Ma and Domenico Onofrio Tempesta

Ma and Domenico Onofrio Tempesta are father and only child, joined by a life of close dependence and unequal authority. He provides the house in which she lives and the standard by which the family remembers him; she keeps his home, recounts his history, and, after his death, gathers the pages of the life story he had hidden from her. Their bond survives not as a simple inheritance but as a set of photographs, stories, and unfinished writing that Ma preserves without ever having the chance to read his manuscript.

Identity and Family Foundations

Domenico Onofrio Tempesta was Ma’s father and only parent after the early deaths of his two brothers and his wife. Ma was his only child, and the two lived together in a household whose material and emotional center was Domenico. He had emigrated from Sicily to America in 1901. Through careful handling of money and hard work, he bought a half-acre lot from a farmer’s widow and became the first Italian immigrant to own property in Three Rivers, Connecticut. He built the brick Victorian duplex on Hollyhock Avenue where Ma lived all her life and where she raised her twin sons.

That house made Domenico’s authority tangible. He was remembered as a resourceful immigrant who had secured a home for the family, but also as a man whose word governed the household. Ma’s accounts to her sons presented him as stern, stubborn, and accustomed to command. Her devotion to maintaining his home and her later care for his records grew out of a relationship in which protection and control were closely intertwined.

Authority and Ma’s Memories

Ma passed on stories that conveyed both her father’s discipline and the force of his presence. When she complained about fried eggs, Domenico pushed her face down into her plate; afterward, she stopped objecting to the meal. As a teenager working at a Rexall store, she secretly bought cigarettes. When Domenico found them, he went to the store and made her eat one in front of its customers and her boss. These anecdotes do not present his strictness as abstract family lore: each turns a small act of youthful resistance into a public lesson in his power.

The stories also show how Ma kept her father present in family life. She described his achievements and repeated episodes from her childhood to her sons, who grew up knowing him chiefly through his stern-faced photographs and her accounts. Her admiration for what he had built coexisted with memories of harsh treatment. The family portrait she transmitted therefore carried both gratitude for his provision and evidence of the fear through which he maintained authority.

The Private Life Story

In the summer of 1949, Domenico began dictating an account of his life, an unusual undertaking for a man Ma remembered as intensely private. He arranged for a stenographer and a Dictaphone, with separate rooms for himself and the person taking down his words. The arrangement lasted about a week. Domenico had misunderstood the rental terms: the machine cost eight dollars per day, not per week. He sent the equipment back, and Ma recalled being so anxious about the machines left on the front porch awaiting collection that she could not sleep. Domenico then returned to dictating directly to Angelo Nardi, but that method also failed to proceed smoothly.

Ma kept her distance while her father worked. She said she had not dared to approach the parlor when he was dictating, and that he did not discuss the project with her directly until near its end. Sometimes she heard him crying or arguing aloud with himself in the backyard. The manuscript’s existence thus complicates the image of a father who had insisted on silence about his past: he had avoided talking with Ma about his childhood and the Old Country, yet devoted his final summer to setting his history down.

The surviving papers were a physical record of that uneven process. In a strongbox Ma gave her son, a large manila envelope held a small, coverless dictionary and a sheaf of pages. The first ten or fifteen pages were typewritten originals and carbon copies; the rest were handwritten in ornate blue fountain-pen script. The manuscript was in Italian and bore the title The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Its contents were not a story Ma had been allowed to follow as it was written. She knew about the work only indirectly, and her sons encountered it after his death as a fragile, partly handwritten document requiring interpretation.

Death and the Inheritance of the Pages

Domenico died in the summer of 1949, unaware that his unmarried thirty-three-year-old daughter was pregnant with twins. On the morning he died, he told Ma that the manuscript was nearly finished and suggested that he might burn it when he completed it rather than send it to publishers in Italy. Ma heard him crying that morning but held back, believing that an approach might anger him or make matters worse. Later, when she brought him lunch, she found him slumped at the table. Pages had blown or fallen around the yard, reaching the hedges and chicken coop.

After calling for help and returning to watch beside him, Ma went around the yard collecting the pages. The act became her final service to her father and the means by which his private history survived. Yet preservation did not give her access to the whole account: she never read it. In October 1986, while Ma herself was undergoing surgery at Yale–New Haven Hospital, the manuscript remained an inheritance she had rescued but not entered.

Memory, Objects, and Their Relationship’s Afterlife

Domenico’s presence continued in Ma’s photo album, where he occupied a prominent place among the family photographs and memories. The album itself became a vulnerable family archive: its two brass cover pins eventually bent and broke, loosening most of the black construction-paper pages. During a fire at the family home, Ma went back inside to retrieve it from the bottom drawer of the china closet. The rescued album, like the recovered manuscript, preserved traces of a father whose life had been more private than the family stories that surrounded him.

Ma died of breast cancer on May 1, 1987, without reading her father’s history. Her sons inherited both his written pages and her oral account of the man who had built their home and ruled his own. The relationship is therefore mediated through what Ma could preserve: the house, the album, the scattered manuscript, and anecdotes that remember Domenico as provider and disciplinarian at once. His story reached the next generation through her care, even though the private account he had made of himself remained unread by the daughter closest to him.