The Seamstress (47 page)

“Good heavens!” a woman chided from the back of the trolley. “Mind yourselves!”

There was a scuffle. Emília saw one of the orchestra men pushing a drunk in ratty clothes. There was shouting. Their faces were flushed and angry. They grappled. The remaining orchestra members cheered their friend. The drunk ripped off the orchestra member’s blue sash. The assistant conductor blew his whistle. The other trolley riders moved away from the fight, crowding Emília and obscuring her view.

“Mother Mary!” a woman screamed.

“Stop the car!” a man shouted.

The conductor looked back. “We’ve got to wait for the next stop,” he yelled. “It’ll cause a collision to stop in the middle of the tracks.”

There was another scream. The drunk jumped off the trolley car. In the dusk light, Emília saw something glimmer in his hands.

“Viva Gomes!” he shouted from the ground.

Another orchestra member jumped from the car, then another and another. They chased the drunk, their figures becoming shadows as the trolley moved forward. The remaining passengers backed away from the trolley’s center, pinning themselves against its waist-high walls. The boy beside Emília dropped his corncob. Lindalva gasped and gripped Emília’s arm tighter.

She will leave a bruise,
Emília thought.

The corncob rolled to the center of the car. The fighting orchestra man knelt. He crossed his arms against his stomach, like a child with a bellyache. His remaining band mates looked on, their instruments in their limp hands. An inky stain spread across his shirt. He sucked in a long breath and wobbled backward. His arms loosened and then let go. There was a dark slash across his midsection. His insides unfurled from the cut like a flower blooming from his belly.

Emília heard the screech of the trolley car. She felt herself moving backward. She saw the cob of corn, stained now, rolling toward her. The dark, shining puddle beneath the slumped musician trickled toward her shoes. Lindalva fainted. She fell onto Emília, knocking the air from her lungs. Emília stumbled backward with Lindalva in her arms. She was ready to fall. Ready to hit the wet floor. She closed her eyes but did not feel the impact.

When the trolley came to a full stop, Emília opened her eyes. There was a hand upon her waist and another along her back, cradling her. Propping her up. The hands felt strong and, for an instant, Emília recalled her childhood heroes—those romantic and brooding men from the pages of
Fon Fon
. Quickly, she regained her balance and heaved up Lindalva. Then she turned to face her rescuer.

Emília did not see the broad forehead and massive frame of one of her romantic heroes. Instead, she saw a freckle-spotted face. Its brown eyes were lined with pale lashes. She recalled Luzia’s old teasing:
Pig eyes! Pig eyes!
Emília recoiled.

“I’ll help you,” Felipe said, moving to Lindalva’s other side.

His sandy hair was matted; during the cramped trolley ride he’d lost his fedora. Together, he and Emília carried Lindalva from the trolley. They were in a working-class neighborhood. Small, whitewashed shop fronts with crookedly painted signs lined the street. On the corner was a diner. The owners and patrons had left their tables and stood in the restaurant’s open doorways to watch the trolley. Emília and Felipe carried Lindalva inside and propped her in a chair.

“I’ll see if I can get some vinegar,” Felipe said. Emília nodded.

Outside, the trolley’s electric lights had clicked on. The conductor shouted. He and the remaining orchestra members moved the dead man. Emília wanted to ask for a lit candle to place in his hands and guide his soul. She wanted to run into the neighborhood’s dark alleys, away from Felipe, but she had Lindalva to consider. Emília took a newspaper from the dining table and fanned her friend’s face. Felipe returned with the restaurant owner’s wife, who waved a bottle of vinegar beneath Lindalva’s nose. When she woke, she drank two cups of sugar water. Her face was pallid, her hands trembling.

Felipe handed Emília a cup of sugar water.

“You should have some,” he said.

Under the restaurant’s gas lamps, his freckles took on the color of cooked condensed milk, heated and stirred until it became caramel. Emília felt short of breath.

“No thank you,” she said, pushing the cup away.

“Drink it,” he said gently. “You may feel fine, but what we saw…it was a terrible shock.”

She felt angry, suddenly, at his courtesy.

“I know what I need and don’t need, thank you,” Emília said, imitating the indifferent tone Dona Dulce used with her maids.

“Pardon me, Mrs. Coelho,” Felipe said. He set down the cup of sugar water and glanced at Lindalva. She’d closed her eyes again and was taking deep breaths, guided by the restaurant owner’s wife.

“Degas went down the front steps with that pilot. I saw him,” Felipe said. “He left us both to the trolleys.”

“I didn’t look for him,” Emília replied. “I left on my own.”

Felipe lifted the cup of sugar water meant for Emília. He took a long sip. His lips—pink and thin, bordered unevenly by freckles—pursed. Opening his jacket, Felipe rifled through the pockets and removed a small pencil and his
Graf Zeppelin
ticket stub. The middle-class tickets were meant to be mementos, printed on thick paper with a sketch of the dirigible and the date, May 22, 1930, stamped across their faces. Felipe bent over the restaurant’s wooden table and wrote on the ticket stub. When he finished, he folded it into quarters and handed the fat square to Emília.

“Give this to him, would you?”

Emília glanced at Lindalva. Her friend kept her eyes closed and gulped another serving of sugar water offered by a waitress.

“Deliver it yourself,” Emília said. “You’re his friend.”

“I’m not allowed near the legal college,” Felipe replied, staring intently at the folded ticket. His pink mouth twitched. “Degas avoids me. Dona Dulce doesn’t want me calling at your house.”

Felipe leaned forward. Emília smelled sweat and cigarette smoke on his suit jacket. He clamped his hand over hers. Moving brusquely, he turned Emília’s wrist over and fumbled with her fingers until she and Felipe were caught in an awkward handshake. He pushed the square of paper into her gloved palm.

Emília thought of Professor Célio, of their note exchanges, of how greedy she’d been for his replies, of how feverishly she’d waited to see him each month. She saw that same greed, that same awkward eagerness in Felipe and felt a stirring of sympathy for him. But when his grip loosened, Emília instinctively tugged away. She dropped the folded ticket onto the table.

“I won’t,” she said.

Felipe nodded stiffly. His brown eyes were wide, their pupils large, as if he’d caught a fever.

“You worked in my house,” he said, his voice hushed. “Not that long ago. You were a giggler. But your sister wasn’t. She couldn’t afford to be silly, not with that crooked arm. It’s a shame, what happened to her.”

Emília felt a sharp pain in her breast. It was as if a needle had pricked her lungs, deflating them. She let out a long breath. Emília reached for the half-empty glass of sugar water and finished it.

“You don’t have to remind me of our acquaintance,” she said, putting down the cup and taking up the folded ticket stub. “You never spoke to me in Taquaritinga. Now you know what it’s like to be avoided.”

Emília glanced at Lindalva; her friend’s eyes were still closed, her head down. Emília slipped the stub into her glove, poking it down past her wrist until it settled into her palm.

Outside, their trolley car was gone, moved before there was a collision on the tracks. Lindalva had left her purse inside the car. Emília did not have enough money for their fare to Derby Square. She could not telephone the Coelho house; there were no phone lines in the neighborhood.

“We’ll need trolley fare,” Emília said, startling Felipe from his thoughts. “Degas doesn’t give me pocket money.”

Felipe nodded. Once Lindalva felt stronger, they walked to the nearest trolley stop where Felipe paid for their tickets and cautiously waved good-bye. Emília and Lindalva rode to Derby Square in silence. Each time Emília closed her hand into a fist, the ticket’s pointed edges pressed into her skin. Her sympathy was replaced by anger—at Felipe for making her a messenger, at her husband for his convenient escape, and at herself for her weakness, her shame.

In the months since the first articles had appeared about the Seamstress, Emília had convinced herself that only Degas knew the similarities between the cangaceira and Luzia, and that his suspicions could not be proven. Emília had made herself believe that Felipe—who’d never gone near his mother’s sewing room and rarely returned to Taquaritinga after starting at the university—didn’t remember Luzia. But he did. When he’d mentioned Luzia, Emília hadn’t thought of claiming her sister or defending her. The comfort and pride she’d felt each time she read an article about the Seamstress were replaced by shame, by fear. Emília recalled her long lessons with Dona Dulce, her many walks in Derby Square in the hopes of gaining acceptance. She thought of her membership in the Ladies’ Auxiliary and of the very real possibility of opening her own atelier—that many-windowed and spotless place she’d often dreamed of, with rows of well-fed seamstresses creating her designs. All of her work, all of her plans would be lost if people knew about Luzia. Emília could hear the Recife women’s shocked voices: what kind of family allows a girl to be carted off by cangaceiros? Only poor unfortunates kept their daughters so weakly guarded; only people with no background, no money, and worse—no decency. No respectable woman bought dresses from a criminal’s relative. No one, not even the baroness and Lindalva, would associate with a person of such low caliber. Dr. Duarte would want to measure Emília again, to study her as he studied the families of prisoners at the Downtown Detention Center. Dona Dulce would not want her in the Coelho house. Emília would be sent into the streets.

She shivered and leaned against the trolley’s wooden rail. The planks’ studs dug into her back. Next to her, Lindalva kept her eyes closed and her hands firmly around a napkin from the diner, given to her in place of a handkerchief. Emília wondered if her friend was still upset by the murder on the trolley, or if Lindalva was ignoring her. How much of Felipe’s conversation had her friend heard? What did Lindalva suspect? Emília took a deep breath and stared into the city streets. The closer they got to Derby Square, the less dark the city became. Gas streetlamps created yellow circles of light. Modest, one-story shacks disappeared, replaced by taller, bulkier homes with decorative fences. Guard dogs howled behind their gates. Emília’s eyes stung.

She had failed Luzia once before, when the cangaceiros took her. Emília had kept quiet, had not defended her sister, had not offered herself in Luzia’s place. Now, though the circumstances were different, Emília felt she had done the same thing. The ticket stub in her glove was moist with sweat. Emília’s heart beat heavily in her chest. It felt too large—cumbersome and bumbling, like the
Graf Zeppelin. I will have to learn how to tether it,
she thought.
I will have to rope it down.

At the baroness’s house, a maid phoned the Coelhos. Lindalva, still shocked by the murder, hugged Emília tightly and cried. “I can only think of that poor man on the trolley!” Lindalva said, sniffling. “I keep seeing his face. Everything’s a blur after that. I hope I wasn’t too much trouble for you?” Emília shook her head, relieved by Lindalva’s forgetfulness.

Thirty minutes later, Degas arrived in the Chrysler Imperial. During their ride to Madalena, he recalled the chaos at the Zeppelin pavilion and explained how he and Captain Chevalier were guided immediately into the mayor’s automobile. Emília did not think to ask about Dr. Duarte and Dona Dulce: if they’d left the pavilion, if they’d arrived home safely. Degas drove quickly, as always. Recife’s roads were only recently equipped for cars; there were few stops. At the single traffic light at the intersection of Visconde de Albuquerque and Rua José Osório Emília pulled off her glove and handed Degas the folded square within it.

“Here,” she said.

“What’s this?”

“A note. From Felipe.”

Degas stared at her. The traffic light, built into a post on the corner, projected a red glow onto his face.

“He was on the trolley,” Emília said, her voice irritatingly shaky. “Take it.”

Like Felipe, she pushed the square into Degas’ hand.

“What does it say?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t read other people’s notes.”

Degas was still. He held the ticket stub in one hand and gripped the steering wheel with the other. When the light changed, he did not accelerate. A breeze came through the car’s windows, bringing with it the rank, mossy scent of the Capibaribe River, which they’d just crossed.

“He told me,” Emília said, “that he’s been having trouble finding you now that he’s been expelled.”

“It was stupid of him,” Degas spat out. “He cares more about Gomes than anything else. Just like Father.” He ran his hand along the ribbed steering wheel. “Father’s promised me a stake in his business. If I finish at the university, if I don’t make any mistakes, I’ll have a share. I’ll have responsibilities. He’s going to let me manage his properties, Emília. I can’t risk losing that.”

Degas threw the note into her lap.

“Tear it up,” he said. “I don’t want it.”

“He’ll think I didn’t deliver it.”

“So?”

“He mentioned Taquaritinga,” Emília said. “My sister. He remembers her.”

Degas stared at the road ahead. The muscle at the base of his jaw twitched, as if he was clenching and unclenching his teeth. Without turning his head, Degas reached into Emília’s lap and, fumbling with the skirt of her dress, took back the note.

“Don’t tell Mother you took a trolley,” he said. Then he shifted gears and pressed the gas pedal.

7

In June, winter rains washed away the city’s dank smells. They flooded Camp Jiquiá. They forced construction of the Madalena trolley line to stop. They made the Capibaribe swell and surge onto the city’s streets, carrying away summer’s refuse. And they bred fat mosquitoes, made bold and awkward by their size. Emília killed them with one good slap.