When We Were Strangers (24 page)

How could she speak so calmly? But I walked to the table, picked up the chair and carried it to the bedside, stepping over the fallen belt. My legs were stiff as sticks.

“Thank you,” she said, sinking into the chair. “Irma, I’m not a priest. I don’t ask that you forgive what he did, certainly not excuse it, but
the man
must be attended. That’s why we’re here. It’s our work now.” She turned to me, taking my hot hand in her cool white ones. “Listen. Pulling a pea from a child’s ear, that was easy. And for the rest, you study anatomy and symptoms, you learn treatments. It gets easier, you get more sure. Even amputations get easier. It’s all here,” she touched her head. “But doing this,” she pointed to the twitching man, “tending someone who did wrong, and to you, that’s the hard part. It may be too hard.”

I stared at a bit of trampled ribbon on the worn wooden floor.

“I know that he raped you and probably others as well. I also know that sugar may revive him a little, but soon he’ll be in coma.” Sofia touched the long, naked feet. So clean. Had Daisy washed them? “They’re cool already. Irma, believe me,
this
is not the man who hurt you. This is a dying man. But you’re right, perhaps he deserves it.”

I forced myself to watch the heaving, bony chest. So many times I had wished on him the pain and mortal fear he caused me, at least bitter remorse and shame for what he’d done. The pale eyes opened and closed. The body heaved. What were his thoughts now, in the hour of his death?

The calm voice continued. “Irma, will you stay at least until Daisy returns? Then I can tend the others.”

“Yes,” I whispered, “I’ll stay.”

“Good then.” Sofia stood up slowly, pressed my shoulder. “Have her give him the sugar. I’ll be back.” She left us together, closing the door quietly behind her. Terrible breathing filled the room. A rat gnawed inside a wall and the bony blond head turned briefly toward the sound. I stared out the window into the gathering dusk until Daisy came panting in with a sack of penny candy.

“See if he’ll take one,” I told her. My voice seemed flat and strange.

The eyes flicked open and glazed blue fixed on me for an instant and then drifted off. The eyes closed again and the heavy head flopped toward Daisy. She pressed a cherry candy between dry lips. “Here, Jake. It’ll make you better, the lady doctor says so.”

“Huh,” he muttered. A long pause and then again, “Huh.” The wet red drop crested, peaked and fell on the thin pillow. The head lurched toward me and a word puffed out: “Who?”

“She came with the doctor. Rest now, Jake. You’ll feel better soon.” The eyes closed and the face sagged as if these few sounds had wasted him. He seemed smaller now. Daisy turned to me. “I’ll straighten up a bit, miss. I’m sorry, but with him sick, I let things go.” She took the belt from the floor, laid it carefully across the chesterfield and righted a penny print of dairymaids on the wall.

“Never mind that now, Daisy. You just sit with him.” I took a dingy washcloth from its nail and rinsed it in the water bucket. “Here, wipe his brow with this.” The breath came wet and rasping, paused and rasped again. The blotches were fading, leaving the long arms tinged with gray. I walked up to the dust-caked window that looked over ruffled domes of sycamores, silhouetted now against the sky. Behind me I heard Daisy’s steady “There, there now, Jake” and the slosh of her rag in water. I longed for Sofia’s light step to release me from this room with its stink of sickness and wide hands too close to mine, but the thin plank door barely muffled the other tenants shouting that their case was worse, far worse than their neighbors’ and Sofia must see them next.

“Miss?” Daisy whispered. “He’s sleeping now. I want you to know that it’s true what they say about us out there, how Jake sends me to the streets for work. I’m not a lady like you. Jake wasn’t always decent. He’d pick fights, drink too much and stay out late, but he always came back to me. We had our good times,” she insisted. “You believe me, don’t you?”

“Yes, I believe you.” Would she believe that her Jake dragged girls into empty houses, gagged and raped them? How could she, and still sit by his bed?

She wiped the wide forehead gently, then the gaunt face and neck. “He was such a handsome man. All the girls looked at him when we went walking. They were jealous, you know?” I said nothing, which she took for assent. “Nobody but Jake ever paid me any mind. Because I’m a hunchback. See?” She lifted the shawl to show a bulge between the shoulders, high as a hand.

“A little, yes.” There would be constant pain, Sofia had once commented when a barkeeper showed us such a hump. No spine can be so bent and not have pain. I found an empty wooden crate and sat beside Daisy. She studied my face.

“You have a scar, miss,” she said.

“Yes. From the ship coming over.”

She nodded. “So you know. Most men won’t want a girl that’s not perfect when there’s plenty that are. So the ones that do want us usually aren’t so perfect either. Maybe not on the outside, but on the inside, see, so girls like us make them feel better. Anyway, that’s what I think.”

My cheek burned. What was Gustavo’s imperfection, then, that had him seek me out?

“Look at Jake!” Daisy cried. I followed her finger and yes, in this little time his flesh had changed again. It was grayish now, with a faint blue tinge around the mouth. Daisy smoothed the slick blond curls. “He won’t be getting better, will he?”

“No, Daisy, he won’t.”

“And it won’t be long now?”

“No, not long.”

“At least he’s not hurting, is he?”

I looked at the slack jaw. “No, I don’t think so.”

“I’m not calling any preacher man. Jake didn’t hold with any kind of God talk.” She sat straighter. “It’s true what they said,” she jutted her chin towards the stairwell. “We aren’t married.” Her voice rose. “But we were going to, soon. And he was going to get a job from a friend with the police in Indiana. He always wanted to be a copper, the kind on horseback. Jake loved horses.”

Now whoa there while I mount you
,
filly bitch
. I gripped the crate.

Daisy looked over in alarm. “Miss, what’s wrong? You want some water?” She pointed to the water bucket and dirty bobbing cup. “Fresh from the well this morning.” I shook my head, although my throat felt dry as ash.

The dying man’s face smoothed as the white hands curled upward like a sleeping child’s. Think of him this way, only this way. “Where is his family, Daisy?” I managed.

She shook her head. “Jake never talked about them.” As twilight came, mothers up and down the street began calling their children home. “I come from a farm near Perth Amboy in New Jersey. We kept dairy cows. And you, miss, where are you from?”

“A little town in Italy called Opi. We kept sheep.”

She smiled. “Was it nice there?”

“I liked it.”

“I liked Perth Amboy too, but—I had to leave.” She stroked the waxy brow. “Miss, do you think Jake can hear me, if I talk real close in his ear?”

“I think so, Daisy.”

“Well then, can I say good-bye? He was good to me mostly, whatever they say, and I tried to take care of him like a wife. Do you mind?”

I stood up. “No, I don’t mind.” At the door I asked, “Will you go to Indiana—afterwards?”

She looked around the shabby flat. “Maybe. I got no reason to stay here. Thank you for asking, and for trying to help Jake and thank the doctor lady too. God bless both of you.” I held out my hand, but then hugged her, stretching my arms around the ridged back.

Sofia met me in the stairway. She looked tired and let me carry her bag. “Gone?” she asked, nodding at the door.

“Not yet.” It was full dark on the hushed street.

“Was he conscious?”

“Once, for a minute.”

“Did he know you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Just as well. Irma, I know it was hard. But you stayed and I’m proud of you. Very proud.” She slipped her arm in mine and leaned slightly against me as we walked a block in silence. A warm breeze ruffled our skirts. We talked of the night’s cases, a new anatomy book and a clinic like hers that had just opened in San Francisco, the Pacific Dispensary. She wanted to show me a letter from its director. I listened vaguely, still hearing Daisy’s voice and Jake’s rasping breath. Yet the long walk was peaceful and the pain in my chest released a little, like a tight corset loosened. At her door, I gave Sofia her bag. “Jake did do one good thing,” she said. “He brought you to me and I’m grateful for that.” She laid a cool hand along my cheek. “Buona notte, Irma.”

“Buona notte, Sofia.” I roused Enrico and he walked me home in the muggy night.

Chapter Twelve
Mr. John Muir

That Friday, Vittorio met me at Sofia’s door.
“She won’t be here this evening. She’s with her sister,” he said, staring over my shoulder at boys kicking a rag bag up and down the street.

“What sister?” I demanded. “She only had the one who died in childbirth.”

“A half sister then. Let’s get ready. We’ll be running the clinic ourselves this time.”

“How? Vittorio, that’s impossible. Sofia checks all our work, even bandaging.”

“We’ll do it ourselves,” he repeated, and then more warmly: “Besides, Irma, you know more than you think. For catarrh with coughing, what do we give?”

“Iodide of potassium, but—”

“For diarrhea?”

“Salts and castor oil.”

“If it persists?”

“Laudanum.”

“There, you see?” Vittorio said, hurrying me back to the office. “Serious cases we’ll send to the hospital. Where they should all go anyway,” he muttered. He kept his back to me as he dealt out instruments, powders, pills, ointments and bandages. I scrubbed the examining table and set out chairs. To every question and objection, Vittorio stolidly insisted: “Sofia wanted this.”

But nothing made sense, neither Vittorio’s brusque firmness nor Sofia’s sudden absence. She had never spoken of a half sister and said nothing on Monday of a guest on Friday. Even if this half sister had come, couldn’t she help at the clinic, or watch at least?

At least it began as an easy night. A mother brought two children with head lice. I hurried her out the door with instructions to rinse their hair with kerosene, wrap their heads in cloth and comb out the lice at night. We had a wracking chorus of coughers, whom I dosed as usual. Dyspepsia we treated with subnitrate of bismuth. Following Sofia’s notes, I gave the bricklayer with rheumatism a tincture of aconite. For babes limp and listless from diarrhea, I used our familiar cures. But we could think of no relief for a young Irish sausage stuffer whose right arm had suddenly become paralyzed, nor for a Serbian boy rolled in a knot who howled when we tried to straighten his legs. There was an Irishman who twitched uncontrollably and an old woman who insisted that something heavy was growing in her belly. We sent those last four to the hospital and I began to clean the room.

“Will Sofia be here tomorrow?” I asked, but Vittorio had gone to answer a light knock at the door.

He came back muttering in Italian: “It’s some hunchbacked American for you. Be as quick as you can and tell me when she’s gone.” He waved Daisy impatiently into the office.

She was clean and modestly dressed, hair brushed smooth and face unpainted. The calico dress bulged at the ridge of her hump, but she walked in proudly and set two silver dollars on the table. “For the house call,” she said.

Vittorio recorded her payment and left us. Daisy sat down, hands folded neatly as a schoolgirl, but looked around curiously. “Where’s the doctor lady?”

“She couldn’t come tonight.”

Daisy nodded. “Jake didn’t last long after you left.”

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded. “Well, at least he died easy, and maybe he heard what I told him. Anyway, I stopped the clock and covered the mirror, you know, so the spirit don’t see itself. And then I sent for the doctors’ men.”

I started. “What doctors’ men?”

Daisy’s brown eyes widened. “You don’t know about them, miss? The ones who buy bodies from poor folk, so doctors can cut them up to see what we look like inside. They said that because Jake wasn’t old or gunshot or consumptive and since he was, you know, fresh, they’d give me twenty dollars silver. They were dressed all respectable, like regular undertakers with a good black cloth to cover him, so the neighbors wouldn’t talk. They took him out feet first, like for any funeral. You don’t have doctors’ men in your country, miss?” I shook my head. “Well, funerals cost here, you know, and like I said, Jake didn’t hold with churches or wasting good money on dead folks. He would have done the same if it was me that went first.”

I nodded, stunned. So in America the dead might be stripped naked, sliced, pulled apart and talked over? In Opi, we buried even drunkards and thieves. No one probed their bowels or peeled back the ribs. But what a fool I’d been not to trace the fine drawings in Sofia’s books back to bodies of the poor acquired by “doctors’ men.” How else could we learn? Still, to have strangers cut open your chest, releasing the soul. “
What
soul?” Molly would ask. “It’s better than he deserves.”

“Miss,” Daisy was saying. “I want you to have this.” She set a man’s pocket watch on the table. I remembered it pressed against me. “It keeps good time, but you can sell it if you want. See, real gold plate. Feel how heavy.”

I didn’t touch it. “Daisy, you paid for the visit. And you might want that to—to remember him.”

“No, miss, you heard how the others talked, but you treated me right. And I don’t need money now. With what the doctors’ men gave me, I’ll be fine. I’m not going to Indiana. My cousins in Michigan have a dairy farm. I used to like making cheese at home so I telegraphed and they said to come. I’m tired of city people anyhow, staring at my hump and calling me names.” She pushed the watch away. “I don’t need one of those now anyway. On a farm you just follow the cows. Well, miss, I have to pack. I’m leaving on the morning train.” She stood up.

I walked Daisy to the door and came back to finish cleaning, leaving the watch untouched. Vittorio returned and cleared his throat. “Irma,” he began.

“Yes?” I was wiping tongue depressors with cotton soaked in alcohol, my back to him. “There’s a watch on the table,” I said. “Will you give it to Enrico?”

“It’s from the hunchback?” Vittorio asked, his voice high and strained.

“From Daisy, yes.” When I turned and saw his face, a depressor clattered from my hand. “What’s wrong? It’s about Sofia. What happened?”

“Her pains came back this morning and this time they didn’t pass.”

“What?” Silence. “Vittorio,
what
pains?”

“She didn’t tell you she had angina pectoris?” I shook my head. “She took digitalis, but as you know, it doesn’t cure the heart.”

“Angina,” I repeated. Angina pectoris, from Latin: a strangling in the chest. Sofia strangled? Not possible, no. “She’s in a hospital then? Which one? I want to see her.” I groped for my bag and hat.

“Irma, it’s too late. She’s gone.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, Irma, but Sofia died this afternoon, just a little before you came.”

I sank in the chair. Death never came like this in my life, without warning, as a swooping hawk plucks a mouse from the grass. How could Sofia be dead if here were her tools, her chair, her books, her tongue depressor, her stethoscope? I squeezed the rubber tube. “Monday she was fine,” I insisted. “We walked to the South Side and climbed five floors. She told me about the Pacific Dispensary. She wanted to show me a letter.” There: I couldn’t have invented this fact. “She wasn’t sick. Just tired.”

Vittorio took my hand. So she
was
dead. Breathing hurt, as if my own heart were strangled. “Enrico could have come to the shop for me.”

He shook his head. “She didn’t want that. She was so proud of you on Monday, whatever it was that you did, and she wanted that night to be how you remembered her, not how she was today.”

Cold ran up my legs. “
How
was she today?”

Vittorio pressed his palm into the scrubbed table. “I was in the shop and she was working here, mixing compounds, and about ten this morning, Enrico shouted for me. I ran back and found her on the floor holding her arm. Her face was white.” Cats screamed outside in the alley. My fingers closed around her stethoscope. “I knew it was bad this time. Claudia and I brought her to bed. The first attack passed, then another came and she asked for a priest and had me get this from her desk.” Vittorio took a neatly folded page from his jacket pocket, opened and read it: “To Irma Vitale, my stethoscope, record book, whatever medical texts she chooses and the proceeds of this week. The remainder of my instruments may be given to Mercy Hospital.” He showed me her accounts ledger and my eyes crawled down the neat lists: the dilator was paid for and our last shipment of clamps. Tuesday she had done a breech birth and on Wednesday an abortion, both in fine houses on Lake Shore. Vittorio handed me
The Midwife’s Practical Directory.
“There’s seventy-five dollars inside for you.” I closed the book.

Memories of Sofia rushed over me like a battering wave: my abortion, our walking home afterward talking about the clinic, Sofia teaching me how to stitch skin and bandage wounds. Sofia listening to the sick with her head slightly cocked, and how on the hottest nights she would run,
run
upstairs after a frightened child whose father had collapsed in the kitchen.

“When did you know she was sick?” I asked.

“This spring, just before you first came here. I was bringing her a bottle of carbolic and saw her slumped over. She didn’t say anything, but the next day when I asked if we needed more digitalis she said yes. She was so sly. We’d be talking, she’d cough, put a handkerchief to her face and you never saw her take a pill. In May she stopped hiding it from me and I made her see a doctor at Mercy Hospital. He said there was nothing to do. We can set a broken arm, but you can’t go into the heart and fix it. I know how you cared for her. And she knew as well. You were like a daughter to her, that was one of the last things she said.”

Tears poured down my face. Vittorio pushed a length of bandage gauze across the table and sat patiently as I held it to my face and wept for Sofia, for my mother and Zia Carmela, for all who cared for me and now were gone. “Why didn’t she tell me she was sick?” I stammered. “I could have—”

“Done what, Irma?” He took my hand. “I told you, there’s no cure. Digitalis doesn’t work forever. The first time I met you, when you came for a restorative, something told me you were sent here for Sofia. And you helped her heal more people. That’s all she wanted.”

No, it was she who helped me, who made from my worn cloth a new Irma. And what of the children watching for us from windows, the men who carried their comrades in from work, the parents who thrust babes in our arms and the women who needed us? “Who’ll run the clinic now, Vittorio?” I demanded, my voice shrill in the little room.

Vittorio excused himself and came back with two glasses of wine. “Drink, Irma, and listen to me. You know we can’t take her place. I helped her when I could, but I’m just a druggist. I don’t have a mission, like Sofia did. I have a wife and rent to pay. You’re a very clever girl, but you’re—”

“A dressmaker.”

“Yes. Exactly. So the sick must go to the hospitals.”

“But the hospitals are crowded and filthy. They don’t want immigrants. They don’t have interpreters. They don’t explain anything.” I stopped. Vittorio was calmly drinking his wine.

“Irma, if the sick go to the hospitals and fill the beds, if the priests and the rabbis and the pastors and the newspapers cry out, things will change. Slowly, but they will. You know we can’t heal the city. You saw how hard Sofia worked and it cost her health. We did a fine thing. I was proud to be part of it and you should be too. We helped many people. But the clinic is finished now. My cousin and his family are coming from Genoa to live with us. I have to help them.”

I slumped in the chair. With Sofia gone and the sick untended, my dream of a shop for fine ladies seemed a hollow, foolish thing. I felt hollow myself, as if I’d rattle when I walked.

Vittorio filled my glass again. “When Enrico brings you Sofia’s papers, read them. Perhaps there’s an answer there. Not for Chicago, but for you.” Just then Claudia appeared. “Finished?” he asked.

“Yes. She’s in the purple. Angelina helped.”

So they had washed and dressed her as Opi women had washed and dressed my mother. This much was a comfort. The doctors’ men would not take Sofia. I explained what Daisy had said, how the poor sold their bodies for cutting. Claudia’s face darkened. “There’s
nothing
Protestants won’t do for money.”

“Never mind that,” said Vittorio. “Sofia will have a proper funeral.”

“You’ll see, half of Chicago will come tomorrow. And half of
them
,
”
Claudia added bitterly, “never paid her. But when they come, they see how we care for our dead.”

“Where is she?” I interrupted.

“We’ll show you.”

I sent Enrico to tell Molly what happened so she wouldn’t worry when I didn’t come home, for I would sit with Sofia all night. Vittorio and Claudia brought me to the parlor where she was laid out. Her hands crossed over her failed heart were so still. Of course. And yet—
so
pale and
so
still, with her wiry curls smoothed as they never were in life. Rouge brightened her long cheeks. Alive, she had worn no rouge. They had dressed her in a dark purple silk, elegant and severe. Touching her side, I felt a whalebone corset. Didn’t they know she hated corsets? Who in a corset could run upstairs, lift children onto tables or work for hours in a steaming room?

Claudia whispered. “Doesn’t she look like a gentlewoman?” I nodded. “She was good to the poor, but there
is
a limit, you know.” Claudia brought me a chair and pillow, a shawl and a stool for my feet, but in her clucking care I read that if Sofia had lived, Claudia would soon enough have pried Vittorio from the clinic and kept him close at home. She brought me some chamomile tea and a little plate of biscotti and left us alone.