The Evil Eye

Car lights flashed through the window into the pitch-black room.

“What about Georgie?” a strange voice asked.

“He’ll be okay,” mother replied. “He won’t know we’re gone.”

The sound of tires on gravel. The lights receded across the ceiling. The room was pitch-black again, and my little heart froze with fear.

I must have been two-and-a-half years old at the time. We lived next door to the grocery store my father and mother owned and operated. I don’t know what time of year it was. I think it was late summer and the window through which the car lights had shone was open; years later, I found out that the store often closed late at the end of summer because of the tourist business. When this happened, my parents and their employees went to Cooper’s to drink away what remained of the night.

As I grew older, I became more and more of a hindrance to the smooth operation of the store. Mother would leave me by myself with instructions not to get into trouble, and she would tell me if I did, she would whale the daylights out of me. And she could whale like no person I was ever to meet.

I hid under the bed with my back pressed against the wall. Shouts and screams. I couldn’t understand a word of what Mother was screaming. But I didn’t have to. The rage in her voice pressed me flatter against the wall. The small shovel mother used to empty ashes from the coal stove that heated our house made a sweeping arc under the bed. It missed me. More shouts and screams. The shovel made several passes in front of me. As each one missed me, I felt safer and safer. But a two-and-a-half-year-old mind is limited. The bed moved away from the wall, and the reign of terror commenced.

Mother saw it was hopeless to leave me by myself. She disapproved of the games I invented to amuse myself. My most inventive game brought on the shovel attack. For reasons only a young mind can understand, I decided to redecorate the house, and I began with the furniture. I used the coal shovel to cover the living room furniture with a thin layer of coal ash. When I ran out of ashes, I used hot coals from the stove. I worked hard to ensure that no furniture was left undecorated. When mother walked in to check on me, the upholstered furniture had begun to smolder. One look at her face, and I was under the bed waiting for an armed attack.

Three weeks after the shovel attack, Patrick O’Neill, the older of the two brothers who lived next door, and I wandered away from O’Neill’s backyard. When Mother found out I was missing, she became hysterical. She was sure I had gone to the lake and drowned. Patrick’s father found us not far away from their yard. Mother took me into the house, pushed me into a closet, and beat me with anything she could find: suspenders, coat hangers, and her fists. “On my birthday!” she shouted, “How could you do this to me!”

Mother hired a full-time, live-in babysitter to take care of me. Grandma Rice was a godsend. She hugged me to her full bosom and told me I was her wonderful little boy. She sheltered me from a threatening world.

Grandma Rice bathed me in a large washtub in the kitchen. When Mother was present, I would taunt her. “You’re not my boss,” I would scream. That was my way of telling Mother that I didn’t have to obey her and only listened to Grandma Rice.

Murphy showed up shortly after Grandma Rice. He lived in a small room in the basement, took his meals with the rest of us, and worked as an all-around handyman. His job was to keep the dilapidated grocery store building from falling apart.

I liked Murphy; he was my friend. He played games with me and let me help him. When Murphy dug up the septic system, he fashioned a small shovel—not like Mother’s coal shovel—so I could work with him. I didn’t know Murphy liked his whiskey and was half in the bag most of the time. I just knew he sang songs, joked about everything, and was fun to be around. When I wasn’t with Grandma Rice, I was with Murphy.

One day, Grandma Rice was crying. She picked me up and held me tighter than usual. She told me she had to leave for a while but would return to take care of me. Two weeks later, Mother told me Grandma Rice would never be back. She died of a sudden heart attack while attending her mother’s funeral in Missouri. I didn’t understand any of this. I didn’t know what dying meant, except it took a person away forever. I was sunk.

Six months later, I could not get Murphy up for breakfast. We always played the same game in the morning. He pretended to be asleep in bed. I tickled his feet until he sat up in bed and roared like a lion. But this time, it was different. I ran upstairs and tried my best in my baby talk to tell Mother and Father something was wrong with Murphy.

Later, men dressed in black came and carried Murphy out of the house. He was wrapped in a blanket and laid out on a stretcher. The men put him in the back of a big black truck and drove off. From then on, I feared and hated death, a pest that clung to my right shoulder, overlooking everything I did.

Ten years before her death, Mother told me that when I was one day old, a toothless Gypsy hag—who was thought to be a witch—came to visit me, the new baby. After the old woman left, I cried for three days, Mother’s milk turned sour, and I was bottle-fed by whom I don’t know. Mother said the old Gypsy woman had given me the Evil Eye. The hag invoked dark supernatural powers to cause terrible things to me and anyone who loved me. When Mother’s milk dried up, she abandoned me before more bad things happened to her. Grandma Rice, my true mother, died after loving me unconditionally for three years, and Murphey followed shortly thereafter. I had been dragged over to the dark side; death would proceed or follow me wherever I went.

Mother believed I would bring about one calamity after another upon her and the entire family unless I were isolated and disowned. Perhaps to assuage her conscience, Mother, in her elliptical way, felt compelled to tell me why she abandoned me and never held me, for underneath, she hated and feared me; I was cursed from day one.

Unless I somehow shook off the Gypsy curse, I would be condemned to be an outsider, an unlovable stranger, bringing misfortune to anyone who loved me or even cared for my well-being. Little did I know that the Gypsy curse set me on a dark, perilous journey that would challenge conventional beliefs and what was taken as the fabric of reality.

A Brief Family History

I remember my father as an extraordinarily handsome man. He had pronounced cheekbones, a square jaw, a full head of hair, still dark at sixty-five, and a robust build that attested to his tremendous physical stamina. I got out the old family photographs I had inherited to check my memory.

The first photograph I saw caused my heart to sink. It was a head-and-shoulders snapshot of my father and mother. Someone, probably my sister, had written “Mom and Dad in 1946” in blue ink across the top of the photograph. My father was dressed in a tuxedo, and my mother held a bouquet. I have no idea what the occasion was, probably a wedding. My father looked exactly like I remembered him; he had a large toothy smile and looked like Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his prime. Sadly, if the photograph had been of my mother alone and no one had written her name on it, I would not have recognized her. The other pictures of my mother I saw in the family album were considerably more recent and matched my memory. My mother had two distinctive facial features, her Mongolian eyes, a biological legacy of the many tribes that marauded through Romania centuries before her birth, and a pleasant, inviting smile slightly inclined toward her right ear. The photographs of her convey a woman of great vitality, but no photograph could have captured her keen intellect.

My parents came from the same village in Romania, although they did not know each other in the old country since my father was twelve years older than my mother. I had hundreds of cousins but no uncles and aunts who had children. It took me a while to figure this out. Romanians call all persons from the same village “cousins,” whether or not they are blood relatives. In America, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins are excluded from the core family, which is taken as the husband, the wife, and their children. Except for my hundreds of “cousins,” our family was more or less like all American families. At one time, I found this comforting until I realized that the traditional family in America no longer exists. But this is not news.

Unlike Americans, rural Romanians think of the family as an organic whole with its own ends that each of its parts serves. Romanian men and women work for the family, performing their daily tasks with the welfare of others in mind. Labor and actions are measured by human relations. A promiscuous daughter dishonors the family. A good housewife is praised for the health and weight of her children, not the quality of her cooking. A talented builder is esteemed for the number of people he pleased through his work, not for the beautiful houses he constructed.

In America, my parents couldn’t duplicate the rural Romanian family, and they knew it. The fundamental aspect of the family resisted transplantation to the new world. The family with its own ends that each member serves withered and died years ago in most American families. My guess is that in rural and small-town America, families with farms and small businesses were similar to our family in that an economic interest engaged all family members in a common purpose.

In Romanian, Italian, Irish, and other ethnic communities, the old-country family survived for a generation or two; however, children were often conflicted between the traditional and modern understanding of their roles within the family, as I was. My attendance at Romanian weddings and picnics was required; otherwise, people would conclude that Georgie’s absence meant something was wrong with the Stanciu family.

The family in democratic America is not a community of persons united by common interests but rather a collection of individuals, each pursuing personal ends. Those Americans understand “the pursuit of happiness” to mean that each person seeks their own happiness as they see fit. Family members tend to live in their own world. The network of intense interpersonal relations within the family separates it from the outside world. In the transition from the old world to the new democratic America, the family changed from institution to companionship.

A narrow focus on the self fosters conflict and competition within the modern family, despite the prevailing myth that the family is an oasis where harmonious human relations can be achieved in an otherwise hostile world. As the world seems more hostile, people desperately cling to the small, fragile family for emotional comfort denied elsewhere; then, the family is seen as an individual’s primary emotional support group.