• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1742 0

Sinatra refused to be deprived of anything her betters had. And her blond hair and blue eyes enabled her to pass. She would introduce herself as Mrs. O’Brien, thereby making herself acceptable to the Irish. She was determined to become uptown, and she dreamed constantly of better days, even though Marty, a plain man who loved baseball and boxing, did not share her aspirations. He boxed regularly but not well; he was never a champion like Dolly’s brother Dominick. Marty spoke only when necessary; she talked all the time. He was quiet; her raucous laughter shook the ceiling plaster. He preferred staying downtown in the pool halls and bars of Little Italy, where he could eat ravioli and drink homemade wine with the rest of the men, but Dolly wanted to wear Hoboken like a ribbon in her hair.

She had an amazing facility with languages. She spoke all the dialects heard in Little Italy as well as she spoke English. This made her someone her immigrant neighbors could turn to when they had problems understanding the rules and regulations of the new world. She was also the person in Little Italy to whom Irish politicians could go when they needed Italian votes. And so she became a natural for the position of leader of the third ward in the ninth district, a position never before held by an immigrant woman.

Dolly was a woman of such gall that men had to recognize her as their equal. If they didn’t, she told them off in words that from a man would have started a brawl.

“The mouth on that woman would make a longshoreman blush,” said Steve Capiello, a former mayor of Hoboken, who knew Dolly when he was growing up. “Her favorite expression was ‘son of a bitch bastard.’ She’d curse your mother to hell without even blinking.”

“Dolly had the roughest language of any female I’ve ever known,” said Doris Corrado, a Hoboken librarian. “One time, she walked into a party from pouring-down rain and the first thing she said when she got in the door was, ‘Holy Jesus! It’s raining sweet peas and horseshit out there.’ She was a devil! Her mouth dripped with honey one minute and the next it was ‘Fuck this’ and ‘Fuck that.’ ”

The vile language added to Dolly’s tough reputation. Immigrants in Little Italy knew that she would never be intimidated by Irish policemen, Irish priests, or Irish politicians. So they naturally turned to her whenever they needed someone to plead their case to the public officials.

Her door always open, Dolly came to know those in the downtown area on a first-name basis. People flocked to her home for spaghetti and linguine. Fun-loving, she danced the tarantella at weddings. When someone died, she swooped into the wake to comfort the bereaved with a platter of sausages and homemade pasta. During the holidays she made crispeddi, the sugar-coated fried dough pastry that the Italians loved, and distributed it to everyone on her block.

A year after she married Marty, Dolly became pregnant. Both families were excited by the prospect of a grandchild, the first to be born in America to either the Garavantes or the Sinatras. And so the Garavantes became more tolerant of their Sicilian son-in-law.

The child would come into the world with four uncles and two aunts on his mother’s side, one uncle and one aunt on his father’s side, and two sets of grandparents, all living within two blocks of one another. Later, there would be almost a dozen cousins. And the generations would live together in daily contact. For the family was the primary source of support.

The baby arrived in the Sinatras’ Monroe Street apartment on December 12, 1915. It was a breech birth and an excruciating delivery for the twenty-year-old mother, who was never able to bear children again. As a result of the doctor’s forceps, the baby—a thirteen-and-a-half-pound boy—emerged with a punctured eardrum, a lacerated ear, and deep facial wounds on the left side of his face and neck.

Because of the baby’s birth injuries, the baptism was delayed for several months. When it did take place, downtown Hoboken was shocked by the compart (godparents) the Sinatras had selected.