When We Were Strangers (10 page)

Teresa made me come to English lessons, at least to leave my bed. A young man on his third voyage to America taught bits of English, but our accents enflamed him. “Th . . . th . . .
TH
!” he repeated, rapping his pipe against long yellow teeth. “The tongue
here
, imbecile, not on the roof of your mouth. Why waste my time with you?” he demanded of a startled child.

“It’s an ugly language if people talk through their teeth,” someone observed.

“If you live in New York with us, Irma, you won’t need English,” Gabriella said, but I practiced silently, pressing my tongue to my teeth:
the
,
three
,
think.
The next day, when Gordana and Milenka joined the lesson a clot of women moved away.

I asked Nonna for news of Gustavo. “The one with the broken leg? Still washing pots I suppose.” He sent no word. Perhaps he had heard of my scar. Or our night had cost him too much. Or he had forgotten me.

“Forget him,” Teresa whispered. But she had not eaten figs by moonlight and her face was not gashed.

“We dock Tuesday morning,” the matron announced on a Sunday night, the sixteenth of our voyage. “Make sure you’re packed.” They passed out syrups for coughs, powders for lice, creams to hide rashes and drops for rheumy eyes. Even children took them willingly, for we had all heard about those who were turned away from America. Many died on the passage home.

“Fair skies to the west and calm seas. At worst, we’ll have fog in the harbor,” the matrons reported. Suddenly even New York seemed so present and real, a city with a foggy harbor that opened to land vast enough to swallow us like pebbles. My hands shook as I counted my few remaining coins and mended a rip in my skirt. I took out the stone from our house and tried to smell in it the must of our walls, smoky bite of our fires, damp wool of our clothes, the rosemary and lavender hung over our beds and tang of new cheese.

My face still hurt, more at night, a sharp tug beneath the skin. Even if Carlo had a friend in America, why would that friend want a woman both plain and scarred?

“We’ll see Papà soon,” Gabriella chanted happily. “I’ll wear my new red dress. He’ll pick me up and carry me on his shoulders. What about you, Irma? How will you fix your hair for America? What will you wear?”

“Don’t bother her, child,” Teresa said.

Gordana and Milenka silently slid off their beds. While the others prepared their bags, brushed shoes, and pulled out once again their worn maps and letters, the two somehow found fresh water to wash my hair, then brushed and combed it shining.

“Now we make knots,” Gordana announced. With deft fingers, they began braiding. They finished, conferred, undid their work and began again. “We have better idea, wait,” they said, gently moving my hands away. One by one, women came to watch. Gordana touched my skirt. “Look down here.”

Silence fell over the group. When I tried to look up, Milenka tugged so sharply on a hank of hair that my scalp burned. Simona was standing before me holding a russet velvet ribbon
.
“I don’t need this,” she said, letting it curl in my lap. “I’m sorry about—your face.”

“Is pretty color,” Gordana said gruffly.

Simona nodded. “Well, I have to pack now.” When she backed away, Gordana drew the ribbon from my hand.

“Look, Mamma,” piped Gabriella. “They made her hair like a rose.”

“Irma, it’s beautiful,” Teresa whispered.

They showed me the rose with mirrors, wound with Simona’s ribbon. Milenka’s long fingers wiped away my tears. “I know we pull tight,” she said, “but at night when you sleep, it stay good.”

“Doesn’t she look like a fine lady?” Gabriella demanded. Teresa straightened my dress and nodded.

“No, Irma!” said Milenka and Gordana when I tried to thank them. “Is nothing what we do for you.”

After dinner, matrons called all the steerage passengers into one chamber, where we stood shoulder to shoulder in the damp, thick air. A steward climbed on a table flanked by translators. As each language took its turn, we learned what would happen at New York. If we satisfied the port doctors, government clerks would help us buy train tickets to other cities. We could bathe in hot fresh water with soap and towels to dry ourselves. Many cheered, for days of salt water had crusted our skin. We would be fed by ladies of charity, given our baggage, and those leaving the city would be directed to train stations. So the city would be rid of us by nightfall, like gypsies or stray dogs.

“The city’s full,” the steward warned. “If you stay, you’d live worse than here.” He waved his hands at the dank sea of us. “Wages are low and many have no work. Those of you from the country are better off west.” As for seeing the port of New York, he warned, the
Servia’
s
deck was far too small for all of us. Only a few could go up in the morning. He wished us well and curtly took his leave with translators bustling after him.

“He’s lying,” said Teresa. “How can a city be full?” Everyone agreed, but I was silently grateful to be headed west. I would go first to the church in Cleveland, the one on the main piazza, I had decided. If there was another church, I’d go there too. The priests would know, as Father Anselmo knew, everyone in their parish. And if the priests didn’t know, I would go to the marketplace on a feast day. Surely Carlo would be there.

Teresa, Gabriella, Milenka, Gordana and I spent our last night in line below the grate to be sure to have space on deck. We shared the last of my cheese and slept on our heaped bags. No one troubled the Serbian girls. To protect my braids, I sat braced against a post, dreaming of Ohio’s mountains and towns bustling with people who spoke with tongues pressed against their teeth. When Gabriella shivered, Gordana and Milenka covered her with their skirts.

Sailors unlocked the grate before dawn and we clambered on deck in a gray fog so dense that we could barely see the ship’s own railings. The
Servia
seemed to float on clouds, her mast scraping a low ceiling that hid flocks of noisy gulls. Muffled horns and bells called out from all sides. The engines lurched and died. We stopped, waited, bobbing on mist until, slowly, a faint white sun hoisted itself and wind skittered across the deck.

“Look!” cried Gabriella as the fog lifted. “Tall buildings like teeth.” She was right. Jagged teeth bit the sky. So this was New York, a great wolf’s open mouth.

“Irma,” said a low, familiar voice beside me. It was Gustavo, leaning on a crude crutch. “I’m glad I found you,” he whispered. “Here, it’s not as fine as your sewing, but I hope you remember me.” He tugged from his pocket a disk of polished whalebone the size of a palm. Scratched roughly into the bone was a half moon hung over waves. Out of the waves leaped three dolphins. Below them was scratched “Gustavo of Genoa.”

“I’ll remember you even without this,” I said. “How is your leg?”

“Better already. Sailors bounce, you know.”

When he looked at me curiously I turned my cut cheek away. “Your hair,” he said. “It’s very beautiful.”

“My Serbian friends did it.”

“I heard what happened.” He looked at my cheek. “It’s not as bad as they said.” All around us, women from steerage politely turned away, pretending not to listen. “You were brave to defend them.”

Heat swirled over me. “You’ll stay on the
Servia
?” I managed.

“Of course. When my leg’s healed, I’m on the rigging again, but Irma, may I write to you?”

“How?”

“I’ll send it to General Delivery in Cleveland. We go to Liverpool next. I’ll write from there.”

“Yes, I’d like that.”

“Gustavo!” came a shout. He touched my hand gently and then limped into the crowd. Teresa braced my shoulder and Gordana wound her arm around my waist as we steamed into port.

“He seems like a good man,” Teresa whispered. “You’ll find another like him.” But I had not “found” Gustavo. I had only briefly known him when my face was whole. I slipped the whalebone into my bag with my stone from Opi.

They herded us into barges, fifty together, splattered by the choppy, cold water. When we stepped on land, it seemed to rock as well, to heave and dip. We fell against each other as American boys in woven caps laughed and pointed. Clerks appeared at the door of a brick palace to divide us into lines, tugging apart those bound west and those staying in New York. So I lost all my friends: Teresa and Gabriella, Gordana and Milenka. When I craned my neck to see them one last time, a clerk impatiently thumped his desk.

“
Italiana
?” he demanded. I nodded, still searching the crowd. “May I have your attention, signorina?”

“Yes sir,” I managed.

“What is your business in America?” I told him of Carlo and Federico. “Proof?” he demanded. I handed him the schoolteacher’s letter and my documents from Naples and Opi. “Profession? Skill, what can you do?”

“Needlework,” I stammered. “Fine needlework.” When I showed him my muslin with “Irma” in five scripts, he nodded and scratched words on a long ruled page.

“How much money do you have?” Did he want a bribe? I had barely enough for my train ticket. “I mean, will you be a public charge? Can you get to Cleveland?” When I nodded and held out my lire, he did not touch them, only wrote something, pinned a card on my shawl and sent me to a doctor who had me cough and breathe, show I had no rash, lift a weight over my head and do sums in my head. He spoke in English to a clerk beside him, pinned another card on my shawl and pointed me to the baths.

There I was instructed where to undress and given a number to retrieve my clothes. We were hurried through the lines with neither cruelty nor kindness, only brisk exactness, as my father moved sheep. But they made me take out my wonderful braids to check for lice. The baths were foggy with steam, a small blessing for the shame of being naked among strange women and plain again, with dull brown hair streaming down. I thought I saw Teresa and squirmed between wet bodies, calling her name, but the pockmarked face that turned to me was not hers.

“I’m sorry, signora,” I stammered, covering myself with the cloth they gave us. The woman backed away and I finished quickly, my eyes streaming tears. Outside the baths, I heard, long tables of American ladies would offer clothes to women whose country dress might offend their new country or waiting husband. I stood straighter then, dried my eyes, smoothed my skirt and arranged my shawl neatly. My hair was back in its customary winding, some coiled on top and the rest hanging down. The ladies let me pass, so at least I entered America in my own clothes.

In a vast, echoing dining room, we were served a kind of minestrone, dark bread and a mug of watered beer. At my table there was not one person from the
Servia.
Had so many ships arrived that our little world was already scattered? “Good food,” said an Italian. “And free. So far, America’s one fine country.”

In another line a tall blond clerk read my ticket and pointed to a courtyard where from the milling mass a shrill voice cried out, “Irma!” It was Gabriella, who had clambered up a lamppost and was waving wildly. “We saw Papà! He has a beautiful doll for me and flowers for Mamma.” Below her was Teresa’s gleaming face. “God bless you, Irma!” she called.

“I’ll write!” I shouted as a blond guard plucked the child from her perch and handed her to Teresa before the crowd surged them both away and dragged me past a knot of peddlers hawking their cities. “Boston! Philadelphia, Chicago!”

“Mill work in Hartford,” said a woman who plucked at my sleeve. “Sleep and eat where you work, don’t pay rent.”

“Iowa, rich black earth. Plant your grain, turn around and reap,” another called out.

“
Treni per
Cleveland?” I asked an officer.

“Trains for Cleveland
,
” he corrected sharply, and then told me in Italian to find Track 34. “Get on the wrong train and they’ll throw you off at the first stop.” He spoke in the flat, weary way of one who repeats the same words all day. “Get your provisions here. There’s none on the train and it’s a long ride.”

“How long, sir?”

“Long.”

I bought bread and cheese for more than they cost in Naples. “That’s America, good pay, high prices,” the peddler said, but still it was exciting to see this light, spongy foreign bread and have change in American coins. At the Cleveland track an agent helped me into the last carriage, where a trio of broad-shouldered Polish men amiably squeezed together and made room for me. My gold was gone, but Zia, look at me, safe in America with American food in my bag and American coins in my purse. Our train shuddered, lurched and rolled out of the station.

Chapter Five
Cut, Sew, Work

We wove through a maze of tracks
branching as wildly as Rosanna’s first embroidery, then plunged through a tunnel and out into blazing sun. As passengers shut their windows against the racketing wheels and dusty wind, the cabin grew hot, stinking of sweat and garlic, sausage, cheese and pickles. Babies wailed and children spilled into aisles, playing loudly while the Poles beside me spoke quietly, a lulling stream of sound. Exhausted, I hugged my bag, pressing Gustavo’s whalebone into my chest.

I must have slept, for when I woke we were flying through a green blur, passing houses so quickly that their edges feathered like torn silk. Whole towns seemed to be made of wood, even a squat white church. Was there no stone in this land? “Ohio?” I asked.

A Pole laughed. “Nu Jersay,” he explained, pointing. In tiny stations we stopped while express trains raced by. Around noon I ate some of my bread but its airy loft did not fill the stomach as Assunta’s loaves always did. To beat down hunger, I turned back to the dusty window and studied America. Father Anselmo had told us of a great civil war here that killed half a million men. Yet how could that be if every station bustled? Gentlemen in fine suits lifted glistening black hats to each other, while around them swarmed shopkeepers, farmers, day laborers, some few cripples and drunks. Women moved easily among the men, most in simple cotton prints, but every station boasted ladies in fine layered gowns under flounced parasols. Girls trailed their mothers or played in knots outside houses. Black men worked at the train stations in crisp uniforms or by the roads in tattered shirts. Two boys raced beside the train tracks, arms swirling like cartwheels. Once we slowed to a rattling crawl, keeping easy pace with two black women stepping nimbly along a footpath with wash baskets large as lambs perched on their heads. It seemed they were singing, but when I leaned toward the window to hear them, the Poles stared at my scar. I sat back quickly. The one they called Josep spoke sharply and the men turned away.

As the train lurched ahead, Josep began a long tale in a rolling voice that put me in mind of the old ones in Opi who told the best stories and thus earned the best seats by winter fires. The Poles leaned forward to listen, eyes flaring when Josep’s voice deepened and passing him a bottle each time he paused. Once he paused so long that the men grew restless. When he snapped out a line in an old man’s voice, they sat perplexed an instant and then burst into wild guffaws, repeating the phrase and roaring again. One even slapped my knee as if I understood. Suddenly I was laughing too and they laughed that I laughed. Josep handed me the bottle. Zia would be horrified, but I took a sip and later shared my cheese and tried their salami. The train rattled on and the men dozed off, although from time to time one would murmur Josep’s line, chuckle, tap his knee and rock back to sleep.

We passed a rosary of towns clutching the tracks, low hills cloaked in forests and barns with painted disks like gypsy charms. Cattle grazed in herds as large as a nobleman might own, but there were no villas, only tidy wooden houses.

At one station the porter had us understand that we must wait at least an hour to fix the engine. When I looked longingly at this land the porter called Pennsylvania, Josep made finger signs for walking and pointed from my bag to his eye. With my last coins, crane scissors, pewter buttons, cloth and rock from Opi safe beneath my apron, perhaps I might trust my bag to Josep and take some steps outside.

A wooden sidewalk met the rails—how astonishing to walk on wood. Peddlers swarmed the station selling meat pies, salted twists of bread and beer from tin mugs on long chains tied to barrels. A woman sold curved yellow fruit she called bananas and let me smell their sweetness. When I bought one for a penny, a skipping boy mimed eating it whole and howled with laughter when I bit into the rubbery bitter skin. The peddler grabbed my banana and peeled it, pointing from the white flesh to my mouth. “Greenhorn,” she called me and snapped out words that made the boy cower.

I hurried along the tracks until the laughter faded and then I tasted my first banana. Oh! What creamy flesh, sweet and melting soft as custard. I ate slowly, savoring, as a little masked and humpbacked striped cat with a fat tail waddled across my path. Nobody had warned me that in America even the animals are different.

A cherry tree’s laden branches arched nearby, the crimson fruit far sweeter than our own. If only I could fill our bread bowl and tell Zia, “Take all you want, bury your hands in cherries!” When I reached for more, an ugly little flat-muzzled dog leaped from the bushes, snarling at me. A sandy-haired boy appeared beside him, snapped an order and the dog sat, his eyes pinned to me as the boy held up a cotton sack and three fingers.

At home no one would dare charge for wild fruit, but gathering cherries in my apron would stain it for Cleveland. I showed two fingers and the boy shot up the tree. He scrambled from branch to branch, both hands picking, and then landed lightly on the ground, the filled bag in his teeth. After I thanked and paid him, he tugged a tiny arrowhead from a pocket, batting his mouth and crying, “Woo, woo, Injan!” until a sudden blaring whistle made me grab my bag and run, briars tearing at my skirt. I had barely reached the wooden walkway as the last passengers boarded and the train lurched forward. “No!” I cried. “Wait!”

At that moment Josep leaned from a doorway rushing toward me, shouted and reached out a wide hand. I caught it and leaped, still gripping the cherry bag. My feet found purchase and I was safe on the landing, wind flapping my torn skirt. Josep held my arm until I caught my breath and then politely stepped away. “
Grazie
,” I said. “Grazie, grazie.” He smiled and patted my shoulder.

Wedged back in my seat, I offered him cherries. He waved his square hand around our little circle. We emptied the bag quickly, licking our fingers and tossing pits out the window. After the last cherry, the Poles drifted to sleep as we rattled on, stopped for express trains and rolled again through green Pennsylvania. Careful not to expose my legs, I mended my skirt to be respectable in Cleveland.

When the Poles woke, they pushed bags together for a rough table and began a card game. A thin-faced man in a fur hat first watched intently from another bench and then eased into the game. He bet eagerly, ignoring a woman who tugged at his sleeve, batting at her hand until Josep looked sharply at him. I remembered Emilio, who married my mother’s cousin and gambled her dowry away. Fur Hat dug into his jacket and fished out a fine meerschaum pipe, which he bet and lost. One night Emilio would have gambled his whole flock if Carlo had not dragged him from the tavern, shouting, “Idiota, only dice are dumber than sheep.”

“Pittsburgh!” shouted the porter but outside I saw only a wool-thick, acrid fog that Alfredo of Pescasseroli never mentioned in his letter. Here and there, passengers herded their children together and dragged trunks and bags down the aisle. Fur Hat and his wife hurried after them.

“Mountains in Ohio?” I mimed to Josep. He shook his head and swept a hand flat out from his chest. One man stamped on the wood floor, smiling. Flat as this floor. He drew a hump in the air and frowned: mountains are bad. Had they never looked down on fields rippled like soft wool beneath them, seen dawn brush the far hilltops or springtime creep up brown slopes? Don’t think of the shape of the land. Think: work, make money and see Zia again. I leaned against the window, watching the darkness stream by until the porter passed again, calling: “Cleveland, Cleveland.” Travelers stretched and gathered bags. Zia would frown, but I let the Poles kiss me farewell. Josep pressed his hand to his heart, his words swallowed by a shrill whistle as I joined a swarm pushing off the train. When it lurched away, I realized I had left my food bag behind.

There seemed to be Italian in the jumble of voices on the platform, but I could not follow them through the swirls of children and babies passed around for kissing, men and women falling into each others’ arms, bags and trunks handed off to young men and lesser relatives waiting at the circle’s rim. Slowly the families pulled apart, still touching the new arrivals’ faces, children tugged along, questions flying and gifts pulled from jackets. Some single men were met by others with easy cheer, as if after a short week away. Three Hungarians shouldered their bags and strode off purposefully, following a tiny hand-drawn map they held among them and suddenly I was alone.

Of course Carlo wasn’t there. Even if he had reached Cleveland, how would he have known that I would come this night? How absurd to have dreamed of seeing his peaked hat, hearing the rough, familiar voice complaining that I was late, and having him take my bags and hurry me off to our new house.

The last train lights blinked away. A porter sweeping the platform glanced at me and returned to work. I gathered my bags and walked out the great iron gates of the station. Gaslight gleamed on wet brick. A stumbling shadow crossed a street, nailed shoes clicking. I leaned against a wall. What now? What had Alfredo done on his first night in Pittsburgh? Probably a cousin or friend already rooted in America had cut him from a crowd and hurried him home. Dizzy, I pressed into the wall, remembering how once while picking wild herbs I had seen a field mouse run onto a bald stone patch and freeze, flicking its little head left and right. “Go!” I had shouted, clapping my hands. “If you stay, a hawk will get you.”

From deep in the station came an echoing metal clang. I gathered my bags and walked toward a wider street that would surely lead to the main piazza and church. Carlo could be out walking late at night. But I found only tavern crowds clustered under gaslights. A one-armed man waved his hook at me, clucking as if I were a Filomena.

I hurried into a net of streets with no churches, only locked shops, shabby wooden houses and squares of scrubland where rats rustled as I passed. Carlo could live in any of these streets. Or none of them. Puddles soaked my shoes and blisters grew. I saw a plant like the one whose leaves we used on open wounds, but perhaps in America this plant was poison. My arms ached from the weight of my bag. I was cold, afraid and alone, like the night my father touched me.

A church appeared, but with no welcoming Virgin statue, only an empty cross. Sinking, exhausted, on the steps and bent over my bag, I must have slept, for a policeman woke me with the crack of his stick on the stone step, making sharp words and shooing signs as if to a stray cat. Feet swollen and hunger burning my stomach, I stumbled on with no plan now but enduring the night. And then? Once I leaned against a lamppost and a passing gentleman offered a coin. I hurried away. Fog filled the streets with a soft woolen gray that muted the knife lines of buildings and bleak tattoo of my shoes. Finally I came upon a great reach of water. Had I walked back to the Atlantic? A chill breeze pried the fog apart, revealing an iron bench. I sank onto it, squeezing my bag for warmth and slowly recalling a map on the
Servia
that showed lakes on top of America, big as the Mediterranean. Impossible, I had thought then.

A gauzy moon hanging over the charcoal waters showed broken hulls of small boats, a battered pier and pebbled shore. Far away a campfire glittered. Men gathered around it might have food, but how could I know until I got too close what kind of men they were? I rinsed my bleeding feet in the waves and hurried back to the bench.

A rising wind skimmed the water, chilling my heart and empty stomach. If I died here, who would know? A stranger who found my body could only report “Italian girl, immigrant” and I would have died alone like all who left Opi. Laughter from the fire floated over me. I fumbled for my rosary beads. The Lord had brought me safe across the ocean. But Fortune is like bread loaves, my mother once said. Some people have smaller loaves than others. Mine could end here on this bench at the frayed edge of America.

I would sit until first light, I decided, and then search for food and shelter, like those who first came to our mountain. But they were together at least, that band of wanderers. Exhausted, every muscle spent, I closed my eyes and must have slept again, for when I woke, a pale rosy band had slid across the water and a hand was shaking my shoulder.

“
Italiana?
” a voice demanded. I nodded. I turned to face a woman in a thick gray jacket with a long nose and black eyes that narrowed at the scar along my cheek. By her voice she was not Italian. She studied me as men study livestock at markets, then grasped my hand, prodding my fingertips. “You come now to Cleveland?”

“Last night on the train,” I said, pulling my hand back.

“And this?” she jabbed my scar.

“On the ship. I was not to blame.” She waited for more, arms crossed.

“You speak English?”

“No.”

“Good.” Why was this good? “You want work?”

I nodded.

“What can you do?”

“I embroider.”

“Show me,” she snapped and studied my samples, front and back. “They’re yours? The Missus will test you.”

“They’re mine.”

“You know nobody in Cleveland?”

“My brother was coming here. I’m looking for him.”

“But he didn’t meet train?” I said nothing. “Listen girl, you’re not the first who doesn’t get met at the station. I am”—she laughed—“a Samaritan.” Was she some kind of holy sister? But she wore no cross. When she leaned down to return my samples, her breath smelled of wine.

“You hungry?”

Why lie? “Yes, signora.”

“Then come.” She nodded when I stood and my stiff legs buckled. “You see? Lake air is very bad. Second night you die. What is your name?”