Excerpt from the novel "The Evil Eye and Other Stories My Grandmother Told Me"

The Last, First:  Uncle Johnny

(1920-1944)

Pregnancy was becoming as commonplace and regular an occurrence to my grandmother as Christmas.  All of the children were conceived in the fall as my Grandfather’s summer exploits waned, and thus all have birthdays in the summer.  In fact, for the first fifteen years of her marriage, she couldn’t remember a holiday without carrying the extra burden of a child in her womb. Nonetheless, she was still required to maintain the cooking for the restaurant business and to supervise the production of the bathtub gin that was the family’s main source of income.

My grandfather was not very sympathetic to his wife’s suffering --- it was women’s lot.  Already, love was no longer an ingredient in my grandparents’ marriage.  The relationship was a one-sided one favoring my grandfather:  he got everything, she got little or nothing.  They only slept together now when the next child was to be produced.  My grandmother had become larger with every pregnancy and my grandfather, who had literally been squeezed out of their marriage bed, had taken to sleeping in the front room.  He was leaving the house earlier in the morning and straying further from the property during the day, sometimes disappearing for hours at a time.  All his other, non-romantic needs were met by his daughters.  He was catered to as befitting his status as the ‘lord and master.’  But he lacked a son, and all the comforts and convenience of his present life were empty without that achievement.

Somewhere in the recesses of the deep secrets between my grandmother and me, and even deeper in my memories of her, lies a story about my uncle’s birth told to me perhaps when she thought I couldn’t fully understand and when wine had loosened her tongue.  I can’t bring up details of the story and certainly no facts.  But it is not hard to believe that my grandmother, nearing exhaustion from eight pregnancies and a marriage now devoid of passion, would seek to end the suffering by evoking the ‘special prayers’, particularly since this was apparently a time when she was becoming more familiar with the powers of the curse.  Her incursions into their dark realm were becoming more daring.  She was still left uncomfortable from these episodes, her head aching and feeling somewhat diminished, but she recovered more and more quickly.  The prayers were not specific to a particular end but rather to seek direction or guidance or some general intervention.

She was also becoming ‘aware’ that the prayers had consequences --- if not to her than to someone near to her.  Curing of an illness in one child caused another to come home with a bruise the next day.  The consequences were not dangerous enough to avoid the risk, but neither were they trivial enough to be ignored.  She knew that the ‘arrangements’ to produce a male child would be extraordinary, and the price to pay would be very high.  But she could no longer face the endless pregnancies.

She started her novena in the back room calmly looking out the back window at the cherry tree.  She remembered back when she planted the tree as a gesture of thanks to God for her first child.  Her mother had told her it was a tradition in the ‘old country’.  She daydreamed of her childhood and her mother and the prayers learned on Christmas Eve.  Then, drifting into deeper sleep, she dreamed of walking through the woods outside her mother’s home in Sassano, a place she’d never been.  Then, slipping even further back into time, she found herself in a time when the houses in the town were few, the woods were closer and darker.  It was night, and wolves with glaring eyes skirted the houses looking for prey.  All the while, she whispered the words to the prayer only to awake an hour later with only vague recollections of the dreams and no memory of the words.

The next pregnancy came after the nine-week novena ended.  This time there was no pain and suffering, no sicknesses and headaches.  She remained at peace through the nine months, through the labor and through the delivery. 

And so my grandparents’ ninth child was finally a boy.  My grandmother, who was convinced that she was destined to bear as many children as necessary until a son was finally born, was greatly relieved, and for my grandfather, this was the fulfillment of his dream of an heir.  From birth, my Uncle Johnny was fawned upon by everyone, including his sisters.  My Aunt Marion was in her late teens and soon to be married, and Uncle Johnny’s youngest sister was only old enough for dolls.  In between were six other sisters in addition to a doting mother.  So Johnny was the object of every possible female attention.

When his son was old enough to understand, my grandfather began grooming him in his image.  Unfortunately that included all the worst traits of the old-world Italian male, chief among which was the concept that Italian woman are servants to the men of the family.  Whatever privilege was afforded my grandfather was equally afforded Johnny.  His bed was made, his clothes laundered, his meals prepared.  There were no physicals chores left undone by the girls, and besides Babe was already fine tuning her obsessive cleaning techniques.  In fact, more and more of the chores were being taken over by her to assure they met her increasingly impossible standards, leaving Johnny free to spend time with his father and hone his baronial skills.

Even using the most charitable measures possible, the women of the family were plain looking, and the later children seemed to be dredging even deeper into the exhausted gene pool of beauty.  In fact, Hilda, the last female child, was painfully ugly.  But the few photographs that exist of my uncle show an amazingly and uncharacteristically handsome man.  The one photo I personally own of him in sailor uniform is cracked, and stained by the endless tears of his adoring sisters.

However mysteriously my Uncle Johnny entered this world does nothing to compare to the way he left it.  The simplified facts of his birth and the official facts of his death may, like his photo, be a grainy black and white, but the shades of mystery and the cause-and-effects of these events are infinitely shaded.

At twenty, Uncle Johnny was the embodiment my grandfather’s tutelage on the manners of the Italian male.  He had even fathered a child, unbeknownst to the family, who would appear forty years later in search of his lineage.  When Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, Johnny was in his prime in his early-twenties and it was natural for him to want to enlist.

“Papa, I want to join the Navy,”  my Grandmother with tears glistening in her eyes would, in the rare instances when she allowed a glass or two of wine to unlock the memory, recount the story of her son first approaching his father.

My grandfather was all pride that his son was now going to be an American.  His daughters, of course, were technically citizens, but had been raised so strictly that they might as well have still been in Italy.  But his son was going to fight for this new country, and that made him a true American.

My grandmother had a more selfish view.  Her baby was putting himself in harm’s way, and might never return.

“Johnny, my boy,” my grandmother was at first calm, the voice of love shaded with concern, “You’re not going!”

“But Mama, the Labetti boy is going, the Russo boy …” Johnny was meekly protesting.  He might have otherwise been the image of his father but he couldn’t ever provoke an argument with his mother.

“Mariucca, if he must go, he must go,” my Grandfather didn’t often invoke his pet name for his wife.  He smiled weakly realizing my Grandmother’s mounting fury, but still believing his word was God’s.

My grandmother’s need to protect her son far outweighed all the traditions that even a thousand-year culture could muster.  For the first time in their marriage she stood up to my grandfather.

“Ssh, you!”  even as she would recount the story, I would flinch at the words of absolute dismissal.  She was referring to her husband as if he was a peddler having just asked her for a dime.

“You stay home with us!”  she turned on me at this point in the story, wagging her finger, as if now facing her own son.  I suddenly heard my heart pounding in my ears.

Johnny was not to enlist; it would be suicide.  Certainly, she hadn’t gone through the hell of all these pregnancies just to throw her only son into the jaws of death.  This battle between my grandparents would persist for months.  My grandfather suffered through sleepless nights and began a long struggle with illnesses that lasted the rest of his life.  But my Uncle Johnny was adamant.  As more of his friends left for the front, he became more and more insistent.  My grandmother realized that the certainty of losing her son’s love far outweighed the slim possibility of him losing his life.  At its end, Uncle Johnny did enlist but my grandfather never again challenged my grandmother’s rule.

In the first few months after Johnny left for the front and no bad news came her way, she thought her premonitions had been wrong.  She couldn’t admit to anyone, at times even to herself, that her fears were based on the novenas she had made to God before the birth of her son.  It had been more than twenty years and Johnny had led a charmed life up until now.  But she was haunted by demons that came in the night and took back her son.

As the war continued to go well for America, the fears subsided into the background, although the dreams continued.  It wasn’t until victory in Europe was all but assured that she finally felt that she might see her son again, and that the nightmares would stop.

While my uncle was away, Vivian and my Aunt Jenny had been having the time of their lives.  There were always sailors in town, always dances at the local piers and there was the Roseland Ballroom in the city.  On a typical weekend evening, my aunts would dress in their dance clothes and slip into bed.

“Babe, where are the girls?” her mother’s booming voice would wake Babe throughout the night and Babe would have to shuffle through the bedrooms counting heads and reporting back to her mother.

She’d tap Vivian as she passed her bed that it was time to but their plan into action.  She and Jenny would throw the covers back, and use the noise that Babe intentionally made to gather up the paper bag that contained their high heel shoes, purse and makeup.  They’d stand in the doorway watching Babe make her report.

“Mama, they’re all asleep, ssshhh!” she’d stand at the ‘window’ that connected her mother’s room to her own.  While temporarily blocking the view to the back door; she’d signal behind her back that the coast was clear for Jenny and Vivian to make their escape.

The two sisters who had waited long enough would virtually crawl past Babe’s back and out of the house onto the porch.  It was impossible not to hear their giggling as they congratulated themselves on their escape.

All my grandmother’s precautions about her daughter’s was at the insistence of my grandfather sleeping in the front room.  Apparently he had sufficient experience with the more ‘common’ woman of the town to be particularly strict that his own daughters didn’t follow in their path.

My grandmother was well aware of what was going on (she’d smile to herself when she heard the giggling from the back porch), but for the sake of pretended honesty with my grandfather, she allowed herself to be fooled, convinced that a bad husband was better than none.  Certainly, she couldn’t ignore the fact that her girls were not getting younger and would never get prettier.

Not only did my aunts fear that the end of the war would bring an end to their fun, but also that the return of their brother Johnny would make certain their celibacy for life since, even before he left them, he had become overly protective of his sisters, ever trying to emulate his father.  Probably, too, he shared his father’s experience with women.  A young man with his good looks and family resources would be within the sights of dozens of young woman in the neighborhood.  On the other hand, he would fly into a rage if some local boy even so much as tipped his hat to one of his sisters.  His temper, flamed by these innocent attentions, had become legendary, even before the war.  His rage was first directed at the boy involved, after which he would storm home after his sister and rage at her for allowing any such familiarity.

Toward the end of 1943 everyone sensed that the tide of the war in Europe was turning.  There were rumors that some local boys who had enlisted together were on the USS Leopold which was close to home in the North Atlantic.  The ship, it was thought, might head soon to Norfolk to what would appear to be its final port.  My Uncle Johnny would be home and a war hero.

My grandparents were jubilant.  It was the happiest of Christmases for them and the New Year promised a long awaited reunion, perhaps as early as Easter.  Vivian was not so delighted.  That Christmas and New Year holiday she acted with desperation during her evenings out in the city throwing herself at single and even not-so-single men in a last minute attempt to have someone in hand before her brother put an end to her ‘manhunt.’  The holidays, now come and gone, and the celebrations ending, the long bleak winter stretched ahead.  By early March, as Easter Sunday approached, the routine of Roseland was becoming drudgery.  And Johnny was coming ever closer.

It was on the ferry ride home at night from the city that Vivian’s anxiety reached its height.  She felt that the ferry and her brother’s ship were somehow connected through the black waters of the bay.  She could literally feel his presence.  Already the harbor was crowded with returning war ships and she realized that one day, all too soon, Johnny would be on one of them.  Even now she could feel his eyes staring at her, reprimanding her for being out this late and for the life she had led in his absence.

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The USS Leopold was on a routine mission near Iceland just as Vivian was staring out toward the Atlantic and picturing her brother’s eyes…

Johnny was on watch that night and actually looking toward New York into the black night, picturing his father in his perfect white linen suit and starched white shirt, and his mother in her favorite light blue dress, his sisters gathered in various poses behind them.  They all had the unfortunate facial characteristics of large noses and sunken cheeks that made them obviously sisters.  But each had a personality that made their faces distinctive and provided a window into their souls.  Marion had a bit of her mother’s stern face set, but her eyes belied how easily amused she was by the simplest of jokes.  Julia could barely contain that she wanted to be somewhere else having fun, but her eyes were shadowed with a portent of gloom.  Anna appeared a literal scarecrow wedged amongst more robust sisters, her hands were clenched and her eyes set against unforeseen challenges.

But when Johnny pictured Vivian, all he could see were her eyes in a blank featureless face.  He closed his eyes to refresh the image.  It was then that he realized that his father was dressed in a dark wool suit, and his mother in a black dress, her face obscured by a veil.  They were in mourning:  but for whom?  Which of his sisters had died while he was away?

Despite the cold biting wind of the North Atlantic, he felt a momentary warm flash; the pulse hit his chest.   He looked down at the sea in time to see the plume of foam heading toward the ship.  The torpedo struck the USS Leopold with such force that Johnny was knocked unconscious.  It wasn’t until much later that he was awakened by the icy waters fast swallowing the ship.  He struggled to pull himself above and beyond the grasp of the sea.

By early the next morning, the ship had sunk and with it 171 sailors.  Uncle Johnny was gone!

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The telegram read:

The Navy Department deeply regrets to inform you that your son, John A. DeLisa, Jr,, was killed in action, at sea, in the performance of his duty and in the service of his country. The body has not been recovered. On behalf of the United States Navy, I extend its sincerest sympathy in your great loss. To prevent possible aid to the enemies, please do not divulge the name of the ship or station.     

My grandmother went into mourning.  No caricature of an Italian-in-mourning can prepare you for the genuine event.  In my grandmother’s case it was particularly wrenching.  Perhaps it was because there were no remains to bury, perhaps because of the strength of her personality or perhaps it was that she began to understand the nature of the evil that she believed had haunted her family for generations.  It wasn’t something outside but rather inside the family that hunted them.  No matter.  She did not show any of the outward signs of grief:  no beating the chest, no wailing, no encircling herself with the black-shrouded mourners.  Her sorrow was too deep for conventional responses.  Her daughters in their sympathy only provided her with a reminder of the sameness of her own life with theirs.  The emptiness of producing daughters who produced children who produced more children with none able or daring enough to rise above the anonymity of being a female.   Her son had provided uniqueness to her existence.  He had held the promise that she had once held:  that life was the constant expectation of experience, not the monotony of perpetual motherhood.  Now Johnny was gone and, with that, her last hold on her own youth.  She simply fell silent and aged.

At age fifty and in a matter of days, she became the person she would remain for the rest of her life.  She was now simply an old woman, no less grand, no less powerful, no less possessed of an iron will, but somehow beaten down and only just able to regain some of her lost footing.

But her purpose was set.  She was to be grandmother to her daughters’ children and their protector against the evil, even though she had not yet determined precisely what the evil was.