Surprise and Remembrance

When you were Italian and Catholic, Sundays always began with Mass.

You wore your best for church in the 1940s. One particular Sunday morning a young woman living in Providence, RI, in the Federal Hill neighborhood overlooking the downtown shopping area, then largely an Italian neighborhood, was dressing for Mass. Like most young women of the time, she took pride in dressing in the latest fashion. It was a cold December day, so she probably donned a long-sleeved blouse and a wool skirt, or perhaps a woolen dress. She would carefully pull up silk stockings, fastened in body-twisting motions to a garter belt, and then check and recheck in the mirror that her seams were straight. A prink here and a tiny careful tug there made it just so. Feet then slipped high-heeled pumps. She fixed her short wavy dark hair in the latest style, then made up her face, patting on just the tiniest bit of rouge and the bright red lipstick of the time.

Her parents also were dressed in their best for church, as well as her younger brother, slim and natty in his suit. They probably walked to church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, bundling their coats around them. Women wore dressy hats back then, but not the type that kept your ears warm; instead they were cute little creations in bright colors perched on top of your head, tilted at a saucy angle, some with decorative veils, others with a jeweled brooch. Gloves were also in fashion, sleek leather or perhaps thick wool for a Sunday eighteen days before Christmas. In church you would be elbow to elbow with others in wool coats, snug scarves, and fur collars. Presumably some of the coats had just come out of  storage and along with the scent of women's cologne and Old Spice was the faint trace of camphor. Sunday Mass was full of music and incense, the service in majestic Latin, the choir in full throat along with the pipes of the organ. It was Advent and the priest would be in vestments of violet touched with gold and white.

Post service, despite the winter wind, you would stand and talk with your friends for a few minutes until the lure of Sunday dinner took you home. If you wanted to receive Communion, you couldn't eat breakfast, so it was a particularly hungry family who arrived home. Putting on patterned full aprons to cover their Sunday dresses, the young woman and her mother boiled macaroni, tossed a big green salad with oil and vinegar, and stirred up the "gravy" that had been simmering on the back of the stove, redolent of tomatoes and garlic and meatballs. The table set, they gathered around, said grace, and enjoyed their Sunday dinner along with Italian bread fresh from the neighborhood bakery and some type of dessert, perhaps a lemon square or a sfogliatelle.

Sunday afternoon for this working-class family was for visiting or for a movie. Our young lady's father settled before the radio set, perhaps to listen to a football game or a concert. Younger brother went out to see "his girl." If he was flush they might go to the movies and have an ice cream sundae afterwards. Perhaps this Sunday they might only visit at her mother's house.

Our young woman and her mother set out to visit a cousin who lived nearby. Of course they walked; no one jumped in a car back then for distances of a few blocks. They bundled up against the cold with scarves and kerchiefs, strolling the sidewalk that lined the steps leading up to the triple-deckers and the duplexes.

As they passed the house of a friend, an upstairs window flew open, and a woman's head emerged. She was wildly excited, called out the name of the young woman and her mother. She wanted to know...had they heard the news on the radio?

They were astonished. No, they had left the house before Papa turned on the radio. What was wrong?

This was how my mother and my grandmother learned about the attack on Pearl Harbor. They rushed up the stairs of their cousin's house, only to hear the awful first bulletins on the radio. The newscasters' words were in English and Mother had to translate for her mother. She did so with tears in her eyes, for every woman who heard the news that day interpreted the terrible truth in one way: that their sons and brothers and fiances and husbands would be going to war.

Later they walked home. People were out on the street now, talking about the news. Some men boasted they would enlist the very next day. Others looked troubled. Women wept. How could one go home and sit in their living rooms or their kitchens, and drink coffee when this had happened? Just sit around and listen to the radio?

It was as if their thoughts coalesced into one. Grandpa rose from his chair and donned coat and hat to join his wife and his daughter, and they walked back to church. The doors were always open and one by one, in small groups or in lines of family members, they filed in, some crying, some still stunned. The church was warm with steam heat and still held the odor of incense from earlier Masses, plus the perpetual scent of the candles burning in rows upon rows in metal stands that clustered around the altar, flickering red and blue and gold in their jewel-bright glass candle holders. From the rectory the priests came out, one by one, their surplices still askew, to hold hands, to comfort, to pray.

Mother told me that story so many times that it is almost as if I were there myself, burned into me like my own memory. World War II, a quarter century earlier, was as real to me as Vietnam already boiling up under the children of the 1960s. Each time I hear Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" speech I still get gooseflesh. I can feel the December cold on my legs, smell the warm candles at church, hear the weeping of the mothers and the sisters and the wives. I know what they lost but will never know the total depth of that feeling on December 7, 1941.