Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (24 page)

Dad paid off the empty lot. He started negotiating with builders. However, the empty lot itself didn’t have enough equity to convince any savings and loan or insurance company to finance the construction of a new home.

Dad and Mom had only a crumb of additional equity in the house in which they were living. They knew they’d have to cut corners for years before they could build their dream home on the subdivided lot in the shadow of the church.

Dad struggled for promotions or at least big raises at the McCulloch Corporation. Mom clipped coupons and bought day-old hamburger.

A letter arrived from Poland. It was addressed to Dad. But he was out of town, traveling on business. Mom opened the letter. She couldn’t read Polish, but the envelope contained a photograph. It showed the body of Marja Godzisz lying in a crude wooden box, her stomach bloated.

Dad knew that his mother’s health had been declining over the previous decade. He had spoken about her over the phone with his father in Detroit and corresponded with other relatives in Poland.

Dad had communicated directly with Marja very little since 1948, when she received his letter explaining his decision to stay in America. The older and weaker she became, the less she imposed on others to write letters for her.

She once sent Dad a photograph of herself in better health. She still had her fiery eyes in that photo, but they emitted less of a flash and more of a subdued flame. She tilted her head and bit her lower lip. She appeared angry, broken, and defeated.

When he came home from his business trip, Dad read the letter. It explained that his mother had died of a “female illness,” perhaps ovarian cancer, sometime early in 1959. She was either 55 or 56.

Other than sharing the fuzzy details, Dad kept the news to himself.

“
He didn’t talk to me about it at all,” said Mom. He chose to bear the pain alone.

The four grandchildren of Marja Traczykiewicz Godzisz began to display distinct personalities.

Stan unscrewed the doorstops and the knobs around the toilets. He tried to take everything apart. He even tried to find the star in the stone of Mom’s sapphire ring. He took the ring, smashed it with a hammer, and ruined it. He was always the scientist.

Genie hated dolls. She threw them out of her bed. She liked wearing pants, not dresses. She liked walking down the street without her shirt on. If the boys could do it, then so could she. Nobody could convince her otherwise. She was always the feminist.

Geri loved dolls. Her favorite was Bubbles, who went pee-pee. Her second favorite was Fanny the Fallen Angel, who had wings, pink hair, and a green dress. Her third favorite was a ballerina with a blue tutu. Geri loved to get dolled up herself with a blue dress, red purse, and matching red shoes. Even before entering kindergarten, she knew that the outfit accentuated her rosy red cheeks, pointy white chin, and curly black hair. Among the kids, only Geri had the kind of hair that twirled higher toward heaven the longer it grew and that held together in one intact and interlocked crown, as opposed to falling haphazardly all over the place and running wild every which way. Geri knew that she was the only one in the family whom God had blessed with naturally curly hair. She was always the girly girl.

Joe rarely talked. He watched. From his high chair, the two-year-old toddler stared a hole through Mom and kind of gave her the creeps. He studied her every move and motivation. He was always the strategist.

The kids played with lots of other kids on the block, but few things were as entertaining for the neighborhood kids as watching Mom cook. Cooking was a thing of joy for her. She sang, whistled, and clicked the tip of her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she prepped the kitchen and staged her performances, eager for the young audiences to participate in her productions. Popcorn balls. Caramel apples. Rocky road candy. Fudge. Cupcakes. Cookies. Always more than her own kids could ever eat. When Mom cooked, she cooked for the whole neighborhood.

Mom played to older audiences as well, luring in teenagers and other moms, along with the younger kids, to behold the most captivating performance of them all: the baking of the bread. “It was just plain old bread,” she claimed, made of nothing but flour, water, yeast, and a bit of sugar. “It was like pizza dough at the start.” But it was like nothing else at the end.

She choreographed dances of bread molds, bread tins, and bread pans. She baked six loaves at a time, each loaf swelling soft and white on the inside but turning crusty and brown on the outside. As six loaves rose in the oven, she joked around and kneaded another half-dozen globs of dough with her big Farindola hands. The yeasty aroma, faintly sweet, wafted beyond the house, filling the lungs of the neighborhood and pulling in the people with its pungent warmth. The performance hit its climax when Mom sliced open a newly baked loaf, reeled back momentarily to let the steam rise high above her head, and then slapped a slab of cold butter onto the hot fluffy pillow below so that the creamy sweetness baked right into the bread. And that’s what the kids bit into. Heaven.

Most anything could trigger her spurts of culinary energy: a food tip from Iowa, a new recipe, or an intuitive need to refresh her skills on an old one. She went into cookie mode for days at a time. On those days, it was her mission to deliver chocolate chip, peanut butter, oatmeal, coconut, or “anisette” cookies to relatives, neighbors, and friends. She used the term “anisette” to describe her anise-flavored biscotti, because no true-blue American in those days knew what a biscotti was or how to pronounce it. She dazzled the kids with her pizzelle, another Italian cookie oddity that was flatter than a pancake, five or six inches in diameter, and pressed into a snowflake pattern by a waffle iron. When she burned out on cookies, she took a few days off to make simple feasts of meat loaves, tuna casseroles, or scalloped ham and potatoes. Then another energy spurt produced surplus supplies of pizzas, enchiladas, or Rice Krispy chickens.

At her most ambitious, she pounded egg-filled lumps of dough and flattened them with a rolling pin on flour-coated cutting boards. She cranked little rectangles of the dough through a mechanical pasta machine, just like her mother had taught her, and churned out egg-noodle spaghetti, fettuccini, and lasagna so velvety that they melted in your mouth and slid down your throat before you realized how much you’d eaten.

In honor of Dad, she expanded her repertoire to include Polish delights: sheetfuls of pierogies, platefuls of potato pancakes, panfuls of golabkis, and freezerfulls of
kruszcikis
, which were crunchy, bow-tie cookies of twisted, fried dough sprinkled with powdered sugar. On Fridays during Lent, she experimented with such abstemious meals as chocolate chip pancakes, cheese enchiladas, and chop suey. So much for fasting.

Rainy days were popcorn weather. Her popcorn balls were the size of softballs. She dyed the connective tissue of melted marshmallows orange for Halloween, green for Christmas, and red for Valentine’s Day.

No one could stop her once she started on a cooking binge. No one wanted to.

Food never got thrown out. Not in her house. That would have been a sin. She served generous portions, but she was never profligate. She taught us kids always to ask for seconds but never to leave food on the plate. Once we ate every scrap of food on our plates, we learned the true purpose of bread: to scoop up any remaining, precious sauce. Mom showed us how to wipe the bread in enormous swirls all around the plate to mop up the good stuff. If there still happened to be any saucy residue left on the plate after the bread was all gone, then there was only one thing left to do. “Lift the plate to your face, and lick it clean till it shines!” Mom demonstrated the technique. Food was simply too glorious a gift to take for granted.

While Dad traveled on business, Mom had the time of her life feeding her kids and the neighborhood kids. It was as if she were reliving her childhood all over again, except the second time around was even better. She could play with the kids on Calle de Ricardo like she had once played with the kids on Lehigh Row, but there was no fear of going hungry among any of the G.I. kids. There were simply more goodies to go around.

“
Seeing you kids grow up was the most fun of my life,” she said years later. “Helping you. Dressing you. Making spaghetti and cookies. Hosting pizza parties for you and your friends. I loved it. The day wasn’t long enough. It was all fun.”

“
You should start your own restaurant,” the neighbors told Mom at the time.

She thanked them for the compliments but never took the idea seriously. For her, the cookies, pizzas, lasagnas, pierogies, golabkis, and popcorn balls were labors of love. As much as she enjoyed cooking those things, she enjoyed giving them away. Turning that source of joy into a monetary exchange would have robbed her of her motivation.

“
Besides,” she clucked to the neighbors, “this way, I don’t have to worry about getting gifts for everyone at Christmas. Christmas is every day!”

The tight-knit community around Calle de Ricardo was one of adults as well as children. The other moms, in particular, took care of Mom and her kids just as she took care of them and their kids. When Mom gave birth to Mary Jo in June 1959, the neighborhood moms showered our home with casseroles, salads, and desserts.

Mom was part of a large community of stay-at-home moms who met sporadically, but routinely, for coffee. The block around Calle de Ricardo contained about 50 homes with nearly 200 kids. The only husband and wife on the block who didn’t have kids at home were an elderly couple across the street, but even their grown son lived down the street with a wife and kids of their own. When the dads of the neighborhood left for work in the mornings, the squads of moms reached out to one another and their kids.

Serendipitously, Mom had combined the best of Lehigh Row with the best of the rest of her hometown in a way that she had never dreamed possible. Everyone on the G.I. Row that was Calle de Ricardo was in the same boat, and all the moms stuck together and looked after everyone else. At the same time, nobody in the neighborhood fussed about economic status, because everyone belonged to an expanding middle class in which all boats were rising together. G.I. Row blended community with upward economic mobility.

For the multitudinous kids in that neighborhood, G.I. Row might have been a world produced and protected by platoons of dads, but it was unquestionably a world managed and maintained by teams of moms. The kids knew that all the moms kept tabs on all the kids. It was as if each kid had not just one mom but a dozen moms and as if each mom had not just a handful of kids but scores of kids.

“
We knew how much we were loved,” said Genie. “We had our needs met. We felt very safe. We had our fortress, but we could also leave the fortress and invite others in.” She could walk down the hill to the park or up the hill to her piano lessons and not be afraid, because the kids of the neighborhood felt safe around each other’s moms.

“
Thanks to the community of moms on that block,” said Genie, “the whole neighborhood felt like a safe and secure cocoon.”

If the home front on the hill was the fortress, the Catholic grade school at the bottom of the hill was the boot camp for spiritual battle. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Saint Lawrence Martyr Elementary School operated under a strict regimentation. Founded by a hard-nosed Irish immigrant priest, controlled by a phalanx of resolute nuns, and reinforced with a cadre of loyal lay teachers, the school educated its masses of children with remarkable efficiency, according to Stan and Genie.

On the first day of school, more than 70 first-graders in their uniforms squeezed into each of the two first-grade classrooms. Because each classroom occupied 840 square feet of floor space, each of the 70 first-graders in each classroom could have been allotted a maximum of 12 square feet of space for a desk plus the room around the desk. Of course, the teacher needed to occupy a big chunk of territory at the front of the classroom. That would leave about 10 square feet per child, including the desk and aisle space. Somehow those nuns and lay teachers managed to single-handedly instruct 70 kids at a time in the confined quarters day after day.

The overburdened nuns of that era scored higher marks for effectiveness and efficiency than for warmth and sensitivity. “They weren’t cruel people, but they had a job to do, and they were determined to do it,” said Genie.

Their mission: to create soldiers of God. Their objective: to equip the soldiers of God with a solid Catholic education. Their strategy: to cram as much solid Catholic education as possible into as many kids as could cram into those classrooms—and to keep order. The nuns executed their strategy with a demeanor as crisp and unyielding as the stiff white wimples that covered their ears, necks, and foreheads.

Before class started each morning, the students lined up single file to march into the classroom. Talking in class was strictly forbidden. Handwriting inspections were common. Tests were constant. “There was little room for individuality,” said Genie.

There was also little chance that any student could fall behind. Every student advanced at the same slightly accelerated pace. If any student had trouble keeping pace, after-school detention allowed the student to catch up.

The nuns ruled their overpopulated domain with an unbending egalitarianism. The girls played in just as many organized athletic teams and with just as much athletic equipment as the boys. “Nobody received special treatment,” said Stan. The nuns weren’t there to answer random questions or to take any grief. They had no time for that. Expectations were clearly spelled out, and the armies of students complied. They hit the books; they drilled the multiplication tables; they memorized the Baltimore Catechism.