MARIAN A DE MARCO TORGOV ICK
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turns out to be less dramatic than it sounds, I fly home immediately.
My brother drives three hours back and forth from New Jersey every
day to chauffeur me and my mother to the hospital: he is being a fine Italian–
American son. For the first time in years, we have long conversations alone.
He is two years older than I am, a chemical engineer who has also left the
neighborhood but has remained closer to its values, with a suburban,
Republican inflection. He talks a lot about New York, saying that (except for
neighborhoods like Bensonhurst) it's a "third world city now." It's the summer
of the Tawana Brawley incident, when Brawley accused white men of ab–
ducting her and smearing racial slurs on her body with her own excrement.
My brother is filled with dislike for AI Sharpton and Brawley's other vocal
supporters in the black community - not because they're black, he says, but
because they're troublemakers, stirring things up. The city is drenched in
racial hatred that makes itselffelt in the halls of the hospital: Italians and
Jews in the beds and as doctors; blacks as nurses and orderlies.
This is the first time since I left New York in 1975 that I have visited
Brooklyn without once getting into Manhattan. It's the first time I have spent
several days alone with my mother, living in her apartment in Bensonhurst.
My every move is scrutinized and commented on. I feel like I am going to go
crazy.
Finally, it's clear that my father is going to be fine, and I can go home.
She insists on accompanying me to the travel agent to get my ticket for
home, even though I really want to be alone. The agency (a Mafia front?)
has no one who knows how to ticket me for the exotic destination of North
Carolina and no computer for doing so. The one person who can perform this
feat by hand is out. I have to kill time for an hour and suggest to my mother
that she go home, to be there for my brother when he arrives from Jersey.
We stop in a Pork Store, where I buy a stash of cheeses, sausages, and other
delicacies unavailable in Durham. My mother walks home with the shopping
bags, and I'm on my own.
More than anything I want a kind of
sorbello
or ice I remember from
my childhood, a
crerrwlata,
almond-vanilla flavored with large chunks of nuts.
I pop into the local bakery (at the unlikely hour of eleven a.m.) and ask for a
cremolata,
usually eaten after dinner. The woman - a younger version of my
mother - refuses: they haven't made a fresh ice yet and what's left from the
day before is too icy, no good. I explain that I'm about to get on a plane for
North Carolina and want that ice, good or not. But she has her standards and
holds her ground, even though North Carolina has about the same status in
her mind as Timbuktoo and she knows I will be banished, perhaps forever,
from the land of
crerrwlata.
Then, while I'm taking a walk, enjoying my solitude, I have another
