Sunday, April 17, 2011

Mrs. Vanotti -- Part One

THE FOLLOWING IS THE FIRST IN A SEVEN-PART SKETCH OF ONE OF THE MOST MEMORABLE PEOPLE FROM MY YOUTH:

Part One

Mrs. Vanotti was my surrogate Grandmother.

She owned the neighborhood candy store at the corner of Sixth Street and New York Avenue, in Union City, the northern New Jersey town I grew up in. I was three years old when Mrs. Vanotti, already middle-aged, entered our family’s life. The year was 1940, just prior to America’s entrance into World War II. She soon became my family’s benefactor, enabling my mother, father, brother and me to own our first home.

Mrs. Vanotti was average height, and “pleasantly plump” (the phrase she liked to use about herself). Beautiful of complexion, she had milk-white skin, reddish cheeks, and lovely, round, twinkling eyes. She had velvet steely grey hair; always well coiffed, piled high on the top of her head. She spoke sweetly, with a lovely, alluring sing-song British accent. She was for me Billie Burke, the good fairy godmother from The Wizard of Oz.

Mrs. Vanotti had been in her native Great Britain a theatrical dancer, a “showgirl,” a “dance-hall girl,” as she laughingly liked to say. From pictures of her my mother showed me from her youth, she was slim, beautiful and sexy.

When I first met her, Mrs. Vanotti was firmly ensconced in America, married to an artist, Frank Vanotti. She had met him many years before, on one her dance troop visits to America. He was a very successful Italian-American artist, reportedly designed some of the murals in the lobby of New York’s Rockefeller Center. He was excellent in other art media as well: charcoal portraiture and copper etchings prominent among them. On the wall of our living room, displayed proudly by my Mom, was an original charcoal self-portrait. Hanging next to it was an exquisite copper etching he had made of the New York City skyline. The etching was intricately graceful, smooth, precise and detailed; the self-portrait, black on off-white, was dark, brooding and powerful.

At the time of our initial family involvement with Mrs. Vanotti and her candy store, my father, mother, I, and twelve year old brother Kurt lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Fourth Street and Palisades Avenue, in Union City, three blocks from Mrs. Vanotti’s candy store.

(to be continued...)

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