“She doesn’t speak! She screams and punches, throws things on the floor. She came home in handcuffs!”
“She will speak to me,” Dr. Ricci said with such calm assurance that I sat down, tamed by the force of his certainty. “Now, Miss D’Angelo, shall we return to the last time you saw your mother? It was”—he glanced at his notebook—“in Chicago, at the Haymarket Theater.” After more questions and a careful study of Mamma’s “letters” home, he announced that he would visit her.
Incredulous, I watched Dr. Ricci mount the stairs, unlock the door, knock politely, and enter as calmly as one might enter a bakery. He got her to speak: a steady murmur of two voices filtered through the door. Hers rose and fell; his never changed. No crashes or thumps, no bodies thrown against walls. Had the danger passed, like a wild drunkard grown sober? An hour later, Dr. Ricci came downstairs and again closed us into the parlor. From his grave face and gentle manner I knew the danger had not passed or perhaps even truly begun.
“Lucia, is there no one else in your family I can speak with? An older relative?”
“I’m her only family, here or anywhere. Tell me, please, sir. What happened to her?”
Dr. Ricci helped me sit and then sat himself, thoughtfully smoothing his jacket as I gripped the chair arms. “Your mother is exhibiting multiple symptoms: paranoia, hallucinations, nervous prostration, neurasthenia, hysteria, aggression, sexual anxiety, and catatonia, the rigidity you noted on first entering her room.”
“Catatonia,” I repeated dully, dazed by the chain of terms, each like a surgeon’s knife laying bare the deformity and disorder of my mother’s mind, making her an esposito. Whether I understood each one hardly mattered.
“More precisely, transient catatonia, since she attacked you.”
“Not really attacked—”
He opened his notebook and read: “ ‘She hit me in the stomach with her fist.’ Those were your words, Lucia? You were thrown across the room?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Then we are speaking of an attack. Your mother is seriously ill.”
“Dr. Ricci, why did this happen?”
His grandeur diminished. He lifted empty hands. “We are profoundly ignorant of the workings of the human mind, both its glories and its troubles, the injuries it suffers. Dr. Freud and his colleagues would look for explanations in your mother’s childhood and,” he said delicately, “the circumstances of your conception. Yet others with a similar past might show different symptoms, or none at all.” He tapped his brow. “Here is the unknown land, the Dark Continent, the mystery to plumb in this new century.”
“And my mother, sir?”
“Yes, of course, the practicalities. How is she to be cared for in the next months?”
“She won’t improve? Perhaps after a rest—”
Dr. Ricci leaned forward. “Mental illnesses, and we may call your mother’s case an illness, build gradually for years, as you yourself have indicated.” He indicated his notebook. “We cannot expect a rapid cure, if cure is even possible. Still, we can’t be hopeless. Patients have recovered from cases worse than this. However, at present, she must be kept from harming herself or others. A private sanitarium would provide perfect rest in peaceful, comfortable surroundings. However, such establishments are costly, hundreds of dollars a month.” I crumpled in my chair. “Precisely. They cater to the wealthy and are not universally efficacious. Often they are family expedients, places to house the infirm or inconvenient. There is the Cleveland State Hospital, which is free”—he coughed slightly—“for those in need.”
“No, not there! Never!” Yolanda’s aunt had worked in that place briefly and told us what she saw: rats, chains, straitjackets, filth and feces, food slopped in trenchers, cages where men and women howled day and night, women abused by keepers hired from jails or pulled from the wards themselves. The aunt took lower pay in a factory to escape that “human zoo.” Whatever else I wanted for my life would now come after keeping Mamma out of Cleveland State Hospital.
“Could she”—my mouth struggled to frame the words—“get worse?” Lines from Milton loomed: “And in the lowest deep a lower deep.”
“She could worsen,” Dr. Ricci agreed. “And that would raise new conditions, of course, but for now, there may be a place for her, a third option.”
A crack of light. “Where?”
“Here, if you are willing and your landlady agrees. With daily doses of laudanum she could be kept quiet and might sleep a good deal. She fears ‘the outside,’ which is fortunate, for all that is ‘outside’ will agitate her, possibly creating violent reactions. She must not leave this house alone. She must have quiet and calm in familiar surroundings, with no obligations. We are speaking of a grave charge, Lucia.”
“I can keep her. For how long, do you think?”
In the lift of his hands and shoulders, I saw my hope of college gone, my portal to a different life closed and shuttered. “Let us not speculate now. Rest has cured some difficult cases. She needs bland, wholesome food. Sweet and spicy tastes inflame the passions. Dr. Kellogg of Michigan gives his patients toasted cornflakes of his own devising. You may find this helpful.” He wrote out a prescription for laudanum and his own address for emergencies. He did not say what I knew: if our plan proved insufficient, Cleveland State Hospital would be my only option.
And so began my life as a caretaker. I wrote to my professors, who sent lists of books I might read. When could I do this? My life was whittled down, spare and tight. I read a little poetry or sonnet before sleep, other chapters of the Iliad, and sometimes solved a problem in geometry, nothing more.
Mamma slept in the daytime while I worked; at night she paced the room, watching me sleep or try to sleep. Mr. Kinney hired me back, generously paying thirteen dollars for a fifty-four-hour week since I had attended college, however briefly. I bought grains and cornflakes, brown bread and beans, which my mother ate in our room, chewing loosely and dropping food. I cleaned her afterward and took her plate away before she threw it. Don’t think about this. Don’t remember how she thrilled hundreds from the stage with the warmth of her voice and the lift of her hand. Now she was stiff and silent as a wooden doll when I washed her. Exhausted, ashamed, afraid, I saw nobody. “She’s much better,” I told Father Stephen. He nodded gravely, and I felt like those who dictated fanciful news at my scribing table: “Everything is wonderful in America. I have a good job. We live in a beautiful house. The streets are paved in gold.”
October brought a strange relief. I awoke with a start past midnight, horrified to find myself alone, and raced downstairs. Had she run away? Where would I find her in the dark? But she was on the kitchen floor, scrubbing. “What are you doing, Mamma? It’s not your job. Come to bed.”
“I’m not finished.” She had spoken a whole sentence! I backed into the cabinets, stunned. No clean floor had ever brought such joy. I watched her work until, convinced that she was calmly cleaning, I retreated to our room. Before dawn she came upstairs, undressed, and fell into peaceful sleep beside me. She did the same the next night and the next.
After a week, Roseanne accepted my proposal. She would put out supplies, and Mamma would do whatever cleaning she chose at night, or none at all. Money proportional to her work would be deducted from our board. This was far from vaudeville’s glory, but there was no shame, for nobody would see her on her knees. She took no orders and faced no expectations. Tired after hours of furious cleaning, she slept easily and I could sleep myself without her restless, looming presence. Mamma didn’t speak again for weeks, but we had found a peaceful order that could last, I thought miserably, for years to come.
If rest had cured difficult cases, then I must simply wait. I wrote to my professors of the hope that my mother could someday return to vaudeville and I to college. Then I would find happiness. “We wish the same for you,” Dr. Sutton wrote back, adding a gentle admonition drawn from Milton whose sense evaded me then: “The mind is its own place and in itself, can make
a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” What could be heavenly in Cleveland? Was he speaking of my mother or of me?
Chapter 12
USEFUL WORK
By the end of a cold, bright January 1910, Mamma had been home more than five months. In that time she had not gone out the front door and only occasionally ventured into the tiny backyard to hang our clothes. Her skin had paled to paper whiteness, and her gaze was vague. She spoke rarely, and her phrases were as disjointed as her letters: “Which is why,” she might begin, and then lapse into silence. “Before the dogs.” Or: “The third time.” I couldn’t prompt a finished sentence. Her thoughts surfaced as dolphins leap from the sea, and descend where we cannot follow. She’s getting better, I kept telling myself, despite all proof. She must be.
Anxious fear folded back on me: all I knew of my father was that he brutally raped a serving girl. Would a sane man do this? If sickness infected me on both sides, what could my future be? Could my own mind crack? Don’t think of this, don’t, don’t. Think only of her.
Cleaning was good for Mamma, said Dr. Ricci. “Wholesome, useful work in familiar surroundings brings self-respect.” This was true enough, but the work gave me new tasks. Mamma disliked certain of Roseanne’s pictures and hid them or turned them to the wall. She put chairs, china figures, or books in strange formations. When she came to bed before dawn, I slipped downstairs to reset the rooms.
Still, those months held a small, unexpected pleasure: Mamma began cooking. I never knew she had watched Nannina so closely. After the first minestrone appeared from beans and vegetables in the pantry, Roseanne began casually leaving ingredients on the kitchen table. In the morning we might discover a warm frittata, spicy ragù, baked pasta, lentil soup, vegetables roasted with Anna’s sausages, or stuffed manicotti. The boarders were delighted. Yet sometimes ingredients would be ignored or hidden. I found pasta thrown against a window, tomato sauce splashed across the floor, or forks jabbed in the purple flesh of eggplants. I studied her footsteps coming upstairs before dawn like wives straining to hear in their husbands’ tread if they were returning happy or drunk, injured or laid off from work.
Those who knew of Mamma’s collapse pressed me curiously for details. How much, exactly, of her reason was lost? Could I relate odd things she said or did? Some wanted to see her, as if she were a circus sideshow. Others backed away as if I bore sickness on my breath like smallpox. “I appreciate your concern. She’s resting from overwork,” I always replied. Some ceased asking, but when I slipped into Sunday mass late or left early, they watched me, perhaps wondering: Is Lucia turning strange as well?
I couldn’t bear to face Mrs. Livingston and say she’d sold her ring and risked the old man’s anger for nothing. Even to knock on the kitchen door, whisper to Agnes that my mother was ill, and then have Agnes ask what kind of “ill”—I couldn’t bear that either.
“Your patrons will be disappointed,” Mr. Bellamy intoned after extending his deepest sympathy. Leaning back, he explained how hard it often was to help immigrants, how hopeful he had been of my success before this unfortunate problem. Doesn’t he know how neatly great wealth can ease away problems? If we were rich, Mamma could be kept in a beautiful sanitarium until I finished college. By his avid concern for my mother’s health, I knew he’d heard the gossip and wanted more.
“She was overworked,” I said stiffly.
“Have you considered the Cleveland State Hospital?”
“No, sir.” And more boldly: “You’ve heard about that place. Would you put your mother there, sir? In any case there’s no reason to confine her. She’s recovering at home.”
“Surely those horror tales are exaggerated. Besides, the infirm must be restrained and isolated for their own good and society’s. Remember, Lucia, the deficient aren’t like us. Most likely they aren’t even aware of their predicament.”
I gripped my chair. By good chance, a messenger boy appeared. “I see that you’re busy, sir. I’ll leave you.”
At Lula’s, I spun out my rage. “Now, now,” she said. “He built Hiram House and keeps it going. He does a lot of good. Just don’t mind what he says. Keep telling yourself your mamma could get better.”
I was doing that, conjuring scenes of miraculous recovery or at least a steady softening of her symptoms. Meanwhile, I struggled to understand how this disaster had happened, and where my own guilt lay in not averting it. In that tangle, I lied to the countess. She had described her trip to Rome with Paolo, how they’d wandered through the Forum and the Vatican and watched a moonrise over the Colosseum. In turn I related all I’d read and learned in college. I said that I’d left because Mamma was “sick.” Why not tell the whole truth? The countess would not have scorned us and might not even be surprised. There would be no blame or coy reminders of past misdeeds.
No, my lies were born of pure superstition. In Naples, Mamma had been “difficult,” often bad-tempered, “unstable,” but not mad, not catatonic, paranoid, or any of the other terrible words that defined her condition now. If that image changed in Naples because of what I wrote, I was darkly convinced that somehow her fate as a hopeless lunatic would be sealed. “Words create our world, Miss D’Angelo,” Dr. Sutton had intoned. I knew I distorted his meaning when I considered my own condition and Mamma’s, but since the why of her collapse and the how of her healing were unknowable, I clung to magic.
I called up images of my old life as if they could somehow protect me from the new one. These images were perfect as painted postcards: the magenta blaze of bougainvillea and soft hills beyond the city, marble fountains, children playing on jetties by the sea, daily miracles of sunset over water and the floating green island of Capri. Yet even more than I missed all the beauty of Naples, I longed to be a child there again with many duties but no responsibilities, no deep dreams, and nothing that I’d wanted so deeply and then lost.
Fixed as she was on her boardinghouse economies, even Roseanne saw my isolation and offered a small release: “There’s a Valentine’s Day party at Hiram House. I heard they’re teaching American dances. Why don’t you go? I’ll watch your mother.” Dr. Ricci agreed that I could try an evening event.
I protested, they both insisted, and in the end I went. A cheerful American couple demonstrated the turkey trot, a sliding ragtime step with scissor kicks that left us convulsed with laughter when too-exuberant dancers scissored themselves off their feet. In a break between dances, Henryk’s mother and aunt pulled me aside to ask about Mamma. I said she was getting better, even starting to cook. They hovered between curiosity and fear, plying me with questions yet keeping their distance. “Probably a dybbuk got her,” the aunt announced. The conversation swerved into Yiddish.
Henryk spoke to them sharply and drew me away. “They shouldn’t talk to you like that.”
“What’s a dybbuk?”
“Just a silly superstition from the Old Country. A spirit with unfinished business takes possession of people and makes them mad. It’s nonsense. My aunt’s sister in New York went hysterical last year and drowned herself in the Hudson River. My aunt thinks a dybbuk must have gotten her because she’d always been so docile.”
“Mamma could have a dybbuk,” I said as we watched couples line up for a cakewalk. “According to Dr. Ricci, nobody knows why madness comes or how it can be healed.”
“Whatever happened, I’m sorry it’s happening to you,” Henryk whispered. I looked away and asked about Miriam.
“She’s in Pittsburgh again to take care of her aunt. Maybe this aunt has a dybbuk. Miriam is the only one who can stand her.”
“Everybody loves Miriam,” I said, staring out at the turkey trot.
“They do. My mother says we’re perfect together.” Breathe, I told myself, just breathe. “Our families were close back home, and we helped them emigrate.”
“I see.”
“I’m the only son, you know.”
“I’m the only daughter,” I blurted. This talking was too hard. “Should we try the dance?”
“Yes.”
We were awkward and out of step at first. In the second round we improved. Fix on the dance, only the dance. Scissor-kicking past the frowning aunt and mother, I heard that foreign word again. “What’s a shiksa?”
“It’s a Gentile woman.”
“That’s bad?”
“Well, it’s like: you have your best apples set out and a stranger steals one.” His smile spun past me. “Italians are the worst. They look like us, so a boy could be fooled.”
“If he didn’t know.”
“Exactly.”
“Change partners!” the caller shouted. The rest of the evening was a swirl of faces: Italians, Czechs, Germans, Poles, and a shy Bohemian. I didn’t dance with Henryk again.
I came home late, and Roseanne met me at the door, distraught. Mamma had hidden in an unheated alcove off the kitchen and nearly froze. “I thought she was upstairs. When I found her and tried to bring her inside, she hit me with a broom handle. What could I do? I left her there. I thought you’d be home sooner.”
With difficulty, I got Mamma into the kitchen, sat her by the stove wrapped in blankets, and put her hands and feet in warm water as once had been done to me. She was stiff as wood. Her eyes were dark marbles. Had anger or spite kept her in the cold? Did this mean I could never go out to dances? A cage was closing around me.
Help came unexpectedly. When Giovanna’s mother died, her father left the younger children with relatives and drifted out of town. Giovanna found work with Mrs. Halle. She had no particular artistry, but could precisely copy any design and had a pleasing way with customers. Frank was her fella now; she meant to stay in Cleveland until he was promoted, move to Youngstown, marry him, and help make hats. Meanwhile, she would board with us and graciously offered to watch Mamma some evenings while she made hats for extra pay.
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