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Louise DeSalvo T!" H#$%" #& E'()* S#((#+% F#(,!'- U./0"(%/1* P("%% N"+ Y#(2 3456 Copyright © 3456 Louise DeSalvo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechani- cal, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, ac- curate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic for- mats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https:// catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 34 57 56 8 9 : 3 5 First edition For all who have encouraged me and helped me with my work and especially for my family C!"#$"#% Prologue: Ghost Writer &' Lifeboat ( Cutting the Bread () Dark White *+ Passing the Saint ,, White on Black -. Fourteenth Street // The House of Early Sorrows .) My Sister’s Suicide (0* (** breathless, adjective V and I (,0 Adultery Stories (/* Old Flame ()+ Moving On (+1 Acknowledgments *0) P!"#"$%& Ghost W riter When my father is in his nineties, he tells me the story of a di'cult day in my maternal grandfather’s life. He is a boy working the (elds in Puglia with his parents, and his small hands are covered with scratches from the wheat stalks he is binding after his parents cut them. He looks up to the road high above the (eld and sees a small boy about his age walking along the road carrying a book bag. It is at the end of the nineteenth century, well after 1860, the year that marks the great divide in southern Italian history. Thereafter, the peasantry become increasingly poor, increasingly despised, increasingly unable to extricate themselves from debt. It is a time when there is never money enough or food enough, though families toil from before dawn until after dusk and live lives of virtual indentured servitude. “Papa, where is that boy going?” my grandfather asks, looking at the boy walking alone on the road, for a boy walking alone on a road without carrying wheat in this part of Italy is an unusual and wondrous thing. “That boy,” his father says, “is going to school.” “Papa,” my grandfather says, “I would like to do that. I would like to go to school.” his father says, “you cannot do that, you cannot go to school.” “Figlio mio,” “But why can’t I go to school, Papa?” my grandfather asks. “You cannot go to school,” his father answers, “because you are a farm worker and your lot in life is to work the (elds.” “But Papa,” my grandfather says, “what about my children?” IX x P!"#"$%&: Ghost Writer “Your children,” his father answers, “cannot go to school for they, too, will be farm workers and they will work in the (elds like you.” In my father’s retelling of the story, my grandfather pauses for a moment, looks again at the boy on the road, and says, “But Papa, my children’s children. My children’s children, they will go to school.” According to my father, though poverty was an impelling cause for my grandfather’s leaving Puglia and coming to America to work on the railroad, wanting his descendants to be able to go to school, like that boy on the road, was the major reason he emigrated to the United States—so that his children’s children could go to school. I am the eldest daughter of my grandfather’s only child, a daughter, and I have gone to school, and I have become a teacher and a writer. And although I am certain my grandfather would have been proud of my having become a teacher and a writer, I am quite certain that he would not have wanted me to write about my family. For there were, and would be, secrets in our family— that my mother’s mother had died; that the grandmother I knew was her stepmother; that after her birth mother’s death, my mother was abused by caregivers; that she had been institutionalized and shock treated; that my grandfather drank too much; that my father was violent; that my sister killed herself; that I was sexually abused by someone known to the family. These subjects were never discussed, much less written about. Still, my maternal grandparents and my father were storytellers. And schooling was encouraged in my family. My mother went to high school and didn’t attend college only because her family needed her income during the Depression. From when I was small, everyone took pride in my academic accomplishments, the men in my family as well as the women (unusual at that time in my culture). That I would become educated was encouraged and assumed. That I would become a writer was never imagined. Or was it? ! Among my father’s many (and not altogether endearing) nicknames for me was “the storyteller.” When we move from Hoboken to Ridge(eld, New Jersey, my father makes me a special desk that (ts into a small, triangular space at the top of a )ight of stairs. He takes time and trouble with this desk, made of plywood, P!"#"$%&: Ghost Writer xi because it is what he can a*ord. He sands, stains, bu*s, and polishes it; he buys a special pull for its one small drawer. “This is where you can write your homework assignments,” my parents announce when the desk is (nished and installed in its place. My mother has bought an expensive desk lamp secondhand, for next to no money, she says, so I can work at night, too. My retreat to my desk in my troubled household is encouraged, even sanctioned. In part it might have been my parents’ way of giving their di'cult child something to do, someplace to be other than where they were, annoying them. Often, I make up fake homework so I can stay there and escape from chores or taking care of my sister. Most of the writing I do at this desk is schoolwork. It includes essays like “Safety in the Home, Street, and School” that win me a prize, that tell me my words might be worth something, and research projects like “The Shakespeare Controversy,” in which I conclude that Christopher Marlowe has written Shakespeare’s works. Here, too, when I was younger, I’d penned elaborate schemes for a club a friend and I have organized, a club of two, she and I, the only members, and we called it “The Elms Club,” a name combining our initials. It is a club of two because no one else wants to play with us, though I am not altogether aware of this. That we are only two seems (tting and right: It means that we are never excluded from any activities we plan; it means that we can lead often; it means that each of us stands a good chance of getting her way. Our club activities (that, as I recall, consisted of doing things with dolls, with old clothes in my friend’s attic, with the rubble we collected on the street that we fashioned into assemblages, with paper and pens and crayons), important as I deemed them, didn’t interest me as much as our being together. Still, it was my job as the club’s historian to record what we did and when we did it and why. It was at that desk my father made that I (rst experienced a realm that did not heretofore exist in my life—a place where I recorded two girls’ doing seemingly insigni(cant things that enriched their lives and made them exciting. It is at that desk that I learned the power of the imagination, the power of language to create a world, the power of language to forge a bond between people, the power of language to record experience and to re)ect xii P!"#"$%&: Ghost Writer upon its signi(cance, the power of language to make us feel as if what we do has meaning. And so it is at this desk that I did my (rst important writing, encouraged and sanctioned by my parents, with whom I had a contentious relationship. But that I might become a writer, I never dream. I am destined for more practical matters: a career in teaching, or, perhaps the law, because, as my father says, I love to argue. ! It is 1983 and I am on a very small airplane, )ying from Boston to Maine to give a series of talks at Colby College about my work on Virginia Woolf. The )ight has been thrilling. The pilot has hugged the magni(cent coast, )own low enough so we can see the waves pounding the rocks and the salt spray pluming in the air. Soon, the plane banks, heads inland, descends. “Below,” the pilot announces, “is the Maine Central Railroad.” And I burst into tears. For these are the tracks that my maternal grandfather, Salvatore Calabrese, worked on at the beginning of the twentieth century. The richness and sorrow of this moment, the unlikely story of my life’s journey, are evident to me immediately.

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