Silenced
by
Jennifer Reres
For my Grandma, Rosemarie
I hear you, I see you
I'm not taking him, Dottie said. She had been her father's favorite. Dottie didn’t feel the same – and she hadn’t seen him in 30 years.
My great grandmother, Nicoletta, lived on Carroll Street before she was wooed by Joseph, a man who drank too much. For this reason, and many others, Joseph is referred to in our family as “The Wolf.”
After the wedding, Joseph moved Nicoletta to the Bronx, and then the babies arrived: Joseph Jr., Anthony, Orlando, Anna, Betty, Pauline, Dottie, and finally, my grandmother Rosemarie on May 12, 1926, who everyone called Rosie. The Wolf hid and transported bottles any way he could during Prohibition, involving his children as agents of his ploys. My grandmother pushed them in her baby doll carriage, for instance, and he made wine at home. There was hardly enough money for her father's two loves–alcohol and his children–and like many families of yore, the eight siblings went without because of their father's weakness. They were also subject to his lashes in drunken rages.
Anna, the oldest of the sisters, and closest to my grandma, was often summoned to the illicit wine cellar. She had lost count. At her breaking point, Anna refused to succumb to this fate. If you touch me again, I'll slit your throat, she said to her father. It never happened again. To her, anyway.
When Rosie was little, she always went to church with her mother. They were women of faith, yes, but even then, my grandmother knew she was safe, at least for an hour, from the hands of her father and older brothers. This safety was shattered when Nicoletta died. My grandmother was 10. The eight siblings, all older, scattered to the wind. We'll come back for you, they assured her. Rosie went to the orphanage at Mother Cabrini at age 10 and lived there until she graduated at 18.
Her sister Anna found Rosie a job as a secretary where she worked at the time, a prosthetics company. Rosie was trying to gain her footing after what seemed like a lifetime at the orphanage. She was ready to start fresh. In the company cafeteria, Rosie met Tommy, one of the engineers. Dark jet black hair combed back, smiling eyes, charming, kind. Rosie came to work without her lunch that day. Tommy shared half his sandwich. They were together for the next five decades.
As a teenager, Tommy immigrated from Mezzojuso, Palermo in Sicily with his father, John. His mother Jenny and sisters Rosa and Dora remained behind in Sicily until they settled. At school, he was beaten for his broken English and for any trace of dirt under his nails. He joined the U.S. Navy at age 17, lying about his age. As a young man, after the war, he worked in a grocery store in the East Village. He took engineering classes at Pratt and opened up an electronic shop in East Harlem with his buddy. He put his sisters through college.
When Rosie and Tommy were married, he bought a house in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, steps from St. Ephrem’s Roman Catholic Church. The older folks recounted to the newlyweds the cornfields where homes had sprung up. Tommy, who was handy, built that three floor yellow brick house from the ground up. He planted the garden and wired the lighting to his liking. He created the doctor's office on the ground floor. The Greek doctor who set up shop there would later become one of his best friends. During their childhood, my grandparents would run my mom and aunt downstairs in an emergency for the doctor to take a look.
For most of their time in the house, they lived on the top floor. It was a simple, but beautiful, sun lit apartment. It smelled of Italian cooking and the breeze would move chimes in the window. Bocelli and Sinatra often played. On the porch, my grandfather hung the American flag each day and took it in each evening. On long, warm summer evenings, Rosie spotted passersby and shouted to them: How is Tony doing? Are you coming from Mass?
Tommy, a Navy veteran and back on solid ground, never liked to leave home. At the dining room table, Tommy had his large black plastic frames and a copy of the Daily News. He wanted to see what the Mets were up to. He had a handheld black radio tuned to the game. There was a plaque on the left side of the hutch commending his years of service to the MTA. To the right, there were photos of the destroyer he was deployed on as a sailor. The windows looked out onto other Dyker Heights homes, with the Verrazano Bridge glowing in the distance.
Rosie also settled into married life. She raised her children, Janet and Marie, who went to St. Ephrem School. They groaned when they arrived to a feast of antipasto and Sunday gravy with meatballs, sausage, and hard boiled eggs – and their grammar school teacher, Sr. Concetta, who was prone to throwing erasers, striking with a ruler, and administering punishment to the entire class would appear in their sacred place, home. Rosie was leader of their Brownie troop when they were children and volunteered for charity fundraisers at Fontbonne Hall Academy, the all-girls Catholic high school.
Rosie also loved nature, traveling, and her friends. She was often bouncing around, walking the neighborhood, popping into the shops on 5th Avenue or grabbing lunch at Skinflint’s. She belonged to many social clubs, bowling, pottery, rosary society, whatever the other stay-at-home moms and her friends were doing at the time. And she loved her food, a little too much. Rosie brought the gallon of ice cream to the couch as she watched General Hospital and Oprah. She rotated through Weight Watchers and other diets throughout most of her adult life.
Rosie also always wrote in her journals–what was happening that day or what had happened long ago. Even with her home, her husband, and her family, Rosie was a woman who had been through a lot. Rosie carried this with her and it made her quite a firecracker. Some would say, difficult. But she held her own at home, at church, and in the neighborhood. Not known to back down from a fight, she pummeled into adulthood with raised fists.
After her mother had died, Rosie's father had returned to Italy and remarried, living another life. Thirty years later, he came back to New York, an old man, requesting to live with one of his eight children. All the eight siblings had convened for a family meeting at Anna and Bill's house. I'm not taking him, said Orlando who everyone called Jill. His father, aside from the beatings, had denied him the $5 fee to graduate from high school. Jill never did get his diploma.
Well, said Rosie, I'm going on Donahue and telling everyone what a horrible family we really are. I have the show date and everything. The siblings were stunned into silence.
Anna, the older sister-in-charge, growled, I'll punch your teeth to the back of your throat.
At that very moment, their elderly father emerged from a taxi, suitcase in hand, in front of Anna and Bill's house.
Everyone, we decided we'll take dad, Anna said calmly. A collective sigh of relief.
Rosie never did go on Donahue. Families didn't talk about such things in public, let alone on a talk show. When I was growing up, my grandma told me, Children are seen, not heard. Of course, she let me be a chatterbox, as she naturally was too, but I knew, even then, that's how she was raised.
In the end, at the nursing home, there was a light of recognition in grandma’s eyes when we visited. She had forgotten all of her words, all of our names, but one. She called everyone–her family, the staff–Anna. Anna, who had abandoned her as an orphan and feuded with her, but also loved her fiercely like no one else. Rosie remembered the comfort and the shelter of her older sister. Not the hard times, not the dark times.
Not the time when Rosie had fought to tell her story and was silenced.
No more.
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