Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (7 page)

The work was slightly more varied than Irena’s but still stunning in its monotony. All over the city, in hundreds of shops and factories, did girls barely older than I do this all day? Service work was hard, but at least the chime of a new hour rarely found me at the same task. There were always the great windows out to sea and hope of a swim in warm, moon-struck waters.

“The girls can talk, you see,” Yolanda rattled on, “if the supervisor’s not around. And sometimes there’s a good singer like your mother.” I saw lips moving, some smiles, perhaps a joke, and the different styles and colors of the women’s own clothing. But still they seemed like machines themselves, as if at night they simply froze in darkness until the morning shift.

“What do they earn?”

“Older girls make ten dollars. Younger ones get less.”

“Why, if they do the same work?”

“Because they do. And there’s always fines. And rent for the machines, and then they have to buy needles and thread.”

As if we’d paid Paolo for the use of his buckets and brushes. “That’s not fair. You shouldn’t have to pay to work.”

Yolanda looked at me curiously. “If your mother doesn’t get sick or hurt, you could finish high school, I guess. Then if you have good English, you could clerk in a downtown store and make more money.”

“Italian girls do that?”

She considered. “Well, most shopgirls are Irish or Swedish or German. But you could be the first Italian. Let’s go, before the boss sees us.”

I must finish school,
I determined secretly,
and at least be a shopgirl.
We had twenty words for a spelling test in school and forty for Hiram House. With others I’d pick up, I could learn a hundred this week. But what if Mamma tired of dipping, if she got sick or hurt or argued with Mr. Stingler and lost her job? My English would fade away over a sewing machine.

“I have to make dinner,” Yolanda announced. She plucked at my charity dress. “If you take it in here and here and add some ribbons, it would look nicer, you know.” Then she was gone, hurrying back to her flat.

I never did
alter my dress. Not that I didn’t envy Yolanda’s effortless style, her deft use of ribbons, feathers, and dried flowers to make hair ornaments and hats. She said it was easy. I never found it so. I did study my face and body in a tall mirror at the boardinghouse. My body was changing and my face too, as if I were clay being molded by America. I was changing inside as well. In that first autumn, I got “the curse,” as Mamma glumly declared when my monthly blood began. “Be careful, don’t let what happened to me happen to you. Nothing’s the same afterward.”

Was
I
the curse? “It’s not like that, Lucia,” said Roseanne. But nobody said what
it
was like.

“Just be careful,” Mamma said briskly. “You don’t want trouble in America.”

I tried to keep hold of Naples. I reread letters from the countess about street festivals, a new opera or scandal, and the count’s increasing debts. There were always best wishes from Nannina and Paolo. They seemed so distant. I lay in bed imagining the villa. Was the bust of Julius Caesar on the right or left of the window? In what month did the setting sun spark more rainbows from the crystal chandelier? When, exactly, did the lilacs bloom? I missed the creamy tang of fresh mozzarella and rich, intense bite of tomatoes from the slopes of Vesuvius.
Come back,
I begged my memories.
Don’t leave me in America with trouble.

Mamma still sang her street songs and arias for me at night. But she had discovered the old player piano in Roseanne’s parlor and eagerly memorized lyrics of popular tunes I sounded out for her. “If it wasn’t for the piano,” she said, “I couldn’t keep going.” And then quite calmly: “If Stingler ever says I can’t sing, I’ll drown him in a chocolate vat.”

“Mamma, don’t talk like that!” I saw the crystal decanter flying, the count’s face streaming blood, our flight through the dark streets, and exile in America. Where could we go if her temper flared again and we had no Paolo to arrange our escape?

“It’s just thoughts, Lucia,” she said, and yawned. “Go to sleep.” But thoughts can become acts: a sudden push, a body sinks in chocolate, police are called.
Just thoughts, just thoughts,
I repeated into the darkness.
Ignore them. Think other thoughts.

When Hiram House announced a talent show for Christmas, I begged Mamma to sing “Santa Lucia” or “Maria Marì.” I was sure people would be amazed. “Listen,” they’d say, “she sings like an angel!”

“I’m too old,” she said flatly. “Remember Toscanini?” Like a horse balking at a weakened bridge, she wouldn’t budge, either to sing alone or to join the women’s choir. “But
you
do something, Lucia,” she said, “and I’ll watch. Just don’t sing.”

I knew enough English now to ask Miss Miller after class if I could recite a Leopardi poem. Standing straight with my hands at my sides as Contessa Elisabetta taught me, I began “L’infinito”:

Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle

E questa siepe che da tanta parte

Dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.

A gray-haired Italian in a tweed suit stopped to listen, his lips moving with mine. Speaking slowly, eyes closed, he translated for Miss Miller: “Always dear to me was this lonely knoll and these woods that here and there concealed the horizon from my sight.”

“Thank you, Umberto,” she said. “But it’s rather melancholy, don’t you think? How about ‘The Village Blacksmith’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, our great American poet?”

“Leopardi was very great.”

“Of course, Lucia, but could you
try
the Longfellow?” She flashed the smile that had coaxed a room full of immigrants to their feet for Simon Says.

“Yes, Miss Miller.”

Beaming, she produced a small volume of Longfellow’s poetry. Umberto sat with me, carefully translating lines I repeated in English:

Under a spreading chestnut tree

The village smithy stands;

The smith, a mighty man is he,

With large and sinewy hands.

“Listen, Lucia,” he whispered as Miss Miller watched Polish girls practicing a dance, “the Printz-Biederman Company gives a handsome book of English speeches to the newcomer with the best recitation. The Leopardi was lovely, but try for the prize.”

I went home beating out lines to the thump of my shoes on slate sidewalk in the meter that Miss Miller favored: “Ta-
dum
, ta-
dum
, ta-
dum
.” That night I read to Irena as she worked, repeating new words and rereading lines to learn the string of sounds. If I spoke more slowly, we discovered, she could make buttons to my time. Irena worked and I recited, until with a broad smile she dropped the last of the day’s buttons in her “finished” sack, tied it with a cord, and held her hands over the gas lamp, rubbing them slowly and flexing her fingers against the cramping pain. I stood to go.

“Lucia,” she said, “you stay a time here?” The countess in her sitting room could not have been more gracious in smoothing the bedsheets for me. We shared a little English now. Irena pointed on a calendar to when her brother Casimir would be coming, five months and thousands of buttons away. She brought out a Bible in Polish and opened it carefully to a page of handwritten names and dates. Using button backs, the words we shared, and much pointing between buttons and names, she assembled her family tree.

“Here my parents.” She turned the buttons over. Dead, I understood. “Three sisters.” Dead. She mimed how they died: fever. “Two brothers. Poland.” Here was Casimir, the one she loved most, coming to Cleveland. She pointed to her ring finger. “Married, to Anna from our village.” I brought paper and a pencil from my room and with clever drawings she showed that Casimir was a fine butcher, Anna made delicious sausages, and they would both work in a cousin’s butcher shop. She could live with them and never make buttons again. “Look. Wedding present for Anna.” She showed me a richly embroidered jacket.

“You
made
this?”

She nodded shyly.

“Beautiful. Anna will love it.”

Irena beamed, but then she muttered something about the button dealer. With mimes and drawing, I gathered there were many girls doing home work who didn’t have her problems of cramps and back spasms. “I must trust in the Lord.” She pushed me a pile of buttons. “Now your family.”

How to explain that a masked man had pushed my mother into seaweed and got her pregnant with me? Instead, I put down buttons for my great-grandfather Domenico, who sang for the church; for my mother’s father, whose work was unknown; and for my own imagined father, the artist Pietro D’Angelo, who fell from scaffolding to his death. Yes, I lied to her. I didn’t want to be a bastard in America.

A warm hand touched my cheek. “I fall from streetcar. But live. Poor Lucia. Alone with the mamma.”

When I finally left my friend’s room, Roseanne pulled me aside. “How did you make her talk? She
never
talks.”

“I asked questions. We used English and drawings—and buttons.” Roseanne’s eyes widened as if I’d acquired astonishing powers.

That night I prayed for Casimir to come and bundle Irena into a warm, familiar Polish world. I prayed for Mamma to find peace, for the count to treat the countess well, or at least return to Capri, and for myself to graduate from high school. Sleepless, I followed wildly running ceiling cracks that recalled the swirling foam of tide pools. Outside, a slow clop of horses pulled me back to Cleveland and my poem: “The-
smith
-a-
migh
-ty-
man
-is-
he
-with-
large
-and-
sin
-ewy-
hands
.”

The next day, Mamma came home in a foul humor. The chocolate vats were too hot for swirls to form properly, so Little Stingler, the owner’s son, wouldn’t pay for half the day’s production. He also fired a girl for “insolence.”

“Insolence about what?”

“Never mind. And we can’t sing. Little Stingler thinks we’re singing about him. The old man isn’t so bad, but the young one’s a bastard. A Sicilian girl who sits by the door whistles when he’s coming.”

“Well,
were
you singing about him?”

“Of course. He doesn’t understand Italian. If I don’t do
something
to get even, I’ll think bad thoughts and then one day—”

“You better keep that job,” Roseanne warned. “If you make trouble they put you on the blacklist and nobody hires you. Then how do you pay rent?”

I looked anxiously at Mamma, who seemed unconcerned. Something clattered in the kitchen. Seizing my chance, I speared more meat for Irena. “One piece each,” Roseanne warned. “That’s the rule.”

“But she’s so thin.”

“And it’s tough as shoe leather anyway,” Mamma added.

“You think stew meat grows on trees? You know what it costs these days?” Thus began another litany of the price of beef, potatoes, dried beans, lard, onions, and turnips. If prices kept rising, what could poor folks eat? Cats and dogs like the heathen Chinese?

“So, where can I buy good marzipan and salami?” Mamma interrupted.

This was a clever ploy: Roseanne loved giving advice. “Go to Catalano’s on Woodland Avenue. It’s like you’re home again.”

After dinner I took Mamma aside as she headed for the piano. “We have to pay back the countess. We can’t buy imported food.”

“Don’t we deserve it, after the pig swill we eat here?”

“Shh, Mamma, she’ll hear you. We
can’t
be buying more food.”

“You think I
like
dipping chocolate all day? My back hurts, my shoulders hurt, and you’re at school learning poetry.” Her nostrils flared. “I want something special that isn’t chocolate. Don’t you?”

I did, actually. I longed for Nannina’s cooking and home tastes. “Well, we could get a couple things.”

“Exactly. The countess has plenty of money. She can wait a little longer.”

That Sunday was astonishingly mild. “See? We’ll have a good day,” Mamma said, taking my arm as we stepped out of the boardinghouse. “We’ll eat by the water like we used to. Don’t worry. I’ll make enough money and maybe you’ll work a little. Breathe. There’s not so much factory smell here.” I gulped in the bright air, scrubbed clean by night winds. Quick walking was a pleasure.

In Catalano’s store, everything American melted away. We spoke our own dialect, jostling and bargaining as if we were home again. I tried to hold back, saving pennies for the countess, but in the end we bought wine and bread, smoked mozzarella, salami, a paper cone of salted fava beans, marzipan, and two ricotta pastries. Then we took a streetcar to Lake Erie, found flat rocks to sit on, and opened our packages.

“Mamma,” I asked as I cut the bread and salami, “are you sorry we came to America?”

“Not yet. And anyway, we had to. Let’s eat.” She shook herself as if casting off cobwebs and for the first time asked about school. I eagerly described our lessons until we finished eating and then I braided and unbraided her hair as she sang a street song, an aria, and an American song before pulling her braids away.

“Now stand up,” she said briskly, “and tell me your poem.” I gave her every line, proud that I’d learned them all by heart. “Ta-
dum,
ta-
dum,
ta-
dum,
” she mimicked. “That’s not poetry. That’s a clock. Even your precious Leopardi isn’t a clock.”

“Let me tell you what the words mean. A blacksmith is a
fabbro,
so the poem is about—”

“The
sound
is the problem, the way you speak. Toscanini would hate it.” Not him again, spoiling our time together.

“Mamma, the maestro won’t come to a talent show.”

A shadow crossed her face. She shook it away and put me on the flat rock as if it were a stage. Firm hands adjusted my chin, neck, chest, and back. “Now the first lines.” She stood in front of me as I spoke. “No,
tell me
the story. Look in my eyes. Take deeper breaths, so you speak longer with each one. It’s better that way.” She listened to the poem again and again, lifting a hand when I could breathe.