Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (37 page)

I’d never seen her like this, so calm, as if we were speaking of another city’s troubles. The strike had been my world since early June. Could it be over so suddenly, like a summer storm?

“But the white marches were working. Didn’t you say so yourself?”

“They
were
good, and we’ll use them next time, maybe earlier. But
this
strike is over. The owners promised to hire everyone back at the same wages and terms. No reprisals at least.” She leaned against the brick wall, spent.

“The owners promised? You
talked
to them?”

“We’ve been negotiating. I’m sorry, Lucia. We had to do it secretly.”

I put down the plate. My eyes burned. So much hunger, so many sacrifices. Constantly telling ourselves we could win, urging women to march one more time, one more time. I saw Enrico’s bright face, then his bloodied face, and finally the rigid little body before his casket closed. The tears came now, sheets of them falling silently. Josephine gave me a handkerchief and wrapped her arm around my shoulder.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said finally, “that because we’re going back, we lost everything.” I nodded. “But it’s not like that. We aren’t stopping. In another city, in the next strike or the next one we’ll win. Workers will get a fifty-, even a forty-five-hour week. We’ll keep going forward, for Enrico, for everyone who marched and all who couldn’t. The owners suffered too: remember the loans they took out? They never expected us to last this long. Next time, they know we’ll do better.”

“Why will we do better?”

“Because of all the groups that
didn’t
help us. If just one of those had been with us, we might have won. If the Cuyahoga County Women’s Suffrage Association or the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the YMCA or the Federation for Jewish Charities had supported us, the others might have too. Imagine if they marched with banners or took out a notice in the
Plain Dealer
. Suppose we’d had a mink brigade of rich women like in New York? The owners would have noticed. If we’d had the newspaper editors on our side, if churches and synagogues had spoken more openly or the summer was cooler or the Bohemians had been here longer and felt more American, we might have won. Perhaps we moved too quickly after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. We should have planned better to be sure of our allies.”

“If we’d tried the white marches earlier,” I said, joining the swell of possibilities.

She smiled. “You see? And even if the strike is over, we didn’t completely lose.
You
changed, Lucia. Others changed. Don’t you feel it?” She picked up her plate again.

Yes, I had changed. While Josephine ate, I thought back to that first glorious day when we left our posts in unison, to the marches, the songs and jokes my first time in jail. I had asked Mrs. Livingston and Mrs. Kinney for money and spoken boldly to Father Stephen, to pastors, rabbis, and ladies’ groups. I’d managed strike pay for hundreds of families. Others had changed too. Young women whose lives had been ruled by bosses, fathers, and husbands, had convinced neighbors and friends to join the strike. They had marched for hours in public, chanting despite heat and hunger. Even Enrico’s too-brief tenure in the great enterprise took on stately meaning. A street boy had been known as far as Ashtabula. His funeral filled a church. My appeal raised funds for a dignified casket and headstone. Pride in these things swept over my past pleasures of books and school. Perhaps Father Stephen was right: my calling was here.

Josephine set down her plate. “Lucia, I’m going to Michigan soon. The Kalamazoo Corset Company sells one and a half million corsets a year, but they won’t heat the factory decently in winter.” She opened her notebook and showed me a list. “These are girls who died of pneumonia.” As her finger traced the line of names, I saw Irena’s pale face in candlelight. “And here are those bitten by rats.” She traced a longer list and closed the book. “The girls have to buy their own thread unless they make ‘other arrangements’ with the bosses.”

“Like at Stingler’s?”

“Yes, exactly. While the company sponsors silly songs about American Beauty corsets, workers get fondled in front of their mothers. They’re fired if they speak out or won’t ‘cooperate,’ and there’s no other work in town. Some girls take poison to end their shame. Others smother the babes born in shame. Some jump off bridges. Three couldn’t pay for a decent abortion and bled to death.”

I thought of the girls at Stingler’s, of Giovanna and Mamma. What right had any boss to treat his workers like whores?

“Some girls will testify,” Josephine went on. “We can convince others. The clergy will march; they know how bosses use factory girls. This time the suffragettes will come with signs and the WCTU as well. Rich women are different in Michigan, everybody says. If we organize well, the strike will be short and we’ll win. You’ll see, Lucia. I want you to feel that joy.”

“How will I feel it?”

“By coming to Kalamazoo with me.”

“I told you I can’t leave—”

“Bring her. We’ll find lodging for both of you. Stay a couple months and then come back to Cleveland, if there’s somebody waiting here for you,” she finished slyly. “Once the strike is started, the union can run it themselves.”

“Mamma’s used to the boardinghouse. In a strange place she’d get worse.”

“Is it really because of her that you won’t go?” she asked mildly. “Are you afraid of something else?”

“Like what?”

“A bigger job than bookkeeping, a bigger voice.” The women in the corner untangled themselves and sat up. Josephine brought over their plates, keeping her back to me.

Was
I afraid? Going to Hiram had been easy. Because I was younger then, or because nobody depended on me? Confused in a new place, Mamma might wander and perhaps end in an asylum where the rest of her mind would fail. Yet if I stayed in Cleveland, how could my life be more than bookkeeping and caretaking? Even if I somehow went to college, would that solitary pleasure satisfy me, having once helped build a march of six thousand? If I went to Kalamazoo and we lost, how could I bear the weight of another failure? Was that a reason not to try? Another question loomed: was it better to never see Henryk again or to see and not have him? My chest tightened. I was trapped in a cell within a cell, a prison of questions.

Josephine came back to our bench. “You’re thinking about your fella, that you’d miss him in Michigan?”

“There’s no fella,” I said too sharply. “Henryk is—” Josephine raised an eyebrow. Caught, I slumped against the wall. “Anyway, he’s Jewish.”

“That’s what Pepe said, but he thinks a lot of this young man who’s not your fella.”

“Well, Henryk’s family doesn’t think a lot of a girl who’s not Jewish, with no money and no father and a crazy mother.
They’d
like me to go to Michigan and never come back.”

“Lucia,” Josephine said casually, “it’s a new century. Not everyone needs a family. And marriage isn’t the only path. Men and women come together for pleasure and then go their separate ways. It’s called ‘free love.’ ”

I stared. Was that how she lived in the private life of which she never spoke? Of course I’d heard talk of free love all summer as union brothers and sisters coupled and uncoupled, as unfettered as Count Filippo in Capri. “But isn’t that—”

“A sin?” Josephine finished, smiling. She opened her book and pointed to the names of girls dead or rat-bitten. “
Here
is sin. Being forced into ‘services.’ Working in firetraps. Sixty- and seventy-hour weeks. Free love is men and women living their lives as they choose, caring for each other. Think about it.”

Just then a tubby officer rapped at the bars of our cell and said a friend had posted bail. “Isadore came early,” Josephine said, brushing her dress. “Well, let’s go.”

The officer shook his head. “Not Isadore, some American: Harry White.” Perplexed, we followed him to where Henryk was waiting in a striped suit and Panama hat.

“Ah, Mr. Harry White,” said Josephine, “so good to see you.”

Henryk grinned as we stepped into the street. “How’s my American look?”

“Very convincing,” said Josephine.

“Pepe said you were arrested,” Henryk told us. “The strike’s over. Two thirds voted to end it. Isadore read a statement from Printz-Biederman promising to rehire the strikers. They’ll put up a list of fines so foremen won’t invent new ones, and they’ll supply the needles and thread.”

“Pepe told you all this?” I asked.

“Yes, I pay for his news with apples.”

“Henryk, shall we stop the little secrets?” Josephine interrupted. I looked between them. “Lucia, remember the last donation, the one you thought came from the Livingstons? It actually came from a grocer.”

I turned to Henryk, who shrugged and smiled. “It was important to you, so I helped,” he said.

“But you’re saving for a new shop. And then you paid our bail.”

“I’ll earn it back. People always need vegetables. They’ll buy more now that the strike’s over.”

Near Public Square, Josephine stepped aside. “I have to talk with Isadore. Henryk, will you walk her home?” He nodded. “And, Lucia, think about Kalamazoo.” Then she was gone, dodging a truck unloading bundles of newspapers.

Left alone with Henryk, I felt the air between us thicken. Perhaps he felt it too. A newsboy ran by. “It must be a
Plain Dealer
extra on the strike,” I said.

“Do you want a copy?”

I nodded, thinking that we could read as we walked. That would be easier than talking. My head spun with the end of the strike, the question of Michigan, and the strange, dizzying notion of free love. Henryk caught up with the boy and paid him. But he didn’t unfold the paper. “I guess you heard about Miriam,” he said instead.

“Yes, I’m sorry. Lula told me.” Without discussion, we had taken the long way home, kicking through a crunchy blanket of leaves.

“Everyone said we were perfect for each other. She didn’t think so, obviously. She thought she’d be better off with a banker than a grocer, especially if the banker loves her.”

“And the grocer?”

“The grocer thought he did. But mostly he was a big fool. Is that what Lula says?”

“She didn’t say.”

“But she probably thinks so, and it’s true.”

“I see.” We walked a block in silence. I didn’t want to talk about Miriam.

“What’s happening in Kalamazoo?” he asked suddenly.

I explained the corset makers’ strike and that Josephine wanted my help in organizing a strike. I listed the grievances and how the workers could win.
Yes, just talk about Kalamazoo. It’s easier.

“What about your mother?”

“Josephine says to bring her, but I don’t think I can. It’s a problem.”

“Michigan’s far away. And cold.”

“That’s true.” Far away, but wouldn’t it be easier to have just one task: to win a strike for corset makers. Our feet sounded a beat on the slate sidewalk like the blacksmith poem from long ago: ta-
dum,
ta-
dum,
ta-
dum
.

Closer to the boardinghouse, Henryk took my arm. “Lucia, I’ll miss you if you go.”

Another time, his words and the warmth of his hand would have thrilled me, but I’d lost patience for half measures. Perhaps the walk to Vesuvius had done this, or the ending of the strike. “Henryk, we’ve been friends since we first played Simon Says.”

“Yes—friends.” He stumbled on the word like a greenhorn.

“Perhaps it was more,” I said.

“It was.”

“Is that why your father found Miriam for you? Because we’re too different to be more than friends?” Henryk flinched. “We
are
different. And I won’t convert, and I’d never ask you to be Catholic.”

“The problem is my family. My father.”

I pulled a dry leaf from a tree. “What do
you
want, Henryk?”

“I want to go walking with you and dance with you without a dozen people telling me the next day: ‘She’s not one of us.’ I want a life with you, I want to marry you, but I need my father to stop—”

I crushed the leaf. “Then tell him! Tell them!” I was weary, shaken by the end of the strike and flushed with Josephine’s truth: so much had changed.
I
had changed. “Henryk, we marched all summer. We went hungry and were beaten because we wanted a better life. We went to jail. Can’t you tell your father who you want to marry?”

His face went pale under the streetlight. The newspaper crinkled. “I’m the only son, the only child. I’m everything to my parents. I know that’s hard to understand because you don’t have a father—” I stopped walking and spun to face him. He covered his eyes; the extra fell with a slap to the ground. “I’m so sorry, Lucia, I didn’t mean—”

“To remind me that I’m illegitimate? You can do a good deed and pretend you’re my husband to get my crazy mother out of the crazy house, but really I’m just a
shiksa,
and worse because I’m poor. Is
that
what you meant?” I had never spoken thus to anyone, never, never. The words tore my throat, but I was more than Lucia now. I was all the women born poor, born with no fathers, born germ plasma, born wanting too much. “Maybe you should get your father to find you a better Miriam. Then everybody would be happy.” My words stopped. Tears were coming. I turned away.

A breeze blew his Panama hat off. He let it go. “You’re right,” he said quietly. “Enrico was just a child, but he fought for what he believed in.”

I kicked at the dry leaves around us. I’d had so little of family in my life. How could I disparage his and the solid ground it gave him? Yet what pain, what aching loss to cast away those wide, kind eyes and lean face, the welcoming way of listening and easy jokes, his goodness and the comfort of his presence.

“Lucia, you want—”

“Too much, I know.” We were walking again, dragging our feet as if we’d suddenly grown old. “Josephine says it’s a new century and we don’t need families. Love can be free, men and women coming together and leaving each other when they choose. But I need a place I can count on forever, where I can be
me
as I am, not me different. And you need your family. Why should you give that up? I wish I had one myself. So yes, I want too much.”