When We Were Strangers

by Pamela Schoenewaldt

  I decided to go to the port and see if, by wild chance, the Servia ever docked in San Francisco. Early the next morning, the port resounded with fishermen’s shouts, the banging of boats returning with the morning catch, seagulls cawing and barefoot boys clamoring for work. Italian women from North Beach swarmed the wharf, seeking broken crabs or scraps of fish to fashion into a poor man’s stew they called cioppino.

  I found the harbormaster in a tiny office cramped with charts, maps and logbooks heaped in nets hung from the wall. A telegraph receiver commanded one clear island of space on his desk. He was a big man with a peg leg and shaggy mustache that mimed the tilt of his body.

  He looked me up and down before answering my query. “The Servia,” he repeated, scratching his bristling hair. “The Servia, the Servia, yes, she docks here every year or so. Just sent word from Buenos Aires.” His eyes swept the office as if he might spy out news in the jungled heaps of paper. “You’re expecting a shipment?” His quizzical look said I was hardly a fine enough lady to be ordering goods by ship.

  “I’m expecting—someone.”

  “Ah, a sweetheart?” That strange American term: sweetheart. My sweet heart. Carlo would laugh and even Zia would ask if Americans ate each other’s hearts.

  “A friend,” I said stiffly.

  “Well then, let’s see when your friend might be coming.” He fished a logbook from the swinging net, discarded it for another, and ran his finger along closely written lines. “Telegraph transcripts,” he announced, shoving a pipe through brushy lips. “Some wire ahead, some don’t, some change course, like this one,” he jabbed a line, “headed here, then lit out to Australia. You’ve heard much about Australia, miss?” I shook my head impatiently. “Got those queer kangaroos, big as mules and jump like rabbits. Birds taller than a man. You have to wonder about their rats, no?”

  “The Servia, sir.”

  “I’m getting there, yes: the Servia out of New York, docked in Rio de Janeiro, then Buenos Aires, left three months ago to round the Cape of Good Hope, call in San Francisco and out to the Sandwich Islands.”

  “When will she be here?”

  “Ah, that we don’t know. Like I say, some ships change course. If sailors jump ship in Rio, the captain has to hire new ones. If the ship is damaged rounding the Cape, and a lot of them are, there’s repairs that take time. They may have to wait for supplies. I could keep an ear out for news, if you know what I mean.” I set a quarter on his desk. He didn’t move and I added another. Then he swept both into his pocket. “Fine, then, miss, come back in a fortnight. I may know something more about your—friend.”

  I walked to the dispensary, heart thudding with joy, until Molly’s warning voice seeped into my head like smoke. Suppose Gustavo didn’t remember me? How many times had he stood on decks with peasant girls? Suppose on land he was indeed only another sailor, hungry for whores and rum? By lucky chance the next two weeks left little time for supposing.

  Dr. Bucknell returned unexpectedly, greeted me kindly as I cleaned the laboratory and listened to grudging good reports of my work from Mrs. Robbins. The next day the doctor called me to her office, where a file of Sofia’s letters sat on her desk. “An excellent clinician. Largely self-taught but fine instincts. You were her assistant? Tell me about that.” I described our clinic and house visits, our infection controls and record keeping. Dr. Bucknell listened thoughtfully.

  “So, you have an excellent start. With Mrs. Robbins’s good report, I believe we can make an exception and have you enroll next year without a high-school diploma. Please, sit down and have some tea,” she said kindly, but I didn’t sit.

  “Dr. Bucknell, I would like to enroll now. I believe I am prepared.” I took a breath. “The bones of the cranium are the ethmoid, frontal, occipital, two parietals, sphenoid and two temporals. The axial skeleton is formed by the vertebral column of twenty-six bones and—”

  Dr. Bucknell set down her teacup. “I see, an oral examination. Well then, let us proceed. The spine?” I named the bones of the spine, the pelvis and legs and described the primary digestive organs and structure of the heart. She had me fold a sling for a broken arm and give the symptoms for malaria. I explained why babies might be born blue and how to effect a dilation of the uterus. Nails dug my hand as I described Dr. Sim’s curette, but I relaxed when she asked about care of the stump after an amputation.

  Dr. Bucknell returned to her tea. “My compliments, Miss Vitale. It seems we must find someone else to clean for us. I will tell Mrs. Robbins to expect you in the morning for lessons. Welcome to the Pacific Dispensary.”

  I flew home to tell Molly. We celebrated that night in a tavern with separate rooms for ladies. In the morning I dove into my lessons, drunk with all I was learning.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Straits

  Rains swept in from the Pacific that season, storm after storm. I splashed to school in men’s boots. The morning of the second week, thinking the harbormaster might have news of the Servia, I went to the port at dawn. The rain had paused to a misty drizzle and fishing boats returning brought a chorus of famished gulls. The harbormaster shouted over their cries. “The Servia? Yes, miss, I do have news. Come inside.”

  Yes, like a simple fact. Gustavo might be coming. Some sailors must be good men, the same on land as they were at sea. The harbormaster shuffled papers, pulled at his mustache and cleared his throat. Another fishing boat docked and the gulls cawed wildly. “You have news of the Servia, sir?”

  “Yes I do. Unfortunately, miss, she was lost in an ice storm off the Straits of Magellan, down at the hook of South America. It’s a devil’s own passage even in summer. A cargo ship out of Liverpool saw her go down.” His words tossed like gulls in my head.

  “Saw her go down?”

  “Sank, miss, destroyed. The cargo captain tried to approach but was driven back by high seas. He reported no survivors.”

  “Weren’t there lifeboats?”

  “She went too fast. Sometimes it’s like that, miss. No time at all.”

  “But the Servia was a stout ship. Crossing from Naples we were three days in a storm.”

  “Begging your pardon, but that was the North Atlantic. These waves,” he peered at the closely written report, “were sixty feet high. Yonder there, you see the Rosa Marie? That’s twice her mainmast.” I followed the line of his finger and gasped. “Any man thrown free would freeze in those waters or be pounded to death in one ‘Our Father.’ I’m sorry, miss. So it was your sweetheart on board?”

  I didn’t answer, only thanked the harbormaster and left. No, Gustavo was not my sweetheart, hardly even a friend, only a hope, a sweetening of the heart, a dream dashed in rough waters. When Zia Carmela died, no one thought it strange to mourn her. But my past with Gustavo was as thin as voile, fragile as the drawings he sent me that I had so briefly. Mourning such a dream would surely be daft, as Americans said, but still I felt chill, despite the rising sun, shorn as a sheep in the springtime. I walked aimlessly in the port, passing sailors with their sea bags and a man meeting his family, just arrived on a passenger ship from the East Coast. The children leaped and chattered, bursting with stories of their sea adventures, the parents walking slowly together, arms entwined. How easily death could snatch one of these, even in their youth and strength, and how great their grief would be. Better to move alone and bear the chill. I made my way to the dispensary.

  “Bad news from home?” Dr. Bucknell asked kindly at the start of our lesson.

  How to explain the loss of what was never mine? “No,” I lied, “only a bit of indisposition.”

  “Miss Miller, would you get some subnitrate of bismuth for Miss Vitale?” she asked Susanna, a round-faced young woman from Texas. Properly dosed, I took a seat behind a larger girl, where I might be less observed and tended.

  We began the next lesson: washing and feeding the bedridden patient. Bent over my notebook, I imagined howling winds in the Straits of Magellan. Did Gustavo see that last wave arc over
the Servia’s mast? Did he stare into the wild ocean’s mouth as Jonah gaped at the swallowing whale? Still limping, could he find purchase on ice-caked decks?

  “Miss Vitale! We were speaking of bedsores.” Startled back to the room, I described how in Opi we sometimes put sheepskins under the very old to cheat the sores a little longer.

  “An excellent folk practice,” commended Dr. Bucknell. “And now Miss McClaren—”

  Hard as it was to lose Sofia, I had touched her still body and cool face and heard the mourners’ thanks and remembrances. If I ever went to Opi and spoke of Carlo, others I knew would remember him too. “Yes,” they might say, “remember how he went after that wolf? Remember his last fight with Gabriele at the tavern?” Someone might have seen him gathering wild herbs for our mother. My Carlo was Opi’s Carlo and if he was lost to me, he was lost to us all. Who could mourn Gustavo with me now? He was like a polished stone held in my pocket for so long that he seemed familiar. But what did I truly know of him? What little he shared of his life might have been just a story. Even the whalebone he might not have carved himself. Was he, as Molly often said, only my excuse to avoid risking stares or indifference at dances, my stubborn proof that the few good men were far away at sea?

  The lesson over, I hurried away before Dr. Bucknell could ask about my indisposition and walked home dodging muddy water thrown up by wagons barreling through puddled streets. The collar girl’s litany hissed in my ears: cut, sew, work. What was left for me now? Read, study, nurse the sick. When the road heaved up, I bent into the driving rain, thinking of those who first climbed to Opi and claimed it as their own.

  “Did the harbormaster know anything?” Molly asked after dinner.

  “The Servia was lost in the Straits of Magellan.”

  Molly stopped her washing. “Perhaps he was on another ship.”

  “Perhaps.” But I couldn’t spend my life at the port waiting for ships. I would work, simply work as Sofia had done. Healing and the company of healers would be sufficient for my life. Sufficient and good, I repeated, drawing my blankets up against the cold wet of the night. It would be days before I slept in my bed again.

  Chapter Sixteen

  An Obstruction

  In the morning, while Mrs. Robbins continued our anatomy drills, Dr. Bucknell called me to translate for a patient doubled over in her office. “She’s Italian, we know that much,” said Dr. Bucknell. “The complexion is sallow, as you see, the pulse elevated and she manifests considerable abdominal pain.”

  I drew my chair close to the young woman, who seemed to be my age and wore the plain cotton dress of a factory girl. She said her name was Francesca De Santis and she worked at Mr. Levi’s factory on Battery Street, sewing pockets onto the trousers that people called blue jeans. Her accent rippled through me and I nearly wept for joy. She was from Abruzzo and seemed freshly in America, still bearing the smell of our earth and savor of our bread.

  “Family here?” Dr. Bucknell had me ask.

  “No one now,” Francesca said. “I came last month to join my sister, but she had already died of pneumonia.”

  When I gave my condolence and said that I was alone in America too, she leaned closer, as if tasting my words. “How long have you been in this country, Francesca?” I asked.

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  “Irma Vitale of Opi. I am a student here.”

  “Opi?” she breathed. “So close. I’m from Scanno.”

  Scanno! “On a clear day we see your village.”

  “And we see Opi.” Buttons of sweat crowded her brow as she stretched a pale hand toward mine. I grasped it.

  “When you’re better, Francesca, we’ll talk about home. We’ll—”

  Dr. Bucknell coughed lightly. “Symptoms?”

  “Francesca, the doctor asks where it hurts you.”

  She pointed to her belly below the navel, but the finger wavered. “There. But it moves, like a snake, hot.”

  I translated for Dr. Bucknell, whose pen scratched over a blast of laughter from the street below us. “So the pain shifts locus. See if the tongue is coated.” It was. “Ask what treatment she has had so far.”

  “I tried mustard water to bring vomiting and then a man at the factory said I should swallow bullets.”

  “Bullets?” I gasped. “Lead bullets?”

  “Yes, he said the weight would push out an obstruction. I took them and walked home, but then I must have fainted. Someone brought me here.”

  Dr. Bucknell threw down her pen when I translated. “Idiots! Pure idiots! Never mind, let’s get her to bed. We’ll try to treat without operating.” Yes, Sofia always said that to open the belly makes a gaping door to infection.

  Francesca tugged me closer. “Irma,” she whispered, “there’s blood when I pass water.”

  I translated for Dr. Bucknell, whose muttered “huh” shot a wave of terror across the pale face. Sofia had never shown the slightest jolt at any patient’s story. Now Francesca gripped me with desperate strength. “Will I die? Will I see Scanno again? I promised Mamma I’d come back.”

  “We’ll take care of you. You’ll see Scanno again.”

  Francesca closed her eyes.

  I whispered to Dr. Bucknell. “We can help her, can’t we? She’ll live?”

  “Be careful of promises, Miss Vitale,” said Dr. Bucknell. “We’ll do our best.”

  With Susanna I helped Francesca into a linen shift and had her eat a little broth. We applied poultices to the abdomen and dosed her with calomel, sodium bicarbonate and pepsin. We gave morphine for pain and woke her to pass urine streaked with bloody ribbons. The lead bullets never emerged. I brushed her hair and sang an Opi song, but with each passing hour she drifted further into a private world of pain.

  In the morning Dr. Bucknell called the students to Francesca’s bed, explained the symptoms and had them prod the belly to feel its heat and tightness. “There is an obstruction and massive infection,” she explained in the next room. “Possibly in the appendix.”

  “What is the treatment?” Susanna asked.

  “Generally, opium to ease the patient into death. However we can try, at least, to drain off the worst of the infection. She’s young and her body may expel the rest. I have summoned Mr. Benjamin.”

  A plump, dapper young man soon presented himself with a gauze-topped jar of leeches moving languidly in the clouded water. “The very finest specimens, imported from France,” Mr. Benjamin boasted. “My last of this shipment and exquisitely famished. Each one is fifty cents.” He examined Francesca, sounded and smelled her. “She may require ten,” he warned.

  “Then apply ten, sir,” said Dr. Bucknell. “And quickly, please.”

  Mr. Benjamin reached in the jar and pulled out a leech, which he laid on Francesca’s belly, holding gently until its head burrowed into the taut skin. He attached another and another until she was draped with pulsing black ribbons. “They will eat for an hour,” he said and produced a slim book of poetry that he proceeded to read as his charges swelled to thick fingers. Francesca murmured but did not wake. When the leeches ceased to pulse, he plucked them off easily and dropped them into a wooden box. He would empty them in our cesspit, Dr. Bucknell explained. High-quality leech masters used fresh beasts for each patient. “They have done their job well,” Mr. Benjamin said.

  In fact there was some flattening of the belly and the skin did seem to soften. Francesca awoke and asked for water in a voice that was nearly her own. “Rest now,” Dr. Bucknell told us. “We may need you later.” I put a chair by Francesca’s bed and finally closed my eyes.

  By midnight, Francesca’s moaning cut me from sleep. The tiny wounds were spitting pus and the dark, swollen belly was ghastly. I sent Susanna racing for Dr. Bucknell, who examined Francesca and then stepped sadly back. “Too much infection,” she sighed. “If it continues, she will die.”

  “More leeches?” I suggested.

  “No, they’ve done all they can. I have just read an account by Dr. Mor
ton of Philadelphia of a grocer with similar symptoms. He too, attempted a cure with leeches. When they did not suffice, he opened the abdomen, cleaned it of pus, tied off and removed the appendix. The next patient treated thus did not survive, but the grocer was utterly cured. We must operate. It is our only chance for this girl. Try to get her consent.”

  I woke Francesca and explained what the doctor had said. “No,” she gasped. “My father died from cutting. I saw him.” She clenched my smock. “Get Mamma. Oh Irma, it hurts so much.”

  “Francesca, please let us try. The doctor is very skilled.”

  A wave of pain convulsed her. “Make it stop, Irma! Make—stop.”

  “Let us operate.” The wild hands flailed. “Francesca, it’s your only chance.”

  She found my arm again and gripped it. “You’ll stay with me, Irma?”

  “Yes, I’ll be right here, but please let the doctor operate.”

  She nodded and closed her eyes, still gripping my hand.

  “Miss Vitale?”

  “She consents.”

  Dr. Bucknell studied the account from Philadelphia again as Susanna and I sterilized tools, prepared the operating table and washed Francesca’s belly. Other students filed into the room and pressed against the walls, hands over their mouths.

  “Phew, worse than a cesspit,” one of them whispered.

  “Miss Miller,” said Dr. Bucknell severely, “there is no cause to dwell on the obvious.”

  Francesca’s lips moved in prayer. After she crossed herself I took her hand as Dr. Bucknell brought the glass tube of the ether chamber to her mouth and had her breathe deeply. When a pinprick brought no response, Dr. Bucknell poised a scalpel over the taut belly. “We’ll begin,” she said, “and proceed as quickly as possible.”

  The cut gaped open, a terrible mouth. Foul streams of corruption drained into basins that Susanna handed to students who hurried them away. How could such corruption be within a body and that body live? “The bullets,” Dr. Bucknell muttered, dropping three into a basin where they rattled like cherry pits. In the pulsing red mass, she found the appendix, tied it off with silk thread, then removed it neatly and closed the aperture with tiny stitches.