Irma Zarko’s house had a cellar. In that cellar was always a barrel of wine. Fresh wine in the fall, heady wine by summer. The aroma of it competed with the garlic, but was victorious only in the cellar. One of childhood’s great adventures was being sent down with an empty bottle to funnel that red wine straight from the tap. Hers was a working cellar; low, irregular, musty with cobwebs, filled with sacks of potatoes and onions, jars of fruit and tomatoes, braids of garlic, bags of freshly dried herbs, goat meat, dried tomato paste in ceramic crocks. To be sent to the cellar was to enter another world. My cousins and I relished going down to fetch supplies. I still dream about it.
Irma Zarko’s yard had a hen house. Quite often we’d be invited to gather eggs. We weren’t sent alone on these forays, but we could carry the basket, touch the warm shells, commune with the hens.
Irma Zarko’s garden had two plots, both quite large. One, next to the barn, was mainly for kale. Kale and lentils, with sausage for Sundays and holidays, is what got her young family through the winters, and even as prosperity nudged aside the need to cleave to that diet, it continued from force of habit. The other garden was behind the house and was everything else that could be grown in that climate, which is to say, everything.
Irma had goats, too, but gave them up when I was still too young to form opinions about them.
After their one-minute courtship in Dubrovnik, Irma had done as Vito suggested. He bought passage for her in about two months’ time. That allowed him to return to California, put some money together, send it to her (by wire? Must have been.), and ready his house for a new wife. She traveled alone from Dubrovnik to Naples, Naples to Liverpool, Liverpool to Ellis Island. She stayed in New York for a few days with friends, in the Croatian neighborhood west of Hell’s Kitchen; the same area I called home for sixteen years. Then she caught a train across the continent to Oakland, and changed to Sunnyvale where Vito met her with a buggy. It was her first journey longer than the two hundred kilometers that lay between her island home in Brac and her laundry job in Dubrovnik.
She was nineteen, spoke fluent Italian and got by in Portuguese. Years in California added Spanish and English to the category of getting by. Because her favorite market was owned by Asians, she even picked up a few words of Chinese, just to be friendly.
When Vito died in 1935, Irma put on widow’s weeds, and never again wore color in public. She had a black straw hat decorated with flowers of such a dark blue that they, too, seemed black. She allowed a mild exception to the rule of black with her aprons (impossible to find a store-bought apron in solid black) and a few house dresses. For those, she was able to find fabric with black backgrounds dotted all over with small patterns in drab colors. But most of the time, she was solid black, all the way. Her hatpin was decorated with a black fake pearl. She carried a black shopping bag. And the older she became, the blacker her attire.
On Irma’s dresser stood six or eight pressed glass perfume bottles with great fan-shaped stoppers. All the bottles were empty, and I was fascinated by them. She must have worn a fair amount of perfume for a long time before widowhood deprived her of scent as well as color. It made me yearn to know her when she was young and vibrant and smelled of perfume.
At the foot of her bed was a sizable steamer trunk. She kept things of special value in it. I realize only now that it was probably what she brought with her from Brac. Every now and then she would go into it, open drawers, dig around bits of fabric and sacks of who-knows-what, and emerge with a silver dollar that would be passed, palm to palm, to her only grandson. What a piece of art that dollar was, and what it could purchase!
Land Vito had not sold while he was alive was passed on to Irma, of course, but I have personal memories of only the cherry orchard located on a street oddly named The Dalles. Dad and Uncle Bill cultivated, irrigated, and harvested those ten acres when I was small, spending almost every spring and summer Sunday afternoon there. Bill enjoyed it. The work wasn’t greasy enough for Dad.
I loved that orchard. Loved to watch the clay-rich soil being turned by the discs as they sliced into the dark earth. I loved the little rivers and ponds that formed when the orchard was flooded with water and that we could wade in, imagining ourselves in some great system of canals. I loved seeing the trees in bloom, then suddenly laden with their pink treasure after what seemed like only a few days.
But Sunnyvale was now home to Lockheed and Sylvania, and the housing market was exerting pressure on the farmers. By the late fifties, the ten acres of cherries that Irma owned were surrounded by subdivisions. The people who lived in them saw the cherry trees as a personal amenity, and giddily joined in the harvest. They were city technicians recently hired by the burgeoning electronics industry, their food had always come from stores. They gave little thought to where it had been before it appeared labeled and priced and refrigerated. Or to whom it belonged. Irma’s portion of the harvests became smaller and smaller.
She was offered ten thousand an acre for ten acres of unprofitable cherry trees. Such money was an unimaginable fortune. Her sons advised her to sell, to use the income to fund a comfortable old age. She sold, put the money in the bank, and kept on exactly as before; the garden, the chickens, the wine in the basement. A place for me to come for lunch during the school year, and a place for me to eat too many raisin cookies after school when my mother had a meeting or event and wasn’t going to be home.
“I don’t need it,” she said to her sons of her new wealth, “you can enjoy it when I’m gone.” And she happily continued her productive cycles that included dried prunes, canned apricots, quince candy, bakalar, fried pastries, cured meats, and stocking her aromatic basement; she enjoyed every bit of it until diabetes suddenly weakened her.
“Mr. Musso walks like this,” she once said to me of a neighbor, imitating his limp. “Grandma Zarko carries fifty pounds of chicken feed on her shoulder and look! Straight! You be like Grandma when you’re old.”
I’m trying, Grandma.
Photo: Irma center, her three sons (left to right, Pete, Tony, and George) and my mother, Ann, to her right.