Birds of Paradise 1
A Memoir
By
Leslie Golding Mastroianni
In order to understand and enjoy this lengthy memoir it’s important to understand what Pittsburgh was like in the 1950s. To be more clear, it’s important to understand what my family’s life was like in those years.
My world was ruled, excluding the Jewish faith, by two huge establishments: the University of Pittsburgh, and the steel mills that were running at full speed then, every day, all day. The University of Pittsburgh towers over everything because of its Cathedral of Learning, the tallest academic building in this hemisphere. Moreover, all the men in my family at that time got their educations there. The Cathedral of Learning was grey from all its exposure to the smoke from the steel mills but was made of grey stone also. My point: life was serious. My mother’s family was fun-loving, fortunately, but as a child I was sensitive and aware of things. Everybody—especially my father’s family— was working hard and living by high standards. My parents with their strict moral sense—my grandparents’ devotion to Judaism—my mother and her sisters were always making things; gardens, clothing, babies—the kosher laws, not wiping dry the meat dishes with the milk dish cloth—the times tables in school—endless mimeographed worksheets—this world was, to use a cliché, a tight ship. I wasn’t even allowed to drink Coke except for one glass at Saturday night dinnertime.
This is, then, the background onto which my great aunt Cecil and her male partner would swoop every now and then to throw all the grey and brown skies and shadows into oblivion.
Most of the stories of Cecil and Manfredi—her life-long partner—came to me from my mother. But there is a lot of it that I learned on my own.
Cecil was born between 1900 and 1905. Very early in her life, she was different. She knew in her adolescence that she was an artist, a painter, but this wasn’t what middle-class young Jewish women did. Maybe if they had talent they would paint little pictures while their babies were taking naps. But Cecil was driven and she wasted no time; she left home while still a teenager and made her way to New York City to study art and become what she knew she had to be—a true artist. One of her art teachers was Manfredi Rubino.
Cecil was 18 and Manfredi, twice her age. If one is romantic it’s easy to picture the scene. Cecil was little, small-boned, and not beautiful but pretty; Manfredi, an Italian, who spoke English with a thick accent, tall with a moustache. They fell in love, and very soon afterwards they were living together. They did not believe in marriage.
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