Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (31 page)

“Made in Torre del Greco, outside Naples, before 1850. I know this artisan’s work. I call him Carlo because there’s always a curl of hair in the shape of a C. Look closely; here’s the C.” His forefinger hovered over the curl. Mr. Beattie looked at my face as carefully as he’d studied Diana’s. “I’ve seen you before, miss. On the picket line, was it, with Miss Casey?” When I nodded, he dropped his voice. “A just cause. I wish you well. Let’s say forty dollars. I know a collector who appreciates fine work.”

A month’s reprieve. “Thank you, sir,” I stammered. “Thank you very much.” He let me hold the cameo one last time before gently setting it in his case and counting out my dollars. The thrill of my sale lasted barely a block. Walking home, I pictured my dingy bedroom’s worn wooden floors, cracked walls, and curtains grayed by coal dust. But yesterday it held my cameo, like a perfect diamond set in tin.
Don’t think of this.

I fixed on the villa instead, so intently that when I got home, paid Roseanne, and saw a letter for me from Naples, I was half convinced I’d conjured it. I fingered the creamy parchment, tracing the watermark with the Monforte family crest. While I sweltered here in Cleveland, golden plums were ripening in the villa orchard. Nannina would be picking tomatoes, eggplants, and sweet peppers, and canning her winter sauces. As I imagined the great window looking out to sea, a curl of cool slid through our open kitchen door. “Ah, a lake breeze,” Roseanne said. If I’d told her no, no, my letter had brought it from the Bay of Naples, she would have thought me mad as Mamma. I closed myself in the dining room to read.

It was a long letter. The countess was making steady progress in paying off the count’s debts. She had sold land on the Vomero hill over Naples for a good price, traded two unprofitable farms for a larger one with water rights, and given one creditor an ancient marble bust. This hadn’t pained her: “Who needs a Caesar staring at you?” Paolo repaired a small guesthouse which was now rented to an English couple. Nannina had married Luigi the gardener and was selling her marmalade, a tiny business, but it turned a steady profit.

“We live simply,” the countess wrote. “I don’t have a box at the opera or go to balls anymore, so I don’t have to buy new gowns. It’s a great savings.” Early that morning “Paolo and I” had taken a rowboat along the rocky coast west of the city. “Lucia, you’re floating
inside
Roman ruins. Sunlight sparkles on the walls like a jewel box.” After the count’s cruelty and many offenses, how could she not deserve these pleasures on a glassy sea? “Paolo and I . . . Paolo and I.” Peppered through her pages, those words brought an ache of loneliness. Where was
my
Paolo?

“Please tell me all your news,” she wrote. “Your last letter was too short. How is Teresa? Is she feeling better? Has she gone back to vaudeville? Tell me about your day.”

I wrote to her about the strike, but not my time in jail. At each new sentence, I thought:
now, now, tell her about Mamma
. But my pen wouldn’t shape these words, neither Dr. Ricci’s medical terms nor the common ones: that she was crazy, out of her head, not herself, or, in that strange American phrase, “gone screwy,” as if her head were a small machine rattling itself apart. I recounted the pressing heat and how Bohemians had left the strike. I did not say I’d sold her cameo. By the fourth sheet, all that I hadn’t said weighed on me like bricks. I wrote that a young man I cared for was engaged to another. Yet even without her, he’d never be my “fella.” His family would refuse and he couldn’t oppose them. “But there are many fine men in America, and when I’m ready, I’ll find one, as you have found Paolo.” I promised Nannina and Luigi a wedding gift from America when the strike ended, which would surely be soon with victory for the workers. When the letter was finished, I slumped in my chair, exhausted by the effort of so many lies and so much good cheer.

Roseanne eyed me acutely. “You didn’t tell her the truth about your mother, did you?”

“No.”

“Because you think she’ll get better?”

Perhaps. Even Josephine knew only that Mamma was “not well” and for that reason I sometimes could not attend meetings, marches, or pickets. She didn’t know why I cringed when we passed Cleveland State Hospital on our way to visit possible donors. Howls and curses poured from the asylum’s barred windows. Inside the iron fence, wild-haired men and women in shapeless gowns drifted across the yard, sometimes walking into trees or stopping, immobile as trees themselves, until gruff attendants set them moving with a push. The patients’ ages were vague. Rich and poor looked the same, as if madness washed away every sign of former rank.

Once I saw a pretty young woman staring through the gate. She seemed to be summoning me, but drawing closer, I heard only “Pigeons going away, pigeons, pigeons.” An attendant shooed the others inside like chickens and then came back for her. His wide hand on her back moved as if soaped, down to her waist, between her legs, up her side, across her breasts. She never flinched, but the voice rose steadily as he drew her on, a steady cry of “Pigeons going away, pigeons, pigeons,” until the door slammed shut behind them.

“Poor thing,” Josephine had commented.

“Yes, poor thing.”

Pneumonia had never destroyed what was Irena in my friend. Sick or well, she was one of us. Mamma’s case was different. Friends from school and church ceased using her name or even saying “your mother.” They asked how “she” was feeling, if “she” was any better. Did only Roseanne, Donato, and I remember the Teresa who once spoke and sang and worked as other women worked? I sometimes doubted my own memory.

At least the union hall and picket lines brought the comfort of company and a common vision. We buoyed one another with a constant flow of stories: outrages at work, other strikes, and peaceful victories. These stories reminded us that we weren’t alone. We were part of a vast tapestry of American workers in cities, mines, mills, factories, foundries, and quarries, woven together in righteous cause.

On a July day too hot for pickets, Josephine went to meet a group of rabbis, hoping they would persuade wealthy Jews to support a kosher soup kitchen. “It was easier in New York,” she grumbled. In Cleveland, too many wealthy families were linked by business, family, friendship, or marriage to the garment industry. As the strike ground on, their giving faltered. “Still,” she said, “you have to ask. Nothing comes from not asking.”

I’d never realized how tightly woven a city could be. Lula had to let her kitchen girl go because the tavern had fewer customers now. Shoeshine boys complained that office clerks and supervisors in the garment trades no longer used their services. Landlords, grocers, pharmacists, barbers, and peddlers all cursed the owners, the workers, or both for the lengthening strike.

Meanwhile the constant, astonishing heat touched every moment of our lives and every conversation. Yes, a hard winter’s cold did the same, but who could imagine cold now? Scuffles came easily when hot bodies pressed too close in streetcars and shops, stairways or crowded flats. A splash of shade on a baking sidewalk became contested territory. Women waiting in lines for ice squabbled irritably. Garbage rotted in the street, and horse droppings seethed with flies. Through open windows one constantly heard parents shouting at children or each other. Clerks snapped at messenger boys. On front steps and porches, men and women sat in a dull torpor.

It seemed that only Pepe and Enrico were active, darting through the city, carrying messages between the organizers and pasting up notices of marches, pickets, and the owners’ injustices. As quickly as they were torn down, the boys put up new ones. Josephine managed to pay them a few dollars a week, and they swelled with pride. They lifted our spirits, telling jokes as we marched, showing off handstands, and fashioning noisemakers out of scraps of wood and metal.

Moving constantly, the boys saw everything. They knew when wives of strikebreakers were cursed and mocked by strikers and their families. When the newspaper reported that a strikebreaker’s window on Woodland was pelted with eggs, the boys knew otherwise. “Eggs?” cried Enrico. “It was rocks. And company thugs did it to make us look bad.
If
we had eggs, we sure wouldn’t waste them on windows.”

“I’d rather have potatoes,” his mother said. “They fill the belly more.”

The
Plain Dealer
made much of the egg-throwing report and a strikebreaker’s wife who said, “I’ve got hungry babies at home. My man’s working to feed them. What’s the harm in that?”

“The
harm
is Printz-Biederman working people to death and stealing back their miserable pay in fines and fees. The
harm
is sixty-hour workweeks, secret contracts, threats, and layoffs,” Isadore said when he read the article aloud at a meeting.

“We need more money. You can’t keep a strike going without it,” Josephine added, regular as a clock. “We
all
have to think of who we know with money. Think and ask. I can’t do everything.”

The countess had sent fifty dollars by wire to help the strike. She would have sent more, she wrote, but new debts kept surfacing. Suffragettes were helping, but not enough to meet our “special needs”: sick babies and children, wives whose husbands spent their strike pay in bars, and evicted families camped in parks or neighbors’ flats. Strikebreakers drew idle young men into scuffles, battering faces with brass knuckles the owners provided. Josephine gripped the “special needs” cards, as if drawing strength from them. “A strike always looks worst before the end. We just have to hold on a little longer.”

I decided to go to Ashtabula and appeal to Mr. Kinney. I’d leave on Saturday morning and be back by afternoon. When I explained this plan to Roseanne, Mamma gripped my wrist, her voice taut with panic: “Don’t leave me.”

“It’s just for a few hours, and you don’t like strangers.”

“Take me!” Useless to explain that her presence would be distracting, that I was afraid of what she might do. “Take me! Take me!”

“You can’t leave her with me like this,” Roseanne warned.

So I gave Mamma laudanum and prayed for a good day. The morning started well. We walked quietly from the Ashtabula train station through streets lined with trees holding dense clouds of fluttering leaves. The nearness of water and the flash of bright birds on fresh-cut velvet lawns enchanted us both. A young boy on a bicycle pointed to an elaborate confection of turrets and porches surrounded by rose arbors and blooming blue hydrangeas. “That’s their house yonder. Missus Kinney is in, she just paid me for trimming the hedges.”

“And Mr. Kinney?”

The boy shrugged. “He’s
always
in unless he’s out walking with her, and she’s
in,
like I said.”

The Kinneys saw us coming and met us on the porch. “Who is it?” Mr. Kinney said, beaming and pumping first my hand and then Mamma’s. He studied me with friendly curiosity.

“It’s Lucia D’Angelo, dear,” said Mrs. Kinney quickly. “She worked at your store. And here’s her mother, Mrs. D’Angelo. I told you they’d be coming. Lucia sent a note, remember?”

“Of course, of course. Lucy, come sit on the porch swing with me. And your friend can take the rocking chair. Would you like some lemonade, my dears?” The right side of his face dragged a little. He held his right arm stiffly, and his speech was slightly slowed. A cast dulled his eyes, like those of pleasant drunks at Lula’s. I watched with astonishment as Mamma, who always shied from strangers, sat readily in the rocking chair as if she’d just come home. I was the stranger now.

“Lucia, let’s fetch the lemonade,” said a gentle voice. I followed Mrs. Kinney through the cool, dark elegance of her parlor, where potted ferns and palms sprang from every corner and a cut-glass chandelier threw splatters of light across a flowered rug and polished upright piano. I wanted to curl into the divan, nesting in this room far from Cleveland’s troubles. “You have a lovely home, Mrs. Kinney.”

“We built it as our refuge, a place to come back to after the travels we’d planned. We had such plans.” Her voice trailed off. “Well, the kitchen’s this way. The maid’s busy upstairs, we’ll get the refreshments ourselves.” But we didn’t move, both of us caught by the scene outside: Mr. Kinney talking to Mamma, her face turned peaceably toward his. “Five minutes later, he’ll tell her the same thing,” Mrs. Kinney said.

“What happened, ma’am?”

“He had a stroke last spring. The doctor said we’re lucky he’s not paralyzed or lame. But he forgets everything. As soon as we go somewhere, he wants to come home. I think he knows he’s not himself. He’ll only walk with me early or late, when there’s nobody around.” Mr. Kinney was still talking; Mamma was still listening. “Does your mother speak English?”

“Not well.”

“But they understand each other, I think.”

“Yes, they seem to.”

Mrs. Kinney rested her hand lightly on my arm. “Excuse me, Lucia, but did she have a stroke as well?”

“No, it was a—a nervous collapse.”

“Sit down with me, dear, and tell me about it. He’s already forgotten the lemonade.” Nobody in Cleveland had asked for Mamma’s story with such compassion. It loosened my tongue. I told how we had to come to America, Mamma’s singing, her first triumphs and swift unraveling in vaudeville, how her troubles had wrenched me from college and back to work, my struggle to keep her from an asylum and daily fears of failing.

Mrs. Kinney was silent. Then she brushed a strand of hair from my face and pressed my hand between hers. Just that, but it seemed a crushing weight had lifted. “He’ll be getting anxious now,” she said finally. We brought lemonade and sugar cookies to the porch, where a warm breeze blew rose scents over us.

“I was telling your friend about my store,” said Mr. Kinney. “I’ll be going in tomorrow or the next day. We have some lovely shirtwaists, don’t we, Olivia?”

“Yes, dear. Here’s your lemonade.”

“Rain’s coming. Look there,” said Mr. Kinney, signaling with his glass. Indeed, dark clouds had rolled across the lake. Birds called urgently. Butterflies and bees sucked at banks of flowers; branches bowed as if welcoming a great guest. “We love rain on the lake in Ashtabula,” Mr. Kinney announced. “Don’t we, Olivia?”