“Well then,” said Yolanda loyally, “I hope you get it.”
On a warm July evening, Mamma was singing a silly popular song, “The Moon Has His Eyes on You.” I’d translated the lyrics for her and any American would have imagined that she understood each word. I was curled on the divan with my battered dictionary and A Tale of Two Cities. A knock at the door brought Roseanne rushing, for new boarders often came at that hour from the last New York train. In fact, a weary young couple stood on the porch, a neat stack of luggage behind them.
“Yes, I have a room to rent,” Roseanne said loudly before they could speak.
The man looked past her into the parlor. “Irena?”
My dictionary hit the floor with a thud. The piano slowed and stopped. Casimir was square-shouldered as Irena might have been before her accident, with the same blue eyes, thick blond hair, and open face. He carried a wooden box that surely held butcher knives.
“We need a translator,” Roseanne said quietly. “Lucia, go get your friend Henryk.” Then she explained to Casimir loudly in Italian that I would bring over a friend who spoke Polish. Meanwhile he and his wife should come in and make themselves comfortable in the parlor.
“Irena?” he repeated.
My shoes were too small, I remember. They pinched as I ran the few blocks to Henryk’s flat. When I blurted my news, Henryk said something to his mother, who used the “shiksa” word again. His father spoke in a steely, low tone of command, more unnerving than any Neapolitan shouting. I heard “Polski” and “Irena” in Henryk’s answers. Finally his mother and then father appeared to relent. Neither spoke to me.
“I’m sorry,” Henryk said as we left his flat and hurried down the foggy street. “They just didn’t like a girl calling on boys at night.”
“They thought I was—”
“Yes, that sort. But I said you scribed with me, study hard, good girl, respect your mother, all those things. And they want to help other Poles, even Gentiles.”
“Your mother sent over the soup,” I remembered.
“Yes, her magic soup.” He slowed his walk for me. “This brother must be exhausted, and now he’ll find out his sister’s dead.”
“Roseanne’s probably shouting at him in Italian.”
“My mother does that too. I keep telling her that Americans aren’t deaf. They just don’t speak Yiddish.”
By the time we reached the boardinghouse, Roseanne had brought Casimir and his wife wineglasses and little plates of chiacchere, the fried sugared strips that were her pride. They held these things on their knees, not eating or drinking as she rattled on about Cleveland.
Henryk bowed slightly to Anna and shook Casimir’s hand before taking a chair in front of them. When it seemed their glasses and plates might slip to the floor, Roseanne quietly took them away. Henryk leaned forward, speaking softly, his eyes fixed on them, even when asking me for details of Irena’s slender story. Their faces turned to wood; their hands sought each other. Finally Casimir spoke.
Henryk listened, nodded, and told us. “He never got your telegram. They must have already left for America. He’d like to see her grave.” Silence filled the room like thick new snow.
“Tell them,” I began. My voice cracked. Four blue eyes fixed on mine. “Tell them that Irena was given last rites and a funeral mass and buried in consecrated ground.” Donato mouthed the word dress and I added as Henryk translated: “The sisters put her in a good blue dress she wanted for the end.” Anna whispered to Casimir. Perhaps she knew the dress. “We’re very sorry that we couldn’t afford a headstone.”
Another exchange and Henryk reported: “Casimir says he’ll buy one as soon as he can. They brought some Polish earth.” When we looked startled, Henryk explained: “Three handfuls, one for each of their graves.” Nobody spoke.
I brought down Irena’s box. Casimir opened it and touched the buttons avidly, as if they still held her heat. I told them the jacket she made for Anna had to be sold. “Describe it,” said Roseanne, and I did: the deep red velvet, gold braid, and embroidered flowers. Anna smiled.
Then Casimir spoke at length and Henryk translated: “He wants us to know about Irena. She was always a happy child. She won footraces in their village. He made her a wooden doll and she dressed it.” He and Casimir conferred. “She dressed it in a gown of feathers and bits of moss. He wanted to emigrate first, but Irena said he should finish his apprenticeship. She said she’d be lucky in America.” Tears pooled in Casimir’s eyes.
Anna spoke and Henryk translated: “She says he loved his sister very much.” How redundant words can be, I thought, how unnecessary.
“Tell them I happen to have a room available,” Roseanne said finally, “if they’d like to stay here where Irena lived.” Henryk conveyed this, adding some words and then giving Casimir’s answer.
“He thanks you all, especially Lucia, for your kindness to Irena, and the offer of a room. But I told him that in our building we’re all Poles, Jews and Gentiles, and we have space. He said he’d rather stay with us until he finds a flat. He hopes you understand. When they’re settled, they’ll invite you to a stypa, a feast in Irena’s honor. Now I’ll take them home with me. The journey has been difficult and they’re very tired.”
“You can use my handcart,” Roseanne offered. We helped load their bags and Irena’s box and watched them move slowly down the street. In the fog their bodies merged. I was ashamed of my flash of envy: Casimir and Anna would live near Henryk. They’d see him every day, hear his laugh and see the particular way he knit his brow when working figures. He might tell them about the bread-wearing pigeon. Stop this. Stop.
“So many buttons Irena made,” Mamma said softly. “For nothing.”
“Henryk seems like a nice young man,” Donato said, glancing at me.
“He’s Jewish,” Roseanne announced.
“Oh. Well then.”
“He’s just a friend,” I added quickly.
Casimir settled quickly into Cleveland, working for his cousin, the Polish butcher on Forman Avenue. Anna made sausages and was soon producing great quantities for Polish customers, Lula’s tavern, Roseanne, and other boardinghouse keepers. When Anna fell briefly sick, Lula sent over a special “reviving brew.” Her customers wanted Anna’s sausages, she said, and accepted no others.
After Casimir and Anna moved to a flat of their own, Henryk came to invite us to Irena’s stypa. “They’ll be months repaying the feast,” he predicted, “but it’s tradition. He owes her this honor.”
“Wear something nice,” Roseanne advised Mamma that evening. “You might snag a fella.”
“I have work, I have Lucia. Not everybody needs a fella,” Mamma snapped. In fact, her few evenings “walking out” with men who met her at church had ended badly. She came home early, said nothing, and the men never returned. She wore a work dress to the stypa.
Casimir’s flat was packed with Polish families and customers for Anna’s sausages. Lula came too. “That man loved his sister, but he’s one good businessman,” she noted. “All these folks will remember him.” We’d surely remember the tables heaped with sausages, stuffed cabbage, potato pancakes, smoked and pickled fish. A picture of Irena, young, straight-shouldered, and beaming, hung on a wall. She might have just won a footrace and perhaps already begun dreaming of America.
Yolanda came with a tall young man whose sandy curls covered his head like lamb’s wool. “This is Charlie Reilly,” she said. “We met in a candy store three weeks ago.”
“Yes, she’s my little Italian sweet,” said Charlie. His hand strayed to her waist as if he were constantly assuring himself of her presence. “And here I am at a Polish party. God bless America!” Yolanda had spoken mysteriously of a “fella,” never mentioning that he was American.
When I asked if he was also Catholic, Yolanda looked at me sharply. “Not that I know of,” Charlie said with a laugh. “Actually, my parents don’t even like Catholics, but that’s only because they don’t know Yolanda. Look, litt
le rolled-up pancakes.”
“Blintzes,” I corrected primly, but they didn’t seem to hear me.
Charlie fed Yolanda a blintz. Her blissful smile, the soft curve of her body toward his, and the rich freedom of his laughter made a mesmerizing show. I watched them move along the tables, tasting every dish. Yolanda’s face caught the light. In a plain shirtwaist dress transformed by lace, new buttons, and a subtle band of tucks, she seemed as elegant as any young woman on the stretch of Euclid Avenue that people called Millionaires Row.
“They look so happy,” Roseanne observed. Yes, perhaps, but I couldn’t help being rudely critical of this fella. What would Dr. Galuppi have thought of the slight scoop of Charlie’s temples, the slope of his forehead? Could he be trusted? My teachers said phrenology was a bogus science, best forgotten in this century. I didn’t care. A handsome young man was leaning close to Yolanda while I stood by with my landlady?
Across the room a slim, dark-haired girl with lavish curls stood with her back to me, talking to Henryk, his father, and Henryk’s friend Abraham. Her rippling laughter skittered over the room. The men seemed bewitched. “Who’s she?” I asked Roseanne.
“Some Jewish princess from Pittsburgh, just moved here. Look at your mother. Why is she facing the wall?”
I hurried over. “Mamma, what’s wrong? Come, I’ll get you something to eat.”
“It’s Polish food.”
“Yes, everything’s delicious. And there’ll be singing later.”
“In Polish.”
“Yes, but you sing in English all the time. What’s the difference?”
“It’s so crowded with strangers.”
“It’s a wake for Irena, our friend. I’m glad so many people came. Look,” I said, pointing. “Even the Russian is here, her button dealer.” But Mamma was rigid and her eyes too wide. “Did someone say something to you? What’s the matter?” For a frantic moment, I thought she’d conjured Toscanini.
“I want to go home.” A film of sweat covered her face, and her breath came fast, like Irena’s at the end.
“I’ll tell Roseanne—”
“Take me now.”
“Fine, Mamma, we’ll go.” Halfway down the narrow stairs, we heard the singing start, rich and rolling, buoyed by violins. She looked back as a hungry man strains toward a feast, even took a step up toward the flat again, but at a burst of laughter, her face clouded and she hurried me out of the building.
On the sidewalk, her breathing calmed, the seeming fever passed, and she spoke calmly of a new piano roll she wanted. “Mamma, shouldn’t we see a nurse? You looked so sick.”
“Because I wanted to leave,” she said sharply. “Don’t you ever want leave someplace?”
“I suppose, but—”
She began humming the tune we’d heard on the stairway. Mamma never explained the attack, why it came or how it passed, but that evening began a new time for us in Cleveland.
Chapter 6
FROZEN WAVES
By the chill autumn of 1906, Mamma was the fastest dipper at Stingler’s, earning eleven dollars for a sixty-hour week without fines. However, possible fines were many: for being late or covering a friend’s lateness, dropping or miscounting chocolates, making imperfect swirls, damaging equipment, slowing the line, talking excessively, singing inappropriate songs, or for the vaguely defined “insolence.”
“Old Mr. Stingler’s gone soft in the head as a caramel,” Mamma said. He had started the company in his kitchen and designed every machine in the production line, but now between flashes of clarity, he wandered the factory, somberly studying the operations as if each was of the most astonishing interest. Sometimes he saw his dead wife sitting with the dippers. “Milly, you don’t need to work,” he’d say, tugging at a young girl’s sleeve. “Come home. We have servants now and a big house on Euclid Avenue.”
“Some girls would gladly be Milly,” Mamma said, “if they could stomach Little Stingler, that nasty little cock who never dipped a chocolate in his life.” In our parlor, she mimed him pacing the line, chest thrust forward, short, thin legs as stiff as rods, arms flapping as he urged the workers to be more industrious and attentive to their swirls. “Someday a cat will tear that cock to pieces,” she took to muttering.
“The other girls might tear her to pieces first,” Yolanda warned. “Little Stingler’s always telling them to work as fast as Teresa D’Angelo. She needs to slow down.” But as we dressed for bed in our chilly room, Mamma said she couldn’t slow down. “If I do, my head fills up with bad thoughts about Little Stingler. Besides, if I’m learning a new song with a quick beat, I have to dip to that beat.”
“Perhaps you could talk to the priest about your thoughts.”
“They’re mine and I’ll think them.”
“Be careful, Mamma.” When did that tone of mine begin, that patter of advice, as if I were the mother and she the child? I didn’t ask again. After all, that autumn began as an easy time. We chipped off bits of rent by doing chores for Roseanne; we were faster and more exacting than her cleaning girl. We had finally paid our debt to Countess Elisabetta. This meant nothing to Mamma, but it was a triumph for me. I stood straighter, wrote to the countess more often, and received longer letters back from her.
In October she trusted me with her great secret: lurking beneath Count Filippo’s malarial fevers was syphilis. His rages had grown worse and more frequent with the pain of his great disease. His mind half gone, he gambled wildly, signing notes against the estate. The countess didn’t know how many or to whom. “He spent the summer with us, which was a torment, as you know. At least he gambled less. Paolo turns away the ‘gentlemen’ who come like vultures to profit from his weakness. But tell me about school and all the wonderful things in America. I want to hear that you and Teresa are happy.”
“He won’t last long, she can hope,” Mamma observed.
“What should I write about?”
“Anything except that bastard.” I wrote about Cleveland, the parks and grand stores and the noisy immigrant quarters. I described Central High School. Students constantly left to find jobs in the factories, mills, and limestone quarries south of Cleveland. Little was done to keep them. Only eight in one hundred Americans had high school diplomas, our teacher told us. I was determined to be one of those eight.
Having skipped tenth grade, I was now in eleventh, gorging on speeches and poems to memorize, chapters to read, essays to write. When my first dictionary broke into pieces from constant use, I won another for reciting Mark Antony’s speech to the Romans. I wrote to the countess about algebra’s secret language of x’s and y’s. My geometry lessons made the city an intricate mosaic of shapes: arches of doorways, cones and pyramids of gaslights, cylinders of smokestacks, tangents and trapezoids of pathways and streets. In those days, I dreamed less of finding a fella than of holding a diploma in my hands.
“Don’t waste your chances,” Yolanda warned. “You need to get married in high school. Your friend Henryk’s family wants a Jewish girl, so don’t bother with him. Maybe Charlie knows somebody good for you. Should I ask?”
“Not yet. I don’t have time anyway, with school and scribing and work in the boardinghouse.” I saw Henryk often, for he too had skipped a grade, and we sometimes worked in the public library together. Sitting across from him at a long oak table, each in a pool of light, I tried to nail my eyes to books, away from the glossy falls of his black hair, wide mouth moving slightly as he read and long fingers scribbling. When we did our math together, droll little stick figures marched up and down his notebook pages. “They help me think,” he said, but they couldn’t help him think how to keep up these library hours when he had to work more afternoons with his father.
“Charlie wants me to graduate,” Yolanda was saying, “but school is so boring. I want my own hat shop. Charlie says . . .” She talked constantly of him: where they’d gone, what he said, how he’d own a factory or limestone quarry one day and they’d have servants.
“Have y
ou met his family yet?” I interrupted.
“No, but I will at Christmas.”
“Why not now?”
“Because Protestants announce big things at Christmas. That’s how they are. Lucia, you should be worrying about your mother, not about me. She keeps saying things about Little Stingler, crazy things she shouldn’t say, even in Italian.”
I fretted for days about how to ask Mamma about the “things,” afraid she’d slip into another of the dark silences that often encased her. Finally one night I blurted my worry. She backed away from me and snapped: “The girls make up stories. Everyone’s crazy with this cold. And your friend Yolanda is crazy with Charlie.”
It’s true that the cold pushed into every corner of our lives. The last winter had been mild, with barely more snow than we saw on Vesuvius. Now ice froths rimmed the lake; we stuffed paper in our shoes and wore coats in the house. I wrote to the countess that the Alps couldn’t possibly be this cold. Even Miss Miller, born in Cleveland, remembered no winter so hard.
By December Lake Erie had frozen in ragged silver-gray waves as the wind drove icy chunks into hummocks. The sky shook down snow, paused for breath, and shook again. Frigid gusts raced down the streets, drilling through the boardinghouse walls, laughing at our coal stove. Every floor, table, door, book, and plate was cold. “Even the fire’s cold,” said Donato. Much as I missed Irena, I was grateful she was spared this suffering. Like a great plug pulled from a washtub, color drained from the city. Green was long gone, of course, and now constant frost dulled each surface to a dingy gray. New snow turned quickly black from coal and wood ash. Under a milky sky we scuttled to and fro, swathed in coats and mufflers. “How can we stand it?” I asked Miss Miller, wrapped in my coat for scribing.
“What can we do but stand it?”
Donato spent his evenings at Lula’s, drawn by the comfort of her potbellied stove, many bodies, warm beer, and hot cider. When demand drove up the cost of coal, poor families huddled under blankets. Coroner’s trucks passed each morning; black-garbed men plucked stiff bodies from the gutters outside taverns and hurried up apartment steps, returning with small bundles as mothers followed, weeping into their shawls.
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