“No, because the child was conceived in sin.” Yolanda’s voice dropped, and she drew closer to me. “Everything’s happening so fast, Lucia. I’m afraid.”
“Did you want the baby?”
She wove her fingers into the metal slats of the bench, her head bent down so far I could barely see her face. I held her as she trembled. “It was just once that we were, you know, together. Charlie said he heard that nothing happens to the girl her first time. He was so sure, and I didn’t know anything. Nobody ever told me how it is.”
A storm of questions came to me. Where were they “together”? What did “it” feel like? Did “it” hurt? Did she lie naked with Charlie? Instead I asked: “When is the wedding?”
“Next week in City Hall. My parents won’t come because he’s Protestant. His parents are busy. And everyone but Charlie’s angry that I’m pregnant. Angry at me, not him.” She was weeping now, heaving like a child, wiping her face on her coat sleeve. “I can’t stop crying at night.”
I gave her my handkerchief. “I’ll come to your wedding, and Mamma and Donato will too, I’m sure. We’re not angry with you. Maybe Henryk will come. We’ll make a little party.” When the tears finally stopped, I walked her slowly home.
“Lucia, what did you want to talk about?” she asked at the door of her noisy flat.
“Nothing. It’s not important.”
In those days before her audition, Mamma wolfed dinner and nailed herself to the piano, practicing American popular tunes, arias, and Neapolitan songs. Then she slipped out for solitary walks around and around our block. “I have to be alone,” she said. “It drives out bad thoughts.” Everyone in our neighborhood knew her, I reminded myself, and she’d kept the street-wary habits from years in Naples. Still, I waited anxiously at the window.
When I passed his father’s vegetable shop and found Henryk working by himself, I told him about my mother’s audition and Yolanda’s coming marriage at City Hall, saying nothing of the cause. I said she’d live with the Reillys after her wedding.
“Not at home?” Henryk asked quietly, arranging the frilly tops of carrot bunches.
“No, not at home.”
He nodded, hearing what I hadn’t said. “Well, they’re getting married, which is the important thing. And they love each other. Anyone can see that. If I can get off work, I’ll come. Miriam would too, but she’s in Pittsburgh.”
“I’m sorry.” Stay in Pittsburgh, I thought peevishly as I hurried home. Be beautiful in Pittsburgh.
On Saturday afternoon, Donato, Henryk, Mamma, and I met Yolanda and Charlie at City Hall. They were the last in a line of couples being married that day. I’d dismissed Charlie as a selfish, handsome American who wouldn’t present Yolanda to his parents, made her pregnant, and then had her live with them. But now I saw him solicitous and attentive. He brought her a fruit ice as we waited, found her a chair, and called his older sister’s fine church wedding “a waste of time and trouble.” Every extra dollar, he said, was better saved for a house of their own.
Yolanda held the fruit ice as it melted. “Your parents hate me.”
“They don’t know you, Yolanda. Once I’m gone, Ma will miss me, so she’ll fuss over you, and once she changes, Dad will too.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course. And today they had to work.” When his sister married last year, I whispered to Henryk, his parents closed their store. A judge galloped through their vows, declared Charlie and Yolanda man and wife, and reminded them to pay the clerk before leaving. We stood awkwardly in the hallway until Donato suggested we celebrate at Lula’s.
“What’s this, another funeral?” Lula asked as we settled in a corner booth.
“It’s Yolanda’s wedding day,” I said. “Charlie’s leaving for Youngstown tomorrow.”
Lula’s knowing eyes scanned Yolanda’s belly and her nervous hands upon it. She studied the young husband. “So you have a job in Youngstown, Charlie?” He nodded. “And would you have married this pretty little girl if she wasn’t in a family way?” No judge was ever so somber.
“I surely would, Miss Lula. I’d marry her and count myself the luckiest man in Cleveland.” Yolanda reached for his hand and the stiffness in her body melted away.
Years after, Charlie and Yolanda would say their real wedding was in Lula’s tavern. I didn’t envy Yolanda’s belly, but I wondered if I’d ever find the happiness that lit her face that evening or the bright expectation that wrapped my mother like a cape.
Laughing and telling jokes, sharing stories of our first days in Cleveland, we gorged on Anna’s sausages, fresh bread, cheese, pickles, and warm beer. When Henryk politely asked Mamma about her audition, she hummed her songs. I’d never seen her so easy and relaxed in company.
In the next days, she practiced walking across the parlor, setting her feet, and refining her gestures. “Mario says Americans need to watch you sing. You have to act,” she informed me. “Otherwise they get bored.” I had thought she rehearsed me hard for the talent show, but she was relentless now, starting over for tiny mistakes I swore I couldn’t see or hear.
“I dream those songs,” Roseanne grumbled. Even Donato began slipping out to Lula’s when Mamma headed to the piano after dinner. She cajoled Roseanne into letting her borrow a fine indigo dress with black trim and a frill of lace. Yolanda offered a hat she’d made splendid with partridge feathers.
On the great day, Mamma and I took a streetcar to the theater, but she wouldn’t let me take her hand or speak. “Please, I have to concentrate.” Fears spun in my head. If after so much work and rooted hopes, the maestro said “Next,” what then? Would the knife come out?
At the Empire she gave her name to a clerk, who told us where to sit until “Ben” came for us. We watched a tubby man who called himself the Great Regurgitator. His act was to swallow gasoline, spit it out, and light the flames. Unfortunately, his shirt caught fire. He howled in pain until stagehands rushed out, rolled him in a canvas and hauled him away. “Next,” shouted a man in shadows, “and he owes me for the canvas.” Through all this Mamma sat motionless, mouthing words.
A girl my age presented four little dogs that leaped through hoops, jumped as high as her head after balls, and danced on their hind feet to the rhythm of her clapping hands until one brown terrier darted off after a mouse. “Have a seat,” said the voice, “but get rid of the brown one.”
A somber unicyclist waved flags as he rode in circles. “Next.”
A magician brought out a table, stood behind it, and made flowers, scarves, and stuffed birds appear and disappear. Now accustomed to the dark, I made out a slim figure sitting by an unmoving, square-headed gentleman I took to be Mr. B. F. Keith. The slim one whispered constantly in his ear, perhaps the secret of each trick. “Next.”
The Tumbling Turks, bare-chested acrobats in silky pantaloons, tossed one another through the air, springing from the stage as if it were India rubber and their bodies weightless. In their final stunt, a little boy came flipping from the wings and scrambled up a tower of men. “Take a seat.” As the Turks hurried off, glistening with sweat, stagehands dried the stage with rags.
A dapper ventriloquist with his dummy dressed as a ragged newsboy traded jokes in breathless patter, so outrageous and unrelenting that even the square-headed man guffawed. “Take a seat,” he said, “both of you.” Mamma didn’t laugh. Doubtless the English was too fast for her, but neither had she been listening. Her hand beat the air in time to music only she could hear. Two tap dancers performed with blurring speed, precise and elegant with top hats and canes.
“Next.”
Now I was sinking in a pool of doubt. Did I want “Take a seat” because Mamma did, or because I was afraid of what she’d do after “Next”? Suppose she collapsed? Exploded? I’d watched her get dressed, but she might have somehow slipped a knife into her laced boot. Suppose she didn’t attack but still seemed hysterical, “unstable”? Would Mr. Keith call for guards to take her away? Aside from these threats,
did I want “Next” so she’d stay home with me or “Take a seat” so I could stay in school instead of working in a garment factory? I gripped the armrests so tightly that Mamma whispered, “Relax! It’s not you that’s performing.”
I made myself watch the Whistler, a handsome young man with an astonishing repertoire, as if flocks of birds nested in his throat. He even mimed a comic debate, cleverly leaping back and forth between two stances until the whistles seemed like words. “Next.” Why would these men want a foreigner who simply stood and sang? How could we have been so stupidly hopeful?
A dwarf appeared in the aisle, pointing a stubby finger at Mamma. She rose calmly and followed him. With every step her walk grew taller and more stately. She must have spoken to the piano man, for he announced, “Teresa D’Angelo, the Singing Angel of Naples,” just as she glided onstage, set her feet, and began with “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì” from La Bohème.
How many times had I heard this aria? It was never so magnificent. Her voice effortlessly filled the theater, climbing and swooping, achingly sweet. Square-head never moved. Was he deaf? Stone-hearted? Then came “Maria Marì,” poured out with such warmth that it seemed the Naples sun shone down on us. She had just finished a chorus when the voice called: “Give me ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ ” and now the indigo gown was a motionless pillar.
The anthem wasn’t in her piano rolls. She’d heard it once that I knew of, at a concert by the lake. The piano man slowly played the opening chords and then a long, looping introduction as the pain of held breath crushed my chest. My mother’s shoulders dropped; her mouth opened. “Oh, say can you see,” she began, and then, in perfect phase with the music: “da, da, da, da, da, da.” After the first verse, she and the piano man closed like two breaths joined.
Square-head laughed. I closed my eyes against the surely coming “Next,” picturing rage, screaming insults, or, worst of all, a grim and stolid silence, her last dream gone. She stood rigid as the men conferred in shadows.
Now the slim one spoke: “Miss D’Angelo, you’ve got fifteen minutes to learn our national anthem.” The dwarf whisked Mamma away. I endured a minstrel duo, a soliloquy from Hamlet, and a portly juggler. Each received a “Next” before Mamma returned.
“Oh, say can you see,” she began slowly, with grave deliberation. The piano man matched her tempo. She had reached the fourth line before “Have a seat. Please.” Warm air filled my chest. Have a seat. Please. Have a seat. Please. My wet hands slipped from velvet armrests as the dwarf returned her. We sat together, attached, for the last auditions.
“You’ll be called to the office for contracts. Wait where you are,” the dwarf told those of us left sitting.
Mamma shook her head as I tried to speak. “I have to rest.”
When the slim man came for her, I stood as well, announcing: “I’ll translate.”
“She doesn’t speak English?”
“Not well enough to negotiate.”
“Negotiate? My, my, a translator and negotiator. Well, come on.”
“Teresa D’Angelo,” intoned the square-faced, immaculately dressed gentleman who introduced himself as Mr. B. F. Keith. “The Singing Angel of Naples.” He rolled out the words. “Don’t like it.”
“How ’bout Naples Nightingale?” the slim man suggested. “Like Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale.” Mamma shook her head. They ignored her. “Okay, Naples Nightingale it is. Who’s this?” Mr. Keith pointed at me. “A sister?”
“Daughter,” I said.
“Translator and negotiator.” Both men laughed. Mr. Keith leaned forward, delivering company rules to Mamma as I struggled to match Italian to his furious pace: Decency onstage always, in costume, gesture, and words in any language. Sick, well, or on women’s days, one performed two, sometimes three shows a day. In certain cities, shows might be continuous. For any scandal, breach of local law or custom, public drunkenness, or any debts left unpaid when the show moved on, immediate release without pay. For pregnancy in or out of wedlock, release upon discovery without pay. For liaisons between performers detrimental to the peace of the troupe, release of both parties without pay. For insolence or insubordination to the manager or his agents, refusal to alter any act or costume upon request, immediate release without pay.
“And we’d be hiring you, Miss D’Angelo,” Mr. Keith said firmly. “No translator, no negotiator. If you need more English, take lessons on your own time.” Barely blinking, Mamma hadn’t moved, seeming staked to the floor. “She understands, miss?”
“Yes, sir. Of course.”
“Good. Let’s see what she looks like. Turn around.” My mother glared and stepped back. Mr. Keith bristled. “What does she take me for? I run vaudeville, not a burlesque. But men have to look at something.” She turned, nearly spinning. “Good enough with some padding top and bottom. She understands twenty dollars a week? Room, board, costumes, two days off a month. Take it or leave it.”
Mamma stiffened, clenching her fists. “Bastards,” she whispered in Italian. “Mario said thirty. But I want this so much, Lucia. Should I take it?” My heart lurched for her.
“What did she say?” Mr. Keith demanded.
“She said I have to finish high school, sir. Right, Mamma?” She nodded slowly. “My father broke his neck falling from scaffolding in the Naples cathedral. Before he died, he told her to take me to America and have me finish school. So she needs enough for my keep at the boardinghouse, and books and clothes.”
Mr. B. F. Keith glanced at the slim man. “Father’s dying wish, was it? Cathedral painter? Well, I like women who think on their feet. ‘Oh, say can you see, da, da, da, da, da, da.’ Good try. Tell her she’s welcome to B. F. Keith’s vaudeville. Twenty-five at aforementioned conditions.”
“Thirty-five,” I said.
“Thirty the first month. If we like her, we’ll raise it to forty.”
Mamma nodded.
“She’ll accept thirty, at aforementioned conditions.”
“Good. Have Little Ben take you to the costume mistress. We leave town Monday morning early. Learn the anthem. We’ll do a big number with flags and the Turks. That’s all. And thank you for your service, negotiator.” Laughter followed us to the door.
Little Ben was waiting outside. “You stay here,” he told me. “Miss Emma don’t like outsiders in the fitting room.” For the next hour, I stood in the dark, narrow hallway as vaudeville people hurried back and forth. From inside the office, I heard the slim man say, “Thirty’s a bargain for the Nightingale, Mr. Keith. The girl with the dogs cost us forty.”
“I’ll get my money’s worth from both of them, but be careful, Jake. You might have trouble with that Nightingale. Something fishy in the eyes.”
Jake gave Mamma fifteen dollars and she never went back to Printz-Biederman or even told them she was quitting. Instead she spent the next days in the parlor, learning new songs, practicing in front of the long mirror, going out only for costume fittings and walks. When I read a letter from Countess Elisabetta, she barely listened. “You paid her back. What does she want now?”
“It’s a letter, Mamma. She’s just being friendly.”
“Well, she can be friendly with you. I have to practice.”
Count Filippo couldn’t last much longer, the countess wrote. He took morphine constantly for the pain. He’d ordered a coffin with an elaborate system of pulleys and bells to raise an alarm if he chanced to be buried alive, now his all-consuming fear. “Paolo and I” had discovered that the costly “Eastern powders” Dr. Galuppi peddled were merely clumps of dirt scooped from the villa’s own garden. “Paolo and I” denounced him.
“Paolo and I,” the phrase turned in my head, calling up sheaves of memories: Paolo’s devoted attention to the countess; their long evenings in her sitting room “reviewing accounts,” his effortless anticipation of her needs, her eyes falling gently on him. I remembered hearing her weep behind closed doors after one of the count’s cruelties and Paolo’s voice, low and soothing until the wee
ping ceased. Had they been lovers all these years?
“Of course,” said my mother impatiently. “Were you blind?”
“Everyone knew about Paolo and the countess,” Roseanne added. So this too I hadn’t seen, as I hadn’t seen Yolanda’s condition or Charlie’s kindness or my mother’s knife. Countess Elisabetta’s letter made me feel young and raw, unfledged in the world and soon to be alone. I followed Mamma like a puppy in the days before she left, but she barely seemed to notice me.
She packed and repacked her bag and picked at the American feast of roast chicken that Roseanne made on our last Saturday night, suddenly fretful and anxious: “I could forget the words. Maybe the audiences won’t like me. They’ll want an American.” She worried that Toscanini might speak to Mr. B. F. Keith, that “bad thoughts” would trail her.
“You can come home if you aren’t happy,” I reminded her.
She told the wall: “If I’m not happy in vaudeville, there’s nowhere else to go.”
“You’ll be happy, Mamma. You’ll be a great success. Everyone will love you. Nothing bad will happen.” Nothing, nothing, nothing, I repeated to myself.
On Sunday we bought food for a picnic at Catalano’s and lugged our heavy basket to a pine grove along Lake Erie. The breeze was chill, but sunlight glittered on nearly blue water. We shared bread, prosciutto, cheese, and olives, and scooped artichoke hearts from marinade sharp with garlic. We drank red wine and ate pastiera, a rich and heavy ricotta pie that brought sweet memories of home. Then we stretched out on the mossy bank with a bag of candied almonds.
“Tell me about Palazzo Donn’Anna,” I begged. It was one of my favorite stories. Our rock by the villa looked out on the old palazzo’s ruins, whose macabre and tragic history gave me delicious shivers on the warmest summer nights. Fishermen avoided Palazzo Donn’Anna’s mussel beds. “They do well to stay away,” Mamma began as she always did. Long ago a princess of great wealth and insatiable sensual appetites had beautiful young fishermen lured to her palazzo at sunset. They must have thought themselves in an earthly paradise as servants bathed, perfumed, and dressed them, fed them the choicest sweets and wine, and took them to the royal bed for a night of unimaginable passion with the lusty princess, serenaded by unseen musicians. “At the first rays of dawn,” Mamma always whispered, “servants roused the fisherman, still half drunk from his debauch, and brought him to the highest window.” Closing my eyes now as I always did, I pictured the naked figure against a violet sky, a quick thrust from behind, and the wild howl as the not-bird falls, flailing, to jagged rocks below. The battered bodies were weighted in bags under the palace moorings, and their restless souls still haunt the ruined galleries where seabirds nest.
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