When We Were Strangers (27 page)

Chapter Fourteen
In the Dispensary

The storm weakened and snow patches shrank
as we neared Sacramento. After days of fried steak and old potatoes, we dove into the apples, oranges, and huge purple grapes that farmers sold at the stations, ravenous for the color, sweetness and juicy crispness of fresh foods. “California!” cried Molly, lofting a gleaming orange. “Where gold grows on trees.” If only Zia could have seen this land.

We reached San Francisco on a clear bright day in November 1883. Flecks of foam sprinkled the blue bay and soft hills surrounded us like waves of green velvet. The city’s gaudy bustle thrilled us both, but
Scribner’s
hadn’t mentioned the dizzying prices out on America’s rim. The rich reaped boundless profits from mining, timber, hides and shipping. But how did the poor live here? In the hulks of rotting ships moored in the bay, men and even women rented berths for the night. The Italian blocks of North Beach were clogged with newcomers from Genoa and Calabria. We found no boardinghouses that were hiring and not even any decent rooms to rent.

I suggested we spend our first night on the ships, but Molly refused: “I didn’t come so far to sleep with drunks and sailors.” We rested on Market Street, sharing a loaf of soured bread that the baker swore was the finest in the world and in any case was all he had. “We only need
one room
,” Molly repeated. “One room in a decent boardinghouse where I can work and do my business and the landlady won’t notice that I’m buying her out. That shouldn’t be hard to find, if it wasn’t for these hills,” she said, panting. “I hope you’re liking them, Irma Vitale,” she said, grasping my arm on a steep ascent. “Because they can go to the devil for all of me.”

At last we found a boardinghouse near Van Ness Avenue, roughly made and still unpainted. Room and board cost twice what I paid in Chicago, but the Irish widow who owned it needed a girl to cook and clean, and agreed that if I helped in the evenings, she’d charge me two dollars less each week. By the third day Mrs. Sullivan wondered aloud how she had survived without Molly’s skillful economies and two-handed cleaning. She even paid me to make new curtains for the parlor, but refused Molly’s suggestion to buy the adjoining house and expand the dining room to serve more men. “If the lady’s got no gumption, why not stay home in Donegal?” Molly grumbled.

Yet by the end of the first week she had gained one more concession: Mrs. Sullivan let Molly rent space to store furniture she could sell to newcomers. The linens Molly brought from Chicago fetched such high prices that they nearly paid her passage west. “Now I start saving for a boardinghouse,” she said, buying a fresh calendar for her San Francisco plan.

My own plan proved more difficult. The morning after we came to San Francisco, I put on a clean, pressed dress. With letters from Vittorio and Doctor Windham and Sofia’s record book under my arm, I walked to the Pacific Dispensary on Taylor Street, confident I could present these letters, ask to enroll and certainly be admitted. I would fit as easily into the school as a sleeve sets into a well-cut bodice.

“May I speak with Dr. Bucknell?” I asked a servant who answered my knock, the first Chinaman I had ever seen. Gravely astonished that I had no appointment, he left me in an antechamber thick with potted palms and ferns and glided away on felt-soled slippers. He had offered no chair, so I stood, straining to unravel words wafting from a nearby classroom. I caught only “sepsis” and then “thrombosis” before clicking heels announced an elegant woman in a starched shirtwaist dress fastened with a line of brass buttons as small as nails. A sleek gray pompadour perched on her head.

“I am Mrs. Robbins,” she announced. “Dr. Bucknell’s assistant. The doctor is in Denver, but you may tell me your business with the dispensary.”

“My name is Irma Vitale. I’ve come to study nursing. I have—”

“Unfortunately, young lady, courses have already begun. You might apply for the next term. You have a high-school diploma, I presume.”

“No, madam, but I can read English.”

A thin eyebrow arched up. “Perhaps, then, you might have read our requirements and saved yourself the journey.”

“I thought—”

“Ah, but a good nurse does not ‘think,’ she knows.”

I had not felt so much a greenhorn since begging Mrs. Clayburn for work. “Here are two letters of recommendation and our clinic record book,” I persisted.

“In
Italian
,” Mrs. Robbins observed curtly, glancing at Sofia’s fine script. I reminded her of Sofia’s correspondence with Dr. Bucknell. “What other work can you do, miss?” she asked, her voice just barely edged with kindness.

“Fine dressmaking and embroidery.”

“Excellent. There is a great need for your kind in the city. You could go to high school in the evenings and get a diploma.”

“When may I speak with Dr. Bucknell?”

“Perhaps next week, or the week after,” said Mrs. Robbins. “And now if you’ll excuse me, Miss Vitale, my students require me.” She turned crisply and clicked away, the gray pompadour disappearing behind a high palm.

I went to the dispensary the next week and the next, but still Dr. Bucknell had not returned. On my third visit, Mrs. Robbins offered me a job scrubbing tables, washing bandages and tools, sweeping and cooking: servants’ work. But I would be carefully observed and perhaps judged worthy to enter the school “at some later date” without a high-school diploma. “Given your persistence, we
may
stretch a point,” she conceded. Yes, I told her, I would take the job.

On Market Street I bought a small notebook that fit in my apron pocket, two Dixon lead pencils and a small penknife to sharpen them. That way, I explained to Molly, I could copy every word on the blackboards before washing them, bits of lessons overheard, the names of tools and labeled bones of a skeleton dangling in the classroom. I bought a dictionary on Market Street and began translating Sofia’s records into English. When Dr. Bucknell returned, I would be ready.

Despite the long hours of those days, there were pleasures in San Francisco. On weekends Molly and I explored the city, drinking its beauty in gulps: the grand new houses on Nob Hill, gardens brimming with vivid bougainvillea, bright winter sunlight twinkling on late roses and elegant Spaniards on horseback. South and east of the city, fruit trees and vineyards fingered through the hills. We watched fog lift over the blue basin of San Francisco Bay, revealing lush green islands and took streetcars out to the wild ocean edge, which reminded Molly of Ireland but brought back the
Servia
for me. Gustavo’s face rose over the waves, I heard his voice in the steady breeze and felt the cool slickness of the whalebone he carved for me.

“There are plenty of sailors here,” Molly scoffed, “and you know where
they
go.” Yes, I had seen them hurrying off their ships and streaming into taverns, brothels, opium dens and gambling halls in the squalid blocks along the bay called the Barbary Coast. They caused little enough trouble in the rest of the city, she reminded me. “Everything they want is in Barbary. And supposing his ship did just happen to dock in San Francisco? What then, Irma? Would he even remember you?”

The next day, at the dispensary, folding strips of gauze into bandages for hours, I imagined Gustavo coming down the gangplank, dropping his sea bag and blinking in the sun. He would know me, even in my American clothes with a new-fashioned fringe of curls on my forehead. “Irma!” he would say. “How well you look. Why didn’t you answer my letter?” And I would explain that thieves had stolen my envelope with his address. “Never mind,” he would say, “let’s walk in the city.” And we would wander through Nob, Telegraph and Russian Hills and gaze across the windy strait at the rolling green of the Marin Headlands. I would smell the salt on his sea coat and we would walk at night by the water. He would be nothing like a Barbary sailor.

I decided to go to the port and see if, by wild chance, the
Servia
ever docked in San Francisco. Early the next morning, the port resounded with fishermen’s shouts, the banging of boats returning with the morning catch, seagulls cawing and barefoot boys clamoring for work. Italian women from North Beach swarmed the wharf, seeking broken crabs or scraps of fish to fashion into a poor man’s stew they called
cioppino
.

I found the harbormaster in a tiny office cramped with charts, maps and logbooks heaped in nets hung from the wall. A telegraph receiver commanded one clear island of space on his desk. He was a big man with a peg leg and shaggy mustache that mimed the tilt of his body.

He looked me up and down before answering my query. “The
Servia
,” he repeated, scratching his bristling hair. “The
Servia
, the
Servia
, yes, she docks here every year or so. Just sent word from Buenos Aires.” His eyes swept the office as if he might spy out news in the jungled heaps of paper. “You’re expecting a shipment?” His quizzical look said I was hardly a fine enough lady to be ordering goods by ship.

“I’m expecting—someone.”

“Ah, a sweetheart?” That strange American term:
sweetheart
. My sweet heart. Carlo would laugh and even Zia would ask if Americans ate each other’s hearts.

“A friend,” I said stiffly.

“Well then, let’s see when your
friend
might be coming.” He fished a logbook from the swinging net, discarded it for another, and ran his finger along closely written lines. “Telegraph transcripts,” he announced, shoving a pipe through brushy lips. “Some wire ahead, some don’t, some change course, like this one,” he jabbed a line, “headed here, then lit out to Australia. You’ve heard much about Australia, miss?” I shook my head impatiently. “Got those queer kangaroos, big as mules and jump like rabbits. Birds taller than a man. You have to wonder about their rats, no?”

“The
Servia
, sir.”

“I’m getting there, yes: the
Servia
out of New York, docked in Rio de Janeiro, then Buenos Aires, left three months ago to round the Cape of Good Hope, call in San Francisco and out to the Sandwich Islands.”

“When will she be here?”

“Ah, that we don’t know. Like I say, some ships change course. If sailors jump ship in Rio, the captain has to hire new ones. If the ship is damaged rounding the Cape, and a lot of them are, there’s repairs that take time. They may have to wait for supplies. I could keep an ear out for news, if you know what I mean.” I set a quarter on his desk. He didn’t move and I added another. Then he swept both into his pocket. “Fine, then, miss, come back in a fortnight. I may know something more about your—friend.”

I walked to the dispensary, heart thudding with joy, until Molly’s warning voice seeped into my head like smoke. Suppose Gustavo didn’t remember me? How many times had he stood on decks with peasant girls? Suppose on land he was indeed only another sailor, hungry for whores and rum? By lucky chance the next two weeks left little time for supposing.

Dr. Bucknell returned unexpectedly, greeted me kindly as I cleaned the laboratory and listened to grudging good reports of my work from Mrs. Robbins. The next day the doctor called me to her office, where a file of Sofia’s letters sat on her desk. “An excellent clinician. Largely self-taught but fine instincts. You were her assistant? Tell me about that.” I described our clinic and house visits, our infection controls and record keeping. Dr. Bucknell listened thoughtfully.

“So, you have an excellent start. With Mrs. Robbins’s good report, I believe we can make an exception and have you enroll next year without a high-school diploma. Please, sit down and have some tea,” she said kindly, but I didn’t sit.

“Dr. Bucknell, I would like to enroll
now.
I believe I am prepared.” I took a breath. “The bones of the cranium are the ethmoid, frontal, occipital, two parietals, sphenoid and two temporals. The axial skeleton is formed by the vertebral column of twenty-six bones and—”

Dr. Bucknell set down her teacup. “I see, an oral examination. Well then, let us proceed. The spine?” I named the bones of the spine, the pelvis and legs and described the primary digestive organs and structure of the heart. She had me fold a sling for a broken arm and give the symptoms for malaria. I explained why babies might be born blue and how to effect a dilation of the uterus. Nails dug my hand as I described Dr. Sim’s curette, but I relaxed when she asked about care of the stump after an amputation.

Dr. Bucknell returned to her tea. “My compliments, Miss Vitale. It seems we must find someone else to clean for us. I will tell Mrs. Robbins to expect you in the morning for lessons. Welcome to the Pacific Dispensary.”

I flew home to tell Molly. We celebrated that night in a tavern with separate rooms for ladies. In the morning I dove into my lessons, drunk with all I was learning.

Chapter Fifteen
The Straits

Rains swept in from the Pacific that season,
storm after storm. I splashed to school in men’s boots. The morning of the second week, thinking the harbormaster might have news of the
Servia
, I went to the port at dawn. The rain had paused to a misty drizzle and fishing boats returning brought a chorus of famished gulls. The harbormaster shouted over their cries. “The
Servia
? Yes, miss, I do have news. Come inside.”

Yes, like a simple fact. Gustavo might be coming.
Some
sailors must be good men, the same on land as they were at sea. The harbormaster shuffled papers, pulled at his mustache and cleared his throat. Another fishing boat docked and the gulls cawed wildly. “You have news of the
Servia
, sir?”

“Yes I do. Unfortunately, miss, she was lost in an ice storm off the Straits of Magellan, down at the hook of South America. It’s a devil’s own passage even in summer. A cargo ship out of Liverpool saw her go down.” His words tossed like gulls in my head.

“Saw her go down?”

“Sank, miss, destroyed. The cargo captain tried to approach but was driven back by high seas. He reported no survivors.”

“Weren’t there lifeboats?”

“She went too fast. Sometimes it’s like that, miss. No time at all.”

“But the
Servia
was a stout ship. Crossing from Naples we were three days in a storm.”

“Begging your pardon, but that was the
North
Atlantic. These waves,” he peered at the closely written report, “were sixty feet high. Yonder there, you see the
Rosa Marie?
That’s twice her mainmast.” I followed the line of his finger and gasped. “Any man thrown free would freeze in those waters or be pounded to death in one ‘Our Father.’ I’m sorry, miss. So it
was
your sweetheart on board?”

I didn’t answer, only thanked the harbormaster and left. No, Gustavo was not my sweetheart, hardly even a friend, only a hope, a sweetening of the heart, a dream dashed in rough waters. When Zia Carmela died, no one thought it strange to mourn her. But my past with Gustavo was as thin as voile, fragile as the drawings he sent me that I had so briefly. Mourning such a dream would surely be daft, as Americans said, but still I felt chill, despite the rising sun, shorn as a sheep in the springtime. I walked aimlessly in the port, passing sailors with their sea bags and a man meeting his family, just arrived on a passenger ship from the East Coast. The children leaped and chattered, bursting with stories of their sea adventures, the parents walking slowly together, arms entwined. How easily death could snatch one of these, even in their youth and strength, and how great their grief would be. Better to move alone and bear the chill. I made my way to the dispensary.

“Bad news from home?” Dr. Bucknell asked kindly at the start of our lesson.

How to explain the loss of what was never mine? “No,” I lied, “only a bit of indisposition.”

“Miss Miller, would you get some subnitrate of bismuth for Miss Vitale?” she asked Susanna, a round-faced young woman from Texas. Properly dosed, I took a seat behind a larger girl, where I might be less observed and tended.

We began the next lesson: washing and feeding the bedridden patient. Bent over my notebook, I imagined howling winds in the Straits of Magellan. Did Gustavo see that last wave arc over the
Servia’
s mast? Did he stare into the wild ocean’s mouth as Jonah gaped at the swallowing whale? Still limping, could he find purchase on ice-caked decks?

“Miss Vitale! We were speaking of bedsores.” Startled back to the room, I described how in Opi we sometimes put sheepskins under the very old to cheat the sores a little longer.

“An excellent folk practice,” commended Dr. Bucknell. “And now Miss McClaren—”

Hard as it was to lose Sofia, I had touched her still body and cool face and heard the mourners’ thanks and remembrances. If I ever went to Opi and spoke of Carlo, others I knew would remember him too. “Yes,” they might say, “remember how he went after that wolf? Remember his last fight with Gabriele at the tavern?” Someone might have seen him gathering wild herbs for our mother. My Carlo was Opi’s Carlo and if he was lost to me, he was lost to us all. Who could mourn Gustavo with me now? He was like a polished stone held in my pocket for so long that he seemed familiar. But what did I truly know of him? What little he shared of his life might have been just a story. Even the whalebone he might not have carved himself. Was he, as Molly often said, only my excuse to avoid risking stares or indifference at dances, my stubborn proof that the few good men were far away at sea?

The lesson over, I hurried away before Dr. Bucknell could ask about my indisposition and walked home dodging muddy water thrown up by wagons barreling through puddled streets. The collar girl’s litany hissed in my ears:
cut
,
sew
,
work.
What was left for me now?
Read
,
study
,
nurse the sick
. When the road heaved up, I bent into the driving rain, thinking of those who first climbed to Opi and claimed it as their own.

“Did the harbormaster know anything?” Molly asked after dinner.

“The
Servia
was lost in the Straits of Magellan.”

Molly stopped her washing. “Perhaps he was on another ship.”

“Perhaps.” But I couldn’t spend my life at the port waiting for ships. I would work, simply work as Sofia had done. Healing and the company of healers would be sufficient for my life. Sufficient and good, I repeated, drawing my blankets up against the cold wet of the night. It would be days before I slept in my bed again.