Frances "Bootie" Zimmer
Frances "Bootie" Zimmer was born on Halloween in 1911 at Monongahela General
Hospital, three years before the country had an income tax or a Federal Reserve Bank, in
the first flush moments of scientific pedagogy practically realized. She was five years
younger than dad, two inches taller, born in a country on the gold standard where
common citizens carried precious metal in their pockets as money.
She was three when WWI began, six when the Gary Plan riots struck New York City
schools. In the postwar years, her father, son of a German immigrant from the Palatinate,
became prosperous by working around the clock as a print shop proprietor and sometimes
investor in movies, carnivals, newspapers, and real estate. His grandchildren, Moss and
Taylor, my brilliant cousins, are still in the printing business in Bethel Park, near
Pittsburgh, one hundred years later.
Bootie graduated from Monongahela High, where she was a cheerleader, in 1929, a few
months before the market crash. Besides losing money, some other great catastrophe
must have happened to the Zimmers then, but I've only been able to unearth a few shards
of its nature. Whatever its full dimension, it included the sudden eviction of Grandmother
Moss from her home, the incarceration of great-grandfather Frederick in an old-age
institution far away, the flight of great- grandmother Isabelle to Detroit at the age of
seventy-nine, at a time when Detroit and the moon were equally distant, and the severing
of ties between Granddad and his brothers to the 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 who commissioned stone sculptures for his garden.
Grandfather Gatto was also leader of the Freemasons of Pittsburgh, the Grand Venerable.
An old news clipping reported his death in thirty- five column inches with three headlines
and a dignified photograph. The obituary called him "leader of the Italian colony of
Pittsburgh," continuing, "fifty-eight cars, each carrying eight persons, were required to
convey friends of the deceased to the cemetery and back home again."
His death produced a shock for the living. No assets survived Giovanni. Only a hasty sale
of the home for much less than its value kept the family out of immediate poverty. The
children scrambled to find a toehold in the working world and by a stoical acceptance of
reduced circumstances managed to keep the family together and to support Lucrezia, who
spoke little English. It was a pulling together the Zimmers had not been able to manage.
Ten years later, mother was drawn into this family orbit, she holding tight to her secrets,
Dad doing the same with his own. What the merger should have conferred on Sister and
me was a striking band of distinctive individuals: big-hearted Laura, elegant Josephine,
witty and caustic Virginia, crotchety Achilles (renamed Kelly.) There was also Nick, the
humanist; Frank, the intellectual; and Lucrezia, the contessa. But instead, our private
hurts kept us apart as surely as the same force divided my sister and me.
Mother found subtle ways to discourage fraternization with the sociable Gattos, Dad
eventually taking the hint. Until I was fully grown and well into midlife, the Gattos were
a palimpsest for me; what cousins that family held, I was strictly partitioned from. When
occasionally I was taken to visit Frank or Laura or Josephine, or all together, we were
formal with each other, in Old World style. Each extended courtesy to me, complete with
those little flourishes of etiquette which give significance to the best encounters of
children with grown-ups — a quality once common and now rare which transferred
naturally into my schoolteaching.
Walking Around Monongahela
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