Elizabeth Street - Laurie Fabiano [84]
A few months later, my mother was stunned at my enthusiasm for attending the family reunion picnic. She kept looking at me out of the corner of her eye. It baffled me that my mother knew so little about the kidnapping. “That’s so long ago. What do you care?”
Unlike my grandmother, who was stonewalling me, my mother honestly didn’t have the information and didn’t seem interested. But for me, it had become an obsession. I replayed scenes from the past, looking for clues. There was the obvious—Nanny yelling to get the strangers out of the house when my friends came to visit—but I needed to know more to be able to make sense of it all. For the first time, I truly tried to understand the tangled web of my family. It wasn’t easy. Nanny and Nonno were cousins as well as husband and wife, and they weren’t the only ones. Our family tree had so many diagonal lines it looked like it was covered in netting. I missed Nonno every day, but now I felt desperate for him.
There wasn’t a hamburger or hot dog in sight at the family picnic. Trays of lasagna, eggplant parmigiana, swordfish, clams on the half shell, steamed mussels, calamari salads, veal rollatini, stuffed artichokes, and more covered the redwood picnic tables. The tuna casserole and noodle salad brought by the few cousins who had married non-Italians were politely put on a separate picnic table and went untouched.
I decided that Uncle Cakey, Nanny’s younger brother, would be my best source. Nanny’s older brother, Clement, and sister, Frances, were both dead. Aunt Mary lived in Wildwood and wouldn’t be coming, and Aunt Etta was a lot younger than Nanny, so I figured she didn’t know much.
Uncle Cakey was immediately drafted for a game of bocce, so I had to wait. When the game and bickering about whose ball was closer ended, I brought Uncle Cakey a glass of wine and steered him far away from my grandmother.
“So, Uncle Cakey, were you born when Nanny was kidnapped?”
“You know about that?”
I tried to sound nonchalant. “Yeah, of course.”
He looked at me skeptically but answered. “I was born when they had your grandmother.”
One of the old cousins walked by. “Dominick, my great-niece here wants to know about when they took Lena.”
Dominick looked older than Uncle Cakey but was taller. He pulled up a folding chair.
“Yeah? Who’s your mother?”
“Josie. I’m Angelina’s granddaughter Anna.”
“You look like her.”
Cousin Dominick squeezed my face and gave me a kiss. “How old are you?”
“I’m sixteen…I saw this old movie about a cop named Petrosino.”
“Oh, yeah, Petrosino, I knew him. I wanted to be a policeman.”
“Did he help when my grandmother was kidnapped?”
“No, he was dead by then. I still remember his funeral. It didn’t matter that he was Italian—everyone came. I had a friend who worked for him. Detective Forseti, Fachetti—something like that.”
“So what exactly was the Black Hand?”
“Thugs. Black rats. You know they even tried to get money out of Caruso when he came to New York. My friend the detective got them that time.”
“So was he the one that got Nanny back?”
“No, your great-grandmother got her back. I helped her, you know. She was smart, your great-grandmother. And strong. I loved Zia Giovanna. My father, Lorenzo, didn’t live long like she did, but my mother, Teresa, God rest her soul, had eleven children and died at ninety-two.”
“How did Big Nanny get her back?”
“Does your grandmother know you’re asking all these questions?”
I lied. “Sure. But what does it matter?”
“Because you don’t talk about it, that’s all. Cakey, did you tell her about how people would wait around the block for our ice cream in Hoboken? If you want to hear old stories, that’s what you should know.”
“See this muscle?” Uncle Cakey jumped into the conversation by flexing his biceps. “The longshoremen didn’t have muscles like this! We had to lift barrels of ice and rock salt. Even your grandmother had muscles from carrying the cream and condensed milk.”
“Lena!” Cousin Dominick called Nanny. “Tell your granddaughter about our ice cream.”
Nanny walked over, effectively