PROLOGUE
“Morta! Morta! Morta!” a middle-aged Italian woman cried out on that warm Sunday afternoon.
Men and women craned their necks to try and get a better view amid all the chaos and panic. People flooded from the church doors and stood, shocked and crying, on the lawn outside. Men held sobbing women in their arms and offered cloth handkerchiefs to dry their tears. Several people fell to their knees, unable to comprehend what was happening, but also unable to move as they absorbed what they’d witnessed. Small prayer circles formed as townspeople desperately prayed together and asked for a miracle.
A young woman approached on the sidewalk, shocked by the unfolding scene. She stopped to take in all the hysteria and pandemonium. Voices wailed as the distraught crowd mushroomed in front of the church. Cars slowed, some stopped, and others had drivers who’d parked and run toward the church to see if they could help. Bedlam erupted as the crowd grew and shrieks, cries, and gasps escalated. The young woman paused on the sidewalk. She wondered if she should walk toward the mayhem to try and help. Instead, she decided to run to a nearby house.
“May I use your phone?” she urgently asked as soon as the front door had opened. “There’s an emergency at the church, I think!”
Then, without hesitation, the kindly homeowner swung her door wide open. She stepped back and waved the woman toward a nearby black telephone and gestured to go ahead and make the call.
“Operator, an ambulance, please! We need an ambulance right away at Our Lady of Good Counsel,” the woman said as she impatiently shifted. “No, ma’am, I don’t know anymore; I’m sorry. But people are screaming about someone being dead! Please, send someone quickly!”
– CHAPTER 1 –
“How did you feel about everything once you’d learned about all of it? I’ve only heard parts of the story,” my girlfriend told my mom one afternoon in the spring of 2000. I held my breath, afraid to meet my mother’s gaze. We didn’t talk about it often, but the ghosts from it still hung in Ma’s house, silent and lingering, but long since put away.
Instead of being surprised by the questions from Debbie, Ma seemed almost at ease with the topic, maybe since so many years had passed and so much had happened. I knew she’d always considered Debbie to be like family, and that, since she presumed Debbie and I would one day end up married, Ma would be okay with talking with her.
“That’s a question that’s hard for me to answer,” I heard Ma reply. “For a long time, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about it, and the story is very complicated. But no one promises us that life will be simple, I suppose.”
Debbie settled into Ma’s brown floral sofa and pulled an embroidered throw pillow onto her lap. I’d long known that my girlfriend had wanted details about the strange story. For years, it had blanketed my family like an opaque veil, only giving an obscured glimpse of the truths that came to be. Oddly, my mother had always seemed at ease with her place in the story. Yet I had often wondered what she had sacrificed over the years.
“I’ll go and get us some drinks from the kitchen,” I offered. It would be a long afternoon, and I’d heard it all before. I already knew Ma’s story, and I was glad she liked Debbie enough to share it with her.
Our home was like most of the other ones on the block. Privacy was at times something of a premium in our house. Most Italian families were like that, though—close-knit and in each other’s business, as if everyone under one roof were a singular unit, operating in tandem and sharing the same vision. It was one of the things we all loved about our neighborhood. Being surrounded by families like ours felt comfortable. Everyone worked hard, cared about each other, and did their parts to make life easier for the next generation that came after them.
Even when a disagreement broke out between the families or among neighbors, it was rarely anything that couldn’t be resolved over the dinner table while sharing a meal. When I was a young kid, I wondered if Ma put something special in her gravy, some sprinkle of magic that made everything okay again, since everyone was in a better mood around the dinner table. As I got older, I realized that it wasn’t Ma’s secret ingredients at all. It was that Italian families had long ago built traditions around their dinner tables, the heart of the home where they gathered. When people broke bread together, they found a common ground that always brought them back together, as if sharing the same food somehow allowed them to see one another’s points and consider different opinions. While this worked in our house, too, I couldn’t help but always feel that there was a little something that remained lacking and unaddressed, like people didn’t dare get too close for fear of what could happen. The dynamic was sometimes confusing. As I grew up, I always imagined my family to be a gigantic puzzle—with one piece perpetually missing. I’d always felt a need to find that elusive piece that would satiate some unseen hunger for answers.
As a boy, I had sensed it. As a teen, I had seen it. As an adult, I felt it. Was it because I had changed or because others did? Had I matured and learned to view life and my family differently through the eyes of an adult? For decades, Ma had seemed to wrap herself in a passive acceptance. It had been that way for as long as I could remember. She wore that acceptance like a protective cloak, always crowned with a permanently set smile that hid so much.
When I was a boy, my heart hurt for Ma whenever Dad was insensitive to her. But that iron cloak of hers seemed to be all she’d ever needed, her suit of armor against his words and his dismissive attitude toward the woman who fiercely loved us all. I’d never understood it—any of it. I had wanted to be like the other families on our block, but we were different, and I’d always sensed it. At least, I had always felt that we were different. But try as I might, for many years, I never could figure out why. I never could peel back the opaque veil that prevented me from seeing the whole picture of whatever it was Ma hadn’t wanted to share for so long. I thought I’d never find the hidden puzzle piece that would make me complete and provide me answers.
“That’s not even your real mom!” the boys had teased one evening when Ma had come outside to call me home for dinner. When I’d turned to run toward my mom, I flipped off the boys with my hand behind my back as I raised my Wilson baseball glove to let Ma know I’d heard her. I’d listened to similar rumblings before. I had always ignored them and shrugged off the taunts as some half-baked nonsense.
“Frank, bring Debbie some pignoli cookies and some of that mustazolli, too,” Ma said as I handed an iced tea glass to Debbie.
“I made the mosto cotto juice and the mustazolli myself,” Ma added as she turned her attention back to her captive audience of one seated on the patterned chenille sofa. “The mosto cotto juice is important. I do it just like my mother taught me. Just use a bit of the burnt ash from the woody parts of the grapevines to cook down the juice. Gives it a richer flavor. Some say it’s the rich taste of the earth in it that keeps us close to our family roots. I’m not sure, but my family has done it this way for generations—and Frank likes it that way. I hope you’ll let me show you how to do it one day, Debbie.”
Ma was always so hospitable to everyone. She liked to sit and visit and swap stories. It was probably a relief to her to be able to talk with someone, especially someone with a genuine interest in hearing the details of what had felt like my family’s most taboo secret. We never talked about it. No one had said not to discuss it, but we all somehow knew to steer clear of it, lest someone open Pandora’s box of secrets.
“Just let it be, Frank. Leave it alone. It was all such a long time ago.” That had always been Ma’s answer to me: just leave it alone. But I couldn’t do that for the longest time. Years earlier, whenever I’d tried to press her for more, Ma had decisively shut me down.
“We’re not dredging up past ghosts, Frank. There’s no use in it. It’s over. Let the past just stay in the past and look forward. We can’t change the past.”
I’d always somehow innately known not to talk to my dad about it, the forbidden subject. And it wasn’t that my dad had told me not to speak of it. He hadn’t. In fact, Dad never told me much of anything. He was a man who kept to himself, one of those men who felt it was his role to be the stalwart backbone of our family, the fortified port in any storm.
But I’d wondered about so many things over the years, so many tidbits of incomplete details that had only led to more questions. So finally, in time, I’d had to learn to make peace with the likelihood that I’d never know any more about it, about that mysterious, one-syllable something that had overshadowed my family’s very existence.
I never brought it up to my dad. I had always instinctively known not to bring it up with him. It was because Ma had once abruptly changed the subject when my dad came home from work one day. My mom’s raised eyebrows and pursed lips—cast in my direction, but only after Dad was out of eyeshot—had padlocked the discussion once again. Yet I was sure that I’d never get anything beyond "Let it alone. It doesn’t matter today. That’s old news."
Eventually, I learned to move on and not to nag Ma with my inquisitive nature. Plus, let’s be honest, by the time I had discovered girls, my priorities had changed, and it was easier to let it go and focus on more pressing things—like a date for Friday night.
When I’d told Debbie the little bits of the story I knew, she’d become just as intrigued as I had once been. “Yeah, well, if you get any more outta Ma, you must be some kinda mind guru,” I’d told her. “Believe me. I’ve tried, and I only know so much, even today.”
“But your mom may feel like talking now since some time has passed. Women confide things more easily to other women,” Debbie had joked.
Debbie had been my girl in high school, years earlier. When we graduated, her father had insisted she go off to some university in South Orange, New Jersey. I’d heard their family’s story enough times that I could recite it verbatim. “Our family’s lineage goes back to the Setons,” her dad repeatedly told me. “Debbie’s mother and I could not go to college, but our Debbie must go. She has a responsibility to the family, to Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton and all the work she did in the name of education and religion—but mostly religion—and our Debbie is a good girl with the same values as the original Setons.”
Debbie never bought her father’s story. “Dad, how can we be related to the Setons if the Setons were a Scottish noble family?” she once asked.
I had wondered the same, since all the Italians I knew had last names ending in vowels. But Debbie’s dad didn’t skip a beat when he launched into his trademark puffery. I could recite this part of his monologue, too, but I always stayed quiet and acted interested, out of respect, like I’d always been taught. I still silently recited the words in my head as Debbie’s dad said them.
“My daughter, I have explained all that to you,” he told Debbie as I listened one day. “Our family joined with the Seton family in the late 1700s when a Seton bought a violin from a Felipe Felicci in Leghorn, Italy, and the two men introduced their adult children to one another.”
Now, Debbie had always been the curious sort, and she wanted more answers. So, she went to the local library one day and researched what she could. She never had the nerve to tell her dad that her research had found that a Filippo Filicchi had been the one to bring the first Stradivarius violin to the States. “He’d never admit he’s wrong,” Debbie laughed. “Besides, he’d just say that the original spelling of our surname was changed when our Italian ancestors came over on the boat, and the immigration people weren’t been able to deal with all the vowels that we Italians use. It’s one of those things better left alone, I guess. What’s the point, right? What’s it hurt?”
In that case, I decided that she was right. No harm was being done if her dad believed his family was connected to the Setons. That story somehow had comforted Debbie’s mother and filled her with ancestral pride. But Debbie’s parents weren’t thrilled when she ultimately opted to go to beauty school instead of the university.
It had been Debbie’s dream to open her own salon one day, so it was no surprise that when she went to beauty school our relationship took a back seat. To be honest, we were both young, and I had a bit of a wandering eye, so it was inevitable that we broke up and began dating other people. I would see her every so often around the neighborhood, and although we were no longer an item, the flame never died.
I placed the tray of cookies on the coffee table in front of Ma and Debbie. “The dresses were just gorgeous, like straight outta the bridal fashion magazines,” Ma continued, just as I’d heard before. Neither woman blinked as Debbie remained transfixed on my mother’s recollections. But, of course, I’d already heard plenty about the bridesmaids and their gowns, and, if I’m being honest, that part of the story had never interested me too much.
“I’m goin’ out to the porch for some air,” I said, although no one acknowledged or even glanced at me. Instead of paying me any notice, my mom was thrilled to be able to talk about it with Debbie, maybe since some time had passed.
Like a slow-pressure cooker, poor Ma had held it all inside for so long. As she spoke, it was like watching that pressure cooker as it started to rattle and steam, threatening to blow the lid off the pot and into the ceiling as more and more parts of the story escaped her.
I was grateful that my mom and dad had always liked Debbie. I remember Ma rejoicing when I had told her that Debbie and I were dating once again.
“She’s such a good girl, Frank. I heard her father talk about that story of the famous violin for so long, I was surprised when she didn’t want to go to the university where her family had been.”
I didn’t bother to explain that Debbie and I had always thought her dad had given life to that story all on his own. I just nodded and left it alone since I’d learned to pick my battles over the years. Some things didn’t matter as much as others.
Ma’s voice trailed off as I stepped out to our front porch. I could occasionally hear just a word or two when Ma was dramatically recounting an impactful part of the story. But I didn’t hear a peep from Debbie as she absorbed every syllable that escaped Ma’s mouth. I knew, even without looking at her face, that Debbie was mesmerized by Ma’s memory of that fateful day, the day that had changed everything for everyone.
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