They struggled, and I remember kicking my father in the shins. "I hate you! I hate you!" I screamed, as I had the first time he had attempted to kidnap me from my mother and dragged us across a street, clinging together, in Washington, D.C. My beautiful mother, who sang like an angel and danced across a stage to hundreds of cheers, whom I worshiped as the goddess of my life, beaten and dragged with a screaming little boy hanging on to her shoes!

On the strength of that terrible memory when I was four years old, I attacked my father on my eighth birthday while he pummeled the beloved Italian friend who had flown to my aid. I tremble with rage even now, after all these years since 1942, and in my mind I kick and yell and reach again for Dad's golf club in the corner of the hall, and I strike him across the back with it repeatedly, my father, until he falls to his knees, beaten down by a scrawny eight-year-old with murder in his eye.

Now my father was afraid. He had never seen me like that. That brutal man who always had the advantage, and his bitch of a teenage wife, both were now afraid. They cringed and cowered before me while my 19-year-old Italian, tall, gaunt, dying his slow, agonizing death, lay trembling beside me on the floor. His baseball cap had fallen off. He looked so naked there, so frightened, so vulnerable. I tossed the club aside and knelt to take his poor bald head in my lap. As I kissed it, I put his cap back on.

At that moment, his mother came up the stairs from outside, passed our door and saw us there - her son and me crumpled on the floor, my father and his woman backed against the wall. She sized up the situation in a flash, helped her son to his feet and took me by the hand. She stood there for a second or two, her silent rage striking my father and stepmother like a tongue of fire which made them flinch.

"I am not American," she said slowly, her Italian accent as thick and rich as her spaghetti sauce, "but if we are in MY country, I KILL you for this. You listen to me. You don't hurt my son no more. You don't hurt YOUR son no more neither. This building very high. I am only a woman, but I push pretty good. Ten floors a long way to fall down!" She tugged us away. "Come on boys, now we eat happy-birthday ice cream, and Mama tell you a story."

She led us away to her apartment and gave me the mothering I needed in recompense for having been father to her son when he lay beaten to the floor. Clearly established to me at that early time in my life was the notion that "father and son" constitute a state of mind as much as any so-called biological reality.

The End

Part 1 | Part 2