The Tin Box: Chapter 2 (Copyright 2011)

 Chapter 2                                          The Tin Box

On Sunday morning, my sisters and I pulled on our best dresses over our slips made of stiff itchy lace and headed for church.  We sat in a pew toward the back and near the aisle so that we could get out quicker at the end of mass.  My mom took out two pieces of Dentyne gum from her pocketbook, popped one in her mouth and asked me if I’d like a piece.  The spicy cinnamon taste bit my tongue as I watched her chew with her freshly painted bright red lips.   The wrinkles in her skin were covered over by tan colored cake makeup that stopped at her chin; her throat below the line of makeup was pale and ghostly by contrast.  I thought that if I were a man, I wouldn't want to kiss a face full of makeup.  It almost seemed to be a layer of protection between my mother and anyone who might try to get close.  A mask, used to hide who she really was from everyone else, including her own children. 

          She wore a real fox stole.  The whole head of the fox was on one end and the tail was on the other.  The glass bead eyes of the fox looked up blindly toward the ceiling of the church.  Angie was showing off her brand new white muff.  She made a show of it so that everyone sitting around us would see how pretty she looked.  Angie looked like a little angel.  Her little heart shaped face featured wide open eyes and a sweet bow of a mouth when she smiled.  By contrast, Mary and I wore somber black veils that blended in to our nearly black hair.  I imagined that we looked like mysterious Spanish Contessas.  Usually, we fought over who would get to wear the white veil, but today it was on Angie’s head because it matched her new muff. 

Overheated bodies pressed up against each other and the sickly sweet odor of sweat mingled with the smell of incense burning at the altar, causing me to feel light headed and a bit sick to my stomach.  Just before mass started, the O’Reilly family filed in.  They had twelve kids and they took up an entire row.  To the astonishment of other parishioners, their mother let them bring books, small toys and candy to church to keep them occupied.  

My attention was drawn to the aisle as the palms were passed out and my sisters and I went to work making crosses out of them.  Of course, Mary’s came out the best.  Angie had some trouble getting hers’ to stay in its form so Mary helped her tie it together. There was a small commotion at the very back of the church, I turned around to look in that direction.  Donny was standing along the wall with his family.  Church was very crowded today on account of it being Palm Sunday.  His great-grandfather, Silas Finster, stood angrily at the end of a pew; his eyebrows pressed down to make a frightening scowl.  A woman seated in the row opposite him, poked her husband and whispered to him.  With that her husband stood up and gave the old man his seat.  Even though the pew was already jammed, the woman moved to her left to leave as much room as possible between herself and the old man. 

          I looked back at Donny and saw that his eyes were shaded and staring at the floor.  His father, who was standing behind him, put his hand on Donny’s shoulder.  His touch made Donny grimace.  It also made him look up briefly and, once again, he caught me watching him.  He made a small smile in an attempt to hide the dark mood that I saw shadowed in his eyes.  The overheated church pressed in on me and my stomach started to churn.  

Masses that had always been spoken in Latin, had, for the past few years, been translated into English.  This was something that my father still disapproved of.  It was difficult for him to accept change.  The priest’s voice droned on, saying mass.  I drifted away into my dreams once again.  I saw a small black bird, trapped in a net.  Its wings beat furiously trying to free itself.  But with each attempt, the net closed more tightly around it.  Tears beaded up at the corners of my eyes.  My mother shook me awake and I felt the headache return again.

After the mass, I followed my parents out of church.  Miss Tandy, an elderly woman who lived on our block, was talking to another of our neighbors, Mrs. Conner, a widow who lived across the street from her.  Mrs. Conner stopped my mother and said, “Did you hear that Lydia Menlo has moved back into her parents’ house?   She’s even brought her family to live there too!  The girl looks to be about the age of your girls.”  She pointed to Mary and me as she shook her head in disapproval. 

My mother looked surprised and asked, “Where has she been all of these years?”  

Miss Tandy explained, “I heard she married a professor that she met in Europe.  Now he's working in New York City, so they decided to move into her old house.”  

 

In a small voice my mother whispered, “Well, it’s been a long time; maybe we’d all be better off forgetting about the past.”  She brushed off the neighborhood gossip.    

My father was about to cross the street and was losing his patience waiting for my mother, he motioned toward her to get moving.  She started walking toward the street, pushing Angie to walk in front of her.  My mother politely waved goodbye to the ladies and wished them both a Happy Easter.

At the corner, across from the church and next to the funeral parlor, there was a candy store where my father bought the Daily News every week after the 10:15 mass.  He was a man of habit that liked to keep to his routines.  We took turns coming with him into the store and today it was my turn.  On the counter was a box of chocolate ice cubes, sweet creamy chocolate blended with hazelnut, my favorite candy!  I might have been able to convince dad to buy me one, but I had given up chocolate for Lent.  One more week until Easter and then I would have all the chocolate I could eat!

 Directly after church, we drove to Brooklyn.  The road that connected my parents’ house to my grandparents’ house was aptly named the Belt Parkway, as it connected the generations of our family and the dysfunction that had been passed down through the years.  The roadway was rough and the car bounced every time it hit a pothole.  Curious about them, I asked, “Daddy, why are there so many potholes on this road?”

Daddy loved to explain the workings of the world to us so he relished the question. “A lot of cars that travel this road and the constant use wears down the surface.  Then during the winter, snowplows sometime break up the road and the salt that’s laid down eats at it and weakens the road even more.  It’s expensive and takes a lot of time to repave the whole road.  So, instead, the city just patches the potholes every year.  Since the filling is really only a temporary fix, the potholes tend to reopen again and again.  Until they decide to do it properly, and take the time to repave the whole road, they’ll just have to keep on refilling the holes.”

I thought about what an inconvenience it would be if they ever decided to shut down the whole road to repair it correctly.  It probably took a lot less downtime to just keep on refilling the potholes, but I also realized that if they just took the time to do it right, once, they’d be saving themselves, and us, a lot of grief.  I guessed potholes were just something people learned to live with, as long as they could still get to where they were going.  

          The bumper-to-bumper traffic was slow going.  Since I had the privilege of going with my dad to buy the newspaper, I had agreed to sit in the middle seat.  Now, I tried to keep my mind occupied so that I wouldn't think about the hot hump in the center of the car floor.  It burned through the bottom of my patent leather shoes and if I moved my feet to the side, it would scorch my ankles as they rested against it.  So I tried to hold my feet stiff on the top of the hump, lifting them occasionally to gain a short respite from the heat.  My head still ached and the smell of gas that always lingered in the car was making me feel sick.  One look at me, and both of my sisters opened their windows wider. 

          Last night, my sisters and I had gathered around the colored television to watch the annual showing of  “The Wizard of Oz.”  I don’t think I even realized that we were watching it in black and white until Dorothy opened the door and all the color of Munchkinland flooded in.  Colored televisions had come a long way since the one that Martha’s family had owned.  Our new T.V. didn't have the rainbow of colors around the edges like hers did.  I knew that television technology must have improved in the past few years and that this was supposed to be an improvement, but I thought it was a shame that they had gotten rid of the rainbows. 

“Did you hear that they are postponing opening day?” my dad asked.   “I guess maybe they’re afraid to have too many people gathered together right now.”  Over the past week there had been constant coverage of the riots happening all over America following the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King on April 4^th.  With the Reverend’s life cut short, there were a lot of angry people out there.

My dad was not happy that the baseball season was being postponed because of the assassination.   He was a big Yankee fan and had waited all winter for baseball to start again.  Sunday afternoon meant Yankee games and Ballentine beer.  Once in a while, on a hot summer day, he would let me have a sip of his beer.   I didn't really like the taste, but the cold liquid felt good going down my throat.  Sometimes he would roll out the small black and white T.V. into the screened-in patio for us to watch.  The occasional breeze would cool the sweat that drizzled down our back of our necks.  Summers on Long Island were hot and humid, but summer was still a while away; April was just getting started.

“It’s not like he was the President or anything.”  My father shook his head.  “What is this world coming to?”

          We exited the parkway at Bay 8^th Street and headed down the local roads to my grandparents’ house.  I loved to look at the Italian pork stores, little groceries, and bakeries along the way.  When I saw them, I could imagine what it was like in Italy.  I realized that I didn't know that much about my family history and decided that maybe it was time that I asked some questions.   

We drove past the house with the big concrete flowerpots at the base of the front steps.  We had to circle the block a few times to find a parking spot.  There was a long driveway to the left of the house that led to the garage, but for some reason, no one ever parked in it.  In the hot summer months, we had our family dinners in the garage.  Fresh vegetables came from the garden next to the garage. The little garden had a small white picket fence surrounding it and a path of flat stones, winding through the summer vegetables, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, and squash.  In the center of the garden was a fig tree.  Years ago, my grandmother had brought a sprig of the tree from her parent's house in the old country and planted it here in New York.  Its mother tree was still probably standing in a garden somewhere in Sicily. 

          The front door was rarely used, instead, we walked down the driveway to the side door and climbed the stairs.  I could smell the mingled aromas of fresh coffee brewing and the sauce cooking on the stove.  My grandmother’s voice, with her thick Sicilian accent, greeted us as we opened the door from the hallway stairs, “Com’a in, Com’a in. Put’a your coats on’a d’bed.” 

We kissed our grandparents, aunts and uncles as we walked through the kitchen to the bedroom and then added our coats to a pile that smelled like mothballs.  Next, we headed for the front porch.  Some of our cousins were already in there watching my Uncle Lou put quarters in his mouth and then, miraculously, taking them out of his ear a second later.  Sometimes he folded his cigarette backward into his mouth with his tongue and then pulled the cigarette out of one of our ears, still lit! 

My grandfather had shuffled from the kitchen and now sat in his rocking chair in the corner reading his Italian newspaper.  He reached in his pocket and pulled out a silver snuffbox.  He clicked it open and, with his thumb and pointer finger, he grabbed a little snuff and placed it to his nose and breathed in.  Although he had been in this country since he was a young man, Grandpa spoke very little English.  Grandpa was what the adults called “senile.”  One time, a few years ago, my cousin Denise and I asked him if he knew who we were and if he knew how old we were.  We were shocked out of our shoes when he said our names and told us that we were eleven.  That’s when I started wondering if he was as senile as everyone thought he was. 

          My cousin Denise was the only child of my Aunt Mary and Uncle Lou.  She was fourteen and they lived upstairs in an apartment at the top of my grandparent’s house.  Although they had had their share of trials and sorrows, they were the most loving parents that I knew.  They would do anything for Denise and no matter what trouble Denise got into, they always seemed to look the other way.  I wondered if my life would have been different if they had been my parents.  My Aunt Mary worked in a factory in New York City.  Sometimes she brought home costume jewelry or a nifty new utensil to use in the kitchen; but best of all, sometimes she brought home small toys.  Today Aunt Mary had brought yo-yo's for all of us and we each took one from a dog-eared box upon entering the porch.  We spent much of the afternoon playing with our yo-yo's and trying to accomplish tricks.  My cousin, Georgie, was really good at it and took every opportunity to show off.  Georgie was Uncle Giorgio and Aunt Teresa’s son.  He was thirteen and Denise and I tried to avoid him as much as possible. 

          “Dinner’s a’ready,” my grandmother called.  Sunday dinner was held around this huge mahogany dining room table.  Sometimes there would be a kids’ table set up in the living room.  But today it was just my Aunt Mary’s family, my Uncle Giorgio’s family, my Uncle Tommy, my grandparents and us, so we could all fit together at the big table.

After the anti-pasta and the macaroni, meatballs, sausage, pigskin, and braciole, we were all filled to our eyeballs. The girls and women around the table stood up to clear the table while the men and boys sat back in their chairs and loosened their belts in preparation for the next course.  Everyone knew that you should never serve just one type of meat to an Italian family, someone might not like it and, after all, you didn’t want people to go home hungry. 

After clearing the table, I sat back down and waited for my grandmother and aunts to bring in the meat.  I heard my father say, “The neighborhood is changing.  Mom and dad should move.” 

Uncle Giorgio replied, “You’ll never get them to move again.” 

“Sooner or later, they’re going to have to move.”  My father replied.

Curious about the past, I asked, “Did you live in this house when you were children?”

 

Uncle Giorgio said, “No, Grandma and Grandpa didn’t move here until 1952.  By then Uncle Tom and I were the only ones left at home.  But even we were old enough to work and everyone chipped in to buy this house.”

My father added, “When we were small we moved from one tenement to another, we never stayed anywhere for more than a couple of years.  Life was tough during the Depression.”  A look of despondence settled on his face.

 Aunt Mary walked in from the kitchen, “When we were just children,” she said, “your Uncle Joe and your father used to shine shoes for pennies.  Everyone did what they could to help put food on the table.”  She smiled at a memory, “And then there was your father’s voice.  He was always singing.  He would sing on the corner and people would put money in his cap just to listen to him sing!”

My  father smiled.  “One time I was on an amateur hour on the radio and I won first prize.  It was $25!  It was supposed to be for singing lessons.”  He whistled.  “That was during the Depression."  He shook his head sadly, "That was a lot of money in those days.”

My grandmother brought in the pork and said, “They told’a him he should’a take da voice’a lessons, but we need’a da money.”  She placed the heavy tray on the table and wiped the kitchen towel over her face that was wet with sweat, and what looked like tears.

My father said, “So I gave mama the $25 dollars and that was the end of my singing career.  Instead I got a job digging ditches where they had begun construction on LaGuardia Airport.”

          My grandfather got up and started pacing back and forth, back and forth.  My grandmother yelled at him in Italian, “Siedo qui!”  Telling him to sit down.  He was agitated and he argued with her in Italian, he grabbed his hat and his cane and started walking toward the kitchen.  This caused a slight disruption until my father and uncles could get my grandfather to sit back down again at the table. 

My father interpreted for him, “He wants to take a walk!” 

“Where’s he going to go?”  Uncle Giorgio asked.

          “I donn’a know?  He always want to’a take’a walk’a.  He’s’a got’a ants’a in his pants’a.”  My grandmother explained.    

The table settled back down to the business of eating and my father started telling a story.  “When we were little, six of us boys had to sleep in the same bed.  Tommy was a baby, so he slept in the top drawer of the dresser.  Grandpa made us sleep with our bare feet sticking out past the end of the blanket so that when he came home from work he could inspect them.  If they were dirty, he’d smack the souls of our feet with his cane!  What a way to wake up!”  Then he joked, “It’s amazing that your Uncle Giorgio can still walk!”  Everyone started laughing. 

Aunt Mary walked back into the room with stuffed artichokes.  “It was really hard during the depression for papa to get any work.  Even if there was a job available, there were often signs on the shop doors that said, ‘Negros and Italians Need Not Apply.’” 

“Why did they come to America?” asked Mary. 

My aunt replied, “When papa lived in Italy he was like a professor of music, they used to call him ‘maestro,’ that means, ‘teacher.’  He married nana there; she was much younger than him.  Everyone told him that in America the streets were lined with gold.  In Italy, times were hard.  No one had money to pay a teacher.  His mother was a widow and lived with one of his older sisters who had never married.  He was responsible for their welfare and for that of his new wife.  So he decided to try to make a better life in America.  He gave his mother all the money he had and left his young wife with her as he joined the crew of a passenger ship working in the boiler room.  This way, he did not have to pay for his passage.  He was planning all the time to jump ship when it docked in New York harbor.”

My sister Mary gasped, “You mean Grandpa came here illegally!” 

Nana waved her hand in dismissal and said, “That’a was’a long’a time ago.”   Then to her daughter she said, “What you have’a to tell them’a that’a for?”  Her fingers flipped under her chin in a gesture that showed she was not happy with my aunt.

Ignoring her, Aunt Mary continued anyway, “Working in the bowels of the ship was long, hard, dirty work.  The boiler rooms were terribly hot, the living quarters were cramped, and the food was meager.  The trip to America was cruel and backbreaking for papa, but he came to America to find a better life.”  She looked sadly at the old man sitting at the head of the table; he seemed oblivious to our conversation as he gazed off unfocused on anything in the room.  She shook her head, “Once here, he did odd jobs.  He was most often a tailor or a shoemaker.  He sent for his wife and, as the years past, he had a wife and seven children to support.  It was a struggle to keep the family going.” 

“And he still’a had’a to send’a da money to his’a mama in Italy!” Grandma said a bit angrily.

Uncle Tommy asked, “Wasn’t there a story about boys throwing rocks at papa?”

My father sighed, “One day, papa was walking home from work and some boys blocked his way.  Teenagers, hoodlums.”  He explained.  “One of them picked up a rock and threw it at him.  The other boys picked up rocks too, threw rocks and yelled at him, saying ‘Go home, Dago!’ No one wanted the Italians here.”

There was a long silence that followed.  Although I had heard some of these stories before, for the first time I thought about how difficult it must have been to grow up under these conditions and started to see my father in a new light.  I knew his father hadn't been the most loving man, but I hadn't realized how difficult life was back then.  Life had been hard for him.  As difficult as my own childhood seemed to me, it appeared that it was better than the one my father had known. 

          Other than my Uncle Giorgio and my father, there were five other brothers, Joseph, Nick, John, Angelo and Tommy.  I had never met Uncle Nick.  There had been some fight between him and my grandparents long ago and no one ever spoke of him anymore.  I knew that he had two little girls who were my first cousins, but I had never met either of them.  And my Uncle Angelo had died when I was little.  I only had a few memories of him. 

Uncle John and his wife, Lucia, had a daughter, Gina, and a son, Johnny, who was very “active.”  Johnny’s nose was always running and it was hard for him to sit still anywhere for long.  My cousin Georgie teased him and called him “retarded.”  Gina was a year younger than me and when we spent time together we really had a lot of fun.  But I didn’t get to see her very often.  I think her parents didn’t always come to family events because Johnny was so unpredictable and difficult to control and this annoyed grandma who didn't have a problem blaming them for Johnny's actions.  

Uncle Joe was the oldest of my father’s brothers, and he and his wife, Amelia, who was not Italian, had three children, Frankie, Sal, and Lucy.  Frankie was married now and had a baby of his own.  Sal was away in the Navy and Lucy worked in New York City as a secretary. 

My Uncle Tommy was still a bachelor and lived at home with my grandparents.

          We ate the main course and I marveled at how my grandmother could gnaw at the meat with most of her teeth gone.  When dessert was served, out came the coffee, pastries, pies, cakes, cookies, and anisette cookies and biscotti.  Nana liked dunking the anisette cookies in her black coffee.  Dad’s favorite was the seeded cookies.  Personally, I loved the cannoli! 

After dessert, Denise and I took a walk around the block to work off all that food.  I remembered when Denise, Gina, and I were about five years old, we used to make believe we were cooking dinner by putting leaves in a bowl and mixing them together with a spoon.  Uncle Angelo would play along with us and make believe that he enjoyed the dinner we had prepared for him.  He had been in France during World War II and had never married.  Like my father, he loved to sing.  But he would always have difficulty breathing and get into coughing fits that scared me.  One of his favorite songs was, “Alouette.” 

Alouette, gentile Alouette,

Alouette je te plumerai, . . .

The song had sounded so beautiful when he sang it.  But after he died I found out that the song was about plucking the feathers off of a lark that was about to become someone’s supper. 

         

          Denise sometimes spent a week in the summer at my house or I might spend a week upstairs in her apartment at my grandparents’ house.  We were really close when we were little, but as we became teenagers, we had grown apart.  She had trouble at school and her parents were recently forced to move her into a new school. 

 

           I looked at my cousin and wondered how things had changed so much between us.  I missed the old days when conversations between us had come so naturally.  “So, how’s school going?” I asked.  

 

“There’s this one guy that almost makes spending time in school worthwhile.  He’s a bit older than the rest of us and he has a really groovy car.”  She took out a cigarette and started to light it.  I tripped on a crack in the sidewalk. 

 

“Would you like one?” she asked. 

 

“Um, no.” was all I managed to say. 

 

She laughed at me and said, “You know, it really doesn’t stunt your growth.” 

 

We walked on in silence and I watched her puff on the cigarette.  I wondered how she could have forgotten how Uncle Angelo had struggled for each breath before he died of tuberculosis. She and I had even made a pact at his funeral that we would never smoke.  Time even changed promises.

 

Denise asked me if there were any guys that I liked.  I thought of Donny and I could feel butterflies in my stomach but I just said, “No, no one special.”   Donny was a conundrum.  Conundrum was one of my vocabulary words.  It meant “a problem with no satisfactory solution.”  There was a dark side to him that both fascinated me and frightened me. 

 

After she finished puffing on the cigarette, she threw it on the sidewalk and stepped on it.  Then she took a small piece of paper out of her pocket and started to chew it.  She explained, “It gets rid of the smell of smoke in your mouth.”  I didn’t believe that a little piece of paper could do that, but when we got back to my grandparent’s house, no one seemed to smell the smoke. 

 

          That night as we headed home on the Belt Parkway and I watched the streetlights glare off the window, I wondered about how times changed.  About how something could be so important to someone at one point in time and yet at another, it could seem childish and insignificant to the same person.  I thought about the conversation that my mother had had with the neighbors earlier at church.  Angie had fallen asleep so I whispered to Mary, “Do you know who Lydia Menlo is?”  “No, I have no idea but it sounds like a bit of a mystery doesn’t it?” 

 

From the back seat I tapped my mother on the shoulder, “Mom, who’s Lydia Menlo?” 

 

“Well, you know the big house next to Miss Tandy’s house?” 

 

“Yes.”  I pictured the old run down Victorian with the overgrown front yard.

 

My mother lowered her voice when she noticed that Angie was asleep, “Lydia grew up in that house.  But when she was about your age, her mother committed suicide.  They say she drank tea laced with poison.  It was Lydia who found her mother’s body when she came home from school.  We didn’t move into the neighborhood until years later.  By then, Lydia and her father had moved away and the house was closed up and left to rot.  But the story of her mother’s suicide is something people still whisper about.   I guess Miss Tandy and Mrs. Conner are surprised that Lydia decided to move back into a house with such bad memories and when it’s in need of so much repair.” 

 

 Miss Tandy was a kind old lady who was also known as the “magazine lady.”  She subscribed to every magazine you could imagine.  Every time I needed to cut out pictures or articles for school, my mother would send me down to Miss Tandy’s house for magazines.  She kept piles of them and newspapers on her porch and she told us that anytime we needed some, we could just come in and take them. 

 

Lydia Menlo’s old Victorian house seemed to hold a lot of secrets.  My whole life, I heard stories that there were ghosts walking about in that empty house.  Some people actually claimed to have seen lights turn on and off in the middle of the night. Which was crazy since everyone knew that the electric wasn't even on in the house.  My father’s car swerved to avoid a pothole and a shiver ran down my spine.

 

I thought about how life was like a road and how sometimes along the way, potholes opened up.  I guessed you had to learn to either fill those potholes or navigate around them.  If you didn't, you’d keep falling in and never get anywhere.  

 

Lydia Menlo and her family intrigued me.  I had a feeling there was more to the story then my mother was telling me.  I decided to find out more about them and the tragedy that had taken place in the old house.