heavily on me. Besides, I know what I will find, two doors heavily paned with frosted glass that face each other, silent guardians against the probing eyes of memory. I hesitate. I turn to go, but the ghosts of other days, once aroused, do not return easily to their rest. Instinctively, my hand goes to the knob. "How futile," I think. These are different days, and other unfamiliar lives abide here. I merely stand and think how when I was very young. . .
Aunt Carmela was my favorite aunt. She rarely smiled, but I was sure she was glad to see me whenever I called. It was always the same. She would go to her improvised cupboard behind print cloth suspended by a string, for three or four cookies. Later, I would be allowed access to the player piano in that perpetually shaded room, where I would pump the pedals, my legs barely long enough to reach them. Atop the piano three votive candles in little red cups illuminated three photographs casting eerie shadows in the semi-darkness.
Sometimes, I would sense her presence behind me, as I played. She would be staring, tearfully, at the memorial photographs of her three dead children, two girls, by scarlet fever and her first son, by drowning. The piano was his. The daring devil may care, Tony, suffered a cramp when he tried to dive under a Hudson River ferry and failed. Only Nino was left, her last child. Young as I was, I knew she listened perpetually for any sound, any signal that he was coming home. He was as daring as his brother, unpredictable in his comings and goings, but when he did appear, though she did not smile, her face illuminated with joy.
It is strange that this sad house was the family gathering place on the day of the Madonna.
The Church was only a few blocks from my aunt's house. Each year, she hosted the family for the celebration, always dressed in forbidding black, never smiling and rarely participating in the ceremonies.
Yet, there was always laughter, and food and wine, and cookies in mounds--unprotected from the natural avarice of children. Teresa, my beautiful cousin from across the hall would dance the Tarantella with Nino, and all of us would clap our hands to the tempo of the usic. Teresa would be flushed and happy, and everyone would remark on how well they danced together. The children would repair to the fire escape, secured by sturdy planks, to observe the activity five stories below, watching the hydrogen filled balloons that escaped unwary hands.
Downstairs, the penitents continued their procession toward the Church, some crawling on hands and knees in supplication or in hope of a miracle. Others walked barefoot, rosaries in hand, intoning prayers, interspersed with mutterings of self-castigation. But these things were far from us. Here, there was food and drink and family and love, and looking down we could feel what God said at Creation, "It is good!"
The door on the right opens suddenly. I am startled. The face is unfamiliar, but looks very much like one I would expect, a ubiquitous face, lined, one that has known much of pain. It is like my aunt's face, perhaps the last of generations, bound, like Prometheus, by the chains of custom and taboo.
I turn to go, but cannot. There are voices from the past that intrude themselves. They seem to be coming from the landing that leads to the roof. The voices are familiar, insistent, hushed, afraid, uttering forbidden words of love. Cousins. Unmarried. "Jesu misericordia!"
How hard it is to trace one's memory to that day of epiphany, when childhood innocence becomes disillusion.
There was music and laughter, and gallons of wine at the last party. There were trays of pastry, but one did not feel like having one more cookie. Somehow the laughter did not hide the pain in eyes that did not smile. Teresa, my beautiful cousin from across the hall did not dance with Nino. They sat as if a thousand miles apart. I think of a phrase, "And for the first time they knew that they were naked in each other's presence." So it must have been in that primeval beginning. As I watched other eyes watched too. Hate exploded. A gallon of red wine came crashing down. There was a flash of steel and ino fell, and rich red blood mingled with thick red wine.
A memory remains. A face of abject, wordless sorrow. It is her face, the face eternal of the Mater Dolorosa. "There stood by the cross of Jesus, His mother. "
We must allow these restless ghosts to wander. They are now beyond our compassion. Downstairs, there are crowds and joy and laughter, and questions. The festa of the Madonna del Carmine is at its height.
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