Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (26 page)

“
Basta,
Mamma!” Murmurs grew around us. I stood up, moving toward her. Still today, I don’t know my intentions. To block her from view, hug her, or lead her away? None of this was needed, for she sank into a crimson puddle, rocking, her hands slapped over her face.

“Mamma!”

“What’s wrong with me?” she sobbed. “Why am I like this?”

I put my arms around her. “The doctor says it’s a sickness in the brain.”

“Why?
Why?
”

“I don’t know, Mamma. Nobody knows.”

“Help me!”

“I’m trying, Mamma. Dr. Ricci’s trying.” I realized later a sad irony: in this exchange we came closer to “conversation” than in all the months since her collapse, even if the only answer I could offer was ignorance. “The mind is its own place,” Milton had said. That “place” had consumed my mother. She tore at her hair and gown, sobbing full-throated, not to be hushed. Behind us children whimpered at the strangeness of an adult so reduced.

I tried to lift her and couldn’t. Then Yolanda and Charlie, each taking an arm, helped me half lift, half drag her to a chair by the window. A waiter brought water. I held the glass so she could drink. Slowly, the sobs faded to babble and then silence.

“I’m so sorry,” I said over and over to Yolanda. “We ruined your dinner.”

“No, no. Everyone knows she’s not well, and nobody blames either of you.”

This kindness in a sea of troubles brought me close to tears. I leaned on my friend’s shoulder. “It’s so hard, Yolanda, and she’s not getting better. If I can’t keep her, she’ll have to go to—”

“The state hospital. I know. It’s horrible. And if she stays with you—”

“It’s like this, or worse.”

“We’re so sorry, Lucia.”

“I have to get her home.”

Mrs. Reilly watched their children as Charlie and Yolanda helped me wrap a shawl around my mother and pin up the worst of the rips in her dress. Limp as a doll, she offered no resistance as we maneuvered her to the train station. In Cleveland I hired a taxi, saving us from streetcar stares. I leaned against the taxi window. We were so far, so very, very far from that last warm night at the villa, when we floated in our linen shifts, so happy in the moonlight.

Roseanne saw us come in, saw Mamma’s vacant eyes, torn dress, my own exhaustion, and never asked what happened at the wedding. She helped me bring my mother upstairs, where we undressed her and put her to bed.

Terrified that we had begun a new, worse phase of illness, I sat for a long time watching her sleep.
Do something,
I told myself. Moving slowly, I folded the ruined dress and was about to lay it in the vaudeville trunk that had sat for months untouched in a corner, heaped with books. What else was inside?

I began a silent exploration. Here was the lace-trimmed walking dress I’d seen on my first trip to Chicago, then magnificent hats, gloves and hatpins, corsets and hair rats for performance. I pulled out plumes and fans, gorgeous memories of her triumph. Then at the bottom I found the catalog of her collapse: a thick roll of playbills from every city where she’d performed, so meticulously ordered by date that I could follow a zigzag line through Ohio and the Midwest, north to the Dakotas, south and east again. At first “Teresa D’Angelo, the Naples Nightingale” was inching up the playbill. Then the name began steadily creeping down, always in smaller print. The night of “unacceptable gestures” in Chicago was reflected in the next city’s listing: “The Swiss Yodeler
and
the Naples Nightingale.” She’d lost her own line. In Springfield, Missouri, her name appeared in a stream of “other acts.” Loew’s notices said only “Live dancers! Singers! Clowns!” In each venue, she must have hastened to find her listing; each would bring new dismay.

Yet in that downward odyssey she had the methodical will to acquire each clean, unfolded playbill and carefully preserve it. Perhaps Mario or Harold helped. While sending shreds of “letters” home, still she kept evidence that strangers cheered and clapped for her, even if less wildly every time. Her last “performance,” at Giovanna’s wedding, would have no playbill. I folded the dresses and carefully set the hats so no plume or flower would be crushed, rolled up the playbills in their sequence, and closed the trunk. “Why?
Why?
” she had cried in Youngstown. And now I cried myself. “Why?
Why?
” Why had the nightingale fallen so far? Why was her wondrous voice held captive by a broken mind? The boardinghouse was very quiet. I made my way to the parlor and sat alone for a long time. No answers came, only the grim fear that this solitude could be the shape of the rest of my life.

In the days
after Youngstown, Mamma was pitifully silent and subdued. Desperate, I followed Yolanda’s advice and bought her yarn and knitting needles at the May Company: bright blues, greens, yellows, and reds. Knowing better than to
ask
her to knit, I simply set these things in our room. Three days later she began balling the yarn. “Remember those scratchy gray scarves church ladies made for us that cold winter, all of them the same?” I asked casually. “Wouldn’t it be nice if the children had prettier ones?”

Mamma said nothing. I tried, as Dr. Ricci constantly suggested, not to let her silence wound me: “When a consumptive coughs, it’s no attack on the loved one, merely the disease expressing itself. Her silence
is
the disease. Keep talking to her.”

Two days later a scarf appeared. She worked quickly, yet was as severe with herself in knitting as she once was with singing, fiercely examining her work, unraveling rows on rows for a single dropped stitch. Hiram House desperately needed warm clothes for immigrants unprepared for Cleveland winters. “Children won’t notice little problems. Or you could work more slowly,” I suggested. Or else, I finally chided myself, she could work as she pleased. Remaking scarves kept her calmly occupied and saved money on yarn. In fact, each was more accomplished than the last, beautifully designed, marvelously soft and warm. These “Teresa scarves” would come to be passed from child to child in families, carefully washed after each season and packed away in mothballs.

On those summer evenings I studied in my room as Mamma knit. When Mr. Sutherland at Printz-Biederman suggested that “increased utility” could bring higher pay, I enrolled in a correspondence course on the elements of bookkeeping. “Like before,” Mamma muttered one night, pointing with a knitting needle to my books and then quickly bending over her work again. But we weren’t quite like before, when I was in school. “Before,” I had my college dreams. “Before,” her mind wasn’t sick.

Dr. Ricci had found a small consolation in the Youngstown collapse: “She is aware of her own condition. That is a hopeful sign.”

“But eating like that, touching herself, that song—”

“Inappropriate, yes, of course. Not normal. Yet you brought her home and no physical harm was done. Lucia, you must remember that every day you care for her is a day saved from this inferno.” He showed me a photograph of a woman confined to an asylum by a husband who’d found her inconvenient. She looked hardly human: shriveled to bones, skin crusted with scabs, hair chopped off, bruised where she’d been tied for days and burned by electrical shocks. Perhaps she was beautiful once. Now she’d likely die of syphilis contracted from her keepers if other ailments or sheer misery didn’t take her first. At night images of her scabs, burns, bruises, and those wild and haunted eyes come at me like cards dealt by a manic player.

“You are doing well,” Dr. Ricci insisted.

“But
will
she get better?”

“I’m sorry, Lucia. I don’t know. Try to find a way to live with her in this state and include her in your life.” I must make a heaven of hell, Milton would say.

How? I had thought we’d be safe in Youngstown among people she knew. Clearly now I couldn’t take her among strangers. Mrs. Kinney had invited us to their summer home in Ashtabula on Lake Erie. I longed to go, having seen pictures of American country homes with deep lawns and mounded shade trees, arbors thick with roses and children running by with hoops. I imagined Mamma well and healed, magically returned to “before”: we drink iced tea on a porch looking out at the blue lake. Knitting quietly, Mamma sings “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Mr. Kinney explains a puzzle of double entry bookkeeping. The dream reels on. We eat roast beef on fine plates in the dining room and an American dessert, perhaps lemon meringue pie. Talk flows pleasantly around the table. Mamma sings an aria after dinner. The Kinneys are charmed. We spend the night in a canopied bed with crisp sheets, and windows open on a sweetly flowering locust tree.

But the dream ends badly and always in a new way: the Kinneys may have a little dog that resembles Lydia’s in the vaudeville troupe. Mamma attacks this dog. She makes “unacceptable gestures.” She walks into the lake, bound for Vesuvius, and must be rescued. She hurls insults at the Kinneys. She stabs them with knitting needles. In the end I sent Mrs. Kinney my regrets: “My mother is ill and can’t travel.”

At least I was absorbed by work at Printz-Biederman, constantly given new tasks in the elaborate puzzle of entering, verifying, and balancing accounts for a business of nearly a thousand people, one of the largest garment makers outside New York City. “A great company is built on accounting. We are the foundation, the steady core of this establishment,” declared Mr. Sutherland. Sometimes I barely raised my head from the books for hours, hearing only my adding machine’s ratchet, whirl, and ding.

When I was sent to other offices with account statements, I passed through the factory and saw garment workers doing hand tailoring on lines of straight-backed chairs, women in dark skirts and white shirts, faces alike in solemn attention, bent over their work. Sometimes the finished piece went to the next woman, sometimes into great baskets collected by young boys. The tedium, close space, stuffy heat, and constant harangues to work more quickly, more neatly, to appreciate their stake in the good name of Printz-Biederman, how did they endure these days? When bosses ordered long lines of stitching torn out, what pain this must cost those who had bought thread from the same bosses.

I counted the quirks of fortune that separated me from this line of labor: Mamma had taken easily to chocolate dipping; I could add to her pay by scribing at Hiram House and serving at the Millers’; her voice had brought dollars to buoy me to graduation; I worked easily with numbers and had been well trained by Mr. Kinney. Lacking any of these chances, I’d be bent over a shirtwaist now, tearing out thread.

My department loaned me to payroll one week when a clerk was sick. Now I truly saw the heavy toll of fines these workers bore, sometimes taking home nearly nothing. “They’ll learn,” the head payroll clerk said crisply. But how could they live in the week of such learning?

“Why are these five sleeve setters paid five different rates?” I asked.

“That’s what they took when we hired them.” Filling out pay envelopes, I pictured the scene of each woman’s hiring. Perhaps one spoke more English and thus was bolder. Another might have been more desperate for work, perhaps with a sick child at home. One who earned a dollar more may have offered some “service” for her job. I knew workers never compared their pay. When I scribed, they leaned over my table to whisper a number. “We aren’t supposed to tell the others what we earn. They’d be jealous.” But how could
each one’s
pay be higher than the others’? Ignorance kept them pliable.

“Look at this,” I said. A pattern cutter was fined for bloodstained cloth when the mechanical blade cut her flesh instead. “It’s not her fault the machines are old.”

“Miss D’Angelo,” the head clerk snapped, “since we have nine hundred pay envelopes to prepare, perhaps we needn’t comment on each one.”

“No, sir.” But I
did
comment, over and over in my head as I worked.

R
EADING THE
N
AMES

In the weeks
after our problems in Youngstown, I spooled between home and work, terrified that Mamma’s sickness might worsen, deepen, or take some new and terrible shape and I must be there to help or shield, divert or, if nothing else, be present for a new decline. But we seemed to have reached an endless plateau. By day she knit, slept, and stared out the window. At night she cleaned, sometimes cooked, or paced barefoot through the kitchen, dining room, parlor, and hall. “She’s not much trouble, really,” Roseanne said. So for now we could stay at the boardinghouse. By midsummer I began slowly expanding my circuit, going to church, attending some union meetings, and scribing again at Hiram House.

“See?” said Lula. “You can breathe a little.” Autumn was early and glorious that year. When the maple trees blazed red and yellow, I stopped by Henryk’s store for apples. Or rather that was my excuse: I’d told Roseanne that Mamma might make a tart if we left some apples in the kitchen.

“Is Henryk your fella?” Roseanne had asked. No, no, I’d protested, just a school friend and bound to another woman besides. Still, I couldn’t deny even to myself that I’d missed his easy presence, patient way of listening, and gift for bringing pleasure to the simple act of buying fruit.

Colors mounded everywhere in the shop: squash and pumpkins, beans of many kinds, strings of peppers, golden braids of onion, heaps of bright red cabbage, and everywhere bushels of apples. The shop was nearly empty, just Henryk and a young helper. “Lucia, I haven’t seen you in weeks,” said Henryk, setting down his clipboard.

“No. I’ve been busy.”

“Yes, of course.” If he’d heard of Mamma’s scene in Youngstown, he gave no sign. He said some words in Polish to the boy and ushered me into a tiny office, meticulously organized and astonishingly clean. “My little kingdom,” he explained. “No onion peels or old cabbage leaves. Let’s see how Samuel does by himself. He just arrived last week from Poland.”

“He’s a relative?”

“Sort of a cousin, very clever. He’s already learned some English. He’s taking lessons at Hiram House.”