“Wasn’t there one fisherman she let live?”
“No, not one.”
“More,” I begged. Mamma told a tale of a good fisherman who did marry a grateful mermaid and another of a hungry soldier who bought a fish with his last coin and found a precious ring inside that caused him both joy and pain. She sang me “Santa Lucia” and then, both weary, we slept a little under our shawls. When we woke, she said dreamily: “If I made seventy or eighty dollars a week, maybe a hundred, we could have our own house.”
“Here in this grove.”
“With a piano in a sunroom looking out on the water.”
“Yolanda and Charlie and the baby could visit. We’d have a tide pool over there.” I pointed to the rocky shore.
“Let’s go back,” she said suddenly. “It’s getting cold.” She tied a scarf around her neck to protect it from wind. “I’m leaving at dawn. You know how much I’ll miss you, Lucia?”
“Yes, Mamma.” Tell me you love me. Tell me my life will be good here without you, that I’ll find my way as you have now.
“I have to do well in vaudeville.”
“You will,” I repeated. “Of course you will.”
Chapter 8
AT THE HAYMARKET
The troupe would go east to Pittsburgh, then south and west through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. I wouldn’t see my mother until September, when she played in Chicago. Even Yolanda was drawing farther from my life. She worked at Mrs. Halle’s millinery shop, where fine ladies came for hats or brought their own to be more elegantly trimmed with feathers, tiny stuffed birds, dried flowers, ribbons, and lace. She didn’t mind the long hours, even as her belly grew. “I have a padded chair and a footstool; I can walk around the shop when my back hurts. She smiles and jokes with me. She doesn’t stare like Charlie’s parents do when I come in the door.”
“It’s quiet in their house at least,” I said, remembering how eager she’d been to leave her parents’ noisy flat.
“I’m not used to quiet. Charlie’s father is nearly deaf, so he doesn’t speak. His mother has nothing to say, so she doesn’t talk. She just cleans. How much can you clean three little rooms? She sleeps with that dustcloth. I wish she’d go away to vaudeville.”
I got penny postcards from my mother in childlike script, bits of messages that broke off when space ran out and rarely returned to explain: “Mario had a new act that . . . Jimmy the piano man is teaching me . . . I eat in restaurants but . . . I have a new stage hat but it’s so heavy . . . People clap too much for the dummy and ugly little dogs . . . loved my ‘Star Spangled’ anthem . . . I get forty a week now but the fines . . .” She crossed out a note on winning at dice but sent the postcard anyway. “No Toscanini!” she declared from Detroit. Still, she seemed happy. I sent her letters through Mr. Keith’s office, but if she received them she never said. She was becoming like the immigrants I scribed for, whose lives moved ever farther from their old country and families.
Yet into that space that divided us came new pleasures. On Sunday afternoons, while Yolanda wrote to Charlie, I roamed the city on streetcars, searched for treasures in used bookstores, or curled in the quiet parlor with my homework. Each time our teacher said “Next spring, when you graduate,” bolts of pride and pleasure shot through me. I would be in the eight of one hundred with a high school diploma. When Miss Miller announced that a civic-minded benefactor was offering a prize of thirty dollars for the best essay on “Cleveland, a True American City,” I wrote and rewrote my entry, fretting over every word, determined to win a diploma and the essay prize.
Free from my mother’s complaints, I let books puddle on my bed. Papers carpeted the unwashed floor. “Teresa would scream if she saw this,” Roseanne warned. I didn’t care. All my life I’d scrubbed and dusted and put things away neatly. Disorder was a happy luxury that said: “This is Lucia’s room.”
Along with the penny postcards came money wired home and a note that said “Buy something pretty.” I did: a softly tucked blouse and flounced burgundy skirt for a Saturday night dance at Hiram House. Roseanne arranged my hair in a pompadour bulked by a horsehair pad she called a “rat.” All fashionable women used rats, she said. “Don’t you know?” I didn’t, having vaguely supposed that great wealth brought opulent masses of hair.
Embarrassed by her bulk, Yolanda wouldn’t go to the dance, so I went alone, startled at my own reflection in dark shop windows, so elegant and American. Would the countess know me now? I didn’t see Miriam with a chattering knot of girls by the door, tying and adjusting ribbons, carefully setting ringlets to frame their cheeks. She’d gone to Pittsburgh to tend a sick aunt, someone said. Don’t smile. She’ll be back soon enough. Henryk wasn’t with the stand of boys across the room furtively watching us. Why should I care about this? He wasn’t my fella. I didn’t need a fella. I was too busy for fellas.
A put-together band of Italian, Irish, Polish, and Russian musicians played, grasping one another’s tunes with uncanny speed. Casimir and Anna demonstrated an intricate polka that had been Irena’s favorite, he said. “Here, Lucia, I’ll show you the steps.” He was a good teacher, patient and encouraging. In his sweat-soaked blond curls and wide smile as we spun around the room, my dear friend seemed alive again.
Donato’s wife and daughter had finally come to America. He’d taken a furnished flat and was now proudly presenting his cheerful, exuberant wife, Sara. She was quickly learning our names, laughing heartily at jokes and sharing stories. “Cleveland is wonderful. Everyone’s so kind,” she exclaimed. In her bright presence, the tense, shabby city did seem charmed. Their daughter, Clara, slipped into a pack of children vigorously debating an elaborate game in a jumble of languages. “Look at her!” crowed Donato. “When I left Italy she couldn’t speak at all.”
In a ring around the dancers, knots of newcomers grouped themselves by country, talking, smoking, or playing cards. Some girls still wore their Old Country dress, but most were decked in American styles, with bright plaids and stripes. All were smiling now. When I scribed, I often recorded bitter complaints to friends and cousins back home: “I give all my pay to Mamma, but she won’t give me enough for nice clothes.”
“You could ask your boss for a raise,” I’d suggested to one girl. “You shouldn’t be getting half a man’s pay for the same work.”
“I can’t talk to him. I don’t speak English.”
“If you learned, you could get a better job,” I persisted.
“I’m too tired for night classes. And after work there’s laundry and cleaning and watching the little ones.” Every family suffered long workdays: six, six and a half, or even seven days a week. Children rarely saw their fathers awake. They became strangers, awkward and stiff. Mothers locked small children at home, left babies in the care of five-year-olds, or even tied them to table legs. What else could they do? Garment workers often slumped wearily at my scribing table as if I were another sewing machine arm endlessly pricking cloth. They might not have my mother’s plague of “bad thoughts,” but work engulfed and dulled them. Only nights like this cracked the weary sameness of their days.
“Casimir says he taught you Irena’s polka,” announced a voice at my shoulder. I turned and saw Henryk.
“He’s a good teacher.” I stepped back, for the room was turning hot. A barbershop quartet sang “Sweet Adeline.”
“Will you dance it with me?”
First I thought no and then, Why not? It’s a dance; that’s why we’re here. “If the band plays another polka,” I said. Away from his shop and our school, I felt stiff with him, my skirt too tight, my pompadour too heavy. What could we talk about? “Are you writing an essay for the Cleveland contest?” I asked.
“I would if I was going to college. I’ll finish high school, but then I’ll work with my father. You should go, though, for all of us.”
“Roseanne says I’d be lonely; I’d be the only Italian girl.”
“Maybe, but then you’d be the first and others would come af
ter you.”
“Then who’ll make all the clothes and hats and chocolates?”
“Yes, Congress must consider the consequences of educating Italian girls. What will Americans wear?” The furrowed brow, thoughtful rubbing of his hands, and sly smile melted my reserve. We joined a circle dance that swept us apart. When the circle brought us back together again, he asked after Yolanda. I said she and I would be out walking on Sunday.
“You should go to Western Reserve campus and see if you feel at home.”
“It’s allowed?”
“Of course it’s allowed.” He was called away to greet an aunt but came back for the polka. Without a word we moved into Irena’s steps, spinning, sliding, turning, my feet where they needed to be, the room a bright smear of color and sound. “Anyone would think,” Henryk panted as the music ended and we pulled ourselves apart, “that you were a Polish girl.” But I wasn’t. Watching eyes raked over us. Donato was coming toward me.
“Hello, Henryk. May I borrow Lucia for a minute?” He drew me back to my people. “I was just telling Sara that we must invite you for dinner. Perhaps you can help with her English. You must be lonely with your mother so far away.”
A group of young men closed around Henryk. I didn’t see him for the rest of the evening.
Yolanda wanted me to come by the Reillys’ flat early on Sunday morning; she wouldn’t be going to mass. Children spilled down the steps of their apartment building. Bunches of boys shot marbles; girls played jacks on the landings. Small children raced up and down the halls. Voices poured through flimsy walls: laughing, talking, shouting. Furniture scraped over wooden floors as beds were shoved aside or dismantled for the day. Babies cried.
No sound at all came from the Reillys’ flat. I knocked softly. Nothing. At last a neatly dressed woman with a face as still as clay opened the door. She studied me somberly, saying nothing. Yolanda stood behind her, ready with hat and gloves, strangely shrunken despite her bulging belly. She too said nothing.
“Good morning, Mrs. Reilly. I’m Lucia D’Angelo.” When the woman didn’t move, I added: “Yolanda’s friend. We’re going walking this morning.”
Was she deaf as well? No, her head tilted slightly, considering me. “You speak pretty good English,” she conceded, “for an Italian.” I nodded, unsure how to answer this. A pale man at a spotless table watched us, immobile. Words dried in my throat.
Toneless as a sleepwalker, Yolanda announced: “We’ll be leaving now, ma’am. You needn’t wait lunch for me.”
“You’re not going to mass?”
“No, ma’am, not today.” Yolanda eased her belly past the folds of her mother-in-law’s dress. Infected by the Reillys’ silence, we didn’t speak all the way down the stairs and into the next block. Then, like a clogged pipe bursting open, Yolanda gushed out her troubles: “See how they hate me? If I sit in a chair, it’s like I’m wearing it out. If the floors creak when I walk, she looks up. If the baby next door cries, she complains. What happens when a real baby’s inside their flat? I don’t think she’d talk to her husband even if he wasn’t deaf. He just looks at me and grunts. What does that mean?”
“Yolanda, they’re quiet people.”
“No! They’re people who hate Italians. And Catholics. The longest ‘talk’ we ever had was when they asked if I believe the Blessed Virgin Mary is greater than Our Lord. Does the priest really drink blood at Holy Communion? Do I want the pope to rule America?” Her voice rose. “They think I made Charlie marry me. And he can’t come on weekends like we planned. He works twelve-hour shifts every day so we can buy a house. If we all have to live with Charlie’s parents . . . Lucia, I can’t think about it.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“Yes! I want the noise, the fights, the twins yelling, people talking to me, even if they’re angry. But I can’t even if they’d let me. My uncle just came over from Calabria. He’s got my bed. And I shamed the family, remember?”
How to answer this avalanche of laments? “At least you like your work.”
Yolanda blinked at the effort to recall that happy corner of her life. “Yes, work is wonderful. I made a hat with Brazilian blackbird feathers, and Mrs. Halle loved it so much she got more of those feathers for me. If I could, I’d be there now,” she said fiercely. “When I go ‘home,’ the table’s set for two. Then she slowly gets up, sets out another plate, and pulls out another chair as if she’s surprised again that I’m living there.” Yolanda stopped walking. Her voice rose. “No Italian would treat a guest that way. And the food! Everything’s boiled to death: potatoes, cabbage, beans, stew meat, potatoes, cabbage, more beans. No salt, no garlic, no herbs. No wine ever. I asked if I could cook, and she said, ‘Don’t trouble yourself.’ Is she afraid of eating something good?”
We were close to the Western Reserve campus now; fine stone buildings cut into the blue sky. American students hurried by. “I don’t know what’s wrong with the Reillys, Yolanda. Maybe they don’t talk, so you don’t talk, so they don’t know you. If they did, they’d love you like Charlie does, like I do.”
She hugged her belly. “I’m being punished because our baby was conceived in sin.”
“So was I. So were lots of people. You’re married now, that’s what’s important. Charlie loves you and you’ll be together soon. When there’s a beautiful little baby, you’ll see, his parents will fall in love with both of you.” Her path was so straight, I thought: make hats, mother her coming child, and tolerate these silent people until she could move away.
“I don’t know where Charlie learned how to talk, let alone how to love somebody. What’s wrong with them?” Yolanda’s voice rose again and cracked. Passing students looked at us sharply, as if to say: “We speak English here and we speak softly.”
“They’re blond,” Mamma had said, when long ago we passed the campus by mistake. Was I here again by mistake in this land of square-shouldered, light-haired people? My hair was heavy and dark, rolling with waves; my cheap wool dress hung stiffly; my boots slapped the brick pathways. Their clothes swished and their fine shoes tread softly. Yolanda’s discomfort had weakened my resolve. “Let’s go home,” I said, taking her arm and turning her quickly around.
“I can’t go back to the Reillys’,” Yolanda declared. “I can’t breathe there.”
“Then come live with me.”
“How? It’s impossible.”
“We’ll find a way.”
At the boardinghouse I convinced Roseanne to let Yolanda take Mamma’s place in my room. Roseanne finally conceded, on the condition that Yolanda paid her share of room and board.
“But you’ll have to let me keep the light on late to study,” I warned my friend.
“You can read all night if you want. Just talk to me sometimes.” We got her small bundle of clothes from the Reillys, who received without comment the news that she’d be leaving. “You see?” Yolanda demanded. “They’re so strange. Suppose Charlie turns out like them?”
“He won’t.”
“I hope you’re right.” After dinner, Yolanda stretched out on my bed and watched me study, then closed her eyes and fell asleep. For the next months we lived companionably together as I finished eleventh grade, then scribed and worked for the Millers in the summertime when Mamma’s money home wavered. By mid-July we had to wedge a cot into the room to leave my bed for Yolanda’s bulging girth.
At last, in September, I could see Mamma. I left on a Friday, hurrying to the station before dawn to catch the first train for Chicago. The flat green miles sped away as I memorized sonnets for English class. “Any two you like, one from Shakespeare, one from Milton,” our teacher had said. “Just learn them so they’re yours and no one and nothing can take them away.” I pored over the lines until we passed into the great stain of Chicago, cupping its lake. Then I closed my book and waited.
By good fortune Mamma saw me first on the platform. How could I have recognized the stately woman in a crimson walking suit bursting with lace at the bust; a wi
de-brimmed, black-plumed hat; kid gloves; and a massive pompadour? Men drew back as she came toward me, leaving an awed channel between us. “I know,” she said after we’d kissed. “I look different. People are supposed to recognize me on the street and be excited. Are you excited?” she demanded of a gawking, red-faced young man. “Then come to the show tonight.” She pulled two tickets from a velvet purse. “You can hear the Naples Nightingale.” I was speechless. Was this my mother, hawking herself with such aplomb? And where were these hovering men for all the years when I saw that she was beautiful and all they saw was a house servant?
“They’d be panting after you too if you dressed like this,” she said, sweeping me toward the great sunny mouth of the station. No, it wasn’t just the lace and nipped waist. Her walk was different: straight shoulders, high hips, and a forward tilt of bulging bust. If she took off her gloves, would I recognize her hands at least, rough and red from years of bleach and soapy water?
“Look at this!” Mamma declared, drawing out a hatpin as long as my forearm. She waved the pin at one of the hovering men, who jumped back. “Who needs knives with a weapon like this? And look how strong it is.” When she jabbed a wrought-iron girder, the hatpin barely bent. “Should have had one of these at Stingler’s,” she muttered. I gripped her arm as she shoved the long pin through her hat and hair. Come back, Mamma. Stop being so different and strange.
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