In March of 2009 I was at my father’s house with my cousin, and the conversation drifted to the family, as it always eventually did. My father was in his seventies. He said that his own father had told him, once: if you ever learned the truth of the family, the hair on the back of your neck would stand up.
“What could that mean?!” my cousin asked — turning her head slowly toward me, wide-eyed, mouth open.
“I don’t know,” my father said, and changed the subject.
I have spent six essays following that sentence into my grandmother’s family, and it was accurate — there was a burned archive and a village in Piemonte and a woman who had been holding the record for ninety years, and a good deal of what she held was indeed hair-raising.
But the sentence was not issued by a neutral party. It came from the man in my grandmother’s house, about my grandmother’s people, and at the time he said it there was a great deal going on in his own.
This is about him.
What I knew
I barely knew him at all, and I want to be exact about that, because it is the whole condition of this essay.
He was born in 1896. He died in 1979, when I was twelve. In that overlap I can recall almost no occasion on which he spoke to me directly.
I do not know where he or my grandmother are buried, but I know they are near each other. She is buried near his people, and that fact tortured Alice. She is surrounded by enemies there, she would say — and after a couple of sherries she would start in on my father about having the body moved.
What I have instead of a relationship is a description assembled from other people and from the corner of my eye. He was strict. He had a bad temper. He was intensely focused on work and extremely opinionated, and he fought with his sons. He also liked nice clothes, and cigars, and cars, and wine, and women. He dressed well into his eighties, and stayed slim, with a full head of white hair. He was not a warm man and he was not, by any account I have, an uninteresting one.
He had two names. He was Michael and he was Morris Lewis, and when he met my grandmother in about 1920 at the newsstand where she worked in midtown, he gave her the second one, and did not mention that he was married to somebody else and living on Riverside Drive.
She gave him a false name too — she was Martha Rouvelle, of a French family from near Marseille — so the two of them met inside a pair of inventions and simply went on standing in them. Readers of the earlier essays know all that. What matters here is that he had a first family and a second one, and that the second one was mine.
My uncle Ron was the eldest son of that second family. As far as I knew for most of my life he was the eldest child of it, full stop — I had no idea there had been a girl before him, given away in New York and raised in Italy, until a woman in a rest home in Pontecurone told me so and I told her she was mistaken. That is the subject of the six essays before this one.
My father used to say that Ron was the apple of their father’s eye, that he could do no wrong, and that whatever there was to be given, Ron got it.
I should say that I liked Ron. He had an enormous personality and a loud voice and was the center of attention in any room he entered, and he was welcoming to me.
There was also something else in the way he looked at me, which I have never been able to name. A curiosity. As though he were regarding an intriguing stranger and trying to work out where he had seen me before — or looking for something in my face, some piece of proof or evidence. It was not unfriendly and it was not rude. It was warm and it held me at arm’s length at the same time, and it left me feeling, mildly and consistently, like an outsider being appraised. I am not going to invent an explanation for it here.
What I registered, without understanding any of it, was that there was something permanently unresolved between him and my father, and between both of them and the man who had produced them.
The apartment full of smoke
After my grandmother died in 1950, my grandfather eventually took up with a woman who was his neighbor at a summer cottage community where he kept a small place.
Her name was Alice.
This was, to put it mildly, not well received by my great-aunt Alice — who had disliked him on sight at a tea at the Plaza in the 1920s and had never revised the judgment by a single degree, and who now had to contend with him being attached to a woman with her own name. The two Alices were never in a room together, and it was understood by everyone that they never would be.
When the second Alice died, my grandfather came to stay with us in our apartment for a while.
I was young. I remember being told to be nice to him, to try to talk to him, because he was going through a bad time. And I remember coming home from school and finding the living room full of cigar smoke — genuinely full, a layer of it hanging a few feet below the ceiling and thickening as the afternoon went on — and him sitting in a chair in the middle of it, looking out the window.
My sisters and I would crawl around on the floor, under the smoke, where the air was.
I have no memory of him acknowledging any of us. Not unkindly. Just not.
There is something about that chair that I did not understand until 2015.
Our apartment was at 13 Mott Street. My father was the superintendent of the building — the job Alice had found for him when he came out of the army, mentioning it in passing, without ever explaining how she came to know about it.
It was also the building my grandmother had grown up in.
She never told anyone. Not her sons. Not my father, who moved into it as a young man and took over its boiler and its stairs and its rubbish and raised his children in it, in the same job her own parents had held in the same building sixty years before — and who lived there for years without knowing that a single member of his mother’s family had ever set foot in the place.
So when my grandfather came to stay with us after his second wife died, he was sitting in the front room of the building where his first one was raised. The woman who had told him she was French. Whose name had never been Martha Rouvelle.
Whether he knew that, I cannot say.
But I have thought about the way he sat there. Whole afternoons at that window, smoking, saying nothing to any of us. At the time I read it as an old man being sad about a dead woman. It may also have been an old man sitting inside somebody else’s childhood, in a room with a view he had no way to explain to the children crawling around under the smoke.
Then one day I came home and he was gone. He had moved to Florida, with his cloud of smoke.
What he left behind was already running. To explain it I have to go back to before I was born.
Look to your right
My father was the youngest of the three boys and the last one left in the house.
Sometime before what would have been his junior year of high school, my grandfather mentioned — in passing, the way you mention weather — that it was possible for a student to graduate a year early. And then added that it would probably be too difficult for my father.
My father heard a challenge and took it. He worked very hard, graduated a year early, and was accepted to an Ivy League university.
Then he arrived and found out what he had walked into. At an assembly for incoming freshmen, a well-known professor told the room to look to your right, and look to your left — one of you is not going to make it to graduation. Don’t let that be you. Academia has since developed other manners.
Within a few days of that assembly he was notified that his mother had died. Unexpectedly. She was fifty-eight.
He stayed. He always said that finishing that degree was the hardest work he ever did, and he was proud of it for the rest of his life in a way he was not proud of much else. It was Alice who carried him through it — letters, telephone calls, the whole apparatus of an aunt stepping into a vacancy no one else was going to fill. His mother died in the autumn and Alice simply took up the office.
His father stayed distant.
My father invited him to the graduation. He came, with the second Alice. The ceremony ended and they left immediately. My father had no memory of his father congratulating him. What he remembered — and he remembered it for sixty years, and told me about it more than once — was his father’s concern about catching the soonest train back to New York, because he had things to do.
Ron, who had gone to a considerably less demanding school, had been given a convertible for his graduation.
I do not think my father ever forgave that afternoon.
And I have come to doubt that the business about graduating early was a challenge at all. My grandparents were finally, and dubiously, married that same year — I have written about that license elsewhere — a few weeks before her death, and just as the last child was leaving the house.
I suspect my grandfather wanted the house empty.
The paychecks
When my father came out of the army he needed a job and a place to live, and he went to stay with Alice, who found him the superintendent’s position at 13 Mott Street — the building I have just described, and whose significance she declined to mention.
What I left out of that story, when I told it in an earlier essay, was why he needed the job so badly.
Throughout his service he had sent his paychecks home to his father, who had promised to hold the money for him. That was the arrangement. It was not a small sum by the standards of a young man with nothing.
When he came home and asked for it, he was told that it had been given to Ron, to start a general contracting business — of which my father was now, according to my grandfather, a partner.
There is a prehistory to Ron. My grandfather had been trying for years to launch him into some kind of career and the previous attempts had all failed. At one point he brought Ron into his own business, and his longtime partner responded by announcing his retirement.
But here is the part I had wrong for a long time, and it matters.
He did not need my father’s money. Ron’s company did not need my father’s money. My grandfather had means, and Ron was going to be funded either way.
What my father’s wages bought was my father.
By converting that money into a stake, my grandfather made his youngest son a partner in his eldest son’s firm without consulting him, and thereby attached him to it. It was not a financial arrangement. It was a tether, purchased with the tethered man’s own pay.
That is what my father could never get past, and he was right not to. The sum was incidental. The placement was the point.
He had no interest in general contracting and no say in the matter. He took the job on Mott Street instead, and said very little about any of it, which was his way. A few years later, with a child to support, he let Ron talk him into actually coming to work at the firm — the firm founded with his money, in which he was already, on paper, a partner.
For years I told myself that none of this was deliberate. That it was simply a man’s settled view of how things ought to be distributed, Ron being the one and everything else arranging itself around him, without malice and without much thought.
I no longer think that.
A man who suggests to his youngest son that graduating early is probably beyond him, and then cannot stay an hour after the ceremony, and then spends that son’s army pay on the favourite and informs him he is a partner, is not distributing anything. He is steering.
And when the steering eventually failed — when my father walked out of that office and started his own company — what followed was not disappointment, or grievance, or argument.
It was rage, and it went both ways.
Nominally the two of them were fighting about a business. They were not fighting about a business. Each had an account with the other that had been open for decades and had never once been stated out loud, and a quarrel between two brothers was simply what called it in.
Both bills came due at the same time.
How the door opened
There is a detail about the founding of that company which I only learned much later.
The connection that brought Ron into the construction trade was made by my grandmother.
She was at a health spa in the suburbs — one of those places that existed as a retreat for women from the city — and she fell into conversation with another woman there. The woman mentioned that her husband might be able to open some doors. The couple were Italian and had Americanized their surname, filing it down to something entirely unplaceable, the way a great many families did.
I want to separate what I know here from what I have made of it, because the difference matters.
What I know: my grandmother met a woman at that spa; the woman’s husband opened a door for Ron; that couple were Italian and had filed their name down; and my grandmother was at that same moment running a household that believed itself to be French, having gone by Myriam and Martha and Elisa and Lizzy, and having used Rouvelle and Rawley along the way.
What I do not know is whether the two of them ever said any of that to each other.
I think they probably did. Two women at a retreat, away from their husbands and their children and their respective performances, talking the way people talk in places like that. But I am reasoning from circumstance, and nobody ever told me it happened, and I would rather say so than let an inference walk around dressed as a fact.
What I cannot stop noticing is that the shape holds either way.
If they confided in each other, then a door opened for my uncle because two women set the same disguise down at the same time.
And if they never said a word about it, it opened anyway — between two people who had each performed the identical operation, and who would have known the technique on sight, across a room, without a syllable being exchanged.
I am not going to characterize the business that came through that door, partly because I cannot verify what I would be saying and partly because the version of this story that a reader may already be assembling is a story that has been done to death at the expense of a great many Italian Americans who never went near it. What I can tell you is what my father told me, which is that he did not like the people, and did not want to be near the work, and felt he had no way out.
And I can tell you what happened to both families afterward, which is more interesting than the part I am leaving out. Years later, on his own and in his own company, my father did business with that same family for a long time, cleanly. The descendants on both sides integrated. Both knew perfectly well where the other had come from, and let it sit there without making anything of it, and — as far as I am aware — never discussed it.
Two households that had each filed a name down in order to get somewhere ended up, a generation on, as the thing the filed-down names were pretending to be.
I find that a fairly sharp comment on how contingent all of this is.
Say goodbye to your father
He was working at his brother’s firm by then and he was not happy. That is the situation. Nothing had been said out loud yet.
I was about six.
My father — who was never still, who was always doing something — became very ill very suddenly. It started as fatigue and within a few days he could not get out of bed.
I would come home from school and go in to see him and the scene made no sense to me. He was withering. There is no other word for what I was looking at.
A doctor came to the apartment. And a few days in, my mother came and told me it was time to say goodbye to my father.
I thought he was going on a trip. I remember being relieved, because that meant he had recovered enough to travel.
I went in. The shades were drawn and the room was dim. The doctor was sitting beside the bed. My father was lying on his stomach, stretched diagonally across the mattress in his pajamas, not moving. He looked asleep. He did not look like he was in pain.
And my first thought, standing there, was that this did not square with a trip at all. When was he supposed to leave? He was going to miss his flight.
I want to stay with that for a moment, because it was not simple confusion.
I was at an age I remember clearly — the age at which the world was becoming intelligible and had not finished. As a very small child I had spent a great deal of attention on adult conversation: my parents, other grown-ups, older children, the radio, records. And what fascinated me was not the parts I understood. It was the way the parts I understood were always surrounded by parts I did not. Words I didn’t have. Whole regions of a sentence that went past me. I filled the gaps in with imagination, and I remember wondering whether that was simply what conversation was — whether everyone did that — as though language came with its own absence built into it.
So I was standing at the edge of that bed inside exactly that condition. Some of what was in the room was available to me and some of it was not, and I had already learned, in my short life, that this happened constantly and that it was to be accepted rather than solved.
I asked my mother again why I had to say goodbye. When I turned around she was facing the wall with her face in her hands, silent.
I looked at the doctor. He said, quietly, “Just say goodbye to your father.”
So I said: “Bye, Dad. Have a nice trip.”
And I left the room.
I understood that nothing was going to be explained, and that I would have to hold the whole thing as a kind of thought-feeling rather than as information. I have written elsewhere in these essays about that boundary — between what is intelligible and the edge of what is — and how it has always had a pull on me. That evening is the earliest instance I can date.
The rest of that evening was unusually quiet — as though nobody were in the apartment, although everybody was. My mother spent a long time on the telephone, speaking in a low voice. A neighbor came by with dinner for us.
I woke the next morning and felt the chill and the silence before I remembered why, and then I remembered.
The apartment had become uncanny. That is the only word for it. It was oscillating between the familiar and the unrecognizable — the same rooms, the same objects, and something in the air around them that had changed completely. I remember being strangely fascinated by it, and moving through the place slowly, the way a diver moves, as though it had filled with water and I was down inside it looking at things.
The truest way I can put it is that the strangeness felt like an entity. Not a mood. A presence, occupying the apartment, that everything else was now inside of.
I went to the kitchen and my father was sitting there, in pajamas and a bathrobe, eating half a grapefruit and sipping a drink.
He did not speak. He did not seem to be focusing on anything in particular. He was there and not there, but mostly, physically, there.
I did not ask about the trip. It did not occur to me to ask. I had adapted overnight to the presence in the apartment, and inside it the question no longer had anywhere to go. There was something beyond me and I accepted it.
So I understood that he had been very sick and that he must be getting better, and I was glad. But his distance disturbed me more than his unconsciousness had the night before. He was awake, and he was further away than he had been asleep.
I remember wondering how far out into the city this strange ambience went. Whether the entity would follow me to school. Whether what I was carrying could get into somebody else’s space.
At school my teacher looked shocked to see me. I lived a few blocks away, my mother taught in the system, and I assume word had traveled. I started talking to the other kids and she took me aside and asked whether I was all right. I said I was. She asked more than once, watching my face.
And standing there being examined, I understood something I could feel and could not have said. She was looking at me the way I had looked at my father in the kitchen. There but not there. Being handled as someone with a condition on him.
It drew me closer to my father. That is the strange residue of the whole episode. Not pity, and not fear. A sense that the two of us were the same kind of thing that morning, inside the same presence, and that neither of us could be reached in the ordinary way.
Then the school day started and everything was completely ordinary.
I went home that afternoon and heard the familiar noise of my family through the door and knew that the episode had passed.
Within a few days my father was on his feet.
We were told he had heart flu. That is what everyone in the family called it, for decades. The actual name is Coxsackie — a virus named after a town in the Hudson Valley that I drove through many times, years later, going up to school and back, and never once passed without thinking of my father.
It was very serious. He recovered completely.
He was in his late thirties, he was working inside a situation he could not get out of, and his heart had been attacked from the inside. I am not claiming a connection. I am putting the two facts next to each other, which is what the family never did.
What has never left me is the entity. To this day, when I am in a house and it goes very still, I am six years old and the apartment has filled with water.
Easter at Ron’s
The following spring, as near as I can date it, we went to Ron’s house for Easter. Alice was there, and all my cousins. I got on with everybody and I was having a good time.
We sat down to eat, and the middle brother, Alex, took out a cigarette and lit it.
“What are you doing?” Ron said. “I told you. No smoking in my house. Put it out or go outside — and since we’ve just sat down to dinner, you’ll have to wait.”
“Let him smoke, Ron,” my father said.
“No. It’s my house. There’s no smoking here. That’s it.”
Then there was a silence, and Ron looked at my father.
I remember the look because it was a version of the one he used on me — the appraising one, the one that always seemed to be checking something. Not angry. Surprised, and faintly confused. A silent what are you doing? As though some tacit agreement had just been broken and he could not work out why.
“Fine,” my father said, quite calmly. “Then we’re leaving.”
My sisters and I assumed this was a dust-up that would blow over before anyone got their coats on, so none of us moved. There was an argument among the adults that I cannot reconstruct. And then we were being told to get our things.
I was the last one out. And at the door I turned around to the room and said:
“Well — I just want to let you know that I don’t want to leave.”
“It’s okay,” Ron said. “Sometimes people have arguments. Don’t worry about it.”
We got in the car and ate at a McDonald’s, as I recall. My sisters and I wanted to go over every detail — who said what, what it meant, what would happen now. And I remember my parents being entirely elsewhere, glancing sideways at each other, in the manner of two people who know something they are not going to say in front of the children.
At the time it seemed to me a wild over-reaction. Almost staged. My father’s response was so far out of proportion that it did not make any sense.
I have since thought about that afternoon from Ron’s side, and it looks different from there. His younger brother had, within the previous year, spent a week in bed with a virus that attacks the heart, in a family already thick with heart disease. It is entirely possible that no smoking in my house was the older brother looking after the younger one — clumsily, and in the only register he had, which was the register of a man laying down the law in his own dining room.
Which would mean that my father walked his family out of an Easter dinner rather than accept a rule that was protecting him.
I have written in an earlier essay that my mother used to say my father was the most stubborn person she had ever met. Here it is, then, working the way stubbornness in this family always worked: aimed at the thing that was trying to help.
It would also explain the look at the table: a man discovering, in real time, that the favour had not been received as one. And his puzzlement in the doorway afterward — sometimes people have arguments — reads, from here, like the genuine bewilderment of somebody who thought he had been doing his brother a kindness and had it walked out on.
None of which was what the afternoon was actually about. There were undercurrents underneath that table that I knew nothing about, and they were carrying my father toward water considerably deeper than anything at Easter dinner.
The mason
He had been thinking about leaving for some time.
One evening he came back to the small office after the secretary had gone, and walked in on his brother in a face-off with a mason. The mason was holding a baseball bat. He said Ron owed him money — probably correctly — and he was not leaving without it.
My father talked it down. The mason wanted cash and eventually agreed to take a check and go.
Then there was a silence in the office.
“You just cost me a lot of money,” Ron said.
“I think I just saved your life.”
“You don’t know how this business works,” my uncle said. “He wasn’t going to do anything.”
On the drive home my father understood that he had to get out.
He spent the following week working out how to say it — how to put it to Ron in a way that might be heard, what to ask for, how to leave the thing standing. He had it more or less prepared.
And before he could have the conversation, Ron had a massive heart attack.
The war
So my father took over the day-to-day running of the company while his brother recovered, and for the first time he saw all of it from the inside.
He also knew, from the first day, that he could not leave yet. He was not going to deliver that news to a man in a hospital bed, and he was not going to deliver it to a man newly home either. He waited until his brother was literally back on his feet, which took about a year.
That is characteristic of him and it is worth recording.
Then he told him.
He tried to frame it as good for both of them. It was not intended as a confrontation. He wanted out, and he wanted his original investment returned — the army paychecks, finally, coming back around.
“You can’t leave,” Ron said.
And then it stopped being a conversation. Ron began with the standard material — that my father would fail, that he could not do it alone, that he had no idea what he was doing — and when my father did not move, his brother lost his temper altogether and said:
“If you leave, I’ll kill you.”
It is worth knowing that Ron was a considerably bigger man than my father, and physically imposing, and that the two of them were alone in a small office.
My father took him at his word. He got up and went out into the reception area where the secretary sat.
“He threatened to kill me,” he told her.
“Get out,” she said. “Run.”
He did.
I never saw my uncle again.
The man at five o’clock
The war went on for several years. I was somewhere between seven and nine for most of it.
One evening, at the peak of it, after my father had started his own company, a man came to his office. It was five o’clock and the secretary had just left. My father was alone.
The man had worked for my father and Ron in the old firm. They had always gotten along. My father had not seen him since the split.
He knocked. My father let him in, and took him back to his small office, and waited — thinking, he told me, that the man had come to pass along something useful, or perhaps out of some remorse, to try to make things right.
The man sat down in the chair across the desk and said nothing. He was visibly nervous.
And my father, who had been getting along fine a moment earlier, went suddenly and completely cold.
“Are you here to kill me?” he asked.
“Yes,” the man said.
And then: “But I can’t do it.” And he began to cry.
My father did not call the police. What he did instead was talk to him — about what it would do to him, and to his family, and about how it would land entirely on him and never on Ron, who would be untouched by it. He talked him all the way down and then let him go home.
He told me this story in my twenties. I had put a small computer system into his office and I would come by after hours to work on it, and he and I would talk in the quiet after everyone had gone. That is when a great deal of this came out. He told it plainly, without dramatizing it, and said that he had known the man could not go through with it.
He also started paying for private security afterward.
Seven in the morning
The thing I actually witnessed was the telephone.
My grandfather was enraged by the split. Not grieved — enraged, and at my father, for leaving his brother. He would ring the apartment at seven in the morning while my mother was getting ready to go and teach and my sisters and I were getting ready for school, and he and my father would have screaming arguments, full of profanity, that went on and on.
I only ever heard one side of it. That was enough. I had never heard my father make those sounds and I have not heard anything like it since.
I knew it had nothing to do with me. I also knew exactly where it was coming from — that there was a man in Florida, on the other end of the line, who could do this to my father at seven in the morning from a thousand miles away.
It frightened me. The hair stood up on the back of my neck.
Which is where I want to leave this, because it took me another thirty-five years to see it.
My grandfather told my father that if he ever learned the truth of the family, the hair on the back of his neck would stand up. He meant the Italians. He meant the village, and whatever was on the far side of the story his wife had invented — a story she had partly invented for him, and which he had evidently never tested.
He said it as a warning about them.
He was a man with two names and two households. He had been exposed, in the 1930s, by a little girl at a children’s birthday party who could not understand why Michael Lewis was taking Ronny Rouvelle home — I told that story in an earlier essay. His sisters had stood in the street outside my grandmother’s house shouting that she was a home wrecker. He had taken his youngest son’s army pay and handed it to his favourite, and installed the one in the other’s company without asking. And he was at that moment telephoning from Florida at seven in the morning to scream at the son who had finally refused the arrangement.
The hair on the back of my neck did stand up, repeatedly, throughout my childhood.
It was never once about the Italians.
A final note about the sentence in question.
Two people lived inside two inventions in one house for twenty-five years. His family found her out — his sisters came and stood in the street. Her family found him out — the little girl at the party saw to that. At some point, in some conversation nobody wrote down, in a kitchen in Queens, they must have told each other the rest.
And I think the sentence came after she died. I cannot prove that. It is a sense I have from the way my father told it, and from the fact that he had no memory of ever hearing it while his mother was alive.
Which would make it something other than a warning about strangers. It would make it a widower keeping his wife’s secret in the only way available to a man with no talent for confidences — by rendering the subject radioactive, and then changing it.
And he would not even have been wrong. The truth of her family was hair-raising. A mother who disowned her children and cut their faces out of the photographs. A daughter dead under a mulberry tree. A baby handed across an ocean and a name filed down so that nobody could follow it back.
So the sentence may have been accurate, and protective, and a deflection from his own house, all at the same time. Almost everything anyone in this family said turns out, on inspection, to have been doing three things at once.
I cannot choose between those readings and I am not going to pretend the evidence does.
What I can say is that he handed it to his son with the warning intact and the contents sealed, and his son handed it to me the same way, in a living room in March of 2009, and changed the subject exactly as he had been taught to.
It took me the next six years and a woman in a rest home in Pontecurone to get it open.
Part two of this coda: Florida, a letter about Moscow, a nightmare two days early, ten handwritten pages about business, and a painting in a basement.
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