When We Were Strangers (20 page)

“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.

“Now Irma, why do you believe that you’re pregnant?” Her manner was calm, listening as Zia did, hands folded in her lap as if nothing on earth could shock or disturb her. In the end I told her everything: the charred house, the man, his belt and thrusts. She nodded, asking how long ago I was attacked and how late I was in bleeding.

“There is no morning sickness,” I offered. “Could this mean there is no—obstruction?”

“That you’re not pregnant?” prompted Signora D’Angelo. “Irma, use the word. Not using it changes nothing. Let me examine you.” Before I could protest that country doctors barely touched a woman, she had me lift my skirt, pull down my bloomers and lie flat on the table. “I’m feeling for the pregnancy,” she explained, pressing gently on my belly. “Breathe deeply. Don’t tighten. You are from Abruzzo? Where?” I told her. “Ah, Opi. Now I must feel inside. What is your work now?” Her touch was careful, but waves of heat washed over me to be touched again
there
. “What stitches do you use?” she persisted. Clenching my fists, I spoke of running, whip, blind, blanket, cross and feather stitches. “Really? How do you sew a feather?” she interrupted. I told her. “Definitely pregnant,” she announced. “You may dress now.”

“You are sure?”

Her back to me as she washed her hands, she said firmly, “It is my business to be sure. And
you
are sure you cannot have this child?”

“Yes.”

“You know there are orphanages?”

“Yes, but I could not hide this—pregnancy and still work.”

“And if you cannot work, you cannot live. Correct?” I nodded. She dried her hands. “So then, Irma, you must have an abortion. Not this evening, but a Sunday morning, so you can rest afterwards. Now I’ll make us some chamomile tea.”

Abortion. The full truth of this word flooded over me. The signora returned with a tea tray and sat down at the long table with me. “Listen, Irma. For weeks you have thought of nothing else but of whether you were pregnant and how to keep this baby. But you cannot.”

“No.”

“So you must have an abortion,” she said gently. “Irma, your body has been abused. So you come here and I will restore it. Where is the sin? There is no other way for working girls. And therefore you want to know the cost?”

“Yes,” I murmured.

“It is twenty-three dollars.”

After Dr. Bronson’s Pills and the costs of Zia’s funeral, I had only the dollars Molly would bring me for the tablecloth, and only if she found a buyer. After room and board, I’d have five dollars left from next week’s pay. Signora D’Angelo set a teapot between us, two cups and two saucers, five things. Twenty-three dollars. “There are those who work for less,” she said. Yes, Molly’s woman asked for ten. “But I follow the practices of Dr. Lister and the great Mrs. Nightingale. Everything that touches your body will be clean. I have lost no one to puerperal fever and I have done this—wait.” She opened a small ledger. “Five hundred and sixty-five times. I work quickly, so you will not be long in pain. Afterwards, I don’t turn you on the street, bleeding, like some do.”

“There is pain?”

“When the cervix is disturbed, there is cramping and therefore pain. If you wish, you may have an opium sponge. Bite down and relief comes quickly. You can return to work on Monday and no one will know. If you have trouble or discomfort, I will care for you and when you choose to bear a child, you may do so easily, for there will be no damage to the uterus. For this I ask twenty-three dollars before we begin.”

Of course she wanted payment first. How many women promise to pay, have their abortions and never return? “If I come, what will you do? I mean, how do you make an abortion?”

She cocked her head, studying me afresh. “Most girls don’t want to know.”

“I do.”

“We use these tools.” She uncovered a tray of gleaming instruments. “Would you like to hear names?” I nodded. She pointed to a device the size of a hand and shaped like a crane’s beak. “This is the speculum, to see into the vaginal passage. And here,” she pointed to a finely made clamp, “is the tenaculum to open the cervix. And here,” she said proudly, “from Germany, a dilator designed by the great Dr. Hegar. You may visit a hundred abortionists and not find these implements. Inside the uterus I use Dr. Sim’s curette.” She touched a delicate triangular steel ring on a slim silver stem with a polished ebony handle.

“To scrape?” I ventured.

“Yes, to scrape out the pregnancy quickly without puncturing the uterus.” Late-afternoon sun caught the keen edges, but I could not look away. Nothing made in Opi was so delicate and precise. Signora D’Angelo draped a starched linen cloth over the tools again. “Irma, I’m not a doctor, but I study the same texts and buy the same tools. When great doctors speak at Chicago Medical School, I go to hear them. I read their books.” She refilled my teacup. “You know how some women try to end their pregnancies? Punches, blows, kicks to the belly, hard riding on horseback. Last month a Sicilian girl threw herself down a stairway to dislodge a babe. She broke her neck and died. Some wild herbs may contract the uterus,” the signora admitted. “There’s foxglove, hellebore, mistletoe, aloe. But if the voiding is not complete, dead tissue stays in the womb and rots. Or the woman is poisoned, for what kills a fetus may kill the mother too. Some use electric shocks to the cervix, because we are so modern now,” she added bitterly, “we in 1883. Others open the uterus with sharp tools and even if there is no infection and the woman does not bleed to death, the uterus is scarred and the woman becomes sterile. Should I stop?”

I shook my head. In that bright, ordered space, I could hear these horrors without flinching. I had pulled lambs from bellowing ewes. Once in butchering, my father found a uterus with a lamb half formed inside and threw it to a lunging dog. So I was not as shocked as a city girl might be. Yet amazement wound inside my horror: so many women had used such desperate means.

“Irma, I know dozens of abortistas. Some can’t write their own names, but still have great skill for simple cases. Yet if an infection begins or too much blood is lost, if a woman’s anatomy is unusual, they can have difficulties. The patient suffers.” She took my hand. “When I watched my sister die of puerperal fever, I swore that no woman I touched would come to this. Irma, you will be safe.”

I glanced toward her tray and thought how deftly my crane scissors worked in the hand. I thought of Father Anselmo’s hands holding mine as if they were fine and precious things. This woman’s hands were skilled, blessed perhaps. I must only find the money. “This Sunday, Signora?”

She nodded. “If you wait too long, not even the greatest London doctor can help. Be here by seven in the morning. Eat well Saturday night, but nothing after that.” A bell rang twice. “Vittorio needs me.” She darted off and I let myself out the door.

On the street outside her house a giddy swarm of children flocked around a Sicilian vendor selling shaved ice drizzled with bright fruit syrups. A young couple strolled by with a tiny, bright-faced girl in a starched pinafore skipping between them. When the father bought a cup of ice and knelt to feed the child, her rippling laugh wove them in a tender circle of delight. I froze.

“Would you like some lemon
granita
, signorina?” the Sicilian asked politely, waving toward his cart.

“No!” I said, so loudly that both parents turned to stare at me. I hurried away, tears burning my eyes. Outside Signora D’Angelo’s bright, ordered room I felt like a sinner and unclean, one of
those
women who killed their own children.

Chapter Ten
A Clean Oak Table

Trying not to think of fruit ice or families,
I hurried through the Italian streets and out into the American section.
FINE WIGS. WE BUY HAIR
, read a sign across the street. The wigmaker examined my hair, had me sit on a stool in bright light while he checked for lice, weighed it in his pudgy hands and shrugged. “Clean enough,” he said, “but a very plain brown, dearie, with no undertones at all. Frankly, who’d
choose
it for a wig? I could make a chignon, perhaps a few braids or some filler for a pompadour.” He dropped my hair and waved me toward a mirror behind the door. The gilded glass on his counter must have been for customers, not sellers. “Listen, dearie,” he called out as I quickly pinned up my hair again, “you seem like a nice girl and nobody comes here for no reason. I can give you six dollars, say seven, since it’s clean, but I’d need most of it.” He showed me how I would be sheared, a hand’s-length from the scalp, like a boy. How could I explain myself to Madame Hélène? I thanked him and left.

The streets filled with women crowned with blonde, auburn, lustrous black or chestnut hair. An old woman swept past me under a sleek gray pompadour. Only one head with my brown passed, a galloping messenger boy in torn knickers.

Fifteen dollars rose like a mountain between me and Sunday. Jacob’s sisters must have cut my green dress into a dozen purses by now. I owned nothing else to sell. If I asked for pay in advance from Madame, she would surely wonder why. I couldn’t look her in the face and lie and yet how could I say, “For an abortion, Madame”? In the long walk home, I discovered no better plan than to borrow from Molly and put myself on her calendar.

After dinner I asked for a loan of fifteen dollars. Molly set down the pot she was scrubbing and leaned over the wash basin, her back to me and wide shoulders hunched. “So the pills didn’t work?”

“No.”

She turned, her eyes rimmed red. “Wait here.” She hurried out of the kitchen and returned with a heavy knotted sock. “Here,” she said, pressing it into my hands. “I haven’t sold the tablecloth yet, but the Poles paid for their chairs today.”

“Thank you, Molly. You’ll have it back in one month.” I fished a card from my apron with my figuring: so much from my pay each week, so much for embroideries, so much for interest. Molly jerked open the stove door and jammed my card into the smoldering coals.

“I’d do
that
to the bastard who hurt you,” she said fiercely. “I’m no saint, Irma, you know that. I’m a money lender. But I haven’t slept in weeks after what I think happened to you that night. Please, this money is a gift. Don’t return it.”

“Molly, you don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do. And now put the sock away before Old Gaveston raises your rent.” I slipped the sock in my apron and Molly returned to her pots. “So,” she said over the clatter. “You’re not using my ten-dollar woman.”

“No.”

“Then it’s a real doctor you’ve got?”

“She works for a druggist and uses doctors’ tools and goes to doctors’ lectures.”

Molly laughed.
“Doctors’ tools
. Good for you, Irma. When is it?”

“This Sunday.”

“We’ll go together.”

“Thank you, Molly, but no.”

She looked back at me, curls wet with steam pressed against her cheeks. “Irma, was everyone in your village like you? So alone?” In steam rising from the washtub, I saw Opi’s people, shoulders bunched together in a tight herd. Even my family looked curiously back at me. Was I alone now because I left Opi or because I had lived apart even when I passed my people daily in the narrow streets?

A wet hand touched my shoulder. “Irma, you go by yourself if that’s what you want. I’ll be here when you come back. But take a bit of whiskey with me now at least.” So we tarried in the kitchen. The next morning I sent a messenger boy to Signora D’Angelo with a note that I would come on Sunday, in four more days.

With the sewing machine’s steady whirl and a press of ladies demanding summer gowns and garden dresses, I fixed on the problem of a railroad-owner’s wife who wanted a riding habit for a grand hotel in the Sierra Mountains of California. With Madame’s help I had combined a tailored bodice with ruffled peplum below the waist and pleated skirt hiding pantaloon legs so a woman could be respectable while walking and yet still ride astride like a man.

When the dress was done, Madame ran her little fingers over the crisp pleats, smiling at the plaid lines that met precisely at the seams as if the skirt were molded of a single hoop of wool. Madame herself modeled the habit for our customer. Standing, walking or sitting, the pantaloons were invisible, but when she mounted a chair, spreading her legs wide, the customer was ecstatic. That was Saturday.

I woke early on Sunday and slipped out of the boardinghouse. High winds tugging at my skirt came from every side, twisting and turning me at each street corner. “Don’t go, don’t go,” they seemed to say, but I pressed forward, my belly hot and heavy.

In her office, dressed in a clean cotton smock, Signora D’Angelo pointed to a tray where I should leave the money. She did not count it. The room, which had seemed clean enough before, was spotless now. The oak table gleamed. Snowy linen covered the implement tray. Signora D’Angelo led me to a desk and carefully opened a book. “This is
The Midwife’s Practical Directory
, by Dr. Thomas Hersey,” she explained. “Do you want to see it?”

“Yes, thank you.” The signora turned to a plate called
Female Reproductive Organs
. Astonishing, as if a woman’s skin had turned to glass. She explained the intricate drawing, pointing out tubes and folds, receptacles and channels. Here was the cervix that Dr. Hegar’s dilator would open and here an egg growing against the uterine wall, here the blood-rich lining which the curette would scrape away. My stomach cramped.

“It is seven thirty,” Signora D’Angelo said quietly, pointing to a clock. “By eight, we’ll be finished. First, drink some willow-bark tea to relax.” I sipped the bitter, pungent brew. “Now undress behind the screen and wrap yourself in this sheet.”

I did, returning like a ghost in the room, bare feet padding weightless across the floor. She helped me on the table and gently leaned me back.

“Will”—I coughed—“will you explain what you’re doing?”

She smiled. “Yes, of course. I’ve cleaned the instruments and covered them with cloth. I’m drawing the tray table close by.” The tray rattled slightly. “Now bend your knees. Good, and now spread them. Wider please. Good. The speculum is cold. There will be a click as I insert it.” I heard the click. She went on calmly announcing each step as if her fingers linked our bodies, sensing my thoughts. “You are afraid, but you are very safe. You’ll feel some cramping now, growing stronger.” Waves of pain rolled across my belly. Sweat washed my face. Pain, pain, a stairway of pain. I clenched my teeth and gripped the table edge. “Do you want the opium sponge, Irma? It’s ready.”

“No,” I gasped. “Just talk to me.”

“Everything is going well. We’re beginning the curettage. Steady, steady. Breathe deeply. Remember the illustration, the lining we must remove?” A blaze of cramps smeared her words but their steady flow made a grappling line that hauled me through each minute, even as the room hazed with tears.

“Excellent, Irma, we’re almost done. You’re very brave. Now you’ll feel some blood flow. That is the uterus emptying.” A warm stream gushed between my legs. “Don’t worry, it’s cleaning you. Now I’m removing the curette through the cervix. Four, three, two, one, and it’s out. Releasing the dilator. The tenaculum . . . the speculum. The cramps will be easing now.” And so they did, as a pounding rain slowly slackens. Just as I began shivering, she laid a blanket over me. “Rest now,” said a distant voice, “you are tired.” As chills slowly passed, I heard her cleaning instruments. She brought a basin and towel, helped me wash myself and deftly rolled away the bloodied sheets. “They’ll be boiled tonight,” she said. “Soiled linen spreads infection. Mrs. Nightingale said a hospital can be judged by its laundry.”

The clock showed eight as she helped me into a freshly made bed. I was safe and clean. Washed free of
him
. “Chamomile tea to help you sleep,” she said, pressing a cup into my hand. I slept until noon and woke to a plate of pasta and lentils by my bed, comforting tastes of home. I ate slowly and dressed myself.

Signora D’Angelo was writing at her desk. “I describe each procedure in my journal afterwards,” she explained. “There’s always more to learn.”

I nodded. How does one take leave of an abortionist? “Thank you for—the procedure. And the pasta,” I said awkwardly. “I’ll get the streetcar now.” The night before, Molly had given me the fare, saying, “Come home like a lady.”

The signora shook her head. “It’s better to walk afterwards, even slowly. Take off your corset and carry it. They’re evil inventions. A crime against women.” She closed her book. “Suppose I come too? I try to walk an hour each day. We’ll rest when you like.”

On the slow way back, the signora spoke of her childhood outside Milan, her parents who died of pellagra, her sister who died of childbed fever and how the great doctors laughed when she tried to enroll in medical school. “So I apprenticed with a midwife. When I delivered a healthy son to a countess who had suffered years of stillbirths and miscarriages, she gave me a fine gold brooch. I sold it to come to America. Shall we rest a little?” We found a bench.

When we set out again, she spoke of Chicago. Between her hours of work for Vittorio, abortions and midwifery, she read and studied medicine.

“Who do you treat?” I asked.

“Those who need me,” she said simply. “Irma, you’ve seen where the poor and the immigrants live. Huts built of wood scraps, some left from the Great Fire. Whole tenements using one toilet. Foul water, rat bites, blazing heat in the summer, ice in the water buckets all winter. Crowded like stable animals and more coming every day. Coloreds from the South, poor whites, Jews, Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians and Swedes—more crowded and filthy than any village at home.” She was speaking so intently that an American couple separated to let us pass.

It’s true that I knew these places in Chicago and before that in Cleveland, but my boardinghouse was in a “respectable” neighborhood, as Mrs. Gaveston tirelessly repeated, and the streets around the dress shop were elegant. Lately I had begun skirting the poor districts and not just to avoid
him
. I simply didn’t care to see them.

“Irma, I run a clinic at my house on Friday evenings,” Signora D’Angelo continued. “The poor pay what they can. If they’re afraid of hospitals or can’t afford doctors, they come to me. Vittorio says that one person can’t heal all Chicago, but I do what I can.” She took my arm. “Irma, you must be clever with your hands if you do fine dressmaking.” We stood in the shade of a maple tree. Her eyes glittered. “Will you help me at the clinic? Vittorio does sometimes, but his wife doesn’t like him ‘giving his time away,’ as she calls it. Perhaps you could come just to the end of this month, three Fridays. If you agree, the abortion was free.”

“But I know nothing about medicine. I’m not a nurse. I’m just a—”

“Just a curious, intelligent young woman and I believe a compassionate one as well. You could help with the washing and bandaging. Can you write?”

“Not fast or well, but I’m learning in English class.” We were near the boardinghouse.

“So you could keep my record book. At home, if wolves attacked your sheep, if they were hurt in some way, what did you do? Let them bleed to death?”

“We cared for them, but they were
sheep
.”

“Well? There are people in pain. You nursed your mother, you told me, and helped your aunt.”

“But that was my family.”

“Yes, that’s true and these are other families. Come this Friday, just come and watch. Could you think about it, at least?” I said I would. She reminded me to rest that night, to drink warm liquids and not wear a corset for the week. Then she took her leave and walked swiftly down the street until her wiry hair, wide shoulders and the straight line of her back were hidden by a liveryman leading a string of horses to the stables around the corner.

Molly brought a cup of broth to my room. “Agnes, the maid next door, went to the ten-dollar woman last week,” she whispered. “She lost blood and fainted in front of her mistress, who asked questions of course. Agnes told her everything, the little fool. Now she’ll lose her post and have no references. I worried all day for you.”

“It went well, Molly. She was very careful. And she walked me home.”

“There was pain?”

“Some.” I looked away.

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

“No. Tell me about your calendar.”

As I sipped the broth, Molly described a loan to Swiss brothers who spoke five languages between them and would sell kitchen goods to immigrants. She rolled on and I ceased listening, breathing in the cool late-afternoon breeze until I felt empty as a shell. “You’re tired. Rest before dinner,” said a distant voice.

“Yes, I’ll come down later,” I answered, but the door had already closed. In the silent room my cramps pulsed like waves: pain and release. Tools floated in the darkness: curette, dilator, speculum. I imagined the signora’s office on Friday evenings filled with immigrants, parents and children and those whose families were far away. I imagined the cries, like wolf-torn sheep. I did not come down for dinner but lay in bed that evening and into the night, thinking of my family and what they would say if they knew what I had done and why.