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In many ways, Mom was not the stereotypical Italian mother. First off, she was American-born and was younger than a lot of my other friends’ mothers. She had “dirty” blonde hair (how I hated that term) and blue-green eyes. She liked to dress in bright colors, and although I never told her this, she wasn’t a particularly good cook. But even though her mother had died when she was 7, the fatalism so imbued in Italian women had somehow seeped into her soul.
She looked at life as an accident that only St. Rita could unravel. There was a statue of St. Rita in my parents’ bedroom. I’ve often wondered if Dad had any say in the matter. Like so many Italian women, my mother had a patron saint. She never explained why she had this attachment to St. Rita. There wasn’t a “Rita” in our family history as far as I know. My mother’s name was Eleanor; her middle name was Theresa after her mother. Mom never asked for God’s intercession to solve any of her many crises. She viewed St. Rita as her personal advocate. And Mom did not share St. Rita. You wanted a heavenly advocate, go get your own.
Mom constantly reminded us of her importance in the household. One of her favorite songs was Sophie Tucker’s “Some of These Days,” which she would sing while doing household chores. When she got to the line, “you’ll miss me, honey,” she put extra oomph into it. You knew she was sending you a message.
Back in Mom’s day, there was another popular song called a “Slow Boat to China.” Mom loved to threaten us with leaving on a slow boat to China if she ever got fed up with us. She was doing us a favor sticking around and putting up with our shenanigans (Mom never used the word “shenanigans”). Funny thing is she knew she would never leave us and so did we. It was all part of some elaborate charade she had to go through to prove her point. And she did it on almost a daily basis.
I think it was out of this feeling to be needed that she courted death like many of the Italian women of past generations. She had almost a love affair with death. True, she had health problems as far back as I can remember, but it was more than that. She was one of these women that just begged death to take her. Death was her substitute for that slow boat to China that she would never take.
When her father died at the age of 83, never having had a prolonged illness, Mom wore black for a year. She didn’t come down from her bedroom, except to eat, for three months, which exasperated my father to no end. Her sisters were much the same way. My aunt Mary came to my home for dinner about six months after her father died and turned her back on our television the entire time of her visit. Aunt Jenny tried to toss herself into the grave of my grandfather during his funeral ceremony and made it a regular ritual of hers every time someone in the family passed away. It got so bad someone in our family had to be assigned to catch aunt Jenny at every funeral before she jumped. It was as if she yearned for the grave like some of us look forward to a European vacation and one day landed there herself.
My father assumed he was going to outlive Mom. I guess he figured any woman whose favorite phrase was, “God, why not me?” would get her wish granted at some point. Dad warned me not to get offended because when Mom died, he intended to run off with some blonde on his arm. I dutifully assured him he would always be welcome in our home, even with his blonde. To Dad’s surprise, he went 20 years before Mom. On his death bed, he managed a smile and uttered those fateful words that still ring in my ears, “She’s all yours now, sonny boy.”
Mom was not so much devastated by Dad’s death as angry. By her reasoning, Dad had deliberately abandoned her. She was the victim. Dad had run off and died. You could never rely on that man. She found herself now arguing with Dad in her sleep. Just as in real life, Mom won all the arguments. Again she started with, “God, why not me?’ Had she offended God? Is that why he took Dad first? Was she, Eleanor, unworthy? What had she done to deserve to live? It should be noted she only turned to God to ask these questions after St. Rita abandoned her. Apparently, somewhere along the way, St. Rita had gotten tired of listening to Mom’s complaints and decided, let her go whine to another saint. St. Rita must have asked, “God, why me? Haven’t I been a good person? You don’t make just anyone a saint, right? Hand her over to St. Theresa, please.”
When Mom did pass away, it took me some time before I realized she wasn’t just playing one of her jokes. One of these days had arrived. And she was right, we do miss her.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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