Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (32 page)

“Yes, dear, but we must go inside before our guests catch a chill.”

When the rain comes,
I told myself,
I’ll talk about the strike and ask for money.
Until then, we sat in comfortable silence, Mamma and Mr. Kinney rocking, Mrs. Kinney and I on the creaking swing. The rain did come, first gently and then blowing harder. Heavy heads of hydrangea swayed; petals flew off rosebushes. Mrs. Kinney urged us inside, walking behind her husband, reminding him to step up from the porch. “I know that, Olivia,” he complained amiably, although he kicked the door riser several times before stepping up. “We’re going to travel,” he announced. “When I close the store, I’m taking Olivia to Italy.”

Mamma edged past him to the piano, her eyes flashing in the dim light. I darted to her side, whispering, “Mamma, come sit down with me.” She stroked the keys. “It’s not a player piano like Roseanne’s. See, there’s no rolls? You can’t—”

“Would you like to play, Mrs. D’Angelo?” asked a gentle voice behind us.

“Thank you, Mrs. Kinney, but I don’t think—” Mamma pushed me aside. “I told you,” I hissed in Italian, “it’s a
real
piano.” She sat down hard on the bench, held her fingers over the keys, and froze. I froze as well. Would she cry now? Beat the keys? Walk out into the rain or start the steady rocking she did when most distressed? I couldn’t ask for money then, perhaps couldn’t even get her back on a train. Would someone set the police on a rocking, lunatic foreigner?

“I will sing ‘Shine On, Harvest Moon,’ ” Mamma announced, in her nearly perfect stage English.

“Wonderful,” cried Mr. Kinney gleefully. “My favorite.”

“What a treat,” his wife added. “Vaudeville in our own parlor. Come sit by me, Lucia.” I took myself to the flowered divan, stiff as wood, consumed by fear. At home Mamma kept such distance from Roseanne’s piano that she hadn’t even noticed I’d sold her song rolls.

Her hands stretched over the keys, stopped, and shook. Was she just now realizing there was no button to start the music? “Shine on—shine—on,” began Mr. Kinney, his voice deep and achingly slow, as if calling words back from a great distance. Pale fingers lowered to the keys, pressed one, the next, the next until a tune came halting out. I was stunned. Had the piano man taught her to play, or had she watched the player keys go up and down until the patterns pressed into her mind? She’d never told me. And of course I’d never asked.

“Harvest—moon—up—in—the—sky.” Mamma joined him, her still-rich voice carving words from air. She or Mr. Kinney might repeat a word as the other one pushed on. Together they managed: “I—ain’t—had—no—lovin’—since—April—January, June, or July.”

A warm hand closed over mine. Tears glistened in Mrs. Kinney’s eyes. She leaned close and whispered: “We were going to be in Venice on a full moon. Herman wanted to sing this to me on the Grand Canal.”

Have music bring Mamma back.
Could she feel once more the heavy drape of her vaudeville gowns, the weight of the puffed pompadour and hat, the thrilled breath of her crowds?
Just one step, just a little step back to me.

The two voices, high and low, gathered their forces and finished together: “For me and my gal.” Drumming rain filled the silence as we waited, breathless, for the next verse or song. Neither came. Mamma slumped, her hands sliding off the keys as if they’d been greased. Mr. Kinney simply stopped, his mouth hanging open. We clapped. Mrs. Kinney caressed her husband, but he didn’t move again, staring fixedly at his knees.

I ran to hug my mother. “
Brava,
Mamma,
brava
! Can you sing another? You haven’t done ‘Santa Lucia’ in so long. I’m sure Mrs. Kinney—”

The piano bench scraped back, and Mamma pushed past me to a stiff little chair facing the rain. “So, the concert’s over,” said Mrs. Kinney.

“Yes.” We sat in the dim room, drained by the upswell of hope and its sudden collapse. When Mrs. Kinney asked her husband and Mamma if they’d like some luncheon, he didn’t answer, already deep in sleep, and Mamma shook her head.

Mrs. Kinney sighed. “We’ll eat here then. I often do.” She had the maid bring us cold chicken sandwiches, chilled broth, and cucumber salad. Alice set these things on little tables by our chairs. How many times had I brought lunch for ladies? I mouthed to Alice that she’d forgotten soup spoons and diverted Mrs. Kinney from her broth until the errant spoons appeared.

All through lunch our eyes strayed constantly, hers to Mr. Kinney and mine to Mamma. “Tell me about the strike, Lucia,” she asked finally. “Are you involved?”

“Yes, I am.” Carefully naming Mr. Kinney as a fair and generous boss, I outlined our grievances with the others. I tried to be calm, to stress how often and earnestly the workers had presented their complaints. I explained fines and fees, the long hours and dangers of work. She knew about the Lentz fire but not the Triangle disaster. I told her how suffragettes gave private gifts but refused public support, the strikebreakers and the fights they started, my own time in jail, the heat that eroded patience, and families without savings, hungry and soon to be homeless.

“So you’re wanting a donation, Lucia? Is that why you came?” she asked gently, without Mrs. Livingston’s bitterness or hurt.

“Yes, ma’am. The workers are desperate. Anything you can give will help.”

She looked at her husband, his mouth slowly opening and closing, chewing air. A foam of spittle glistened on his lower lip. It seemed so long ago that he watched as I kept his books, attentive, even playful. Once he reeled off twelve random prices for my adding machine. Before I could pull the heavy lever, he announced the sum: $187.63. “You see, Miss D’Angelo,” he said, tapping his head, “it never leaves you, never, never.”

Mrs. Kinney wiped away the spittle with a lacy handkerchief. “He’d be distressed to wake up soiled. You know what a gentleman he always—” She turned away.

“Yes, ma’am. He was a true gentleman.” Her shoulders dropped, and regret surged through me. Why had I said “was”? How much pain pressed into that little word? “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Kinney.”

“Oh, Lucia. I fought it at first, but yes, he
was
a gentleman.” She straightened her back. “And he was very fond of you and would have wanted to help. Just a minute.” She left me with Mr. Kinney nodding and Mamma a glaring statue. I listened to the slackening rain and first birds chirping. So often in the next weeks I recalled that lovely room filled with loss and quiet sympathy.

In the streetcar back to Cleveland, I unfolded the bank draft Mrs. Kinney had given me. Three hundred and fifty dollars. “Look,” I whispered to Mamma. “See how much? Josephine will be pleased.”

I think she smiled, but I wonder now how many smiles and comprehending looks I’d simply imagined. “Home?” she asked.

“Yes, we’re going home now.”

Josephine received the money gratefully, but it melted like ice on summer sidewalks, gone for soup kitchens, bandages, to pay fines for “disturbing the peace” and reward the few policemen who favored our cause.

Two German mechanics who had boarded with Roseanne left for better jobs in Chicago. She had us pay more each week until she filled the empty rooms. “What can I do, Lucia?” she demanded. “There’s no work in town, and other landlords are throwing people out on the street. How long will you keep striking?”

“Until we get justice,” I said, as we’d been drilled to say. I took a dime to Henryk for a watermelon to mollify Roseanne. He gave me a cup of ice as well.

“Try this,” he said, running a cube against the back of his neck. I did the same and felt the cool, delicious trickle down my back. When our eyes met, I took my melon and hurried home. Sweat burned away the trickle but not the image that filled my mind that night: ice cubes melting on our hot and eager skin.

When the strike crawled on, I slipped two of Mamma’s best vaudeville hats from her trunk and sold them. Walking at night, searching for cool pockets in the city, I heard from every window the whine of fretful, hungry children. People slept on roofs, porches, and patches of parched grass. Picketers fainted in the heat. A portly man who used to jeer at us didn’t come one day. He’d collapsed on the stairs of his boardinghouse, Enrico announced importantly. “He cracked his head and died. People say he was nice enough before the strike. His wife is lame and he’s out of work.”

Josephine used the story at a night meeting. “He should have joined us. We would have cared for his wife. Brothers and sisters, you’ll tell your children stories of the Cleveland Garment Workers’ Strike of 1911. They’ll wish they were here with us, with the six thousand.”

“We aren’t six thousand no more,” cried a voice.

“We will be, when the owners start to crack. A little longer, brothers and sisters. Let’s sing.” We sang “Hard Times Come Again No More” and a rollicking ballad of Casey Jones, “The Eight-Hour Day” and “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching.” We sang loudly, clapping and tramping until we were roused again to solidarity and hope. Men and women, Jews, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Russians, and Serbs linked arms for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Pride in all the good our country could hold and our place in America eased our aching feet. We could march tirelessly and no trouble seemed a sacrifice.

But after the meeting, as I swept the union hall, I saw Josephine and Isadore speaking together. The curve of their bodies filled me with dread.

G
ERM
P
LASMA

August was my
bitter month in a smear of heat. I’d forgotten the feel of clothes that didn’t stick like skin to my body. Coal dust, street dust, and the grime of factory smoke mixed with sweat. I couldn’t keep clean. Ice prices rose steadily. There was no relief.

Even the peace of Ashtabula turned sour, for in the days after our return Mamma was consumed by a grim frenzy, terrible to watch and live with. She scrubbed the front steps as sweat streamed from her face. She tirelessly opened and closed windows, doors, and curtains as if seeking magic combinations to pull in breezes. She polished the player piano until Roseanne pulled her away, saying, “
Basta,
you’re wearing it out.”

I asked Dr. Ricci if our trip had caused this change. He passed a snowy handkerchief across his brow. “I’m sorry, Lucia. Sometimes we’re like poor billiard players who can’t predict where a ball will go. Singing to the Kinneys was a great step forward, but perhaps it brought back a difficult memory. Or the change might have come in any case.”

“What should we do?”

“I can’t prescribe more laudanum. You might tire her with walking. Try to be patient. This manic phase had a beginning and it will surely have an end.”

“And the next phase?”

He sighed. “We don’t know.”

I repeated the line from Milton: “The mind is its own place.”

“Yes, Lucia, it surely is.”

At night, when the heat dulled a little, Mamma and I walked along Lake Erie. A hazy moon swam in charcoal water. Languid waves heaved against the pebbled shore. She’d kick one small stone and then frantically search for it to kick again. By turns, I’d help, feeling foolish, or try to stop her: “Mamma, please. Pick another. They’re all the same.” Or I’d simply watch her rummage, grateful nobody saw us. When I’d had enough, I hurried her home.

“What’s the rush, girls? Where’s the fire?” men called out from tavern doorsteps, but nobody troubled us. Perhaps they had no energy. Dripping with sweat, we hung our clothes to air, washed our faces and arms in rosemary water, and went to bed still damp, hoping for slips of cooling breeze. Mamma slept in ragged patches, rising early to cook with a great rattling of pans, opening and closing doors, knocking furniture around. Dark circles bloomed around my eyes from constant worry and wakefulness.

“She’s bothering the boarders,” Roseanne complained fretfully. “You have to make her stop or else put her someplace while she’s like this.”

“You mean the state hospital? You know what happens there, Roseanne.”

“Well, there’s a reason for these places if people can’t be kept at home. Maybe your rich friends in Ashtabula can keep her for a while.”

“No, they can’t. I’ll find a way.”

“Do it quickly. Two men with good city jobs came by yesterday, and she spooked them. I can’t afford this.”

Donato’s wife was working. I telephoned Charlie and Frank in Youngstown. Both were kind but couldn’t help. Yolanda met customers at home for her hat business. “If they’re uncomfortable, they won’t come. I’m sorry, Lucia,” Charlie said. Frank and Giovanna had a boarder, a new baby coming, and no space for Mamma. I went to see Enrico’s mother, Angela, thinking to hire her help, but in the tiny, stifling flat, a cot in the kitchen held her oldest son, paralyzed from a fall in the limestone quarries. Her husband couldn’t rouse himself for the picket lines but sat hunched on a chair, rocking on the warped wooden floor and lamenting the family’s lost land in Calabria.

“If I had money, I’d give it to him for drink,” Angela said. “At least get him out of the house. Now what did you want, Lucia?”

How could I add to her troubles? “Nothing. I just came to say what a blessing Enrico is, what a clever boy. When school starts in September, he must go. I’ll help him with his homework once we win the strike.”

“When the strike’s over,”
she corrected me, “when there’s work again.” The invalid groaned, and Angela hurried to his side.

“He needs changing,” she said over her shoulder, “and he’s ashamed with a stranger here. Excuse us please, Lucia.”

I let myself out.
Think, think, who else could help?
Not the Reillys. Even if they’d softened after the birth of Maria Margaret, the silence of that flat would terrify Mamma. Father Stephen offered sympathy and prayers, but the church was a place of worship, not a sanitarium. She couldn’t stay at Hiram House, Mr. Bellamy said firmly. Consider the donors who funded the nursery school and children’s clubs. “What would come next, Miss D’Angelo? First lunatics wandering in the halls, then drunkards and the demented? Should we expose our innocents to the depraved and syphilitic?”