When We Were Strangers

by Pamela Schoenewaldt

  That afternoon I walked down every street in Opi. It seemed the wind had blown out word of my leaving as it once blew Filomena’s threads through our town. The mayor’s wife drew me behind a chestnut tree by the well. Her little daughter asked eagerly, “You’re going to America, Irma?”

  “Hush,” said her mother and pressed twenty lire into my hand. “Buy something pretty in Naples.” She stepped closer. “They say in America, women don’t have to marry. It’s a wonderful country.”

  “Will Irma come back?” the child whispered.

  “No, never!” said her mother fiercely, her eyes blazing. I had never felt envy before. She kissed me and hurried away, pulling the child behind her.

  I would come back, I told myself. But when? For now I must take Opi with me. I climbed to the high, flat rock where our pastures began, took out a scrap of cloth and sketched with needle and black thread the jagged line of our city wall, the mayor’s house, our church and bell tower and finally the low jumble of the street where I lived—where I once lived. The sun was low by the time I went home. My father, who never returned before dark, had dragged his chair to the doorway, his lined face russet in the waning light.

  “Your dowry’s there on the table, one hundred twenty lire,” he said gruffly. “Wherever you go, tell people that you are a Vitale from Opi. Here, take these too.” He gave me a salami and small wheel of our cheese. “You can eat decent food until Naples, at least. Work hard in America and send money as soon as you can. You’re a good girl. Don’t dishonor us.” I could not remember my father ever making a longer speech.

  “Will you marry Assunta?” I asked. He shrugged. So yes, he would marry. “And Zia will live with you?”

  My father glanced at Zia and nodded. Then he jerked his head toward the hearth where I kept my pressing irons. “And Irma,” he added gruffly, “that night when . . . that night I was thinking of your mother, wanting her.” He cleared his throat. “A man gets lonely, that’s all.” He stood up heavily as if these words had exhausted him. Then he pressed my shoulder, pulled his cloak from its peg and left us for the tavern. He did not speak to me again.

  After my silent meal with Zia, I pressed the altar cloth and scented it with lavender oil, and then packed my sewing box, documents and rosary from Father Anselmo, my few clothes and apron, good shoes and a small stone pried from the wall of our house. I blew out our candle and climbed into bed beside Zia. When I tried to speak, she whispered, “Hush, rest.” She cried in her sleep and I held her tightly. When I woke, my father had already gone to the fields.

  At dawn, I drew water from the well for the last time. Assunta met me there with a small dense loaf, still warm. “It’s good for traveling,” she said. “And don’t worry, I’ll take good care of your Zia.”

  “Thank you, Assunta.” Tears wet the loaf and I brushed them away with my shawl.

  “Listen to me, Irma, your father is a good man.”

  I said nothing.

  “When he was young,” Assunta insisted, “he had a beautiful laugh. You know that he and your mother lost three babies before Carlo was born? He told me once that he was afraid of loving his children too much and then losing them." My father never spoke of this. Perhaps I would never have known this if I wasn’t leaving Opi. “It’s true. Here,” said Assunta, pressing five pewter buttons into my hand. “They’re very fine. You can sell them in America for a good price or use them yourself.” I tried to thank her, but she hurried away. The buttons in my hand grew as warm as the bread as I made my way home. My last coming home. My last time mounting our worn stone step.

  Morning sun cut through our window. “It’s time,” said Zia as I entered the room. “Now leave me Carlo’s cloak and go.” She sat in her chair without moving as the goat boy clattered down the street. I put my dowry and the gold in a chamois bag I hung between my breasts. Then I smoothed Carlo’s cloak over our bed, lit a candle and knelt by Zia’s chair. She touched my face, my nose, and kissed my two hands. “When you are safe in America,” she said, clasping my hands so tightly that they ached, “write to me.”

  “Yes, Zia, I promise.” When I tried to kiss her, she gently pushed me away.

  “Go now, Irma. Be proud and God keep you.”

  I left, the bag beating against my heart as I hurried down our mountain and the birds cried, “Stranger, stranger passing.”

  Chapter Two

  Attilio

  By the time I reached Pescasseroli, my shadow had shrunk to a puddle. I took cover from the noonday sun in a slice of shade beneath the city gate while once-familiar streets gaped and taunted: “Mountain girl, if you’re so afraid now, how will you get to America?” Working my rosary to calm myself, I realized one small blessing: the streets were nearly empty. Merchants’ wives must be resting in the cool of their high-ceilinged, curtained rooms while husbands drowsed in shops and market stalls. Perhaps no one would point to my pack and ask with a smirk if I was bound for a convent, like Sister Filomena.

  As I crossed the main piazza, only a pair of sleepy beggars watched me fill my water pouch at the fountain, not for thirst, but by habit. Once when we were young, Carlo had passed a mountain stream in summer without drinking. “Idiota,” my father cried. “The next one could be dry.” He didn’t waste his breath to add: “Irma, you drink too.”

  Rinsing my face and arms, I looked up and saw Opi sitting like a brown-gray lid on the mountain. A jagged line of rock and trees seemed for a moment like a crowd of all my people: my father and Zia, Assunta, the mayor’s wife, Father Anselmo, even Gabriele and the goat boy all there without me. “Irma embroidered this before she left,” the women might say as my altar cloth was laid out next Sunday, but then talk would drift to wool prices, an ailing child or a marauding wolf the men must hunt. My father rarely spoke of my mother after her death and doubtless he would not speak of me after I left Opi. My shoulders shook until a beggar turned his bleary eyes at me. “Go,” I told myself. “Move your legs.” I gave the beggar a piece of my bread.

  “God bless you,” he murmured and added, “wherever you’re bound, signorina.”

  Outside the city walls, the road curved south, drawing me from Opi as we drew weaning lambs from their ewes. To keep from looking back, I fixed on pine needles pressed in packed earth, on dragonflies and thorny humps of blackberry bushes that would bear fruit when I was gone. I watched the clouds, not the whole ones we saw from the mountaintop, but white bulges glimpsed through trees. The water pouch dug at my shoulder and the money bag beat at my breasts. I thought of embroidery stitches and catechisms, anything but home.

  After perhaps an hour of walking I came upon a gray-haired peddler fixing his cartwheel, copper pots neatly stacked by a ruddy, broad-backed horse tethered to a tree. “Brace the spokes?” the man asked the horse thoughtfully. “Good idea, Rosso. Such a clever boy.” My father never spoke so kindly to any man.

  I offered the peddler a drink, for his brow gleamed with sweat. He swallowed, glanced at me, and when I nodded, drank again and then wiped the spout with a clean cloth. “Thank you kindly,” he said. “I did need that.” He had a long wedge of nose, waves of wrinkles ruffling his face, a wide smile and kind eyes. “My name is Attilio,” he said. “And this is my companion, Rosso. We’re bound for Naples to buy copper pots. And you, signorina?” he asked politely.

  My throat went dry. To inquire of a name was surely common enough for city people and travelers, but at home we knew each other as we knew our own clothes. “Irma Vitale,” I managed. “Daughter of Ernesto Vitale. Of Opi.”

  “Opi? Oh yes, just north of here, no? Too small for my trade. But,” he added quickly, “I’m sure it’s a fine town.”

  I nodded. Soon nobody would have heard of Pescasseroli. Strangers might stare at me as we once surrounded an African juggler who ventured into Opi. We children had dared each other to touch his sheep-thick hair and Carlo asked Mamma if his skin had been burned to make it so black. Father Anselmo overheard and whispered, “Hush, Carlo. Don’t you see a child
of God?”

  “So Irma, are you bound for America perhaps?” Attilio asked. Was America written on my face? “I’m guessing,” he added quickly. “We see more people going all the time, even whole families.”

  “Not from Opi. My brother left, but no one else.”

  Attilio bent over his work. “Well, some places are like that.”

  When I asked how far we were from Naples, Attilio scanned my shoes and bundle. “With good weather a man on foot might get there in five days. But a woman alone would do well to find a group to travel with or a family at least. Further on you can get a train.” Carlo had described long iron boxes on iron wheels that ran faster than any horse. People rattled and slid inside the wagons unless they had lire for first-class salon cars. Attilio cleared his throat. “Signorina, you could ride with us. You hardly weigh much. Rosso’s strong and I’d welcome the company.”

  It was true that peddlers often took travelers free for just this reason. Even respectable women accepted rides on a public road. They sat in back and nobody gossiped. How else could they get to market without a horse? Attilio seemed honest. He was respectful to me and kind to Rosso. He worked steadily at the cartwheel, letting himself be studied. He was a good man; I knew this as surely as I knew how much wool a sheep might yield or how long a line of stitches a pull of thread could make. Still, surely it was better to pay for favors from a stranger. I saw rips in his shirt and vest.

  “I’ll mend those clothes if you get me to Naples safely.”

  “You needn’t, signorina. Many peddlers gave me rides before I bought Rosso. It costs me nothing to return the favor.”

  “I can embroider as well if you’d like something made for your wife,” I added, for there was an air of married man around him; the locket around his neck surely held a portrait. I took from my pack an apron I had made for my mother in her last sickness. Yellow poppies and wild roses bloomed across the linen. She had judged each flower sharply before her strength fell away. “What poppy droops like this?” she demanded. I remade the petals, cupping them to the sun. “How can it bloom?” she asked of my first rose bud. In her last days, she held the finished apron weakly in her hands and raised it to her face. “Smells of roses,” she whispered, and slept with the apron in her arms.

  Attilio studied the flowers gravely. “You have a gift, Irma. Your needle paints. Yes, perhaps you could help me.” He plucked from his own pack a fringed shawl of fine blue muslin. “A present for my wife. She is not well.” He chewed his lower lip for so long that I finally asked, “Would you like a design on the shawl?”

  “Yes, a design.” He stroked the muslin. “She took fever last winter. Afterwards, she was as gentle as ever but like a child.” He looked up. “She still loves roses.”

  I traced a line where the blooms might go, and we agreed on three full-blown roses with tendrils and buds. I would mend his torn clothes as well. At the next market town Attilio would buy thread and English needles and help me choose a good ship in Naples, for he said it sometimes happened that people bought tickets for ships that had already sailed. A fair exchange, even Carlo would agree, but I was astonished how many steps lay between me and America and how easily one might slip.

  When he’d fixed the broken spoke, Attilio cleared a place beside him, handed me his torn vest and we started south. Opi women would have plucked my sleeve and asked, “Irma, have you lost your wits to sit beside a stranger?” They might whisper at our well that mending leads easily to other “services” for a man whose wife has turned simple. But they hadn’t seen how gently he held the muslin shawl or how when he offered me onion slices he held them by the edge so that not even his fingertips grazed mine.

  Spring rains had left the road so lumpy that I pricked myself constantly as I sewed. “Here, Irma,” said Attilio. “Use this.” He held out a spongy spike of aloe leaf and showed how to squeeze the healing jelly on my bleeding fingers. “The road gets better soon. Just look around for a bit now. You’ve never been so far from home, I wager.”

  Never. So close to Opi and so much had changed, even in women’s dresses, their skirt borders, the cut of bodices and puff of sleeves. The language, too, was changing. When a boy called out to a group of girls, making them laugh, Attilio had to explain the joke to me. In Naples, would I seem as foreign as the African in Opi? All afternoon the road thickened with travelers: merchants, friars, gypsies, shepherds and goatherds with their flocks, ragged soldiers wandering home and rich signori whose coachmen shouted us aside. We passed families going to America, one with a baby who would take its first steps there.

  “Irma, who do you know in America?” Attilio asked.

  “My brother Carlo left to work on a ship for Tripoli and earn his passage to America. By now he could be in Cleveland.”

  “I see. So he might not meet you at the New York port?” I took a stitch and shook my head. Attilio cleared his throat. “I’ve heard that American police question single girls to make sure they won’t be a—problem.” A “problem” like Filomena, did he mean?

  I tugged at the thread. “My Zia said I could sew for rich women in Cleveland. I thought I’d go to a shop or ask at churches for work while I look for Carlo.”

  “I see.”

  I read doubt in Attilio’s quiet face and now my stomach ached like the night I ran from my father. Cast out of Opi, closed out of America, would I be homeless as the wind?

  “Don’t worry, Irma, we’ll stay with my sister’s family tonight and think how to help you.” Bent over my work, I nodded and sewed, trying to think only of stitches. “See? The road is easier now,” Attilio said kindly. “You aren’t pricking your fingers.” It’s true, I was learning to move with the cart. Soothed by my needle’s steady slip through cloth, I remembered Giovanni’s letter and his plans to marry the landlord’s widow. “Attilio, don’t some people go to America and then return?”

  “Some men, yes. They come back to marry.” He ran a finger down his long nose. “Perhaps some women as well.”

  “But no women you know?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Irma. But you could be the first. Or you could make a good life there.” I had made dresses, altar cloths, aprons, cheese and wine. But how to make a life? Tiny stitches crept across the cloth. Could I make a new life thus: one stitch at a time?

  At the next town, as he promised, Attilio bought embroidery thread for the shawl, pinks and reds for the roses, greens for the leaves and stems, yellows for the centers and long-eyed needles made in England. I gasped at the price but Attilio only shrugged. “Good copper makes good pots,” he said. “There’s no other way.”

  In late afternoon, we stopped on the road to Isernia in a crowded farmhouse where his sister Lucia lived with her husband’s family. A smile as wide as Attilio’s warmed her plain face as she welcomed us.

  “Come with me, Irma,” she said. In walking to the well, drawing water, feeding chickens and gathering vegetables for the evening soup, Lucia’s quiet listening and gentle questions teased out my hazy plans for America. Although I had determined to tell no one of the night my father touched me, I told her that as well.

  “Help me cut the onions,” Lucia said. As I cut and cried, she leaned close and whispered, “You did right to leave Opi.” Heat swarmed up my neck as I confessed the secret shame that by my father’s touch I was tainted like Filomena.

  “You’re blameless,” Lucia insisted. “Did you tell your priest what happened?”

  “My Zia did.”

  “And did he say you must confess? Did he set you any penance?”

  “No.”

  “Well then,” said Lucia briskly, “you see? You haven’t sinned.” She handed me the broom. “Sweep the floor. I’ll be back.”

  I had swept, filled the kindling box and scrubbed the oak table by the time she returned. We ate quickly and in silence as at home, but while we scraped the trenchers clean, a stream of neighbors filled the house, standing along the walls and studying me, not unkindly but intent, as if I were a
horse that they might buy.

  Attilio led me to the table. “Irma, I said we’d help you get in America. Come close to the fire,” he invited the neighbors. “Welcome.” In the murmuring scuffle, I saw that many had brought their own chairs and stools, as we did at home for pageants in the church piazza. Now I was the pageant. He asked for my documents and I fished them from my pack. Someone ushered in the schoolteacher, who read Father Anselmo’s letter aloud and shook his head. “I’m sorry, signorina, but you’ll need a letter from America to prove you won’t be alone.”

  “Here,” said Lucia, handing me wine in a clay cup. Her child laid a warm hand on my sleeve.

  “She has a brother,” Attilio offered and explained Carlo’s plan for Tripoli and Cleveland.

  “He left six months ago?” the teacher asked. I nodded. “And you’ve heard nothing from him?” When I shook my head, the others whispered in dialect. “Carlo will write you now, Irma,” the teacher declared loudly. “He’ll invite you to America. You’ll tell the police that there’s no envelope because you lost it.” As the teacher filled his pen, those around the table debated what work I could do in America. Factory work, some suggested, millwork or glove making. Others suggested I paint ceramics, cook, or be a nursemaid to the children of rich Italians.

  “Not a lady’s maid,” one said, “she’s not pretty enough.”

  “Baker!” cried Lucia.

  “Needlework,” I offered into the din.

  “You know, she wouldn’t need a trade if she married Carlo’s friend,” a rumbling voice announced. The teacher looked up, considered and nodded.

  In the heat and close air, my head spun with wine. “What friend?”

  “Your brother’s in America, no?” the teacher prompted patiently. “And he will meet people there, no, men from Italy?” I nodded, although in truth Carlo rarely made friends. “So then, Irma, if such a man were single, might your brother not wish for him a good wife and think of you? So Carlo invites you to Cleveland and sends money for your passage.” Now suggestions for my fiancé’s name thickened the air like blackbirds: Giuseppe, Antonio, Carmine, Matteo, Paolo, Pietro, Salvatore, Luigi, Federico, Gabriele or Ernesto, like my father.