The mother’s book rested on a starched white apron that skimmed the crisp pleats of a traveling dress. Her conscience must be smooth as well. I twisted thieving fingers in the coarse folds of my charity skirt. When the porter passed, I cringed. At any station where the train took on mail bags he might receive a telegram: “Young Italian female. Brown dress. Face scar. Arrest for theft.” The passengers, Americans and greenhorns, all seemed light and easy as they played cards, slept, read or talked together quietly. Three men studied a map, making lists in leather notebooks. Honest men, surely.
“Are you sick, miss?” asked the soft, rolling voice of the porter.
“I’m fine, thank you.” One of my first English phrases tripped off the tongue so easily.
“Look,” he said, pointing out the window. “Indiana already, God’s good black earth.”
We were crossing farmland, flat as pressed linen, with neat white houses scattered like toys among the fields. “How was it to live on a mountain?” Attilio once asked me on the long road into Naples. It was good to be lifted up from troubles that brewed in the valleys. With the earth so flat, how easy for the swooping hand of God to destroy the evil-doer. Where could he hide? Don’t think of this. Better to sew, to practice folds and tucks, smocking and hidden hem stitches. I pulled scraps from my bag and tried to work them with my stolen needle but nothing came right. Scissors from the Missus made false turns and blunt corners. Like this starched land, the muslin would not tuck. Smocking samples bunched and puckered. Cross-stitching lost its easy rhythm.
The porter’s shadow crossed my work. “Learning to sew, miss?”
“Yes,” I said faintly.
He smiled as I had smiled at Rosanna’s first wild stitching. When he moved on, I fingered the rosary beads inside my bag but only one chant came smoothly: cut, sew, work. I lay two raw edges of cotton scrap together and whipped them closed with blanket stitching, breathing with my needle’s pricks. Then I moved to chains. When they came out even, I made them smaller.
“Hey, you could sew for Lilliputians,” said a happy voice. I looked up at the boy. “Those little people Gulliver met.” His mother frowned and handed him a neatly packaged lunch. I took out my own food so she would not feed me out of pity. The boy peered at a tiny watch hanging from his mother’s waist. “An hour more for us,” he announced. I nodded, brushed crumbs from my skirt and leaned against the window, slipping into a well of sleep. When I woke, the mother and boy were gone. Afternoon sun coated their empty seats, but a tiny slip of paper hid in the folds of my skirt. “Gulliver’s Travels,” it said. The boy was real, then, not conjured by the strangeness of the day.
“Chicago, Chicago,” the wheels rattled on. Solitary trees in the far fields cut rounded C’s against a pale blue sky. Lula had given me the address of a boarding house where her cousin once worked. Mrs. Gaveston’s was nothing elegant, she said, but decent and safe for single women. I could pay for a week’s room and board, but then must find a job without any letter of recommendation and without selling myself to a workhouse.
“Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Central Depot,” the conductor chanted. Far ahead, dark teeth of the city nipped at a hazy sky. Soon Chicago spread like a giant stain across the land. Could I find my place there? In my last Opi winter, high winds ripped a pine tree from the ground and sent it tumbling down our mountain, where it wedged against rocks and withered to sticks. Don’t think of this. Think—what? That even an uprooted tree could find a scoop of welcoming earth. I clutched my bag and waited.
We reached the station at four in the afternoon. When I showed a station officer the boardinghouse address, he sketched a map on a scrap of paper, muttering as he worked, waxed mustache jumping. “It’s pretty far, miss. Be careful.” A thick forefinger tugging down loose skin below his eye made the gesture: watch for thieves.
I joined a stream of passengers flowing through the station. Sunlight pouring through high windows burnished lacy wrought-iron gates and spilled down the street, so rich and buoyant that the people hurrying past seemed to walk on golden air. A whoosh of wind ruffled my skirt, tugging me along. I can do this, I thought. I can find honest work. Look alive, another voice hissed in my mind. Remember the first time you left the Missus, so happy and full of dreams.
Still, the bustle and swell were thrilling. I followed wide avenues dividing palaces of brick and stone leading to blocks of wooden houses, new ones and others still gutted by a great fire ten years ago that our English teacher once described. Following my map, I turned onto a long brick street that should take me to the boardinghouse. On a quiet block a stock wagon lurched at a pothole. Its back gate flew open and a dozen spotted pigs tumbled out, shook themselves and scattered, squealing through the street.
“Forty cents each if you catch them,” bawled the driver. Soon boys, men, even old women and young girls burst from doorways. Stumbling men poured through a tavern door, waving beer mugs, whooping and chasing frenzied pigs, crashing into each other, cursing and laughing. Drivers reined their horses as pigs, their hopeful captors and wildly barking dogs swept by. Two well-dressed gentlemen helped street boys flush a screeching pig from a clump of ash cans.
A little girl with long black braids and two pigs trotting docilely beside her shouted at the driver. “Give me a dollar, mister, or I make them run away. I’m very good with pigs.” The driver paid and at a word from her, the pigs scampered up a ramp into the cart. “Bye pigs,” she called cheerfully. “You’ll be pork pie soon.” I squeezed past the roiling crowd and eight blocks later found Mrs. Gaveston’s boardinghouse. ROOM TO LET, said a neat sign in the window.
Mrs. Gaveston opened the door. She was a tall woman with lustrous gray hair who listened with hands on hips as I introduced myself. “Harriet was a good worker,” she conceded when I spoke of Lula’s cousin. “But she found a sweetheart and moved to Wyoming. Are you Polish?”
“Italian,” I said.
“Good. The city’s filling up with Poles. What’s going on in their country?” She seemed to need no answer and bustled me through a sitting room with a piano. “Strings broke,” she said shortly, taking us up two steep flights to a door marked NINE and handing me a key. I fingered the smooth steel shaft. “Never had your own before?” I shook my head. “Well, no time like the present.” I unlocked the door and slowly pushed it open. The room was so narrow that a man with outstretched arms could nearly touch both walls, but it had a metal bed with a flat pillow, green cloth spread and neat stack of sheets and blankets, a tiny table with wash bowl and pitcher, a rush-bottom chair, clothes pegs, gas lamp on the wall and one small window with faded gingham curtains.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Don’t know about beautiful, but decent for a working girl. You do have work?” When I explained that I would find a job with a dressmaker, Mrs. Gaveston folded her arms as I showed samples I made on the train. She barely glanced at them. “I never sew,” she said briskly. “No patience for it. If you don’t have a job, I need two weeks’ room and board.” That would take nearly all I had. She studied my face. “You seem like a decent sort. Not too pretty at least. My damn fool maid left this morning. She found a sweetheart too. Listen, if you clean for me an hour each morning, two more in the evening and all day Saturday, I’ll charge you half rate until I find a proper maid. That’s more than fair, right? You can look for work in the daytime.”
So I’d be a servant, but at least not a slave as I was for the Missus. Surely I’d find a job within the week. I thanked Mrs. Gaveston, stumbling over my words. “Never mind, Irma,” she said. “Come on, you can start now.” I dusted the downstairs rooms, swept the floor with her new Bissell carpet sweeper and rubbed lemon oil into the woodwork.
I found no job by Saturday, but Mrs. Gaveston found Molly, a big-boned Irish maid with references who cleaned with both hands, moving so quickly that rooms seemed to shine themselves as she whirled through. With her extra time, Molly shopped, helped cook, and spaded over a patch of earth behind the boarding
house for a kitchen garden. Mrs. Gaveston said nothing on Monday when I paid my full room and board. After buying a decent dress to look for work and streetcar fares to search more quickly, I had five dollars left. I fell asleep over my rosary, imploring the Virgin for mercy.
Signs on dressmakers’ windows said, NOT HIRING. Once I saw no sign, but the owner, her mouth full of pins, pointed to a discrete NO in tailor’s chalk on the doorpost. NO read other doorposts. Some dressmakers stopped me at my first words. “No foreigners,” they said. One pointed to my scar. “No trouble.” Yet everywhere there were women in fine dresses that no factory could have fashioned. Someone had fitted these bustles, folded narrow pleats and matched plaids. Someone had set sleeves that bloomed like clouds from tight bodices. Once I stopped a kind-faced gentlewoman stepping out of an apothecary, thinking she could tell me who made her dress, perhaps a shop I hadn’t tried. But she backed away, grasping a jeweled purse to her chest. Mortified, I hurried across the street, so close to a coal wagon’s horse that his sweat-slick flanks brushed me.
“Hey girl,” the coal man shouted. “Look alive!”
At least in the workhouse a handful of people knew me. Here I walked for hours in crowds, invisible. A dry-goods man smoking a pipe in his doorway stared through me. “I’m Irma,” I wanted to cry out. “Irma Vitale of Opi.” The man ducked back in his shop.
There were dress shops near the train depot, Mrs. Gaveston suggested, but none were hiring. Walking in widening circles through the city I ate day-old buns and wore holes in my shoes, which I stuffed with felt that Molly gave me. I pawned the little jade cat I had stolen from the Missus for streetcar fare. When it rained, I bought an umbrella from a peddler, since no respectable dressmaker would let me come dripping into her shop. “Thirty cents? He cheated you,” scoffed Molly. “But come in the kitchen and have some tea.” I sank in a chair as muddy water dripped from my skirt. It was my fourteenth day in Chicago.
As Molly chopped cabbage for soup, I spoke of the Missus, the workhouse and Lula, but not how I robbed the Missus. “Funny you didn’t save more, coming alone to a new city and all,” said Molly briskly, her back turned from me. “Left quick or something?”
I clenched my chair. “I was tired of Cleveland.”
“I see.” What did she see? I helped chop to keep my hands from shaking. “Listen, Irma, what about your own kind, all those Italians around Polk Street? Don’t they have ideas?”
I had asked on Polk Street. “Some Russian’s hiring girls to make collars and cuffs,” said an olive vendor. “Try the factories,” his wife added. “There’s always meat packing. And sausages.”
“No,” I said, “no, thank you.”
“What, you’re too fine?” she muttered. “Or just not hungry enough?”
It’s true that factories and meat packers sprouted thick as weeds. Streams of workers crossed the city each morning. I watched women through greasy windows as they canned, sorted, stamped, stuffed and packed. In low brick buildings near the slaughterhouses they stood on slatted frames over pools of blood, stuffing sausages all day. Who was I to want better work? My feet ached from walking. Once I nearly fainted on the stairs to my room. Perhaps it was folly to come here, but where could I go now, even with train fare to leave? In New York’s Lower East Side, said Molly, police pulled bodies from gutters each morning, frozen in winter, rat-bitten and robbed of their clothes. “Don’t ever go east,” she warned. “It only gets worse for the poor.”
On my fifteenth day in the city, I lay in bed staring out my tiny window. Before Chicago, I had never slept in a room alone. How could Americans endure such solitude? In the night silence I considered my own death. And what of Zia then? If she grew sicker, if my father had his own babe to feed or a bad year for sheep, would he care for her if I could send no money, if I was gone? Sinking into despair, I conjured the year before my mother took sick, when sleet blew all day at shearing time. Wet, matted wool dulled our blades. My father and Carlo stopped constantly to hone them. We fell hours behind. My mother and I washed wool until our hands were raw and bleeding, stiff with cold. “We can’t finish by morning, it’s impossible,” Carlo protested.
“That’s when the wool buyer comes,” my father snapped.
“Keep working,” my mother repeated. “Just keep working. We need wool to live.”
This was my shearing time. I must not stop. I needed a job to live. I decided to look for sewing work one more morning and then go to the sausage factory. I’d stand over blood twelve hours a day but at least have work. At the bakery where I bought my stale bun for lunch, two Italian women suggested Hyde Park, where rich people lived.
I walked across the city as an early fog thickened into rain. There were no dressmakers hiring in the ten blocks around Hyde Park, only chalk-marked NOs on doorposts. When the rain stopped I wandered into the park past two old soldiers in ragged jackets. One was drawing old battle lines in mud with his crutch. The other begged from gentlemen hurrying by.
“You have Union pensions,” one man chided.
“They’re not enough to feed a dog,” the crippled soldier called back.
I found an empty bench and sat, too late remembering my skirt. It would be wet and clammy now. But who would notice if every door said NO? Sausage makers wouldn’t care: their workers’ skirts were soaked in blood.
A quick patter on the brick walkway announced a fine lady coming. Despite myself, I studied her dress from a distance: fine tuckwork on the bodice and matched plaids in a ruffled skirt, tumbling waterfalls of lace at the throat. I knew the pattern from Godey’s, but the dressmaker had made a wider skirt that brushed park benches as the lady sidestepped puddles. Light-headed, I nibbled my bun as the dress came closer. Egyptian cotton with a satin waistband. Crinoline petticoats swished under the soldiers’ drone. Then a loud rip. The lady wailed and tugged at her skirt, caught on a bench nail. Faster than thought or prudence, I crossed the space between us and knelt beside her on the wet pavement.
“What are you doing?” she shrieked, yanking loose a wider gash of ruffle until it sagged toward the muddy brick in a gaping mouth. “Here!” she fumbled in her purse. “Go away.”
My English crumbled. “I fix,” I said, beating the air gently to calm her. “I am a sew girl.”
“A what?” She looked around wildly. The crippled soldier started toward me.
I gestured threading, sewing, cutting and held up my bag, pulling out samples. “Don’t move, lady. You hurt the beautiful dress. I fix it.” This was child’s English, I knew, but at least the lady ceased pulling, horrified by the size of the tear, so wide now that the skirt would drag in the mud if she took another step. “You mean fix it here? Now?”
“Yes, yes, but be still, please.” I carefully worked the fabric free and draped it over my knee to examine the gash more closely. “Idiota,” Carlo would say. “Suppose you can’t fix it?” But Zia would answer: “Irma, do your best. Or else make sausages.”
Sweat slicked my brow, for the rip was terrible and near the front. Pulling raw edges together would make the plaid lines waver and then every eye would see the repair. The rip must be patched. In Opi, we basted scraps over holes without hope of hiding the repair. But this one must be invisible. I examined the hem: six fingers deep, a rich woman’s hem. I could replace the gashed cloth with a patch darned into place, then tack down the cut-out hem.
“How long will it take?” the lady demanded.
“A little bit.” I must do better work than ever in my life, and faster too.
“You may sit, ma’am,” the soldier offered, pointing his crutch to the ragged army jacket he had laid on the wet bench. The lady nodded and she and I shuffled toward the bench, the skirt held like a train between us. When she gave the soldier a coin, he bowed gallantly. “Lieutenant Rafferty, Army of the Potomac, at your service.”
The other soldier disappeared into the brush and returned lugging a stone he set by the bench. “And a stool for you, miss,” he said. “Nearly dry.”
I thanked him, prepared a needle and began. My hands, at least, were clean. The soldiers hovered, stinking of tobacco and sweat-stained cloth, until the lady coughed and they drew back. Bored and fretful, she asked idly about their wounds and battles. They spoke of a place called Gettysburg and another, Vicksburg. I barely listened, seeing only plaid lines, my needle and the lift and fall of ruffles. The lady sighed. I worked faster. Such fine fabric, and so wondrous much of it. How delicious to touch this softness every day and shape it into gowns.
“Almost done, girl?”
Almost—just two edges of the patch to finish, the needle barely nipping the warp threads, blending into the greens and reds. I held my breath. Yes, the patch matched perfectly: plaid lines skimmed across the seam. The Virgin had blessed my fingers.
“Well God damn if that don’t just fix the flint,” exclaimed Rafferty, bending over the skirt, his breath warm on my ear. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but you can’t hardly see what she done.”
The lady studied the patched skirt and neatly tacked hem. “It will suffice, I’m sure. Here, girl, and I thank you.” She extracted a half dollar from her purse and held it out to me with as pretty a gesture as a queen might make.
I scrambled to my feet. “I need a job, ma’am. Can you speak for me to your dressmaker?”
The outstretched arm slowly lowered. “You want me to find you work? I took a risk, you understand, letting you do this. And fifty cents is more than generous for a patch, don’t you agree?”
When We Were Strangers Page 14
