The Life in My Years

“Western fully understood that he owed his existence to Adolf Hitler. That the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life in the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.” ~ The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy’s fictional character, Bobby Western, and I share a common beginning. Western’s mother and father met while working on the Manhattan Project, the enterprise that built the atomic bomb which would have been forestalled but for Hitler starting a worldwide dust up. My own debut also came about as a result of World War II.

While I was aware that my parents met in Rome sometime during the closing months of World War II, I didn’t know the particulars of their chance meeting. My parents never volunteered to tell me how they came to meet and I never asked. They were never very forthcoming about their past. Hard to say why. I guess we just weren’t close in that way. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that in some ways we were strangers to each other. We just weren’t close in many ways, particularly my mom and I. When I moved out of the house and into an apartment with my friend Scott, Mom and I didn’t part on good terms. We’d had enough of each other. It’s hard to say whether she felt sorrow over my leaving or if it was just plain old good riddance. The chill thawed over time, warmed by my marriage, and warmed even more by the birth of her grandson, Matthew. He was the apple of her eye.

It was my wife who spilled some of the details of my parent’s meeting. I guess it was during one of those late night, woman to woman talks at the kitchen table when my mother told Cora the story of the American Sergeant who was relaxing in a park in Rome, and saw the young Italian girl who was walking her dog, a terrier named Tommy. Tommy’s leash somehow got tangled and when the girl struggled with dog and leash, the sergeant approached and helped her gain control. That’s it. The story begins there, and that’s where it was left. That short story and hundreds of photographs and letters in various boxes, bins, bags and albums left a puzzle that will never be completed. There’s nobody left to offer anecdotes or clues.

 

It was in large part just a matter of chance. Any number of events large or small could’ve intervened farther upstream of that chance meeting. Lieutenant General Mark Clark could have made a wrong turn months earlier at Anzio, thus stalling the Allies capture of Rome and aborting or postponing the soldier’s walk in the park. The girl’s dog could have eaten some grass the night before, causing the dog to vomit, causing the girl to forgo the walk out of worry over the dog. Hell, what if, in the autumn of 1888, Klara Hitler had said to husband Alois, “Not tonight dear, I have a headache”? The cataclysm wouldn’t have happened and generations would have been altered or simply nonexistent. That is unless you subscribe to God’s plan, a subscription that I canceled long ago.

After the war, after their marriage, the couple stayed in Rome until the Spring of 1947, when they embarked on an Italian liner, the MV Saturnalia for the journey to America and dad’s childhood home, Salt Lake City, Utah.

In 1947, Salt Lake City was little more than a frontier town, a de facto theocracy ruled by the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. It must have been a culture shock for mom. Fresh out of war torn, yet still cosmopolitan Rome, mom found herself in a place where drinking wine and coffee, two staples of the Italian diet, was barely tolerated. A place where doing laundry on the sabbath garnered nasty looks and gossip among the neighbors.

Dad had had plenty of time to become immersed in Italy. He was in Naples when Normandy was still on the drawing board, ending up in Rome sometime in late 1944. With his new bride, he’d spent parts of the summer of 1946 on the beach at Ostia, at the Mediterranean coastal resort of Fregene, and at a volcanic lake near Bracciano. I can only imagine that the return to Salt Lake sucked out some of the vitality that he’d found in Rome. He’d been to the Pozzi family’s property at Porta Pia, Pius IV’s northern gate of Rome’s Aurelian wall. He’d spent over two years in Italy and when he left, Italy possessed a chunk of his soul.

Now he was returning from the Foro Romano to a statue of Brigham Young bearing the inscription, “This is the place.” It was a place, but for dad it was no longer the place. Maybe it never was. I know that he never had any truck with the Latter Day Saints. That was made clear when I found some of his writings from back in the days when he wrote an op-ed for a small town Utah newspaper.

The couple would end up settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. Shortly after arriving in the States, they sent for my grandmother, Nonna Maria, who helped to raise me. My mother and my nonna formed a family culture that celebrated Italy. They defined our family. Dad was all in, even though he never learned the language. I was a kid, along for the ride. By the time I started elementary school I was fluent in the Italian language and beginning to embrace the culture.

***

During my childhood and my early teen years, we paid visits to Italy, mostly to Rome. Zio Carlo’s was always the place where my family stayed when we visited Rome. At least that’s my recollection. We usually went in August, which is just about the worst time to go unless you like baking with tourists in the urban summer swelter. That hasn’t really changed. The locals bug out for the coast or someplace where they don’t have to deal with the heat, the Americans, the Brits and the Russians. During those August visits, we spent a few days in Rome, before “getting the hell out of Dodge” with our relatives to their beach villas in Lido Dei Pini near Anzio.

Zio Carlo’s apartment in Rome was on one of the upper floors of a drab looking building. If you didn’t know the building was in Rome you could have mistaken it for Soviet era East Germany. The upper floors were accessed by an old cage elevator. The elevator door closed with a clang, the cage squeaked shut and the old lift groaned upwards, giving off a weary sounding thump at each landing as if it were pausing to catch its breath.

The apartment belied the structure. Stepping into zio’s apartment was a crossing into a different, yet gracious era. There wasn’t a single hint of plastic. Everything was made of magnificent old wood, fine fabric, or aged leather. Paintings, old photos and antique plates adorned the walls and the cadence of time was kept by a grandfather clock which chimed at every hour of the day and, yes, even at night. One’s steps were marked by the creaking of the wood floors. Entering the apartment, one was met with the distinguished, not unpleasant, hoary scent of antiquity, married to the aromas of garlic, tomatoes and the love and care put into a thousand sauces that had been cooked in the small kitchen in the back.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, Rome closed up shop until about three. It was time for pranzo – lunch. Zio came home from work and my parents and I returned from downtown on the Nomentana bus. Pranzo was no small affair. It started with a pasta dish, worked its way to a main course and ended with fruit and cheese. Stomachs groaned with food and the spirit was filled with gaiety and affection. Dinner often consisted of the leftovers from lunchtime and a fresh serving of fellowship all topped off with extra wine and maybe some grappa.

After dinner zio and dad would settle in front of a chess board, pipes clenched between teeth and glasses of cognac at hand. Neither could speak the other’s native language but they still communicated in their own intimate way. Mom, my Zia Giuliana and cousin Livia would sit at the dining table and talk. At some point in the evening dad and zio and I would take the family dog out to do its business. The dogs, having been fed pasta, potatoes and whatever else might be left over from dinner were invariably obese. This was a time before poop bags and poop scoops, a time when dog owners were on their honor to curb their canines. One particular side street was apparently favored by dog owners who mostly ignored the idea of curbing their dogs, as the sidewalk was littered with mounds, many squashed flat by unwary pedestrians. One night, in a quiet aside, Dad whispered to me, “I guess they call this street crapper’s lane.”

***

In May of 1988, Cora and I and the two kids, ages five and not quite two, were living in South San Francisco, in a rental house tucked into the side of a 581 foot ridge called Sign Hill, so named because the southern slope was painted with the town’s slogan, ‘South San Francisco The Industrial City’.

I was awakened by a phone call late on the night of the 2nd day. Dad in a panic. The EMT’s were there. Mom had suffered a heart attack. It probably took me 15 minutes to get to the family home in the hills above San Mateo. A drive that normally took 30 minutes or more. When I pulled up to the house the lights were on in the surrounding homes. Neighbors stealing a peek. The EMTs were loading mom into an ambulance. Dad was lost. Mom never woke up. She passed on the morning of the 3rd – her birthday and now her final day. Dad was lost even more. Already suffering from dementia, when mom left him she took a good chunk of what was left of his mind. Cora and I packed up our stuff, moved it into storage and then packed the kids up and moved ourselves into the San Mateo home.

It was less than an ideal situation. Cora and I were commuting back and forth to work in San Francisco, dropping the kids off at daycare in Daly City, and coming home to dad who was floundering.

One evening over martinis he told me he wanted to return to Italy one last time. He wanted to see the relatives, stay at zio’s apartment and savor one final sip of Rome. My first reaction was probably something along the lines of, ‘you must be out of your fucking mind.’ Which he was. It was for that reason that I told him the answer was a hard, ‘no.’

Rome became the bone that the old dog wasn’t going to relinquish. He had changed over the decades. He had learned to embrace the politics of liberalism and Democratic Socialism and whenever he got together with his relatives from Salt Lake City, politics dragged conversation down into bitter door slamming arguments. He had no desire to make one final visit to Salt Lake, even though it was closer, and his siblings all still lived there and they shared a common spoken language that dad never shared with his in-laws. Maybe he sensed what I later came to find out, and that was that some members of dad’s family held his wife in some measure of contempt. For dad, Rome had become his adopted family home and mom’s family the one he yearned to embrace.

Dad was adamant about another visit to Rome and so at some point I communicated dad’s wish to Luciana, my mom’s cousin in Rome. Luciana seemed to be mom’s go to whenever she needed the comfort of a shoulder or the council of a level head. For me Luciana was the logical person to turn to.

Looking back on it now, I have to wonder which one of us was really out of his mind, because, after some back and forth with Luciana, I gave in to dad’s wish. I put him on a plane to Rome and prayed that he wouldn’t accidentally catch the wrong connection and have it all end up with me getting a call from Moscow telling me that some old boy from America was found knocking on the door of the Kremlin.

During dad’s stay Luciana communicated to me her concern over just how far dad had slid. In the end dad made it back home – without an unplanned side trip to Oslo, or God knows where.

***

A few years later, surrounded by Cora and I and his two grandchildren, dad passed away in a nursing home in Stockton, California. I remember the look in his eyes just before he left. It almost seemed as if there was an instant of clarity on the split second before Dad flatlined and his grandson said, “He’s finally free.”

Before his final trip to Rome, my mother and father had last visited in 1979. The purpose was to take Nonna Maria back for her final trip home. Home. Ironically, by that time, home for mom was the San Francisco Bay Area. She had no desire to return for good. Dad? You wouldn’t have had to ask him twice. His chosen soil was that trodden by the Caesars.

Dad’s final trip to Rome after mom died were the best days of those that remained. What roamed in his head might have been a frustrating clutter of things vaguely recalled or not remembered at all (Shortly after returning he was calling me “buddy” as if I was some random stranger who’d happened into his life), but one thing was clear – Rome. The Eternal City had beckoned to him. It was as clear as the Tyrrhenian waters off of Ostia in1946. To this day I can’t imagine how he made his connections and cleared customs on both ends of his trip. I guess it was the homing instinct, that irresistible impulse to complete a seemingly implausible journey.

I don’t for one second believe in God or heaven. I guess if there is, then dad’s heaven is that stately old apartment. He and Zio Carlo are concentrating on a chess board while their wives are swapping gossip at the dining table.