Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (21 page)

“There’s another!” People shouted and pointed. Firemen turned their hoses on the blazing dresses.

“Blankets!” someone cried. Mr. Kinney was already coming, his arms full of blankets and heavy coats. Firemen snatched them to wrap the burning girls.

A girl I knew from scribing raced by. “Adele, where’s Giovanna?”

“Machine,” she gasped before a policeman pulled her away.

Of course, the sewing machines. Everyone knew what happened after garment shop fires: girls who survived lost all they’d invested and had to begin again. A dark shape appeared against the tumbling smoke: a girl hugging her machine. Two firemen doused her with water. A third pulled the machine from her arms. But the girl wasn’t Giovanna.

Starting toward the building, I was yanked back. “You can’t help,” someone shouted. I barely recognized Giovanna when she finally came reeling out, her sooty face darker than Lula’s. The steel in her arms would be blazing hot. I saw the seared, scorched skin, smelled the stink of flesh. When someone brought a soggy coat, she howled as it touched her. Two men carried her to Kinney’s back lot, where the wounded lay on blankets. Other blankets covered the dead. Three more girls were found charred inside the building, cradling their machines.

The fire chief ordered his men back just before a surge of flame brought down the roof and the four walls fell in like a collapsing house of cards. Now the crowd ringed a new spectacle: a black-suited, dazed man, Mr. Lentz.

“My daughter died for your damn machine!” a mother screamed. Boys spit on his suit. The first girl who had escaped, her dress merely singed and arms blistered, moved through the parting crowd toward Mr. Lentz. She opened her mouth. Nothing. When someone brought her a cup of water, she drained it. “I paid seven dollars into my machine,” she croaked in an old man’s voice, horrible to hear. “Tell me.” She gestured for another cup and drained it. “Tell me I’ll get that back.”

Filled with all I had seen—the blackened girls, the dead beneath blankets, and Giovanna’s scorched arms—I pushed to the front of the crowd. “Tell her!” I shouted, startled by the force of my own voice. “Tell her!”

Voices behind me repeated: “Tell her! Tell her! Tell her!” When Mr. Lentz tried to back away, boys blocked his path. A smoke-darkened fireman silently joined the ring.

We were sweating freely now with the crackling, hissing fire behind us. Mr. Lentz wiped his face with a white handkerchief and faced the girl. “Rachel, you and the others will have full credit for what you have paid into the machines when I rebuild my shop. I’ll have to trust your word on how much you’ve paid. My account books are in there.” He pointed to the ruin. “But you’ll have jobs when I rebuild.”

“Give your hand on it, sir,” I said, and he did. Someone passed around a Panama hat for funeral expenses. When it came to Mr. Lentz, silence fell over the crowd. He took out his wallet, hesitated, and put it in. The hat sagged. Fifty dollars, I heard later. A murmur of content swept around the circle as I pushed my way toward Giovanna.

If Mr. Lentz had rebuilt his shop, he might have kept his promise. But he didn’t rebuild. Two weeks after the fire, declaring bankruptcy, he joined the wholesale firm of Joseph & Feiss. He did write letters of recommendation for the survivors and paid them two, three, or four weeks’ wages, depending on the severity of their injuries. Giovanna received four weeks’.

P
ARADISE
L
OST

Finally Mamma wrote
again, not penny postcards but notes on the backs of used tickets from the People’s Vaudeville Company, mailed in Memphis. She never explained her change of company, only commenting that she would be “south,” safe from “him.”

Where could I find a lever long enough to pry Arturo Toscanini from her head? Her imagined enemies grew on every side. A ticket from Little Rock spoke of Lydia and her dogs. “They follow me too.” She stayed in the theater between performances to watch the moving pictures. “Safer than the street.” She didn’t play cards. “Everyone cheats.” I’d waited so long to hear from her. Now this little stack of tickets made me sick with dread. Far away, was her mind unraveling?

“Lucia,” Father Stephen said severely. “She is using His gift, her marvelous voice, to earn her bread. She renounced the vice of gambling. You must trust His protecting hand.” He seemed so sure.

Walking home from church, I counted Mamma’s other “protectors”: the comfort of song, a smaller company, and moving pictures to safely entertain her. Mr. Loew’s audiences were surely less exacting, his rules less austere. Her “unacceptable gestures” might be acceptable, even welcome in his theaters. Without a schedule of her tour, I couldn’t arrange a visit, but she sent a few dollars home every week. That constancy was reassuring: she wasn’t fired at least. Yet when nobody wrote to warn me or complain of her behavior, I shared a new worry with Roseanne: perhaps she had no friends to fret over her. Had she even given Mr. Loew my address?

“Stop it!” Roseanne snapped. “You’re making yourself sick. Teresa’s working and sending money. And look at you with a high school diploma and a fine job in a downtown shop. What could be better?”

College would be better, but perhaps Roseanne was right: work in the shop brought some quiet satisfaction and paid my room and board. Mr. Kinney had begun teaching me the rudiments of double entry bookkeeping, “invented by your Italian ancestors five hundred years ago.” The craft demanded perfect concentration, he warned, for a single transposed or misplaced number could bring havoc. He began cautiously entrusting me with more complex tasks. In quiet hours bent over the broad pages of ledgers, I didn’t fret about Mamma, absorbed by the clatter of adding machine keys, the handle’s ratchet, and that first giddy moment when the day’s transactions fell neatly into balance. “To the penny, Miss D’Angelo, to the penny!” Mr. Kinney crowed. Delighted, he gave me the pick of a new shipment of ruffled blouses. “If my Olivia and I had a son,” he said wistfully, “I couldn’t have asked for a better hand on my books.”

Yet despite Mr. Kinney’s praise, bookkeeping wasn’t enough. I yearned for college as much as Yolanda ever yearned for a fella and release from her family’s flat. I devised a plan, ironed my best shirtwaist, and puffed my hair in a pompadour.

Mr. George Bellamy, the director of Hiram House, was known to have wealthy friends. He dined with Rockefellers, bankers, and mill owners. He knew me and knew my work as a scribe. Perhaps he could help. I went to his office and found him seated behind a gleaming walnut desk. Gold studs glittered in his cuffs. The lapels of a finely tailored jacket were cut in the season’s fashion, and his shirt was of English weave, stiff-collared and perfectly starched. Surely friends of such a man could provide a scholarship. I scarcely cared to which college; they all blended together. A young girl dreaming of marrying a prince would be happy with any prince.

He listened, folded his hands, and fixed me with an avuncular gaze. “You graduated from high school, Lucia. Most immigrant girls do not. Your parents surely sacrificed for your education.”

Was he taunting me? He must know that Mamma had no husband. “My father was killed in Naples, sir. He was a cathedral painter who fell from a scaffold and died.”

“Ah, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He wanted me to be educated. It was his last wish. And for this I’m applying to you.” I stood very still, hoping he wouldn’t notice the flush of heat from passing on my mother’s lies again.

Mr. Bellamy turned a heavy ring. “Don’t you want to get married, Lucia? If you go to college, your chances will diminish.” Because most Italian boys don’t go to college, he must have meant, and American men wouldn’t consider me.

“I hope to marry someday, sir, but I want to go to college
now
. If someone provides the means, I’ll make my patron proud.” Mr. Bellamy drummed his blotter. I remembered to breathe.

He sighed. “I will try, young lady. I make no promises, but I will inquire.”

I thanked him and left quickly. Once clear of the Hiram House grounds, I raced to the boardinghouse and threw myself into the arms of an astonished Roseanne. “There now,” she said, patting my back. “Here’s our Lucia again.”

Restlessly waiting for Mr. Bellamy’s response, I persuaded Giovanna to visit Yolanda with me that Sunday. Her singed hair had been cut short and her throat was still raw from smoke, but her spirits lifted on the short train ride south. Joy filled Yolanda’s tiny house and flavored the amiable disorder of baby Maria Margaret’s toys and clothes mixed with piles of feathers and flowers, entire stuffed tiny birds, hat forms and lace. Finished hats perched rakishly on chairs. “Isn’t she clever?” Charlie demanded. “She sells to all the owners’ wives.”

“Look at her!” demanded Yolanda as she lifted up the gurgling baby. “She’s so adorable!” Charlie had designed a new pulley system and was bound for greatness, Yolanda insisted. I had stumbled into a storybook.

Charlie’s friend Frank came for dinner, a slender, cheerful man, clearly brought to court Giovanna. He leaned close to catch her whispered story. Her dark eyes glittered; curly cropped hair framed the perfect oval of her face. “No woman who doesn’t want to should have to work outside the home,” Frank announced. She beamed.

“We could have invited someone for you,” Yolanda whispered when Frank and Giovanna had gone out walking. “But—”

“I don’t want to be married yet, and you didn’t have space for another chair.”

Yolanda laughed. Nothing troubled or offended her now. I was happy to see her happiness, to play with the cheerful baby and admire the new hats, but I felt out of place in the little house and eager to go back to my life.

A month after I’d visited Mr. Bellamy an envelope arrived from his office. “Open it,” said Roseanne, but I took it to my room instead and held it, turned it over and over, warmed it, finally opened it and drew out a single monogrammed sheet. An anonymous donor had offered funds to send a “worthy young woman” to college and I had been selected for this honor. Mr. Bellamy recommended his alma mater, Hiram College, just south of Cleveland, for which Hiram House was named and where I might receive an excellent education in the wholesome country air. President Bates had arranged my lodging beginning in midsummer so that I might have private readings before the next semester. My patron was most anxious that I do well but did not wish to be identified.

Happiness whirled inside me like a great wind. I was certain that Mrs. Livingston was my patron despite her father-in-law. Perhaps she had argued for Hiram House to be added to their “charity budget,” having made private arrangements with Mr. Bellamy that I receive these funds. How could I thank her without betraying the elaborate subterfuge? Not in writing, for the old man might intercept my letter. If I went calling, one of his servants could reveal me. Finally I determined a means: I put on my drabbest dress and battered straw hat, approached the grand house through a back alley, and knocked at the kitchen door, asking Agnes for scullery work.

She peered closely at my face and then said gruffly, “Sorry, girl, we’re not hiring.” Leaning forward, she whispered: “I’ll tell the missus you came.” Agnes pointed to a reddened finger where a ring might be and made a sign for money. “Sold?” I mouthed, and Agnes nodded. Then aloud: “The Winstons next door might need a maid. Wait, here’s a fresh oatcake. Good luck to you, girl.” It was warm and sweet under the rough grain, the taste of hope and secret kindness.

When my time for college finally came, I wrote to Mr. Loew, imploring him to forward a letter to Teresa D’Angelo with my new address. Then I took a difficult leave of Mr. Kinney, who doubted finding a better clerk, “even among Americans.” Finally I visited those who had filled my years in America: the Reillys, Casimir and Anna, Donato, and then Yolanda’s and Giovanna’s families. I went to Hiram House, to church for Father Stephen’s blessing, and then early to Lula’s before her first customers stumbled in from the night shift.

She was scrubbing the front steps, for she took particular pride in a gleaming limestone entry. “Girl,” she said, setting down her brush, “I’ve been hearing about your good-byes. You’re going thirty miles away, not to Timbuktu.”

“I won’t be back until Christmas, and you’re the only people—”

“The only people you know in America?” she said, patting my cheek. “Well that’s true. And your mamma’s not here. You’re a good girl, Lucia. We’ll have a grand graduation party someday.” She went back to scrubbing, working at a stain. “Now in all these good-byes, did you happen to give one to Henryk?”

“He’s busy,” I told the limestone step. He
was
busy in the shop. I’d also heard that he was often out walking with Miriam. I had stopped going to Hiram House dances, not wanting to see them there.

“Well, I’m busy too, Miss Lucia. I’m not sitting around eating chocolates, but I’ve got time for a friendly good-bye. How would Henryk feel if you blew out of town like a bad breeze?” I mentioned Miriam. “So what? He’s still your friend.”

Henryk was stacking apples in a neat pyramid when I told him of my scholarship. Apparently he already knew. “You’ve worked so hard for this, Lucia. You deserve it. I’ll miss you though.” He looked up from his apples. “You
could
write me a letter, since you don’t need a scribe.” His wide smile and warm, dark eyes melted away my stiffness, as they always did.

“You mean, you want to know what books I’ve read? Would that be interesting?”

“Well, sure. And I’ll tell you the fruits and vegetables I’ve sold. Everybody wants to know things like that.” He slipped an apple to a hungry-eyed street boy who darted off, chomping.

“And what fruit you gave away.”

“Right, I’m a famous philanthropist, like Andrew Carnegie, but don’t tell my father.” A customer came in for onions. As furtively as he’d fed the street boy, he reached out quickly and squeezed my hand. “Congratulations, Lucia. Do us proud.” Then to the impatient woman: “Yes, Mrs. Rothbard, sweet new onions right over here.”

I crossed the street to put automobiles, pushcarts, and wagons between us, my hand clenched to hold in the heat of his touch. It was good that I was going away, better that than seeing him out walking with Miriam.