Marie Taylor, Ink

She was in her mid-20’s when she met him, long past the age that her cousins and girlfriends had married and there was something knowing in the way that she carried herself that said she was no longer a virgin.  She had red, Rita Hayworth hair and the low, sultry voice you got from too many cigarettes. Her nose was too arched for real beauty and her almond-shaped eyes had a yellowish glint that gave her small face a feline look.   Her name was Gina and she worked as a beautician in an Italian beauty shop on the wrong side of the wrong town. 

 He was the youngest of four children and the only son in a first-generation Italian family.  His mother and father were immigrant peasants who never learned to read or write. He had been drafted into the Second World War but due to the incessant prayers of his three sisters and mother had emerged unscathed from the conflict.  Upon returning to the States, he got a job in the local steel mill and a girl friend at a local dance hall.  But his strong-willed mother did not want a non-Italian, non-Catholic, daughter-in-law and eventually exerted enough pressure to wear down the young soldier as the war had never done. Finally, he relinquished his love and set out to find the kind of daughter-in-law his mother expected.

Because Gina fell in love with him right from the start, she never had a chance.  She was the Rebound, the girl he got when he gave up the one he really wanted.  And although she was Italian, it seemed her family was not from the right part of Italy.  His family was from Rome whereas hers hailed from Calabria; and everyone knew they were the black Italians, crazy with their passions and jealousies and knives. 

An uneasy truce was declared between the mutual families when the six bridesmaid-wedding was held.  Gina wore an ivory ensemble of satin and lace with hand-sewn pearls and a tiny turban-like hat.  In the wedding picture, the groom looked a little drunk as his best man stood beside him. In the background, his mild-mannered father was wearing his only suit and his mother had a dark dress with big white flowers in honor of the festive occasion.

After a two-week honeymoon at Niagara Falls, Gina and her new husband moved into the second floor apartment in the family home his mother has prepared for them.  Within a month, Gina and her mother-in-law were fighting. Within a year, the first and only child was born, a son, who was, of course, named after his father. 

Soon her husband began drinking more and staying out later and Gina suspected he was seeing his old girlfriend again. The famous Calabrese temperament that had been asleep appeared and soon Gina was following him when he went out.  She cried, she threw things, she begged him to stay home, she scratched him with her long, red, manicured, nails.  His mother called her a witch and said she was killing her son.

After three years of marriage, they divorced.  Gina went into a deep depression and was institutionalized.  It was the mid-1950’s, so they gave her shock treatments to snap her out of it.  After a few months, she returned to work at the same beauty salon that she left years before to become a bride.  There was a haunted look at the back of her yellow eyes and tightness in the center of her. 

He continued living at home in the upstairs apartment of his parent’s home.  He went to work at the mill every day, drank too much every night and saw his son on weekends if the child support was paid up.  Since he was Catholic, he could never marry again without being excommunicated so the nice girls wouldn’t date him.

Although I had known Gina most of my life and had, in fact, attended her wedding as a toddler, I got to know her better in my early teens when she and my uncle finally remarried.  This time they bought a house in another neighborhood several miles from the domineering mother-in-law and Gina used the downstairs rumpus room, as it was called then, to set up an at-home beauty shop. 

I used to go there for haircuts and perms and every once in a while Aunt Gina would talk to me about how unhappy she was.  “I hope you never learn what it’s like to love a man more than he loves you, Marie. It’s like always being hungry,” she said one day.  “No matter what I do, he never wants me like I want him.”

The continual battles they had were common talk within the family and my uncle, although a nice man was, like his father, a born victim.  Everyone felt sorry for him because of “that woman” and overlooked his steady drinking and lonely eyes. 

I remember one day when I was about 14 my uncle asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that if I hadn’t been a girl I would like to be an archeologist or an architect.  He told me, “Do whatever you want to do.  Don’t listen to anybody. Don’t let them take your dreams away.”  He never identified “them” or talked about which dreams he had lost, so I can only surmise. 

Within the next few years, Grandma and then Grandpa died. When Aunt Gina didn’t go to Grandpa’s funeral because of a fight that morning, that was the end of the shaky marriage.  My uncle went back to living alone at the home he grew up in.  One Sunday morning, about a year later, my mom stopped by to see why he didn’t answer the phone.  She found him in his pajamas, sitting on a kitchen chair, dead of a heart attack- or was it a broken heart.   I think he was in his mid-40’s. 

At the time of his death, the divorce hadn’t gone through yet so Jackie was still technically his wife. At graveside, when the VFW folded the flag from his casket, instead of giving it to the wife, as was the custom, they gave it to my mother, the sister. The snub was unmistakable and the verdict on Aunt Gina’s behavior public. She took his death real hard because now he was forever out of her reach, with the mother who had gone before him.

Over the years, Aunt Gina got vaguer and vaguer from the tranquilizers the doctor prescribed. During this time, she faithfully sent my children cards for every birthday or special occasion and dutifully called my mother and my aunt like they had shared a happy past.  In her mind now, they were her only link to the man she loved. The son who had been named after the father grew up and had a child and a divorce of his own in due time.

Aunt Gina’s hair was always perfectly groomed and she was a woman who loved makeup and perfume to the last.  She ended up living alone in a tiny subsidized apartment on the wrong side of the wrong town until one day her son found her in bed partly conscious and unwashed.  After being hospitalized for several days, she was taken to a nursing home where she waited to rejoin her long absent husband. 

“For one man is my world of all the men
This wide world holds; O love, my world is you.”

Christina Rosetti, Come Back to Me