Only in Naples by Katherine Wilson Page B

Princeton alumni. They went to reunions every year with orange top hats, they sang the college anthem “Old Nassau” at family dinners, their response when they found out that someone had gone to another Ivy League school was, “What a shame, he seemed like such a nice man.” Throughout my childhood I thought my father’s legal name was Edward Wilson ’63.
    So everyone was ecstatic when I was admitted to Old Nassau and decided to go. I was supposed to be ecstatic, too. I was supposed to be “
so
psyched.” My mother was supposed to be relieved and proud and ready to enjoy her husband’s company in a peaceful empty nest. We both pretended that we couldn’t wait. I was going to be Katherine Wilson ’96! There were auditions for
Kiss Me, Kate
with the Princeton University Players that very fall! In the checkout line of Bed Bath & Beyond, pulling the biggest suitcases down from the attic, attaching that luggage thing on top of the station wagon, we talked about how “cool” it was going to be.
    And then the night before leaving I went upstairs to brush my teeth and set my alarm for the next day. My mother came to my room with an excuse, did you pack your toothbrush or something, and I gave her the opening of a very quiet, very contained, “Mommy, I don’t want to go.”
    “Sweetheaaaart,”
she bawled, “it’s just the worrrst thang thit ever happened to me! My baaayybyyy girl!”
    In Naples they say,
’E figlie so’ ppiezze ’e core.
Your children are little pieces of your heart. But to feel what that expression means, you need to imagine Dolly Parton saying it. No, actually, you need to imagine Dolly singing it. Because this dialect, like that of the American South, lays bare so much suffering and so much love that it does to the body what good country music does—it goes straight from the ears to the gut.

T he Avallones’ apartment smelled like a geriatric ward. Ben-Gay stung my nostrils as I walked into Salvatore’s room to find Nunzia Gatti massaging his bare shoulders and neck. Salva was sitting at his desk; Nunzia was behind him. I was appalled.
    The desk where Salva “repeated” his studies faced two French doors through which he could see the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius.
“Dunque,”
he was repeating,
“la legge canonica del Settecento prevedeva…”
Eighteenth-century canonical law foresaw the enforcement…I could not believe my eyes, or my ears, or my nostrils. Had Salva really asked the Avallones’ housekeeper of twenty years to massage him with Ben-Gay? Was he really studying his law texts while she did it?
    I said nothing. No one noticed me standing there.
    “Grazie, Nunzia,”
Salva thanked her when the massage was finished, and she went to wash the Ben-Gay off her hands and to return to chopping eggplants in little cubes to fry. She was making
melanzane a funghetto,
following strict instructions from Raffaella. (Nunzia, born and raised in central Naples, surely knew how to prepare
melanzane a funghetto
when she came to work for the Avallones. But Raffaella had to make sure that the recipe was exactly the same as hers, and so one morning twenty years ago Nunzia followed Raffaella around like a little duckling as she prepared the
melanzane,
learning from scratch.)
    “Oh, ciao,
Ketrin!”
she said cheerfully as she passed me on her way out.
    Nunzia came in the mornings to do simple cooking and heavy cleaning in the apartment. What are
le pulizie grosse
? I asked Salva when he described Nunzia’s responsibilities, translating the expression in my mind as the Big Cleanings. I saw that Raffaella did a lot of cleaning herself: she swept, dusted, even got up on a ladder to wipe the windows down with old
Mattino
newspapers. So why did they need a housekeeper? “The big cleaning,” it turns out, meant keeping things clean in the Neapolitan sense of the word. For this she needed Nunzia Gatti.
    In Italy, one’s apartment must be spotless. Outside, many Italians think nothing of throwing