Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (39 page)

“It’s just a place where people go to drink,” I warned. “It’s nothing elegant.”

“We’d like to meet Lula. You’ve written so much about her.”

So we went. Lula had somehow heard they’d come to town and pushed through knots of customers to reach “Lucia’s countess and her friend.” She made a group of regulars surrender a table and called for beer and sausage, beer cheese, smoked and pickled oysters. Then she sat herself down between Paolo and Elisabetta and I watched in astonishment as they conversed, she in English and they in Italian.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Elisabetta would say over my translations. “We understood.” They whispered and laughed together. When Lula was called to the bar, they looked at me, smiling.

“So,” said Paolo, “Miriam left Henryk for a young man with more money.”

“How do you know?”

“Lula just told us.”

“Don’t embarrass her,” said Elisabetta. “I’m sure we’ll find out more in good time.”

“What else do you know?”

Elisabetta patted my hand. “Just that she’s fond of you. And she’s a very wise woman.”

Paolo took out his notebook. “We’d like to see the eerie lake tomorrow.”

On Sunday, a winter chill settled into Cleveland. Leafless trees spiked the white sky. I was glad for these changes, hoping that nothing would remind my mother of our terrible last visit to Lake Erie. Careful as I was to choose a vista point far from where we’d walked into the water, she hugged her waist and stayed far back from shore. Our guests tactfully made no comparisons with their own blue bay, exclaiming instead over the expanse of the lake, many times larger than any in Italy, and the scurrying traffic of barges and freighters. When I pointed out the distant abandoned warehouse that reminded me of the Palazzo Donn’Anna, they nodded politely, for in fact, there was no resemblance at all.

Elisabetta had been watching Mamma all morning, perhaps searching for signs of the old Teresa. I’d done the same since her collapse, heartened by every trivial normality, pained at each new oddity. As we walked along the shore speaking of Naples, I hoped the talk would vault my mother back to what now seemed the golden days when she was a servant, but at least herself. We spoke of Nannina’s sweet babas with rum, the season’s first fava beans, brimming bowls of shellfish, the clatter of carts, fishermen’s cries, church bells and glorious fireworks for our Feast of the Assumption. Sometimes a smile crossed Mamma’s wooden face. Other times she turned away.

We found a lakeside café and drank freshly pressed apple cider: “As fine as any wine,” said Elisabetta. She and Paolo and I were devouring warm doughnuts, comparing ocean crossings, when a waiter tapped my shoulder. “I’m sorry, miss, but that lady’s scaring the customers.” Mamma was splayed against a wide window, arms outstretched. Nobody ever called us sisters now, I realized with a start; she had so aged and changed that we scarcely seemed related. I hurried over and peeled her from the glass.

“So cold,” she protested. “I need sun.” I wrapped my coat around her.

“Elisabetta’s tired, perhaps we should go back,” Paolo announced. “I’ll get a taxicab.” When it came, Mamma peered through the window and jerked back, pulling me with her.

“You want my cab or not, gents?” the driver demanded. He had a thin, elegant build, a neatly trimmed mustache, and a gray homburg hat.

I sighed. “She thinks he’s Toscanini.”

“Tell her it’s just a
taxicab
driver,” Elisabetta whispered.

“She’ll say he’s in disguise to spy on her.”

“Then I’ll get another taxicab,” Paolo said.

“For you and Elisabetta, if you like, but she’ll be too anxious now. We’ll have to walk.”

So Paolo tipped the driver and we all walked home, stopping for roasted chestnuts from a vendor born in Naples within sight of our villa. But the long trip was difficult, requiring constant crossing of streets and detours when Mamma panicked at men in homburg hats or mustached men or certain alleys where, she whispered, “the maestro likes to hide.” At the boardinghouse, after giving her a dose of laudanum and putting her to bed, I joined our guests in the parlor. They were perched on the divan, shaken.

“She wasn’t like this yesterday,” Elisabetta began.

“I know. She has good days and bad days. This wasn’t a good day.” I recited Dr. Ricci’s diagnosis: paranoia, hallucinations, nervous prostration, hysteria, sexual anxiety, catatonia. The strange words pooled around us.

“She’ll recover?”

“Dr. Ricci can’t say. Being arrested, the asylum, and then the operation made her worse.” I didn’t speak of our own walking into the lake. That secret was best unshared, the doctor had said, locked in my heart forever.

“Would a sanitarium help?” Paolo asked.

“The good ones are very expensive, and the cure isn’t certain. The sick are treated kindly, but even if I could afford that care, she’d feel abandoned to strangers. How could I do that?”

“So you’ll care for her?”

“Yes, somehow.”

Elisabetta took my hand. “Were we wrong to come, Lucia?”

“No, she’s glad to see you both. Or, I think she is.” I slumped in the divan. Was Mamma ever “glad” now? Could she still feel joy? “
I’m
very glad you came.”

“Oh, Lucia, we miss you every day. With all that happened, are you happy here in America? Do you want to stay? You
could
both come back to Naples with us now that the count is gone.”

The last six years flew across my mind: school and scribing, my happy time in college, vaudeville and Mamma’s collapse, the terrible cold and heat, the failure of our strike, Cleveland’s acrid air, the steady strain of needing money, the lack of my blue bay. Yet I had grown and graduated. I was Lucia D’Angelo here, not a servant girl or
bastardina.
I’d helped six thousand march for justice, and even if our strike had failed, some gains were made and more would come. “Yes, I want to stay.”

Paolo and Elisabetta glanced at each other. She took my hand. “Well then, Lucia, we’re happy that you’ve found your place.”

S
ANTA
L
UCIA

The next day
, our guests announced a grand desire to visit the Ohio countryside. “What for?” Roseanne demanded. “In winter there’s nothing but dead fields and bare trees.”

“Still, we’d like to see,” Elisabetta said.

“We’ll have an American adventure,” Paolo added. In Little Italy he found a reliable driver who spoke Italian and English and owned a touring car they could hire for a week. “It’s magnificent!” he declared. “A beautiful Stoddard-Dayton, made this year, six cylinders and twenty-eight coats of red paint. The driver has tools for any repair, and there’s a waxed leather roof against rain,” he assured Elisabetta. “She goes twenty-five miles an hour on a good road.”

“
If
you find a good road,” Roseanne countered.

“I’m sure we will,” said Paolo. Thrilled by the coming adventure, he spent a happy afternoon with Cesare the driver poring over maps and guidebooks. They planned an elaborate course with alternate routes for roads washed out or simply imagined by the mapmaker.

Elisabetta was flushed with excitement. “It’s nothing like a train, Lucia! We go where we want with no schedule at all, we’re free as birds.”

At Roseanne’s insistence, they packed ample provisions from Catalano’s. “You can at least eat decently the first day.” Her frets about the cold, rain and snow, wind, wolves, bears, wild dogs, Indians, bandits, washed-out roads, and lack of respectable inns grew so pressing that finally even Paolo lost his temper, reminding his cousin that he and Elisabetta were quite capable and Ohio no longer a wilderness.

“Maybe not a wilderness,” she conceded, “but it’s
country
out there. You never know what could happen.”

“That’s the beauty of traveling,” Elisabetta said brightly. “I’m sure we’ll have a wonderful time.”

On a clear, windy morning, Mamma stood with me on the sidewalk, raising her hand as I did to wave them off, but she left it in a stiff salute until I levered her arm down. “Going home?”

“No, Mamma, they’re driving around Ohio.”

“Why?”

“Very good question,” Roseanne said, stomping inside.

With my friends gone, days at Taylor’s department store felt unbearably long. I shared a small office with the head bookkeeper, Mr. Hess, a slight, thin-haired man of indeterminate age. Each morning he settled into a straight-back chair, planted his feet, inked his pen, and sharpened a line of pencils. He swept the shavings into an envelope that he sealed, labeled, and discarded, opened a ledger book, and began to work. Only his hands and arms moved; the rest of his body was immobile. At the stroke of noon, he cleared his desk, unwrapped a ham sandwich, and ate silently, gazing out our dusty window. Fifteen minutes later he returned to work. Aside from the briefest exchanges regarding the day’s work and a few pleasantries—“Good morning, Miss D’Angelo,” “Good evening, Miss D’Angelo,” and “God bless you, Miss D’Angelo” when I sneezed—nothing but the scratching of our pencils and pens and rustle of papers filled the sepulchral stillness. I longed for the friendly chaos of our union hall and even missed the insults and jabs of picket lines.

Mr. Hess had fired three bookkeepers before me, but apparently my work was acceptable. After the first week, I wondered if my predecessors had intentionally botched entries to end their tenure. But no other post offered higher pay with a day and a half free each week. So I stayed on, bolting at the stroke of six into streets full of shopgirls chattering, automobiles honking, horses snorting, and newsboys hawking the evening papers. Walking the long way to avoid Henryk’s store, I unknotted muscles that ached from hours of silent, rigid work.

Mamma would be pacing the parlor, disappointed that I came alone. “The countess?” she’d demand. “Paolo?”

“I told you, Mamma, they’ll be back soon.” Did she miss
me
as much when I was gone?

She pulled at the wild hair I couldn’t stop her from breaking strand by strand. When I asked why, she pointed to her slashed stomach, leaving me to translate: if she’d have no more children, what did beauty matter? How could I even think of taking her to Michigan? Other strange behaviors would surely emerge and nobody would believe that she had once been otherwise.

Yet she
had
softened a little with the coming of our friends. At night she sometimes dealt out chips of old memories, which I filled in like the penny postcards of her vaudeville days. “Swimming in the moon,” she’d announce.

I’d say: “Yes, wasn’t it beautiful that night when the moonlight made a white road in the bay? Remember lying on our rock looking up at the stars?”

“Hmm,” she might say, and then: “Nannina dancing.”

“You mean when you sang and clapped for us and Nannina taught me the tarantella?”

Or: “Lemons and olives.”

“Yes, they were so delicious, her lemon salads with olive oil and black olives.”

Not every memory was pleasant. “Dr. Galuppi!” she cried once, jerking herself upright.

“He’s dead. Lie down, Mamma, and I’ll tell you what happened.” When she was quiet, I shared Paolo’s story. It had happened during one of the doctor’s “cures”: having Ugo, the hulking assistant, hold a woman underwater in a copper tank until she nearly drowned. Suddenly Ugo rebelled, tired of being the doctor’s henchman. He freed the woman, and together they drowned the doctor in his own tank. Then they released his caged patients, emptied his safe of a sizable fortune, seized everything of value, set fire to the laboratory, and slipped out of the city. None of the patients were ever found. Some said they had gone with Ugo and the woman to a villa in the south of France where they all lived peaceably together.

Mamma was silent. Then came a new delicious sound: a low, heaving
huh, huh,
huh.
By a glimmer of moonlight, her teeth flashed in an almost-smile before she turned to the wall. Little bursts of
huh, huh,
huh
led her into sleep.

On the afternoon before Elisabetta and Paolo were to return, Roseanne sent me to Lula’s for beer. Isadore was there, drinking with union brothers. “Ah, Lucia, it’s good to see you. I just heard from Josephine. She’ll be back soon. She’s arranged meetings in Kalamazoo with suffragettes and pastors and the WCTU. Everyone’s ready to strike. You know what she says.”

“Long pickets make short strikes.”

“Exactly.”

“To the corset workers!” cried one of the men, raising his mug. “Hold on tight! Keep those laces snug!”

Isadore laughed. “Don’t mind them. Are you going to Michigan, Lucia?”

“She’s got things on her mind besides corsets, Isadore,” Lula called out.

“Well, think about it. Josephine could use the help.”

“What’s wrong with Henryk?” Lula asked as she filled my bucket. “If his face gets any longer, it’ll hit the floor. Yours too. Did you have a fight?”

“No,” I said wearily, “and he’s
not
my fella. We just spent some time together.”

Lula’s dark eyes peered into mine. “And that time was too much for ‘friends’ and not enough for more than friends?”

The question untangled itself in my mind. “Yes. I guess so.”

She slid the heavy bucket to me. “I’m betting you’ll work it out soon. Elsewise both your faces will fall off.” A regular called for whiskey. She patted my cheek and plunged into the crowd. I hauled the bucket home, pondering my problem once more. Yes, caring for Mamma in a new place would surely be difficult in ways I couldn’t predict. But I might see workers win. And I wouldn’t see Henryk and whatever new Miriam his father recruited.
Don’t think about him.

Mamma was knitting quietly in the parlor. In a neat row on the windowsill were strands of hair she’d broken off. I sighed. In Michigan, she’d be a crazy lady from Ohio. But if we didn’t go, what would happen to
me
after more months with silent Mr. Hess? By careful saving I could eventually earn enough for college. Could I still care for Mamma? And the picture of me in a book-lined library had become troublesome, too silent when so many workers needed a voice.