Aunt Maffie would lean in, squeeze my cheek and murmur, “Mannaggia.” Believe me, she squeezed hard. Then she’d say, “Get yourself something to drink.”
My dad poured himself a glass of wine, and I would have a root beer.
“Deirdre, go check the table and see if the spoons and forks are there,” Aunt Maffie might say.
I always had some assignment, like helping mix the salad dressing or making sure all the silverware was on the table. Sometimes I would go with my grandmother upstairs when she wanted some wine or anisette, which she made herself. She would open the door to a locked room to reveal shelves filled with all kinds of liquor and stacks of cash.
All the cooking took place downstairs, with the whole family gathered around and milling through the rooms. The heavenly aroma of Theresa’s meals would fill the whole house, just about melting our noses, it smelled that good. Like so many families at that time, most of the ingredients for the meals were fresh or had been canned the previous fall. The basement was filled with canned tomatoes, pickled eggs, olive oil, and many other condiments.
Occasionally, Grandmacita would send me out to pick up the meats she needed. One Saturday morning she sent me to the butcher shop and, when I returned home, she looked at the meats and sent me back to the store saying I didn’t buy the right ones. When I told the butcher, “My grandma says that this is not the right meat,” he stared down at me and answered, “Oh yeah, and who is your grandma?”
When I told him “Mrs. Capone” his faced immediately paled. “She is right. Please tell her I am terribly sorry.” He sent me back to her with the correct meats. Grandma just smiled.
As Grandma cooked, I could hear the radio in the dining room broadcasting classical Italian operas. Sometimes she sang along. Uncle Al loved the opera; his favorite was Aida. Everyone in my family loved the opera and they encouraged me to study singing, which I did.
Uncle Matty, Aunt Annette, and Cousin Gabey, their son, would arrive and hang their coats on the wall hooks while my uncle Matty hung his hat on the hat rack in the living room. Like us, they all dressed in their Sunday best.
“Buongiorno, Mamacita.”
Uncle Matty was the shortest and stockiest of my uncles. I remember he drank way too much, and he would sweat a lot. To me, he was the different one. His wife, Annette, was Sicilian, which didn’t sit well with Aunt Maffie. Their son, Gabey, who was eight years older than I, was very handsome.
When they got themselves something to drink, Uncle Matty liked the dago red wine, while Aunt Annette would drink only root beer. But Gabey also drank wine and would let me take a sip, sometimes even more.
Usually arriving next were Uncle Bites and Aunt Larry. Aunt Larry (Loraine) was beautiful, with long blond hair and a striking figure. I remember wondering if I would ever be beautiful like her. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, their adopted son, Albert Robert, or Bobby, was my half brother. No wonder we looked so much alike—down to the beauty marks above our upper lips. Aunt Larry and Uncle Bites eventually divorced, and over the course of time, he went on to have many women in his life, all of them beautiful.
Entering next would be Uncle Mimi and his wife, Aunt Mary. Then came my grandfather Ralph. My father wanted me to call him “Grandpa,” but Ralph really worked with me not to. In fact, he would put a bill in my hand each time I called him Ralph. He would come to Sunday dinners with his second and last wife, Val, but my Grandmother had us all understood tacitly that she was not family.
Finally, Uncle Al would arrive with Aunt Mae, the signal that the day had begun. His bodyguards would remain outside, but Grandma always brought food out to them after we had finished our dinner.
Uncle Al was just like all his brothers. He would go into the kitchen, give Grandma a kiss, call her “Mamacita,” and of course squeeze my cheek, hard.
I think that Uncle Al was my grandma’s favorite. She beamed when he came into her kitchen. She stopped whatever she was doing to give him a big hug and kiss. She squeezed his cheek. She didn’t hug any of the others; they kissed her on the cheek, and she would continue cooking.
Aunt Maffie hugged and kissed Al, too. My, how she loved him.
When her sons greeted Theresa, they would often exchange words in Italian. She spoke English, but most of the time it was sprinkled with Italian. I was able to understand everything she said.
All her boys wore starched cotton, or silk, shirts and custom-made suits. I remember looking at their cufflinks and the stickpins in their ties. Their shoes were shiny. Grandma expected them to look their best. Each one of my aunts wore beautiful clothes, jewelry, and furs.
The men would disappear into the parlor shortly after arriving to talk business, my grandfather carrying a couple of ledger books with him. The girls would remain separate, bustling around the kitchen and sharing everything that had happened during the week. Oh my goodness, what gossip they would tell!
When it was time to eat, everyone took a place around the dining room table except Grandma and Aunt Maffie, who stayed in the kitchen. We began each meal with Uncle Al holding up his small glass of wine and saying, “Salute per cento anno,” in his deep, raspy voice.
We would all hold up our glasses in turn and say, “Salute.”
Most of them would then swallow the wine with one gulp.
After the toast, we ate. First came the antipasto. All the men would stand up and reach with their forks and stab what they wanted and put it on the first plate. Next was the soup, and we passed around the wine bottle in the basket. If it was pasta e fagioli, my grandmother would put a pot of soup and a bowl of pasta on the table. We would put some pasta in our bowls and ladle soup on top.
The wine bottle in the basket was passed around again.
Next course was the macaroni—our general word for pasta—served in a bowl with Grandmacita’s gravy on top. If the pasta was spaghetti, the noodles were extraordinarily long. In those days, spaghetti came in very long boxes, and each noodle would be twice as long as the box. You don’t see spaghetti that long anymore. I guess shelf space is too valuable.
We never cut the spaghetti into smaller pieces. I was taught very young how to use the larger spoon and swirl the spaghetti on my fork into a ball. Usually that took too long, and I wound up putting one strand in my mouth and slurping it through closed lips. The sauce flew everywhere, especially on me. After this course, I was usually full because I had eaten so many meatballs, but everyone else stayed in their chairs and talked and drank more wine—a lot more food was still to come.
The main course changed each week, and there would be special meats for various holidays, but usually it was meat, potatoes, and vegetables. Then the salad, that was always last. Grandma believed that eating the salad last would help us digest the rest of the meal. The first time I visited Italy I laughed when the salad was served after the main course.
After dinner—which usually lasted three hours—I would help Aunt Maffie clear the table and bring the dishes to the kitchen, where Grandma scraped the plates into the garbage can and filled the sink with hot soapy water. Very little food remained on any plates because Grandma regularly reminded us of the starving children in Europe. I could never figure out how cleaning my plate helped those starving children, but I did as I was told. As we cleared the table of dishes, Grandma placed big baskets of fruit and nuts on the table, which I loved.
After dinner, the boys took off their coats and ties, rolled up their sleeves, and lit up cigars—big fat Cuban ones. They chewed on the ends and blew perfectly round smoke rings, which always fascinated me. And they played cards, usually poker but occasionally an Italian form of blackjack called “Seven and a Half.” During the game, they only spoke Italian. I think they did it because they swore a lot and didn’t want me to understand.
I would be invited to sit on one of their laps to bring them luck. When my dad was there, I wanted him to win. When he wasn’t there, I took turns rooting for Grandpa Ralph and Uncle Al. If one of them won, he would put some of the bills in my hands and tell me to put them in my
pocket.
I later learned that Al used to be the top player, but regressed after his prison stay. It didn’t stop him from loving to gamble, though. The Capone boys would bet on anything. In fact, Al and Ralph even placed bets on my birthday when my mother was pregnant with me.
I enjoyed seeing all the money in the middle of the table. Tens, twenties, and hundreds crumpled up and piled high about two feet long and two feet wide. I remember trying to count the money on the table but it was too hard because the stack kept changing. If someone ran out of money, he went home.
They were usually very serious and intent on winning, but I also sensed a feeling of camaraderie. Frequent smiles and bursts of laughter filled the room as they regularly teased each other.
I remember Uncle Al turning to Bites, who had a habit of mixing metaphors, and asking, “Hey, Bites. You still seein’ that redhead?”
“Nah, I dropped her.”
“How come?”
“Ah, she drinks like a chimney.”
The room exploded with laughter. Uncle Mimi, who was drinking water, sprayed it across the table all over Uncle Matty and started coughing and laughing at the same time.
Then Grandpa Ralph said, “Yeah, and she smokes like a fish.”
Another explosion of laughter. I was laughing too, though I wasn’t quite sure what was so funny. Many years later when I watched Johnny Carson on the Tonight show spraying water when Ed McMahon said, “The King Lives!” it took me back to that card game and the most uproarious laughter I ever heard.
Then, as quickly as it started, the laughter stopped, and Al said, “C’mon, Matty, check or bet.”
Sometimes I’d wander away from the card game and into the kitchen to join the women. I remember once finding them in a heated a debate on who was the best singer, Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby. Maffie liked Sinatra and thought he was “cute and sexy.” Aunt Mae and Aunt Annette said Crosby had the better voice, and they loved him in the “Road” movies with Bob Hope.
Maffie turned to Grandma, still washing the dishes, and asked, “Mamacita what do you think? Who’s the best?”
Grandma just smiled and answered, “Opera, Caruso. That’s music.”
All agreed, but Maffie said, “Yeah, Ma, but we’re talkin’ about popular music, not classical.”
Grandma said, “Well, opera is popular with me.”
Usually long before the poker game ended, I fell asleep on the sofa in the parlor. My dad would wake me up at some point, and we would walk home together.
Miami and Chicago, 1947
I don’t want to end up in the gutter punctured by machine gun slugs.
- Al Capone
The historians have it all wrong. My uncle Al did not die on Saturday evening, January 25, 1947 with his family at his bedside; and his funeral was not the sorry, lonely affair it’s been made out to be. He didn’t even die of complications of syphilis, as is commonly accepted.
Christmas 1946 is still fixed in my mind, as if the excitement and splendor of that year were enough to last a lifetime. The war had been over for more than a year, enough time for grown-up talk to turn away from death, Nazis, and faraway places, and turn toward celebration and family. Best of all, Uncle Al and Aunt Mae were coming to Chicago to spend Christmas with us. We were a family again, which meant spending time with my dad, whom I hadn’t seen since Thanksgiving.
Any visit to 7244 Prairie Avenue was a welcome relief from the dour environment inside the tiny apartment where I lived with my maternal grandparents. Any visit with Al there made it positively electric. Everyone wanted to be near Al, and when he and Mae came to stay in the upstairs apartment, I knew there would be more food, more wine, more cash at the card games, and almost more excitement than a seven-year-old could stand.
Almost, but not quite.
I arrived at the Prairie Avenue house and the Christmas tree immediately grabbed my attention, positioned in the corner where the hat rack usually stood. It was hard to miss, because someone had decorated it not only with real, glowing candles and the usual ornaments, but also with thousand-dollar United States savings bonds. The money flowed when Al was around. He may have successfully hidden his assets from the federal government, but he never hid them from his family. The Outfit had their own retirement plan, and they took care of Al and his wife and son as long as they lived.
My dad took me into the living room where Uncle Al sat on a big chair in one corner. They started talking to each other in Italian, but I didn’t care. It was music to my ears. I ran right over to Uncle Al and climbed onto his lap. He gave me a big hug. He had a very large neck and his skin always seemed moist. He smelled like scotch, and I noticed a glass on the side table. It was a familiar smell; both my parents drank scotch every day of their lives.
On his lap, I couldn’t help but notice the big scar on his left cheek.
“Does it hurt?” I asked him. He just laughed.
When Uncle Al was just with family, he often acted silly, loving to make us all laugh. At times he seemed like a little boy. But as soon as an old friend entered the room, or someone from the Outfit came in, he would sit up straight, take on a very stern look, and a wide-eyed stare would come into his eyes. To me as a little girl, it was like watching someone put on makeup.
That Christmas, Uncle Al wore a white shirt, cufflinks that sparkled, and a tie held in place with a stick pin in the form of a woman’s face. After Al’s death, his mother had that cameo made into a charm that she wore around her neck. After Theresa died, Aunt Maffie gave it to me. When I wear it today, everyone comments on it.
When Uncle Al was with us, everyone in the family dressed in their finest clothes. Grandma would give my father money to buy me something new. I loved that. Very seldom did I have the chance to wear new clothes, even new shoes. In my own world, I was an outcast, and a poor outcast at that. In the special world of Prairie Avenue, I was a princess.