When We Were Strangers

by Pamela Schoenewaldt

  “Irma, I run a clinic at my house on Friday evenings,” Signora D’Angelo continued. “The poor pay what they can. If they’re afraid of hospitals or can’t afford doctors, they come to me. Vittorio says that one person can’t heal all Chicago, but I do what I can.” She took my arm. “Irma, you must be clever with your hands if you do fine dressmaking.” We stood in the shade of a maple tree. Her eyes glittered. “Will you help me at the clinic? Vittorio does sometimes, but his wife doesn’t like him ‘giving his time away,’ as she calls it. Perhaps you could come just to the end of this month, three Fridays. If you agree, the abortion was free.”

  “But I know nothing about medicine. I’m not a nurse. I’m just a—”

  “Just a curious, intelligent young woman and I believe a compassionate one as well. You could help with the washing and bandaging. Can you write?”

  “Not fast or well, but I’m learning in English class.” We were near the boardinghouse.

  “So you could keep my record book. At home, if wolves attacked your sheep, if they were hurt in some way, what did you do? Let them bleed to death?”

  “We cared for them, but they were sheep.”

  “Well? There are people in pain. You nursed your mother, you told me, and helped your aunt.”

  “But that was my family.”

  “Yes, that’s true and these are other families. Come this Friday, just come and watch. Could you think about it, at least?” I said I would. She reminded me to rest that night, to drink warm liquids and not wear a corset for the week. Then she took her leave and walked swiftly down the street until her wiry hair, wide shoulders and the straight line of her back were hidden by a liveryman leading a string of horses to the stables around the corner.

  Molly brought a cup of broth to my room. “Agnes, the maid next door, went to the ten-dollar woman last week,” she whispered. “She lost blood and fainted in front of her mistress, who asked questions of course. Agnes told her everything, the little fool. Now she’ll lose her post and have no references. I worried all day for you.”

  “It went well, Molly. She was very careful. And she walked me home.”

  “There was pain?”

  “Some.” I looked away.

  “You don’t want to talk about it?”

  “No. Tell me about your calendar.”

  As I sipped the broth, Molly described a loan to Swiss brothers who spoke five languages between them and would sell kitchen goods to immigrants. She rolled on and I ceased listening, breathing in the cool late-afternoon breeze until I felt empty as a shell. “You’re tired. Rest before dinner,” said a distant voice.

  “Yes, I’ll come down later,” I answered, but the door had already closed. In the silent room my cramps pulsed like waves: pain and release. Tools floated in the darkness: curette, dilator, speculum. I imagined the signora’s office on Friday evenings filled with immigrants, parents and children and those whose families were far away. I imagined the cries, like wolf-torn sheep. I did not come down for dinner but lay in bed that evening and into the night, thinking of my family and what they would say if they knew what I had done and why.

  The cramps had dulled by morning, but at work Simone and Madame agreed that I looked pale, and Jacob hovered over a dress I was smocking for a banker’s young daughter. “You are well, my dear?” he asked. “Always you say ‘yes, yes,’ but still—”

  “I’m well, Jacob. And your sisters?”

  “Well also and send their greetings. They’re selling their work on State Street near the great Marshall Field's store. Look, Madame, how fine.” He pulled from his jacket a black velvet purse enriched with fringe and purple beading. Madame held it near and far, tugged the beads to see how strongly they were sewn and examined the seams, fringe and cording.

  “Could they make these to match our gowns?” she asked. As the bargaining commenced, Jacob’s eyes flicked constantly across the room. When a cramp bent me over the smocking, his brow furrowed.

  “I’ll supply the fabric and beads, remember,” Madame pressed.

  I slipped into the kitchen and leaned against the wall, breathing hard. Jacob’s voice rose in the shop. “Ah, but the cost of their skill, Madame, the magic in their fingers.” Their voices faded as I squeezed my eyes shut, remembering the stringy sheaths of muscles casing the uterus in Dr. Hersey’s drawing. These muscles must be contracting, that was the cause. Contract and release. Contract and release. The pain will pass. There, there, it’s passing.

  “Irma,” said a low voice beside me. “Freyda and Sarah are worried. The washing wasn’t enough?” I shook my head and Jacob touched my arm, sleeve tatters fluttering like fingers. “Ah, Irma, you poor child. Someone helped you?” I nodded. “Someone skilled?”

  “Yes, very skilled.”

  Madame called out a question and we hurried back into the bright shop. “Our customers will love these purses, Madame,” I announced. “His sisters could make plain ones as well, for the day dresses.”

  “Perhaps,” said Madame thoughtfully. “If we have a good price. Let me consider.”

  “Sarah’s apple cake. I nearly forgot!” Jacob cried, pulling a paper-wrapped package from his jacket. “Three pieces, one for each.” But he whispered to me, “We pray for you, dear child.” Then he was gone, slipping out the back way as our doorbell jangled in a gentlewoman.

  That evening Molly handed me an envelope left by a messenger boy. Signora D’Angelo trusted I was well and hoped to see me that Friday evening.

  “What is it?” Molly demanded. “An admirer?”

  “The woman who—helped me—has a charity clinic. She wants me to help on Friday.”

  “What? You’re a dressmaker. Besides, there’s diseases. Irma, don’t do it.”

  “She’ll pay me. You can have your money back.”

  Molly’s back straightened. “I said it was a gift. And what do you want with a clinic?”

  What did I want with a clinic? I asked myself that night in bed. Why go back to a place that would call up the pain he caused me? It could be blackmail, Molly had hinted darkly: “The woman needs a free assistant and you don’t help her, she’ll tell Madame or Mrs. Gaveston why you came to her.” No, surely not that. Yet why did Signora D’Angelo want me? Why not one of the healing sisters, a nurse or even a servant girl she could train? “Chicago has charity hospitals,” Molly reminded me. “Crowded, yes, and maybe dirty, but better than nothing.”

  I wondered, finishing the tedious pearl beading of a wedding dress that week, if perhaps I needed Signora D’Angelo. Her ordered, book-filled flat called me. Perhaps I could be useful there. She might want something particular for herself or her tools, a storage bag for the dilator, a smock with certain pockets. Something not a wedding dress or riding suit for rich, indolent wives.

  So that Friday evening I hurried after work to Signora D’Angelo’s flat with my sewing basket, a pack of needles fresh from Jacob and some muslin scraps. Turning onto her street, I stopped, astonished. Sick and wounded filled the steps and spilled into the walk: a mother with a howling, spotted baby; a man whose head was roughly bandaged; a mother shepherding three sniffling children with rheumy eyes; and an old woman tied in a chair carried by two young men. A baker coughed fresh blood on a flour-strewn apron. My steps slowed. “Everyone here is for the Signora D’Angelo?” I asked two Italians, then realized, embarrassed, that one of them was the Sicilian granita vendor whom I had rebuffed so rudely.

  He pointed to the blood-stained baker. “You’re after him. Wait your turn.”

  Howling burst from the house. Children whimpered, tugging at their mother’s skirt. “I’m not sick,” I explained to the vendor. “Signora D’Angelo wanted me to come.”

  “To help?” he asked. When I nodded warily, he seized my shoulder and began propelling me through the crowd. “Aside, step aside. You!” he barked to the men with the old woman, “Move that chair! The signorina’s here to help.” He pushed me through the door. The flat’s ordered calm was gone. Coughing, wheezing, and
children’s whimpers filled the air. I breathed blood, vomit, babes’ fouled diapers and the tang of alcohol. Patients leaned against bookshelves, filled chairs and slumped on the floor. A ruddy boy moved deftly through the crowd, emptying pots of spittle and vomit and shoving rags at coughers.

  “Cover your mouths!” he ordered. “Use the pots for spitting. Clean rags here.” He pointed to a basket heaped with scraps of white cotton. “And dirties over there.” He waved at the stove, where soapy water boiled in a great tub. I backed to the door, gasping for fresh air.

  “Ah, Irma, there you are!” cried Signora D’Angelo. “Come here.” I plucked my way across the room. She was cleaning a small Polish girl’s chest, horrible with weeping pus, crusted blood and dirt. “Sit,” she said. I pulled up a stool, looking past the child. “Vittorio’s wife, Claudia, ‘needs’ him to help visit her sister. Listerine, over there.” I handed her the bottle. “One would think,” she muttered, moistening a square of gauze, “that a grown woman could visit her own sister without a husband’s help.”

  “So many people, Signora. How do they know about you?”

  “From friends, neighbors.” She flicked her eyes to a young man jabbering at a wall between fits of coughing. “Johan over there won’t go to a hospital. He’s afraid they’ll send him to an asylum. He’s probably right. Enrico, more gauze,” she called out to the ruddy boy who lofted a roll across the room.

  Scrambling to my feet, I caught it. “Fold a square and wet it with Listerine,” Signora D’Angelo said. “Then clean the wound. Dab like this. Don’t rub. Good. Start here.” I opened my mouth to protest, but she pointed to the worst patch of the ravaged little chest and I began. She stepped back, watching me work and gesturing when I should change gauze squares or clean more deeply. “What these people pay doesn’t cover everything, of course. The rest I make from abortions, midwifery and work in the pharmacy. Don’t press too hard where it’s raw. For gentlewomen, abortions cost forty dollars, sometimes fifty. When rich men have me ‘take care’ of their mistresses or housemaids discretely, they pay more. At births, if they want me days ahead and make me sleep in the servants’ rooms, they pay.”

  “Like the English bandit Robin Hood,” announced Enrico.

  “Empty the spittle pots,” she told him sharply, “if you’ve nothing to do but watch. Now, Irma, look at this chest. The infection started as measles, but the child scratched herself raw. Now the rash is infected. Look at this arm. Impetigo. We have to teach the mother how to treat it. So we’ll need someone who speaks Polish.”

  “Signora, I’m—”

  “A dressmaker, I know. But you’re here. And before you go, if you go, cut the child’s nails close, and find us a translator.”

  A howling pierced the room as a drunken butcher stumbled in, fresh blood streaming from his arm onto an apron already stained from work. The crowd erupted as he pushed through the line, dribbling a dark red stream behind him.

  Signora D’Angelo sighed. “Not again, Antonio.”

  “Cutting and drinking,” said the man cheerfully. “Big one for you this time.” When he thrust out his right arm, a cut opened like a wide mouth. I gasped. “Oh I’ve got more, signorina,” he said. “Look.” He brandished his left arm, latticed in scars.

  “If you drank after work,” said the signora, unspooling a length of catgut, “you’d cut yourself less. And I’d have more time for the others.”

  “True, I’ll do that. I’m done working for today. Stitch me up and I’ll go straight to the tavern. What about her?” he demanded, nodding at my sewing basket. “She could do it.”

  “No,” I protested. “I never—”

  “You’ve sewn sheep,” she reminded me. “And this one’s tough as a ram. You can’t hurt him.”

  “That’s for sure,” Antonio agreed, settling himself on a stool. Then as calmly as Madame showed me stitches, Signora D’Angelo explained how to tie off each suture, demonstrating on a bit of gauze. I’d need ten stitches, she estimated. She examined the wound. “Rinse it well with alcohol but I doubt we’ll get infection here.”

  “That’s right,” crowed Antonio. “Never had one. Good sharp cleaver.”

  Ignoring him, the signora handed me a curved threaded needle and pair of steel scissors. “When you cut the ends, leave enough to pull out the sutures next week. I’m not wasting my opium on him, he’s drunk enough. Irma, you’ll be fine, just work as fast as you can. There’s others waiting.”

  “But—” She was gone. The needle shook.

  “It’s just sewing and knots, miss. I’d do it myself, but it’s my right arm, see?” Antonio said, his speech starting to slur.

  “Be quiet,” Signora D’Angelo called across the room. “Let her work.”

  “You got cut too,” said Antonio, “there on the cheek.” I nodded. He rocked forward. “No stitch marks though.”

  “Someone kept it closed for me.”

  “Must have been a friend. Don’t mind me. Won’t be my first. But you can sew?”

  “I’m a dressmaker.”

  “So I’m the lucky man,” mumbled Antonio, leaning back. “Sew me up.” Like sheep, I reminded myself. No different, really. I made the sutures and slowly unclenched my hand from the needle. “Good job,” he said, swinging his head to look down his arm. “See, nothin’ to it, like fixing a shirt.”

  Standing by my shoulder, the signora agreed. “Very even. Good knots. Bring her some wine,” she told Enrico. “And have someone walk this fool to the tavern.”

  For the next hour I took notes for the record book, changed dressings and held babies while their mothers were examined. Wine had eased my shaking and I felt almost easy when the signora moved to a moaning man who held a hand pressed between his thighs. “Irma, you go talk to her,” she said, pointing to a gaunt and glassy-eyed woman slumped in a chair.

  A young boy standing by her gripped my arm. “What can I do?” he wailed. “My mother’s always like this and my father says he’ll leave if she can’t be a proper wife. See.” When the boy shook the woman’s shoulder, her head flopped and wobbled. Her eyes opened but if she saw us she gave no sign.

  “Irma!” came a cry from across the room. “Come!” Heart pounding, I hurried back to the signora and the moaning man. “Roberto, show Irma your hand.” Blackness stretched out from the thumb, and the skin was swollen bronze-black and dry as paper, leaking a foul-smelling ooze. I stepped back.

  “Why did you wait so long?” she demanded. “You should have seen a doctor days ago.” He shook his head, muttering. She leaned toward him, listening intently through the cries and talk that clogged the room.

  “You’re afraid he’d cut off your thumb? You’re right, he would have, any doctor would have—to save your hand. By tomorrow they’ll take the whole arm. If you live that long.” She knelt by his side. “Listen to me, Roberto. This blackness is called gangrene. The blood is poisoned now. That poison will spread up your arm and into your heart and kill you by morning. Look.” When she touched his blackened skin with a square of clean linen, it splintered and cracked. “The hand can’t be saved. Any doctor will tell you that.”

  “Take it off then,” said a woman’s voice behind us. “Roberto, our sons can work, I can work. You’ll learn another trade. Don’t die of stubbornness and leave us alone. It’s you we love, not your hand.”

  Signora D’Angelo’s eyes fixed on Roberto. “You can go to a hospital. Talk to a doctor, but do it today.”

  “No,” he whispered. “My brother died in a hospital. You do it. Here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, we’ll be quick.” She ordered the table scrubbed, a saw and scissors boiled, opium sponge prepared, a cautering rod heated, Roberto’s shirt removed and his arm scrubbed down to the blackened hand. She had Enrico find four strong men to hold him. When I backed away in the milling crowd, she pulled me gently toward the table. “Irma, the stump must be sewn after I cut. There’s catgut here. I’ll show you the stitc
h.”

  “Signora, please. It’s not like—the other.”

  “No, it’s not like Antonio. Roberto will die if you we don’t help him now.”

  “Will you give him this?” the wife asked, unfastening a slender crucifix from her neck. “Put it in his—other hand.”

  “Irma, please,” the signora whispered, stepping closer. “If he leaves, he’ll go home. Have you seen a man die of tetanus? It’s an agony, believe me. Will you sew him?”

  “Yes, I’ll sew him.”

  “Good, thank you.” I helped Roberto onto the table, gave him the crucifix, and when the signora produced an opium-soaked sponge, I wedged it between his chattering teeth and had the men holding him leave space for the signora to cut.

  “Can you write?” I asked Roberto. He nodded, eyes wide in a whitened face slick with sweat. I described Bruno the one-armed clerk in Cleveland who scribed for Italians. Roberto’s eyes bore into me. When I began to explain what was happening, that a razor was being readied, perhaps to shave the arm, he shook his head so hard that it thudded against the table.

  “Don’t talk. Just pray,” the wife whispered in my ear. I recited every prayer I knew, leaning close to block his view. So I did not see the amputation, but heard it: the wife’s prayers rising over Roberto’s mounting howls, the grunts of the four men holding him, the saw’s steady rasp and finally a dull thud of the hand in a basin. “Almost done,” the signora murmured, calling for the cautering rod. Roberto howled, a wolf shriek in the clamorous room, and then fell utterly silent.

  “Irma, has he fainted?” she demanded, not looking up.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now, have someone else hold his head while you scrub your hands and then come here. Here’s how I want it sewn.” She calmly explained how to trim the dangling tendon, where the stitches must go, how deep and wide to make them. “You understand?”

  I nodded, my chest pounding with prayer. Lord help me. I breathed deeply and punctured the skin. Cut, sew, work. “Good,” the signora said, bending over me. “Fast as you can before he comes to.” She moved away to the gaunt woman. “When you’re done,” she called back, “I’ll show you how to bandage the stump.”