Inspired by Walt Whitman's, "The Sleepers" (but MUCH shorter!)

www.times-union.com

 

 Saratoga: Fourth of July

To the man carrying the newborn in two hands, like an offering,

To the ten-year-old busker with skinny legs and too-big guitar,

To the gay couple at the hot sauce store gauging the heat index,

Happy Fourth!

To the man in black loafers, no socks and gold chain,

To the slim-faced girl in her spotless smock at the cheese shop,

To the panting pug on his leash and his obedient follower,

Happy Fourth!

To the iced-coffee-carrying ingénue in fishnets and shorts,

To the pierced pedant in black with his dog-earred Ulysses (why today?),

To the seller of gelato belting out Verdi and scooping stracciatella,

Happy Fourth!

To the little girl who cries as her pink balloon floats skyward and away,

And to the little boy who says, “Hey, Dad, look!” and “Hey, Dad, look!”

To the moon-faced toddler in her stroller, beaming and effulgent,

Happy Fourth!

To the carousel horses on their appointed rounds,

To the waterspout fountain gods, Spit and Spat,

To the antique cars, buffed and shiny, lining the park,

Happy Fourth!

Before the rain comes, which it will,

Before the sun sets, which it will,

Before the last shop closes and the lights go out,

Happy Fourth,

Tarry on,

Happy Fourth.

 

From the novel....Milly and Johanna's Mother, Leah, in 1962

Thanksgiving, 1962     

Driving back from Charles’ parents’ house in Summit we had the most ridiculous fight. Not that it was a fight in the sense that we were arguing. We had the girls with us, of course. Milly was in the front between us, her head on my lap. She slept most of the way. Johanna was in the back seat, reading Nancy Drew, every now and then spelling out a word and asking me what it meant:

“What’s an r-o-a-d-s-t-e-r, Mommy?’ ‘What’s a hex sign?’”

Charles is no talker, anyway, so that’s another way it wasn’t really an argument. But you can have a fight without fighting words, of course. What happened was that I brought up the idea again of me giving piano lessons. Not even teaching school again. Just piano lessons. I ought to have known better. Charles was already in a bad mood because his brother had been at his parents’ house, as well as his older sister and her husband—not that they count as a threat to him. It’s his brother, Henry, who riles him. Henry is five years his junior and makes more money than he does. His wife, Suzanne, is younger than I am and they have two sons instead of two daughters.

Suzanne could double as Dinah Shore singing “See the USA in a Chevrolet.” She’s sprightly, for God’s sake. Tall, blonde, busty. She wears those artillery bras. And the sons are the same way—tall and blond. Hitler would be proud of their erect carriage and sparkling blue eyes. I don’t think a holiday goes by that Charles doesn’t not-so-subtly rue his choice of a Sicilian fisherman’s daughter from Gloucester as his wife, even if she did somehow make it out of Gloucester, as well as into and out of music school.

Before we got married, before the babies, I thought he liked it that I taught school. But once Henry married Suzanne and he rose at Alcoa like lava at the top of a volcano, Charles has been impatient with his life. Or the deficiencies he notices: We don’t have a vacation home. Having had daughters, he can’t coach a Little League team. He doesn’t have a wife with a chiseled clavicles and manicured fingernails.

I think it’s superficial of him to want all that. But I still can’t help feeling apologetic. Inadequate. I feel I’ve failed, somehow. I’m short. I’m dark. (In fact, our daughters have my complexion and brown eyes.) I listen to “Cavaleria Rusticana” and Verdi instead of Bing Crosby and Patti Page. I read instead of playing tennis. I grow vegetables instead of day lilies. I make pasta with cauliflower and sardines (actually, I don’t make that anymore; I’ve learned from the women at the church how to make Swedish meatballs and angels-on-horseback). I’m almost there, but not-quite in an unsettling, though defining, not-quite way.

So when I brought up giving piano lessons, Charles just said quietly, “And turn our living room into a store front?”

I knew what he meant. I even know who he was referring to: Angela Orlando Brancaleone. Her husband had been a drunk as well as a fishermen, as if the two weren’t incompatible. And she was scolded by the Our Lady of Good Voyage priest for giving piano lessons in her parlor after Vito Brancaleone’s ship went down off the Georges Banks.

‘What’s she supposed to do?’ my mother had asked, time and again, ‘Say novenas to the Blessed Virgin Mother to send poor Angela another drunken fisherman that she could marry and bury some more? Though it’s true she didn’t have to bother much about the burying part. The sea took care of that.’

I think my mother sent me to Signora Brancaleone for lessons just to spite the parish priest. And if was spitefulness toward him, it was such a gift for me.

Signora used to talk about music as if it were tactile, as if every musical phrase had a concrete correlative in the real world.

‘Listen,’ she would say, as I practiced one of Schumman’s “Scenes from Childhood.” ‘What do you hear in ‘Traumerei’? Does it make you think of dreaming?’

After every lesson she’d send me home with laden with treats, loaning me her recordings of operas and symphonies.

“Next lesson I want you to sing for me the Funeral March in the Beethoven 3,” she’d say. Or, “Listen to this and next lesson, you tell me what it was that Smetana was writing about when he wrote, “The Moldau.” (I didn’t even know then that the Moldau was a river.)

She gave me easy assignments, too: Everybody knew the Offenbach can-can music and “Pomp and Circumstance” and “The Waltz of the Flowers.”
“Yes, but what do they have in common?” she’d asked. I, of course, had no idea.

Jane Avril, Can-can

“It’s all music for showing off!” she’d declared, as if anyone with ears would have heard that. “The putains dancing and showing off their backsides, the scholars parading in to special music because they’d passed some tests—as if any fisherman in Gloucester ever got a diploma for making it back past Dog Bar breakwater. No, it’s just prayers and tears when they don’t come back--. Oh, but then there is “The Waltz of the Flowers.” They have a right to show off. Flowers are better than can-can dancers or scholars and even fishermen. All they do is live to give beauty. And when they die, we’re sad, maybe for a day. But we know they’ll come back next spring. And the next spring after that. The flowers don’t ever really leave us.”

That’s the kind of thing she would say and it made sense to me. Maybe she was a little crazy—she was a widow who had five kids to support. That would have made me crazy, too. But she told such great stories. She made music this invitation into another world, a world beyond the cramped streets and smelly wharves where drunken men, back in port and flush with cash, wanted girls like me. Or any girl, actually.

So Signora Brancaleone was a kind of anchor, grounding me. She was also as much a beacon, letting me know there was safe passage: I could leave Gloucester. I would be all right.