Mortar and Stone

We are the product of all the stories we have heard and lived--and many that we have not heard. They shape how we see ourselves, the world, and our place in it.

Knowing and embracing healthy stories is crucial to living right and well. If our lives are broken or diseased, they can be made well. If necessary, they can be replaced by a story with a plot worth living.

Daniel Taylor, The Healing Power of Stories

The old house where Aldo, Jr. grew up is still standing at 570 South Main Street. The bottom half was built in solid stone and speaks of the old world, stories of generations past, bound together by a special mix mortar, holding each rock firmly in place for the past 110 years. It is the dependability of this sturdy foundation that supports the weakening, deteriorating upper structure of the old house. The more contemporary upper addition was built from wood, and wood cracks, twists, and warps with time. This is the Mariotti family home, located in Naugatuck, Connecticut, formerly a bustling New England industrial town where my father Aldo Mariotti, Jr. grew up, and his father, Aldo Mariotti, Sr. before him. I grew up there, too, influenced in ways that I have only recently come to understand. The place, the culture, and the secrets, some I discovered as truth, others I can only surmise. A culture of strength, courage, and loyalty, adultery, abuse, fear and resignation.

Naugatuck’s major employer, the US Rubber Company/Uniroyal Chemical closed in 1971. The factory moguls were attracted to the banks of the Naugatuck River, providing the most cost-effective way to dispose of industrial waste. Vulcanized rubber was produced there, a process that prevented rubber (mostly used for automobile and truck tires) from becoming sticky in the heat or brittle in the cold. As a result, there was no mistaking the characteristic stench of the Naugatuck River and no ignoring the cloudy haze that hung over the place like an unnatural gray soft-focus fog. On the outskirts, and in juxtaposition, the Peter and Paul Candy Company, where Mounds and Almond Joy candy bars originated.

All this in the forefront of an ethnic Italian backdrop. Anything worth finding was within walking distance of 570 South Main Street, or so believed most of its residents. Tony Piculo’s Barber Shop, where the smell of hair tonic combined not so delicately with the aromas of Mrs. Piculo’s garlic spaghetti sauce, drifting down from their modest living quarters over the shop. Just up High Street, Phil’s store, where an apron clad Phil Lamparella served up pound after sumptuous pound of fresh cut imported prosciutto ham and imported provolone cheese. Fred’s restaurant offering apizza, bracciole (a slow simmered juicy, spicy meat) and veal parmesan. There was no denying that life revolved around food in our little town. Men and women alike—we knew how to cook, and we knew how to eat.

Downtown Naugatuck was just a ten-minute stroll out of Little Italy and into a melting pot of merchants, Polish and Irish, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish. The downtown Saint Francis Catholic Church was the chosen place of worship for the Mariotti Family. A place to marry. A place to say good-bye to the souls of the dead. A place to confess the most mortal or the most venial of our sins. As a child of seven years old, I knelt for the first time in the claustrophobic closet-like confessional, my little white gloves tapping nervously together, the mandatory mantilla veil covering my bowed head, tickling my cheek. The overwhelming scent of burning candles drifted in, each lit as a symbolic prayer for the sick or for the repose of someone’s soul. My stomach flip-flopped as I reviewed my sins. In just a few moments, it would be time to come clean. I nervously pretended to pray as I waited for that inevitable moment. Wood sliding on wood as the ghostly shadow of a priest slowly appeared to forgive me my trespasses inside the same confessional where my father, his father and his grandfather came for absolution. And it was there that I learned the fear of God—some outside entity watching and waiting to condemn me for even the slightest misstep.

Naugatuck, Connecticut was just one gigantic wave of sights, smells and beliefs, a small town sprouting up from the seeds of immigration.

My great-grandfather, Giovanni Mariotti, was born in the Marches region of Central Italy in 1880. He came to America with his wife, Marcella Nori, and their only son, four-year-old, Aldo. Giovanni had chosen to be one of the million plus Italians who emigrated to the United States between 1902 and 1906. Yet Giovanni chose not to become one of the nearly 80,000 Italian immigrants who returned to their homeland by 1914, disillusioned by the promise of the American dream.

“It is strange that the country which values most highly the individual and his rights is also the one which neglects human life, calculating it too often in dollars. Many companies prefer to put into an account a small sum to pay widows and orphans of the unfortunate (workers injured or killed on the job) rather than diminish their production or introduce more costly systems to reduce or prevent accidents.

In New Jersey, children of Italian immigrants fill the glass factories. They are little martyrs who begin work at 10 or 12 years of age and die 10 or 12 years later with tuberculosis. The Americans eat too fast and do not digest. They sleep too little and do not rest. They keep every nerve tense enough to break, and keep their minds agitated like the lava of a volcano with the hope of business for tomorrow. Every year Americans take large amounts of patent medicine the contents of which they do not know, in order to calm their nerves so they can continue the race and win at the end. Their objective is prosperity. Then they die." (The words of Alberto Pecorini from his publication Gli Americani Nella Vita Moderna, published 1909)

But Giovanni and his family stayed in America, still believing in the dream. He was proud to have become an American citizen to the day he died in 1955. I never met him. That was the year I was born.

THE ITALIAN IMMIGRATION

While Italy’s population was not so dense as that of other European countries during the late 1800’s, it grew from less than 27 million in 1871 to over 34 million in 1905. Unfortunately, the natural resources of the country were not rich enough to take care of the increasing population. This was especially true in central and southern Italy, where draught and poor soil conditions made it increasingly difficult for a peasant to eke out an existence. Malaria in an especially virulent form stands out as one of the primary causes for emigration during this time.

Communication as a whole, was poor in Italy. Railroads operated under difficulties which created a scarcely of coal, Italy’s primary source of fuel. This scarcity put Italy at a distinct disadvantage competing with manufacturing of other countries. The opportunity for making a decent living became increasingly less likely. Since the circumstances which encouraged emigration were most prevalent in central and south Italy, most emigrants to America were from that area. Since the percentage of illiteracy in South-Central Italy was high, most Italians arriving in America could not read or write.

Such was the case with Giovanni Mariotti. Giovanni envisioned a good life for his son, the hope for more children, a home for his family, and a comfortable, long life for himself and his wife.

THE AMERICAN DREAM

The church chimes could be heard across town. Family and friends gathered. For three days, the wake. In the casket, the body of thirty-four- year-old Marcella Nori Mariotti, the body of her stillborn child placed gently, symbolically between her legs. The dead child was one of ten born dead to Marcella and Giovanni over the years. Just one would survive. Aldo, Sr, my grandfather. Then, the funeral mass and the burial. Later, all who gathered brought copious amounts of food and drink. Hours passed and visitors slowly trickled away. Giovanni and his son Aldo, then eight years old, and destined to be an only child, were alone. Marcella would never live in the stone house. But according to Giovanni, she would visit him there, over and over again, in his dreams.

“Be good,” she would tell him. “If you are good, then I can someday come and be with you again.” So, Giovanni was good.

Ironically, with each death in the quiet New England community, the stone house rose taller, moving closer toward completion. It was the same cemetery where Marcella was buried where a wealth of building materials for the rock steady foundation of the Mariotti family home was harvested. Whenever a grave was dug, Giovanni would set to worked filling his horse drawn wagon, gathering the rocks from the earth that had been tilled aside to make room for the dead. Once separated and properly washed, Giovanni mixed up the special recipe cement, a formula that he held in his head that he had learned from the old country. The walls of a house and what was left of his American dream was built, one rock at a time.

Eventually, Giovanni saved enough from his work at the synthetic plant, a division of the US Rubber Company, to contract out the completion of the house. It was finished out in wood which, by then, had grown three families high. The Mariotti’s would live on the top floor, its back door adjacent to the woods behind and the perfect setting to raise chickens, a goat for milk, ducks, two pigs a year, and lots of vegetables.

A perfect plan, save for the fact that 570 South Main Street was located smack in the middle of town, and times were changing.

My small feet struggled, negotiating one rickety wooden step at a time, as I climbed the three floors of that house, wearing my patent leather shoes and my Sunday best. That was the day to visit Grammy (Genevieve) Mariotti, the wife of Aldo, Sr. I was captivated by the old house, even then, because of the dozens of stories I had heard about the place, usually by ease dropping when adults gathered for coffee and pastry, or to play cards for pennies. During those visits to my grandmother, and in spite of my young age, I could feel the pain, depression and resignation lingering in those walls and from behind the words of my paternal grandmother. Stuck in time, trapped in that old house where she felt her American dream was permanently out of reach.

Our Sundays would continue with a visit to the cemetery. The car radio was turned down along with our voices. The whole world immediately piped down to a whisper as the gravel crunched beneath the tires of our blue two-tone1959 Plymouth. A Sunday visit with our departed loved ones. I can still feel the cold, wet dew soaking through the knees of my little girl leggings as I knelt in the grass beside each grave. Praying for the souls of those I had never met. Offering words of a prayer that I did not understand.

Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

THE STONE HOUSE BECOMES A HOME

Aldo Jr. was married young to Genevieve (Jenny) Romanski, and the couple remained with Giovanni at the stone house. Jenny produced five healthy children for Aldo in a very short time. My father, Aldo Jr., the youngest son, was born in 1932. Giovanni was thrilled as his family grew. He continued his work at the factory that he reached by walking over a footbridge that stretched across the pungent Naugatuck River, to help support his son, daughter-in-law and his five grandchildren.

Giovanni hid any extra cash he could save in the cellar. All the kids in the family knew exactly where the cash was, but no one dare touch it. Out of respect? Partially. But mostly because Giovanni hid the money under a pile of sand, next to his favorite chair in the cellar. He would smoke there, Italian cigars. And he would spit into that pile of sand, next to his favorite chair, where he hid his money.

Giovanni drank wine there, too. Homemade. He drank wine out of a special fancy bottle. Always three swallows. Never more, never less. But he took three swallows quite often, I am told. He poured wine over ice cream. He soaked his toasted cheese sandwiches in wine. And to his morning coffee, he added plenty of cream, and wine.

Giovanni always preached the evils of drinking plain water.

“Ats’a because’a water, she’s a gonna rust’a you pipes.”

Aldo Sr., husband, and father of five, became what was referred to back then as a playboy. He squandered money on women, alcohol, and gambling. As my father remembered it, Aldo Sr. came home drunk most of the time. When I asked my father if he was abused physically, he replied,

“No, ya know. We would get just a regular beatin’ from him, ya know, nothing worse than that.”

It was on that day, hearing my father describe beatings from his own father, that I suddenly understood the beatings I had received from my father. He really didn’t see it as anything so bad. Just a beating. Nothing worse than that. I felt compassion for him and a story he had embraced, and shouldn’t have, not knowing any better.

My father, Aldo Jr., vividly remembered the day Aldo Sr. walked away from his family for the last time.

“I was thirteen. I was in my parent’s bed, sick. I had just had ear surgery. He came in and got a suitcase full of clothes from the closet. There was a lot of hollering and everything. When I heard the door slam, I looked out the window to the downstairs. I could see the street and parked by the rock wall, there was a black convertible. There were two women sitting in that convertible, just waiting for him. He got in and they drove away.

We heard from him once. He had a bonus check coming from his job as a waiter at Fred’s restaurant. He told my mother to send it to him so he could get back home to her and help take care of us. She sent him the check and that was the last we saw of the money. And it was the last we ever heard from him.”

Aldo Richard Mariotti, Sr. was never heard from again. It was recently discovered that he died in 1972 of heart failure in Las Vegas, Nevada at the age of 67.

“YOU EITHER MADE IT OR YOU DIDN’T”

“It was hard after that,” my father continued. “The animals came in handy. We weren’t supposed to have them. There were zoning laws on that, but nobody said anything because we had to eat. And there was no welfare back then. You either made it or you didn’t.”

My father along with his brothers, began to go door to door, collecting garbage in pails on their wagon to help feed their pigs.

“We had the fattest pigs in town,” my father joked, as he went on to enlighten me on how to make a pig drunk. Crabapples, it seems have an intoxicating effect on a pig. So, feed a pig some crabapples and for mischievous little boys, there were hours of entertainment to come, watching the hapless creatures acting even more pig-ish than usual.

Before and after the sudden departure of Aldo Sr., Giovanni took on the responsibility for disciplining his five grandchildren and nurturing in them, a sense of responsibility.

“We had to water the garden,” my father explained, “and the well was down near the house and the garden was three tiers up the hill in the woods. I was in second grade. Me and my pal Paulie DeFranzo had to help with the watering. So, I filled up my bucket and I’d run like hell as fast as I could to the garden and by the time I’d get up there, I’d be lucky to have this much water left in my bucket.”

He shows me about a half inch with his thumb and forefinger.

“But I just figured, I’d just have to make a lot more trips, faster than everybody else and I could still do it. I was still proud, ya know, that I could do it. We thought we were helping. But we were just kids. What did we know?”

STORIES: THE RECIPES FOR LIFE

He just hung there, by a noose, tied to a tree limb in the middle of South Main Street, all puffed up and bloated, with a stupid little mustache drawn onto his face. A life-size doll of Adolph Hitler provided the centerpiece for a wild, joyful celebration. The war was over. People gathered in the streets, smacking Hitler with big sticks and threw rocks. At first, they tried to bust him open like you would a piñata on Cinco de Mayo. But, at the end of the evening, they set him on fire and watched him burn. My father, then 14 years old, sat among the crowd. He had quit school and had a job setting pins at the local bowling alley to help with expenses at home. Marion Theresa Errico stood shyly with her cousins amidst the chaos, watching Hitler go up in flames. Aldo Jr. acted cocky for his friends and pretended not to see her. Marion giggled with her cousins, pretending not to see him.

“I was only 14, too, my mother always said, but I knew that day, the first time I saw him, that he was the man I would marry.”

They did marry, four years later and would remain married for their entire lives. My father never completed his high school education. Still he retired as a district foreman for a Florida cement company, responsible for pouring most of the concrete used to construct Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

Strangers live in the old stone house now. My parents’ Central Florida home was made of wood. But my father saw to it that the wood was carefully maintained, its integrity well preserved. Often, when I would visit, we would stroll together throughout the plush landscape he had created there. Row upon row of vibrant azaleas, hibiscus, protected and blessed by ceramic statues of Saint Francis and the Virgin Mother. These were the times when he most freely share the stories, his life experiences that impacted us both, consciously and unconsciously.

And under our feet, walkways of brick. My father built these walkways, one brick at a time. The bricks are held firm with that special recipe cement, the formula he holds in his head as did his grandfather before him. The mortar represents the stories of generations past, binding us all together. It was almost immediately, as I heard each of my father’s stories, that I would decide which accounting I would incorporate into my own life and which ones I would rewrite. Not only to create a happier, healthier experience for myself, but to ensure that the legacy I pass down to my own children and grandchildren is weighted more heavily on the side of strength, courage, and loyalty, and less so on the side of adultery, abuse, fear and resignation. In some ways, I have been successful in tipping those scales. But undoubtedly, some of the more negative, dark stories remain—told and untold— stories that my children and grandchildren will need to rewrite for themselves, if they so choose.

The stories that make us, the stories that break us, from this life, from past lives, all provide us with the raw material out of which we can construct our lives into whatever we want them it to be.

Download Free: From Beneath the Olive Tree: Rewrite Your Stories from This Life and Past Lives