The Brooklyn Rail

When the greatest living historian of our time, Robert Orsi, started researching Italian Harlem and unearthing the documents that allowed him to study the meanings and importance of the festa of the Madonna of Mount Carmel between the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, one of the things he discovered was that the life that those poor, mostly southern Italians lived was centered on the notions of home and rispetto. Home gave a meaning to their life. It was their moral center, as well as the locus of a private matriarchy, which in a way was also the flip side of the patriarchy that ruled the street, the public space. Rispetto was their key social value. It defined and included hard work, fear, love, intimacy, distance, the notion of holiness, and an understanding of the self as connected to the other and their surrounding reality, which consequently was understood as communal. Because of this, one’s destiny—and one was both the individual and his or her people—was “shared.”¹

Pilsen, the working-class Chicago neighborhood of Ann Napolitano’s moving novel Hello Beautiful, is both geographically and chronologically a long way from what used to be Italian Harlem, as the novel spans from 1960 to 2008. But it is all too close to it too, as the previously same notions, albeit fictionalized and somewhat adapted to their new context and purpose, are the coordinates according to which the Padavano family, especially the four sisters—Julia, Sylvie, and the twins, Cecelia and Emeline—operate and eventually deploy to reinvent their family. One could even argue that Napolitano succeeds in updating the value of those concepts as she de-patriarchizes the notion of family and reimagines it as a unit where difference—be it in the guise of class, gender, or sex—is not a self-referential affirmation of one’s identity, resulting in a version of a self-interested, atomized, and detached-from-reality individualism. Difference within the reconstructed Padavano family becomes an interconnected community that allows one to sustain even the biggest adversities that life can give, including the premature death of a dear one.

It is no coincidence, I think, that the novel begins not in Chicago, but in the mythological and factual cradle of the country—the Boston where the well-off, father-centered family of the main male character of Hello Beautiful, William Waters, resides before moving to the suburbs after William’s sister dies, just six days after his birth. The move to the suburbs is the father’s way of coping with the trauma of his daughter’s death, but it turns out to be only an escape from reality that produces the exact opposite. Moving to the suburbs does not bring peace to the family, let alone a new beginning. It does not help in processing the daughter’s death. On the contrary, William’s parents increasingly distance themselves and eventually cut the proverbial umbilical cord from their son, who finds psychological shelter in the game of basketball. William enjoys the sport because he can play alone or as part of a team without the need to ask, as is the case when some boys on the neighborhood’s court invite him to join their team. They offer him “a chance to be part of something for the first time, without having to talk.”

Silence is what defines William, who internalizes the loss of his sister as his own fault to the point that he is afraid of coughing in front of his parents, fearing that his sickness will bring back the ghost of the sister’s death. Basketball becomes his voice, and, despite a serious injury in high school, is what allows him to get a scholarship to Chicago’s Northwestern University in 1978, where he pursues a history degree. The move westward, however, does not signify the mythology of the frontiersman that to a large extent has come to define American masculinity and manhood as a version of rugged individualism. Rather, the move to Chicago translates to the end of his relationship with his parents and the encounter with what will become his new family, the Padavano family. Not only does Julia Padavano, a fellow Northwestern student who, unlike William, does not lack self-confidence and words, introduce herself to this English and Irish boy with “very white skin,” she also immediately introduces him to her own fourteenyear-old twin sisters, who stand out to him because of the “same olive complexion, same light brown hair,” and then to Sylvie, the middle child of the Padavano sisters. Shortly thereafter, William meets their parents. The father, Charlie, is a lover of poetry, especially Walt Whitman. Reluctantly, but with a sense of duty toward his family, he continues to work the job in a high school friend’s paper factory that allowed him to buy his house in the Pilsen neighborhood when “a lot of white people were fleeing the city,” and to support the four girls and his wife Rose, the matriarch who rules the family. When William proposes to Julia in their junior year of college, he completes the opposite experience of the “young man goes West” mythology. He chooses domesticity and marries down. Julia, in fact, thinks that William waits until the last minute to give his parents the news of their engagement because he is “embarrassed to tell them that he’d asked an Italian American girl from a poor family to marry him.”

By marrying an Italian American girl, he soon realizes that he married her family, too. As Rose, the mother, tells Julia, the boy is “an orphan; you know that. He has no other family.” And by marrying the Padavano family, he also marries the ensuing dramas that the Padavanos go through in the first half of the book, dramas that separate the family, physically and otherwise. These are the following: Cecelia gets pregnant at age seventeen and decides to keep the baby without telling the mother who the father is, because “there’s no good to come from his knowing,” a decision that infuriates Rose, who did not want her daughter to make the same mistake she made when she got pregnant with Julia and, Italians being Italians, married Charlie; Cecelia moves down the block with Mrs. Ceccione, as Rose refuses to endure the shame of a daughter being a single mother; Charlie dies prematurely right after visiting the daughter and her newborn, Isabella (Izzy), collapsing on the stairs on his way out; Julia’s plan for William to become a professor fails miserably, which in turn furthers William’s descent into depression as he realizes that his marriage is over merely a year and a half into it and continues to be haunted by the death of his sister, to the point that he writes in his novel in progress “it should have been me, not her;” William refuses to raise and even acknowledge the existence of his daughter Alice, fearing “that [his] darkness would swamp her light,” (note the Catholic vocabulary); and, last but certainly not least, given the traditional Catholic environment the novel deals with, Emeline tells her family that she is homosexual, the final blow to Rose’s dream of the classic up-from-theghetto American success story for all of her daughters, which translates as the achievement of middle-class status, a stable heterosexual family that would give her grandchildren and everything else that the embracing of whiteness grants to white ethnics. Just like William’s parents, Rose too runs away from reality and does the unthinkable. She sells the family home and moves to Florida, away from her daughters, to escape what she reckons, in proper white American diction, the “failure” of her marriage that her old-fashioned and guilt-ridden Italian Catholic mind sees reflected in Sylvie’s failed marriage.

But nothing succeeds like failure in America, as the second half of the novel espouses, beginning with one more dramatic and untraditional plot move—certainly within an Italian American context. This is Sylvie’s gradual discovery of her feelings toward William, something that his attempt to commit suicide increases, convincing Sylvie to pursue a relationship with her sister’s husband, who eventually reciprocates her love. As Emeline says when she breaks the news of Sylvie and William’s relationship to Julia, “they didn’t have a choice.” Instead of breaking Books103 the family, however, Sylvie’s action triggers a new beginning for every single one of the Padavano sisters. Gradually, they become fulfilled, independent women, which allows them to reconstitute their family according to their values of origins—what I would call the return of the Italian immigrant repressed that helps them make themselves subjects rather than objects of modernity; what allows the sisters to embrace modernity and America on their own terms, under the given circumstances of an advanced and complex society. Sylvie’s action also signals the rebirth of William as a man and a father, a transformation that goes hand-in-hand with the sisters’ transformations. Essentially, each member of the family gradually takes off the shackles of 1980s patriarchal America and enters into the twenty-first century.

Yet, this change is neither presented as an anti-modern move neither a return to traditional family roles nor the insufferable American sentimentalism of bourgeois heritage that afflicts our culture, from the middlebrow eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels to, say, Grey’s Anatomy or The Butler. Napolitano is not in the business of Hollywood-like happy endings. On the contrary, here the synchronous individual and communal metamorphosis is the result of people’s hard work, interpersonal conflicts, difficult decisions, and, ultimately, death. All of which is sustained and overcome by everyone being truthful to him or herself, giving priority to the exact opposite values of patriarchy and social conformity that the latter demands. Every single character realizes that when one gets there, “there is no there there” because they realize that they can’t get there by themselves. They realize that to get there, they need to let somebody else help them, which often comes in the form of non-traditional gender roles.

William accepts the suggestion of Sylvie and his dear friend and basketball fan Kent, a medical student in Indiana, to enter a recovery program and, slowly but surely, he also lets Sylvie love him, embracing and reciprocating her love. When he tells her that he does not deserve her, she replies, “Well, I do.” Julia accepts the offer of her homosexual economic professor at Northwestern to move to New York City temporarily to help him with his consulting work, a move that becomes permanent and turns her into a successful businesswoman and single mother without depriving herself of occasional encounters with a male partner of her liking. The move to New York makes her realize that “when confronted with a husband who needed to be saved, [she] had defied centuries of misogyny that demanded wives prioritize husbands and had chosen to save herself.” Emeline and her girlfriend Josie move into the house that her twin sister, a painter, bought from a fellow artist, and live there with Cecelia and her daughter Izzy.

One realizes that at this point in the novel, a series of micro-units with either a non-traditional leader or codependents has replaced the original nuclear Padavano family. At the same time, one notices that success is no longer defined by the traditional middle-class status, even when Julia obtains it in New York City. Success is the result of the self-fulfillment of one’s aspirations—small or big as they may be: whether this is Sylvie’s promotion at the local library and her loving relationship with William; or Cecelia’s achievements as a painter and single mother who raises her daughter well; or William’s skills in helping basketball players prevent injuries, which earns him a reputation and a job with the Chicago Bulls. This might as well be why—when tragedy strikes again in the form of Sylvie’s terminal brain cancer—death, however hurtful, is not the end of the Padavano family. On the contrary, it becomes the tool to reconnect the family based upon different values and brings them all truly together for the first time. Paradoxically—and paradoxes take us to the truth of the story—death brings them home.

As this process unfolds, in fact, the old values of rispetto, acceptance, giving as a form of receiving, and the interconnectedness of people and of the world they inhabit are refashioned, renewed for a new age and a new set of circumstances. This explains why the discovery of Sylvie’s cancer does not turn the book into one more story of sentimental platitude. Instead, the sickness becomes both a painful experience and a way to rebuild interpersonal relationships. It becomes a way to affirm the essential beauty and sacredness of life. The latter is what everyone truly possesses on the individual level, which can only become meaningful in the interplay with others, whose presence dialectically recognizes everyone’s individual worth. As Sylvie puts it for the reader when she reads her father’s favorite Whitman’s line, “And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” Simply put, it is an affirmation of love in a culture that is historically haunted by the gothic terror and Protestant fear of death. Rather than surrendering to the meaning of her sickness, Sylvie uses her cancer to reconnect with people, indirectly making them reconnect with their past, themselves, and one another, confronting the uncomfortable truths that their silences cover. Sylvie knows that this is how she will remain alive. Not in obvious family memories, or in objects that evoke a nostalgic memory of hers, but as an inherent part of her family’s being, in a mix of a Whitmanesque self that contains others and Mediterranean popular Catholicism. Her father had told her “We’re all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is. Your mother and sisters don’t have that awareness. Not yet, anyway. They believe they’re contained in their bodies, in the biographical facts of their lives.”

The terminal cancer reinforces this sentiment in Sylvie, while her actions first, and her death later, trigger that awareness in the rest of the family. “This is worth dying for,” Sylvie thinks when Julia secretly visits her in Chicago after learning the news of the sister’s cancer, and the two go to a movie, the beginning of their reconciliation, or, better yet, the rupture of the silence that Sylvie’s relationship with William had brought between the two. After Sylvie’s death, when Julia arrives to Emeline and Cecelia’s house, knowing that Sylvie will no longer be on the other side of the door, she realizes that “when your love for a person is so profound that it’s part of who you are, then the absence of the person becomes part of your DNA, your bones, and your skin.” At the same time, Julia realizes that while she tried to do her best for herself and her daughter, “she’d done it alone, and of course—she realized now—that could never have worked.” Because of this realization, Julia decides to tell her daughter the truth: that her biological father had not died in a car accident as she told her when she was a child. William is her Aunt Sylvie’s husband. In a different guise, William realizes the same thing—twice over. First, when he decides to open the box that contains the only material memory of his sister Caroline, a photograph of her, something he had refused to do thus far thinking that, had he opened “his eyes and heart to her, she would hurt him like she’d hurt their parents.” By doing so, he realizes that “that had been absurd,” and thus asks Cecelia to use the picture to paint an enormous canvas of the sister—“that way, she would continue to exist.” Second, he realizes how “almost thirty years after his death,” Sylvie’s love for her father Charlie “ran so deep that he could be considered the most successful person William had ever known.”

Giving becomes receiving and, ultimately, a form of forgiveness. Instead of a Catholic funeral, which Cecelia told her sisters Sylvie would have not wanted, they convene at home around food at the kitchen table, the true altar of Mediterranean people like the Padavanos. There, “everyone who had been lost—including Julia and Alice, of course—would be accepted as they were.” This is why the sisters welcome back their mother, who, albeit reluctantly, is forced to recognize the beauty of her much changed and enlarged family. For the same reason, Izzy explains to Alice that her mom had forgiven her grandmother who kicked her out of their home because she wanted to continue to love her. For the same reason, Alice, after dinner, realizes that she is no longer angry at her mother for keeping the existence of her father a secret. She realizes that “whatever Julia had taken away from Alice for all these years, she’d taken away from herself as well.” Alice, who previously said she can only cook one decent meal—spaghetti, a marker of her past—also comes to understand where she comes from, who her family is, and why they are who they are: “For Alice, part of the strangeness of this new Chicago family was that they conducted a kind of love that seemed voluminous; it required talking over one another and living on top of one another, and it was a force that appeared to include both present and absent, alive and dead,” a passage that could be taken out of Jerre Mangione’s classic memoir of Italian American life in the 1920s and ’30s Mount Allegro. That type of love turns, for Alice, into “a bigger kind of love. It was vast; it felt like everything.” Now, “she sensed” (note, again, the Catholic vocabulary) that her father was ready to accept her because he had accepted himself, because she “forgave herself for locking herself away, and she forgave her parents for the bold choices they’d made to protect her.” Earlier in the afternoon, when she had seen Grandma Rose cry, her Aunt Emeline had told her that “grief is love.” Now, she thinks, “Forgiveness is too,” which is Napolitano’s reminder to the reader that the precondition of love is the recognition and acceptance of the other, because, like Orsi found out in Italian Harlem, “destiny is shared.” When Alice finally confronts William and tells him that she feels she knows who he is, but does not really know who she is, he replies, “For a long time, Sylvie knew me better than I knew myself. I think sometimes … we need another pair of eyes. We need the people around us,” just like the reconciled Padavanos around the kitchen table, “I know you can do this on your own,” he continues, “But, if you allow me, I’d like to help.”