Uprising (14 page)

What kind of mother was Signora Luciano, that she could let the baby cry like that and not do a thing?

Other tenants in the surrounding apartments began pounding on the walls.

“Make that baby shut up!”

“Can't a man get any sleep around here?”

Bella rolled away from the wall and leaned toward Serefina, the little Luciano girl lying right beside her.

“There's a poultice my mama used to make,” Bella whispered. “For when we had coughs. But it uses flaxseed. Is there any flaxseed in New York City?”

Bella's relationship with the Luciano children had changed in the last few weeks. She still hated Signor and Signora Luciano, but Rocco must have said something to his younger brothers and sisters. Now, sometimes, when Bella fell asleep over her unfinished pile of flowers, one of the Luciano children would nudge her awake before Signora Luciano noticed and began screaming at her. When one of the Luciano girls scooped out macaroni for the boarders, Bella's bowl always seemed to contain extra noodles. And at night now, she and the girls huddled tightly together, uniting their body heat against the winter chill of the tenement. Sometimes, in the haziness of nearly falling asleep at night or nearly waking up in the morning, Bella could imagine that she was cuddled up again with her own siblings, children she loved. Coupled with Signor Carlotti's new, unexpected kindnesses at work, and the dancing every day at lunchtime, being friends with the Luciano children made Bella's life downright bearable. Maybe even happy.

Except for the wailing baby.

“You know how to make the baby better?” Serefina whispered back.

“It might work,” Bella said.

Serefina slid out from under the thin cotton blanket, being careful not to disturb her younger sister, who had somehow, miraculously, managed to fall asleep despite the baby's crying. She climbed over the top end of the bed, her nightshirt dragging pitifully on the floor. She pushed open the door to her parents' bedroom.

“Bella says you need flaxseed,” Serefina said. “For a poultice.”

Bella heard Signor Luciano swearing, cursing “useless peasant remedies.” She climbed over the top of the bed herself, suddenly full of righteous indignation on the baby's behalf.
You're going to let your own baby cough itself to death without trying to help at all?
she wanted to scream. But she stopped short when she reached the doorway. Signora Luciano wasn't lying in her bed, lounging around while her baby screamed. She had the baby in her arms and was pacing up and down the floor. She was pounding on the baby's back, bouncing it up and down, trying everything to soothe it.

And still the baby screamed.

Signora Luciano had her back turned to Bella; she couldn't have known Bella was standing right there.

“We have to go to a doctor,” Signora Luciano was pleading with her husband. “We can use Bella's money to pay for medicine.”

What? Surely Bella had misunderstood; surely Signora Luciano's voice was distorted by the strain of trying to make herself heard over the baby's wails. But Bella felt a chill go through her that had nothing to do with the cold wind rattling through the tenement or the iciness of the floor beneath her stockinged feet.

“What do you mean, use Bella's money'?” Bella demanded. “What money?”

Signora Luciano turned around, a motion that made the baby wail louder. It also made Signora Luciano's shadow loom larger in the dim light from the kerosene lamp.

“I mean, the money from you paying rent,” Signora
Luciano snarled. “Now, leave us alone. Go back to bed. This is family business that doesn't concern you.”

Bella hadn't paid any rent since the beginning of the month, almost three weeks ago. She was certain that the Lucianos had already spent that money long ago, on potatoes and flour and kerosene and the rent to their own landlord. All she could think about was the coins she'd placed in Signor Luciano's hand only the day before, Saturday afternoon. Coins he'd promised to wire to Bella's mama back in Calia, immediately.

“Why would you call the rent ‘Bella's money? Why not Nico's or Benito's or—” Bella couldn't even think of the names of all the male boarders. She was dizzy suddenly; she had to grip the door frame. “You sent my money to my family, didn't you? On Saturday, didn't you go right away to the Banco di Napoli and send the money for me? Didn't you?” She was screaming at Signor Luciano now, her voice mixing with the baby's wails.

She saw Signor Luciano exchange glances with his wife. She heard Nico's voice rumbling behind her. “You ought to tell her the truth, Luciano.” And then other people in other tenements were banging on the walls, calling out, “What happened to the girl's money, Luciano?”

Signor Luciano glanced around frantically, like a man suddenly finding himself on trial for a crime he thought was secret. Signora Luciano stepped between her husband and Bella. Her bloodshot eyes gleamed red in the lamplight; her mouth was an ugly gash in her cruel face.

“What does it matter what he did with your money?” she asked, her voice filled with venom, with contempt. “Your family is dead.”

•  •  •

“No!” Bella wailed, her voice as panicked and desperate and full of pain as the baby's cry. “My family—I've been sending them money since I got here. . . .” She was clutching at a twisted logic. Her thoughts flickered like the light from the kerosene lamp. Even if Signor Luciano weren't honest, even if he'd been stealing her money, even if he'd lied all along, her family had to be alive because she'd
wanted
to send them money, she'd tried, she'd hunched over the sewing machine for so many hours, so many days, so many weeks, always imagining her brothers eating grapes, her mama pouring out grains of wheat, her sister with a new ribbon in her hair . . .

“It's true,” Signora Luciano hissed. “They died right after you left home. Some fever, I guess. Or the malaria. Pietro had a letter about it. He knew, but even he didn't tell you. He was enjoying it too much, you batting your eyes at him and giving him all your money. ... He had a lot of money to go out drinking with, didn't he?”

“No!” Bella wailed again. “Pietro, he—”

But she was too choked up to say anything else. She couldn't stand another minute of being near this horrible woman, listening to these horrible words. She whirled around, grabbed the doorknob, stormed out of the apartment. The darkness of the landing enveloped her, but she could still hear the Luciano baby crying—louder now, as if he'd taken on her pain along with his own. She clutched the railing and raced down the stairs, out the front door. Out on the sidewalk she stepped in snow, the crystals of ice crunching beneath her stockings, sliding up against the bare skin of her
legs. For the first time, she stopped, seeing the danger in the icy glitter. She had no shoes on, no coat.

What does it matter ... ? Your family is dead.
Signora Luciano's cruel voice seemed to echo up and down the street, off the fire escapes, the pavement, the walls. Such a cold place, New York City, so cruel . . .

Bella didn't know that she'd pitched herself forward into the snow until she felt someone lifting her up. It was Serefina, placing Bella's boots on her feet, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders.

“Rocco sent me,” the little girl said. “He says to come back.”

“No,” Bella said, the word coming out like a sob. “It isn't true, don't you see? I can't stay in a room with a lie like that.”

Serefina stared up at her, old-lady wisdom in her little-girl eyes.

“Then keep moving,” she said. “Keep moving or you'll freeze.”

If I freeze to death and my family is dead, then we'll all be dead in heaven together,
Bella thought. But she couldn't let herself believe that her family was dead; they needed her to stay alive and make money so they would stay alive too. She stumbled to her feet, because doing otherwise would be like admitting that Signora Luciano was right, that her family was dead.

“Leave me alone,” she told Serefina, her words as slurred as a drunk's.

She lurched away down the street, frozen puddles cracking beneath her feet. She had no plans, no destination in mind. Nightmarish faces leered at her out of alleyways and she took off running, blindly, desperately, terrified. She
remembered the stories she'd heard on the boat about girls captured and sold into white slavery, girls used by horrible men for horrible deeds.

“Mama wouldn't want that to happen to me,” she sobbed, and she ran harder, faster. She'd stop and collapse against a building to catch her breath, and then something would frighten her again: a shadow on a wall, a cruel voice still echoing in her head. Your family is dead. . . .

That, she couldn't run away from. But she tried. All night long she tried, darting down alleys, stumbling over bricks, falling and struggling back up over and over and over again. She was surprised to see the first rays of daylight fall across the tall buildings, surprised that such a thing as daylight still existed.

“My job!” she gasped. She had to get to work, had to earn money for Mama and the little ones, because if Signor Luciano hadn't sent any of her money, surely they were terribly hungry now. She could picture them all huddling inside their one, bare room, the winter wind howling outside the door. They would be so hungry by now that maybe they were boiling plain water just to pretend to themselves that they had food, maybe they were even . . .

“No!” Bella screamed, and the people around her on the street stared at her as though she were a madwoman. She grabbed the coat of the person nearest her, a man with a long beard and long curls on either side of his face.

“I'm lost—how do I get to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory?” she demanded.

The man stared at her blankly, uncomprehending and maybe a little afraid. She tried out the language she'd heard
at work, words and rhythms she'd been absorbing for months but had never attempted herself.

“Triangle factory—where?” she asked.

“Ah,” the man said, nodding, looking a little less frightened. “Where the girls are striking. Turn right here, then left. Go straight for five blocks? Six? Until you see the pickets . . .” He pointed, gestured, held up fingers for the five blocks, the six. “Are you a striker?” He was looking at her sympathetically now, as if that would excuse her odd behavior. “Here. Take this.”

He pressed something into her hand, and then he slipped back into the crowd before Bella thought to look to see what it was: one thin, precious dime. She slid it into her pocket, thinking,
For Mama and the little ones. This could help until
payday. . . .

She struggled through the crowd toward the factory. It was hard walking alone in the clot of people, with no Pietro, no Nico, no Signor Luciano to lead the way. Bella pursed her lips and muttered to herself, “I don't need them. . . .”

The buildings around her began to look familiar. She'd reached the corner opposite the factory. But she still needed to fight her way through the strikers, fight her way all alone while they called out “Scab! Scab!” and pleaded “Don't go in there! Please don't!” She leaned against the wall, gasping for breath and gathering her strength and nerve.

“Bella,” someone said beside her.

It was Rocco Luciano.

Bella narrowed her eyes, glared.

“Get away from me,” she snarled, an entire night of anger and fear boiled down into four words.

Rocco grabbed her arm.

“I'm sorry about what my parents did,” he said. “I didn't know. You have to believe—they were good people, back in Italy. But here, it's always the money, the money, there's never enough money.”

Bella tore her arm away, out of his grasp.

“You think my family is rich?” she asked, her voice coming out in ragged gasps. “You don't think they needed the money more?”

Rocco looked down, as if ashamed to meet her eyes. Bella saw the cowlick at the back of his head, a little boy's cowlick.

“I have the letter,” he said. “It was in Pietro's things when he left.”

Bella grabbed at him, as desperate now to cling to him in the surging crowd as she'd been willing a moment before to shove him away forever.

“Where is it? What does it say?” she begged.

Rocco held out a thin, battered envelope. It looked as though it had traveled from far away, but Bella could make no sense of the scrawlings on the front, the arcs and loops of letters she'd never had a chance to learn.

“I can't really read Italian,” Rocco said. “But this word here is “Calia”—he pointed to lines of official-looking ink near the stamp— “and the letter inside is signed by a priest. Father Guidani, I think?”

“Our priest,” Bella breathed. “In my village.”

She tightened her grip on Rocco's sleeve. He unfolded the letter and they both stared at it.

“Maybe it doesn't say they're dead,” Bella said in a tight voice she barely recognized as her own. “Maybe it says they
were delighted to receive the money Pietro sent for me, they have enough food to last the winter, they'll have Father Guidani write again in the spring. . . .”

Rocco was silent for a moment, then he said, “Bella, I don't think so. I think that word right there—”

Bella snatched the letter from his hand.

“I'll have someone else read it to me,” she said. “Someone
educated.
Someone who wants my family to be alive, who doesn't want all my money for their own family. A priest . . .”

“The priests around here are Irish,” Rocco said. “They only know English. But at the bank—”

“I'm not going to the bank!” Bella snapped. The bank was part of Pietro's world, Signor Luciano's world—how could she trust the men there? She thought of Signor Carlotti, her boss. He probably knew how to read and write. But he'd known Pietro, he'd cheated her himself, he'd lied to her— how could she believe anything he said?