When We Were Strangers (11 page)

“Irma Vitale of—”

“Never mind, Irma is enough. Is a long walk, let’s go.” She marched a pace ahead, drawing me briskly through the waking streets, shooing rangy cats aside. Women balancing clothes bundles on their heads dogged the hurrying crowds. Barefoot, ragged children settled on steps as if they would spend the day there. Was there nobody old in this city?

“What is your name?” I asked as we stopped for a wagon loaded with coal.

“Maria,” she said shortly.

“From?”

“Greece. Hurry up.” If this woman had wanted to rob me, she would have done it at the lake. But if not charity, what was her interest in me? When I stumbled at a curb Maria slowed her pace a little and noted, “You eat soon if she takes you.” I walked faster despite my burning feet.

“What is the work, Signora Maria?”

“Collars. We’re here,” she said suddenly, pulling me into the tiny entryway of a dark brick building. I leaned against a wall as the door opened slightly, some words were exchanged, the door closed again and we waited until a steel-haired woman jerked it open and peered at me through baggy pleats around her coal black eyes. “Missus Ballios,” announced Maria shortly. “You call her Missus. Show your work.”

The Missus examined my scripts and flowers, her lips pursed, and then turned to Maria. Words flew between them. The Missus nodded, jerked her thumb at me and snapped out clacking sounds that seemed like “Teh er dat.”

Maria cleared her throat. “You eat here and sleep with the other girls. You make linen collars from six in the morning until six at night. Piecework. She pays for what you make. If you’re quick and clever, you make three, maybe four dollars a week after room and board. Half day off on Sunday the first six weeks, then all day Sunday. That is generous, you understand? You don’t speak English, remember. You know nobody and can’t get other work.”

“I can learn English.”

Maria looked at me sharply. “You want sleep at the lake again and bad men find you?”

I shook my head. “No, but I thought—”

“You think about
work
, girl. No work, no food. Understand?”

“Yes.”
Oh Zia, to have come so far for this.

Maria nodded at the Missus, who pulled a cloth purse from inside her skirt and plucked out coins for Maria. “Why are you staring?” she snapped. “I get your first week’s wages. Finder’s fee.” When the Missus spoke and jerked her thumb at me, she added, “The Missus say she runs a decent shop. Unmarried girls, good girls. If you get in the baby way, you leave. I say no problem, you’re not pretty and you have that.” She pointed to my scar. “But no more fights, understand?”

“I’ll do good work for her.”

“You must,” Maria snapped, dropping the coins in a bag. After some words to the Missus she was gone.

A sturdy black woman appeared and motioned me to a long, narrow dining room. She said “sit” and pushed me firmly in a chair. Then she held up a hand, said, “wait,” left and returned with bread, a mug of water, wedge of orange cheese and a bowl of green mash. Pointing, she said, “
Pea soup
,
bread
,
cheese
,
water
,” and then had me repeat these sounds. Then she put her hand to her mouth and said, “Eat.” While I ate the warm mash, she pointed to herself and announced, “Lula.”

“Irma,” I said. She patted my shoulder. I ate until my stomach eased. From the other room, a shrill voice repeated words I would soon understand: “Cut, sew, work.”

“Eat, Irma,” Lula urged. Sun poured through the tall, dusty windows, brushing a photogravure hung on the wall. A sad, ugly bearded man gazed kindly down on us, perhaps an American saint. I pointed and Lula tapped her heart. “Abraham Lincoln,” she said reverently.

I whispered to my soup: “Saint Abraham, keep me safe in America and help me find Carlo.”

Lula touched my shoulder. I finished my bread and she hurried me to a second narrow room, where rows of women bent over long tables, fingers flying like birds. Thread bits and cotton fluff drifted through the warm air. The Missus snapped her fingers and a cross-eyed Albanian girl who spoke Italian came to explain the work.

“These are collars for gentlemen,” Bèla said, holding up linen strips. “And these for the ladies.” A creamy embroidered tendril curled around the collar edge. The Missus spoke rapidly and Bèla continued: “She said they’re for
fine
gentlemen and ladies. The work must be perfect.” Bèla showed how to measure and cut for the two Hungarian girls who would sew the pieces on machines in another room and bring them back for finishing.

“Machines that sew?” I asked. “What do they look like?”

The Missus snapped at Bèla, who barreled on. “Black machines,” she said. “Then we trim and turn, add buttons and loops, starch and iron them. If she lets you embroider, you make a little more money.” The Missus touched a long, curved finger to her eye and Bèla added, “She inspects each one. If she can’t sell them,” Bèla lowered her voice, “if
she says
she can’t sell them, you don’t get paid. And don’t bloody the linen.”

I understood that I must work harder than I ever worked in Opi, even in shearing season. And this was America that so many longed to reach. Should I have stayed in New York with Teresa or searched longer for Carlo last night? But where? And I could not risk the lake again.

The Missus gave me a place on a bench, patterns, thread, needles, cording and tiny shell buttons. I would soon learn that workplaces were carefully set to separate our languages. I was wedged between a Swede and a Hungarian, then came an Irish girl and next a Pole. “Cut, sew, work,” the Missus snapped if girls whispered across the table. She threw away my first six collars. The next seemed perfect to me, but her fingers jabbed a curve. My next was bloodied. When the Swede nodded at my ninth, I raised a hand for the Missus. She inspected it minutely and grudgingly dropped it in my “finished” box. Tomorrow, I vowed, every one would reach the box. And I would work as fast as the Swede.

With Lula’s bell, the workroom exploded in sound: a rasp of benches pulled back, one knocked over, women stretching, sighing and calling to friends. I staggered as I stood, my back, legs, neck and shoulders all knotted in pain. I had never worked so steadily, so hunched tight and pressed on both sides. Even making the altar cloth, there was always our fire to feed, water to draw, and constant small services for Zia. Simply moving my chair to catch the shifting sun gave a little rest. Now my body screamed, “Not a collar more.” And the day was only half over. Bèla seized my hand and rubbed it while the Swede worked my shoulders like Assunta’s dough.

“At least you finished the morning,” said an Italian girl from Puglia called Elena. “Some don’t. The afternoon goes faster,” she assured me but I wondered how one eternity could outlast another. Lula dished out a thin stew, watered beer and yellow squares she called corn bread, rough-grained but warm and slightly sweet. I ate slowly, flexing stiff fingers. Talk filled the room in layers of languages like on the
Servia
.

Corn bead
,
eat
,
sit
,
collar
,
stew
,
pea soup
,
greenhorn
,
banana.
My few English words were blades of grass plucked from a meadow. To learn a new language would be like mowing that meadow blade by blade. Yet sitting silently making collars, how could I learn enough to find a better job, send money to Zia, bring her here or go home myself?

“Tell us news,” clamored the Italians. But I knew nothing of their cities and none of them knew Opi or had seen a man like Carlo. There was a Lucinda from Abruzzo once, but she met a button peddler. Elena made signs for a rounded belly. “He unbuttoned her and disappeared,” she said. The others howled with laughter.

“What happened to Lucinda?” I asked.

Elena waved to the dusty window and the streets beyond. Saint Abraham’s great sad eyes said,
“Irma, be careful.”

The afternoon crawled by, but at least more of my collars reached the box. Elena raised a finger: one more hour. At the closing bell, I staggered from the workroom, aching to my fingertips. Dinner was sparse. “
She
got her work from us today,” Elena muttered.

In the evening the girls stayed at the tables in their language knots, clustered around lamps doled out by the Missus, but I had Lula take me up a dark stairway to a dormitory under the roof. I shook a snow of thread snips from my dress, found my rosary and crawled into bed, my first in two days. I prayed for Lucinda, alone with child. English voices passed in the street below, trailing streams of laughter. I pulled the blanket tight around me and vowed not to go walking with men. Terrible as this work was, I would be safe here, watched by Saint Abraham. Twisting gingerly in bed to stretch my aching muscles, I drifted into a dream of Opi, standing with Zia in our piazza, watching white-collared birds skim the valley below us.

In my third afternoon, Elena was called from her bench. She did not return to work and her cot sat empty that night. I was the fifth Italian, I discovered. The Missus disliked having too many girls who spoke the same language and I was already faster than Elena. So she was sent away and replaced by a gaunt Norwegian. For days the Italians looked at me slant-eyed. “Listen, girls, it’s not Irma’s fault,” Bèla insisted. “Elena
was
slow and the Missus always lets the slow ones go.” Gradually the others started speaking to me again or perhaps they had simply forgotten Elena.

On Sunday afternoon, my half day off, I bound my blisters with linen scraps and put on my good shoes to go walking in Cleveland. Across the street, a mother with a tiny baby came carefully down the stairs, her husband guiding her. A red-haired girl clung to his free hand, chattering brightly. When they reached the sunny street, her hair blazed like Attilio’s new pots. She waved and smiled at me, calling out, “Hello, Collar Girl.” How quickly names fell away in this country.

Walking in widening circles to keep from getting lost, I joined swirls of families, couples and men in bright caps. I did not see Elena or Carlo, but the city seemed endless and I walked further. Everywhere raw brick glowed and the air rattled with hammers. Ragged children tumbled from doorways. I watched women’s dresses, jackets and hats, the loops of their hair, their shoes and cloth purses, the lift of their shoulders and roll of their hips in walking. The few visitors to Opi always said we might all be cousins, we looked so much alike. Not so in Cleveland. These people varied as wildly in height and hair, color and the shape of their bodies as swallows differ from herons or hawks. Surely these people could not guess a neighbor’s step behind them and friends they walked with might not know their families. Yet they seemed at ease.

Two Italians sent me to what they called “Little Italy,” a tight knot of streets around Woodland Avenue. There I found shops and cafés sending out sweet, familiar smells, children playing games I knew, bags of pasta and dried beans, barrels of olives and a church with an Italian priest. But no one had seen Carlo. “Working in Tripoli?” a man from Naples repeated, glancing at his friend. “And the ship owner will buy his passage to America? It might be a while before he gets here.” They backed away from me, melting into a knot of card players.

I found no better jobs. Some girls did piecework from their homes, but I had no home. Shop girls must be pretty, shop owners had me understand, and not have scars. “Don’t work in rich people’s houses,” warned a woman selling dry beans. “Servant girls get seduced by the master and then fired by the mistress. Leave that for the Irish.” For a single woman speaking no English, I heard over and over, I couldn’t do better in Cleveland than making collars.

A
scribe from Sicily had set his table just outside a grocer’s shop with paper, pens, and three ink pots neatly laid out. A short letter cost ten cents with paper and postage to Italy. My last ten cents. I had him begin: “Dearest Zia. I am in Cleveland, looking for Carlo. I am sewing for rich people and live with respectable girls in a wooden house. I eat well and am learning English. I miss you very much and pray for your health and to see you soon. Greet my father and Assunta for me and Father Anselmo.” Weeks from now in Opi, this letter would be unfolded and smoothed and Father Anselmo would read it to Zia. The scribe peered at my face. “First letter home?” he asked kindly. I nodded. “The next will be easier.” He signed my name before asking if I could do at least this much myself, swept my pennies into a pouch and promised to mail the letter.

At dusk I found my way back to the workhouse with families wending home. The little red-haired girl hung on her father’s shoulder, exhausted but still singing softly to herself. He held her as carefully as my father carried his prize lambs—he never carried me. A clap of laughter burst from the dining room and pushed those thoughts away. The girls were playing cards. “Irma, come join us!” Bèla cried and I did. Someone had found a game we all knew and our languages shuffled together easily all evening, first with cards and then with songs and dancing.

Days and weeks with the Missus passed like beads on my rosary. Every Sunday after church I asked about Carlo in the shops around Woodland. No one had heard of him or anyone who had worked on ships between Naples and Tripoli. I wrote to Teresa in New York, but she never wrote back, nor did Attilio’s sister Lucia. Perhaps my letters were lost. No letter came from Zia or Gustavo. Yet in the Italian blocks, others were finding their people. Sicilians knit themselves together, while immigrants from Naples, Puglia and Calabria claimed their own streets and shops. Of Opi everyone said, “Never heard of it.” When someone insisted there was no such place I felt as transparent as glass.