My American Dream by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich

Author:Lidia Matticchio Bastianich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

15

Shoofly Pie and Succotash

One year after our arrival, in July 1959, we returned to the Catholic Charities office, as promised, to give our social worker an update. My mother was determined that we all look our best for the meeting, and so we all wore our best clothes and paid special attention to how we looked. Everything had to be perfect. I even wore a hat my mother had purchased for me from a vendor on the street for fifty cents, and I looked sharp.

“We are so happy,” my mother reported. “We have everything we want. We moved from New Jersey to Astoria, my husband and I are both working, the children are doing well in school.

“We don’t know how to thank you. We want to repay you for everything you have done for us.”

“How do you want to pay us?” the social worker inquired.

My mother pulled out a bankbook from her purse, which showed how much she’d been able to save during the past year, and handed it to the woman. “People here taught me how to open a bank account and manage our money,” she said. “I am frugal and planned carefully how much we can spend and how much we need to save. I have one thousand dollars, and you can have all of it.” Even though my mother had been told she would not have to repay the agency, she and my father were proud people and felt a moral obligation to return what had been given to them.

The social worker smiled. “Go home,” she directed. “We don’t want a penny from you. Catholic Charities has covered all of your expenses. You and your family are the future of America. Continue as you are doing. Come back on your five-year anniversary and tell us how you are doing.”

On the surface at least, as my mother said, we were very happy as a family; things were going as well as could be expected. But there was turmoil beneath the surface, and we were still far from settled. My father had gone from owning his own trucking company and having an upscale and spacious home in the heart of Pola to a menial job delivering newspapers and a fourth-floor walk-up next to an elevated subway line. The apartment was furnished with items we had found on the street that to us seemed still usable, or obtained with an S&H Green Stamp book. My mother went from being a respected teacher who wore beautiful clothes and hats to doing simple factory work. I was doing well academically but still striving to “fit in” and find my place in school.

Franco was perhaps the only one who was comfortable, making friends in school and planning for the future. He attended Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School, which was on the service road of the Grand Central Parkway in Jamaica, Queens. He got himself a part-time job after school at a television-repair shop not far from the school, and started working there two or three hours a day, in the afternoons.

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