Nona's House

Nona’s House

I held my breath for all the years I lived at home. I never knew what might happen from one day to the next, or even one moment to the next. Ahead of all the good things that happened in my house are thoughts of chairs nearly flying through windows, splintering glass, the thump, thump, thump of my mother falling down the stairs, her cuts and bumps and bruises marring her beautiful face, and days of staying home from school for fear of what would happen if I left.

I remember her lying on the floor, spent from interior battles we could never understand; her weapons - alcohol and drugs. My father, always calm, would ask us about school or our plans for weekend, pretending everything was normal, and if we thought it wasn’t, well, he said, "we must be imagining things." Yet poor Mom and her demons, sprung from her unhappy years growing up in a family that we’d only heard snatches about - the sister who’d killed herself, leaving Mom to find her, the mother who never thought she was good enough, the father who was never there - played out their scenes as bizarre theatre in our home for as long as I can remember. And I longed for peace.


My grandfather on my father’s side died when I was thirteen. He was kind, gentle, soft-spoken, a staunch Catholic with a little statue of St. Anthony on his bureau, a member of The Knights of Columbus who did fundraising for good causes. He wouldn’t let my grandmother do dishes because he thought it would ruin her beautiful hands. He called her "Mother," the mother of his children. "Now Mother, you just sit down and have your coffee and I'll do these dishes," he'd say. And as usual, she frowned. Never even said thanks, but he adored her anyway.

Like my own father, he never raised his voice except to laugh. Their house was always full of people and pretty things, well-tended little plants on windowsills, the windows themselves sparkling from weekly cleaning - and best of all, it was so normal, so ordinary, so stable.

They had the wake at home. Italians then did things the way they had done them in Italy. So amidst a throng of people in the living room, my grandfather lay in a coffin wearing his Knights of Columbus uniform. He looked like a king with his gold epaulets sparkling on his shoulders and an expression of peace and calm on his face that made it possible to not look away.

"Go and kiss him," my father said to me. I froze. My mother, sober on this occasion, and clinging to my Nona for support, although it was Nona who needed it from her, watched me. I kissed him quickly on the cheek, wishing that my kiss would bring him back to life, as it always did in fairy tales. And although I studied him for a long time after that, he didn’t move.
.
Now that my grandmother was going to be alone I asked my parents if I could stay with her for awhile to keep her company.


I remember the house so well. An older house on a shady street just below the busy downtown area. The front lawn was tiered, divided by slabs of granite steps leading up to a verandah. The veranda centred by four white columns that supported a large balcony - the one that opened from my Nona's bedroom on the second floor. The third floor had been intended as a maid’s quarters, although it was my place now, a miniature garret that made me feel like a little princess. Off the living room facing the street, was a tiny white balcony where I would stand and dream looking down below where hundred-year-old maples and chestnut trees met to form a thick green arch.

Inside the house, an Oriental carpet and a small mahogany table with a glass top dominated the foyer, reflecting light coming in through small leaded windows in the front door. One crystal bowl filled with fresh flowers, and a smaller silver one for keys adorned the tabletop. The doorknob was crystal. Furniture shone and smelled like lemon, and all was blissfully quiet. Except for Nona.

Nona always let people know where they stood. And that included me. She didn’t just love you for who you were. You had to be better than that. Simply existing in her family was not enough to earn her respect. Sometimes on my way out the door she would stop me and study me. "Managia!" she would say (this was the strongest word she ever used, roughly the equivalent of dammit). "No granddaughter of mine is leaving the house like that. Those pants are too tight. Your eyes are too black. You look like a raccoon. Go upstairs and change those pants and get that gunk off your face."

She criticized my hair, my weight, my relationship with my boyfriend. When I cried over some slight he had hurt me with, she'd say. "Smarten up. He's a good boy. A good family. And money too. It's just as easy to love a rich man as a poor man. Don't forget it." At home no once criticized me, but here I didn’t mind because I knew it meant she cared.

I would arrive home from school, put my key in the lock and say a silent prayer of thanks. I was "home." Nona was usually coming from or going to one of her many activities - sometimes a meeting of the Italian Immigrant Aid Society, or getting together with her bridge club, interpreting at the hospital when they needed her or having tea with her friends at one of the fund raisers they organized for different causes, most of them to do with the Italians who were new to the city.
The phone was always ringing and there were two men who liked Nona and wanted to take her out. Wanted to be her boyfriends. But she wasn't interested. "Why would I want to wash somebody else's socks?" she'd say to me.

"And you loved Grandad so much too. Right?"

"He was a nice man," was all she'd answer back, as she fussed with her gloves and her funny little fur stole with a little animal's head at the top end of it, nestled just under her throat.

She came to Canada on a boat at the age of six and never finished school. She worked in the small convenience store she and her mother ran. My great-grandfather had died shortly after his family arrived in the country and my great-grandmother couldn’t afford to hire help. My grandmother, as the eldest, was asked to work. Years later, when someone asked Nona where she had gone to school, she always said, "St. Mary’s." No one knew she meant the little school in Italy where she had finished only Grade 4. But she and my grandfather had done well in their new country, and no one knew her secret. Her English was flawless, her tiny frame, under five feet, upright with pride.


At night we had dinner together in her spotless white kitchen with the black and white checked linoleum floor. Her favourite announcer, Gordon Sinclair spoke softly in the background from the radio that was always on low. On Sunday afternoons she put the opera on the radio, struggling to translate the words from Italian to English for me, while tears ran from her eyes. The table was always beautifully set just for the two of us, with cloth napkins, good cutlery, and crystal cruets. Her food was extraordinary - home made pasta, sauteed veal, green beans with almonds, rice pudding or Laura Secord chocolates for dessert. We spoke of school, friends, my grandfather, my future, her responsibilities to her community, her hobbies, and her friends, but never of my home life, a subject that was too painful for either of us to broach. Through these dinner conversations I began to feel that I was an only child, or an adopted child, and one who was very lucky to have Nona in my life.

She almost always went out in the evenings. Home alone, I revelled in the silence of the huge house. I made my way upstairs, past the gleaming wooden sculpture of lovers entwined, to my large and lovely room where I kept my clothes and books and music. I sat down to study or daydream, while looking out the leaded windows onto the street where magnolia leaves were falling onto green lawns. It was my heaven. Lost in the silence, I sometimes sat for hours without opening a book at all.

Years later when I moved into my first apartment I invited her to come and see it. Looking around the place and frowning, deep creases between her eyes, she was unimpressed.

"Managia," she said. "How can you sleep on a mattress on the floor? You damn kids."

She had brought me some teacups, pretty ones, with her name on a strip of adhesive at the bottoms of the saucers. These had been used for all of those fundrasing tea parties years before when she was younger and more active. I remembered them well from our Friday nights when we'd wash and dry them together, getting ready for an event the next day where all of the women would bring things from home to make the tables look beautiful.

I put them on the windowsill in the dining room where they looked back at me as if they were scolding me for eschewing a lifestyle that would include a hutch to show off my collection of china, not to mention a proper bed.

When Nona got sick with cancer she called me from the hospital.
"I'm sending the bedroom suite. Don't worry about what anyone says. They can fight about it after I'm gone."

"But ... you're coming home, aren't you?"

"Don't be a damn fool. I'm not coming home and you know it. Now you can sleep on a nice bed."

The bedroom suite arrived along with all the gifts I'd given her over the years. I don't know how she remembered who had given her what but she did. I cried when I opened the boxes and saw these things, shining out at me, clean as a whistle, as always. Nona's things.

The drawers in the vanity still smelled of the pale pink powder she applied to her face every day.

She knew, I think, that she was leaving me a piece of the life I would always miss.