Tempting Faith Di Napoli - Softcover

Chapter One

These are the things I remember about the city. The crumbly, brown-bricked houses in our neighborhood were stacked so closely together, I used to pretend when I was four, they were the chipped, rotting teeth lining the mouth of an urban ogre, and the people who lived inside were busy little cavities. It was as though we all lived in the same house. If we were bad and sent to bed early, we could easily peek across the street into the Trevis' living room and finish watching the TV show with them, guessing at the dialogue.

Privacy was something only rich people enjoyed.

Our house, in Little Italy, shared a wall with the Rossis' next door, and our clothesline connected with the Pilettis' behind us. My mother used to say that if one of the neighbors' houses was swallowed up by hell, we would all be pulled down with them. When I was little, I didn't understand her jokes, so I would include Mr. Piletti in my prayers, whispering, "Also, God, please make Mr. Piletti stop beating his wife in the face, because Mom says he's gonna go to hell, which means that so will we."

In the city, the four of us kids were always together, not just because our house was small and we had no choice, but because when we were small, we weren't given any. My mother only had one goddamn set of eyes, two hands, for chrissakes, and four bloody kids. So stick together, she'd say, don't you ever, ever let go of my hand. And don't let go of each other's, either, she'd say, or I'll kill you. There was all that traffic and those perverts and the crowds to contend with. And always a lot left for her to do before the day was out.

In the city, the four of us kids were all the same people. We had the same bodies, the same moods, and the same ideas. For ten years, we had the same parents, who did and said the same things to each other and us. It was the only time in our lives when we could pretend to be like everyone else, which I came to believe was the gift of the city. In the city, it's difficult to stand out, unless you were like my mother. But her uniqueness was an accident of birth, and completely unintentional, which was true with us, too, but we just didn't realize it at the time.

I remember being small enough that the first things I saw when my mom entered the room were her dirty pink slippers. I got bigger and it was her knees, scabbed and puckered. Then bigger, and there's me grabbing her macramé belt and my little brother's hand as we'd scramble across a busy street because my mother was the type who never crossed at the lights.

Then, church became my measuring stick. At first I couldn't kneel, as I wouldn't be able to see Father Pete or the pretty hats. Then my chin fit perfectly over the back of the pew in front of me. Soon after, all the prayers and songs were in my head, permanently, despite the fact that I don't remember anyone putting them there on purpose. I don't know how old I was when I realized I could not legally marry Jesus, but one day it, too, became something I knew for a fact.

In the city, buildings got built around us or torn down. Nothing ever seemed finished. And unlike God on the seventh day, no one stood back from the city and said, "There, I'm done." But after our seventh year in the city, our neighborhood began to treat my mother like it was done with her. When that happens, I've learned, there's nothing left to do but leave.

My mother told me that ever since she was little she knew she was going to have four kids. All boys. Other people are born with moles or left-handedness, but my mother said she was born with the knowledge that she would have four boys. For proof, she showed us her high school yearbook. Under her graduation picture, next to "Future Plans," it says, "Mother to the Four Tops (only white)." Someone had written next to it: "Sure, Nan, we'll see about that. [Signed] Johnny Mathis."

My mother's name was Nancy Maria Franco.

Back then, Johnny Mathis and being Catholic were her hobbies. In fact, she came up with the names for her four boys in Sunday school: Matthew, Mark, Luke, then John -- to be called Johnny, because of her favorite singer. It was there, in Sunday school, that she first fell in love with a boy. Also, in Sunday school, she got into deep religious debates with her younger sister, my auntie Linda, about who was a sexier Jesus, Max von Sydow or Jeffrey Hunter. This debate continued well into my own childhood, my mother sometimes opting for the Jesus on my Bible, who looked to be a calmer type of hippie, and not like the long-haired American kids we'd see dancing naked on the TV. My mother would watch them for a second, roll her eyes, and switch the channel. Though she was around the same age as they were, she always said, "Know who has time to be a hippie? Bored, rich people, that's who. And me, I'm neither."

One of the first stories I memorized about my mother was how she met my dad. It was at her church, Most Precious Blood. Grandpa had forced my mother and her sister to attend Italian mass, after the both of them slept through the earlier English one. They had been out late the night before, celebrating Auntie Linda's eighteenth birthday. My mom noticed the back of my dad's head, liked his black curly hair, and the way he swayed during hymns. My auntie Linda noticed that my dad kept turning around to stare at my mother.

After the service, the church was holding the annual Giovanni Caboto Day picnic. Normally they never went, but to spite my grandpa, my mother and my aunt stayed and mingled with the other Italians. Someone whispered to my mom that my dad and his family had come from a particularly war-torn part of Italy. The DiNapolis, they said, arrived with almost nothing except the clothes on their back and nobody spoke very much English, even though they'd been in this country for more than a year. My mom was Italian, too, but in name only. She never learned to speak a word of the language, because what for? This is not the Old Country, my grandpa Franco would say. His own family had left Italy a thousand million years earlier, so my mother's only Italian legacy was a vowel at the end of her name. And as her father continually pointed out, nobody gave them a thing when they moved here. Nothing. Sure, my mother's mother, when she was alive, cooked spaghetti, but she served it with Ragú. She used vegetable oil, never olive oil, as it was too expensive. Same with prosciutto. Baloney was good enough. And she passed these fine family traditions down to her two Italian-in-name-only daughters.

My aunt said when my mother finally spoke to my dad, she knew those two would marry. But she knew it in a bad way. A way that made her nauseous and hot-faced. My mother felt the same and told my aunt that she had to sit down a lot while they were dating. Everyone was nice to my dad when he started to come around, but Auntie Linda was disappointed in my mother. Not that she didn't want her sister to fall in love and have children, but not right now, with this all-wrong man. He was a construction worker, not a businessman. He lived with his parents, and he hadn't learned to drive.

The bank where my aunt and my mother had just started to work was on the bottom floor of the second tallest building in downtown Detroit. But the big plans the two sisters had had about moving into the very tallest one simply began to vanish.

My dad loved my mother right away, too, only in a good, not bad, way. He thought she was beautiful and funny and smart, and even though he didn't much like skinny women, he thought she had the potential for abundance, at least around the hips and bum.

They met during the Detroit riots, so my mother would arrive back in Windsor with exciting stories of black people yelling at white cops. My dad would worry in the depot, holding his plaster-flecked face in his red, callused hands, waiting for his new girlfriend to come bounding off the tunnel bus wearing one of her professional bank outfits. Every day he would pray for her to arrive unbeaten, unshot, and unraped.

Soon, my mother began to latch onto my dad, steering him around the city, happily the one behind the wheel, happily the one paying for hamburgers and records. If you were a sharp girl, with a basic education, and better-looking friends, he was not such a bad catch. He was handsome and handy. He was a dreamy dancer. Plus foreign men were interesting back then. My mom loved the Gigi movie, because of Louis Jourdan. (That's where I got the name for my seventh-birthday present, a Siamese kitten.) And her big favorite was Marcello Mastroianni. I'm sure when she married my dad she pictured herself as a small-time Lucille Ball with a construction worker kind of Ricky Ricardo, who would come home, slap her bum playfully, defusing all marital tension. I'm sure my dad figured their young love would sort out big misunderstandings, due to language barriers, cushioning them when they landed on their blissful wedding bed each night. But, in fact, my mother married my dad because she was three months pregnant, and not yet twenty.

And it came to be that Matthew my older brother did come to be. There is a picture of my mother in the maternity ward, cradling Matt in her right arm, a lit cigarette in her left hand. My dad's next to her with a beer. This was back when smoking was a bad habit, pregnant women only had a few drinks, and hospitals were more like hotels where people like my mother went for rests when their nerves were bad.

After Matthew came me.

She said that when the doctor told her it was a girl, the news stung. She thought her body had performed a kind of trick on her. Plus she delivered me so painlessly and quickly she was sure she had had a bowel movement instead of me, a little baby girl. (Later when I got older on her and she would get madder at me, she sometimes called me a "little shit." I'd say, "But Mom, I can't help it, I was born that way, wasn't I?")

My mother loved me the exact same as Matt, it's just that she didn't have a backup name. I was supposed to be a Mark, not a girl. Her naming scheme and the rest of her biblical intentions kind of tanked. But determined to fulfill at least one yearbook promise, and Mark not being an easily feminized name, she changed religious tracks and called me Faith, and figured Charity would follow Hope. And after Hope was born, all that was left for us to do was pray for a little Charity. But my mother became overly confident carrying the fourth, even teaching me, at two, how to pronounce Charity, and Matt, at three, how to spell it out, her hand cupped around his, both wrapped around a crayon.

At one, the best that Hope could come out with was "Char-yee," so when number four was born an unfortunate boy, "Charlie" became his name.

"Hope can already pronounce it, so we'll give her this one," was my mother's defeated reasoning.

Matthew, Faith, Hope, and Charlie -- the unholy thud of our baby brother's name made us sound more like Mousketeers than disciples.

Our names were her choices, but the fact that most of our H's were completely unpronounceable to my heavily accented dad was nothing but a funny coincidence. My mother was never that mean.

After Charlie was brought home from the hospital there was a period of about six months where my mother said we were all in diapers at the same time. At three, Matt was ready to toilet-train, but was having a hard time with her giving constant birth to diapered rivals. Out of frustration, she made the mistake of trying to train Matt and me at the same time. She figured teaching things to us in twos might be the trick with four kids, each only a year apart. This worked for things like coloring and singing, but not for peeing.

One sorry Saturday, my mom was hit hard with a bad flu, the worst she had ever had, and my dad couldn't, or as she said, wouldn't stay home to help her with us. Matty was not fully trained, and I treated the toilet like a toy. Hope was little. (When he'd argue with my mother about working weekends, my dad's accent sometimes got thicker. "Whose-a gonna pooda food on da tabe. Eh? Jesus Haytch Chryse hisself?" he'd ask.)

My mother didn't know how long she'd be upstairs in the only bathroom, with us out of eye line and earshot.

"Hey, who has to pee? Matt, have to pee? Faith? Pee? Hopey? Come on! Let's all pee. Mommy has to pee real bad."

We were all at an age where we couldn't be left alone because we put a lot of things into our mouths. So we trundled up behind her, me and Matty tugging Hope up each step by her arms. My mom held on to Charlie while she wrestled her pants down around her ankles. She practically fell back on the toilet with instant relief, which set Charlie off bawling hard. This apparently set off me, then Matty, then Hope. We were like a bonfire of babies at her feet. My mother couldn't move from the seat, which set off her own helpless wailing. She alternated between shushing us and patting us on the head, and grabbing herself around her middle.

When my dad came home, he heard the wretched squalling and headed straight upstairs expecting a satanic cult to be butchering his wife and all of his babies. Instead, he found her crying with the four of us collapsed at her feet, drenched in tears.

"I'm sick, Joe, I have no dignity anymore. Look at me! None!" she whimpered from the toilet.

"Nan. Oh, jeez. Why's everybaddy crying?" he moaned.

"Hand me some paper. People get emotional when they can't care for themselves with dignity, Joe, they do," she wept, as he fished out a roll from the top shelf.

He left her there, scooped us up one by one and dropped us, still crying, back down in front of the TV. My mom couldn't move from the toilet for another half hour. My dad was lost downstairs in the sea of afternoon diapers, damp flesh, and snotty noses. None of us had shirts on, we all stank, and we all had the same mess of dark, matted curls. My dad had no idea who was who. Fate? Ope? Matte-ew? Baby? Stop alla dis crying. For Daddy, okay?

He yelled upstairs to her that he would find a teenager, somebody, to help her on weekends. He hollered up a promise to finish the little bathroom on the main floor. He vowed that he would maybe try to work every other Saturday, if he could. Anything to stop her crying, to get her the hell-a downstairs, to help him.

"I give you sam more manny, okay?"

My mom said that we were all so scarred by this, for the next few months Matt refused to learn to pee standing, I would not sit down, and Hope wouldn't keep a diaper on. Little Charlie associated noise with toilets. Until he was approximately five years old, he'd sing songs to himself, out loud, from the bathroom, even when we were in a Chinese restaurant.

Dad never finished the downstairs bathroom.

In general, he was very little help, only because he was hardly ever home. He worked for a man my mom called "The Biggest Asshole in the World" on account of the hours my dad put in fixing that man's messes. Dad's coworkers became simply "those bunch of knuckleheads." She'd leave phone messages for him that read, "Joe: T.B.A. in the W. called. Job in Chatham canceled -- rain. Maybe take kids to my dad's? ...