258
PARTISAN REVIEW
Parents of kids in her classes often described her as "sensitive" and
"imaginative," and it's true that one day, after I had sung her a verbally
garbled but heartfelt rendition of "Eh, Cumpare," a then -current julius
LaRosa hit that I'd often heard on the radio, she phoned my parents and
told them that I was musical and ought to have piano lessons. Nearly
everything that has happened in my life since then has in some way been
affected by her suggestion. But one October morning Mrs. Guarino
scolded me for drawing, at the top of an assignment, a cheerful, pipe–
smoking, top-hatted
face
on the first letter of the month's name. The
scolding was so unexpected-I hadn't done anything disruptive, after
all-that it made
me
cry. Mrs. Guarino made
me
cry two or three other
times that year, for similar reasons, and all in all she seemed
to
me less
sensitive and imaginative than was generally believed. So I don't think I
spent twenty-three years in Italy because of any subliminal message that
Mrs. Guarino transmitted to
me.
Tiny, iron-gray-haired Miss Antonia Daponte taught our experimen–
tal conversational French course in fourth and fifth grades. She was a
phenomenally entertaining gossip: in plain English, she would hint
broadly at problems in the private
lives
of other faculty members,
thereby awakening us to the alarming fact that teachers existed before
and after school hours. I think I had assumed, for instance, that dry,
harsh Miss Kleinzack, my fourth grade teacher, lay down on the spent
ventilator in Room
206
every
afternoon at 3:35, folded her hands under
her not-very-motherly breast, and slept soundly until the first bell rang
at 8:45 the next morning. But Miss Daponte
let
on that Miss Kleinzack
had a
boyfriend.
I sensed that Miss Daponte was lonely, and sometimes,
when I walked home from school, I would try to keep her company by
tagging after her as far as her bus stop. (I
have
a strong visual memory
of moving through snow drifts with her.)
Ell
deux,
however, she talked
less than in the classroom, and in fact seemed rather gloomy. Years later,
when I first saw
David's
"Bonaparte Crossing Mount Sr. Bernard," I
recognized Miss Daponte's strong, bony facial structure and remote
expression in that of the First Consul.
But I don't suppose that Miss Daponte ignited my Italophilia any
more than Mrs. Guarino did. Maybe Mrs. juliet D'Arrigo, a next-door
neighbor during my junior high school years, was the one who threw off
the spark. Mine was one of only four jewish families on a predomi–
nantly Catholic block (as a child, I thought that the term
goyilll
referred
only to Protestants), but the D'Arrigos
were
part of a tiny Italian minor–
ity that
lived
uncomfortably cheek by jowl with substantial numbers of
Irish,
Slavic,
and Hungarian Catholics. Mrs. D'Arrigo, a former
