Ancestors Are Whispering in My Ears, Telling the Story of the Two Dante Antonios

As hard as it is to believe, I am now beginning to understand that I may be writing another novel, another tale about another ancestor, this one on my mom's side of the family. This realization comes after I swore to my dear massage therapist Sarah Williams last fall that I might very well never write another novel again.

I am doing this when I haven't even picked up the paperback version of my fifth novel, "Finding Filomena." That happens tomorrow, August 1, 2025, when my husband and I drive an hour to The Troy Bookmakers to pick up the boxes. Am I excited, oh yes.

Anyway, if I didn't know better -- that is, if I didn't know very very well that it oftentimes takes hundreds, and even THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of pages of writing before a novelist even knows what chapter goes first -- then I might be willing to call what follows

CHAPTER TWO, "Angels (or Ancestors?) Keep Whispering in My Ears."

I am not more than four years old the first time I follow my Grandma Mish, short for Michelina (my mother’s mother) into her bedroom. She lifts the oval photo off the wall. She shines the glass with the bottom of her cotton apron.

Mish was, temperamentally, as soft and gentle as her pillowy lap.

I lived with my Grandma Mish and Grandpa Claude (“Pop” to everyone who knew him)

Grandma Mish lived until age 95, long enough to know my three beautiful children.

when I was a brand-new infant, while my Dad was finishing building -- with his own two hands -- our first house, in Bristol, Connecticut, and then again when Dad was away at IBM's computer school. Mom and me, and my brother Richie and my baby sister Karen stayed in Canton, CT -- about a half hour's drive from Bristol -- for what seemed like forever.

Anyway, in Grandma’s sweet bedroom, there is, hanging on the wall, an oval frame and

inside this frame is a baby. But this is not a baby, this creature inside the frame. He looks to be more like a doll, or better yet, a saint. In my first recollection, I remember him being all powder blue and yellow and glowing in the photo like an angel, at least the way I imagine angels being.

Grandma Mish is slowly polishing this precious photo of her first baby. But wait, when my cousin sends me the photo of the baby last week, I realize that my memory bank is all wrong.

He is cherubic, much like my grandson Monte (Italian for mountain), but this other long ago baby sits inside a gloomy background. Dark, just like his story.

He is Dante Antonio Rotondo. The first Dante Antonio Rotondo.

Is he a ghost? Who am I to say? Lately, I have begun to believe in ghosts, even though I never actually see them. Or do I?

But I know for a fact that this baby did haunt the life of the second Dante Antonio, my mother’s oldest brother, all of his life. My Uncle Dante was a giant of a man, like his brothers, over six feet tall. And handsome

as a movie star!

It is for my beloved uncle that my oldest grandson, Ronen Dante, 11 years old, is named.

What I remember best about Uncle Dante is his scissoring sense of humor. And his superb ability to make the best wisecracks.

I can still recall him telling all kinds of funny stories, many of which he shared as he sat sandwiched into the corner of Grandma Mish and Pop’s couch. Uncle Dan was such a great great storyteller, and jokester, that it should come as no surprise that his children, my beloved first cousins, whip out funny stories at dizzying speed. They are really really funny stories. Oh, and it also helps that their mother, my aunt who is 97 years young, and the last of my parents’ generation, has a crackling sense of humor too.

OK, back to Dante Antonio the first. This is the story of the first Dante Antonio. And also, inevitably the second Dante — whose middle name was Americanized to Anthony. Dante was my mother’s oldest brother and he suffered dearly because of Dante Antonio.

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You may be wondering how this story of the two Dante Antonio's connects to "The Story of Clementina," which I wrote and posted in Substack last month.

The simple answer is that this story has EVERYTHING to do with Bis Nonna (Great Grandma) Clementina's story. I suppose I should just tell you right now that it was because of Clementina that the first Dante Antonio died, at the excruciatingly tender age of eight months, all cherubic and fleshy, his cheeks brushed pink and constantly reminding me -- and perhaps scaring me too -- of the cheeks of my darling grandson Monte, who is two and a half years old but still highly cherubic. When her precious first baby died, Grandma Mish was still a new bride, only 20 years old.

What continues to amaze me, all these many decades later, is that looking back, when Grandma Mish used to sit on her bed and proudly show me her beloved first baby, she never once spoke a mean word about her mother. She never once even whispered words of sadness. I didn't know better then, but now, as the mother of three and the grandmother of three, I realize that Mish's restraint bordered on the miraculous.

Can I in my wildest imagination comprehend how Mish managed to keep mum about the fierce sadness that must have hummed in her heart?

Ah, but as time would tell, Grandma Michelina, for all her pillowy softness, had a core of the hardest steel, as was demonstrated six decades later when in the space of ten years, she lost two of her beloved adult sons, Delio, who held a doctorate in Math (he succumbed to Multiple Myeloma in 1980,) and Claude, Jr., "Sonny," who held a doctorate in engineering, and who died in 1990 of a massive heart attack.

Back to baby Dante Antonio.

Grandma Mish learned very very early in her extraordinary life as a mother (she had six more children after losing the first Dante) a fundamental lesson that THANKFULLY we modern mothers rarely have to learn:

that children are God Given and (God FORBID) God Taken Away. At any moment of any day, these precious offspring can be snatched away from us, even in their prime months of babyhood.