When We Were Strangers

by Pamela Schoenewaldt

  And yet—to be in a school, to learn and learn and know the human body as I now knew thread and cloth—the longing rose up against fear like a rock against waves. And wouldn’t this work be enough for life, to heal the sick and ease those in pain? Sofia did not go to dances, I wagered. She did not stand against walls and watch young men’s eyes scan the stock and never, not once, come walking toward her. She simply worked.

  Near midnight, I felt my way down to Mrs. Gaveston’s sitting room, where she kept stacks of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Scribner’s Monthly. I put them all on an end table, lit the gaslight and pored through articles on Indian tribes of the West, geysers, mountains full of silver and the Continental Divide. I read of San Francisco’s new cable cars and mansions. Mr. John Muir described Lake Tahoe, redwood forests that were old before Rome was new, canyons, glaciers, deserts and petrified forests. San Francisco had a fine seaport, one writer noted, “where ships call from the world’s great cities.” My heart shook. Gustavo had been to San Francisco and might come again. South of the city, one writer said, hills rolled down the coast covered in sweet grass, where sheep and cattle grazed all year.

  Gradually, as I read, Chicago seemed like a shell that I had split and outgrown. I did not sleep that night, but curled on the horsehair settee with the magazines until Molly came to start her morning chores.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Furry Chicken

  Studying me, Molly’s reddened hands cupped her hips. Head cocked, she listened to my plans. I held up my own hands, spotted with needle pricks. “Molly, I have to do more with these than make fancy dresses.”

  “Fine. Do what you want. But you don’t have to cross the country just to go to nursing school. There’s Mercy Hospital right here in Chicago. They admit women.”

  I fanned the California pictures across the settee. “Look—it’s like Abruzzo. See these beautiful hills in San Francisco!”

  “Ah now, hills in a city, how very grand. And why do we want to be walking up to a dry goods store. You see something special there?”

  “Yes. You can look down on the land rolling all around you, houses, churches, parks, the bay and the ocean, shadows moving, mists in the morning . . .” I trailed off as Molly sighed.

  “You mean fog? Plenty of that here.” Molly picked up the letter announcing the dispensary’s nursing school. “Candidates must have good character,” she read. “You have that. But what about this?” her finger jabbed the page. “A high-school diploma? You have one of those?”

  “No, but I can read English. I can study Sofia’s books.”

  Molly put down the letter. “You’re just wanting to leave Chicago, aren’t you, Irma? Because of what happened that night?”

  Silence settled over us. Yes, San Francisco was far from all I longed to forget. But I was also weary of the flat earth, the heat of summer and hard press of winter cold. The etchings in Scribner’s made me yearn for the loop and roll of land. I wanted to break free of the squeeze of buildings and streets running endlessly out to horizons. Carlo would laugh, but I even missed sheep. Chicago had squirrels and rats, crows, pigeons, rangy dogs and alley cats. Backyard pens in the new neighborhoods often held pigs, and chickens squawked in rough coops behind many houses. Mules and horses clogged the streets with their whinnies and snorts, but where was the comforting calm of sheep?

  Molly’s hands took my shoulders. “Irma, you could be safe in Chicago. You don’t have to go to bad neighborhoods. That man who hurt you is gone. The clinic’s finished. So you could come dancing with me on Friday nights, meet a good lad and learn nursing. Isn’t that better than moving all the time, always being a stranger?”

  It’s true. In Opi my life was cradled in a net, knit to every soul around me. A new net was just forming in Chicago. Could I rip it again and hope to make another?

  “Enough about moving,” said Molly, pointing to the ceiling that shook with Mrs. Gaveston’s heavy tread in the room above us. “Herself has arisen. You’d think a body with a little money could put down carpets and not make that racket in the morning. Yes, Your Highness, the hired girl is busy. Come on, Irma.” In the kitchen she set me to grinding coffee as she put out plates, sliced a loaf into perfectly even slices and tossed out the crumbs for birds. “And now tell me, why should they take a foreign dressmaker with no high-school diploma in this San Francisco nursing school?” she asked. And then: “Grind more coffee. The boarders drink it like water.”

  “Madame Hélène can write me a recommendation.”

  “Sure she could. But that just proves you’re a good dressmaker.” Molly poured oatmeal into a pot of boiling water. Waves of shame washed over me as I watched her work. She had been a good and faithful friend. So many evenings we shared stories of home. I had sat on my bed as she playacted her bargaining with immigrants or mimicked Mrs. Gaveston’s ways until my sides ached with laughter. I remembered the night of the charred house, when she waited and worried for me. “I’m sorry, Molly. I’ve just been thinking of myself.”

  “And just who else should you be thinking of? It’s a free country. Go where you want. Take care of your sick people.” She stirred the oatmeal hard, her wooden spoon knocking the heavy pot. “San Francisco’s a new city. Newer than Chicago. Could be you’ll like that.” Molly wheeled around, oatmeal spoon in the air. “But the Lord knows I’ll be missing you when you’re gone, Irma Vitale.”

  I wrapped my arms around her broad shoulders. “I’ll miss you too, Molly. I’ll miss you so much.”

  “We’ve been good friends, haven’t we?”

  I nodded.

  Molly stepped back to the stove. “Oatmeal’s sticking.” She stirred furiously. “Shouldn’t you write to this Dr. Bucknell first, make sure she’ll take you and then go? Suppose it costs? Don’t you want to know how much? And why the sudden rush?”

  True, all true. But what of Sofia brushing off Vittorio’s steady urgings to rest between patients, to close the clinic earlier or tell patients to come back next week. “They’re sick now,” she would insist. “They need help now.”

  Molly studied my face. “I see. So you’re going soon.”

  “Yes, as soon as I can.”

  “Well, put out the bread and ring the bell. It’s feeding time.”

  Madame Hélène was setting a billowing muttonchop sleeve into a close-fitted bodice when I told her of my plan. She pulled pins from her mouth and pushed them into a cushion. “Irma, why do you go west? The women—everyone cares for you here. We need you.” In the next room, the whirl of Simone’s machine stopped. Even the old cat looked up as I described the dispensary, the new nursing school and the hills of San Francisco.

  Madame Hélène nodded. “This flatness here, like a floor, is hard for me too. But why is sewing people better than making fine dresses that you do so well? Every day, all day seeing the sick, cripples, children dying, it’s like the Old Country, no? Everything hopeless and sad. If you want to see mountains, take a little vacation. Then come back and we do the spring season together, the new styles from Paris. We go to New York perhaps, and see the great shops.”

  I wavered, as if a strong wind pushed against me. I had worked so hard, sewing enough skirt lengths to cover Opi. Yes, of course I would miss the surge of pleasure and pride when a customer asked for me, thanked me and reported how many suitors had noticed her daughter in a gown I made. And yet . . . Sofia’s hands gently pressing a woman’s belly or my own hands lifting a wailing child to our examining stool, knowing we could help.

  Madame Hélène sighed. “So, you go west. But before you go, can you finish the trousseau for the long-waist girl at least—the senator’s daughter? And the two evening gowns for the stockyard woman with too-wide shoulders, Mrs. Will.”

  “Willis,” Simone called from the other room.

  I promised. Madame yanked a needle from her cushion. “And how do I find a new Irma to help me?”

  “Perhaps there’s a girl looking for work now, walking through the city like I was, asking ev
erywhere for work. You could put a notice on the door.”

  “Ah. A notice on the door for everyone to see?” In the way Madame Hélène tightened her lips I knew there would be no more said that morning of my going. When we gathered for our noon meal, she cleared her throat. “I have decided. First, Irma, you will teach Simone all you can while you are here. You will work extra hours with her. I pay you for this. I will put a notice in the newspaper for a girl to do machine sewing and decent French cooking. Not on the door. So I find a girl who reads at least. Simone, you will learn from Irma?”

  “Yes, Madame!” said Simone gleefully.

  “Irma, you will teach her everything?”

  “I’ll try, Madame.”

  “And second, we will have a dinner together before you go away. We will invite Jacob and his sisters and your friends if you like.”

  “Thank you, Madame.”

  She waved me silent. “You are a good dressmaker. The ladies like you. The shop is peaceful. We make money at last. And now you leave me. Such is the life. But we will eat together first, good French food.”

  Late summer cooled quickly into autumn. An Irish friend of Molly’s would teach my English classes. I delivered Sofia’s instruments to Mercy Hospital and worked with Simone to finish the trousseau and velvet gowns. She learned quickly, having been secretly practicing on scraps of fabric and studying pictures as I once did. “Teach this to me,” she would say avidly, pointing out a skirt’s bias swirl or curving pleat on a tight bodice. “And the little buttonholes, how do I make them so perfect and round?”

  A parade of young women answered our notice in the Chicago Daily Tribune. “Irish, Polish, German, Greek, American,” Hélène muttered. “I want French food, or at least Italian.” Finally a slight, caramel-skinned girl from Haiti appeared who spoke a kind of French. She called herself Lune and would not say how she had come to live in Chicago or anything of her family, but her seams were straight as shot arrows and she could take apart, clean, oil and reassemble the sewing machine as if it were a child’s toy. The thick soups she called gumbo were French enough for Hélène and delicious. The old cat adored her and the customers were charmed by the waft of her songs over the whirl of the sewing machine.

  The night before I left, we had our dinner. We closed early, drew the curtains and moved our cutting table to the middle of the shop. Vittorio and Claudia brought wine and I arranged flowers from the Maxwell Street market. Freyda, Sarah and Jacob brought challah, a golden braided bread. Molly came with candied nuts, a thick wedge of cheddar cheese and crystal glasses secretly borrowed from Mrs. Gaveston. Lune made a gumbo, Simone baked a flaky onion tart and Hélène had spent hours simmering a choucroute of potatoes, cabbage and goose, the traditional going-away meal in her village. “To give strength for the voyage,” she explained. “So you carry away the taste of home.” For dessert Simone produced a dense chocolate pudding called mousse. “It is the fashion in Paris,” she boasted. I had never eaten anything so delicious, so dark, sweet and soft in the mouth, like a melting cloud.

  We ate and ate, sharing stories of home and America. Then came the gifts. I had embroidered handkerchiefs for the women and bought pipes for Jacob and Vittorio. Claudia presented an ample carpetbag for traveling “like real Americans use.” Jacob’s sisters gave me one of their pieced purses. Hélène pushed a small, cloth-wrapped package across the table. “Simone told me you were robbed in Cleveland,” she said. “So we find these for you, from England.” It was a pair of crane-head scissors with golden handles, a bright enamel eye and even finer blades than those of my stolen pair.

  “Why does she cry over scissors?” Lune demanded.

  “They are beautiful, thank you,” I whispered.

  “Yes, certainly,” Hélène agreed. “So you must not forget your sewing and you must not forget us.”

  “I could never forget—”

  Hélène made her shooing-away wave. “And you will not to be robbed again out West with the cow-boys?”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “If you come back, Irma, there will be space in my shop for you, always.” Hélène got up abruptly and hurried to the kitchen. The water pump rattled and she returned wiping her eyes.

  “And this is my present,” Molly announced, slapping her calendar on the table. “Irma, look at November.” I looked. All the numbers were erased. Curious, I turned to Molly’s beaming face. “I’m going with you to San Francisco. No, listen first. They say it’s full of single people looking for boardinghouses. I have a plan. We get work in a house right away: you help me clean and we have a place to live for no money. Then I find a rich widow to invest with me. By next year I should have my own house. This way at least you’ll know one person in San Francisco when you go. Well, do you like my plan?”

  To travel with a friend, to enter a strange city and not be alone? I gulped back my tears. “Yes, Molly, I like it very much.”

  Molly’s old bustle returned. “Now Irma, you’re going third class?”

  “Yes, I have to.” Second class cost eighty dollars—too much. Third class meant renting bed boards to sleep on at night and sitting all day on hard benches, but I would bear this for a week to save money for San Francisco.

  “If we come back to visit,” Molly vowed, “we’re coming first class.” Everyone laughed, including me, seeing myself in a Pullman car with velvet settees and Persian carpets, eating from China plates and sleeping on fine linen sheets at night. I’d have a picture made and sent to Opi, where people would pass it around, astonished.

  “Now Simone,” Molly was saying, “where are those dusters? Look, everyone, the first clothes I ever had of a French seamstress,” she boasted. Simone fetched two gray linen dusters.

  Hélène sniffed. “Very plain.”

  “Of course,” said Molly. “They’ll protect our clothes from coal dust. See, no ruffles or pleats, so they’re easy to shake clean.”

  “I designed them myself,” said Simone, blushing.

  We raised our glasses to the dusters and each other. Such a warm net I had finally woven around me, a net about to be ripped. When I noticed Simone and Hélène debating the waistline of a new gown for Mrs. Willis, I looked away, embarrassed at a flush of envy. As Opi had closed behind me when I left, Hélène and Simone would go on working in this room, creating dresses I would never see. Their heads touched as they folded and refolded a bit of linen to test how the dress might drape.

  A hand pressed my arm. “You will find good friends in San Francisco, my dear,” Jacob whispered. “And other work to do. Your work.”

  “But no friends like these.”

  “That is true, none like these. And we will have no one like our Irma, but I carry you here always.” He touched his heart, patting the somber black coat that Freyda said he wore on holidays and feast days. “And for tonight, we celebrate together.” We finished the wine and mousse and sang songs from our old countries until the church bells rang midnight.

  “I don’t come to the station, Irma,” Hélène announced suddenly. “I have had enough sadness in good-byes, but you do well in San Francisco, mon amie, you promise? And write to us. Now go home, it’s late and I must think how to tell the ladies they have lost their Irma.”

  “Yes, we have to go,” Molly announced, pulling me to the door. “The train leaves early. But don’t worry, this time leaving will be different.”

  The next morning was different. I had my fine carpetbag, not an immigrant bundle. Vittorio hired a cart to take our baggage to the Central Depot, and a noisy clump of well-wishers crowded around us: Jacob, Freyda and Sarah, Molly’s friends, some of my English students, Vittorio and Claudia, Simone and Lune. There were kisses and hugs, packages of sweets tucked into our baskets and addresses pushed into our hands.

  “Zay gesunt, go in good health, my dear,” Jacob said, coming close to whisper, “and remember, there are good men in the world.” Then he handed me off to Sarah and Freyda, who warned me against strangers.

  Molly called
a porter to stow a trunk of linens, which she heard fetched high prices in San Francisco. We each had a clump of tickets: passage with the Chicago and North Western line to the Pacific Transfer station in Council Bluffs, Iowa, then tickets on the Union Pacific to Omaha, and finally the Pacific line to San Francisco. We had our dusters and two dresses for the trip, underclothes, books, soap, food for the first day, my sewing box and a neat package from Vittorio with medicines for travelers’ ills: sick headaches, nausea, sore throats, coal coughs, and all manner of digestive problems.

  The shrieking train whistle and bustling conductor hurried us onto the train. Below our window, handkerchiefs fluttered like doves. “Good-bye, good-bye, au revoir, zay gesunt, arrivederci!” My last view of the Chicago Depot was hazy with tears.

  “Six days,” said Molly, busily sorting our bags. “I’ll learn bookkeeping and you’ll study medicine. Not like those bumpkins who stare out the window or play cards all the time.” I did study my book of child and infant maladies. But the window drew me relentlessly.

  “You’ll wear out that nose,” Molly warned, “pressed to the glass like that.”

  But I couldn’t stop, and even paid boys at the stations to wash the coal dust from my window. We roared across prairies at forty miles an hour through green-gold seas of grass. Children tumbled from sod houses to wave us by. Years ago, a traveler said, there were buffalo herds as large as lakes here, horizon to horizon, moving like thunder. Flocks of passenger pigeons once passed for hours. No matter, the golden light was enough now; hawks rose into a cobalt sky and crimson tipped the shocks of trees. I saw Indians in fringed leather with rain-straight black hair. Storm clouds bloomed over wheat fields, mounded high as mountains. Lightning laced the sky. No one had ever told me that America was so grand. If Carlo and my father were here, these sights would amaze even them.