Pieces

It is our wisdom and duty, under mournful events, to do what we can to comfort ourselves against our sorrow, by suggesting to ourselves such considerations as are proper to allay the grief and balance the grievance. But sometimes the sorrow is such that the more it is repressed the more strongly it recoils. This may sometimes be the case of very good men ... whose soul refused to be comforted and fainted at the cordial.

~ M. Henry (Jer. 8:18)

Josephine Stanoli

It's as if it never happened. They say 'What the eye don't see the heart don't grieve for,' big fat lie.

~ Call the Midwife, S2 E3

The beginning of Sam and Angie's financial heyday was circa late '54, the year they joined the ICF (The Italian Catholic Federation), tallying up another feature to already active lives that lasted until the September of Destiny, 1959. The crescendo of '54 was met by the decrescendo of '59. It goes to show what is for some a mere five years for others a lifetime can make.

Vincent's Aunt Rose, second eldest of Sam's sisters, flew out from Detroit in December of '57, at eldest sister, Josie's, behest to fly her back to what would be the final resting place she called home. Early in January of the New Year, they received a phone call from Rose that Josie had passed. Twelve-year-old Vincent never forgot his Aunt Josie's last words just before she was wheeled out on a stretcher to an ambulance in front of their house on route to the airport. She wanted all the children there, too, to hear a promise, though, so infirm was hardly able to speak. The words came out just above a whisper that she would send them a sign after leaving this world she was finally at peace in heaven. It would be something no one could mistake, not in the San Fernando Valley. And that would be snow. Vincent remembered the moment, and held close to his heard the last words he would hear his dear Aunt Josie utter again.

Sure enough, one morning, about a three weeks later, Vincent awoke with the strangest feeling. He looked out the window of the current bedroom* on the corner of the house that faced The Wash and front yard. And there, to his wondering eyes, beheld the serene quiet of snowflakes falling down from grayish-white skies. The normal green of the front lawn was transformed into a heaven-sent picturesque glistening landscape. He scurried over to his brother's bed, shaking his shoulders to hurry and get up and see the snow before it was too late and then ran to his sisters' bedroom and woke them up, as well. Soon, they were all out in the front lawn scooping up as much of the beautiful welcoming white as they could, in unspoiled joy forming it into balls and throwing them at one another. Then Vincent turned and ran back into the house to his parents' room. The door was open and he carefully peaked around the corner seeing his dad putting on his slippers and mom her robe. With that, he ran back to the hallway and yelled out for them to come see that Aunt Josie had kept her promise. A minute later he was back outside with the others, while his pa, with his arm around ma and she, leaning into his chest an arm around his waist, stood on the stoop watching their children run, dance, and play on the new fallen snow.

It stayed one full day. A day of sweet sorrow and, to one little boy that lacked understanding of what had happened to his dear aunt short months before to so suddenly be taken away forever. Aunt Josie, a woman that gave him so much love, care, and attention, so giving and cheerful, to decline and plummet so rapidly, totally bedfast. And then to see her carried away, in shock and dismay, left him bewildered. All through that week Vincent found himself remembering, remembering this woman, the one that had meant so much, the one who taught him how to comprehend what he read like never before, line upon line, precept upon precept. Through recent years of paternal disapproval and disparagement, he'd regressed, and she was the kind instrument to help bring not only his aptitude but also fondness in reading, to a degree, up again. Equally, she helped him understand the principles of arithmetic and do it well. It was Aunt Josie who had been there every day after school to greet Vincent and his brother and sisters with those big, warm, loving open arms and that contagious Stanoli smile, while their parents ran Sam & Angie's Café on Cherry Street in the heart of Hollywood. It was Aunt Josie who, without fail, served that big bowl of hot buttered popcorn fresh from the kettle, to snack on every day after school, while they all watched Looney Tunes on Cartoonaroony, before venturing out to burn it off outside, playing hard before suppertime.

She was a good cook, too, and always had dessert and plenty of it, either homemade cookies or a cake made from scratch, or she gave them servings of whatever homemade pies Ma and Pa brought home from their café. Vincent could still see the large and inviting banana crème and cherry pie, and man, were they desert dreamland! And, yes, it was Aunt Josie who tolerated her nephew in ways his ma and pa never did. Her uncommon tolerance gave him room to act out, no doubt because the usual heavy restraints upon him were unshackled when his parents were away and, taking liberty, ran with it. The guilt from the way he'd acted and treated her at times, to this day, still stings his conscience. It was Aunt Josie who was thrilled spending time with her nephews and nieces and they all knew it. She adored them and that was no secret. She introduced them to some things without which they would not have known and learned to enjoy. On weekends, they would watch the late night hillbilly show, too, followed by the roller derby. It was Aunt Josie who darned their socks and jeans, crocheted slippers for the four and, just for show, when playing cowboys & Indians and pirates, knitted neckties, scarves, and gun handles as embellishments. And it was Aunt Josie who sometimes told them stories of bygone years, days when she was a tomboy and took her two younger brothers, Clem and Sam, to task. How, not infrequently, she beat the tar out of defiant, rude, and disrespectful brother Vico. Of glory days when she could want for nothing, living in the lap of luxury. "We were on top of the world," she would commonly add. Aunt Josie was the only one, up until then, who gave them more than their father's oft-heard, "We were worth over a quarter of a million dollars," but dropped it there, leaving them to wonder where it came from and where it went. She described their house, the land, the community, friends, relations, and she described the day when it faded before her eyes the same year she lost her one and only true love, Sandy, a loss from which she would never recover.

Although, she never told them outright, whenever she talked about him, they could see it in her eyes, Vincent eventually putting two and two together that the advent of these tragedies found her slowly go downhill. She'd lost the lust for life and the vitality and verve that from the start had been her manner. She pined in her loss of Sandy, the one and only man she would ever love and he loved her just as much, a love of immense almost incalculable proportions. They were in their mid-20s, and she was still that woman, vibrant, slender, and eager for life, she would longingly lament, holding Vincent in her snuggly, pillow-like, arms, and rocking him. He could not imagine her any other way but one day she took him to the box of family photos and showed him a few when she was "young and alive," with flowing long black hair she'd painstakingly straightened, with a big smile as she was playing the piano and Sandy standing behind it looking at her as if she was the most beautiful and delightful thing he had ever seen.

To a nephew from nine-to-eleven, Josie spoke it often enough that he could not mistake it. Her dreams had been taken away, dreams of making something out of her life, the first expert pianist of the family, long before Giovanni. Gone were the aspirations and dreams of having a family of her own with the man of her life. Only decades later, would Vincent come to the realization that those moments, the things she'd told him, she hadn't uttered to anyone else, kept as they were in the safety of her heart. Only he knew what she would never tell others, save Rose and Katie way back when, why she never found anyone else after Sandy, or exactly what happened to him, except to say

"He was taken from me before his time. Oh, he was a handsome, smart, happy giant of a lovely man and wanted to give me the world. He will always be big in my heart. There he will never die, but I die a little every day without him. What you see, my darling nephew, is a fat woman, but inside I am wasting away."

The curtains were closed, as a kind of mirrored swan song, a part, a large part, of her life had stopped: those dancing fingers would never glide across the ivory and ebonies again as if, when the keyboard cover came down, it would be for the last time and no requiem. You see, even that was too much. One would never hear the sounds of happiness, of hopes and dreams, of a heart full of life and desire through her music anymore, nor even to lift up her voice to join her siblings in song when gathered together for the next twenty-seven years of her fairly young life, ending at forty-eight. Looking closely, one could see, behind the smile that encircled her adorable face, and natural, tightly curled, dense gray hair, a wonderful woman with a broken heart and broken life. Aunt Josie, a chapter out of the pages of his childhood Vincent will always prize and cherish above almost no other.

That same January of '58, a change of another sort took place. It began unobtrusively for Sam, who started suffering from an itching, swelling, and general discomfort after a day's work, taking baths in Epsom salts and applying creams to the affected areas. Initially, it seemed to help but not for long and was getting worse. Finally, his resistance gave way to common sense and he went to their family doctor down the block who said he thought he knew what it was but with the appropriate tests wanted to make sure. In the meantime, he prescribed a strong salve to help alleviate the symptoms. But the condition did not abate and salve, too, of small avail.

A week later Sam knew he was in serious trouble when the tests revealed he was allergic to grease. The depressing prognosis came of little surprise; he'd already figured out the cause. There was no way out of this one and knew they had to shut down their sweetheart business. Within the month, Sam & Angie's Café was a thing of the past. By then, his suffering had grown to appalling levels. His face had swelled to horrid proportions, even scary to his eldest child. His body, wracked in bumps and sores, left him with no option but to be admitted to the hospital for a week's treatment and observation, spending the balance of the month-long recuperation at home giving him ample time to reflect.

Mere months before, his beloved sister Josie began suffering from severe pain in her lower extremities. In those days, no one went to the doctor unless they absolutely had to and Josie hadn't a said word to her brother or sister-in-law about it, taking aspirin to help alleviate the pain. Vincent caught her crying alone in the living room one day when he came in for a drink of water. She'd been having these episodes for some time when she thought no one was around. He asked, as all little boys do so attached to their aunt, what was wrong, what had happened, was she all right, could he do anything to help. All she said was that she had a boo-boo and it hurt really badly but there was nothing he could do about it right now but she loved him for caring. That night, he stayed up in bed, waiting for his ma and pa to come home from work. He heard them settling down in the kitchen/ family room area and quietly got up and when he passed by his aunt's room he slowly opened the door and looked in. Good, she was asleep. She'd been doing that for some time now, going to bed earlier than usual and that told him something just wasn't right. He knew he wasn't supposed to be up after bedtime and took the risk of being disciplined but he knew he had to tell them and so walked down the long hallway past the front room and stopped at the top of the three steps into the kitchen/family area and saw them turn on the TV and sit down with some snacks preparing to watch the late night movie. He stood there for a moment and just when he was about to walk down the steps, his dad unexpectedly turned and saw him. He was smiling and, as his mother, seeing the strange look on his face, rose from her chair, asked him what was going on, did he have a nightmare. No, no, it was something else he thought they should know and told them about Aunt Josie. Of course, he was told that was something little boys should not worry about, they would take care of it, and he should go back to bed. Everything would be okay.

For a while, Josie steadfastly refused to go to the doctor, slowly increasing her dosage of aspirins to the point of four in as many hours around the clock, until she finally agreed to be seen by the family doctor. Two weeks later, she was admitted to the hospital for a thorough examination, the diagnosis revealing the dreadful results. That night, Sam made the initial phone call to his sister, Rose, who in turn relayed the information to the family. To the horror of the other siblings that had lost their sister Katie to the same disease, less than a handful of years earlier, Josie was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Progressing at an alarming rate, following the prognosis almost to the week, she was gone in four months.

The only thing she ever wanted was Sandy and to have a family. Who could have imagined her killer would ravage the very area of her body to produce just that. And so Vincent would tell the story, his Aunt Josie had died twice: first in her mid-20s and the second at forty-eight.

Sam & Angie's Café

The sentiments which we indulge throughout the day often mingle with the grateful slumbers of the night.

~ Claudian

During that period of the café, they made many friends and regular customers some of whom were TV and movie stars or would become them. The experience was one of the highlights of Sam's life and Angie's, no less. It left Sam with especially fond memories of those he would refer to for the rest of his life; sometimes Angie would chime in in warm remembrance. Among the many were John Dehner, Robert Horton, Steve Cochran, Ida Lupino and Howard Duff, Dane Clark, Mark Stevens, Myron Healey, L. Q. Jones, Claude Akins, James Best, Paul Fix, Anthony Caruso, Stacey Keach, Sr., Ray Teal, Phyllis Thaxter, June Lockhart, Ben Cooper, Marjorie Main, Nick Adams, Rory Calhoun, James Drury, Gene Evans, Slim Pickens, Neville Brand.

How did this list ever come about? Soon after they opened for business, John Dehner stopped by for a late lunch. A wildly popular TV actor, he was in between one of his many projects, and many guest appearances on TV series' during those years and had just finished filming the movie The Scarlet Coat. These and many other things were mentioned as he hung around, striking up a lively conversation with the gregarious and expert cook after they closed for business for two hours, between lunch and dinner. The beautiful and convivial Angie joined in for a while, too, and all had a wonderful time. John would become a regular customer but, more than that, he and Sam became fast friends and the seed was planted of a relationship that would follow. It was largely because of his influence that word got around about this fabulous quaint café on Cherry Street, with out of this world food and service by a husband and wife team, a pretty and energetic gal and remarkable man.

And the list grew including Simon Oakland, R. G. Armstrong, Royal Dano, Andrew Prine, Dorothy Provine, Sharon Farrell, Virginia Grey, John Mitchum, Nina Foch, Sterling Hayden, William Bendix, Guy Madison, Jock Mahoney, Gilbert Roland, Chill Wills, James Gregory, Robert Sterling, Janice Rule, Roger Smith, Mala Powers, Andrew Duggan, Martin Milner, Jack Elam, Brad Dexter, Ed Begley, Warren Oates, Allen Jenkins, Archie Johnson, Jay Silverheels, Alan Hale, Jr., Arthur Hunnicutt, James Coburn, Claude Jarmin, Jr., Pat Brady, Mike Mazurki, and Vito Scotti.

A short time later, John Dehner gave Sam this advice:

"You never know how long things will last in this town, Sam. You might want to make a list, chart, or something, indicating all the people from radio, TV and movies who come in here, for remembrance sake. You know, kind of like something to look back on."

"Hmm, you think so, eh?"