OUT OF THE EVER AFTER AND OTHER STORIES by Claudia Amadori­Segree Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters Masters of Fine Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida August 2008 PREFACE Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, Che la retta via era smarrita... In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, For the straight way was lost… Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno I iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Prof. Papatya Bucak, my thesis advisor, who I consider my mentor from the drafting of my first stories as an undergraduate English Major, to my current work as a Master of Fine Arts candidate. Prof. Bucak helped me grow immensely as a writer and encouraged me to pursue creative writing when I lacked confidence in my skills. I am indebted to Prof. Bucak for her dedication over the years, her helpful feedback and the work she put in the careful reading of this thesis. I truly value all her comments and suggestions. I also would like to thank the other members of my committee for accepting to read my fiction. I am thankful to Prof. Wenying Xu because she introduced me to postcolonial theory and to the work of US ethnic women writers which has influenced my creative writing. I hope to become a good scholar as well as write creatively, and Prof. Xu is a role model in the study of literature, research and academic writing. I would like to thank Prof. William Bradley for his generous praise, advice and encouragement. Prof. Bradley helped me discover the value of writing creative nonfiction both as personal reflection and as a tool to develop the skills which have influenced the style of my fiction and helped improve my ability to dive into the characters’ minds. Finally, I would like to thank my mother, Marilisa Baldassi, because without her I would not have completed this degree. My mother has been behind me through every iv step, from the first undergraduate seminar to the completion of this Master’s degree. In the course of this journey, she never stopped believing in me, she supported me emotionally and financially, read every one of my short stories and partook in all my successes. My joy in obtaining this degree would not be as complete if I were not able to share it with her. v ABSTRACT Name: Claudia Amadori­Segree Title: Out of the Ever After and Other Stories Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Professor A. Papatya Bucak Degree: Masters of Fine Arts Year: 2008 Out of the Ever After and Other Stories is a collection of language­driven stories set in different parts of the world and thematically linked, comprising realist narratives and magical realism. The trope that unifies this collection is that of the journey. The characters go on journeys, whether real or metaphorical. Many are lost at the beginning, but they find themselves in the end; others remain lost, but have a better understanding of their condition in the world. Although diverse in nationality, cultural background and gender, the characters in the eight stories share the need to find a lasting identity and a home­place to return to, whether physically or psychologically. The collection alternates magical and realist plots, male and female narrators, points of view, and diverse settings to create variety and a multicultural, hybrid and hyphenated experience. Some stories experiment with language; others have a more traditional mood, akin to fairytales. vi To my mother Marilisa, and my son Nicholas, the most important people in my life TABLE OF CONTENTS The Aunt of Canal Grande ..............................................................................................1 Strays ............................................................................................................................22 The Blue Octopus..........................................................................................................43 The Black Crow.............................................................................................................67 After the Yacht Show ....................................................................................................95 The Clown Who Wanted to Be a Lawyer.....................................................................129 The Island of Men .......................................................................................................155 Out of the Ever After ...................................................................................................199 Genesis, Process, Themes and Literary Sources...........................................................224 vii The Aunt of Canal Grande The thing that changed my life forever happened in Venice. I still remember the intense, sweet scent of night blooming jasmine coming from the tiny inner garden under my bedroom window. A smell forever associated in my mind with that strange summer. I had an aunt who lived in Italy, zia Cecilia, my father’s older sister and the only relative who had refused to move to New York. She was in her mid-seventies and nearly blind, but she still lived independently in a two story house facing Canal Grande in the neighborhood of Accademia. For years I had wished to visit Italy or—even better—move there for good, although my father swore that zia Cecilia was a crazy old hag and warned me to stay away from her. But I was adamant, and my aunt was my best chance to stay in the country, as I was always penniless and couldn’t even afford the most modest hotels. One summer, I contacted zia Cecilia in Venice, without telling my family. Two weeks later, I scraped up just enough money to buy an airline ticket, quit my uninspiring job as a waiter in an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, and left New York, hoping never to come back. My mother had died when I was little and my father, who was just a twenty-one year old pizza boy from Naples and the youngest of four siblings, had immigrated to New York with two of his sisters and their husbands and, of course, me. His older sister, zia 1 Cecilia, had stayed behind to care for their aging parents and help them liquidate all their possessions in Italy. When the time had come to follow the rest of the family to America, she had instead put my grandma and grandpa on a ship headed for New York and refused to go with them. A month later, she had moved to Venice with a man nobody knew, a stranger, who had come to Naples to open a business and apparently had a wife and children in Florence. Or, at least, that was the rumor. Grandma and grandpa had been devastated and had refused to speak with their daughter again. Only at her mother’s death, had Cecilia tried to contact her sisters, but they had intimated to her to stay away; she had made her choice. Many years later, when I was around fifteen, the name zia Cecilia resurfaced again in the family banter. This time the rumor was that her husband (she had eventually married the business man from Florence) had died under mysterious circumstances. One of my aunts maintained that someone had murdered him, the other that zia Cecilia herself had killed him in his sleep because he was seeing another woman. I was used to my aunts’ gossip as I had been raised by them, and I didn’t believe their sister—my Italian aunt—would kill her husband. On the contrary, the more I heard stories about zia Cecilia, the more I became fascinated by her and decided that, as soon as I was old enough, I would look for her in Venice. She had been treated like an outcast by the rest of the family for years, and I resolved to be the one who would reach out to her and make amends for everybody else. As I grew older my resolution weakened and the reality of my family’s financial constraints made me reconsider my dreams. After high school, I began to work as a waiter and to paint in my spare time. My dream was to become an artist, like Picasso or 2 van Gogh, but I didn’t have any formal training except for a few art classes taken in school. It never occurred to me I could go to college; it was something no one in my family expected me to do. Besides, I had been a mediocre student all my life and my poor grades made it hard for me to think of higher education. Even if I had enough money to apply, no university would have considered me a suitable candidate as I barely made it through high school. The one time I told my father I would have liked to be able to go to art school, even part time, he said, lifting his head from his plate of minestrone soup: “Art school is for girls. Do you want everyone to think you’re a sissy? I started working when I was fourteen. Now it’s your turn to help out the family.” We never discussed it again. In all truthfulness, I didn’t want to go to college. I hated school and, except for drawing and painting, talking to girls in the school corridors, and sports, my school experience was a never ending drudgery. Yet, working in a pizza place wasn’t much better. Something was missing from my life. My girlfriend, Marina, who I had known since we were in our junior year, had broken up with me for a car salesman who made more money and drove a red Corvette. They went to church together; I guess her family approved of him more than they did of me. I sat in the back pews and tried not to look at them. Painting in my basement by myself was not much fun, and I had never managed to sell any of my work. That’s when I began to think about zia Cecilia again. About zia Cecilia and about Venice. Really, more about Venice than about zia Cecilia.