Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (10 page)

“
Where’d he get the money?”

“
Where do you think?”

“
Oh, is that the bootlegger?” it suddenly became acceptable to incriminate one of their own.

Some people on Lehigh Row could not imagine that the immigrant Italian laborer and father of seven children could have saved enough money through legitimate means to buy the house. It didn’t matter that he and Maria had rented space to boarders, killed their own pigs, stuffed their own sausage, carved their own soap, boiled their own medicine, grown their own vegetables, culled their own jack rabbits, and purchased everything in volume for 20 years. It didn’t matter that Leola had dropped out of school, gone straight to work, and helped pay the bills. It didn’t matter that the extended family had pitched in to help buy the house. It didn’t matter how much the family had embodied the seven Yankee virtues of work, patience, perseverance, thriftiness, frugality, ingenuity, and resourcefulness. Nor did it matter that the fine imposed on Serafino for selling wine had negated any profit he had made by selling wine. The only thing that mattered to some people on Lehigh Row was that he had gotten caught one night for selling wine. And that was the one detail about selling alcohol that distinguished him from many of them: He had gotten caught. Bootlegging was all that some people talked about.

“
Everyone else was renting,” Ida explained. “People envied us.”

In their 20 years in America up to that point, the Di Gregorios had experienced two sharp blows to the sense of community that characterized Lehigh Row. The first blow came in 1923 with the inadvertent firing of a gun, which drove some people to react in fear and to behave in disturbing ways toward one another. The second blow came in 1933 with the divide-and-conquer strategy of the local police who were trying to enforce a problematic federal law. The police tactics pitted neighbor against neighbor and child against adult, driving some people in the community to become distrustful of one another.

But neither of these blows could have prepared the Di Gregorios for what came next. Unlike the firing of a gun or the raiding of a basement, the purchase of the house in 1934 was neither brutal nor blunt. On the surface, it was perfectly benign. The purchase of the house marked a proud milestone for Serafino and Maria: the reward for their 20 years of sweat, savings, and sacrifice. The achievement was breathtaking in its implications for the immigrant couple: They now owned a piece of America! But the purchase of the house marked an additional milestone that the Di Gregorios could have neither foreseen nor desired. The purchase of the house marked the end of community as they had known it.

Some of the new neighbors were warm and welcoming, but others weren’t. Ralph remembers some people in town calling him and other Italians by all kinds of derogatory names. Some of the common slurs back then were “dagos,” “wops,” “guineas,” “grape crushers,” “garlic stompers,” or simply “furriners.” On one of his first visits to the dilapidated farmhouse, Ralph overheard a few of the new neighbors muttering to one another about the “black hands” who had purchased the property. “Black hands” were code words for the Mafia, as if the Di Gregorios were somehow in cahoots with the Chicago army of Al Capone.

Serafino tried not to take the slurs personally. It struck him as silly for people to ridicule Italians for crushing grapes or stomping garlic, as if there could be anything shameful about harvesting grapes or garlic. As far as he could tell, the native-born Americans were the ones with the truly disgusting habit. Only the native-born Americans seemed to be forever chewing tobacco and spewing their vile wads all over the otherwise perfectly good soil. Serafino coined his own nickname for native-born Americans: “chewtabaks” (pronounced CHOO-tah-box).

Most of the chewtabaks in town kept their surly comments to themselves, but one relatively courageous chewtabak told Serafino to his face: “You’ll never be a
real
American.”

Serafino retorted: “I don’t see no feathers growin’ out o’
your
head.”

But there was no use arguing. To some folks in town, it made no difference that Serafino had been granted his naturalized U.S. citizenship and had absolutely and forever renounced his allegiance to Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy. To some folks in town, there was no room in their kind of America for the likes of Serafino. To some folks in town, second-class citizenship was the best he could ever hope for.

The ill wishes of some of the people, both on Lehigh Row and in town, almost came true. Soon after the Di Gregorios moved to town, Serafino was mysteriously and summarily laid off from the job that he had held for more than two decades. No reason given. The family grew defensive, convinced that Serafino had been singled out only because “other people at the cement plant were jealous of him.”

The new home had been paid off in full, but there was no way that an unemployed Serafino could pay the utility bills and other expenses, let alone pay down the familial loan. He was 48, with few professional skills, fewer options, larger bills than ever before, and seven increasingly hungry children. He might have to sell the house for a loss and move the family back into an apartment just to keep food on the table. Or else go bankrupt if he couldn’t sell the house during the Depression.

The 18-year-old Mafalda tried to contribute. However, following a bout of double pneumonia, she was too weak to join Leola on the assembly line at the packinghouse. Instead, Mafalda went to work for free as a stenographer for the county attorney, hoping the experience would lead to a paying job. It didn’t. Only thanks to Leola did the Di Gregorios keep the house. The 17-year-old dropout began donating her entire paychecks to Serafino and Maria.

They bought lots of seeds. The Di Gregorios would live off the land again, and Leola would pay the bills.

Leola refused to take any crap from anyone: hostile chewtabaks, jealous coworkers, or stingy county attorneys. Whenever she ran into any of those characters around town, she greeted them each with the same disdainful gaze, grinding her right teeth and lifting her right lip toward an accusatory eyeball. She would allow nobody to drive the family out of their home.

Leola stated her terms unequivocally and stuck to them. She had never been an academic whiz like her big sister Mafalda, but Leola was fluent in barnyard language and taught the rest of the family its powerful utility, starting with a low tone of voice from deep down within her diaphragm and raising the altitude and volume of each successive syllable in her battle cry: “Hell, I ain’t gonna let no goddamn sonuvabitch banker try to take a shit in this house!”

Despite the reaction of some of the neighbors old and new, moving into the new house itself was “like going to heaven!” said Ida.

The house had two stories, five bedrooms, and an inside toilet. Five bedrooms meant just two girls to a room instead of six. The parents had their room. Ralph, the only son, had his room. All nine Di Gregorios cheerily shared the one indoor toilet, warm year round. No more piss pot.

There was a separate kitchen and dining room, a cozy living room, and a large porch that spilled out onto the massive yard. Along the perimeter of the property, there was a smooth sidewalk where the nine-year-old Ida rode her scooter made from the wheels of a roller skate and the planks of wood from a fruit crate.

The house held together with some repairs, but Maria and the five-year-old Angeline knocked down the flimsy barn where the previous owner had stored his horse and buggy. In place of the barn, Serafino and Maria built a double-wide garage. They used it as a tool shed for everything they needed to convert the vast untilled yard into something useful: food.

Each week, Maria tilled more and more land and planted more and more seeds. She worked in the yard from morning till night and yet still managed to supervise the preparation of homemade family meals, shouting instructions from the yard to the girls inside the house.

“
The harder she worked,” remembers Elsie, “the happier she was.”

Over the course of several months, Maria converted an acre of uncultivated soil into a tidy garden. Still unsatisfied, she gave one final push. In a single day, she dug up another quarter-acre of weeds and grass to make her future workload that much heavier.

“
Catastrof’!”
Serafino cried from the kitchen window, shaking the back of his hand at her. “You didn’t have enough?”

But the garden became everything to Serafino and Maria. Even with no work at the cement plant, they could still thrive on the land. The garden became their safe harbor. A fallback. A second chance. An insurance policy. A security blanket. A refuge. Their happiness. They didn’t want the kids in the garden. That’s not why they had come to America. They wanted the kids to learn to work elsewhere. So the kids washed vegetables, scrubbed dishes, cleaned house, ironed shirts, or babysat for one another. Ida was the courier. It was her job to pull the wagon to the store for chicken feed and other supplies. All the while, Serafino and Maria toiled in the garden. That was their job and their job alone. They hoed everything by hand.

About a year after losing his job, Serafino was called back to work at the cement plant just as mysteriously as he had been laid off. He resumed his day job. But he returned to the garden for his evenings, weekends, and holidays.

As the garden sprouted from the rich, black, ice-age–moistened earth of northern Iowa, the Di Gregorios savored their first tastes of the American dream. And what a dream it was! The garden yielded bounties of zucchinis the size of watermelons, tomatoes the size of cantaloupes, and so much succulent sweet corn that the family started a tradition of summer sidewalk sales to sell the ears by the dozen in front of the house. There were buckets of peas, bushels of green beans, and wheelbarrows full of asparagus, strawberries, honeydew melons, squashes, and fiery hot red peppers. Gooseberry and currant bushes hugged the sides of the house and flourished in its warmth. The Di Gregorios planted only things that they could eat. Then they recycled much of what they couldn’t eat—watermelon rinds, mushy apples, and weeds—as fertilizer for things they could eat.

The family raised geese, chickens, turkeys, ducks, and guinea hens. Serafino’s new, bigger chicken coop meant a nearly self-sustaining supply of Maria’s egg noodles, and the days of parsimoniously apportioning the chicken “filets” were long gone. From the packinghouse, Leola brought home the bacon, the salami, the ham hocks, and the pork chops fresh from the truckloads of aromatic sows that rolled past the Di Gregorio home on their way to their destiny up the food chain.

Maria cranked her handmade dough through a wooden pasta machine to make fettuccini, ravioli, and
pasta fagiol’
(pasta and beans). She boiled beef, shredded it, mixed it with eggs and Parmesan cheese, and rolled it into gigantic ravioli that fit no more than three to a plate. For sauce, she filled roaster pans with tomatoes, onions, zucchinis, and red potatoes from the garden, allowing the ripe and juicy tomatoes to produce their own broth. She then added garlic, oregano, and a touch of allspice. That was the trick. The allspice made the sauce “full” as well as fresh.

For bread, she poked dimples into her pizza dough to capture little pools of olive oil and black pepper. For dessert, she fried the same kind of dough into paper-thin
pizzelle
cookies and sprinkled sugar on top.

“
If you throw bread away,” she almost sang one of her favorite aphorisms, “you have to kiss it first!” She then held a breadcrumb to her lips, gave it two exaggerated kisses, and tossed it in the trash.

As Ida grew up in this Middle American slice of paradise, she bore witness to its benevolence and mercy as her parents spread the bounty beyond the family. Each harvest, Maria delivered vegetables to the neighbors, especially to those who were sick or hungry. Everyone who bought a dozen ears of corn received a baker’s dozen and maybe some little extra ones thrown in for fun. The kindest neighbors were granted a patch of the garden to cultivate as their very own.

“
It was heaven,” Ida recollected, “because my parents made it heaven.”

One summer morning during the Great Depression, a hobo appeared on the sidewalk outside the home. He peered over the four-foot chain-link fence and watched Maria as she worked in the garden. “Good morning, ma’am,” he announced himself.

Maria looked up from her hoe. She approached the fence and just looked at the man.

“
Good morning,” he repeated. His face was stubbly. His coat was rumpled. His front tooth was missing. “Awful nice garden you’ve got here, ma’am. I’d be more than happy to help y’out around here.”

“
That’s okay,” said Maria. She unlatched the gate and invited the man in with a nod. “Come,” she beckoned him toward the house. When they entered the kitchen, she waved away the kids and pointed the man toward a seat at the table.

He took his seat.

“
Would you like a cheese sandwich, a ham sandwich, or fried eggs and bacon?” she enticed him.

“
Eggs and bacon, ma’am!”

She cracked four eggs fresh from the chicken coop and dropped them into a skillet on the stove. She tossed a little water into the skillet and placed a lid over it to allow the eggs to simmer, sunny side up. She sliced four strips of bacon from a slab that Leola had brought home from Deckers. Maria drizzled olive oil over the bacon in a hot frying pan on a separate burner. The eggs crackled. The bacon sizzled. The aroma filled the room.

“
I can do work, ma’am,” he offered once again to pay in the only way he could.