NICE TO HAVE MET YOU

My brother had just bought Neil Young’s album Harvest and could hardly go two hours without hearing it played. Sitting next to my father, who was at the wheel of his Oldsmobile 98, he slipped it into the tape deck. After “Heart of Gold” played, Young’s characteristic whine bristling from the speakers, my father observed, “You know, that was a lovely melody--but she has a terrible voice.”

            My father was a born-and-bread New Yorker who’d moved to Michigan for business and found Midwestern friendliness very uncomfortable.  As far as I can tell, part of the problem lay in the fact that he took after his mother, an Italian immigrant, born in 1900, who found modern life confusing.  The first time she heard music from a tape recorder, she clasped her hands in wonder at the little machine and said, “Just like a Victrola.”

            It is no ­­accident that my father, Selvi, and his mother, Desolina, were both hard of hearing.  She used it to her advantage—for example, when I told her that my visit was over and I had to go home. She’d act as if I had said nothing, shuffling the cards for yet another game.  In short, she shut out things she didn’t want to hear; my father shut out what he viewed as extraneous.

And his list was long. He hated gossip and eschewed small talk. He cared nothing for trivia, whereas my mother, to prove during a dinner-table debate that the capital of Nebraska was Lincoln, would let her veal parmigiana go cold while she dashed for the World Book Encyclopedia.

            “Tune out” was the expression my father used to describe his abandonment of a conversation that was keeping him from more important business. He didn’t suffer fools. Seeing him at the barbershop was to see him in action, or, better put, inaction.

Barbershops are where men go to bullshit and to brag. Selvi detested both forms of discourse. When he sat in a barber’s chair, he stuck his nose in a magazine and kept it there until the barber was brushing the back of his neck with talc. I once saw him page through a magazine for thirty minutes, pretending to be engrossed in it, but having forgotten his reading glasses, just to avoid friendly banter with the man cutting his hair and his fellow customers.

To Selvi, it was incomprehensible, not to mention indiscreet, how a man could enter a barbershop, hang up his jacket, and announce, “Yeah, my wife busted her leg in three places last week.” 

            Why should Selvi care if a stranger’s spouse shattered her femur in an icy parking lot?  With a wife and three children, he had ten legs of his own to worry about. Sure, he was sorry for the lady and wished her a speedy recovery. But, to him, the information was useless; it was the equivalent of a mass-mailed solicitation.  Just as mystifying was that the guys at the barbershop could converse about the woman’s leg for ten minutes, adding their own tales about broken bones.

            Selvi’s regular barber for many years was a gravelly-voiced chain-smoker named Dale, who smoked so much that the ashes floating off his cigarettes could give a six-year-old child on the booster seat a salt-and-pepper look. My father could barely tolerate Dale’s inning-by-inning accounts of Detroit Tiger baseball games, but hearing him discuss his daughter’s marital problems was sheer hell.

It wasn’t that my father didn’t like conversing with strangers. Having lived a rags-to-riches life, and traveled around the world as a pharmaceutical executive, he could be a riveting raconteur. And he respected an educated mind.

            But he had a nose for sniffing out a conversation that was drifting into half-truths—in other words: a) an exaggerated war story; b) a tale about a killing on the stock market; and c) an inventory of the spectacular achievements of someone’s children. My father was a perfect gentleman, but was rarely willing to invest time in chitchat whose true purpose was to boost the speaker’s flimsy ego.

            Or that revealed a person's ignorance.

            “The guy doesn’t know his ass from a kumquat,” was a favorite expression of his. As far as my brother and I can ascertain, he’d invented it.  

Mark and I—born fourteen months apart and nearly inseparable—catalogued our father's observations on people he suspected as slackers, fakers, or sheisters—such as a guy with a specious claim to post-traumatic stress syndrome living off a lady friend of my mother’s. “I’ll tell you what he’s got: post-nasal drip syndrome,” Selvi muttered.

Kalamazoo, where my father’s company relocated him in 1962, seemed a million miles away from Hell’s Kitchen, the tough New York neighborhood where he’d grown up and where conning people was a way of life. It took my father years to believe that the solicitous nature of Michiganders, inquiring about vacation plans, was not a scam to clean out our two-story colonial while we were away for a week in California.

            Hell’s Kitchen also made my father impatient with life’s gray zones. In this, he took after his father, Tony, a poor peasant who’d immigrated to the United States in 1922. A stonemason, Tony was a man of few words. Very few.  He ate like a horse, but rarely joined after-supper card games and conversation. Instead, he’d sip red wine, twirl a matchbook in his fingers, and stare at nothing.

Occasionally, someone would look over and say, “Allora, Tony, whadya say?” 

            He’d sigh and reply, “Si piove, piove. Si non piove, non piove.” He’d nod knowingly, and everyone, out of respect, reciprocated, believing he’d delivered a philosophical gem.

            What he’d literally said was, “If it rains, it rains. If it doesn’t rain, it won’t rain.”

            One evening while driving home after a visit with my grandparents, my mother, at the time my father’s fiancé, turned to him and asked, “Does your father say what I think he says?”

            Selvi nodded.

            “Do you have any idea what he means?” she asked.

            My father shook his head.

Selvi's home office is a modest shrine to a remarkable career. There is a world map with pins marking every one of the five-dozen countries he’s visited. His desk retains an executive air, with neat stacks of papers relating to corporate boards he serves on. Awards line shelves next to antique apothecary bottles with their Latin scripted labels. On the walls are photos of ceremonies and annual meetings. But when you study them, you notice something peculiar: Whether a photo contains a single line of people or a large group standing in rows on bleachers, whether the occasion is a factory opening or a meeting with a foreign dignitary, my father is at the end of a row.

One caption reads: (Left to right: Bob Smith, Margaret Scala, Norm Pratt, Jay Schaefer, Mary Tuttle, Chris Wedge, and Selvi Vescovi).

Another: (Back row: Selvi Vescovi, Jerry McMahon, Leslie Yee…)

There isn’t a single photo with my father out of position.

 "Hell's Kitchen instincts," he explained to Mark and me. "Always be ready for a quick exit.”

Neither rude nor abrasive, my father was forced to come up with a phrase that allowed him to kindly exit those day-to-day encounters, some common in the Midwest, that were of no use to him.  It was, “Nice to have met you,” as well as its derivative, “Nice to have chatted with you.”

An example from the catalogue: Selvi is in Sears looking for some obscure bolt to hang up a punching bag he’d bought Mark and me for Christmas. The three of us are in a hardware aisle, but we can’t find what my father wants. He hails a salesman. After learning the bolt’s intended use, the fellow walks us to another aisle to show him a more suitable product. 

            So far, so good. My father was grateful when people proved to him how to build a better mousetrap.

            But things soon go wrong.  Without a doubt a native Michigander, the amiable salesman, a middle-aged bald fellow with lamb-chop sideburns, begins talking about how his brother-in-law used the same bolt to mend his doghouse and now the rain wasn’t leaking on the German shepherd so the family was saving money on vet bills and this allowed him to take his children to Cedar Point amusement park and how wonderful because the tickets were cheaper than he’d thought and the wife was thrilled and “who’d a thought this bolt come all the way from Germany,” which my father had visited countless times but which the clerk implied was 150 million miles beyond Pluto.

            Mark and I always saw it coming.  Selvi would nod, back up a step. This was a cue. It meant, “I’ve heard enough, I appreciate your help, and I’ve got to go.”

If the clerk missed the signal (and they usually did), my father would say, “Right, very interesting…okay...terrific...”

            If the fellow continued to babble on, my father said, “Nice to have met you,” turned on his heel, and departed with the person in mid-sentence. 

One more example, involving the lady at a bank safe deposit desk. After some small talk while retrieving my father’s box, it became clear that she was a childhood friend of our cleaning lady. For Selvi, the coincidence was an end in itself, not worth probing any further.  She saw it as an opportunity to regale us with tales about our cleaning lady’s childhood mischief.

“Nice to have chatted with you,” he stated, retreating into a private room and closing the door.

“Your father acts this way, in part, because he’s an only-child.”

            This was my mother’s take on why my father never learned to appreciate Midwest small talk.  She was also a first-generation Italian, but insisted his brusqueness had less to do with his immigrant parents than because, as a boy, he’d never lain awake at night engaged with a sibling in a go-nowhere but comforting conversation.

            My mother was his complete opposite. Elma felt obligated to listen to anyone who addressed her, ask lots of questions, and build up the person’s self esteem. She generally liked people, though her motivation was partly self-serving: She was always looking to pick up random facts and tidbits that would allow her to win our dinner debates.

            My mother’s chattiness grew the longer she was married, perhaps because she was uncomfortable with her husband’s long silences. One hot day on Sanibel Island, Florida, where my parents had bought a time-share condominium, I sat with her on the porch of a general store while she argued with a local man about what year the island was flattened by a major hurricane–1935 or 1937. For twenty minutes.

            Selvi, who had seen the dead-end disputation coming, had moved himself to the opposite end of the porch and placed nearly his entire body behind the day’s New York Times.

As we climbed into the car to leave, I could see my father was annoyed, not to mention embarrassed. He’d been taught by Hell’s Kitchen to mind his own business. From his mother he’d inherited a general wariness about people who weren’t family. Desolina had a term for this huge section of humanity: “stranger people.”

“What difference does it make—a hurricane in 1935 or 1937?!” my father asked my mother. “And you, who spend six weeks down here every year! You’re having this argument with a cracker who’s lived on this island his entire life?!”

            “When I’m right, I’m right,” my mother said.

            We drove home in silence.

The fact was that Elma, daughter of a gregarious, convivial father, loved chatting with “stranger people.” And she sometimes did it to skutch her husband. It kept the balance of marital power in check.  (The word comes from the Italian verb “scocciare”, which means “to bother or annoy”.

            On another occasion, my mother called over the owner of a new Italian restaurant and, pointing to the menu, said, “I thought I’d let you know that ‘cannelloni’ has two L’s.”

“Why are you embarrassing these people?” my father asked after the owner left. “What’s important is that the cannelloni are good. And they were.”

            “It’s just as important that the word be spelled correctly,” she replied. “Otherwise, the place looks foolish.”

            “Just how many people in Kalamazoo, Michigan, know that cannelloni has two L’s?” he asked.

            “I do.”

            A few minutes later, the waitress appeared at their table to offer my parents free dessert and coffee, courtesy of the proprietor, if she would agree to take home a menu and proofread it.

Of course, she'd be delighted, my mother said, snatching the menu and pointing out that the accent on caffe latte was reversed.

            My father tolerated her proclivity. And we, as a family tolerated my father’s ways, though were occasionally made uncomfortable by them--specifically his frustration when he got a bad meal in a restaurant. Selvi had eaten in the world’s best establishments, and he didn’t expect a liverwurst sandwich to taste like French pate. But he did expect the bread to be fresh and the food served hot and he didn’t want his egg yolks hard when he'd ordered them "over easy."

            These ftense episodes happened with some regularity because my mother was always on the lookout for new restaurants whose menus reached beyond hambugers, spare ribs, and pie ala mode. A fan of Julia Child long before she became world famous, Elma found Kalamazoo—where women, in lieu of ricotta, used cottage cheese in lasagna—a culinary wasteland. 

We’d pile into the Oldsmobile, though the look on my sister's face said it all: “Shouldn’t mom know better than to take the Vescovis to a restaurant for a test run?”

Our town had a fair number of foreign students who saw our streets lined with Pizza Huts, Chop Suey joints, and Mexican chains. Sensing money to be made, they raised some capital and opened establishments that would serve Kalamazooans the real thing. Many didn’t know what they were doing or figured we wouldn’t question what they were doing. Not Selvi.

We watched my father take one bite, then a second. His lips puckered; he raised his eyes to the ceiling; he glared at his plate; he shook his head. Woe to the nice, young Western Michigan University co-ed working her way through college as our waitress and who was called over to hear him say, “Sweetheart, I know this isn’t your fault, but I can’t eat this spaghetti. In fact, it’s the worst God ever created.”

My mother had to keep a stiff upper lip; stand by her man. My sister wanted to melt away like butter on garlic bread. My brother and I met eyes: another memorable phrase had been minted and logged.

“I didn’t know God created spaghetti,” I whispered.

The waitress stood there in shock. I don’t believe she’d ever had to return food to the kitchen. It just wasn’t done much in the Midwest.   

My brother used to say, “You can take the boy out of Hell’s Kitchen. But you can’t take Hell’s Kitchen out of the boy.”

This was only partly true for my father. In fact, for the child of semi-literate peasants, he possessed a regal, even presidential air. There was a reason why, in the late 1960s, when he was visiting his aunt in a remote town in Argentina, tens and tens of villagers (stranger people) greeted him with tears in their eyes.

“Well, nephew, I wish I could say that the crying was for you, but, the truth is, you remind them of JFK—a much beloved figure in this country.”

Whether my father entered a living room or a boardroom, people noticed, though he didn’t call attention to himself. When he wasn’t called to lead, he observed keenly, and he spoke when he had something to say. Moreover, his stark side did not preclude him from being man of great compassion. He gave a damn about people that were important to him, and he put his money where his mouth was. When a doctor friend lost a bundle on a foolish real estate investment, my father offered to lend him money—the only guy in the country club to do so.

            Most poignant for me was when I was in the midst of a mid-life crisis. A family visit found me in the midst of an incredibly difficult period, suffering from panic attacks and insomnia. The moment I’d stepped off the plane my father could see the state I was in. Poor man, he was helpless to help, and he knew it. A few days into the visit and feeling worse, I was climbing the stairs to my room when he said, "If you wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep, come get me."

            Night, of course, is worst because you have nothing to distract you from your troubles; you suffer alone. 

            And wake up I did. I took him up on his offer. It was 4 a.m. We sat in the living room. The only words he spoke were, "We're going to get you through this." From time to time he rested his hand on my knee. When our eyes met he forced a smile. The only sound was an early-morning freight train clattering down nearby tracks. Just before 5 a.m., I said, "I think I'll try to sleep again." We returned to our beds.

            That was the man: compassionate with a few, tolerant with many, and essentially old school: You didn’t tell a restaurateur about menu misspellings, any more than, with the best of intentions, you’d hint to the Pope he had halitosis. Selvi was never comfortable with the societal trend toward informality. And forget calling strangers by their first names.

Once he arrived at a photo store to discover that the videocassettes to which our family’s 8 mm films had been transferred—thousands of feet of Christmas mornings and first baby-steps—were missing. Neither could anyone at the shop locate the 8 mm films themselves.

            I thought he was going to strangle the clerk across the counter. The young man, in an attempt to bring calm, said, “Sir, it’s entirely possible that your order, after being processed, was accidentally delivered to our other location. I’ll call the store when it opens in an hour and get right back to you.”

            “Fine,” my father muttered.

            The fellow took a slip paper and asked, “Now, may I have the spelling of your name?”

            “V-E-S-C-O-V-I.”

            “Okay. GREAT. And what’s your first name?”

            My father roared, “You’ve lost a hundred hours of my family’s most precious memories, and you want to phone me at my home and call me by my first name?!”