“How? Vittorio, that’s impossible. Sofia checks all our work, even bandaging.”
“We’ll do it ourselves,” he repeated, and then more warmly: “Besides, Irma, you know more than you think. For catarrh with coughing, what do we give?”
“Iodide of potassium, but—”
“For diarrhea?”
“Salts and castor oil.”
“If it persists?”
“Laudanum.”
“There, you see?” Vittorio said, hurrying me back to the office. “Serious cases we’ll send to the hospital. Where they should all go anyway,” he muttered. He kept his back to me as he dealt out instruments, powders, pills, ointments and bandages. I scrubbed the examining table and set out chairs. To every question and objection, Vittorio stolidly insisted: “Sofia wanted this.”
But nothing made sense, neither Vittorio’s brusque firmness nor Sofia’s sudden absence. She had never spoken of a half sister and said nothing on Monday of a guest on Friday. Even if this half sister had come, couldn’t she help at the clinic, or watch at least?
At least it began as an easy night. A mother brought two children with head lice. I hurried her out the door with instructions to rinse their hair with kerosene, wrap their heads in cloth and comb out the lice at night. We had a wracking chorus of coughers, whom I dosed as usual. Dyspepsia we treated with subnitrate of bismuth. Following Sofia’s notes, I gave the bricklayer with rheumatism a tincture of aconite. For babes limp and listless from diarrhea, I used our familiar cures. But we could think of no relief for a young Irish sausage stuffer whose right arm had suddenly become paralyzed, nor for a Serbian boy rolled in a knot who howled when we tried to straighten his legs. There was an Irishman who twitched uncontrollably and an old woman who insisted that something heavy was growing in her belly. We sent those last four to the hospital and I began to clean the room.
“Will Sofia be here tomorrow?” I asked, but Vittorio had gone to answer a light knock at the door.
He came back muttering in Italian: “It’s some hunchbacked American for you. Be as quick as you can and tell me when she’s gone.” He waved Daisy impatiently into the office.
She was clean and modestly dressed, hair brushed smooth and face unpainted. The calico dress bulged at the ridge of her hump, but she walked in proudly and set two silver dollars on the table. “For the house call,” she said.
Vittorio recorded her payment and left us. Daisy sat down, hands folded neatly as a schoolgirl, but looked around curiously. “Where’s the doctor lady?”
“She couldn’t come tonight.”
Daisy nodded. “Jake didn’t last long after you left.”
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “Well, at least he died easy, and maybe he heard what I told him. Anyway, I stopped the clock and covered the mirror, you know, so the spirit don’t see itself. And then I sent for the doctors’ men.”
I started. “What doctors’ men?”
Daisy’s brown eyes widened. “You don’t know about them, miss? The ones who buy bodies from poor folk, so doctors can cut them up to see what we look like inside. They said that because Jake wasn’t old or gunshot or consumptive and since he was, you know, fresh, they’d give me twenty dollars silver. They were dressed all respectable, like regular undertakers with a good black cloth to cover him, so the neighbors wouldn’t talk. They took him out feet first, like for any funeral. You don’t have doctors’ men in your country, miss?” I shook my head. “Well, funerals cost here, you know, and like I said, Jake didn’t hold with churches or wasting good money on dead folks. He would have done the same if it was me that went first.”
I nodded, stunned. So in America the dead might be stripped naked, sliced, pulled apart and talked over? In Opi, we buried even drunkards and thieves. No one probed their bowels or peeled back the ribs. But what a fool I’d been not to trace the fine drawings in Sofia’s books back to bodies of the poor acquired by “doctors’ men.” How else could we learn? Still, to have strangers cut open your chest, releasing the soul. “What soul?” Molly would ask. “It’s better than he deserves.”
“Miss,” Daisy was saying. “I want you to have this.” She set a man’s pocket watch on the table. I remembered it pressed against me. “It keeps good time, but you can sell it if you want. See, real gold plate. Feel how heavy.”
I didn’t touch it. “Daisy, you paid for the visit. And you might want that to—to remember him.”
“No, miss, you heard how the others talked, but you treated me right. And I don’t need money now. With what the doctors’ men gave me, I’ll be fine. I’m not going to Indiana. My cousins in Michigan have a dairy farm. I used to like making cheese at home so I telegraphed and they said to come. I’m tired of city people anyhow, staring at my hump and calling me names.” She pushed the watch away. “I don’t need one of those now anyway. On a farm you just follow the cows. Well, miss, I have to pack. I’m leaving on the morning train.” She stood up.
I walked Daisy to the door and came back to finish cleaning, leaving the watch untouched. Vittorio returned and cleared his throat. “Irma,” he began.
“Yes?” I was wiping tongue depressors with cotton soaked in alcohol, my back to him. “There’s a watch on the table,” I said. “Will you give it to Enrico?”
“It’s from the hunchback?” Vittorio asked, his voice high and strained.
“From Daisy, yes.” When I turned and saw his face, a depressor clattered from my hand. “What’s wrong? It’s about Sofia. What happened?”
“Her pains came back this morning and this time they didn’t pass.”
“What?” Silence. “Vittorio, what pains?”
“She didn’t tell you she had angina pectoris?” I shook my head. “She took digitalis, but as you know, it doesn’t cure the heart.”
“Angina,” I repeated. Angina pectoris, from Latin: a strangling in the chest. Sofia strangled? Not possible, no. “She’s in a hospital then? Which one? I want to see her.” I groped for my bag and hat.
“Irma, it’s too late. She’s gone.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, Irma, but Sofia died this afternoon, just a little before you came.”
I sank in the chair. Death never came like this in my life, without warning, as a swooping hawk plucks a mouse from the grass. How could Sofia be dead if here were her tools, her chair, her books, her tongue depressor, her stethoscope? I squeezed the rubber tube. “Monday she was fine,” I insisted. “We walked to the South Side and climbed five floors. She told me about the Pacific Dispensary. She wanted to show me a letter.” There: I couldn’t have invented this fact. “She wasn’t sick. Just tired.”
Vittorio took my hand. So she was dead. Breathing hurt, as if my own heart were strangled. “Enrico could have come to the shop for me.”
He shook his head. “She didn’t want that. She was so proud of you on Monday, whatever it was that you did, and she wanted that night to be how you remembered her, not how she was today.”
Cold ran up my legs. “How was she today?”
Vittorio pressed his palm into the scrubbed table. “I was in the shop and she was working here, mixing compounds, and about ten this morning, Enrico shouted for me. I ran back and found her on the floor holding her arm. Her face was white.” Cats screamed outside in the alley. My fingers closed around her stethoscope. “I knew it was bad this time. Claudia and I brought her to bed. The first attack passed, then another came and she asked for a priest and had me get this from her desk.” Vittorio took a neatly folded page from his jacket pocket, opened and read it: “To Irma Vitale, my stethoscope, record book, whatever medical texts she chooses and the proceeds of this week. The remainder of my instruments may be given to Mercy Hospital.” He showed me her accounts ledger and my eyes crawled down the neat lists: the dilator was paid for and our last shipment of clamps. Tuesday she had done a breech birth and on Wednesday an abortion, both in fine houses on Lake Shore. Vittorio handed me The Midwife’s Practical Directory. �
�There’s seventy-five dollars inside for you.” I closed the book.
Memories of Sofia rushed over me like a battering wave: my abortion, our walking home afterward talking about the clinic, Sofia teaching me how to stitch skin and bandage wounds. Sofia listening to the sick with her head slightly cocked, and how on the hottest nights she would run, run upstairs after a frightened child whose father had collapsed in the kitchen.
“When did you know she was sick?” I asked.
“This spring, just before you first came here. I was bringing her a bottle of carbolic and saw her slumped over. She didn’t say anything, but the next day when I asked if we needed more digitalis she said yes. She was so sly. We’d be talking, she’d cough, put a handkerchief to her face and you never saw her take a pill. In May she stopped hiding it from me and I made her see a doctor at Mercy Hospital. He said there was nothing to do. We can set a broken arm, but you can’t go into the heart and fix it. I know how you cared for her. And she knew as well. You were like a daughter to her, that was one of the last things she said.”
Tears poured down my face. Vittorio pushed a length of bandage gauze across the table and sat patiently as I held it to my face and wept for Sofia, for my mother and Zia Carmela, for all who cared for me and now were gone. “Why didn’t she tell me she was sick?” I stammered. “I could have—”
“Done what, Irma?” He took my hand. “I told you, there’s no cure. Digitalis doesn’t work forever. The first time I met you, when you came for a restorative, something told me you were sent here for Sofia. And you helped her heal more people. That’s all she wanted.”
No, it was she who helped me, who made from my worn cloth a new Irma. And what of the children watching for us from windows, the men who carried their comrades in from work, the parents who thrust babes in our arms and the women who needed us? “Who’ll run the clinic now, Vittorio?” I demanded, my voice shrill in the little room.
Vittorio excused himself and came back with two glasses of wine. “Drink, Irma, and listen to me. You know we can’t take her place. I helped her when I could, but I’m just a druggist. I don’t have a mission, like Sofia did. I have a wife and rent to pay. You’re a very clever girl, but you’re—”
“A dressmaker.”
“Yes. Exactly. So the sick must go to the hospitals.”
“But the hospitals are crowded and filthy. They don’t want immigrants. They don’t have interpreters. They don’t explain anything.” I stopped. Vittorio was calmly drinking his wine.
“Irma, if the sick go to the hospitals and fill the beds, if the priests and the rabbis and the pastors and the newspapers cry out, things will change. Slowly, but they will. You know we can’t heal the city. You saw how hard Sofia worked and it cost her health. We did a fine thing. I was proud to be part of it and you should be too. We helped many people. But the clinic is finished now. My cousin and his family are coming from Genoa to live with us. I have to help them.”
I slumped in the chair. With Sofia gone and the sick untended, my dream of a shop for fine ladies seemed a hollow, foolish thing. I felt hollow myself, as if I’d rattle when I walked.
Vittorio filled my glass again. “When Enrico brings you Sofia’s papers, read them. Perhaps there’s an answer there. Not for Chicago, but for you.” Just then Claudia appeared. “Finished?” he asked.
“Yes. She’s in the purple. Angelina helped.”
So they had washed and dressed her as Opi women had washed and dressed my mother. This much was a comfort. The doctors’ men would not take Sofia. I explained what Daisy had said, how the poor sold their bodies for cutting. Claudia’s face darkened. “There’s nothing Protestants won’t do for money.”
“Never mind that,” said Vittorio. “Sofia will have a proper funeral.”
“You’ll see, half of Chicago will come tomorrow. And half of them,” Claudia added bitterly, “never paid her. But when they come, they see how we care for our dead.”
“Where is she?” I interrupted.
“We’ll show you.”
I sent Enrico to tell Molly what happened so she wouldn’t worry when I didn’t come home, for I would sit with Sofia all night. Vittorio and Claudia brought me to the parlor where she was laid out. Her hands crossed over her failed heart were so still. Of course. And yet—so pale and so still, with her wiry curls smoothed as they never were in life. Rouge brightened her long cheeks. Alive, she had worn no rouge. They had dressed her in a dark purple silk, elegant and severe. Touching her side, I felt a whalebone corset. Didn’t they know she hated corsets? Who in a corset could run upstairs, lift children onto tables or work for hours in a steaming room?
Claudia whispered. “Doesn’t she look like a gentlewoman?” I nodded. “She was good to the poor, but there is a limit, you know.” Claudia brought me a chair and pillow, a shawl and a stool for my feet, but in her clucking care I read that if Sofia had lived, Claudia would soon enough have pried Vittorio from the clinic and kept him close at home. She brought me some chamomile tea and a little plate of biscotti and left us alone.
It was a timeless night, for the mantel clock had been stopped, the windows and mirror draped and candles lit the room. I stared at my empty hands. Sofia, what is their work now? Cloth yielded to these hands and thread followed them meekly. My work pleased women and charmed men. “These hands are a gift,” Father Anselmo had once said. And the wise shape their lives according to their gifts. So why not keep sewing for gentlewomen? It was an honest, respectable craft. Molly was right: I could have my own shop one day. Chicago was growing and everywhere there were pockets of rich women. Soon I would be as skilled as Madame, and there was work enough for many fine dressmakers. I stared at my hands and Sofia’s until dawn edged through the curtains and Claudia brought me bread and coffee.
News of Sofia’s death had spread quickly across the neighborhoods. Many had seen the notice on Vittorio’s door. Others heard through the air, it seemed. Mourners squeezed more chairs into the narrow room, bringing flowers, gifts or food, according to their customs. Plates and glasses were handed to me and taken away. Families filed past the body. Some touched her face, her hands, heart or clothing, murmuring prayers in their languages. Jacob came with his sisters, for Sofia had visited them when measles tore through the tenements.
A thin young woman came alone and whispered that her name was Martha. I remember hearing of her case: Martha has ceased eating, nearly herself starving to death after an uncle raped her. She swallowed poison. Sofia saved her, found her a job and a room in a new part of the city and made her come weekly to be weighed. “Look at me!” Martha said proudly. “You can’t see my bones no more.” She leaned close to add, “There’s a young man what wants to marry me. I’m going to night school too, and learning bookkeeping.”
“Signora D’Angelo would be pleased,” I said.
When wealthy women came alone and filed silently past the body, I suspected that they had sought out Sofia for abortions. Late in the morning, Mrs. Clayburn slipped into the hot, close room and laid a gloved hand on Sofia’s. When she looked up and saw me, she blinked. “Aren’t you—?”
“Irma Vitale. You introduced me to Madame Hélène.”
“Ah yes, the girl in the park, with those soldiers. But—”
“I worked at night with Signora D’Angelo. I was her assistant.”
“Ah yes, you Italians, always sticking together.” When I said nothing, she turned away.
In mid-afternoon the undertaker came with Sofia’s coffin, for it was a hot day and we could wait no longer. Vittorio, Claudia and I lifted her in, but as the undertaker’s men moved to close the lid I turned away, unable to watch that sharp-edge shadow once again cross a dear, familiar face. When they took out their hammers, I left the room. No blacksmith beating on his anvil is as loud as the pounding in of coffin nails: that sound cracks air.
We followed her carriage to church, where Father Paolo gave the mass, but I remember none of it, only my own prayer: Lord, wash away these last five da
ys. Take me back to Monday when we walked together and I believed that Sofia was well.
“Irma, come back for the funeral meal,” Claudia and Vittorio urged afterward, but I could not bear to see that house again. “Then here, Enrico,” said Vittorio, giving the boy some coins. “Make sure Irma gets home safely and stop checking that watch.”
Mrs. Gaveston offered condolences and Molly brought tea to my room. In the next days, boarders bowed politely in the hallways or took my hand in the dining room. Many had gone or had friends who had gone to the clinic. Somehow I worked the next days, bent over cloth and driving my needle as if it would stitch out a new path for my life. Grief was a wearying weight I carried to the shop and home, barely speaking to Molly and trudging upstairs to my room. Each night the steps seemed steeper, like the rocky path to Opi.
On the fourth day after the funeral, Molly announced that Enrico had brought something for me. On my bed sat a wooden box with Sofia’s papers. There were letters from medical schools politely saying she could not be admitted because she was not an American citizen or because she had no high-school diploma or because she was a woman. There were descriptions of instruments, sutures and clamps, announcements of lectures at the Chicago Medical College, copies of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, and her own lecture notes, carefully ordered.
I found a fat bundle of correspondence from the Pacific Dispensary for Women and Children in San Francisco. In our last walk, Sofia had spoken of their care for the poor. Letters from the dispensary thanked Sofia for her mortality and morbidity lists, midwifery notes and descriptions of troubling cases. I remembered some of them: poor healing of stumps after amputation; repeated miscarriage in the first trimester; blue babies, rickets, arthritis in children, intestinal obstructions, sudden seizures and strange cases of nerve damage in meat packers.
The final page in the bundle was an announcement that the dispensary had opened a two-year nursing school, the first one west of the Rocky Mountains. Inquiries were to be directed to Dr. Martha Bucknell. A woman doctor? My fingers traced her name and then stopped. In the corner of the page, in Sofia’s small, angled letters was written: “Irma?” A warm wind puffed through the open window, ruffling my hair, the linen of my chemise and the page in my hand. I looked around the little room, suddenly so familiar, a narrow, safe nest. Was this Sofia’s idea, that I leave Chicago, go west and throw in my lot with strangers once again? The thought was fearful.
When We Were Strangers Page 23