Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (15 page)

Mamma nodded.

“She’ll accept thirty, at aforementioned conditions.”

“Good. Have Little Ben take you to the costume mistress. We leave town Monday morning early. Learn the anthem. We’ll do a big number with flags and the Turks. That’s all. And thank you for your service,
negotiator
.” Laughter followed us to the door.

Little Ben was waiting outside. “You stay here,” he told me. “Miss Emma don’t like outsiders in the fitting room.” For the next hour, I stood in the dark, narrow hallway as vaudeville people hurried back and forth. From inside the office, I heard the slim man say, “Thirty’s a bargain for the Nightingale, Mr. Keith. The girl with the dogs cost us forty.”

“I’ll get my money’s worth from both of them, but be careful, Jake. You might have trouble with that Nightingale. Something fishy in the eyes.”

Jake gave Mamma fifteen dollars and she never went back to Printz-Biederman or even told them she was quitting. Instead she spent the next days in the parlor, learning new songs, practicing in front of the long mirror, going out only for costume fittings and walks. When I read a letter from Countess Elisabetta, she barely listened. “You paid her back. What does she want now?”

“It’s a
letter,
Mamma. She’s just being friendly.”

“Well, she can be friendly with you. I have to practice.”

Count Filippo couldn’t last much longer, the countess wrote. He took morphine constantly for the pain. He’d ordered a coffin with an elaborate system of pulleys and bells to raise an alarm if he chanced to be buried alive, now his all-consuming fear. “Paolo and I” had discovered that the costly “Eastern powders” Dr. Galuppi peddled were merely clumps of dirt scooped from the villa’s own garden. “Paolo and I” denounced him.

“Paolo and I,” the phrase turned in my head, calling up sheaves of memories: Paolo’s devoted attention to the countess; their long evenings in her sitting room “reviewing accounts,” his effortless anticipation of her needs, her eyes falling gently on him. I remembered hearing her weep behind closed doors after one of the count’s cruelties and Paolo’s voice, low and soothing until the weeping ceased. Had they been lovers all these years?

“Of course,” said my mother impatiently. “Were you blind?”

“
Everyone
knew about Paolo and the countess,” Roseanne added. So this too I hadn’t seen, as I hadn’t seen Yolanda’s condition or Charlie’s kindness or my mother’s knife. Countess Elisabetta’s letter made me feel young and raw, unfledged in the world and soon to be alone. I followed Mamma like a puppy in the days before she left, but she barely seemed to notice me.

She packed and repacked her bag and picked at the American feast of roast chicken that Roseanne made on our last Saturday night, suddenly fretful and anxious: “I could forget the words. Maybe the audiences won’t like me. They’ll want an American.” She worried that Toscanini might speak to Mr. B. F. Keith, that “bad thoughts” would trail her.

“You can come home if you aren’t happy,” I reminded her.

She told the wall: “If I’m not happy in vaudeville, there’s nowhere else to go.”

“You’ll be happy, Mamma. You’ll be a great success. Everyone will love you. Nothing bad will happen.”
Nothing, nothing, nothing,
I repeated to myself.

On Sunday we bought food for a picnic at Catalano’s and lugged our heavy basket to a pine grove along Lake Erie. The breeze was chill, but sunlight glittered on nearly blue water. We shared bread, prosciutto, cheese, and olives, and scooped artichoke hearts from marinade sharp with garlic. We drank red wine and ate
pastiera,
a rich and heavy ricotta pie that brought sweet memories of home. Then we stretched out on the mossy bank with a bag of candied almonds.

“Tell me about Palazzo Donn’Anna,” I begged. It was one of my favorite stories. Our rock by the villa looked out on the old palazzo’s ruins, whose macabre and tragic history gave me delicious shivers on the warmest summer nights. Fishermen avoided Palazzo Donn’Anna’s mussel beds. “They do well to stay away,” Mamma began as she always did. Long ago a princess of great wealth and insatiable sensual appetites had beautiful young fishermen lured to her palazzo at sunset. They must have thought themselves in an earthly paradise as servants bathed, perfumed, and dressed them, fed them the choicest sweets and wine, and took them to the royal bed for a night of unimaginable passion with the lusty princess, serenaded by unseen musicians. “At the first rays of dawn,” Mamma always whispered, “servants roused the fisherman, still half drunk from his debauch, and brought him to the highest window.” Closing my eyes now as I always did, I pictured the naked figure against a violet sky, a quick thrust from behind, and the wild howl as the not-bird falls, flailing, to jagged rocks below. The battered bodies were weighted in bags under the palace moorings, and their restless souls still haunt the ruined galleries where seabirds nest.

“Wasn’t there
one
fisherman she let live?”

“No, not one.”

“More,” I begged. Mamma told a tale of a good fisherman who
did
marry a grateful mermaid and another of a hungry soldier who bought a fish with his last coin and found a precious ring inside that caused him both joy and pain. She sang me “Santa Lucia” and then, both weary, we slept a little under our shawls. When we woke, she said dreamily: “If I made seventy or eighty dollars a week, maybe a hundred, we could have our own house.”

“Here in this grove.”

“With a piano in a sunroom looking out on the water.”

“Yolanda and Charlie and the baby could visit. We’d have a tide pool over there.” I pointed to the rocky shore.

“Let’s go back,” she said suddenly. “It’s getting cold.” She tied a scarf around her neck to protect it from wind. “I’m leaving at dawn. You know how much I’ll miss you, Lucia?”

“Yes, Mamma.”
Tell me you love me.
Tell me my life will be good here without you, that I’ll find my way as you have now.

“I
have
to do well in vaudeville.”

“You will,” I repeated. “Of course you will.”

A
T THE
H
AYMARKET

The troupe would
go east to Pittsburgh, then south and west through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. I wouldn’t see my mother until September, when she played in Chicago. Even Yolanda was drawing farther from my life. She worked at Mrs. Halle’s millinery shop, where fine ladies came for hats or brought their own to be more elegantly trimmed with feathers, tiny stuffed birds, dried flowers, ribbons, and lace. She didn’t mind the long hours, even as her belly grew. “I have a padded chair and a footstool; I can walk around the shop when my back hurts. She
smiles
and jokes with me. She doesn’t stare like Charlie’s parents do when I come in the door.”

“It’s quiet in their house at least,” I said, remembering how eager she’d been to leave her parents’ noisy flat.

“I’m not used to quiet. Charlie’s father is nearly deaf, so he doesn’t speak. His mother has nothing to say, so she doesn’t talk. She just cleans. How much can you clean three little rooms? She sleeps with that dustcloth. I wish
she’d
go away to vaudeville.”

I got penny postcards from my mother in childlike script, bits of messages that broke off when space ran out and rarely returned to explain: “Mario had a new act that . . . Jimmy the piano man is teaching me . . . I eat in restaurants but . . . I have a new stage hat but it’s so heavy . . . People clap too much for the dummy and ugly little dogs . . . loved my ‘Star Spangled’ anthem . . . I get forty a week now but the fines . . .” She crossed out a note on winning at dice but sent the postcard anyway. “No Toscanini!” she declared from Detroit. Still, she seemed happy. I sent her letters through Mr. Keith’s office, but if she received them she never said. She was becoming like the immigrants I scribed for, whose lives moved ever farther from their old country and families.

Yet into that space that divided us came new pleasures. On Sunday afternoons, while Yolanda wrote to Charlie, I roamed the city on streetcars, searched for treasures in used bookstores, or curled in the quiet parlor with my homework. Each time our teacher said “Next spring, when you graduate,” bolts of pride and pleasure shot through me. I would be in the eight of one hundred with a high school diploma. When Miss Miller announced that a civic-minded benefactor was offering a prize of thirty dollars for the best essay on “Cleveland, a True American City,” I wrote and rewrote my entry, fretting over every word, determined to win a diploma
and
the essay prize.

Free from my mother’s complaints, I let books puddle on my bed. Papers carpeted the unwashed floor. “Teresa would scream if she saw this,” Roseanne warned. I didn’t care. All my life I’d scrubbed and dusted and put things away neatly. Disorder was a happy luxury that said: “This is Lucia’s room.”

Along with the penny postcards came money wired home and a note that said “Buy something pretty.” I did: a softly tucked blouse and flounced burgundy skirt for a Saturday night dance at Hiram House. Roseanne arranged my hair in a pompadour bulked by a horsehair pad she called a “rat.” All fashionable women used rats, she said. “Don’t you know?” I didn’t, having vaguely supposed that great wealth brought opulent masses of hair.

Embarrassed by her bulk, Yolanda wouldn’t go to the dance, so I went alone, startled at my own reflection in dark shop windows, so elegant and American. Would the countess know me now? I didn’t see Miriam with a chattering knot of girls by the door, tying and adjusting ribbons, carefully setting ringlets to frame their cheeks. She’d gone to Pittsburgh to tend a sick aunt, someone said.
Don’t smile. She’ll be back soon enough.
Henryk wasn’t with the stand of boys across the room furtively watching us. Why should I care about this? He wasn’t my fella. I didn’t need a fella. I was too busy for fellas.

A put-together band of Italian, Irish, Polish, and Russian musicians played, grasping one another’s tunes with uncanny speed. Casimir and Anna demonstrated an intricate polka that had been Irena’s favorite, he said. “Here, Lucia, I’ll show you the steps.” He was a good teacher, patient and encouraging. In his sweat-soaked blond curls and wide smile as we spun around the room, my dear friend seemed alive again.

Donato’s wife and daughter had finally come to America. He’d taken a furnished flat and was now proudly presenting his cheerful, exuberant wife, Sara. She was quickly learning our names, laughing heartily at jokes and sharing stories. “Cleveland is wonderful. Everyone’s so kind,” she exclaimed. In her bright presence, the tense, shabby city
did
seem charmed. Their daughter, Clara, slipped into a pack of children vigorously debating an elaborate game in a jumble of languages. “Look at her!” crowed Donato. “When I left Italy she couldn’t speak at all.”

In a ring around the dancers, knots of newcomers grouped themselves by country, talking, smoking, or playing cards. Some girls still wore their Old Country dress, but most were decked in American styles, with bright plaids and stripes. All were smiling now. When I scribed, I often recorded bitter complaints to friends and cousins back home: “I give all my pay to Mamma, but she won’t give me enough for nice clothes.”

“You could ask your boss for a raise,” I’d suggested to one girl. “You shouldn’t be getting half a man’s pay for the same work.”

“I can’t talk to him. I don’t speak English.”

“If you learned, you could get a better job,” I persisted.

“I’m too tired for night classes. And after work there’s laundry and cleaning and watching the little ones.” Every family suffered long workdays: six, six and a half, or even seven days a week. Children rarely saw their fathers awake. They became strangers, awkward and stiff. Mothers locked small children at home, left babies in the care of five-year-olds, or even tied them to table legs. What else could they do? Garment workers often slumped wearily at my scribing table as if I were another sewing machine arm endlessly pricking cloth. They might not have my mother’s plague of “bad thoughts,” but work engulfed and dulled them. Only nights like this cracked the weary sameness of their days.

“Casimir says he taught you Irena’s polka,” announced a voice at my shoulder. I turned and saw Henryk.

“He’s a good teacher.” I stepped back, for the room was turning hot. A barbershop quartet sang “Sweet Adeline.”

“Will you dance it with me?”

First I thought no and then,
Why not? It’s a dance; that’s why we’re here.
“If the band plays another polka,” I said. Away from his shop and our school, I felt stiff with him, my skirt too tight, my pompadour too heavy. What could we talk about? “Are you writing an essay for the Cleveland contest?” I asked.

“I would if I was going to college. I’ll finish high school, but then I’ll work with my father. You should go, though, for all of us.”

“Roseanne says I’d be lonely; I’d be the only Italian girl.”

“Maybe, but then you’d be the first and others would come after you.”

“Then who’ll make all the clothes and hats and chocolates?”

“Yes, Congress must consider the consequences of educating Italian girls. What
will
Americans wear?” The furrowed brow, thoughtful rubbing of his hands, and sly smile melted my reserve. We joined a circle dance that swept us apart. When the circle brought us back together again, he asked after Yolanda. I said she and I would be out walking on Sunday.

“You should go to Western Reserve campus and see if you feel at home.”

“It’s allowed?”

“Of course it’s allowed.” He was called away to greet an aunt but came back for the polka. Without a word we moved into Irena’s steps, spinning, sliding, turning, my feet where they needed to be, the room a bright smear of color and sound. “Anyone would think,” Henryk panted as the music ended and we pulled ourselves apart, “that you were a Polish girl.” But I wasn’t. Watching eyes raked over us. Donato was coming toward me.

“Hello, Henryk. May I borrow Lucia for a minute?” He drew me back to my people. “I was just telling Sara that we must invite you for dinner. Perhaps you can help with her English. You must be lonely with your mother so far away.”