Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (29 page)

Late at night, when cool breezes finally curled into our room, Mamma and I took turns brushing out each other’s hair. It was a good sign that she would do this, Dr. Ricci said. I recounted the speeches and how an Irish piano player had made up funny strike lyrics for “Frankie and Johnny” and “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.”

“Before Mr. Keith,” Mamma muttered at breakfast. The boarders stared, for she rarely spoke in public. When I asked what she meant, she pushed a spoon around her oatmeal, saying nothing.

Roseanne drew me aside. “I think she meant that you’re like she was before she joined vaudeville. Happy and excited.”

I was. May’s unseasonable heat didn’t bother me. Neither did Roseanne’s constant accounting of the cost of every foodstuff, as if we ate boiled pennies. Even stopping at Henryk’s shop was possible if the purpose was to enlist assurance of good prices on vegetables for our soup kitchen. I smiled at Miriam standing by the beets, ignoring her icy stare. I even felt sorry for her, for anyone not busy organizing.

“Will Bohemians join the strike?” Henryk asked.

“They said they would. They didn’t know how much less they were making than factory workers. They didn’t realize that contractors pay each of them differently and pit them against each other. They’re angry now.”

Miriam had moved to a pool of light where her glorious black hair glistened. “I wouldn’t trust Bohemians. They don’t mix with anybody. They don’t want to be American and they can’t keep their word.”

“Not all of them,” Henryk said quietly.

I managed to smile, thank Miriam for her concern, wish them both a good day, and leave, feeling triumphantly above petty issues of the heart. The Bohemians
would
strike, I reminded myself. More than promised, they
understood
that even if they lived apart and worked for contractors, only unity could save them from misery.

We would begin the strike on June 6, 1911. A letter of demands was sent to the owners and ignored. “Of course,” said Josephine, “if they answer it, that means they think we’re worth answering.” We would be absolutely peaceful and orderly, trusting in the virtue, modesty, and logic of our cause. New York owners had agreed to these demands. Why shouldn’t owners in Cleveland? I was sent home early the night before. I’d done enough, Josephine said, and needed rest.

I didn’t rest. I watched gaslight from the street throw shadows on our wall, imagining problems that might unfurl in the morning. Workers would not come to their posts as we’d instructed, or would not leave in a mass at ten o’clock, taking their tools. There would be heckling or fights with those who refused to strike. The factory doors would be locked so we couldn’t walk out. Yiddish workers had raised their hands and vowed: “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise.” Suppose they foreswore? Suppose only a pathetic scattering of us rattled in the union hall, looking foolish?

Nothing I’d seen in America, not the first snow or any blaze of autumn, was as beautiful as that day. A crisp breeze had scuttled across the lake that morning, pushing heat and clouds away, scrubbing the air. Workers found the promised red cards calling for a general strike and calmly left their stations at the stroke of ten. I stood in a balcony over the factory floor to watch that thrilling sight: rows upon rows of women and girls pushing back chairs; dropping scissors, needles, thimbles, and thread in their waist bags; and walking calmly out of Printz-Biederman, their faces alight with purpose. Have you ever wanted arms enough to gather in hundreds of fearless women, a massive chest to hold your swelling pride? The entire fleet of ancient Greece sailing out to vanquish Troy could not have been more glorious.

We were six thousand Italians, Poles, Jews, and Germans, a thousand more than we had fondly hoped for. The Bohemians came together, a glorious show in blazing white, puffed-sleeved blouses, embroidered crimson vests, and blue skirts. “New Americans wearing the flag,” I heard a striker say approvingly. Women brought babies in beribboned carriages. Lines of finishers, shirtmakers, dressmakers, and tailors swelled our stream. We were a “joyful parade,” the
Plain Dealer
reported, and indeed we were. Enrico carried the union flag, head high, sunlight frosting his dark curls.

“He’s so proud,” his mother told me. “And I’m so proud of him. I just hope we can go back to work soon. The strike pay isn’t much.”

“I know.”

“Still,” she said loudly in English toward a hovering reporter, “I’d rather starve fast than starve slow at Printz-Biederman.”

“It has been an orderly strike,” the
Cleveland Press
acknowledged in an editorial read aloud at the union hall, “and orderly strikes, when waged in a just cause, are almost certain to end in a victory for the wage earner.” We cheered and sang. On my way home, I stopped at an Italian bakery for little almond cakes to celebrate with Mamma that night. The baker wished us well and slipped an extra cake in the neat package.

The Cloak Manufacturers’ Association’s statement came three days later in the
Plain Dealer
. “I could have written it myself,” Josephine huffed. The full page announced that our strike was useless, even foolish. We enjoyed “optimal” conditions and pay. We were dupes of the East, stirred up by outsiders and radicals to price Cleveland cloak makers and dressmakers out of business and thus enrich New York manufacturers. Thinking only of our welfare, the association urged us to return to work and in that way avoid reprisals for our ill-considered actions.

We marched again. This time hecklers stood in clumps. “Socialists! Go home if you don’t like American work!” they shouted. Alda, a clerk whose desk was near mine, called from the sidewalk: “My little boy’s sick, Lucia. How do I pay the doctor if we can’t work? How?” Men and women whose faces I knew from church or scribing watched grimly. How could they not see the rightness of this strike? Yet I had no answer for Alda. How had everything that seemed so clear yesterday now become so murky?

As we turned from a shaded street to a blast of sun, my head swirled. In that instant, a bull-shouldered vagrant named Roy who was often thrown out of Lula’s charged our line, flailing like a drunkard seeking a target. Over and over Isadore had warned: “There must be no violence. Whatever the provocation,
do not fight back.
” Newspapers, suffragettes, churches, and city leaders who might support our cause would turn away if we behaved like ruffians.

“Lucia, do you know him?” Josephine whispered. I nodded. The gesture must have caught his eye, for he lunged at me. A heavy hand pawed my shirtwaist. “Ex-cuse
me
!” he muttered. When I stepped aside, he followed. From the sidewalk, people watched as if we were a vaudeville show.

Steeling myself to Isadore’s orders, I stood like a post until Roy’s heavy hands gripped my head as Dr. Galuppi once did, fingers driving through my hair. A voice thick with beer whispered: “Eye-talian girl, go home to your crazy mamma.”
Basta!
I wrenched myself free from his grasp. How could I know that he would stagger, trip, and fall, cutting his head on a curb?

Police had been watching. Stepping over Roy, they seized me and Josephine. “Both of you, under arrest for assault.”

“We have been exercising our right of peaceful assembly,” Josephine announced, “with permission to march signed by your chief. This young lady was avoiding a ruffian who touched her indecently. He tripped, that’s all. How is that assault?”

“Under arrest,” the police repeated. This was worse, far worse than being taken from the San Carlo in a carriage. This was handcuffs. We were pushed into an airless Black Maria; the door locked behind us as if we were criminals. Nobody listened to my protests. Nobody cared. Josephine’s beautiful hat slipped off, and we couldn’t retrieve it.

In the stifling darkness I cried in anger and shame. “When he touched me like that, when he talked about my mother, I had to get away.”

“Of course you did,” said Josephine’s calm and steady voice, “and if they want arrests, they get arrests. Roy was paid. I just didn’t think they’d bring in strikebreakers so soon. But don’t worry. Isadore will bail us out soon.”

“
Soon
? If I’m not home for dinner, my mother will worry. She’ll go looking for me.” I panicked. Would
she
be arrested? I pounded the walls, screaming, “Let me out! I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Stop that. It doesn’t help. Someone will go to your house and explain what happened. Lucia, we never claimed a strike would be easy, only that we’ll win in the end. Now sit back and try to relax. Here’s what I do. I imagine I’m a smooth stone in a riverbed. Cool, clear water runs over me.” I peered at her face in the gloom. Cool, clear water? This was a nightmare.

We were hauled from the Black Maria, pushed into the station, and fingerprinted.
Cool, clear water,
I repeated to myself. But this water roiled; it was dark and bad-smelling. I was in prison, a criminal. The countess, Mrs. Livingston, my professors, and Henryk, what would they think of me now?

“Put ’em in cell three,” a clerk grunted. Two burly officers hauled us along, a hand on each of our arms. Nothing in my life could have prepared me for that sound: an iron gate creaking open and locking behind us with an echoing thud.

The constant bustle at least distracted me as our cell filled up with strikers crowding onto narrow benches against the wall. “So, what’s our first song?” Josephine demanded. How could she be so cheerful? We were in jail! Two women offered a pretty tune in Yiddish. Others sang “Casey Jones,” their voices echoing off brick walls. Police wandered by to hear “America the Beautiful,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” Swept up in the noise and fellowship, I slipped my voice into the bouncing flow. “Do ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’!” a policeman called out. We shouted back:

Come on and hear, come on and hear,

Alexander’s Ragtime Band.

Come on and hear, come on and hear,

It’s the best band in the land!

In pauses between songs, we told stories. I shared the tale of the fishermen killed by the lascivious princess of Palazzo Donn’Anna, expecting gasps of horror. Instead, a woman in the corner shared a lewd joke on the length of a fisherman’s “hook.” Talk spun into other tales of lusty excess. Translations flew across the room, followed quickly by guffaws. I remembered bits of such talk between Nannina and her friends before they shooed me away. I’d never been welcome in a circle of such freely talking women.

“Look at Lucia,” a voice called out. “She’s red as a berry.”

“The poor child hasn’t had a proper liberal education,” lamented Josephine in a tone so prim and somber that everyone laughed. Thus began another round of jokes on schools and “proper education.” As we howled after a wild story of a priest in the Irish countryside, a Polish woman suggested we get ourselves jailed all together again.

“No lack of opportunity,” Josephine commented, and we talked in easy good humor about tactics for the strike, allies we might tap, and slogans for our marches.

Near dusk, Isadore bailed us out as if the process were as perfunctory as buying onions. An assault charge hadn’t been recorded. “It was all for intimidation,” he said. “Were you intimidated, Lucia?”

“At first, yes.”

“Of course. So was I, the first time.”

“How often have you been jailed?”

“Can’t remember. Let’s say often,” he answered lightly. “It comes with the job.”

At the boardinghouse, in the markets, and around the neighborhood, everyone knew where I’d been, as if a sign around my neck read: “Arrested. Been in jail.” Friends fluttered with questions: “What was it like? Did they beat you?” Enrico and Pepe hovered around me, demanding: “Did you break out? Did you see real criminals? Did you have bread and water? Could you scratch through the wall with spoons?” Basking in unaccustomed glory, I didn’t mention the songs and jokes I’d blush to repeat.

“Never mind criminals, we need rich women,” Josephine said briskly. We would speak to them with two workers: Amelia, a young Italian mother with a cherubic baby, and Hannah, a Jewish woman whose arm had been scorched by the Lentz fire. I would translate for Amelia. Hannah spoke English well, and her dramatic tale of the fire, many said, could make a polar bear sweat.

I expected audiences like my mother’s in vaudeville, thrilled and expectant, listening avidly. Ladies of the Cuyahoga County Women’s Suffrage Association were polite, even distressed to hear Amelia’s stories of a worker’s life and to see Hannah’s arm. “However,” said their leader, “we come together for women’s suffrage. To win this fight requires focus, as does yours.” Individuals might sign a statement of personal support, but the association could not publicly endorse our strike. The ladies passed a pretty basket for donations. I saw many of them later in that long summer bandaging strikers, cheering, handing out sandwiches, or giving lemonade to weary children. But none wrote letters to the
Plain Dealer
or marched with us.

“Rich bitches,” Hannah muttered as we left the meeting. I explained our failure to Amelia as she soothed her hot and fretful baby.

“Well yes, but they did contribute,” I pointed out. On a secluded bench I counted our take: $547.50. If the suffragettes were so generous, how could they not see that the rightness of our cause was as clear as water, as indisputable as gravity?

“We’ll keep asking,” Josephine announced. “We’ll go back each month for more.”
Each month?
Hannah glanced at me. “Next, we ask the WCTU.”

We went to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, arguing that strikebreakers were being issued alcohol and the workers’ misery led many to drink. Again, some gave money or promised letters to the manufacturers’ association, but the group itself could not publicly support the strike. In the gathering heat, our dresses clung to sweaty skin and the weight of each no dragged at our feet. This must be a singer’s nightmare: a perfect performance that nobody cheers.

In all we gathered $970.56 that day for our soup kitchens. Hannah said she’d visit her father’s cousin who owned a fine haberdashery near Public Square.