BRONX BROOKLYN TALES

Antipasto and Gin Rummy

Remembering Aunt Paula

Photo taken at Nicky’s Clam Bar

In physical terms we inhabit space, but in emotional terms, we are inhabited by memory. — José Saramago

Losing a parent as an adult is a rite of passage. It alters how we face the world. Personal history shifts. What once felt solid loosens. Losing a beloved aunt or uncle — or an entire generation of them — marks another ending, another threshold you don’t see coming until it’s already behind you. Time, when you’re not looking, can smack you in the back of the head. Call it aging. Call it loss. Call it whatever you like. It moves through you like a river in late March.

On the day my Aunt Paula died, I put on my father’s collared gray tattersall shirt, pulled from the back of my closet. He’s been gone three years now. My mother twelve. Still, they linger — like sun and clouds that simply belong to the day. When I learned Paula had died, the shirt made sense. Like animals who sense rain before it falls, death leaves breadcrumbs. The old gray shirt.

Aunt Paula was salt of the earth — a working-class Bronx–Brooklyn hybrid, more Bronx than Brooklyn. Everything about her leaned toward caretaking, generosity, and goodness, except when it came to herself. Her life was marked by fear, pain, and long stretches of suffering: agoraphobia, depression, relentless back and spinal pain. But to call her tragic wouldn’t do her justice.

Paula Mormando was feisty — almost a Sopranos cutout. The kind of aunt who showed up every Sunday at my grandparents’ house with the best pastries Brooklyn had to offer, who tousled your hair and told you how handsome you were. She was always there: birthdays, holidays, childhood, adolescence, marriage, divorce — the whole shish bam cabool, as she’d say. An emotional fixture. First on Wallace Avenue. Later, Lido Beach.

She went by many names. To my mother, she was Paul. To my father, “Paullishi.” To Uncle Frank, with his one word of Yiddish, “Mishpucha.” To me, simply Aunt Paula.

You can’t write about Paula without Frank. They were a post–Korean War couple who spent sixty years together — battles and birthdays, blowouts and barbecues, Fourth of July street parties. Loyalty defined them. Right up until death and dementia did them part. They lived for decades in Brooklyn, then followed the working-class migration to Staten Island, settling into the basement of their daughter’s house.

She was a daughter, a grandmother, a mother, a wife — and my mother’s best friend for nearly seventy years. They spoke on the phone every day of their lives. In a family prone to silence and estrangement, their sisterhood stands out as something rare and holy.

My father and Paula shared a bond built on play. Pranks. Verbal jousting. He’d be playing gin with Uncle Frank and call out, “Paullishi!” — Brando-style, Streetcar Named Desire. She’d shoot back, defiant and amused: “Sammie! What is it?” He’d say something outrageous. She’d cap it with an Italian expletive, carefully edited for the kids. She carried a chip-on-the-shoulder defiance, a Bronx swagger that softened into Brooklynese over time.

According to my mother, Paula wasn’t academically inclined. On more than a few occasions, as the older sister, she served as both lookout and voucher. School wasn’t her thing. She preferred cigarettes, boys, and dancing — the cha-cha, the mambo, the Sock Hop. She and Frank made the rounds of Bronx dance halls, a striking pair: he a thin and wire-framed Sal Mineo; she a bobby-soxer from Longfellow Avenue who adored Sinatra. He went to Korea. When he returned — along with my uncle Irwin, also home from the war — they married.

She was one of five children, wedged in the middle. Sundays meant my grandparents’ house in the Bronx. Looking back, I think that’s where we learned happiness — if only for a few hours at a time.

All the aunts and uncles, all the cousins. Smoke-filled kitchens. Bobby Darin or Rosemary Clooney on the radio. Women clustered around Nanny as stories spilled out and food multiplied. No specialties — just abundance. The kids ate at the card table. Poppy sat at the head of the aluminum foldout with my uncles, their occasional friend, my father. Paula was always there, like Ed Sullivan or the Jerry Lewis Telethon, weeping when Liza Minelli sang. “David”, her voice would reach across the table: “More yams? How about roasted chicken? You want a drumstick?”

Time was not kind to Aunt Paula. Even as a child, I noticed the dark bags under her eyes, the color of used Lipton tea bags. They lost their son Nicky in his early forties after years of addiction. Years later, their daughter Lorraine died of leukemia. By then, dementia had erased awareness.

More than anything, Aunt Paula is synonymous with Thanksgiving. Alongside my mother, she formed a culinary team that made the holiday sacred. Uncle Frank would drop her off in Lido Beach — where my parents had a house — before heading upstate to hunt.

For Paula, it meant a week with her best friend: shopping, cooking, talking, drinking coffee, playing gin, listening to Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Neither of them drove, so my brother would come out early and be the designated driver. Over three days, they produced an immaculate three-course feast.

Her signature dish was antipasto — a visual and gastronomic display. A palette of color and peppers: roasted reds stuffed with breadcrumbs, greens marinated and fiery, prosciutto-wrapped, surrounded by eggplant, mushrooms, artichokes, anchovies, cheeses, slices of pepperoni, and breads stuffed with broccoli rabe from Brooklyn. After an intermission came her red sauce — handmade, deeply flavored, heavy with garlic, oregano, and whole tomatoes — ladled over her other signatures: eggplant parmesan and stuffed shells.

She died in a nursing home on Staten Island, an undesired exile for someone who spent her life caring for others. The last time I saw her, was with my uncle Irwin. She didn’t recognize either of us. As I rubbed her back, she snapped, “Who the hell is that guy?” Her sassiness remained impregnable. I didn’t go back.

Some people have bad luck. My aunt was one of them. But if justice reigns in whatever great kitchen lies beyond, she’s there now — with Nicky, Lorraine, — standing over a stove, a Kent cigarette in her mouth, stirring small ziti as it comes to a boil, asking who wants a spicy sausage. My mother slices onions in a skillet older than the Bronx. Barbra Streisand belts out “New York, New York” on the radio. And from another room, as cards are crisply shuffled by my uncle Frank, my father calls out, “Paullishi!”.

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