My Mother Tells me

Denise Tolan

My mother tells me she had no idea a man could be as mean as my father. Her own father, she says, was like a saint.

“My father never raised his voice, never hit any of us, never tore the house apart.”

“That qualifies him for sainthood?” I ask my mother. “Isn’t that what normal fathers don’t do?”

She ignores me, hands over another piece of broken glass. I place it in the trash bag, tie a knot at the top, and reach for a new bag.

In the middle of the night, my father, stumbling over his own darkness, broke every breakable object in the living room.

This is not an unusual occurrence.

“Your father has a lot on his mind,” my mother tells me as we survey the living room together.

“Where is he?”

“Sleeping,” she says, calmly. “Let’s clean before he wakes up.”

“Speta,” she says now as I shake the new trash bag open. Wait. “I need to sit for a minute.”

She rubs the base of her spine with the palm of her hand. I guide her into a chair, take a pillow from the couch, place it behind her back. She is getting old. Too old to spend weekends shopping at garage sales for more objects my father will destroy.

In the kitchen, I find a Sprite, a couple of glasses, and some Tylenol. I sit next to her at the dining room table in chairs that do not face the living room.

“Your father works hard,” my mother says. “Sometimes he wakes up angry.”

“You never saw your father angry?” I ask, ignoring the familiar excuse she uses for my father’s behavior.

My mother closes her eyes tight, as if shutting every door in front of her might open a back door to a memory. “Just one time,” she says, opening her eyes. “When I was twelve. The War had started and we left France because they were bombing the coal mines where my father worked. We moved back to Italy, to his family village, and we were eating dinner together at the kitchen table in Ciseriis. It was just the three of us then. Both of my sisters were gone. Armida was working in Switzerland. Maria Louisa was married. She was the oldest. I was the baby, remember?”

My mother likes to remind me she was the baby of the family. Babies are blameless, after all.

“My poor sisters. When Maria Luisa was fourteen, my parents sent her from France to work for a family in Udine. And when Armida was fourteen, it was 1939. People were starting to talk about the War so they sent her to Switzerland to work. Many of the poor families, like mine, sent their children away. I was too young.”

“The baby,” I say.

“Yes,” my mother smiles, sips her Sprite. “So there we were, eating dinner. My mother started telling us about a lady whose house she’d cleaned that day. When my mother took the sheets off the clothesline, the lady said they smelled funny. My mother was being loud, because she was acting like the lady. I was laughing so hard. Suddenly my father slapped his hand on the table and said Enough, Carolina. Stazito.” Shut up.

“What did your mother do?”

“She shut up. We both did. My father had never raised his voice to any of us before and we were surprised.”

My mother busied herself arranging the salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the dining room table, then brushed invisible crumbs into her hand.

“That was it? That was the one time he got mad?”

“No,” my mother said, taking in a breath and putting on a smile that looked like high heels, hard to wear. “After my father yelled, my mother got up from the table and went into the kitchen. I heard a match being struck so I thought she was smoking her one cigarette of the day. But soon she came back with a cup in her hand. It was full of hot polenta that had been heating on the stove. She threw it on the back of my father’s head.”

“Are you serious? That’s crazy, Mom. Was he burned?”

“I don’t remember that part,” my mother says. “He jumped up, my father, and ran to the kitchen. I sat at the table waiting to see what my mother would do next. All she did was pull out her chair and sit. When my father came back from the kitchen, he had a wet towel around his shoulders.”

I don’t like this table, my mother told my father. The marble is too cold for my arms.

Carolina, my father said, this table will stay in our house until I die, then you can make it my tombstone. And you know what, after he died, my mother sent the table to a stone cutter and turned it into my father’s headstone.”

“Wait a sec. I don’t get it, Mom. Your father was so good he was like a saint, then all of a sudden, out of the blue, he yells at your mother, she tries to hurt him, and they argue about the kitchen table?”

“It was a marble table,” my mother says, as if that explains the argument. “My mother was right; it was cold. But yes, it happened, just like that.”

“That was the one time you saw him angry?”

“There is more, but it’s part of the same story,” my mother says. “So it counts as the same anger, yes?”

She waits for me to nod as if my answer is like one of those books where you can choose the direction of a story.

I nod.

“The next morning we were back at the table finishing breakfast when the door opened and Maria Luisa walked in. I was happy to see her, but when I ran to hug her, she pushed me away. I could see she was hurt. Her eye was red and bruised around the outside. I wondered if someone had thrown a ball at her face. Around her collar, her dress was ripped, like someone pulled her from behind. She held the material together tightly, as if it were the only thing keeping her inside her skin.”

Valencia, my mother said to me, go outside. Look for the cat. See if she had her kittens. Go.

“I walked to the little shed behind our house. The cat did have kittens and I was so excited I forgot there was anything happening in the house. But soon, I heard Maria Luisa screaming. I peeked out of the small window at the top of the shed. My father had Maria Luisa by the hair and was pulling her like she was an animal to the part of the yard where the chickens lived.”

“Mom,” I said. “I think I’m missing some backstory. Was Maria Louisa in trouble?”

My mother stood up and took her glass into the kitchen. She continued her story from the doorway. “I never told you about Maria Louisa, did I? I have to or the story makes no sense. When my sister was working in Udine, she had trouble with the man who was her boss. One night she ran away from the house where she worked. There she was, on the streets of the city with no way to contact our family and no money to leave. My sister got hungry, of course, so she stole some food from a street cart and got caught. They threw her in jail and she had no way to pay to get out.”

“Your sister was in jail at fourteen?”

“She was sixteen by then,” my mother says. “But they kept her in jail like she was a common thief.”

“What problems did she have with the man?”

“My sister said he was touching her. Years later she told me she ran away because he got her pregnant. She lost the baby while she was in jail. Can you imagine?”

I’d always imagined my Zia Louisa darker than her sisters, but I figured it was because of her thick black hair and deep brown eyes. Now I knew it was the past that shadowed her.

“In jail, there was a man who came around every week to visit his cousin in the cell next to your Zia. That was your Zio Aderke.”

“He hit on her while she was in jail?”

“Aderke? Don’t be stupid. Back then they didn’t have visiting areas. Aderke would take a stool and sit outside the bars to talk to his cousin. My sister was next to them. Eventually, to be nice, Aderke brought Maria Louisa grapes and cookies and they started talking. He told her his wife had died a year before and left him with a seven-year old daughter. One day he asked my sister if she wanted help getting out of jail. He told her he could give her a job taking care of the little girl.”

“She didn’t have much choice but to say yes, Mom.”

“Maybe not. But Aderke had a nice place to live where she would have food and earn a little money. My sister said yes. The only problem was they would only release her to her family or a husband, so they got married.”

“She was sixteen. How old was he?”

“Oh, who knows? Somewhere in his forties,” my mother says. “Eventually she came to love him. He was handsome even if he was older.”

“This is the saddest story ever,” I said. I thought back to the last time I’d seen my Zio Aderke. He was standing over the kitchen sink with his dark black hair, hard, shiny shoes, and cruel frown sucking an uncooked egg out of a tiny hole he’d poked in the top with a knife. I remember shuddering. I shuddered now. When my Zia died at fifty-two years old, he must have been in his early eighties. He got two for one with her: Someone who took care of his daughter when she was young and him when he was old. Did anyone ever take care of Maria Louisa?

“Why are we talking about my sister?” my mother says.

“You were telling me the one time your father got mad. When your sister came to your house with a black eye.”

“Okay,” my mother sat back at the table. “Apparently, the day before Maria Louisa came to our house, my father ran into someone in town who told him that my sister had been in jail. She never told my parents that story. We’d just moved back from France, remember? My father was mad because he thought she brought shame to our family while we were gone, so he went to look for her and they got into a big argument. That morning when Maria Louisa came to the house, it was to beg my father’s forgiveness, but he was still too mad to listen. As soon as my sister opened her mouth, my father pulled her toward the buckets where the chickens drank. He forced her to her knees and grabbed her hair again. I watched him push her face into the bucket, into the dirty water, again and again until my mother ran over with a big piece of wood and hit my father across his shoulders.”

“Who hit her in the eye before she came to the house, Mom?”

“I don’t know. I never asked.”

My mother and I faced each other like we had both run a great distance and needed a rest.

“So there,” my mother tells me. “Now you know the one time I saw my father mad.”

“Did he and Zia Louisa talk again?”

“Oh sure,” my mother says. “In Italy we say, La famiglia è la patria del cuore.” Family is where the heart is. She bends and kisses my head, then faces the living room and the rest of the mess we have to clean up.

I pick up broken pieces of frames and bowls and figurines and wonder if that moment of anger from her father is when she learned to swallow hard? Did it happen sitting at the cold table hearing the near-saint yell? Or was it in the little shed watching her oldest sister nearly drown in a bucket of dirty water because she’d lied to protect a family who sent her away at fourteen? Was that one escape from sainthood how my mother learned to excuse my father’s torture of our family by saying he was tired, worried, sick?

“We’re almost done,” my mother says, turning to look at the living room.

“Mom?” I ask, “Did it bother you that your father might have killed your sister?”

“Oh you,” she says. “So dramatic. My father was a wonderful man, ask your cousin. He just had a bad moment. But nothing happened really.”

I throw a few pieces of pottery in the trash bag. The living room is finally clean, stripped of all color, all debris, anything decorative. When my mother moved to the US from Italy, she brought nothing personal with her. There were no vases from our childhood home or picture frames or collectables. She left everything of value behind, where it was safe.

My mother scans the living room and tells me, “I said my father was close to a saint, not that he was a saint. I know the difference.”

I believe she does.

Denise Tolan's work has been included in places such as Atlas and Alice, Hobart, Lunch Ticket, and The Best Small Fictions 2018. Denise was a finalist for Best of the Net 2021 and both the 2019 and 2018 International Literary Awards: Penelope Niven Prize in Nonfiction. Denise currently has a memoir in essay, Italian Blood, scheduled for release in 2023. You can find out about her Moby-Dick obsession at denisetolan.com