A Girl from the Hill by Patricia L. Mitchell

Author:Patricia L. Mitchell [Mitchell, Patricia L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781452569451
Publisher: BalboaPress
Published: 2013-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

Dahlia in front of Uncas Manufacturing

Dover Street

Alphonse and Dahlia began life together on 153 Dover Street, along with his parents Anthony (Tony) Testa and Giovannina (Jenny) DeLuca Testa.

The small, tidy bungalow in the Mount Pleasant section of Providence, with voluptuous, pale blue hydrangea bushes in front and perpetual vegetable gardens in back, reflected style, order, and many, many ominous feelings. I could feel them whenever I visited, like they were happy to see us but underneath all the smiles lay sadness, darkness, hopelessness. No matter how many times I blessed myself with the numerous holy water receptacles throughout the house, or how hard I stared at the crosses woven from blessed palms, the sadness could not be erased.

The house looked no different in the 60s and 70s than in 1946, when my mother moved in. The first floor housed three small, dark bedrooms, each with mahogany furnishings and a pale crucifix on the wall that almost glowed (as I child I thought they were glow-in-the-dark but was promptly corrected). The eat-in kitchen had a pale green Formica table and chair set, a pantry where my grandmother both prepared meals and also performed rituals over water and oil to ward off the malocchia in order to soothe someone’s headache, or determine whether a particular visitor meant harm or good.

The dining room held more mahogany—a beautiful Chippendale set for Sunday dinner and holidays, then a pale living room and the one bright spot—my grandmother’s sun parlor, bursting with African violets, ferns, lilies and other silent, peaceful life forms. There was a big white wooden chair with a blanket customized with the name Testa in red. I thought this was the most special chair in the world, though I was never allowed to sit on it.

Upstairs in the attic the summer air stagnated, the winter air froze your breath, and the times in between allowed us kids a perfect escape from the pressure of family interactions. My Grandfather Tony’s escape was downstairs in the cellar, where he tinkered with tools, hoarded old newspapers and avoided the rest of his family. Both areas seemed pretty much off limits to my mother when she moved in. My parents, my grandparents, and their three remaining daughters all lived on that first floor until my sister Maree was born in 1947.

My mother’s metamorphosis from indulged little Dahlia, with a full assemblage of parents and brothers and sisters to shield her from pain, distract her with laughter and provide an audience for her animal sounds and tap dancing serenades, into Mrs. Testa began on Dover Street. Her own mother could no longer comfort her, or snuggle her at night while her father worked the night shift. That same mother who, sickly for as long she Dahlia could remember, never complained. So as Dahlia shared her new family’s home, a place where making mistakes gained more attention than making jokes, my mother assumed she held no right to complain. Her own mother never complained, no matter how sick she was.

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