Swimming in the Moon: A Novel

Dedication

To the memory of my father,
Erwin Schoenewaldt, who lived the joy
and the dignity of work

Contents

S
INGING TO
V
ESUVIUS

I spend hours
in trains now or shivering in borrowed Model Ts, bouncing down rutted roads between towns strewn like rocks across frozen fields. I wash in sinks and eat at roadside stands or from china plates, served by ladies with more wealth hung on their bodies than I’ll ever hold. I speak in parlors and parks, taverns, churches, and drafty union halls in the great Midwest. I can’t go home to Cleveland yet. “Believe me. You
can
win,” I tell those whose bodies are deformed by long hours in factories and mills. My voice grows ragged and rough, harsh as a crow’s. Who would guess my mother was the Naples Nightingale?

I ask for water, clear my throat, and say: “This is 1913. Your lives
can
change. Think of your children.” Workers stare, disbelieving. When their doubts claw me, I hear my mother whisper: “Lucia, even crows must breathe.” So I take a breath, plant my feet as singers do, and go on. When women kiss and thank me and men’s work-roughed hands press mine, then the torments of this path, the jail slabs where I’ve slept, the betrayal of friends, and the ache for those abused when I’d sworn they’d be safe, all these things have their purpose.

If our maps show rivers, lakes, or canals, I ask to see them, even when the shallows reek and oil slicks the water. I stand on shorelines and feel my body easing after so many hours of work. Inside laced shoes, my feet are bare again. I’m wading in the Bay of Naples, that warm scoop of blue held in a green embrace, watching the bright bob of fishing boats and hearing peddlers’ cries. It’s my last summer in Italy, and I’m still Lucia Esposito, passing out of childhood and content enough with my life. Mamma and I are servants to Contessa Elisabetta Monforte in her rosy villa that juts into the bay. I was born in the kitchen and never in my fourteen years slept anywhere but on a narrow cot with Mamma.

Where else would I go? Lemon, orange, fig, and golden plum trees filled the orchard. Lilacs and bougainvillea climbed our walls. On Sunday afternoons, our half-days off, we took bread and wine to the great flat rock turned like a stage to the cone of Vesuvius. If Nannina, the cook, was in good humor, we’d have chunks of cheese and earthen bowls of pasta with beans. Tomatoes and sweet peppers that birds had nibbled were ours. Ripe lemons dropped from trees; we scooped them in our skirts.

“I saw lemons at the fruit market,” says a young man from the union hall.

“Were they as big as two fists, with dimpled skin?” I ask. “Heavy as melons and nearly as sweet? Were the skins warm from the sun and the flesh inside cool as a sea breeze?”

“No,” he admits, “nothing like that.”

It would be hot on those afternoons along the bay, but not the heavy, coal-thick heat of American cities. Summer in Naples brought a soft, wrapping warmth. Our linen shifts, thin with age and damp with sweat, pressed like veils against our bodies. Mamma was beautiful at twenty-eight, with gentle curves, creamy skin, almond eyes, and waves of tumbling glossy black hair. Young men with baskets of mussels cut from the cliffs of Posillipo rowed by our rock, calling: “Come out with us, Teresa. You can bring your sister if you want.”

She ignored them or answered back so brusquely that once I asked if it was a mussel diver who had pushed her into the seaweed when she was just fourteen and made her pregnant with me. “No, it was someone from a costume ball. The bastard wore a mask.”

“Sing to me,” I’d beg in times like these, when anger darkened her face and her body shook. Then she’d turn toward Vesuvius, the brooding mound she loved so much, and sing “Maria Marì,” “Santa Lucia,” or “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì” from
La Bohème,
her favorite opera. She’d soften as she sang, letting me unpin her hair, wind it into braids and loops or loosen it across her back. In my earliest memory, I’m plunging my small hands into that silky mass and drawing them up like dolphins from the dark waves.

On those Sunday afternoons, children played on jetties, fishermen mended their nets, and lovers nestled between rocks. All were enchanted by her voice soaring and dipping like a seabird, weightless as wind. I leaned against her shoulder. She held me close, our skin melted together, and she was all that I needed.

I never saw signs that her mind was so fragile, or else I read them wrong. Her sudden rages, the precious porcelain figurines that slipped from her hands by seeming accident to smash on marble floors, the count’s threats to send us both away, and tense conferences between Contessa Elisabetta and Paolo, the majordomo, were the familiar texture of my days. What did I know of other mothers? Only now, looking back, do these signs speak to me as clearly as black woolen clouds over cornfields tell of coming rain.

If I thought of my future in those days, I imagined us both in service to an aging countess. “Lucia, if you read and do sums, you could manage a great house when you’re grown,” Paolo said once when we were alone. A wide smile cracked the solemn face he wore in public rooms, and I was thrilled. But what would Mamma do without me? No, I’d stay in the villa forever.

What would I do without the rock of Paolo’s steady watching out for us? Once I mused aloud how sweet our lives would be if he were my father. Mamma and I were dusting the sitting room perfumed with lilacs that framed the high windows. Her face turned wistful, then darkened like the moon masked by clouds. “Well he’s not your father,” she snapped, dusting a porcelain shepherd girl so roughly that it toppled. I lunged across the carpet to catch it.

“But
all
men can’t be so bad—” Her glare withered my words. When I reset the little shepherd girl, her silly painted face seemed to mock me, saying: “
I
have a good father.”

“Leave me alone! Go help Nannina,” Mamma snapped. So I was banished to the kitchen again and set to scrubbing crusted pots.

“What now?” Nannina demanded. I confessed my grating fear: that Mamma saw
him,
the masked bastard, whenever she looked at me. How could I dig him out of me? Hot tears dug holes in the billowing suds.

“Here,” said Nannina, handing me a slice of yesterday’s bread softened with ricotta. “First, lots of people don’t know their fathers, more than you think. And second, that man made you. Do you want to be not born?”

“No, but sometimes she’s so—”

“
Difficult
. I know. But she loves you. She loves only you. Remember that.”

“Unstable,”
I’d overheard the count complain to Paolo. I pictured Mamma standing on a tottering rock in rough waters, unstable.

With nightfall, her anger faded. As she brushed and braided my hair for sleep, I tried, as I often did, to have her ease her mood with stories. “Tell me about your father, Mamma.”

“He was a—choirmaster.” And another fantasy began. Her father was a handsome fisherman, no, no, a cameo carver, a fencing master, an actor from Paris, a German prince. Once, after wine at a street fair: a magical fish-god. Now she muttered: “Here’s the truth: he left us and then my mother and brothers died of cholera. I found work with the countess and had you.” She never spoke of him again and I understood that we had no family but ourselves. We lived in the villa by Paolo and Countess Elisabetta’s good graces. “Close your eyes,” she said softly, “and I’ll sing you to sleep.”

Early the next morning as we swept the terrazzo, she suddenly stopped and hugged me fiercely. “My little Santa Lucia. Nothing bad will ever happen to us. Nothing!”

“No, Mamma, of course not.”

Just as suddenly, she set to work again, declaring it was my turn to spin a story. I made us mermaids in a watery villa where the sea washed all dust and dirt away, brought us food, and polished our coral dishes. We slept on seaweed beds that needed no ironed linen sheets. “We can read all day,” I continued dreamily. Mamma’s creamy brow creased as if this were the strangest fantasy of all.

Looking back, I find it odd that I never thought of leaving Naples. In 1905 ships sailed constantly for America. Peddlers, day laborers, fishermen, even water boys had someone “over there.” Paolo and Nannina, our gardener, Luigi, and Alma the laundress all had photographs of family and friends in America. Old Bernardo’s marionette shows about his brother’s adventures in New York featured splendid painted backdrops of the Statue of Liberty and magnificent palaces on Fifth Avenue. Yet none of these wonders seemed reason enough to leave Naples.

No, our path to exile began with an octopus the summer I was fourteen. Most summers Count Filippo fled the city heat for his hilltop villa in Capri, his pleasure palace where, Nannina muttered scornfully, “
certain women
entertain him.” That year malaria trapped him with us, restless and querulous. Early one steaming morning in August, he demanded a lunch of pasta with octopus sauce, mozzarella, tomatoes from the slopes of Vesuvius, and lemon gelato from Caffè Gambrinus.

“Dr. Galuppi said to eat lightly,” Countess Elisabetta warned.

“I’ll eat what I damn please,” he roared. So Nannina sent us shopping with orders to hurry home; the sauce took time to prepare. At the fish market Mamma bargained skillfully for a fat octopus and slapped it dead. The Big Olive Man filled our jar, and then we bought tomatoes, bread, and milky balls of mozzarella. Now we carried the heavy basket together.