Imagining a Life

My grandfather was a mailman in Brooklyn. He wore long sleeves and pants, even in the summer. My aunt—only a few years older than me—whispered that it was because of the scars. He’d been in a fire when he was a boy, a devastating blaze that killed his family and left him disfigured. He never spoke of it; I never asked. Even as a little girl, I understood that mine was a family of secrets.

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As old age loosened Grandpa’s tongue, though, bits of information slipped out: his great-grandmother—his Nonna—had been there. His brothers, too. There had been a leap or a fall from a third-floor window. A heroic fireman caught Grandpa mid-air and rushed him to the hospital. Grandpa’s Uncle Vito, a doctor who’d served in the First Great War, was furious that the boy’s third-degree burns had been wrapped with gauze and stormed into the hospital. Vito rushed his nephew to his Bushwick brownstone, where he filled a bathtub with olive oil and painstakingly removed the bandages that had already begun to adhere to the boy’s wrecked skin.

 

Grandpa lived until he was ninety-seven. By then, I was immersed in a career as a political scientist and lawyer, writing about social movements and inequality. One day—probably a day I should have been researching the latest court decisions about employment law or privacy rights—I went to the New York Times archives and typed in FIRE + NEW YORK CITY + 1920s. There were hundreds of results. Thousands dead in fires all over the city.

 

Buried in that heap of results, though, was the fire.

 

"20 DEAD, TRAPPED IN TENEMENT BLAZE ON UPPER EAST SIDE," the headline screamed. A huge conflagration had wiped out almost every member of the three families that lived on the third floor: the Silvers and the Sugarmans—twenty-one dead, mourned for months afterward by the city’s Jewish community—and the Ingleses, my grandfather’s family. Among the Inglese dead were my grandfather’s Nonna, aged 85; his little brothers, Tony (age 9) and Eugene (7); and someone named Mattia, aged 30. Conspicuously absent were his parents, Caterina and Bartolomeo.

 

My grandfather had never mentioned his Aunt Mattia. But autopsy reports revealed that her body had been found in the cellar, beside the boys, suggesting they’d been in the same room when the building imploded. I was left wondering if my grandfather’s memory of falling or being pushed out the window—the act that saved his life—had something to do with this woman.

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Maybe Aunt Mattia had only enough time to get my grandfather (the oldest of the boys) out that window before the terrible collapse. Maybe she had saved my grandfather’s life, long before the fireman or Vito with his bathtub full of olive oil.

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The Times article should have been enough. It answered so many of the questions I’d been carrying around almost my whole life. There had been a fire. Scars. A great-grandmother and two little brothers. There’d been a fireman. And so much death. Grandpa had survived, however scarred he was on the outside and the inside.

 

But there were new questions. Where were Caterina and Bartolomeo? What about my grandfather’s grandparents? His grandfather had been designated the head of the household in the 1920 census, along with his wife, Maria. And why had Grandpa never mentioned his Aunt Mattia—his mother’s sister—who appeared to have been his caregiver?

 

So I did what I do when I’m trying to make sense of something: I went to the “stacks”—i.e., I started doing research. The Ellis Island Passenger Arrival Lists. The New York City Wedding, Birth, and Death Records. In time, more newspaper articles emerged, this time from the smaller papers, including the Italian-language periodical Il Progresso. Later, I turned to the Birth and Death Registry housed in the Town Hall of a tiny Sicilian village.

 

As I delved deeper, more questions arose. Antonino was listed in the 1920 Census, but he was absent from the household in the 1910 report. Instead, Maria was head of household. Perhaps he’d returned to Sicily? People did that all the time. But there was no record of him reentering the United States. So I kept looking. Eventually, I found him in a place I never expected: the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta.

 

My hands trembled when I opened the envelope from the National Archives. Inside was a copy of Antonino’s prison records and his picture. His close-set eyes, the shape of his chin—he looked like my grandfather and one of my brothers. He was fifty-four years old, convicted of extortion. Numerous entries from the prison doctor revealed that he’d suffered from gastritis, eczema, and a case of the grippe. There had been habeas corpus petitions, character witnesses, and requests for an early release. All of his requests were denied. He served his full three-year term.

 

On Thanksgiving Day soon after, I excitedly laid the photograph and prison records before my family.

 

“You’re not going to write about this,” one family member said, sneering.

 

Another chimed in that it was in the past. There was no reason to drag the family name through the mud, though the Inglese line had long since died out.

 

I felt embarrassed, even ashamed. My grandfather had gone to his grave without breathing a word of this to any of us. Who was I to divulge such a closely-guarded family secret?

 

Still, I kept writing, hewing to the facts I knew or could readily extrapolate. Writing dispassionately, like a good social scientist. My first draft was seven hundred pages, with three protagonists: my great-great-grandfather, Antonino; my great-great-grandaunt, Mattia; and my grandfather, Sebastian. I workshopped the book, had it professionally edited, and rewrote it, over and over, trying to figure out who these people were and what they wanted.

 

Nino was easy: he was the son of a fading Sicilian noble family, then a notorious criminal and fellow inmate of Carlo Ponzi, the famed pyramid schemer.

 

Sebastian, too, was knowable. He was my grandfather. He might have kept quiet about that fateful fire, but there were other stories he told: about going on house calls with his Uncle Vito; about his decision not to pursue medicine and to marry instead, much to his uncle’s great disappointment; about his stint during WWII as an Italian translator for the Department of Justice, gathering information to deport or detain people of Italian ancestry.

 

Nino and Sebastian were easy because I understood the context of their lives. They were out there, doing things. There were Immigration Records, Draft Cards, Marriage Indexes, Voter Lists, and Prison Rolls. Evidence of what their lives had been.

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But Mattia was silent. Invisible. The only trail she left was in her autopsy report. She’d been in that room with my grandfather and his brothers as the fire crept up the walls, making what must have been the most important decision of her life: staying true to the promise I imagined she’d made to her sister Caterina on her deathbed, seeing these children through to adulthood.

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The fire loomed so large that it was hard to imagine who Mattia—Mimi, to me by now, after Puccini’s doomed heroine in La Bohème—had been before. What had she wanted before that obligation to her sister landed her in that room with the terrifying smoke cloud billowing overhead?

 

What could she have wanted? The eldest daughter of a fading Sicilian dynasty? Immigrant to the mean streets of Harlem? Struggling to stay alive despite the constant danger of terrible diseases like tuberculosis, which ravaged the wealthy and poor alike? Could Mimi have wanted more than she’d ended up with? Doubtless, yes. Could I imagine a scenario for her that would be probable or even likely? That’s where things got difficult. And interesting.

 

Because there were few records, I was free to imagine Mimi’s life—what she might have wanted, though she was constrained first by the Sicilian tradition of sequestering noble girls and later by the conditions of immigrant life in New York City.

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After a long time—through the inevitable changes and losses in my own life—it came to me. What Mimi wanted was what we all want: a chance for a life of her own. Dreams of her own. Something to live for. A person to be if she hadn’t sacrificed herself on the altar of family obligation.

 

Many women (and men, too) feel burdened by obligations to their family of origin or the family they choose or end up with. Some of us struggle mightily under the weight. We look forward to the time we’ll be free, only to discover that the future saddles us with other obligations—ones imposed by children, aging parents, and infirm partners.

 

Still, I asked myself what Mimi would have wanted. Who she would have been had she not died that terrible night. Or if her sister hadn’t perished from a botched abortion, another family secret revealed by a beloved aunt who wanted to make sure I got that piece of the family history right.

 

The trail she left was faint. The eldest daughter of a bastard, and a bastard herself until, at the age of 12, she witnessed her Nonna come forward and claim her father Nino as the baby she’d abandoned to the orphan’s wheel more than forty years before. A father who was caught between two worlds: accepted neither by the nobility nor the increasingly powerful mafiusi. A man desperate to prove himself and likely willing to do whatever it took to make his way in the world. The kind of man who didn’t necessarily buy, hook, line, and sinker, the view that his daughter would be silent and invisible. A father like that could open doors. Make the impossible possible.

 

So I gave Mimi something of her own—her art. At first, maybe she created beautiful needlework or painted teacups: both acceptable outlets for the female domestic arts. Then, just when Mimi was comfortable, I forced her to come face-to-face with what it would mean to lose that thing that lit her up inside. When her family demanded she give it up, I made her face the quandary so many of us face: how to remain singularly herself in the face of sometimes overwhelming pressure to conform.

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In the end, this is the challenge for each of us: how to remain in community, caring for those we love while holding a place for ourselves. A room of one’s own, as important now as when Virginia Woolf coined the term almost a hundred years ago.

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A place to think. To dream. To consider why each of us is here and what that small voice inside still whispers, and maybe, occasionally, demands, despite all the twists and turns life takes. This was the challenge I set for Mimi. Perhaps for myself, too. Because as the years have passed, my stories have helped me navigate a world that has at times been unrecognizable. They’ve helped me be brave, and step into myself. To live my own life, unapologetically and fully. I could do this only because Mimi forged the path. For this, I am grateful.