Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (13 page)

She patiently endured a dramatic recitation beyond her limited English. Then came a storm of acts: ventriloquists, Blackstone the magician, acrobats, tragic scenes from Shakespeare, tap dancers with black-painted faces, and fast-talking comics who had the audience howling with laughter. Of course it was the singers who transfixed Mamma, first Nora Bayes and then the White Tscherkess Trio, a man and two women who with deft changes of costume and scenery created opera scenes as effortlessly as Blackstone pulled garlands of flowers from the air.

“Look at your mother,” Yolanda whispered. “She’s like one of those Egyptian things we read about, the finks.”

“Sphinx,”
I corrected, but it was true that Mamma hadn’t moved since the show began. At the intermission, she shook herself as if waking from sleep.

“Did you hear people cheering for Nora Bayes?” she demanded. “Let’s come back next week when I get paid.” Donato explained that Miss Bayes could be gone next week to another city. Mamma’s eyes glittered. “Really? The singers travel?”

“They probably don’t have families,” I added quickly.

“They could,” Yolanda said. “They might send money home. Imagine how much, with all these people buying tickets.”

Mamma nodded thoughtfully. Her eyes glittered as they did at the flush of laudanum, wide and wet, cut loose from reason. I wished the vaudeville show were over and we were back in our room. It seemed as if a thick velvet curtain had slipped between us.

N
APLES
N
IGHTINGALE

A late snow
had fallen during the show, as if winter, having once nested in Cleveland, had no mind to leave. We walked home through a froth of slush. “Sara and little Clara will be here soon,” Donato announced, explaining yet again how their life would be. After mass each Sunday they’d go to Lake View Park for Clara to play with American children. They’d see moving pictures at the nickelodeon and vaudeville at the Empire. My tales of villa life reeled out for Mrs. Miller’s ladies were scarcely more distant from my own childhood than his happy plans, yet these were no fantasies: Donato already knew which streetcar lines went to the park and which playgrounds drew the most American children.

“Maybe Charlie’s parents could come to a vaudeville show with us,” Yolanda mused. “Even Protestants would like vaudeville, don’t you think, Signora Teresa?”

Mamma barely looked up from her feet imprinting the slush, only asked again if we’d heard the applause for Nora Bayes and her harvest song. The next day she came home with a piano roll for “Shine On, Harvest Moon” and fed it into the player before taking off her coat. “Teach me the words,” she demanded. I was often exasperated by my mother’s blithe refusal to improve her halting English, yet she drank in English lyrics like water, perfectly pronouncing every word. “Silly song,” she concluded after my translation. “And a sleepy tune. But you heard how people like it.”

After dinner, she set herself to practicing while I studied mathematics. This semester we were learning to graph equations. “You
like
that work?” Yolanda often asked, astonished. I did. I found peace in letters and numbers. I buried myself in equations on days I saw Henryk with Miriam or heard her laughing and talking with girls who clustered around as if her beauty could be contagious. As Mamma sang “Shine on, shine on, harvest moon,” I set myself a problem: If moonlight comes at angle
x,
traveling
y
distance to earth, how far above us is the moon?

Three days after the vaudeville show, Mamma missed dinner. I fretted, then panicked and tried to persuade Donato to go out with me and look for her. “Look where?” he asked reasonably. “It’s a big city. Maybe she’s with a friend.”

“She doesn’t have friends.”

“It’s only eight o’clock. Show me some geometry.” Reluctantly, I brought down my notebook, pencil, compass, and ruler. Distracted, constantly checking the parlor clock, I constructed right triangles as Donato feigned great interest in the Pythagorean theorem.

Mamma came home past nine, swept me upstairs, and pushed the warped door tightly closed behind us. “Lucia, listen. I could be the Singing Angel of Naples!”

“The what?”

“The Singing Angel of Naples, my new stage name,” she explained as if to a simpleton: “Toscanini kept me out of opera, but I could do vaudeville. I sing as well as Nora Bayes, don’t I?”

“Yes, of course, but vaudeville singers travel, remember?” Away from Cleveland. Away from me.

“Yes, all the time, just like Donato said. Who’d come if the acts were always the same? In a big city like this, they stay a week and in a small one a day or two.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I went to the Empire and heard two men speaking Italian. So I—”

“You went to the Empire?”

“Yes, listen. One was Mario, the juggler clown in blue. Remember him?”

“No, but never mind. You met Mario.”

“Yes, he’s from Sorrento. I sang the harvest song for him on the street, and then we went to a tavern and he told me all about vaudeville.”

“I see.” If my mother had begun reciting Shakespeare or revealed a passionate interest in mathematics, I couldn’t have been more astonished. When had she ever gone to taverns with strange men? “But, Mamma, I thought after the San Carlo and the guards—”

She waved this memory away like a bothersome fly. “That was
opera.
Vaudeville is different.” I nodded, a little dazed.

With growing fervor she explained how smaller acts might be picked up or switched with other troupes in new cities. The first number was always a “dumb act” of jugglers or clowns as latecomers straggled in. Big names, who earned more, came after intermission. She explained the sequence of acts and how nothing in bad taste or risqué was permitted, so the clergymen in small towns wouldn’t preach against vaudeville. In fact, clergy often got free tickets.

The ground rocked under my feet. Since we’d come to Cleveland, her life had spooled between work, home, church, Hiram House, Catalano’s for Italian foods, and music stores with Italian clerks where she bought and traded piano rolls. Once again new truths about my mother dashed over me like a bone-freezing winter wave.

She sat on our bed, the luster fading from her face. “Lucia, the truth is, I
can’t
work in factories anymore. It’s too dangerous.”

“Dangerous? You mean the machines?”

“No, my danger’s here.” She pointed to her head. “Even now, in this room with you, I’m still
there
at Printz-Biederman
,
passing sleeves left to right. I could die, still passing sleeves left to right. I sing and talk to myself to keep from melting into my machine. The other girls stitch, stitch, stitch. They never make mistakes. Sometimes I make mistakes on purpose just to prove I’m not one of them. Maybe I
am
a hysteric, like Dr. Galuppi said.”

“Mamma, he was a—” What did Americans say? “A
quack
.”

She shook her head. “The bad thoughts don’t go away here, even at the lake. There’s no Vesuvius. It’s cold and the water’s gray.” Her eyes were very big. I moved closer and put my arm around her.

“Let me work more, Mamma, and you rest awhile. I can finish school later, when you feel better.”

“No. The bad thoughts can’t get out.” She beat at her head. “They’re like claws inside. You know what I mean?”

“No, Mamma.”

“It’s Little Stingler’s fault.” She held her hand in front of her face. “He’s
here,
all the time, what he did, what I wanted to do to him.”

I froze. “What did he do?”

She looked out the window at a maple tree just starting to haze with green. Her voice went flat. “On my last day, he said I had to get paid in his office. I was ready. I’m always ready. See?”

I gasped as she lifted her skirt. A slim-handled street fighter’s knife was strapped to her calf. She put this on each morning and I never knew? When did she even buy it? The skirt dropped down. “He said I could still keep my job if I let him take me like a dog, from behind, against his desk. A dog because I was insolent, not ‘appreciative’ like the other girls. He takes
them
from the front.”

“The bastard.” I tried to picture him with Mamma, but all I saw was blackness.

Her voice went on, fierce and driving. “I pulled out my knife and showed where I’d cut if he touched me. I’d geld him. No more little stallion. He understood that much Italian.”

“Mamma!”

She laughed. “The cock messed his trousers. Served him right. He said he’d have me locked up forever. The old man happened to come in just then. It was one of his good days. He made Little Stingler pay me and let me go.” She grabbed my shoulders, shaking them until my head rattled. “Lucia, if the old man hadn’t come, if his brain had been soft that day, I would have cut Little Stingler. You understand? My hands burned to do it. I could have gelded him and walked away. Then what? I’d be in jail or worse, an asylum with doctors like Galuppi. At Printz-Biederman, sometimes,” she continued, as if noting that the parlor needed dusting, “it’s all I can do not to tear my machine apart. The one I’m
renting,
” she finished bitterly. “So I have to try for vaudeville. It’s my only chance, Lucia.
Our
only chance.”

Her rages had frightened me at the villa, but this placid calm was more terrifying.
Reason,
I thought frantically
, have her be reasonable
. “Remember Toscanini, Mamma? You tried to sing for him and we ended up in trouble. A vaudeville maestro might be rude like him. Then what would you do? You said yourself that if Old Stingler wasn’t there—”

“Mario said nobody’s rude at auditions. When the manager, Mr. B. F. Keith, is in town, you go onstage and show your act. If he says ‘Next,’ he doesn’t want you. ‘Have a seat’ means he might want you. He’ll tell me to have a seat.” Her eyes blazed with certainty, as if Mario had given her a magic spell for Mr. Keith.

“But you thought Toscanini would take you and he didn’t.”

“That was because I surprised him. And,” she rushed on, “when I’m in vaudeville I’ll send you money. You can finish school. You can buy all the books you want. Mario said the pay starts at thirty dollars a week
with
room and board. Thirty, Lucia!”

With thirty a small family could eat chicken on Sunday and buy coal all winter. The mother wouldn’t need to work. They could have four rooms and the children could finish school. But we didn’t need thirty dollars, I thought frantically. We needed the life we had right now, with her happy, just that one change. “But, Mamma, we’d be apart.” Difficult, unstable, unreasonable, sometimes selfish, still she’d been my world. I’d never slept apart from her. If she left me so easily to sing for strangers, what was I worth? Who would truly care for me in Cleveland? I’d be one more immigrant girl, adrift like an abandoned boat.

“I’ll see you when the show’s in Cleveland, or you could take a train to Chicago when I’m there. I’ll be happy. I won’t have to go walking at night,” she went on, as if spinning out one of her tales of poor fishermen transported to bejeweled mermaids’ palaces. Just as Paolo had arranged our leaving Naples, a new life was being arranged around me. She took my hands. “Lucia, of course I’ll miss you. I’ve never loved anybody but you. I have a bad temper. I don’t say sweet things. But when I sing, it’s for you. Can you understand this?” She stood up suddenly. “Anyway, I
have
to try vaudeville. Factory work makes me crazy. Do you want me to be a servant again?”

“No, Mamma, but—”

“You do your homework. I have to practice.”

And then she was gone, back downstairs to the piano. A good daughter should be happy for her mother, I told myself. But would a good mother leave? Were her needs so much greater than mine? Had she kept me from the rich Roman lady only to leave me now? Still, in my waves of anxiety and fear came the utterly selfish thrill of youth: I could stop serving Mrs. Miller’s lunches and buy a dress for dances. I could finish high school and even go to college. I could stay at the boardinghouse, easily paying room and board. Mamma wouldn’t be dead, only distant. She wouldn’t have to work like a machine, paying rent on her own machine. She would be singing, her one true joy. How could I begrudge her this?

But all these outcomes, good and bad, rested on the slightest chance that she’d be accepted in a vaudeville troupe and this would bring her peace. Rage had stalked her from Naples to Cleveland. Could she outrun it on the stage? Wasn’t it more likely that Mr. B. F. Keith would say “Next,” forcing her back to Printz-Biederman? With no escape, a new provocation might call out her knife. Disappointment could break her spirit. That evening I didn’t work a single equation. I opened the door and lay on our bed as her gorgeous voice floated up from the parlor, the voice that had serenaded me all my life and now might leave for cities I didn’t even know. I wished I was far away, not on this narrow bed, but on the warm waves of our other life when we swam in the moonlight. Would we ever have such peace again?

A week ago, I could have easily shared my fears with Yolanda, but she had quit school to work in a hat-trimming shop. It was Sunday afternoon before we could go walking together. First I had to hear about hat shapes and styles, ostrich, parrot, and partridge feathers, dried and silk flowers and the subtly distinctive traits of each. Yolanda even looked different now that she was working, more solid and matronly. She saw me studying her. “So you know. You can see it. Anyone can.”

“See what?”

“That I’m pregnant.”

It’s true that this thought had flitted by, but I’d dismissed it. Yolanda belonged to
my
world, not the somber realm of mothers. I stumbled through the obvious questions. Yes, she was sure. Yes, Charlie knew. He had not denied her. “He wants to get married. He found a new job at the Bessemer Limestone Company in Youngstown. By the time the baby’s born, he’ll have the down payment for a company house. I’ll live with his parents until then.” Her voice dropped. “My mother says I’ve shamed our family.” I found a bench, and she sat down heavily, pressed against the wrought iron.