Sisters

Sisters

In my list of top five holiday movies is White Christmas with Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen. Words almost can’t describe how evocative of the holiday season I find that movie. Perhaps it is because it was made in 1954, the year of my birth. Maybe the latent New Englander in me likes the setting in a quintessential Vermont inn waiting desperately for snow to make its Christmas season prosperous. I’ve always liked Bing Crosby, whether in this or Holiday Inn (often confused with this film), The Bells of St. Mary’s, Going My Way or any number of his 106 acting parts most prolifically in the ‘40’s or ‘50’s. The finishing scene of following the old man wherever he wants to go gives me a lump in the throat. Danny Kaye could have been the attraction since The Danny Kaye Show was a family favorite in the ‘60’s, ranking right up there with Lawrence Welk and Hullabaloo. But the truth is that the attraction has a lot to do with Rosemary Clooney’s All-American girl apple pie good looks and Vera-Ellen’s wasp waist and high-stepping. In the movie they play the Haynes sisters and their lounge act in Miami starts with the vaudevillian song, Sisters, which Bing and Danny end up imitating in order to scam the landlord out of his back rent and give the sisters an escape route to the overnight train to Vermont.

Tonight I was wondering how to capture and write about the unusual events of my day and then on came Irving Berlin’s White Christmas and my problem was immediately solved. This morning at 9:11am I got a text which changed the trajectory of my day (not that I had much in particular planned otherwise). The text laid out two facts of importance. The first was that my half-sister Sondra (a.k.a. Charlie, who is seven years my junior) reported that she was recuperating from heart surgery for a serious cardiac electrical problem commonly known as Atrial Fibrillation only hers is worse since it involves both sides of the heart. The second was that the night before she went into surgery she learned that we have another heretofore unknown half-sister in Santa Clarita.

Let me start with a quick review of my family structure. My Mother and Father were married in Venezuela in 1948 (she was there with the Rockefeller Foundation and he had immigrated from war-torn northern Italy with his family, escaping the specter and taint of fascism). They had two girls (Kathy and Barbara in 1951 and 1952) and then after a pause, had me in 1954. In 1957, after almost twelve years with the Rockefeller Foundation and nine years of marriage, they moved to California and my father got what he had dreamed of since his days in an Italian military prison, an American citizenship under the War Brides Act of 1945 that was intended to grant citizenship to the spouses of returning WWII servicemen….and women. I’m not sure what strings got pulled or what exact loophole was used to qualify my mother as a member of the United States Armed Forces, but I will just attribute it to the power of the name Rockefeller and a generally open-door policy for people who looked and dressed like most other Americans, as my father most certainly did (Caracas was less a backwater and more a sophisticated tropical urban center under the dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez, who was hanging on to power at that time).

It didn’t take my father long to step out on dear old mom while she settled in with the three kids into Santa Monica. Mom was busy setting up her new life and dad found reasons to be away a lot. During those early days he managed to impregnate a woman in Northern California with a son, whose name is supposedly Ralph, presumably born in 1958. We know this because my mother told my oldest sister that if she ever ran into a man named Ralph from California that she was not to marry him under any circumstances. Then dad met Shirley and fell in love with this blonde California beauty. They moved to Granada Hills in the San Fernando Valley where daughters Diane and Sondra (Charlie) were born in 1960 and 1961. Mom and the three of us (me and my two sisters) headed back to Latin America to Costa Rica for a few years and then to Wisconsin for graduate school. While my father was busy in his suburban life, we didn’t hear much from him until the day I was told that he had changed his name from Prosdocimi to the much more American-sounding Marin (actually his mother’s maiden name). My mother dutifully changed our name to Marin, which always seemed strange to me, but felt better when I saw how people reacted to our prior name when they heard it. I had the opportunity to spend a summer with my father in 1962. I learned about Shirley, Diane and Sondra on the drive from my Uncle John’s house in National City to Granada Hills. So suddenly, I had two new sisters, aged three and eighteen months at the time. They seemed a lot less trouble than my older sisters back in Wisconsin and Shirley was a great stay-at-home mom compared to my grad student mother who was trying to survive on a $3,000 per year fellowship. It seemed worth it to be forced to shower daily in California rather than bathe weekly in Wisconsin. But the summer ended and I grew homesick for my friends and the sisters I had grown used to back in the Midwest.

We moved on from Wisconsin to Maine (to run the first women’s Job Corps Center) and then on to Rome to be a Director of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. While in Rome in about 1971, my mother got a call from a woman named Maria Antonia in Mexico City asking my mother if she and my father had been married in the Catholic Church in Venezuela. My mother was no babe in the woods and she understood very well the purpose of the call. Nonetheless, while she bore my father no ill will that I ever saw, she bore a stronger loyalty to the truth and said that they had, indeed, been married in the Church. That was all it took for my father to get run out of Mexico City on whatever the Mexicans use for a rail, leaving behind an annulled Maria Antonia, with a boy child that was to bear his name, Andre.

When he returned to California from Mexico with his tail between his legs, that apparently did not get in the way of dad getting his pants down for one more child who showed up years later bearing the name Karina. Those of us keeping score figured that we had eight of us spawned by the great man himself, five girls and three boys, with two boys missing in action at that stage. But then my father had the bad timing to suffer a fatal heart failure during his evening walk at the end of 1993. Several days before succumbing, the universe warned him to the effect that he visited with daughter Sondra and explained his wish to have all his children gathered for a visit. That required him to come clean with Sondra and his enumeration of his offspring added to nine to his knowledge, one more than the eight the rest of us collectively knew about. There was a suspicion that this missing sister was lost somewhere in suburban Los Angeles or Mexico City. Life is too short to seek out missing persons until they want to be found.

The first to surface was son Andre Jr. from Mexico City who, when learning of our father’s death searched all the siblings for understanding of how a father could not want to know his son. Several of us did our best to explain the man as well as we knew him to this lost son and it seems it allowed him to pass his point of paternal quandary. No one knows how many Ralphs there are in California (maybe he became a very successful grocer?), but none of them found our clan or sought entry into our club. Then Karina surfaced and reached her point of resolution quickly through Sondra, who seems to be the magnet in our family for lost souls. That left the ninth, the sixth sister, technically. 23andMe to the rescue once again.

Imagine a woman in her late fifties, widowed and with three grown and gone children taking a DNA test that tells her that unlike the five brothers and sisters with which she grew up, she does not have all the Spanish heritage as she thought, but rather a bunch of Italian heritage as well, and several new genetic siblings that are not her known brothers and sisters. She reaches out to the soul magnet in Tustin, texting Sondra for answers, and she hits the genetic jackpot. Cutting through the discovery details, it seems that while Sondra was in utero, her dad was tom-catting around the neighborhood and managed to impregnate another young mother and produce a daughter named Marissa. So all the names on the Andre Silvano Marin (a.k.a. at birth Silvano Andre Prosdocimi) scorecard are now filled in and while I have one missing Ralph, I now find that I have six identified and named sisters. I started to get to know Marissa today and I see a little of both Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen in the picture she sent of herself. I suspect there is a big family Zoom call in our future and I’m betting Andre’s oldest child, Kathy, will be in charge as she was throughout my tortured youth.