Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (41 page)

“Papa, please don’t—”

“What question, Mr. Weiss?”

“You love my son, Henryk?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Of course,” he snapped. “Why not? He’s a fine boy. The best in Cleveland. I mean, how—” He frowned, chewed his lip, asked something in Yiddish that Henryk couldn’t answer, and stepped even closer. “When you love my son,
how
do you love him? Explain.”

“What kind of—?” Henryk demanded. I held up my hand.

“Mr. Weiss, when I love him, the best in me and the best in him are like this.” I folded my fingers together.

Two wrinkled hands encased mine. “Well then,” said a rough voice, “from your mouth to God’s ear.” He slowly pulled his hands away. “So, Henryk, don’t just stand there. Get her some nice apples! Even Italians like apples, no, Lucia?”

“Yes, sir, very much.”

Henryk hurried away but looked back over his shoulder at us, beaming.

I floated home with my apples. Cleveland had never been so beautiful, the sky as blue as the Bay of Naples, the wintery air sweet as any lemon grove. I told nobody that night, savoring my secret alone.

The next evening I brought Mamma’s finished shawl to Lula. She admired the delicate lace of pinks and purple, the softness, the design and fringe, and then hugged me tighter than any shawl could merit. The cook and her new girl hugged me too, but when several regulars lurched up, arms outstretched, Lula shooed them away.

“Lula,” I demanded, “does everybody know
everything
in Cleveland?”

“What are we, girl, stone blind? That boy doesn’t need to say a word. Buy an onion from him and you can see that he’s happy. You don’t have to be a genius to guess why. You tell your mamma this shawl is the prettiest thing I’ve worn since my wedding dress and we’ll take good care of her girl. Give your countess this.” She handed me a crock of her beer cheese. “Can’t get it in Italy, I bet. And you hurry back from Michigan, Lucia D’Angelo. Don’t leave a good man waiting.”

In our last
days together, my mother grew vague and easily confused, surprised at each mention of Henryk and our future together. She moved clothes from my suitcase to hers, emptied hers, and stared blankly when Paolo explained the wonders of their ship: its parlors, galleries, fine dining halls, and musicians at every meal. “They’re going?” she asked, pointing to Elisabetta and Paolo.

“With
you,
Mamma. You’re
all
going home to Naples.”

“You?”

“No, I’m staying in America. I’m going to marry Henryk. I told you.”

Her eyes widened, and she pulled away from me. “The count? The doctor?”

“They’re both dead, remember?” Then she relaxed and asked how soon we’d swim in the bay.

“Oh, Mamma.” The jagged speech, hesitant walk, and darting, birdlike eyes were as familiar as my own skin. How could we part? Yet how could I
not
let her go?

The days passed quickly, each one torn to bits with tasks and meetings. Dr. Ricci, Elisabetta, Paolo, and I determined laudanum doses and planned ways to manage the inevitable bad days. I pried loose time to walk with Henryk or sit in his mother’s kitchen beside mounded plates of sweets as she peppered me with questions that he sometimes translated and sometimes would not. Henryk’s father rarely spoke; he sat smoking his pipe, considering me.

“As if I were some new kind of potato,” I said as we walked back to the boardinghouse at night.

“Well, he
is
a grocer,” Henryk conceded. “But I think he’s liking this new kind of potato, more and more each day. Me too. The finest, most delicious potato on earth.” We stopped in dark places between streetlights, braiding our bodies together, storing up warmth against the months of separation, our joy delighting in joy.

Our wedding would be in Brookside Park when I came back from Michigan, we had determined, with Father Stephen and Rabbi Rosen presiding. To be together was happiness as warm and buoyant as a summer sea. We talked and were silent, laughed at good memories and cried in remembering Enrico. I nestled into the comfort of our union, entirely at ease.

Paolo and Elisabetta hosted an engagement dinner at the Forest City Hotel. Henryk’s parents came, and Lula and Roseanne. Mamma sat next to Henryk, twisting and untwisting her napkin. Yet once, furtively, she squeezed his hand. My heart thumped. When Henryk tapped his glass for attention and stood, she set her napkin down and listened quietly as he recited a ragged little speech in Italian: “Contessa Elisabetta, Signora D’Angelo, and Paolo, I will love and care for Lucia forever and with all my heart.”

Mr. Weiss spoke to his son in Yiddish, and Henryk said something softly back that would always be their secret. Then the old smile returned as he raised his hand. “My father reminds me of the workers’ vow before the strike: If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may my hand wither from the arm I now raise.” I translated for my friends.

“You deserve this woman, Henryk” was Paolo’s rejoinder. “And that’s our highest praise for any man.”

“Do each other wrong,” Lula added pleasantly, “and I’ll have your heads for beer mugs.”

I wrote to my professors, explaining that for now life was bearing me away from college. I might travel often for the union, Isadore warned. I conveyed this to Henryk. “It’s your work,” he responded, “as vegetables are mine. All I want is a home with you.”

At night Mamma let me lie close by her, matching my breath with hers. And then, so soon, her time in America was ending. Josephine and I were to leave Saturday morning for Michigan. Mamma, Paolo, and Elisabetta would take a later train east. When Henryk came to bring me to Union Depot, Mamma stomped upstairs. In the parlor crammed with suitcases and bundles, I felt like a child, abandoned and exposed.

Elisabetta drew me aside. “I think she
can’t
say good-bye. Perhaps it’s better this way. Go to the station with Henryk. Hurry, or you’ll miss the train.” Above us I heard Mamma’s footsteps, pacing our room.

“Tell her how much I’ll miss her. Tell her I’ll write and we’ll visit as soon as we can.”

“We will, but you go now.”

Henryk and Paolo carried my bags to the taxi where Josephine was waiting. Seeing my distress, she busied herself with a notebook. I looked up at our bedroom window. The curtain had been drawn aside. Was she watching?
Let her find peace without me.

“We’ll visit soon; we’ll start saving right away. You can show me all around Naples,” Henryk whispered. I nodded, turning my face to his jacket and the warmth of his breath.

Union Depot was packed with immigrants arriving, travelers and businessmen leaving, all of us swirling together as if mixed with a giant paddle, the air thick with voices and shouts, the rumble and squeal of trains, conductors’ whistles, newsboys, and peddlers hawking provisions. Henryk hired a porter and got our tickets. I stood frozen in the swirl. Suppose this was a bad day for Mamma? Suppose they couldn’t get her on the train? Suppose she bolted in the station and they lost her forever?

“I’ll go ahead and get settled,” Josephine announced, plunging into the crowd.

Henryk and I walked close together, constantly bumped by porters. I couldn’t speak, seeing only Mamma running upstairs away from me. It was Henryk who heard voices crying “Lucia!” just as we reached my platform.

Roseanne, Paolo, Elisabetta, and Mamma were flushed and breathless just beyond a swarm of passengers. A tight group of men in fine coats and homburg hats brushed past us. “She wanted to say good-bye!” Roseanne shouted as she and Paolo helped my mother climb on a bench. Henryk put his arm around me, a prop in the buffeting tide. Now Mamma was head and shoulders above the crowd. Yet at first nobody noticed this slight woman in a burgundy coat and feathered hat. She settled her feet and lifted her arms.

“Shine on, shine on, harvest moon, up in the sky,” she began, that miraculous voice rising again, clear and bold. Two passengers stopped, astonished, and then a few more. Spots of quiet grew into pools of travelers, stilled and listening. Some sang with her, but she had unhooked the words from their meanings, leaving nothing more of a boy and girl under a willow tree. No, here was the Naples Nightingale singing of our good times and struggles in America, all that we had gained and lost, all that we were together. Her arms floated, the voice arched over the crowd, stopping talk, seeming to stop even whistles and screeches and rattling wheels. A conductor stood listening. Two brakemen with grease buckets turned their heads. The last note faded and her arms floated down. A splattering, then waves of applause followed.

“Encore! Encore! Sister, sing us another!”

Mamma lifted her head. “Now,” she announced in English, I will sing ‘Santa Lucia,’ for my Lucia.” She sang the first verse, my favorite, of silver stars over waves. Here was my mother tongue, thick with love. As her arms reached toward me, I breathed in the dark eyes, pale face, and slight shoulders that had borne so much. Tears smeared my vision; I wiped them away. She faltered in the next verse and stiffened, her eyes darting over the crowd as if searching out an enemy, then fixing on a face near me. The shoulders caved. When she seemed about to topple, caring hands helped her down.

Strangers turned to each other: “What happened? Concert’s over?”

The crowd swallowed her. “Mamma,” I called out, but she was gone.

A gloved hand politely tapped my shoulder. I turned toward an elegantly dressed man with a dark swoop of eyebrows. “You are Lucia?” I nodded. “My compliments,
signorina.
She sings like an angel.” A slight bow and he too dissolved in the crowd.

A whistle shrieked beside me. “That’s your train,” Henryk said in my ear. “Hurry.” He kissed me as I jumped on the train. “Remember what Simon said!” he called out as we pulled away. He kept waving, standing steady amid the platform’s swirl, and he would be there when I returned in two months, three months, outwaiting any strike. Early snows sprinkled the lake as we left the station. Josephine wrote quietly in her notebook. I pressed my face against the chilly glass. Hours ahead lay the work that called forth the best of me in this land.

Near Milwaukee, 1913

I am standing
by the frozen fringe of Lake Michigan in early sunset. Despite the bitter cold, I close my eyes and see my mother in Naples on our rock jutting into the bay. She’s dressed in a linen shift. Her hair is beautiful again, thick and rich. She has been gathering shells with Paolo and Elisabetta’s little son, Luciano. On good days, she’s a kindly older sister to the child. On bad days, she stays in the lemon grove or curtained in her room, knitting scarves that Paolo bundles and mails to me “for the immigrant children.”

I admit that I often envy Luciano’s time in the villa, free from the looming, brutal presence of the count. He has loving parents; soon he’ll have tutors and all the books he’d ever want. He has the best of my mother; she sings to him and tells him stories. When we visit next year, he’ll show me how sunlight fills the sitting room, how yellow plums fall in your hands and tide pools bring treasures every day.

My driver coughs discreetly. “Mrs. Weiss, are you ready? They’re waiting at the union hall. The pastors are there, and the suffragettes.”

“Yes, Pete, I’m ready.”

Very shyly, he gives me a lemon. “I’m hoping it reminds you of home,” he says. It’s small and hard, but still there’s the clean, sharp smell of sour mixed with sweet. “I have a blanket as well and a cushion, since I couldn’t help noticing that you’re . . .”

“Yes, we’re expecting a child.”

“Congratulations to you and your husband. I wish you joy.”

“Thank you, Pete.”

We drive toward the union hall, a tiny point of light across frozen fields vast as a dark sea. I feel in my pocket for Henryk’s letter. Next week, or the next, depending on these meetings, I’ll be home again in Cleveland. I’ll see the room he’s preparing for our child. We’ll take our long walks and be abundantly fed by his mother. We’ll lie in bed for hours talking, dreaming, and, as we like to say, “negotiating.” Each morning waking together is a joy.

But first I’ll speak to these pastors, suffragettes, and workers. I’ll remind them of Josephine’s vow: “Long picket lines make short strikes.” I’ll speak to the owners tomorrow; perhaps we can still avert this strike. It’s been a long day. We bounce over rough country roads, but when I close my eyes, the smell of lemon takes me back to warm waters where I’m swimming again in the moonlit path to Vesuvius.

Acknowledgments

Writing historical fiction
is an exercise in the practice of gratitude. So many give generously of their expertise and counsel. I’ll begin, historically, with the first inspiration for this project. In the fall of 2011, Dr. Serena Scaiola-Sizka, honorary vice consul of Italy in Cleveland, arranged a series of readings for my previous novel,
When We Were Strangers
. In this way, I met Pamela Dorazio Dean, associate curator for the Italian American collection of the Western Reserve Historical Society, whose subsequent help and access to the astonishing wealth of that collection proved invaluable.

Dr. John Grabowski, director of research at the Western Reserve Historical Society, was a limitless, endlessly patient source of historical background on Cleveland history, immigration patterns, and labor history. Ed Pershey, director of special projects and exhibits, assisted on issues of transportation in Cleveland.
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
was my constant friend. Lois Scharf’s excellent article, “The Great Uprising in Cleveland: When Sisterhood Failed,” addresses the early success and rapid unraveling of the Cleveland Garment Workers’ Strike of 1911. In depicting Hiram College, I am indebted to the college archivist, Jennifer S. Morrow.

Leslie Woodcock Tentler’s
Wage-Earning Women
is a detailed, compassionate labor history. The list of victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire is available online through the University of Missouri, Kansas City, School of Law. For immigration and labor history, I often interrogated my sister, Dr. Karen Schoenewaldt. In the areas of union history and organizing, I drew on Frances Ansley, J.D., of the University of Tennessee and Jobs with Justice of East Tennessee, and the Reverend Jim Sessions of Interfaith Worker Justice. Joe Uehlein directed me to sources for union songs of this era. Melissa Brenneman and Jamie Osborne, both of Knox County Public Library, were steadily helpful in a stream of varied inquiries.