Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
C atherine’s mother, Vivian, was born in 1947—five years after Catherine’s grandfather immigrated to the United States. She lived in California with her tabby cat, Princess, down the street from Catherine’s cousin Walt, who often checked in on her. She was seventy-seven years old but just as intellectually spry as ever.
Vivian answered on the second ring. Catherine walked the exterior of Central Park as daylight dimmed over the city and streetlamps flickered on. She planned to walk back to the hotel and then research whatever she could online.
But she also wanted to dig around her mother’s memories for answers.
“How’s my darling daughter?” Vivian asked.
“Great, Mom. I’m in the city,” Catherine said.
“You’re back! I can’t imagine why you ever left. Nantucket’s beautiful for a few months out of the year, but don’t you miss the culture? The life? The restaurants? I’ve lost my mind looking at the ocean all these years. It’s just too big. My thoughts get lost.”
“You’re the one who left New York forty years ago,” Catherine pointed out.
“You know UCLA was the only university that would support my research.”
Catherine smiled into the phone. It pleased her that her mother was such a whip-smart lady; that she’d given so much of her life and her effort to the pursuit of knowledge in scientific research, alongside being a mother and a wife. Her field had been ecology. She’d studied bird routes from Canada to Brazil and given several early-year Ted Talks about the environment. My mother is smarter than me, Catherine had told Quentin early on. Quentin had insisted it wasn’t true until he’d met Vivian. And then he’d said, You’re equals. It’s terrifying.
“You’re out for a walk, aren’t you?” Vivian asked. “I can hear all the horns screaming. It’s making me nostalgic.”
“I’m not far from where you grew up,” Catherine said.
“Oh! I so loved the city in the summer,” Vivian said. “Especially in August. Everyone left for the Hamptons. It was divine to have the city to ourselves.”
Catherine listened to her mother talk about the past and her childhood for a few minutes. Her heart swelled with love for her.
“Did you ever go down to Little Italy and hang with the other Italian children?” Catherine asked after a while. She couldn’t believe she’d never asked it before.
“It was so far away,” Vivian admitted. “We tended to stick with the other families in the Upper East Side, and most of them weren’t Italian. There were loads of kids around and so much trouble to get into. My father and mother always chased us out of the bakery.”
Gwen.
“I wanted to ask you,” Catherine said. “Do you know what your mother was up to before Grandpa got to America?” She wet her lips, trying to keep her tone light. She hadn’t told her mother about her idea for the book yet. She hadn’t been sure how to pitch it.
In a way, Vivian was a much more difficult audience to please than even Greta Copperfield.
“My mother was raised in New York,” Vivian said. “But she was really quite secretive about her past. She died too young for me to get a real grip on it. I was young and selfish myself. I didn’t know what questions to ask before it was too late. I didn’t know what I would want to know.”
“Did you ask your father before he passed?”
“No,” Vivian said. “But you remember how he was. He had so many stories himself from the old country. He couldn’t get enough of telling them. All that wealth they had! Those gorgeous castles! It all sounded so mesmerizing to me as a child. I always imagined that Mother was raised in some Manhattan slums. It sounded too sad to me, especially when I could return to Father’s stories.”
Catherine paused at a crosswalk and waited for the red to turn green. “I’ve been wondering,” she said tentatively, “how was it that Grandpa lost his money? Had he already lost it when he got to America? Or did he lose it once he got here?”
“Haven’t I told you the story?” Vivian asked.
“No! I would have remembered it.” Catherine had searched her mind for any hint but found nothing.
“Goodness. Well, you remember what a funny guy your grandfather was. He was impatient and rash and all over the place. His moods were just as all over the place. Happy one minute; sad the next; frantic the next. My poor mother was the only woman who knew how to handle him. In any case, he always said he got onboard that ship to go to America , and immediately got so painfully homesick and frightened and goshdarn bored that he had to do something with his time. Something to distract himself. So he set up a poker game with some of the guys on board. Some were wealthy; others were not.
“Your grandfather was notoriously bad at poker,” Vivian said. “He was also something of a gambling addict. That first night, he was up twenty-thousand dollars, or so he said. And after that, he proceeded to lose all of it.”
“All of it?” Catherine could hardly believe it.
“It took three weeks to get to America,” Vivian said. “My father always described that period as his metamorphosis. He boarded a rich man, and he left the ship a very poor man.”
“Huh.”
“It’s a fascinating story,” Vivian said. It was clear she’d never probed deeper into it. She’d taken it at face value.
Because her father told her that story. And she believed her father above everyone else.
It was romantic to believe the ones you loved.
Maybe it’s still true, Catherine thought. But she was beginning to see the cracks in his tale.
“What did he come to America to do?” Catherine asked.
Vivian sounded huffy. “You know he had to escape the war. He didn’t want to fight for Italy and the Germans, and he wanted to pursue his academics in the New World.”
“But he didn’t pursue academia,” Catherine pointed out. The other Gionnocaro did.
“He had to make money as quickly as he could,” Vivian said. “I believe he answered an ad in the paper for a little place in the Upper East Side and set up his bakery by the end of that first year, 1942. After that, he was consumed by the bakery. As was my mother.”
Catherine had reached her hotel. She entered the lobby and smiled at the receptionist. She wanted to get on the elevator, but she didn’t want to lose her mother. So she hung around the shadowy hotel bar for a few minutes to wrap up the conversation. She felt she hadn’t gotten much out of it. Just more lies, maybe.
“Is it possible that Grandma Gwen used to work as a nanny for wealthy families?” Catherine asked.
“It’s certainly possible,” Vivian said. She sounded like she didn’t care.
“And she never mentioned any wealthy families she might have worked for?”
“Where is all this coming from?” Vivian demanded.
But Catherine didn’t have enough information to explain everything yet, and she didn’t want to distract her mother so soon before she went to bed that night. It was nearly ten here, which made it seven in LA. Her mother liked her beauty rest. She resented anyone who upset her.
“Do you have any old photographs of Grandma Gwen from the late thirties? Before she met Grandpa?” Catherine asked, then bit her tongue.
“I do. Somewhere.”
“Would you mind taking pictures of them and sending them to me?” Catherine asked.
“Should I scan them?” Vivian suggested.
“No, no. Just use your phone to take photos of them as best as you can,” Catherine said, praying that her mother would use natural light.
Catherine never liked explaining new technology to her mother. She always felt like technology was going too quickly for even herself. She hated how it made her mother feel small and obsolete. Catherine would probably feel like that soon, too.
“I’ll do it as soon as we get off the phone,” Vivian promised.
“Thank you. I love you, Mom.”
“And I love you, too, honey.” Vivian was quiet for a moment. “I hope you’ll ask me everything you want to know before I go.”
Catherine’s heart seized with worry. She hated when her mother referred to her own death.
“I’ll pepper you with endless questions next time I see you,” Catherine said.
“This has been a good start,” Vivian said. Catherine could hear the smile in her voice.