PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES / LINDA BLANDFORD : A Line of Stitches, a Line of Song--Ties That Bind

For a city thought to live in the present, we are bound by so many unexpected threads to the past. Here for instance, are the members of the Garibaldina Society arriving in Highland Park for their regular Thursday get-together.

In the club’s ballroom, beneath 13 crystal chandeliers, between pink floral walls and marbled mirrors, the women gather around tables for handicrafts, card games and gossip. They work on intricate crochet, tiny needlepoint and embroidery, on dolls, aprons, samplers, tablecloths--nimble hands fleeting across linen and yarn. Long ago, in another land, women always gathered thus.

Here is Katie Giannoni, women’s vice president, handing around cards to sign for those who are absent, those who are ill. The small rewards of being known. Mrs. Giannoni, nee Cardone, with her elegant and pampered hands, whose father left Italy for the backbreaking coal mines and gravel pits of the New World. Daughter of a laborer, wife of a businessman in pale trousers and leather shoes--the leap of a generation.

Giannoni herself worked for a ceramics company for 48 years. When it went out of business one day in 1985, she walked out of her office, and yet another world vanished. In the small town of her father’s birth, the land was always there. Generations knew one rhythm, one history--and the certainty of hardship.

What can Italy still mean to the elderly women with their sprayed and ornate hair, painted nails and costume jewelry? The women who would, in the distance, stand out in Italy as “American”? Giannoni, for instance, has been to Italy once--for one day, when her cruise ship docked in Venice. And yet here they are held together by this invisible Italy of the spirit.

When the Garibaldina was founded in 1877, there was an Italian neighborhood here. Now there is only this squat, brick, mortgage-free hall and the sprawl of Highland Park stretching around it. The American cars of a certain age in the parking lot next to Lucky come from miles away. Those who have given up their driving licenses wait for kinder, younger souls to pick them up. Their grandfathers could shuffle the same known, narrow streets until their death. In the pitiless old age of today, there is no “neighborhood.”

They have lost the old country: the dense and complicated mass of ancient walls, hovels, palaces, churches, piazzas, fortresses, alleys and gardens. And yet, in some magical way, the old Italy has been reborn in this unlikely hall between the freeway and the railway tracks.

Out back, at the boccie court, old men line the narrow alleys, watching the slow game in the sand--the dusty memory of village squares, of park benches, of men gathering stiffly in the quiet friendship of years together.

At first, all this is hard to see: there are only smooth American faces, the texture-less look of new clothes, the flatness of men who have worked indoors, ignored nature, known a sufficiency. But watch their faces sharpen as the games go on: the hats worn indoors against the glare of an imaginary Tuscan sun, the keen eye, the pointed edge of concentration. The warmth of men’s greetings, the ease of a place where all the faces are familiar.

A world of dinners taken together, of poker games in the back room, of anniversary waltzes on the ballroom floor, of a line of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren who did not die of scarlet fever as children once did. Friendship grows in many ways, not only forced by hardship, howling winds and predators.

Wandering along the boccie alleys is Arbace Bracci, 90, born in Italy. His wife is resting at home; they were out with friends until early in the morning. His wife of nearly 70 years, the friend of childhood, resting now in the garden where he grows zucchini and fresh basil.

He goes off down the passage, meaning to see what the women are doing. Something catches at him and he remembers years past, and Verdi--to him, the spirit of Italy. In a ballroom in Highland Park, he sings of love, death, hatred, feuds, passion, and his old man’s voice rings true and his face lights up. “Aida,” “La Traviata,” “Un Ballo in Maschera”: the old man in his plaid flannel shirt, braces, cloth cap and lace-up leather shoes, made strong by his love for this one thing, Verdi, that makes him “Italian,” that makes him one man rather than another, that ties him to a brotherhood forged on a distant shore.