Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (11 page)

“
That’s okay,” she slid the eggs and bacon onto a plate and placed it before him.

He ate knowing that each bite was a gift.

As he ate, she prepared him two ham-and-cheese sandwiches to go. When he finished his breakfast, she sent him off with the sandwiches and a small bottle of Serafino’s homemade wine for lunch.

One hobo told another. News spread far, and the farmhouse with the “awful nice garden” about a mile east of the railroad tracks became a destination on the hobo circuit. One hobo carved an X into an elm tree at the edge of the property so that others could identify it. The men came one at a time. They arrived on a mid-morning schedule dictated by the daily switching of the train cars on the tracks near the roundhouse. The men were almost always different men. Some of them were fathers, riding the rails from town to town in search of work.

During the summers of the mid-1930s, the men appeared at the fence about twice a week. Over the course of a typical summer, about 25 of them came for breakfast and left with lunch. Usually, the men came to the fence when Serafino was at work.

“
You shouldn’t do this,” Serafino warned Maria. “You never know when a bad one will come along. He could hurt you and the children.”

She kept doing it anyway.

Serafino kept warning her. But he didn’t force her to stop. He couldn’t help but imagine his own father in the faces of the hobos who hopped off the rails.

With Prohibition a thing of the past, Serafino strung his vines of concord grapes unrepentantly in 15 rows that all stretched for nearly 50 feet: from behind the garage all the way to the back property line. In autumn, he harvested the grapes as soon as the rest of the work in the garden—the truly arduous work—was done.

To harvest grapes, he didn’t need to bend over, lift, or yank anything. He simply plopped himself on a stool and proudly plucked the plump clumps of purple. As he sat there, he took the opportunity to admire the beauty of the vines extending along either side of him, to contemplate the elegance and sturdiness of a properly cultivated vineyard. Unlike those forlorn grapes that he had once found growing wild like orphans in the bushes near Lehigh Row, these vines grew the way vines were meant to be grown, spaced just far enough from one another along a common structural framework so that they could all develop strong trunks and yet be near enough so that they could still reach out to one another, intertwine themselves in mutually reinforcing grasps, and together bear much greater weight than any one of them could ever withstand alone, producing the heaviest, juiciest, and sweetest harvests. Serafino never rushed through his grape harvest. Harvesting grapes was never work. Harvesting grapes was the reward.

He poured the fruits of his labors into suitably aging wooden barrels in the basement. He stored the surplus finished product in transparent bottles, not covert olive oil cans. He was once again free to make wine not for the profit but for the love of it.

Maria worried that he loved it too much. Once or twice a year, the two of them argued furiously about his drinking, typically when he came into the house from harvesting grapes and headed directly to his barrels in the basement.

“
Is that all you care about?” she yelled at him from the kitchen.

“
So what if it is!” he yelled back.

Then he slammed the basement door. Moments later, everyone in the house heard him crooning from the cellar, singing his favorite Italian love songs to his wine.

Maria denounced his drinking, but she extolled him as a role model at the same time. “If you want to marry a man,” she advised her daughters, “get him drunk first. If he gets angry, don’t marry him. The
real
man comes out when he’s drunk.” She was grateful to be married to a happy drinker, not a bitter drinker.

“
Things could be a lot worse,” she defended him further. “He doesn’t squander his paycheck. He drinks only what he makes himself.”

She made sure of it. She couldn’t read or write, and she needed her kids to translate for her. But she knew her numbers. He brought his paychecks home to her, and she managed the money.

She also kept him from ruining the house: the electricity, the plumbing, the heating. She knew he couldn’t fix anything like that, no matter how hard he tried. She knew when to call someone else.

She was still the stabilizing force.

But, boy, was he an entertainer.

Those were the days when Serafino regaled the family by dressing up in any new article of clothing that the girls brought home and that could fit him: hats, scarves, brassieres. Once he even tried on a girdle. He strutted and preened in those clothes, imitating his daughters, trying to make them laugh. He tried hardest to make Mafalda laugh, because she was so unhappy that she was still working for the county attorney for nothing. Serafino paraded around the living room, modeling the frilly female fashions while twitching his prodigious handlebar moustache.

The family laughed so hard they cried. Even Mafalda laughed.

Those were also the days when Serafino serenaded Maria with his love songs, just as he had done in their youth in the fields of Farindola. Maria shook her head and shooed him away, dismissing his courtship as nothing but a momentary and worrisome intoxication. But the more she tried to ignore his entreaties, the louder he sang:

Those were also the days when Serafino told his children that the laughter and song never had to end. He never wanted his kids to move far away, but he knew that some of them probably would. They would probably leave home, start families of their own, and perhaps not see each other for years. After all, he and Maria had left Farindola and never returned, having never seen their own parents since. Yet he told his kids, “No matter how far from home you ever roam, we’ll always be together. Always together.”

His words were put to their ultimate test when he received word from Farindola that his mother, Angelade Mergiota Di Gregorio, had died there on August 16, 1936. She was 76. When Serafino read the letter on the porch steps, he cried so hard it scared Ida.

The 11-year-old girl had come upon the scene while foraging through the gooseberry bushes. She saw her father’s shoulders collapsed over in anguish. She froze. She could only imagine the pain of losing her own mother or father. She began to have nightmares of seeing her father in a coffin.

But Serafino continued to reassure his family that they would always be together. Even if some of them were to leave home and to move far, far away, they would never really be far from each other. Ever.

“
Some-a day,” he promised in his undulating English, “we will all have a bigga party upastairs!”

Mafalda was the first to go. She moved to California in 1936 in search of better health and a paying job. The Midwestern winters had battered her. The double pneumonia had nearly killed her. And the perpetually unpaid work at the county courthouse had demoralized her. Serafino and Maria had agreed that the diligent but delicate young woman should go west to the land of those brilliant tangerines.

So she rode the train to Los Angeles at the age of 20. Her bilingual skills helped her find a paying job downtown as an executive secretary at Amerigo Bozzani Motor Car Company, Inc., near what was then Little Italy. She established a beachhead for the Di Gregorios beyond the assembly line at the packinghouse.

Ida was still 11. She had always found Mafalda to be supportive and encouraging despite her own travails and tribulations. But suddenly, Mafalda was gone. Ida had to fend for herself. She wanted to follow her big sister to California as soon as possible but first had to navigate her way through junior high and high school. Mafalda wouldn’t be there to point her in the right direction.

Over the next three years, Ida watched her big sister Bessie follow their bigger sister Leola to the packinghouse, and then Ida watched her next big sister Elsie develop every intention of following Bessie and Leola in turn. Ida would be next in line, but she promised herself to buck that trend. She just wasn’t sure how.

As far as the 14-year-old Ida could see, she could work at the packinghouse for the rest of her life, or she could marry and become a housewife. “There just weren’t many options open to women in those days,” she recollected.

Ida was aware that a few incredibly lucky women became airline stewardesses, teachers, nuns, or secretaries. She dreamed of becoming an airline stewardess, but she didn’t think she had the looks. She didn’t want to become a teacher, because teachers lost their jobs once they married. As a matter of fact, so did airline stewardesses. The prevailing wisdom of the day held that wives should work for their husbands and families at home rather than gallivanting around the world or educating other people’s children. Ida considered becoming a nun, but she assumed that only rich girls became nuns, because only rich girls went to Catholic schools. Of the limited career options she saw available to her, Ida ruled out everything but secretarial work—Mafalda’s line of work. “That kind of work could also get me to California to live with Mafalda.”

For the first time in her life, Ida had a plan of her own.

“
Then I really went to town!” she crowed. She gave up her violin lessons to prepare for her move to California. She taught herself how to type during the summer before the tenth grade. When school began, she typed 50 words per minute on an old clunky typewriter and once hit 70 words per minute, her fingers flying like bumblebees across the keyboard. She was the star, known not only for being fast but also for having the best rhythm. It was as if typing had become her way of playing the piano.

Nothing prepared Ida for the outside world like her best friend through high school, Valletta Huckins. Ida and Valletta took the same typing, shorthand, and other “commercial” courses. They did their homework together in Ida’s bedroom, where Valletta’s eyes turned to tears as Serafino boiled his grapes and raisins in the basement—a sort of salty baptism into the innermost family circle.

Serafino nicknamed Valletta “
Zappett’
,” or “Little Hoe,” because of her sharply protruding two front teeth. She stood five feet tall, weighed 90 pounds, and “never ate enough,” according to Ida. Valletta came from a family that was poor in comparison with the Di Gregorios. They kept trying to feed her.

In the seven years since moving from Lehigh Row into Mason City proper, Ida had never been invited into anyone else’s home. But Valletta’s family told Ida that she could drop by “any ol’ time.” They even invited Ida to spend the night. It was the first time in her 16 years of life that she spent a night away from home.

Ida and Valletta dreamed about goodlooking boys. Ida still thought of herself as the ugly duckling, and Valletta was still the “little hoe” with her buckteeth, but the girls egged each other on nonetheless. They hung out at carefully selected street corners, hoping to run into carefully selected boys. “They didn’t know us from Adam,” Ida laughed. But she had never been so bold.

Nor had Ida ever felt so affirmed by any other friend in town. “Valletta accepted me for what I am,” said Ida. “It didn’t mean anything to her that I was Italian or anything.” Valletta was White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but she didn’t care that Ida was Olive Roman Catholic or had a mostly illiterate immigrant father who made wine in the basement.

Nor had Ida ever met a family like the Huckins family. The parents were divorced, which was odd enough. But they were still friends, which was even odder. One of Valletta’s sisters became pregnant out of wedlock, but the parents didn’t crucify her for it. They sent her away to give birth to the baby, and then they brought her and the baby home and helped to raise him. The family made just one judgment about the baby boy: “He’s cute!” Valletta’s brother found himself attracted to men instead of women. Nobody talked about it much, but nobody pestered him about it, either. The family made just one judgment about the brother: “He’s so goodlookin’!” Ida had never experienced anything like this. She disapproved of divorce, unwed motherhood, and what would later become known as homosexuality, but she admired the way the Huckins family loved one another no matter what.

On the surface, the Huckins family was a mess. They moved from place to place, subsisting wherever the father could find work refurbishing an old house or apartment building. But even though the family could never afford a stable home, everyone in the family—father, mother, brother, sisters—welcomed Ida into their home, wherever it happened to be. They had very little to share, but they had a lot.

“
There was a lot of love in that family,” Ida raised her chin in salute several decades later.

Ida dropped by one evening to visit the Huckins family but was met by a surprising gloom. Mrs. Huckins was upset about something, having just come home from working as a housekeeper for one of the wealthier families in town. Everyone else in the room was trying to console her. “Don’t let her bother you, Momma.”