by David Winner
After Giselle died, I wanted to define the role that she played in my life, an uncommon relationship, a step-grandmother.
Her existence had been presented to me by my parents as a fait accompli, an addendum to my list of older relatives: Baba and Jeta, my maternal grandparents from Prague who ran a bakery together in Cleveland, my father’s mother Faie, bone thin, friendly but extravagantly self-involved, and her ex-husband, the dour, bald Grandfather Percy who married Giselle in the early 1950s.
Giselle was the only adult that I knew by first name. Giselle’s last name was Winner like ours, but it would have been ridiculous to call her Mrs. Winner or Grandmother Giselle as no kid had three grandmothers.
Like a breath of perfumed wind, Giselle occasionally blew into Charlottesville where I grew up. From whence she came and to whence she returned, I don’t think that I thought to ask.
Several decades after her death when I first started visiting Christopher, her son and my uncle, in Rome in what had been Giselle’s apartment, he told me the bare outlines of her story.
There were photographs of an adolescent Giselle in 1930’s Poland, blond, ethereal, standing outside a grand house in the country. Grace Kelly comes to mind.
When the Germans invaded, Giselle’s family found themselves in their crosshairs. My mother wondered if they were Jews, but nothing suggested that to be true.
The Germans killed her father, her uncle, her siblings.
But Giselle and her mother escaped. Her mother went to France, but Giselle took one of the trains that ran between Nazi-friendly territories to Fascist Rome.
In Rome, an illegal alien and perhaps a Jew, Giselle did everything that she could to survive, including, Christopher’s dark speculation, sex work.
After being captured by the Italian authorities, she was sent to be “in confino” in a tiny village in Abruzzo. Those deemed undesirable were often sent to small islands where they could not escape but did not have to be imprisoned, but I don’t know what prevented Giselle from simply decamping and returning to Rome. She seldom spoke of her time in Abruzzo, but it left her with an aversion to provincial spaces.
Back in Rome after the war, she spent long afternoons drifting into evenings at Café Il Cigno (The Swan) still extant on Viale Parioli. At Cigno, she met her first husband Arslan, who according to family legend had been along with his twin brother, “Crown Princes in the Albanian Court of Egypt.”
I finally began to figure out what that might have meant when I read about Ahmed Bey Zogolli, who took over Albania in 1922 and in 1928 declared himself King Zog and invented an Albanian royal family. Zog’s closer political allies were also given royal status, including, quite possibly, the exiled brothers at Il Cigno.
After Giselle’s brief marriage, she took on the title of princepessa in Rome, which she used on and off as late as the 1980s.
Not long after they went their separate ways, she met my grandfather, an American writer living in Rome.
After their marriage, she pressured Percy to spend his savings on a penthouse in a grand condominium in Parioli made affordable (barely) by the post war Italian economic doldrums.
In 1953, Giselle gave birth to Christopher.
A few years into their marriage, Percy, who had been an early apologist for Mussolini and the first American to interview him, landed a two-year position in Madrid working for the administration of another Fascist, Francisco Franco.
Handsomely paid and connected to the Spanish diplomatic corps, Percy provided Giselle with the polar opposite of life in Confino: a large apartment in a fashionable neighborhood, cocktail parties, receptions, servants. But Percy’s position was not renewable or, in any case, not renewed, and he could only find work in Washington DC, desolate and provincial like an Abruzzese village, much worse after Kennedy got shot and Camelot closed down.
In Washington, Giselle was restless, and Percy was moody and abusive, yelling his head off when he didn’t get his way. Having lived through so much from Poland to Rome to Washington, she had no stomach for domestic turmoil. She returned to the penthouse on Via Bertoloni, leaving her twelve-year-old in the hands of her sixty-eight-year-old husband, who cared for him in his fashion until Christopher went off to college in the early seventies.
Terrified of flying and staying clear of Percy, Giselle remained in Rome for the remainder of Christopher’s childhood and Percy’s life as well as he had developed terminal kidney cancer.
Giselle started to visit the United States after Percy’s death at the tail end of the ocean liner era. After sailing to New York on the Leonardo Da Vinci, she’d train south to Washington to check on the three houses that Percy had purchased in the 60s, then down to Charlottesville, the small southern city where I lived with my parents that did not seem to make her feel confined.
She and I would walk the mile or so from our house to downtown where she’d buy costume jewelry at five and dime stories to dole out at charity functions in Rome. And she always purchased several cartons of her beloved Shake and Bake, a crucial ingredient, unavailable in Italy, in the one meal that she cooked for herself.
*
Having visited the apartment on Via Bertoloni so many times now, I can visualize my journey from the airport after Christopher hangs up the phone in his newspaper’s tiny offices off of Piazza Barberini. My first international solo journey at age eighteen.
A bit dazed from lack of sleep, I watch the highway from Fiumicino to central Rome rattle by.
The spin by the Colosseum.
The enormous square with the grandiose monument to the Risorgimento.
Past the trees, dogs, and mothers with strollers in the Villa Borghese.
The taxi drops me off in front of a driveway that leads to the condo development made up of grandiose Art Deco buildings called palazzine that came up in the 1920’s.
It is still morning, but the air is dense with humidity and the heady aroma of early summer flowers.
I drag my bags past the wooded driveway until the sign for palazzine EFGH becomes visible to my right along with an electronic gate and a series of buzzers with names. Winner pops out from all the Italian ones, which include Ettore Scola, the movie director who kept an apartment in palazzina E through the seventies and eighties.
After I ring the bell, the buzzer resounds through the quiet morning, and the driveway gate swings open. It expects a vehicle, but I lurch forward on foot, dragging my bag inside a courtyard surrounded by four palazzine.
Climbing the stairs to the front door of Giselle and Christopher’s building, I see my surname again along with the words PH for penthouse. The Italian term is attico, but the English word was grander.
After being buzzed in, I climb a short flight of stairs to reach a brass cage that holds a tiny elevator just large enough to fit a small family. Once inside, I press PH but nothing happens until I fully close the door, and the elevator swirls slowly upwards like a Ferris wheel, depositing me in front of the apartment in which I’m slated to spend the summer.
Each ensuing journey, the flight, the taxi ride, the walk to the front of the building, the elevator ride has been shorter than the one before it.
After dragging my bag out of the elevator, I pause for a moment in front of the large wooden door to Giselle’s apartment. It slowly opens, and Giselle emerges.
Tentatively, I move towards her. She smiles widely, brushing both my cheeks with her glossy lips.
Once inside her apartment, she instructs me to put my bags down in the foyer and follow her past Christopher’s tiny bedroom to the long galley kitchen where coffee cake and orange juice have been laid out for me.
I’m sure she asks basic questions about my parents and my flight, but we probably did not speak for long as Giselle had a gift for making silence companionable.
After we’ve finished in the kitchen, she takes me farther into the labyrinthian apartment to a formal living room with couches and chairs and a cot made up with sheets and a pillow, my quarters for the summer of 1983.
Approximately a decade earlier, Giselle and I had been walking down Locust Avenue in Charlottesville when her sharp eyes had caught something on the ground, a twenty-dollar bill.
We exchanged conspiratorial glances. The money had fallen from a pocket or wallet, but that wallet and pocket were no longer in sight.
Giselle picked it up. She handed it to me, more money than I had possessed before.
Later, guilty and anxious, a more honorable child than the adult that I later became, I told my mother. And she bestowed her blessing upon me, allowing me to keep it.
*
Approximately six years after my Roman summer with Giselle, I have graduated college and moved to Brooklyn, and the breast cancer that Giselle had secretly gone off to France to have removed has returned. She has moved to Washington with Christopher in the vain hope of superior American medicine.
My boss at a temp job in Manhattan refused to give me a day off for the funeral of a “step-grandmother.”
But my mother drove up to Washington from Charlottesville. Tasked with going through Giselle’s personal effects, she discovered tiny figures of saints, icons, hidden in her bras. They had protected her from the Nazis in Poland, the dangers of wartime Rome, the humiliation of life in confino only to allow her to succumb to disease.
All of her life, she’d hidden her age. When she died, Christopher had no notion of her actual birthday, so her tombstone bears her younger fictional one.
But in June of 1983, her death was a far-off phantom.
I ran errands for her in Parioli, buying uno or due etti, mysterious measurements of prosciutto and mozzarella as well as coffee cakes from the supermarket. For breakfasts and lunches only, as no one cooked all summer.
Almost every evening, Giselle, myself, and occasionally Christopher would stroll down Viale Parioli to their restaurant, La Scala. A large aery space run by a man from Modena with many tables both inside and out. We would eat slowly and quietly amidst cigarette smoke and the occasional rainstorm.
One evening while we were waiting for our table to be made ready, I watched Giselle’s body stiffen in alarm, anticipation.
In the distance, just outside the periphery of the restaurant, stood a mustachioed man in a white summer suit.
“Aspetti qui,” demanded Giselle, forgetting to talk to me in English.
Obediently, I waited while she walked over to the man. They kissed each other chastely and talked for several minutes before she returned, and we were shown to our regular table.
“My former husband,” Giselle informed me, the Albanian crown prince.
*
Before finishing this writing, I wanted to make sure that I had Giselle’s first husband’s name right.
A few days ago, late February 2025 as the world seems to be falling apart, I called Christopher, blind but alive in Giselle’s apartment in Rome. I asked him to confirm the name of Giselle’s first husband. He corrected me, Arslan not Mustapha. And casually added a few details to the Giselle/Arslan story with which I will conclude this writing. It was what Percy and Giselle had told him, and he could not vouch for its accuracy.
Giselle and Arslan had indeed married and lived together but slept platonically in separate beds in the same room.
After Arslan moved out, Giselle met Percy. Giselle was willing to marry Percy, but there remained the problem of her marriage to Arslan.
So Percy traveled to Cairo to the corrupt court of King Farouk the First.
And the king, as was his practice, gave out an Islamic divorce for a fee, thereby dissolving Giselle’s first marriage and paving the way for her second.
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