Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (34 page)

He considered the issue as calmly as if I’d asked which potatoes were best for boiling. “I can’t be your father, obviously. Since we don’t look alike, I can’t be your brother. So I’ll be your husband. Samuel can run the shop while I’m gone.”

“What will you tell your father?”

“That I’ve gone out to the country for apples. It’s getting harder and harder to find good ones. Don’t worry, Lucia. Just think about your mother.”

“And Miriam, what will she say?”

“She’s in Pittsburgh again with her aunt.” He put a strange inflection on
aunt,
but in my distraction I assumed he was only distressed that she was so often away. I left without thanking him. Shouts from the street reminded me of inmates’ howls, and I wanted to be back in my own room, where Mamma’s presence still lingered.

“You have to look important when you go,” Roseanne declared, and loaned me a deep purple shirtwaist, severe and respectable, and even her own wedding ring. Yolanda had given me a lovely plumed hat. The night before, Lula brought over a fresh peach pie because, she said, “A girl can face anything better with my peach pie inside her.”

Henryk came to the boardinghouse in a dark suit, his thick hair combed neatly back. “What a fine-looking couple,” said Roseanne, but on the streetcar to the state hospital anyone would have thought we were headed to a funeral.

We got a shimmer of respect in the reception office. A gangly clerk took my receipt and had a silent inmate bring two chairs. He ran a long finger down a column in his ledger and tapped an entry: “Esposito, Teresa, No. 4389F. Recovering from surgery.”

Surgery!
I hadn’t guessed this, not in all my grim imagining. “She was healthy when she came. What did you do to her?” I demanded.

The clerk looked startled, excused himself, and after a lengthy wait was replaced by a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a forward-jutting jaw who introduced herself as Nurse James. She snapped the ledger closed and turned on us. Were
we
the inmates now? I folded my gloved hands and leaned forward. Her eyes flicked away, then back.

“Mister and Missus—”

“Weiss,” Henryk supplied. “Where is my mother-in-law?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Weiss,” Nurse James began evenly, “the woman identified as Teresa Esposito has been surgically sterilized and is, as I said, recovering—”

I bolted to my feet. “Sterilized!”

“You’ll sit, please, Mrs. Weiss. There is no cause for alarm,” she continued with patronizing detachment. I have never hated a voice so much. “Sterilization is widely prescribed for the protection of society and the patients themselves, male and female. Normally, of course, we obtain the family’s consent, but unfortunately there was some confusion. Two women of the same name, Teresa Esposito, are inmates in this institution. Your mother, case number 4389F, was given the surgery in place of”—she flipped open the ledger—“number 4289, who had been scheduled for the procedure.”

“You butchered my mother
by mistake
?” The shrill knife edge of my voice cut the air. Henryk gripped my hand in warning.

“Mrs. Weiss,” said Nurse James archly, “we ‘butcher’ nobody. This is a standard procedure, done under hospital conditions by an experienced surgeon. While in this instance, it may have been technically premature, it would have been advised in anticipation of any extended stay by a woman of fertile age. You can appreciate the practical benefits. Mental deficients are often promiscuous, breeding more of their kind.”

“My mother was
not
promiscuous. In twenty years she has not had a single—”

“Then, you see, Mrs. Weiss, there is nothing lost if she cannot breed.”

“We are not speaking of animals, Nurse James,” Henryk said sharply. “Human beings do not ‘breed.’ ”

“We are speaking of a deranged woman who bit a peaceful citizen.”

“Peaceful? He was a hired goon attacking her daughter!”

“A citizen, Mr. Weiss,” the nurse repeated, “and two officers.” She leaned back. “As you know, there is rising concern regarding germ plasma entering this country from Europe and weakening good American stock.”

“Germ plasma?”
Henryk demanded. “That’s what you call immigrants? Germ plasma? When did
your
people come here?”

“A rising number of recent immigrants become public charges, and many, as I say, actively breed more of their kind. Sterilization is advocated by some of our finest minds: captains of industry like Mr. Henry Ford and Mr. Rockefeller, senators, doctors, and scholars at Harvard and other great universities.”

Fury lifted me off the chair again. “I don’t care about great universities. You butchered my mother! You know nothing about her, nothing! Not even her name.” Nurse James stood as well now. I followed her large eyes to a buzzer prominent on her desk. Doubtless it would call a guard. Could I end in shackles myself? I sat down. Was this how Mamma’s fits possessed her, the churning frenzy to silence a smug, cool voice, to make a jutting jaw tremble? In a whisper so low I felt it through my skin, Henryk warned: “Lucia, remember why we’re here.”

I gripped my chair and lowered my voice. “Nurse James, you have my mother. May I see her now? I’ve come with my husband, who will sign the necessary papers.”

“That is impossible. She’s recovering.”

“She can recover at home.”

“There are charges against her. She needs to be evaluated.”

“I should give you more time and risk another butchery,
by mistake
?”

Henryk sat forward, his voice low and hard. “There may be charges against this institution and against yourself, Nurse James, if it is widely known that records are so poorly kept that women are butchered at random; if the newspapers, for example, investigate this case, or if certain officials were informed.”

“She was not
butchered,
sir.” But the nurse’s voice had weakened.

Henryk pressed on: “Very well, she was
mutilated
against her will, against her family’s will. Do your patrons know this? Would they like to know this? And doesn’t your director constantly seek public funds, warning that the wards are dangerously overcrowded? We’ll take this patient off your hands. You should be grateful.”

“She needs medical care.”

“Of course, after her shameful treatment in this institution. Nurse James, release her
now
.”

The woman opened and closed her mouth, took in Henryk’s good suit and neatly brushed hair, my dress, hat, and gloves. She made a show of examining her ledger and finally said, “Wait here.”

We waited an hour in that airless gray office. “Try to sit down, Lucia,” Henryk said. “Tell me about Naples.” He kept me talking until the nurse returned, pushing a woman in a rattling wheelchair. We gasped aloud. My mother’s face was bruised, her hair shorn. She was dressed in a shapeless gray gown, bent over, arms wrapped around her belly.

I knelt by the chair. “Oh, Mamma.”

“Bastard—wore a mask,” she said in a terrible voice, low and toneless.

Glancing at Nurse James, Henryk touched my mother’s shoulder and began, “Mamma Teresa—”

She jerked away, growling: “He cut me.”

“Yes, Mamma. We’re so sorry.” I turned to Nurse James. “We’ll be going now.”

Henryk took the handles of the wheelchair. “We’ll need this to get her home. Obviously she can’t walk. I’ll return it later.”

Nurse James opened her mouth to protest, closed it, then blurted: “There are papers to sign, sir. You’ll have to assume responsibility for the inmate’s care.”

“Where are they?” he said sharply. “Bring them to me.”

Henryk quickly signed pages of tight script, arranged for a taxicab, and helped me get my mother home and into bed. How could I begin to thank him? “Henryk, I don’t—”

He took my hand. “Lucia, it’s nothing. Anyone else would have done the same for you.”

“But
anyone
didn’t, only you.”

He shrugged. “Then they’re fools. I have to get some apples now. I’ll come back later.”

I got Hilda the midwife to examine Mamma, for I wanted only women near her. The cut was clean, at least, and not infected. They had “only” severed the Fallopian tubes and not performed a hysterectomy. Still, she’d be bedridden for days as the incision healed. Hilda looked sadly into Mamma’s beaten face. “The other healing will take longer.”

I combed the remains of her beautiful hair and fed her broth that Roseanne brought upstairs. After she’d turned from me to face the wall and shuddered into fitful sleep, I stood at our window, breathing the thick night air. How long could I keep our secret from my oldest friend? This silence had to end.

I got a glass of water from the kitchen, took out an ink bottle and sheets of onionskin paper, filled my pen, and moved the chair to catch a thread of breeze. Then I undressed to a cotton chemise, straightened my desk, and when I could think up no more excuses, began: “Dear Contessa Elisabetta.” I stopped.
Tell her. Write it down.
“My mother is very sick. You remember what we called her ‘fits.’ They became worse in the last years. Now she is afflicted by—” The pen froze. I made myself write: “hysteria and paranoia. The doctor fears she may not recover. It’s true that she was happy at first in vaudeville, but nearly a year ago she had a nervous collapse and was sent home in handcuffs. It is for this reason that I left college. She believes that Maestro Arturo Toscanini follows her everywhere. She barely speaks and cannot control her behavior.”

I walked around the room, stood at the window, and finally sat again. I described my struggle to keep Mamma safe and how I had failed at this task. “They took her to a hospital, a horrible place such as Dr. Galuppi would relish. There she was sterilized. If you saw your Teresa now, you would not know her. Pray for us. These are difficult times in America.”

After these few pages my fingers cramped around the pen; my arm throbbed, and the paper was damp with sweat. Weeks might pass before an answer, but writing the countess had been like the slow release of a volcano, letting pent-up lava run harmlessly down the sides.

I slept more easily that night and stayed home for the rest of the week. Mamma stared at the ceiling and walls. Her eyes skittered across my face. When she spoke, it was a toneless drone against “the bastards,” as if memories of all those who had hurt her were spreading like a stain, absorbing the man who had pushed her into the seaweed, Toscanini, Little Stingler, the surgeon who cut her, and now random men she spied from our window.

I ceased trying to reason with her and cared only for the wounded body. The red gash across her belly was pointing us both to a new land.

D
USK BY
E
RIE

September dulled the
press of heat, but still ice prices rose in the parched city. Underground storehouses in Michigan and New York were exhausted by the summer’s heat, and, after the long trek from Canada, blocks arrived half melted. “It’s not our fault! Ice costs, straw costs, barges cost, and we’re not running a charity,” icemen insisted when customers cursed them. Stones were hurled at wagons. Looking for culprits, icemen saw only grim-faced children or women standing by the road, empty-handed.

Like widening circles from pebbles thrown in water, troubles spread across the immigrant quarters. Nursing mothers exhausted by heat and hunger lost their milk. “What do I give my baby now?” they demanded at union meetings.

I appealed to Mr. Bellamy. “For this cause,” he vowed, “I’ll move heaven and earth.” He did, wheedling funds from patrons to buy dairy milk and enough of the costly ice to keep it fresh.

“Look at that,” said Josephine. “You have power.”

“Not really, if I can’t help my own mother.”

When Dr. Ricci finally returned from New York and received my message, he hurried to the boardinghouse, but Mamma wouldn’t turn from the wall or speak.

In the parlor, with the door closed, I described her treatment to the doctor. His kind face darkened. “There is no excuse, none!” he said fiercely. “Even if she were promiscuous, even then, to have robbed her of the chance for motherhood without consent or knowledge,
by mistake,
because one Italian woman is the same as the next to them, it’s beastly. But these places
are
beastly. The filth and crowding and hellish noise, the mass of insane, demented, aged, and imbeciles, drunks and criminals crowded together strips the best doctor of his humanity. He forgets his calling. Feeling that he’s among beasts, he becomes a beast himself. A beast with a scalpel. And your mother was subject to this.”

I sighed. “What can be done?”

“For other men and women, we can try to stop this curse of sterilization. I’ll write the director and the governor and protest her treatment. For Teresa, I’ll go to the police, describe her, and give them my card. If she’s arrested again, we’ll be warned. Send for me when she’s willing to talk. For now all we can do is let time bring its healing.”

Everyone was sorry. Roseanne berated herself for having forced me to find day lodging. “But since now she’s . . .”

“Catatonic.”

“Yes, that, I can watch her, poor creature, when you’re on your strike.”

My
strike? I seemed to watch the world through glass. Even union songs and chants couldn’t lift my heart now when my mother’s very presence seemed insubstantial, as if she might at any minute cease to be or melt away. I made her eat, bathed her, put yarn and needles in her hands, closed mine around hers, and had her “knit,” cursing my clumsiness, for she was visibly pained when we dropped a stitch. At night she pointed wildly at the bedroom window. What did she see: Maestro Toscanini, the doctor who cut her, or only the beckoning darkness?

With whom could I speak in those days? Not Henryk in my dismal state, grateful as I was for his help in rescuing her. Not Yolanda or Giovanna. Nestled in their domesticity, how could they understand us? Josephine and Isadore were consumed by “the final push.” Lula was racked by guilt that she had let my mother escape. How could I increase her pain? I’d expected an answer from Countess Elisabetta by now, but nothing came from Naples. Perhaps she was traveling. Or perhaps, like so many Americans, she feared the contagion of madness, even by post and across the ocean.