GRANDPA GATTO
From In the Shade of a Lightning Rod
Bobby associated brunch with Chicago cemeteries After the death of Grandpa Gatto in May of 1973, the Rand family began to make irregular trips to visit his grave on Sundays. Bobby enjoyed them. He liked the silence of Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, the decorative WWI cannons, the hand-pumps that gushed jets of well-water, so full of minerals it tasted like blood. Grandpa Gatto wasn’t one of the many veterans buried there. Born in 1902, he had been too young for the First World War and too old for the Second. He eloped with sweet-sixteen Emily Mondo in 1920 (and married her before a justice of the peace outside Crown Point, Indiana), made bathtub gin during Prohibition, owned a couple of taverns in the 1930’s that quickly went broke, found a permanent job at the Sherwin-Williams paint factory after Pearl Harbor. He was a convinced Anglophobe, remaining true to the principles of blustering “Big Bill” Thompson his entire adult life. He laid all the world’s problems squarely at the door of the English. “That’s the country we should have gone to war with in 1941.” His eldest child and only son enlisted in the Carlson’s Raiders. Uncle Joey, seldom spoken of by his sisters, had been a local tough in the Roseland neighborhood of his youth. He copped it on Tarawa. Grandpa Gatto had taken his death philosophically. He hadn’t been the most loving of fathers. Bobby’s mother recounted that he used to give little Joey a swift kick in the morning to wake him for work. Good old Grandpa Gatto had also gone off with another woman for a time, abandoning the family in the darkest days of the Depression. Grandma Emmy had been forced to sell the furniture and to peddle homemade fruit pies door-to-door with her two preschool daughters to make ends meet. Alex “Mucklehead ” Gatto mellowed in his later years. When he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 71, Bobby joined the females of the family for three days of endless wailing and gnashing of teeth. Bobby’s dad had been fond of the old man too, and did his best to console them all. He often accompanied them on their Sunday visits to Holy Sepulchre. They took place at the end of the morning, just in time to catch the smorgasbord brunch at the Olde Beverly Inne restaurant afterwards.
Bio:
John Satriano is a native of Chicago. His original work has appeared in various publications, among which Antaeus and Magic Realism in the U.S. and Nuovi Argomenti and Pastrengo in Italy. He is also a translator and the recipient of PEN’s Renato Poggioli Award. “Grandpa Gatto” is an excerpt from his novel In the Shade of a Lightning Rod (Casa Italia, 2021).
OVUNQUE SIAMO 