A Girl from Costa
On my great-aunt, the French she taught me, and the fire — the first of three essays
On weekends, when I was young, I often stayed with my Great-Aunt Alice.
Alice — though no child in the family called her that. To us she was Aunt Booey: a name that predated me, whose origin no one knew and whose spelling I never learned, and which she used freely of herself with the children. I called her Booey well into my twenties, when I began, like my father, to call her Alice. My sisters call her Booey to this day.
She lived alone. Her husband had died in the 1950s, before I was born; she had no children; and for reasons neither of us ever examined, she and I were immediately and permanently close. She taught me French — she was very strict about pronunciation, and we spoke it together, our own channel — and she drew, and painted, and loved to walk the city while revealing its secrets, and above all to cook. She told me, regularly, that I reminded her of her father, and when she said it her voice did something it did nowhere else — she seemed to relax into some pleasant, wistful distance. I did not know it then, but those weekends were the happiest rooms of my childhood, and they were built, floor to ceiling, on an invention.
The family story, as I received it, was this: we were French. The name was Rouvelle. The family had come to New York from France; there had been a dispute — inherited land, and trouble made by the wives of Alice’s two brothers — and the rift had been so severe that the family split for good, most of them returning to Europe, the brothers eventually moving to South America after the war, beyond reach. What remained on this side were the two sisters: my grandmother, called Martha, who died before I was born, and Alice.
There was one more piece of family furniture I should set in place, because everything later leans on it. When my father came home from the army he was staying with Alice and looking for an apartment and a job. Alice mentioned — without explaining how she knew — that a building on Mott Street was looking for a superintendent, or “super,” as we called them. He went down, was offered the job, and the job came with an apartment. That is why I was born at 13 Mott Street, and why I spent my first years in Little Italy, in a building my family had, as far as anyone knew, no connection to beyond my father being the super.
I did not quite fit.
I grew much taller than my parents and my siblings; my features ran differently from theirs, differently enough that people asked, more than once, whether I was adopted. My sisters’ friends, meeting me, would often ask if we were really related. I have written in these notes about the strange season of my early childhood; add to that an appearance that seemed to have wandered in from elsewhere, and you have a boy who privately entertained the theory that he had been dropped off by space aliens. But the neighborhood had a different theory. The shopkeepers of Little Italy — most of them Italian — called me Angelo. When my mother explained that we were French, they would look at me and say, flatly, “No. That boy is Italian.” Kids at school always assumed I was Italian.
And there was the accent. Alice’s French took root in me, and I have spoken it all my life — and all my life, whenever I’ve met a native French speaker, they have asked me the same question, sooner or later, with the same puzzled tilt of the head: why do you speak French with an Italian accent?
I never had an answer — and I always, silently, recalled Alice’s strict tutelage, and wondered how I had gone astray.
The first time I understood that there was something to understand came in a dark car, when I was around eleven. We were at the family’s summer place, and one evening we drove to a tiny town nearby where a pop-up art-house cinema had installed itself above an agricultural hall. The film was Polanski’s Knife in the Water — a couple takes a young stranger sailing, and the boat’s small world tightens around everything nobody says. My father was an avid sailor; sailing was his and mine, our shared thing; and walking to the car afterward he asked me — me specifically — what I thought the title meant. I didn’t know. He told me to think about our trips, about what a hull does as it moves through water — and then, what a knife would do. And I had it: a knife would move through the water without leaving a trace. “That’s right,” he said, and went quiet, visibly thinking something he wasn’t saying, the whole rest of the walk through the warm streets.
In the car, on the dark winding roads home, the summer air mixing with ocean through the windows, he announced it: “James figured out what the title meant” — and had me repeat my answer. My sisters were unmoved. But from the front seat I heard my mother say, audibly, under her breath, and not to me: “Sounds like Alice.”
I had never heard anything like it — a shadow cast on my aunt from inside the family, in four syllables, meant for my father and intercepted by me. There was no way to ask a follow-up question; the remark had not been addressed to my row of the car. But that was the night the mystery announced itself: the first time I knew, without knowing anything, that the woman who taught me French moved through the world the way a knife moves through water.
I should say a word about the shape of my family, because it bears on everything. My mother’s side and my father’s side had, essentially, nothing to do with each other. It was not war; it was détente — family events included one group or the other, rarely both — and so I grew up between two worlds that were presented to me as simply, permanently distinct: irreducible, co-present, unmixable. I have come to understand that arrangement as one of the foundational forces of my life, inside my family and far beyond it. Readers of the previous essay know the one world, my mother’s — the chemist, the dawn walks, the box of letters. This writing is about the other one.
As an adult I became one of Alice’s caregivers. I shopped for her, visited, phoned.
She also, occasionally, attended performances of my music. I was maturing, as other essays in these notes describe, into a composer of highly chromatic, often “difficult” music. She generally hated it. Her taste reached about as far as Debussy’s Clair de Lune — one of her favorites, which I would one day play at her funeral — and stopped there, and she saw no reason to pretend otherwise. “Were you responsible for that?” she would ask afterward, making no effort to hide her verdict. “Yes,” I’d say, smiling. “What did you think?” “Ugh.” And she would turn away. I loved her anyway — more, if anything. Her dislike was so honest, so entirely without performance, that I found it compelling rather than deflating; and I understand now what I could only feel then: in a life built on invention, her opinions of my work were the one register in which Alice was incapable of pretense. She deceived me about who we were. She never once deceived me about what she thought.
The most memorable of these occasions followed the premiere of a piece I had written for two oboist friends at Juilliard — two oboes, harp, percussion, and cello. The hall was full, the performance was excellent, the response warm. Upstairs afterward, in a classroom transformed into a makeshift reception room, I saw Alice at once, sitting very straight in a chair, and made my way to her, and the exchange above occurred, verbatim. Then, after the customary silence, she asked whether I knew who a certain gentleman was — pointing across the room at my teacher, Charles Jones, of whom I have written several times in these notes. “Yes,” I said. “That’s my teacher.” I braced for the sigh. Instead her face lit. “That gentleman told me I was the best dressed woman here!” And he would have been right to say it — I never once saw Alice in pants; she was impeccable, composed, carefully put together every day of her life — and his courtliness was, to her, sweet music at last. It was, as far as I know, the only meeting of my two great teachers — the one who gave me French, and the one who, through the French, shaped my hand and eye. Because that is what I believed in those years: that they were teaching me the same inheritance. Charles’s pedagogy ran through Milhaud and through Koechlin’s counterpoint book, which I copied out by hand, and the Frenchness of that lineage warmed and deepened the work — bent over the book, I felt I was being drawn closer to my own blood. Milhaud was from Aix-en-Provence: the south of France, the very region of our imaginary origins. The warmth was real. What it warmed itself on was not, though it would be years before I knew it. What passed between my two teachers, at their one meeting, was a compliment about clothes. Charles, for his part, never mentioned it to me. They died the same year, five months apart.
Through all of those years — the errands, the visits, the concerts she happily attended but frequently disliked — she went on recalling her parents wistfully, went on telling me I reminded her of them, especially her father. “You move like he did. You have his spirit.” Once, I came upon two old, small, framed photographs — a man, and a woman in an elaborate dress and hat: her mother and father. My great-grandparents. I looked at them and saw myself distributed between them. What Alice said aloud, always, was the father: his spirit, his way of moving, mine. What she never said, and what the photographs said plainly, was the mother — my face, my coloring, my hair, looking back at me out of an elaborate hat. Alice spoke of her father wistfully and often. About her mother she was polite, and brief, and somehow at a distance, and I did not think to wonder why. She narrated the resemblance she could bear. And somewhere in those years the wish took shape in me: I spoke French; I felt the pull; I wanted to find the European family. I told Alice. She assured me, gently and completely, that they were all dead or gone, and that finding them would be impossible.
I hired a genealogist anyway. I gave her what I had — the names Alice had given me: Adelaide, the mother; the sisters Carrie, Martha, Alice; the brothers Alexandre and Christophe. She came back with a census record, and the census record broke my life in half, quietly, while I stood with the document in the foyer of my apartment, in the space of a minute.
The women were there — Adelaide, Carrie, Martha, Alice — at a single address. There was no mention of the men. The address was 13 Mott Street! The building where I was born. The building Alice had steered my father into, decades later, without a word of explanation, as though a stranger had happened to mention it.
And they were not French. The census listed them as Italian. And the name was not Rouvelle. It was Rovelli.
I told the genealogist she had made a mistake — a coincidence, a clerical error, something. In fact, we argued about it: I suspected she had fabricated the document, and I became furious — so much so that I hung up on her. She called me back. She told me no. She explained her methods, and they made sense. She was confident she had found my family, and that someone, apparently, was hiding the truth.
I went outside and took a long walk, my mind racing.
I want to be honest about what that felt like, because it was not the thrill of discovery. I was, at that time, a person of French descent; that identity had been a comfort and a floor, and beyond that an organizing principle — so many of my cultural connections passed through France and drew sustenance from it. In one minute the floor was gone and the organizing principle scattered — and worse than that, because the person I loved most easily in my family, the person whose kinship with me had always felt like the one sure thing, was apparently the author of the concealment. I was devastated, and confused, and I did what I have always done with the largest things: I carried it. Quietly.
I mentioned some of my situation to a cousin on my mother’s side — the poet who lived below Xenia Cage, through whom I once met the people described in an earlier essay. She had rarely spent time with Alice; the détente saw to that. She listened, and then asked a simple, single, unexpected question:
“Tell me what she cooks.”
So I told her. There was the pasta Alice made — impossibly thin, rich with egg yolk, tossed in a rustic pan sauce of minced chicken livers, butter, onion, rosemary. There was a dish she served on its own, without any pasta at all: chopped chicken livers with butter, onion, rosemary — the same sauce, sovereign, presented as though it had never had anything to do with a noodle. There was a meat sauce with no tomato in it at all — crumbled sausage, chopped livers, ground porcini. There was a date and nut bread. I laid the menu out like evidence, because that is what it was. Aside from the date and nut bread, everything on it was Italian — and not generally Italian: I would learn, later, that the pasta was tajarin con i fegatini and the sauce was ragù langarolo, and that both belong to one small region of Piemonte, the way an accent belongs to a town. And the liver dish, I would eventually understand, was the same Piemontese recipe with the pasta removed — every ingredient intact, the one element that would have named it taken away. She had done to her cooking exactly what she had done to her family: kept everything, subtracted the thing that would have identified it. Every weekend of my childhood, the truth had been on the table. I had eaten it for decades and never once thought about it.
“There you go,” said my cousin.
I decided to ask Alice, and to show her my evidence.
It did not go well. Alice was fiercely independent and outspoken. She was on the tall side — like me — and thin, but remarkably, physically strong. She had a wonderful, resonant laugh, was very polite and proper, but could also be very direct. And she had a temper. People gave her space and treated her carefully. She was dismissive of my questions, and became visibly upset by what I showed her — “What do you have there?!” she said, sharply, glancing at the papers. And beneath the upset, I saw behaviors I realized I had never seen in her and did not want to name: she seemed afraid. She seemed nervous. The census was obviously false, she said. A clerical mistake. I should stop my research, and I should not bring it up again.
I had made her defensive — against me. I was, temporarily, an outsider, and it felt terrible. I didn’t like distressing her, and the absence of our closeness was foreign and awful. I backed off. I changed the subject.
And then, not long after — unprompted, on an ordinary visit — she reversed everything.
She brought out letters. Old ones, in French, written to her. When she handed them over she smiled with a shy, almost girlish vulnerability I had never seen in her, and even her voice was different — gentle, quiet. She asked me to read them aloud. And so — paying close attention to the pronunciation of every word — I did. As I read, a look of joy and wonder crossed her face; she reminded me of a child hearing a favorite story. And as I went on it became clear the letters were from a man, and that the man was jealous — but playfully, tenderly, flirtatiously jealous, the way you are with someone you have not yet lost. In one letter he accused her of having gone dancing during Easter — and then, softening, described her as a lovely girl from Costa. For the length of a sentence I was shown a person I had never met: Alice young, Alice accused of dancing, Alice lovely to someone. The place-name I read and released without a thought; it meant nothing to me, and I was caught up in the sudden magic of the moment. It would take more than a decade to understand it, and when I finally did, it would mean everything. I noticed that the envelopes were all damaged, and then realized that every one had its return address torn away. It seemed strange. I said nothing.
She had been abroad when she received them, she told me, and now, at last, she told me the story of her return: she had been in the south of France, with family, when word reached her that her sister — my grandmother — was in trouble, alone with a child and pregnant. It was January. The only passage she could get to New York was on a steamer out of Italy — it had departed Genoa — and the only cabin left was in first class, and so a small boat carried her out from Cannes, she said, to meet the ship at sea. She told it in detail: the season, the urgency, the little boat, the great liner. I sat very still and asked almost nothing, terrified of causing another withdrawal.
Then she said the words I had been waiting my whole life to hear without knowing I was waiting: “I’ve decided to tell you the truth of the family, and my history. Come back tomorrow at the same time, and I’ll tell you.”
The next day I came at the appointed hour and knocked.
Through the door I could hear her television playing a soap opera, loudly. I knocked again. I rang the bell. I called her name. Nothing — she couldn’t hear me over the set. I stood in the hallway with the melodrama seeping through the door, so close to the truth that I could hear the room it was sitting in. There seemed to be no way to reach her, and I didn’t want to embarrass her by causing a commotion in the building. I went home.
When I returned a few days later she opened the door looking like she hadn’t slept. I asked if she was all right.
“I’m just a little tired,” she said, coldly. “Why?” I asked, sensing an odd energy. “Oh, I just had to get rid of a lot of old papers I had lying around.” She paused, looking at me. “I had to throw them into the incinerator.”
I have turned those sentences over ever since she said them. I couldn’t tell, then, whether she was angry with me — whether she believed I had failed to come, had left her sitting there with the truth laid out and her courage assembled, and that my absence had released her from the promise. I will never know what happened within her over those few days. What I knew is what she did, and what her actions meant, because they could only mean one thing. Whatever she had gathered — whatever record existed of her history and ours — had gone down the chute into the building’s fire. She had agreed to show me everything, and then she had burned it. She made her point, and I received it.
Her health began to fail soon after, and I did not press. I have asked myself many times, in the years since, what my restraint really was. Respect for a dying woman’s sovereignty over her own story? Or fear — fear doing what fear does, managing, maintaining, keeping the room intact at the price of the truth? I still cannot fully separate the two, and I have stopped pretending I can.
Alice died in 1997, at home, and the dying was sudden, short — about six weeks — and very hard. She had lived alone for decades; caring for herself, controlling her space, was most of what remained of her sovereignty, and now the sofa was replaced by a hospital bed, and there were nurses, and then hospice workers — strangers moving her things in order to make her comfortable. As her strength receded and she stopped speaking, her eyes mostly closed, she grew hypersensitive to the apartment itself. Every surface anyone touched drew a groan or an awkward turn in the bed, as if the rooms had become continuous with her body and every object in them was a nerve. Cabinets and drawers were the worst. And here I have to correct something I wrote above. I said that I did not press. Once, I did. Alone with her, I went quietly to the cabinet where she had kept the letters, hoping to find something she had forgotten to burn. As I began, silently, to open it, she let out a sound of distress and moved in the bed, eyes still closed. She knew. I cannot explain how, and I have stopped needing to; she knew what I was doing, and it hurt her, and I stopped, and I did not try again. When hospice took over, the nurse asked us, kindly, whether Alice might have unresolved matters with the family — her restlessness was typical, she said, of people who do not want to leave before clearing something up. She suggested we help her go in peace: tell her everything was fine, that all was forgiven. We took turns staying with her. We tried. It didn’t work.
It was my mother who kept the last watch — my mother, who had been, decades earlier, in a dark car, the first to name what Alice was — and I want to mark how strange and how right that was. My mother and Alice were never close. My mother was unfailingly warm to her — welcoming, attentive, for decades — and Alice returned a politeness with a chill inside it that never thawed. It was well known in the family that Alice had wanted my father to marry a different woman; and the chill, everyone agreed, dated from my parents’ wedding day itself, where Alice had been so distant and irritable that my mother settled, for the rest of her life, on the only explanation available: Alice was offended at not being seated at the head table. The coldness never erupted; it simmered, at a low boil, for decades, and it organized the family — the polite distances my sisters and the others kept around Alice all ran back to it. And yet at the end, with my mother by then the last surviving member of her own side of the family, it was she who sat with Alice through the final hours: the détente closing as it had lived, politely, at a bedside — the last woman of one world holding the last woman of the other.
The real reason for Alice’s behavior at that wedding I discovered only after all of them — Alice, my father, my mother — were gone. My parents had married on the 39th anniversary, to the day, of a wedding of Alice’s own: one that no one in that room knew had ever taken place. I can only imagine what was moving through her that afternoon, seated away from the head table, inside an anniversary only she could see. That story belongs to the third essay.
As she was dying, my mother beside her, Alice was calling out a name none of us had ever heard: Sandrina.
None of us — except perhaps the incinerator — had ever heard of, or encountered, a Sandrina. About a year later, I received a phone call from a genealogist — a stranger — researching a family called Sandriani, asking whether I had any connection to them. The name was so close to the name my aunt had carried out of the world that I stayed on the phone longer than the conversation deserved. We concluded, in the end, that there was no connection. He apologized for the trouble. I sat with the receiver in my hand and the feeling that something had brushed past me in the dark.
There were two more encounters in those first days, and I could read neither of them at the time. Going through her address book and calling her friends with the news, I reached someone who had known her for decades, and who offered, in the tone of someone finally permitted, a sentence whose sense I remember perfectly and whose words only approximately: Alice always acted like she was hiding from someone — or perhaps it was, like she didn’t want to be found. Between those two phrasings sits the whole of her. I have never needed to choose. And clearing out her apartment with my father, we found her photo albums — and found that every photograph of her late husband had been attacked with scissors: cut out, scratched away, page after page, an absence with edges. “He really must have hurt her,” my father said. I stood holding the albums with no way to understand what I was looking at. I understand now. But that, too, belongs to the essays ahead.
That is where it stood, and where it stood for years: a census, a name, a burned archive, an album of scissored absences, and a dead woman I loved who had spent my whole life lying to me with perfect tenderness.
I want to end this essay inside that contradiction rather than above it, because I have never resolved it and I no longer believe it resolves. Alice was the family member to whom I felt the most familial, organic, simple closeness. Yes, there were the weekends, the French, the drawing, the table — but in truth it didn’t much matter what we did, because, I believe, we both felt the same thing when we were around each other. And yet Alice was the one who built the wall. Both of those things are true, all the way down. The connaissance and the concealment were not two Alices; they were one woman, holding both — the way this notebook keeps finding that everything real is held.
And she was not, in the end, entirely successful, because some things cannot be burned. She destroyed the papers, but she had spent years placing the evidence directly into my body: the French itself, pressed into me with that strict, unexplained care about pronunciation, carrying its Italian accent like a watermark; the recipes of one small corner of Piemonte, served every weekend in plain sight; the unexplained tip that steered my father — and therefore my birth — into a building on Mott Street that the family had, officially, no history with. And the name. The nursery name she answered to with every child in the family and offered freely of herself — Booey, we said — which I could not read until I had learned the language she buried. To American ears it is a buoy: a marker floating on the water, showing where something is. In Italian it is bui: dark, as in dark times. I do not know who made the name, or how she spelled it. I know what it says. All her American life, the woman who could not be found had been telling the children exactly where, and exactly what, she was — in a word that meant both at once. And at the very end, with the archive already ash, the construction itself dissolved, and what rose out of her was not France. It was a name from the deep truth of things, from an infancy on Mott Street she never once admitted to — called out into the room, past my mother, past all of it, to someone none of us could see.
She burned everything she could reach. The rest of it, she had already given me. It just took decades to read.
There is one more thing to tell, and it belongs at the end because it happened at the end.
Before she died, my father asked her the hard practical questions — what she wanted done, where she wished to rest. Alice and my father had their own unique closeness: he was the youngest, and when his mother died, Alice had stepped into the space a mother leaves, and stayed in it for most of his life. Her answer to him was simple. She wanted to be where he was.
He kept the promise his way — in truth, and parenthetically, he did everything his way. He had her cremated and buried her ashes beneath a tree on the country property he had retired to and loved above all places, with a small stone bearing her name — the name, of course, that she had made: Alice Rouvelle Williams. She rested there, near him, for a decade. Then my father died, in January, and his ashes were interred beside my mother’s, in a cemetery — and Alice, under her tree, was no longer where he was.
For various reasons his funeral did not take place until late May, and it was in that suspended spring, before the service, that I went — privately — to the tree with some of my father’s ashes, and mingled them with hers. It fell to me, I suppose, because the old family détente had run down through the children too — my sisters were always of my mother’s world (and my mother had already died), and their rapport with Alice was polite and distant — while my father and I had been Alice’s. And the arrangement has held: to this day, the truth these essays are unfolding remains strikingly distant from the rest of my family, untouched and unclaimed, so that this part of our history, like Alice herself, became almost uniquely mine. I told no one. Ash had been her way of making things disappear. It is also, it turns out, a way of keeping a promise.
What I could not have known, standing at the tree that spring, was how little of the old ignorance remained — less than two months. The truth Alice burned was already on its way to me, from the other side of an ocean, wearing a face I would recognize. But that belongs to the next essay.
Both gravestones carry the invented name. The correction is not on the stones; it is here. And under the tree, the last wish of a woman who spent her life concealing her whereabouts is, at last, permanently granted. She wanted to be where he was.
She is.
Almost Visible is a notebook of encounters with art, sound, space, and attention. If this one opened something, consider sharing and subscribing.