I closed my eyes and in the darkness the pale face of the child Rosanna appeared. How had she endured, when death entered her house like a prowling beast, seizing one and then the next in her family until all were dead of malaria? Yet she endured. She learned to sew on scraps and went, seemingly gladly, to the fisherman’s house. But Rosanna was innocent, unspoiled, and I . . . Zia’s fog-soft voice fanned my ear. “Sleep, Irma,” she whispered. “You’re Irma of Opi still. Irma of Opi, Irma, Irma.” Wrung dry, I sank into tumbling sleep.
In the deep gray before dawn, the sisters moved like shadows, dressing and folding bedclothes. When I sat up, Jacob protested. “Stay and rest today. I’ll tell Madame that you’re sick.”
“No, don’t, she’ll ask why.” I must endure this day and last night must be my secret, damped like coals in the evening. Speaking of it would only fan new flames.
Jacob chewed his lip. “Well then, eat breakfast with us at least.”
Freyda rustled in a corner, producing a modest tan dress she quietly set at my side, and then drew Jacob into the kitchen. I put it on and joined them. Jacob was sorting rags while Sarah stitched beads on a blue velvet evening bag. In her scrap bag I spied bits of my work from Madame’s: a length of rose satin, scarlet silk from an opera gown, yellow organdy of a bride’s trousseau we had just completed, a widow’s black bombazine, and just below it, moss green wool. My green. I turned away.
“Look, Irma,” said Jacob. “Your fine dress is here and not so badly ripped. It can be fixed.” When he held it up, the torn skirt gaped at the waist like a leering mouth. Green engulfed the room.
“Please, you keep it.”
“But you were so beautiful, like a princess. It could be fixed and sold for a good price if you don’t want to wear it,” he persisted until Freyda tugged the fluttering edge of his sleeve, glancing at me. “Is it my mishigas again? I’m sorry, Irma, but you are too generous.”
“You helped me. Give it to your sisters or use the cloth for purses.”
He put the green away. “Thank you, Irma, but it is nothing what we did. We are all strangers in this city, here to help each other. Sarah, come eat with our guest.”
Sarah blinked at his English, but sat at the table. Freyda served strong coffee, dark bread, jam, boiled potatoes, hard-boiled eggs and balls of pickled fish. They would eat sparely at night for the wealth of this breakfast. I nibbled at an egg that tasted of wood and took a bit of potato. “Very good,” I told Jacob. “Tell them it’s delicious.”
Eat, Freyda must have said, rolling another fish ball on my plate. They ate solemnly, glancing at me until a street vendor’s cry brought Jacob scrambling to his feet. “That’s the ice man. We must go.” He hustled me out the door before I could thank the sisters.
Morning sun dazzled my eyes. “What will people think?” said Jacob in his gentle, jesting voice. “Me walking with a lovely Gentile.”
“Jacob, I’m not—”
“You are,” he insisted, “a lovely Gentile.”
What would people think? They would think I was no virgin. Somehow they would see that I was spoiled. They would read it in my face and walk. The blade sharpener chanting, “Razors, blades, knives to grind,” knew, and the brewer rolling kegs of beer off his cart knew as well. I snapped my head away and saw a news boy smirking.
The sweet-potato lady by her charcoal brazier sang: “Yeddy go, sweet potatoes-O!” Was she thinking, seeing me: “One of those women?”
A bricklayer mixing mortar looked up, licking dusty lips.
A baker resting against a doorpost idly squeezed a bit of dough, soft as a woman’s flesh.
Even the old French silhouette cutter who used to nod at me when I passed bent over his work, scissors flashing.
Messenger boys in tattered shirts, clerks in round black hats all must be thinking: “He had her. Why not me?” In a knot of men by the bank, I saw striped trousers flash.
“Stop!” Jacob yanked my arm backward as a fire engine roared past, legs of the great white horses churning, spotted dogs racing beside them. Only then did I hear the brass bell clang. “Be careful, Irma!” Jacob mopped his creased brow. “Suppose you are hurt? What I tell my sisters? Even afraid, you must be careful.”
“How did—?”
“How I know you are afraid? I feel it.” He pulled back his sleeve, revealing a fresh bruise circling the thin wrist.
“Jacob, I’m so sorry.”
“It is nothing. But Irma,” he said earnestly. “You cannot let that man’s evil live here or here,” Jacob lightly touched his head and heart. “That is the way you become the crazy one, the mishigas. You must forget.”
“How? I could see him again. He could—”
Jacob shook his head. “Chicago is too big. You will never see him. Or if you do, you run another way. The Cossacks did not return. Even they had shame.” How could I believe this when every man’s smile mocked me and every jacket hid a belt? Jacob sighed. “Look, we are almost to your shop. Who is that by the lamppost, calling you?”
Heart pounding, I looked where Jacob pointed and saw Molly waving wildly. Molly! I hadn’t once thought of her. She darted across the street, dodging a coal cart. When the driver cursed, she didn’t hurl back her customary hot retorts but grabbed my arms and shook me. “Irma, what happened? I looked, we all looked for you everywhere. I waited and waited with the Poles. What happened?”
How could I explain? And why? To make her suffer more for me? “I got lost,” I said finally. “Jacob our ragman found me. I told you about him. I stayed with him and his sisters.”
Molly flicked her head to Jacob, then whirled back on me. “Do you know how long a night can last, waiting? You could have sent a messenger boy.”
“Molly, I’m sorry.”
Her shoulders fell and she dropped her arms. “No, it was my fault. I shouldn’t have sent you off alone.” Limp as a weary child, nothing like the old Molly with calendars and plans, she leaned against the lamppost. Suddenly her eyes widened and she pointed at my dress. “Where’s the green?” Her voice shrilled as she turned on Jacob. “What happened to her? Where is the dress?”
“I tore it on—a fence. So I borrowed this from his sister.” I tried to look away, but Molly held me. That I rarely lie is only habit, for it was useless in Opi where every neighbor knows your family, all you have and everything you do each day. So I only said, “I can’t talk about it.”
She dropped her hands. “But you will later? Tonight, when we’re alone?” When I said nothing, she stepped away, shoulders sagging.
“Molly, I’m sorry. Madame is waiting.”
She stared at me. “You’re different. You’ve changed. And it’s my fault.”
“Miss,” said Jacob suddenly, “Irma must work. You’ll walk a bit with me?” When Molly opened her mouth to protest, I kissed her, swearing to be home that evening.
“Take the streetcar tonight,” she said. “Here, use this.” She pressed a coin into my hand as Jacob led her away. He would not tell my secret. And I would cut, sew, work and think of nothing else that day. Mother of God, help me do this.
In the shop, Madame was curious about Freyda’s tan dress. “A strange cut,” she commented. “But the fullness here is good?”
“It’s comfortable,” I managed.
“For girls with the small breast,” she persisted, “we could try. With more gathers at the waist perhaps, and finer cloth, of course, we could show off the line.” When I opened my mouth, nothing came from the dryness inside. Fortunately, a steady stream of customers carried us through the morning. Work, I told myself. Hear only the steady whirl of Simone’s machine and the whining senator’s wife. Remember only stitches. But when I pricked a finger and dabbed the blood with cotton, a new fear rushed in: my monthly flow, suppose the washing didn’t wash the seed away? Pins dropped from my mouth.
“What is it?” Madame demanded. We were draping muslin on a dress model to try a new design.
“Nothing,” I said hastily. “Only, that I
see more tailored jackets on the street.”
“True,” she said. “Always more.” She pulled her little notebook from a pocket and sketched busily. “You have worn the green dress?” she asked, thank the Lord not looking up at me. From behind the dress model I said yes, I had worn it. “And it was noticed?” A page turned. Her pencil roughed another jacket.
“Yes, Madame. It was noticed.”
“Good. Is good a woman is noticed.” The whirl of the sewing machine did not cease, but I felt Simone’s great soft eyes on me. She never again spoke of the green dress.
Late that afternoon Mrs. Maxwell came for a fitting with her customary peppermint candies, complaining that her stomach was swollen from dyspepsia and she could not lace her corset tight. “Help,” she begged Madame.
Who would help me if my flow didn’t come? I bent over an intricate panel of shirring, trying to be as invisible in the shop as I once was.
“We will cut the neck lower,” said Madame. “You agree, Irma?” I nodded. “A man does not notice flesh at the waist if there’s more skin above it.” Mrs. Maxwell laughed loudly. I made myself smile. Behind her machine, Simone giggled politely as Madame chalked a lower neckline on the bodice. “We add some fine French lace here,” Madame added. “Costly, but it draws the eye.” Mrs. Maxwell praised us all and went away.
At last the clock released me, but wedged in a crowded streetcar, I could not cease thinking of Filomena. When we were children, how fast her bare feet skimmed over the meadows and tumbled boulders, faster even than Carlo’s. I remembered the lustrous stream of her black hair and a nose so big that boys called her Hawkface. When my uncle dragged her to a Naples convent, the family gained a benediction and one less hungry child. Never pious, Filomena must have hated the cloistered, ordered days, the lack of sun and space for running. Perhaps she looked for city work, but merchants shunned a rough-hewn mountain girl, and fine houses wanted comely servants. In the end only the street would take her. Near the boardinghouse, church bells called out: Filomena, Filomena, Filomena. Were they calling out her death?
Once, in Cleveland on the way back from the market, Lula and I had passed a prostitute slumped in a doorway. Lula fished a coin from her purse and a potato from our bag. I gaped at the bruised face, ragged shawl and gray teeth gnawing the raw potato. “Four years is all a body lasts in that life,” Lula whispered as she hurried me away. “If the pox or drink don’t get her, if some man don’t beat or cut her bad enough to die, and if she don’t die of getting her womb cut up too often or poisoned, she’ll hang herself with her own bedsheets. If she’s got any.” It had been, I counted quickly, six years since Filomena left Opi. I stopped in a church to light a candle that might help ease her soul through purgatory.
At the boardinghouse, I went to my room after dinner, so weary I could barely mount the stairs. When her evening work was done, Molly knocked on my door, bringing a plate of oatcakes and a little glass. She sat on my bed, her long, freckled face taut with worry. “Irma, I won’t ask what happened to you last night, but I swear on my mother’s grave, I wish it had happened to me. I shouldn’t have sent you alone.”
“Molly, you meant no harm.”
“Have a dram of whiskey.” I drank to oblige her and nibbled an oatcake as she spoke of her country, her brothers who went to sea and cousins gone to serve in English houses. When she left to dim the gaslights and bank the coal fires, I crawled into bed, praying the sisters’ herbs had cleansed me.
Don’t think of yesterday. Dream the old dream, I told myself. My own shop. On the wall a photogravure of Opi, tinted with the greens, blues and tender browns. I would surround myself with women and never think of—what happened. But the smell of charred wood wormed through the window. I put lavender oil on my pillow, but still the smell remained.
Always before, my blood had come regularly, but that month it did not come. I put linen strips in my underclothes each morning and in the evening they were clean. At church after lighting another candle for Filomena, I lit one for my blood. Worry can make a woman late, I once heard Molly tell a friend, but how to stop this worry? Hurrying through the streets, keeping wide of clots of men, taverns or police, scanning for that thick sandy hair, wide mustache and striped trousers, I constantly thought of blood. By the time the full moon shone like a great white plate over the city, I knew I was with child.
And now? My mind churned. When I could no longer hide a growing belly, what would Madame’s customers say, knowing I was single? She could never keep me if they complained. Would even Mrs. Gaveston keep me, she who constantly intoned, “I have a reputation to think of”? Even if a big belly could be hid, what if I died after childbirth, as so many women did? What became of orphaned bastard babes? Collar girls had whispered of newborns quenched in their birthing cloths for a merciful quick death.
How often did Father Paolo bid families to be fruitful, to welcome the gift of each child? But the church did not help families feed and clothe these children, poor women whispered after mass, and many used what means they had to block another birth. How could a single working girl keep a child? And where? Not at the boardinghouse and surely not at the shop, for Madame disliked “little screamers.” Our customers wanted no babes underfoot. Hire a wet nurse? I could pay only the poorest with many mouths to suckle. Many died of neglect in such hands, crawled too close to hot stoves or went unaccountably “lost.” If by some miracle my child survived, how could I look into its eyes and not see him or hear in its laughter that sneer when he bridled me? Wouldn’t I feel in a child’s warm touch the crush of his hand on my breast? Lord forgive me, but I could not keep this child.
I sought out a drugstore near Vernon Park in the blocks called Little Italy. Waiting for the crowded shop to empty, I gripped a polished wooden counter, thinking how to phrase my problem. When the last clutch of customers pressed out the door, a squat, round-headed druggist shuffled to my side.
“Buon giorno, signorina,” he said politely and must have sensed my unease, for he spoke of the weather, inquired where I came from and exclaimed over the extraordinary coincidence that he himself was from Isernia, quite near to Opi. A cousin’s flocks grazed the hills south of ours. He glanced at my white hand gripping the counter.
“You are wanting female pills perhaps, signorina, for some internal obstruction?”
“Yes,” I said gratefully, “for an—obstruction.”
“And you wish to be restored, to have this obstacle removed?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “There is a simple preparation. If you’ll excuse me.” He scuttled into a back room and returned with two small boxes. “Made by a fine house in New York, absolutely safe for the most delicate constitution. We have Dr. Bronson’s Infallible Cure, Number One, two dollars the box and also Dr. Bronson’s Infallible Cure, Number Two, four degrees stronger, for obstinate cases of obstruction. Five dollars the box. Take two each day for three days.” The boxes looked up at me like eyes. Five dollars. A week’s room and board.
“Perhaps you are wondering which to buy?”
I nodded.
“It is your choice entirely. Both are very fine. However, if Number One does not remove the obstruction, you must purchase Number Two, which would be, of course, seven dollars in total.”
I cleared my throat. “And if Number Two does not remove it?”
The druggist’s round eyes flicked toward the closed door. “Then you will return to my shop and I will recommend an excellent woman, very skilled in female matters, who will remove this obstruction by other means.”
My dry mouth barely framed the words: “An abortista?”
He nodded. “I’m sorry, signorina, that is the only way. But,” he said, patting my shoulder, “for good luck, we won’t speak of this yet. Take these pills and I hope, for your sake, not to meet again.”
“Grazie, I will take the Number Two,” I whispered, setting five crumpled dollars on the counter. When a pair of women bustled into the store, he turned his back to them, shie
lding me as I slipped Dr. Bronson’s Infallible Cure in my bag.
I took the pills but nothing happened. On the fourth night, Molly stopped me by the water closet. “You are worried about something?” she asked, glancing at the door and dropping her voice. “Something female?” I nodded. “There are pills, Irma.”
“I know.”
Molly drew me further from the boarders’ rooms and whispered: “There is a woman who helps girls in trouble. She costs only ten dollars.” I looked away. “You don’t want to talk of this?”
“No.”
“But if you need her, ask me.”
Mr. Roane, the new boarder, passed us in the hall. “Molly, come look at the tablecloth I embroidered,” I said, leading her to my room. The violets and pansies scattered across blond linen were lovely, Molly agreed. She could easily sell it to the coal dealer’s wife for seven dollars. Good. I might need these dollars for an abortista.
The pills brought vomiting, stabbing pains in the belly and loosened bowels but no release of my obstruction. Three days later, I returned to the druggist. Again he waited for the store to empty before asking quietly: “The Infallibles, Signorina?” I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but it is good you came now. Signora D’Angelo is here.” I froze. I would have the abortion now? The druggist patted my shoulder. “Today you only talk to her,” he said amiably. “Come.” He led me to a room behind the shop where a tall, wiry-haired woman of perhaps forty measured powders on a gleaming brass scale. When he introduced me, she nodded, still working.
“Thank you, Vittorio. Signorina Irma, you may sit.”
The druggist left us, closing the door quietly behind him. When Signora D’Angelo finished, she bid me follow her out a back stairway, across a narrow alley and into her own immaculate flat, where a bright room held a long scrubbed oak table and bookshelves filled the walls. All these books were hers? I didn’t ask for fear she’d think me a peasant.
When We Were Strangers Page 18
