Demise

The Panuzio Home, East Lake Monday, 19 September, 5:47 a.m.-2

His heart is pounding. Monsters under the table! I…He…He is scared. He is scared of being scared. He is scared Santo or Henry will tease him. Or Sylvia. She always—

Johnny hears Rocco and Uncle John in the front parlor; Tessa, Nonna, and Aunt Fran in the kitchen. There is noise in the back parlor, adult noise, perhaps Aunt Millie or Aunt Tina or Zi Carmela. Johnny thinks, is sure, Santo and Henry wouldn’t hide there, and Sylvia wouldn’t seek there. He scrunches beneath the china hutch, feels exposed: feels the heads, the eyes from beneath the table moving, glaring at him. He sidles to the door to the hall. Quickly, quietly, he slips out, rounds the spiral newel, then on all fours scrambles up the stairs to the landing. There he…I look into the back of the house, look down the narrow servant stairs, look up into the upper back hall between the room that had been Rocco’s and Uncle Carlo’s, and the one that had been Aunts Tina’s, Sylvia’s and Carmela’s when they’d all been little.

Johnny-panni sees…I…I see Sylvia’s rump! She is bent, searching under the bed in Rocco’s old room. Quickly he retreats, still on all fours, down to the landing, leaping up to the open upper hall between Aunt Tina’s room, Nonno and Nonna’s room, and the upstairs den. He scurries into the den, opens the closet, backs in between hanging garments, pulls the door all but a finger’s width shut, smiles. No one will find me here.

He waits motionlessly. I…He waits long. He is hot. It is midsummer. The closet is stuffy, smells of old shoes and of an old woman’s powders. He does not want to hide anymore. Why, he thinks, isn’t Sylvia searching for me? Did she get Santo? Henry? Henry always gets caught first because he doesn’t like to hide because he’s afraid. Ha! He’s a scaredy-cat. Not like me. I’m going to go to home base, call in Santo and Henry, tell Sylvia we quit so we can play something more fun than hide-’n’-seek where the seeker’s a girl who can’t find anyone anyway!

I slip from between the smelly garments. My neck is itchy. I sit on the bench in the den, my back to the window, my face to the door, my legs swinging. Ha! Sylvia’s so stupid she wouldn’t even see me if she walked through the upper hall with her eyes open.

I lean back. I am still thinking I should go…I’m going to home base. But I don’t want to quit. I don’t quit. I’m not a quitter. Not like…Ooo! Mama’d spank me if I said who. If I…She doesn’t spank us. She never spanks me. Sometimes she hits me with her hairbrush. If you cry before she hits, she doesn’t hit you. If you cry after she starts, she hits you harder. Johnny, he doesn’t want to lose. His neck itches and he pivots his head back and turns it side to side and makes believe he’s…

On the closet wall, high up, in a heavy gold frame…a picture of a man in a blue uniform with gold arm braids; a thin man with a small mustache, high boots, and a sword. A real sword. I stand, step closer to get a better look, but at that angle the glint on the glass blocks the picture. I drag the bench over, stand on it. I know the man in the picture. I’ve seen him…in newsreels, in books…but without the sword. The sword is long, curved.

“Ah, Little Johnny-panni! There you are.”

Johnny spins.

“Your mother and father have been looking for you.” Aunt Tina’s voice is high, sharp. “They want to go home.”

Johnny doesn’t answer her. He glances up at the large photo then jumps from the bench, starts for the door.

“Whoa!” Aunt Tina halts him. He sees her waggle a long, bony finger. “How about the bench?” She begins to move the seat. Johnny helps with the other side. “Do you know who that is?” Aunt Tina asks.

Johnny looks up. Without hesitation, his voice booming, proud, he announces, “Adolf Hitler.”

“Adolf Hit…! No-oh!” Aunt Tina’s voice cackles. She is a horse neighing. A know-it-all horse. “That’s my father.”

Johnny doesn’t understand.

“That’s Nonno,” Aunt Tina says. “That's Nonno more than fifty years ago. When he was in the army.”

“Granpa?!” He is ashamed. “Granpa had a sword?” He is astounded. He can feel it…in my hand.

“Oh. Yes. That was taken in 1900. Maybe 1899. He was drafted into the cavalry after he had already come to America. He had to go back to Italy. Wasn’t he handsome?”

Johnny-panni does not know what to say. Nonno with a sword. Nonno, maybe chopping someone. Nonno looks like Hit…With a sword. Like in the movies.

He hears Aunt Tina’s voice running on, she seemingly talking to herself or to the photograph, but letting Johnny…letting Little Johnny-panni overhear. “It was a mistake. They were supposed to draft his brother, my uncle Nicole, because he wasn’t the oldest. They never take the first son. But they drafted my father because they didn’t have their records straight. When he was let out he went back to his hometown and he told the Scarpetti…”

Johnny is lost. It shows on his face. Aunt Tina thinks he is retarded. He can see it on her face. She thinks I’m retarded. Or slow. Slow anyway. She sits on the bench, pulls me toward her like I am a pet, a puppy…no…a stuffed animal. A lamb. Johnny sits politely. He does not like the way she smells. She looks up at the photograph and her words rise and descend and rise as if an aria. “Mr. Scarpetti—”Johnny can see into her nose; her nostrils are big and he can see up her nose as she gabs at the photo “—was the padrone of the village. He was a very kindly man but to my father, well…when my father…when he went back to his village before he was put into the army…Just like that they order him back from America, snatch him up. Like a slave! Like…Ah, but he saw my mother…She was so beautiful. They called her pacca bel because…Oh, you’re too young to know. When you’re a man you’ll know. But she was so very pretty and Papa told Mr. Scarpetti that he was going to marry his daughter. And Mr. Scarpetti was so angy, he forbade my father from seeing her. And Mrs. Scarpetti, she hit Papa with a pot.” Aunt Tina swings her arm. “Bang!” She explodes, laughs, continues.

“But all the time he was in the army my mother wrote to my father and my father wrote to my mother, and when he came home to his village—he was so handsome—My father was the most handsome man in the paese. And the strongest. No matter what they did to him. And Mama, she was almost sixteen.”

Johnny-panni interrupts. He will show her. “Nonna was fifteen!” He doesn’t really believe his aunt. She is old. She still lives with her mother and father. She has never married. She is the only woman Johnny knows who is old and who has never married. He has heard his mother whisper that her real name is Santina. To him it sounds like Satan. A girl Satan. That’s what his mother means when she whispers, “There’s something wrong with that one. It’s nothing to do with the family but she…”

“Oh, yes.” Aunt Tina’s enthusiasm speeds her on. “She was fifteen, but almost sixteen.”

“But—” Johnny tries to catch her “—you can’t get married when you’re fifteen.”

“Well…you…can’t…now.” He sees Tina snort, hears her add, “You can’t do that today but back then, in Italy, a girl could marry…even at fourteen! And my father, he was already a man. He was twenty-two and he had saved his money, so he was of substance.” She is rolling again. “But Mr. Scarpetti was going to kill my father. And Mama’s brothers were going to kill him, too. And my father said, ‘Mr. Scarpetti, if you don’t let me marry your daughter, I’m going to steal her and take her to America.’ Oh, they had a big fight!”

“Did Grandpa use his sword?”

Aunt Tina’s laugh is shrill. “Not a sword fight,” she cackles. “But both families, the Panuzios and the Scarpettis, oh, they don’t even talk for months. And my mother cried and cried and said to her father that she was going to run away to America, no matter what! So finally Mr. Scarpetti said, ‘Okay. You can get married. But only if you marry here. In Italy.’ He wasn’t going to let his daughter go to America unmarried. Oh, wouldn’t that have been a scandal.” Again he hears Tina’s shrill laugh, and again it is to something he thinks that she thinks Johnny-panni doesn’t understand because, he thinks, she thinks I am a retard.

Aunt Tina grabs his hand, leans closer. “That’s when Mama and Papa came to America, Papa for the second time. That’s how your family came to this country. Mr. and Mrs. Scarpetti, that’s my grandfather and grandmother, they never came...”

I pull away. “Where’s Nonno’s sword?”

“Oh! Maybe he gave it to Mr. Scarpetti.” Aunt Tina laughs.

“And Nonna’s pocketbook?”

“Pocket…? Ah! Pacca bel.” She holds the side of his face, pinches, laughs at him for being so stupid. “You’re too young. Too young. But the padrones…You know the padrones?”

“Like Grandpa?”

“Yes. In the old sense. Not like those here. In Castelfranc they were such gentlemen. Here, nothing but trouble. Oh…all the troubles…Ah, but look at Papa. Wasn’t he handsome?”

Johnny pushed back, released the frame, let his eyes fall upon others. Beside the photo of his grandfather was one of Johnny’s father’s oldest brother, Giovanni Baptiste II, Uncle John, Johnny’s godfather. In the photo Uncle John wore a double-breasted, natural linen suit—the kind of suit he’d worn most of his life, to work at the bank, to go to church on Sundays, even at home. After the death of his father in 1965, and until his own death ten years later, the family title Il Padrone passed respectfully, if somewhat whimsically, to Uncle John.

There were separate pictures of Johnny’s father, Rocco and Johnny’s mother, Tessa, from World War II, both wearing the uniform of the United States Army. Familiar and fluent with the dialects of southern Italy, Tessa Altieri had become an enlisted administrative assistant to General Mark W. Clark, commander of the American 5th Army. For ten months, from the landing at the Gulf of Salerno in September 1943 through the battles of Ponte Bruciato, Monte Cassino, and Anzio, Tessa translated for the wild three-star. Someplace, during the cold, muddy, rainy campaign, she’d contracted pneumonia. Rocco had been an infantryman with the 34th Division, had been wounded, shot through the right calf, at Anzio. They’d met in the hospital in June 1944; had been, as far as both their families were concerned, foolishly married after a one-week engagement. In a double frame there were pictures of them cheek to cheek: one, in sepia, in uniform, on their wedding day; the other, in full color, on their 50th wedding anniversary.

To one side there was a very small, very old photograph of an uncle of Johnny’s grandmother, the playwright, novelist and royal tutor Nicole Del Vecchio, on the day his first film opened in America at the Loew’s Poli; to the other, in a matching frame, was a small, dark photo of Nicole Panuzio, Johnny’s grandfather’s youngest brother, on the day he was disinterned.

There was a very elegant photograph of Julia, on her and Johnny’s wedding day, dressed in a flowing satin and lace gown trimmed with minute satin roses. In it she held a bouquet of red and white roses. The picture had been taken at The Bastille Restaurant and Marina in South Lake Village, and Julia’s radiant image was surrounded by the blurred blue-green water of Lake Wampahwaug. Their wedding had been traditional, with tens of Barnums and a hundred Panuzios in attendance—perhaps more like the 1926 wedding of Uncle John and Aunt Francesca than the modish sixties and seventies weddings of many of their friends. “This is the woman,” Johnny had often laughingly introduced her, “who turned me around. Before we met I was tuning in, turning on, dropping out. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” Difficulties or not—Johnny caught himself grinding his teeth—she still is.