In truth I rarely read from Leopardi now. “English literature,” our teacher insisted, “is the crown of European culture. We must honor our Anglo-Saxon heritage and remember that we are heirs to Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Browning, and Wordsworth.” I studied hard. In the last months of school, my grades edged over Henryk’s. I would be the valedictorian, our teacher announced.
Mr. Steinblatt, the principal, wasn’t pleased. “Boys make better valedictory speeches,” he grumbled.
“He’s a fool,” Henryk said. “You won the Cleveland essay prize.” I had indeed, but that prize money was sucked away so quickly in the weeks when no money came from Mamma that I hardly felt the triumph of winning. I was determined to savor my valediction.
I wrote out a graduation speech and went early one Saturday morning to Lula’s, seeking Mr. Hardwig, a rheumy-eyed regular who’d once taught rhetoric in Boston. Fortunately, I caught him sober. He had me read each sentence aloud, tapping his finger at ungainly constructions until my changes satisfied him. Then I practiced in front of our parlor mirror and in the kitchen for Roseanne.
“It sounds good, but don’t you want to say something else?” she asked.
No, I wanted this speech. Remembering Mamma’s lessons, I even marked where I must breathe. On graduation night, I put on a new dress that Roseanne had helped me buy with a sudden spurt of money from my mother, dark violet with soft pleats down the front. My cameo shone at the collar like the moon on a clear night.
At last my time came. I began the valedictory by listing all those in my first American class who were not with us onstage: Yolanda, Carmen, Ciro, Herman, Benjamin, Antonio, Joseph, Gabriella, Patrick, Bronya, Anna, Salvatore, Mary, Maria, Sarah, Johan, Domenico, Angela, Jakub, Robert, and Roberto. “Why are they not here?” Everyone knew. Most were working. Many of the girls had families. Domenico and Joseph had died in the quarries, Patrick and Jakub in the mills, Maria in one of the workplace fires. “Was this the golden future for which their parents came to America? If they had stayed in school, they could have one day helped to educate their own children.” Young faces turned to mine. Power surged from my feet. Here’s the joy my mother finds in singing, I thought, the stunning power of one’s own voice.
I took a breath where I’d marked my page and went on: “From educated citizens could come inventors and scientists to design machines for relieving the tedium of work, artists, writers, scientists, and gifted craftsmen. What is needed for these benefits? Only that parents earn enough to keep their children in school and not have to thrust them into the working world too soon. Can our rich country not give her young people two simple gifts: the pleasures of a childhood without labor and the solemn discipline of education? Yes, we on this stage are proud indeed to be the eight in a hundred with diplomas in our hands. We will treasure this evening forever. Yet, how proud, how great our land would be if we were eighty, ninety, a hundred in a hundred, crowding this stage, bathed in the light of learning!”
My speech was brief. Not brief enough, said Mr. Steinblatt’s scowl. The polite applause was brief as well, but I was flushed with pleasure to have done the whole only glancing at my notes. I had remembered to breathe and passed my eyes over every quarter of the audience just as Mamma did in Chicago. I had made myself smile at parents who stared back not understanding English. I had looked to the front row of wealthy patrons who paid my working schoolmates so little, whose wives knit children scarves in winter but hired their parents for pennies an hour. They looked at one another, whispering, their gloved hands tightly folded.
Only Mr. Richard Livingston, Miss Miller’s fiancé, sought me out after the ceremony. “Well done, Lucia. America needs more clever men to invent new machines. Just be careful not to veer.”
“Veer, sir?”
“Into socialism.”
“Oh, Lucia’s no socialist,” said Miss Miller with a tinkling laugh. “She only meant that young people should stay in school. Isn’t that right, Lucia?”
“Yes, Miss Miller. They should be able to stay in school.”
“What would you like to do now, Lucia?” Mr. Steinblatt inquired stiffly. “Teach young immigrants at Hiram House?”
“No, sir. I’d like to go to college.” There, I’d spoken my dream to a stranger.
He frowned. “That would be difficult, don’t you think? Do you have funds?”
“No, sir. I’d need a scholarship.”
“Certainly. Well, congratulations on finishing high school. That in itself is an achievement.” For an immigrant girl, he surely meant, for the “daughter of a showgirl,” I heard him say to a patron.
Clutching my diploma so hard that the paper creased, I joined a milling cluster of new graduates and their family and friends, their voices loud and strident in the rich June air. The Reillys shook my hand, gave me the present of a steel-tipped fountain pen, and walked slowly home, wrapped in quietude.
“Let’s go to Lula’s!” someone said, and we moved in a jubilant crowd, graduates, we who had endured. On that balmy night we believed our teacher’s promise: “Now you can do anything!”
“There must be scholarships you can get,” said Henryk as we crowded around a table.
“Couldn’t Miss Miller help?” Miriam asked, her creamy white hand resting on Henryk’s forearm. “You did shine her silverware.”
Henryk slipped his arm free to pass around a plate of toasted cheese and pickles. “Miss Miller may not have her own money,” he said. “And she has a fancy wedding to think about.”
“A lot of parties means a lot of vegetables,” said Miriam thoughtfully, taking a pickle. “Will your father be getting some of that business?”
“I doubt it. That’s a big contract and we’re a small shop.”
“It never hurts to ask, does it?” she said sweetly and I wondered, not for the first time, how he could love her. Yet he seemed happy.
While the others drank ginger beer and talked eagerly about a country weekend organized for us by Hiram House, I cobbled together a plan. I wouldn’t go to the country if Henryk and Miriam were going; I’d visit my mother in Chicago before the troupe swerved west. I’d get a job in a shop, for my English was good enough now. Then I’d wait until after the wedding, when Miss Miller would have forgotten my speech, and ask her for a scholarship. Annoyed as I was with Miriam’s constant little lessons, she was right in this: it never hurts to ask. If Miss Miller couldn’t help me, she might know someone who could.
Mario had written that it would be “useful” if I visited Mamma soon. He hadn’t said why. So I was anxious all the way to Chicago. When she didn’t meet me at Union Station, I made my way to the Haymarket Theater and then backstage through a gauntlet of eyes and murmurs: “There’s the Nightingale’s daughter.” Yolanda had given me a fine straw hat with silk flowers, the rim skillfully shaped for my face. With a trim striped shirtwaist bought for the trip, I could hold up my head against any voices.
I looked for Harold, who’d taken me to the station on my last visit, and found him in a warren of ropes, set pieces, and performers in costume. He was dressed in a white shirt with a crisp celluloid collar, carrying a notebook, a pen tucked behind his ear. “I’m the backstage manager,” he announced proudly, “coming up in the world.”
“That’s wonderful, Harold. I’d like to see my mother.”
His face clouded. “She’s locked herself in her dressing room since last night. Claimed some Eye-talian gent was bothering her. But it wasn’t no gent, just an old drunk at the stage door. Your ma was going on about his eyebrows.” Blood pounded in my head as I watched Harold force her lock with a skeleton key and usher me in. “Good luck,” he whispered.
The dressing room was meticulously ordered, I saw with relief. At least this much was unchanged. “Lucia, you’re here,” my mother said wearily. “I’m so glad. Nobody talks to me now.” Because you locked them out. “I couldn’t meet you at the station. The maestro’s waiting outside the theater.”
“Mamma!”
; Her arms wove like vines around me. “I’m so thirsty,” she said in a tiny voice. “So thirsty and cold.”
“Wait here.” I darted out to ask Harold for some hot tea.
“She’s mostly drinking wine these days.”
“Tea, if you would, please.”
“She’s on in an hour. She knows that?”
“I’m sure she does. She’ll be ready.” When I returned, Mamma was listlessly putting on her costume. “Can you sing? Are you well enough?”
“Of course,” she said sharply. “I’m just tired of people asking how I am. Tired of being whispered about and worrying about him. Why can’t he stay at the opera houses? This is vaudeville. He should leave me alone.” She tugged at the corset straps. “And my act is still before intermission. Fasten my dress behind. I don’t want to ask the girls.” My fingers struggled with the tiny buttons. Her once-glorious emerald dress showed constant wear: small rips in the seams, a ruffle unstitched, a dirty hem, and several buttons replaced with pins.
“Let me fix the ruffle at least, Mamma.”
“No, it doesn’t matter. The audience is far away, and all they want is a show. They don’t care about us. They’re so stupid they think the clowns are really smiling. They look at acrobats jumping and spinning like tops and think it’s easy. Backstage, the young ones cry. There’s some on crutches between shows.” Her voice turned shrill. “Crutches and canes. The dancers’ feet are always bleeding. Vaudeville’s a sad world, Lucia. That’s why performers are so mean. When he comes backstage looking for me, of course they’re scared.”
I made her sit down. “Mamma, it was just a drunk. Maybe it looked like Toscanini, but it wasn’t.” Harold came with tea, and I watched gratefully as she arranged and padded her hair with practiced hands, painted her face, and adjusted the heavy plumed hat. Perhaps she was only agitated about my coming or in a woman’s time of the month. But I feared worse. Nannina’s word, unstable, rolled inside my head. The darting eyes, loosened fingers, the shrill edge to her voice made me feel unstable myself, perched on a rock in a rising sea.
When a ruffle of applause had her cock her head and stand up, I pounced on this good sign: she still knew the pace of the show by heart. Harold rapped on her door and called “Five minutes.” She smoothed her gown and squared her shoulders. “Tap dancers, then me. Lydia and her ugly dogs come after the intermission.” She hurried away.
Nobody led me to a seat this time, so I found a spot to watch her from the wings. My fingers sought the folds of my skirt, squeezing tightly. Would her voice crack? Would her old fear come true and the words run away? Would the audience laugh? Blessed Mary, Mother of God, be with her now. The curtain rose. From my nook I saw the fray of her gown. Yet the marvelous familiar voice was the same, rich and rising, warm and strong as ever, the high notes held to impossible length. The glorious Naples Nightingale. I sank gratefully onto a coil of rope.
Then I panicked. The hands were going wrong. The left one, which first had been rising and falling with practiced grace for “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì,” now lay flat on her chest and then—No, Mamma, no!—cupped her breast, rubbing. The audience hooted. When her right hand copied its mate, men whistled and stamped. In the front row, a dark-suited man lifted a red card, and the piano man jumped his tempo.
With the slightest flinch, Mamma righted herself. Both hands floated modestly down, then gracefully lifted, airy with longing. Cheers, calls, and whistles filled the hall. Sweat ran under my cotton dress, which now seemed made of heavy wool. Mamma, how could you?
A boy ran across the stage with an enormous American flag. A change in the sequence, obviously. Red and blue lights flashed. Drums beat backstage. Catching time with the music, my mother began “The Star-Spangled Banner,” knees lifting slightly in a march, arms stiffly swinging. My heart ached for her frozen face and toy soldier act. What did she care about the rocket’s red glare, the dawn’s early light?
Behind me acrobats were assembling, recalled by Harold and grumbling at the forced reprise. So she’d have just two songs? How many had she sung before? Frantic, I tried to remember. Four? Five?
She took her bow with hoots from the cheaper seats. Elegantly dressed women in the first rows did not clap. The acrobat master barked “Alley-oop” and clapped his hands. The troupe smiled in unison like a single string pulled tight across their faces as they flipped themselves onstage.
Mario was waiting in Mamma’s dressing room. When he held up a red card, her face paled to white. “It’s your second warning, Teresa,” he said severely. “Mr. Keith could turn you out today for unacceptable gestures. You know this. You signed the contract. Vaudeville is a family entertainment. Teresa, what were you thinking?”
I moved to her side. “She was singing from opera, Mario. She was taken by emotion. It was a dramatic gesture. Please, give her another chance. Where can you find a voice like hers? And the national anthem, have you ever heard it sung so beautifully? Mamma, you won’t do that again, right? Right? You won’t make unacceptable gestures?” She nodded so stiffly that it seemed her neck might creak.
Mario sighed. “Teresa, next time I’ll have to telegraph Mr. Keith. If there’s one more incident, one gesture, one late entry, one more angry word with Lydia about her dogs, one more scene about that maestro—”
“Toscanini,” Mamma muttered.
Mario ignored this. “One more problem and you’ll be traded to the Loew circuit as a warm-up act to one-reelers. Five shows a day. You’ll share the bill with movies. Do you understand?”
“She understands,” I said.
“I’m speaking to Teresa. Do you understand, Teresa?”
She nodded. Mario went over some bits of business: new lyrics, changes in staging, a shuffling of songs. When he left, we slumped in chairs, more spent than we ever were after a summer day of cleaning.
“Do you understand, Mamma?”
“Yes, yes, of course. Stop talking about it. Let’s go out.”
We walked along Lake Michigan. Against that mass of water she seemed frail and uncertain, tentative in her step. “Vaudeville isn’t what I thought, Lucia. All these rules. Always watching for him. And nobody’s kind to me anymore, not even Mario.”
“Mamma, the problem is the way you touched yourself. You know they don’t like it.”
“Americans!” she exploded. “They hate their bodies. They hate women. The churchmen see filth everywhere. Whatever I did, it just happened. It’s not my fault.” Useless to remind her that she practiced every gesture, every crook of the finger and bend of the wrist. Nothing in her performances “just happened.”
“Mamma, I’m worried. Why don’t you come home and rest? I can get a good job. I can’t go to college without a scholarship anyway.”
“No, I’ll stay here. I feel better now. Look.” She pointed to a boulder by the shore. “We’ll sit over there.” In the hour we had before the next show, I told her about Yolanda’s baby, the cameo, and my graduation speech. She held my hand, barely listening. When I had no more news to share, she announced: “Maybe it was just a drunk backstage. I’ll keep singing, Lucia. It’s the best thing for me. After all, I am the Naples Nightingale.”
“Of course you are. And you’re wonderful.” She sighed as we leaned together. In the next day and a half, there were no incidents, unacceptable gestures, or talk of Toscanini. Mamma didn’t gamble, which annoyed the acrobats who won from her regularly. “You see?” she said. “I’m fine. If they would just treat me well, everything could be easy. Or if you came with me,” she said wistfully.
Mario said there was no possibility of my traveling with the troupe, none. Mr. Keith would not tolerate an unwieldy crowd of spouses, children, lovers, and “others.” He did promise to work harder at enforcing Mr. Keith’s rules against backstage gambling. That in itself might help, for losing made my mother anxious and angry. Perhaps the gestures were only a passing error, an operatic excess. Lying awake in our hotel room, I could think of no better work for her than singing and no bett
er world than vaudeville. If only she could stay.
“I’m fine,” Mamma insisted at the station as I left. “You worry too much, Lucia.” I went back to Cleveland, hovering between hope and helpless worry.
“You did your best,” said Roseanne. “You can’t be her mother forever. The best thing for both of you is work.” Perhaps she was right.
My diploma earned me a trial post as junior clerk for $11.50 a week at Mr. Kinney’s Dry Goods. I didn’t mention my hope for college, and of course Mr. Kinney had no suspicions. In a stroke, every lesson in geometry, grammar, history, rhetoric, civics, and geography was replaced by principles of shopkeeping, constant reminders and instructions. I must be attentive, he warned, for respectable-seeming customers might slip unpaid-for items into commodious purses. The most trusted employee might take merchandise, sell it at lower rates to friends, or simply give it away for favors. Loyal employees, Mr. Kinney reminded us, could expect due recompense. Others would be fired immediately.
“You’ll work hard,” other clerks warned, “but he does appreciate diligence.” I tried to make myself useful. Sales to Italian customers increased. I grasped the knack of running a sharpened pencil down a list of prices and summing them in my head. I had no talent for artful arrangement of merchandise but could bargain hard with wholesalers. When a dealer from Boston agreed to my price for strong cotton thread and fine steel needles if I bought two cases, I pressed the point on Mr. Kinney. “You’ll see, sir, Italians will appreciate quality.”
“And if not, you’ll buy the overstock yourself, Miss D’Angelo?”
“Yes, sir, of course.”
I began quietly speaking to friends and sisters of friends and those who came for scribing, showing the strength of the thread, the smooth finish and keen point of the Boston needles. “Why buy from your bosses at twice the price and half the quality?” Factory girls hesitated, afraid of fines for dealing outside the company store. “I need my job,” said Yolanda’s cousin Giovanna, who sewed for Printz-Biederman. “My mother isn’t a vaudeville star.”
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