When We Were Strangers (15 page)

When Albert came that night, I sat in the dining room for hours while muffled, happy groans seeped through the door cracks. I copied lines from
Godey’s Lady’s Book
on scraps of paper until past midnight, when Lula shook my shoulder. “So now you’re writing like your fine ladies? Come to bed. Albert’s gone.”

“Can you write?” I asked as I undressed in the dark.

Lula snorted. “When I was young like you we had the War. And before that,” she added bitterly, “the plantation.”

“There wasn’t a priest to teach you?”

Lula’s rolling laughter filled the narrow room. “I got to tell Albert about you. A
priest
on the plantation for us? No, girl, just an overseer, and he didn’t keep no slave school. Go to sleep. Sun’s coming soon.”

Sleepless and stiff the next day, I worked poorly. “Is
this
how a ladies’ dressmaker sews?” the Missus demanded. “Aren’t you ashamed?”

I made only three dollars that week, and barely more the next week. Day and night, resentment smoldered. The Missus robbed me constantly, refusing good collars, stealing work hours or simply taking my collars, as brazen as if I were blind. Bèla, Marta and the other girls wove a net around themselves, offended that I once scorned a place that they endured and frightened that leaving had brought down such disaster. I was
sfortuna
, bad luck, and they kept their distance. I ate little and moved like a shadow. In Lula’s narrow bed, I squeezed against the damp, rough wall.

“Too bad you’re not Albert,” she muttered, and I wished I was anyone but myself. Chicago glimmered like the Promised Land, always further west. Weeks of misery passed.

One Tuesday the Missus left in haste before dawn, giving orders that I was to clean the gas lamps before breakfast, a dirty, tedious job. Lula hummed and sang in the kitchen, for Albert had come that night. In the hallway outside the apartment of the Missus, I brushed past her door and was astonished when it moved. Impossible—she was always so careful, even locking away our needles at night. I eased the door open, slipped into her parlor and closed the door behind me.

There were Persian carpets and silk lampshades, a fine desk with a dozen small drawers, four stuffed chairs and dark velvet curtains puddled at the floor, more wealth in this one room than in all of Opi. But it was the four boxes on the floor that drew me: collars packed for sale. I recognized my own embroidered work on top, dozens of collars, those few she paid me for, those she called faulty and those she had given away for “fixing.” Below was other girls’ work, but a buyer would see mine and think the rest were equal.

Rage ripped through me for my stolen collars and her mocking cruelty, pitting poor girls against each other, for our watered soup and icy rooms, for lodging me with Lula to punish us both, for the hours I worked without pay. Rage for girls cheated of their last week’s pay and buyers cheated with indifferent goods. Rage for the thieves, laughing and laying their hands on my body. Rage at Cleveland, where I was alone and miserable.

Lord forgive me, Father Anselmo and Zia forgive me, I began to rob the Missus. First I took only English needles from a sewing basket, for she had so many. Then a set of fine muslin handkerchiefs and hanks of silk embroidery thread, all shoved into my apron. Anger burned hotter, wanting more. Did Gabriele of Opi burn this way the first time he beat a dog? But I had been
wronged
, my feverish mind insisted. In the desk drawers I found paper, pens and stamps: useless. One drawer would not open until my questing fingers found a tiny knob behind the letter slats. Deep inside the desk a click sounded, sharp as a snapped twig. The locked drawer sprang open, revealing stacks of dollars tied with string and a bag heavy with coins, money squeezed from us. Or perhaps (how thievery makes us think like thieves) some darker business made wealth for the Missus and she masked it by selling collars. Never mind how she got this money; it would get me to Chicago.

I took the five dollars stolen from my pay in each of four weeks, then ten more for her cruelty. I took no coins, lest she note a change in the weight of the bag. From her sewing basket, I plucked a little pair of scissors and golden thimble light as air, working quickly to outrun my conscience. As wind spins dry leaves in running circles, a chant whipped through my head:
she robbed me
,
thieves robbed me
,
I was wronged.

Needles, thread, thimble, four handkerchiefs, little scissors and paper money weighed my apron pocket like bricks. Like a starving man who eats until he sickens, I circled the room for more, fingering porcelain teacups and heavy silver plates, china dogs as high as my knee, a porcelain shepherd boy playing a flute, velvet cushions and crystal vases. What would I do with such things? Even a pawnshop might question a poor girl with a china dog and smelling a trailing policeman. It was Chicago I wanted, not prison. Lula would wonder why I was so long at cleaning lamps and the Missus might return.

I examined the room for anything ruffled or out of place. No, she would suspect nothing until she counted her money. Take more, just one, two small things more, whispered a fevered voice. What would it matter since I was already a thief? From a bronze bowl in a corner hutch I plucked a dusty rosary of amber and coral. Since thieves had taken mine, surely I deserved this. Then for no reason but the fever of taking, I took a carved jade cat no bigger than my thumb. Opi faces gaped at me: Zia, Father Anselmo, even my father who for all his gruffness and easy anger had never robbed any man. “
Who are you?
” they demanded. “
Where is Irma?
”

“The Missus robbed me,” I reminded them and faltered. I’d do penance, I’d give to the poor in Chicago. When I had money, I’d return what I took. I crept to the door, listening like a practiced thief. From the kitchen came a steady rain of
thwack
s: Lula making beaten biscuits, her small celebration when the Missus was gone. She would hear nothing from this room. I patted my apron to flatten its bulge and crept toward the dormitory stairs for my coat and few clothes.

“Irma!” Lula called out. I jumped, sweating cold, and slipped into the kitchen, standing where a laundry basin could shield my apron. Huffing, Lula stirred the thick batter, counting strokes, “nineteen, twenty,” as her brown arm circled the wide wooden bowl. “Eighty more. You took your sweet time out there.”

“The lamps were dirty.”

“Well anyway, we need more ice. The Missus didn’t leave me no money so have old McGowen put it on credit. Tell him I want it this morning or I’ll lose my butter and milk.” Was the Lord blessing my sin? “Did you hear me, Irma? If you do it now you’ll be back for breakfast.”

I swallowed. “The Missus?”

“Gone for the day. Thank you Jesus.”

So it could be hours before she knew she’d been robbed. “I need my coat.”

“So go get it. What you waiting for?”

To thank her for sharing a bed, even unwillingly. To wish her well with Albert and to remember her wide, dark face. To say I was not evil and not a thief, only wanting what was mine. “I’ll get my coat.”

“You said that. A
big
block, hear? None of them little lumps.”

In the dormitory some girls were rousing, dressing, and splashing their faces with water. The Swedes stood in a tight circle, weaving intricate braids in each others’ hair. Bèla, Marta and Sara still slept. If I whispered my leaving they would ask how, with what money. In some way they might betray me to Lula, who, to keep her own job, might run after me. So I said nothing as I stuffed the charity clothes into a bag hidden under my coat and slipped out the front door, listening for Lula’s
thwack
s and huffing counts: “eighty-one, eighty-two, eighty-three.” I would write to her from Chicago. Don’t think of Chicago, I told myself. Just think of leaving without getting robbed.

No, no, not just yet. I would stop at McGowen’s, for the Missus or even Lula would surely check there and perhaps then conclude that some disaster had befallen me between the iceman and the workhouse. So I ordered ice, trying to show no hurry or impatience as Mr. McGowen carefully scratched a figure in his credit book, slowly wrote out a delivery order, considered my thoughts on the weather and finally let me go. By good fortune a swirl of foundry workers was passing the door. I slipped among them so Mr. McGowen wouldn’t notice that I was headed away from the workhouse.

This time I was careful and looked alive, hurrying past alleys and avoiding pairs of men. Because people sitting on a streetcar might have time to note my scar, I walked to the train station, staying in crowds. I bought food for the train from peddlers: a roll and sausage, two apples and a cone of salted peas, trying to seem easy, calm and relaxed.

At the desk for the Buffalo, Cleveland and Chicago Railway Company, I asked for a one-way third-class ticket to Chicago. “Hard money or paper?” the clerk asked. Was this a test?

“Paper,” I managed.

“Let’s see.” When I pushed my bills across the polished counter he examined them carefully, holding each to a candle and glancing from the bill to my face. Could he feel stolen money? Was he waiting for a blurted confession? Then he would call the police, perhaps the very two who would remember where I came from and drag me back to the Missus, not a victim this time, but a thief.

“Sorry, miss, there’s lots of counterfeit bills around. But these are fine. Don’t worry, nobody cheated you.” I forced a smile, tight as a gather in heavy cloth. “Here’s your ticket. The eight oh six for Chicago leaves from Platform Three, right over there.” He jabbed a stubby finger to the right. “Better hurry, you can just make it.”

I flew across the station, stunned by this good fortune. “Just running to get a train,” I could tell any officer. Not running away. If the porter thought it odd to go so far with only an old cloth bag, he said nothing. In the hot car, passengers beat the air with penny fans and sloughed off coats, but I kept mine on to hide my heaving chest, searching the platform for policemen in case the Missus had laid a trap for me.

The doors groaned shut. Then came a long hiss of steam and the train lurched forward. As ruffling winds stirred the air, passengers sighed and put down fans. I drew the stolen rosary from my apron pocket, my fingers so slick with sweat that I lost count of the prayers, stopped and started again. “
Thief
,” said the clattering wheels as we left the city, “
thief
,
thief
,
thief
.” Fog lay over broad plowed fields and my reflection in the window gave back not Irma but the pale face of a stranger.

“Lady,” said a young boy tugging on my skirt, “you dropped your pretty beads.”

Chapter Seven
Madame Hélène

I stuffed the rosary beads in my bag
while the boy regarded me, green eyes blazing under straw-stiff hair. Did he think I was soft-handed, like drunken men in taverns, reeling and spilling their beer? Would he believe it wasn’t truly me who was the thief? That was Irma the collar girl.
I
was Irma Vitale who made an altar cloth and rubbed Zia’s feet in the morning, the Irma that people called plain, but a good girl, always a good girl.

“Those were Catholic beads,” he announced. The woman beside him pressed a clean gloved hand against his shoulder. “My mother doesn’t talk much, even in Swedish. She thinks I’m bothering you. We’re Lutheran.” I nodded. The woman pulled a leather-bound book from her bag and set it on his lap. “I’m supposed to read this,” he explained, holding out the book like a thick slice of cake. “But it’s good. You know
Gulliver’s Travels
?”

I shook my head. The boy’s thin lips opened in a perfect pink
O
, then rippled on. “It’s about a man named Gulliver who visits four lands. In the first one, everyone’s tiny, like this.” When he stretched apart his thumb and forefinger, the gloved hand opened his book. “Anyway,” he whispered, “it’s an almighty—” The mother gave a warning glance. “I mean a bully good story.” I nodded. The woman carefully opened her own volume to a place marked with a single strand of thread and both began reading. The boy’s eyes skimmed the close-set lines but he never touched the page. Father Anselmo used his finger to turn newspapers or proclamations from Rome. For the Bible he had a wooden pointer whose tip was a tiny ivory hand. But this American child read with eyes alone. Once I found work in Chicago, I vowed, I would learn to read like this. Then I remembered that I was a thief.

The mother’s book rested on a starched white apron that skimmed the crisp pleats of a traveling dress. Her conscience must be smooth as well. I twisted thieving fingers in the coarse folds of my charity skirt. When the porter passed, I cringed. At any station where the train took on mail bags he might receive a telegram: “Young Italian female. Brown dress. Face scar. Arrest for theft.” The passengers, Americans and greenhorns, all seemed light and easy as they played cards, slept, read or talked together quietly. Three men studied a map, making lists in leather notebooks. Honest men, surely.

“Are you sick, miss?” asked the soft, rolling voice of the porter.

“I’m fine, thank you.” One of my first English phrases tripped off the tongue so easily.

“Look,” he said, pointing out the window. “Indiana already, God’s good black earth.”

We were crossing farmland, flat as pressed linen, with neat white houses scattered like toys among the fields. “How was it to live on a mountain?” Attilio once asked me on the long road into Naples. It was good to be lifted up from troubles that brewed in the valleys. With the earth so flat, how easy for the swooping hand of God to destroy the evil-doer. Where could he hide? Don’t think of this. Better to sew, to practice folds and tucks, smocking and hidden hem stitches. I pulled scraps from my bag and tried to work them with my stolen needle but nothing came right. Scissors from the Missus made false turns and blunt corners. Like this starched land, the muslin would not tuck. Smocking samples bunched and puckered. Cross-stitching lost its easy rhythm.

The porter’s shadow crossed my work. “Learning to sew, miss?”

“Yes,” I said faintly.

He smiled as I had smiled at Rosanna’s first wild stitching. When he moved on, I fingered the rosary beads inside my bag but only one chant came smoothly: cut, sew, work. I lay two raw edges of cotton scrap together and whipped them closed with blanket stitching, breathing with my needle’s pricks. Then I moved to chains. When they came out even, I made them smaller.

“Hey, you could sew for Lilliputians,” said a happy voice. I looked up at the boy. “Those little people Gulliver met.” His mother frowned and handed him a neatly packaged lunch. I took out my own food so she would not feed me out of pity. The boy peered at a tiny watch hanging from his mother’s waist. “An hour more for us,” he announced. I nodded, brushed crumbs from my skirt and leaned against the window, slipping into a well of sleep. When I woke, the mother and boy were gone. Afternoon sun coated their empty seats, but a tiny slip of paper hid in the folds of my skirt. “Gulliver’s Travels,” it said. The boy was real, then, not conjured by the strangeness of the day.

“Chicago, Chicago,” the wheels rattled on. Solitary trees in the far fields cut rounded
C
’s against a pale blue sky. Lula had given me the address of a boarding house where her cousin once worked. Mrs. Gaveston’s was nothing elegant, she said, but decent and safe for single women. I could pay for a week’s room and board, but then must find a job without any letter of recommendation and without selling myself to a workhouse.

“Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Central Depot,” the conductor chanted. Far ahead, dark teeth of the city nipped at a hazy sky. Soon Chicago spread like a giant stain across the land. Could I find my place there? In my last Opi winter, high winds ripped a pine tree from the ground and sent it tumbling down our mountain, where it wedged against rocks and withered to sticks. Don’t think of this. Think—what? That even an uprooted tree could find a scoop of welcoming earth. I clutched my bag and waited.

We reached the station at four in the afternoon. When I showed a station officer the boardinghouse address, he sketched a map on a scrap of paper, muttering as he worked, waxed mustache jumping. “It’s pretty far, miss. Be careful.” A thick forefinger tugging down loose skin below his eye made the gesture: watch for thieves.

I joined a stream of passengers flowing through the station. Sunlight pouring through high windows burnished lacy wrought-iron gates and spilled down the street, so rich and buoyant that the people hurrying past seemed to walk on golden air. A whoosh of wind ruffled my skirt, tugging me along. I can do this, I thought. I can find honest work.
Look alive
, another voice hissed in my mind.
Remember the first time you left the Missus, so happy and full of dreams.

Still, the bustle and swell were thrilling. I followed wide avenues dividing palaces of brick and stone leading to blocks of wooden houses, new ones and others still gutted by a great fire ten years ago that our English teacher once described. Following my map, I turned onto a long brick street that should take me to the boardinghouse. On a quiet block a stock wagon lurched at a pothole. Its back gate flew open and a dozen spotted pigs tumbled out, shook themselves and scattered, squealing through the street.

“Forty cents each if you catch them,” bawled the driver. Soon boys, men, even old women and young girls burst from doorways. Stumbling men poured through a tavern door, waving beer mugs, whooping and chasing frenzied pigs, crashing into each other, cursing and laughing. Drivers reined their horses as pigs, their hopeful captors and wildly barking dogs swept by. Two well-dressed gentlemen helped street boys flush a screeching pig from a clump of ash cans.

A little girl with long black braids and two pigs trotting docilely beside her shouted at the driver. “Give me a dollar, mister, or I make them run away. I’m very good with pigs.” The driver paid and at a word from her, the pigs scampered up a ramp into the cart. “Bye pigs,” she called cheerfully. “You’ll be pork pie soon.” I squeezed past the roiling crowd and eight blocks later found Mrs. Gaveston’s boardinghouse.
ROOM TO LET
, said a neat sign in the window.

Mrs. Gaveston opened the door. She was a tall woman with lustrous gray hair who listened with hands on hips as I introduced myself. “Harriet was a good worker,” she conceded when I spoke of Lula’s cousin. “But she found a sweetheart and moved to Wyoming. Are you Polish?”

“Italian,” I said.

“Good. The city’s filling up with Poles. What’s going on in their country?” She seemed to need no answer and bustled me through a sitting room with a piano. “Strings broke,” she said shortly, taking us up two steep flights to a door marked
NINE
and handing me a key. I fingered the smooth steel shaft. “Never had your own before?” I shook my head. “Well, no time like the present.” I unlocked the door and slowly pushed it open. The room was so narrow that a man with outstretched arms could nearly touch both walls, but it had a metal bed with a flat pillow, green cloth spread and neat stack of sheets and blankets, a tiny table with wash bowl and pitcher, a rush-bottom chair, clothes pegs, gas lamp on the wall and one small window with faded gingham curtains.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Don’t know about beautiful, but decent for a working girl. You
do
have work?” When I explained that I would find a job with a dressmaker, Mrs. Gaveston folded her arms as I showed samples I made on the train. She barely glanced at them. “I never sew,” she said briskly. “No patience for it. If you don’t have a job, I need two weeks’ room and board.” That would take nearly all I had. She studied my face. “You seem like a decent sort. Not too pretty at least. My damn fool maid left this morning. She found a sweetheart too. Listen, if you clean for me an hour each morning, two more in the evening and all day Saturday, I’ll charge you half rate until I find a proper maid. That’s more than fair, right? You can look for work in the daytime.”

So I’d be a servant, but at least not a slave as I was for the Missus. Surely I’d find a job within the week. I thanked Mrs. Gaveston, stumbling over my words. “Never mind, Irma,” she said. “Come on, you can start now.” I dusted the downstairs rooms, swept the floor with her new Bissell carpet sweeper and rubbed lemon oil into the woodwork.

I found no job by Saturday, but Mrs. Gaveston found Molly, a big-boned Irish maid with references who cleaned with both hands, moving so quickly that rooms seemed to shine themselves as she whirled through. With her extra time, Molly shopped, helped cook, and spaded over a patch of earth behind the boardinghouse for a kitchen garden. Mrs. Gaveston said nothing on Monday when I paid my full room and board. After buying a decent dress to look for work and streetcar fares to search more quickly, I had five dollars left. I fell asleep over my rosary, imploring the Virgin for mercy.

Signs on dressmakers’ windows said,
NOT HIRING
.
Once I saw no sign, but the owner, her mouth full of pins, pointed to a discrete
NO
in tailor’s chalk on the doorpost.
NO
read other doorposts. Some dressmakers stopped me at my first words. “No foreigners,” they said. One pointed to my scar. “No trouble.” Yet everywhere there were women in fine dresses that no factory could have fashioned. Someone had fitted these bustles, folded narrow pleats and matched plaids. Someone had set sleeves that bloomed like clouds from tight bodices. Once I stopped a kind-faced gentlewoman stepping out of an apothecary, thinking she could tell me who made her dress, perhaps a shop I hadn’t tried. But she backed away, grasping a jeweled purse to her chest. Mortified, I hurried across the street, so close to a coal wagon’s horse that his sweat-slick flanks brushed me.

“Hey girl,” the coal man shouted. “Look alive!”

At least in the workhouse a handful of people knew me. Here I walked for hours in crowds, invisible. A dry-goods man smoking a pipe in his doorway stared through me. “I’m
Irma
,” I wanted to cry out. “Irma Vitale of Opi.” The man ducked back in his shop.

There were dress shops near the train depot, Mrs. Gaveston suggested, but none were hiring. Walking in widening circles through the city I ate day-old buns and wore holes in my shoes, which I stuffed with felt that Molly gave me. I pawned the little jade cat I had stolen from the Missus for streetcar fare. When it rained, I bought an umbrella from a peddler, since no respectable dressmaker would let me come dripping into her shop. “Thirty cents? He cheated you,” scoffed Molly. “But come in the kitchen and have some tea.” I sank in a chair as muddy water dripped from my skirt. It was my fourteenth day in Chicago.

As Molly chopped cabbage for soup, I spoke of the Missus, the workhouse and Lula, but not how I robbed the Missus. “Funny you didn’t save more, coming alone to a new city and all,” said Molly briskly, her back turned from me. “Left quick or something?”

I clenched my chair. “I was tired of Cleveland.”

“I see.” What did she see? I helped chop to keep my hands from shaking. “Listen, Irma, what about your own kind, all those Italians around Polk Street? Don’t they have ideas?”

I had asked on Polk Street. “Some Russian’s hiring girls to make collars and cuffs,” said an olive vendor. “Try the factories,” his wife added. “There’s always meat packing. And sausages.”

“No,” I said, “no, thank you.”

“What, you’re too fine?” she muttered. “Or just not hungry enough?”

It’s true that factories and meat packers sprouted thick as weeds. Streams of workers crossed the city each morning. I watched women through greasy windows as they canned, sorted, stamped, stuffed and packed. In low brick buildings near the slaughterhouses they stood on slatted frames over pools of blood, stuffing sausages all day. Who was I to want better work? My feet ached from walking. Once I nearly fainted on the stairs to my room. Perhaps it was folly to come here, but where could I go now, even with train fare to leave? In New York’s Lower East Side, said Molly, police pulled bodies from gutters each morning, frozen in winter, rat-bitten and robbed of their clothes. “Don’t ever go east,” she warned. “It only gets worse for the poor.”