La Giara (The Water Jug): A Story About Longing

By Patricia King Haddad

La Giara begins in Sicily in 1909, when adolescent Nunzio Minissale’s imperious
cutting in line at the town water fountain leads to breaking his aunt’s giara —the
water jug. This incident unleashes a lifetime curse that crosses the Atlantic from
Sicily to the New World. La Giara becomes a symbol of the family’s rupture and its
eventual reunion, challenging three generations of Minissale women.

Nunzio thinks he wears the pantaloni in his family until he instigates an incident
that prompts his wife and two daughters to disappear suddenly. Leaving behind
their successful family bridal business in Philadelphia, they use aliases and take a
cross-country train out West.

In this inspiring story, long-shattered relations are eventually healed by Nunzio’s
grandchildren, who discover that la giara, their symbolic container of traditions—some
broken, some lost, some retained—has endured the cracks and damage
caused by the patriarch of their troubled Sicilian family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543903232

Book preview

ORIGINATE.

PROLOGUE:

FAMILY GHOSTS

I startled awake to the spirited chattering of birds outside the window, my eyes straining through darkness to discern where I was. I squinted at the clock—5 a.m. Shadowy forms about the room hung in soft, eerie angles like remnants of a dream, leaving me with a sense of unidentifiable doom. I then remembered I was at my parents’ house to be with my mother as we anticipated my grandfather’s funeral. Hollow and ill, with buzzing nerves and upset stomach, I recognized the symptoms of exposure to our family’s past since our grandfather’s death, a past that I had never fully connected to, that had produced a type of neurosis, a constant longing.

I’d had this certain longing ever since I could remember. Something felt perpetually out of reach—as if a train ran by my life as I stood waiting on the platform. I was sure I’d had my hand out to flag it down, but somehow I’d missed my connection. In the dawn hour, longing arrived at the station, enveloping me like an approaching funeral march.

I heard the soft pulse of music. Half-dazed, I ambled down the hall where Brahms floated from my mother’s painting studio, light beneath the door verifying activity. I found my mother at a canvas in her green Indian tunic—the one she had sewn in just an afternoon. Dangly earrings sparkled between waves of hair about her shoulders; her glasses, now a permanent fixture, rested on her nose. Furiously, her paintbrush dabbed at the canvas, percussively beating away, layering purple to the pointed mountain. Without turning, she acknowledged me.

I can only think of Sicily today. I’ve been up for hours. She bit her lip, then took a step back to scrutinize her work. Her long fingers tilted the lamp to shine on her painting. Tomorrow would have been my father’s birthday—he died just eight days shy of completing his ninety-sixth year. Oh I dread seeing the family in Philadelphia.

A week ago, my grandfather’s—Papa’s—Denver lawyer had called about his death, as my two-year-old hung on my knees, twisting the coiled phone cord.

Is this Patricia—Carol King’s daughter? I couldn’t reach your mother. Your grandfather died last night in his sleep. They found him this morning.

Of what? The household sounds disappeared, drowned out by the hiss of the long-distance telephone line.

Uh … some kind of hemorrhage.

Oh, I responded politely, stalling for more explanation.

I have more calls to make. I’m glad I could reach you, he said with a tone that told me he was merely scratching me off his to-do list.

I phoned my mother, who responded in a worn voice. I know—Mimi already called.

I’ll drive into Carlisle, to help you get ready for the funeral. My parents’ charming Pennsylvania town was only two hours from our Philadelphia home.

She sighed. I suppose you could help me pull together a photo board.

I stepped over books piled around my mother’s studio, embalmed in the woodsy scent of oil paints that glistened on her wet canvas. Is that Mount Etna? I asked. Her painting of the seductive and powerful mountain peak pulled me into its landscape, dotted with ancient stone houses where my grandparents had once lived.

Why would our family ever leave such a beautiful, peaceful place?

I thought that many times myself, my mother muttered. The canvas bounced back and forth as her brush formed a jug resting on a woman’s shoulder, held by the graceful arc of her arm. As I watched Mom bring images to life on the gauzy surface, I longed for the faraway country to which we felt we belonged.

But why did they leave? I moved her pile of clothes to the side of the chair and sat down.

Mom swirled blue and green on her palette, producing a vivid teal color that she added to a stone fountain in the forefront of the painting. She floated with the melodic piano phrase, lifting her arm in time with the music, and added burgundy to the sandy-colored jug, making it more prominent. Her sense of rhythm from years of piano study was internalized.

Oh, I don’t know. Intently, she filled in the jug before offering more information. We could still be living in Sicily if it wasn’t for my father, she huffed, pulling her strokes harder across the orange-streaked sky.

Why?

Because of that broken water jug and its curse.

You never told me the whole story, I said, remembering parts of the story she had repeated all those years when she thought I was too young to be listening.

Your grandfather and your Nonna’s mother, Vincenza, had that fight. But our family doesn’t speak of the incident much, she answered, one eyebrow raised to discourage further questions.

I wondered if that was why our families rarely met except at funerals. And why Papa never invited relatives to his grand mansion, or why our mother barely visited her Philadelphia cousins. We children had missed out on lavish Sunday dinners with relatives, hearing our Sicilian language, and the general intimacy a family experiences at regular gatherings. We drifted around the periphery of our culture, fantasizing what our life should have been. The few family occasions we attended left us with fond memories and a longing to be more connected to my mother’s relatives. But we could not find our way into the family circle.

Tell me more.

Mom stopped painting and lifted her glasses from her face.

When your grandfather broke Aunt Vincenza’s water jug, the whole town believed their lives became cursed, especially after the terrible drought that followed, with the bugs attacking the weakened plants, munching cut-out shapes into the leaves, and then the big food shortage. She leaned into her painting with the fine point of her paintbrush and added a thin line to the jug handle. Now, she never forgave Papa. Your grandfather’s reputation was ruined in a small village, hungry for gossip.

But why would Papa break his aunt’s water jug?

Apparently you didn’t know my father well enough, she curtly replied.

She smirked. I waited while she collected her thoughts, and now that she seemed to relish telling the story, she shifted into her grandiloquent manner, as she often did for a dramatic effect. Raising her voice over the radio’s lively orchestral passage, she elaborated.

Your grandfather was known for his volcanic disposition, as explosive as the mountain that loomed over his village at the base of Mount Etna. And he was just the same—destructive to everything and everyone who came onto his path. She scooped her arms up as if to show the grand mountain, enlarging her dark eyes with excitement, tossing her head with an exaggerated gesture. In the highlands of Sicily, your grandfather, Nunzio Minissale, became as rugged as the hilly land, and—she leaned forward, narrowing her eyes—as deceptive as the volcano behind his village. She lifted her arm as if holding an imaginary tray. Consequently, his environs were to blame for shaping his volatile behavior. Mom’s eyes drooped with sadness. It’s funny how your grandfather was so full of fire, and yet it was a water jug that changed the course of his life—and everyone else’s, if you think of it that way.

Mom returned to her table of oozing paint tubes and picked out a deep vermillion color. She entered her painting, and I entered my thoughts about our grandfather’s powerful influence on the family. She spoke in staccato phrases, steadying her hand to produce long brush strokes. You know, that water jug had more power than we ever imagined. It really was a type of curse; relations were never repaired, then the family dispersed to America, Vincenza carrying those same old grudges, as if the water jug dispute had frozen us in that one ridiculous moment. Mom painted a faint arc of light over the mountain, then sketched three transparent forms floating toward Mount Etna. The hardly visible humanlike shapes drifted like wispy smoke, scrolling across the sky.

Our family’s comings and goings, fleeing and uprooting, eventually left a crevasse between who we are and who we once were. You know what they say in Sicily: ‘There are forces, there are gods, and there are mortal wounds too deep to heal.’

I took in the smoky, spiral clouds painted about the mountain peak, suggesting ghosts of generations who had left so much behind. What had been lost in our family’s migrations when they had to turn their backs on the past? Did this longing, imbedded deep within me, reach further back to my relatives, who also lost something in folds of generations?

Mom added hairline cracks to the muted brown jug, then wiped her paintbrush on the speckled rag.

If only someone had known how to mend our damaged vessel, Mom mused.

How could one incident hold so much weight in our family’s history? And who were those three spirits in her painting? I watched Mom swing her brush back and forth, painting the expanse of sky. Her clouds, layered with hues of blue and purple, drew me into lofty thoughts.

We can only dream of the time when we once belonged to our land, our people, our ways, she mumbled, absorbed by her ancestral landscape.

But don’t we still belong to all that? How could she disregard our heritage with such finality? Surely my mother longed for the past as I did. Longing was a random phantom. It surfaced whenever I saw old family photos, smelled garlic sizzling in olive oil, viewed sunsets, heard Italian opera, caught a scent of my grandfather’s cologne or a whiff of geraniums, or came upon a palazzo resembling my grandparents’ mansion. The constant longing that my siblings and I felt was our lifelong conversation, as we’d wistfully ask, Do you remember when …? Together we tried to capture smells and images of our grandparents’ life that had forever stamped nostalgia on our hearts.

I wish we could go back in time, I lamented.

My mother turned to me. While some can look forward, some of us agonize a lifetime over loss too remote to define, and too profound to forget. She dabbed the canvas once, as if adding a period to her philosophical statement, then reached over and turned off the commercial that blasted on the radio.

I hung on to my mother’s last thought, her rhythmic brush strokes comforting me, reminding me to notice the present. Sweet morning air wafted through the cracked window while she hummed in a soft, breathy voice.

I leafed through the scrapbook that she used as inspiration, and discovered a brown-tinged photograph of our Sicilian relatives staged in poses, staring back with hungry looks.

That’s our family before they had to leave Sicily, she said over her shoulder.

I turned the page, and a photo of a young, dark-haired man, clipped to an old Philadelphia train ticket and a packet of letters, fell from the book.

And who is this? I held up the photo, signed Eugene. Mom froze with a pained look, then whisked the photo away from me.

There are some questions that cannot be answered. She tossed the photo in her drawer, shutting down into a silent mood.

The grandfather clock chimed six. Now that the birds had quieted and my mother was deeply focused on her painting, I trudged back to my darkened room and slipped back to bed. Longing was waiting for me. In the bit of nascent sun that found its way through the parted window curtain, in the spicy scent of our sheets, in the familiar creaks of our old house where five children’s voices bounced in tiers of time—I was lost in our distant past, in an endless procession of memories. As I tried to still the thoughts evoked by my mother’s comments that morning, a deep urge rumbled within me with a force to be recognized and expelled. I searched for a notebook and began to write furiously, as if struck by lightning:

A persistent longing reminds me that I have been missing something from the very beginning, which continually begs its resolution. I have always been on a quest, a mission, to find what it is that I have lost.

PAPA’S FUNERAL PHILADELPHIA—1990

Papa’s green alligator shoe tips peeked over the coffin’s edge as the line moved toward the front of the room, where stooped figures leaned into the open casket and murmuring voices droned from the crowd. Groups of white-haired elders congregated, as my siblings and Philadelphia cousins conversed on the periphery, uneasily stuffed into barely used suits and formal dress.

Our grandfather, Nunzio Minissale, was more myth than person; his inflated stories and grand Denver mansion had placed our Papa into an untouchable realm. As we grew up, our ears often caught gossip of his colorful life, as Mom and Aunt Mimi cooked in the kitchen and Uncle Alfredo and Ezio sat in front of the television during baseball season. Our white-haired relatives had lived the stories that we kids heard from the sidelines. They knew the real Nunzio Minissale, the one who owed Aunt Angela and Uncle Frank money, the one who berated his wife and daughters, who betrayed his mother, and who equally charmed the world.

Our Papa was buried in his three-piece suit. Though he’d gardened in it for years, it still remained nearly immaculate. His daughter Mimi dressed him with the two fancy pens, always clipped to his front coat pocket, that he pulled out in moments of inspiration, exclaiming Apropos! as he scribbled notes on a miniature pad. Papa's clothes retained his familiar Ivory soap scent mingled with the overly fragrant lilies as we peered into the silk-lined casket at Papa, his brown mustache contrasting with white waves of hair combed back from his forever tanned face. The waxy finish gave his skin a glow, deceiving all in attendance that he was still full of life. Even in death, he projected a false opulence, decked out in his expensive clothes and diamond stickpin, while everything he left behind was in shambles.

Before our old, tough grandfather died, almost fourteen years after our grandmother Annunziata was gone and with the mansion just a memory, he had sold his house for a fraction of its value, moved to a penthouse in the Lido apartments in Denver and was illegally speeding around his gold Cadillac in his early nineties, scaring everyone out of their wits. His daughters were not recognized in his will and we grandchildren were not recipients of his wealth, having been grouped into the eternal resentment he held against our mother. He mistrusted his very own family, instead favoring the questionable people that cared for him at the end of his life. When Mother returned from Colorado after visiting Papa’s diminished Lido apartment, she reported shocking stories of his deteriorated state.

He piled his money in stacks on his dining room table, handing bills out to that pretty young nurse, Margaret, who cared for him. He hoarded remnants from his house on the apartment balcony where snow and rain had ravaged and rusted all those beautiful antiques.

Picked over by the pharmacy delivery guy with the help of his caregivers, our father cut in. It was just a bunch of old stuff, anyway. He brushed Mom’s sentiments off as he sipped coffee, the swirling vapor steaming his eyeglasses.

We waited by the tower of funeral flowers with my mother’s sister Mimi, Uncle Frank, and Aunt Angela, greeting family that we hadn’t seen for years. In our young adult years, we five children looked like we came from the same cookie cutter form—four slight girls and one boy, with dark skin, black hair, and almond-shaped eyes, who resembled our mother instead of our tall, light-skinned father with pale blue eyes.

We thought youse kids had it made all these years, Uncle Frank said, referring to our grandfather’s inheritance. But your grandfather hadn’t paid his taxes or bills in ye-e-ars, our overweight uncle bellowed. He was living in denial, believing he was still one of the richest residents in Denver.

Oh, he made his fortune all right—from rags to riches, whispered our aunt Angela with the blueish hair and puffy face. But I knew he’d eventually keep it all to himself. That’s how he wanted to go out—holding on to his gold … tsk … thinking we’d all be so impressed.

My oldest sister, Nancy, scanned the crowd. Jeez, where did Mom disappear to?

Last I heard, she was down the street buying stockings, my other older sister, Michele, said, digging into her purse for gum. At least she didn’t wear the ones she had on this morning with runners stretched down her legs.

The five of us stood among our aunts and uncles, embarrassed about our mother’s late arrival to her own father’s funeral. She should have been standing with us, with a supportive arm behind our backs and a courageous smile. But it was usually we children who felt we had to do the comforting.

Our patience was almost exhausted when we heard our mother’s entrance, as if she had been blown in off the streets by a blustery wind. Ahhhh … haaa! Her shrill laugh carried over the crowd. Lucy, it’s been forever! she cried with exaggerated affection, hugging the family friend, as if performing in front of a movie camera.

She came over and squeezed me with a distracted hug, and I sensed her eyes scanning the room. Mom was wearing gold, tangerine, and brown—her favorite earth colors—but today she belonged to the blueness of the distant sky. Oh, you look so peaked, she said as she held my chin and tilted her head back to better view my face. Are you not well? Before I explained that I felt great, she hugged Nancy, who stood stiffly. Oh goodness, did you put on a few pounds? While I worried that I was pale and sickly and Nancy glanced at and away from her stomach, we saw our aunt Mimi head our way. We were shocked that this once-admired beauty had been replaced by a haggard person with missing teeth, overly dyed hair, unmatched clothes, and garish jewelry.

Don’t listen to your mother, Aunt Mimi whispered, as Mom greeted the rest of the family with pleasantries and we wondered if she remembered that her father had just died.

Please, make sure Nancy doesn’t smoke in front of the relatives, Mom begged Lloyd, the oldest of us, as she leaned over and kissed our middle sister, Carolyn.

Your mother gets a little ruffled around her family, our father said in his calm voice.

John, I just don’t believe in looking at someone who is gone. Justified, Mom moved off into the crowd.

She can’t even make an effort to see her own father? Carolyn implored, and we collectively shared the sibling ‘knowing’ look.

You have to understand, Dad explained, your mother lived under the same roof with Papa’s anger for many years. She never had a chance to live a normal life. That’s what happens when one has been trapped for too long.

Which explained why Mom showed no grief as she made her cheerful social rounds, dressed in her stylish manner. She was merely fulfilling her last obligation—reporting to finish her duty—to see her father buried in the ground, period.

Oooo … Mimi, I think I just saw your old friend, Bill Lowly. Mom returned, pulling on Mimi’s sleeve. Don’t you want to say hello to him?

How can you be thinking about that right now? Mimi huffed, her grief momentarily erased by irritation with her sister. Anyway, they’re calling us to move on.

Our family was ushered into the adjoining sanctuary, and as I waited for mass to start, I read the highlights of Nunzio Minissale’s obituary: moved to Philadelphia in 1909, worked for Lubin Film Company, began real estate business in 1920, operated three trousseau stores, was a nationwide investor and estate broker, negotiated the sale of Park Lane Hotel and Kitteridge Building in Denver, Colorado.

It was the first time our grandfather had been in church in half a century. We listened to an unknown priest boast of Papa’s holy afterlife, when instead we wanted affirmations of his gambling and womanizing, the millions he made and lost, and his mansion that we all missed more than we missed him.

When Ave Maria was sung from the pulpit by a singer straining for notes, we shifted in our seats and Mom winced. If anything could have been better, it should have been the music.

Disgrazia, our opera-loving Papa would have muttered, after all the years he’d hosted numerous opera singers in his home, including Caruso. Yet, as the singer screeched out her high notes, it occurred to me that the unimpressive performance put Papa’s death into a needed perspective, forcing us to look at his departure without any ceremonial brilliance enhancing his leave. Had the music been transporting, we would have been swept away yet again by blinding sentiment, falsifying our grandfather’s final exit.

It’s time for us to wake up from our lifelong delusions, Mom remarked to Mimi toward the end of the service. It is the end of an era, and the end of the big myth that will finally cease to embellish our own lives.

In our adult years, my siblings and I had started to disengage from our innocent admiration of our grandfather, discovering the deception beneath the seemingly charmed life he had led. Our grandfather was a master at creating beauty for the sake of appearances, but his family’s skittish ways were evidence of his irrational behavior rarely seen in public. I observed our family gathered in the church—those who had gotten tangled in his web, whether obsessed with his grandness or victimized by his temper. Aunt Mimi was the most damaged by her father’s abusiveness, and the only one who cried as she took in her father’s hollow form, identifying with the great vacuum she most likely noted in her own body. As the casket was rolled down the aisle, Mom hardly acknowledged the shell of the man who had tried to rule her life.

Relatives ambled out of the service, cracking light jokes, some fishing cigarette packs from their pockets to catch a smoke. Families formed the car procession to the cemetery, arriving at the manicured development in sporadic groups. Car doors swung open and our relatives stepped out in shined shoes, high heels, and sunglasses, all variants of formal black dress that somber Sicilians comfortably wore in respect for death. The funeral staff efficiently guided us to the graveside, checking their watches, as Mom murmured sarcastically to Mimi: Even death has a limited time to present its last face.

After Papa’s coffin, scattered with flowers, disappeared into the dark rectangular hole, everyone seemed to breathe more lightly. Papa would have been devastated to see all of us unaffected by his passing, more relieved that he was gone. Instead of feeling inspired by an elder’s life, I was deflated by the sight of my fragmented family about the cemetery. Papa had left us in a state of dysfunction; he lived on in the memories from which we couldn’t escape.

It took Lloyd until the funeral luncheon to cry, gripping his orange juice glass, paralyzed by the memory that had triggered his tears. Papa had shown his kindest gestures to Lloyd, and one of them was squeezing fresh orange juice every morning while Lloyd, raised on his toes in mini cowboy boots, watched Papa fill his glass and adoringly hand it to his only male descendant. He had never forgotten the day when Papa led him to the giant bathroom for his first shave, lathering soap in a small dish with a bristly brush, then slathering his soft face and gently shaving clean rows across the new stubble growth. Water ran, gurgling in the sink, and mirrors bounced light off white ceramic bathroom fixtures while Papa whistled and dabbed his young cheeks with a spicy liquid.

At the table, Mom leaned into Uncle Frank. You have to be kidding! Her rich, seductive voice purred, then broke into laughter that fluttered devilishly, cutting through the dark mood of the crowd.

Oh, God. Mimi averted her eyes.

What’s wrong with her? Nancy grumbled.

Our grandfather’s sister Angela, with the constant curl on her forehead, sneered, enjoying an opportunity to gossip.

After your mother fell in love with that Jewish boy, she was never the same. She was already a difficult person to begin with. Boy, did she cause a lot of waves in her family. She nodded, directing our attention toward Mother with her chin in the air. You kids might be too young to understand, but when your mother was burned by love, and her dreams to be an artist were squelched, she hid her real self for too many years.

No wonder she didn’t know who she really was, Mimi said between bites of food. But one thing—she lowered her voice—she knew she had to save herself from Papa.

Yeah, maybe that’s why she changed her name from Norma to Carol, Aunt Angela added.

His mouth full of food, Uncle Frank added, While them children were growing up, she was so busy throwing them dinner parties for her professors, taking all them college courses, paintin’ away—or that trip around the world on a freighter for months at sea—she was hardly ever around. Them kids practically raised theirselves.

Uncle Frankie, we can hear you, Nancy said, as we shifted in our seats, sickening of all the talk of our mother.

Great-aunt Angela swished her drink down. Your uncle is right; she wasn’t around like most mothers. Always at her Carol King’s Bridal Boutique, running back and forth to New York. Don’t you remember, Frankie? She elbowed him in the ribs. If you ask me, Norma’s issues all originated with your Papa and his old Sicilian country ways.

I saw Mom across the room heading for the restroom, and got up and followed, detained by several polite greetings before I arrived in the green fluorescent-lit bathroom. There I found Mom bent over the sink, splashing water onto her face.

Oh, you scared me! she gasped. Her hoarse voice spoke to me through her reflection in the mirror.

Are you okay, Mom?

She exhaled a shaky breath, blotting her face with a towel. I just got sick. She motioned to the bathroom stall. I need to be alone.

I felt I had no comfort to offer my mother and quietly slipped out the door, feeling like I was drowning in a sea of funeral guest goodbyes. As I put on my coat to leave, Aunt Angela waved, rushing over to me.

Hey, hon, I brought something that I wanna give you. She opened a frayed cloth, showing a ceramic piece. Your Nonna wanted someone in the family to keep this. She said your mother would lose it. Since you like all that family stuff, maybe you want it?

I examined the ancient cracked surface of muted colors, running my fingers along the rough edges of the piece.

She said it belonged to some water jug from Sicily. In fact, there’s more to that story. But your grandfather and great-grandmother Vincenza might roll in their graves if I brought it up. She smirked, looking behind her shoulder.

Aunt Angela’s comment verified my mother’s story and made me shiver. As we rode home from the funeral I held my hand over the family relic, with an urgency to piece my family’s past together. It was the broken piece of ancestral Sicilian memorabilia that stirred my emotions more than the death of my grandfather. I felt Mount Etna rumbling within me and the waves of the Mediterranean sweep me into a current destined for my ancestors’ homeland.

Deep sweet longing, you’ve become an old friend as well as an enemy. This longing that runs through my veins, like water that once flowed in and out of a weathered family water jug, has carved its path for a very long time.

OUR ANCESTORS’ SUN SICILY—2004

Morti. He shook his head, waving his hand as if suggesting their spirits had flapped their wings and flown away. Morti. Tutti sono andati in America," he explained as he swiveled his wrist in the air, pointing as if America was just over there, across the large range of mountains we had just crossed. My husband, Orlando, my son, Jordan, my daughter, Nicole, and I had traveled hours from Palermo before cutting through the mainland to make our way to the small village my grandparents had left behind. Maletto, sitting at the base of Mount Etna, had seemed a lot closer on the map until we arrived at the soaring hills, leaving the view of the aqua Mediterranean miles below, climbing and descending again and again until we crossed the highest points of the island. Hours later, we swung into the town square of Maletto, where a church, a rustic bench, and a fountain created the central meeting spot. Caps, beards, and white hair designated the townsmen at their regular afternoon hangout, where slow-paced conversation was accompanied by church bells, bonging the time of day.

We parked the car and Orlando stepped out, shaking blood into his legs before he approached the group of men, explaining in sketchy Italian that his wife, a descendent of Maletto, was looking for her relatives. Smiling meekly from the car window, I waved. I climbed out of the car, hearing Orlando repeat the family names, Minissale and Piccione, and then their response in unison: Morti.

As they mumbled among themselves, with occasional words sparking disagreement, we interpreted that we had come to a dead end, until the man with a cane said he might know where some of our relatives had lived, and motioned for us to