Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (6 page)

It was the most triumphant day of all for the Di Gregorio family on Lehigh Row. It was the birthday of a son, Raffaello, on November 11, 1918. It was the day that World War I ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. And here was the first Di Gregorio son, born on the first day of peace following “the war to end all wars.” On the day in which America had given birth to a new world, the Di Gregorios had given birth to a healthy new American boy, the grandson of Nicola. All earth, heaven, and history seemed to usher in a beautiful new age with this beautiful new son.

Serafino shared his vigorous yet smooth wine with the neighbors to toast the victory in Europe, to toast their new life in America, and to toast the destiny of the American-born son. For Serafino and Maria, all of their agonizing choices in the past, all of their enervating efforts in the present, and all of their ardent hopes for the future seemed to be validated on that glorious day.

“
A-me-ri-ca!” Serafino strode from house to house, pouring his wine into the cups of his mutually adopted fellow countrymen. “A-me-ri-ca!” he cheered them on. “She is a BYOO-tiful country! Made more BYOO-tiful by my brand new American baby boy!”

The neighbors spilled out of their homes, assembled on one another’s front porches, and congregated in the gravel lanes between the rows of homes.

“
A-me-ri-ca! She is the most BYOO-tiful country in the world!” Serafino crowed repeatedly.

The neighbors nodded and drank his wine repeatedly.

Within a few days, Maria regained enough of her stamina to resume nursing, an activity that had become almost routine for her over the previous four years. Her afternoon interlude with Raffaello was interrupted, however, by a soft, barely audible knock on the door. When Maria opened the door, she beheld a wisp of a woman: an enfeebled young mother hardly capable of holding the hungry, crying infant in her arms.

“
Spanish flu?” Maria inquired, eliciting a somber nod from the neighbor. The two women couldn’t speak the same language much beyond those universally dreaded words. So Maria pointed to the babe in the woman’s arms and then pointed to her own breast, looking the other mother in the eyes, nodding and smiling.

No spoken words could have expressed the gratitude of this ailing mother any better than her faint cry of surprise and her widened, enthusiastic eyes. She handed her child over to Maria, wiped away a tear, and tottered home.

A nationwide terror of the Spanish flu had scared some people from caring for others. But once Maria recovered from her own bout with the illness, she nursed the babes of other stricken moms in the neighborhood for the remainder of the epidemic. “There’s no use letting my milk go to waste,” she told those who could understand her. For Maria, nursing someone else’s child was a privilege, not a sacrifice.

By February 1919, the Spanish flu had run its course through the states of the upper Midwest. Lehigh Row could resume its customary pattern of population growth.

Maria delivered two more girls into the hands of Serafino. Bice arrived in 1920. She was named for her Aunt Bice Baccanale, who had died earlier that year in Farindola as a young girl. Algisa arrived in 1923. From 1914 to 1923, Lehigh Row had given birth to six Di Gregorios: Ida, Mafalda, Leonata, Raffaello, Bice, and Algisa.

At the quarry during those years, Serafino was in his prime. He had steady work every day. Even during winter. His was a predictable yet thrilling routine. Operating a tractor, he dug away nine to ten feet of black dirt before hitting solid rock. He and the other men then poured water into the excavated hole and maneuvered an enormous electric drill into place to bore 60 feet down into the bedrock for the placement of dynamite. Once the drill had been chiseled down into the earth, the men inserted a tube to suck the water back out of the hole. Upon removing the drill and tube from the deep cavity, the men lowered the dynamite into the dark, dry place. And as soon as they lit the fuse, they got the hell out of the way. When the kids on Lehigh Row heard the whistle scream, they knew their dads were about to blow up something that would later become cement. Each blast left behind a 60-foot cliff overlooking a hole in the ground with rocks strewn everywhere. Serafino drilled five or six holes a day and carted away the rocky riches in his tractor. He never learned how to drive a car, but he was the master of his tractor in the quarry.

He spread the word back to Farindola. Others followed, beginning with his brothers, Antonio and Gaetano; his sister Mariacarma; and his brother-in-law Francesco Baccanale. News about the jobs traveled fast, and the Di Gregorio home of 30 Lehigh Row became a settlement house for men from Farindola and other nearby villages. Several of the men lived for months with the Di Gregorios as boarders until they found other places of their own on Lehigh Row, leaving room for further newcomers at 30 Lehigh Row. That helps to explain how Lehigh Row became the first American home for a long line of immigrant families from one small corner of Abruzzi: the Ammazzalorsos, Barbarossas, Cardarellis, Cirones, Colantonis, Di Luccos, Di Marcos, Magnanis, Maranos, Marrones, Napoletanos, Nardicchios, Puccellas, Scalabronis, and Tatones as well as the Baccanales and Di Gregorios. Serafino begged his aging mother to come join them all on Lehigh Row, but she was already too frail to endure the arduous journey down from the hills.

Serafino, Maria, and the babies slept in the bedroom downstairs. The upstairs became a dorm room for the older kids and the boarders. The older girls slept on one side of the staircase. Raffaello and the boarders slept on the other.

The boarders were a cast of characters. The most memorable were Uncle Tony, who made and played violins and mandolins; Uncle Gaetano, who couldn’t find enough pretty women in Iowa and so moved back to Italy; Uncle Joe, who wasn’t really related to anyone; and Red Pete, a gambler and a fighter who ran with a rough crowd. Red Pete had earned his nickname for having red hair and green eyes and for being suspiciously pale.

There was one big piss pot upstairs for everybody. That way, nobody had to venture out into the freezing cold in the middle of the night during winter or any other season to use the outhouse. Instead, everybody used the piss pot. It was made of white enamel, shaped like a bucket, and equipped with a lid. Everybody in the house did everything in that pot. Each morning, somebody had to carry the brimming pot down the stairs and dump it into the outhouse. Nobody ever wanted that job, but everybody took turns doing it. After all, everybody was in that pot together.

Maria mastered the economics of Lehigh Row. The cement company paid the workers $10 a week and charged $8 a month rent for each home, regardless of the number of people living in it. Therefore, renting beds to boarders became a valuable way for families to supplement their incomes.

Maria’s boarders paid her half their wages—$5 a week—for full room and board. That included a bed, hand-washed laundry every day, and three homemade meals a day.

For laundry, Maria pumped the water from the earth. She lugged the pails inside and boiled the water on the stove. She scrubbed the men’s work clothes on washboards and sterilized the garments in the boiling water. She hung the clean laundry on clotheslines strung inside or outside the house, depending on the weather.

For meals, Maria served the men more than they thought they could eat. “You better finish everything,” she warned them every night, “or else I’ll have to throw away the leftovers!” The men could have rented beds elsewhere on Lehigh Row, but they gravitated toward Maria’s munificent meals.

She calculated the tantalizing implications in her head. Typically, there were four boarders at a time, meaning that she collected $20 a week—twice as much as Serafino brought home in his paycheck. If she could save at least half the money after deducting for the costs of coal, soap, breakfasts, sack lunches, and dinners for the boarders, then she could at least double the household income of $10 a week. At that rate, she could save the astounding sum of a thousand dollars every two years. Money for the electric flour mill in Farindola. Money for an emergency on Lehigh Row. “Maybe someday,” she dreamed, “we could buy our own home.”

Maria did not deposit her savings in a bank account. She put most of the savings in a cigar box. She hid the cigar box behind a pile of pillows that stuffed the opening of an otherwise unusable chimney in her bedroom. To reduce the risk of storing all her money in one place, she wedged some of the $5 bills into the tight coils of the metal spring beneath her mattress.

In November 1923, the oldest child, Ida, was the budding beauty of Lehigh Row. She was only nine years old, but she already displayed the pensive yearning eyes, the tumbling russet curls, and the carved cresting lips of a Botticelli goddess. She carried her rouge with her wherever she went.

On the morning of November 16, she gathered with the almost eight-year-old Mafalda and the six-year-old Leonata in the big room downstairs before leaving for school. Mafalda and Leonata were ready to go, but Ida was idling. She seemed to be distracted by something. She hadn’t put her shoes on yet.

She walked languidly around the staircase toward the bedroom, where Maria was juggling the five-year-old Raffaello and the three-year-old Bice. By that hour of the morning, Serafino and the boarders had already gone to work.

“
Mama,” Ida called, “I don’t want to go to school today. I want to stay here with you. Because I won’t be here tomorrow.”

“
Don’t talk crazy like that!” Maria waved her off.

Ida just stood in the doorway, her eyes fixed on her mother.

“
Hurry up,” Maria told her. “Put your shoes on. Don’t be late.” Maria was already planning ahead for dinner and dessert. “Raffaello, bring me the sugar from the cabinet.”

Ida and Raffaello walked together into the big room. Ida sat down on the wooden floor to put on her shoes, positioning herself beside the nine-month-old Algisa, who lay in a blanket on the floor.

Raffaello shuffled toward the rickety cabinet at the back of the room. He was five years and five days old. He noticed something glinting from the top of the cabinet, which nearly touched the ceiling. He completely forgot about the sugar.

Lured by the shiny object, he pulled a chair over to the cabinet. He stepped on to the seat of the chair and climbed on to the flat surface atop the cabinet drawers about four feet off the ground. The upper shelves were now at his eye level. The glimmering object still beckoned from above. He reached for it, causing the cabinet to wobble. He almost fell.

“
You get down from there!” his big sister Ida demanded as she laced her shoes.

He reached for the object again, pressing his body up against the shelves. This time, he grabbed it. It was a gun that had been hidden there by Red Pete.

“
Put that down right now!” Ida insisted.

Raffaello thought the gun was a toy. He just wanted to pull the tab. He fumbled with the heavy object, struggling to hold it in his clumsy hands.

A gunshot rang through the house.

Mafalda and Leonata screamed. Algisa cried.

Maria rushed into the room. She saw Ida crumpled on the floor in a growing pool of blood, Mafalda and Leonata hysterical on either side of her, Raffaello standing stunned atop the cabinet drawers, and the gun lying on the floor beneath him.

“
Ida!” Maria ran to her daughter and cradled her, rocking her limp body. “Ida!”

Maria then ran to the neighbors for help.

A teenage girl from Farindola rushed over with a broom to sweep up the blood.

The news spread swiftly around Lehigh Row.

Serafino came straight home from work.

None of the Di Gregorios went to school that day.

Ida was buried with her rouge.

Maria and Serafino blamed themselves.

“
Why didn’t I listen to her?” Maria cried. “She was trying to tell me something. She knew. How did she know? Why didn’t I listen?”

“
It’s my fault,” Serafino sobbed. “I never should’ve let a man like that live here. I should’ve known better. It’s my fault.”

No guns were allowed in the Di Gregorio home after the accident, but the damage had been done in more ways than one. The accidental firing of the gun tore away at more than just the Di Gregorio family and their circle of boarders. The accidental firing of the gun tore away at the fabric of the entire community. People reacted to the freak accident in freakish ways.

The mother of the teenage girl from Farindola snapped at Maria: “You didn’t have to get blood on my broom!”

Some of the kids from Lehigh Row taunted the Di Gregorio girls: “Your brother killed your sister! Your brother killed your sister!”

Some of the kids taunted Raffaello, too. “Look!” they pointed at him. “The little murderer!”

Leonata promptly beat them up, each punch of a heartless neighbor an outlet of her own grief.

The tragedy was the type of thing for which none of the families on Lehigh Row could have been prepared. Adults and children alike behaved bizarrely, as if all their fundamental assumptions about one another and about life in America had been suddenly stripped away, leaving the immigrant families with only shock and horror.

The Di Gregorios learned to avoid talking about certain things outside the home. They learned that some things were too painful to talk about at all. They rarely mentioned Ida’s death. When they did, they referred to it only as “the accident.”