“If we’d tried the white marches earlier,” I said, joining the swell of possibilities.
She smiled. “You see? And even if the strike is over, we didn’t completely lose. You changed, Lucia. Others changed. Don’t you feel it?” She picked up her plate again.
Yes, I had changed. While Josephine ate, I thought back to that first glorious day when we left our posts in unison, to the marches, the songs and jokes my first time in jail. I had asked Mrs. Livingston and Mrs. Kinney for money and spoken boldly to Father Stephen, to pastors, rabbis, and ladies’ groups. I’d managed strike pay for hundreds of families. Others had changed too. Young women whose lives had been ruled by bosses, fathers, and husbands, had convinced neighbors and friends to join the strike. They had marched for hours in public, chanting despite heat and hunger. Even Enrico’s too-brief tenure in the great enterprise took on stately meaning. A street boy had been known as far as Ashtabula. His funeral filled a church. My appeal raised funds for a dignified casket and headstone. Pride in these things swept over my past pleasures of books and school. Perhaps Father Stephen was right: my calling was here.
Josephine set down her plate. “Lucia, I’m going to Michigan soon. The Kalamazoo Corset Company sells one and a half million corsets a year, but they won’t heat the factory decently in winter.” She opened her notebook and showed me a list. “These are girls who died of pneumonia.” As her finger traced the line of names, I saw Irena’s pale face in candlelight. “And here are those bitten by rats.” She traced a longer list and closed the book. “The girls have to buy their own thread unless they make ‘other arrangements’ with the bosses.”
“Like at Stingler’s?”
“Yes, exactly. While the company sponsors silly songs about American Beauty corsets, workers get fondled in front of their mothers. They’re fired if they speak out or won’t ‘cooperate,’ and there’s no other work in town. Some girls take poison to end their shame. Others smother the babes born in shame. Some jump off bridges. Three couldn’t pay for a decent abortion and bled to death.”
I thought of the girls at Stingler’s, of Giovanna and Mamma. What right had any boss to treat his workers like whores?
“Some girls will testify,” Josephine went on. “We can convince others. The clergy will march; they know how bosses use factory girls. This time the suffragettes will come with signs and the WCTU as well. Rich women are different in Michigan, everybody says. If we organize well, the strike will be short and we’ll win. You’ll see, Lucia. I want you to feel that joy.”
“How will I feel it?”
“By coming to Kalamazoo with me.”
“I told you I can’t leave—”
“Bring her. We’ll find lodging for both of you. Stay a couple months and then come back to Cleveland, if there’s somebody waiting here for you,” she finished slyly. “Once the strike is started, the union can run it themselves.”
“Mamma’s used to the boardinghouse. In a strange place she’d get worse.”
“Is it really because of her that you won’t go?” she asked mildly. “Are you afraid of something else?”
“Like what?”
“A bigger job than bookkeeping, a bigger voice.” The women in the corner untangled themselves and sat up. Josephine brought over their plates, keeping her back to me.
Was I afraid? Going to Hiram had been easy. Because I was younger then, or because nobody depended on me? Confused in a new place, Mamma might wander and perhaps end in an asylum where the rest of her mind would fail. Yet if I stayed in Cleveland, how could my life be more than bookkeeping and caretaking? Even if I somehow went to college, would that solitary pleasure satisfy me, having once helped build a march of six thousand? If I went to Kalamazoo and we lost, how could I bear the weight of another failure? Was that a reason not to try? Another question loomed: was it better to never see Henryk again or to see and not have him? My chest tightened. I was trapped in a cell within a cell, a prison of questions.
Josephine came back to our bench. “You’re thinking about your fella, that you’d miss him in Michigan?”
“There’s no fella,” I said too sharply. “Henryk is—” Josephine raised an eyebrow. Caught, I slumped against the wall. “Anyway, he’s Jewish.”
“That’s what Pepe said, but he thinks a lot of this young man who’s not your fella.”
“Well, Henryk’s family doesn’t think a lot of a girl who’s not Jewish, with no money and no father and a crazy mother. They’d like me to go to Michigan and never come back.”
“Lucia,” Josephine said casually, “it’s a new century. Not everyone needs a family. And marriage isn’t the only path. Men and women come together for pleasure and then go their separate ways. It’s called ‘free love.’ ”
I stared. Was that how she lived in the private life of which she never spoke? Of course I’d heard talk of free love all summer as union brothers and sisters coupled and uncoupled, as unfettered as Count Filippo in Capri. “But isn’t that—”
“A sin?” Josephine finished, smiling. She opened her book and pointed to the names of girls dead or rat-bitten. “Here is sin. Being forced into ‘services.’ Working in firetraps. Sixty- and seventy-hour weeks. Free love is men and women living their lives as they choose, caring for each other. Think about it.”
Just then a tubby officer rapped at the bars of our cell and said a friend had posted bail. “Isadore came early,” Josephine said, brushing her dress. “Well, let’s go.”
The officer shook his head. “Not Isadore, some American: Harry White.” Perplexed, we followed him to where Henryk was waiting in a striped suit and Panama hat.
“Ah, Mr. Harry White,” said Josephine, “so good to see you.”
Henryk grinned as we stepped into the street. “How’s my American look?”
“Very convincing,” said Josephine.
“Pepe said you were arrested,” Henryk told us. “The strike’s over. Two thirds voted to end it. Isadore read a statement from Printz-Biederman promising to rehire the strikers. They’ll put up a list of fines so foremen won’t invent new ones, and they’ll supply the needles and thread.”
“Pepe told you all this?” I asked.
“Yes, I pay for his news with apples.”
“Henryk, shall we stop the little secrets?” Josephine interrupted. I looked between them. “Lucia, remember the last donation, the one you thought came from the Livingstons? It actually came from a grocer.”
I turned to Henryk, who shrugged and smiled. “It was important to you, so I helped,” he said.
“But you’re saving for a new shop. And then you paid our bail.”
“I’ll earn it back. People always need vegetables. They’ll buy more now that the strike’s over.”
Near Public Square, Josephine stepped aside. “I have to talk with Isadore. Henryk, will you walk her home?” He nodded. “And, Lucia, think about Kalamazoo.” Then she was gone, dodging a truck unloading bundles of newspapers.
Left alone with Henryk, I felt the air between us thicken. Perhaps he felt it too. A newsboy ran by. “It must be a Plain Dealer extra on the strike,” I said.
“Do you want a copy?”
I nodded, thinking that we could read as we walked. That would be easier than talking. My head spun with the end of the strike, the question of Michigan, and the strange, dizzying notion of free love. Henryk caught up with the boy and paid him. But he didn’t unfold the paper. “I guess you heard about Miriam,” he said instead.
“Yes, I’m sorry. Lula told me.” Without discussion, we had taken the long way home, kicking through a crunchy blanket of leaves.
“Everyone said we were perfect for each other. She didn’t think so, obviously. She thought she’d be better off with a banker than a grocer, especially if the banker loves her.”
“And the grocer?”
“The grocer thought he did. But mostly he was a big fool. Is that what Lula says?”
“She didn’t say.”
“But she prob
ably thinks so, and it’s true.”
“I see.” We walked a block in silence. I didn’t want to talk about Miriam.
“What’s happening in Kalamazoo?” he asked suddenly.
I explained the corset makers’ strike and that Josephine wanted my help in organizing a strike. I listed the grievances and how the workers could win. Yes, just talk about Kalamazoo. It’s easier.
“What about your mother?”
“Josephine says to bring her, but I don’t think I can. It’s a problem.”
“Michigan’s far away. And cold.”
“That’s true.” Far away, but wouldn’t it be easier to have just one task: to win a strike for corset makers. Our feet sounded a beat on the slate sidewalk like the blacksmith poem from long ago: ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum.
Closer to the boardinghouse, Henryk took my arm. “Lucia, I’ll miss you if you go.”
Another time, his words and the warmth of his hand would have thrilled me, but I’d lost patience for half measures. Perhaps the walk to Vesuvius had done this, or the ending of the strike. “Henryk, we’ve been friends since we first played Simon Says.”
“Yes—friends.” He stumbled on the word like a greenhorn.
“Perhaps it was more,” I said.
“It was.”
“Is that why your father found Miriam for you? Because we’re too different to be more than friends?” Henryk flinched. “We are different. And I won’t convert, and I’d never ask you to be Catholic.”
“The problem is my family. My father.”
I pulled a dry leaf from a tree. “What do you want, Henryk?”
“I want to go walking with you and dance with you without a dozen people telling me the next day: ‘She’s not one of us.’ I want a life with you, I want to marry you, but I need my father to stop—”
I crushed the leaf. “Then tell him! Tell them!” I was weary, shaken by the end of the strike and flushed with Josephine’s truth: so much had changed. I had changed. “Henryk, we marched all summer. We went hungry and were beaten because we wanted a better life. We went to jail. Can’t you tell your father who you want to marry?”
His face went pale under the streetlight. The newspaper crinkled. “I’m the only son, the only child. I’m everything to my parents. I know that’s hard to understand because you don’t have a father—” I stopped walking and spun to face him. He covered his eyes; the extra fell with a slap to the ground. “I’m so sorry, Lucia, I didn’t mean—”
“To remind me that I’m illegitimate? You can do a good deed and pretend you’re my husband to get my crazy mother out of the crazy house, but really I’m just a shiksa, and worse because I’m poor. Is that what you meant?” I had never spoken thus to anyone, never, never. The words tore my throat, but I was more than Lucia now. I was all the women born poor, born with no fathers, born germ plasma, born wanting too much. “Maybe you should get your father to find you a better Miriam. Then everybody would be happy.” My words stopped. Tears were coming. I turned away.
A breeze blew his Panama hat off. He let it go. “You’re right,” he said quietly. “Enrico was just a child, but he fought for what he believed in.”
I kicked at the dry leaves around us. I’d had so little of family in my life. How could I disparage his and the solid ground it gave him? Yet what pain, what aching loss to cast away those wide, kind eyes and lean face, the welcoming way of listening and easy jokes, his goodness and the comfort of his presence.
“Lucia, you want—”
“Too much, I know.” We were walking again, dragging our feet as if we’d suddenly grown old. “Josephine says it’s a new century and we don’t need families. Love can be free, men and women coming together and leaving each other when they choose. But I need a place I can count on forever, where I can be me as I am, not me different. And you need your family. Why should you give that up? I wish I had one myself. So yes, I want too much.”
Henryk stopped me, touching my shoulders as lightly as wind. Pain washed over his face. “I’m sorry, Lucia. I need time to think.”
“There isn’t much time.” I grasped the lapels of his American jacket, then released them as if the cloth were burning. Night air filled me, blowing us apart, and suddenly I was running, my feet on the sidewalk drumming ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum, up the boardinghouse stairs and into our bedroom, where Mamma was already asleep.
Don’t think about Henryk. Stop thinking of him. I paced the room, never lifting my eyes from the floor or looking out the window, afraid he might still be there on the sidewalk. Look at your mother instead, I thought frantically. Think about her. Think about work, only work. I’d need a job to pay the next weeks’ room and board. Where could I find one? Not at Printz-Biederman, the memories were too painful. I paced the room until I was exhausted enough for sleep, still thinking of him.
In the following days I obtained a letter of recommendation signed by Mr. Kinney but surely written by his wife. With it I was hired in the accounts department of Taylor’s department store for seventeen dollars a week. From Monday to Friday, bookkeepers worked nine-hour days: on Saturday afternoons we were free to “enjoy the pleasures of family life.”
“Imagine, Mamma,” I said, “we could go to the country or see a concert.”
She shook her head violently. Of course, Toscanini.
I sighed. “That’s true, he might be conducting.” I’d ceased arguing with her. As Dr. Ricci said, she lived beyond logic and I must meet her in that land. We went to Garfield Park, far from Lake Erie or any concert hall. She wanted more yarn. I bought it, and she began making a shawl for “the dark lady.”
“Lula?”
“The dark lady.”
“Well, I’m sure Lula will love it.”
The countess finally wrote that she and Paolo had just returned from Rome, where an aged aunt had died. They were sorry to hear of Mamma’s “condition.” She prayed for us both, held us close to her heart, and would write again soon. The single page was a thin blanket for a cold night, yet the simple words reminded me yet again of how far I was from my friend. Yolanda and Giovanna had written lately with veiled references to the asylum and for the first time did not invite us to Youngstown.
“You can bring her over here,” Lula said. “It’s not Youngstown, but it’s someplace.” I did sometimes bring her on quiet nights. I never loved my mother more than in that time when we learned to be alone together.
Chapter 20
IN THE PARLOR
The city surged into lively action after the summer’s languor. Josephine went to New York for ILGWU meetings. She’d pass through Cleveland again on her way to Michigan, hoping to take me with her. Isadore confided that Josephine had a “friend” in New York, although each had other “friends.” So this was free love: freedom from this tearing, constant heart pain. Don’t think about Henryk. Don’t.
At Printz-Biederman and even in the smaller factories, salaries were creeping up with rising demand for dresses, coats, and men’s suits. Workers began simply refusing forced overtime and banding together to buy sewing machines at wholesale prices. Bosses complained and threatened but in the end did nothing, knowing that a skilled seamstress could easily find work in other cities. As Josephine said, we were changing and the bosses were changing with us.
I had successfully avoided seeing Henryk until a rainy November day when Roseanne needed potatoes for dinner and brushed away my excuses. “I am not letting my boarders go hungry just because Lucia and her fella had a fight.”
“He’s not my fella.”
“Wonderful. Then go now, please. I have to start the stew.”
“Couldn’t—”
“Lucia, I need those potatoes!”
So I went to the store. Henryk and I were elaborately cordial, discussing the rain and Pepe’s progress in school while his father noisily stacked cabbage crates, muttering in Yiddish. Henryk answered back sharply. Lamplight brushed his shoulders as he filled my basket. The light, his hands, the workings of his arms all w
ere more than I could bear. I looked away. “What about Kalamazoo?” he asked softly.
“I still don’t know how to bring my mother.”
“I talked to Isadore about the factory. Those poor girls.”
Don’t be good. Don’t make me care for you. When a cluster of women crowded into the store, I slipped away. Next time, Roseanne would have to do her own shopping. Or I’d pay a neighbor boy. I began scribing again and keeping ledgers for the union. The work was tedious but it filled my time.
The next Friday evening, I was hurrying home for dinner with a pack of receipts from Isadore. Boys selling late apples had tossed bruised fruit in the gutters. The air was bright with apple tang. I ran up the boardinghouse stairs, pulled off my coat, and was about to go check on Mamma. The parlor doors were closed, which was odd. Roseanne met me, hands on her widening hips. “You’re late! And you have visitors in the parlor.”
Police? A complaint about Mamma? Fear shot through me. “What happened?”
“Find out.” Roseanne opened the doors and pushed me in so briskly that I stumbled over the rag rug, noticing nobody at first, but caught by familiar smells: lavender and English soap. I stepped back in terror, fearing that my mind had truly gone. Mamma saw Toscanini everywhere. I’d seen Enrico in the union hall. Now here were two visions from my past.
Behind me, Roseanne was laughing. “Lucia, have you forgotten my cousin Paolo? He hasn’t forgotten you.”
So they were real, Paolo and the countess in our parlor. He came forward and kissed me on both cheeks. The black hair was tipped with gray, but he was Paolo still, the steady ground of my life in Naples. “Elisabetta,” he said, “just look at our Lucia, such a splendid young lady, all grown up!”
“Come here, my dear,” said the kind, clear voice. Here was the countess in soft blue wool and lace, stretching out her arms to me. I looked between them, dazed.
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