Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (35 page)

I was becoming as reclusive as Mamma when Roseanne ordered me downstairs to speak with a visitor in the parlor. It was Enrico. Strike rations had thinned his body and sharpened the lines of his face, but I couldn’t help smiling at the soldier stiffness of his shoulders and his air of solemn importance.

“The first message,” he announced, “is that Josephine says you
must
come back to the pickets. The path is not easy, but together we
will
win. The cause of the ILGWU is greater than any of us, and to be a part of this greatness makes us strong.” He let out a long breath after his feat of memory.

“Thank you, Enrico. You know, if you can learn all that, you can easily learn your times tables at school.”

“Maybe.” He relaxed a little. “I might go back after the strike. Here’s the second message. It’s from Lula: you need to get your skinny self down to the tavern ’cause she’s got some news.” He grinned. “So now me and Pepe are going fishing at the lake.”

“You mean ‘Pepe and I.’ ”

“Yeah, us two.” But he didn’t go right then. The smooth brow furrowed and he stepped closer. “Lucia, you really don’t look so good. Maybe you
should
come to the union hall like Josephine says. To get your mind off—” He glanced at the stairs.

“Other things?” I prompted.

“Right, other things. Well, Pepe’s waiting.” And he was gone in a whirl of churning legs.

So I went to the tavern with a bucket from Roseanne to fill with beer. Lula drew me aside. “Listen. You know how your friend Henryk’s Miriam is always going to Pittsburgh to see her aunt?”

“Yes. The aunt is sick and Miriam’s the only one she wants around her.”

“Hum. I don’t know about ‘sick.’ What I
do
know is this aunt has a young cousin, a bachelor, and this young bachelor cousin owns a bank.” Lula folded her arms. “Did you hear me, girl?”

“Yes,” I said dully, “the aunt’s cousin owns a bank.”

“Well, don’t you think Miriam wants a bank? One of my regulars says
he’s
the reason she goes to Pittsburgh. He gave her a diamond as big as your eye. And whatever her family owes Henryk’s family for whatever they did in the Old Country, this banker can pay off easy. My regular says Henryk’s father’s so angry, it’s like the girl was cheating on
him
.”

Another time, this news would have mattered. Lula sighed. “I know, you can’t forgive me for what happened at that place.”

“It’s not that.” No, I couldn’t be angry with Lula. Soon or later, my mother might have found her way to a madhouse, as surely as water is drawn to whirlpools. “I just can’t think about fellas now. Like you said, maybe this isn’t my time.”

“I know, honey. Fact is, I just wanted to see your pretty face and get you out of that house.”

“Thank you, Lula. And I am getting out. I’m going to the union hall tonight.” I filled the bucket, brought it home, and made myself go to the hall. Still, I avoided Henryk’s shop. Angry as his father was with Miriam, wouldn’t he be more enraged by a girl who entangled his son with a lunatic?

A restive speaker at the union hall claimed to be a member, although I’d never seen him on the picket lines. He called himself Mel and accused the union sisters of acting too ladylike. “It’s like you’re wearing fancy dresses instead of making them. If you want victory, you gotta fight for it. Fight back! Fight back! Fight back!” Soon the hall was shouting too: “Fight back! Fight back! Fight back!”

Isadore began rousing union songs that finally overwhelmed the pounding chant. “We
will
fight, brothers and sisters,” he promised, “for justice, not for anarchy. We are workers, not rabble.”

But Mel’s chant had charged the room. People were tired, hot, and hungry, weary of waiting for victory. I knew he was wrong, that fighting would only win us jail cells, yet it was something to do, some shift in our apparent stalemate. “Where’d he come from?” Josephine demanded as we gathered in a smaller group after the meeting. When Enrico offered to follow Mel, I quickly said I’d go along.

“Good idea,” said Josephine. “Don’t let him see you, but if he does, just say you’re taking your little brother home.”

We trailed Mel to an office building where the Cleveland Manufacturers’ Association met. Hidden in a shaded doorway, we watched him speak to a man in a homburg hat, take an envelope that he slipped into his pocket, and then hurry away.

A small, warm hand slipped into mine. “Lucia, sometimes I’m scared.”

“Me too, Enrico.”

“What if the strike doesn’t work?”

“We can’t think that way,” I whispered back. “Come on, it’s late and your mother will be worried.”

Like sparks on dry leaves, fights were breaking out everywhere that week: in taverns and soup kitchen lines, on stairways of apartment buildings where some supported the strike and others did not. When I saw Mrs. Reilly on the street, she first shared the latest adorable saying of little Maria Margaret before lowering her voice in warning: “Lucia, everyone says the strike isn’t working. People just
have
to go back to work.”

In the end, it was ice that changed so much, or rather a lack of ice. Icemen went on strike, infuriating Josephine and Isadore, who feared the city would turn against all workers now. In fact, newspapers throbbed with warnings of general strikes, anarchy, and Cleveland held hostage to socialist demands.

I was working at the union hall when Pepe came pounding in. “Mob at the icehouse. Enrico’s there,” he gasped.

Josephine ran with me. The icehouse wasn’t far, but my chest burned as we drew nearer. A boiling crowd spread out from the warehouse steps, swearing there was ice inside not being released. “You’re holding it to push up the price,” a woman shouted.

“That’s not true,” the guard was saying. “I don’t have
any,
but there’s five tons coming tomorrow.”

“What’ll it cost then?”

Josephine stopped, took a breath, and shouted: “Brothers and sisters, let’s talk to the bosses, not the workers!” The magic of her voice could calm any crowd, I told myself. People would listen. They’d calm down and go away. But afterward, few remembered that she was even there.

“We want ice
now
!” a man shouted.

I heard Enrico’s high, clear voice: “He
said
they’ll have a shipment tomorrow.” Was he alone inside an angry mob? I pressed my way into a hot thicket of bodies.

“Look out!” someone said. Talk stopped as a brick sailed overhead, flying as if winged, smashing a high window to leave a black hole, a gaping O. Cheers exploded. Did they think cool air would pour out, chilling the city? Rhythmic clapping joined a menacing chant: “We want ice! Ice now! Ice now! Ice now!” I thought I saw Mel; certainly I heard his driving voice: “Ice now! Ice now! Ice now!”

Josephine cried: “Come back, Lucia. Pepe’s getting the police.” But the station was blocks away. Could they come in time? Wearied by endless calls to settle fights, would they even try? Burrowing frantically through the crowd, I finally glimpsed Enrico’s rough curls. He was standing on the icehouse steps. For an instant, pride lifted me over fear. “The man said we’d have ice tomorrow,” he was calmly reminding the women in front of the crowd. “Let’s go home. The guard can’t help. We’ll talk to the bosses tomorrow.” A woman in a red shawl stopped chanting and looked at him, considering. He could do it! A child could truly calm this crowd!

He saw me and smiled. I’ll remember forever those bright eyes and that hand raised in greeting. He pointed to the woman who was saying to her friend: “He’s right, Sarah. It’s not the guard’s fault. Let’s go.”

“Come with us, Enrico,” I said. “Josephine needs you.” I saw his worn shoe lift, about to step down, then pause and move backward, up a step. Now he was at eye level with the adults.

His voice rose. “Listen, everybody, let’s just—”

A man cried out: “Get outta there, kid!”

“Enrico, come down,” I hissed. “It’s dangerous.”

Behind me, a chant was swelling: “Ice now. Ice now. Ice now.” Mel! Where was he? Turning to look, I saw the brick instead. How could I see it so clearly, turning so slowly?

“Enrico!” And then louder, shrieking, tearing my throat:
“Get down!”
But his eye must have been caught by the woman’s red shawl disappearing into the crowd.

The brick met his bright, upturned face. A horrible jerk back of the neck like a breaking doll. The slender body spun down, headfirst on stone steps, bouncing. Racing forward, I caught the last jerked flail as Enrico tumbled limp into my arms, one side of his face a bloody mass. The other side was perfect, the eye glazed, slightly astonished. I reached for his hand. Perhaps it closed around mine. Perhaps I only imagined this from gripping his so tightly.

“She can still hear,” Sister Margaret had said when Irena was passing. “Enrico,” I whispered in his perfect ear, “don’t worry, we’ll save you. You’ll go fishing with Pepe. You’ll go to school.” In the midst of horror so great, what’s left to trust but miracles?

The crowd was deadly calm around us. A man pulled off his shirt and wadded it under the bleeding head. “Get a doctor!” I shouted. “Go!”

“Sure, a doctor’s coming, or a nurse,” the man said slowly, as one might speak to a child or crazy person. He removed his cap. He was a big man with an Irish voice that rolled over me: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters.”
Why is he doing this?
But I recited the psalm with him, slipping into Italian. Some joined us in English, others in their languages. Dark blood flowed over my hands; the glazed eye rolled back. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”

Now a woman was kneeling beside me. “I’m a nurse,” she whispered. Clean hands moved over Enrico’s slender body, touching his chest and neck, closing the eye.

The man reached out long arms. “I’ll take him home.”

The woman with the red shawl wrapped Enrico. “So the mother won’t see his face right off.” She helped me stand. Now we were all moving, a slow river flowing toward Enrico’s house. The woman’s voice never stopped, gentle and insistent, leading me on: “You’re Lucia, aren’t you? I saw you at the union meetings. Step down here.
Brava.
This way, we’re turning. Shall we rest a minute?”

“Take the shawl away. He can’t breathe.”

“Later, dear. We’ll do it later.”

Someone must have run ahead. Angela and her husband met us in the street. Neighbors had cleared the kitchen table to lay out the little body. A priest was called. A woman brought Pepe and then led him away, holding him tightly against her side. The thin shoulders heaved. People moved silently, as if in a picture show. Sitting in a corner of the crowded kitchen, I watched them come shuffling forward to gently touch Enrico and say a word to his family. So many knew him. He had brought them messages; they’d sent him on errands and watched him put up union signs and beat his drum at marches.

“For ice, can you imagine? He died for ice,” I heard over and over.

Then Isadore and Josephine were beside me, one at each arm. “Lucia, we’re taking you home.”

“No.”

“Yes. It’s time.”

At the boardinghouse they maneuvered me to the parlor, where I folded like paper into the divan. The news must have flown through the air like bricks. Roseanne brought a wet cloth for my head. When Isadore and Josephine left, images of the child came at me like cards: Enrico flushed with pleasure when he outran “six thugs,” the guilty face when I first caught him turning over ash cans. Enrico in our kitchen when I persuaded him to help the strike. Persuaded? Hadn’t I threatened him? Enrico drumming, marching, skittering along picket lines with messages, pasting signs on walls, handing out notices, standing tall in our parlor to give his last message. His warm hand in mine as we followed Mel. Enrico at the icehouse, smiling at me. The brick. Enrico falling, bloody. A red shawl over the astonished young face.

Then I was crying. The sound brought Mamma downstairs, running her hands along the walls as she eased into the parlor, touching me curiously, as if recalling what tears might mean. “With a brick,” I sobbed. “That beautiful, beautiful child. Why couldn’t I leave him turning over ash cans?”

Roseanne held me. “Lucia, control yourself. You didn’t throw the brick. You didn’t hurt him. It’s not your fault. You don’t want to be—” She glanced at Mamma.
Like her,
she meant,
crazy.

I lost myself
in busyness, for when I stopped, the bloody face loomed before me. I translated for Josephine and Italian icemen. I went with her to the ice dealers, who finally agreed to a small reduction in price. Because Enrico’s family had no funds for a coffin and headstone, I wrote an appeal. Casimir and Anna gave generously, remembering Irena’s common grave. None of this brought comfort or relief.

Enrico’s funeral brought the shamed city together, filling the sanctuary with strikers and non-strikers, Lula and many of her regulars, Henryk and his family, and the boys’ club that I’d cajoled Enrico and Pepe into joining. I thought I saw Mel in a corner scanning the crowd, but when I looked again, he was gone. Had I conjured him? Was he my imagined Toscanini?

“Lucia,” said Roseanne severely when I said I might have seen Mel, “you promised to control yourself.” There was no control. The peace of Enrico’s funeral passed quickly and the city itself swirled into madness. A strikebreaker was found stabbed. Sidewalks shimmered with broken glass. Perhaps
I
was part of the seep of germ plasma. Hadn’t I pushed Enrico into the union, stored my mother in a tavern, setting her on a path to the asylum and from there to the cutting room?

“Stop!” Father Stephen ordered when I confessed my sins. “Think of the good you’ve done. Think of Pepe going to school in Enrico’s place. Think of the funeral, so many lives touched by one child. Perhaps you have been called to this work, more than to a life of study.”

“The work of killing children, Father?”

“Lucia! You must seek peace within yourself, the peace that passes understanding.”