Whence the Crazy?
What went wrong and right with my family of origin
This is the first of several essays weaving together the threads of my family’s saga. In its warp and weft, twists and turns. health and mental health challenges, I think many of you will recognize a pattern or two from your ancestor’s histories and dynamics.
My parents were the children of immigrants who by my time had achieved the American Dream. While our lives looked idyllic from the outside to me it was only a pretty picture for neighbors, friends, and even extended family.
The lovely colonial in an affluent neighborhood of doctors, lawyers, and executives was a short commute into Manhattan. There, my father had an office and secretary at a major bank’s headquarters in Rockefeller Center. My considerably older siblings attended private schools and when I was in grammar school, my parents joined their first country club. By Junior High, we’d achieved the New York suburban holy grail, by becoming members of the most prestigious one.
We were high-functioning people and it looked like we had it all. Unfortunately, our house lacked the fairy dust that people in the United States are led to believe transforms the material objects of an upper-middle-class lifestyle insto-presto into a happy family.
As the Tolstoy quote from Anna Karenina goes, “All happy families are alike: every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The details aren’t important. What I want to share is my long-term quest to figure out as much of what formed our particular dynamic as I could. In the end, I understood considerably more than I would have thought possible. I think what both went wrong and right over a century or so in my family will resonate with many of you. I’d love to hear what you’ve uncovered of your own family stories.
As the youngest with considerably older siblings, I was jarred onto high alert at an early age and spent the rest of my time in that house trying to figure out what genes, personalities and events had caused such a volatile atmosphere. It was like missing the first twenty minutes of a TV drama when a football game ran over into prime time. I began my Mission Impossible scramble to figure out what had happened earlier, hoping to save myself.
Junior detective and psychologist in one
I formulated questions and developed my own form of scientific inquiry.
The most important questions were:
Something is seriously wrong inside my mother’s head. Was she born that way or did something happen to her? That one had a corollary. Since people said I had my mother’s beautiful skin, I worried that I could also get whatever was so off about her.
Were my parents ever in love? If so, what happened?
Was my father always so quiet and in his own little world or was he only like that in our house? He had to be different at work.
I’ll leave my siblings out of this, but had questions about their relationships as well.
On the paper trail
As an adult, my curiosity helped me both discover more and heal. I became close to a cousin of my mother’s, who slotted some fascinating pieces into the puzzle. Secrets and obfuscations were revealed, some heart-wrenching, some just odd. It turned out that I hadn’t even known where in Manhattan my mother grew up, Nor was that neighborhood gone as she’d claimed.
Genealogy yielded considerable additional information and later DNA did the same regarding extended family. I even traced some fascinating ancestral lore through old newspaper archives that have been digitized.
More family information came to light when I gathered documents to obtain dual Italian-American citizenship. I went on a pilgrimage to the Manhattan street addresses where my maternal grandparents lived.
Seeing the old country
After that, I took a seminal trip to where my grandparents grew up in southern Italy, thankfully before one of those regions became a tourist destination. Seeing buildings where they lived on the Roman Road, the macabre, yet opulent church that my great-grandparents and their family had attended. A couple of insights into Italian language and culture provided unexpected explanations of famialial blind spots
Meeting a paternal patriarch who remembered my American G.I. father visiting their mountain-top village during WWII was fascinating.
Before going on that visit, a genealogist finally helped me find where my fourth grandparent, my paternal grandmother, was from and I was able to trace her journey to the U.S. Like most families, there was abandonment, courage, and perseverance.
I once read that it’s important to tell our children family stories of grief and loss and that ancestors came out the other side to thrive. When those children inevitably meet their own great losses, they know that they can survive and experience better times as well.
My parents
My parents were the children of poor Italian immigrants who arrived in New York City in the first decade of the twentieth century. They had little money and no English.
I was a menopause surprise when my mother was 45 and my father was 49, so there were more than two generations between us-likely part of why I’m so interested in world and family history.
Today’s story is about my mother’s corageous people, who moved from Manhattan to the Bronx when my mother was 16. I knew her parents the best, and have fond memories of them. My mother was one of those rare native New Yorkers and she attended only the second public school for girls. It’s still an amazing building and they offered real business classes as well as ordinary ones and something that sounds like they walked up and down stairs with books on their heads. Well, it was the 1920s, early 30s.
Minnie and Patsy
Going to see my maternal grandparents in the Bronx was like traveling to the past, like a sepia-toned photograph coming to life. Arriving from our manicured neighborhood in the suburbs, the Bronx was alien territory full of trash, poorly maintained streets, and hard angles. By the 60's the large apartment building on Jerome Avenue squatted amid a block of bars. Strangers hurried by as my father let us out of the car and went in search of safe parking.
Back then, Sundays were sacrosanct for Catholics. Early in the day, I’d have been forced into a dress or scratchy wool skirt and jacket with uncomfortable white tights, either saggy or inevitably twisted around on one leg, and black patent leather shoes. Winter called for a short beige, swingy coat and matching faux fur trimmed hat tied under my itchy chin with velvet ribbons with pom-poms on the ends. If I was really unfortunate, and my mother could find it, there was an embarrassing matching hand muff of fake fur as well. It was impossible to do anything fun, even read a book, in that getup.
City Fascination
Inside the first set of doors on my grandparent’s building was a fascinating wall full of names with important-looking fat black buttons next to them. This was part of the mystique of the city for me. We had nothing like it in Westchester. Pressing the one next to Bruno, my mother spoke to the little holes in a brass plate and then a loud buzzer sounded.
We hurried to open the big glass door before the awful noise stopped. Then we were in the inner sanctum, where only a few were allowed and I hardly ever saw another person. If I did, they were the subject of intense curiosity. Did she knit that purple beret? Does she have a box from the bakery? Did she stop for groceries? Has she been to see her daughter in the suburbs or across the city? Did she take a bus, a subway, a cab? If she spoke, she might have a thick Russian accent, an unexpected thrill.
Usually, the tomb-like entry hall was warm and empty. The hard soles of our Sunday shoes echoed up the three wide, mica-flecked steps to the elevator. The heavy elevator door pulled outward like the front door to a house only it was brown metal. Once inside, that door closed by itself, finishing with a surprisingly soft click. Then we had to pull an accordion-like gold metal gate closed. Through the diamond pattern of the gate, I could still see the outer door and the little window in it crosshatched with gold. Once the gate was secure, a button could be pushed and the elevator lurched upward, taking me to the past.
All was quiet except for the creaking and squealing of the elevator cables. When it clunked to a stop I would get excited. I jiggled my legs waiting for the gate to be opened, then the door, which was too heavy for me to budge. Then I was skipping in the echo chamber of a hall. It was a dimly lit miasma of competing cooking odors, the Sunday dinners of Poles and Italians, Russians and Greeks, Irish and Scots. In a moment, one of the metal doors with a peephole would open and my grandfather would emerge, having heard the elevator noises stop on their floor.
A formal, dignified man no more than 5’6”, he always wore a hand-tailored three-piece Italian suit and a beautiful, impeccably ironed white shirt. His name was Pasquale, Patsy for short, but he was no one’s patsy. His hair was almost all white and he had practically a full head of it. We had a language barrier since my parents only spoke Italian when they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying.
My grandfather would smile and bend down to me, putting his hands together in a way I took to mean he was happy to see me. My mother always said how stern he was when she was young, but he never seemed that way to me even though grandma was more fun.
I don't remember Grandpa hugging or kissing my mother in greeting. I think it's possible they had the dance of him greeting me while she watched, sharing that rather than anything much between themselves.
The time machine apartment
The apartment itself was small and the living room was like a dust-free museum exhibit. I don't think a piece of furniture was ever moved in that room except to put leaves in a normally narrow side table to make a big one for Sunday dinners. At one end of that room were two formal chairs covered in a pale, soft cloth. Between them sat a fancy-edged, round wooden table with a shelf underneath. On the table was an off-white, crocheted doily that cushioned a dome-shaped radio.
Against one wall rested a Duncan Phyfe couch with a fancy curved wooden back, carved legs, and a long plump damask-covered cushion.
My grandfather believed in only buying the best but was a little slow when it came to modern appliances. The focal point of the chairs and the couch was an squat television on a chrome stand. That T.V. took forever to warm up. The picture started with a pinpoint of light in the middle of the screen and enlarged from there. The black-and-white picture was sprayed with static. I couldn't believe the same programs were on that set as on our state-of-the-art larger color one.
The kitchen was across from the front and only door to the apartment. The tiny room sat open to the hall. At home, there were seven doors off of our eat-in kitchen: one to the family room, the garage, the dining room, the hall, the basement, a powder room, and the back yard (later to the large screened-in porch.)
Grandma's kitchen was a warmer, safer place. She had a tall, narrow, white metal cabinet that served as a kind of pantry and a metal box for bread on a counter. She rolled out the dough for her meat pies and Easter bread on a small, red Formica-topped table. I liked to kneel on a chair and watch her.
When we visited, Grandma would be in there, wiping her hands on her apron or a dish towel, smiling like my arrival was the best surprise in the world. She was wrinkled and had soft white and gray hair. The cat eye frames on her glasses, green with little fake diamonds at the corners, gave notice of her playful personality.
Her name was Domenica, which I knew meant Sunday in Italian. but was called Minnie. When she wore sleeveless dresses in summer, she kept Kleenex conveniently inside her bra. During the winter, she tucked tissues up a dress sleeve and wore those sturdy, black lace-up shoes Italian women and men of that era seemed to be issued at birth.
That and the black pocketbook over one arm. Her leather bag was always of great interest since my memory was that it only contained a wallet, a handkerchief, and white candy store bags of licorice Allsorts that she shared with me.
The family dance and dinner
Looking back, I see that I was an all-purpose buffer. Grandma would turn from greeting me to my mother, briefly asking "How is everything.” Then she’d give a one-word response, bene or good, to whatever pleasantry my mother had returned and Minnie would turn back to me.
Soon we'd hear the clonk of the metal elevator and open the apartment door for my father. He was a tall, slim handsome man with a mustache and bushy eyebrows. My grandparents greeted my father warmly, my grandfather holding his hand between both of his after they shook, my grandmother kissing him on the cheek. My easy-going father remarked how good something smelled from the kitchen. My beautiful, stylish, intelligent mother never quite seemed comfortable in her parent's home. I knew they favored her out-of-state brother, the boy being the second coming in so many ethnic traditions.
The gold-edged china came out for Sunday dinner. The heavy Burgundy wines that accompanied those eight-course meals, were poured into delicate glasses decorated with a white, lacy design and edged with gold. Minnie began meals with her own particular brand of blessing. Dunking a piece of celery into a glass of water, she flecked water at each of us in turn saying, "God bless," and laughing at our reactions.
Those meals always began with antipasto with orange slices, pimento, salami, a sliver of hard-boiled egg, and black olives, and ended with nuts or Ricotta pie. There was always a variety of little Italian bakery cookies that came in white, square paperboard boxes tied with thin red and white string. I liked those boxes as much as my much older sisters coveted Tiffany blue ones.
Back in the hall for goodbyes, we stood toward the end of a long clear plastic runner intended to protect the carpet. The other end stopped in front of the bedroom where my grandparents had matching, single, four-poster mahogany beds with carved pineapples at the top of each post. The beds were covered with the kind of white, nubby, chenille bedspreads that were weirdly back in fashion a few years ago.
Too little time
Those trips to the Bronx ended when I was ten. One Sunday when my grandparents were visiting us, my father, my grandmother and I went shopping at B. Altman’s in White Plains. The store turned out to be closed and my grandmother went to use a phone booth around the side of the building to call my mother.
Too much time passed. We looked around the corner at the phone booth, but she wasn’t in it. The door to the booth was closed. My father was bewildered as there was no place she could have gone. That side of the building was surrounded by a tall wall of shrubbery.
Maybe only a child would think that a woman of my grandmother’s size could be hidden in the bottom of the phone booth, where the glass was dark. I skipped over and found her there. She’d had a stroke, and after another one the next day, she was never the same. She was partially paralyzed, her mind was affected and she reverted to Italian. She lived in a nursing home for six years and my grandfather was devoted to her, visiting often. I missed Minnie and wish I’d known her better, long enough to think to ask questions about her life and to have had time to learn her Italian dialect. At least I had her for a few years. She was important to me.
Tradition
I’m not religious, but every Easter I make Minnie’s Easter bread recipe and share it with family and close friends.
As an adult, my mother gave me two cups, saucers, and little plates from Minnie’s set of china. After my mother died, I got one of my grandparent’s two tables that expanded into dining room tables.
It’s made of gorgeous walnut with a border of quarter-sawn oak and has delicate carving on the legs. Without the leaves, people think it’s a side or occasional table, with faux drawer pulls on the fluted portions of the front. People living in small city apartments today would pay plenty for a side table that converts to seat eight when two additional, hidden legs drop down.
There are some dings and scratches and a small ring, likely made by one of my relatives, all long gone now. I remember some of them and heard stories. On each special occasion, when I pull out that table and insert the leaves, they are all with me.
***If you enjoy reading about family history journeys, check out The Feminist Kitchen substack by Addie Broyles I loved reading about her discovery of her Swedish roots and doing so inspired me to write about my ancestry, culture and traditions.
*** If you like stories about the rich history of New York City, check out The Bowery Boys podcast with Greg Young and Tom Meyers. With the zeal and curiosity of converts, these non-natives have been providing a “romp down the back alleys of New York City” for 15 years.
If you visit or live in NYC, they have great-sounding Bowery Boys walking tours. They don’t lead them themselves, however, the wonderful Esther Crain of Ephemeral New York below is one of the guides!
***Another great source of NYC history is the sixteen-year-old weekly newsletter, Ephemeral New York. A fascinating blog founded by native New Yorker Esther Crain. Her emails with old and present-day photographs and short posts about a NYC building, piece of artwork, sign, or other relic of earlier times will hook you on history.
Don’t miss her book, The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910.
This is so full of stories within the story, Rita. It is a remarkable one that has been and is your life and the life of your immediate and extended family. The layers of complexity certainly live in the layers of such history. That you know all of these details is remarkable. Such a different "space" than yours at Three Birches.
Really enjoyed this generational portrait of a New York family. Some great details - like your grandmother’s water-flicking stick of celery!