A Secret Gift (30 page)

That was what made the Christmas of 1933 so special and so painful for so many. Though it was a time for families to gather together, many families were disintegrating under the financial and emotional stresses. It was a story as tragic as it was common. As the numbers of children “orphaned” by poverty grew, so too did the place of Canton’s orphanage, the Fairmount Home. For others, the dissolution of one family gave rise to the birth of another, as others came forward to provide for them. Often these were not people of great means, but working-class neighbors barely able to keep their own heads above water.

One need look no farther than Bender’s tavern—not the dining room that catered to Canton businessmen like my grandfather, but behind the dark oak swinging doors that separated the dining room from the kitchen—the divide between white collar and blue. There worked a man named Frank Nicholas Margo. At fifty-six, he was a devout Catholic, a member of St. John’s Church, the League of the Sacred Heart, and the Altar Society.

Once, before the Hard Times, he had had his own restaurant. Now he wielded the cleaver as Bender’s meat cutter, trimming prime ribs, sirloins, and flank steaks that ended up on the plates of men like my grandfather and, in better times, such distinguished diners as George Monnot and Frank Dick.

But in 1933, though Frank Margo barely had enough to feed himself, he and his wife, Louise, had taken it upon themselves to provide for others, especially orphans. But by Christmas 1933, Frank Margo was largely incapacitated by a stroke.

On the evening of December 18, 1933, Louise noticed B. Virdot’s ad in the
Canton Repository
. She took up a pencil and wrote this note:

Days later, a check for five dollars arrived in the mail signed by B. Virdot. On December 31, 1933, Louise Margo wrote again:

THREE YEARS BEFORE Louise Margo wrote her letter, the 1930 U.S. Census records that she and husband Frank owned their own restaurant. Frank was listed as proprietor, Louise as the waitress. But in the Hard Times that followed, they lost the restaurant and much more. The census shows they had not two but five children living with them at 1009 Troy Place Northwest. Eleven-year-old Mary and eight-year-old Annie were listed not as adopted children but simply as daughters. At the time, the two girls were unaware that they were adopted. The Margos had no biological children of their own.

In addition, the census records that Dorothy Shingle, age five; Bobby Shingle, age two; and Martha Shingle, an infant, lived with the Margos. They are listed as adopted. What became of the Shingle children is not known except that following Frank Margo’s stroke, the Margos were no longer able to feed and clothe so large a family and took the Shingle siblings to the orphanage. There is no mention of them in subsequent Canton city directories, telephone books, marriage or probate records, or county orphanage records. They simply vanished. Perhaps they moved away. Perhaps they were adopted by another family and changed their names.

The story of how the other two daughters, Mary and Ann, came to be in the Margo home begins even before the Great Depression. Glimpses of the story can be gleaned from orphanage records and from the memories of Mary’s seventy-one-year-old daughter, Shirley.

That story begins on March 29, 1910, when an eighteen-year-old farm laborer named Antonio Sabelli, from the village of Agnone in southern Italy, set out from Naples aboard the SS
Madonna
bound for America. He traveled by himself. On the manifest he listed that he was headed for Canton, Ohio, to join Gelsomina Gualfieri, who would become his wife. She would later be known as Susie. In 1922 he and Susie and their four children—Joe, Nicholas, Mary, and Ann—purchased a farm just outside Canton. Eight decades later Mary’s daughter, Shirley Crew, would pass on the story as it was told to her—that Antonio Sabelli abandoned the family and returned to Italy, leaving a distraught and crazed wife to try to feed and provide for their four children.

It is undisputed that Antonio Sabelli disappeared in 1922, but the records, sealed for nearly ninety years, tell a different story. An October 13, 1932, memo from the Catholic Community League to the Fairmount Children’s Home reports that no sooner had Antonio Sabelli purchased the farm than the notorious Black Hand Gang attempted to shake him down, threatening to harm him or his family if he did not make payments to them. Coming from the region of southern Italy where Sabelli had, he was no stranger to the Mafia or its tactics. He knew the first payment to such gangsters would not be the last.

Instead of meeting their demands he secretly went to the Canton police and set up a sting operation. When the mobsters came for their money, the police were waiting. Four gang members were convicted of extortion and sentenced to twenty years in the penitentiary.

But not long after that, Antonio Sabelli disappeared. The memo speculates that he either ran away to escape the Mob or, more likely, was kidnapped and murdered. In either case, no trace of him has ever been found. In September 1923, the Catholic Community League, in a final effort to locate Sabelli, placed an ad in three Italian-language newspapers in New York soliciting information about him. There was no response.

He left behind his wife, Susie, two little girls, Mary and Ann, and two sons, Nicholas and Joe. Susie was in dire condition when the authorities found her. She had no job, spoke no English, and was found alone in a farmhouse with four hungry children living in squalor. She had retreated into her own little world, neglecting both herself and her children.

A 1932 family history written by the Catholic Community League describes the Susie Sabelli they found: “Patient is much reduced physically, probably gastric ulcer. Neglectful of personal appearance. Depressed and agitated. Talks of suicide and destruction of her children. Supposed cause of insanity is desertion of her husband, poverty and personal harm. Patient said she wished to destroy herself, did not wish to see her children live. . . . Intense abstraction exhibits much fear.”

In January 1923, probate records reveal that at age twenty-nine she was judged to be mentally ill—“incurable,” in the words of the court—and committed to an insane asylum. A year later, on December 19, 1923, daughters Mary and Ann were adopted by Louise and Frank Margo. It brought an end to the girls’ nightmare, but even in later life Mary still remembered and spoke of the farmhouse and of waiting and hoping that someone would come to rescue her.

Seven years later, in 1930, the census finds “Susie Sabella [
sic
]” still a patient in the Massillon State Hospital for the Insane. She worked in the asylum’s laundry service. She was then thirty-six.

How or when Mary learned she was adopted is not known, but it was a secret she long kept from her younger sister, Ann, afraid of how she might take the news that their mother was institutionalized. Mary had two separate birth certificates, both dated May 5, 1919. One lists the Sabellis as her parents, the other, Frank and Louise Margo.

The Depression hit the Margo home hard. Then came Frank Margo’s stroke. On July 31, 1934, seven months after Louise Margo wrote her letter to B. Virdot, Frank Margo suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. He was fifty-seven. Louise Margo was forced to find a job, and Mary, then fourteen, had to take on both housecleaning and much of the parenting of her younger sister.

At about this time, Mary, a freshman in high school, discovered the whereabouts of her biological mother. One day she secretly visited her in the asylum. After that, she routinely met with her mother after school and told no one. Despite the findings of the court and doctors, she was convinced her mother was not insane, just profoundly traumatized and disoriented. Unable to communicate with anyone, she had been overwhelmed by the loss of her husband, the plight of her children, and her inability to speak English. She was fated to become one of more than a thousand asylum inmates at the vast Massillon, Ohio, facility.

It was years before Mary could bring herself to tell Ann of the adoption and the story of their mother. It did not go well. Ann recoiled and refused to accept it. The topic created a decades-long rift between the two. Ann ceased speaking to her sister. Over the years the chasm only widened. Ann married and moved out of state.

Then one day years later, when Mary was at the dentist, the receptionist casually mentioned that her sister, Ann, had been in earlier that morning. Mary was stunned. Ann, now widowed, had made no attempt to contact her. Months passed before Mary reached out to her. And when they finally met again, they fell into each other’s arms. Their friendship grew, but Ann still insisted that there be no public discussion of their mother, Susie. Indeed, at Ann’s insistence, the rest of the world was not to know they were sisters because that would mean that Ann was adopted and Susie was her mother.

Everyone but Mary and her daughter, Shirley, believed them to be just best friends—though the family resemblance was hard to miss. Shirley was made to promise that she would never refer to Ann as her aunt. And so it would remain all their lives. Ann took her secret to the grave.

Even today Shirley declines to say where Ann is buried or under what name. Like much of Ann’s life, that too is a secret. So too is the identity of the woman who lies beside her and with whom she shares a common tombstone. But Mary kept a Christmas card her long-estranged sister sent her in 1984, shortly after they got back together. It reads: “Mary, dear, The Blessing of 1984 . . . we are reunited . . . not as we would wish . . . all the way . . . but together. Thank the dear Lord that we both lived to see this day. Love and prayers . . . Always, Ann.”

During all the years of Ann’s living in denial, Mary had forged an ever-closer relationship with her birth mother. On Sundays after church, Mary and her family would bring Susie home for the day. “Grandma Susie,” Shirley came to call her.

Susie Sabelli died on February 8, 1961. Her daughter Mary lived a simple life but not an easy one. She made no excuses for herself. In high school she worked at Wagner Fruit Stand and waited tables at the Village Restaurant, and still she excelled in the classroom. In June 1938, when she graduated from McKinley High School, she was a member of the National Honor Society.

Two years later Mary was working as a dollar-a-day-plus-tips waitress in the dining room of Canton’s fashionable Hotel Onesto. On November 17, 1940, she had the pleasure of serving lunch to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Mary made a note of that experience, describing how nervous she was, but wrote that Mrs. Roosevelt put her at ease.

In 1942, Mary worked as an inspector at the Timken Roller Bearing Company but lost her job two years later because she got married—company policy. From 1947 to 1957, she and her husband, William, operated a popular Canton night spot, Naples Spaghetti and Steak House, a place frequented by the likes of Cleveland Indians Hall of Fame pitchers Bob Lemon and Bob Feller, comedian Jerry Colonna, and actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, not to mention judges, mayors, and other town notables. Her biological father, Antonio Sabelli, would have beamed to know that his daughter had helped make the city of his embarkation a Canton landmark.