Gramma Stella was 14½ when her mother told her that Giuseppe Monardo had asked for her. It was 1929. He was back in their Calabrian village from America, where he’d made a little money. He was now looking for a wife and, in the piazza, he’d seen Stella getting her family’s water at the fountain.
“No!” she said. He was older, she barely knew him.
“Marry him,” her mother told her. “He’ll take you to America.”
Those were Depression years, jobs scarce, so after the wedding, Giuseppe was in no rush to return to the steel mill. Like everyone else in Vazzano, he worked the fields. In time, the couple had a child, my mother.
Quiet as Grampa was—drawn into himself, tilting toward pessimism—it is hard for me to imagine him acting on the wild possibility that a pretty young woman could actually be his. My mother once told me that Grampa’s family had a lesser social standing in town than Gramma’s family, and Gramma had relatives who advised against the marriage, but her mother was ambitious to get her only living daughter to the New World, where an older son already lived. There had been two daughters and a son who died very young, which was, sadly, not unusual in their neglected part of the world. Given the harsh conditions, wouldn’t any mother, when she saw an opportunity for her daughter, grab it?
When Stella and Giuseppe’s daughter was three, he left Vazzano again, with the plan to make enough money to purchase passage for his wife and little girl. As Gramma Stella waited, she sewed, filling up her steamer trunk. Sheets, pillowcases, bedspreads, tablecloths, napkins—all had to be handmade. On looms, she and her friends wove long heavy panels—red threads mixed with white, sometimes red with blue, always rough to the touch. The panels were hand-stitched together to make bedspreads wide enough for a nuptial bed; then the girls, according to their abilities, added six or seven inches of decorative crochet to the edges, transforming a piece that was originally coarse into something quite pretty. And in the same way, Stella took the little bits she knew of Giuseppe’s life all’estero and embroidered stories to entertain herself and her friends as they worked.
He was called Joe there, and he and his brother were saving for a liquor license so they could open a bar and be independent of bosses at the steel mill.
“The bosses, are they bad there? Harsh?” the young women wondered. “And the houses, are they big?”
Sewing their dowries, talking and speculating—that was how they waited the long wait to emigrate, marry, or find out from their fathers and mothers what would happen to them next.
The nuptial bed sheets were also made of woven panels, and now, in my house in Omaha, where a university teaching job lured me years ago, and where I raised my son, I have two of those heavy sheets Gramma hand-stitched in Vazzano ninety-five years ago. One cloth covers the couch, and I use the other as a winter bedspread. The fabric is the color of wheat, a natural shade you’d find in the Pottery Barn palette; the stitching is sturdy enough to have withstood countless spins in the washer and dryer. The weave has nubby irregularities, and I like the scratchiness. When I’m lying beneath this cover, I feel cocooned, but also slightly smothered, exactly the feelings I grappled with—sweet cocoon, suffocating smother—when deciding it was time to leave my parents’ home in Pittsburgh to build a life determined by my career, far from family. I cherish that cloth, perhaps for the way our multi-generational stay-go history is woven into it. And that cloth is just one of many totems I have surrounded myself with to assure me that nothing and no one has been lost to time or distance or even to death.
Which is false, a lie. My parents and grandparents are gone. For my son and me, the closest relatives—my brother and his family in Atlanta, our cousins in Canada and Italy—are, at minimum, a time zone away. But my cedar chest full of Gramma’s cloths, along with her coffeepots and sewing machine, my dad’s wooden desk chair and woolen muffler, my mom’s ceramic bedside lamps and mohair shawls, the shot glasses from Grampa Joe’s bar—it all allows me to pretend that the whole family is still close enough to touch, that finally we’ve confounded distance, and that any minute, there’ll be a knock at the door: “I was passing by and saw your lights on. I have time for just a cup of coffee, that’s all.”
“Sure. Come in. Sit down.”
Excerpt from After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage, Bordighera Press (2024). Also available as an eBook.
Anna Monardo is professor emerita in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her novels The Courtyard of Dreams and Falling in Love with Natassia were published by Doubleday. Visit www.annamonardo.com
