When We Were Strangers (12 page)

In our workhouse the Swedish girl Katrin’s belly swelled and then she was gone. No one spoke of her. A Greek named Irene from Delos appeared and at first was a favorite of the Missus. But as weeks passed Irene grew silent, refusing to play cards or sing with us in the evening, seeming to live on currants from a Greek grocer near Woodland. She nibbled the black nubs all day, eyes half closed as if each held a memory of home. She had a little etching of a white house surrounded by olive trees and perched on a cliff over a glassy blue sea, and she took to setting it in front of her as she worked, at meals and by her bed at night. Her dark eyes fixed on the scene as a starving man stares through a bakery window. Once I saw her finger tracing an arc from the house to the sea.

“Devil’s breath,” said Lula, making a sign to brush away evil when Irene passed by, thin and silent as a shadow. At a shop on Woodland I spied a postal card of a mountain village in Italy, but when the clerk urged, “Just a penny for a picture of home,” I hurried away.

And then Irene was gone. I came back from walking in the city one Sunday to find policemen talking with the Missus. A muddy black shawl dripped from a chair. Irene had waded into Lake Erie with stones tied in her apron, I learned from Bèla. By chance the father of the redheaded girl on our street recognized Irene and ran after her, but she was dead by the time he dragged her back to shore. Her body would go in a common grave kept by the city for the poor, the nameless and criminals, in a pit with strangers like my uncle Emilio.

“I should have known,” the Missus said. “Delos women! Strong as goats but crazy as bats.”

Lula piled Irene’s clothes in the back room, muttering, “Devil’s breath.” We found no address in her bags or any document bearing her name. Perhaps she took them with her to her death, but now we could not write to her family and they would never know her fate. We burned her picture of the white house and I tried to forget how her finger marked a path to the sea.

The Missus shifted the benches so Irene’s workspace was gone and replaced a photogravure in the dining room of a country lake with one of fine ladies strolling through a park.
CHICAGO IN SUMMER
was written in fine script below.

“If my brother comes to Cleveland,” I told Bèla at lunch, “we’ll get an apartment and I’ll find work making dresses like that.”

“You really think he’s coming?” she asked mildly. “I’m sorry, Irma, but wouldn’t he be here by now?”

I said nothing. Perhaps she was right. For weeks now I had been beating down the suspicion that waiting was hopeless, that I would not ever turn a corner on Woodland and see Carlo or hear a merchant say, “Signorina Vitale, I met your brother in a tavern last night.” That afternoon as I worked, memories of him tumbled across my mind, each one announcing that it was not in his nature to come.

Carlo had fought, often bitterly, with every man in Opi. “If your mother wasn’t my wife’s cousin,” the tavern keeper told me once, “I would have kicked him out long ago.” Then there was the night of the lentils, soon after my mother died. Carlo and my father had been arguing over the sale of two ewes at market. In a fury, Carlo knocked each of our wooden trenchers to the floor. I swept up the lentils and we ate them dusty, for that was our dinner. “Never mind Carlo,” Zia had whispered to me in bed. “He’s mourning your mother. That’s just how he’s made.”

Somewhere on the road to Naples or on the sea trip to Tripoli or in a foreign tavern, Carlo could have had such a fight with nobody there to say, “Never mind Carlo, that’s just how he’s made.” He could have fought with the stranger who had promised a job in Cleveland. On shipboard, would he bend to the ship captain’s will and humbly learn a new craft? I imagined him climbing high rigging, his foot pawing air. Sparring with a deck hand, he might trip on coiled rope, fall against pipes or slide across a slick deck in heavy squall with nobody to catch and hold him. Men went overboard in storms. An angry captain could send him aloft on dangerous tasks, anxious to save a troublemaker’s pay. I saw his body sink under waves.

If by some miracle Carlo had safely reached America, he might easily be distracted by tales of an easy life in another city, farms in Ohio, ranches or gold mines in California. He might have stayed in New York with other Italians. Why push on to Cleveland if he couldn’t know I was waiting there? After all, I had said I would never leave Opi. Like two pebbles on a mountain, what was the chance that we would ever meet?

No, Carlo was lost to me. With this certainty came grief and waves of softer memories. Careless and quick to anger, arrogant and often gruff, still he was never unkind to me. When I was a child he had carved me a doll and made her a bed with a sheepskin blanket. He shielded me from Gabriele’s torments and the other boys’ teasing. He scoured the high meadows for herbs to treat our mother. At her funeral he wept with me. Despite his rough talk, he was quietly attentive to Zia, never leaving her without firewood, once buying a salve for her aching shoulder when he overheard an old woman call it miraculous. And there was the softness I saw in my brother’s face at night when the day’s tightness eased away in sleep.

“Are you alright, girl?” demanded Lula at dinner.

“Yes,” I said with my little English, “I’m fine.”

That Sunday I asked the priest at my church to say a mass for Carlo. When I could give no particulars of his death, the priest gently folded the coins back in my hand, but knelt with me to pray for my brother’s wandering soul. I lit a candle, said a rosary and did not mention Carlo in my letter home. Walking slowly back to the workhouse, I understood that I must stop waiting like a sheep to be led into better pasture. I must find it myself. “I am alone,” I repeated in English words plucked from Lula’s rough lessons.

“You’re right. Carlo won’t be coming to Cleveland,” I admitted to Bèla that night.

She patted my shoulder. “We’re all orphans,” she said. “If not, we won’t be here, no?”

The next day the Missus showed us a pattern book. We crowded around as she turned the wide pages, showing ruffles and flounces, layers of deep gathers, pleats and swirls of fine fabric. “Imagine wearing that one,” Bèla sighed, but I imagined the beautiful weight of silk across my legs in sewing such a gown, streams of lace between the fingers and the joy of shaping curves from lengths of cloth.

“Look at the shirts,” the Missus demanded, pointing to an etching of gentlewomen strolling along the edge of Lake Michigan.

“Is that in Chicago?” I whispered to Bèla.

“Enough,” the Missus said, snapping the book shut. That afternoon the Missus dangled a bribe: the best of us would make shirt fronts which paid a little more. I must get this work and save more money in the bank.

At first, like the other girls, I had kept my pay in a sock inside my cabinet. But Lula took hers to a bank where it was safe and grew more money, called “interest,” and she could have it all whenever she wanted. Once, delivering collars for the Missus, we had walked past this bank. Well-dressed Negroes went in and out along with merchants, ladies, and even servant girls. On the next delivery day, Lula helped me open an account. I wish Zia could have seen the little gray book with my own name elegantly written on the front and columns inside for deposits and interest. When a squint-eyed Hungarian collar girl slipped away one day, taking half the socks in our dormitory, my money was safe.

On Tuesday and Thursday evenings now I walked to Woodland and joined a dozen women in a hot little room in the church where an American nun taught us new catechisms: “What is this?” she would say, pointing.

“This is a window,” we answered.

“What are these?”

“These are shoes.”

I learned to say: “I am Irma Vitale. I am Italian. I am single. I make collars.” The nun had us copy these sentences, so my first whole written sentences were in English, when all I ever wrote in Italian was my name.

Soon, with these new words I could speak haltingly to Lula of Gustavo as we peeled potatoes in the yard behind the house. She spat on the dirt. “Sailors. You know what they do, girl, every chance they get on land?”

“We only talked.” I showed Lula his whalebone etching. “He gave me this.”

“How many times did you do this talking?”

“Two times.”

“He said he’d write?”

“Yes, by General Delivery.”

“You done with those potatoes?”

Had I been as much of a fool for Gustavo as I’d been for Carlo? Full summer came and no letter. Sweat dripped from our fingers, staining the collars. The red-haired girl and her baby brother played listlessly in shreds of shade. On Sunday afternoons now, I took a streetcar to Lake Erie that lay like glass under a creamy blue sky. The shimmer of willows and bright clumps of wildflowers relieved the sameness of my days: the dull pine of our worktables, the white of collars, the brown bread and bean soup. Each month I wrote to Zia, but dared not send money until she wrote back, for if letters did not reach her, how could my money arrive safely? If she sent no letter, was it because she—no, I yanked back that thought. She was alive, safe and well in Assunta’s house.

At last an envelope came from Gustavo with two thin sheets of paper. On one was a drawing of the
Servia
surrounded by leaping dolphins. A man and a woman stood on the deck. The other sheet bore a sketch of a busy port under dark skies with “Liverpool” written below. On the back was a note: “Dear Irma, I think of you and your mountain. The leg heals. We go to Africa tomorrow. They say it is beautiful. I hope you are well in America. God keep you. Gustavo Parodi.” The careful script of the letter was the same as his signature. So he had written it himself—or used a scribe for both.

“The pictures are nice,” Lula conceded.

Ashamed of my still awkward script, I endured the scribe’s bushy raised eyebrow when I explained that I was writing a sailor. I thanked Gustavo for the drawings and said that I had found work and friends, was learning English and hoped to see him again. I did not say I lived in a workhouse. I signed the letter, folded it around an embroidery of olive trees and gave the scribe Gustavo’s letter with the long English address of the shipping company to copy.

“So this sailor wrote you already?” the scribe asked.

“Of course.”

“Huh.”

“Now don’t be looking every day for a letter,” warned Lula. “He’ll be in Africa when yours gets to England.”

“No I won’t.” Yet even if my ties to Gustavo were as slender as a spider’s line, without Carlo or any news from Opi, Gustavo was my link to Italy.

Times were hard in Cleveland. Prices rose for linen, beans and bread. The Missus said customers wanted more embroidery, so each collar took us longer. Unbending after work, our backs made cracking pops and we spent hours at night rubbing the knots from our bodies. “You’re lucky to have work,” the Missus snapped. She was right: ragged women passed the dusty windows, gazing at us longingly.

Brisk autumn winds drove the heat away and brought a spectacle I never imagined: leaves turning scarlet, yellow, orange and russet, a thrilling blaze of splendor splashed against a cobalt sky, nothing like the browns of our autumns at home. But when Lula found a fuzzy worm with a dark band around his belly, she shook her head and muttered, “Trouble. Bad winter coming.”

Lula was right. The cold came fast, harder and deeper with more snow than I had ever known in Opi. Erie froze hard by late November. Night winds cut the walls of our sleeping room and snow dusted the floors. Wet clothes that were hung from the rafters froze stiff by morning. Our plates and mugs were cold, our needles and scissors, even the wood of tables and benches. The Missus put small stoves in the workroom, but charged us for coal and complained that our collars were ill made and she could not sell them. Our fingers stiffened. We bled easily, stained the collars and had to wash them at night in icy water.

In early December, on the day of the Immaculate Conception, the coroner’s wagon stopped at the house across the street. We watched black-caped men hurry up the stairs and return with a small, stiff bundle. “Cut, sew, work!” the Missus demanded. “It’s not your family.”

Yes, Lula discovered the next day, they had come for the red-haired girl. Her father had lost his job and the weakened child died of fever. I still had Assunta’s five pewter buttons and brought them to the mother. “From Italy,” I explained, showing their soft sheen. I had seen such buttons in a store fetching good prices. She could buy food for the baby at least, and perhaps a little coal. Weeping, she thanked me and I hurried home through the blistering wind, aching for Zia’s arms around me at night, the spit of our fire and even the smell of my father’s tobacco. Winter crawled on. Lula thinned our soup. The girls grew angry, demanding more bread.

“And cheese, like we used to have,” Bèla snapped.

Fools, I thought, but said nothing. Didn’t they see that by the next year or the next, there would be no more use for collar girls? Walking home from a delivery I had stopped at a storefront, pressing the bulb of my sock-wrapped hands against the glass to study a display of women’s collars and men’s shirtfronts, all machine made and costing less than ours. Yes, a few fine hand-embroidered collars rested like tiny white crowns on wooden stands, but how many of these could be sold in Cleveland? The Missus was squeezing the last dollars out of a shrinking trade.

What now? The light lift of a needle between my fingers and the slip-whisper of thread through cloth, that was the work I knew. I had walked home slowly despite the cold, stitching a new plan together. I would save money, then go west to Chicago, where rich women roamed grand parks in fine dresses.