La Dolce Vita A paean to peaches
I
By Nancy Oakley
vividly remember her hat, a wide-brimmed straw topper with a rounded crown, but what struck me most was its color, which matched her outfit: a soft pinkish-orange shade of peach. It seemed apropos to me that Patty Gordon-Mann should be so colorfully clad for the wedding of her niece and my childhood friend Margaret Frassineti, because I always associated the name Gordon-Mann with Sandhills peaches. By now, some of my esteemed colleagues in Southern Pines who are reading this may be rolling their eyes at my enthusiasm for their local staple that, to them, must seem so commonplace. Who doesn’t take for granted anything quite literally grown in one’s own backyard? But for me, and I’d wager for anyone else residing in the Triad and points farther north or west, the arrival of local peach season is as big a deal as Christmas morning to a child. Perhaps because my early childhood was somewhat peachdeprived. The only ones I’d known came out of a Del Monte can, smothered in thick, overly sweet syrup that masked their natural goodness. The stuff of school lunchrooms, they were often served with a scoop of cottage cheese, and sometimes a maraschino cherry as garnish. Hardly anything to write home about. Until the day my friend Margaret’s mother and my godmother Bet Frassineti — aka “Aunt Bet” — introduced freshly picked and fragrant peaches to my family and me, arriving on our doorstep with a large round bushel basket filled with the plump, rosy fruit sheathed in ohso-fine fuzz, some with stems and leaves still attached. My first bite of the tender, juicy yellow flesh inside was nothing short of a revelation. And all the sweeter because Aunt Bet had taken the trouble to drive nearly two hours south and two hours back just to make a peach run for all of her friends. Her supplier was Aumans Orchard, which she had no doubt heard about from her husband, Dano, (short for Giordano and later Anglicized to Jordan), and her mother-in-law, Helen Gordon-Mann. “Miss Helen,” as my mother called her, was an engaging Philadelphia gal who developed a shipboard romance with a naval officer and Italian noble Guido Frassineti, during a transatlantic crossing. The two married and produced two children, Dano and his sister Danila (named for Count Danilo, a main character in Miss Helen’s favorite opera, The Merry Widow). The family made subsequent trips between the States and Italy, specifically the hills overlooking Florence, home to the Frassineti farm. During another crossing, Guido died unexpectedly. Miss Helen ultimately remarried an expat named Eddie Gordon-Mann. Though a British subject, he
48 O.Henry
was, for all intents and purposes, Italian. I once met Miss Helen and Eddie at a gathering Aunt Bet and Dano hosted at their old house on Round Hill Road, where I’d hang out with Margaret and her brothers Bill and Jeff, when we weren’t swatting tennis balls on the soft courts at Carlson Farms. Miss Helen and Eddie seemed very elegant and stylish to my awkward teenage eyes. She was tall and statuesque. He had white hair, a complement to his sartorial panache consisting of white flannels and navy blazer — complete with pocket-square. He was a cheerful soul with a twinkle in his eye, and he talked my ear off for the better part of the afternoon, though I could barely understand a word of his heavily accented English. Dano, I later learned, had little patience for his stepfather. But such are family dynamics, especially blended ones frayed by the family’s separation during the war years. For when conflict raged through Europe, Miss Helen, Eddie and their two younger daughters Gaby and the aforementioned Patty, were interned in a concentration camp. Because they were considered Italian citizens, Dano and Danila, with the farm retainers to care for them, were allowed to remain in the basement of the family villa, which was used to quarter the occupying German army. “My dad never eats chicken,” Margaret Frassineti once told me, explaining that her father had eaten more than his share of fowl, which would often spoil during those uncertain years; he had the unpleasant chore of snapping the birds’ necks. It was a scenario I couldn’t fathom for I only knew the tall, rumpled, laconic charmer with the rapier wit, whom my parents affectionately dubbed “Count Frassineti.” The same fellow grinning and mugging in the home movies of their infamous New Year’s Eve parties seemed a far cry from the boy my friend had described. When, during the liberation of Italy, a division of the Fifth Army encamped at the farm, Dano was the one to communicate with its officers. One of them expressed admiration for the boy’s fluency in English, prompting Dano to explain that his mother was
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