ITALIAN PRIDE

I feel the illusive ancestral stirrings of my Italian grandparents, progenitors of a commonplace dynasty of American nobodies, presented to the world as we were because Vincent and especially Marie DeMartino were ashamed to be Italian outside of the confines of their secret hearth. Vincent was disgorged onto the shores of Ellis Island as a young man, in the time when whole towns fled there with their tattered hopes. He was a tailor, as proud of avoiding taxes as he was of his exquisite hand on the needle. Vincent’s life became arranged by the marriage to Marie, whose family had settled in Little Italy when she was only five. She had no accent and she liked it that way.

When Vincent came to her, Marie grabbed the wedding ring, a talisman that empowered the hopeless mission that would become her life’s work: to scrub the foreignness from the fabric of their lives as soon and as thoroughly as she could. Their three sons and a daughter would speak ONLY English, even in the home. She would sharply carve another sliver of flesh from the lips of her husband whenever his anger and resentment drew him back to the comfort of his mother tongue. From Little Italy to an apartment in Queens, she moved them soon with the pennies she hoarded in the kitchen, and then to a duplex. Finally, she claimed the ultimate embodiment of her American dream: a house in the leafy suburbs.

Even as a boy, somehow I knew I was “Italian,” but had no way yet of filling that empty vessel with the fluid of meaning, the identity I so desperately needed as a rootless Army gypsy child. We had been stationed in Germany by the time I started first grade. Maybe there is a misty, vague memory of longing and disappointment stirring that our one vacation to the south of France didn’t include a side trip into Italy. So I must have known, how could I not with a last name like DeMartino? “Three pages of DeMartino’s in the Manhattan phone book—-it’s like Smith in Italy!” I would later proclaim to the Wasps and the rubes, a made-up fact that credentialized and defended me, as if they cared.

But I was a half- breed, the non-Italian stock from my mother’s folk who left the shores of Ireland, the valleys of Alsace, the highlands of Scotland, surrendering their chastity in adequate Protestant couplings that populated the impoverished European-American farmlands of Kentucky back when they were young.

I am a mongrel of Europe, deceiving the world with my last name which summons a glorious civilization that once ruled everything. The name was a badge for that young man who, like generations before, sweetly wandered the streets of Florence in search of its boundless gifts of beauty. Sitting in the coach class train to Rome, surrounded by frenzied sweaty young soccer fans, like animations of the David statue I had devoured in the Palazzo della Signoria just the day before. I imagined what life would have been like had Vincenzo’s seed not travelled on that heartless boat to New York in 1907, but instead had made me one of them. Mounting the crest of the cliffs above Monterossa al Mare, breathing the perfumed air that comforted Richard the Lionhearted as he journeyed off to slay the dragons of Islam, I placed myself in the long line of fishermen, mending their nets and waiting for the world to arrive and to conquer Italia once again. Arm in arm I stroll with a handsome architect along the Venician Fondamento dreaming of the riches of the doges, imagining that my simple last name would somehow have opened the treasure houses of history. The flood of cheap tourist memories is upon me, antidote to the peculiar self-hate of my grandmother, knowing all the while that my Italy would have undoubtedly provided for me only a squalid hovel and the starchy subsistence of the South. It was starvation that had driven them all to abandon the hateful boot for the unknown.

Shimmering is the image of my little 8-year-old self, sitting anxiously in shorts on the bench of the baby grand piano that grandma had wedged into the tract home’s parlor, a mural of tranquil Lake Como on the wall behind. It was the only place in the room that he could sit because the Italian provincial furniture was encased in clear embossed plastic that stuck to his legs, and made his unbreathing Dupont miracle fabric shirt stick to his skinny young flesh back there in the 50’s.

Marie performed for me that day, for all of us. There were the plates of mysterious Italian delicacies brought out, along with stern tributes to my neatness…. Served up with invective to the hapless tailor she had married, a man who, I would later learn, kept a mistress in the next town. He would take his lover for trysts in the cabin of his boat, docked somewhere on the Long Island Sound. Tipped off, Marie evidently burst upon them in the throes of whatever passion was being spooned out, and this is how she got her mink coat, the very one she could not resist bringing out to show us on that first summer visit to the tiny Lindenhurst house. She put the thing on and sashayed back and forth in the space between the piano and the couch. I sneezed as the moth ball chemicals filled the still and humid air, and I had to go outside.

My identity is cheap and pinned on, like an oversized tin button, striped with the green, red, and white of the Fatherland: ITALIAN PRIDE. I bought one in my 20’s at a stall in South Philly from a fat lady serving sausages and onions when I was visiting Kitty Capparella. Tattered pictures of the Pope and JFK were taped to the cart where she cooked the sausages. She resembled my grandmother, right down to the visible dark hairs on her upper lip, plucked painfully every week in a vain attempt to escape being a cliche like the shrouded women in the black-and-white movies that I love too much for words.