When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [8]
The way my grandmother always told me the story was that early in the week while I was staying with her and Grandfather, she had one of her dreams. The next morning, she took me along with her when she went over to the neighbor’s house. There, over cups of espresso and biscotti, they discussed the sad death of compa Dominic while I played on the kitchen floor with an old teapot and cups.
That day, after my nap, Grandmother put me in the sunroom and went about her chores. As she passed by the sunroom, she heard me happily babbling away in Italian. This was not so unusual in and of itself: Although my parents spoke mainly English in our house, my grandparents knew very little, so in their home Italian was the language we all spoke.
She stuck her head around the doorway and saw me. I was sitting on the floor, facing a corner of the room. I was waving my hands and nodding as if I were conversing with someone.
“Mary Ann, who are you talking to?” she asked.
“He says he is paesano,” I replied.
“Where is he?” she asked.
I pointed to the empty corner.
At first, Grandmother admitted, she thought that I was just imitating the conversation I had overheard that morning at the neighbor’s house.
She began to ask me questions. “What does the paesan’ look like? Where is his home? How did he get here? What has happened to him?”
As I answered each of her questions, my grandmother came to believe that I was talking to the man who had just died. No two-year-old could have made up the answers to the questions she was asking. By the end of her interrogation, my grandmother knew that I was not simply playacting a scene I had witnessed earlier. She knew that I was speaking to a ghost.
My grandmother wasn’t worried. In fact, she couldn’t have been happier. Her daughter—my mother—did not have the gift, and my grandmother had worried about who would carry on for her family. Now, to her great relief, though it had skipped a generation, her family gift for interacting with spirits had been passed along.
From the time I was four years old, my grandmother began taking me with her to funerals in the neighborhood. It was the early 1950s, and in the ethnic neighborhoods of Cleveland, Italian families stuck to the ways of the Old Country. My first impressions of funerals consisted mainly of large, garlicky women clasping me to their generous bosoms or pinching my cheeks while exclaiming to my grandmother, “The bambina has the gift. Ah, Maria, you must be so proud!”
My grandmother, who always turned out for the occasion with her wiry black hair freshly finger-waved and held in place by “diamond” bobby pins and her lips and nails gleaming with her signature Revlon Fifth Avenue Red, would modestly accept compliments on my behalf, beaming with pride and importance. Then, prompted by the family members and my grandmother, I’d inform the stunned-looking man or woman who was standing at the foot of the casket that I had some questions and would then relay his or her answers to the mourners who were gathered.
When I was going on all these “outings” with my grandmother, I don’t think my parents ever knew exactly what I was doing. By now, with four small girls at home, my mother was probably mostly grateful that my grandmother wanted to spend so much time with me. What I’m even more certain of, however, is that the idea of actually questioning my grandmother—the undisputed matriarch of the family—never crossed my parents’ minds! I don’t think it ever crossed my grandmother’s mind to tell her daughter, my mother, who didn’t have the gift, why she was spending so much time taking me on outings. Maybe she was disappointed that her abilities had skipped a generation; maybe she thought her own daughter would disapprove—I never found out for sure. But I’m certain neither of my