Every Uncle Frank has his own Uncle Frank.     

I THINK EVERY ITALIAN FAMILY has at least one good Uncle Frank story. This is for the simple reason that there are so many Uncle Franks. Frank, or Francesco, continues to be one of the most popular Italian names, and even in the 2020s, it ranks second only behind Leonardo among newborn Italians.

My grandfather’s name was Frank, and so to all of his nieces and nephews, the children of the famous Uncle Vinny, he was their Uncle Frank. My mother’s brother is also called Frank. Believe me, we have a lot of Uncle Frank stories concerning this particular Uncle Frank. The funny thing is that all of those Uncle Franks also had their own Uncle Franks. It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope or prism; you point it at one Uncle Frank and then suddenly there are hundreds of them reflected in tiny pixels, a fantastic mosaic of Franks for the eyes.

This is not to be confused with Cousin Frank. Cousin Franks, sometimes nicknamed Frankie, are a different phenomenon. Thanks to Italian naming traditions, I have at least two Cousin Frankies that I know of, and there may be more. Years ago, when I briefly toyed with the idea of compiling a family biography, I began collecting stories. I knew that I had a Cousin Frankie who was in a rock band. Because of his dark and mysterious looks, he had at least for some time been nicknamed Cochise, after the Apache Indian guerrilla. 

There was another cousin that I had heard of, however, who had ventured to the South Pole. And then there was a cousin who was running a pizza restaurant out in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The book project was going well, and I imagined all of these as three separate profile pieces. The rock musician, the Polar explorer, the pizza guy. After some investigation, however, it turned out that all of these cousins were the same person, Frankie Abbatecola, one of Uncle Vinny’s legions of grandchildren. Had I written the book, most of it would have been about the same person. This energetic Cousin Frankie is a Mötley Crüe devotee not much older than me, who slings pizza dough during the day, wakes up the neighbors with his electric at night and yes, even once made it to Antarctica, or at least some place where there happened to be lots of penguins. Today, Frankie runs a busy, buzzing pizza restaurant in Massachusetts called “I Love Frankies.”

Whenever anyone questions my Italian identity, I just tell them about I Love Frankies.

 “That’s my Cousin Frankie’s place,” I say. They seem satisfied by this information.

***

BUT THIS STORY is not about Cousin Frankie. This story is about Uncle Frank, and a certain Uncle Frank who happened to be the older brother of my grandfather Jerry’s mother Rosaria. I suppose to me, he would be a great great uncle, the sibling of my great grandmother Rose. His real name was Francesco Petrellis, and he was born on that mountain top in Calabria in the village of San Giorgio Albanese overlooking the Ionian Sea, the same place I spent the night watching Godzilla dubbed into Italian. His birth year was 1889. It was a long time ago. At that time, America had not even yet formed itself on the lips of my predecessors. It’s interesting to imagine that if I rewound the clock back a century, most of my family was not even speaking English to each other. They were Italians, born and bred into the soil.

Uncle Frank emigrated to the United States with his family in 1900. It seems his father, whose name was Carmine, and who came from an old Greek family in San Giorgio Albanese, had already crossed the mighty Atlantic before, but this time decided to make the move with his whole family. There was Francesco, Rosaria, Maria Theresa, and their youngest sister Rosina.

It’s hard for me to imagine what the lives of this immigrant family was like because Carmine, the father, was illiterate, and when they later purchased a house in the town of Huntington on Long Island in the 1920s, where I was born decades later, it was Carmine’s much younger wife, Anna, who signed the contract, because her husband didn’t even know how to write. By that time, they had come to call themselves Peters, instead of Petrellis, to make their American life more manageable. This was a fundamental aspect of American identity. Even if you were not born in America, and obviously were not an American, you could give yourself an American name. Petrellis became Peters. For some of the Abbatecolas, their unwieldy name was shortened to Abbott to make it easier for bank tellers and telemarketers. It was a cosmetic change though. You can change your name, but that doesn’t change who you really are.

As such, the newly minted American “Frank Peters,” known to anyone within his circle of family and friends still as “Francesco Petrellis” was a loyal citizen of the United States to whoever wanted to know, but spoke Italian as a native tongue. He married, perchance, a Hungarian immigrant named Ethel, who was from a village called Nyírbátor near the Romanian border. I know much of this information because in 1920, she applied for a passport to visit Czechoslovakia. What I find fascinating about this is that she had never had a passport before then. In the early 1900s you could sail from country to country and settle with no documentation.

It seems that Uncle Frank and my grandfather Jerry had something of a rapport. Perhaps because Jerry did not get on so well with his own father, Salvatore, which was understandable considering that he had once left him bound in a basement cellar. According to my grandmother Margaret, they would go and visit Uncle Frank and share some coffee together.

Jerry had met my grandmother Margaret, who was not Italian, while working for a construction company in Virginia. They were introduced by friends and married impulsively after knowing each other for just a few weeks. Margaret at that time was working as a school teacher. Her grandfather was a German architect, but most of her ancestors were British settlers who had crossed the sea centuries before the Italians. One can only imagine this young Virginian school teacher being introduced to the enigmatic Uncle Frank, with his fedora hat and thick Italian accent, and his equally mysterious Hungarian wife Ethel. He told the government whenever they asked him that he did odd jobs for a living. But according to various family members, Uncle Frank really made his living as a chauffeur for underworld figures. My father claims it was to Vito Genovese himself, “Don Vitone,” the founder of the Genovese crime syndicate who dominated the American mafia for most of the 20th century. Others claim that he drove around another mobster called Capone. 

Whether true or not, Uncle Frank was well paid for whatever kind of work he was doing in his career of odd jobs. One day in early 1965, when he was already an old man, Uncle Frank paid his nephew Jerry a visit and gave him a $500 bill. This banknote, which is no longer in circulation, featured President William McKinley on the front. My uncle still recalls the scene of the old man in his fedora sitting in the family kitchen and handing his nephew the money. But Uncle Frank actually visited all of his relatives and similarly gave each one of them a $500 bill. This became the Uncle Frank Story, the old relative who showed up, handing out $500 left and right. He then departed the United States, ceased being Frank Peters, and resumed being Francesco Petrellis and died several months later in San Giorgio Albanese, his home village. After he died, my grandfather Jerry went over to his uncle’s house. Frank’s wife had died the previous year and the house was empty. To his surprise, he discovered bags of money, hidden in various places. There were several purses full of banknotes that had been stuffed in the oven.

***

WHEN I RETURNED to New York after my adventure in Southern Italy I showed the photos of San Giorgio Albanese to my Virginian grandmother, who was 91 years old then, and still quite lucid, though slowly fading mentally. Grandma was in every way of a different breed than my grandfather. Her body was trim and lean, and she had her own kind of measured or balanced energy that she carried with her. Like most women in my family who had lived to an advanced age, she seemed almost preternaturally perceptive, and could listen and understand many things, without revealing any of her thoughts or opinions. It was all there, hidden behind the eyes. 

This same Virginia school teacher had fallen in with some Calabrian construction worker in the South. To a woman like her, he must have been dark and exotic, and, well, it must have been a passionate relationship. You just don’t marry someone after two weeks if it isn’t a scorcher. Often when I think of this story now, I consider how I got married in more or less the same way. There is a wild streak in the family, but it’s hard to pinpoint its origin. Surely, some of it is rooted in the rugged mountains of Calabria. Yet maybe some of it comes from the swamps of Virginia.

At my parents’ house that Christmas, everyone had gathered around to see the images from my great Italian adventure, and my mother’s brother Frank even thanked me for at last re-establishing contact with our Italian cousins. “It was good of you to do that,” he said. My father’s mother had looked at the photos with some interest, but said little. Once she went back to her home, where she lived a solitary life watching CNN, listening to the radio, and playing her piano, she somehow discovered an old photo that had once been sent to Jerry from a relative. 

The photo showed a man in a coffin, covered with bouquets of flowers. The photo read, in Italian, “On the 9th day of June 1965, in San Giorgio, died Petrellis Francesco.” The photo had been taken by A. Triolo, also of San Giorgio, and the photo was signed by Cosmo Petrellis. 

This family curiosity had traveled across the Atlantic and across decades of forgotten memories, only to find its way into my hands, hands that had recently returned to that same village. In thinking about Uncle Frank with his fedora hat and bags full of mob money, I felt that I had understood something that perhaps only another Italian could understand. That whoever we were, and wherever we lived, and whatever names we called ourselves, we were still this illusory thing. Italians were just another unexplained meteorological phenomenon, like those tall waterspout tornadoes rising up like the mighty staff of Poseidon from the depths of the Ionian Sea. We came and we left, we appeared, vanished, and reappeared. One day, we might show up at your door in a crisp gray suit and fedora with a bag full of $500 bank notes. The next day we were gone. And weeks later, we might turn up in the old village, to greet our many relatives. 

Just as I had done weeks before in San Giorgio.

Uncle Frank was Frank Peters to the US government and Francesco Petrellis to the Italian one. His odd jobs were driving bigshot mobsters around. But Italians belonged to other kinds of systems. Governments didn’t mean as much as family. The mafia was just another kind of human organization, as legitimate or illegitimate as the local police. Laws were distant, arbitrary, written by strangers. Politics, like in the mafia, was personal, dangerous, and corrupt.

And time, as I have said, was just imaginary. Everybody knew that it didn’t really exist.