A visit with my great-aunt

It’s been more than three decades since I last saw Aunt Achilla and Uncle Tony’s second-floor, three-room apartment on Hoffman Street, but its image often surges into my mind. Their building was on the corner of 187th Street, in the heart of the Arthur Avenue (or Belmont) section of the Bronx, a neighborhood often called “The Real Little Italy of New York City.”

For the longest time, they didn’t have a phone, so we showed up unannounced, though they more or less expected us on Saturday nights or Sunday afternoons. Besides visiting my mother’s aunt, however, our frequent visits had another motivation.

Kicking his way among the stray cats, my father made wine with Aunt Achilla (a diminutive for “Agata”) in the building’s basement, since she had the requisite equipment and also rented a storeroom down there. Together they bought the crates of Alicante grapes I remember seeing stacked high in tottering piles. Together, with Uncle Tony nattering and mumbling in the background, they deposited the clusters of ripe fruit in the wooden hand press. Then Dad pulled at the long metal handle, over and over, for hours on end on an autumn day, pausing at intervals only to pour the fragrant vintage from the collecting vat into one of four sturdy barrels.

Together they decanted the slurpy concoction, weeks later, into outsized demijohn bottles. This operation had to be undertaken, along with the actual crushing of the grapes, either at the waning or the waxing of the moon — I forget which. If this lunar schedule was ignored, the wine was sure to spoil. My tiny great-aunt, in her leaf-green sweater, was a pleasure to watch, bustling from chore to chore with her unfading smile, sparkling blue-gray eyes, and plump cheeks merrily red, like the embodied spirit of the wine itself.

The cooperation between my father and Aunt Achilla was remarkable because, in most other respects, they got on each other’s nerves. Dad judged my aunt to be a “chiacchierona” (chatterbox), while my aunt considered my father blunt, insensitive and capricious. Yet, in order to produce four brimming barrelfuls of inky, vinegary, syrupy, knock-your-socks-off red wine, which would last them a year, they minimized all personal frictions. Since we didn’t have any storage space in our tiny apartment, Dad needed to stop by just about every week to fill up an empty gallon or two from the demijohns. Sometimes he went alone, but often the rest of us accompanied him and made a social visit out of it.

Zi’ Achilla came to this country in 1930 at age 29 and lived, with Uncle Tony and then long after his death, in the same cramped apartment for more than six decades. It was basically three tidy boxes in a row: one for eating, one for sitting around, and one for sleeping. In the early days, the rent was $25, but my uncle earned only $40 a month, since his job as a track-maintenance man for the New Haven Railroad was part-time at first. My aunt worked in some aspect of underwear manufacture in a sweatshop on 14th Street in Manhattan, from where she and some neighborhood friends once walked home after a blizzard paralyzed New York in the mid-1940s. It took them seven hours. My uncle got home the next day.

A short stocky woman with wavy gray hair, Zi’ Achilla seemed devoid of personal vanity, except for the concern she displayed for her black patent-leather shoes. It was strange to see her cover them with dust rags whenever she did the dishes, to avoid getting the shoes wet, but it would never have occurred to her to take them off, even temporarily, while she had company. A titan of domestic industry, she rose every Saturday morning at 5 to begin mopping and waxing her kitchen floor and tidying up every inch of the apartment. Every Sunday morning she attended the earliest Mass so she could get a jump on the day’s lavish midday meal. She loved priests — and talked about local Bishop Pernicone as if he were a crony of hers — but she considered doctors little better than charlatans. Once her insurance company sent a doctor she didn’t know to examine her in the convenience of her home. When he decided to do an informal stress test by having her jog in place by the kitchen table, she suspected a lewd motive — especially since she was in her slip — and clobbered him with her log-shaped handbag.

Though usually good-natured and placid, she was prickly on detecting any criticism or sarcasm in her interlocutors. But her soul’s core had been shaped by transcendent love in the form of the Baby Jesus in the Christmas manger — the bambino par excellence. She loved the divine infant as if he were the flesh-and-blood child she had been denied.

The presepi she set up in her living room at Christmastime, on an old wooden chest covered with a scented crimson cloth, was suffused with her simple piety. The light of a candle in the darkened room made the star above the little scene twinkle. As a child, and as an adult, too, I was entranced by the ceramic angel announcing the glad tidings to awestruck shepherds; the stately, gift-bearing Magi — Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar; the benign ox; the sleepy sheep; and the solicitous St. Joseph. But the most striking figure was the Virgin Mary kneeling with clasped hands while praying to the son destined to bear the sins of the entire world on his delicate shoulders.