When I introduced Giovanna, my mother had no response. But I noticed that she ate when Giovanna urged her, seemed to listen when she spoke, and could sit for hours watching her work. I fought a niggling jealousy. Wasn’t it good that Mamma at least responded to someone, even if that someone wasn’t me? Of course it was.
What could I do in my free evenings? Miriam had returned, so I stopped going to dances. Looking around for other diversions, I was intrigued by notices tacked on walls and posts: TWELVE REASONS WHY WOMEN SHOULD VOTE, said one. SISTERS UNITE! said another. WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE IS GOD’S WILL AND NATURE’S TRUTH. A rally had been announced for a warm spring evening.
“Go if you want,” Giovanna said. “Even if it’s a little silly, all that shouting and carrying on. Frank said that when we’re married we can talk over who he’ll vote for, so it’s almost as if I’m voting myself. Besides, I didn’t finish school, so what do I know about politics?” Frank hadn’t finished either, I might have mentioned, but I only thanked her for taking my place. When I left, Mamma was sitting rigidly, watching Giovanna sort feathers.
In Public Square, women in elegant dresses and hats waved signs for suffrage. How beautiful America would be if women could vote, one speaker said. “Our true American votes could cancel out those of the lower class of men.” A speaker for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union promised a pure and sober world if women voted. More speeches followed, despite heckling from clots of drunk or idle men. Drums beat; we carried banners and chanted as we marched to City Hall. I was thrilled with the power and rightness of our cause: why shouldn’t women vote? Yet where were the workingwomen, the thousands on thousands in Cleveland who bore the weight of laws favoring factory bosses and owners?
“You mean factory girls? They’re always welcome to come,” said a woman marching beside me. “But I think immigrants don’t care about suffrage. Or they don’t understand what it means.”
I wasn’t exactly their image of a typical immigrant, I gathered from talks with suffragettes. I had finished high school and spoke good English now. Soon I could even be a citizen. But still I wasn’t like these ladies; I could be useful for their marches but not precisely welcomed in their parlors.
“I do want a vote,” I told Mamma that night as she faced the wall. “It’s wrong that we can’t. But women’s suffrage seems so far away. There needs to be change now to make life better at Stingler’s or Printz-Biederman. Making new laws takes years and years. There’s a meeting of garment workers at the union hall. I think I’ll go.” Of course she didn’t answer.
“Keep talking,” Dr. Ricci said, “even if she’s silent, she’s listening.” So I chattered on, feeling foolish, as if speaking to a doll. There was a second, less worthy reason for my rambling: to show that I was the always-present daughter, not Giovanna.
“I heard a speaker at the union hall,” I reported the next week. “It was Mother Jones, the great organizer, talking about mill children. She brought up a little worker, just eight years old. Mamma, her face was already old. Machines mash their fingers and tear off limbs. Four- and five-year-old children work from dawn to dark. They fall asleep on the floor and get kicked awake. Boys work in the mines pulling carts. Can you imagine?”
“You worked. What’s the difference?”
“It’s different because housework isn’t dangerous—” I stopped. She’d listened and asked a question! “Mamma!” But she’d already turned away, smoothing the sheets. Keep talking. I described how in 1903 scores of children walked from Pennsylvania to Long Island to see President Theodore Roosevelt, show him their bodies, and have him feel the shame of a country that used its little ones so cruelly. When I said the president refused to see them, Mamma pushed a pillow to the floor. Was she outraged by Roosevelt or only angry at my talking? Annoyed by the pillow? Discouraged, I fell silent. Mamma wrapped herself in a sheet and slept.
I started going regularly to meetings of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Standing in the back, I studied workers’ faces. Many were my own age but already looked aged and drawn, their young shoulders curved. Several had lost fingers; many had chronic coughs from the lint-filled air. I saw workers scarred by fires. Everywhere I felt the bitterness and confusion of those who wanted a better life in America.
“You’re right to want more,” cried Miss Josephine Casey, who had come from New York to help us. We were all to call her Josephine because we were brothers and sisters through the union. My sister? She was elegantly tall, or seemed so, with a fine black dress and wide hat trimmed in velvet. Her voice was astonishing: softly rounded and stretched like taffy candy. It seemed to speak inside my head. People said she came from a wealthy family in the South, where people talked like that. She’d gone to college. Yet she chose a life with us. Josephine could silence hecklers with a glance and pull from a babble of voices a neat assemblage of all that we meant to say.
“I hear what you want,” she told a rumbling crowd. “You want a fifty-hour week. You want time with your families. You want no more than two hours overtime on weekdays and higher pay for those hours. You want repose on legal holidays and equal pay for equal work.”
“The machines!” a woman yelled from the back.
“And you refuse to pay your bosses for sewing machines, needles, and thread. Why should they take back the little they give you? You deserve fifty hours and a decent wage!”
“Fifty” flew through the great hall like a flock of wild birds. “Fifty, fifty, fifty!” we repeated until it seemed almost within our reach.
Mr. Isadore Freith, our local union president, spoke. “Cleveland workers must claim their rights. George Washington, Simón Bolívar, St. Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, Giuseppe Garibaldi, all the great liberators would join our struggle.” Songs and chants began. In Chicago I had thrilled when a great crowd sang with Mamma. This was even more glorious. Simple tunes with strident beats bore the longing, rage, and bonded hopes of those whose bodies ached from making clothes they’d never wear. A buttonhole maker taught us a song by Mr. Joe Hill:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die
I sang too, despite the crow voice that so embarrassed Mamma. I felt light and thin-sided as a rubber balloon, no longer Lucia the clerk or Lucia, my mother’s keeper, but a voice among many. We were Joshua’s warriors, whose cries tore down the walls of Jericho. I told Josephine that, yes, of course I’d put up signs at Hiram House for the next union meeting. If children could walk from Philadelphia to Long Island, surely I could hang signs.
“Come to the meetings,” I urged Elena, who lived on our street and did piecework at home.
“Lucia, I have three little ones. If my contractor finds out I go to meetings, he’ll give my work to the Bohemians. Anyway, it’s their fault my wages are low.”
“Bohemian bosses tell their workers it’s Italians who keep their wages down.”
“What? That’s crazy.”
“Exactly. Workers have to stick together.”
Elena’s face cleared, then darkened. “But we aren’t together. You have a steady desk job, and my sister lost her contract to a Bohemian. How do you know what it’s like for us? I’m sorry, I have to feed my babies.” Her hand on the door told me I must leave.
Bohemians had just starting coming from the western fringe of Poland. They lived in tight clusters, and the women did contract work. When fires ripped through their quarters that spring, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported many home workshops ruined. “Did you hear?” Jewish and Italian women whispered in the markets and union hall. “How horrible.” Yet the news brought a guilty shiver of relief. Now more jobs might come back to the factories.
“If the pieceworkers and factory workers got together, they’d all earn more,” Mr. Kinney observed. He had taken to stopping in my upstairs office, at first to check my sums, but often to smoke his pipe, drink tea, and g
aze through a balcony window down at the shop floor. He left more and more tasks to his assistant, Mr. Wells: installing displays, choosing merchandise, greeting customers, and overseeing an army of clerks. “He’s hungry for work. Like I was once,” Mr. Kinney said. “But we were speaking of the Bohemians. Now if wholesale prices on our dresses were to go up, what then, Miss D’Angelo?”
“Our prices would have to go up as well.”
“Naturally. But if working girls had more to spend, we wouldn’t do so badly, would we? Now Mr. Wells wouldn’t agree, but if you’re old like me or young like you, you can see some sense in raising wages.” He tapped out his pipe. “What was the balance yesterday, Miss D’Angelo? And the plaid shirtwaists, how are they selling?”
Another day, reading in the Plain Dealer of union demands for a fifty-hour week, he mused: “I worked seventy hours a week when I was young. But it was my store and the time never bothered me. Now Olivia wants some of that time. Born as mewling babes, all we have in this world is time, Miss D’Angelo.”
“Sir?” But he had closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the chair. I had meant to ask why he hadn’t ordered more dress stock in the last weeks but instead returned to my pile of sales slips, handling them carefully so the rustling paper wouldn’t wake him.
Some minutes later, he opened his eyes, stood, and straightened his collar. “I think I’ll go home to Olivia,” he announced. “Do you think she’ll be pleased to see me in the middle of the day, Miss D’Angelo?” I nodded, perplexed by the sudden bustle. “If you have questions, Mr. Wells is quite capable. You know the poem by Robert Burns: ‘My Luve’s like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprung in June’?”
“Yes, sir, we learned it in school.” Years ago, it seemed, my work was books and poems. Now it was ledgers and numbers and worry for the workers whose children would never go to school.
“A lovely poem. I believe I’ll bring my Olivia a red rose. Good day to you, Miss D’Angelo.” I could barely fix on my work then, thinking of Olivia, who had been loved so well and for so long.
A week later, as we were closing, Mr. Kinney called the staff together. The store was ending, he said simply, as if announcing a new line of shirtwaists. The inventory would be sold to Higbee’s, which had also bought the building. We stared at him, stiff as statues. What about us?
Mr. Kinney smiled, even rubbed his hands. “I’ve arranged posts in other establishments for every one of you, similar to those you now hold so capably. When Mr. Wells hands out your pay envelopes, you’ll find two weeks’ salary in lieu of notice as well as your new position, should you choose to accept it. Mrs. Kinney and I will be moving to our lake house in Ashtabula, where we’ll be happy to receive you as visitors. Now I must go home. Good evening. I thank you all for your faithful service and wish you well.” And then he was gone, never looking back. Even Mr. Wells was stunned as he handed out our envelopes.
“I didn’t know anything,” he answered each query. “The old man never said a word. But look in your envelopes. I’m sure he told us the truth.”
“Miss D’Angelo,” said a note in Mr. Kinney’s elegant hand, “Your position is in the accounts department of Printz-Biederman. In light of your high school diploma and other estimable qualities, Mr. Printz has agreed to pay a dollar above your present salary. Please give my best regards to your mother. Yours respectfully, Herman Kinney.”
We lingered in the stockroom, comparing notes in our envelopes until four gentlemen from Higbee’s came to take inventory with a small army of clerks and hurried us out of the building. The door was locked behind us.
In the days before my new job began, I decided to spend a Sunday by Lake Erie and managed to persuade Mamma to come with me. She leaned against a tree, wrapped in the burgundy coat. Her face mirrored the water’s heavy calm. “Are you tired?” I asked. She shook her head, never turning her gaze from the lake. At least she nearly smiled as I set out our lunch from Catalano’s: provolone and salami, crusty bread, paper cones of fava beans, and the salty black olives she loved. When an afternoon chill skimmed over the water and I was packing our basket to leave, my mother walked along to the water’s edge, trailing a murmured wisp of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”
I stopped, so happy to hear her voice again, but when I turned, she fell silent. Still, she had been singing.
I visited Dr. Ricci, who agreed that her willingness to go to the lake, the almost-smile, and the bit of song were positive signs, but not, alas, indicative of significant healing. Another matter troubled him. “Lucia, there is much bitter talk now in newspapers and Congress and even great universities of ‘deficients’ arriving from Southern Europe.”
“Deficients, sir?”
“Immigrants such as ourselves.” Dr. Ricci adjusted the drape of his fine wool trousers across his knee. “Apparently we bear ‘germ plasma’ which might infect pure American stock. ‘Scientific study’ shows us disposed to insanity. Many insist the condition is hereditary, even if there is little evidence for this claim. There is talk that this germ plasma must be removed from the healthy population.”
His words rang in my head like a leaden gong. “Removed—”
“We must do what is necessary to keep your mother at home.”
Fear churned through me. “How? What else can I do?”
“Talk to her as you have been, even if she makes no response. Treat her as one who could be healed. Encourage useful work.” Feeble counters to the threats around us.
Dr. Ricci asked about her color and appetite, hygiene, the few words she said, what she cooked, and how she behaved around Giovanna. “Her condition has not worsened,” he concluded. “We should be grateful for this. More I can’t say.”
Discouraged and anxious, I made my way home. Mamma was staring out the window. In a pale rose shawl, she seemed to fade into the wallpaper. “Mamma, can we talk?” I pleaded, but she pushed me away like a bothersome cat. “You must get better, Mamma. I can’t afford a sanitarium.” No response. I recited a happy sonnet, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Nothing. I talked about the union: “You remember how factory work made you feel like a machine? How bad the pay was?” Nothing. I mentioned the “services” Mr. Stingler demanded. She glared and then looked away. Finally: “I want to help the workers. And I want to go to college when you’re better. I want you to sing again, Mamma, and smile and hold me.”
She didn’t move, and I couldn’t be still, head-clogged with all that I wanted. That evening, when the frantic cleaning began, Giovanna said she’d be up late making hats and could watch Mamma. So I became the nightwalker, trying to beat out dark fears with the tread of my shoes. I passed families sitting outside in the spring air and boys playing marbles by streetlight. What did they know of germ plasma or deficients? I came home near midnight and sat on our front steps as a half-moon rose and the last streetcars rattled off. A couple passed, laughing, turned a corner, and disappeared. In that warm spring night with maple leaves unfurled against a violet sky, blood pounded in my head and I vowed to make my place in America, even while I kept my mother safe.
Chapter 13
“WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?”
Yolanda arranged for her second child to be baptized in May, just after Giovanna and Frank’s wedding, so guests from Cleveland could attend both ceremonies. If we wanted to come early, Yolanda’s letter said, she’d find a friend to host us. “It would be like a vacation.”
Vacanza. I stared at Yolanda’s rolling script. “We can’t even go for the ceremonies,” I told Roseanne. “It’s impossible. Yolanda and Giovanna will understand.”
Roseanne shook her head. “No they won’t. They’re your friends. You can’t give them up just because your mother’s sick.” Just because! Did Roseanne live in this house and not know how much I was already giving up?
Still, I asked Dr. Ricci for his advice. “It is a risk,” he agreed. “However, these would be pleasant occasions with no demands on her.” In the end, he said I should try. We wo
uld go and return on Sunday; Mamma should take a stronger dose of laudanum, and I’d have the name of a Youngstown doctor in case of “disturbance.” I must choose front seats on the train and aisle seats in church so she didn’t feel surrounded by strangers. “You both deserve a happy day,” he said earnestly. Yes, I determined. I would somehow make us a happy day.
The morning started badly. I had chosen a plaid shirtwaist from Kinney’s and had laid out for my mother a navy blue walking suit she wore in Chicago. Instead, she rummaged through her trunk for a flounced crimson gown from the stage, gaudy and low-cut, ripped in the back, with a rim of grime at the hem.
“You can’t wear this; it’s dirty and not right for a wedding,” I protested.
“Nobody sees!”
“It’s a church, Mamma, not a show! People will talk.”
She stomped on the floor until Roseanne came.
“Lucia, let her wear what she wants. If people don’t know she’s not right, they will soon enough.” Roseanne and I sewed up the rips and arranged a shawl to cover the gown’s worst indiscretions.
At least our train was nearly empty. In the foggy cool of the Youngstown station, Mamma seemed calm enough. She carried our presents: a linen tablecloth for Giovanna’s new home, a stuffed Teddy Roosevelt bear for little Charlie, and The Tale of Peter Rabbit for Maria Margaret, so she wouldn’t feel neglected in the celebrations.
At the baptism, guests studiously ignored Mamma’s gown. Even Mrs. Reilly said politely: “Good day to you, Mrs. D’Angelo,” gathering from Mamma’s clenched fists that she would shake no hands. The kindly circumspection brought me to tears.
“I know just how you feel, dear,” Frank’s mother whispered. “I always cry at baptisms and even more at weddings. See?” She opened her purse, filled with snowy handkerchiefs.
The priest made much of the confluence of sacraments, the purpose of holy matrimony being the creation of Catholic children to be raised in the loving cradle of sanctified union. Little Charlie squalled. When ripples of laughter passed through our crowd, Mamma gripped my arm. Was she overcome with emotion like Frank’s mother, grieving that a sanctified union was so far from her life, or simply afraid of the crowd? “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I’m right here.”
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