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

My Mother                   

(1910- )

My mother, Anna, was the sickliest of my grandmother’s children at birth.  She was skinny as an infant, and became thinner and more gaunt during early childhood.  My grandfather was particularly concerned for her health, and uncharacteristically attentive to her as a child, her frailty creating a special bond between them.  As close as I felt to my grandmother, my mother felt more so toward her father.  My mother and I, to this day, have an understanding:  She doesn’t speak ill of my grandmother and I will respect her opinion of her father.

My grandmother was equally concerned for Anna, but was too busy producing the rest of the children.  Julia, Jenny, Antoinette and Vivian followed with little rest in between.

After Vivian’s birth, and certainly as a portent of what was to come, my mother fell ill.  Her weakened condition made her a target for disease, and Rosebank was not the healthiest of environments.  The crush of immigrants, the massive numbers of children, the slow progress with which sewers were being built and the open air markets combined to create a breeding ground for tuberculosis, dysentery, cholera, polio.

Into this rancid backwater, the great flu pandemic of 1919 came raging, and claimed my mother as its victim, the only in the family.  Before it was over, one out of every four children in Rosebank would die.

The family doctor, who viewed my grandmother as his most reliable client was a regular visitor to her house.  That night when he visited, he found my mother in my grandfather’s bed.  She had been moved there in an attempt to save the other children from infection.  My grandfather planned to sleep nearby on a kitchen chair he had brought into the living room.  He wouldn’t allow himself to be comfortable until Anna recovered.

It was with the greatest of difficulty and only over a long period of time that my grandmother came to tell me the story of my mother’s illness.  It was for her a turning point in her understanding of the special powers she possessed, and she was uncertain about how much to keep secret.

My mother was barely visible under the mountain of comforters.  Her straight black hair was the only marker in the sparkling white piles of down.  Even though the house was hot and every blanket had been moved onto her bed, she was shivering.  Her arms and neck were so thin that the doctor could see the blood pulsing in the blue surface veins.

He examined her quickly, and came into the living room to my grandfather.  “There’s no hope,” he said.  “The disease has progressed too far and she’s too weak to survive it.”  Even the doctor seemed affected by the look of grief on my grandfather’s face.  Through all of my grandmother’s pregnancies and her miscarriage, the doctor had admired my grandfather’s steely resolve and lack of emotion.

“Papa,” a weak call from the bedroom had my grandfather on his feet in an instant.  “Papa … hot peppers, Papa,” my grandfather would have laughed if he hadn’t realized that this might be her last request.  He couldn’t speak English, but he knew his Anna loved hot peppers.  She would pour a liberal serving of hot peppers and tomato sauce on spaghetti, whereas no one else risked more than a small spoonful.  She’d even add two or three peppers to a sandwich, but her favorite was simply pan-fried peppers in olive oil.

My grandmother turned to the doctor for approval, and with a weak smile, he said, “What harm can it do now?”

My grandmother went into the pantry off the kitchen, and took down a large string of red peppers that had been drying there since summer; careful not to touch them with her bare hands.  With the other hand she took down the cast iron skillet blackened with ages of oil.  And so, in the dead of winter in a house heated beyond human endurance, my grandmother fried a large pan of the hot red peppers.  The acrid smell was so intense that the other children were choking in their beds.  There was a haze that rose from the stove and encircled my grandmother.  That’s when the memories of her own childhood flooded over her.

It would be at this time in my grandmother’s telling of the story to me that she would pause, watching me carefully to make sure that what she was about to say would remain between the two of us.  Only then would she continue.

As a small child, my grandmother had often seen her own mother rapt in the strange prayers at the bedside of the sick, the dying and the pregnant, always when they were asleep.  Her mother made special care to be unobserved even by her host, while Mary was allowed to watch from a distance but not to overhear the prayers.

It was one Christmas Eve, when my grandmother was eleven and only days before the end of the 19th century, that her mother decided to take her aside and to make her ‘aware.’  Mary was the one chosen of all the children by the same intuitive sense that all before her had been chosen.  It wasn’t a conscious decision but more a recognition by her mother that the ‘gift’ was in its embryonic form in her alone and must be nurtured or left to die.  It was a long night of drifting in and out of sleep.  The prayers, the curses, the warnings, the history became a blur to the child as they were intended to be.  The ‘awareness’ was not conveyed in a catechism of strict and pedantic instruction but rather in a spiritual, oft-unspoken bonding between mother and daughter.  My grandmother awoke late on Christmas morning despite the excitement and noise in the house, no longer a child and not quite a woman.  She did not speak of the night’s events.  Her mother had not warned against revealing the secrets; she simply knew that she must not.   

Now brought to the reality of her own daughter’s dying, my grandmother realized that once invoked the prayers could not be withdrawn and that with the intervention came uncertain consequences.  She had never before dared to use the spells she had learned as a child from her mother.  But red peppers were one of the most powerful tools of the incantation, and Anna herself had asked for them as if asking to evoke the curse.  My grandmother had been warned about the curse.  She had been told of its effect on her family in Italy. In fact, she had been told, it was the reason they came to America.  It was the furtive glances more than the overtly hostile comments of the townspeople that had hounded them out of their home.

Standing there in the kitchen, she was reluctant to cross herself and start the ritual.  Surely, she’d been tested before, but she had an iron will, and had dealt with problems in a more ‘normal’ way.  But, Anna was dying.  “What harm can it do now?” the doctor had said.  Besides, if these prayers existed for any purpose, what better than to save the life of her child.

She began the chants at the stove, her tears camouflaged by the hot peppers and the haze.  There was another voice that seemed to be speaking through her own mind in phrases that sounded unfamiliar until they were uttered.

The bubbling oil turned the peppers darker and darker and occasionally spattered out onto my grandmother’s arm without effect.  She stared at the pan, imagining the peppers forming into the shapes of people and symbols; every stir brought a new image.  The voices in her head still spoke through whispers she was hearing for the first time as they were uttered.

When the peppers were finally reduced to thin strands, she poured them hissing into a white bowl.  The voices stopped.

When she brought the white dish of the dark red peppers to the bedroom, the blood stained olive oil at the bottom of the dish was vibrating with heat.

Anna struggled to sit up but she was too weak to feed herself.  My grandmother, taking care not to crush her daughter beneath her own great size made her way under the blankets into the damp and fetid air of the rampant fever.  Holding Anna up in the crook of her arm, against her massive breasts, she fed her the peppers a spoonful at a time.  Now and then, putting down the spoon, she would look toward the doorway to be sure my grandfather wasn’t around before making the sign of the cross on her daughter’s forehead.  Wave after wave of heat pulsed across the room, and my grandmother’s head began to throb.  The prayers continued, interrupted occasionally by “mangia, mangia,” as she prompted my mother to eat.

Just as the headache was blinding my grandmother with white flashes, my mother’s head fell back. “Anna!  Anna!” my grandmother cried, thinking she had died.  “John!  John!” she cried again, certain she was calling her husband to the death bed.  Only then did she hear a sigh, and realized that Anna was asleep.  Covering her, she made the final sign of the cross on her forehead before her husband came to the door.  For his part, my grandfather had waited in the living room with only a sense that something was going on, something that even he couldn’t be a part of. 

My grandmother went and sat with my grandfather in the living room in the second kitchen chair he had brought for his wife to join him to wait for their daughter’s death. The night passed slowly.  What sleep my grandmother got was burdened by dark figures with featureless faces and glaring eyes.  And she knew she had unleashed something that would not be easily recaptured.  But if it gave Anna some peace in her final moments, it was worth it.

 “Mama, Mama,” Anna called so early the next morning that there was barely enough daylight for my grandmother to find her way to the bedroom.  When she bent down to kiss Anna, she discovered that the girl’s forehead was cool to the touch.  The fever was broken!  My grandfather was at the door.  It was the only time in his life he cried.

And so her daughter had been spared.  And yet my grandmother wasn’t yet fully convinced by whose intervention this had happened.  She didn’t believe she had such power, but nonetheless she understood that a price had to be paid.  She also knew Anna had been changed, and prayed that ultimately it would be for the better.