When We Were Strangers (25 page)

It was a timeless night, for the mantel clock had been stopped, the windows and mirror draped and candles lit the room. I stared at my empty hands. Sofia, what is their work now? Cloth yielded to these hands and thread followed them meekly. My work pleased women and charmed men. “These hands are a gift,” Father Anselmo had once said. And the wise shape their lives according to their gifts. So why not keep sewing for gentlewomen? It was an honest, respectable craft. Molly was right: I
could
have my own shop one day. Chicago was growing and everywhere there were pockets of rich women. Soon I would be as skilled as Madame, and there was work enough for many fine dressmakers. I stared at my hands and Sofia’s until dawn edged through the curtains and Claudia brought me bread and coffee.

News of Sofia’s death had spread quickly across the neighborhoods. Many had seen the notice on Vittorio’s door. Others heard through the air, it seemed. Mourners squeezed more chairs into the narrow room, bringing flowers, gifts or food, according to their customs. Plates and glasses were handed to me and taken away. Families filed past the body. Some touched her face, her hands, heart or clothing, murmuring prayers in their languages. Jacob came with his sisters, for Sofia had visited them when measles tore through the tenements.

A thin young woman came alone and whispered that her name was Martha. I remember hearing of her case: Martha has ceased eating, nearly herself starving to death after an uncle raped her. She swallowed poison. Sofia saved her, found her a job and a room in a new part of the city and made her come weekly to be weighed. “Look at me!” Martha said proudly. “You can’t see my bones no more.” She leaned close to add, “There’s a young man what wants to marry me. I’m going to night school too, and learning bookkeeping.”

“Signora D’Angelo would be pleased,” I said.

When wealthy women came alone and filed silently past the body, I suspected that they had sought out Sofia for abortions. Late in the morning, Mrs. Clayburn slipped into the hot, close room and laid a gloved hand on Sofia’s. When she looked up and saw me, she blinked. “Aren’t you—?”

“Irma Vitale. You introduced me to Madame Hélène.”

“Ah yes, the girl in the park, with those soldiers. But—”

“I worked at night with Signora D’Angelo. I was her assistant.”

“Ah yes, you Italians, always sticking together.” When I said nothing, she turned away.

In mid-afternoon the undertaker came with Sofia’s coffin, for it was a hot day and we could wait no longer. Vittorio, Claudia and I lifted her in, but as the undertaker’s men moved to close the lid I turned away, unable to watch that sharp-edge shadow once again cross a dear, familiar face. When they took out their hammers, I left the room. No blacksmith beating on his anvil is as loud as the pounding in of coffin nails: that sound cracks air.

We followed her carriage to church, where Father Paolo gave the mass, but I remember none of it, only my own prayer: Lord, wash away these last five days. Take me back to Monday when we walked together and I believed that Sofia was well.

“Irma, come back for the funeral meal,” Claudia and Vittorio urged afterward, but I could not bear to see that house again. “Then here, Enrico,” said Vittorio, giving the boy some coins. “Make sure Irma gets home safely and stop checking that watch.”

Mrs. Gaveston offered condolences and Molly brought tea to my room. In the next days, boarders bowed politely in the hallways or took my hand in the dining room. Many had gone or had friends who had gone to the clinic. Somehow I worked the next days, bent over cloth and driving my needle as if it would stitch out a new path for my life. Grief was a wearying weight I carried to the shop and home, barely speaking to Molly and trudging upstairs to my room. Each night the steps seemed steeper, like the rocky path to Opi.

On the fourth day after the funeral, Molly announced that Enrico had brought something for me. On my bed sat a wooden box with Sofia’s papers. There were letters from medical schools politely saying she could not be admitted because she was not an American citizen or because she had no high-school diploma or because she was a woman. There were descriptions of instruments, sutures and clamps, announcements of lectures at the Chicago Medical College, copies of the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
, and her own lecture notes, carefully ordered.

I found a fat bundle of correspondence from the Pacific Dispensary for Women and Children in San Francisco. In our last walk, Sofia had spoken of their care for the poor. Letters from the dispensary thanked Sofia for her mortality and morbidity lists, midwifery notes and descriptions of troubling cases. I remembered some of them: poor healing of stumps after amputation; repeated miscarriage in the first trimester; blue babies, rickets, arthritis in children, intestinal obstructions, sudden seizures and strange cases of nerve damage in meat packers.

The final page in the bundle was an announcement that the dispensary had opened a two-year nursing school, the first one west of the Rocky Mountains. Inquiries were to be directed to Dr. Martha Bucknell. A woman doctor? My fingers traced her name and then stopped. In the corner of the page, in Sofia’s small, angled letters was written: “Irma?” A warm wind puffed through the open window, ruffling my hair, the linen of my chemise and the page in my hand. I looked around the little room, suddenly so familiar, a narrow, safe nest. Was this Sofia’s idea, that I leave Chicago, go west and throw in my lot with strangers once again? The thought was fearful.

And yet—to be in a school, to learn and learn and know the human body as I now knew thread and cloth—the longing rose up against fear like a rock against waves. And wouldn’t this work be enough for life, to heal the sick and ease those in pain? Sofia did not go to dances, I wagered. She did not stand against walls and watch young men’s eyes scan the stock and never, not once, come walking toward her. She simply worked.

Near midnight, I felt my way down to Mrs. Gaveston’s sitting room, where she kept stacks of
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
and
Scribner’s Monthly.
I put them all on an end table, lit the gaslight and pored through articles on Indian tribes of the West, geysers, mountains full of silver and the Continental Divide. I read of San Francisco’s new cable cars and mansions. Mr. John Muir described Lake Tahoe, redwood forests that were old before Rome was new, canyons, glaciers, deserts and petrified forests. San Francisco had a fine seaport, one writer noted, “where ships call from the world’s great cities.” My heart shook. Gustavo had been to San Francisco and might come again. South of the city, one writer said, hills rolled down the coast covered in sweet grass, where sheep and cattle grazed all year.

Gradually, as I read, Chicago seemed like a shell that I had split and outgrown. I did not sleep that night, but curled on the horsehair settee with the magazines until Molly came to start her morning chores.

Chapter Thirteen
Furry Chicken

Studying me, Molly’s reddened hands cupped her hips.
Head cocked, she listened to my plans. I held up my own hands, spotted with needle pricks. “Molly, I have to do more with these than make fancy dresses.”

“Fine. Do what you want. But you don’t have to cross the country just to go to nursing school. There’s Mercy Hospital right here in Chicago. They admit women.”

I fanned the California pictures across the settee. “Look—it’s like Abruzzo. See these beautiful hills in San Francisco!”

“Ah now, hills
in
a city, how very grand. And why do we want to be walking
up
to a dry goods store. You see something special there?”

“Yes. You can look down on the land rolling all around you, houses, churches, parks, the bay and the ocean, shadows moving, mists in the morning . . .” I trailed off as Molly sighed.

“You mean fog? Plenty of that here.” Molly picked up the letter announcing the dispensary’s nursing school. “Candidates must have good character,” she read. “You have that. But what about this?” her finger jabbed the page. “A high-school diploma? You have one of those?”

“No, but I can read English. I can study Sofia’s books.”

Molly put down the letter. “You’re just wanting to leave Chicago, aren’t you, Irma? Because of what happened that night?”

Silence settled over us. Yes, San Francisco was far from all I longed to forget. But I was also weary of the flat earth, the heat of summer and hard press of winter cold. The etchings in
Scribner’
s made me yearn for the loop and roll of land. I wanted to break free of the squeeze of buildings and streets running endlessly out to horizons. Carlo would laugh, but I even missed sheep. Chicago had squirrels and rats, crows, pigeons, rangy dogs and alley cats. Backyard pens in the new neighborhoods often held pigs, and chickens squawked in rough coops behind many houses. Mules and horses clogged the streets with their whinnies and snorts, but where was the comforting calm of sheep?

Molly’s hands took my shoulders. “Irma, you could be safe in Chicago. You don’t have to go to bad neighborhoods. That man who hurt you is gone. The clinic’s finished. So you could come dancing with me on Friday nights, meet a good lad
and
learn nursing. Isn’t that better than moving all the time, always being a stranger?”

It’s true. In Opi my life was cradled in a net, knit to every soul around me. A new net was just forming in Chicago. Could I rip it again and hope to make another?

“Enough about moving,” said Molly, pointing to the ceiling that shook with Mrs. Gaveston’s heavy tread in the room above us. “
Herself
has arisen. You’d think a body with a little money could put down carpets and not make that racket in the morning. Yes, Your Highness, the hired girl is busy. Come on, Irma.” In the kitchen she set me to grinding coffee as she put out plates, sliced a loaf into perfectly even slices and tossed out the crumbs for birds. “And now tell me, why should they take a foreign dressmaker with no high-school diploma in this San Francisco nursing school?” she asked. And then: “Grind more coffee. The boarders drink it like water.”

“Madame Hélène can write me a recommendation.”

“Sure she could. But that just proves you’re a good dressmaker.” Molly poured oatmeal into a pot of boiling water. Waves of shame washed over me as I watched her work. She had been a good and faithful friend. So many evenings we shared stories of home. I had sat on my bed as she playacted her bargaining with immigrants or mimicked Mrs. Gaveston’s ways until my sides ached with laughter. I remembered the night of the charred house, when she waited and worried for me. “I’m sorry, Molly. I’ve just been thinking of myself.”

“And just who else
should
you be thinking of? It’s a free country. Go where you want. Take care of your sick people.” She stirred the oatmeal hard, her wooden spoon knocking the heavy pot. “San Francisco’s a new city. Newer than Chicago. Could be you’ll like that.” Molly wheeled around, oatmeal spoon in the air. “But the Lord knows I’ll be missing you when you’re gone, Irma Vitale.”

I wrapped my arms around her broad shoulders. “I’ll miss you too, Molly. I’ll miss you so much.”

“We’ve been good friends, haven’t we?”

I nodded.

Molly stepped back to the stove. “Oatmeal’s sticking.” She stirred furiously. “Shouldn’t you write to this Dr. Bucknell first, make sure she’ll take you and
then
go? Suppose it costs? Don’t you want to know how much? And why the sudden rush?”

True, all true. But what of Sofia brushing off Vittorio’s steady urgings to rest between patients, to close the clinic earlier or tell patients to come back next week. “They’re sick
now
,
”
she would insist. “They need help
now
.”

Molly studied my face. “I see. So you’re going soon.”

“Yes, as soon as I can.”

“Well, put out the bread and ring the bell. It’s feeding time.”

Madame Hélène was setting a billowing muttonchop sleeve into a close-fitted bodice when I told her of my plan. She pulled pins from her mouth and pushed them into a cushion. “Irma, why do you go west? The women—everyone cares for you
here
. We need you.” In the next room, the whirl of Simone’s machine stopped. Even the old cat looked up as I described the dispensary, the new nursing school and the hills of San Francisco.

Madame Hélène nodded. “This flatness here, like a floor, is hard for me too. But why is sewing
people
better than making fine dresses that you do so well?
Every
day, all day seeing the sick, cripples, children dying, it’s like the Old Country, no? Everything hopeless and sad. If you want to see mountains, take a little vacation. Then come back and we do the spring season together, the new styles from Paris. We go to New York perhaps, and see the great shops.”

I wavered, as if a strong wind pushed against me. I had worked so hard, sewing enough skirt lengths to cover Opi. Yes, of course I would miss the surge of pleasure and pride when a customer asked for
me
, thanked
me
and reported how many suitors had noticed her daughter in a gown I made. And yet . . . Sofia’s hands gently pressing a woman’s belly or my own hands lifting a wailing child to our examining stool, knowing we could help.

Madame Hélène sighed. “So, you go west. But before you go, can you finish the trousseau for the long-waist girl at least—the senator’s daughter? And the two evening gowns for the stockyard woman with too-wide shoulders, Mrs. Will.”

“Willis,” Simone called from the other room.

I promised. Madame yanked a needle from her cushion. “And how do I find a new Irma to help me?”

“Perhaps there’s a girl looking for work now, walking through the city like I was, asking everywhere for work. You could put a notice on the door.”

“Ah. A notice on the door for everyone to see?” In the way Madame Hélène tightened her lips I knew there would be no more said that morning of my going. When we gathered for our noon meal, she cleared her throat. “I have decided. First, Irma, you will teach Simone all you can while you are here. You will work extra hours with her. I pay you for this. I will put a notice
in the newspaper
for a girl to do machine sewing and decent French cooking. Not on the door. So I find a girl who reads at least. Simone, you will learn from Irma?”

“Yes, Madame!” said Simone gleefully.

“Irma, you will teach her everything?”

“I’ll try, Madame.”

“And second, we will have a dinner together before you go away. We will invite Jacob and his sisters and your friends if you like.”

“Thank you, Madame.”

She waved me silent. “You are a good dressmaker. The ladies like you. The shop is peaceful. We make money at last. And now you leave me. Such is the life. But we will eat together first, good French food.”

Late summer cooled quickly into autumn. An Irish friend of Molly’s would teach my English classes. I delivered Sofia’s instruments to Mercy Hospital and worked with Simone to finish the trousseau and velvet gowns. She learned quickly, having been secretly practicing on scraps of fabric and studying pictures as I once did. “Teach this to me,” she would say avidly, pointing out a skirt’s bias swirl or curving pleat on a tight bodice. “And the little buttonholes, how do I make them so perfect and round?”

A parade of young women answered our notice in the
Chicago Daily Tribune.
“Irish, Polish, German, Greek, American,” Hélène muttered. “I want
French
food, or at least Italian.” Finally a slight, caramel-skinned girl from Haiti appeared who spoke a kind of French. She called herself Lune and would not say how she had come to live in Chicago or anything of her family, but her seams were straight as shot arrows and she could take apart, clean, oil and reassemble the sewing machine as if it were a child’s toy. The thick soups she called gumbo were French enough for Hélène and delicious. The old cat adored her and the customers were charmed by the waft of her songs over the whirl of the sewing machine.

The night before I left, we had our dinner. We closed early, drew the curtains and moved our cutting table to the middle of the shop. Vittorio and Claudia brought wine and I arranged flowers from the Maxwell Street market. Freyda, Sarah and Jacob brought challah, a golden braided bread. Molly came with candied nuts, a thick wedge of cheddar cheese and crystal glasses secretly borrowed from Mrs. Gaveston. Lune made a gumbo, Simone baked a flaky onion tart and Hélène had spent hours simmering a
choucroute
of potatoes, cabbage and goose, the traditional going-away meal in her village. “To give strength for the voyage,” she explained. “So you carry away the taste of home.” For dessert Simone produced a dense chocolate pudding called mousse. “It is the fashion in Paris,” she boasted. I had never eaten anything so delicious, so dark, sweet and soft in the mouth, like a melting cloud.

We ate and ate, sharing stories of home and America. Then came the gifts. I had embroidered handkerchiefs for the women and bought pipes for Jacob and Vittorio. Claudia presented an ample carpetbag for traveling “like real Americans use.” Jacob’s sisters gave me one of their pieced purses. Hélène pushed a small, cloth-wrapped package across the table. “Simone told me you were robbed in Cleveland,” she said. “So we find these for you, from England.” It was a pair of crane-head scissors with golden handles, a bright enamel eye and even finer blades than those of my stolen pair.

“Why does she cry over scissors?” Lune demanded.

“They are beautiful, thank you,” I whispered.

“Yes, certainly,” Hélène agreed. “So you must not forget your sewing and you must not forget us.”

“I could never forget—”

Hélène made her shooing-away wave. “And you will not to be robbed again out West with the cow-boys?”

“I’ll be careful.”

“If you come back, Irma, there will be space in my shop for you, always.” Hélène got up abruptly and hurried to the kitchen. The water pump rattled and she returned wiping her eyes.

“And
this
is my present,” Molly announced, slapping her calendar on the table. “Irma, look at November.” I looked. All the numbers were erased. Curious, I turned to Molly’s beaming face. “I’m going with you to San Francisco. No, listen first. They say it’s full of single people looking for boardinghouses. I have a plan. We get work in a house right away: you help me clean and we have a place to live for no money. Then I find a rich widow to invest with me. By next year I should have my own house. This way at least you’ll know one person in San Francisco when you go. Well, do you like my plan?”

To travel with a friend, to enter a strange city and not be alone? I gulped back my tears. “Yes, Molly, I like it very much.”

Molly’s old bustle returned. “Now Irma, you’re going third class?”

“Yes, I have to.” Second class cost eighty dollars—too much. Third class meant renting bed boards to sleep on at night and sitting all day on hard benches, but I would bear this for a week to save money for San Francisco.

“If we come back to visit,” Molly vowed, “we’re coming
first class.
” Everyone laughed, including me, seeing myself in a Pullman car with velvet settees and Persian carpets, eating from China plates and sleeping on fine linen sheets at night. I’d have a picture made and sent to Opi, where people would pass it around, astonished.

“Now Simone,” Molly was saying, “where are those dusters? Look, everyone, the first clothes I ever had of a French seamstress,” she boasted. Simone fetched two gray linen dusters
.

Hélène sniffed. “Very plain.”

“Of course,” said Molly. “They’ll protect our clothes from coal dust. See, no ruffles or pleats, so they’re easy to shake clean.”

“I designed them myself,” said Simone, blushing.

We raised our glasses to the dusters and each other. Such a warm net I had finally woven around me, a net about to be ripped. When I noticed Simone and Hélène debating the waistline of a new gown for Mrs. Willis, I looked away, embarrassed at a flush of envy. As Opi had closed behind me when I left, Hélène and Simone would go on working in this room, creating dresses I would never see. Their heads touched as they folded and refolded a bit of linen to test how the dress might drape.