“Come to the dance tonight,” urged Marta, but I refused. Men had their pick of beautiful girls without scars.
“If I married,” I reminded her, “the money we sent home would go to his family, not mine. I have to think of my Zia.”
“Irma, the truth is, you’re afraid of men,” said Marta flatly.
Not Gustavo, I thought, but of the others, yes, perhaps. “It’s just not my time for dancing.”
“But if we go, you’ll be alone here tonight.”
True, but better alone than hovering at the edge of a social hall. I begged a lamp from Lula to practice the tucks and smocking, piping, matched plaids and scalloped hems in Godey’s Lady’s Book. That night I dreamed of gowns: small as a finger, I wandered ruffled hills and slipped through shimmering galleys of tucks, crossing taffeta fields strewn with bright buttons until storm clouds of collars covered the sky. I was first on the bench in the mornings and the last to leave. Finished collars mounded in my box and the Missus bought them all. “You’re learning,” she conceded coldly.
Late in March, a letter came from Opi. I pressed it into my hand, smelled it, ran my fingers around the envelope edges and studied King Umberto’s face on the stamp. “Read it!” Marta demanded. I tore open the envelope and read slowly:
Dear Irma.
The new postman brought all your letters last month, which was a great relief. We had been so worried not to hear from you. We have no word of Carlo but thank Our Lord that you are well and working. Zia Carmela sends her love. She has had fever and chest pains and a cough this winter. Your father asks that you send money for a doctor. He and Signora Assunta are married and Assunta is with child. The bishop praised your altar cloth when he saw our church. The mayor had a new well dug by his house. Old Tommaso died. Gabriele was killed by his own sheepdogs. I must close now for the postman is waiting. The Lord bless you in America.
Father Anselmo
Nothing else was in the envelope. What had I expected: a clump of our earth, the smell of spring rain or the savor of our bread? I tried to see home faces through the pale page. Did Old Tommaso have a beard? Which of Gabriele’s eyes was crossed? Were all of his dogs lame from his beatings or only the spotted bitch? I pictured my father’s hand on Assunta’s swelling belly. I thought of Zia wrapped in her shawl, sick. I must go to Chicago, make more money and send it home for medicine.
“Irma!” Marta cried. “Look what you’re doing!” I smoothed out the crushed letter. “Something wrong?” she asked anxiously.
“No, I’m just happy to hear from home.” I would send five dollars to Father Anselmo right away for Zia’s doctor although it would cost me another week with the Missus. I looked for my scribe on Sunday, but he was gone.
“Went home to Sicily,” said the fruit seller. “Try Bruno the clerk. He lost an arm in a streetcar crash, but he still writes. You’ll find him in his uncle’s butcher shop.”
The shop smelled of blood and raw meat. At a tiny corner table, gaslight pooled in the caved cheeks of a young man whose jacket sleeve dangled on his lap. He sat motionless, bent over a thick book. “Look alive, Bruno, you’ve got a customer,” the butcher called.
The young man sighed and closed his book. “Good day,” he murmured. “Please sit down, signorina.” From a neat stack, Bruno drew a single clean sheet of gentleman’s paper, not the old scribe’s rough pages. He set a leather-covered rod to weight the sheet, selected a pen from a wooden box, wrote the date and paused for my first sentence. In elegant script, he wrote my words: I had sent five dollars for Zia through a bank and would soon go to Chicago to find better work since Carlo had not come here and I could no longer wait for him.
The soft scratching of Bruno’s pen eased out every other sound: rumbles and shouts from the street, steady thwack of the butcher’s cleaver, yowl of cats and shrill laments of customers fighting over their places in line. Bruno was not like the old scribe. He wrote carefully and gently perfected my grammar. I hoped that Father Anselmo would describe to Zia his elegant writing on the clean white page. “Would you like to sign?” Bruno asked politely, offering me his pen as the old scribe never did.
“Yes, thank you.” Gaslight warmed my face as I leaned over the tiny table. I drew back, turning away.
“It’s only a scar,” said Bruno softly. “Not like this.” He picked up the empty sleeve and let it flap on the table.
“But look how beautifully you write.”
“I work in a butcher shop,” he said ruefully. “And out there,” his eyes flicked to the churning street, “people think I’m a monster. Girls don’t talk to cripples.”
“I’m talking to you.”
“But you’re leaving, no? For Chicago.” I nodded. “Then, addio, signorina.” He sighed.
“Addio,” I said, sliding my coins across his desk. He swept them into a drawer, folded the letter and deftly slipped it in an envelope he braced against a paperweight. When he had addressed the envelope and given it to me, his hand dropped heavily on the folded empty jacket sleeve. This was a good man, I was sure of it, like Attilio and Gustavo. And like them he would slip out of my life.
“Bruno! Customers!” the butcher called. Leaving, I dodged a beaming couple in new wool suits.
“Your best paper, scribe!” the man boomed. “For a marriage announcement.”
I made my customary circle of the Italian shops around Woodland, one last futile time seeking Carlo and explaining that he could reach me at General Delivery in Chicago.
“We’ll look for him,” said the Genovese baker.
“Don’t be a meat packer,” the wife warned. “My sister caught her hand in a grinder, then the whole arm turned black and they cut it off.” When I described my plan of making fine dresses, the couple glanced at each other and the wife said, “Well, good luck, signorina.”
The winter had ruined my old shoes. With the cost of new ones and a better dress to look for work in Chicago, it took three more weeks to earn my leaving money. Finally, the last payday came. The Missus sat at the dining table with her great ledger and piles of coins. When she pushed my six dollars at me with her pen as if the very coins were tainted, I swept them into a pouch and said, “Missus, I’m going to Chicago to be a dressmaker.” A gasp ruffled the line of collar girls.
“You’re a fool, Irma!” the Missus snapped. “You think dressmakers take just anyone? You’ll starve before you earn a cent. Besides,” she said darkly, “girls disappear in Chicago like that.” She snapped her fingers, closing the ledger with a thud that filled the narrow room.
I didn’t move. “If there’s work, Missus, I’ll find it.”
The girls who spoke a little English listened avidly, as if we were one of the puppet shows in Garfield Park. Bèla’s face hardened. Sara took Marta’s hand and only Saint Abraham looked down kindly.
I took a long breath. “I’ll need a letter of reference, Missus.” Without such a letter, Lula had insisted, I’d get no decent job in Chicago.
The Missus stood up so suddenly that her chair clattered to the floor. “You leave without notice and want a letter? I should write that my shop wasn’t fine enough for our little Italian dressmaker?”
Silence rolled across the room. “Missus, I did good work, you said so yourself.” Lula stood at the kitchen door, pitcher in hand. The mantle clock hammered two ticks. Carts rumbled outside and a drunkard kicked at ash cans. I said nothing.
Finally the Missus sighed loudly, her gray curls trembling. “You will leave tomorrow before breakfast,” she announced, moving so close that a fine spray misted my face, “without disturbing the working girls. A letter will be on the table, saying that your work was satisfactory. It will not note that you are ungrateful and abandoned one who befriended you when you were a stranger in this city.”
A year ago I would have begged her pardon. Now I said only, “Thank you, Missus.” She stalked out, her footsteps hammering down the hallway until the heavy door to her apartment slammed shut and a lock bolt clacked into place.
“You kept secrets, Irma,” Bèla said flatly.
“You know how the Missus sniffs out everything. Lula said if she knew I was going, she’d keep my last week’s pay.”
“But why are you going? We’re like a family here. You’re never alone.”
“Yes, but I don’t want—”
“To live in a workhouse?” Marta asked quietly, brushing gingerbread crumbs from her skirt. “You think we’re not good enough?”
“No, no,” I stammered.
“Irma wants fine sewing, for fine women,” Sara announced, gulping her beer. The oiled table was a dark pool between us. “Isn’t that true? You don’t want to be a poor collar girl.”
Her words were knives on my face. “I’ve been poor all my life, Sara. It’s not that. Don’t you see? I want to work with good wool and silk, Egyptian cotton, making pleats and gathers, lacing, smocking. Don’t you—” But Sara had turned to Bèla.
“Irma, there’s more gingerbread,” Lula announced, but it was dry in my mouth and the beer burned.
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Bèla finally. “You weren’t happy here and your brother didn’t come. Chicago might be better. Write to us when you get there. Here, to remember me.” She took one of the delicate carved wood combs from her glossy black hair and gave it to me. I had embroidered poppies on handkerchiefs for her, Sara and Marta. They thanked me politely, and we finished our gingerbread and managed to speak and even laugh a little together. They wished me well and we kissed each other.
Soon clumps of girls drifted up to the dormitory. “God keep you, Irma,” some said. Others laid a hand on my arm and muttered blessings in their languages. I tried to help Lula gather dishes but she brushed me away.
“Go to bed. You’ll need your sleep.”
But I did not sleep that night, only lay on the cot watching hazy stars drift across a patch of attic window as voices tossed in my mind like waves in a narrow tub: Stay, go. Chicago will be better. Worse. End in the streets. End as a collar girl. Make fine dresses. Be alone again and die with strangers. Mice skittered across our floor. Girls sighed in sleep, snored and moaned. In the chill hour before our rising bell I dressed and crept downstairs with my traveling bag.
In the kitchen, Lula was already at the stove. “There,” she whispered. “For the train.” She pointed to a basket with corn bread, boiled egg, a bit of potato pie and a jar of tea. A letter from the Missus lay on the table. “And take this,” she added, holding out a palm-sized photogravure of Abraham Lincoln. “So you won’t be alone in Chicago.”
“Thank you, Lula.”
She pressed her dark, warm hand to my cheek, then pushed me away. “Run now, girl. That train don’t wait. Be careful. Look alive.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Don’t you ‘yes, of course’ me. Write. And send me some money from your rich ladies.”
I kissed her quickly, hoisted my bags and ran down the workhouse steps with the basket bumping my side, not looking back. A thick, cool mist revived me. I had twenty dollars in the chamois bag between my breasts, my crane scissors, a rock from the house in Opi, Gustavo’s carved bone, his drawings and address. When I was settled in Chicago, I would write him and he would write me back, not to General Delivery but to a boardinghouse. I would turn twenty-one that month, April 1882. Soon I could send Zia more money from Chicago and a drawing of the first fine lady’s dress I had made. I would write to Lula and the collar girls and try again to reach Teresa in New York and Attilio’s sister Lucia. In Chicago I might even go to dances. The maple leaves were still unfurling and I was leaving this city.
A block from the workhouse, my dreams bloomed more grandly. I would visit Opi and give a fine gift to the church: silver candlesticks or even a new baptismal font. I would bring Zia to Chicago. We would go strolling in parks carrying parasols. A doctor would fix her eyes. We would eat roast chicken, white bread and sweet cakes and have our own apartment.
I never saw the two men slip behind me. Before I could cry out, a fleshy hand stinking of cigar clamped my mouth and I was yanked into an alley. “There’s two of us, see?” a voice hissed in my ear. “And we can do what we want to you, but if you keep your mouth shut we’ll be gentlemen.” They covered my eyes with a rag tied hard behind my head. When Bèla’s comb caught in the knot, they tore it out. I heard thin wood breaking at my feet.
“Turn her around,” said the other voice. I was spun to the wall, forehead pressed into wet brick. They took my bag and felt under my coat for a money bag. “Make one sound and you’ll be sorry, girl. Some of you greenhorns keep money in tight places.” I bit my tongue, drawing blood as a hot hand groped under my skirt and up between my legs. Another dove between my breasts, pulling out my chamois purse. “Here it is, the titty bag. Some greenies never learn.”
“Hold still, girl. We just want money, not your skinny ass.”
In a slit below the blindfold, I glimpsed brown boots. Blood filled my mouth. I’m disappearing in the streets, I thought. Like that. The Missus was right. Marta was right. I should have stayed a collar girl.
“Twenty dollars. Shit. Why bother? Got any more?”
“No,” I whispered. They released me. Legs trembling, I leaned against the wall.
“What’s in the basket?” one demanded.
“Lunch,” said the other. “Let’s see. Corn bread, boiled egg. Well, well, here’s old Uncle Abe Lincoln. What a jackass!” Glass shattered beside me. “Where you from?” one demanded. I said nothing. A hand on my shoulder jerked me forward and back so hard that my head slammed brick. “I asked a civil question, girl. Where you from?”
“Italy,” I whispered.
“Eye-talia.” A blunt finger jabbed my scar. “Look at that. A little Eye-talian fighter. We like that, don’t we, Bill?” Rage ripped through me and like Gabriele’s dog I snapped, whipping my head to the side where my teeth found a wide finger.
“Bitch!” cried both voices. “Now you’ll get it.” My blouse was torn open.
I screamed for help but their voices smothered mine: “Shut up, bitch!”
Suddenly new voices rang in the alley, and the clatter of hobnailed shoes running on stone. “You there. Let her go!” I was spun back. Falling, I saw the brown boots racing down the alley. When two men knelt beside me and pulled off the blindfold I saw crisp uniforms and glittering buttons. “We’re police. You’re safe now, miss. They’re gone. Can you stand up?” Clean hands lifted me. “What happened?”
“I was robbed,” I gasped. “They took my bag and money.”
“Well, you looked like a traveler, miss. Thieves go for them, you know, folks carrying everything they’ve got. And it’s not the best neighborhood.”
“Look alive,” Lula had said. Don’t go dreaming how life could be better.
The big policeman’s pale wide eyes studied my scar. “That’s a nasty one. Recent too.”
“I got it on the ship.” The policemen folded their arms comfortably across wide chests like men at a dance. “Can’t you catch them?” I asked. “It was two men with brown shoes, one called Bill. They went—” I pointed down the empty alley, seeing only then how it branched into a warren of niches, stairways and dark gaps between buildings. The police barely followed my finger.
“They’re gone,” said the taller one. “And you were blindfolded, right? If we got two men, could you swear it was them?” No, I admitted. “And besides, if they knew you fingered them, they’d come looking, and you wouldn’t be hard to find, miss.” His chin jutted at my scar.
“But I’m leaving Cleveland, so they couldn’t—” I began. The leaving money was gone. And my pay from the Missus. My new dress and second pair of shoes, rosary and Lincoln picture. Embroidery samples for wor
k, my mother’s apron. The crane scissors and stone from Opi, stitched picture of Opi, Teresa’s address, Gustavo’s whalebone, his address and any hope of reaching him. All my treasures.
What was left? One dress with a muddy, torn skirt and—Holy Mother—my blouse torn, showing a white swell of breast. I grabbed at the edges, hot with shame. The shorter officer plucked my trampled shawl from the mud, shook it out and gave it to me, dripping black water. I pressed the clammy cold around me.
“Never mind, miss, we see everything in this work. And you’re lucky, you know,” the broad-shouldered one said severely, as if to a whimpering child. “It could have been worse, would have been worse if it wasn’t for us.”
“Yes, thank you, sirs.”
They nodded. “We do our job. But you can’t go far now, looking like that. You got a home? We’ll take you if it’s close.”
I stared at the wet brick. The short policeman cleared his throat. Like a prisoner caught, I pointed to the workhouse. “Let’s go then,” the tall one said.
Flanked, I retraced the path I’d taken so proudly. Black boots rang out idiota, idiota, for a stupid mountain girl, not looking alive—careless and arrogant. Without my bag I was as weightless as a beggar. What dressmaker would hire me now?
The policemen spoke over my head, fast and low in another language, laughing. “Watch, miss,” they said at a wide puddle. For an instant, gratitude overtook shame. Watch, miss, as if I were a gentlewoman unaccustomed to puddles. But the very cartwheels squealed idiota. Factory girls in laughing pairs swept past us. “She’s not so proud now,” their laughing said. Even the pale disk of sun gloated at my broken dream. My feet dragged.
“Miss, we don’t have all day.”
I pushed on like a sheep trudging back to the fold. Where else could I go? Even if somehow I reached Chicago, suppose it was only a larger Cleveland with more thieves? Go back to Opi? How, with an empty purse? And to do what? Care for my father’s babe? Work for Assunta? If I looked for a new post in Cleveland, I’d be turned away at any factory, mill or even any respectable house seeking a scullery maid. Only the streets would take me. Like Filomena’s father, my friends would shred their handkerchiefs. With every step, the Missus loomed larger: the jutting chin, charcoal smears around her pale eyes, gray wire of curls and long bent fingers pawing at collars, scratching for flaws.
When We Were Strangers Page 12