My mother’s face fell naturally into a smile. She had high cheek bones, buck teeth and dark slanting eyes. She was her father’s favorite; he kept her from the heaviest work in the fields. She loved school and she sailed through the three grades of the one room school house in the village.
She stayed on for two extra years, helping the younger students while the teacher gave her extra assignments. In old age, she remembered words, fragments of the saga of Orlando, which must have been the Italian version of the tale of Roland.
I have a letter my mother wrote to her sister in Sicily about forty years before she died. In it, her third grade prose, strewn with errors, tugs at my heart.
My mother insisted that her boys go to school, at a time when many of my friends went to work at sixteen. That’s why she worked, to keep her sons in school, perhaps go on to college. She won two of her bets; my middle brother became a jazz musician, but Steve and I did go to college.
My mother was a machine operator who worked in a factory. The machine, of course, was a sewing machine. She worked only in silk, one dress at a time. High end stuff. When I was twelve, and my oldest brother was in the Pacific, and my middle brother was at a Boy Scout camp, my mother gave me, and herself, a treat: lunch in center city, Philadelphia.
We ate at Lit Brothers, the modest department store at Eighth and Market Streets. Lits was the store we normally patronized. Afterwards we walked to John Wanamaker’s, the high end store at Thirteenth and Market. We found our way to the exclusive Tribout Shop on the third floor, where expensive women’s clothes were displayed and sold. We found the racks that held the dresses made by the manufacturer for whom my mother worked.
A machine operator of my mother’s skill could complete about one dress per day, depending upon the complexity of the dress. Every operator faintly initialed the labels of the dresses she completed. We couldn’t find any that my mother had initialed but my mother pulled a dress from the rack: $79.95. Very big bucks in 1944, but there was plenty of money around during the war years. To make that dress, a day’s work, my mother had been paid about $13.50.
My mother wanted her sons to marry educated girls, girls worthy of her sons. She hit the jackpot with my wife. Look at that smile. In the photo, my mother is leaving the reception hall after my wedding. She is thrilled that I was finally married, to an educated girl, whose relatives and friends were so tall! So American! Margie was far better educated than I but my mother was ignorant of distinctions. To her, college was college.
chasperrone 