“Elisabetta wanted to surprise you,” Paolo explained. “Perhaps the surprise was too much?”
“My aunt in Rome left me enough money to pay for a trip to America,” the countess explained. “We’d planned a spring visit, but after your letter, we knew we had to come now. That’s why my letter was so short. We left that day.”
I cried and laughed and couldn’t speak. Roseanne brought a glass of water. Paolo handed me a spotless linen handkerchief scented with his soap. So it was real; they were here with me, and this was joy, pure joy, like a warm summer night on the bay. When the countess closed her white hands over mine, I saw a gold band on her finger, the mate of Paolo’s.
“Yes, we’re married,” she said simply. “But in truth, we’ve been pledged since you were a baby.”
Paolo sat beside us. “We’re having our honeymoon in Cleveland.”
Roseanne brought wine and her best glasses, announcing that my mother was asleep after a restless afternoon. In his silky way of smoothing out all trouble, Paolo proposed that we three visit until Teresa awoke. Then we could all go out to an American restaurant.
“You’ve grown, Lucia, even more than I imagined,” said the countess. “You’ve done so much and learned so much. We’ve been proud to read your letters.”
“You look well, Countess.” I couldn’t cease smiling to see them, the places of my life joined like broken china miraculously repaired. She did look well, the furrows of her brow smoothed, a ready smile, and no dark circles beneath her eyes.
“Call me Elisabetta. We’re friends, are we not?”
“Yes—Elisabetta. How are Nannina and Luigi?”
“Very well. They’re expecting a child and send their love.” Elisabetta took my hand, excited as a child herself. “I can’t wait to see Cleveland with you. And Teresa of course, if she’d like.”
If she’d like. The simple words rolled in my mind. Who could know what Mamma truly “liked”? I asked instead if they wanted to eat at an Italian restaurant.
Elisabetta glanced at Paolo, who took a small leather notebook from his pocket. “Elisabetta and I have been reading about American foods we’d like to try. Shall I read you our list?”
I was young again, enthralled by his solemn grace. “Please.”
“Some I will translate. For others I’ll attempt the English.” He cleared his throat. “Succotash, puffed rice cereal, and quiet little dogs—”
“Hush puppies,” I corrected, trying not to stare at Elisabetta’s face watching his, as if this were Leopardi himself, reciting for her.
“Thank you. Hush puppies, buttered toast with hash, biscuits, maple syrup and pancakes, peanut butter, frizzled beef, sliced ham, smoked bacon, fried clams, clam chowder, oyster stew.” He looked up: “Shad?”
“A kind of fish.”
“Ah. Shad. Campbell’s soup; angel’s cake and devil’s cake; gingerbread; strawberry shortcake; rhubarb, pumpkin, and blueberry pie; sweet potatoes; baked beans; corned beef; creamed corn; whipped potatoes; and roasted turkey, stuffed. That is all, Elisabetta?” She nodded happily. The familiar parlor was so charged with their presence that I felt like an intruder. “So,” Paolo asked, “where can we find good American food?”
“The Forest City Hotel is very fine,” Roseanne called from the hallway.
“Perfect,” they said together.
“I’ll see if Mamma’s awake.” When I stood, Paolo rose as he would for any lady. In that instant, the sheath of “servant girl” I’d worn for years fell away. I straightened my shoulders. A gentleman had stood for me.
Perhaps Mamma saw something new in my walk. She sat up and allowed the sheet she had wrapped around herself to be pulled away. “Mamma, Countess Elisabetta and Paolo are here! They’re married and came to visit us.” She said nothing as I brushed her dull hair and helped her put on a handsome woolen suit from her vaudeville days. It hung on her now. When had she grown so thin? “Isn’t it wonderful to see the countess again?” I persisted. No answer. Perhaps she didn’t believe me. Or perhaps she had truly forgotten our old life. “Let’s go to the parlor,” I said finally. She shuffled close behind me down the stairs.
Elisabetta and Paolo were standing, smiling. When I stepped aside and they saw her, color dropped from Elisabetta’s cheeks. Paolo’s hand braced her back. I realized then that I’d ceased noticing Mamma’s flat-footed walk and wooden face or that her hair looked fresh-shorn because she’d taken to snipping off small bits when she was alone. Now I saw her as they did: a figure you’d avoid on any street. Could they even recognize in the gray face and vacant eyes the wild-spirited, lovely woman who left Naples six years ago? Could they believe she’d been a skilled chocolate dipper, much less a vaudeville singer? Was I insane to imagine taking her to Michigan?
Mamma’s eyes slowly grazed the floor until they bumped into Elisabetta’s shoes and then climbed upward. When they reached the pale face, she howled, a terrible, trapped animal sound. “Uhhhhhhh, the count!” She would have fled the room if I hadn’t shut the parlor door.
“The count is dead, Mamma!” I said loudly, gripping her arms as she struggled. “We’re going to a restaurant.”
Paolo drew Elisabetta to a chair. “It’s a pleasure to see you, Teresa,” he said in the soothing voice that could turn black to white. “We’ve been visiting with Lucia. Doesn’t she look well?” Mamma twisted around, her back to our guests, shoulders heaving.
“It’s only Paolo and the countess, Mamma. You’re perfectly safe.”
“We don’t have to go to a restaurant,” Elisabetta murmured. “We could stay—”
“A restaurant!” Mamma said loudly to the wall.
“Well—” I began.
“Restaurant!” Mamma repeated.
“You have taxicabs?” Paolo asked smoothly. Yes, I stammered, we could find one nearby. “So we’ll go out, if that’s what Teresa wants.”
“Certainly,” Elisabetta managed.
The enterprise seemed bound for disaster. In an elegant restaurant, wouldn’t people stare and whisper? Wouldn’t we be made to leave? But Paolo’s calm eased us all. I got Mamma’s burgundy coat from the closet and hid her ragged hair beneath a broad-brimmed hat. Elisabetta composed herself, fixing a smile that never flagged all evening.
At the restaurant Paolo found an Italian waiter, whispered a few words, and deftly transferred a generous tip. The waiter gave us a corner table, obsequiously welcoming Countess Monforte and her party. Throughout dinner, he was unfailingly gracious, no matter what Mamma spilled or how often she stood, moved her chair, scraping it across the floor, and sat down hard again. Mortified, I barely ate, but Paolo and Elisabetta courteously ignored her, exclaiming over every dish. They included Mamma in conversations even when she merely stared at her plate or busied herself hiding knives beneath the tablecloth.
“My favorite,” said Elisabetta as we walked home to digest our feast, “was the ice cream sundae you had me try.” Under gaslight, I saw Mamma almost smile. We stopped at the hotel where Paolo and Elisabetta had taken a room.
“Thank you for a lovely evening,” Paolo said. Mamma pulled away as Paolo, Elisabetta, and I kissed a good night. When a doorman ushered them into the lobby, Elisabetta buried her face in Paolo’s jacket, seeming more exhausted by our evening than by their long trek west. Mamma watched curiously through the glass doors.
“They’re staying here,” I explained. “We’ll pick them up in the morning.”
“Why?”
“Because they want to see Cleveland with us.”
“Why?”
I sighed. “Let’s go home, Mamma. You must be tired.”
The next day Paolo had the hotel arrange a touring car and driver. We glided past Public Square, “Lucia’s union hall,” Garfield Park, fine houses on Euclid Avenue, and the zoological park. Mamma was skittish, her eyes darting everywhere, watchful for “him,” but quiet at least. In the afternoon, we brought her home to rest. “And now,” Elisabetta announced, “we’d like to visit your friend Lula’s tave
rn.”
“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.”
Chapter 21
SANTA LUCIA
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.
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