Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [10]
My father spent his career as a pilot in the U.S. Navy. It was a dream for my dad and his family. Although Dad was born in America, his parents had both been born in Italy. The Navy meant that you were really part of this country, the credential of a real American that no one could dispute. But it didn’t come easily.
The one-hundred-year-old, three-story home in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, in which my father grew up might have been grand had it not also been the factory where his father, Flores, made and sold his potions and ointments and where his mother, Mary, made soaps in the kitchen. The neighborhood was all that way: family homes and family businesses under one roof. Next door the Silvers ran a dry-goods and novelties business from their house. All the houses are gone now, lost to the cloverleaf for the Lane-Bane Bridge that solved a lot of traffic problems in Brownsville but took histories, and my family’s history, with it. Still, that house on Market Street, from which he could look down on the Monongahela River, was probably the grandest house my father ever lived in, even if the upper floors were rented to roomers. It was there that my grandfather, Dr. Flores Anania, supported his growing family as a pharmacist and chemist, and from there, in 1931, he left to be sworn in as an American citizen.
At Brownsville High School, my father was as dapper as his father, but taller. Sports consumed the time left over after he helped his father or worked the several jobs he had in high school. When I look at the pictures of my father from those days, I can imagine him serving dinner in a supper club he had once described, where his wealthiest customer tipped only on the dinner but never on the drinks that kept my father running to the bar throughout the evening. In photographs, I see him dressed in a double-breasted suit, with thick wavy hair and an open handsome face, and I can imagine the girls swooning over him, as two lovely eighty-year-old twins told me they had, sixty-plus years before, when I met them on a campaign visit to Brownsville in 2004.
And although I never met my grandfather, I can picture him as the Italian father in control. He died before my parents even met, but I’ve heard the stories all my life. How he would sell one of his formulas to a company, make a small fortune, and spend it on fancy clothes, or an automobile. It may even explain that grand house on Market Street. Then times would be lean again, and my grandmother—Nana, we called her—would be in the basement making soap in a dress that had been custom-ordered from France. One of our favorite stories, told enough times that it might even be true, concerns a new automobile he purchased when my father was about sixteen. He took the family to New York City in the car to see his brother Joseph, who lived on Long Island and broadcast a radio show from Radio City Music Hall. While negotiating the streets in New York, my grandfather’s new car stalled in the middle of an intersection. Traffic was being directed by a large barrel-chested Irish policeman who ordered that he move the car. My grandfather tried to start the engine and failed, the policeman bellowed, and the scene repeated itself. Finally, my grandfather, exasperated and unused to being yelled at, told my father to take “the women”—that is, his mother and sisters—to the sidewalk nearby. When he turned back around at the curb, my father saw this short, well-dressed Italian man, his own father, opening the hand of the policeman who towered over him, slamming the keys into his hand, and stomping off, yelling over his shoulder, “You move it. It’s your car now.”
After a year at the University of Pittsburgh, my father got the long-sought-after appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. At six feet three inches, he had broad shoulders accentuated