Dora's Memoir

When Dora answered the doorbell, Mrs. Iannucci and her old maid daughter already sat on the front porch of their row house across the street. They nodded good evening as they cooled themselves with the paper fans that advertised Bertucci Olive Oil. Dora had one of those fans, too, and the pretty lady on the back reminded her of her mother in the photograph sitting on her father’s dresser.

“C’e permesso?” the gentleman at the door asked, touching fingers to the brim of his straw hat and bowing slightly down at her.

Dora hated when her parents’ friends spoke to her in Italian. She never knew which language to answer in. So, she simply opened the door wider to allow the gentleman to enter and hid all but one eye behind it. The gentleman was one of the two or three who stopped by each night to pick up her father on the way to the tavern. She thought this one was Signor’ Bertolini, but she wasn’t sure.

“Fa caldo, sta’ sera,”he commented, removing the hat, but in his perfectly pressed white suit and bow tie, his words were the only deference paid to the heat.

Dora felt ashamed that the house, which would normally be opened to the night breezes by now, remained a dark oven and also that her mother couldn’t get the twins to stop screaming from upstairs.Still, she had no choice but to whisper“Prego,” down at the floor and gesture her small, chubby hand toward the sofa.

“Grazie,” the gentleman thanked her with a squeezed smile. He sat straight backed on the very edge of the sofa, placing the hat carefully on his knees, then acknowledged the bawling twins with a wince toward the upstairs.

“Prickly heat,” Dora explained. She used the same accented English in which her mother described the condition. “E i denti,”she added and pointed to her teeth.

“Bambini,”he sighed, shrugging his shoulders. He winced again as the volume increased but seemed unable to come up with another word on the matter.

Standing there, tunneling her finger into the corkscrew of her curl and rocking onto the outside of her scuffed shoes, Dora wondered when her father would come down to rescue her. Every other night, he was ready and waiting when his friends came to call, having just turned off the news program on the radio. Then, as they left for the corner tavern, they might talk about Rosa Velt or “quel diavolo, Mussolini.”

Dora liked to hear the men discuss Rosa Velt, because they said good things about him and how he helped poor people get work. But when her father called Mussolini a devil it made her mother upset. Father Santini had said that Mussolini was a friend to the Pope, and so sometimes her parents argued about it at dinner. Not one of their arguments where her father yelled or banged the table, but the kind where he shook his head and threw up his hands and smiled after her mother when she turned her back to leave the room. Still, Dora liked it better when, at dinner, her parents talked about the shop where her father made beautiful fur coats for women who were rich enough, but not pretty enough, to wear them.

Though, since the twins were born they didn’t talk much at dinner anymore, and tonight everything was so mixed up and backwards that her father hadn’t even listened to the radio. He was already angry when he sat down to dinner because it hadn’t been on the table as soon as he arrived home from work, and he had been forced to read the newspaper before dinner instead of after. It was one of those nights when he didn’t smile at Dora under the waxed points of his mustache. Instead, he stared across the table at her mother, who sat with a twin bawling in each arm, escaped strands hanging in all directions from her pinned back hair, and one thin thread holding the button that no longer closed over her breast. His lips squeezed together, his nostrils flared, and his eyes looked like marbles. Dora wasn’t surprised when he banged the table so that meatballs bounced on her plate and complained that he could never eat in peace anymore, but she jumped anyway. And when he demanded that the “screeching demons” be removed from his sight, she wasn’t surprised that her mother obeyed. She was surprised, though, when her mother screamed back that, if he only gave her some peace, there wouldn’t be any screaming babies, and she didn’t exhale until her mother crossed herself and sent the necessary retraction to the Virgin Mary. Then, with her mother gone, Dora had been left with her stiffly silent father, trying very hard not to slurp her spaghetti, which was another thing that made him bang the table.

After her father left the table, and the smell of his stogie drifted through the screen door, Dora wondered what she should do next. She thought, perhaps, that she should clean up, but she had never done more than trail after her mother, carrying one dish at a time, and she had never, ever, been allowed to lift the heavy bowls. So, she sat there making patterns in the leftover gravy with her fork, and when she heard the screen door slam, she stopped and stayed very still and quiet as her father walked by. Lucky for her, he hadn’t seemed to notice her or the dirty dishes. He simply passed on through the dining room and then the living room. He walked past the radio, and up the stairs, and, then, just a short while after, the doorbell rang and she went to answer it. The dirty dishes still sat on the table, but the gentleman could not see them.

Now, the two of them faced each other in the living room, Dora standing but focusing on the scary faces in the patterns of the carpet, and the gentleman sitting straight backed on the sofa, casting his eyes on everything but her. If this were one of her mother’s friends, the woman would be talking to her while they waited. She would say the usual things like how big Dora was getting and how she would be starting school soon and how she had to be careful because her father was sending her to the public school where she would meet Protestant and Jewish children who might try to put bad ideas into her head. And Dora would feel shy and wonder what to say, but not as shy as she felt now with this man who said nothing.

Now and again, they took turns flicking glances at the staircase, and when Dora peeked at the gentleman through her eyelashes, she noticed a few drops of sweat on his forehead. Still, though, he continued to sit very straight, his hands holding the hat perfectly centered on his knees, and did not take out his handkerchief to wipe the drops away.

All day long, the women on the street had called to the children from their porches that it was too hot to run or walk or even sit out on the steps, but it was not until now that Dora felt the heat growing from under her dress and up her neck. It was even more important now to keep her head down. Otherwise, the man would notice when her cheeks, that were now pulsing, became red like a pepper.

But before that happened, her attention was yanked away by a cry from the top of the stairs.

“No, Giuseppe, no. I won’t let you leave the house again tonight. All day long their screams fill my head. I can’t spend each night the same way.”

The gentleman’s back grew even stiffer, and Dora tucked her chin even tighter into her chest, though she peeked sideways at the stairs. She had sometimes overheard her mother complaining to the other women but never to her father and never in such a loud voice and never with one of his gentleman friends sitting right there to hear.
“And what do I do all day?” her father roared from the top of the stairs. “Work to bring food into this house, and when I arrive home, it isn’t even on the table; my wife hasn’t bothered to dress herself properly, and babies screech in my ears. You could be one of those women whose husband has no job. Then I would be at home all day. And you could worry about feeding your children instead of spending one night alone with them.”

He stepped down so Dora saw just his legs at the top of the stairs. Even the crease in his trousers looked angry, and she knew he was tugging at his sleeve, wrestling with his cufflinks, as the Italian curse words tumbled from his lips.

Then she heard her mother again. It wasn’t yelling this time, more like a shriek with no words, and her father barely caught himself on the banister as she pushed passed him on the stairs.

She wore the white silk dressing gown Dora’s father had tailored for her two Christmases ago. It was tied loosely over her baby-thickened waist, and as she descended the stairs, flashes of brown leg alternated with the white cloth. Remembering her mother’s warnings about running down the steps, Dora expected the legs to entangle in the white silk and for her mother to plunge to the floor. But instead, three whole steps from the bottom, she took to the air. Her black hair and white robe flew behind her, and for that moment she looked like the airborne stained glass angels that distracted Dora during Mass. She landed like an angel too, very lightly on one bare foot. Then she spun around and pressing her back against the heavy wooden door, spread her arms full length. Her eyes looked too wide, and one breast, slightly exposed by the movement, revealed itself more with each heaving breath.

When Dora dared to glance at the gentleman, he still sat stiffly, but his eyes, even wider than her mother’s, were fixed on the sight.

“I swear to God, Giuseppe,” her mother’s voice came deep and rasping. “If you leave this house tonight, it will be over my dead body. If I spend one more night alone in this house with those babies, I will kill myself. I swear on the Virgin, Giuseppe, I will kill myself.”

The room fell silent except for her mother’s heavy breaths and the tick ticking of the clock on the mantel. Dora stopped breathing, and even the twins ceased their squalling, as though fearing to call attention to themselves.

Dora’s father had descended to the last step and now stood looking down on her mother. Nothing on him moved, except for one twitching muscle in his cheek, his hairy fingers wrapped white around the railing. The air felt thick around Dora as she stood and watched, wanting to run, but too frightened to move. The gentleman could not move either. Only the pendulum moved as it ticked and ticked and ticked.

Then she saw her father’s hand lift from the railing, and she did take one small step, just enough to send a pleading look toward her mother. But it did no good. She stood like a wooden cross, blocking the door. She did not cry, or say she was sorry, or beg forgiveness. She just looked straight into her husband’s eyes, as though she saw no one else in the room. Her chest rose and fell as air whistled through flared nostrils.

And then, something changed. Her father continued to stare into her mother’s dark eyes, but his body softened, and a faint smile passed over his face as though he’d suddenly discerned the features of an old friend he hadn’t seen in years. He reached up and tugged the end of his tie until the bow flattened out and the black silk strip hung loose around his neck. 
“Va bene, cara mia,” he said in a level, but soft tone, still looking into his wife’s eyes and slipping the tie from under his collar. “I will stay home tonight.” He stretched a hand toward her cheek, but the distance was too great, and so he turned, not even acknowledging the gentleman who stared after him, and walked slowly back up the stairs. The tie hung from his hand like a limp, dead snake.

It wasn’t until he reached the top that her mother’s arms drifted down to her sides, as though the air releasing from Dora’s chest had been what supported them. She watched after her husband. Only now, her breathing was like it always was, and her eyes were their normal size.

The gentleman coughed twice, and Dora’s mother looked at him for the fist time. The hat no longer sat on his knees but was clutched to his chest, the brim curled in his clenched fists.

“Buona sera, Signor’Bertolini,” her mother said with a cordial smile.

“Buona sera,Signora Libertini. I’ll just be going, then.”

“Please send my regards to your wife,” her mother said, spreading her fingers over the opening at the top of her robe. With the other hand she pushed open the door for Signor’ Bertolini to step out. He nodded as he passed, and his eyes rested, for just an instant, on the spaces between her mother’s fingers. Then he stepped onto the porch and dropped the misshapen straw hat onto his head.

Her mother put an arm around Dora and drew her close as they watched the gentleman leave. Dora stood very straight and tall, just like her mother, and she realized that her head came well past her mother’s waist. She was growing bigger, and in a few weeks she would start school and speak English all day long.

Across the street, Mrs. Ianucci and her old maid daughter sat on their darkening porch. Dora’s mother nodded good evening. The night was still quite warm, but there was a fresh breeze. The ladies no longer required their fans.