gat

extent that though they lived cheek to jowl with us in the tiny city, I was neither aware of their
existence nor did they once say hello. Ach!
In the great breakup, Bud ran to Chicago without a penny and without graduating from high
school; Mother, too, ran off in dramatic fashion, telling her best friend as she boarded a train for
Pittsburgh that she would wave a handkerchief at the window if she intended to return. She didn’t
wave. And though she did return, she hid ever after, never speaking to any of her childhood
friends again. I discovered all this when I advertised in the local paper after Bootie’s death, asking
to speak to anyone who had known her as a girl.
Mother was bone-thin with large blue eyes and hair gone white at thirty, just as my own did. She
lived on a razor’s edge between a need to avoid shame and an almost equally desperate need to
find a way to express her considerable talents, a goal conventional assessment would say eluded
her forever. Yet everything she turned her hand to was marked by electrifying energy. Our
Christmas trees were an art form. Our home was cleaner and neater than a hospital operating
room. Beauty and good taste flowed from her fingertips. But the shame, which she would rather
have died than acknowledge, always defeated her in the end and made her melancholy when she
thought no one was looking.
I think Mother tried to force her fierce spirit into Dad and live through him. When that failed, she
pinned her hopes on me. This, I think, caused the original breach in the marriage. Compared to
the driven Germans she knew best, Dad must have presented a lifelong frustration. And though
we never went hungry or lacked a roof, the absence of extra money represented decisive evidence
to her of damnation, permanent exile from the fairyland of her youth.
And yet the exquisite irony bedevils me like a fury—never have I met anyone able to make such
magic out of nothing. When, to her great surprise, she came into a considerable amount of money
after father’s death, like Midas’ wish, it offered her nothing she really needed. Nor was she able to
spend any of it to buy her heart’s desire, an avenue for her talent and some dignity.
In 1932 Frances Zimmer went off alone on her frightening adventure, marrying into a magnificent
Italian family which had pulled itself out of the immigrant stew while the patriarch was alive, only
to plummet back into the soup after his death. She married all alone, without a father or mother
there to give her away.
Giovanni Gatto, my grandfather, had been an enlightened publicista in Italy, an unheard of
Presbyterian Italian who swept a contessa off her feet in Calabria in the elopement which resulted
in her disinheritance. Together, Giovanni and Lucrezia came to America with their young children
and set up house in Pittsburgh.
Giovanni is another family ghost I worked to discover. After a short time in this country, he was
hired (personally) by Andrew Mellon to be manager of the Foreign Exchange Department of
Mellon Bank. He was a man for whom restaurants kept a personalized champagne bucket, a man
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