When We Were Strangers (23 page)

“I’m sorry, Jacob, but Sofia must—”

“I know. You and she must be healing the whole South Side.”

I harried Molly to find us a space for a larger clinic, but when I told her how little Sofia could pay in rent, she laughed. “You’re crazy, both of you.”

Sofia shrugged. “Someone has to help. When it rains, people waiting outside get wet. We need translators, chairs, supplies. I can’t pay for everything with abortions and midwifery.”

It seemed that I sat down only for sewing that summer. I learned to eat while walking, stopping at street vendors to buy food no one in Opi ate or imagined: apple dumplings, fried potato slices, doughy pretzels, salted peanuts in paper cones, taffy from penny candy stores, ginger snaps, corn still on the cob and St. Louis hot dogs. “
What happened to you
?” Zia Carmela would have demanded. “
Only animals eat standing up
.”

Perhaps my students were right. I
was
becoming American, but change came quickly in those years in Chicago. The land itself was changing: the city was squeezing up around the lake and pressing out into the rich black fields to the south. Day and night, immigrants poured out of the train station and lake ports. The city ground away our foreignness as we milled past one another in shops, parks and the clattering streets. In their first months, it was easy to pick out Swedes, Irish, Italians, Germans, Slovenians, Hungarians, Bulgarians and Russian Jews who clustered around Maxwell Street. But in the tenements, factory blocks and work crews swarming around the new buildings that sprouted everywhere, Old Country ways melted like fruit ice in summer.

The home songs remained. Hurrying through the streets, I heard strips of song in a dozen tongues, refrains torn to shreds by harness bells, street calls and steady rain of hammering. Under our breaths, we sang in dialect from our villages, dredging old wells of memory, but we sang alone. When Mrs. Gaveston hired a Sicilian carpenter, I understood nothing of his sweet, haunting lament and he had never heard my Opi songs.

Once that summer I saw two men catch each other’s tunes across a crowded streetcar. They were Bulgarian, someone said, as they pushed toward each other, heedless as lovers. “From my village—Brazigovo!” one of them shouted to us all in English as they beat each other on the back, weeping and scrambling off at the next stop, arm in arm. Women on the streetcar smoothed the folds of their skirts and men tugged at leather hand straps. Where were
our
people from
our
villages who knew
our
songs?

A letter came to me that summer saying that Assunta and my father had a baby girl they named Luisa. I sent a little money and asked for a photograph of the child. Yet even these photographs from home locked us helplessly in the past. If I ever saw Luisa, she would be long past her baby looks. So often at the boardinghouse I watched Mr. Janek, the telegraph clerk, fondle a photograph of his infant son back home until the tiny black eyes were worn to a gray smudge. Mr. Janek boasted that he would bring his wife and son to America, not in steerage, but
second class.
Not only that: by the time they came, he would have a house with a bathroom and yard of his own where his wife could grow roses. By then, I feared, the boy might be half grown.

Yet, week by week, more of my waking thoughts turned to the clinic and my house calls with Sofia. Even now, I remember the first babe I birthed on my own that summer, the first
grand mal
seizure I witnessed and a beautiful little Russian girl carried in limp by frantic parents. The heart raced and when Sofia pinched the child’s pale skin it pleated like an old woman’s.

“Dehydration,” she announced. “Probably from cholera, it’s bad in the Russian quarters, I hear. Irma, find a translator. She’ll need twenty-five laudanum drops every four hours, and as much sugar water as she’ll take. They must boil all the water she drinks and wash their own hands constantly.” The parents listened carefully to the translator, nodding and repeating her words.

Two weeks later, the child burst into our clinic, rosy and gleaming with two mushroom-shaped cakes, one for Sofia and one for me.

“Could your Sofia cure pellagra?” Madame Hélène asked wistfully as I shared my cake with her and Simone at lunch the next day.

“No. She says the poor suffer the most, but not everywhere or in every season. We don’t know where it comes from or why. There’s so much we don’t know: how to cure paralysis or blindness or weak hearts, how to stop consumption or cancer. Why some babies are born perfect and some are not.”

“Better not to worry about what you can’t know,” Simone announced, plucking cake crumbs from her apron.

“I know how to make a dress a lady asks for,” said Madame. “What I
don’t
know is if she’ll still like it at the fitting. What do you think, Irma? Will Mrs. Cooley like the russet? Irma, are you listening?”

“Excuse me, Madame. Which?”

“The russet walking dress with lined jacket. Will she like it? Remember the gray damask ball gown? She had us change the sleeves three times.”

“She’ll like the russet,” I said quickly. “Perhaps with ivory buttons.”

“Ivory? Hum. Where to get the best ones?” From Jacob, Simone thought. Madame said no, better Alfonso the Portuguese who had them straight from Africa. But I was thinking of how Sofia had given quinine to a Negro man with malarial chills who had come from New Orleans. We stood with his wife and son, dripping with sweat in the stifling room as the sick man moaned for blankets, shivering so hard that his cot rattled on the wooden floor and his teeth chattered like tiny hammers.

“Will they break?” the son asked anxiously. I tried to force a length of cloth into the man’s mouth, but he batted my hand away.

“Never mind the teeth. Give him this,” Sofia told the wife, handing her a small bottle of quinine. “But it’s all I have. You’ll have to buy more.” Quinine costs, she told me bitterly as we walked to the next patient, and so the poor with malaria would keep on dying. If there had been quinine in the village I had passed with Attilio, little Rosanna would not have watched her family die.

“Irma!” said Madame. “I asked if you’ll get buttons from the Portuguese.”

“Yes, Madame. Certainly.”

I went on Monday and bargained a good price. That evening I was working with Sofia, making calls in a shabby street north of Maxwell, when a brightly dressed, slightly hunchbacked young woman stopped us on a stairwell.

“My husband—” she began. The women snickered. “
My husband
,” she insisted, “he shakes and says he don’t see straight.”

“Because he’s corned, Daisy, what’s new about that? He’s corned blind,” a voice called out.

“Jake’s
not
drunk,” Daisy insisted. “He ain’t been out of the flat in three days. He drinks water all the time and still he says he’s dying of thirst. I’m so scared, lady. He’s never been like this.”

Sofia set down her bag and leaned back against the banister. “His breath?” she asked calmly. “Is it the same as before?” The women hanging on the stairways protested: one called us to her child’s wracking cough; a woman complained of a gnawing burn in the stomach. A carpenter’s wrist was broken; another’s limp was worse; there was a woman half starved from morning sickness and a baby that would not grow.

“His breath’s
always
the same,” said a lanky woman leaning over the railing. “Always stinks of whiskey.”

“I told you, Jake’s
not
drunk,” shouted Daisy. Her dark-rimmed eyes scanned the crowd up and down the stairwell. “He stopped all that. He took the Temperance Pledge last month.” She turned to Sofia. “His breath
is
changed. It smells like medicine something strange.”

“Let’s go, Irma,” said Sofia. With the women calling angrily after us, we followed Daisy up the dank stairway to a one-room flat on the fifth floor.

“Thank you, thank you, lady. He’s not so bad like they say.” Daisy pushed open a battered door and cried, “Jake, here’s the doctor lady.”

A tall man lay splayed facedown on a narrow cot, twitching, his face turned from us. Red splotches covered his arms and the skin on his back seemed loose, as if the flesh was melting away. Sweaty curls of sandy hair plastered his head like a wet lamb’s wool. A filthy cup bobbed in a water bucket on the floor.

Sofia stepped close to the man and gently took his wrist, feeling for pulse. “Has he lost weight recently?”

“Yes, he don’t eat, just drinks and drinks and excuse me, ma’am, pisses all the time. Then he stopped going to work. He said he’s afraid of these stairs. He don’t look it now, but he was a big, strong man before he started melting away.”

“Does he have pains anywhere?”

“No, not that he said. First I thought it was just laziness, but this morning he was got up to piss and just fell, right there on the floor. Like a baby, weak as a baby. I put him to bed and he’s gone worse and worse since then.”

“Why didn’t you get a doctor?”

“He wouldn’t let me. He said it wasn’t worth it. Then I heard a boy shouting that the Eye-talian doctor lady was coming and with Jake sleeping I figured I’d fetch you even if he yells at me again. But he’s not yelling no more. He just lays there twitching, just melting away.” She sobbed into her sleeve.

“Daisy, do you have anything sweet here, honey or sugar, penny candy?”

She looked up. “No, but I got some porridge and potatoes. Isn’t there medicine to fix him? I can pay. I got a little money”—she hesitated—“last night.”

“Right now, he needs sugar. See if the neighbors have some, or go to the corner store.” With a desperate glance back at the cot, Daisy took her shawl and fled. Waves of nickering laughter followed the clatter of her shoes down the stairs.

“It’s bad,” Sofia whispered wearily. “Irma, can you bring me a chair?”

There was one in the corner of the cluttered room heaped with clothes. I made space on a table stacked with crusted plates and sprouting potatoes and began moving the clothes there: cotton drawers and a chemise, a crushed bonnet and fringed shawl, a man’s vest and chesterfield coat. My outstretched hands froze over a pair of striped trousers, brown derby hat, and slung across them, a wide leather belt. The chesterfield, the sandy hair. The heavy belt buckle clanging on a charred floor. Pain. Blood. The glass shard in my hand. When I lay on the scrubbed oak table.

“And, Irma, look at the chamber pot,” Sofia called. “We need to check his urine.” The cot creaked. Sofia must be turning him over. I glanced at a chipped bowl pushed half under the foot of the bed but not at the man, at
him
.

“The bowl’s empty,” I said, my voice as dry as wood.

My hand closed around the belt until it dug into my palms. How many girls had he dragged into that house, his den? Rage filled my body top to toe, a flame of rage. I was strong. I could do it. If I was alone in the room for an instant, couldn’t I press that belt down on his neck, sick as he was, or better, bridle him? Couldn’t I stand over his cot and scream into the clammy white face: “Remember me! Remember what you did to me, your filly bitch!”

I looked over my shoulder. The man lay on his back now, brushy mustache pointing up, ragged on the shrunken face. Sofia was shaking the bony shoulders, calling, “Jake!” Can you hear me?” The man groaned, eyes closed. If he opened them, they would be pale blue, gleaming hot in the dingy room.

Sofia was leaning close to him.
Get back!
I wanted to cry out
. Don’t touch him.
I should leave, I knew, just leave the room, this building, this street, but my feet would not move.

“Irma, can you bring the chair?” Sofia asked impatiently. “And come smell his breath. Like alcohol but more fruity. His urine would taste sweet too, come.” But I stood at the table, eyes nailed to the lank body. Then I closed my eyes. Sofia’s breath was heavy then, I remember, and his was uneven. The room filled with heaving air. She sighed and began: “It’s diabetes mellitus that caused the thirst and the wasting as well. I’m sure of it. The urine test was described by Thomas Willis in the 1600s,” her teaching voice was saying. “It’s a sure sign of diabetic shock, which leads—Irma?”

“Sofia, I’m sorry. I can’t stay.”

She sighed. “I know. There’s someone sick in every flat. They all want—”

“I mean that’s the man who raped me. This is his belt. And those are his trousers behind me. He called me his—” My voice collapsed.

Sofia looked between us. “You’re sure it’s him?” I nodded. Then she saw the belt taut in my hands. Her eyes widened. “Irma, put that down. Drop it.”

“He had a knife. He said he’d cut my throat if I made a sound. He said—” In two steps she had closed the distance between us, blocking my view of the man. “Please, drop the belt. Let it go.” Perhaps I dropped it, for the clasp rang on the floor with a sickening jolt through my body. “Irma,” she said quietly, taking my empty hands. “If you say that it’s him I believe you. And I can imagine—it’s my work to imagine the pain that he caused you. But would it help, really, to hurt him now? Would that undo anything?” I closed my eyes.

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

“Irma, open your eyes and look at him.” The large hands had flopped toward the floor. Spittle ran from his mouth. He seemed to have shrunken, even in these last minutes. “For those who believe in judgment, he has been judged, he’s dying. Can you bring me that chair at least?”