The Supreme Macaroni Company (17 page)

“How about China?” Alfred wondered.

“We’d be starting from scratch,” Bret said.

“We’re going to be starting from scratch no matter what,” I told them. “But you know, this is an Italian company. It started with our great-grandparents in Italy, and they came over here and built this business. I feel we should try to stay close to their vision. We could go anywhere we want in the world, but why would we if we could make the shoes here or in Italy? I know it might not be possible, but I’d like to try.”

“I hear you, Val,” Bret said. “But we have to think about cost.”

“And you need an experienced workforce,” Alfred offered. “Your shoes are not always simple. We need excellent machine operators who can also do any extra hand work. You designed a line with lots of embellishments—and one shoe with a tricky ankle strap with buckles. It’s going to take some time on the line to build it.”

“Valentina has worked with some factories in Naples that make the embellishments. We might be able to order the straps from them directly. That will save production time.”

“Would you look into that for us, Gianluca?” Alfred asked.

“Of course.”

“What about America?”

“What about it?” Alfred asked me.

“Is there a factory that makes shoes in the United States?”

“Sure, there are a few left. But they make men’s shoes, and they have lug soles, and they use glue,” Alfred said.

“Why don’t we put up our own factory?” I asked. “People need jobs, and we need somebody to make our shoes.”

“You’d have to cut a special deal on real estate, and you’d have to train the workforce.”

“So we train them.” I looked at Gianluca.

“We can’t afford to put up a factory in Manhattan. I already talked to a guy in Brooklyn who used to make shoes for Kenneth Cole. Those factories went to China.”

“We’re not mass producing,” I reminded them.

“Not yet.” Bret smiled.

“How about Jersey?” Alfred asked.

“Expensive. Their real estate is high. And you’re taxed up the wazoo.”

“What about Youngstown?” Alfred wondered.

“Why would we go to the midwest?” I asked him.

“I was talking with Cousin Don. He is always on the lookout for new business opportunities. They have a workforce there that is familiar with piece-good construction. They had a couple of garment mills there.”

“Where is Youngstown, exactly?” Bret asked.

“It’s about six hundred miles away—halfway between New York and Chicago. It’s the town that ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini came from. Made it famous,” Alfred explained.

“It’s close to Pittsburgh.”

“So you’re near a major airport.”

“It’s worth a look,” Bret said. “If it makes financial sense.”

“I
haven’t been on a road trip since 1979,” my father said as he loaded his suitcase into the trunk of his car. “University of Michigan versus the University of Ohio. Lansing campus. It was a real head-knocker.”

Dad handed me a separate Mylar bag filled with snap-lid containers of cookies, biscotti, ham and butter panini, and for good health, crudités, carrots and celery.

I put the bag of food on the backseat. “You know we can stop to eat along the way. This isn’t 1812, when 7-Elevens didn’t exist.”

Dad lifted a giant cooler and placed it in the trunk.

“That cooler isn’t for you. It’s sausage from Faicco’s on Bleecker Street. Don has a yen for it.”

My mother came running down the sidewalk in front of her compact Tudor, the house I grew up in, wearing the exact color palette of the cross-timber trim: strictly black and white. She carried a bag of tarelles.

“Really, Ma?”

“They never go bad.”

“But no one eats them.”

“Then it’s good for them that they never go bad.”

Mom was wearing her housekeeping ensemble: black slacks, a crisp white T-shirt, gold hoop earrings, and a black-and-white bandana in her hair. She wore her “knock-around” shoes, brushed black suede mules with a kitten heel.

It occurred to me that I’d never seen my mother without her lipstick, including two weeks in 1988 when she had the swine flu. She is of another era when women dressed before leaving the house. There was never a dirty dish in her sink or a dead flower in her vase. She may be old fashioned but she lives to be mod and in the moment. The result of having grown up with a camera-ready mother is that I always think something is about to happen, even when it isn’t.

“What are you going to do while we’re in Youngstown?” I asked Mom.

“I don’t know. Watch some movies. Light the gardenia candles, because they make your father sneeze and I happen to love them. I’ll probably call some girlfriends and take a ride to the Short Hills Mall. I don’t know. I’ll fill up the hours.”

I gave my mother a kiss. “Have fun without him.”

“Not a difficult assignment,” she said. “Did you pack a business suit?”

“For Gianluca?”

“For you.”

“Ma, it’s Cousin Don.”

“You should be your professional best, even if you played Trotta Trotta Cava-lee with Don when you were five.”

“There will be no bouncing on the knee. We’re looking for a factory, Mom. It’s not like I’m having a meeting at Bergdorf’s. I’ll look good enough for Ohio. I promise.”

Gianluca came out of the house with a couple bottles of water. He handed them to me. “Thanks, honey.” I gave him a quick kiss.

Dad was already in the front seat with his seat belt fastened. “Come on, G. L. You’re driving the first leg. I’ll take over in Pennsylvania.”

The last thing we heard as we pulled out of Queens was the gentle hum of the front passenger seat as my father put it in recline. He pulled the brim of his baseball cap over his eyes and promptly fell asleep.

T
he hills of Pennsylvania gave way to the low, rolling flats of Ohio on Route 65. The first buds of spring turned the gray landscape into a green pointillist painting. The sky, wide and blue, had no edges. It extended as far as my eye could see.

Along the highway, we saw the abandoned steel mills obscured by overgrown brush, looking like lost toys in high weeds. I remembered when the rust belt was in full operation. I had cousins who worked in the steel mills and the auto plants on school breaks. Their fathers retired with pensions and dreams of travel beyond these fields. A few lived long enough to enjoy those years, but most weren’t so lucky. The plants closed before retirement and pension plans dried up. There was a mad scramble to make a living.

The work began to dwindle in earnest when I was growing up.

And just as Don Pipino had moved west to work in Youngstown in the 1950s, now my generation did the same, moving in the opposite direction, away from steel towns like Bethlehem and Allentown and on to opportunities in Chicago and Atlanta and Charlotte. Italian Americans who had never been south of DC were suddenly moving to places like Georgia and Tennessee and Florida to find work.

The manufacturing jobs in the small towns where they were born were gone. It was time to look for other ways to make a living in new places. Cousins my age went to college and came out and went into computer programming, pharmaceutical sales, and teaching. This new reality left us with the conundrum of building our own families away from our family of origin. The drive to Youngstown had me thinking about my brother and sisters, our family and our future. We had made a full circle, locking arms at work, just as our great-grandfather and his brother had at the turn of the last century.

O
nce we arrived in Youngstown, we followed the directions Don had e-mailed us. We found Bears Den Road with the help of the GPS, and turned off the main highway onto a dirt road.

I called Cousin Don’s cell and told him we were moments away.

In the distance, through a clearing of trees, we saw a large rectangular box building with dull gray aluminum siding. There was a row of windows along the main floor and a double entrance door.

The parking lot had grown over with weeds, but I could see where once at least a hundred parking spots had been marked for the workers.

We pulled up. Cousin Don was waiting for us outside in a University of Michigan baseball hat and matching jacket. He wore aviator sunglasses and chewed on an unlit cigar.

“Jesus, Don, you look like Banacek from the TV show.” My dad gave him a hug.

“Did he have a good head of hair?”

“Yeah, good and thick like yours. U of M?”

“This is my go-see jacket. I like to wear a winning team when I’m about to lose my shirt.”

“You won’t lose your shirt, Cousin Don,” I assured him as he gave Gianluca a slap on the back. In our family, “Cousin” is a title of honor. When I was a girl, I thought “Cousin” was Don’s first name.

Don unlocked the door and took us inside the old mill. The large, empty room had a thirty-foot ceiling and a concrete floor. It was as cold as a meat locker and it had the scent of motor oil and crushed metal. I could almost hear the sounds of this steel mill in its heyday, the hum of the electrics, the sawing of the metal, and the hiss from the torches.

“It’s a big space,” Don said.

“You have a lot of room here,” Dad said. “But you need it. You need the assembly space, room for the sewing machines, the buffer, the polisher, the presser.”

“You could put up a wall and do packing and shipping over here.” I pointed. “You have the loading dock outside this door.”

“That door rolls up like a shade,” Don said. “You pull the truck right into the building. And when you’re dealing in high-end shoes, you don’t want those boxes getting wet. Perfect for dry load-ins.”

“You’re thinking of everything.”

“Ohio gets a wet spring. Think ahead. That’s the Pipino way. No stone unturned. No rock unthrown.”

“It needs work, Don,” Dad said as he walked the floor.

“Look, we can’t occupy the space tomorrow. But give me a couple of months, I get the water on, I rewire. I gravel the pavement out front. I put in the industrial lights, the HVAC. I mean, we could do this thing.”

We spent the next day looking at more spaces. Don showed us everything Youngstown had to offer. An old dairy farm. The Weatherbee coat factory. A restaurant supply warehouse. If it was for sale, Don knew about it. But Gianluca and I couldn’t shake the thought of the old steel mill on Bears Den Road. It was too perfect. It felt right.

D
ad stayed with Cousin Don at his house. I imagined one widower, one temporary bachelor, and some colorful locals engaging in all-night card games played through a fog of cigar smoke over a plate of soppressata and Parmesan cheese washed down with grappa. However it played out, they would have a ball.

Gianluca and I checked into the Marriott, where I set up camp in the room with a coffeemaker and a cooler, just as my mother had on every family trip we ever made. Gianluca was propped up in bed, watching a soccer match, as I went through the particulars of the properties we had visited.

I organized my notes of potential factory buildings from best to worst, separating out my favorites. I tried to imagine the spaces accommodating the operations I had seen in Buenos Aires. I was concerned about ceiling height, an area for shipping, and enough space for cutting and finishing.

“It’s not like buying a house,” Gianluca said, flipping off the television.

“I know, honey.”

“Are you sure about putting up a factory here?”

“Why? Are you?”

“Why would you choose this town over Italy?”

“Didn’t you say that the factories in Italy are booked?”

“We could put off the manufacturing until next year.”

“That’s not an option. I have orders to fill.” I took a deep breath, hoping I wouldn’t snap. “I like the idea of Youngstown because the raw space is cheap, it’s close enough to New York City, and they have a workforce here that needs jobs. Most of these families are like mine—they’ve worked in factories or run their own small businesses. They would understand the mission.”

“Your father said things had changed over the years,” Gianluca said. “The workforce isn’t what it was.”

“We’ll revive it.”

“So you’re going to find the space, renovate it—”

“Gianluca, there are no shoe factories here.”

“So you have to renovate. How will you pay for it?”

“We’ll get a loan.”

Gianluca picked up the file and began leafing through the circulars.

“You don’t want to open a factory at all, do you?”

“I want you to have what you need to do your work.”

“I need a little support from you.”

“I’m here, Valentina.”

“Are you? Or did you get roped into this because I was enthusiastic about it? Cousin Don is a great salesman—maybe you feel we played you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Tricked you into coming out here and looking at the real estate.”

“What is your tie to this place besides your cousins?”

“I have memories of this town as a girl. I remember the boom years when the steel mills operated double shifts, and the small factories couldn’t accept all the work that was offered them. I remember meeting middlemen traveling through from New York. They went from town to town making deals. There used to be a system. There were jobs and if you needed one, all you had to do was work hard and you’d be all right. You could take care of your family. If I’m going to manufacture shoes in a factory, then I want to make them in America.”

“Because?”

I felt my face getting hot. “Because it’s the right thing to do! Because American-made means quality.”

“That’s why manufacturing left this country.”

“God, Gianluca, it was the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement that killed it. Other countries like China made what we made more cheaply, and our factories couldn’t compete.”

“What happened to American quality then?”

“The standards were lowered. Customers started to accept cheaper construction and materials,” I said softly. I knew when I was licked.

“And you, a custom shoemaker, are going to bring it all back.”

“I want to try in my small way to do
something
.”

“What if we went to Italy and worked from there?”

“Oh, man, you totally set me up. Do you want to live in Italy?”