I looked down at my breasts, heavy and aching. I had put hot compresses on them the night before to ease the tenderness. How many days before the milk dried up, unused, unneeded, and my body forgot the last seven months?
I remembered the women in Venticano who appeared like angels at the bedside of a mother who had died giving birth, offering nourishment to a wailing, hungry child. Or who came to the aid of women like my mother, bedridden for months carrying twins, unable to feed both adequately. Who were these women, with their generous breasts, their open arms? My brother Frankie, the twin who survived, could always find refuge in the skirts of Lucia Russo. As a boy of five he’d been chased by some bullies and our older brothers had been nowhere to be found. He’d raced frantically to Lucia’s cottage and she’d protected him, chasing the other boys away with her cast-iron pan as she’d cursed them for daring to threaten Frankie.
As a little girl, I hadn’t given a second thought to the women like Lucia. She used to come with Frankie and sit by Giuseppina’s fire in the winter. She’d felt more welcome there than in my mother’s house.
Giuseppina had her remedies, her teas and herbs, for the women whose milk was scarce or thin, but in the end, Lucia was her ally, her final choice, in the battle to keep her grandson alive and growing.
I had no need of Giuseppina’s medicines. My blouse was already wet, two round circles of dampness spreading across the front. I folded my arms across my chest to stem the surge of milk. What a waste, I thought.
“Of course I’ll help,” I told Flora, who nodded.
“She’ll be so relieved. She’s been frantic with worry. ‘It’s not like the village at home,’ she told me, ‘where someone would be on your doorstep in an instant to feed an undernourished baby.’ The poor girl has no one here. She came as a bride with her husband. All her own family is still back home.”
Carmella brought me the baby that afternoon. Flora had already hung the sheets on the line out the kitchen window. The day was windless but brilliantly sunny and the sheets fell straight and still as if this were August in my mother’s courtyard on Pasqualina’s wash day. The sheets betrayed no sign of the struggle. They were restored to their original whiteness.
Flora left a soup for Paolo’s dinner before going home to cook for her own family.
Carmella’s little girl appeared sickly. She was very fretful, did not know what to do with a nipple. Moved her little face from side to side, screaming.
Carmella could not keep her hands still as she watched her daughter against my unfamiliar body. Her hands were rough, worn, not at all the hands of a woman younger than I was. She grasped the cloth of her skirt and bunched it in her fist, then released it, repeating the gesture as she muttered some words—prayers, a lullaby? I tried to coax the baby to turn toward my breast but she did not stop screaming. She was so hungry.
When she opened her tiny mouth to scream, I slid in my finger. She stopped abruptly and sucked my finger. With my finger still in her mouth I eased her to my breast. She continued to suck. Her mother took a deep breath. My milk surged into my breasts, so painfully that I gasped. The baby’s blue-veined eyelids fluttered and then closed. Her agitated, frantic body slowed its kicking and grasping. Little noises of contentment filtered up. I watched her face; I watched her mother’s face. The baby finally fell asleep at my breast, and the tiny fists that had been pummeling the air were splayed across my lap.
I sat staring at her for several more minutes while her mother’s tears fell quietly. I did not want to let go of her. I wanted to feel that weight leaning into me, to hear and measure that breathing, to smell that mixture of soap and milk.
But then I handed her back to her mother.
“Grazie, Signora Giulia,” she whispered.
“Bring her back later when she wakes up.”
When she left, I placed my hands on my breasts. They felt lighter. A gift, I thought. For me, for this baby, for this mother.
I turned and lit the stove under the soup and began to set the table for Paolo. I knew that he expected me to be still resting, not up and about, and I wanted to surprise him.
I no longer felt tired.
Chapter 35
Bread and Roses
AFTER CARMINE DIED, I got pregnant again, and again carried the baby for seven months. It was such a tiny thing, tinier than Carmine. A little girl. Emilia, I named her. I can say her name now, in a soft voice, but the memories of those dead babies haunt me still. My mother was right. There is no other pain, not even the pain of bearing those children, of giving birth to them, that is greater than the pain of losing them. Take my arm, my eye, cut me up piece by piece. That is what it’s like to have a child snatched from life.
The winter after I lost Emilia was bitterly cold. It drove us all inside, including the customers of the Palace. The bar was full every evening and I kept warm over the stove in the kitchen, burying my grief by filling large pots with meatballs and sausage.
Paolo’s grief was as raw as mine, but his pain was compounded by guilt and fear. Guilt that it was his passion, his desire for me that had caused us these losses; and fear that the next time he would lose me as well as his child. A man does not know how to behave at these times. When he should have been able to walk down the street with his son riding on his shoulders and screaming with delight, “Babbo, Babbo, look at the sky,” he had only an empty cradle and an empty wife.
It is no wonder to me that he turned outside, taking refuge in his work with the union in the same way I had hidden in the Palace’s kitchen. I didn’t have the will to hold him back or even question him, as his days and then his nights became consumed.
One night in January when he’d returned from New York City, I came up the stairs from the Palace to give him his dinner. I found him packing, throwing shirts, socks, his notebook and pen into an open bag on our bed.
I watched, my already pale face and slumping body losing whatever was left that had held me together over the last few months. I felt myself sink to my knees and leaned against the door frame for support.
“What’s this all about, Paolo? Where are you going?”
“Lawrence, in Massachusetts. Twenty thousand workers have walked out of the woolen mills. Many of them are women and children, mostly Italians. In the last two days they’ve stopped production in thirty-four mills. New York got a telegram this morning. This isn’t something that the cops or the state militia are going to quash in a couple of days. The workers need help, a strike committee, organized relief. Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovanitti are going, and I’m going with them. I know the leaders—I worked with them when I was up there last year. They need me.”
He was almost feverish as he moved around the room grabbing clothes from a drawer, sweeping his books from the night table into a pile that he thrust into the bag. He was no longer the shell of a man who’d only been going through the motions of life in the last two months. He had reignited the fire within himself and it was smoldering in our bedroom. His face was flushed and his eyes glistened as he ticked off a mental list of what to take.
“When are you leaving?”
“Tonight. I’m meeting Joe and Arturo at the train station.”
He was a man of action that night, a man with a destination and a purpose. He was also a man who did not see me trying to cling to something solid and permanent as I was about to lose him to history yet again. I remembered Schenectady, and how little power I had to hold him back.
“Why now? Why the urgency? Why do they need you if the others are going?”
“Because this is momentous. Twenty thousand people, Giulia. It’s what we’ve been waiting for. They believe in us, they hear what we’ve been trying to tell them for years—that their power is in their collective voice.”
I pulled myself to my feet. My face felt as flushed as Paolo’s. I was jealous. Jealous of the passion he was feeling, not for me, but for a cause, for twenty thousand human beings struggling to put a loaf of bread on the table and clothes on the backs of thei
r families. And I admired him, too, for the role he was about to play.
But watching him prepare to leave was killing me. My hands were shaking and I could feel the tears stinging my eyes. Other women, my sisters and mother included, had to endure the callousness and betrayal of husbands whose eyes and hands wandered, who thought nothing of keeping a mistress on the side. I knew I was the only woman Paolo loved. I had no doubts about his faithfulness. Even when he was gone to the city overnight. Even though I knew there were women involved in the union movement—American women who saw marriage as a convention of constraint. Even when Pip or Zi’Yolanda would insert the knife of their own discontent tipped with the poison of rumor and conjecture.
Pip, especially, who lived in New York and who believed herself to be the authority on everything that happened there.
“How can you continue to tolerate his involvement? It’s bad enough that the Wobblies are preaching anarchy and would kill us all if they could. But that woman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, that intellectual up on the platform with them—how many of the men do you suppose she’s slept with? How do you know she hasn’t invited Paolo into her bed when he’s working late on one of those speeches that get him into trouble with the police? I warned you, Giulia, when you were first seeing him, what a mistake it would be.”
Pip’s words were seeds she tried to plant, hoping they’d force their way into my heart the way weeds here break through the cracks in the sidewalk. But I had no cracks. My love for Paolo, my faith in him, was as strong as on our wedding day. I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe the muck and the dirt she tried to drag into my home.
But I knew that although I was the only woman in Paolo’s heart, I had to share space in there with his work. It wasn’t some American girl who was my rival, but an ideal. How do you overcome that? How could my kisses, my warm and pliant body, the safety and repose he found in my arms, measure up to the excitement and sense of being on a fast-moving train hurtling toward his goal?
Standing there, holding back my tears, I saw that I could not be a substitute for that. I went to the laundry basket where I’d stacked the ironing I’d done the night before. I plucked three neatly folded handkerchiefs from the pile.
“Here, you’ll need these.”
He took them from me, placed them on top of his other things and closed the bag. He looked at me, at the weariness staring out at him from my dark-circled eyes, but he also saw my acceptance and resignation. He realized that I would not try to hold him back, and I imagine he was grateful for that. He took me in his arms and held me, wordless.
“I’ll write. I don’t know how long it will take.”
I broke the embrace first. I did not want to remember him pulling away from me.
“Stay safe,” I said as he turned and walked down the stairs. Come back, I thought, because I’m pregnant again and I don’t want to raise this child alone.
Chapter 36
Letters from Lawrence
January 18, 1912
My dearest Giulia,
I am writing this on Thursday night from the rooming house where our group from New York has found lodging. In only a week, Joe Ettor has organized a strike committee and our leaflets have blanketed the town. On Monday morning, afraid of the message that is reaching the workers, the mayor ordered in the local militia. They are patrolling the streets—college boys from Harvard who have no idea what it means to lose the money in your paycheck that paid for three loaves of bread each week. That is what drove the workers from their looms—a reduction of two hours’ pay because of new, faster machines.
Already, the spirit in the streets is alive, crackling. Thousands of workers are marching and picketing, a surge of humanity that is like one organism. Even when repulsed, like storm waves hitting the beach, they surge again. This afternoon, at a demonstration in front of the A&P Mills, the company goons drenched us with fire hoses. The temperature was so cold that the water turned quickly to ice on the streets, freezing into icicles on the men’s beards and the women’s eyebrows. But instead of being pushed back and dispersed, the crowd retaliated. The younger ones picked up chunks of dirty, ice-hardened snow along the road and flung it back at the goons. The police, who’d been on the periphery of the crowd, waiting for them to give up in fear, saw that something different was happening. Something defiant, something unified. They moved in and began arresting people, throwing them into wagons. Don’t worry. I managed to elude them. They only got a few people—thirty at most—and there are twenty thousand of us still in the streets. They cannot arrest us all. They cannot ignore us.
Per la vita,
Paolo
January 29, 1912
My darling Giulia,
Another cold and dark night in Lawrence. This afternoon, Joe Ettor spoke to a mass meeting on the Lawrence Common. He is a voice of calm and reason. He has managed to bring together so many nationalities—Italians, Poles, Germans, French, Syrians—with the power of his ideas. No one else could do it—no other union even wanted these poor, unskilled, uneducated ragged folk. I heard him up there on the platform we had built out of scrap wood, a man inspired by the faces in front of him, raw from the cold and the days of picketing, but warmed by the fire of his words. I stood behind him, scribbling down phrases as he spoke them, my fingers clutching my pen as I tried to capture what he was saying. Then he jumped down into the crowd and led them on a march downtown.
While Ettor has been leading the strike, Arturo Giovanitti put together the relief committees. Soup kitchens, food distribution, doctors—the striking families are being cared for so that no one feels compelled to go back to work out of desperation.
I cannot express to you how proud I am to be a part of this, to see my people stand up against the tyranny of the mill owners and the complicity and enmity of the government. The governor ordered in the state militia and the state police. They are afraid—of women and children with no weapons except their own sense of justice.
I want you to know how much I miss your loving arms around me. I have only these words that I write to you to warm my soul.
Per sempre,
Paolo
February 1, 1912
Dearest Giulia,
As you have no doubt read, Ettor and Giovanitti have been arrested, falsely accused of a murder that occurred miles away from where they were. The government believes it can disrupt the strike by imprisoning them. Already, martial law has been imposed. Public meetings have been declared illegal, and even more militia-men are patrolling the streets. Everywhere you turn stands a soldier with a gun.
But we are not alone. At the behest of the strike committee, I telegrammed the IWW in New York. More organizers are on their way to Lawrence, including my compadre, Claudio Tresca, from Naples.
All is not lost.
Paolo
February 5, 1912
Dearest Giulia,
It was thrilling. I can still hear the strains of the “Internationale” sung in nine languages by twenty-five thousand workers. Bill Haywood, one of the leaders of the IWW, arrived on the train this afternoon and fifteen thousand of us met him and carried him to the Common to speak to the others gathered there. Haywood is full of tactics for passive resistance. We picket the mills constantly, our white armbands proclaiming our unity.
My beloved, I know I have asked so much of you already by leaving you alone while I fight this battle. But I have one more request.
Because the strike shows no sign of waning, we think it best to find a safe place for the children, away from the danger here. The Italian Socialist Federation is organizing safe homes for them. I beg you, take one or two of these children into our home. I know you will care for them as the loving mother you will one day become to our own children. Let these children experience your warmth while I am away from you.
Yours forever,
Paolo
Chapter 37
The Children’s Exodus
BECAUSE HE ASKED ME, I said yes. My family, of course, was outraged. C
laudio was already irritated that Paolo had gone to Lawrence. He was less concerned about Paolo’s leaving me alone than the fact that he had no one he trusted managing the Palace. It meant that Claudio’s activities were constrained; that he had to spend more time at the Palace. Claudio didn’t like the monotony and restrictions of shopkeeping, of maintaining the day-to-day life of a business. Instead, he preferred to be out in the world, sniffing out the next deal. His presence every night was a burden for me, as well. It provided too many opportunities for him to watch me and criticize me. When he heard about the children from my sisters, he came storming into the Palace’s kitchen.
“What’s this I hear from Tilly—that you’re going to take in some brats from Lawrence? You don’t have time to help Angelina with our kids anymore, but you can be a foster mother to strangers?”
Pip’s concern, on the other hand, was not my unavailability to be a nanny to Claudio’s brood, but the hygiene of the children. “Do you have any idea how filthy they are? They live like animals in the tenements. They’ll be full of lice and disease. How can you bring them into your home? And how do you know they won’t rob you of what little you have?”
But I would not be swayed. Paolo had begged me to do this, and besides, my heart went out to the mothers trying to care for their children in the midst of all the unrest. In my eyes, these women, as poor and illiterate as they were, were trying to do right by their families. The least I could do was ease their burden somewhat by putting a roof over their children’s heads.
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