Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (19 page)

“For now, only study,” said Father Stephen when I brought my anxious questions to his confession booth. “Finish high school. Then we’ll see.” It was true. I was so close. That spring I was called to serve at a round of garden parties, teas, and banquets for Miss Miller’s coming marriage to Mr. Livingston. I visited Yolanda, Charlie, and little Maria Margaret in Youngstown. They were kind and fussed over me, but their world was limestone and hats and the tiny girl’s varied triumphs. Better to study, to wrap myself in books and papers.

My graduation date had nearly arrived. Maria Margaret was sick with whooping cough, so Yolanda couldn’t attend, but Roseanne would come, the Reillys, Henryk’s family and Miriam, Casimir and Anna, Donato and his family. When I invited Lula, she patted my face. “Thank you, sugar, but why would I go someplace I’m not welcome?”

“All the graduates have tickets. I’ll give you one.”

She roared with laughter and pressed me into the white apron stretched across her chest. “Everybody, here’s the most ignorant child ever to leave high school,” she called out to the early drinkers. “Look at this,” she said, putting her dark arm against my light one. “Understand? That’s why I can’t come. But never you mind. You bring your friends here afterward and we’ll have a little party. I’m proud of you, just like I’m sure your mamma is.” In truth, Mamma’s only comment was the word
Brava
marooned on the face of a Denver postcard that perhaps referred to my graduation.

The countess sent me as a graduation gift the cameo I had loved most in her collection: a perfect head of the goddess Diana set in a filmy veil. My hand shook when I held it. She had sold so many jewels, paintings, and silver pieces, yet saved this one for me. “We’re so proud of you,” she wrote. “Wear it to remember us.”

“You’ve studied hard,” Roseanne observed. “You deserve it. And who else would have repaid a countess? Not Teresa. And not me,” she added emphatically. “Put it on and look in the mirror.” I hardly saw myself behind the cameo, as if the swirling veil eclipsed my face. I set the lacquered box on my dresser and opened it at night, when the pale face glowed by streetlight and I could imagine my distant friend saying, “Come to the sitting room, Lucia, and let’s read from Leopardi.”

In truth I rarely read from Leopardi now. “
English literature,
” our teacher insisted, “is the crown of European culture. We must honor our Anglo-Saxon heritage and remember that we are heirs to Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Browning, and Wordsworth.” I studied hard. In the last months of school, my grades edged over Henryk’s. I would be the valedictorian, our teacher announced.

Mr. Steinblatt, the principal, wasn’t pleased. “Boys make better valedictory speeches,” he grumbled.

“He’s a fool,” Henryk said. “
You
won the Cleveland essay prize.” I had indeed, but that prize money was sucked away so quickly in the weeks when no money came from Mamma that I hardly felt the triumph of winning. I was determined to savor my valediction.

I wrote out a graduation speech and went early one Saturday morning to Lula’s, seeking Mr. Hardwig, a rheumy-eyed regular who’d once taught rhetoric in Boston. Fortunately, I caught him sober. He had me read each sentence aloud, tapping his finger at ungainly constructions until my changes satisfied him. Then I practiced in front of our parlor mirror and in the kitchen for Roseanne.

“It sounds good, but don’t you want to say something else?” she asked.

No, I wanted
this
speech. Remembering Mamma’s lessons, I even marked where I must breathe. On graduation night, I put on a new dress that Roseanne had helped me buy with a sudden spurt of money from my mother, dark violet with soft pleats down the front. My cameo shone at the collar like the moon on a clear night.

At last my time came. I began the valedictory by listing all those in my first American class who were not with us onstage: Yolanda, Carmen, Ciro, Herman, Benjamin, Antonio, Joseph, Gabriella, Patrick, Bronya, Anna, Salvatore, Mary, Maria, Sarah, Johan, Domenico, Angela, Jakub, Robert, and Roberto. “
Why
are they not here?” Everyone knew. Most were working. Many of the girls had families. Domenico and Joseph had died in the quarries, Patrick and Jakub in the mills, Maria in one of the workplace fires. “Was
this
the golden future for which their parents came to America? If they had stayed in school, they could have one day helped to educate their own children.” Young faces turned to mine. Power surged from my feet.
Here’s the joy my mother finds in singing,
I thought,
the stunning power of one’s own voice.

I took a breath where I’d marked my page and went on: “From educated citizens could come inventors and scientists to design machines for relieving the tedium of work, artists, writers, scientists, and gifted craftsmen. What is needed for these benefits? Only that parents earn enough to keep their children in school and not have to thrust them into the working world too soon. Can our rich country not give her young people two simple gifts: the pleasures of a childhood without labor and the solemn discipline of education? Yes, we on this stage are proud indeed to be the eight in a hundred with diplomas in our hands. We will treasure this evening forever. Yet, how proud, how great our land would be if we were eighty, ninety,
a hundred in a hundred,
crowding this stage, bathed in the light of learning!”

My speech was brief. Not brief enough, said Mr. Steinblatt’s scowl. The polite applause was brief as well, but I was flushed with pleasure to have done the whole only glancing at my notes. I had remembered to breathe and passed my eyes over every quarter of the audience just as Mamma did in Chicago. I had made myself smile at parents who stared back not understanding English. I had looked to the front row of wealthy patrons who paid my working schoolmates so little, whose wives knit children scarves in winter but hired their parents for pennies an hour. They looked at one another, whispering, their gloved hands tightly folded.

Only Mr. Richard Livingston, Miss Miller’s fiancé, sought me out after the ceremony. “Well done, Lucia. America needs more clever men to invent new machines. Just be careful not to veer.”

“Veer, sir?”

“Into socialism.”

“Oh, Lucia’s no socialist,” said Miss Miller with a tinkling laugh. “She only meant that young people should stay in school. Isn’t that right, Lucia?”

“Yes, Miss Miller. They should be
able
to stay in school.”

“What would you like to do now, Lucia?” Mr. Steinblatt inquired stiffly. “Teach young immigrants at Hiram House?”

“No, sir. I’d like to go to college.” There, I’d spoken my dream to a stranger.

He frowned. “That would be difficult, don’t you think? Do you have funds?”

“No, sir. I’d need a scholarship.”

“Certainly. Well, congratulations on finishing high school. That in itself is an achievement.” For an immigrant girl, he surely meant, for the “daughter of a showgirl,” I heard him say to a patron.

Clutching my diploma so hard that the paper creased, I joined a milling cluster of new graduates and their family and friends, their voices loud and strident in the rich June air. The Reillys shook my hand, gave me the present of a steel-tipped fountain pen, and walked slowly home, wrapped in quietude.

“Let’s go to Lula’s!” someone said, and we moved in a jubilant crowd,
graduates,
we who had endured. On that balmy night we believed our teacher’s promise: “Now you can do
anything
!”

“There must be scholarships you can get,” said Henryk as we crowded around a table.

“Couldn’t Miss Miller help?” Miriam asked, her creamy white hand resting on Henryk’s forearm. “You did shine her silverware.”

Henryk slipped his arm free to pass around a plate of toasted cheese and pickles. “Miss Miller may not have her own money,” he said. “And she has a fancy wedding to think about.”

“A lot of parties means a lot of vegetables,” said Miriam thoughtfully, taking a pickle. “Will your father be getting some of that business?”

“I doubt it. That’s a big contract and we’re a small shop.”

“It never hurts to ask, does it?” she said sweetly and I wondered, not for the first time, how he could love her. Yet he seemed happy.

While the others drank ginger beer and talked eagerly about a country weekend organized for us by Hiram House, I cobbled together a plan. I wouldn’t go to the country if Henryk and Miriam were going; I’d visit my mother in Chicago before the troupe swerved west. I’d get a job in a shop, for my English was good enough now. Then I’d wait until after the wedding, when Miss Miller would have forgotten my speech, and ask her for a scholarship. Annoyed as I was with Miriam’s constant little lessons, she was right in this: it never hurts to ask. If Miss Miller couldn’t help me, she might know someone who could.

Mario had written that it would be “useful” if I visited Mamma soon. He hadn’t said why. So I was anxious all the way to Chicago. When she didn’t meet me at Union Station, I made my way to the Haymarket Theater and then backstage through a gauntlet of eyes and murmurs: “There’s the Nightingale’s daughter.” Yolanda had given me a fine straw hat with silk flowers, the rim skillfully shaped for my face. With a trim striped shirtwaist bought for the trip, I could hold up my head against any voices.

I looked for Harold, who’d taken me to the station on my last visit, and found him in a warren of ropes, set pieces, and performers in costume. He was dressed in a white shirt with a crisp celluloid collar, carrying a notebook, a pen tucked behind his ear. “I’m the backstage manager,” he announced proudly, “coming up in the world.”

“That’s wonderful, Harold. I’d like to see my mother.”

His face clouded. “She’s locked herself in her dressing room since last night. Claimed some Eye-talian gent was bothering her. But it wasn’t no gent, just an old drunk at the stage door. Your ma was going on about his eyebrows.” Blood pounded in my head as I watched Harold force her lock with a skeleton key and usher me in. “Good luck,” he whispered.

The dressing room was meticulously ordered, I saw with relief. At least this much was unchanged. “Lucia, you’re here,” my mother said wearily. “I’m so glad. Nobody talks to me now.”
Because you locked them out.
“I couldn’t meet you at the station. The maestro’s waiting outside the theater.”

“Mamma!”

Her arms wove like vines around me. “I’m so thirsty,” she said in a tiny voice. “
So
thirsty and cold.”

“Wait here.” I darted out to ask Harold for some hot tea.

“She’s mostly drinking wine these days.”

“Tea, if you would, please.”

“She’s on in an hour. She knows that?”

“I’m sure she does. She’ll be ready.” When I returned, Mamma was listlessly putting on her costume. “Can you sing? Are you well enough?”

“Of course,” she said sharply. “I’m just tired of people asking how I am. Tired of being whispered about and worrying about
him
. Why can’t he stay at the opera houses? This is vaudeville. He should leave me alone.” She tugged at the corset straps. “And my act is
still
before intermission. Fasten my dress behind. I don’t want to ask the girls.” My fingers struggled with the tiny buttons. Her once-glorious emerald dress showed constant wear: small rips in the seams, a ruffle unstitched, a dirty hem, and several buttons replaced with pins.

“Let me fix the ruffle at least, Mamma.”

“No, it doesn’t matter. The audience is far away, and all they want is a show. They don’t care about us. They’re so stupid they think the clowns are really smiling. They look at acrobats jumping and spinning like tops and think it’s easy. Backstage, the young ones cry. There’s some
on crutches
between shows.” Her voice turned shrill. “Crutches and canes. The dancers’ feet are always bleeding. Vaudeville’s a sad world, Lucia. That’s why performers are so mean. When
he
comes backstage looking for me, of course they’re scared.”

I made her sit down. “Mamma, it was just a drunk. Maybe it looked like Toscanini, but it wasn’t.” Harold came with tea, and I watched gratefully as she arranged and padded her hair with practiced hands, painted her face, and adjusted the heavy plumed hat. Perhaps she was only agitated about my coming or in a woman’s time of the month. But I feared worse. Nannina’s word,
unstable,
rolled inside my head. The darting eyes, loosened fingers, the shrill edge to her voice made me feel unstable myself, perched on a rock in a rising sea.

When a ruffle of applause had her cock her head and stand up, I pounced on this good sign: she still knew the pace of the show by heart. Harold rapped on her door and called “Five minutes.” She smoothed her gown and squared her shoulders. “Tap dancers, then me. Lydia and her ugly dogs come
after
the intermission.” She hurried away.

Nobody led me to a seat this time, so I found a spot to watch her from the wings. My fingers sought the folds of my skirt, squeezing tightly. Would her voice crack? Would her old fear come true and the words run away? Would the audience laugh?
Blessed Mary, Mother of God, be with her now.
The curtain rose. From my nook I saw the fray of her gown. Yet the marvelous familiar voice was the same, rich and rising, warm and strong as ever, the high notes held to impossible length. The glorious Naples Nightingale. I sank gratefully onto a coil of rope.

Then I panicked. The hands were going wrong. The left one, which first had been rising and falling with practiced grace for “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì,” now lay flat on her chest and then—
No, Mamma, no!
—cupped her breast, rubbing. The audience hooted. When her right hand copied its mate, men whistled and stamped. In the front row, a dark-suited man lifted a red card, and the piano man jumped his tempo.

With the slightest flinch, Mamma righted herself. Both hands floated modestly down, then gracefully lifted, airy with longing. Cheers, calls, and whistles filled the hall. Sweat ran under my cotton dress, which now seemed made of heavy wool.
Mamma, how could you?