Yolanda hadn’t spoken for an hour. “Trouble?” she whispered.
Claire turned away.
“You’ll hold the baby, love,” Hilda promised.
So it might not live. I might see the stillness of Irena’s deathbed, the last heave and stop of the chest. With the pale excuse of bringing more hot tea, I fled to the kitchen, trying to think of nothing at all. Then under the pounding rain I heard a furious knocking. “See who it is,” Roseanne called, “but don’t let anybody wet my floor.”
“Coming!” I shouted. When I opened the door and a staggering, dripping man pushed past me into the hall, my screams brought Roseanne with a fire poker raised.
“Yolanda!” gasped the man. Roseanne set down the poker as Charlie pulled off his dripping cap and bent over, panting. “Didn’t get—another telegram. Afraid—trouble. Boss gave twenty-four hours’ leave. How is she?”
“She’s fine, fine,” I said too earnestly. “The labor is just slow.” I peeled off his coat and made him sit to catch his breath.
“Got a ride with a coal truck—streetcars flooded. Ran forever.” He looked down at his shoes, leaking muddy water.
“Just a minute,” Roseanne said, returning with slippers left by a former tenant.
“I’ll take you,” I began, but he was already bolting upstairs. I ran after him and was there when he opened the door.
Yolanda’s face blazed like a moon suddenly blown free of clouds. “Charlie! Charlie! Charlie! You’re here!” He lunged toward the bed and buried his face in the crook of her arm.
“So here’s the father. Maybe the babe will turn for him,” Hilda said.
Charlie lifted his head. “Turn? What’s wrong?” He listened carefully to the risks of breech birth, never ceasing to stroke Yolanda’s brow as Hilda related their options. How had I so misjudged him? “Let me stay” was all he asked.
“Will you faint at blood?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Will you leave if I tell you, no questions, just leave?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Lucia, bring a chair.” My chair, she meant. I was to leave and wait in the parlor with Roseanne. Claire came down soon after to say the baby had turned.
“How?” we both asked.
“Charlie told it to. Sometimes that happens.” Then: “Soon, very soon.” Yolanda’s screams were louder now, but without the desperate terror of the night.
A half hour passed before a sudden roaring howl shot me to my feet. Roseanne followed, and like sneaking children we slipped upstairs and stood outside my door.
“Good, good, we’re coming,” Hilda was saying. “Another push, love, and we’re there. Push! Yes! Yes!” And now a hush.
We stood shoulder to shoulder, and Roseanne’s hand gripped mine as we heard that raucous cry like no other, that imperious “I am!” beyond the magic of any vaudeville show.
Charlie: “Yolanda! Look!”
“Yes, love,” said Hilda, “a perfect baby girl.” Then loudly: “Come on, you two. We know you’re there.” We slipped into the crowded room. Hilda and Claire were washing the baby. Charlie had collapsed across Yolanda’s chest, shoulders shaking. We glimpsed a tiny red face as the bundle was passed to her parents. “We’ll leave them alone now,” said Hilda, herding us into the hall. “It’s their time.”
Downstairs in the parlor, Roseanne brought out her best crystal and we toasted the little one’s health. “There’s no work like mine,” said Hilda. “It’s the best in the world.” The oiled table reflected our weary, happy faces. Upstairs, Charlie and Yolanda were beginning their new life. When would mine begin?
An hour later the rains ceased so suddenly that the last day and night might have been a dream except for the baby upstairs. Sunshine blazed, and the earth began sucking in the waters she had lately refused. A young boy running by shouted: “Streetcars are moving again!”
Upstairs Yolanda slept quietly with little Maria Margaret, named for her grandmothers. Charlie paid Hilda. In two days, Roseanne would arrange for a cab to take Yolanda and her daughter to the Reillys’ flat. The birth had been exciting, but her boarders didn’t feature living with a baby. Meanwhile I’d sleep in the parlor.
Charlie had me come with him to see his parents before he left for Youngstown. He seemed taller since going away, and older. “I got a promotion at Bessemer Limestone. I’ll be a loading foreman. The last one didn’t lock a pulley and was crushed to death. There’s a little company house. We’ll need a boarder at first, but if Yolanda earns enough with her hats, we’ll be fine.”
“But isn’t the work dangerous?”
“That’s why it pays well. The last man was careless. I won’t be. I have a family now. And if I get to be a boss, it won’t be dangerous at all.” He had a dazzling smile and buoyant certainty. I knew why Yolanda loved him, but how did that sunny soul come of age in his parents’ grim flat?
We reached the Reillys’ block and began threading through children sprinkled on the wet sidewalk. They greeted Charlie, hung on him and begged for pennies. When he’d amiably shaken himself free, I stopped him on the landing. “You know that Yolanda was miserable here. She thought your parents hated her.”
“They didn’t. They’re quiet, I know, but it’s just their way.”
He was about to mount the stairs, but I held his sleeve and persisted: “Why is it their way?”
He looked out at the noisy street. “Four children died, two after my sister and then two after me. The last had a fever that my father caught, and he lost most of his hearing. Then my mother stopped talking. All she did was clean. When Yolanda complained about how noisy and crowded and dirty her flat was, it almost made me jealous.”
“So you kept putting off bringing her home? You thought she wouldn’t love you if she met your parents?” He nodded sheepishly. “And you never told her what you just told me?”
He had the grace to blush. “I didn’t know how. Then I was working so hard and I couldn’t write all that in a letter. But everything will be different now in our own house. Will she forgive me?”
“If you talk to her. If you don’t keep secrets.”
He shook his head in wonder. “I have a family. Can you believe it?”
Charlie knocked loudly. Mrs. Reilly opened the door, saying, “You’re here,” as if he’d ducked out for bread. He rested a hand on her shoulder, a barely grazing touch, shook hands gravely with his father, sat down, and began slowly, loudly explaining the difficult labor, his race to Cleveland, and then the birth and naming of their baby girl. The father closed his eyes. Mrs. Reilly rose, went to the second room, and returned with a dusty bottle of sherry perhaps left over from Charlie’s birth. We drank without toasts or clinking, our eyes fixed on the scrubbed oak table. Count Filippo would have pounded that table, shouting: “Celebrate, you fools! You’ll be dead soon enough!” For once I would have agreed with him.
Mrs. Reilly turned, the first she’d acknowledged my presence. “You saw Maria Margaret?” Only in “Margaret” did her voice rise slightly to the palest hint of wonder.
“Yes, ma’am. If you’d like to visit, I’m sure Yolanda would be happy.” Or rather, Yolanda’s joy was so great that not even Mrs. Reilly could distress her. A nod, then silence swallowed us again. Any comment seemed pointless or overdrawn. We had been sitting for twenty-one minutes by the kitchen clock. Occasionally, Mrs. Reilly asked about Charlie’s work. He answered and we all fell silent again. I touched my empty glass, then jerked my hand back lest they think I wanted more sherry.
Finally: “Yolanda will stay here before she moves to Youngstown?”
“Yes, Mother, she’d like to come in a couple days, when she’s strong enough.”
Was this truly a smile, an upward lift in the lips? “We’ll be glad to see them.”
At Charlie’s urging I spoke very loudly of Maria Margaret’s beauty. Mr. Reilly’s blank face made me wonder if he recalled a baby’s general appearance. When Charlie rose, saying he’d have to leave for Youngst
own now, his mother fetched a neat brown package. “It’s our family’s christening gown, for Maria Margaret.” A stranger might have missed the tiny tremor and misting of her eyes.
On the stairway to the street, Charlie took my arms and shook them. “Did you see how happy they were? How proud? The christening gown, it’s all we have from Ireland. Everything will be different when Yolanda comes back, she’ll see.” Church bells tolled in the gathering dusk. “I have to go, the boss is waiting. Kiss my wife and daughter for me, we’ll be together soon!” Charlie cried, darting away. Looking up at the lighted window, I saw two figures, each raising a hand. I raised mine back at them.
Two days later, while I was at school, Roseanne helped Yolanda take the baby to the Reillys’ flat. Roseanne reported that a dresser drawer had been emptied and lined with cloth. A basket of snowy diapers sat in the corner of the room and next to it a knit afghan.
Six weeks later a telegram came from Charlie: he had furnished the little house and was ready to receive his family. I would see Yolanda and the baby off at the Cleveland station.
The Reillys brought them, hovering over Maria Margaret. In the crisp morning each building and tree seemed cut from the blazing blue sky. Yolanda was incandescent with happiness. She would at last have a home of her own, a fella, a baby, and a job that she loved. “Miss Halle will send me everything I need and sell the hats for me. I’ll work while the little one sleeps.”
When the train came, both Reillys kissed Maria Margaret, shook Yolanda’s free hand, and stood with me, almost waving as the train pulled away. Then we looked at one another, awkward without the baby’s presence. Were they reluctant to return to that silent flat in a buzzing hive of families? For the first time, I pitied them.
“Will you come to my graduation in spring?” I asked suddenly.
“We’ve been invited to Lucia’s graduation,” Mrs. Reilly shouted to her husband. “Yes, we’ll come.” As if exhausted by this flurry of emotion, they solemnly shook my hand and left the station without touching or speaking.
And then I was alone. In the roar and rattle of the station, I felt like the smallest gear in the great machine of Cleveland. But if I was a gear, I had a task, even if no one cared for it but me: to graduate from high school. That afternoon, I cleaned my room, washed the sheets, and straightened my piles of books. Late nights followed to fill the emptiness of Yolanda gone to the cocoon of her little house. I studied, scribed, and finished my essay on the “true American city,” explaining how Cleveland’s factories clothed America, built her automobiles, forged her steel, and cut limestone for monuments to her greatness.
Chapter 10
UNACCEPTABLE GESTURES
During the next months, the money my mother sent home began varying wildly and without explanation. An extra twenty dollars might appear, or only half her usual funds. I swerved between guilt for dependence on her pay and grating irritation. I was working too, and wasn’t it our plan that I’d finish high school and get a job that might one day support her? Her penny postcards grew fewer, harder to read and understand. If people asked after her at church, there was little to report. “She’s having a wonderful time,” I always said. “Everyone loves the Naples Nightingale.”
Certainly she wouldn’t come to my graduation. The troupe had begun a long loop across the Dakotas, through the western states, and perhaps back to Chicago, where I could see her again. A note from Bismarck said, “Cowboys cheat.” At cards, I assumed, for she sent half the usual funds that week. I missed her. I was angry with her, worried for her, and tired of so much worrying. When Roseanne pressed me for room and board, I bundled up the piano rolls and sold them all. I worked more and more often at the Millers’ house.
A note from Mario warned that Mamma had been fined for coming onstage late and complaining loudly about cowboys in the audience. “They buy tickets like everybody else, and tickets pay our salaries,” he wrote. “Please remind your mother of this.” As if she were my child, as if she’d listen to me.
I walked to Lake Erie, gray under a chill, dull lid of sky. Pebbles trapped in dried algae fringed the shore. When I tried to console myself by reciting Leopardi, the lines wouldn’t come. How was that possible when once they were nailed in my head? Had my English sonnets chased them out? I’d brought pen and paper, but trying to relay Mario’s message to Mamma, I was overwhelmed by the hopelessness of finding words that would somehow work a change in Bismarck.
I decided to go back to the boardinghouse, fish out my volume of Leopardi, and read until every trouble of these last months was washed away. I did read Italian that night, but not Leopardi. A letter had come from Countess Elisabetta. “Count Filippo died in his sleep. May the Lord rest his troubled soul,” she began. His last days were marked with breathless “little deaths” in which he seemed to cross into another land and then return and reach for one of his Capri women.
After the funeral, she and Paolo spent a week by Lake Como. I imagined them traveling north by train, she in first class and he in second until they’d passed north of Rome and were sure they’d meet nobody who knew them. Then Paolo might have donned his gentleman’s attire and they could sit together, her purse in his pocket, fine manners masking his common birth. I pictured them in the mountain mornings, watching mist rise off the lake. Surely she deserved such pleasure after so many years of subterfuge and pain.
But the pleasure was brief. Returning to Naples, they found the count’s death had triggered a new flood of debt notices. Some claims were false, merely vultures’ forays, but now their days were consumed by meetings with lawyers, creditors, and bankers. As they feared, the villa was heavily mortgaged. In dark hours, the countess wrote, she remembered how I’d repaid her when it would have been so easy to escape this burden. “I will follow my Lucia’s example. The debts will be paid, and interest on the debts. Somehow we’ll keep my family’s villa.”
They could sell the house in Capri, I reasoned, the count’s erotic statues that so repulsed her, and the land she’d managed to buy on the hills over Naples. Would that be enough?
“Why is it your problem?” Roseanne demanded. “They’ll sell what they can and live more simply. They don’t have to eat on silver. You just keep up with your room and board.” Yet the count’s debts were my problem for a reason I couldn’t share: my plan of asking the countess to help me pay for college. Now even raising the question seemed unkind. How could I add to her burden?
I could hardly bear to hold the three tinted photographs that came with the letter. The first was captioned “To remember your distant friend.” Fresh and glowing, the countess sat in a ruffled gown of apricot and cream, framed by the great parlor window with the blue of the bay behind her. “All of us” showed the countess, Paolo, Nannina, Alma the laundress, Luigi the gardener, and two new servants in front of the villa, flanked by potted geraniums. “Your Vesuvius” she’d written on the last image, taken from our flat rock.
My hand shook at the smell of sea and lemons this photograph recalled, the sound of lapping waves and distant cries of fishermen. If I could show them to Mamma, would they bring her joy or pain? I truly didn’t know. She was so distant and mysterious now.
I bought frames at a secondhand shop and hung these pictures of the Old Country in my room as Irena had done, as immigrants did all over the city. Yet even with pictures, it was so hard to picture myself in Naples. Where was the Lucia who once lived there? The villa itself was becoming a place of fables, like the Palazzo Donn’Anna, grist for stories served up at Mrs. Miller’s afternoon teas, no more real than a mermaid’s romance.
My true home was Cleveland now, and not just to anchor my mother in her wandering. Somewhere in this city of brick and steel, monstrous wealth, and blocks on blocks of scrabbling poor, there must be a place that needed me. Not in a factory, although that might come. Not at Hiram House with those like Miss Miller who labored charitably, if briefly, for the poor. Somewhere else, a distant image wrapped in fog.
“For now, only stud
y,” said Father Stephen when I brought my anxious questions to his confession booth. “Finish high school. Then we’ll see.” It was true. I was so close. That spring I was called to serve at a round of garden parties, teas, and banquets for Miss Miller’s coming marriage to Mr. Livingston. I visited Yolanda, Charlie, and little Maria Margaret in Youngstown. They were kind and fussed over me, but their world was limestone and hats and the tiny girl’s varied triumphs. Better to study, to wrap myself in books and papers.
My graduation date had nearly arrived. Maria Margaret was sick with whooping cough, so Yolanda couldn’t attend, but Roseanne would come, the Reillys, Henryk’s family and Miriam, Casimir and Anna, Donato and his family. When I invited Lula, she patted my face. “Thank you, sugar, but why would I go someplace I’m not welcome?”
“All the graduates have tickets. I’ll give you one.”
She roared with laughter and pressed me into the white apron stretched across her chest. “Everybody, here’s the most ignorant child ever to leave high school,” she called out to the early drinkers. “Look at this,” she said, putting her dark arm against my light one. “Understand? That’s why I can’t come. But never you mind. You bring your friends here afterward and we’ll have a little party. I’m proud of you, just like I’m sure your mamma is.” In truth, Mamma’s only comment was the word Brava marooned on the face of a Denver postcard that perhaps referred to my graduation.
The countess sent me as a graduation gift the cameo I had loved most in her collection: a perfect head of the goddess Diana set in a filmy veil. My hand shook when I held it. She had sold so many jewels, paintings, and silver pieces, yet saved this one for me. “We’re so proud of you,” she wrote. “Wear it to remember us.”
“You’ve studied hard,” Roseanne observed. “You deserve it. And who else would have repaid a countess? Not Teresa. And not me,” she added emphatically. “Put it on and look in the mirror.” I hardly saw myself behind the cameo, as if the swirling veil eclipsed my face. I set the lacquered box on my dresser and opened it at night, when the pale face glowed by streetlight and I could imagine my distant friend saying, “Come to the sitting room, Lucia, and let’s read from Leopardi.”
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