Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (7 page)

They rarely mentioned Ida herself. However, they kept her memory alive in another way.

Less than two years after the accident, Serafino told the five surviving children—Mafalda, Leonata, Raffaello, Bice, and Algisa, who were then ages nine, eight, six, five, and two—to go outside on the porch and to stay there until they were called. It was July 28, 1925. The children waited on the porch as their parents delivered a new baby sister into the world, just as each of the five of them had been delivered into the world by their parents in that downstairs bedroom of 30 Lehigh Row.

Serafino and Maria named the new baby girl Ida to honor the memory of her slain big sister.

The elder Ida forever thereafter became referred to as “La Ida”—or “the Ida.”

The younger Ida is my mother.

2. One Kind of Depression

For my mom, Ida Di Gregorio, growing up on Lehigh Row was fun but also fearful.

She had legions of other kids to play with. They made their own toys, using branches for hockey sticks and rocks for pucks. They attached tattered pieces of cloth to pliant twigs to make slingshots. They squished empty tin cans of condensed milk around the soles of their shoes and clomped merrily over the stones in the gravel lanes between the homes. Nobody had yards to play in, but everyone played together in the gravel lanes. They also frolicked in a nearby wooded area, which they called “the forest.” They swam in a swimming hole gouged out by the cement drilling. They played on a baseball diamond carved into the expansive property of a neighboring farm, which even operated a hippodrome circus. The friendly farmers trained Arabian horses and auditioned them in front of the Lehigh Row kids before selling the stunning animals to the world-renowned Barnum & Bailey Circus. For Ida, Lehigh Row was a wondrous world of camaraderie, curiosity, and amusement.

But there were also things that scared Ida.

One of the first things that scared her was her name. Sometimes when Maria called Ida by name, Maria seemed to give Ida a funny look, as if to ask, “Who are you?” Ida feared that she was somehow the wrong person. She was not the same girl whom her mother seemed to be looking for. Her mother was talking to Ida but apparently thinking about La Ida. Sometimes, Ida felt like a stranger in her own home. At all times, she felt that she could never be pretty enough or charming enough to compete with La Ida.

“
I could never live up to that,” Ida held back tears decades later. The dead Ida was the beauty queen. The living Ida, by contrast, would always be the ugly duckling.

Another scary thing for the young Ida was language. As was common in large immigrant families of whatever native tongue, each successive Di Gregorio child grew up speaking less Italian and more English than the previous child, owing to the steady growth in English usage by a steadily expanding number of people in the home. As Ida was learning to utter her first words in the late 1920s, her five older siblings were already speaking mostly English, while her parents were speaking something that she found to be a confounding muddle of a language that was no longer truly Italian nor quite yet English. As a result, she found herself in an odd linguistic spot: She hadn’t learned to speak Italian well enough for her parents to fully understand her, while they hadn’t learned to speak English well enough for her to fully understand them. She understood the gist of what they were saying but not always the precise meaning. “You just had to have the feeling,” she recalled. She developed a remarkable capacity to intuit people’s feelings regardless of what they might have been saying. Fortunately for Ida, her parents spoke with their hands as well, which made their feelings easier to intuit. But Ida could never converse effortlessly with her parents in Italian the way La Ida could.

Music became the way for Ida to connect with her parents and to distinguish herself from the other children.

The most expressive forms of communication that she had experienced as a child were not the words that her parents spoke but rather the tones of their voices and the movements of their hands. Likewise, the most delightful forms of communication that she had experienced as a child were her father’s impromptu evening performances. He often hoisted Algisa in his arms and rocked her from side to side like a guitar, strumming her tummy with his right hand, fingering the “chords” on her neck with his left hand, and singing song after song while tickling her silly. Serafino always seemed to be singing songs. But Ida could never learn the words, because he kept making up new ones.

When Ida heard formal music in kindergarten for the first time, the voices of the instruments spoke to her like no verbal language could. “It was all about the feeling,” she said. At nap time, she fell contentedly asleep to the dreamy piano movements of Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” that the teacher played on the hand-cranked oak Victrola.

In first grade at McKinley Elementary School, Ida became the leader of the band, conducting her classmates with their blocks and triangles in front of the audience in the school auditorium as the teacher played the bouncy “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” on the piano. Wearing a paper hat shaped like a little crown, Ida dropped her chin beneath her shoulders and giggled, unveiling a cheeky grin and flashing her delighted eyes. She waved the conductor’s wand and poked it at her classmates right on cue, rousing them with her enthusiasm and shivering with excitement as they followed her orchestrations. Observing proudly from the audience, Maria saw an Ida that she had never seen before.

In second grade, Ida stumbled upon a harmonica and taught herself how to play a rambunctious rendition of “Oh, Susanna,” complete with hand vibratos, mouth glissandos, and a stomping right foot. Her Uncle Tony took the cue. He put banjo knobs on a battered violin and gave it to her. She started taking free violin lessons at the public school. She wanted to play the piano, too, because it was the most expressive musical instrument of them all. But she knew it would never be. Piano lessons never came free.

After school, she watched other kids tap dancing at a private studio. The Di Gregorios couldn’t afford dance lessons, but Ida sat and watched. And sat and watched. The other kids struggled through the songs from
Forty-Second Street
. Ida then ran all the way home and “shuffled off to Buffalo” for her father. He clapped to her steps and made up his own words whenever she forgot any.

But music could take Ida only so far. Every Fourth of July, she became mesmerized by the music of the merry-go-round at the local fairgrounds. And every year, she lost her bearings with respect to just about everything else. At the same fairgrounds. Each year, Serafino found her near the merry-go-round, transfixed by the music. She could follow the sound of the music, but she couldn’t find her way back.

Neither Serafino nor Maria could help Ida find her way through elementary school. After all, they had never completed much of elementary school themselves.

“
Mama,” Ida asked a few times, “Could you help me with my homework?”

“
You know better than me,” Maria honestly replied.

Meanwhile, Ida
loved
talking to her friends at school. She could talk about almost anything endlessly and effortlessly with
them
. She talked and talked and talked until the teacher made her sit outside.

One day, the teacher had had enough. She showed up at the Di Gregorio home that evening and urged Serafino, with a swipe of her hand, to punish Ida severely.

Thanks to that unmistakable gesture, Serafino understood exactly what the teacher had in mind. And just as most responsible fathers of his day would’ve done, he went after Ida with a strap. “Wassamattayou!?” he yelled down at her in his broken English.

She tried to explain her side of the story. “I was talking,” she sniffled, “but only to answer a question from a boy who talked to me first because he knew I had all the answers.” That message didn’t translate. It was too complicated.

“
Wassamattayou!?” Serafino yelled again.

Ida just looked up at her father in fright.

He then gave her what was, in those days, widely regarded as a “good lickin’.”

She cried in vain.

Only Mafalda could stick up for Ida. Mafalda was ten years older. She was the only one of the surviving children who could still speak fluent Italian. She translated complex ideas between Ida and her parents. “You didn’t have to hit your poor defenseless daughter!” Mafalda chastised Serafino in Italian. “It wasn’t her fault!”

Ida learned to look to her big sister Mafalda as a teacher and second mother. To Ida, Mafalda’s tipped forehead and tenderly raised eyebrows suggested a permanent state of compassion. Even Mafalda’s lower lip sank softly to one side when she smiled, as if her lip, too, were reaching out in empathy. When two full-time parents just didn’t seem to be accessible enough, Ida found a third.

Throughout the first several years of the Great Depression, the Lehigh cement plant kept Serafino employed and the community intact within its Spartan quarters amid the cornfields. Good fortune meant a steady income and a roof overhead. Other folks in town were losing their jobs, watching their bank accounts vanish, and standing in soup lines. As the Depression deepened, nobody on Lehigh Row complained about the wages.

There was little sense of deprivation on Lehigh Row, said Ida, because nobody there felt too deprived in comparison with anybody else. “We didn’t think of ourselves as poor,” she said, “because we were
all
poor.” Sure, some folks had more than others. The richer people had iceboxes. The poorer people couldn’t even afford butter; they ate their bread with lard and sugar on top. The Di Gregorios fell somewhere between these extremes. But no matter what country the people came from—and no matter what jobs the fathers held either at the cement plant or at the Lehigh Row stores that catered to the workers at the cement plant—“everyone on Lehigh Row felt pretty much equal.”

To underscore their equality as Americans born and bred, the four Di Gregorio children with the most difficult Italian names to pronounce changed their names. Leonata became Leola. Raffaello became Ralph. Bice became Bessie. And Algisa became Elsie. The Di Gregorio kids still called one another by their Italian names in private, but they used their American names in public. Only Mafalda and Ida kept their names the same.

Food on Lehigh Row was rarely, if ever, just food.

Maria used the nightly ritual of dinner to teach the Di Gregorio kids a vital lesson of survival in America. “It’s not how much money you
make
,” she often told them. “It’s how much you
save
.” She demonstrated the lesson with each evening’s meal. The family had grown to nine with the birth of Angelina, who later became Angeline, in 1929. Regardless of their ages, sizes, or genders, all seven kids had inherited those big Farindola hands to feed. Maria’s hand-rolled egg noodles stretched the family budget as far as the spaghetti could. Her little garden plots yielded an abundance of fresh vegetables for the table and canned ones for the winter. When she bought food, she bought it only in volume, filling the basement with bundles of fresh garlic, crates of onions, bushels of apples, gallons of olive oil, 10-pound bags of corn meal, 20-pound boxes of rigatoni, 20-pound rolls of asiago cheese, and 50-pound sacks of flour.

As the kids began to assemble before dinner, her lesson began to unfold in earnest. She pulled out a cutting board, four feet in length by three feet in width, that Serafino had cut and finished with his own hands. She covered the entire dining table with the board and coated it in flour. She spread a half-inch-thick layer of hot polenta all over the board, allowing the polenta to cool. Once the kids were all seated at the table, captivated by the colossal polenta pie spreading out before them, she invited them each to carve their own portions. She then smothered each portion in a sauce of her fresh-grown tomatoes and homemade sausage—each mouth-watering plateful a testament to frugality and resourcefulness. Each precious piece of the pie a veritable incarnation of virtue itself.

Dinner, on the table every night at 5 p.m., was far more than just a meal. “It was a source of family pride,” Ida reminisced. “It was a big celebration. It was sacred.”

The porch became an oven in summer and a refrigerator in winter. Literally. In summer, Maria cooked outside with a kerosene stove to keep the rest of the house cool. In winter, she froze Jell-O on the porch. With no icebox, the Di Gregorios ate chilled food only in the winter. Maria made the cooking and cooling processes themselves paragons of conservation. “Mama could make somethin’ outta nothin’,” Ida recalled.

Pigs were meant to last. Once a year, the Di Gregorios bought a pig from the neighboring farm and butchered the animal. One pig per year. They killed the pig only in the early winter to take advantage of the natural refrigeration. All winter long, the two sides of the pig dangled in the front porch, while the sausage dried on a clothesline.

Killing the pigs required teamwork. Each pig weighed between 250 and 300 pounds. It took three men to pin a pig to the ground while a fourth man sliced the neck or pierced the heart with a knife. Groups of men from Lehigh Row bought their pigs on the same day so they could help each other do the killing.

The killing was just the beginning. Once their pig was killed, the Di Gregorios dumped it into a vat of hot water and lye, making it easier to scrape off the hair. Then they cut out the hams, loins, and pork chops destined for natural refrigeration. Then they cleaned out the intestines. They ground the liver, seasoned it with pepper and garlic, and stuffed the newly spiced liver meat into the cleansed intestines to make the sausage. Then they fried the skin and some of the fat into snacks, called “cracklins,” and they cooked down the rest of the fat to make lard. Finally, Slavic neighbors came over with their pails to collect the blood and lungs for making a spread.