the strength.
At twenty Ellen Straker was not only much too young to be trapped in
the bleak future that now seemed to lie ahead of her, she was also too
pretty and vibrant to be condemned to a life of unremitting heartache
and crushing responsibility. She was a slender, shapely girl-woman, a
butterfly that had never really had a chance to try out its wings. Her
hair was dark brown, almost black, so were her large eyes, and there
was a natural, rosy tint to her cheeks that perfectly complemented her
olive-tone skin.
Before marrying Conrad Straker, she had been Ellen Teresa Marie
Giavenetto, the daughter of a handsome, Italian-American father and a
Madonna-faced, Italian-American mother. Ellen’s Mediterranean beauty
was not the only quality about her that revealed her heritage, she had
a talent for finding joy in small things, an expansive personality, a
quick smile, and a warmth that were all quite Italian in nature. She
was a woman meant for good times, for parties and dances and gaiety.
But in her first twenty years of life, there had not been very much
laughter.
Her childhood was grim.
Her adolescence was an ordeal.
Although Joseph Giavenetto, her father, had been a warm, good-hearted
man, he had also been meek. He had not been the master of his own
home, and he hadn’t had a great deal to say about how his daughter
ought to be raised. Ellen had not been soothed by her father’s gentle
humor and quiet love nearly so often as she had been subjected to her
mother’s fiery, religious zealotry.
Gina was the power in the Giavenetto house, and it was to her that
Ellen had to answer for the slightest impropriety, real or imagined.
There were rules, an endless list of them, which were meant to govern
Ellen’s behavior, and Gina was determined that every rule would be
rigidly enforced and strictly obeyed.
She intended to see that her daughter grew up to be a very moral, prim,
God-fearing woman.
Gina always had been religious, but after the death of her only son,
she became fanatically devout. Anthony, Ellen’s brother, died of
cancer when he was only seven years old. Ellen was just four at the
time, too young to understand what was happening to her brother, but
old enough to be aware of his frighteningly swift deterioration. To
Gina, that tragedy had been a divine judgment leveled against her. She
felt that she had somehow failed to please God, and that He had taken
her little boy to punish her. She began going to Mass every morning
instead of just on Sundays, and she dragged her little girl with her.
She lit a candle for
Anthony’s soul every day of the week, without fail. At home she read
the Bible from cover to cover, over and over again. Often, she forced
Ellen to sit and listen to Scripture for hours at a time, even before
the girl was old enough to understand what she was hearing. Gina was
full of horrible stories about Hell: what it was like, what grisly
tortures awaited a sinner down there, how easy it was for a wicked
child to end up in that sulphurous place. At night young Ellen’s sleep
was disturbed by hideous, bloody nightmares based on her mother’s
gruesome tales of fire and damnation. And as Gina became increasingly
religious, she added more rules to the list by which Ellen was expected
to live, the tiniest infraction was, according to Gina, one more step
taken on the road to Hell.
Joseph, having yielded all authority to his wife early in their
marriage, was not able to exert much control over her even in ordinary
times, and when she retreated into her strange world of religious
fanaticism, she was so far beyond his reach that he no longer even
attempted to influence her decisions.
Bewildered by the changes in Gina, unable to cope with the new woman
she had become, Joseph spent less and less time at home. He owned a
tailor shop–not an extremely prosperous business but a reliably steady
one– and he began to work unusually long hours. When he wasn’t
working he passed more time with his friends than he did with his