My Father’s Ceiling

In a recent email, she wrote, “I have a memory of your dad on a ladder in your house, embellishing a ceiling with painted leaves and greenery. I was mesmerized — and kind of in awe — as I had never seen anything other than the traditional white ceiling. I fell in love with what he had created above our heads.”

Yes, my father created enchantment above our heads and all around us. The photo above may be the very ceiling Jo was remembering, but the walls too were his canvas. There were his famous “leaf sprays” and “marble effect” and “splitter splatter,” all of which were exactly as they sound, and his free-wheeling murals of songbirds and clowns and Roman ruins and fanciful flowers in bloom. There were storybook pictures and faux windows and a strutting peacock, its wings upright and open like a fan. Wealthy people paid my father to paint murals on their walls, and I have often wondered in the ensuing decades if there is a house somewhere in Brooklyn or Long Island with an intact Carbone mural, or if they have all long since been painted over. I still have a wooden cigar box that he decorated with a vine of leaves and yellow blossoms, and an old steamer trunk with my brother’s name inscribed across a luminous green rippled pattern, as though the letters are floating underwater.

I believe my father learned to draw and paint from his father, Raffaele, who probably picked up techniques from his father, and who undoubtedly absorbed the aesthetic all around him before he left Naples in 1905 at the age of 17. Decades later, visiting my grandfather’s village, I entered homes where painted angels hovered on cloudy ceilings, and doors were festooned with whimsical abstract designs. I walked through ancient archaeological sites whose walls were embellished with ornate borders, and I marveled at elaborate frescoes whose colors were still warm and vivid. Perhaps I romanticize, but I sensed a genetic origin here for my father’s penchant to paint his surroundings.

“Artist and Decorative Painting” said my father’s business card, but for paid jobs, the murals and fanciful decorative detail must by necessity go hand in hand with basic wall coverage and plastering, and for years he carried buckets and ladders and labored at this humble work while aspiring to loftier dreams. He wanted his own children to pursue what he considered to be professional endeavors, steering clear of anything related to paint. But all the dwellings of our youth were illustrated, garnished, and splitter-splattered, and it never seemed strange to us. I wonder if he was using our walls to practice, or just proclaiming his own inner spirit — or simply giving us a gift that he could give. I wonder if he found joy in these quirky expressions. Did he sometimes step back and view the results with pride? I think so. He made the world more beautiful. He lifted us.

And it made me so happy that my old friend Jo remembered this, for the holding of such memories keeps a person alive. My father’s murals and decorative touches may have long ago been painted over, but the effect of the remembered images, and of his extravagant giving spirit, endures. Perhaps the world is a canvas, after all, and it is up to us to beautify its blankness or to look beyond and imagine its wondrous potential.

Today, everything seems laden with mystery and meaning, sumptuous and substantial. My father taught me that, even in his struggles. I will always bow to the courage of an ordinary life, the hope in small gestures and creations, the work that proceeds in the face of sorrow. Look how we clean and craft and embroider what is stark, how we clutter, how we cling. What leaves will linger in the house that I will vacate? What flowers will grow? What message will endure?