Big Joe & Mrs. Angelo

Delivering Fruit Every Christmas

By Joe Essid

Christmas, 2010

Every year, the same ritual with dad. Grab boxes of fruit plus the occasional bottle of booze, run, deliver, repeat. We’d get in twenty or more stops,  before illness in pop’s final years made the deliveries a mere shadow of what they had been.  I treasure these memories now, though back then, I hated to spend my precious time running from house to house. 

What remains with me? An old Italian lady who either changed the course of my life—my version—or, in the eyes of others, ruined any chance of my becoming an unthinking and happy American consumer.

So thank you, Mrs. Angelo.  But before I talk about her, I should thank dad and his produce. Without him and his mad annual mission to deliver fruit at Christmas, I’d never have walked through Mrs. Angelo’s door.

Around this time of year, I can hear pop’s voice as though he were seated next to me in the car. “Come on, boy. We got to hit four more places today. Grab that liquor.”

Our first stop was usually St. Benedict’s, where the good fathers got a box of citrus, a box of apples, a fifth of Glenlivet, and a fifth of Gentleman Jack.  If Father Pat answered the door at the Priory, he’d grin ear to ear, the only time I saw that priest smile. I recall Father Pat as a Mensa, his IQ more than 200, who would bring a double-barreled shotgun into English Lit class, then fire it out of the window to kill squirrels in the Church’s vegetable garden.

I’m not joking. That my father could get the old crazy priest to crack a smile was evidence enough that Big Joe possessed some hoodoo-power I’d never have.

Why, this is very nice. Thank  you, Mr. Essid.”

“You’re welcome, Father. We gotta run now.”

Back in the car, Big Joe would look at his list. “Okay, we’ll hit the Siewers place next.”

“Can I grab a fifth for me, pop?

“Go ahead. Just don’t take no 15-year-old Scotch.”

Of course I would sweet-talk a bottle of the MaCallan out of him. So as I got older, delivering fruit at Christmas became enormous fun.

In a family with its share of drinkers, dad and I were clearly lightweights. The only time I can recall getting tipsy with him was on Christmas mornings, when we’d each have a couple of well-spiked eggnogs in the kitchen, while the grandchildren and great-grandchildren ran laps and destroyed presents in the rest of the house.

By then, however, the fruit deliveries were done. They began in earnest about the time of Winter Solstice and continued through Christmas Eve: 3 or 4 days of crazy-rushed trips in pop’s series of Detroit land-yachts: Pontiac Starchief and Bonneville, Olds Regency 98 the length of a fallen Chrysler Building, Buick Riviera, Lincoln Continental. They rode like dreams and swallowed boxes of fruit the way I hoovered cupcakes at 10 years old.

Packing the Christmas fruit began as an ordeal for my clumsy six-year-old hands but, twenty years later, it became a job dad would task to me without much scolding. Some years we’d pack full boxes meant for apples; other years, we’d have half-bushel bags or make do with a series of smaller ones. It was always apples on the bottom, oranges next, tangerines on top if we could get tangerines that season.  And the fruit was to be packed well over the top so we didn’t look stingy; when a woman reminded me to do this recently at her orchard-store, where the apples are sold by the half-bushel box, I nearly cried.  Big Joe would have recognized a fellow soul in this apple-grower.

In the relative chill of a Richmond December, we’d pack for a couple of hours, the longest time I can recall spending continuously with Big Joe other than in cars headed to or from Florida. Then, it was off to the races. As reluctant as pop was to actually see people, he had Santa Claus’ desire to make the presents, with me as his surly elf, and drop them off anonymously, if he could do so at all.

“Just ring the bell and run, boy.” That became our standard procedure. The car was often in motion before I fully closed the door. Not always, for very important business associates would come out to the car for a chat. Yet as Christmas got close and Big Joe’s list seemed to get longer, not shorter, we’d switch to Special-Operations-style commando raids on houses. We’d manage a drop-and-run at many places, sometimes catching a rear-view glimpse of a frantically waving family friend.

Some of the visits were more memorable than others because year in, year out, they were always the same. The two Siewers sisters, from a very old Richmond Catholic family, lived in an never restored yet perfectly intact Victorian house near the corner of Belvedere and Cary Streets. In that time-capsule from 1895, amid dark drapes cut from the finest cloth in intricate and mournful patterns, darker and very expensive furniture, and a forest of fine crystal and china, the old women greeted us at the door. I half expected to see Edgar Allan Poe, ever the spurned gentleman caller, paying them a lugubrious visit in their formal parlor. 

Theirs was one of the few homes on our list that pop would enter, out of some sense of duty. As readers can imagine, at nearly every other stop he waited in his giant car, and if I lingered too long to fill my pockets with candy or take a package for our family, he’d lay on the horn and give me the same little speech when I sulked back into the glare of his disapproval.

But the Siewers women, I later learned, had helped my grandparents financially in the depths of the Great Depression. Something about rent or groceries. Dad was never precise, but for decades afterward, we brought the ancient spinsters fruit and they gave us candy that smelled of medicine and tasted faintly of dust. I never refused their offers.

Dad would take a candy too, and suddenly he became a little boy from a lost Richmond I’d never know when times were so hard that he and my grandmother would collect Dandelion greens from vacant lots and cook them like spinach. Dad, faced with the Siewers and their faded opulence, would mumble something humble and embarrassed about how nice it was to see them and if they needed anything to let him know and he’d light a candle in church in the memory of their father and oh look at the time he had to stop by a relatives before it got dark. 

Whew! Then out the door we went.

I would say nothing as we drove back uptown, with dad not speaking, just dwelling on an old moment of charity he’d wished the family had never been forced to take but that he’d never forget.  He’d eventually break the silence to point—with his middle finger, a tic of his I was never able to cure—at some landmark.

“Yeah, in the Depression that building was the Turkish Baths. If you didn’t have hot water you’d go there once a week for a good bath.  You’d get soap, bath sandals, and a towel for your nickel.”

That was a world he knew, one very different from the elderly sisters with multiple bathrooms where hot water flowed at the turn of a tap. I never resented those two old women who had once saved our family from some unmentioned disgrace, but I was never comfortable in their company.

Yet if the Siewers visits always made uneasy with hints of the divisions and faded grandeur of an older Richmond, just up the street I’d rejoice at my favorite stop.  West toward what is now Carytown I found someone who showed me what I wanted to be and do:  Mrs. Angelo, who was always our toughest customer.  A vivacious Italian, the sort of archetypal grandmother whose house always smelled of fresh bread and pasta sauce, she was not to be denied giving us a return gift.  No dusty candy, either. If Big Joe was the unstoppable Lebanese-American force bearing citrus, Mrs. Angelo was the equally immovable Neapolitan object, arms full of sweets and sausages and fresh bread who rushed out to pop’s car.

I tipped into this online version of the story a photo from Google Streetview, of Mrs. Angelo's house today. I still cannot drive by, as I do at least once a week, without chuckling about how a tiny Italian lady had my alpha-male father cornered and made  him do what she wanted.

“Oh hell. Here she comes with that bottle of Vermouth.” Dad would say that, one of the few times he sounded defeated in his entire life.

 “Oh Mr. Essid! You are so good to Mrs. Angelo!” She always referred to herself that way. 

“You tell Suleyman and Montura,” she would say, carefully using my grandparents’ Old-Country names, “that I pray for them in church. Tell them come see me.” 

“Mama’s been sick.”

My own grandmother was eternally ill, always cooped up in the bedroom by the mid 1970s. Some days she’d only speak Arabic.  Mrs. Angelo, on the other hand, might have seemed crazy to us, but it was happy-crazy. No morose or evil thought passed into her home, and though Mr. Angelo was long, long gone to the afterlife, his widow seemed forever joyful when shown any little kindness from my grandparents and, at Christmas, my dad. She never lapsed into reminiscences about her dead husband or how she might have missed Italy. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure if Mr. Angelo were gone. Entering their house was to be under the protection of some guardian angel who specialized in old Italian women who would stuff you with food until you burst, then cry if you failed to explode. 

Sometimes, just to spite dad, I’d do my best to spend five minutes with Mrs. Angelo and run the risks of his anger. She’d walk me through an immaculate house past pictures of Italians posing in villages that looked so much more romantic than boring Richmond. Mrs. Angelo and all she represented—happy foreigners who know how to cook, who live quirky lives that involved lots of walking up and down tiny streets—warped my teenaged mind and, eventually, spoiled my palette for the crap that most Americans call food.  

Her vermouth, however, was another matter.

“You take little bottle to your parents!” She’d gush, pinching a cheek. Dad would be laying on the horn by then.

“Oh, no thank you, Mrs. Angelo.”

“You take! Good for you!”

Please, dad, I would think, Save me from the Vermouth we’ll all try to drink later.

As if by magic, she’d notice the horn blowing.

“Ah, I know, your poppa is in hurry! You go now, but come back to see Mrs. Angelo.”

I’d get to the car, often with her in tow, and she’d force pop to hug her. I loved watching this, and as we’d drive off, dad would lay into me.

“Why did you take all that stuff, boy?”

 “You love the cookies.”

He’d see the Vermouth. “What’s wrong with you, boy? You crazy? You shouldn’t let her give you that. Nobody drinks that stuff.” 

“She does. You try to stop her next time.”

He never did. The sweets and sausages would not survive much past New Year’s Day, but the unopened Vermouth would go into the back of the cabinet. We’d make a fuss out of opening the one bottle that got perpetually rotated to the front of the crowd, and pop and I would sip and make faces.

Dad would have been happy had I pinched every bottle for my deadbeat friends. I could have slipped in and gotten a wicked underage drunk going on that stuff, but I never got the taste for the red liquor. I still don’t miss sweet Vermouth, but I miss the Christmas mania of fruit deliveries with pop.  I miss Mrs. Angelo nearly as much, even though she had the longer-term effect on me.

Mrs. Angelo has long gone to join her husband, where I imagine her baking bread and stirring pasta sauce even as I write this. When today I find myself a few doors down from her old home at the Belmont Butcher Shop, buying locally-made Italian sausage or artisanal salami from the Old Country, I think of Mrs. Angelo. When I sit in the Stuzzi Pizzeria, just a few more doors down the street, with its wood-burning oven and scents of drop-dead-authentic Italian food, I think of Mrs. Angelo. 

In a sense I’ve been looking for Mrs. Angelo’s world for 30 years. Today, after I drop my bags in a strange hotel overseas, my first act is usually to look for good food, from pedestrian streets near Covent Garden in London, maze-like byways in Segovia and Badajoz Spain, even the more remote corners of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. I follow my nose and vague directions from locals. Blame Mrs. Angelo for helping to make me what I am. My surreptitious moments in her house always ended in a kitchen where she reigned supreme, and she had the sort of serious chef’s stove that I saw in the kitchens of ethnic matriarchs like my Aunt Anne Denby. Mrs. Angelo turned out platters of wonderful cookies dusted with powdered sugar, loves of bread the likes of which I would not taste until my traveling career began with a fateful step out of the Metro on Paris’ Left Bank, and right into the scent of a bakery. Fait accompli.