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

Ida called Mafalda. “Gosh, it would be nice if Valletta could come live with us.”

“
Oh, okay,” said Mafalda. “A friend like her could be just the thing you need.”

All three ladies lived in a one-bedroom bungalow at 1345 1/4 West 4th Street in downtown Los Angeles on property that has since become home to a skyscraper. Valletta found a job near Ida and rode with her on the yellow streetcar to work and back.

When the war ended in August 1945, Ralph came home from his tours of duty in Oregon, Oahu, Saipan, Okinawa, and Korea. He returned to Mason City for five days.

“
All that was there was a packinghouse and two cement plants,” he said. “Noooo waaaaay!”

He bid his folks goodbye, hopped a train to Los Angeles, and moved in with the three ladies in their bungalow. He slept in the Murphy bed in the front room. Mafalda and Ida slept in the bed in the bedroom. Valletta slept in a cot next to Mafalda and Ida. The four of them shared one closet.

Ralph snagged a union job at a brewery in Vernon, just southeast of downtown Los Angeles. He scrubbed the insides of 100-barrel vats of beer that were about 10 feet high and 12 feet in diameter. He made a good living immersing himself in the kind of work that had once gotten his father into trouble with a federal law.

“
You have-a the job
I
should’ve-a had,” Serafino chortled to Ralph over the telephone.

As a veteran, Ralph qualified to purchase one of the new tract homes being built for G.I.’s and their families in a bean field near the Los Angeles airport. The homes came in two models: $8,500 for two bedrooms and $9,700 for three bedrooms.

Serafino sent some money so that Ralph could make a down payment on the larger model and have everyone move in. “Always stay together,” Serafino told his son.

The house, at 6835 Will Rogers Street, stood at the western tip of a neighborhood that has long since been swallowed up by the flight path of the airport. Ralph, Mafalda, Ida, and Valletta moved from their one-bedroom bungalow to their three-bedroom house in 1947. Ida and Valletta shared a room.

Joseph Godzisz completed his convalescence at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital in August 1945 and returned to Detroit. He was a 21-year-old veteran of war, but he still hadn’t completed the tenth grade.

Rather than moving in with his father’s family, Joseph rented a room. He took night classes at Hamtramck High School while working a day job at an automobile plant. He finished the remaining two and a half years of high school in a year of night school.

With financial support from the G.I. Bill, Joseph enrolled at the Jesuit-run University of Detroit as a freshman in the fall of 1946. He was 22.

He continued to write letters to his mother in Poland. He wrote the letters in Polish, her neighbors read her the letters, and she responded with letters transcribed by the same neighbors. Often, the neighbors misread, misinterpreted, or misrepresented information in one or both directions. In some cases, Joseph and Marja needed to write additional letters to each other just to clarify their originally intended meanings.

But one message kept coming through loud and clear to Joseph throughout his first year of college: Marja wanted him to return home to Poland for good. “I’ve saved everything for you,” she wrote. “The land. The house. The farm. The animals. I have not squandered or sold anything.” She clung to the hope of being reunited with him.

One could only imagine the swirl of emotions that Joseph must have suffered as his mother pleaded for his return—the mother he had chosen to leave behind in Poland when he was 11, the mother whose agony he had witnessed upon the death of her older son, the mother whose anguish must have only intensified upon Joseph’s own abrupt departure and unbidden farewell. Michal had given Joseph the choice and the responsibility. How could Joseph not have felt some pang of guilt, even if his responsibility for the departure was truly negligible? And which of his parents could he trust more? The father who had lured him to America under false pretenses? Or the mother who had rejected his father with the letters that Joseph transcribed for her?

Her entreaties forced Joseph to choose once again between two parents and two countries. It was 1947. The Iron Curtain had fallen. From an American perspective, Poland was officially an enemy, “ensnared in the clutches of atheistic Soviet Communism,” as Joseph put it. Nonetheless, the vast majority of Polish farmland still remained in private hands, owing to the fierce resistance of Polish farmers to surrender their property. If Joseph wanted his property, he could have it.

In Detroit, meanwhile, Michal recounted bitter tales about the land in Poland as soon as he heard Joseph mention the offer of land from Marja. “People who had more land looked down upon people like me,” Michal warned Joseph, speaking in Polish.

Michal then disclosed painful details of the arguments between himself and Marja. “She looked down upon me, too,” he groused. “She inherited more land than I ever would. She could never let go of it. Not for nothing. If it weren’t for her damned land,” he almost choked on the word, “she would’ve come with me to America!”

That hit home for Joseph, like a gut punch knocking the wind out of him. Even if the statement were false, it explained things that had never been explained to Joseph before. Apparently, his mother had placed property over family. Apparently, it had been more important for her to squat on her farm in Poland than to offer him a better life in America. Apparently, she had cared more for the land than for him. The implications of his father’s words were too terrifying to contemplate, but the blow had left its bruise.

Joseph chose to believe his father and learned to resent his mother. “Had my mother come from a poorer family,” he said, “maybe she would’ve been more willing to come to the United States in 1933. Perhaps she had it too good.” He came to blame his mother for the divorce and for the hardship that he had endured in America without her.

Michal had triumphed once again. Marja had been silenced once again.

Joseph was no longer an 11-year-old runaway whose flight from Poland in 1935 could be dismissed as a misguided whim or the product of adult manipulation. By the end of 1947, he was a 23-year-old combat veteran. It was time for him to make an adult decision and to stick with it. His explanation would have to be crystal clear, or else the neighbors in Poland would surely misconstrue his words.

He typed a single-spaced, two-page letter informing his mother of his decision. The basis for his decision was the value that he ascribed to inherited property.

He had experienced two completely different approaches to property: one in Poland and one in America. In the old country, he believed, rich and poor were fated at birth. In America, he believed, people were not born into wealth, at least not as a general rule. In Europe, the inheritance of riches had produced miserable societies irrevocably split between the aristocracy and the peasantry. In America, even a poor kid like himself could improve his lot in life with opportunities like the Civilian Conservation Corps, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the G.I. Bill. In Poland, people judged you by what your parents had left you. In America, people judged you by what you made of yourself. Joseph viewed communist Poland as the land of elitist excess and capitalist America as the land of egalitarian restraint. And in a desperate leap of logic propelled by a lifetime caught in the middle, he turned his mother into a symbol of everything he wanted to leave behind.

He wrote her a New Year’s Eve letter on December 31, 1947. It was not warm or celebratory. It was angry and indignant. He tried not to point the finger of blame, but his sentiments were hard to conceal. In choosing America, he rejected his mother. He didn’t mince words.

Before he sent the letter, Joseph typed an extra copy of it for himself and saved it, unlike his other letters, for posterity. The letter was his personal declaration of independence. But it was more bitter than sweet. It was his way of saying goodbye.

He also used the letter to inform his mother that he was planning to transfer to Loyola University of Los Angeles, another Jesuit school, for his final two years of college. His wounded sinuses could no longer tolerate the damp Detroit climate. “Therefore, Mama, I am planning to live in the Los Angeles area permanently.”

He bought a used 1942 Plymouth in the summer of 1948 and drove west. He rented a room near the Loyola University campus in a neighborhood called Westchester, a neighborhood that was adjacent to the Los Angeles airport.

With his family shredded, with his closest tie to his homeland all-but severed, with his notions of decency and honor twisted beyond recognition by the tug-of-war claims of his parents, and with his own string of logic stretched to the breaking point as a consequence, Joseph began taking classes at Loyola University in the fall of 1948. At that university, he discovered a systematic codification of his nascent moral principles in the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican friar and medieval philosopher. For Joseph, who had searched for so long to find a reliable moral road map, the philosophy of Saint Thomas plotted the signposts to an all-encompassing ethical universe.

Joseph sat attentively in philosophy class as a Jesuit professor reviewed one of the core teachings of Saint Thomas. The teaching was the “Treatise on Law,” an essay that has undergirded Roman Catholic doctrine since the 13th century. “The Treatise on Law,” the professor began, “outlines the interconnectedness of God, nature, humanity, and society. Allow me to summarize how Thomas makes the connections. I suggest you take notes.”

Joseph knew that was a sure clue that he would be tested on this material. He took pen to paper.

The professor approached the chalkboard. “First,” he began, “there is an eternal law.” He scrawled ETERNAL LAW in big letters on the chalkboard. He then turned to face the men in the class. “The eternal law is the idea by which God, with a superior intellect, governs all creation. Simply put, the eternal law is the will of God.”

“
Easy meat,” nodded Joseph, jotting it down.

“
Second, there is NATURAL LAW,” the professor scratched two more words onto the chalkboard. “Natural law emanates from the eternal law, because the eternal law is imprinted on everything in nature.” He paused. “When creatures act according to their unique natures, they also act in accordance with the eternal law. The natural law for each type of creature is thus a partial reflection of the eternal law for all creation.”

“
Neat,” Joseph followed. “Like subsets of a universal set.”

“
Third, there is a distinct NATURAL LAW FOR HUMANS,” the professor grew more animated in both writing and speaking. “It is the unique nature of humans to reason and to exercise free will. Unlike plants and animals, humans choose between right and wrong. Therefore, the natural law for humans is to
participate with God
in governing the world by using human reason to discern the difference between right and wrong.”