We always had company on the weekends when my father was alive, especially his family, but after he died, they stopped coming and things grew quieter at home. It was also difficult financially which is why my Aunt Mary and my grandmother gave up their apartment in Brooklyn and came to live with us so that they could contribute to maintaining the house and helping my mother. Also, visits from relatives changed during that time and Saturday night was when we saw an influx of my mother’s family coming around. Sometimes it was my mother’s youngest brother Mike, his wife Vivian, and three of their four children, my cousins Theresa, Phyllis, and Michael. My older cousin Joe was married to his first wife by then and though they visited, too, it was generally on holidays. Saturday nights, though, became poker night as I mentioned in an earlier post and dominated by Uncle Joe (my grandmother’s youngest brother), his wife Bernie, and at that time, before the advent of Charlie, my Aunt Mary and that card shark in the family, my mother. My grandmother didn’t really play, but sat, watched, made coffee, spoiled her grandchildren with homemade zeppole filled with raisins, and sometimes made espresso which, as anyone knows, is a vital ingredient in any Italian household.
But I don’t want to write about Saturday nights. I want to write about what became for me my most cherished memories of those years: Sunday dinners. And to be even more specific, the Sunday dinners during the 3 year period from my senior year in high school through my two years commuting to my junior college.
Those dinners were just the family: my mother, my Aunt Mary, my grandmother, my three brothers (Johnny, George, and Robert), and me. Harry was there, too, for most of those years, sitting in his high chair and making my grandmother smile as he sang the Italian songs she had taught him. Sometimes a friend from my acting school would come as a guest. Either Henry Munoz or Alvin Miller which would delight my grandmother because Alvin could eat three helpings of spaghetti with meatballs and sausage which was a record in the family. Where he put it, I’ll never know, because he was skinnier than me, but it made my grandmother beam in wonder. The surest way to an Italian mother’s heart is to have seconds and even thirds of whatever they cook.
And, of course, there would be music playing on the stereo I bought for my mother one Christmas from Arnie’s Electronics in town. Arnie’s also sold 45s and it was the scene of George’s greatest ordeal when Johnny and I made him return the single Laugh, Laugh by The Beau Brummels 5 times because each single was warped. George had to do this because he was the youngest. We didn’t count Robert who was too young to be persuasive. This is probably the first real training George got in persuading a jury, though I doubt he sees it that way. Al Martino, Jerry Vale, Sinatra, of course, Connie Francis, and, for George, The Four Seasons so he could sing along. We all also sang along to Lou Monte’s Pepino The Italian Mouse and The Beatles’ Revolver album and Rubber Soul. There was always music in the house and it was easy to get my mother to dance by putting on Lou Monte singing Calypso Italiano. For a joke, I would sometimes put on the Kate Smith album my father had mistakenly bought for my mother when she was recuperating from her hip surgery. She would still remark years later how she would never understand how he got it into his head that she liked Kate Smith. But usually it was some Italian crooner singing about Naples, which translates into love with songs like Eh Marie, Eh Marie, a song my aunt’s husband Frank often sang to her before his untimely death.
We always ate at 2pm and it was always some form of pasta, though we never called it pasta, just spaghetti or macaroni, which was anything that wasn’t spaghetti. My grandmother sometimes made her homemade cavatelli which just melted in your mouth and was loved by all, just as we all loved her raviolis, which she made on holidays, both cheese and meat filled, and they, too, melted in your mouth. They were also huge and three filled a plate.
Ah, but I’m getting off-track again so let’s get back to Sunday dinners.
So we would all have to be at the table by 2. My mother waited for no one. If you weren’t there, you didn’t eat. Holiday dinners were like that, too, and I, for one, learned that lesson early on but my sister seemed to always be late (she had 5 kids to deal with so it’s sort of understandable) but our mother began serving at 2 regardless. So on Sundays, all of us were seated and ready to go at two o’clock sharp.
There was salad first (soap was served first only on holidays) which my brother George never failed to point out should be eaten with the dinner to aid in digestion but which everyone else ignored. George was always pointing things out like that which only resulted in Johnny making a face. And Johnny made a lot of faces at the table, often making caustic comments in response to George’s witticisms, and the three of us would banter back and forth, teasing each other, our mother, Aunt Mary, who would often laugh so hard she’d beg us to stop before she would “pee in my pants”. which never happened, nor did she ever have to run to the bathroom just in case. We never teased our grandmother, except maybe about those hot peppers she had hanging in the basement near the oil burner to dry, but instead would wander out to the kitchen on Sunday morning to watch her knead the dough for the macaroni she was making and take the piece she would cut off for each of us to eat. But afterwards, as we all settled back to coffee and cake, I would sometimes kid her about how strong the coffee was by pretending it dissolved my spoon. She always smiled, enjoying it all, the teasing of her daughters by her grandchildren, unconditional love in her eyes.
It was a Sunday dinner that was the scene of many a sisterly argument between our mother and aunt, mainly revolving around cooking which is something Aunt Mary could only do if our mother was not at home. This was usually lunchtime, when our mother would work as a teacher’s aide in the high school, one of two part-time jobs she had, the other being a babysitter for a Jewish family which would cause her to say, “When I come back next time, I want to be a Jewish housewife.”
Grandma’s eggs and potatoes sandwiches were indisputably the best, but Aunt Mary’s came in a close second. This was one dish our mother couldn’t duplicate. And Aunt Mary ‘s rabbit in tomato and wine sauce was also unequalled, though after her death I did cook that for a few Thanksgiving dinners until one year when I cooked an especially large rabbit and quipped that it was really a cat, no one would eat it except my sister and me. It was the last year anyone asked me to cook it again.
But back to Sundays and those arguments between the sisters. The most heated one occurred over what you call sauce. Aunt Mary insisted it was called sauce while our mother insisted it was called gravy. As a matter of fact, it was always called gravy in our house and the only time this was called into question was by Aunt Mary. Well these two sisters went at it for probably 5 minutes, which was a long time to argue in the house since arguments rarely lasted more than a minute. Grandma remained neutral, and we brothers tried to avoid anyone’s eyes lest we be dragged unwillingly into it. But our mother turned to us finally and asked, “Well? Who’s right here?” Now up until we all started going to restaurants, we would have unequivocally answered gravy, but since we never saw it called gravy on any menu that served Italian food in our limited exposure to menus, we had to side, though rather reluctantly, with Aunt Mary. Our mother was stunned. This was betrayal in her eyes. Didn’t she clothe and feed us? Do our laundry? Give us ice cream every other night and one piece of fruit daily? Wasn’t she the head of this household? How could we side with anyone but her?
That was a sad day at the table on Lyon Place.
Years later, after all the women were gone and I was alone reading the Sunday New York Times, I came across an article on Italian cuisine. And there, in the New York Times which has, as any NYer knows, “all the news that’s fit to print”, was the statement that in Southern Italy, where both sets of my grandparents came from and thus, where we all were descended from (albeit Johnny and George come from that land that we Italians discovered and Robert comes from someplace further north, they are all Italian in our eyes), sauce with meat in it was referred to as gravy. In fact, though this was true for just Southern Italians, any meat sauce was called gravy regardless of whether it was for a roast or a pasta dish.
So both were right, but I could not tell them, since they were just two of the ghosts that haunt me. But I called my brother Robert to tell him since he was the acknowledged chef in the family and prepared the “gravy” for all our holiday meals. And at the next family dinner with my brothers, I announced it to the table at large, thus finally vindicating our mother.
Sunday dinners. Even now, in Turkey, thousands of miles from what’s left of my family, I still make a pasta dish for myself. Sometimes a tomato sauce, usually with sundried tomatoes or fresh tomatoes, or a meat gravy, or just olive oil and garlic with salmon or shrimp. I miss using Italian pork sausage (something I can’t get here) and making my clam sauces (again, I can’t find baby clams here) but one does adapt. And Sunday dinners are, for me, still a family affair, even if I have no family of my own to share it with, there is still a tradition I do not have the heart, or desire, to change.