Chapter One
East Meets West
June 1975-January 1985 Your whole past was but a birth and a becoming. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Batricia" It was June 1975, about eleven o'clock at night, and the thumping sound of the disco beat reverberated off the walls of the student union at the Catholic university known for its once-famous basketball team-the University of San Francisco. I wasn't a student at this institution-couldn't afford it-but was there for this Saturday night gathering. It was a diversion from my
grueling schedule at San Francisco State and my job and responsibilities.
The room was filled with a mixed ethnic assortment of students and their friends-Asians, a medley of Middle Eastern males, young white males and females-listening and dancing to the sounds spun by a student disc jockey. I was sitting alone on an overstuffed chair in a corner, sipping a 7-Up, when a young Middle Eastern male approached me. He pulled up a folding chair and started to talk.
"You go to school here? I didn't seen you before?"
I hesitated. He had unusual eyes that instantly captured my attention. They were large, almond-shaped vessels filled with liquid black coal that could penetrate to the other side of your soul.
I responded slowly, "No. Just visiting. Where are you from?"
His head tilted back slightly as he laughed. "Saudi Arabia."
I wondered about the cast on his left arm. "What happened to your arm? Broken?"
"Yeah. I fell. I play soccer in front of Hayes-Healey Hall. That's the place over here where I have my room. I just came to United States few months ago. So now I study English here at this school. My family is big family in Saudi Arabia. My government sends me here to study criminology. Want to dance?"
"No," I declined. "I have to go. It's getting late."
"I can call you? What is your name? I like to talk to you again."
"Pat."
"Bat?"
"No, Pat. Patricia."
"Batricia. Batricia. I like that name. Pretty. I shall call you, Batricia."
We spent another hour chatting about Saudi Arabia and the United States. He told me his name was Khalid Gheshayan, the oldest son of a wealthy Saudi whose family ties were well connected to the ruling Al-Saud monarchy. He stated his grandfather had ridden camels and horses with Ibn Saud, the desert patriarch who had united the Arabian peninsula after WWI and whose descendants now control the oil rich kingdom. As an anthropology major at San Francisco State University, I was intrigued with his stories. Perhaps I had seen Lawrence of Arabia one too many times, but as the evening came to a close I gave him my phone number.
Kapsa with Rice We began having long phone conversations. I had been divorced for several years and was struggling with being a single mom, going to school, working part-time, and grieving the recent loss of my father. Khalid seemed to have a naivete‚ about him, an unsophisticated, uncomplicated, carefree approach to living, and I was overburdened with life itself.
He introduced me to his friends Salam and Abdul Rahman. They had an apartment on Geary Boulevard where many of the Saudis in Khalid's group gathered socially. The smell of kapsa, a Saudi stew made with lamb, curry, cardamom, and hot peppers, filled the air. It was the one dish they all seemed to know how to prepare. They were very lighthearted, friendly, and generous. They enjoyed each other and joked easily-making fun with an easy, almost childlike playfulness. The camaraderie was unlike what I had seen among American men. They would sit on the floor in a circle, drinking sweetened tea from demitasse cups and talking, playing music, and amusing themselves with anecdotes and tales about their country.
They were never without courtesy and hospitality. I was always treated like a "guest of honor" when invited to their many dinners where everyone would sit on the floor-Saudi style-eating kapsa, rice, and salad with bare hands. Khalid's attentiveness to me was almost obsessive. This was his first journey outside the strict Wahhabi Islamic backdrop of his native Saudi culture. He was like a kid at Christmas, opening one present after another with delight at each surprise. At first it was refreshing for me to see this kind of savage "innocence" firsthand; my interest in the ancient Middle East and antiquity colored my judgment. I processed the cultural differences as being exotic and a remnant of the peoples of the past that were coming alive before my very eyes. But then I began to see how Khalid was having difficulty adapting his cultural beliefs and background to all the "fruits" of the open society he became a part of when he took that flight to America.
He drank and experimented with different types of alcoholic beverages which is strictly forbidden by Islam. He and his friends smoked hashish or marijuana at times, but drugs were not a large part of his life. He liked hard liquor.
He called me several times a day. At first I was flattered. I loved the attention and the romantic idea of being pursued. A twenty-nine-year-old woman with a low self-esteem who is lonely, insecure, and vulnerable is easy to wear down. I was that woman.
Esther's Daughter "Daddy, you're here! Daddy! Now the kids can't tease me and say where is your father?"
I stood on the running board of my father's 1952 Pontiac and wrapped my arms around his neck. I dug my fingernails into his skin. I wouldn't let him go. As I kissed his cheek I could feel the scratch of the beginnings of a five o'clock shadow and could smell the unmistakable odor of my-yes, my-father! He was here in Cicero, Illinois, in front of Bella Papa's house on Fifty-fourth Avenue.
Bella Papa, my mother's father, was dead, but we all lived on Fifty-fourth together-my mother, my sister, Bobbie, my mother's sisters and their husbands, and my cousin Marie. This was la famiglia.
My mother, Esther, second daughter of Italian immigrants Enrico and Maria Stancato, was named after a Jewish woman whose bed was alongside my grandmother's in the medical ward the women shared at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in 1918.
Maria was pregnant with my mother and had had a difficult labor. The Jewish woman requested that my grandmother name her baby Esther, after her. This was asking a lot, but my grandmother was a very religious woman with a caring heart and honored her friend's request. So even from the beginning of her life, my mother had a distinct identity separate from her family-a little Italian girl with the name of the ancient Jewish queen of Persia.
My grandmother, Maria Cerza Stancato, had a short life filled with infant mortality and physical pain caused by tuberculosis of the bone in her leg. My mother used to tell me that she always remembered her mother in bed saying the rosary and her prayers in Italian. She died at age thirty-three, leaving Bella Papa with four young daughters to raise. His oldest daughter, Julia, sixteen, was left to raise her younger sisters-my mother, Esther, another sister, Amelia, and the youngest sister, Harriet, whom everyone called "Baby Doll"-while he worked on his small vegetable farm to support the girls through the Great Depression. It was a happy household filled with many relatives and friends. Enrico Stancato was a poor Italian farmer with a generous heart who shared whatever he had with anyone who came to his door. They struggled, but in that house filled with music, singing, dancing, and love there was a oneness of spirit.
When World War II broke out, my mother got a job in a defense plant making parts for U.S. aircraft. She met a tall, blond, blue-eyed man with a soft voice and easy Cary Grant charm and wit-my father, David Roush.
Chicago in 1944 was bustling, and "Rosie the Riveter" types like my mom were keeping the war effort together. My father, unable to get medical clearance for military duty because of an injury to his optical nerve in a childhood accident, came to Chicago from central Indiana seeking employment after the depression. Esther and David were passionate about each other and became inseparable. They were very much in love. There was only one problem-Esther had a husband.
She was married in 1941 to a man she said she never loved, Bob Labut. Soon after the war began he was shipped to the South Pacific and did not return until 1946. When my mother met my father she was emotionally torn about what to do, but her love for my father couldn't be denied. She remained in conflict because of her Italian family and her Catholicism and then became pregnant with me just as the war was ending and the troops were returning home.
Many years later she told me, "Pat, I was pregnant and I didn't know what to do. My father didn't know, and Bob didn't know and he was coming home from the war."
When her husband returned home from the navy, Esther was four months pregnant. She told him but couldn't face Bella Papa. So she disappeared with my father and lived on the South Side till after I was born. Bella Papa wasn't educated, but he wasn't stupid.
He said to Julia, "Where is Hesta?"
"Papa, Esther had a baby girl."
"Where is this baby? Bring her to me."
From the moment Bella Papa saw me, I was his darling. This old Italian man, who was barely five feet tall and walked with a slight limp from an old stroke, carried me around in his arms from the time I can remember. So my early years were spent with a loving grandfather and my adorable aunts, who cared for me with all the love and attention I could possibly desire. Esther never resolved her guilt about Bob and my father. She continued to seesaw between them and, oddly enough, they both loved her very much and tolerated this situation.
Bella Papa said to her, "Hesta, maka uppa yo min'. You...
