Unto the Sons Read Free Page B

reflected in a mirror, opposite a small alcove, the bowed head of my father as he knelt on the red velvet of a prie-dieu in front of a wall portrait of a bearded, brown-robed medieval monk. The monk’s face was emaciated, his lips seemed dry, and as he stood on a rock in sandals balancing a crosier in his right arm, his dark, somber eyes looked skyward as if seeking heavenly relief from the sins that surrounded him.
    Ever since my earliest youth I had heard again and again my father’s astonishing tales about this fifteenth-century southern Italian miracle worker, Saint Francis of Paola. He had cured the crippled and revived the dead, he had multiplied food and levitated and with his hands stopped mountain boulders from rolling down upon villages; and one day in his hermitage, after an alluring young woman had tempted his celibacy, he had hastily retreated and leaped into an icy river to extinguish his passion.
    The denial of pleasure, the rejection of worldly beauty and values, dominated the entire life of Saint Francis, my father had emphasized, adding that Francis as a boy had slept on stones in a cave near my father’s own village, had fasted and prayed and flagellated himself, and had finally established a credo of punishing piety and devotion that endures in southern Italy to this day, almost six hundred years after the birth of the saint.
    I myself had seen other portraits of Saint Francis in the Philadelphia homes of some of my father’s Italian friends whom we occasionally visitedon Sunday afternoons; and while I never openly doubted the veracity of Francis’s achievements, I never felt comfortable after I had climbed the many steps of the private staircase leading to the apartment and opened the living room door to see my father kneeling in prayer before this almost grotesque oil painting of a holy figure whose aura suggested agony and despair.
    Prayer for me was either a private act witnessed exclusively by God or a public act carried out by the congregation or by me and my classmates in parochial school. It was not an act to be on exhibition in a family parlor in which I, as a nonparticipating observer, felt suddenly like an interloper, a trapped intruder in spiritual space, an awkward youth who dared not disturb my father’s meditation by announcing my presence. And yet I could not unobtrusively retreat from the room, or remain unaffected or even unafraid as I stood there, stifled against the wall, overhearing during these war years of the 1940s my father’s whispered words as he sought from Saint Francis nothing less than a miracle.

2.
    Q uite apart from his patriotic activities with the Ocean City shore patrol throughout World War II, and his pro-American speeches to the local Rotary Club, which would soon elect him its president, my father was silently terrified by the Allied forces’ successful invasion of Sicily in 1943 and their inevitable plan to move north up the Italian peninsula against the Nazi and Fascist troops who were encamped in and around the southern region of his birth.
    His widowed mother still occupied the Talese family’s ancient stone house in the hills with most of my father’s kinfolk, except those who were soldiers at the front, associated with the Germans against the advancing Allied ground units and bombers.
    The southernmost part of Italy was virtually indefensible, my father conceded to me at breakfast after reading in The New York Times about the fall of Sicily; it was the fragile toe of the Italian boot, an exposed area where the slanted farmlands and jagged hills descended from the higher northern peaks and were surrounded almost entirely by unguarded bodies of water. To the east was the Ionian Sea, to the west the Tyrrhenian,and to the southwest was the Strait of Messina, which scarcely separated the southern tip of Italy from the island of Sicily.
    Although my father’s village—Maida—was sixty-five miles northeast of Messina, it was precariously situated. The