Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (24 page)

I called up images of my old life as if they could somehow protect me from the new one. These images were perfect as painted postcards: the magenta blaze of bougainvillea and soft hills beyond the city, marble fountains, children playing on jetties by the sea, daily miracles of sunset over water and the floating green island of Capri. Yet even more than I missed all the beauty of Naples, I longed to be a child there again with many duties but no responsibilities, no deep dreams, and nothing that I’d wanted so deeply and then lost.

Fixed as she was on her boardinghouse economies, even Roseanne saw my isolation and offered a small release: “There’s a Valentine’s Day party at Hiram House. I heard they’re teaching American dances. Why don’t you go? I’ll watch your mother.” Dr. Ricci agreed that I could try an evening event.

I protested, they both insisted, and in the end I went. A cheerful American couple demonstrated the turkey trot, a sliding ragtime step with scissor kicks that left us convulsed with laughter when too-exuberant dancers scissored themselves off their feet. In a break between dances, Henryk’s mother and aunt pulled me aside to ask about Mamma. I said she was getting better, even starting to cook. They hovered between curiosity and fear, plying me with questions yet keeping their distance. “Probably a
dybbuk
got her,” the aunt announced. The conversation swerved into Yiddish.

Henryk spoke to them sharply and drew me away. “They shouldn’t talk to you like that.”

“What’s a
dybbuk
?”

“Just a silly superstition from the Old Country. A spirit with unfinished business takes possession of people and makes them mad. It’s nonsense. My aunt’s sister in New York went hysterical last year and drowned herself in the Hudson River. My aunt thinks a
dybbuk
must have gotten her because she’d always been so docile.”

“Mamma
could
have a
dybbuk
,” I said as we watched couples line up for a cakewalk. “According to Dr. Ricci, nobody knows why madness comes or how it can be healed.”

“Whatever happened, I’m sorry it’s happening to you,” Henryk whispered. I looked away and asked about Miriam.

“She’s in Pittsburgh again to take care of her aunt. Maybe this aunt has a
dybbuk
. Miriam is the only one who can stand her.”

“Everybody loves Miriam,” I said, staring out at the turkey trot.

“They do. My mother says we’re perfect together.”
Breathe,
I told myself,
just breathe
. “Our families were close back home, and we helped them emigrate.”

“I see.”

“I’m the only son, you know.”

“I’m the only daughter,” I blurted. This talking was too hard. “Should we try the dance?”

“Yes.”

We were awkward and out of step at first. In the second round we improved.
Fix on the dance,
only the dance
. Scissor-kicking past the frowning aunt and mother, I heard that foreign word again. “What’s a
shiksa
?”

“It’s a Gentile woman.”

“That’s bad?”

“Well, it’s like: you have your best apples set out and a stranger steals one.” His smile spun past me. “Italians are the worst. They look like us, so a boy could be fooled.”

“If he didn’t know.”

“Exactly.”

“Change partners!” the caller shouted. The rest of the evening was a swirl of faces: Italians, Czechs, Germans, Poles, and a shy Bohemian. I didn’t dance with Henryk again.

I came home late, and Roseanne met me at the door, distraught. Mamma had hidden in an unheated alcove off the kitchen and nearly froze. “I thought she was upstairs. When I found her and tried to bring her inside, she hit me with a broom handle. What could I do? I left her there. I thought you’d be home sooner.”

With difficulty, I got Mamma into the kitchen, sat her by the stove wrapped in blankets, and put her hands and feet in warm water as once had been done to me. She was stiff as wood. Her eyes were dark marbles. Had anger or spite kept her in the cold? Did this mean I could never go out to dances? A cage was closing around me.

Help came unexpectedly. When Giovanna’s mother died, her father left the younger children with relatives and drifted out of town. Giovanna found work with Mrs. Halle. She had no particular artistry, but could precisely copy any design and had a pleasing way with customers. Frank was her fella now; she meant to stay in Cleveland until he was promoted, move to Youngstown, marry him, and help make hats. Meanwhile, she would board with us and graciously offered to watch Mamma some evenings while she made hats for extra pay.

When I introduced Giovanna, my mother had no response. But I noticed that she ate when Giovanna urged her, seemed to listen when she spoke, and could sit for hours watching her work. I fought a niggling jealousy. Wasn’t it good that Mamma at least responded to someone, even if that someone wasn’t me? Of course it was.

What could I do in my free evenings? Miriam had returned, so I stopped going to dances. Looking around for other diversions, I was intrigued by notices tacked on walls and posts:
TWELVE REASONS WHY WOMEN SHOULD VOTE
, said one.
SISTERS UNITE
! said another.
WOMEN
’
S SUFFRAGE IS GOD
’
S WILL AND NATURE
’
S TRUTH
. A rally had been announced for a warm spring evening.

“Go if you want,” Giovanna said. “Even if it’s a little silly, all that shouting and carrying on. Frank said that when we’re married we can talk over who he’ll vote for, so it’s almost as if I’m voting myself. Besides, I didn’t finish school, so what do I know about politics?” Frank hadn’t finished either, I might have mentioned, but I only thanked her for taking my place. When I left, Mamma was sitting rigidly, watching Giovanna sort feathers.

In Public Square, women in elegant dresses and hats waved signs for suffrage. How beautiful America would be if women could vote, one speaker said. “
Our
true American votes could cancel out those of the lower class of men.” A speaker for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union promised a pure and sober world if women voted. More speeches followed, despite heckling from clots of drunk or idle men. Drums beat; we carried banners and chanted as we marched to City Hall. I was thrilled with the power and rightness of our cause: why
shouldn’t
women vote? Yet where were the workingwomen, the thousands on thousands in Cleveland who bore the weight of laws favoring factory bosses and owners?

“You mean factory girls? They’re always welcome to come,” said a woman marching beside me. “But I think immigrants don’t care about suffrage. Or they don’t understand what it means.”

I wasn’t exactly their image of a typical immigrant, I gathered from talks with suffragettes. I had finished high school and spoke good English now. Soon I could even be a citizen. But still I wasn’t like these ladies; I could be useful for their marches but not precisely welcomed in their parlors.

“I
do
want a vote,” I told Mamma that night as she faced the wall. “It’s wrong that we can’t. But women’s suffrage seems so far away. There needs to be change
now
to make life better at Stingler’s or Printz-Biederman. Making new laws takes years and years. There’s a meeting of garment workers at the union hall. I think I’ll go.” Of course she didn’t answer.

“Keep talking,” Dr. Ricci said, “even if she’s silent, she’s listening.” So I chattered on, feeling foolish, as if speaking to a doll. There was a second, less worthy reason for my rambling: to show that
I
was the always-present daughter, not Giovanna.

“I heard a speaker at the union hall,” I reported the next week. “It was Mother Jones, the great organizer, talking about mill children. She brought up a little worker, just eight years old. Mamma, her face was already old. Machines mash their fingers and tear off limbs. Four- and five-year-old children work from dawn to dark. They fall asleep on the floor and get kicked awake. Boys work in the mines pulling carts. Can you imagine?”

“
You
worked. What’s the difference?”

“It’s different because housework isn’t dangerous—” I stopped. She’d listened and asked a question! “Mamma!” But she’d already turned away, smoothing the sheets.
Keep talking.
I described how in 1903 scores of children walked from Pennsylvania to Long Island to see President Theodore Roosevelt, show him their bodies, and have him feel the shame of a country that used its little ones so cruelly. When I said the president refused to see them, Mamma pushed a pillow to the floor. Was she outraged by Roosevelt or only angry at my talking? Annoyed by the pillow? Discouraged, I fell silent. Mamma wrapped herself in a sheet and slept.

I started going regularly to meetings of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Standing in the back, I studied workers’ faces. Many were my own age but already looked aged and drawn, their young shoulders curved. Several had lost fingers; many had chronic coughs from the lint-filled air. I saw workers scarred by fires. Everywhere I felt the bitterness and confusion of those who wanted a better life in America.

“You’re
right
to want more,” cried Miss Josephine Casey, who had come from New York to help us. We were all to call her Josephine because we were brothers and sisters through the union. My sister? She was elegantly tall, or seemed so, with a fine black dress and wide hat trimmed in velvet. Her voice was astonishing: softly rounded and stretched like taffy candy. It seemed to speak inside my head. People said she came from a wealthy family in the South, where people talked like that. She’d gone to college. Yet she chose a life with us. Josephine could silence hecklers with a glance and pull from a babble of voices a neat assemblage of all that we meant to say.

“I hear what you want,” she told a rumbling crowd. “You want a fifty-hour week. You want time with your families. You want no more than two hours overtime on weekdays and higher pay for those hours. You want repose on legal holidays and equal pay for equal work.”

“The machines!” a woman yelled from the back.

“And you refuse to pay your bosses for sewing machines, needles, and thread. Why should they take back the little they give you? You deserve fifty hours and a decent wage!”

“Fifty” flew through the great hall like a flock of wild birds. “Fifty, fifty, fifty!” we repeated until it seemed almost within our reach.

Mr. Isadore Freith, our local union president, spoke. “Cleveland workers must claim their rights. George Washington, Simón Bolívar, St. Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, Giuseppe Garibaldi, all the great liberators would join our struggle.” Songs and chants began. In Chicago I had thrilled when a great crowd sang with Mamma. This was even more glorious. Simple tunes with strident beats bore the longing, rage, and bonded hopes of those whose bodies ached from making clothes they’d never wear. A buttonhole maker taught us a song by Mr. Joe Hill:

You will eat, bye and bye,

In that glorious land above the sky;

Work and pray, live on hay,

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die

I sang too, despite the crow voice that so embarrassed Mamma. I felt light and thin-sided as a rubber balloon, no longer Lucia the clerk or Lucia, my mother’s keeper, but a voice among many. We were Joshua’s warriors, whose cries tore down the walls of Jericho. I told Josephine that, yes, of course I’d put up signs at Hiram House for the next union meeting. If children could walk from Philadelphia to Long Island, surely I could hang signs.

“Come to the meetings,” I urged Elena, who lived on our street and did piecework at home.

“Lucia, I have three little ones. If my contractor finds out I go to meetings, he’ll give my work to the Bohemians. Anyway, it’s their fault my wages are low.”

“Bohemian bosses tell their workers it’s Italians who keep their wages down.”

“What? That’s crazy.”

“Exactly. Workers have to stick together.”

Elena’s face cleared, then darkened. “But we
aren’t
together. You have a steady desk job, and my sister lost her contract to a Bohemian. How do you know what it’s like for us? I’m sorry, I have to feed my babies.” Her hand on the door told me I must leave.

Bohemians had just starting coming from the western fringe of Poland. They lived in tight clusters, and the women did contract work. When fires ripped through their quarters that spring, the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
reported many home workshops ruined. “Did you hear?” Jewish and Italian women whispered in the markets and union hall. “How horrible.” Yet the news brought a guilty shiver of relief. Now more jobs might come back to the factories.

“If the pieceworkers and factory workers got together, they’d
all
earn more,” Mr. Kinney observed. He had taken to stopping in my upstairs office, at first to check my sums, but often to smoke his pipe, drink tea, and gaze through a balcony window down at the shop floor. He left more and more tasks to his assistant, Mr. Wells: installing displays, choosing merchandise, greeting customers, and overseeing an army of clerks. “He’s hungry for work. Like I was once,” Mr. Kinney said. “But we were speaking of the Bohemians. Now if wholesale prices on our dresses were to go up, what then, Miss D’Angelo?”

“Our prices would have to go up as well.”

“Naturally.
But
if working girls had more to spend, we wouldn’t do so badly, would we? Now Mr. Wells wouldn’t agree, but if you’re old like me or young like you, you can see some sense in raising wages.” He tapped out his pipe. “What was the balance yesterday, Miss D’Angelo? And the plaid shirtwaists, how are they selling?”

Another day, reading in the
Plain Dealer
of union demands for a fifty-hour week, he mused: “I worked seventy hours a week when I was young. But it was
my
store and the time never bothered me. Now Olivia wants some of that time. Born as mewling babes, all we have in this world is time, Miss D’Angelo.”

“Sir?” But he had closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the chair. I had meant to ask why he hadn’t ordered more dress stock in the last weeks but instead returned to my pile of sales slips, handling them carefully so the rustling paper wouldn’t wake him.