In Elia Kazan’s 1954 film, On the Waterfront, Terry Malloy, a disgraced prize-fighter, reduced to working as a stevedore on the docks of New York, falls to his knees while his brother Charley denounces him as a coward. Charley tells his brother: “Oh, I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.” The unwilling, humiliated stevedore, Charley’s brother Terry (Marlon Brando), crushed, cries out: “You don’t understand, I could have had class. I could have been a contender.”
When it came to baseball, football, basketball or any other sport, there was never any question whether I could have been a contender. By eight or ten, I would join Donnie Nigro and other kids up the block in the Nigros’ back yard, tossing a football around and running for all I was worth, but at a certain point I would drop the ball (if I had it), and head home. My skin was itching, burning, and I just couldn’t take it.
More than fifty years later, a dermatologist at UIC told me, “Oh, I know what that is. It’s cholinergic urticaria. It’s related to prickly heat.” And then she asked whether she could scratch something on my back with her fingernail. “Oh my God,” she said, calling down the hall to a group of her colleagues: “Here’s a case of dermatografia; come and take a look; we don’t often get a chance to see this.” She had scratched in a word or two on my back and my skin had raised up in legible welts.
That was the first time I had any idea of why I had ended up as last chosen whenever teams were picked for any activity at all in the elementary school gym at St. Giles. It wasn’t a moral inadequacy; it wasn’t a personal failing; it wasn’t “all in my head.” It was a physical disability, genetic, not freely chosen, not a matter of consciousness or snobbism or books versus pigskins.
It was seventh or eighth grade and the class was playing dodgeball. I can’t remember the rules any more, if I ever actually knew them. I couldn’t keep my mind on what was going on during dodgeball, because all sports left me feeling bored, humiliated, “not one of us”. Sports? There was no way that I could ever be a contender.
But one day during dodgeball, the ball bounced of its own will directly into my hands. Surprise. Delight. The whole world was watching. I had absolutely no idea of what to do next.
Enter my classmate, Phil Grem, a skinny non-Italian with a high forehead and blond buttered noodle hair. He stepped right up to me and said, “Pass me the ball, Mike. Pass me the ball.” I immediately recognized him as a member of the non-Italian elite at Giles, the kids who hung out together after school. He rarely made eye-contact with me. That would have been an act of charity. But here he was adressing me directly as though I were an equal. A pal.
So of course I tossed him the ball.
What I didn’t realize was that Phil Grem was on the other side, the opposing team. But I think every other kid in the gym did realize that. There was a deafening roar of laughter resounding off every window, every door, every wall of the St. Giles gym.
Even today whenever I set foot in that gym for any religious or secular event, I immediately focus if only for a moment on exactly that spot where I was standing when I tossed the ball to my higher status classmate, the one I thought I could please, the one whose friendship I might have prized.
Okay, some you win, some you lose. Although I couldn’t imagine it at the time, the world is bigger than the St. Giles gym. As it turned out, not everyone agreed that I could never be a contender.
There was my mother’s mother, Mama Gay, for example. Mama Gay was convinced that I’d make it big some day on Jeopardy, her favorite daytime game show. By the time she was in her sixties, exhausted from her daily round of helping her two daughters deal with their combined total of sixteen messy kids, Mama Gay had become an authority on what she called “my stories”, capable of quoting with some conviction from the pages of The Soap Opera Digest, a copy of which she kept tucked away in her knitting basket, beside her favorite African violets.
In any case, the black and white TV game shows were wedged between the afternoon soaps, and Mama Gay was convinced I’d make it big. The evidence might have been rather thin for anyone else, but Mama Gay was a true believer. It was Mama Gay who listened to me spell my spelling words. She was the one who listened to me recite my Facts to Remember.
In those days there were Facts to Remember at the end of every chapter in every textbook, even the textbooks we used for religion class. St. Giles was a Catholic school. Facts to remember was the mechanical heart, the inorganic soul of religion back then, easily as important as showing up for the children’s Mass in the big church on Sundays, not eating meat on Fridays, and not talking back.
Mama Gay was impressed. I might just make it big on Jeopardy.
And then there was Sister Clarissa, the nun who taught piano lessons in the two piano rooms on the first floor directly below the convent chapel. You entered through the garden door, just past the boxes of seeds that the nuns asked you to pick out of the dry remains of flowers.
Though I never set foot in the convent chapel, I knew every square inch of the piano rooms both by direct and peripheral vision. While practicing your scales, you could look out the piano room windows directly across the street over the asphalt parking lot across Columbian Avenue in front of the big church. That was where the seventh and eighth grade boys played baseball after school and on Saturdays. You could see them and hear them, the boys, the crack of their bats against a hardball, their distant banter.
After years and years of piano lessons, years and years of memorization from sheet music spread out on the spinet piano in the sourtheast corner of our living room at home, Sr. Clarissa had me playing Chopin waltzes and Prokofief variations. My father’s father was a professional musician, the kind who played in the neighborhood vaudeville theaters that entertained the working class in the days before those theaters began to feature talkies. But the Rosanovas had moved into Oak Park, where there was no shortage of lace curtains. And music was not a matter of jam sessions.
It was Sister Clarissa who accompanied me to the studio of an accomplished professor of piano (McDougal? McDouglass?) on the fifth floor of The Fine Arts Building, the one next door to the Sullivan and Adler Auditorium Building at the corner of Congress Street and Michigan Avenue. In the Fine Arts Building in 1964, you rode up to the fifth floor in an elevator with a cage door and a round handle managed by a uniformed bell hop who shifted the gears and called out the floors, whether they were “second floor going up” or “fifth floor going down.”
The occasion was a Chicago area piano competition. The piece I had memorized was La Grande Valse Brilliante, a very long and intricate work by the Polish composer Chopin during his early days in Paris. The melody is carried mostly by the left hand, which abandons the base line, flying continuously over the right hand. In my presence and the presence of my medieval Sister Clarissa, McDougal (?) McDouglas (?) was rather distant but not unkind. “He hasn’t missed a single note,” he observed about my playing. “But where’s the feeling between the notes?” And despite that or perhaps in reaction against it, I took third place, thinking all the while that I wasn’t really there.
In the world where I was living in that day and age, no one seemed to be asking that question: but where’s the feeling between the notes? Many many years later when I was newly arrived in my seventies, my ciné-club group at the Alliance Française viewed and discussed “Shoot the Piano Player”, a wonderful black and white New Wave film by François Truffaut. It’s about a concert pianist who drops out of the big time in order to play jam sessions in cheap bars in the hidden corners of Paris. That film meant so much to me.
Mama Gay and Sister Clarissa weren’t the only ones who were willing to place a bet on me when I was in eighth grade, age fourteen, at St. Giles.
There was an essay contest sponsored by the Catholic Junipero Serra Society. I don’t remember what the theme was, but I do remember working like a dog on that essay, rewriting and editing and bringing everything to bear that Sister Benoit had imparted to her third grade nine-year-olds about proper 19th Century English grammar: when to employ the subjunctive mood, when to shade hesitation with a semicolon, when to clarify connections as though you were diagramming a phrasal verb.
The Canaparys’ mom, Anne, was still volunteering to lead reading club discussions in those days, and I remember asking her to confirm that I’d written something worthwhile. When she read it, she said essentially what the piano guy had said: “Not a note missing, but where’s the emotion between the notes?” And then she said, “Why don’t you say what you mean without words, I mean, just draw a picture and then take another look.” She didn’t change a word herself. I don’t remember showing the essay to her again before I handed it in to be judged.
I didn’t win. The prize was a gold watch. I didn’t win it.
In 1986 my father died of an incurable lipoid sarcoma. By then I had gotten through college, grad school (which I wanted) and law school (which my father required). I had a wife from Europe, a one-year old daughter, and a townhouse on Maple Avenue one block south of the Green Line in Oak Park.
The funeral was held at St. Anne’s in Barrington because my sister had her ophthalmology office there across the way from the church. Mary Anne had invited Father Ahern from St. Giles to celebrate the funeral Mass. When he ascended the pulpit, Fr. Ahern had a good deal to say, including a child by child review of each of the Rosanova children.
When he came to me, Fr. Ahern said, “In 1964 there was an essay competition, the Catholic Junipero Sera Society. Mike entered an extraordinary essay. I was on the panel of judges. When we read it, at first we were very impressed; but then we discussed the essay, and we scratched our heads and asked, how could a fourteen year old kid have written something like this? So we came to the conclusion that Mike must have plagiarized it or stolen it from somewhere. That’s why Mike didn’t win. We all thought he lied. But I can’t tell you how embarrassed we all felt, everyone on the panel, including me, four years later when we heard that Mike had graduated with top honors from Fenwick and that he had been accepted at Yale. Maybe we were wrong.”
What was it that people say about big brains and broken hearts?
Does being smart with school smarts immunize you, magically defend you from irony or even traffic tickets? Does hard work and ceaseless determination guarantee reward?
No, I never got to see or touch or wear that gold watch; but time has continued to flee from me at the age of seventy-four as it does from everyone, whether they wear a gold watch or any watch.
The gold watch is not the important thing after all.
