I can feel the scratchy threads of the worn gray and pink floral rug in Aunt Carmella’s room digging into my bare feet as I stare out the window over the open lid of Aunt Carmella’s cedar chest. Aunt Carmella’s room is at the front corner of our house, with two windows behind the trunk facing the busy main street and one window opening onto the side street. I tip my head from side to side, following the track of Aunt Carmella’s pointing finger. I need to be sure of the exact spot.
It is one of the days when Aunt Carmella has given in to my pleading to PLEASE go through her cedar chest with her. It is where she keeps all her treasures, and I love nothing more than hearing her tell the story behind each one. Today, in a small shoebox full of photos, we come across a picture of a boyish Uncle Charlie in his World War I Navy uniform. Charlie was one of Grandpa’s brothers, my great-uncle.
Domenico Mecca, Grandpa and Uncle Charlie’s father, had immigrated to Dunmore, a small coal-mining town in Northeastern Pennsylvania, from the southern Italian village of Avigliano in 1902 at the age of forty, leaving his wife and children behind. Four years later, he had saved enough money to pay for his family’s passage to America. In 1906, Domenico’s wife
Catarina and their five children joined him in Dunmore, including my eighteen-year-old grandfather, Antonio. The family first settled in Dunmore’s Hill Section, where almost all the Italian immigrants lived. In 1917, Domenico completed construction of the house at 401 East Drinker Street. It is the Mecca family homestead, known simply as 401. It is the house where my father was born in 1921 and lived until he died. It is the house where I was born in 1958 and spent my childhood.
I always believed that 401 contained more doors than any other house of its size. My great-grandfather had purposely designed the house with many doors, some at unexpectedly odd angles, so that the layout of the living space could be reconfigured to accommodate the growing and changing extended family that would live there. The upstairs room where Uncle Charlie lived as a bachelor in the 1920s was my father’s bachelor room in the 1940s. In the 1970s, it was our TV room. The same room where I crawled into bed with my mother in the morning after Dad left for work was the room where Aunt Carmella and Aunt Katy buttoned up their black leather shoes and yanked at the cotton stockings that always seemed to pool at their ankles.
I am probably about ten years old the day Aunt Carmella and I find the old picture of Uncle Charlie in his World War I uniform in her trunk. He had died a few years earlier at the age of sixty- seven. I knew him, but only as an old man; Aunt Carmella grew up with him in this house. He was her favorite uncle when she was a little girl. Aunt Carmella holds the photo carefully by one corner as she runs her finger over Uncle Charlie’s youthful face. I want to reach for the picture but wait until she looks up.
“Oh, I loved Uncle Charlie,” she says, as she hands me the photo.
“Was he in the war?” I ask.
“He went to training camp, but the war was over before he had to go overseas.” She pauses and turns to look out the window. “That’s what is so sad.”
“What do you mean? I thought he was OK.”
“Oh, not Uncle Charlie. My grandmother, your great- grandmother Mecca, Charlie’s mother.” Her eyes get that look they always get when she is about to tell a story, like she is rewinding a reel in her head. I wait.
“I never knew my Grandma Mecca,” she continues. “She died a year before I was born.” Aunt Carmella lets her lids close slowly, takes a breath, then looks me in the eye and continues, “of a broken heart.” Circling her head around the room as if she is looking for a ghost, she adds, “This was her room.”
Then Aunt Carmella tells me the story. Uncle Charlie was drafted in June 1918, a few months after he turned twenty-one. He went to boot camp, then was home for a few days before he had to report to a Naval base in Cape May, New Jersey. From there, he would be shipped overseas. Aunt Carmella and I stare at the photo in her hand. On October 22, 1918, he put on his Navy-blue service uniform, the one he is wearing in the picture, said goodbye to his mother, and went out to get the streetcar to Lackawanna Station in Scranton.
Aunt Carmella points out the window towards the grassy triangle separating Drinker and Harper Streets. “See that triangle?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Well, that used to be a streetcar stop. Streetcars used to go up and down Drinker Street, all the way to downtown Scranton. You could get anywhere on the streetcar. Scranton was one of the first cities to have all electric streetcars. We were famous!”
I look out at the busy street and wonder what it would have been like to clank along on silver tracks in the middle of Drinker Street. Dad told me how he and his boyhood buddies used to hop
on the backs of the cars to hitch a free ride. The grimy and smelly COLTS buses that stop in front of our house now could not compare to my romantic vision of a streetcar.
“Well, Uncle Charlie walked out the front door and down to the streetcar stop. Grandma Mecca could see him from this window. She stood here watching him until he climbed up into the streetcar.” She turns to look at the bed behind us. “Then she lay down in that bed and never got up again. She died five days later.”
I peer over the top of the open trunk, trying to lock my eyes on the place on the island where the streetcar stop might have been. I want to stand where Great-Grandma Mecca stood as she looked out on the world for the last time. I know now that Great- Grandma Mecca most likely died of the Spanish flu. But stories, especially family stories, are their own truth. In our family’s story, she died of a broken heart.
I squint into the afternoon sun, staring at the crooked telephone pole that stands just about where Uncle Charlie stood as he waited anxiously for the streetcar, feeling his mother’s eyes burning into him but not daring to look back. As I recreate her gaze, I wonder how long she stood in this exact spot, watching the streetcar, and her son, disappear down Drinker Street.
Aunt Carmella puts her arm around me, but I do not turn to look at her. I want to know what if feels like when your heart breaks.
✤ ✤ ✤
Great-Uncle Charlie and Great-Grandma Mecca are just two characters in the storied history of this house. I am another. So many Meccas superimposed upon one another, layer upon layer, in this space.
Growing up in this house, every space I entered, every wall and window and banister I touched, connected me to those who
had come before. Every door in this house of many doors whispered secrets and I was compelled to listen. Relatives who had long since moved on from this house were still here in the worn spots on the front porch steps and the indentation in the wall left by a doorknob after an angry slam. They were in the knicks in the porcelain sink and the stains in the clawfoot tub. They were in the creaks in the floors and the frayed ropes in the double-hung windows.
Behind every door in this house of many doors was a story, a relative known or unknown, a piece of my history.
There is another house three miles away in the city of Scranton. It was built by the Hudson Coal Company and rented to miners’ families. My mother’s father had immigrated from Germany in 1923. Her mother followed in 1925. They lived first in Western Pennsylvania, where my mother was born in 1926, then moved to a house at 601 Mary Street in Scranton in 1932. It was my mother’s home until she married my father in 1954 and moved to 401. The four-room house where my mother grew up was barely big enough for the family, which consisted of my grandparents, my mother, and her two siblings. I never saw the house on Mary Street, never even drove by it, while my mother was alive. But its stories are no less real than Great-Grandma Mecca’s broken heart.
Two houses. Two nationalities. Two cultures. Two religions.
Two families.
I want to honor the hopes and dreams, the work and the play, the hardships and the laughter, the tragedies and the triumphs of the people in those two families. Some of them I have known in life, some only in story, some through the mystery of the ties that bind us across generations. Traveling from their homelands of Italy and Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, my refugee ancestors made their way to America with
little more than hope. I am the beneficiary of that hope. Theirs are the stories of America; but they are above all their stories— unique and precious, holding truths we need to remember, holding the seeds of who we have become as a family and as a country.
This book is the result of my journey to learn their stories. As I opened one door after another, I found more than I had imagined. People I thought I knew came to life in new ways. People I never knew took shape. They revealed themselves to me and allowed me to step into their shoes. Truths were revealed and idols toppled. The human beings who stand in their place are even more worthy of awe. In their imperfections and secrets is their humanity, grander than any idol.
I hold their stories as a sacred trust.
Rambling Rose 