Family Photos

Why is this task so difficult? My mother. The words come

haltingly; their very sound is a muffled moan within me. My

mother. For me, so much pain seems to flow from those two words.

My sense of the sorrowful nature of life. My troubled

relationships with women. My anxieties and disappointments. My

fear of going crazy. I don't mean that I blame my mother for all

of the difficulties of my life, but my conception of her--the

mother I carry with me, seems to have been weighted with a heavy

negative load. I want to try to get some perspective on this--

get some fuller understanding of who my mother was and how she

differs from the mother I carry with me.

Lately I have become more and more aware of what a large

psychic presence my mother has been throughout my life. As I

write this she's been dead nearly twenty five years, but still

she looms large above my life's landscape--in all of her aspects,

for I have come to know her differently than I knew her as a

child; I have come to discover the various faces of woman within

her--faces she did not show me as I was growing up, but which

have emerged as my own knowledge of life deepens, as the distance

from my childhood widens, as she becomes a more realistic, less

iconic presence.

To start with particulars: I was born on July 13, 1938 to

Stephen and Nina Moramarco in St Mary's Hospital in Brooklyn, New

York. My parents were immigrants to this country from a small

village in Southern Italy called Gravina di Puglia. My father

immigrated first as a teenager with one of his brothers. They

worked as ice deliverers and after he saved some money, he

returned to Italy to marry my mother and bring her with him to

the new world. On a recent visit to Gravina I learned more about

my father and mother's courtship from my father's sole surviving

sister. She told me that my mother's family, the Toriellos, were

aristocratic, condescending, and autocratic. They were among the

town's "nobility" and absolutely forbade my mother to have

anything to do with my father, who came from peasant stock and

lived on the wrong side of the tracks. My aunt remembered being

the guardian of my mother's "hope chest" a trunkful of linens,

tablecloths, and towels that prospective brides accumulated in

those days because my mother could not keep it in her own house

for fear her family would discover it. So theirs was a West Side

Story sort of a romance, and when my father left for America, the

Toriellos thought they were rid of him, only to be absolutely

nonplussed when he returned to elope with his darling and take

her back with him 4000 miles across the sea. They settled in

Brooklyn; my father and his brother started an ice delivery

business and the two bought brownstone homes one block apart from

one another. My father and mother started a family; a first son,

Federico (Fred), born around 1917, then three daughters in fairly

rapid succession: Lucretia, Nicolette, Philomena. (These births

occurred after my father returned from fighting in World War I).

Around 1925, in the midst of the Jazz Age, tragedy strikes. The

eight year old Fred is hit by an automobile and killed. My

mother's life is shattered--my family is stricken. It is a blow

that resonates throughout the lives of all of my sisters as well.

(I'm just realizing--at this late date--how much my sisters'

lives must have been affected by this event---I never discussed

it with them). And although I never knew the brother they always

referred to as "the First Fred," he has resonated through my life

as well. A few years ago, for the first time I wrote about him, a

short prose poem that describes his presence in my psyche:

The First Fred

I can see him in the large oval photograph above my bed. I am

eight years old, looking up at the brother I never knew, the

"first" Fred killed by a rare auto in a country with few of them,

thirteen years before I was born. The picture is sepia, under

convex glass. He wears a sailor suit, a ribbon dangling at the

collar. He looks like me and there are pictures of me that might

be mistaken for him. But they are smaller, less importantly

positioned. His is an icon, an altarpiece, and on Palm Sunday my

mother always slides a sliver of palm between the glass and its

frame, a sacred gesture of her enduring grief. At eight, I am

also hit by a car, my mother hysterical, pushing her toward the

edge of her permanent madness. She has three daughters, but her

sons seem doomed by the machinery of the twentieth century. I

survive, the only reminder, a forehead scar tracing its indelible

mark on my skin. My mother is never the same to me. Jesu,

Giuseppe, e Maria, she recites daily like a litany in the days

and nights and weeks and months and years that follow until she

is in and out of hospitals with Jesus, Joseph, and mary offering

even less consolation. Suddenly all this makes a piece of my life-

-father and mother long dead, two of my three sisters dead also,

the other lost in a madhouse--and my surviving soul drifting more

and more loosely in the colossal free-floating everywhere of the

universe. Closer to the first Fred everyday.

But the mother in that poem I have avoided writing about

except for a mention here or there--never looking at her head on,

never really knowing her, never understanding the deep "whys" of

her sadness and grief. She appears in a short poem I wrote about

my family--a villanelle that I constructed trying to make order

of the shadows that dissected an old family picture that was

given to me by my brother-in-law after my sister Nicky's death

(Fig.1). Let me include both the picture and the villanelle here

so you can see the family entire, as I knew it while I was

growing up:

The Mother I Carry With Me