Swimming in the Moon

by Pamela Schoenewaldt

  Happiness whirled inside me like a great wind. I was certain that Mrs. Livingston was my patron despite her father-in-law. Perhaps she had argued for Hiram House to be added to their “charity budget,” having made private arrangements with Mr. Bellamy that I receive these funds. How could I thank her without betraying the elaborate subterfuge? Not in writing, for the old man might intercept my letter. If I went calling, one of his servants could reveal me. Finally I determined a means: I put on my drabbest dress and battered straw hat, approached the grand house through a back alley, and knocked at the kitchen door, asking Agnes for scullery work.

  She peered closely at my face and then said gruffly, “Sorry, girl, we’re not hiring.” Leaning forward, she whispered: “I’ll tell the missus you came.” Agnes pointed to a reddened finger where a ring might be and made a sign for money. “Sold?” I mouthed, and Agnes nodded. Then aloud: “The Winstons next door might need a maid. Wait, here’s a fresh oatcake. Good luck to you, girl.” It was warm and sweet under the rough grain, the taste of hope and secret kindness.

  When my time for college finally came, I wrote to Mr. Loew, imploring him to forward a letter to Teresa D’Angelo with my new address. Then I took a difficult leave of Mr. Kinney, who doubted finding a better clerk, “even among Americans.” Finally I visited those who had filled my years in America: the Reillys, Casimir and Anna, Donato, and then Yolanda’s and Giovanna’s families. I went to Hiram House, to church for Father Stephen’s blessing, and then early to Lula’s before her first customers stumbled in from the night shift.

  She was scrubbing the front steps, for she took particular pride in a gleaming limestone entry. “Girl,” she said, setting down her brush, “I’ve been hearing about your good-byes. You’re going thirty miles away, not to Timbuktu.”

  “I won’t be back until Christmas, and you’re the only people—”

  “The only people you know in America?” she said, patting my cheek. “Well that’s true. And your mamma’s not here. You’re a good girl, Lucia. We’ll have a grand graduation party someday.” She went back to scrubbing, working at a stain. “Now in all these good-byes, did you happen to give one to Henryk?”

  “He’s busy,” I told the limestone step. He was busy in the shop. I’d also heard that he was often out walking with Miriam. I had stopped going to Hiram House dances, not wanting to see them there.

  “Well, I’m busy too, Miss Lucia. I’m not sitting around eating chocolates, but I’ve got time for a friendly good-bye. How would Henryk feel if you blew out of town like a bad breeze?” I mentioned Miriam. “So what? He’s still your friend.”

  Henryk was stacking apples in a neat pyramid when I told him of my scholarship. Apparently he already knew. “You’ve worked so hard for this, Lucia. You deserve it. I’ll miss you though.” He looked up from his apples. “You could write me a letter, since you don’t need a scribe.” His wide smile and warm, dark eyes melted away my stiffness, as they always did.

  “You mean, you want to know what books I’ve read? Would that be interesting?”

  “Well, sure. And I’ll tell you the fruits and vegetables I’ve sold. Everybody wants to know things like that.” He slipped an apple to a hungry-eyed street boy who darted off, chomping.

  “And what fruit you gave away.”

  “Right, I’m a famous philanthropist, like Andrew Carnegie, but don’t tell my father.” A customer came in for onions. As furtively as he’d fed the street boy, he reached out quickly and squeezed my hand. “Congratulations, Lucia. Do us proud.” Then to the impatient woman: “Yes, Mrs. Rothbard, sweet new onions right over here.”

  I crossed the street to put automobiles, pushcarts, and wagons between us, my hand clenched to hold in the heat of his touch. It was good that I was going away, better that than seeing him out walking with Miriam.

  I left the next day with a rudely hasty thanks to Roseanne. She laughed. “I felt the same when I was leaving for America. All I wanted was to go.” On the crowded local train I stared out the window, so immobile that when I stood up to leave the woman beside me commented, “Miss, you looked frozen.”

  “I’m going to college.”

  “Really now? Well good for you.”

  I should get off at Garrettsville, President Bates himself had written; his wife shopped that day and could bring me to college. She was waiting at the platform, a gracious, motherly woman who bundled me into a carriage. “Mr. Bates does have an automobile,” she assured me, “but with these muddy roads, a horse is more reliable.” Summer rains had washed the land until it shimmered. I saw green in crossing Pennsylvania, but not these soft hills of velvet grass, startling against fields gold with grain, mounds of maple and oak trees and lush hedges. Black-eyed Susans and orange daylilies grew wild along the roadsides. “This is God’s country,” Mrs. Bates observed. “In the spring, with the flowers, it’s like Mr. Wordsworth’s poem. Do you know it, dear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I recited: “ ‘And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.’ ” She smiled, gazing across the fields.

  Describe a dream too closely and it scatters like milkweed. Here is what I remember from my too-brief time at college. I was given a small room whose window opened so near to a giant maple tree that I might have been lodged in its limbs. Two afternoons each week I was to work in the library. Walking through those hushed canyons of books was a pleasure as great as any sunset on the bay. “Joy delights in joy,” said Shakespeare in one of my sonnets, and my joy circled upward in those weeks. Busy with reading and work, I wrote no letters, despite my promises, so no record remains, as if my college time was indeed a dream.

  I came on a Saturday. On Monday I met my three professors: Dr. Sutton for English, Dr. Peckham for classics, and Dr. Bancroft for mathematics. They were grave, courteous, bearded men with faded frock coats; Mr. Kinney would not have been unimpressed by the cut and quality of their waistcoats and collars. But I loved how carefully they opened each text and showed where my reading began. Dr. Sutton announced: “We will commence, Miss D’Angelo, with a review of Milton’s sublime Paradise Lost, with which you are doubtless familiar.” I was overcome by embarrassment, first that I had read only fragments of this work, and second that I was presenting myself with a false, invented name. The alias had never once troubled me before, but in this book-lined office I felt like a fraud.

  “I’m really Lucia Esposito, sir.” Dr. Sutton sat back, hands woven together, smiling slightly, awaiting an explanation. “I changed my name in Pennsylvania, near the Susquehanna River.”

  “And what exactly caused this change near the Susquehanna River?” Words tumbled out. I explained how my great-grandfather Domenico was given away in a churchyard, my mother’s shame over this story, and how, having learned how easily names could be altered in America, we had shredded our old documents and thrown them out the window.

  Dr. Sutton tapped his fingertips together. “So you made yourselves angels?”

  “Yes, sir, for—protection in America.”

  “I see. Very original. Now to return to the matter at hand, since Milton’s Paradise Lost concerns the nature of angels, perhaps your chosen appellation fits our purpose. You will read the first fifty pages for our next meeting, paying close attention to rhetoric. You are familiar with standard rhetorical terms?” I nodded. “Excellent.” He dictated a formidable list of poetry and plays which I would read in the coming years. We would meet the next Monday. “I am certain you’ll be well prepared. When the semester begins, I would suggest joining the Alethean, our women’s literary society.” He smiled. Unsure of the appropriate response, I smiled back and, when he said nothing further, excused myself.

  Dr. Bancroft was next. “We will review your algebra and pass through trigonometry into calculus and higher realms of geometry. You are prepared for this journey, Miss D’Angelo?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  On a small chalkboard he set me a problem in algebra. Once again the play of numbers was a balm, fading
other matters into shadows. “Unconventional,” Dr. Bancroft observed of my method, “but effective. I suggest you prepare the first two chapters and as much of the third as you’re able.”

  With Dr. Peckham I’d read the classics, including selections of Ovid, Horace, Cicero, and Virgil. “As you know, Miss D’Angelo, Virgil was buried in Naples. You have seen his grave?” I hadn’t. “A pity. In any case, we begin with the Greeks.”

  In our next encounters I was thrilled, horrified, and entranced by Oedipus Rex. Even now I remember Dr. Peckham’s slight lift of the eyebrow, urging me on to more precise and defensible analyses: “Understanding emerges from the text, Miss D’Angelo, not from personal speculations on the text. Now, at what point precisely does Oedipus begin doubting his identity?”

  Yet much as he revered the ancients, Dr. Peckham brought a lively, affectionate interest to each of our encounters and seemed in no hurry to shoo me away. After our discussions of Oedipus, readings from Ovid and Herodotus, and the first chapter of the Iliad, he leaned back in a creaking oak chair, lit his pipe, and asked about my life. No one ever listened with such attention, bemused at times, and without judgment.

  I told him about our work for the countess and first encounter with Maestro Toscanini, the rock where Mamma sang to Vesuvius, Count Filippo’s sickness, Dr. Galuppi’s horrific “cures,” and the calamitous circumstances of our leaving Naples. I described Irena’s death and my scribing, my mother’s marvelous voice, her troubles with Mr. Keith’s vaudeville, my longing to finish high school, and the Lentz factory fire, when garment workers died for their machines.

  “Considering such a history, Miss D’Angelo,” he said, brushing tobacco flecks from his trousers, “what is your purpose now?”

  “Sir?”

  “There is a purpose for our life’s journey. Is that not why we’re here?” He waved toward the tall window looking out on lawns and blue sky puffed with clouds. “It is a question which bears contemplation whilst continuing the Iliad for next Monday.”

  We would never finish the Iliad. The next day, before I had begun my assignment or considered his question, I was summoned from the library to Dr. Peckham’s office. “This telegram just came, Miss D’Angelo, and, thinking it might be urgent, I sent for you.” He handed me the envelope and then tactfully busied himself at a table heaped with manuscripts. I opened the envelope: Dear Lucia. Teresa home, nervous collapse. Won’t speak. Dangerous condition. Can’t stay alone. Needs you. Roseanne.

  Mute with shock, I showed my professor the telegram. He left immediately, telling me to await his return. Alone, I bent into the anchoring weight of the great oak desk and cried. The demons that chased my mother from Naples had caught her at last. Who could repair the shards of a broken mind? The magnificent voice hadn’t saved her. Needs you. I would surely have to leave this kindly paradise of books and scholars. Where would my dreams go? Would Mamma’s demons find me too? Can’t stay alone. Could she even stay at the boardinghouse? And if not, where would we go? Who, in a great city consumed with its industry, would shelter a lunatic and her daughter?

  Dr. Peckham returned with a train schedule and a document from President Bates granting me an emergency withdrawal until “personal conditions permit.” Dr. Peckham himself would take me to the station in the president’s carriage. I packed my few clothes and left within the hour. That leaving was like the wrenching away of skin, far harder than leaving Naples, for I was young then and on a grand adventure.

  I said nothing on the road to Garrettsville. “Farewell, happy fields,” Milton’s fallen angels cried and I cried too, turned away from my teacher, who gave me a silent space for grief. At the station, he helped me from the carriage. “Miss D’Angelo, we shall expect a letter from you with news, good or bad, of your situation in Cleveland.” I nodded. “Listen to me, my dear. From the classics we know that families great and small have known the fragility of the human mind. There is no shame in this, any more than in sickness of the body. Those who say or think otherwise are mistaken. You must only find a way to care for your mother or have her cared for. I am confident that you will. And you will find us awaiting your return.”

  I had never wanted a father so much as I did then. And what could I do but extend my hand? He gripped it in both of his. “Miss D’Angelo, I’m sorry that life has found you out so quickly.” He took an envelope from his pocket. “Here is forty dollars. It is a gift.” When I protested, he shook his head. “I was helped when I was your age and I trust you will help another young person in your time.” The Cleveland train clattered in. I ran to get it. Through the dusty window I waved at my slender, bearded friend until the station vanished behind me.

  “She’s in your old room. It happened to be empty,” said Roseanne when I came home. The stairway rose like the Himalayas before me. She rested her hand on my shoulder. “Would you like to rest before you see her?”

  I shook my head. “How did she get here?”

  “A man brought her from Georgia in handcuffs.” I leaned against the stairwell. “He had orders not to remove them until she was out of his care. He wanted five dollars.”

  “I’ll pay you back. When she came, how was she?”

  “She didn’t know me. I sent for Donato and we managed to get her up to the room.”

  “She was violent?”

  “At first, yes. Stomping, throwing things, pounding walls. Then nothing for hours. She hasn’t eaten. We put a lock on the door from the outside.”

  “Like a prison?”

  “Lucia, she was wild! Screaming. Anybody else would have—”

  “I know.” Anybody else would have called the police and had such a lunatic taken away. I had walked out of my old world and into a new one in which my mother was caged like an animal. The ground rocked beneath me. “Give me the key, please.”

  To mount the looming stairs, I summoned the acrobats’ command: “Alley-oop.” It beat in my head: Alley-oop. Alley-oop. Alley-oop. But acrobats know where to put their feet, where to bend, and where to find a hand to steady them. I knew nothing about lunacy. Whatever I expected when I unlocked the door, it wasn’t this: someone once my mother sitting in the burgundy coat buttoned high despite the late-summer heat. The once-glorious hair hung tangled along her ashen face. All the bedclothes, every object that belonged on shelves, walls, in the closet or drawers lay crumpled and stomped on the floor. She didn’t lift her eyes or in any way note that I had entered.

  Here was the Naples Nightingale, stripped of feathers, an angel fallen and crushed. No, she wasn’t here. Here was a shell of the slender beauty who’d floated with me on warm waves in moonlight. The wild disorder surrounding her inhuman stillness churned up nausea so intense that I turned, ran, and retched into the toilet.

  I couldn’t go back to my room; that was impossible.

  No, think of the warriors of Troy, the heroes and great lovers. Of what possible use was my college reading if not to shore up the courage to join the battle that called me? I made myself return, close the door, and lay a cautious hand on her shoulder. “Mamma, it’s Lucia, your daughter. Let me bring you something to eat.” No response. I touched her horribly tangled hair. “Or brush—”

  Her balled fist, whipping full and hard into my stomach, slammed me into the wall. When I struggled to my feet she was a statue again, as if I’d conjured the blow. Panting, I realized my folly. I needed a doctor, a guide and interpreter of the mind’s underworld, the inferno my mother had entered. I left the room, locking the door behind me. Now I was her jailer. No, no, I was only protecting her until the storm passed away. It must pass away. How could she stay like this, like a lunatic, a madwoman? I went out to look for help.

  A nurse at Hiram House promised to send Dr. Ricci, a noted neurologist who could speak to my mother in Italian. She took my hand. “I’m so sorry, Lucia.”

  I thanked her and hurried home to wait in the parlor for Dr. Ricci. Roseanne brought a glass of brandy. “It will calm you,” she promised. What could calm me when so much
had changed so suddenly? Or had the change been sudden? Perhaps this state was merely the logical end of her rages, obsession with Toscanini, manic cleaning, and night walks, the “gestures” and odd behaviors that had disgraced her in two troupes. The strangeness of her cards and letters had been a clear enough sign, if I’d chosen to read it. Just as Irena’s coughing, which I’d taken as chronic but innocent, steadily slipped into pneumonia, my mother’s strangeness had transformed her into an ashen statue with a flying fist. She hit me. No, she must have meant to do something else. Or did she “mean” nothing at all? Was she even capable of “meaning” now? Once she’d said her love for me was like Vesuvius, always there, even if hidden behind fog. Vesuvius, Vesuvius, Vesuvius, I repeated until the word only timed my breathing. No sound came from my mother’s room.

  Roseanne appeared at the parlor door. “You do understand, Lucia, that if Teresa frightens the boarders, she can’t stay.” Yes, I said, miserably, I understood.

  Dr. Ricci came in the early evening, apologetic for his delay. He was a small, dapper man, who spoke a precise and cultured Italian. Yes, Roseanne could take his hat and coat. Yes, he would care for tea. His fee was three dollars for a house call. From the elegance of his dress, I assumed that he charged wealthy patients more. Graciously, firmly, he had Roseanne leave us, closed the parlor doors himself, and began “taking the history”: Mamma’s grandfather, the sordid tale of my conception, our time in Naples, why we left, her work in America and a detailed account of her strange behaviors.

  He wrote without comment until I burst out, half rising from my chair: “Dr. Ricci, what’s wrong with her?” She was the first, the central person in my life, and, like Oedipus, I didn’t know my mother at all.

  Dr. Ricci smiled gently. “Miss D’Angelo, if we can be strangers to ourselves, how much more can we be strangers to each other, to our own parents and children? But first we complete the history. Then I speak with the patient.”