The Shoemaker's Wife (35 page)

As Eileen finished her exercises, Enza went to the secretary. She placed paper and envelopes on the desk; then she pulled two square swatches out of a muslin pouch, one of black velvet embroidered in gold, the other, double-backed pink silk in a fleur-de-lis design of seed pearls and small crystals. Enza checked out the spelling in the library dictionary as she went.

To Whom It May Concern:

Enclosed please find two sewing samples for your perusal. Enza Ravanelli and Laura Heery are experienced machine operators, but also pattern makers, seamstresses, and most excellent trim and beading specialists.

We have extensive knowledge of the stories of the opera, plots, and characters, due to repeated exposure to the phonograph records of Signor Enrico Caruso.

If you would like to meet with us regarding potential positions with your organization, please write to us at the Milbank House, 11 West Tenth Street, New York City.

Thank you.

Very sincerely yours,

Enza Ravanelli and Laura Heery

Ciro made a decision in the spring of 1917, no different from other Italians on long-term work visas. He decided to go to war. Without a sweetheart to keep him stateside, he decided to see the world and do his bit.

The U.S. Army recruitment office on West Twentieth Street was a temporary storefront with an American flag in the dusty window. Inside, a makeshift office operation with temporary desks and rolling stools made up one of the hundreds of official recruitment offices, compliments of the passage of the Selective Service Act.

Ciro met Luigi outside before they entered. A long line of young men snaked around the block, most of them dark-haired like Luigi.

“I didn’t tell Pappina,” Luigi said.

“Why not?”

“She doesn’t want me to go. She thinks I’m slow on my feet and will get my head blown off.”

“She’s probably right.”

“But I want to fight for this country. I want to get my citizenship, and then Pappina will have hers.”

“Are you going to marry before we go?”

“Yeah. Will you be my best man?”

“I’ve never been asked a question with more enthusiasm.”

“Sorry. I have a lot on my mind. I don’t like doctors.” He whispered, “They squeeze the
noci
.”

“I know all about it.”

“It’s barbaric, that’s what it is.”

Ciro chuckled. If Luigi thought the physical was barbaric, what would he think of war itself? Once inside, the men’s applications were taken, and they lined up to go inside to see the doctor. Luigi and Ciro undressed down to their undershorts and waited in line. More than a few young men were asked to leave, when an infirmity was diagnosed that prevented them from serving. Some of the boys were belligerent when asked to leave, while others were clearly relieved.

“You ever held a gun?” Luigi asked.

“No. How about you?”

“I used to shoot birds in Foggia,” Luigi admitted.

Luigi went behind a screen with the doctor. Ciro stood and waited his turn for what seemed like a long time.

Luigi pushed the curtain aside and shook his head. “I have a bad ear. They won’t take me.”

“Oh, pal, I’m sorry.”

Fifteen minutes later, Ciro joined Luigi on the sidewalk outside. Ciro carried the paperwork to report to New Haven, Connecticut, on July 1. He folded the paper and stuffed it in his pocket.

“You got in?” Luigi asked.

“Yeah.”

Ciro was gratified that the army had accepted him, knowing that it was the fastest route to earning his citizenship. But there was also a sadness, a gnawing anxiety that he was running from something he couldn’t name. It was in moments like this that he thought of Enza and wondered about the different path his life might have taken had she been waiting for him on Adams Street.

“I wanted to go fight.” Luigi kicked a pebble off the sidewalk into the gutter. “Maybe I ought to take Pappina and go home to Italy.”

“And what will you do there?” Ciro asked.

“I don’t know. I got no place to go. When the U.S. Army doesn’t want you, you don’t have a lot of choices.”

“You keep working on Mulberry Street. By the time I get back, you’ll be a master.”

“Signora takes all our profits. You’d think she’d cut us in. You invented the cart, after all.”

“Remo taught me a trade. I owe him,” Ciro said firmly. “But I think we have generously paid off the marker. We need our own company, Luigi. And I’m going to count on you to pull all the pieces together while I’m overseas.”

Ciro’s wise offer seemed to assuage Luigi’s feelings of failure at the recruitment office. For young fellows like them, the war was a chance to become men, to see the world and save it and return home as American citizens. It didn’t occur to either of them that lives would be lost, that the world they were to defend would shift under their feet and never be the same again. They only dreamed of the adventure.

A flower cart parked on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street overflowed with bouquets of white lilies and pots of pink hyacinths tied with gold bows. Glassy, bright green boxwood hemmed in the front gardens of brownstones. Windowboxes sprouted with purple and pink bachelor buttons, red impatiens, and bright yellow marigolds. Enza breathed deeply as she walked to Tenth Street. As she climbed the steps to the entrance of the Milbank House, Miss DeCoursey was sorting the mail in the vestibule. She handed Enza an envelope. The return address read: The Metropolitan Opera House. Enza sprinted up four flights of stairs to open it with Laura.

“It came,” Enza said. Laura pulled a hairpin from her chignon and handed it to Enza, who carefully opened the envelope.

Dear Miss Ravanelli,

Miss Serafina Ramunni would like to meet with you and Miss Laura Heery on April 29, 1917, at ten o’clock in the morning. Please bring your sewing kits and further samples of your workmanship, in particular with foil paillettes, silk trims, and crystal beading.

Very truly yours,

Miss Kimberly Meier

Company Manager

The girls immediately ran to the church of Saint Francis Xavier and lit every candle at the foot of Saint Lucy, the patron saint of seamstresses. The girls needed this job. The temporary kitchen work was not enough, and they were one week away from losing their room at the Milbank.

The morning of their interview, they ate a hearty Milbank breakfast of scrambled eggs, coffee, and toast before loading their sewing kits and samples into their purses for the walk from Tenth Street, thirty blocks uptown, to meet Serafina Ramunni, the head seamstress of the costume shop. Enza and Laura wore their best skirts and blouses. Enza wore a Venetian gondolier’s straw hat with a bright red band, while Laura wore a straw picture hat with a cluster of silk cherries for adornment.

The girls spent the night developing a strategy for the interview. If Miss Ramunni liked one of them and not the other, the one offered the job should take it. If there were no immediate openings for seamstresses, they agreed to take whatever starting positions were available. They both dreamed of working in the costume shop eventually, but they knew it could take years to earn a spot there,
if
they were lucky enough to be hired in the first place.

The Metropolitan Opera House, built of native yellow stone hauled from the valleys of upstate New York, took up a full city block on West Thirty-ninth Street. Its architectural grandeur was evident in its details—ornate doors, embellished cornices, and Palladian arches. The opera house had the massive dimensions of a train station.

On the ground level, a series of doors capped by brass scrollwork emptied the theater in minutes. The wide carriage circle accommodated every mode of transportation on wheels: motorcars, cabs, and horse carriages had plenty of space for dropoffs before curtain and pickups after the final ovation.

The main entrance doors, attended by footmen, were hemmed by velvet ropes. Enza and Laura entered through the lobby, where a handyman buffed the white marble floor with a motorized brush machine.

A swirling staircase rose before them, carpeted in ruby red, with a high polished brass railing. A crystal chandelier, dripping in shimmering glass daggers in the shape of a wedding cake, had been lowered on delicate wires to eye level for cleaning, and a maid dusted the crystal drops gently with flannel mitts.

The box office door was propped open. Inside, the ticket sellers were smoking and taking a coffee break. Laura walked up to the window. “We’re looking for Serafina Ramunni. We have an appointment.”

A young man in shirtsleeves and brown tie ashed his cigarette and nodded. “She’s onstage.”

Laura and Enza passed a series of Renaissance paintings framed in gold leaf in the inner lobby. They pushed the doors open, entering the dark theater, an enormous jewelry box trimmed in gold. The scents of fresh paint, linseed oil, and the lingering gardenia of expensive perfumes created a heady mix. Rows of seats swathed in red velvet tilted toward the downstage lip of the cavernous stage like rose blooms. Enza thought that church was the only other place where such hushed reverence was required.

The stage floor was lacquered black, with white lines indicating where scenery should be placed. A series of small X’s were painted strategically across the downstage lip, where solos were performed. From the highest tier of the theater, the follow spotlights were angled at these marks like cannons.

The ring of private viewing boxes, dubbed the “diamond horseshoe” by Cholly Knickerbocker and other society writers, was reserved for the wealthiest subscribers. These theatrical boxes were suspended over the orchestra seats, like delicate gold carriages, decorated with ornate medallions. Red damask draperies hung behind the seats, softening any sound from the stairways and grand aisles. Faceted glass sconces shaped like tiaras softly illuminated each level.

The girls walked down the vom and turned to look up into the upper mezzanine, empty seats that extended as high and far as the eye could see. The theater could hold 4,000 people, with 224 standing-room tickets sold for a lesser price, but never a lesser performance.

The grandeur of the opera house thrilled Laura too. It took thousands of employees to keep such a vast place running. There were hundreds of artists involved behind the scenes—stagehands, electricians, set builders, property masters, costumers, dressers, wigmakers, and milliners.

There is a beehive under every pot of honey on the island of Manhattan
, thought Enza.

Where Laura was galvanized by the possibilities of working at the Met, Enza was nervous. Enza worried about her English, fretted about the skirt and blouse she’d chosen to wear. The Met was a long way from the traveling troupes that pitched tents in the fields of Schilpario or the vaudeville theaters that Laura remembered from her own childhood on the Jersey shore.

Serafina Ramunni stood with a fabric peddler on the bare stage. The head of the costume department was in her thirties, a handsome woman with strong features and a slim shape, accentuated by a belted-waist suit jacket and a long skirt with a kick pleat. She wore brown calfskin boots, and a black velvet hairband in her shiny brown hair. She chose fabrics from the bolts on display, marking the ones she would purchase with a stickpin. Angelic chiffons, sturdy velvets, and liquid satins were unfurled like flags for her perusal. She looked over at the girls, feeling their stares. “You are?”

“Laura Heery, and this is Enza Ravanelli.”

“You’re here for the seamstress jobs?”

They nodded in unison.

“I’m Miss Ramunni. Follow me to the workroom,” she said, walking upstage.

The girls looked up at her, unsure where to go.

“You can come onstage. The steps are over there.”

Enza followed Laura up the steps to the stage, feeling unworthy to step out onto it. It was like approaching a tabernacle in a cathedral. She peered down into the orchestra pit, lit by dim worklights. Black lacquer music stands were cluttered with white sheet music, like the open pages of a book.

Laura followed Miss Ramunni backstage and down the stairs to the basement, but Enza took a moment to turn centerstage and look out into the opera house before following. The upper levels of the theater looked like a massive field of poppies.

“Who wrote the letter?” Serafina asked.

“I did,” Enza said shyly.

“I passed it around the office.”

Laura looked at Enza and smiled. Good sign.

“We got a kick out of it. No one ever applied for a job here using listening to Caruso records as a skill.”

“I hope I didn’t do anything wrong,” Enza said.

“Your sewing samples saved you.” Serafina smiled, ushering the girls into a lift to the basement. “I don’t usually appreciate humor, intended or not, in query letters.”

The costume shop in the basement of the Met was a cavernous space that extended the full length of the building. From cutting tables, to a series of fitting rooms, through a hall of mirrors where the actor could see himself from every angle, past the machines, and through to finishing, where the costumes were steamed, pressed, and hung, it was a wonderland unlike anything either of the girls had ever seen. All weaves and textures of fabric—bolts of cream-colored duchesse satin, wheels of jewel-toned cotton, soft sheets of silver faille and shards of powder blue organza—lay neatly on worktables, stood upright in bolts, or were bundled in bins or jigsawed on the pattern table, waiting to be sewn.

Dress mannequins were staggered around the room, bearing garments in various states of construction. On the walls, a peek into the gallant characters of pending productions—watercolor sketches of Tristan, Leonora, Mandrake, and Romeo—hung like saints in the portrait gallery of the Vatican.

Twenty sleek, top-of-the-line black-lacquered Singer sewing machines outfitted with bright work lamps and attended by short-backed padded stools were lined up like tanks on the cusp of battle on the far side of the room. A three-way mirror and a circular platform for fittings were set off to the side with a rod and privacy curtain. Three long worktables, enough to accommodate fifty seamstresses, split the center of the room, with walking aisles in between.