John started off the New Year by looking for a man to marry his sister. Jane didn’t understand why this should be so vital a quest, so imminently necessary. Most willingly she had given up her sewing alcove, making it into a small but cozy and quite ample enough bedroom for Celestina to feel at home in. Basically a happy person, who loved children, ever eager to learn, willing to help about the house, Celestina was a joy to have around—so why this haste to get rid of her? When questioned, John patiently explained to his wife that a woman needed a man to protect her, feed her, house her, by the gift of his name assure her the respectability necessary to be accepted into the community and most importantly, fulfill her womanhood by giving her children. Certainly there was no quarreling with that. Even if one wanted to, which Jane most earnestly did, all such rebuttal would have fallen onto the stone-deaf ears of any early-twentieth-century man. Knowing that Celestina had a sharp mind of her own—Jane decided it would be prudent to wait and keep her mouth shut. No use getting a husband riled up over something that was obviously beyond his comprehension.
As head of the family, John took his duty of marriage broker very seriously. He felt it was his responsibility to set his sister on the proper path towards matrimony. It was time for Celestina to become a wife, care for a husband of her own. With his usual thoroughness he searched the Ford employment rosters, eliminating Latvians, Croatians, Turks, Dalmatians and other such fringe nationals for being too low on the wage scale. In view of the Red Scare and increased deportations, Russians were definitely out, as were those mostly from the Balkans. The really dependable Germans, these were either already married, about to be or since the war now eager to return to their beaten homeland. The Irish could read—but they drank, were known to beat their women on a regular basis—married their own kind and their hatred of papist Italians was known by all. Of course as a Torinese fond of his innocent sister, choosing a worthy Italian would have been the obvious choice, but this year with both Sacco and Vanzetti finally going to be tried for murder, John was worried. Why he couldn’t quite put his finger on, as he tried to explain to Fritz when discussing the somewhat shocking, even violent, reactions in the press to these two Italian immigrants.
“It’s like one of your feelings, Fritz. I don’t know why, but something … something is going to happen from this. Something bad, very bad.” Of course Fritz had not taken him seriously, said he was only worried because he too was Italian—but John knew that wasn’t the reason.
Having exhausted most of the sixty different nationalities employed by the Ford Motor Company—at the end John was left with the stoic, nose-to-the-perpetual-grindstone Poles. Granted a boring lot at times, still on the whole they took care of their women, were frugal, hardworking men any woman could be proud to belong to.
While John was searching for an eligible Pole, Ford’s giant workforce waited out their seasonal layoff.
In Dearborn, the Rouge, that mastodon of production power in the making, was beginning to sap the creative strength from Highland Park. The continuously moving assembly line, such a revolutionary concept just a few years before, now an accustomed presence in most factories, requiring only unskilled laborers to feed its stupefying repetitiveness, Henry Ford began transferring his best men over to Dearborn and his industrial behemoth, the Mighty Rouge. Zoltan and Carl were reassigned—Fritz and Peter remained, while John divided his designing skills between the two factories.
For some reason Agnes didn’t show. Five months into her pregnancy, Zoltan’s wife still worked at her enviable post of trusted librarian without visually embarrassing anybody. Now that Celestina was there to look after the children, once a week come rain, sleet or icy storm, Jane took the trolley into Detroit to visit Agnes at the library. To have a friend in the big city, one who had unlimited access to books, was an anticipatory joy that Jane treasured. Zoltan’s Agnes, a gifted shepherd, led Jane to regions she would never have discovered by herself amidst the vast riches of beckoning shelves. Sometimes their tastes came into conflict as when the earnest librarian suggested Thackeray openly disapproving of Jane being stirred by Upton Sinclair.
“Jane, how can you?! You mustn’t read such shocking prose! Even I haven’t—The Jungle is not proper for a lady. A violent man, with violent ideas, violent places and so brutal! If you must like the macabre then at least read Edgar Allan Poe but not such a radical as Upton Sinclair!”
Seeing her friend so disturbed by her taste, Jane quickly snatched one of the sisters Bront? off the shelf hoping she would do—then took back Mr. Sinclair and his brutal reality as soon as Agnes’s back was turned. During this year of literary discovery, Jane became engrossed in what would become a lifetime interest in those, who using the weaponry of words, fought against the wrongs they perceived as such. Later this would aid her to endure her destiny—but for now it simply intrigued her view of life.
Jane was maturing, her self-awareness more stringent than when untried youth had governed her perception. Dutiful marriage had given her its grounding, motherhood its pride of achievement, sex its physical discovery, love though still in its infancy, an awareness of its necessity. Without realizing the implications, Jane was becoming herself; no longer wholly dependent on those categories that had made this transition possible. Though her era and its set priorities might demand obedience, even subservience, Jane would travel her own roads, seek her own horizons—ever convinced that freedom was her quest though its applicable meaning still eluded her as it related to herself.
By spring, life and the living of it had settled into its accustomed patterns. Children grew, their expanding individualism separating them from homogeneous babyhood. Under the sheltering attention of a replaced mother—Carl’s little Rose shed her sorrow, reawakening the Irish joyousness that was her true mother’s legacy. Serafina’s Angelo honed his skill of truant of all authority that would shape his violent future. Jane’s sons simply embellished what they had always been. Michael—The Romantic; John—The Sullen; Billy—The Happy. Still childless and resigned, Peter and his Clara adopted a stray kitten and named her Lizzie.
It was summer when Agnes presented Zoltan with a daughter and transformed him into the young man he had never been when young. A spring in his step, a grin on his face—not a sneeze, cough or fidget in sight—he became actually handsome in the process.
Overjoyed, Hannah couldn’t get over that a baby had been born in a hospital—a place designated only for sick people who were going to die.
“Can you imagine—a new life in such a place. What will dey tink of next! Dat Agnes I have to admit—courage she has! You going to do dat too next time, Ninnie?”
Jane preparing to help lay the table for a Sunday supper smiled, “There won’t be a next time.”
“Aha—you sure?”
“Yes—Hannah, I’m sure.”
“Well, la-di-da, you getting to be like one of dose real so modern ladies who know so much but don’t tell—keep dere secrets so dere figures stay?”
Blushing, Jane admitted she had been reading the latest writings by Mrs. Sanger.
“You know, Vifey—I tink someday that lady maybe right—but nature is nature—maybe not so smart for people to play around wit it. God he knows—but plain people? I am not so sure.”
“Don’t worry—it’s simple and not at all dangerous.”
“Aha …” Hannah poured the creamy soup into her cavernous tureen. “But … a woman’s body is for making life—so maybe not good to stop it.”
“A woman’s body belongs to her. She decides what to do with it!”