Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana

Cairns

Dennis Barone 275 Cairns Dennis Barone Memoir (2003) Tides wash all prints away except the fragments stones claim. It is the incompleteness of things that still hurts; that still haunts. Tears held back may break our bones, but names will never hurt us. From the corners of our eyes, stones. Stones in every beating vein. Hearts turned to stone and inscribed with a name. Small stones placed on other, larger markers. It is a way to remember. The last time I saw Uncle Louis he sat quietly by a sunny window in the living room of my in-laws’ apartment. My mother- and father-in-law had arranged a luncheon in Uncle Louis’s honor, but almost no one spoke to him. He was in his mid-nineties and it was difficult to understand him. We made sure that he was comfortable, though, that he had everything he wanted, and then we turned to our conversations that took place elsewhere in the small and crowded room. On that occasion, as on several others, I did not ask him about his lifelong friend, Pietro di Donato. When I had first met my wife’s Great-Uncle Louis Ducoff my lack of knowledge kept me from asking about Christ in Concrete, the famous novel by his friend in which Louis Ducoff appears as the character ‘‘Louis Molov.’’ My wife and I were both graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, and Louis took a great interest in our work and in our lives. Just as Louis had been an inspiration to Pietro di Donato decades before, so, too, he encouraged our intellectual endeavors. By the time of that afternoon luncheon I had finally read Christ in Concrete, but even then I didn’t ask Louis anything about the book or its author. I busied myself in amiable conversation with Rabbi Bernard Ducoff. Every so often I would look over at Louis and think to myself that I should ask, I should ask something . Then I’d check myself and consider how serene he looked with so many nephews and nieces and his son and daughter-in-law and grandnephews and grandnieces gathered about him, the sun catching the sandy strands of hair that fell toward his still handsome face. A few months after that luncheon word came one evening that Louis had died. I think both my wife and I felt that we had lost a true soul mate as well as a great-uncle. As it turned out, the day of his funeral I had another commitment. Long before, I had been scheduled to read that day for the Oasis writers’ group in Worcester, Massachusetts. I felt torn. I had missed my beloved Great-Aunt Mary’s funeral—among other family events over the years—and sometimes I think that, yes, I could be a better son, brother, cousin, nephew, husband. I also felt a sense of obligation to Eve Rifkah and the reading that she had organized in 276 cairns Worcester. I rationalized that Louis loved languages and literature. (He could speak a half-dozen and during his last years spoke Spanish more often than he spoke English.) He’d want me to give the reading. And so from Connecticut I went north to Massachusetts and Debbie, my wife, went south to New Jersey. Debbie had become a correspondent of Hedley’s, Louis’s daughter-in-law, Michael’s wife, and in the months after the funeral Hedley and Michael e-mailed Debbie photographs and genealogical information. Meanwhile after a sabbatical semester during the fall of 2001, I returned to teaching at Saint Joseph College and offered a new course entitled ‘‘New York City and Italian American Narrative, 1924–2000.’’ One of the books for the course was Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete. In the fourth section of the third chapter of the novel Louis Molov tells the protagonist, Paul (an autobiographically based character), about his brother Leov whom the Czar’s soldiers shot. Leov, Louis says, ‘‘was the most brilliant student in Minsk Gubernia. He was a poet. He wore his hair long, and he danced like the Russian winds. He loved everyone and was loved. He was quick and sympathetic. . . . He was a genius.’’ Louis asks Paul if he would like to see a photograph of his brother Leov. Pietro di Donato described the picture as follows: ‘‘Leov sat on a chair that was sideways. His left arm rested over the back of the chair...