Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons (23 page)

"I'll write. I don't know how long it will take."

I broke the embrace first. I did not want to remember him pul ing away from me.

"Stay safe," I said as he turned and walked down the stairs. Come back, I thought, because I'm pregnant again and I don't want to raise this child alone.

CHAPTER 36

Letters from Lawrence

January 18, 1912

My dearest Giulia,

I am writing this on Thursday night from the rooming house where our group from New York has found lodging. In only a week Joe Ettor has organized a strike committee and our leaflets have blanketed the town. On Monday morning, afraid of the message that is reaching the workers, the mayor ordered in the local militia. They are patrol ing the streets—col ege boys from Harvard who have no idea what it means to lose the money in your paycheck that paid for three loaves of bread each week. That is what drove the workers from their looms—a reduction of two hours' pay because of new, faster machines.

Already, the spirit in the streets is alive, crackling. Thousands of workers are marching and picketing, a surge of humanity that is like one organism. Even when repulsed, like storm waves hitting the beach, they surge again. This afternoon, at a demonstration in front of the A&P Mil s, the company goons drenched us with fire hoses. The temperature was so cold that the water turned quickly to ice on the streets, freezing into icicles on the men's beards and the women's eyebrows. But instead of being pushed back and dispersed, the crowd retaliated. The younger ones picked up chunks of dirty, ice-hardened snow along the road and flung it back at the goons. The police, who'd been on the periphery of the crowd, waiting for them to give up in fear, saw that something different was happening. Something defiant, something unified. They moved in and began arresting people, throwing them into wagons. Don't worry. I managed to elude them. They only got a few people— thirty at most—and there are twenty thousand of us stil in the streets. They cannot arrest us al . They cannot ignore us. Per la vita, Paolo

January 29, i912 My darling Giulia,

Another cold and dark night in Lawrence. This afternoon, Joe Ettor spoke to a mass meeting on the Lawrence Common. He is a voice of calm and reason. He has managed to bring together so many nationalities—Italians, Poles, Germans, French, Syrians—with the power of his ideas. No one else could do it— no other union even wanted these poor, unskilled, uneducated ragged folk. I heard him up there on the platform we had built out of scrap wood, a man inspired by the faces in front of him, raw from the cold and the days of picketing, but warmed by the fire of his words. I stood behind him, scribbling down phrases as he spoke them, my fingers clutching my pen as I tried to capture what he was saying. Then he jumped down into the crowd and led them on a march downtown.

While Ettor has been leading the strike, Arturo Giovanitti put together the relief committees. Soup kitchens, food distribution, doctors—the striking families are being cared for so that no one feels compel ed to go back to work out of desperation.

I cannot express to you how proud I am to be a part of this, to see my people stand up against the tyranny of the mil owners and the complicity and enmity of the government. The governor ordered in the state militia and the state police. They are afraid—of women and children with no weapons except their own sense of justice.

I want you to know how much I miss your loving arms around me. I have only these words that I write to you to warm my soul. Per sempre, Paolo

February 1, 1912

Dearest Giulia,

As you have no doubt read, Ettor and Giovanitti have been arrested, falsely accused of a murder that occurred miles away from where they were. The government believes it can disrupt the strike by imprisoning them. Already, martial law has been imposed. Public meetings have been declared il egal, and even more militiamen are patrol ing the streets. Everywhere you turn stands a soldier with a gun.

But we are not alone. At the behest of the strike committee, I telegrammed the IWW in NewYork. More organizers are on their way to Lawrence, including my compadre, Claudio Tresca, from Naples. Al is not lost. Paolo

February 5, 1912 Dearest Giulia,

It was thril ing. I can stil hear the strains of the "Internationale" sung in nine languages by twenty-five thousand workers. Bil Haywood, one of the leaders of the I WW, arrived on the train this afternoon and fifteen thousand of us met him and carried him to the Common to speak to the others gathered there.

Haywood is ful of tactics for passive resistance. We picket the mil s constantly, our white armbands proclaiming our unity.

My beloved, I know I have asked so much of you already by leaving you alone while I fight this battle. But I have one more request.

Because the strike shows no sign of waning, we think it best to find a safe place for the children, away from the danger here. The Italian Socialist Federation is organizing safe homes for them. I beg you, take one or two of these children into our home. I know you wil care for them as the loving mother you wil one day become to our own children. Let these children experience your warmth while I am away from you. Yours forever, Paolo

CHAPTER 37

The Children's Exodus

Because he asked me, I said yes. My family, of course, was outraged. Claudio was already irritated that Paolo had Hone to Lawrence. He was less concerned about Paolo's leaving me alone than the fact that he had no one he trusted managing the Palace. It meant that Claudio's activities were constrained; that he had to spend more time at the Palace. Claudio didn't like the monotony and restrictions of shopkeeping, or maintaining the day-to-day life of a business. Instead, he preferred to be out in the world, sniffing out the next deal. His presence every night was a burden for me, as well. It provided too many opportunities for him to watch me and criticize me. When he heard about the children from my sisters, he came storming into the Palace's kitchen.

"What's this I hear from Til y—that you're going to take in some brats from Lawrence? You don't have time to help Angelina with our kids anymore, but you can be a foster mother to strangers?"

Pip's concern, on the other hand, was not my unavailability to be a nanny to Claudio's brood, but the hygiene of the children. "Do you have any idea how filthy they are? They live like animals in the tenements. They'll be ful office and disease. How can you bring them into your home? And how do you know they won't rob you of what little you have?"

But I would not be swayed. Paolo had begged me to do this, and besides, my heart went out to the mothers trying to care for their children in the midst of al the unrest. In my eyes, these women, as poor and il iterate as they were, were trying to do right by their families. The least I could do was ease their burden somewhat by putting a roof over their children's heads.

I got Claudio to drive me into Manhattan the day the children were to arrive by train. Always looking for ways to appear as prosperous as the American bankers who disdained his success, he had bought one of Henry Ford's Model T town cars the year before and was happy to show it off in Manhattan.

I had packed a basket with some bread fil ed with peppers and eggs, and I'd col ected some warm clothing—

coats and mittens and socks—that Hora’s children had outgrown. I was unprepared for the spectacle that greeted us. Thousands of socialists from the Italian Federation had gathered to welcome the children. Bands played, banners were flying. I worried about finding the children in the confusion. But somehow, despite the presence of so many supporters, I found them, thanks to the good planning of the women who'd conceived of and organized the children's exodus.

As we drove back to Mount Vernon, they sat in the back seat of the car, wrapped in the too-big coats and devouring my sandwiches. A brother and sister, Tino and Evelina, their pale but clean faces took everything in

—Claudio's car, the city outside the windows, the strange lady in the front seat speaking their language.

When we got to Mount Vernon, Claudio left us at the palace. I led them upstairs to the apartment, where I'd made beds for them in the front room. They had nothing with them, not even a paper bag with a nightshirt or a hairbrush.

The first thing I did was draw them a hot bath in the tub in the kitchen. Their bodies were so scrawny, so undernourished.

I put them in two of Paolo's old nightshirts, gave them each a hot bowl of minestrone and put them to bed.

The younger one, Evelina, was only five. She sucked her thumb and barely spoke, but she was trembling and close to tears. I took her in my lap in the rocking chair Paolo had bought me to rock our own children in and that I hadn't been able to bring myself to use. I sang her every children's song I could think of. She final y fel asleep, her head heavy and damp against my breast. The baby inside me had not yet begun to flutter and kick. Instead, I held this silent little girl and dreamed that one day I'd hold my own daughter like this.

Tino and Evelina stayed for a month, until the strike was settled. It was sending the children away that had turned the tide. There was so much public sympathy for them that the mayor of Lawrence ordered a halt to the trips. The next time a group attempted to leave, the police attacked the mothers and children, beating them back from the train station. It was a horrific scene, captured by newspapers al over America.

After that, the workers of Lawrence were not alone. Protests and outrage spread around the country, and the mil owners had no alternative but to settle.

The children of Lawrence went home as Paolo returned. They were well fed. I had stitched each of them some warm clothing. I'd learned how to keep a child stil long enough to braid her hair and had taught them both the letters of the alphabet and how to write their names.

By the time Paolo walked in the door again, my bel y was rounded with our own child.

CHAPTER 38

Waiting

There was no hiding that I was pregnant again. But this time, no other woman carrying a child would look at me for fear that her own baby would fol ow mine into death. If they had to pass me on the street they'd walk to the other side. Old women offered me advice. Eat this. Don't drink that. Don't climb. Don't bend. Don't carry.

Pray to Saint Anne. Pray to Saint Jude.

Paolo walked around in a haze of guilt.

"Giulia will die next time!" Pip screamed at him the night we let them al know another was on the way.

He was afraid to touch me, convinced that his passion for me, undiminished after more than three years of marriage, was to blame for the babies' not surviving. We slept separately—I alone in our bed, crying myself softly to sleep, Paolo on the sofa in the front room, tossing fitful y. It was a lonely time. Most nights, he stayed downstairs at the Palace til early in the morning, playing cards with my cousin or writing music to keep from facing sleep alone. I had no such refuge. I fel into bed exhausted from the routines of the day, from the growing heaviness of my body, from the fears of what stil lay before me. I listened for the sound of life within me. I measured the vigor of a kick.

Worry fil ed my nights. The racket of clattering wagons from the street outside, the tinkling of glass and murmured voices downstairs, the shouting from the Colavitas' apartment across the al ey—all kept me awake and thinking. This wasn't good for the baby, I thought, lying on my pil ow, tears trickling in rivulets down my neck.

During the day, the other women tried to make little of my experience.

"You're not the first to lose a baby, Giulia. Look at Maria Fanel i, at Rosa Spina. Every time they're pregnant they miscarry. Face it. It happens. What are you going to do, stop making love to Paolo? It's life."

"You can't dwell on these things, it'll make you crazy, like Jenny DeVito, remember her? That girl never carried a baby past three months. Started talking to herself, cut off al her hair. They say her husband got some putana in Napoli pregnant because he wanted a son and was convinced Jenny would never give him one. At least you're holding on to them, Giulia. They grow with al their parts. You'll get there. And if you don't, you don't. It's what God gives you."

I tried to keep in my head what it had been like in Venticano with Giuseppina. I knew that not al the babies she birthed actual y lived. I knew this was a part of a woman's life. But the fear that I'd never be able to bear a living child consumed me. I listened to the way other women talked about childless neighbors. How pitiful! God spare me from the fate of my own sister Letitia—eight years married and never even pregnant, praying novenas and making pilgrimages to bless her with a child.

Sometimes I thought that if Giuseppina had been here she'd know what to do. She knew how to help my mother. My mother bore nine children, al living, breathing, whole. Frankie's twin was three months old when he died, so it wasn't like dying at birth. What had Giuseppina done? What secrets? What herbs? I didn't remember anymore. The older women here, women like my Zi'Yolanda, I did not trust. They didn't have the secrets, the knowing that Giuseppina did. They offered a mishmash of household remedies. The nurses from the Social Service came and tried to teach them about germs and hygiene and they half listened. Partly they didn't understand, especial y when the nurses shouted at them in baby English and made pantomimes with their hands. After the nurses left, the women laughed at their naivete, their modern ideas. But sometimes, in spite of their disdain for American ideas, those ideas crept into what they did and they started to forget the old ways. Or they never learned the old ways in the first place.

Yolanda wasn't very smart. She "dropped" her babies, she said, without a thought, without a worry. She could not understand my sleeplessness.

My mother wrote me with advice.

"Get into bed," she cautioned, when she learned of my third pregnancy. "Let the others do for you."