Sunday in Boston With Gnocchi

In my pale blue, cotton flannel pajamas and cotton socks, I could ice skate the polished hardwood floors, around the sides of the oriental rugs. It was very early, but I didn’t pay attention to clocks. I only remember that my grandmother’s large third floor flat on a bluff overlooking a frozen Mystic River in Somerville, Massachusetts was quiet, with winter sun slanting under pulled shades and between drapes, and it seemed magical.

I could skate my stocking feet along the side of the runner down the hall past the bedrooms of my mother and aunt Nina, her elder sister who really ran the family, not my grandmother.

But my grandmother – Nonna Rosa, we called her – had been out of bed already for hours. The hallway led to bathrooms on one side, and past sliding double doors that opened into a dining room, that was closed at the moment. At the far end of the long hallway, was a swinging door that led into Nonna’s large, generous kitchen.

I could see the light under the door and I knew Nonna was up and already cooking for the big Sunday, Alessandrini family dinner, with which I was already familiar…I pushed the swinging door open and walked through to see my Nonna chopping onions on a big wooden block. She looked up at me and beamed, and greeted me in Italian. I answered in Italian, which somehow, I could speak, but don’t remember how.

Today, I remember this as in a dream in which one suddenly speaks in a foreign tongue he’d never heard before…I didn’t speak Italian to my parents, only English. It was as if my fluency in Italian was a secret I shared only with my grandmother, who spoke, actually, in the playful, modulated dialect of her native Rome…

She put the chopped onions into a large, black, cast iron skillet atop the stove and sautéed it in olive oil. I wandered out onto a glassed in sun porch that led off from the kitchen and looked out onto the towering, green-painted iron of the Mystic River bridge with ships passing underneath looking like toys,

A hinged storm window opened onto a small section of roof that covered the downstairs sun deck…the small area was littered with crusts of stale, white Italian bread. The work of my Nonna who loved feeding the blackbirds and sparrows to endured the winter here each year.

I found more bread on a table and threw it out the window to help in the feeding. “Poveracci, poor things, had hava tough time all-a winter,” she would say in her broken English and tossed them pieces of bread. The birds would show up almost immediately.

I was too young to realize that her affinity with wintering birds stemmed form more than a few hard cold winters she’d endured working at a Boston shoe factory supporting four kids, during the just-past, Great Depression, lucking to have any job at all. Things were better now – a little.

As i remember everyone saying, "There's a war on." I wasn't sure what that really meant except that it was something all the adult took very seriously with grim, sometimes frightened, often scared looks on their faces. It also meant a couple of uncles now were gone away and showed up on holidays wearing khaki uniforms with brass buttons and some medals.

Mostly it meant one of my uncles who was in the service, gave me a toy "Flying Tiger" tiny fighter plane with a snarly pointy toothed face painted on its nose, giving it a comic ferocity. It became my favorite toy and i “flew” it everywhere, by holding it up and making propeller noises with my mouth…The little plan was there where I’d left it the day before, on a window sill.

I picked it up and flew it along the windows, silhouetted in early morning sun as it began to rise, I put it in diving mode, swooping along the linoleum and strafed my grandmother’s fuzzy slippers.

Then, buzzing with my pursed lips, I climbed to high altitude along he side of the stove. It was a gigantic cooking stove with one half in black cast iron with a furnace to burn wood or coal, a flat top with flat round tops that could be lifted off with a special long-handled tool that fitted a slot in the round stove top unit, to reveal flames leaving inside…A wide, metal smoke stack ran from the back of the stove up through the ceiling. The other half was a more conventional gas stove with four burners and an oven.

The experience hangs dreamlike and vivid, preserved perfectly in my consciousness from scores of years past. The stove, the quiet of the kitchen the delicious smells of herbs, fresh garlic, sauted garlic and onions blending and filling the warm kitchen as the slanting morning sunlight brightened, fullfiling the promise the coming Sunday celebration.

It seemed a ritual that had come down to us thorugh the ages, from grandmas past and would always be held. Yet I didn't know that our many-course, feast that would be served, 2 p.m. to a dozen or so family members and friends, laughing, exchanging stories, teasing and enjoying music of their own making represented an era coming to a close as this close-knit, extended family with grow more and more affluent in the coming postwar period and spread out into suburbs and across the continent, thinning their connections accordingly.

My grandmother now was rolling out dough on a large table…stopping every few moments to check things on the stove. Instead of flattening out the dough as she usually did to make noodles, she rolled the dough lengthwise into long cylindrical tubes.

Then she cut the tubes into fat, little, equal, inch-long pieces. These were to be her fabled gnocchi. My job was to make a dent in each doughy gnocchi. This produced a little indentation as the gnocchi. When the gnocchi were dried, cooked and served, these little indentations would catch sauce and ground meat of the ragout sauce, along with the grated Parmesan cheese that would be sprinkled on each dish as it is served.

I remember making those dents as one of the happiest times of my life. Maybe my five-year-old finger wasn’t exactly sanitized, but the gnocchi would be boiled anyway. And they were plump, sweet, delightful when she served them covered with the robust, aromatic tomato sauce she sautéed and simmered for hours with pork, and beef and that tasted like you thought you'd dreamed it, and that I've tried to duplicate for decades and still only approached. Then sprinkle well with freshly grated Reggiano Parmiggiano cheese -- something you could never buy in anything but well-aged golden wedges sliced from the wheel by an Italian deli clerk in those days.

                                                                                                        

Cat a la Carte

In spite of naming me after my grandfather, and reminding me constantly that I the first-born of my generation on both sides of my parents' extended Italian families in Boston, I felt like an exotic from the earliest days I could remember. Not that I knew what the word meant botanically. I just knew I wasn’t a native plant, not in my family. and not in the gardens and sidewalks beyond our front door where our elegantly curved residential street led into broad Commonwealth Avenue where the trolley ran to downtown Boston.

I had no rationale for this feeling of apartness. No feeling of hostility from anyone. But I was the only child in each household where I found myself. Few couples were having children in that period since I had been born at the end of the Great Depression and ran about as a tot at the World War II broke out all over the world and became everyone’s preoccupation.

Besides, back then, children weren’t considered something of a breed all their own, little savages, not so much human, but cute little, human-like creatures all their own to be kept in place until ready for adulthood. Disney had made three of its first classic animated films – Snow White, Bambi and Pinocchio – plus Mickey cartoons, but hadn’t turned childhood into a multibillion-dollar industry yet.

There was no Dr. Spock to guide parents – struggling out of the Depression anyway – and we were Catholic in name, but not every Sunday, barely into the New Testament and certainly not into the tight-lipped sternness of the Old Testament about anything. Being Catholic signified identity, not so much Revelation. Being Italians who considered themselves of the high-culture, secular, worldly variety, both my father’s affluent family and my mother’s more artistic family looked at priests largely as social climbers not to be trusted much, and religiosity a hallmark of the toiling masses of “caffoni,” those half-literate country folk who made up the majority of fellow Italians who had made it to the land of the free and lived in places like South Boston and Jersey.

I wasn’t aware of any of this, of course, until many years later in retrospect. But looking back on these two families --- Tosi and Alessandrini, each patrician in its own way, one austere and affluent, the other warm and individualistic – I realize that despite their strained relations and contrasting attitudes about money – they had the one thing in common of considering themselves elite. They were different and raised me as “different,” and I felt different even from them.

Other accidents of history contributed to this rarified family atmosphere that I naively considered normal and universal at the time. It was a good time to be a child, really – though in some ways neglected. One didn’t “raise” children anymore than one “raised” lawns. At least that was the ethos of these two diverging, distinct Italian families, neither one of which was cozy with the other.

Being this little interplanetary visitor, it fell to me to play the expected role of prankster to indulgent grandparents, aunts, uncles – mercilessly – in the process, getting away with murder from my too-young parents knowing they hesitated to come down hard on this adorable little bratty puppy who make their elders laugh and shake their heads.

The Tosi house at 3 Wallingford Road in Brighton near Boston College, a large, two-story urban, red brick New England townhouse, housed a live-in maid and cook named Anna, a tiny, energetic, hunchback woman who had been devoted to my grandmother Luisa Tosi for many years back before I was born.

She blended right in with witches good and bad of my fairy tales and, at age four, i remember having nothing else to do sometimes, i trailed her around the place talking and singing nonsensical songs while she went about her chores and i mimicked my grandmother giving her instructions in half-English, half-Italian to see if i could get her to crack up irreverently.

Poor old Anna put up with my pranks as well as my noise and general misbehavior. My grandmother's beloved black cat, Nero, would trot up and meow for a treat whenever Anna opened the refrigerator door. Anna wasn't supposed to be feeding Nero treats all the time, but I was on her side. Why not, I remember thinking, put Nero inside the refrigerator for a while so he could partake of as many treats as he wanted, especially a nice piece of leftover baked Boston Scrod that happened to be on the bottom shelf.

When Anna went down to the laundry room in the cellar, i cracked the refrigerator door, summoning Nero. I uncovered the backed Scrod, shiny white, sprinkled with bits of parsley, herbs and garlic, buttery and lemony, picked off a piece of the fillet to lure Nero in closer, then let the cat get up on its hind legs to have another bite.

Nero was a large, shorthair, cat with green eyes and a shiny coat, almost too heavy for my little four-year-old self to lift. But from this position it was easy to give him a little encouraging lift into the large bottom shelf space of the refrigerator while he purred and licked at the fish fillet. One step back and i swung the big door shut silently. Click. Oh, did that light stay on when the door closed? I didn't know. No matter, I'd heard that cats could see in the dark.

Now i wandered around the house, looking at the big grandfather clock in the hallway, pondering whether or not to open the glass door, get up on my tiptoes and change the time on it. Instead, i think i went upstairs several times to slide down the fat, curving tubular mahogany banister.

Through the sliding polished wooden doors of the conservatory at the front of the first floor, I could hear my grandmother, Luisa, playing the baby grand and coaching her last student of the day -- a reedy tenor - through his scales and exercises.

The young, rotund student came out, carrying his music in a brief case, took his coat and hat from a rack in the atrium and exited the front door, silently, seemingly lost in his lesson. Then my grandmother emerged, cane in hand, giving me a glance and that smile that made me want to do a little gig in front of her.

I followed her back to the kitchen, watching her severely arthritic limp. And how she worked her polished wooden cane work, and imitating her gait slightly, not in mockery, but being the Grand Old Diva myself.

I fixated on her swaying, dark silky dress, her ornate beads, rings, silver and gold bracelets and her gray hair pulled into a large bun atop her head, like the great ladies in those 19th century photos, exposing the richly olive skin on the back of her neck. I puzzled at her thick, almost opaque silk stockings and her polished, lace up shoes, one medium heel longer than the other to compensate for the list caused by an old back and hip injury sustained, i had heard, in an onstage accident during rehearsal at the Teatro Colon opera house in Buenos Aires, mysterious land of gauchos where my father had been born that i liked to gaze at on the big globe in my grandfather's stud

I caught the beguiling musky lavender scent of her perfume, and she pulled me along like a siren does a sailor with her always placed, rich, mezzo voice that seemed to turn her everyday talking in to recitative between opera arias. She and Anna didn't look or act like anyone else I saw, and seem to me even now as much storybook incarnations as real.

"Ai, beng, beng, ti sento li, birrichino," she'd say in semi-Bolognese dialect, hearing me behind her, ("Ah ha, I hear you back there, little dickens...”)

Each weekday afternoon at this time, she would go to the kitchen, wash her hands in the utility sink next to the pantry, and summon Anna to organize preparations for dinner. I came through the swinging kitchen door and sidled into the pantry for a good view of the proceeding. I'd half forgotten about the cat.

Then pandemonium! My grandmother opened the refrigerator door for a look at the fish and other provisions. Out shot Nero like a jet-black cannon ball, screeching, sending half the contents of the refrigerator clattering out onto the floor with him.

My grandmother's full-throated, window-rattling scream blended with the Anna's shrill, hair-raising screech. I counter-pointed them with my own factory-whistle squeal, and hysterical high-pitched laughter as a ran away a step behind the cat. Neither my grandmother with her limp nor the hunchbacked Anna, of course could ever catch either one of us.

My father was on a sales trip up in Maine and my mother was out buying clothes downtown with her sister. It was left to my grandfather, Umberto, after whom I was named, to call me on the carpet in his study when he returned at 5 on the dot from his Back Bay, Tosi Trading Company office.

"Birrichino," he stared out, as i stood there in the mellow light next to the big globe. He lit a cigar and as always gave me the cigar ring to put on my finger as he shook out the kitchen match and dropped it into the massive amber-glass ashtray on his dark wooden desk. He smiled, and petted Nero, curled up purring on his lap. "I should give you a big spanking," he said.

I wasn't sure I knew what a spanking was, except what I’d see every Sunday in the final panel of the Katzenjammer Kids comic strip on the front page of the Sunday funnies that he would read to me. It showed either the Katzejammer Kids or their arch-enemy, Rollo, yelling as the guardian, the rotund, bearded Captain, puts them over his knee and smacks them soundly.

It always seemed some strange Sunday funnies ritual, performed by Germans or Dutch, or mainly those white bread people that everyone around me growing up almost exclusively with Italians and a few Jews, called simply, "Americans," or "gli Americani."

(Even though everyone was pro-American, patriotic and supportive of the WWII effort, with two of my uncles and several cousins overseas in the military.). Nobody used hyphenated ethnic designations back then. You were Irish, Italian, Mexican, black, Polish, Greek, Jew... or, in less polite company the appropriate pejorative term.

Instead of a spanking, I learned about metabolism. Cats, people and other mammals breath air, my grandfather told me. Our lungs take the oxygen from the air.

“What is oxygen?” I asked.

“Part of the air,” he said and breathed in deeply. I followed suit, filling my small chest. Then in breathed out and I copied him. We breathed in and out for a while in unison. He cracked a smile.

“Look. If Nero had to stay in the refrigerator for too long, he would use up all the air. He could die,” he said seriously. “The same thing could happen to you if you ever got inside one. So, my little birricchino, you must promise never to put another cat in a refrigerator, or a dog, or get I one yourself. Promise?”

I pictured a dead furry, frozen black Nero inside the refrigerator. “But the kitty didn’t die.” I said.

“No, but,” he switched to Italian, “non e una cosa bella, un gatto ghiacciato,” he laughed. (“A frozen cat isn’t a pretty thing,”)

Little Nino laughed at the thought.That's the way I remember the witty, elegant, gentile old man. My mother had another take, also laughing, privately, I overheard her more than once offering that my grandmother, Luisa, had hired and kept on Anna, not just because of her dilligence, but because she held no attraction for the old rue's roving eye. My mother should have know, having attested fairly often of having to step lively to keep from his pinching her on the ass when nobody was looking.

After his mini-lecture, I followed my grandfather upstairs and messed about while he washed up and changed for dinner. My grandmother actually rang a real, brass dinner bell when it was ready. "A tavola, a tovala," she would call out and you better stop what you were doing and come right to the table in the dining room, set with cloth napkins, silver and good china, with candles lit and a large, crystal bowl of fresh fruit in the middle that would provide us the normal weekday dessert with a plate of provolone and maybe asagio cheeses.

First came a clear chicken or beef minestrone with pastina, then the main courses. Then the fruit and cheeses washed down with a moderately decent dry wine, more often red than white. And along with my glass of milk, i would get a wine glass, filled with cool water, topped off by just enough of the wine to color it, make it slightly bitter and give it the bouquet of the wine. They never said grace, being too secular for that.

My mother showed up and joined us and the adults discussed news of the day, telling me occasionally, to finish my vegetables and not noticing that i was flicking bits of chicken down under the table, where Nero prowled like a panther.