Swimming in the Moon

by Pamela Schoenewaldt

  Frank and Charlie had arranged for lunch in a dining hall overlooking the Mahoning River, strangely colored from the mills and stinking slightly, but moving water at least. I settled my mother in a chair by the window, where she sat immobile for so long that when she finally stood up, Frank’s little niece shrieked.

  Someone calmed the child, and I brought Mamma to the table, talking softly in a way that sometimes calmed her. “Let’s eat,” I urged. “See? It’s an Italian-American feast.” The pairings were Yolanda’s gift to Charlie’s parents: pasta, chipped beef, eggplant Parmesan, and boiled potatoes. Giovanna was beautiful that day, beaming with happiness.

  “Are you next to marry, Lucia? Do you have a fella?” many women asked, although some, watching Mamma rearrange her food in angry jerks, put on sympathetic smiles and swerved the talk to Yolanda’s good fortune in having two healthy children, one of them a boy. Yes, I agreed, she was indeed fortunate. When jealousy washed over me, I reminded myself of even worse cases that Dr. Ricci described: the violent, cruel, or depraved afflicted. This wasn’t a Greek tragedy, I reminded myself, only a common case of insanity.

  “Oh dear,” someone said. I spun my head toward Mamma. The waiter was collecting plates. She had jerked hers from his hand, scattering food on the tablecloth. When he edged away, she folded her arms in apparent triumph. There were small children who behaved better, I thought grimly as I gathered scraps while she stared out the window.

  Before the wedding cake, talk turned to work: the long factory hours and how fines and rising costs of thread and renting their machines ate away at women’s salaries. There was whispered mention of “services” bosses demanded of pretty girls.

  “My wife will never work for strangers,” announced Frank, draping his arm around Giovanna. Her face lit with relief. After the Lentz fire, the heaped bodies and burned flesh, why would she want to work?

  “Strikes only bring strikebreakers, and then the workers always lose,” Frank’s brother announced.

  “That’s not true!” I said loudly. “After the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union struck last year, the workers have a shorter week, more pay, and better conditions.” Charlie repeated this loudly to his father, who swiveled his heavy head toward me and seemed to smile.

  “I heard,” Yolanda interrupted, “that Little Stingler’s marrying into the Union Salt Company. Her daddy’s men mine salt, and he grinds it into gold. She and Little Stingler can eat chocolates while they’re counting money.” Everyone laughed. Mamma scowled and stamped her feet. I glanced a warning at Yolanda, who deftly brought the conversation to the kindness of Mrs. Halle and the funny hats that little Maria Margaret made from scraps around the house.

  All talk of strikes and bosses ceased when the cake arrived. Now came toasts, cheers, and songs in Irish, Italian, and American. “You could sing, Mamma,” I whispered. Wasn’t it still possible that somewhere, perhaps in this dining hall by the Mahoning, was a bridge back to her other life? Wine must have gone to my head, for I kept pressing, even using her gown as a prop: “See, Mamma, you’re dressed for the stage. Sing whatever you want, English or Italian. People will love it.” She looked at me as if I’d unaccountably spoken a foreign tongue. And I had: the language of those who believe in magical cures.

  Mamma didn’t sing. She did eat the cake. Hunched over, she crammed it into her mouth as if to punish me. Icing smeared her face and fell into the folds of her shawl. “Mamma! Stop it!” I whispered. When I tried to ease the plate away, she snatched it back.

  “Mine!” she snarled. By now the room was watching us.

  “Look how that lady eats!” Frank’s niece demanded shrilly. “Like a monkey in the zoo.”

  “Hush,” her mother hissed. “She’s sick.” In the silence someone started “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” and at last the many eyes swung away from us.

  Mamma stopped eating and began winding a napkin between her fingers, making intricate loops. “You could have her knit,” said Yolanda behind me. “She might enjoy it.” Mamma “enjoying” something seemed far-fetched. “Try,” she persisted. “Yarn doesn’t cost much.”

  Frank stood up. “For my beautiful new wife,” he announced. The swinging melody of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” Giovanna’s blushing pleasure, and the smiles around the table could have made a nickelodeon show: “The Wedding Dinner.” But I wasn’t an actor in that show.

  Suddenly Mamma scraped back her chair and stood facing Frank, who affably ceded the floor. “Ladies and gentlemen, I bow to the Naples Nightingale.” The room fell silent as Mamma’s shoulders drooped and her arms unbent. The modest black shawl slithered to the floor, revealing her gaudy dress. Rips and stains I hadn’t seen in the morning dimness of my room were now in glaring evidence. She didn’t sing “Harvest Moon” or any Italian song or tune from her vaudeville repertoire. Horrified, I recognized “The Bee That Gets the Honey Doesn’t Hang Around the Hive.” Parents moved uncomfortably, trying to distract their children as she pointed in apparent warning to Yolanda and Giovanna. Then her arms bent, and the fingers, spread wide, cupped her breasts.

  “Basta, Mamma!” Murmurs grew around us. I stood up, moving toward her. Still today, I don’t know my intentions. To block her from view, hug her, or lead her away? None of this was needed, for she sank into a crimson puddle, rocking, her hands slapped over her face.

  “Mamma!”

  “What’s wrong with me?” she sobbed. “Why am I like this?”

  I put my arms around her. “The doctor says it’s a sickness in the brain.”

  “Why? Why?”

  “I don’t know, Mamma. Nobody knows.”

  “Help me!”

  “I’m trying, Mamma. Dr. Ricci’s trying.” I realized later a sad irony: in this exchange we came closer to “conversation” than in all the months since her collapse, even if the only answer I could offer was ignorance. “The mind is its own place,” Milton had said. That “place” had consumed my mother. She tore at her hair and gown, sobbing full-throated, not to be hushed. Behind us children whimpered at the strangeness of an adult so reduced.

  I tried to lift her and couldn’t. Then Yolanda and Charlie, each taking an arm, helped me half lift, half drag her to a chair by the window. A waiter brought water. I held the glass so she could drink. Slowly, the sobs faded to babble and then silence.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said over and over to Yolanda. “We ruined your dinner.”

  “No, no. Everyone knows she’s not well, and nobody blames either of you.”

  This kindness in a sea of troubles brought me close to tears. I leaned on my friend’s shoulder. “It’s so hard, Yolanda, and she’s not getting better. If I can’t keep her, she’ll have to go to—”

  “The state hospital. I know. It’s horrible. And if she stays with you—”

  “It’s like this, or worse.”

  “We’re so sorry, Lucia.”

  “I have to get her home.”

  Mrs. Reilly watched their children as Charlie and Yolanda helped me wrap a shawl around my mother and pin up the worst of the rips in her dress. Limp as a doll, she offered no resistance as we maneuvered her to the train station. In Cleveland I hired a taxi, saving us from streetcar stares. I leaned against the taxi window. We were so far, so very, very far from that last warm night at the villa, when we floated in our linen shifts, so happy in the moonlight.

  Roseanne saw us come in, saw Mamma’s vacant eyes, torn dress, my own exhaustion, and never asked what happened at the wedding. She helped me bring my mother upstairs, where we undressed her and put her to bed.

  Terrified that we had begun a new, worse phase of illness, I sat for a long time watching her sleep. Do something, I told myself. Moving slowly, I folded the ruined dress and was about to lay it in the vaudeville trunk that had sat for months untouched in a corner, heaped with books. What else was inside?

  I began a silent exploration. Here was the lace-trimmed walking dress I’d seen on my first trip to Chicago, then mag
nificent hats, gloves and hatpins, corsets and hair rats for performance. I pulled out plumes and fans, gorgeous memories of her triumph. Then at the bottom I found the catalog of her collapse: a thick roll of playbills from every city where she’d performed, so meticulously ordered by date that I could follow a zigzag line through Ohio and the Midwest, north to the Dakotas, south and east again. At first “Teresa D’Angelo, the Naples Nightingale” was inching up the playbill. Then the name began steadily creeping down, always in smaller print. The night of “unacceptable gestures” in Chicago was reflected in the next city’s listing: “The Swiss Yodeler and the Naples Nightingale.” She’d lost her own line. In Springfield, Missouri, her name appeared in a stream of “other acts.” Loew’s notices said only “Live dancers! Singers! Clowns!” In each venue, she must have hastened to find her listing; each would bring new dismay.

  Yet in that downward odyssey she had the methodical will to acquire each clean, unfolded playbill and carefully preserve it. Perhaps Mario or Harold helped. While sending shreds of “letters” home, still she kept evidence that strangers cheered and clapped for her, even if less wildly every time. Her last “performance,” at Giovanna’s wedding, would have no playbill. I folded the dresses and carefully set the hats so no plume or flower would be crushed, rolled up the playbills in their sequence, and closed the trunk. “Why? Why?” she had cried in Youngstown. And now I cried myself. “Why? Why?” Why had the nightingale fallen so far? Why was her wondrous voice held captive by a broken mind? The boardinghouse was very quiet. I made my way to the parlor and sat alone for a long time. No answers came, only the grim fear that this solitude could be the shape of the rest of my life.

  In the days after Youngstown, Mamma was pitifully silent and subdued. Desperate, I followed Yolanda’s advice and bought her yarn and knitting needles at the May Company: bright blues, greens, yellows, and reds. Knowing better than to ask her to knit, I simply set these things in our room. Three days later she began balling the yarn. “Remember those scratchy gray scarves church ladies made for us that cold winter, all of them the same?” I asked casually. “Wouldn’t it be nice if the children had prettier ones?”

  Mamma said nothing. I tried, as Dr. Ricci constantly suggested, not to let her silence wound me: “When a consumptive coughs, it’s no attack on the loved one, merely the disease expressing itself. Her silence is the disease. Keep talking to her.”

  Two days later a scarf appeared. She worked quickly, yet was as severe with herself in knitting as she once was with singing, fiercely examining her work, unraveling rows on rows for a single dropped stitch. Hiram House desperately needed warm clothes for immigrants unprepared for Cleveland winters. “Children won’t notice little problems. Or you could work more slowly,” I suggested. Or else, I finally chided myself, she could work as she pleased. Remaking scarves kept her calmly occupied and saved money on yarn. In fact, each was more accomplished than the last, beautifully designed, marvelously soft and warm. These “Teresa scarves” would come to be passed from child to child in families, carefully washed after each season and packed away in mothballs.

  On those summer evenings I studied in my room as Mamma knit. When Mr. Sutherland at Printz-Biederman suggested that “increased utility” could bring higher pay, I enrolled in a correspondence course on the elements of bookkeeping. “Like before,” Mamma muttered one night, pointing with a knitting needle to my books and then quickly bending over her work again. But we weren’t quite like before, when I was in school. “Before,” I had my college dreams. “Before,” her mind wasn’t sick.

  Dr. Ricci had found a small consolation in the Youngstown collapse: “She is aware of her own condition. That is a hopeful sign.”

  “But eating like that, touching herself, that song—”

  “Inappropriate, yes, of course. Not normal. Yet you brought her home and no physical harm was done. Lucia, you must remember that every day you care for her is a day saved from this inferno.” He showed me a photograph of a woman confined to an asylum by a husband who’d found her inconvenient. She looked hardly human: shriveled to bones, skin crusted with scabs, hair chopped off, bruised where she’d been tied for days and burned by electrical shocks. Perhaps she was beautiful once. Now she’d likely die of syphilis contracted from her keepers if other ailments or sheer misery didn’t take her first. At night images of her scabs, burns, bruises, and those wild and haunted eyes come at me like cards dealt by a manic player.

  “You are doing well,” Dr. Ricci insisted.

  “But will she get better?”

  “I’m sorry, Lucia. I don’t know. Try to find a way to live with her in this state and include her in your life.” I must make a heaven of hell, Milton would say.

  How? I had thought we’d be safe in Youngstown among people she knew. Clearly now I couldn’t take her among strangers. Mrs. Kinney had invited us to their summer home in Ashtabula on Lake Erie. I longed to go, having seen pictures of American country homes with deep lawns and mounded shade trees, arbors thick with roses and children running by with hoops. I imagined Mamma well and healed, magically returned to “before”: we drink iced tea on a porch looking out at the blue lake. Knitting quietly, Mamma sings “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Mr. Kinney explains a puzzle of double entry bookkeeping. The dream reels on. We eat roast beef on fine plates in the dining room and an American dessert, perhaps lemon meringue pie. Talk flows pleasantly around the table. Mamma sings an aria after dinner. The Kinneys are charmed. We spend the night in a canopied bed with crisp sheets, and windows open on a sweetly flowering locust tree.

  But the dream ends badly and always in a new way: the Kinneys may have a little dog that resembles Lydia’s in the vaudeville troupe. Mamma attacks this dog. She makes “unacceptable gestures.” She walks into the lake, bound for Vesuvius, and must be rescued. She hurls insults at the Kinneys. She stabs them with knitting needles. In the end I sent Mrs. Kinney my regrets: “My mother is ill and can’t travel.”

  At least I was absorbed by work at Printz-Biederman, constantly given new tasks in the elaborate puzzle of entering, verifying, and balancing accounts for a business of nearly a thousand people, one of the largest garment makers outside New York City. “A great company is built on accounting. We are the foundation, the steady core of this establishment,” declared Mr. Sutherland. Sometimes I barely raised my head from the books for hours, hearing only my adding machine’s ratchet, whirl, and ding.

  When I was sent to other offices with account statements, I passed through the factory and saw garment workers doing hand tailoring on lines of straight-backed chairs, women in dark skirts and white shirts, faces alike in solemn attention, bent over their work. Sometimes the finished piece went to the next woman, sometimes into great baskets collected by young boys. The tedium, close space, stuffy heat, and constant harangues to work more quickly, more neatly, to appreciate their stake in the good name of Printz-Biederman, how did they endure these days? When bosses ordered long lines of stitching torn out, what pain this must cost those who had bought thread from the same bosses.

  I counted the quirks of fortune that separated me from this line of labor: Mamma had taken easily to chocolate dipping; I could add to her pay by scribing at Hiram House and serving at the Millers’; her voice had brought dollars to buoy me to graduation; I worked easily with numbers and had been well trained by Mr. Kinney. Lacking any of these chances, I’d be bent over a shirtwaist now, tearing out thread.

  My department loaned me to payroll one week when a clerk was sick. Now I truly saw the heavy toll of fines these workers bore, sometimes taking home nearly nothing. “They’ll learn,” the head payroll clerk said crisply. But how could they live in the week of such learning?

  “Why are these five sleeve setters paid five different rates?” I asked.

  “That’s what they took when we hired them.” Filling out pay envelopes, I pictured the scene of each woman’s hiring. Perhaps one spoke more English and thus was bolder. Another might have been more desp
erate for work, perhaps with a sick child at home. One who earned a dollar more may have offered some “service” for her job. I knew workers never compared their pay. When I scribed, they leaned over my table to whisper a number. “We aren’t supposed to tell the others what we earn. They’d be jealous.” But how could each one’s pay be higher than the others’? Ignorance kept them pliable.

  “Look at this,” I said. A pattern cutter was fined for bloodstained cloth when the mechanical blade cut her flesh instead. “It’s not her fault the machines are old.”

  “Miss D’Angelo,” the head clerk snapped, “since we have nine hundred pay envelopes to prepare, perhaps we needn’t comment on each one.”

  “No, sir.” But I did comment, over and over in my head as I worked.

  Chapter 14

  READING THE NAMES

  In the weeks after our problems in Youngstown, I spooled between home and work, terrified that Mamma’s sickness might worsen, deepen, or take some new and terrible shape and I must be there to help or shield, divert or, if nothing else, be present for a new decline. But we seemed to have reached an endless plateau. By day she knit, slept, and stared out the window. At night she cleaned, sometimes cooked, or paced barefoot through the kitchen, dining room, parlor, and hall. “She’s not much trouble, really,” Roseanne said. So for now we could stay at the boardinghouse. By midsummer I began slowly expanding my circuit, going to church, attending some union meetings, and scribing again at Hiram House.

  “See?” said Lula. “You can breathe a little.” Autumn was early and glorious that year. When the maple trees blazed red and yellow, I stopped by Henryk’s store for apples. Or rather that was my excuse: I’d told Roseanne that Mamma might make a tart if we left some apples in the kitchen.