Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (5 page)

“
Perfect!” Serafino agreed. He needed to work at least six months anyway to save enough money to bring her back.

From May to November 1912, Serafino drilled the bedrock on the outskirts of Mason City, Iowa. He then returned to Farindola with the money to retrieve Maria.

Serafino spent the rest of 1912 and all of 1913 still trying to coax Maria away from the village. “I prepared everything for you,” he told her. “I kept my promise.”

But removing Maria from Farindola was like tearing a mother away from her children. She agonized over the fate of her seven younger brothers and two younger sisters: Francesco, Paolo, Ettore, Guirino, Leandro, Antonio, Ottilio, Bice, and Rosina. The faces of each of them kept passing through her mind. Feeling accountable for any misfortune that might befall them in her absence, she toiled harder than ever on the spring planting and the summer crops so that she could leave her family a record surplus, if nothing more.

She became pregnant in the middle of 1913. And then lost her baby. She kept beseeching Serafino for one more month. “Just one more month.” The idea of leaving her family and home behind forever, perhaps never to see them again, on top of having just lost her baby, all became too much for her to bear.

“
If you’re not happy there,” Serafino negotiated, “we can come home.”

She turned to God for help in making her decision. She visited the village church at least three times a week, kneeling in a pew and reciting the
paternoster
—the “Our Father”—in Latin. At home, she prayed the rosary nightly to calm her soul and to beg the heavenly mother for guidance. “Holy Mary, mother of God, what would you do?”

By the end of 1913, Maria still couldn’t choose between her home and her husband. She harbored the faint hope that her husband might change his mind about America and that she wouldn’t have to choose after all. She still wouldn’t budge.

Serafino knew that if he waited much longer, he might lose his American job and dream forever. In January 1914, he decided that Maria had mourned enough.

“
Either you come with me to America,” he pronounced one frigid night, “or I’ll find another woman there!”

The choice was hers. She didn’t have room in her suitcase for her homemade sheets. She had barely enough room for a small sack of pepper seeds. She would sail to America, perhaps never to return, but she would plant the seeds of Farindola there.

Serafino and Maria departed Naples on the SS.
Cretic
in March 1914. He was 28. She was 20. They arrived in Boston 12 days later, boarded a train, and headed straight for Middle America.

Mason City was a town surrounded by corn, halfway between Des Moines and Minneapolis and readily accessible to neither. With about 17,000 people, the town was a metropolis compared with Farindola. But Serafino and Maria didn’t see much of the town. The Lehigh Portland Cement Company quarry and housing, situated about half a mile north of the rest of town, functioned like a town unto itself.

The Lehigh housing consisted of five rows of wood frame duplexes—19 buildings containing 38 homes. Most of the homes housed large immigrant families. A few of the homes housed up to 20 single immigrant men who shared beds by working opposite 12-hour shifts. At one time in the teeming neighborhood, the 38 homes housed nearly 400 people, composed of roughly 300 family members and 100 single men. The vast majority of the people came from Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Mexico.

The neighborhood included a separate row of stores for the workers and families. There was a grocery, a bakery, a meat market, a barbershop, a barbeque, and a pool hall. The homes and stores straddled a solitary gravel road that became known as Lehigh Row.

Each home was built the same. Although austere, it was more luxurious than anything Maria had ever imagined. The downstairs had two rooms. The big room was a living room, dining room, and kitchen combined. The small room was a bedroom. A cast iron cook stove in the big room heated the downstairs. A staircase separated the two rooms and led upstairs to an enormous U-shaped open space, which was heated by a coal-burning potbelly stove. One light bulb hung from the ceiling on each floor.

“
Heat
and
electricity!” Maria marveled.

The furnishings were sparse. The cook stove commanded the front of the big room downstairs. A rickety China cabinet stood at the back. A plain round table and chairs sat in the middle. The kitchen area had a shelf, a sink, a dipper, washboards, and two water basins: one for drinking and cooking, the other for washing dishes, clothes, and people. Upstairs, several steel cots lined each side of the staircase. Each cot had a metal spring and a three-inch mattress. Upstairs and downstairs, the floors were made of the kind of coarse wooden planks that gave people splinters if they didn’t wear socks.

There was no indoor plumbing. Water pumps had been dug out front between the homes. There was one pump for every four homes.

The two homes in each duplex were built side-to-side. Each home had a small garden on the unattached side and another small garden in the back. People grew vegetables wherever they could find a spare scrap of land. White pebbly gravel covered the remaining spaces of land between the rows of duplexes.

Each home had its own outhouse. The outhouses were also duplexes. They straddled the adjoining back yards. Once a year, the “honey man” came to Lehigh Row to clean the outhouses and to transform their contents into fertilizer for the gardens. Honey for the soil.

The cement company gave each home an additional plot of soil in a community garden a few hundred yards from the homes. Each plot came with its own chicken coop.

Each home also had a front porch and a small dirt-floored basement. Beneath the frame of each home, there were tiny crawl spaces where the chickens stayed warm during the winter. Outside each home, there was a coal shed attached to the building.

Everything was painted gray.

Lehigh Row was a world apart from its Middle American surroundings. It was far enough removed from the rest of town to shield the immigrants from the broader community and vice versa. Mason City proper, with its growing network of paved streets and an expanding sewer system, ended abruptly at the northern edge of the city at 17th Street. The next road north, half a mile further up the highway toward Minneapolis, was technically 25th Street. But everyone in town knew that 25th Street was Lehigh Row. It was that separate place, eight phantom blocks away, hidden by the corn.

Serafino and Maria were delighted. Life on Lehigh Row seemed much better than life in Farindola. An easy walk to work and an honest day’s wages earned Serafino enough money to feed a family. Maria didn’t need to toil in any backbreaking fields. She could work exclusively around the house and garden.

Everything seemed to flourish on Lehigh Row. Maria had arrived just in time for her spring planting of potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. Morning glories, hollyhocks, and lilacs covered the post-and-wire fences around the gardens during the summer. Strawberries, gooseberries, tiger lilies, bleeding hearts, violets, jack-in-the-pulpits, and johnny jump-ups grew wild in the nearby woods. The kids of Lehigh Row picked the berries, dug up the flowers, and brought them home.

Serafino built an arbor against the side of his porch and strung wild grapes that he had found growing like currants in the bushes. The wild grapes proved far too sour for a good wine. So he blended them with raisins from the store, and that did the trick. The finished wine was vigorous yet smooth. “Kind of like myself,” he raised a glass in salute, admiring the rich burgundy color. Lehigh Row began to feel like home.

Serafino and Maria felt that fortune was surely smiling upon them when the outbreak of World War I cast a pall over Europe just four months after their arrival in America. Maria was six months pregnant on that date of July 28, 1914.

Three months later, in the downstairs bedroom of their home on Lehigh Row, Serafino single-handedly assisted Maria in giving birth to their first child, a daughter. The baby girl, named Ida, was born on October 25, mercifully safe as an American citizen sheltered in the American heartland.

“
Her life will be so much better in this country!” an exhausted Maria looked up from her maternity bed and paid Serafino the ultimate compliment.

He looked down upon her appreciative eyes, bent down toward her moistened cheeks, and smothered her face in kisses.

The newborn Ida gained two sisters in quick succession: Mafalda in 1915 and Leonata in 1917. The Di Gregorio family grew alongside the other burgeoning Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Mexican, Polish, and Serbian immigrant families who also called Lehigh Row home.

In the autumn of 1918, though, several of the neighbors fell gravely ill, some dying within days. A few of the stricken moms who survived the affliction were left too weak to nurse their young. The chill of October 1918 had brought to Lehigh Row the pandemic of Spanish flu.

Worldwide, the Spanish flu of 1918 and 1919 would bury twice as many people as did World War I itself. And like the war, the flu preferred young adults as victims.

The 25-year-old Maria fell victim when she was in the eighth month of another pregnancy. She kept trying to get out of bed to cook and clean, but each attempt debilitated her only further. The child in her womb was not as incapacitating as the illness that wracked her body. Beyond the conventional flu symptoms of fevers, headaches, chills, constant coughing, a sore throat, a drippy nose, complete exhaustion, and aching back and legs, Maria also found it difficult to breathe.

A doctor came to the house late in the afternoon. He approached Maria and observed the pallor of her skin. He listened to her lungs with a stethoscope. Keeping his opinion to himself, he turned to Serafino and spoke very few words: “Make sure she gets a good night’s rest. I’ll be here in the morning.” The doctor then left.

Serafino knew that doctors made house calls only in the direst of situations. Nobody knew of a cure for Spanish flu. Its victims either survived or succumbed. And the doctor seemed to be preparing for the worst.

Serafino prayed harder than he had ever prayed in his entire life. “How could I possibly raise all these kids on my own?” he pleaded to Saint Anthony in silence, kneeling at Maria’s bedside with his face in his hands. “How could I bring her all the way to this country only to lose her now when I need her more than ever?”

Serafino finished his prayer by making the sign of the cross very slowly. He rose from the bedside and turned toward the basement. He could think of only one treatment that might help Maria rest and perhaps even fortify her: his homemade beer. Unlike his wine, his beer had been brewed nearly into a meal, so thick with yeast and barley malt that a deep layer of the granular sediment collected at the bottom of each bottle. Maria had lost the strength to consume solid foods, but maybe she could consume this.

Once in the basement, Serafino spotted two bottles standing on a wooden shelf, the last two bottles from his most recent batch. He grabbed one of the bottles, carried it upstairs, and opened it. He poured the contents, unfiltered yeast and all, into a glass.

He brought the glass to Maria and set it on a table beside her bed. He propped the pillows behind her so she could sit up and drink.

She lifted the glass from the table, but her hands shook so badly from the chills that she couldn’t hold the glass steady upon her lip. Serafino balanced the glass as she sipped. When she finished the liquid, he spoon-fed her both the froth clinging to the edges of the glass and the yeasty dregs swirling at the bottom.

That was her dinner. She slept soundly.

The next morning, Maria awakened with a revitalizing stretch of the limbs and a reassuring hint of vigor.
“Damme più,”
she told Serafino. “Give me more.”

He retrieved the last bottle from the basement.

This time, she fed herself. She sat upright in bed, quaffed the full glass, and scooped the mealy remains. She licked the malty moustache from her lip and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She was regaining her appetite, her energy, and her impatience with being confined to the bed.

“
You rest,” Serafino pressed his hands toward her. “Just a little longer.” He kissed her forehead, cradled her body, and eased her head back down onto the pillow.

There was a knock on the front door.

Serafino answered it.

“
How’s she doing?” the doctor asked.

“
Better,” said Serafino.

The doctor looked puzzled. He went to Maria’s bedside, took her pulse, and placed his hand on her forehead. He listened to her lungs once again. “I expected to find you on your deathbed, young lady,” he glanced toward her swollen womb. “But I think you’re going to be fine. I wish I knew your secret.”

The doctor glimpsed the empty glass on the table. He reached for the glass, examined the film coating on the inside of it, and took a whiff, rearing his head backward. He shifted his gaze toward Serafino, who said nothing.

A few weeks later, Maria went into labor once again, unaware if her battle with the Spanish flu had harmed the baby within her womb. As usual, Serafino would be the only other person in the room in case of complications.

“
Dio mio!”
Serafino cried even louder than Maria did. “It’s a boy! He’s strong as an ox!”