Read Online Swimming in the Moon: A Novel by Pamela Schoenewaldt - Free Book Online

she said, “and I’ll watch. Just don’t sing.”
    I knew enough English now to ask Miss Miller after class if I could recite a Leopardi poem. Standing straight with my hands at my sides as Contessa Elisabetta taught me, I began “L’infinito”:
    Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle
    E questa siepe che da tanta parte
    Dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
    A gray-haired Italian in a tweed suit stopped to listen, his lips moving with mine. Speaking slowly, eyes closed, he translated for Miss Miller: “Always dear to me was this lonely knoll and these woods that here and there concealed the horizon from my sight.”
    “Thank you, Umberto,” she said. “But it’s rather melancholy, don’t you think? How about ‘The Village Blacksmith’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, our great American poet?”
    “Leopardi was very great.”
    “Of course, Lucia, but could you try the Longfellow?” She flashed the smile that had coaxed a room full of immigrants to their feet for Simon Says.
    “Yes, Miss Miller.”
    Beaming, she produced a small volume of Longfellow’s poetry. Umberto sat with me, carefully translating lines I repeated in English:
    Under a spreading chestnut tree
    The village smithy stands;
    The smith, a mighty man is he,
    With large and sinewy hands.
    “Listen, Lucia,” he whispered as Miss Miller watched Polish girls practicing a dance, “the Printz-Biederman Company gives a handsome book of English speeches to the newcomer with the best recitation. The Leopardi was lovely, but try for the prize.”
    I went home beating out lines to the thump of my shoes on slate sidewalk in the meter that Miss Miller favored: “Ta- dum , ta- dum , ta- dum .” That night I read to Irena as she worked, repeating new words and rereading lines to learn the string of sounds. If I spoke more slowly, we discovered, she could make buttons to my time. Irena worked and I recited, until with a broad smile she dropped the last of the day’s buttons in her “finished” sack, tied it with a cord, and held her hands over the gas lamp, rubbing them slowly and flexing her fingers against the cramping pain. I stood to go.
    “Lucia,” she said, “you stay a time here?” The countess in her sitting room could not have been more gracious in smoothing the bedsheets for me. We shared a little English now. Irena pointed on a calendar to when her brother Casimir would be coming, five months and thousands of buttons away. She brought out a Bible in Polish and opened it carefully to a page of handwritten names and dates. Using button backs, the words we shared, and much pointing between buttons and names, she assembled her family tree.
    “Here my parents.” She turned the buttons over. Dead, I understood. “Three sisters.” Dead. She mimed how they died: fever. “Two brothers. Poland.” Here was Casimir, the one she loved most, coming to Cleveland. She pointed to her ring finger. “Married, to Anna from our village.” I brought paper and a pencil from my room and with clever drawings she showed that Casimir was a fine butcher, Anna made delicious sausages, and they would both work in a cousin’s butcher shop. She could live with them and never make buttons again. “Look. Wedding present for Anna.” She showed me a richly embroidered jacket.
    “You made this?”
    She nodded shyly.
    “Beautiful. Anna will love it.”
    Irena beamed, but then she muttered something about the button dealer. With mimes and drawing, I gathered there were many girls doing home work who didn’t have her problems of cramps and back spasms. “I must trust in the Lord.” She pushed me a pile of buttons. “Now your family.”
    How to explain that a masked man had pushed my mother into seaweed and got her pregnant with me? Instead, I put down buttons for my great-grandfather Domenico, who sang for the church; for my mother’s father, whose work was unknown; and for my own imagined father, the artist Pietro D’Angelo, who fell from scaffolding to his