Song for Two Guitars

 

by Geraldine DeLuca

 

 

For twenty years, I have been trying to write a poem about my father, one in which music would be the prevailing subject, the constant metaphor, one about a piano, a violin, guitars of various types, a poem vibrant with overtones that I could say repre­sented my relationship to my father as it truly was. I can’t imag­ine, however, that I would have shown it to him or that he wouldn’t have been embarrassed by it and me and life itself, by the awkwardness of all our efforts to do anything notable, to claim for ourselves the right to be relatively ordinary and still be heard.

It is 1996 and my father has been dead for 12 years, so now I have a relationship with the memory of him, with the pictures on the mantle, the worn copy of Ulysses, which was once mine and is now again, the small yellowed five-volume paperback series of George Santayana’s Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Society, Reason in Religion . . . in Art . . . in Sci­ence. You could say there was a reason for everything. I also have his copy of Portrait of a Philosopher, the biography of his per­sonal hero, Morris Raphael Cohen. Cohen taught philosophy at the City College of New York when my father was an under­graduate there and he continued Santayana’s investigations into the nature of reason with two more books of his own: Reason and Law and Reason and Nature. My father, who was a lawyer, was deeply influenced by these works and strove to live his life in a manner governed as much as possible by the precepts of these eminent teachers.

When I was a child, he used to play the violin in the cellar. I don’t know how good he was, only that he played downstairs where the sound wouldn’t carry through the house. Many years later, I learned that he had played the bass fiddle in the orchestra at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. I don’t know why he mentioned it just then, but the fact of it seemed astonish­ing to me. I thought of him standing toward the back of the stage, holding that enormous, unwieldy instrument, and the fact of that strange accomplishment had to be integrated with all the other stories of his childhood, stories of walking the streets of New York on his own, the youngest of seven children, an afterthought to mark the reuniting of his mother and father in this country. He was the only one who wasn’t born in Italy. My grandfather was quite old when my father was born in 1907, and he died when my father was still in college. His mother, who was 42 at his birth, lived just long enough to see him graduate from law school. But his four older brothers and two older sisters also partici­pated in what I imagine was a kind of haphazard upbringing of many influences at times and then, at other times, no influence at all. I have an image of him slipping by them, sometimes getting caught in their stream of talk, but largely making his life deci­sions by himself.

I assume he took the bass lessons at school. Maybe the oddness of it appealed to him. I doubt there was money for lessons at home or that this was the instrument he would have chosen. He was working class, from a family of tailors, one of whom, years later, sewed the collar on John F. Kennedy’s inaugural coat.

I found out, also by chance, when my sister and I were looking at old family pictures at my father’s sister Mary’s house, that he had an older brother named Virgil who went to medical school and disappeared on the day of his graduation. Nobody knew why, it was one of the hushed-up stories, maybe he was in trou­ble, my mother speculates, maybe he owed people money. Maybe he just had to get away. As far as I know, no one in the family ever heard from him again. But my Aunt Mary used to think she did. Which is to say, sometimes the phone rang and nobody responded on the other side. “That’s Virgil,” she would say. “He’s calling to see that we’re all right.”

The violin must have been a late idea, something he took up in adulthood. I imagine he was teaching himself in the cellar. And what more difficult instrument could he have chosen than this small, loud, fretless object that demanded to be held under the neck, the bow just so, the sound so painful and easy to mock when played badly. It was a continuing meditation in small pleasures and humility.

When I was seven years old, our family went to Miami Beach for a vacation, which I always remember as the best of my childhood. We traveled by plane, and stayed at one of the huge hotels on the beach. A lifeguard there, a movie-star-like crea­ture named Winn, told my parents he would teach me how to swim, and by the end of the week I was jumping off the diving board into the deep water. Every morning I got up early, had breakfast with a nine-year-old girl named Lucille, and spent the rest of the day in the pool. One afternoon, we came across an upright piano somewhere in the hotel, and as I remember it, Lucille sat down and with complete self-possession, played the Anniversary Waltz. I was enthralled—by the romance of the words—“Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed”—by the insinuating melody that rose and descended in her right hand, the steady rhythm of her left hand going back and forth in the bass. That’s what I wanted—to play that song. When she fin­ished, I sat down and put my fingers on the keys. I struck notes and the sounds were random. Some went together and some didn’t. The principle was that if you wanted a higher note, you played to the right, if you wanted a lower one, you played to the left, but it was clearly more complicated than that.

My father was pleased by my interest, and as soon as we returned home, he bought a piano. For the next eight years, I practiced an hour a day. Often my father sat in the easy chair next to the piano listening, in the edge of my vision, telling me to go slow, nodding his head, keeping time. Piano lessons gave my childhood a seriousness and a connection to the past that my friends didn’t seem to have. Some of them went to dancing school, but no one else took music lessons. In fact, I stopped taking dancing lessons, sadly—it having been decided that I was clumsy any­way—to begin the piano. And that established a paradigm: other girls showed off their bodies and I cultivated my mind. Except, of course, that I never felt secure about my mind, and my body—in all its awkwardness—refused to contain itself.

Still, I loved the piano. I learned all the famous pieces that children learn: the adaptations of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Grieg, Tchaikowsky. They were in my head all the time. But I never learned theory or chords and I wasn’t even sup­posed to play anything without my piano teacher’s help. Once, in an uncontrolled hour, I taught myself the Marine Hymn. I have a feeling my teacher was pleased, but she couldn’t say it. Instead, she told me I got the fingering wrong. “You see,” she said, “you still need Miss Hacker.” I could blame her, then, for my general lack of adventurousness around the piano, but it was just part of a larger discomfort that always comes to mind when I think of my childhood relationship to adults and their rules, the absurd sense of shame, the constant fear of being found out.

At the same time, of course, my sister and I listened to rock and roll and defined ourselves through those songs. My father consid­ered it a great personal trial that we wanted to hear this on the car radio, and we rolled our eyes in the back seat, thinking about all the ways we could have really made his life miserable if we’d wanted to. We could have failed in school; we could have hung out with a wild crowd; we could, most horrible of all, have been having sex with some football-playing, snow-shoveling, steak-eating brute of a teenage boy. We could have gotten preg­nant.

It was true that we as a tiny family unit were living our essen­tially fortunate and reasonable lives, if you ignored all the strange, unspoken anguish that passes for ordinary life. But right around the corner, on 59th Street in Bensonhurst, my father’s sis­ter Mary and her husband Gus were living through the death of their two children, Dominick at age 26, and Theresa, a few years later at age 31. I was eight when Dominick died, and I remember standing by his body in the funeral home, looking down at his lean, made-up mask of a young man’s face. When Theresa died, I was graduating from the sixth grade, and I have a memory, which I connect with her death, of posing for a graduation pic­ture in my white blouse and red plaid skirt in front of the magno­lia tree that grew in our garden—my young life going on its proper way, untouched by all of this.

Dominick’s death must have been expected and dreaded for 20 years. He had had rheumatic fever as a young boy and had suf­fered heart damage. He lived a careful life in his parents’ house, no doubt mindful and frequently reminded of his frailty. I have no idea if he had a social life, whether he ever fell in love. But in his short lifetime, he accomplished a great deal. Recently, in a box of old photos, I found a copy of an obituary from a local Italian newspaper that reads: “Il Prof. Domenico Arturo Mazzi­telli, figlio di Mr. e Mrs. Agostino e Maria Mazzitelli, recenti­mente fulminato, a soli ventisei anni, da un attacco cardiaco. Era docente di meccanica nucleare al Brooklyn Polytechnic Insititute. I genitori e i parenti hanno perduto un tesoro di ragazzo; la socie­ta un integerrimo esemplare di gentiluomo e di cittadino; la scienza un eletto campione. . . .” [To me this translates as: Profes­sor Dominick Arthur Mazzitelli, son of Mr. and Mrs. Augus­tine Mazzitelli, recently died—was struck down—at only 26 years, of a heart attack. He was a teacher of nuclear mechanics at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. The parents and relatives have lost a treasure of a boy; society a righteous example of a gentleman and a citizen; science an elect champion.] This state­ment was dictated, I suspect, by my father’s grandiloquent brother Alex who was responsible for its being in the paper. Nonetheless, its language seems fitting to express the depth of the loss: “hanno perduto un tesoro di ragazzo.” The terrible lost treasure of a child. And above the words, there is his picture: a handsome, dignified man, his face open and unlined.

Tessie’s dying probably began with the death of this beauti­ful younger brother. She was married and had newborn twin boys, and her grieving, bitter parents insisted she live with them, maybe to help them wake up every morning or to make sure she survived. What I always heard, though, was that it was so she and her husband wouldn’t have to pay rent on some frivolous one-bedroom apartment when they had a big house right there with empty bedrooms. Tessie could go back to work while her parents took care of the twins during the day. Then, of course, when she came home from teaching, she would take over. She and her hus­band George could have Dominick’s room. They could sleep in his bed and live with his ghost. The small middle room became a nursery. George was an artist and he painted a giant clown on one wall. It was the only cheerful space in the whole house.

The strain on all of them must have been enormous, and Tessie was at the center. I don’t know whether she had colitis before she moved back into that house, but the burden of teaching and caring for those furiously active little boys under the dark watch of her parents must have sent it wildly out of control, until one night something just gave way inside her. Peritonitis set in, they said, and the next day she was dead.

I don’t remember her funeral. I just remember people talking in the kitchen and how horrified everyone was. My cousin Eugene wanted to kill the doctor. Even now I can hardly allow myself to contemplate the magnitude of their grief. So I think I shut it out as best I could. It has taken me most of my life to understand what I am feeling—as if my adulthood has been a slow thawing out, and only now, at 49, when I begin to feel the urgency of time diminishing, do I begin to pay enough attention. How hard it is to see, I realize now, what is right in front of you.

One year after Tessie’s death, my father had what was described as a mild heart attack. At the time the treatment was weeks of bedrest. I remember my mother going up and down the stairs to the bedroom, my father’s fear and depression. I remem­ber watching it all, my angle of vision was the hall right outside my parents’ bedroom. And again I felt distanced. Something seri­ous and threatening was happening, but I was outside of it. Per­haps I felt shut out; everything was very quiet. When I was younger I used to have dreams of my father dying, and I would wake up and go into his bedroom to watch him breathe. But this real illness, coming as I was entering adolescence, seemed rather far away. It was my mother’s problem and it was a serious one, I knew. But I wanted no part of it.

Now people tell me I worry too much—as if something terrible was early on imprinted on my subconscious mind and now that it has surfaced, the balance is often off. Either I see nothing or I see everything and imagine the worst. “It’s always something,” my mother says and I believe her.

Years later a cardiologist told my father that that first inci­dent may not have been a heart attack after all, that nothing showed up on the cardiogram. But he was forever after fright­ened of having another one. Sometimes he would feel strange sen­sations in his chest and call my mother from wherever he was to drop everything and come and get him. Once when he was taking my nephew Russell to a ballgame at Madison Square Garden, he felt pain and he sat down on the sidewalk on 33rd Street and told Russell to call my mother. Russell, who was about 10 or 11, went into a nearby store and bought a small rug for my father to sit on while they waited for her to arrive. Everyone was very proud of Russell for handling the situation so sweetly, and the story got told many times.

It seems clear to me now that my father was having panic attacks, that he was entering the same altered state of fear that I recognize in myself. But nobody in my father’s world ever went to a therapist. It wasn’t even a thought they might have. So he kept silent and had a shot of Chivas Regal every night when he got home from work. And even that, like many things in my fam­ily, had an edge of shame around it. Was he becoming an alco­holic? He was so moderate, so abstemious a man, it was ridicu­lous. The concern had to be some deeply felt fear of losing control, some lack of sympathy for people who indulged them­selves. More deeply, perhaps, there must have been some feeling of being stuck in an impossible place, a place in which he could no longer grow. As Linda Trichter-Metcalf, a recent teacher of mine, put it, the panic comes from being stalled. “The self must be in expression,” and there was no movement there for him, no less conventional path for him to take. There was no solution for the longing to put down his burdens and let someone else take them up for awhile. Bring in a younger partner, I used to tell him, let someone help you. Don’t work five days a week. But none of it made any impression. His was the only way it could be done.

 

II

My father’s inability to hear almost any type of popular music always struck me as very strange. It felt ideological. Frank Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, my mother’s heroes, arrived for him after adolescence and he didn’t identify with any of them. For him there was just the great tradition of classi­cal music, and dearest to his heart, because it was not just high art but the music people sang in the streets of Italy, was the music of Donizetti, Rossini, Puccini, and of course Verdi—whose very name was a nineteenth-century acronym for freedom: “Viva Verdi,” I learned, meant, “Long live Victor Emmanuel, Rei d’Italia.” I am named after an opera singer named Geraldine Ferrar. Given the grandeur and brilliance of that music, my father must have wondered how anyone could be even momentar­ily satisfied by anything less. Popular music was like cotton candy, a child’s idea of good food. The whole neighborhood was fragrant with the smell of home-made tomato sauce and this—this too sweet wisp of artificial coloring that turned to sand on the tongue—this is what I chose? What was there to say?

Sometimes when my mother’s brothers, who were almost a generation younger than my father, came over to play chess, they would play Sinatra or Jerry Vale, and my father seemed com­fortable with it. But it was just part of the ambiance of that half of the family. It was part of what he enjoyed in a divided life, in the safe but too-small world he had constructed around himself. He had his books and his complex thoughts: If you reached under the spot on the couch where he rested his head to read, you could find his copy of Joyce or Bertrand Russell. When relatives came to visit, he slipped the book back into its place and got up to make them a cup of coffee. He was Uncle Ernest, the head of the family. Everyone deferred to him, everyone came to him for legal advice. Still, he must have yearned for the pleasure of talking to people who thought about ideas the way he did. But the longer he waited and missed it, the more inaccessible it must have become. Could there be a like-minded soul, someone who wasn’t a pedant, who wouldn’t ridicule his own uncertainties, with whom he could have an ongoing conversation?

I tried sometimes to be that person, but it was hard. I didn’t want to disappoint him, didn’t want to reveal my own ignorance, and we were both so easily embarrassed. I read once that shyness is inherited, and if that’s true, I inherited it from him. Beyond the intellectual issue, there was also the issue of our sexuality. I can’t speak for him, but I lived with an absolute sense of shame about my own sexuality that came from being told directly and indirectly that anything at all I might be doing sexually was, without question, wrong. I learned this first in church and then in my mother’s eyes, and I learned it from my father’s complete avoidance of the fact that I was a female growing up.

For a long time I had a male therapist with a grown daughter of his own who used to say that fathers have a hard time with attractions to their daughters and they sometimes move too far away to compensate for their own feelings. On the other hand, my father’s reserve was fairly universal. Either way, the expla­nations didn’t solve my problem. They suggested, although I know this wasn’t my therapist’s intention, that I was wrong to expect acknowledgment, permission, to be a young woman, to be sexual, to have desires. And it occurs to me now that this was head talk, and that I was having it with my therapist just as I had had it with my father. My father and I could barely hold a conversation that wasn’t about books, and still we were uncom­fortable because intellectually we both suffered from the same self-doubt. I wonder now how our discomfort with ourselves as sexual beings undermined our confidence in other ways, leaving us to prove something from the neck up that we may have needed our whole selves to reach. Nancy Mairs, a poet and essayist who suffers from multiple sclerosis, writes adamantly, “No body, no voice, no voice, no body. That’s what I know in my bones.” And I know that’s true, that to live with such shame, such a fear of be­ing seen or heard, of having desires and wanting acknowledg­ment, has cost me. I know it cost him too, left him irritated and frightened of how his needs might turn on him, how his body might betray him by wanting more than he thought he had a right to have. He had a role to play, and to the extent that what he actually saw and felt and knew in his bones, and what he heard in the voices in his books, conflicted with the set of rules that both he and his family expected him to maintain, the more depressed and frightened he became. And of course that made him less accessible to me.

I wanted most deeply of all people to please him, to be recog­nized by him, physically as well as intellectually. We looked alike, I always thought. We had the same dark eyes, the same nose, the same hands with their small nails that tended to curve in the wrong direction. Sometimes today when I look at my hands, I remember his sister Mary sitting at our kitchen table in her black mourning dress, I see her serious hands that crocheted table cloths, the fingers that she sometimes crossed behind her back to ward off the evil eye, and I think, those are my hands, and that fearful, shame-based culture is my inheritance.

And opera was the music that they listened to, that defined who they were. In the dark, grief-filled rooms of my Aunt Mary’s house, with its photographs of the dead and its smell of anisette and old furniture, there was this extraordinarily vibrant music that was theirs. They weren’t showy about it, but they under­stood the soaring voices of tenors and sopranos, the harmonies of trios becoming quartets and sestets, the wonderful piling on of voices, one more beautiful than the next, the grim plots, the curses and betrayals, the sex that always got punished. If you were Gilda and you slept with the duke, no matter that you were essentially innocent and he was a scoundrel, he would walk away singing, of all things, about your lack of constancy, and you would die in your outcast father’s arms, your body enshrouded in a sack. They understood the power of fate in my father’s family and they moved with a heightened sense of dread.

 

III

I like to think that the guitar was my gift to him. He had always listened to Andrés Segovia. When my sister and I were children we called him “sick over ya” because the somber sounds of his music oppressed us. Then when I was sixteen, I began listen­ing to Joan Baez’s early albums of folk songs. She seemed like some bridge to my father’s music. He would have to respect this, I thought. How could he not appreciate her beautiful bare, clear voice? But he dismissed her as untrained, and I remember feeling angry that he couldn’t for a moment hear what I heard.

When I decided I wanted to play the guitar, he bought me a nylon-string model with a deep and beautiful sound. He was immediately drawn to it himself, and when I left for college and took it with me, he bought another for himself, a used one, which, on the surface, was a sensible decision, since guitars mel­low with age, the wood comes alive and finds itself in its own vibrations. But that particular instrument never impressed me. It looked so plain. It had no inlay around the soundhole or on the fretboard, not a trace of decoration to suggest that it was an object worth admiring, one that might yield sounds worth laboring for. How self-denying it seemed to me that he settled for such a hum­ble object and spent so many hours playing it, as if he were not worthy to play anything better, as if the gods would see him with his beautiful instrument and punish him for his hubris.

Although it’s probably not true, I always imagined that he bought that guitar from a pawnbroker. There’s something about the idea, my father and some very old man turning to this dusty instrument leaning against the wall, no one has come to claim it—I can’t conceive of my father buying it out from under someone else—he pays a fair price for it, and the two of them understand something together about loss and dignity and not setting your sights too high. And maybe it really suited him. Maybe the neck felt right in his hands or the sound of it evoked a particular feel­ing in him. It didn’t have to please me, after all.

He went to Schirmer’s in Manhattan and bought himself Aaron Shearer’s Classical Guitar Technique, Volumes One and Two, and began teaching himself, cutting the nails of his right hand on a slant, learning free strokes and rest strokes, and the guitar became the daily devotion that sustained him to the end of his life. Shearer’s books contained classical melodies of Bach and Sor and Giuliani and Carulli and Aguado, and there were many exercises by the teacher himself, modestly signed A.S. They were simple versions of the melodies played by Segovia and Julian Bream and Christopher Parkening. They have an intense, vibrating clarity, solitary and dignified, a moodiness like a warm afternoon. They move easily into dark passages, places of sadness. Happiness is a brief quickening of tempo, a changed key. They are like sonnets, as Wordsworth writes of them: “and hence for me, / In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound . . . / Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be) / Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, / Should find brief solace there, as I have found.”

 

IV

My relation to the guitar has always been fitful and hard. I have had three teachers over the years, and have learned quite a bit. I have spent some of the happiest hours of my life playing with friends, following along with more skillful musicians, los­ing myself in the experience of being in a room full of instruments with people “making music” and me a part of it. But I am also left after all these years with a profound sense of my own limita­tions on the guitar. Sometimes, when I am playing for myself, I play in ways that please and surprise me. But more often I am struck by how stubbornly my hands fall into the same patterns, how difficult it is to pass to the next stage.

Sometimes now, I play music with a friend who is an English teacher, as I am, and he wrote me an encouraging note recently that said, “You play the guitar very nicely. You should give it some time.” That was kind of him, and even as I frown and drop his note on the desk, I notice that he took the time to write it and I can feel myself taking in the warmth of its positive reinforce­ment. Suddenly I want to go home and play the song we worked on the last time we were together. I feel hopeful that if I just keep at it, there will be some breakthrough, the kind of thing my son’s guitar teacher Chris talks about. Chris says it’s less impor­tant to play for long stretches than it is to play every day. Then it becomes your practice, a part of the rhythm of your life. If you do that, something happens during the night, you wake up one morning and find you can now do what has been eluding you. He calls it developing muscle memory, and it almost seems not to involve the brain. He describes it as going from your heart straight to your hands.

Different people learn instruments in different ways, he says. Some people are linear; they like things written out. Chris is like that, he says, and I’m relieved. Here is a person with talent who, like me, wants things written out. My son learns differ­ently; he learns by listening, by being shown. “Dig it,” my second guitar teacher used to say. Some people can do that. They can dig it. They can learn fast and well while others will labor all their lives for the smallest of accomplishments.

I came across a book the other day, a New Age reflection on the place of music in a life, which gave me some comfort in this regard. It says, “Being musical does not necessarily mean being a musician. . . . It is a way of being awake, an angle of perception, a tilt of the ear” (W. A. Mathieu, The Musical Life [Shambala, 1994]). I wonder if I can say this about myself. In the end, the instrument always defeats me. There is will involved, of course, but I think it comes down finally to the way your circuits are wired. I had my father’s desire and I learned his fear and I came by some level of skill that took me someplace but nowhere near where I wanted to go. And as I write this, I think of the truly fine musicians I know who have turned away from their music because of just this feeling. Their level of skill or art was far beyond mine. But the feeling was the same.

 

V

I had a dream years ago, a short time after my father died, that I like to think of as a visitation, though I know it was just me telling myself what I know most deeply. He was in his office on the 23rd floor of 16 Court Street where he worked for most of his life. From his window, I could see miles of rooftops, bridges, church spires, elevated trains, patches of tenements—the long view of the city he loved. He was smiling in the dream and his guitar rested against a chair. “It’s all right,” he said, showing me his room. I don’t know whether that meant “I accept you” or “it all works out.” The latter seems somewhat out of character, he was more cynical than that, especially toward the end of his life when more and more of the work, which he couldn’t give up, was getting to be too much. But he wouldn’t retire. He told me this once on the phone, when he had had another mild heart attack and he was going back to work after two weeks. I remem­ber it particularly because it was perhaps the only time I can think of that he told me he loved me. Maybe he knew the time was getting short and he should make himself clear. “I know you mean well,” he said, “but I have to go back.” That was his choice and it would have been all right if he hadn’t also been hurt by how hard it was. I watched him grow furious with life, like Yeats’s soulful old man, his spirit “fastened to a dying animal,” feeling less and less powerful, increasingly invisible. The new generation of lawyers was fast, clever, and largely unprincipled. Hucksters he would call them. The hucksters were always at your back.

He did finally die of a heart attack. He worked, as he had chosen to, until two weeks before he died. The last time I saw him, he was in the hospital and he talked about Faulkner’s Light in August. He had just finished reading it and he told me how wonderful it was. And then I told him about The Sound and the Fury, still striving for his approval and a comfortable way to be with him, worrying about whether the Benjy section would annoy him, whether it would strike him as too fancy, too full of tricks. If he loved Ulysses, he would probably like this, but would he find in it something to appeal to him as the homely Leopold Bloom did? He loved the humor and irreverence of Joyce, the puzzle-like quality. Would he sympathize with Quentin? Was that a good choice?

He seemed calm in the hospital. My mother said he drifted in and out of fantasy. He asked how everyone was. On January 2, late at night, he had a last massive attack and lost conscious­ness. He never woke up. Strange doctors worked on his naked body, they didn’t know who he was, they monitored him, his kidneys were failing, they said, and in the early afternoon of January 3rd, he died. We were kept outside the room and nobody had a chance to say good-bye.

I don’t know if one could say he had a fortunate life. He was a lawyer who would have preferred to be a professor, which is a common desire, I’ve come to notice. His clients drained him increasingly as the years went by. Like fund raisers, they called at six o’clock because they knew he would be home eating dinner and my sister and I always took messages. But being a lawyer was lucrative even in the modest way my father ran his practice. It gave him status, there was always enough money, and my mother didn’t have to work—which, in the fifties, was a sign of their prosperity. In his mind, and with his fierce need to defend his choices, he had proven to himself that he was situated in the best spot on earth—America being the best country, New York the best city, Brooklyn the most reasonable, livable bor­ough, the borough of homes and churches, and so on down to the warm spot in the kitchen near the radiator where he sat with his cup of espresso and looked out on his flowers and his grass. He would stare out the window on a Saturday morning, and one of my uncles would appear, maybe unexpected but always welcome for a game of chess, and as he got up to get the board and the pieces, he would say, to fill the space, “America’s a great country,” or some­times in Italian, “America è un bel paese.” And then he would laugh at his wonderful irony and say, “Who’s got it better than me?”

I have a photograph of him playing the guitar, his dignified and still handsome face concentrated into a frown, his fingers on the strings, he is holding the guitar almost vertically, in the classical style. He is overcoming his reserve enough to play for us, my mother and my sister and me. He is a little self-conscious, not quite satisfied with what he’s doing, but he is also relying on what he knows, letting the music carry him, so that he loses and finds himself in these songs that beat so close to his heart.