“He doesn’t have to like me, just pay me and keep his hands to himself. I don’t want a fella. I’m widowed, you know. My husband, Giacomo, trained horses at the royal stables. He was breaking a wild Arabian for the king when he got thrown and broke his neck and died.” I stared. What about Pietro? Roseanne knew that we’d worked at the villa for years and there was no husband, no Pietro or Giacomo. Did past lives not matter in America?
Roseanne pushed back a curl. “I see. I’m sorry, Teresa.”
“Mamma has a beautiful voice,” I interjected to pull our talk from fallen, imagined husbands.
“Stingler will like that. Good singers make the work go faster. Be sure you tell him you can sing.”
“I won’t be on my knees, that’s what’s important.”
The next day she left for work before seven with a light step and shoulders squared. Since we’d come to Cleveland, Mamma had not once raised her voice. Perhaps an angel did watch over us.
So it was with hope and good humor that I went with Roseanne to Central High School to be enrolled as Lucia D’Angelo in the ninth grade. A stubby clerk took me to a classroom hung with maps and set with rows of wooden desks. He handed me a document with English words all over, pointed me to the teacher, and left. The students stared, giggling a little when my shoes creaked. At least I was dressed as they were. Please, let me blend in.
The teacher came gliding across the room, reaching for my document. Rigid as a soldier, I handed it to her. She had gray-blue eyes and a lace collar so high and stiff that it seemed her head swiveled on a white shaft. A brown-haired girl named Yolanda was summoned to translate the melodious voice. Her dress was like mine, but fitted better and was embellished with ribbons. “Her name is Miss Robinson and she is happy to have you. She’s sure you’ll work hard and learn English. If you speak Italian in this room or the halls of this school”—Yolanda indicated a slender wooden pointer—“she reminds you. Now go to your desk. We do history next.”
There was no danger of my speaking at all. The history lesson was a torrent of words I didn’t know. Drops of sweat ran down my face. Mortified, I wiped them away. When Yolanda turned to smile, I took heart and listened harder until, like rocks exposed by a retreating tide, I recognized the words revolution, declaration, independence, and general. Miss Robinson showed us a picture of General Washington standing in a tiny boat during a windy winter crossing. “Sit down, you idiot,” any Naples fisherman would have told him.
Finally I heard “mathematics” and was happy. Numbers were a familiar face in a crowd of strangers. When Miss Robinson put multiplication problems on the chalkboard, I wrote the answers quickly in my copybook. She smiled and said, “Excellent, Lucia.” Ah, she means eccellente. I basked in golden light, glancing in astonishment at yawning classmates. Were they bored? Had they ever spent mornings scrubbing on their knees?
After my lunch of pasta and beans came “recess,” a raucous swirl of students in the courtyard. I stood against a wall, watching them until my new friend found me. “I’ll take you to English class at Hiram House this afternoon,” Yolanda promised. “Then school will go better. But,” she added happily, “you can start working soon enough.” I’d worked my whole life, I might have responded. As soon as I could walk, I dusted, stirred pots, folded laundry, and beat rugs with little sticks. Perhaps I washed two steps to Mamma’s twenty, but I had no memories of “before working.” Yes, I told Yolanda, I wanted English classes.
We reached Hiram House by straight, wide streets meeting at perfect angles. Cleveland seemed a child’s city, ordered and easy to learn, but without the sweet tang of the sea. Not to seem like the Neapolitans Roseanne scorned, I didn’t mention blue skies or sea breezes. Factory chimneys shot up thick plumes of smoke that left their smells behind. Yolanda sniffed out scents for me: iron and steel works, slaughterhouses, glassworks, automobile factories, and factories for “machines that make machines.” Big-windowed garment workshops stood wedged between factories. “The windows are closed so soot won’t stain the cloth.”
Busy as it was with work, the city seemed dead. We passed no puppet shows or street singers, singing peddlers, fortune-tellers, gypsy dancers, or acrobats. Yolanda shrugged when I mentioned this. “It’s America,” she said. “You have fun inside.”
Finally we reached Hiram House, a somber brick building with turrets and a wide porch. “Come on,” Yolanda said, “the class just started.” My English teacher was a bright-cheeked young woman who wrote in sweeping letters: Miss Miller and then Welcome Newcomers! She made us understand that both children and wary, stiff adults must stand by our chairs for a game called Simon Says.
“Repeat: ‘Simon Says.’ ” We repeated. This much I could do, but how could we play in a language we didn’t know? Easily, I discovered. Miss Miller’s mobile face, boundless energy, and large gestures slipped meaning under words for Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Greeks, and Czechs. Some students knew more English than others and pulled the rest along. At Pentecost, our priest once told us, the Holy Spirit spoke to a crowd, each in his own tongue. Miss Miller had that power.
“Simon says, stand up. Simon says, touch your nose. Simon says, raise your hand. Touch your chest. I’m sorry, Niko and Ruth. Sit down, please.”
We played short rounds so many could win. We shaped our mouths to hers. Miss Miller’s good humor made even grown men laugh. I was understanding English! Pride shot through me, as when Mamma first took her hands from beneath my belly and I swam alone to the far flat rock, or when the countess opened a book, pointed to a line, and said, “Start here and read.”
A girl my age wrote our new words on the board: arm, foot, head, leg, chest, his, her, your. Soon, I vowed, I would be that girl, writing. “Now, Lucia, you’ll play with Henryk.” She pointed to a tall, slim boy near my age with wide dark eyes. I’d noticed him in the schoolyard standing with a crowd of laughing boys.
“Simon says, stand up, Henryk,” I managed. Astonishing: he stood. My first English sentence! My first words to an American boy! He smiled and brushed back a flop of hair. I’d play this game forever. “Tell Henryk to raise his hand.” I did. He did. “And touch his head.”
“Simon says, touch your head.” Again the magic: his hand on the glossy hair. “Now, Henryk, tell Lucia to lift her arm.”
“Lucia, Simon says lift your arm.” I did. At Miss Miller’s orders, he had me touch my shoulder, heart, and hand. “Good, now have Lucia sit and stand again.” When we had done this, Miss Miller clapped and the class obediently followed. The girl wrote “clap” and we repeated this word too.
“Excellent, Lucia and Henryk. Now, shake hands.” When she mimed this with the writing girl, I drew back. Henryk hesitated as well, looking down. In a stride, Miss Miller was next to him, offering her own hand and repeating firmly: “Shake hands.” He did. “Excellent. And now with Lucia.” He glanced at one of the boys, then reached toward me. I took the warm, firm grasp and quickly released. “See? It’s no tragedy.” Tragedia, she must mean. Non è una tragedia. “Please sit down.” We did. I risked a glance at Henryk, who returned a furtive smile.
After our lesson, the class shattered like quicksilver. I was engulfed by Italians. Henryk was swarmed by boys who spoke languages I’d soon learn to spool apart: Polish and Yiddish. One looked sharply at me and whispered to Henryk: “shiksa.”
“Yolanda, what does that mean?”
“Who knows? But it doesn’t matter. English is what you need. Are you coming to class tomorrow?” Yes, I said. I’d come every day.
Chapter 4
DIPPING CHOCOLATE
I raced home and was there by seven, before Mamma arrived in good humor from Stingler’s. “Only eleven hours and not once on my knees! You pick up a caramel core, dip it in the vat, twist, drain, and put it on the rack. That’s all. Look.” She held up a little bag of chocolates rejected for their mangled shape but delicious. “Other girls are sick of them. I sang, and everybody said it made the time go faster.”
With
the dignity of her new work and praise from the other dippers, she’d never been so ebullient. We passed a happy evening. If I couldn’t persuade Mamma to attend English classes, she at least agreed that Simon Says was a good game. We played in the parlor with Italian and the English words I’d learned. To Roseanne’s astonishment I lured Irena from her room, and she was happy to play with us.
“Yolanda will show me a garment shop,” I told Mamma that night. “I want to see how clothes get made.” The next day after school we went to Bank Street and stood on wooden crates to peer through a dusty window of the Printz-Biederman Company. Rows of women sat shoulder to shoulder, bent over machines, motionless except for their arms and hands. “That’s my cousin Giovanna, sewing cuffs,” said Yolanda, rapping on the glass and pointing to a girl who shared her wide mouth and slight build. Giovanna’s eyes turned up briefly before dropping back to work. “She’s afraid of needles. One girl got blood poisoning from a needle stick and lost her finger.” I closed my hands tightly. “See how fast she works? They’re paid by the piece.” Stitch, turn the cuff, another line, and snip. Repeat for the next cuff. The finished shirt was laid on a pile with the right hand as the left one reached for the next. “Buttonhole girls earn a little more.”
The work was slightly more varied than Irena’s but still stunning in its monotony. All over the city, in hundreds of shops and factories, did girls barely older than I do this all day? Service work was hard, but at least the chime of a new hour rarely found me at the same task. There were always the great windows out to sea and hope of a swim in warm, moon-struck waters.
“The girls can talk, you see,” Yolanda rattled on, “if the supervisor’s not around. And sometimes there’s a good singer like your mother.” I saw lips moving, some smiles, perhaps a joke, and the different styles and colors of the women’s own clothing. But still they seemed like machines themselves, as if at night they simply froze in darkness until the morning shift.
“What do they earn?”
“Older girls make ten dollars. Younger ones get less.”
“Why, if they do the same work?”
“Because they do. And there’s always fines. And rent for the machines, and then they have to buy needles and thread.”
As if we’d paid Paolo for the use of his buckets and brushes. “That’s not fair. You shouldn’t have to pay to work.”
Yolanda looked at me curiously. “If your mother doesn’t get sick or hurt, you could finish high school, I guess. Then if you have good English, you could clerk in a downtown store and make more money.”
“Italian girls do that?”
She considered. “Well, most shopgirls are Irish or Swedish or German. But you could be the first Italian. Let’s go, before the boss sees us.”
I must finish school, I determined secretly, and at least be a shopgirl. We had twenty words for a spelling test in school and forty for Hiram House. With others I’d pick up, I could learn a hundred this week. But what if Mamma tired of dipping, if she got sick or hurt or argued with Mr. Stingler and lost her job? My English would fade away over a sewing machine.
“I have to make dinner,” Yolanda announced. She plucked at my charity dress. “If you take it in here and here and add some ribbons, it would look nicer, you know.” Then she was gone, hurrying back to her flat.
I never did alter my dress. Not that I didn’t envy Yolanda’s effortless style, her deft use of ribbons, feathers, and dried flowers to make hair ornaments and hats. She said it was easy. I never found it so. I did study my face and body in a tall mirror at the boardinghouse. My body was changing and my face too, as if I were clay being molded by America. I was changing inside as well. In that first autumn, I got “the curse,” as Mamma glumly declared when my monthly blood began. “Be careful, don’t let what happened to me happen to you. Nothing’s the same afterward.”
Was I the curse? “It’s not like that, Lucia,” said Roseanne. But nobody said what it was like.
“Just be careful,” Mamma said briskly. “You don’t want trouble in America.”
I tried to keep hold of Naples. I reread letters from the countess about street festivals, a new opera or scandal, and the count’s increasing debts. There were always best wishes from Nannina and Paolo. They seemed so distant. I lay in bed imagining the villa. Was the bust of Julius Caesar on the right or left of the window? In what month did the setting sun spark more rainbows from the crystal chandelier? When, exactly, did the lilacs bloom? I missed the creamy tang of fresh mozzarella and rich, intense bite of tomatoes from the slopes of Vesuvius. Come back, I begged my memories. Don’t leave me in America with trouble.
Mamma still sang her street songs and arias for me at night. But she had discovered the old player piano in Roseanne’s parlor and eagerly memorized lyrics of popular tunes I sounded out for her. “If it wasn’t for the piano,” she said, “I couldn’t keep going.” And then quite calmly: “If Stingler ever says I can’t sing, I’ll drown him in a chocolate vat.”
“Mamma, don’t talk like that!” I saw the crystal decanter flying, the count’s face streaming blood, our flight through the dark streets, and exile in America. Where could we go if her temper flared again and we had no Paolo to arrange our escape?
“It’s just thoughts, Lucia,” she said, and yawned. “Go to sleep.” But thoughts can become acts: a sudden push, a body sinks in chocolate, police are called. Just thoughts, just thoughts, I repeated into the darkness. Ignore them. Think other thoughts.
When Hiram House announced a talent show for Christmas, I begged Mamma to sing “Santa Lucia” or “Maria Marì.” I was sure people would be amazed. “Listen,” they’d say, “she sings like an angel!”
“I’m too old,” she said flatly. “Remember Toscanini?” Like a horse balking at a weakened bridge, she wouldn’t budge, either to sing alone or to join the women’s choir. “But you do something, Lucia,” she said, “and I’ll watch. Just don’t sing.”
I knew enough English now to ask Miss Miller after class if I could recite a Leopardi poem. Standing straight with my hands at my sides as Contessa Elisabetta taught me, I began “L’infinito”:
Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle
E questa siepe che da tanta parte
Dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
A gray-haired Italian in a tweed suit stopped to listen, his lips moving with mine. Speaking slowly, eyes closed, he translated for Miss Miller: “Always dear to me was this lonely knoll and these woods that here and there concealed the horizon from my sight.”
“Thank you, Umberto,” she said. “But it’s rather melancholy, don’t you think? How about ‘The Village Blacksmith’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, our great American poet?”
“Leopardi was very great.”
“Of course, Lucia, but could you try the Longfellow?” She flashed the smile that had coaxed a room full of immigrants to their feet for Simon Says.
“Yes, Miss Miller.”
Beaming, she produced a small volume of Longfellow’s poetry. Umberto sat with me, carefully translating lines I repeated in English:
Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands.
“Listen, Lucia,” he whispered as Miss Miller watched Polish girls practicing a dance, “the Printz-Biederman Company gives a handsome book of English speeches to the newcomer with the best recitation. The Leopardi was lovely, but try for the prize.”
I went home beating out lines to the thump of my shoes on slate sidewalk in the meter that Miss Miller favored: “Ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum.” That night I read to Irena as she worked, repeating new words and rereading lines to learn the string of sounds. If I spoke more slowly, we discovered, she could make buttons to my time. Irena worked and I recited, until with a broad smile she dropped the last of the day’s buttons in her “finished” sack, tied it with a cord, and held her hands over the gas lamp, rubbing them slowly and
flexing her fingers against the cramping pain. I stood to go.
“Lucia,” she said, “you stay a time here?” The countess in her sitting room could not have been more gracious in smoothing the bedsheets for me. We shared a little English now. Irena pointed on a calendar to when her brother Casimir would be coming, five months and thousands of buttons away. She brought out a Bible in Polish and opened it carefully to a page of handwritten names and dates. Using button backs, the words we shared, and much pointing between buttons and names, she assembled her family tree.
“Here my parents.” She turned the buttons over. Dead, I understood. “Three sisters.” Dead. She mimed how they died: fever. “Two brothers. Poland.” Here was Casimir, the one she loved most, coming to Cleveland. She pointed to her ring finger. “Married, to Anna from our village.” I brought paper and a pencil from my room and with clever drawings she showed that Casimir was a fine butcher, Anna made delicious sausages, and they would both work in a cousin’s butcher shop. She could live with them and never make buttons again. “Look. Wedding present for Anna.” She showed me a richly embroidered jacket.
“You made this?”
She nodded shyly.
“Beautiful. Anna will love it.”
Irena beamed, but then she muttered something about the button dealer. With mimes and drawing, I gathered there were many girls doing home work who didn’t have her problems of cramps and back spasms. “I must trust in the Lord.” She pushed me a pile of buttons. “Now your family.”
How to explain that a masked man had pushed my mother into seaweed and got her pregnant with me? Instead, I put down buttons for my great-grandfather Domenico, who sang for the church; for my mother’s father, whose work was unknown; and for my own imagined father, the artist Pietro D’Angelo, who fell from scaffolding to his death. Yes, I lied to her. I didn’t want to be a bastard in America.
A warm hand touched my cheek. “I fall from streetcar. But live. Poor Lucia. Alone with the mamma.”
Swimming in the Moon Page 5