Maria’s White Gloves

My grandmother arrived in America in December 1930 after a horrific, vomit-inducing voyage on the rough Atlantic sea. She set sail from her homeland in Italy just three weeks before leaving her mother, father and four sisters behind. Barely twenty-years-old and newly married, Maria Busicchio Scutari traveled alone to join her new husband who had come with his parents to set up a home and secure a job before sending for his bride. I heard about the day she reached the port at Ellis Island from a family friend who accompanied my grandfather to retrieve her from the masses of immigrants on that cold winter day. The weary voyagers, ghoulish and pale after weeks at sea, shuffled to the long lines in the Great Hall encumbered by baskets overflowing with the personal items they had packed to bring to their new country. Her friend recounts seeing my grandmother emerge among this unsightly crowd. She stood there, all four feet ten of her, wearing a pristine navy coat, but the immaculate pure white gloves that covered her tiny young hands caught her eye. 

  “Oh those gloves!” her friend recalls, “They were so white. You couldn’t miss them.”

Decades later, I sit in my grandmother’s tiny kitchen watching her prepare her meatballs noting every ingredient and trying to gauge the amounts. I am newly married, and while overcome with excitement at the beginning of a new chapter in my life, the pressure of time with my grandmother hangs over me now that she is in her eighties. I urge her to reveal how she crafts her wonderful dishes that she has lovingly prepared with abandon for her family all of her life. She opens her 350-degree oven and reaches inside bare-handed to remove a pan. I gasp, but she assures me it doesn’t hurt; after years of hard work, her hands no longer feel pain. With every grate of the wedge of Romano cheese and each movement of her knife through a pile of parsley, my desire to know about her intensifies. Does she ever think about her life in Italy? Was she scared on the ship alone? What items did she take with her? Was she terribly homesick for her mother and sisters? Where did a poor peasant girl get those white gloves? I realize I only see her through the lens of mother, grandmother, caretaker, cook, seamstress and widow. I have never heard my grandmother speak about herself or reveal her thoughts. 

Perhaps it is her age or the freedom from social constraints that accompanies it, but my cascade of questions slowly pick away at the surface of her mystery. I hear the story of a little girl growing up in the Italian countryside whose mother taught her to sew. My grandmother adored her newfound skill and awaited the rare occasions when her mother purchased fabric so she could sneakily cut a little piece from the bolt to make a new dress for her doll. Inevitably, her mother did not have enough fabric to complete the garment she needed to sew and became infuriated with her little daughter. Courtship protocol in Italy in the early 1900s both mesmerize and scare me as she recounts how my grandfather would “come by the house” to show his interest in her. I gather that if the girl’s father approved, the young man was given permission to marry the daughter. I also learn that she was never alone with my grandfather until after they married.  

My inquiry about her experience leaving Italy is met with silence, but I press on asking her a few times if she wanted to come to America.

“Yes, I had to,” she finally answers, “He was my husband.” Then she chokes a sob and blurts, “I never saw my mother again.”

Her words pierce my heart, and I am suddenly sorry for bringing her back to that painful time. I know she would not have left her homeland if the choice had been hers. It occurs to me that my grandmother’s life revolved around the demands and choices of others. I could simply excuse the time period for this, but to be fair, I must reflect on the many circumstances not in my control that forever changed the course of my life. There have been more of those circumstances than choices. It is then I think of that young girl about to embark from the ship, alone and afraid, choosing to slip on the white gloves and face her new life reborn.