Elizabeth Street (13 page)

“I will do that, Lorenzo.”

Lorenzo was startled. Even if Giovanna agreed with something, she wasn’t so quick to admit it. So he stumbled on his next sentence. “Well, Teresa’s heard of jobs at the shirt factory.”

Giovanna had already decided to work, but she had other plans. “No. Tomorrow I will go see Lucrezia LaManna. The midwife.”

Lorenzo stammered, “Okay then, it’s settled.”

Her decision to deliver babies in New York was a practical one. Initially afraid to deliver Teresa’s baby, she found that she was capable of doing her job without opening her own emotional wounds. She would work as a technician.

Arriving at 247 MacDougal Street, Giovanna noticed it was a nicer building than most on the block. She asked some children on the stoop where to find Lucrezia LaManna. “Signora LaManna is on the top.” Giovanna thanked them and marveled that even after a twenty-minute walk uptown, you still did not need to speak English.

She was taking the stairs in twos when she looked up and saw a woman waiting on the fourth-floor landing.

“Scusi, Signora LaManna?”

“Sì. Avanti.”

Signora LaManna held her door open and Giovanna walked through self-consciously. It was the first apartment that Giovanna had seen in New York that wasn’t crammed with extra beds and cloaked in darkness. It was small and modest, but natural light illuminated the freshly plastered walls. Signora LaManna sat behind her desk and motioned to Giovanna to take a seat.

Giovanna could tell that the signora was taken aback by her size. In Scilla, where everyone knew her, her height was accepted, but since coming to America, even people she passed on the street looked at her like she was a freak. For her part, Giovanna could not help but stare at the woman’s face. The signora’s refined features reminded Giovanna of her mother, Concetta, as did her grace. But Signora LaManna’s worldliness also intrigued Giovanna. The signora’s hair was streaked with gray and pulled near to the top of her head, rather than in the usual bun at the nape of the neck.

“The doctor sent me,” began Giovanna.

Signora LaManna put on spectacles and picked up a pen. “Did he say how many months you were?”

Giovanna answered with both embarrassment and disappointment. “No, no, signora, I am not with child. I am a midwife.”

Signora LaManna put down her pen and removed her glasses. “Una levatrice?”

“Sì.”

“How long have you been in America?”

“Almost six months.”

“Have you performed any deliveries in New York?”

“I delivered my sister-in-law’s baby.”

“Well,” the midwife got up from her desk and moved to the kitchen, grabbing the espresso pot, “I don’t know your name, signora.”

“Giovanna Costa Pontillo. I am from Scilla, Calabria.”

“Ah, so your family was starving, your husband came to work, and you followed him,” stated the signora matter-of-factly.

Giovanna was taken, rather than taken aback, by her manner. “Not exactly.”

The two women sat down at Signora LaManna’s kitchen table and exchanged stories. Signora LaManna had been a doctor in Italy. She explained that when she came to America, she could no longer practice medicine, but of course she could serve as a midwife. She had accurately surmised that if she settled in the Italian community, she could use her medical skills in the tenements. There was no medical establishment there to care if she treated the sick children in the homes of her expectant mothers. Signora said it took her husband a while to agree to live near the Italian ghetto, but she prevailed by reminding him how easy it would be to get to the university by Washington Square, where he was a professor.

Hours later, when Signora LaManna was preparing lunch, Giovanna marveled at the circumstance. Here she was in New York and for the first time meeting a woman from northern Italy. Her mind swept back to being with Nunzio on the cliff and his dream for her to be a doctor.

When Signora LaManna returned to the table with food, both she and Giovanna were filled once again with questions. Giovanna found out the signora had a daughter, Claudia, who was studying art history in college, and Signora LaManna asked for details about Giovanna’s search for information concerning Nunzio’s death.

Soon after they got into their second round of discussion, a young girl appeared at the door, summoning Signora LaManna. The doctor turned to Giovanna. “We haven’t yet spoken of delivering babies, but would you like to come along on this one?”

“Of course, Dottore…signora…”

“Please, I will call you Giovanna, and you will call me Lucrezia.”

Giovanna was “interviewed” on their brisk walk to Hester Street. “Do you read and write, Giovanna?”

“Yes, fairly well.”

“Good. I like to take notes on my patients.”

Giovanna had never written a thing about a pregnancy. It seemed strangely academic to write about birth.

They reached the woman’s tenement. “We’ll have plenty of time to continue talking. This signora labors long and calls for me early,” Lucrezia commented, starting up the stairs.

Three hours later, Giovanna sent the young girl, who turned out to be the woman’s niece, to Lorenzo’s home with a message explaining her absence.

“Giovanna, I think it best for you to work with me a while. I will introduce you around after I have confidence in your skills.”

“Grazie, signora.”

“Lucrezia.”

“Lucrezia.”

“As for money, I’ll share with you what I get, but it is difficult to say what that will be. If they can pay, they pay. If you consider having little girls named after you payment, you will be wealthy indeed. Even though it is a northern name, there are many Lucrezias in Little Italy. Usually it is the fourth or fifth child, when they have run out of the names of grandparents.”

“I see that a midwife’s pay does not change when you cross the ocean,” remarked Giovanna. Lucrezia laughed, “Yes, some traditions remain.”

The woman was showing signs of needing to push. Lucrezia examined her and spoke to Giovanna. “She’s ready. Why don’t you do the delivery?” Lucrezia had been careful not to let the woman think a stranger was going to deliver the baby and risk losing her confidence for the birth, but the woman was at a stage in labor where her only thought would be pushing her baby out. Lucrezia continued to coach the woman but let Giovanna deliver the baby.

Lucrezia was impressed not only with how Giovanna birthed the child but also with the way she directed the action in the apartment. She gently shooed children from the room and suggested to the woman’s mother that she prepare dinner and boil water to clean up. Lucrezia had learned much in medical school, but household management when delivering a child was not a subject they covered.

She also noticed that she would need to teach Giovanna more about rules of sterility and how to inspect the placenta for clues to the baby’s health. But in their brief time together, she sensed that Giovanna would not scoff at new information. For all her confidence, she appeared to be an eager student.

Lucrezia planned to stay with the mother, but she suggested that Giovanna go home. “I’m sure your family is concerned. Tomorrow, come to my house at eight a.m., and we will make visits together. It is a busy time; I have seven women in their ninth month. You’re skilled, Giovanna.”

“I had a good teacher,” replied Giovanna, thinking warmly of Signora Scalici.

“But more than skills, you have a healing touch. It’s a gift.”

Giovanna blushed. She said good-bye to the family and turned to Lucrezia. She tried to think of something to say that would convey her happiness at meeting her, but as was often the case, these types of words failed her, and she simply kissed Lucrezia’s hand and left.

Giovanna felt triumphant entering her brother’s apartment.

“Tell us, tell us everything!” Lorenzo exclaimed. “Have you eaten? Teresa, get Giovanna her dinner. Sit, Giovanna. Tell me everything,” implored Lorenzo, peeling a pear for the children.

Giovanna began to chronicle her day, but soon she dropped her reporter’s tone and her excitement shone through.

“Working with a dottore! How wonderful!” Lorenzo practically shouted.

“Signora LaManna is not a doctor here in America.”

“That’s a technicality. Italy thought she was good enough to be a doctor, and she chose to work with you.”

“I asked her for work.”

“Another technicality.”

Giovanna smiled at her brother’s pride.

That night, Giovanna couldn’t be sure, but she thought she heard Teresa crying in bed.

Opening what Lucrezia called her “little bag of tricks,” Giovanna searched for honey. The bag had grown since she had discovered the herb shops in Chinatown. One day, in an exhausted stupor after a long delivery, she walked in the wrong direction and found herself standing in front of the most magnificent store with barrels of herbs of every scent and color. She walked up and down the rows; the herbs she didn’t recognize on sight she rubbed between her fingers to smell. The proprietor watched her with interest; few non-Chinese came into his store. Seeing that Giovanna understood the herbs, he tried to explain those unfamiliar to her with pantomime and the three words of English they shared,
good
being one of them. After a few visits they had developed their own sign language. Giovanna became so accustomed to the signs that whenever she said “echinacea,” her hand would instinctively circle her head, meaning for everything, and when she said “ginger root,” she would gnarl her knuckles.

Taking the honey from her bag, Giovanna rubbed it on the stump of the baby’s umbilical cord. Lucrezia did not scoff at her herbal remedies. In fact, she was interested and asked to be taught. Lucrezia had cut the mother an inch to allow the baby’s head to be born. Giovanna whipped up a poultice of comfrey leaf for the mother’s perineum and handed it to Lucrezia, who applied it to the perfectly sutured area.

Giovanna shared her homeopathic expertise with Lucrezia, and Lucrezia taught Giovanna about obstetrics and the illnesses that plagued the tenements, such as whooping cough, chicken pox, and dysentery. Because the need for medical care was so great and respect for Lucrezia so high, Lucrezia had no problem getting the prescriptions she needed, and she began to teach Giovanna much of what she knew about modern pharmacology.

With her new knowledge, Giovanna reflected back on her more difficult births in Scilla. If she knew then what she knew now, could things have turned out differently? Francesca Marasculo was foremost in her mind. Lucrezia had taught her to be wary of quick births and showed her the signs that signaled possible hemorrhaging and how to massage a uterus to help it to contract instead of allowing it to be an open door for the blood in a woman’s body.

After one month of working together, Lucrezia had insisted that Giovanna should take on her own patients. Lucrezia showed Giovanna how to take notes and keep them in order, and on more than one occasion demonstrated their importance by using the previous information to help solve a current problem. Although they each had their own patients, they tended to work together on deliveries, when the other wasn’t called away, simply because they enjoyed each other’s company so much.

The two women became confidants. While Giovanna was serious and hardworking, she also had a quick, biting wit that amused Lucrezia to no end. Once, when Giovanna worried out loud that the relationship was too one-sided, with Lucrezia passing on all the advice and knowledge, Lucrezia exclaimed, “Nonsense! You teach me about all those smelly things in your old bag. Besides, you make me laugh.”

After Giovanna met Lucrezia’s husband, she understood her need to laugh. Signore LaManna fulfilled every southerner’s expectation of an arrogant northerner. He was humorless, cold, and officious. Giovanna looked for signs in her older friend that would explain the mystery of their union, but she couldn’t find them. For the first time, instead of feeling sorrow about Nunzio, she realized how lucky they were to have shared something so few people ever have. Memories of laughing together, running, and swimming flooded her mind. With all Lucrezia’s gifts, she had not been given this one.

Giovanna spoke with Lucrezia of things she had never spoken with any woman. The difference in their age allowed her a certain freedom, and the fact that they were not family allowed her even more. Giovanna told Lucrezia of her problems with Teresa. She knew she frightened and intimidated her sister-in-law, but she didn’t know how not to, and sometimes she was resentful that she should even have to try.

Discussion of her relationship with Teresa became a stepping-stone to other issues. While a mother rested between contractions, they often discussed in spirited whispers the role of women in Italy’s north and south, Italian men, their perceptions of Americans, or the education of women. Lucrezia told her that she believed her own entry into university and medicine was destined when her mother named her Lucrezia after the seventeenth-century Venetian Lady Elena Lucrezia, the first woman to receive a university doctorate. After learning this fact, whenever Giovanna said Lucrezia’s name, she felt it carried with it the strength of history.

In one of these conversations, Lucrezia questioned Giovanna about wanting children and marrying again. Normally, this was not the type of question a woman would ask openly; instead, it would be gossiped about by neighbors on a stoop. When Giovanna got over her initial embarrassment, she was relieved to tell Lucrezia about her failed attempts to get pregnant with Nunzio and her deep desire for children. As far as marriage went, all Giovanna could say was, “I could never love another as I did Nunzio.”

Giovanna asked Lucrezia about her own courtship and marriage. Lucrezia wasn’t very forthcoming, but Giovanna was able to piece together that Lucrezia’s education set her apart and made her less of a marriage prospect. She had resigned herself to a life alone when she met her husband at the university. At first theirs was a professional relationship, but when Signore LaManna’s fiancée broke their engagement, he asked Lucrezia to marry him.

Another recurring topic of conversation was Nunzio’s accident. Giovanna had told Lucrezia in detail about Mariano Idone’s visit. Lucrezia filled Giovanna in on the conditions of workers and the world outside of Little Italy. She recounted stories she read in the newspaper about Italians being used as slave labor and the many deaths in the tunnels they were building for the underground trains. Lucrezia said her husband told her that Italians were dying at a greater rate than any other ethnic group building New York because there were so many of them, and because they didn’t have the power to do anything about it.