I never knew my mother's parents. Neither did my youngest sister. This was a natural consequence of being last to arrive in an already crowded family.
My maternal grandfather, Vincent Zita, seems to have disappeared behind a curtain of mystery around the time my own parents were married. The story I had later was that he had gone into a state of severe depression after losing his powers of 'manhood'---i.e., becoming impotent---which was generally considered the worst of all possible catastrophes by Italian men of his generation.
“He wasn’t a man anymore,” is the way I heard my older cousin Helen say it over coffee and cake one afternoon. I was maybe four or five at this time, and my tender imagination could only translate these puzzling words into a disconcerting image of my grandfather suddenly changed into one of the sleek, feral cats that haunted our backyard.
“What was he then?” I demanded. “What was he if he wasn’t a man anymore? A cat?”
But the assembled company only laughed at my youthful ignorance in that way that is always so infuriating to children, so I just put it down to adult stupidity and dropped the subject for the time being, though the cat image troubled me for a long time after.
My grandfather had worked at a number of jobs, most notably as a ‘fur puller’, which as near I can make out (I had to look it up) involved ‘pulling’ or skinning the fur off of rabbits so that the skins could be used to line coats and jackets. It doesn’t sound like very pleasant or lucrative work, but he supplemented this income selling plaster-cast animal figurines he turned out at his basement work bench, and a second job as a bank night watchman. My Aunt Carmela, who lived in the apartment next to ours, still kept a couple of his old clubs hanging in her closet, and I recall many fond childhood hours whiled away playing 'policeman' with my cousin Joseph from upstairs. Vincent Zita fathered nine children, eight of whom survived, made jugs of red wine from grapes in the cellar, and was by all accounts a hard working and sober-minded gentleman. But the loss of his manly powers was not to be borne. He became increasingly detached from things, made some kind of attempt on his own life, and was thereafter consigned to---a tuberculosis sanitarium! Evidently he was not crazy enough for a mental institution, or else the care was better in the sanitarium, and so there he went and there he remained. Who's to know how much he suffered? In these days of Viagra it seems a thing to snigger and joke about. It was a tragedy for my grandfather.
My grandmother, Rosa Pegano Zita, known to make the greatest Italian sauce and meatballs anyone in Brooklyn had ever tasted, and who had been strong enough to chop wood for the stove and lug it up two flights of city stairs when she was no longer a young woman, succumbed to a heart attack during the closing days of World War II. Somewhere in a pile of papers I have a photocopy of the passenger manifest for the Anchor Line of steam packet ships arriving in NYC on June 21st, 1882, that carried my grandmother Rosa to America Rosa seems somehow more alive to me than ever. Starting with pretty much nothing, she somehow managed to buy the four-story apartment building where all of her children and their families would live, the building I grew up in. My father used to brag that he was her favorite son-in-law. He would go down to the basement and chop the wood for her when he was home, then shovel coal into the furnace. As a reward he was allowed to sit at her kitchen table as she poured him glasses of red wine and fed him meatballs fresh from her frying pan and drenched in homemade tomato sauce. My father told me that the hallway was always filled with my grandmother’s cooking, an aroma richer than the lushest garden, fragrant with tomatoes and garlic and olives and spices from distant provinces. I’ve often wished I could have been around to bite into one of those meatballs, but Grandma Rosa is gone and no one now knows how to make them.
A story my father told over the years was how on the night my grandmother died, he had been dreaming for some reason of a sailor frantically running back and forth on the deck of his ship searching for a life preserver to toss to a drowning woman in the sea, and how he was awakened by shouting and looked out the window to see my Uncle Frankie, home on leave from the Navy, running toward the house, but my grandmother was already gone by the time they all reached her.
All of these things occurred long before I was born. My maternal grandparents exist for me today in a handful of creased and fading sepia and black-and-white photos. And yet, they are no less real to me for all of that.
I was a bit luckier with my father's parents. I can remember my paternal grandmother, though only vaguely. We were pure Italian on my mother's side, and German-French on my father's side. My one real memory of my grandmother was from a Saturday afternoon (It must have been a Saturday, that was the day my father and I would visit) when I was no more than six or seven. I had received permission to go to the little grocery store down the block to buy some candy or something, and I must have been a long time about it (then, as now, I spent most of my day walking around in a daydream), because I have a strong memory of my grandmother coming after me to see what was taking me so long. I don't recall my grandmother as being particularly affectionate or 'huggy', though of course as a general rule these are not particularly 'German' attributes.
My only other strong memory of my grandmother was when she was dying. I might have been eight. It was near Christmas and my father had taken my sister and I as usual to the big holiday blowout at the Knights of Columbus Hall, which was really an excuse for my father and his brothers to drink a lot of beer an eat a lot of German sausages and sauerkraut, while we kids were bought off with ice cream and candy and cake and gifts. The highlight of this occasion was when we got to sit on Santa's lap and tell him what we wanted for Christmas. My sister and I had been coached beforehand to request, on this pivotal occasion, that "My grandmother gets better for Christmas." I was up first, and for some reason I had all along flatly refused to make this request. I am no longer sure why. It surely wasn't that I wanted something more important. I think it was that I understood even at that tender age that this response to Santa's eternal question would bring a chorus of 'oohs' and 'ahhs' from all the adults present, and a spotlight of unwanted attention oh my head. I suppose I was born with a reticent personality. I went up to Santa indignantly shaking my head 'no' to my father's continued pleading. And yet when Santa popped his big question, "And what would you like for Christmas, young man," I responded without hesitation, "I want my grandmother to get better." And sure enough, Santa felt called upon to repeat my answer for those grownups too busy eating or chugging beer to hear, and they predictably 'oohed' and 'ahhed' and applauded, and I just as predictably hated it. When my sister's turn came she dutifully said her piece, but by then no one cared. That kind of 'cute' trick only works once.
Finally, I remember the night my grandmother died, my parents coming home from the hospital, my father, with many beers and shots of whiskey boiling over along with grief inside of him, crying as he staggered to bed, and my mother, whom I loved but who could be pretty heartless at times (and who had never much cared for her in-laws anyway) telling him to shut up and go to sleep. And those are the things I remember about my paternal grandmother, Eva Schmidt.
My strongest memories are of my father’s father, Gustave Schmidt. Along with the ties of blood I shared something special with my grandfather: our birthdays fell on the same day, June 27th. On that day every year my father and I would take the bus to my grandfather’s house, and because the place was always full of relatives who’d come to celebrate his birthday, I was always sure of getting a little something from each of them as well, these distant, distant cousins I hardly knew. Then we’d take the bus back home and after supper that night there’d be a cake (made by my mother) or maybe some lemon meringue pies (always my favorite) and vanilla ice cream, and I’d have some of my friends up. For kids today a birthday is sort of a personal national holiday, but when I was growing up it was a much more private and quiet affair; there were no theme parties, no clowns hired for the afternoon, no bouquet of helium balloons, no back room at Chuck-E-Cheese. But it was a great day just the same. Since my birthday was in the summer I could always stay up late, there was no worry about school the next day. In summer, school is always a distant ogre you don’t believe will ever really return. I didn’t really like when they sang Happy Birthday because everyone would stare at me, but otherwise I enjoyed this day of days, which I shared in common with my grandfather.
I was twelve when my grandfather died. But he was ill for much of this time, an invalid who needed to be carried from the bed to the toilet to the kitchen to his easy chair. He could eat, but after a while he needed to be fed by hand. Five days a week he was minded by his eldest daughter, my Aunt Emmy, and her husband, Herman, a quiet and dignified man who wore a Masonic ring and who had made enough money in some business or other to retire very early, and whose one interest in life now seemed to be following his wife around and wordlessly attending to her every utterance. Saturdays and Sundays, my father and his brothers would take turns watching the old man while Aunt Emmy and Uncle Herman returned to their own apartment in Queens . Most weekends when it was my father’s turn I would go with him. We’d take the bus to his house and stop off at the little candy store along the way and I would load up on comic books for the weekend, or I would bring my own copies of Famous Monsters Magazine, or a book of stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Books for me have always been the ultimate aim and end of life; buying them, reading then, owning them. Books are the reason the world was created. Stretched out on my grandfather’s sofa I would climb the scaffold with Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, and I would revel again the story of my great childhood hero, Cyrano de Bergerac.
Though I have a vivid image of my grandfather in my mind, I cannot recall his ever speaking to me directly. I don’t think that this was a matter of coldness or indifference. My grandfather simply didn’t talk much. What words were spoken were to my father. He had evidently lost much of his interest in life after my grandmother died. And yet he was not only aware of my presence but solicitous of my comfort as well, though I was to forever remain in the third person.
“Did the boy have enough to eat?” he would ask my father. “Does the boy want to watch something on television?” “Did the boy sleep well on the couch?” The boy was well taken care of.
My grandfather lived in one of those old-fashioned apartments that you could still find in Brooklyn in those days; basically a long dark hallway, with doors leading off the sides into bedrooms, anchored by the dining room and small kitchen at one end, and the living room at the other end. There was an old-fashioned toilet with the water tank overhead and a pull chain hanging down from it, and I have to admit it was fun to flush. All of the furniture was dark wood, and there were heavy white lace drapes that effectively kept the sun out, so the rooms were always dark and cool, even in summer. When I sat on the couch to read, which was pretty much all I ever did, I had to put the lamplight on even in the daytime. And that's the way I've liked rooms to be, ever since; cool, dark, and quiet, with just enough light to illuminate the printed word. Sometimes when we were staying there for the weekend my uncles would come to keep my father company on Saturday afternoon, and they would sit around the dining room table drinking beer and playing pinochle or discussing baseball or world events. All I ever wanted to do was read, though occasionally if the weather was mild I would go and play in the empty, weed-strewn lot next to my grandfather's house. That was like my woods, my private forest, and I could freely run around like a wild boy, acting out the Saturday morning Tarzan movie I’d watched earlier, or leap about with a plastic bow-and-arrow set pretending I was Robin Hood. There is something about the wilderness, even an empty lot’s worth of wilderness, that brings out the repressed savage in a boy.
One Sunday afternoon, it must have been in spring, I was sitting on the front stoop reading and waiting for my father to call me in for a dinner of pork chops, or maybe it was roast chicken and mashed potatoes (my father was an excellent cook). The day had the kind of oppressive slowness Sundays often have. I did not know that it was a moment that would stay with me my entire life, but as I sat there a young girl in a red coat walked by me. She was a few years older than me, a teenager to my gangly boy, and she had the blondest hair I had ever seen in my life. She was walking slowly, looking down at her shoes, kind of singing or humming to herself, the way you sometimes do when you’re young and you are sure no one is watching. When she was almost directly in front of me she turned her head up sharply, startled by her awareness of my presence, and stopped short as our eyes met. As I remember it, she smiled, or almost smiled, then frowned, then quickly moved on out of my line of vision forever.
This was about a year before my grandfather died, and when we returned to his house every third or fourth week thereafter I set myself up on the front stoop almost all of Saturday and Sunday afternoon waiting for her to pass by again. If the weather was too cold or it was raining I sat on a hassock by the front window and watched. Once, for what reason I no longer remember, I even spent an entire afternoon perched on an upturned paint bucket hidden by weeds in my empty lot, and was rewarded with numerous mosquito bites for my trouble. And even on the day of my grandfather’s funeral, when the entire family came back to his house for a lunch and the place was filled with the post-funeral conviviality of distant cousins and relatives laughing and shouting with each other for the first time in years, I took up my station by the window and waited for her to pass by, but I never saw her again.
And on that last afternoon, the afternoon of the funeral, I remember my mother and my aunts washing all the dishes after the guests had left, sweeping the floor and leaving the kitchen immaculate. And I remember my father and my Uncle Freddy sitting smoking by the parlor window, discussing all that needed to be done in the coming weeks, the detritus of official busywork always engendered by death. As we turned out the lights and locked the door for the last time that day, it doesn’t seemed to have occurred to me that I would never be coming back here, or if it did, the fact did not mean much to me. What can the concept of vanished time ever mean to a child?
And this is all I can tell you of my grandparents, who are gone from this world and will never return.
"The houses are all gone under the sea"-T. S. Elliot
