“Why are you saying this, Jozzie?” she shouted in distress.
“You slept with him. You slept with Marcus Sandford.”
She whitened and stepped back, putting a hand to her throat.
“Jozzie, what are you saying?”
“Oh God, Nonna, don’t be even more of a hypocrite. You were the one who told me about the four months you had to spend on your own. Four months in summer, from November to February. When you told me I felt so sorry that you had to spend Christmas and the festive season away from people you loved. But then today when everyone was joking about Mama being conceived on New Year’s Day, I thought it was impossible. How could Mama possibly be conceived on New Year’s Day when Nonno was up north?”
“She was premature,” she sobbed.
“She was not. She always tells me what a fat baby she was. Nine and a half pounds when she was born. Premature babies don’t weigh that much.”
“Jozzie, stop . . .”
“No. You slept with him. You had the nerve seventeen years ago to treat Mama the way you did when all the time you had done worse. You were married. You slept with Marcus Sandford while you were a married woman. You’ve gone on about Australians all our lives. Don’t get involved with them, Josie, they don’t understand the way we live, you’d say. What about you, Nonna? Did he understand the way you lived? Did he understand what marriage was?”
I was shouting and she was crying, but I was too shocked to care. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe my grandfather had come home for a weekend during that time. I wanted her to tell me that. I wanted her to say that my grandfather came home for one weekend and they made love and conceived my mother. But she didn’t. She just cried.
“I hate you,” I shouted. “Not because of my life. But because of my mother’s. I’m never going to come and visit you again unless Mama is here. If you complain to her and she forces me to come here, I’ll tell her everything.”
“No,” she shouted. “Don’t ever tell Christina.”
I pushed past her and felt her trying to grab my hand, but I shrugged free and ran to the door. I’m not quite sure why I hate Marcus Sandford and Nonna Katia for what they did. I had thought their story was romantic. I had thought that nothing had happened. It was like he was a myth I could always dream about.
My mother, though, is the reality. Her reality was living in a house until she was the age I am now. Living with a man who detested her for something her mother did. Living with indifference, if not hate.
I wonder about life if Nonna had married Marcus Sandford. If Mama had been Christina Sandford, daughter of Marcus Sandford, and not Christina Alibrandi, daughter of an Italian immigrant. Would life have been different for her? Would she have depended on Michael so much and would she have slept with him like she did, which was more out of loneliness caused by her parents than pressured sex?
Why can’t it seem romantic anymore?
Why does it feel like the end of the world because of what they did?
Now it seems that my illegitimacy is child’s play compared to all of this. Marcus Sandford, a policeman and army officer, had an affair with a married immigrant in the 1950s. They had a baby and that baby had a baby.
People would have a field day. Our lives would be ruined.
I think I’ve always dreamt of being someone really impressive and famous. Someone people could sit back and envy. Growing up the granddaughter of Marcus Sandford, whoever he is today, could have brought me that feeling. It could have brought me a completely different way of life.
But now all I want to be is an insignificant Italian in a normal Italian family where there is a father and a mother and grandparents who have all stayed married to one person because it’s the thing to do. I want a boring life where there is no excitement or scandal. No illegitimacy, no scandalizing affairs. Nothing. Just normality. But we’re not normal.
Katia Alibrandi, Christina Alibrandi, Josephine Alibrandi. Our whole lives, just like our names, are lies.
Twenty-Six
IT TOOK ME a week to realize that I was no longer angry about what Nonna did thirty-six years ago. It’s funny that all my high school life I’ve been worried about what people think of me and say about me behind my back. Yet all of a sudden I realized that I didn’t care what they thought and I even began to doubt that anyone, give or take a few gossips like Sera, gave a damn either. I thought of Michael and my mother, who didn’t seem to worry about people’s opinions. And by the looks of things, Nonna didn’t have the right to. Jacob didn’t give a damn who I was either, John accepted me the way I was and Lee and Anna had never made me feel different. So that covered all the important people, and I’d be a pretentious hypocrite if others were more important to me than those who loved me.
That doesn’t mean I wasn’t angry at Nonna, because I was. She lived her life as a lie. She missed out on having a wonderful relationship with her daughter because that lie allowed her to be trapped.
She dominated our lives hypocritically and made herself look the victim, when in actual fact it was Mama who was the victim. I fully realized how I felt on the way to Sera’s place on Friday afternoon. The four of us were going to catch up on last-minute studying for the HSC and Sera was blabbing on as usual about things that weren’t her business.
“Thank God your father’s a barrister,” she said. “It’s respectable. Could you imagine what the community would think if he was just a laborer or something?”
I looked up, seeing the bus approaching behind her. “My community wouldn’t give a shit what my father does for a living, Sera. Only your stupid community does.”
“Well, touchy, touchy,” she sneered disdainfully.
They got on the bus but I hesitated and stepped back.
“Count me out, okay. I need to see someone,” I said with a wave.
I ignored their protests and walked toward the city and suddenly I began to cry. I must have looked pathetic walking along, clutching my backpack and crying my head off. But I think I cried more out of relief than self-pity. Relief because I was beginning to feel free.
From whom?
Myself, I think.
So I jumped on the first bus that would take me to Nonna’s place.
Maybe thinking of your grandparents as unpassionate people is wrong. I tend to think that passion is only for youth, but maybe older people can teach us a thing or two about it. Okay, so the thought of Nonna Katia having sex makes me sick to the stomach, but one day my grandchildren will feel the same and I’ll say to them, “Why? I once felt passion for a boy. I was once young. I was once in love.”
So I knocked at her door, and when she answered I hugged her, and like all grandmothers and mothers and people who love you no matter what you do to them, she hugged me back.
“Why?” I asked her when we were seated in the living room.
“Because I was young, Jozzie,” she whispered hoarsely. “Because I was beautiful and for all those years nobody treated me like I was beautiful but him. Marcus Sandford made me feel special,” she said fiercely.
“Didn’t Nonno Francesco?”
“Your grandfather Francesco treated me like one of his farm animals,” she spat.
I closed my eyes, wondering how she would have felt.
“I dreamt too, Jozzie. I did it because I had dreams just like you dream now. I was not always old.”
I hugged her hard and cried my guts out. More than I’ve ever cried in my whole life because I had never thought her capable of dreaming like me.
“When did it happen?” I sniffed.
She took out a hankie and wiped my eyes. “He came to bring me a letter from my sister,” she said, holding me against her. “After I had told him not to come to me again, he still came. So I took the letter from him and asked him to go. He shook his head and touched my face and told me I was so beautiful. He said that he could take me away from the life that I hated so much, but I . . . I pushed him out of the door, Jozzie. Pushed him.”
There was anguish on he
r face as all the feelings and memories that she had buried in the past were brought to the surface. I almost felt cruel asking her to bare her soul in such a raw way.
“I . . . I pushed him because he was saying someting that I had dreamt of him saying for so long and by pushing him out I was trying to . . . to push my own feelings, Jozzie. Push them away. But he just grabbed my arms and shook me and I could not fight him anymore. Do you understand?” she asked me.
I nodded because I knew that she needed me to understand.
“I was so sick of fighting him and fighting me. And for what? For Francesco, who never could make me happy?”
There was so much I wanted to ask, but there would be time for that later.
“It was not like being wit Francesco,” she said, no longer looking at me. She clutched her hand to her heart and I noted the tears in her eyes. “He undressed me . . . careful . . . careful as if I was special, and he laid me down on the bed . . . my marriage bed, Jozzie, and he loved me. Not like Francesco, who would lie on me for two minutes and then roll over and go to sleep. He loved me, Jozzie, for more than two minutes. When I was wit Marcus I was so angry wit Francesco because I realized then how much he hadn’t given me. He just took all the time . . . it was as if I had no rights, but wit Marcus I had rights.”
“Why didn’t you stay with him forever?”
“We stayed together for two months and he would beg me over and over again to leave Francesco. He would say that he’d take me someplace where there were no Italians who knew me or Australians who knew him.”
She shook her head and kissed my forehead.
“But I couldn’t, Jozzie. I was still an Italian girl in my heart and I could not disgrace Francesco and especially my sister and her family. I could not disgrace the memory of my mama and papa. People were talking enough.”
“People tend to talk about us a lot, eh?” I tried to joke.
“I suppose that we have kept the gossips well entertained for over forty years.”
“So you left him and he let you go?”
She nodded.
“He is still in my heart. I can still close my eyes and see him today, but I did the right thing, Jozzie.”
“I don’t understand. I wouldn’t have gone back to Francesco,” I whispered.
“That is what is different today from my days. Today if a man gets on your nerves you divorce him. If he says someting you don’t like, you divorce. In my day when you marry someone, you marry them for good. Richer and poorer. Better or worse.”
She looked at me and smiled.
“I was married to Francesco in the eyes of God. I did not want to hurt God any more than I did.”
“What happened when you got to Sydney?”
“Well, by then I knew I was pregnant, so I thought that when the baby came I would say it was premature. I would work it out somehow. So when the time was right I went to Francesco and told him we were going to have a baby. I thought he would be happy after ten years. I remember the way he looked at me. He hit me in the face.”
She touched her face as if she was living it again.
“He called me bad names and I thought he would kill me and I wondered how he could possibly know.”
“How did he know?”
She shook her head.
“He told me he could not father children. When he was a young boy he had the mumps. He married me and tricked my parents and me all those years. All I ever wanted in my life was to have babies, Jozzie, and he married me knowing that. So I hit him and hit him,” she said. “Because I was so angry. Angry for ten years of tinking that maybe life was not good wit him, but I would have babies soon to make up for it.”
“Why didn’t you leave him then?” I said, shaking my head in confusion.
“Oh, Jozzie, you still do not understand,” she sighed. “Could you imagine how life would be for me if I married Marcus? Could you imagine what life would be for my sister? People are cruel. They would make our lives hell. But mostly, Jozzie, tink of Christina. Back then, tink of the way my darling Christina would be treated. It is not like these times, Jozzie. She would have had no one. No Australians, no Italians. People would spit at her and say she was nuting.”
“So you stayed with him?”
She nodded. “He agreed to it. I tink he would have been embarrassed if people found out that it took another man to give his wife a baby. He promised me he would bring her up as his if I didn’t embarrass him anymore, so I stayed to protect my baby. Nobody ever knew. Francesco kept his promise.”
“But both you and Mama paid,” I said, shaking my head. “I would have left him, Nonna. I would have been selfish and thought of myself.”
“No. One day you will understand, Jozzie. One day you will have children and you will understand what sacrifices really are.”
“I would have gone with Marcus Sandford,” I told her stubbornly. “How could you never have seen him again?”
“I see him every time I look at Christina. Do you ever wonder where her gentleness comes from, Jozzie? That serene, soothing feeling about her. She got that from her father. It comforts me.”
“I wish you would tell her. She’d understand so much.”
“When she got pregnant my heart broke. Not for me or Francesco. For her. I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her. If I could have carried her on my back for nine months I would have. But he looked at me wit so much hate and I knew if I tried to help her he would ruin her life. So I said ‘Yes, Francesco. Anyting you say, Francesco.’ When she did someting while she was growing up that he didn’t like, I would say, ‘Yes, Francesco. She is wrong, Francesco.’ Oh, Jozzie, for years I had been waiting for God to punish me. Those years without Christina or you when you were a baby were my punishment. After he died, Christina came home, but she resented me and tings would never be right.”
“My mother loves you,” I cried against her. “I know she does. She’s just so confused about the way you feel about her, Nonna. You’ve both just built up so much resentment, but I know if you try you’ll both be happy. Think how happy Francesco would be and how sad Marcus would be if we were all miserable.”
She nodded and held me close.
I stayed with her that night. I know Mama thinks I’m crazy because in the past I’ve had to be bribed to stay with Nonna Katia, but I wanted to stay with this woman I didn’t really know. She hadn’t lived life the way I’d thought. She hadn’t stuck to rules and regulations. Hadn’t worried about what other people thought every second of her life. She had taken chances. Broken rules. If she hadn’t, Mama wouldn’t have been born and I wouldn’t have been born. That freaks me out.
Just like I made a promise to her not to tell, I made her promise me that she would accept Michael and let him in her house again. She agreed.
I prayed and cried that night, harder than I ever had in my life. I prayed that the blessed “one day” would come so I could welcome it with open arms. And I cried because I was loved by two of the strongest women I would ever meet in my lifetime.
Twenty-Seven
WATCHING RUGBY UNION is probably at the end of my list of things I’d like to do on a Sunday afternoon before exams, but my cousin Robert was playing and I had promised to watch his grand final.
Stupidly I had taken my economics book with me thinking that I would get a few minutes of reading, but every time someone scored, one of the hysterical people around me would hit me on the back and send my book flying.
“You’d do anything to beat me in the HSC, wouldn’t you?”
I looked up in surprise at seeing John Barton and moved over for him.
“Thank God for another sane person. Everyone’s gone berserk,” I said.
“What are you doing around these mad people?”
“My cousin bribed me. If I came to this he’d take me to the St. Anthony’s graduation.”
“Oh yes, where only the privileged can attend. I promised Ivy when we were about twelve, I think.”
I laughed, thinking for th
e first time that I wasn’t envious of Ivy.
“You two are very similar, you know,” he said, taking the economics book out of my hands. “I wish you could be friends. I really want you to be there for each other, okay?”
I shrugged, confused. “We’re very different, John.”
He shook his head, tapping me on the head with the book.
“I’ve known her since I was five. I thought she was the most confused being until I met you. Maybe that’s why I get on with both of you.”
“Because you’re confused?”
He shook his head at the thought and laughed.
“No confusing talk, okay. We will be gay and lighthearted today,” he said theatrically.
I liked John this way, but he was different. There was a euphoria about him that was catching. We were loud and obnoxious throughout the whole game, standing on the seat and singing the St. Anthony’s anthem.
After the game I stood around while the boys threw beer in their hair and all that macho stuff they do when they win a game. Robert, I’m proud to say, won Man of the Match, and when it was all over, John walked me home.
“So how is my competition at Cook High?”
“Jacob Coote?”
“Still with him?”
“Most certainly am,” I said proudly.
“Can you try not to be offended if I tell you something?” he said, looking at me earnestly.
“Please don’t tell me that Jacob and I aren’t suited, John,” I pleaded.
“No,” he laughed. “Don’t be so paranoid. It’s just that I had a big crush on you in Year Ten. I wanted to ask you out, but I was scared you’d say no.”
I laughed and hugged him.
“I had a bigger crush on you.”
“Really? I’m touched,” he said, grabbing my hand and swinging it as we walked along.
“Jacob’s a bit funny about you and all. He’s got his own demons in a way, but you’re a friend, John, and we’re probably going to be in the same university taking the same classes and I want you to always be my friend. Which means that you and Jacob will have to be friends. If we survive the HSC, let’s all try to go out together. Maybe even Ivy, if I can stomach it.”