Mrs. Somebody Somebody Read online

  For Nino and Louisa Rigali

  Contents

  Mrs. Somebody Somebody

  Blue Tango

  Glass Box

  Gumbo Limbo

  Smoke

  Another Way to Make Cleopatra Cry

  Frankie Floats

  Copper Leaves Waving

  Cantogallo

  Luck Be a Lady

  Acknowledgments

  A Reader’s Guide

  Mrs. Somebody Somebody

  Hub Hosiery Mill, 1947

  LUCY MATTSEN WAS NOBODY—LIKE ALL THE WOMEN I WORKED WITH—until the day the baby fell out the window. It was break time at the mill. Us girls from Knitting leaned on the railing over the North Canal, airing out our armpits and sharing smokes. The baby was bare except for diapers. It fell like a bomb in the newsreels.

  Where we were, the mill wall ran straight down to the water like a brick cliff, with the baby’s apartment building doing the same on the other side. Lowell is like that with canals, one for every mill, dirty water running alongside the dirty streets, or under them. Nothing like those romantic canals in the posters for Holland, where flowers reflect in the water and there’s a blue-eyed man behind every boat wheel.

  Ever since lunch, a spring rain had fallen. Then a wind came up and the sun came out and glittered off the slate roofs on the neighboring blocks of company housing. That day Lowell looked good the way used-up brick towns can when the light’s right. In the sparkle, the cockeyed look of the old buildings—how the shutters had peeled and loosened and fallen away—wasn’t so noticeable. With everything shining, who cared if things didn’t line up quite right anymore. The wet bricks and slate gleamed so hard under the blue sky you could ignore the sad look of fences missing pickets—how nothing had been fixed up for years. Weather had polished the WPA walkway. Beyond our cigarette smoke, the air looked as clean as if the smokestacks along the Merrimack River had held their breath.

  We’d been talking about men. I was as man-crazy as a girl could be. I elbowed Katie O’Neill, the strapping redhead, and pointed at the maintenance man stacking wood pallets down in the side lot. “You like those knotty arms?”

  She wrinkled her nose and said, “He’s too short for my taste.”

  “You’ll like him better when he bends over.”

  She said, “Naw, I don’t care about his ass. I like men big. I got no use for the pretty little ones.” She jutted her pale elbow onto the railing and sank her chin into her hand—a dreamy boozer leaning on a bar. “I like to have to reach to get my arms around a man’s neck.”

  “They call that ‘dancing cheek to tie-clip.’” Lucy Mattsen, the new girl with the Southern accent, chimed in.

  I said, “Am I the only one who likes the shape of that fellow?” He tossed the pallets into a pile as if they weighed nothing more than playing cards.

  Lucy scrunched up her face. She didn’t have much going for her except her teeth, which were all hers and very white. She was a sad sack, but with a little makeup, I thought, she could have passed for pretty. She said, “He isn’t my type at all.”

  Katie O’Neill said to Lucy, “I’d say you like your men in wheelchairs.”

  Lucy’s face went red as meat. Mr. O’Connor, the floor boss, had her pushing him in his wheelchair between the bays of us knitters as if he couldn’t manage. Lucy was floor girl in Knitting, which is where you started if you were like me and didn’t have family at the mill to bring you in. She moved the trucks of bobbins along, hauled empty trucks to pick up the done jobs, and swept up the lint and clippings, which were everywhere, like the fur off some dark beast.

  Katie said, “O’Connor can roll his own self around. He’s got you thinking he’s a vet or something and needs help, but blood sugar took his legs.”

  I was a knitter in O’Connor’s room. He tried that stunt on every new girl, and Lucy was the very first to go for it without wanting special treatment in return. Wearing some cast-off brown sweater and lace-up shoes, she wheeled him and his ripe nose around the bays of that big room as if it was the least he could expect. She’d rest under the one working fan to cool herself. Her hair hung lopsided, bent up on one side, flat on the other—she slept on it wet, anyone could see. Someone said she was a nun who ran away.

  Lucy said, “I don’t like him, but I don’t mind giving him a hand.” Her words came out slow and round. She let a cigarette hang off her lower lip, trying to make her soft face look tough. She said, “Seems like if someone has no legs, no matter how he lost them, he could use a little help.” Then she asked, “Who’s got a light?”

  I couldn’t say as I knew any nuns who smoked. I pulled a pack of matches out of my apron pocket.

  That’s when we saw the baby. At first, it was like someone had thrown a whole chicken out the window on the other side of the canal. The body dropping there just couldn’t be a baby. The splash it made was strangely satisfying. Something had been finished, sewn up, and you could say, There, well, that’s done with. The window screen, which had twirled and twisted in the air, landed with a splash a little farther along. Next to me, Sophie Robicheau flung her hands up over her eyes. The baby bobbed up in the brown water, flailing, face down.

  That open window just sat there in the sparkling wet brick wall, gaping like a dumb mouth, while we waited for someone to come.

  Maria Sarzana—she was a mother—elbowed her way to the front of the platform and started to take off her apron. Maria’s got a bum foot. I looked in the water. Rubber pants floating, the pale baby in them, bottom up. It had an air bubble in its dydees.

  Until I saw Maria getting ready to go after him, it didn’t cross my mind that we could do anything. I couldn’t swim, but I said, “Maybe I should go.”

  Pulling at her shoe, Maria said, “Who are you fooling, Stella? You might break a nail.”

  Lucy’d already gotten over the railing by then. She hung on to it with one hand and ripped her shoes off with the other. She’d shed the sweater, and her arms—too thin and white—poked out of her work apron. Her big eyes found mine and didn’t let go as she handed me her shoes and stepped out into the air, all business. She held her nose. Her hair, which had been hanging like spaniel ears, flew up. Two stories she fell, feet first—her apron flapping up in her face. Who knew if it was deep enough. I held tight to her shoes.

  Katie O’Neill said, “Gaah,” and leaned over, looking.

  Lucy came out of the splash swimming as if she’d had lessons. My skin crawled with the idea of being in that water. She crossed the canal in six or seven strokes. We didn’t cheer when she got to the baby, because we couldn’t see if it was all right. She flipped it over and swam on her side, dragging it with the current, kicking like mad to keep it up.

  All of Packing & Shipping rushed out and crowded farther along the edge of the canal, so when she climbed out, we couldn’t see anything but the backs of a bunch of bent-over folks in aprons. No one made a sound—you could have heard a mouse piss on cotton. Lucy was doing something in the midst of them, on the ground. Since she’d jumped, each breath I’d breathed was one that the baby hadn’t taken. My arms got to feeling icy; goose bumps came up over them and went away again. I hung on to Lucy’s shoes. Sophie Robicheau began to sniffle and pray in French.

  The man who’d had my attention straightening pallets sauntered out from the side lot to see what was going on. In the end, we’d all know his name and wish we didn’t, but right then, standing by the others, he was just surprisingly short, not anything like what I’d thought.

  A murmur started out there by Packing & Shipping. Lucy Mattsen had saved that baby. She and his air-trapping rubber pants. Noe Hathaway, the head fixer, a little walnut of a man, came out of the crowd carrying the baby under his arm like a sp
orts trophy. The mill owner, Mr. William Burroughs, Jr., son of Hub Mills’ founder, put his jacket around Lucy and led her inside by the arm.

  In the doorway behind us, Mr. O’Connor clapped his hands, “That will be all, ladies.” He let his voice slide on “lay-dees,” so you’d do anything to shut him up.

  Knitting is no work for anyone who needs variety. I watched the mouth of my machine—with its needles going up and down, around and around, casting the tube of one more black sock—and thanked that baby for giving us something different to think about.

  Single girls like us lived in a rickety rooming house planted in the shadow of the mill, where now there’s nothing but a parking lot. Lucy Mattsen and I were two of a half dozen girls at the mill who didn’t live with their families. Our rooms lined up like stables along the upstairs hallways. The walls smelled like glue. You stayed there because you had to, or because, like me, you needed a stopgap. There was nothing homey about it: drab wallpaper, dented doors, and old iron beds.

  My dream was to marry a good-looking man with enough money to set me up in my own shop. I wanted to run a beauty parlor. I hadn’t come to Lowell to end up like Sophie Robicheau, slaving for the mill alongside her brothers and aunts and cousins, getting as used up as she was and no further ahead. The grandkids who brought her lunch every day would start in at the mill as soon as they were old enough to quit school. With her thinning hair and missing teeth, Sophie wasn’t the only one who looked like life had punched her in the gut. Danuta Bukowski. Mary Karatelis. Nikola Georgeoulis. Corinne Girardot. I could go on.

  Somehow, I’d had the wherewithal to get out of Granville, up in Vermont, where my father had been a quarry cutter. He spent his life in the belly of the hill, up to his knees in seep water, cutting Verde Antique marble, two- and four-ton blocks of it. Our house was smack up to a dirt road in front and the cliff of a spent quarry behind. I never knew my mother, and you’d think that all those years of keeping chickens and minding goats with no place to go but an outhouse would have got me ready for a life without niceties. Just the opposite. Soon as my father died, I quit my job at the wood paneling plant and headed for the city.

  How a quarry cutter’s daughter gets screwball ideas could be a whole other story. The happy accident—how my nose and eyes landed in a nice arrangement, how my lips came to be a fashionable shape—had a lot to do with it. People have always been pleased to look at my face and figure. Anywhere I’ve gotten, I’ve gotten because of my looks. But being a looker can make you think you might be something special. Let me tell you, you’re not. You may have the finest eyes in the world, long dark lashes, lovely shape and color, but it’s what those eyes see that counts. Mine were blind, blind.

  Glamour and LOOK magazine showed me better ways to live. I loved those glossy pages of beautiful women, all those brides who looked like they knew the secrets I would learn. I never doubted that I could be one of them. Not for a second. Those days the world was my mirror. Nothing but shiny surfaces to give me back myself. Wherever I looked, there I was.

  That night, when Lucy came for her shoes—“Stella? Stella, you home?”—I knew it was her by the accent. She was the only southerner at Hub Hosiery.

  I opened the door saying how brave she was to jump into the canal, but she would have none of it. She came on in and crossed the creaky floor like she was going out the window herself.

  “His daddy failed to apprehend that there’d been an accident.”

  To look at her, you wouldn’t think she’d know to use words like that. Her hair bent out from her head at odd angles, and her pants hung long. She said, “I’m going over there to see that baby’s all right.”

  She was barefooted and waving around a pair of the ugliest brown socks on earth. Her hands were more graceful than the rest of her, but she’d bitten the nails to the quick.

  I’d been gussying up a hat, sewing fake cherries onto it and about to add a little veil. I handed her sturdy browns to her.

  She said, “How could someone not notice his child is missing?” I didn’t remember her being so loud, but I didn’t smell liquor on her. “We’ll just see what’s what,” she pronounced. I had to run down the stairs to keep up with her.

  We crossed the WPA walkway over the canal, past Worsteds, where the air smelled toasted. We were lucky, working with cotton. The people who worked with wool shuffled through their mill gate at the end of a day, boiled and limp.

  I asked, “Where did you learn to swim like that?”

  “Back where I grew up.”

  “Where’s that?” I asked, trying to see her face in the dark.

  “Down South.”

  “Yes, but where?”

  “You ever been to the South?”

  “No.”

  “Then it won’t matter to you, will it?”

  On Suffolk Street, people sprawled on their stoops, enjoying the spring air. It was a quiet night. One lone kid skipped rope—clickety-swish, clickety-swish—in a circle of streetlight. You could feel in the air how tired everyone was.

  Lucy didn’t seem to notice. She clomped along next to me in those shoes. Even by streetlight, I could see her eyebrows were in need of a good shaping, but she had fine cheekbones.

  That afternoon with Lucy gone, folks in Knitting had talked about her. Katie O’Neill had said it must be true Lucy was a nun, what with her self-sacrifice and all. And hadn’t we seen the shoes she wore? Who but a nun?

  Teresa Bukowski said that was no kind of proof. She’d heard Lucy was a debutante. We all laughed at that one, but she said, “No kidding. How else are you going to explain those teeth?”

  Mr. O’Connor put an end to it all, saying, “She’s really the Queen of Sheba. Get back to work.”

  Lucy hadn’t told anyone her story. Marching down the street next to her, I asked, “How did you know what to do to make him breathe again?”

  “Learning to swim and do first aid was part of growing up in my daddy’s household.”

  “Why?”

  “There was a pool where we lived.”

  The only pool I knew was one at the Chelmsford Arms. But that was for paying guests of the hotel.

  She slowed down. “Let’s try this one.” She stepped into a vestibule that smelled of spices and rotting wood. By what little streetlight squeaked in, we looked for his name. Except she didn’t know his name, exactly. She said the baby was Greek.

  “That’s all you know? We’ll never find him.” I ran my finger down the line of names, many more than there were floors. Almost all Greek. “Birds of a feather.”

  She said, “I just need to know that baby’s really okay.” Her lips started to tremble. I tried to tell her she should feel good. She’d done her part for that kid. The air went out of her. Her back sagged, and just like that, she was crying.

  I wasn’t good with crying women. My stepmother never quit sniffling, and I got out of there young.

  Lucy sucked a ragged breath and blew her nose on a handkerchief she pulled out of her back pocket. I thought, if this were a man weeping, what would I do? Well, I’d find him a drink. She said she didn’t want one. So we moseyed back the way we’d come.

  The mill, with its windows lit, reflected in the smooth water of the canal like something grand in the movies, like a place Hollywood could feel nostalgic about.

  As we walked, she said, “It isn’t right for me to blame the baby’s father. I know just the kind of tired he was. He’s probably afraid he’ll lose his job if he says no to unpaid overtime. He works whatever he’s told to work, which is too much, probably night shifts, and then when it’s his turn to watch the baby, he can’t keep his eyes open.” She used her hands. “The boy’s next to him on the bed, and the window’s open because the man can’t afford a fan, and the baby is a bright little thing and wants to look out at the world. So he crawls across the bed and stands up. All he wants is to look out, just to get a gander at the life around him. He leans on the screen and that’s all it takes.” She stopped in the middle of the block
and turned toward me. On that side of the street, everything but our boardinghouse was dark, and I couldn’t see her well. “Since when is curiosity a luxury?” she asked.

  It seemed to me that we didn’t have it any better than the baby’s father, or any worse. Millwork was millwork. “What can you do about it?” I said.

  She opened our squeaky boardinghouse door and held it for me. “That’s what I keep asking myself.”

  We parted at the top of the staircase, but afterward, I looked around my room—at the peeling paint of the wainscoting, the path worn in the old floor from the bed to the door, and the bed to the corner sink, and I thought, everything that happened in mill life had happened before, and would maybe happen again, with or without someone like Lucy trying to make it right.

  For a long while I didn’t pay much attention to Lucy for the simple reason that she wasn’t a man. I didn’t have girl friends, really. All of my waking thoughts went toward my next date. In those days, I had my sights on Bucky Thompson.

  Bucky was one of those sandy-haired people who can’t sit still for more than a minute because his energy fizzed up somewhere, in tapping fingers or a shifty seat. Bucky said he couldn’t always go out, because he had his old mother to care for. We liked to double date with his buddy Pete Jenks.

  Lucy seemed like a girl I’d never have to worry about losing boyfriends to, so I tried to get her to go out with us.

  I said, “I know a fellow you might like.”

  “Do you like him?”

  I shrugged, “Yeah, he’s okay.”

  “Then why are you foisting him off on me?”

  I said, “I just thought you’d like him.”

  “So there’s something about him that’s not good enough for you?”

  “No, well, he’s not really my type, but he’s nice.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Is there something wrong with the way he looks?”

  “He has a big nose, but I thought you’d like him because he’s sensitive. He keeps a diary.”