IN THE SUMMER of 1970, my brother, Skip, brought home a new girlfriend. His high-school girlfriend, Weezie, had been a freckle-faced, big-toothed girl whom I loved. She treated me like a kid sister and happily gave me extra scoops of ice cream when I went to the Newport Creamery at the mall, where she worked. But Weezie broke Skip’s heart, and the summer after his freshman year at college, at his job at Zayre, he met the girl he would eventually marry, the one who appeared in our kitchen one hot, muggy night, wearing torn jeans and moccasins, a type of shoe my mother believed only “bad girls” wore. Where she got such an idea I don’t know, but she also believed—and still does—that “bad girls” drink soda straight out of a bottle instead of using a straw. To this day I have never seen my mother lift a bottle of soda to her lips. She sips from a straw.
The moccasins were the least of the problem, however. The girl was Jewish, which did not bother my parents (though my Italian grandmother didn’t much like it), but infuriated her parents. So much so that they forbade Skip from dating their daughter or even calling her. That infuriated my mother, who didn’t like anybody who did anything against her kids. Barring Skip from their house was an insult to her, to all of us, and so a kind of war between the two families began. When the girl’s father called my father and insisted my parents keep Skip away from his daughter, my mother took the phone and gave him a piece of her mind. Who the hell did he think he was anyway? I listened, afraid and excited in equal measure. Somehow we were in a feud—the Hatfields and McCoys, the Capulets and Montagues. It all seemed terribly romantic to me.
Although my family was Catholic, we were not really churchgoers. My father, who had converted from Baptist to Catholic back in 1950 in order to marry my mother, liked the folk masses at Sacred Heart Church and happily went once or twice a month to sing “Day by Day” and “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore” while the young priest strummed the guitar. When he first met my mother, her family didn’t like him—he was a sailor, he wasn’t Catholic, and worst of all, he wasn’t Italian. His Midwestern family viewed my mother as some kind of exotic creature because she was Italian and Catholic. Their nicknames for her—unbelievable now—were “wop” and “fish eater,” the latter because Catholics didn’t eat meat on Fridays. When she offered to make them spaghetti and meatballs during a visit to Indiana, she was shocked that she couldn’t find some of the ingredients—parmesan cheese, fresh parsley, garlic. Still, even without these key things, they marveled at the meal. They’d never tasted anything like it.
But all of that was twenty years earlier, and in time my grandmother fell in love with my father. The two of them fried the crispelles and baked the sweet bread at Easter, and cleaned the eel and calamari for the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. Religious differences seemed old-fashioned and trivial by 1970. We knew exactly one Jewish person: Jean Goldstein, a friend of my auntie Emma. She arrived at our house a few times a year, always heavily tanned and shiny with gold and diamond jewelry. Jean Goldstein became an emblem of our family’s openness in this war. “Jean Goldstein sits right at this table and eats sausage and peppers!” my mother would remind us after another call from Phil, the girl’s angry father. “I would never tell Jean Goldstein she wasn’t welcome in my house. Who does he think he is?”
My family had no understanding of the Jewish religion or of Jewish history. Mama Rose believed the Jews had killed Jesus, so she didn’t trust them. Surely my parents knew about the Holocaust, but to what degree I cannot say. And as terrible as it sounds, religion just didn’t matter to them and therefore they couldn’t accept it as such a big deal—big enough to cause all this trouble. That summer, and into the fall and winter, we got calls that the girl had run off to be with my brother at college; calls insisting that we had to do something, make Skip leave her alone. The calls often came late at night, and I would hear my father’s weary voice say, “The more you try to stop them, the more they’ll want to be together. If you let them see each other, this thing will blow over.”
It didn’t. Instead, at the tender age of twenty, my brother announced they were getting married. My parents had married at nineteen and twenty-one, so they weren’t bothered that Skip was so young. But he also announced that he was converting to Judaism, which did not go over very well. Mama Rose cried, claiming he was breaking Jesus’s heart and that he wouldn’t be able to get into heaven. “What about Christmas?” my mother said, and she was crying too. Even though we were only nominally Catholic in many ways, my mother held on to certain aspects of the faith. She considered saying something against Catholicism blasphemous. “Jesus cries,” she’d tell us if we questioned a tenet or told a joke that involved a priest. She says her prayers—Hail Mary, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Act of Contrition—every night. She loves the Virgin Mary and all the saints, especially Saint Anthony. How would having a Jewish son fit into this construct of her faith? My father, on the other hand, didn’t really care. “It’s just words,” he said. “What matters is who you are, not what you are.”
With the announcement of the conversion, the girl’s parents were suddenly our best friends. Phil brought my father cigars and Eileen went shopping for mother-of-the-bride and mother-of-the-groom dresses with my mother. They came over for Christmas Eve, happily eating shrimp cocktail and drinking my father’s special punch: Hawaiian Punch, rum, strawberries, and rainbow sherbet. As the wedding neared, we saw them more than we saw almost anyone else. There were decisions to be made on color schemes and tablecloths and yarmulkes. My isolated world of Catholic immigrants was all at once steeped in Judaism. And at the same time, in that magical way books have, I slid A Stone for Danny Fisher off the library shelf. Attracted by its size—494 pages!—and perhaps by that sexy cover, I inadvertently picked a book at least nominally about Judaism.
JUST ABOUT EVERYONE in my hometown was Catholic. In second grade the class showed up on the playground one spring morning with our foreheads smudged with ashes. This happened every Ash Wednesday. Before school we went to church and got our ashes. But that year I noticed one girl with a clean, shiny forehead. Her name was Sandra Goldsmith, and I approached her that morning with a great deal of curiosity. Maybe she was going to get her ashes after school, I thought. Ash Wednesday marked the first day of Lent, and the talk on the playground that morning was about what everyone was giving up for Lent—candy, soda, television.
“What are you giving up for Lent?” I asked Sandra.
She kicked at the pavement with the toe of her scuffed brown shoe and shrugged.
“I’m giving up candy,” I offered, already missing the flying saucers filled with tiny beads of sugary candy that I preferred.
Sandra remained silent.
I still remember the moment so clearly, remember the bewilderment I felt at her behavior. Even though I went to a public school, playground conversation often involved discussions about Pope Paul VI and when the secrets of Fátima would be revealed. We were kids or grandkids of immigrants, French Canadians and Italians and Portuguese and Polish Catholics who had come to work in the textile mills that still lined the river that cut through town. That there were people in the world who were not Catholic never occurred to me.
“When are you getting your ashes?” I asked, not meaning to bully.