Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century by John Paul Godges

the roundhouse. The men were almost always different men. Some of them were fathers, riding the rails from town to town in search of work.
    During the summers of the mid-1930s, the men appeared at the fence about twice a week. Over the course of a typical summer, about 25 of them came for breakfast and left with lunch. Usually, the men came to the fence when Serafino was at work.
    “ You shouldn’t do this,” Serafino warned Maria. “You never know when a bad one will come along. He could hurt you and the children.”
    She kept doing it anyway.
    Serafino kept warning her. But he didn’t force her to stop. He couldn’t help but imagine his own father in the faces of the hobos who hopped off the rails.
     
    With Prohibition a thing of the past, Serafino strung his vines of concord grapes unrepentantly in 15 rows that all stretched for nearly 50 feet: from behind the garage all the way to the back property line. In autumn, he harvested the grapes as soon as the rest of the work in the garden—the truly arduous work—was done.
    To harvest grapes, he didn’t need to bend over, lift, or yank anything. He simply plopped himself on a stool and proudly plucked the plump clumps of purple. As he sat there, he took the opportunity to admire the beauty of the vines extending along either side of him, to contemplate the elegance and sturdiness of a properly cultivated vineyard. Unlike those forlorn grapes that he had once found growing wild like orphans in the bushes near Lehigh Row, these vines grew the way vines were meant to be grown, spaced just far enough from one another along a common structural framework so that they could all develop strong trunks and yet be near enough so that they could still reach out to one another, intertwine themselves in mutually reinforcing grasps, and together bear much greater weight than any one of them could ever withstand alone, producing the heaviest, juiciest, and sweetest harvests. Serafino never rushed through his grape harvest. Harvesting grapes was never work. Harvesting grapes was the reward.
    He poured the fruits of his labors into suitably aging wooden barrels in the basement. He stored the surplus finished product in transparent bottles, not covert olive oil cans. He was once again free to make wine not for the profit but for the love of it.
    Maria worried that he loved it too much. Once or twice a year, the two of them argued furiously about his drinking, typically when he came into the house from harvesting grapes and headed directly to his barrels in the basement.
    “ Is that all you care about?” she yelled at him from the kitchen.
    “ So what if it is!” he yelled back.
    Then he slammed the basement door. Moments later, everyone in the house heard him crooning from the cellar, singing his favorite Italian love songs to his wine.
    Maria denounced his drinking, but she extolled him as a role model at the same time. “If you want to marry a man,” she advised her daughters, “get him drunk first. If he gets angry, don’t marry him. The real man comes out when he’s drunk.” She was grateful to be married to a happy drinker, not a bitter drinker.
    “ Things could be a lot worse,” she defended him further. “He doesn’t squander his paycheck. He drinks only what he makes himself.”
    She made sure of it. She couldn’t read or write, and she needed her kids to translate for her. But she knew her numbers. He brought his paychecks home to her, and she managed the money.
    She also kept him from ruining the house: the electricity, the plumbing, the heating. She knew he couldn’t fix anything like that, no matter how hard he tried. She knew when to call someone else.
    She was still the stabilizing force.
     
    But, boy, was he an entertainer.
    Those were the days when Serafino regaled the family by dressing up in any new article of clothing that the girls brought home and that could fit him: hats, scarves, brassieres. Once he even tried on a girdle. He strutted and preened