Umbertina

Helen Barolini

UMBERTINA

A NOVEL BY

HELEN BAROLINI

Afterword by Edvige Giunta

Published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406, New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

First Feminist Press edition, 1999

No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Lines from the song “Eleanor Rigby” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Copyright © 1966 Northern Songs Limited. All rights for the USA, Mexico, and the Philippines are controlled by Maclen Music, Inc., c/o ATV Corp. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The poem “An Old Atheist Pauses by the Sea” by Thomas Kinsella. Reprinted from Poems and Translations, by Thomas Kinsella (New York: Atheneum, 1961), 62.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barolini, Helen.

Umbertina: a novel / by Helen Barolini : afterword by Edvige Giunta.

—1st Feminist Press ed.

p. cm.

1. Italian Americans—New York (State)—Fiction. I. Title

PS3552.A725U39 1999

813'.54—dc21 98-44374

eISBN 978-155861-727-8

The Feminist Press is grateful to Janet Brown, William L. Hedges, Joanne Markell, Caroline Urvater, Genevieve Vaughan, and Patricia Wentworth and Mark Fagan for their generosity in supporting this publication.

It is a wonderful thing to see this reissue of Umbertina twenty years after its first appearance. That this story of three women lives again is due to three women: Edvige Giunta, its advocate, Jean Casella, its editor, and Florence Howe, its publisher.

I am happy to see this story of three generations of women journeying to self-knowledge offered to a new generation of readers. Through the image of immigrants reaching a new land to start new lives, the metaphor of all women’s journey to be reborn to themselves is retold.

In the spirit of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, more than twenty years ago I set out to write an American story that would add a distinct nuance to the national literature through a voice not much heard—one that had the reverberations of an Italian American voice but was, and is, meant for all people.

Helen Barolini

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

September 1998

In memory of Nicoletta and Stefana,

the immigrants . . .

and for my mother, the storyteller.

With great gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts, whose grant made possible the writing of this book, and to the Writers Community in New York, where parts of the work in progress were read.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Cover Page

2. Title Page

3. Copyright Page

4. Author’s Note

5. Dedication

6. Contents

7. Prologue

8. Part One: Umbertina 1860 - 1940

9. Chapter One

10. Chapter Two

11. Chapter Three

12. Chapter Four

13. Chapter Five

14. Chapter Six

15. Chapter Seven

16. Chapter Eight

17. Chapter Nine

18. Chapter Ten

19. Part Two: Marguerite 1927 – 1973

20. Chapter Eleven

21. Chapter Twelve

22. Chapter Thirteen

23. Chapter Fourteen

24. Chapter Fifteen

25. Chapter Sixteen

26. Chapter Seventeen

27. Chapter Eighteen

28. Chapter Nineteen

29. Chapter Twenty

30. Chapter Twenty-One

31. Chapter Twenty-Two

32. Chapter Twenty-Three

33. Part Three: Tina 1950 –

34. Chapter Twenty-Four

35. Chapter Twenty-Five

36. Chapter Twenty-Six

37. Chapter Twenty-Seven

38. Chapter Twenty-Eight

39. Chapter Twenty-Nine

40. Chapter Thirty

41. Chapter Thirty-One

42. Chapter Thirty-Two

43. Chapter Thirty-Three

44. Chapter Thirty-Four

45. Chapter Thirty-Five

46. Afterword

47. Notes

48. About the Author

49. About the Feminist Press

50. Also Available from the Feminist Press

Umbertina

Prologue

He reached over to the low table where the lamp was always lit, day or evening, because the room was dark—dark and unheated and pervaded with Rome street noises—and where lay the paraphernalia of his profession: heavy black-rimmed glasses, pipe, tobacco pouches, matches, ashtray, pencils, note-pads, and clock. From the low table on the zebra-skin rug that created the island of détente between their facing wicker chairs, he picked up the black appointment book. “Va bene, Thursday at five?” he asked. Smooth, self-assured, deep-voiced.

“Don’t leave me like this!” Her own voice was anxious and too high-pitched. And she meant: Don’t reject me, make love to me! But unable to say so she put it another way: “Tell me something—am I right to go ahead with this divorce?”

“You must do as you feel.” It was the refrain of their meetings and it was like an old too-often repeated joke; if she could sort and act on her feelings that neatly she wouldn’t be there at all.

It wasn’t the answer that mattered. She wanted time to recover herself. The hour had been painful, another stalking of the same no-man’s-land. No-woman’s-land, she corrected herself. She was aware of the new currents—they had helped, in fact, to precipitate her into the psychiatrist’s office.

She searched his dark, lean, Sicilian face. “What I mean is, that in my marriage, at least I have sex if I want it with Alberto. You keep telling me to respond to my instincts—be more primitive, you say!—and yet I’m about to dissolve a marriage without another prospect in sight.”

“Well, I can’t help you there,” he said curtly, sitting back and crossing his legs so that her eyes were drawn, as always, to his bright socks. Priests were known to have large collections of socks. Vicarious sex for the vicars of Christ on earth.

“Thursday at five?” Dr. Verdile repeated.

“No,” she said, “I’m going to Florence.” She was repaid by his surprise as he looked up from his book and regarded her quizzically, inviting her to continue.

“I think it’s time for me to have a vacation from these visits—I’m feeling depressed, I have to get away for a while. And besides I have to see about moving there once I’ve gotten the legal separation. I want to be settled there with Weezy by the time Tina flies home. Alberto is going to Florence and his expenses are paid for me, too.” As usual she had told him too much, given too many explanations. She turned her eyes from his face to his hands.

You’re not different from me, she thought, looking at his chewed fingernails. Except that you can hide it better under your analyst’s uniform: pipe, turtleneck sweater, thick black-rimmed eyeglasses, white hairs all over your trousers from the Dalmatians you keep at your country place, dispassion, intelligence, aplomb, Swissness.

“Yes, it’s a good idea sometimes to take a vacation,” he told her equably.

“It’s more than that—it’s all the influencing going on that I can’t stand! All those erotic dreams! I never had them before; it’s the effect of analysis. I want my life to be my own, not conditioned by these meetings with you and the whole thing pressing on me like a chain I can’t lift.”

“Now we come to something!” he said sharply. “Now we come to the real matter, and so, typically, you want to escape it. It’s not these meetings that create the erotic dreams—that material you’ve always had in you. The present confrontation only favors its release. But if you refuse to face it now you go back to your favorite escape-hatch, the self-punishment you’ve inflicted on yourself over the years in order to avoid your main problem. You can go—but you won’t have solved anything. You’ll simply end up in another place with another analyst going over again and again the reasons for your not facing up.”

“But you know my situation! Alberto and I live together in name only; I’ve decided on the divorce, and now I’m overwhelmed with dreams of making love to young boys, in Venice, Mexico, England, all over the world—of wanting to make love, of craving it and not being able to do anything about it.”

“And why can’t you do something about it?”

“But what do you expect? That I put an ad in Il Messaggero saying ‘Lady available’? Besides, it’s too late . . . too late . . .” (If anyone, I’m the white rabbit, she had told him once when he compared her to Alice in Wonderland—timid, tremulous, always late, fearful of duchesses and everything else.)

She wanted to go away and show him that she, Marguerite Morosini, an American transplant filled with fears and desires, who was about to divorce her Italian husband of eighteen years so that she could start again, didn’t need him and his professional cool.

She felt stupid. She had put on her long hairpiece; she had done her eyes; she had dressed carefully as she always did for the Monday and Thursday meetings held in the front room of an apartment whose walls admitted the barest attenuated sounds of an invisible young Finnish wife moving somewhere in the adjoining rooms. All the time the echo chamber behind her ears went on sounding: “It’s late . . . it’s late . . . my word, it’s late . . . what will the duchess say?” Now she heard herself ask him abjectly, “What about sex? Sometimes I just want to say to Alberto, ‘Oh, come on and sleep with me tonight.’”

“Then do it! Do what you feel,” he said energetically.

“But I can’t! Don’t you understand that if I do he’ll never agree to the divorce and I haven’t even gotten him yet to sign the first separation agreement.” Her restless eyes jumped around the room, lighting on the print of the Indian dancers above the table, the abstract paintings on the far wall, the avocado pit sprouting in a jar of water, futilely searching for the clues that would tell her who this man was, this person into whose hearing she was pouring the pains of her life.

“There’s a typical female wile for that. You can get him to sign first and then go to bed. This is something all women understand.”

“I . . . I never thought of that,” she stammered, confused.

“It’s something women have always been able to do. It’s a classic stratagem, no?”

She felt a distaste for his masculine presumptuousness. Did he think she would fall into the trap of letting him persuade her about the female role? The hell with the minor roles, she wanted to be a person as much as he.

Marguerite collected herself to go. “I feel so stupid,” she said. No, not stupid; keen and smart enough to see straight into the mess of her life, to know she had always been preparing it. Mad Marguerite they used to call her at school. The oddball, the nut! But not stupid.

“We all do at times,” he said, smiling generously. “Well, when shall we see each other? Do you want to call me when you get back?” He still had the black book poised in his hand.

“No,” she said, defeated (down, down the rabbit hole—would the fall never end?). “I’ll be back for Thursday.”

Awkwardly she struggled into her coat. He never helped.

They shook hands amicably at the door and said arrivederci nice as pie.

The next day Marguerite took the morning train up to Florence. It cost her 5,515 lire. Alberto would join her at the hotel, for he was coming on a later train with some of the other critics and editors who met annually to discuss entries for the literary prize that they judged.

Only Dr. Verdile knew of her divorce plans. She had taken off the gold wedding band and begun to wear again a turquoise ring from long ago, but people hadn’t noticed, or if they had, didn’t give it any importance. After all, she and Alberto were still at the same address, so who could tell besides Dr. V., and sometimes Alberto, what was going on?

Analysis had intensified everything. She had always been aware of her cover-up—that business receptionist who faced the outside and tried to be pleasing; who hazarded meeting and speaking and giving the correct responses; who engaged in memorized, meaningless routines of life. Now she was another step removed, watching herself watch the receptionist; thinking it was time to fire her and her goddam personality smile.

She opened her newsmagazine in the train: There was Audrey Hepburn divorced, two months from forty, biting her lip in a pretty show of being flustered, looking like a little girl in her pink Cardin mini-dress as she married the handsome young psychiatrist of thirty-one and started life all over again—as perfect as one of her films. No cobwebs in Roman Holiday, Sabrina, or Gigi: all happy endings staged beautifully. Christ, how one would stage one’s life if one could! Yet isn’t that what she had done? Staged marriage and motherhood for years and years until she had been done in by the fakery. The stage props had dropped and she had been left alone in all the artifice to get out of her sham costume as best she could and find another part, in another theater, with other actors. At forty-two. Jesus! She wasn’t Audrey Hepburn.

(“You are young, pleasing, elegant—not like some women, who are impossible,” Dr. V. had told her. And she had turned on him, furious, accusing him of being Dr. Pangloss, of being so stuck in his optimism that he couldn’t begin to see her problems.)

Then suddenly it had been simple: She would get a divorce.

A reddish-haired man entered the compartment of the train and sat next to her. She was aware of him as she drew into her corner and looked out the window.

She thought, of all things, of Umbertina Longobardi, who had emigrated to America as a young wife. Marguerite wondered if her own fears were worse now than those faced then by that Calabrian peasant, her grandmother. Had Umbertina wondered as she lay in steerage, separated from her husband and with her sons by her side, what her life would be like, what its meaning was? Had she wondered how she’d speak? And to whom? Marguerite had never been able to speak to the old woman in her lifetime; they had had different tongues. Now she could, but Umbertina was dead and buried in Cato. Oh, Grandma Longobardi, give me your guts!

As they passed Orvieto, Marguerite applied herself to what she had to do in Florence. She had to find a job. What could she do? Dissemble. Anything else? Translate, teach, type. She had written Tina at Bryn Mawr to ask what she thought about chances over there. Tina, her firstborn. Everything had started to fall apart when Berto died. Her only son. Her last child. Then Tina had left Italy for college. (“Imagine, Dr. Verdile, a child already in college!” “But you’re still young,” he says, pulling on his English pipe.)

“May I see your paper?” Marguerite said to the man seated next to her in the compartment.

“Of course, of course,” he said after a moment of surprise.

She stared at the newsprint; did I ask for the paper or did I ask him to make love to me? Always she asked for love . . . when she asked the shoemaker if the heels on her shoes could be fixed for tomorrow, when she asked the flower man how long the anemones would last, when she asked Alberto’s guests if they wanted more ice in their drinks, when she asked Tina’s boyfriends to return the books of hers they borrowed.

Umbertina

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