When We Were Strangers (22 page)

“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.”

It was past midnight when the last patient had been seen. The gaunt woman, Harriet, was moving slowly through the room, helping Enrico clean. Two husky men—Salvatore the granita vendor and his friend—were ordered to deliver me to the boardinghouse. “Take care,” the signora warned. “Make sure she’s safe, you understand?” They did as she ordered, and each Friday night all the rest of that spring and summer, they or other men she appointed—Germans, Slovaks, Greeks, Poles or Finns—walked me home after my work at the clinic.

Chapter Eleven
Sofia

I remember that Chicago summer
as a long hurry through steaming streets, sweat-soaked linens pasted to my skin. Even the once-fresh breezes off Lake Michigan were like the hot, moist panting of a heaving beast. Pressed under a close white sky, the air grew spongy. Clydesdales strained at their harnesses. Flanks foaming, heads down, they plowed the streets dragging water barrels, beer kegs and huge blocks of ice. Rains brought sucking mud but no relief.

“Still we must be clean and fresh for our ladies,” Madame Hélène insisted. So twice weekly in Mrs. Gaveston’s kitchen I pumped water, scrubbed my garments, and hung them out to dry. The next evening I did ironing, stoking a coal fire to heat and reheat the flatirons. Sweat rolled down my face and arms as I mopped myself with kitchen rags, careful not to stain the crisp calico. Fine ladies wanted no reminder of the city’s milling crowds, prairie dust and mucky streets or the heady stew of smells from packed streetcars and immigrant markets where I bought healing roots and herbs. Certainly they did not want to imagine the stifling tenements of those who used Signora D’Angelo’s clinic.

“It’s
our
clinic, Irma,” she began insisting. “And please call me Sofia. I hardly pay you; at least we should be friends.”

I was as much Sofia’s shadow as her friend that summer, following her with books and bandages, flying up narrow stairways with her, towed by anxious, ragged children who watched for our coming.

“My father coughed blood all night. He can’t work and we’re so hungry.”

“My baby shakes all over. What’s wrong with him?”

“My aunt talks crazy. She scares me.”

“The Polish kid fell down the stairs and now his leg sticks out like this.”

“My mother’s bleeding
there
. Please come quick!”

I tried to be as calm with the sick as Sofia was, to not hold back from the smells of their bodies or wretched homes. I watched her coax smiles from a dying man and stood with her in tiny kitchens as she took a young mother’s hand and said, “Keep the baby comfortable. There’s nothing more we can do.” Strong young men wept in her arms and anxious children spoke their fears.

When a woman lost her unborn twins in a torrent of blood, I helped Sofia clean the wizened gray bodies for the funeral her faith required, but then sank on the stairs as we left the flat. “I can’t do this, Sofia. I’ll make bandages, I’ll clean tools, but I can’t watch so many children die.”

“You cared for sheep,” Sofia reminded me. “You’ve seen them die.” Yes, all my life I had seen lambs born dead, sheep slaughtered or torn open by wolves. I had helped nurse their many troubles: bluetongue, rabies, swayback, sore mouth, rickets and worms of every kind, but in a family of shepherds, you can’t weep over each dead lamb. There was no call for cruelty and I never hated them as Carlo did, but neither did I see myself in their glassy black eyes. Nothing prepared me for women who seized our hands and cried, “Help him! Make him well again!”

There were joys, of course, and cures that seemed miraculous. Two men carried in their friend, flushed and clawing at his chest. “Pounding—hammer,” he gasped. Sofia forced the man’s mouth open, dosed him with a tiny pill and I watched dumbfounded as the hand unclenched, the breathing eased and the man slowly stood upright. “It’s gone!” he whispered, his eyes darting about the room as if hunting out the pain lurking in a corner. He tried to kiss Sofia’s hand but she stepped back to her desk and wrote a prescription.

“I just gave you digitalis, a medicine for angina pectoris. It can’t fix the heart, but it stops these attacks for a while. Vittorio can sell you a bottle.” The man nodded and took the slip of paper, but still he stared at Sofia as if she had cast out demons.

An Irish couple brought their small son, who had suddenly changed from a bright, active, happy child to a sullen little stranger. Sofia examined Rory as he solved a wooden puzzle, wolfed down a slice of bread and caught a ball she threw him. “Smart enough,” she muttered, “good appetite and reflexes.” She peered in his ears, then stepped back and had me look. “Irma, what do you see?”

“Wax.”

“Hum. Bring two men to hold the child,” she said and added in Italian: “If you have a choice, don’t use the parents. They never hold tight enough.” In fact, it took three adults to wrestle a howling, biting Rory to the table and hold him steady as Sofia used a tiny pair of tweezers and one of my needles to pry a dried pea from each of his ears.

“He
is
a good boy,” Sofia told the mother, handing her the peas. “He just couldn’t hear you.”

“How did you know?” I demanded when they left. “How did you
see
?”

“The wax was bulged. You’ll learn what to look for,” Sofia said. At least I could wash and bandage wounds as well as she did, wrapping the gauze tight and smooth, copying her as I had copied Madame Hélène’s pleats and gathers. I clipped my fingernails as closely as she did and rolled my sleeves above the elbows like a peasant girl. I even hemmed my skirts, although Mrs. Gaveston raised an arched eyebrow when she glimpsed the knob of my ankle and Molly caught me in the hall to ask, “Irma, do you want
that
to happen again?”

No, of course not. But carrying bandages and books up tenement steps left no free hand to gracefully lift a skirt. And yes, if I ever needed to outrun a man
,
shorter skirts would help. Work filled my days and mind that summer, dulling the memories of
his
belt falling on shards of glass, the thrusts and shame, his striped pants leaving the charred house, and the hot rush of blood when Sofia’s tools opened me up and I was emptied of a life I could not bear. Work, I must constantly work. When laughter gushed from the open windows of dance halls, it was not calling me.

“Why not?” Molly demanded. “Because of—what happened?”

Partly, but also because I was plain and scarred, with heavy feet for dancing. Only old men had ever cared for me: a priest, a tin peddler and a ragman.

“What about that sailor?” coaxed Molly. “He wasn’t old.”

Yes, I thought of Gustavo on the
Servia
, especially at night as shadows drifting across my ceiling became waves rippling over an indigo sea or faint cracks in the plaster bent into lines in the drawing he once sent me. “I don’t have his address,” I reminded Molly, “and he doesn’t have mine. Besides, he’s a sailor. He could be anywhere. With anyone.”

“That’s for sure,” Molly agreed readily, “but at least he was one young man pleased to be passing time with you. You could find another. It’s a big city.”

But I had little time for searching. My week was pieced in services. Monday to Saturday, I worked for Madame, starting early to profit from the cooler mornings. On Monday evenings Sofia and I made tenement calls. Fridays after work we held the clinic. Late nights after washing or ironing, I memorized lists of symptoms and cures. Tuesday and Thursday evenings I studied English in a cramped community hall on the North Side, where we read aloud from newspapers as blue-eyed Miss McGuire cajoled away our foreign accents.

“Wind
,” she repeated earnestly. “Hold
wrists
to your mouths.
Wind
,
wonder
,
where
.
W’s whisper
on the
wrist
. Repeat and then write all the ‘w’ words that you know.”

On Sundays, on streetcars, in any slice of time, I made embroideries for Molly to sell. The hollow of Wednesday night was soon filled. At the corner grocery with Molly, I watched two sisters fresh from Calabria struggle to buy flour, salt and sugar, pointing and miming for the stolid grocer who folded his arms across a doughy chest and told me he was sick and tired of helping greenhorns all day. When I translated for them and checked their change, the women kissed me. How long since I had been held like this, my cheeks softened with kisses?

“What are they, some kind of cousins?” Molly whispered.

“Teach us English,” the women begged. “At least enough for stores.” I protested that I was learning English myself, that I had never taught and had no books. “Please, Signorina.”

“Why not?” asked Molly, who had fished the word “Inglese” from our talk. “You speak pretty well for a foreigner. But charge them something.
Somebody
should pay you, since the doctor lady barely does. Didn’t you say you had to send some money back to Cleveland?”

Yes, I had told her that, but not why—that the money I had stolen from the workhouse Missus had begun to gnaw at me. In confession at Church of the Assumption, I had recounted my story to Father Paolo, how the Missus robbed us and tried to turn Lula against me. “Stealing from a saint or stealing from a sinner is stealing just the same, is it not?” he intoned.

“Yes, Father.”

“Suppose Lula was blamed for your theft? That would go hard for a Negro.”

I had never thought of how I might have hurt Lula, my first American friend. “But I can’t pay it all back now.”

“You could start, my child.”

So each Wednesday night a dozen men and women crowded into a kitchen that the Calabrese girls shared with their aunt. Each student gravely counted out ten cents for the lesson. The bolder ones fingered my dress. Women touched my braids, tried my shoes and leaned close to stare at my mouth when I spoke. They called out sentences in Italian and asked, “How do you Americans say this?”
You Americans
.

“I’ve only been here two years,” I reminded them.

“Yes, but you’re different already, you’re not like us,” a girl from Bari insisted.

“How? Tell me.
How
am I different?”

The girl shook her head as if the truth were too obvious for debate. Croatian, Polish and Russian neighbors soon discovered these Wednesdays. Someone found a larger room, where more crowded in, bringing stools or leaning against walls. They mimed their skills and tools and I fed them words:
carpenter, bricklayer,
butcher,
cook, barkeeper,
laborer,
hammer,
anvil,
oven,
shovel.
A bearded Armenian yanked a gleaming knife from his boot, flashed it in the air and showed with a flourish how neatly it cleaved a hair from his head. I had him stow the weapon and repeat, “I am a skilled metalworker.”

Soon I could mail five dollars to Cleveland with a letter my English teacher corrected, my first in English. The Missus sent a curt reply: she had always thought me ungrateful and liable to betray any trust. However, she accepted this first repayment and expected the next installments “with all due speed.” Lula, she wrote bitterly, “married that darky soon after you left.” So Lula was gone and safe, I could happily tell Father Paolo, and I would repay my debt before September.

“Listen, Irma,” said Molly. “Let’s do something fun at least once this summer.”

“You should,” said Sofia.

So on the Fourth of July, when even Madame Hélène closed her shop, I went with Molly to a grand celebration by Lake Michigan with bands and speeches, a stilt walker called Uncle Sam, ice cream and balloons. Children flew like bright birds across the lawn chasing hoops. German peddlers sold boiled sausages in long buns and fireworks burst over the lake: red, white and blue sparkles drifted into the dark water.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” shouted Molly. “Nothing like this at home.” Yes, beautiful, like the night on deck of the
Servia
, a blue-black sky stitched with stars.

In the long, slow walk back to the boardinghouse, savoring our ice cream, Molly asked what drew me to dressmaking. “I can sew, of course,” said Molly. “Every girl learns that. But why do you love it?” I tried to explain how fabric will bend and stretch to take the shape we willed it, how thread can paint pictures. I described the magic when suddenly bodice joins sleeves, the skirt is attached and a gown appears. But the truth was that my old joy had begun to drain away.

Our best clients, the Cooley and Glessners women—“railroad queens,” we called them—wanted private fittings at home. I was sent to kneel on thick Persian carpets to mark hems, watch them pose before silver-edged mirrors and sit with them on damask couches to study fabric samples that I drew from Madame’s carpet bag.

“Tell me about the houses,” Molly pleaded, and I tried, but the sitting rooms flowed together, alike in shimmer and gleam and in the sighing indecision of ladies comparing samples of satin or Chinese silk for yet another summer garden party.

“I don’t
know
. What do
you
think, Irma?” they asked in bleating whines. When Mrs. Cooley hugged me, so delighted with her daughter’s wedding gown that she forgot her place and mine, French cologne lingered on my smock. The streetcar conductor scanned me, doubtless wondering how a shop girl could smell so much of money.

“One of those fancy dresses costs more than our farm rent in Galway,” an Irish maid said bitterly as she walked me out to the service door. “Think about that!”

I did. I thought more and more of money in those months. By late July, Madame Hélène was sending me to wholesale houses to choose fabrics, facings, buttons and bindings, for my English was better and I drove harder bargains than she did. In the same warehouses, chiseling time from these services, I bought cheap bolt ends of gauze to cut into bandages. In a tiny shop near Mercy Hospital, I found suture thread and surgeon’s needles. I begged Jacob for odd lengths of cloth we used for arm slings and bindings. “A little profit you’ll permit me?” he lamented.