When We Were Strangers (16 page)

On my fifteenth day in the city, I lay in bed staring out my tiny window. Before Chicago, I had never slept in a room alone. How could Americans endure such solitude? In the night silence I considered my own death. And what of Zia then? If she grew sicker, if my father had his own babe to feed or a bad year for sheep, would he care for her if I could send no money, if I was gone? Sinking into despair, I conjured the year before my mother took sick, when sleet blew all day at shearing time. Wet, matted wool dulled our blades. My father and Carlo stopped constantly to hone them. We fell hours behind. My mother and I washed wool until our hands were raw and bleeding, stiff with cold. “We can’t finish by morning, it’s impossible,” Carlo protested.

“That’s when the wool buyer comes,” my father snapped.

“Keep working,” my mother repeated. “Just keep working. We need wool to live.”

This was
my
shearing time. I must not stop. I needed a job to live. I decided to look for sewing work one more morning and then go to the sausage factory. I’d stand over blood twelve hours a day but at least have work. At the bakery where I bought my stale bun for lunch, two Italian women suggested Hyde Park, where rich people lived.

I walked across the city as an early fog thickened into rain. There were no dressmakers hiring in the ten blocks around Hyde Park, only chalk-marked
NO
s on doorposts. When the rain stopped I wandered into the park past two old soldiers in ragged jackets. One was drawing old battle lines in mud with his crutch. The other begged from gentlemen hurrying by.

“You have Union pensions,” one man chided.

“They’re not enough to feed a dog,” the crippled soldier called back.

I found an empty bench and sat, too late remembering my skirt. It would be wet and clammy now. But who would notice if every door said
NO
? Sausage makers wouldn’t care: their workers’ skirts were soaked in blood.

A quick patter on the brick walkway announced a fine lady coming. Despite myself, I studied her dress from a distance: fine tuckwork on the bodice and matched plaids in a ruffled skirt, tumbling waterfalls of lace at the throat. I knew the pattern from
Godey’s
, but the dressmaker had made a wider skirt that brushed park benches as the lady sidestepped puddles. Light-headed, I nibbled my bun as the dress came closer. Egyptian cotton with a satin waistband. Crinoline petticoats swished under the soldiers’ drone. Then a loud
rip
. The lady wailed and tugged at her skirt, caught on a bench nail. Faster than thought or prudence, I crossed the space between us and knelt beside her on the wet pavement.

“What are you doing?” she shrieked, yanking loose a wider gash of ruffle until it sagged toward the muddy brick in a gaping mouth. “Here!” she fumbled in her purse. “Go away.”

My English crumbled. “I fix,” I said, beating the air gently to calm her. “I am a sew girl.”

“A
what
?” She looked around wildly. The crippled soldier started toward me.

I gestured threading, sewing, cutting and held up my bag, pulling out samples. “Don’t move, lady. You hurt the beautiful dress. I fix it.” This was child’s English, I knew, but at least the lady ceased pulling, horrified by the size of the tear, so wide now that the skirt would drag in the mud if she took another step. “You mean fix it here? Now?”

“Yes, yes, but be still, please.” I carefully worked the fabric free and draped it over my knee to examine the gash more closely. “Idiota,” Carlo would say. “Suppose you can’t fix it?” But Zia would answer:
“Irma, do your best. Or else make sausages.”

Sweat slicked my brow, for the rip was terrible and near the front. Pulling raw edges together would make the plaid lines waver and then every eye would see the repair. The rip must be patched. In Opi, we basted scraps over holes without hope of hiding the repair. But this one must be invisible. I examined the hem: six fingers deep, a rich woman’s hem. I could replace the gashed cloth with a patch darned into place, then tack down the cut-out hem.

“How long will it take?” the lady demanded.

“A little bit.” I must do better work than ever in my life, and faster too.

“You may sit, ma’am,” the soldier offered, pointing his crutch to the ragged army jacket he had laid on the wet bench. The lady nodded and she and I shuffled toward the bench, the skirt held like a train between us. When she gave the soldier a coin, he bowed gallantly. “Lieutenant Rafferty, Army of the Potomac, at your service.”

The other soldier disappeared into the brush and returned lugging a stone he set by the bench. “And a stool for you, miss,” he said. “Nearly dry.”

I thanked him, prepared a needle and began. My hands, at least, were clean. The soldiers hovered, stinking of tobacco and sweat-stained cloth, until the lady coughed and they drew back. Bored and fretful, she asked idly about their wounds and battles. They spoke of a place called Gettysburg and another, Vicksburg. I barely listened, seeing only plaid lines, my needle and the lift and fall of ruffles. The lady sighed. I worked faster. Such fine fabric, and so wondrous much of it. How delicious to touch this softness every day and shape it into gowns.

“Almost done, girl?”

Almost—just two edges of the patch to finish, the needle barely nipping the warp threads, blending into the greens and reds. I held my breath. Yes, the patch matched perfectly: plaid lines skimmed across the seam. The Virgin had blessed my fingers.

“Well God damn if that don’t just fix the flint,” exclaimed Rafferty, bending over the skirt, his breath warm on my ear. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but you can’t hardly see what she done.”

The lady studied the patched skirt and neatly tacked hem. “It will suffice, I’m sure. Here, girl, and I thank you.” She extracted a half dollar from her purse and held it out to me with as pretty a gesture as a queen might make.

I scrambled to my feet. “I need a job, ma’am. Can you speak for me to your dressmaker?”

The outstretched arm slowly lowered. “You want
me
to find you work? I took a risk, you understand, letting you do this. And fifty cents is more than generous for a patch, don’t you agree?”

“Yes, ma’am, but I need—”

“Here.” She fished in her purse again, reached for my hand, planted another quarter in it and stood. “There, that’s far more than my dressmaker would ask.” She turned on the heels of fine polished shoes and hurried off, leaving me with coins in one hand and a threaded needle in the other, staring at the disappearing plaid.

“Can’t blame the lady,” said Rafferty’s rough voice behind me. “It ain’t her funeral if we don’t have work.”

“They’re always wanting girls at the factories,” said the other soldier. “You’re cheaper than men.” The brick pathway curved away, swallowing the skirt’s last billow. The needle pricked my finger. Only that pain was real, that and the sinking certainty that tomorrow I would be packing sausages. Numbed and cut, my fingers would lose their skill. As mist rises from the valleys and thins into air, my dreams were fading. If the machines mauled me, who would ever know I had been Irma Vitale of Opi, so skilled with her needle?

Suddenly I was splashing through puddles, water filling my shoes, calling out: “Please, ma’am, stop!”

“I
paid
you,” the lady called over her shoulder, hurrying faster, heels clipping brick. “Stop chasing me!”

I circled in front, blocking her path like a sheepdog. “Please,” I panted. “I am looking for work two weeks. I embroider beautiful flowers. I do smocking and tucks. Could you speak to your dressmaker? Could you show her my work?” Rafferty was hobbling towards us.

The lady stepped back, eyes wide in terror. “You’re together? I knew it! Get away from me, both of you!” She turned on Rafferty. “My husband’s on the Pension Board. You come one step closer and you won’t get a penny for the rest of your life.”

“Nobody’s wanting to rob you, ma’am,” soothed Rafferty. “I swear I don’t know this lassie, but didn’t you say she fixed that frock good?”

“I paid her. Besides, you heard her talk. She’s a foreigner.”

“And where’s the crime in that? So were all of us, one time or another. I came from Ireland before Mr. Lincoln’s War.” Rafferty studied her face boldly. “And begging pardon, ma’am, you have the fine look of the Irish about you, if I’m not far mistaken.”

Her mouth softened. “My people were from County Cork,” she admitted finally.

“I knew it!” he cried. “None so handsome as the women of Cork. Nor so charitable, I’ve heard.”

Her eyes slid down my limp hair, damp dress and worn shoes and then up to the threaded needle in my hand. When I sighed she seemed startled, as if a photogravure had come to life. “You have worked—in this country?” she asked.

“Yes, in Cleveland I made collars. But I want to make fine dresses like yours.” Although Zia once said that one must never point to gentlewomen, I pointed to her dress. “See how the plaid matches, and the tucks here and here, piping on the seams and how the ruffles fall like water?” She looked down at the dress as if seeing it new and lightly touched a gather. When Rafferty cleared his throat, she waved him silent.

“I trust you’re honest, clean, sober.” I nodded. She looked at my face, frowning at the scar. “No running after sweethearts.”

“I have no sweetheart. I work hard, I send money home.”

“Well, my dressmaker
is
nearby,” she said finally. “Madame Hèléne. I don’t suppose you speak French?”

I shook my head.

“She just needs to work for the Frenchy, not talk to her,” Rafferty said, so close that his crutch brushed the swaying hem.

“Sir, I believe I can speak for myself.” The lady turned to me. “Your name?”

“Irma Vitale.”

“Very well, Irma. I’ll introduce you to Madame Hèléne. Only that, you understand.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“My name is Mrs. Clayburn. And now, if you’ll permit me, gentlemen.”

Rafferty stepped back and saluted. “Good luck, Irma. Do us proud—us
immigrants.
And ma’am,” he added, “a small token of gratitude for a soldier would be much appreciated.” Frowning, Mrs. Clayburn drew two quarters from a beaded purse. Rafferty saluted. “We shall toast the Union and your good health.” He called to his friend and they set out across the soggy grass toward a tavern at the edge of the park.

“Come along then, Irma,” Mrs. Clayburn said impatiently. So I rode in my first carriage. She did not speak as we rode and I studied her dress in the silence. “Stop here,” she called crisply. The driver jerked his horses to a halt and helped her from the carriage, letting me scramble down behind her.

We were in front of a small store with
MME. HèLéNE, DRESSMAKER
freshly painted on a hanging sign. I had been here before and seen the tiny doorpost
NO
. Now I stepped inside. Sunlight splashed the clean-swept floor. A slight woman with wide violet eyes and thick honey hair neatly pinned with tortoise combs hurried to greet us.

While Mrs. Clayburn explained what I had done, the dressmaker’s gaze dropped to the skirt. When her brow knit slightly, joy flushed my heart. Had she not seen the mend? Don’t smile, I warned myself. Do not offend her.

Dropping quickly to my knees, I found the patch and carefully lifted the fabric, explaining in Italian where I had taken the patch, what stitches I used and how I lined the patch along the plaid. Madame Hèléne knelt by me, smelling of lavender. White hands studied the patch as she asked questions in French that I answered in Italian, our languages feathering together. She ran a forefinger lightly over the rich folds. I knew what she meant: a fine English weave.

“Ahem,” said a voice above us. “I really must go.”

“Pardon,” said Madame, coming lightly to her feet. “We try—” she glanced at me.

“Irma Vitale,” I said.

“We try Irma Vitale today. Then we see. Yes?”

My heart bloomed. “Yes, Madame.
Oui
. Grazie.” Turning to thank Mrs. Clayburn, I wiped my eyes.

“Goodness gracious, girl, collect yourself. It’s only a day’s work, nothing to cry over. Just try to make the best of it.” She spoke briefly to Madame and was gone in a swish of plaid. When the door closed, Madame Hèléne waved me toward an oaken chair with a high curved back and seat cushion. Not even Opi’s mayor had cushioned chairs. She held out a starched linen smock and I put it on, scarcely breathing.

Chapter Eight
The Green Dress

“Simone!” called Madame Hélène.
A slight, round-shouldered girl some few years younger than I scuttled into the room, her bird-bright eyes peeking over an armload of gold and crimson satin strips which she set before me as one would lay out a treasure, patted them with a housemaid’s rosy chapped hand and silently stepped away.

With fluttering fingers and rapid French, Madame Hélène showed how the strips must be pinned and basted together. Simone would sew them on the machine and Madame would finish the seams, trimming one raw edge close, then tucking and stitching the other edge around it. Did I understand, she asked? Yes, I understood my task and something new about the very rich: even the seams of their clothing were finer than ours.

Simone returned with a thimble and a pair of scissors, not crane scissors like my stolen treasures, but as light and finely made as mine. Then she led me past neat arrays of tools adorning the shop: long-bladed shears for cutting bolts of cloth, each on its peg, baskets of tailor’s chalk, boxes of hooks and eyes, plump cushions stuck with pins, a set of pressing irons by a gleaming stove, big wool-wrapped egg shapes that served, I would learn, for pressing out curves, spools of thread on spindles like bright colored teeth and lengths of velvet ribbon. One long shelf was filled with button boxes: mother-of-pearl, coral, pewter, whalebone, brass, leather and polished wood. Madame Hélène followed my dazzled eyes and seemed pleased, but when a bell over the door rang and a gentlewoman entered the shop, Madame tapped her lips, pointed to my chair and turned away from me.

So I must be as silent, serviceable and unremarkable as the oak platform that the stout, grim woman mounted to have a mourning gown hemmed. As Madame soundlessly marked the lusterless black bombazine, the widow’s eyes brushed past me and flitted away. If someone asked her later, “Who else works at the shop?” she would not remember.

The sharp sting of a pinprick and bright bead of blood on my fingertip returned me to my task. Gentlewomen might ignore me, but at least I had my place at this table. Gradually the clop of horses, peddlers’ calls, shouting boys and clatter of carriages faded behind the pluck of our needles and I saw nothing but strips of satin and thought only of stitches. After the skirt panels, I was given a hem to finish. An aged gray cat lumbered across the room to curl up on a sheet of sunlight by the front window. Here was the peace of Opi.

My work was constantly inspected. Narrowed eyes meant “Do this part again.” A forefinger brushed across stitching meant “This can stay.” There was little praise, but none of the humiliation that spiked each day at the workhouse. Customers swept in and out for fittings, barely glancing at me, but Simone silently filled my water cup and in mid-afternoon brought a thick slice of crusty bread on a china plate. I prayed that this workday would last forever, but the cat’s sun spot slowly melted away and dark thread grew hard to see. I bent closer to my work. If Madame Hélène paid me now, her message would be clear: don’t come back tomorrow.

When the wall clock chimed half past six, Simone tapped my shoulder and announced, “It’s time to clean.” As she collected fabric scraps for the rag man, I swept the shop, my hands so slick with sweat that twice the broom fell clattering to the floor. Simone cleared her throat and Madame Hélène looked up. Her mouth sprouting pins, she chalked
8
on the table, then pointed from the clock to me and raised her eyebrows in a question. Yes, I said happily, I would be here at 8
A.M.
I floated back to the boardinghouse.

“So you have a job? How much does it pay? Did you even ask?” Molly demanded. I hadn’t. Molly shook her head. “Well, come on, there’s veal stew for dinner. It’s just you and me and Mrs. Gaveston. The other boarders work nights this week.” After dinner, when Mrs. Gaveston had gone to her rooms, Molly bustled me into the kitchen. “Now that you’re set, I’ll tell you my plan. I wasn’t wanting you to feel bad,” she announced, washing dishes so quickly they seemed to fly into the drying racks. “I’m saving every cent from old Gaveston. By September I’ll be making loans to greenhorns.”

“How?” Even if Molly was white and thus paid more than Lula; even if Mrs. Gaveston was less stingy than the Missus, how could a servant girl save enough to make loans?

“Not big loans like the banks, but lots of little ones, a dollar, two dollars. I charge interest and collect on payday. Bit by bit, the business grows. Besides,” Molly added vaguely, “I can do other services for Gaveston.” She showed me a calendar written on and erased until the paper was as soft as cotton. “Here I’m saving,” she flipped through the summer weeks, each with black figures scrawled in, sums for every month. “Here in September, I’m making loans.” She pointed to numbers in boxes, percentages added and sums slowly growing. “Clever, no?”

“Yes, clever.”

“Immigrants need furniture; most don’t bring more than their clothes from the Old Country,” Molly continued eagerly. She would pay Mrs. Gaveston to let her store old beds, tables and chairs in the basement and rent them out to families until they bought their own. “There’s money
everywhere
, Irma,” insisted Molly, her chapped hands waving over the parlor as if coins lay on the rag carpet, under end tables, inside the broken piano or stuffed behind worn horsehair cushions.

“What’s
your
plan, Irma?” Molly demanded. I tried to explain the marvelous intricacy of a gentlewoman’s gown: invisible seams and pleats straight as knife edges, smocking and gathers and ruffles falling like water. “What else?” Sending money to Opi was the other part of my plan, as was Zia being healed enough to visit me and stroll by the lake as sunset colors lit the water. If an American doctor could not heal her eyes, I would at least paint my new country for her with words. “And?” Molly persisted. And the plan of me in Opi with Father Anselmo admiring a stained-glass window that my dollars had bought for the church. I did not mention the plan of watching dolphins again with a sailor under a star-swept sky.

Molly sighed. “Irma, you’re such a peasant. Listen, if you help me get loans from Italians I’ll give you a percentage. In three years you could have a shop. Sooner if we’re partners.”

Closing my eyes, I saw ladies sweeping past a painted sign:
IRMA OF OPI, FINE DRESSMAKING.
“Good morning, Signora Irma,” they would say. Girls,
my
girls, would be working quietly as customers turned the pages of
Godey’s Lady’s Book
. “Could you make this?” they would ask and I would say yes, of course. We would consider velvets, silks, Swiss muslin, gossamer satin or piqué, choose bodices and bustle lines, the puff of sleeves, the curve of skirts, the depth of cuffs or the precise fall of a skirt draped over crinoline. I sighed. “I can’t have a shop yet, Molly. There’s too much I don’t know.”

“So you could help me. Go to the Italian Aid Society and ask who needs money. It’s easy.” For her perhaps. Not me. “You have some secret beau then, someone to work for you?” she asked, lifting a dark brow.

“How?” When I pointed at my scar, she snorted.

“You think
that
puts men off? Dress up and get some property behind your name and they’ll come drooling after you, believe me, Irma Vitale, hordes of men.”

“But—”

“Shush.” Molly tapped my head. “Think it over tonight.” But instead of drooling men I dreamed of green flowered and pleated fields, crossing velvet meadows swelling like bodices and wandering through valleys of tiny waists that bulged into bustles.

Saturday afternoon a neat stack of coins sat at my place. I paid Mrs. Gaveston and took the rest to an Italian bank near Polk Street. In time, Madame promised, when my pleats and piping came better, the stack would be higher. When I offered to embroider bodices with tendrils and flowers, she agreed, but had me understand that to turn flat cloth into a dress that made plain women captivating, to see a skirt billow as we had imagined it,
that
was the great skill, the thrilling victory. When we unfurled a fresh bolt of fabric across our cutting table, she skimmed her palm along the weave, eyes sparkling and a flush running up her neck. “
Imagine
, Irma,” she breathed. “What we make of this.”

I sewed constantly, by day for Madame and in the evenings embroidered handkerchiefs, table runners and antimacassars that Molly sold for me or I bartered with Mrs. Gaveston to prune my room and board. I thought of Gustavo, but could not write him without the address stolen in Cleveland, so I had only my dream of the night we talked.

Yet a peaceful calm curled through me that summer. I had work, a place to live and if there was nobody to share my free Sundays while Molly tended her “plans,” there were parks and markets to stroll through, a lake even grander than Erie, puppet shows, concerts and the friendly nods of immigrant families in the blocks around our boardinghouse.

At noon each day, Simone set a table in the back room with bread and cheese, sometimes bean potage, boiled and salted radishes, potatoes or onions cooked to a silky brown. We spoke of the day’s dresses, our French, Italian and English words woven into patterns that we all understood. One afternoon so rainy that fine women did not go out in carriages, Madame Hélène spoke of her life. She was setting a puffed sleeve as wide as a mutton leg for an opera gown. Flounces for the skirt flowed over my knees in falls of rosy satin. In a map of Europe that Father Anselmo once showed us, France was precisely that shade, a proud block edging the smooth Atlantic blue. “Where did you live before?” I asked.

Madame Hélène frowned at the sleeve, describing Alsace: a foggy place where men dug coal and women sorted rivers of black rock. Children crawled on their hands and knees through mine shafts, hitched like ponies to little wagons piled with coal.

“Hitched like ponies?” I repeated. Surely the truth had tangled in our languages.

“Children,” she insisted, holding out her hand to show how small: four or five years old. She bent over the sleeve, rocking.

“You worked in mines too?” I asked, when the rocking ceased.

“No, for the owner’s wife. First to clean and then to sew.” She bit off a thread.

“Why did you leave Alsace, Madame?”

“Too much death,” she said bitterly. As she trimmed the seam, a curl of satin snaked across her lap. Coal veins often collapsed, killing harnessed children. Men dragged the little bodies out, handed them to weeping women and were immediately sent back down again. Explosions killed miners deep in the earth and women were crushed when sorting bins tipped. Many died in bed, coughing blood. Pellagra ravaged villages.

Father Anselmo had told us how pellagra makes the skin scale and bleed. The stricken grow listless, weak and confused. Sunlight pains their eyes. Many turn delirious. Children starve when parents can’t work. Malaria curses both rich and poor, but pellagra eats only the poor.

“How did you leave?”

An uncle in Chicago sent money for his son’s passage, not knowing the boy had died in the mines. So Hélène went to America in his stead. Dumb with grief, the uncle helped her start a shop and then drifted north to Canada, where he hunted, trapped, and sometimes sent her furs. So he was the source of the fox, wolf and sable pelts she kept in a cedar chest. Ladies paid well for them, chiding Madame Hélène that she might easily be a furrier, but lately no furs had arrived. Perhaps the uncle was dead.

Madame Hélène never sent money to France. All her people were dead or in America. Four baby cousins died in the village the week she left, laid in shallow graves hacked from frozen earth. “More gathers at the bustle, Irma,” she said and then her mouth closed tight as a stitched seam.

Simone bent over her machine; its steady click-click filled the shop. Fixing the bustle, I imagined death bells in Hélène’s village and babes stiff in blankets. My needle stopped. Madame’s shop made no baptismal gowns, I realized with a start, not once since I had come, although we often made children’s clothes. Even Mrs. Richards, the banker’s wife and our best customer, was refused.

“I’m sorry,” Madame Hélène had told her. “There is no time.”

“Surely, you could manage. Just white satin with a little lace down the front. The girl could do it.” She pointed at me. Madame shook her head. “But I pay well and always on time.” This was true. Mrs. Richards wasn’t like some, who regularly “forgot” to get money from their husbands. “Fifteen dollars,” Mrs. Richards offered. “That’s extravagant.” It
was
extravagant for a yard of cloth and bits of lace. “So I must go to another dressmaker for this?” the lady taunted.

“Yes, you must,” Madame agreed.

The ivory brow furrowed. “You’ll lose business with this stubbornness.”

“Perhaps.”

Now I understood Madame, but who could explain to Mrs. Richards so many tiny bodies buried in their baptismal gowns? Could she hear the thuds of frozen earth? Hélène had eight brothers and sisters, Simone once told me, all dead before she left. Three in one spring. Watching Madame work, I thought of the old widows in Opi, whose black shawls seemed to grow into their flesh and were buried with the women to warm them in their graves. Madame wore her sorrow thus.

Madame Hélène turned to Simone and said, “Enough of these sad things. Get the rag bag. Jacob is coming today.”

Jacob the rag collector was a lame, whistling peddler who made the rounds of dress shops with a bulging pack on his back and bright rags stitched to his jacket in a fluttering rainbow. When roving boys snatched away a tatter, Jacob took his loss mildly. “Simone, perhaps you have a bit of something for my arm here?” he would ask. “It seems the ravens plucked me.” On Hélène’s orders, Simone often slipped longer lengths of cloth into the bag, which Jacob sold to a man he called the Ragmaster. “You are righteous women,” he often said. “May the God of Israel bless you.” On rainy days when we had no customers, he sometimes sorted his scraps in a corner of our shop. “Blue for the Greeks, red for the Poles, green for the Slovaks,” he’d chant. “I know my chickens.” He brought us little gifts: flowers twisted from bright bits of paper, prune pastries his sisters made or odd pebbles he found in his travels. When he appeared with a bag of mother-of-pearl buttons he’d gleaned in trade, Madame paid him well, even adding two velvet ribbons for his sisters.