Givol: One Woman's Story

© 2011 by Felicity Dell’Aquila-Geyra. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 09/12/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4634-6007-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-6006-8 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011914568

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Prelude

A Son Remembers

Chapter 1

My Father, My Mother,

My Brother

Chapter 2

Back to the Beginning

Chapter 3

More Memories

Chapter 4

A Dear Little Thing

Chapter 5

More About My Childhood

Chapter 6

Piano

Chapter 7

Girlhood

Chapter 8

Awakenings

Chapter 9

Israel—The Promised Land

Chapter 10

Return to the Real World—1953

Chapter 11

Givol

Chapter 12

Pentimento

Chapter 12

Pentimento

Chapter 13

Liebesleid

Chapter 14

As I Was.

Envoi

The Present

Postlude

The Son

Acknowledgement

Biography

Initiation

Whoever you are,

Go out into the evening,

Leaving your room of which you know each bit.

Your room is the last before the infinite,

Whoever you are.

Then as your eyes wearily scarce lift themselves

from the worn out door stone,

Slowly you raise a shadowy dark tree and fix it on the sky,

slender, alone,

And you have made the world.

And it will ripen as a word, unspoken, still.

When you have grasped its meaning with your will,

Then tenderly, your eyes will let it go.

-Rainer Maria Rilke (1923)

Prelude

A Son Remembers

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;

Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see

A child sitting under the piano, in the boom

of the tingling strings…

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song

betrays me back…

And I weep like a child for the past.

-D.H. Lawrence.(1863)

The Ballad of the Harp Weaver

". . . There sat my mother,

The harp against her shoulder,

Looking nineteen and not a day older,

 . . .

A smile upon her lips, a light about her head,

Her hands in the harp strings frozen dead.

And piled up beside her and toppling to the skies

Were the clothes of a king’s son just my size."

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1922, 77-80-. . . . 114-121)

When I was a child my mother would tell me over and over, When I met your father I thought he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. And, she would add, You will be just like him when you grow up.

She was nineteen, a shy music student. He was a handsome young Israeli. A talented artist and veteran of his country’s War of Independence, he had come to the United States to further his studies while there was the hope of peace in the Middle East. It was love at first sight. They were both Romantics.

She was twenty-one, he was twenty-four when they married.

My grandfather, my mother’s father, was an ardent Catholic, the son of Italian immigrants. He had studied hard to raise himself from his poor beginnings on the Lower East Side of New York to graduate from the University of Michigan Medical School, to become an Obstetrician and Gynecologist, beloved by his patients, at first mostly poor Italians, in Westchester County where he and my mother finally settled. He was deeply hurt by the discrimination rampant there then. There were few Catholics in Westchester County, originally settled by pioneers from England and French Huguenots who resented his humble background. In spite of his reputation as a resident physician at Yale University Medical School, he was only accepted socially and as a respected physician after having served as a Flight Surgeon in the United States Navy during WWII. With high honors, he retired as a Commander to return to private practice and the poor who loved and had waited for him.

My Grandfather was a bitter man. Perhaps that is why he tried to have my father deported before he could marry my mother. He reported my father to the United States Immigration Department because, an Israeli, he was working to support himself while in America on a student visa. By the time my grandfather got through Immigration’s red tape, my parents had eloped, refusing to be separated. They arrived in Israel together. It was February, 1952.

By the following September, my mother was back in the United States, alone, staying with her parents, waiting for me to arrive, eight months later. I was born two days before my mother’s twenty-third birthday.

After a week, my father came from Israel and we lived in my Grandparents’ home where he was loathed because not only was he Jewish, he was an Israeli. My grandmother, always a fragile, sad and disappointed woman, was influenced by my grandfather, She, too, was cruel to my father. My mother became an outcast and soon she entered into a deep post-partum depression. Pitying me, my grandparents made me the center of their world, guarding me jealously from my father, barely offering him a kind word. Finally, he knew he should leave. My mother did not go with him.

When I was a year old, my mother and father were divorced. After that, she and I continued to live with her parents who called us the children and my mother became like a sister. Eventually, she faced reality and we, too, left my grandparents’ home. She telephoned my father to ask if he would take us to live with him.

It’s strange that you called, he replied. Because I got married last week.

My mother and I became two against the world; my father had another wife and soon three other sons. We remained stones upon his heart for the rest of his life; but we didn’t know that then. Years later, my mother found a box with old photos of my mother and father before I was born, as well as telegrams he had sent me on different birthdays—from my father with love.

My mother and I moved back and forth to try to live independently and I went to many different nursery schools; but we always returned to my grandparents’ home, a beautiful house on the shore of Long Island Sound that my grandfather had purchased after his retirement from the Navy. One Christmas my father sent me a fishing rod because we lived on the Sound. I never learned to fish and it stood against the wall in my grandfather’s house for years.

My mother tried valiantly to support us, taking different jobs until finally she decided to resume her studies, to find some career so that we could one day have our own home and I could get my education in one place. I had been baptized and my first grade school was a Catholic school. There, a well-meaning, but misguided nun had told me that I had no father because he was dead; so, when I came home in tears, my mother decided that we had to meet. She took me in my stroller by train and then on the subway to the theater in Greenwich Village where my father was designing a set for a play—Uncle Vanya with Franchot Tone. Growing up I always thought Franchot Tone must have been a special friend of my father’s and I would look to see if he was appearing anywhere so that I could find him and tell him I was Ilan’s son.

When I was about five my mother took us furtively to the Central Park Children’s Zoo where my father was waiting for us. We always met him in secret to avoid arguments with my grandparents and because my father’s sons didn’t know about me. We looked for his name on the television and often found him there as a set designer or Art Director on many important plays and we learned that he had also designed plays on Broadway and that he was a Scenic Artist, too. We were very proud of him. As we were many years later when in a book about Israel we found a photograph of him driving a tank during his country’s War of Independence. He was a hero during the war and when it was over his dream had been to come to America to learn as much as possible about the theater and Television, this new medium, to take what he had learned back to Israel. After his return he did become a pioneer, helping to organize Educational Television and as a famous Art Director. Everybody in Israel knew and loved and still love him.

My father and his new family lived in New Jersey and eventually they moved to Israel where he built an elegant home for them. When I was eighteen, about to enter college, he sent me a plane ticket to visit him in Israel. I had seen him only a few times before that. The last time was just before he took his family back to Israel. We met, again secretly, and he took us to The 1959 World’s Fair where he had designed the Israeli pavilion. He wanted us to know that he was a big artistic success and had made a lot of money. He didn’t intend to be cruel, but the memory of that visit remains with me until now.

We spent the day together. He showed us all the appliances and even the sailboat he was bringing back to Israel for his family. As we walked through the grounds, I remember looking longingly at the kiosks scattered around the fair that offered chances on The Encyclopedia Britannica. It had been my dream to own those volumes that I believed would unlock all the mysteries of the world. But my father said that was just a gimmick and wouldn’t take a chance.

I remember taking their hands in mine so that I could walk between my father and mother. I was, for a few hours, like any other boy holding the hands of his parents as we visited the Fair’s different pavilions. The afternoon passed very quickly.

Before getting into my mother’s car for the trip back to Westchester, we stood beside my father’s van, equipped, he showed us, with a table and small benches where he said his children could draw and play when they went on trips. I knew then that I would become an artist like my father and some day work in the theater and movies, too.

I remember shaking his hand and saying, I guess this is Good Bye. I was seven.

We lived with my grandparents on and off. After my grandmother’s death, my mother cared for my grandfather through a long illness and he left his beautiful home on the Sound to her. After his death she decided to move to the city and she gave our home to me. I remember the day she sold her piano so she would be able to move to the city. This place is so beautiful, but it doesn’t have many happy memories for me, she explained. Why wait till I die for you to get it. You are an artist and you need the beauty here on the Sound.

So I live in the house where I was born. It sits like a queen high above a park-like ruined Italian garden on the Long Island Sound. My mother called this precious spot "Paul’s Giverny" (for, like my father, I am a painter and have been inspired many times by its pristine beauty). An astrologer had told her that a house on a hill, near water would be important in her life and in mine. It is.

For many years I lived here alone. Today I am married to a caring, understanding woman. Before I met my wife, every girl or woman I loved or thought I loved sang the same refrain: Your mother, your mother, I can’t compete with your mother…

My mother was very beautiful. She was born in May, but she was not a typical Taurean. She was a dreamer—When I am too old to dream… she would sigh to me… How sad life will be. My dreams overwhelm me. That’s because Pisces was rising. The moon was conjunct Saturn in Capricorn, squaring Mars. And Neptune squared Venus the night I was born—Disaster. She paused, then continued. You know as Catholics we don’t believe in Astrology, but that astrologer in London also told me that I will die in a foreign land.

I see again the childlike half smile, the soft, trusting brown eyes, a little calico cat or her small white dog, her constant companions, nestled in the crook of her arm as she made this pronouncement on one of the last evenings I spent with her.

After her final visit to Israel where she died, I found a leather bound copy of the Biblical Story of Ruth in her well-worn suitcase. In the center of its cover was a copper bas relief made by my father’s teacher so long ago—the famous Israeli artist Ruven Rubin. Pressed in its pages lay a spray of Freesia and one white rose, dried and crumbling. Under some silk scarves, I discovered a pile of neatly typed papers in a leather folder. "These fragments I have shor’d against my ruins," she had written in school girl’s block letters across the top of the first sheet. (She had been an English teacher and loved the poetry of T.S. Eliot.) The faint, familiar perfume lingering on her scarves wafted onto the pages as her ghosts began once again to inhabit the dimly lit stage of her life.

It takes a lifetime to figure out a person’s poem, she once confided. What follows is the poem of my mother’s life as she tried to put it down in the pages I found after her death.

PART I

Beginnings

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

—T.S. Eliot

From The Imitation of Christ

Not every desire is from the Holy Spirit, even though it may seem right and good. It is difficult to be certain whether it is a good spirit or a bad one that prompts one to this or that, and even to know whether you are being moved by your own spirit. Many who seemed at first to be led by a good spirit have been deceived in the end.

—Thomas a Kempis, born about the year 1380

Chapter 1

My Father, My Mother,

My Brother

I have always been moved by the first line of the poem that begins I remember, I remember, the house where I was born.

I don’t remember the house where I was born, I only remember the house where a part of me died—a house on a hill near water.

I was born in St. Mary’s Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, where my father Anthony Simonato was a resident physician in obstetrics at Yale University. He enjoyed recalling the moments when Mary, my mother, was first presented with her new daughter.

He would begin, What an ugly baby you were, bruised by forceps, with a big bump on your head and a huge tuft of black hair. Your mother cried when the nurse tried to put you in her arms. She kept repeating, ‘I don’t want this baby. I want my mother. I want my mother.’

Her mother had died a month before I was born. Her name was Julia and I was given the same name in her memory. She was laid out on Palm Sunday. That’s why I don’t like white lilies. They remind me, my mother would explain when I was old enough to understand.

What a character your mother was, my father often mused. When she was pregnant with you she was afraid to sleep alone in our apartment when I was on night duty at St. Mary’s, and she would sneak out in the middle of the night and crawl into my bed at the hospital. One morning the physician in charge found her handkerchief in my bed. She was so embarrassed. What a character.

I have a permanent scar to remind me of the day my brother was born. It’s a real scar at the base of my palm: I am left with my mother’s Aunt Lena when my mother goes to the hospital to wait for the new baby to be born. My father drives up to tell the good news.

Julie, I have a son. You have a little brother, he calls to me.

Running to meet him, I fall and cut my hand and, forever after, the little half moon scar at the base of my palm is there to remind me of the day my brother Paul came into my life.

I see him when he is about three years old, driving his tiny pretend fire engine, yelling Toot Toot, his little body swerving from side to side as he negotiates sharp turns up and down our front walk.

My mother holds him in her arms, rocking him back and forth, whispering My Little Butchy, my little boy. How she loved him.

Sometimes he would pucker up his face to cry when I took him on my knee and sang the children’s song, Little Sir Echo, how do you do, Hello, Hello/ Won’t you come over and play? or when I played on the piano About Strange Lands and Curious People from Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood. So many years later, my son, also named Paul, would look so sad when I played that piece for him or began to recite The Ballad of the Harp Weaver.

My brother could do no wrong. Once when he is four or five we are visiting relatives in the country and suddenly we hear a shout from my mother’s cousin. That damn little brat!

He was playing gas station attendant and very carefully has poured handfuls of sand and gravel into the gas tank in the cousin’s car. The tank is full now, he smiles at my father who just laughs and later the cousin has to pay to get the tank cleaned out.

He is about seven and he has fallen from a tree while playing hide and seek with his buddies. He comes home, his hair sticky with blood.

Little Paul has a hole in his head, a hole in his head, he chants as my mother tries frantically to bandage his wound.

Whenever we go to a restaurant—usually The White House Arms after church on Sundays, he glances quickly down the right side of the menu and always chooses the most expensive dish, even if he doesn’t know what it is.

My brother is twelve. He has a job after school delivering papers. One day my mother receives a telephone call. Mrs. Simonato, are you a strong person? a woman asks.

Dear God! What has happened to my son?

He has fallen down an elevator shaft in the apartment at 120 Sea Road., the woman begins. But he is O.K… .

My mother doesn’t hear the last part of her message. She has hung up the phone and begins running frantically the three blocks to where the apartment complex stands.

She arrives to see my brother, safe, talking quietly to an officer. After delivering papers on the second floor of the apartment house, he stepped into what he thought was the elevator. The door opened and he fell into the narrow empty shaft. Hearing him scream for help, someone on a floor