"Ophelia" By John Everett Millais (1851)

    That night in bed, in the room she still shared with her sister,  Nicola said, “Natalie, do you ever think of leaving the neighborhood?”
    Natalie, who was seventeen and had been allowed to have a little too much wine at dinner, turned her face away from the wall and said,  “Leave here? Oh, yeah, all the time. I’m not going to college in New York.  Don’t tell Mom and Papa I told you, but I really want to get away from this place.  It’s just too small and everybody here is the same.”
    “I know what you mean,” said Nicola, “I feel a lot the same way. This is an old Italian neighborhood and it’s a wonderful place to grow up.  You feel safe, people know you,  you have pride in who you are and where you came from, but it’s not the whole world.”
    “That’s what I mean. It’s okay for Roseanne. All she ever wanted was to get married and have kids.”
    “That’s for sure.”
    “And I don’t know about you, but I want that too, but eventually, not until I’m, like, in my late twenties.  Why’s a girl around here have to get married straight outta school?  Y’know, you go to the movies, watch TV, and you see, like, wild stuff going on, and if you watch the local news, you’d think the Bronx is gonna be burned to the ground before long. Do people ask you about that?”
    Nicola snapped her head back and said, “Oh! All the time,” then using a whiny, sniveling voice, imitating those people: “Nee-KOH-luh, you live in duh Bronx with all the shootings and the drugs and people burning their own houses down?”
    “I get the same crap question,” said Natalie. “And I don’t know whether I hate them or the crime that makes them think the way they do more.”
    “I know what you mean.  They know nothing about the Bronx, they’ve never spent one day in the Bronx unless it’s to go to the Zoo—and then they ask you, `Will I be safe if I take a train or a taxi up there?’ And you know what I tell them?”
    “What?”
    “I say, `Yeah, unless you stick your stupid face in the lion’s cage.’”
    “You actually say that to them?”
    “I have, a few times.  But, y’know what, Nat?  You can’t entirely blame them.  I don’t know, maybe Belmont is the last place in the Bronx that will survive.  Maybe Riverdale and Pelham Bay, too.  But I don't want to live in a neighborhood even I don’t feel safe leaving to go to Castle Hill or Tremont, even go to a Yankees game. You remember what happened to Mickey Cesario and his brother when they went to a bar near the Stadium?  The black kids jumped them and beat the crap out of them. They were both in the hospital for a month.”
    “I remember that.  Then some of the assholes here wanted to go down there and bust up some black guys—any black guys—in revenge.” 
    “That would have been a disaster, because then we’d have a gang war going back and forth. I just hate that freaking macho mentality on both sides,” said Nicola, shaking her hands in the air. “I gotta get away from it! I can’t wait to go to Italy.”
    “You think the guys there are any better?”
    “I don’t know, but I do know that Milan is a very safe city and they don’t have the drug problems we have here. And the restaurants are better.”
    Natalie swung her legs around on her bed and looked straight at her sister, saying in a deliberately annoying tone of voice,  “And maybe Nicky Santini will meet some hot eye-talian guy who drives an Alfa-Romeo and works in the fashion industry and sweeps you off your feet.”
    Nicola chuckled and said, “Y’know something? Papa would like that. So would Mom and Grandma.”
    “And what about you, Nick? You saying you wouldn’t like to marry a rich Italian guy with great hair and an Alfa?”
    “It’s crossed my mind, ” Nicola said nonchalantly.  “But, that’s not why I’m going. I really, really want to finish college and study art.  Then I’ll see.  Of course, if a guy like that sweeps me off my feet next semester, well, I’ll tell him I have to finish college back in New York, and he’d have to accept that.”
    There was a pause in the conversation, then Natalie asked, “Nick, uh, you don’t have to tell me, but are you still a ... virgin?”
    Nicola straightened her neck, glared at her sister and said,  “You’re right: I don’t have to tell you.” She paused then said, “But, baby sister, you’ll be the first to know! Now go to sleep.”
    “Promise?”
    “Yeah, you’re almost eighteen,” said Nicola, who was only two and a half years older. “I promise.”
    In fact, though Nicola was only twenty, the thought of losing her virginity had pre-occupied her since she was Natalie’s age. After all, in the 1980s, girls lost their virginity all the time by their late teens, mostly out of love, or whatever passed for love among teenagers.
    The real old-timers, those of Teresa’s generation, still remembered when marriages were arranged, sometimes when the girl was only fifteen or sixteen, and she was expected to begin producing babies as soon as possible—new soldiers in the army of Christ, as the priests would say—and there was a very strong expectation that at least one child would grow up to be a priest or a nun—a Bride of Christ!
    Such a scenario was another of those once entrenched but now archaic traditions that had died out soon after the immigrants landed in America—even if some had themselves been in arranged marriages.  The Italians and Jews and Germans and the rest valued nothing more highly than education, especially for their sons, but, since America was offering it for free in the public schools, why not have a daughter go all the way up to sixth grade, maybe even high school?  An arranged marriage would be considered an affront to an immigrant family in a country where people could do as they wished.  Still, most people thought it would be better for everyone if girls and boys married within their own group.  The priests and nuns made that very clear, and a dispensation to marry a Protestant or Jew was not easy to come by for a Catholic, and to convert to the religion of the husband- or wife-to-be was wholly anathema. 
    Nevertheless, the idea of virginity was always and everywhere an obsession among teenagers.  The Church had pounded it into their heads that there were really only two kinds of women—those like the Virgin Mary and, by extension, their own mothers, and the wicked daughters of Eve, the harlots, the women consumed by their own lusts, seeking to drag good Catholic boys to their damnation for what they called a “roll in the hay” or a “bounce in the sack.”
    The priests and nuns would warn that “Seven minutes in heaven would lead to an eternity in Hell!” Some of the young guys would joke, “Hey, I never lasted seven minutes!” And others boasted, “Yeah, well, with a girl like Rosemary Scamorza, it’d be worth it!”  Everyone was told the story of the prom couple who had sex in their car and then a tree fell on the car on the way home and killed the girl, who went straight to hell, while her errant boyfriend—who could be forgiven his sin by confession the following Saturday—was forced to live his life in the agony of knowing that he’d helped send her there.
      Yet almost every teenage and young adult Italian-American male insisted that, when it came to marrying a girl, she would have to be a virgin, and if he were the one to take that virginity away, then he’d do the right thing and marry her.
    Such conservative religious and social views had, in many other parts of the country, not least on college campuses, dissipated during the decades of “free love,” “do your own thing,” and “women’s lib,” but they were still as strong in the Catholic sections of the Bronx as in the Bible Belt of the South.  
    As she lay in bed that night, Nicola thought about the absurdity of such beliefs, how sexuality was such a beautiful and natural part of one’s self, the way she’d seen it  portrayed in Renaissance paintings of Greek gods in pastoral landscapes by Giorgone and Tintoretto.  She had never—yet—seen the Sistine Chapel, but she knew every inch of Michelangelo’s ceiling from books, an expanse churning with human beings in all their glorious nakedness, freshly sprung from the loving mind and electric touch of God. 
    Nicola loved the white purity of the marble used for Rodin’s statue of “The Kiss” (left) the moving beauty of Millais’ Pre-Raphaelites depictions of “Ophelia” and the brash nudity of Manet’s not-quite-beautiful “Olympia” (below) based on Titian’s “Venus of Urbino.”  There could not possibly be anything wrong or bad about such an idea of physical, naked beauty and loving sex.
    Yet she also reflected on the fact that she was, at twenty, still a virgin, and that it had been more a matter of choice than it was religious or moral opposition to the idea of sex.  Nicola was not much taken with the sentiment about “waiting for the perfect guy to come along.”  No, that was not it.  She hadn’t “saved” herself for the sake of an ideal, but neither were her passions so inflamed as to bed down with someone she did not care deeply about.
      She had certainly battled her way out of more than a few clumsy clinches without using the excuse that she was saving herself for a husband. But Nicola knew that sounded old fashioned, even snobbish, and she had no intention of avoiding the inevitable for much longer.
    Maybe in Italy, she told herself, it will be the right man and the right place and the right wine.  She’d seen all the 1950s and 1960s movies about American spinsters s who traveled to Italy after the war—“Three Coins in the Fountain,” “Summertime,” “The Light in the Piazza.” “Roman Holiday”  (left) was different:  in that one Audrey Hepburn played a naïve European princess on holiday in Rome, where she met an American news reporter played by Gregory Peck.  And while Nicola, like most women, adored the impossibly handsome Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, she recognized that most of the time he played a helpless loser of a man, incapable of coping with a modern woman.
             In “Divorce Italian Style” he actually plotted to become a cuckold so he could marry a girl less than half his age.  In “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” Mastroianni played three parts—that of a poor Neapolitan worn to a frazzle by his wife’s demands to produce more babies; the morally weak lover of a rich married woman; and a neurotic and spoiled rich man desperate for sex with a prostitute who refuses him in an effort to reform a student for the priesthood who has fallen in love with her.  All the women were played by Sophia Loren, who also starred in “Marriage Italian Style,” in which Mastroianni’s upper class ego prevents him from marrying a prostitute who has had a son by him.
    Nicola actually preferred to believe that Italian men of the ‘80s would be more like the world weary romantic played by Mastroianni (above) in Federico Fellini’s film “8½,” about a director like himself whose self-doubt is momentarily muted by the appearance of the stunningly beautiful actress Claudia Cardinale (left), who played herself in the movie. Some said Nicola looked a little like her.
   And if Nicola met such a man—younger, of course—maybe her concern about being twenty years old and still a virgin would simply evaporate in one glorious evening.
    It was a comforting notion to fall asleep to.