Read an Excerpt
Swimming in the Moon
By Pamela Schoenewaldt HarperCollins Publishers
Copyright © 2013 Pamela Schoenewaldt
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-220223-9
Chapter 1
Singing to Vesuvius
I spend hours in trains now or shivering in borrowed Model Ts, bounc-
ing down rutted roads between towns strewn like rocks across frozen
fields. I wash in sinks and eat at roadside stands or from china plates,
served by ladies with more wealth hung on their bodies than I'll ever
hold. I speak in parlors and parks, taverns, churches, and drafty union
halls in the great Midwest. I can't go home to Cleveland yet. “Believe
me. You can win,” I tell those whose bodies are deformed by long hours
in factories and mills. My voice grows ragged and rough, harsh as a
crow's. Who would guess my mother was the Naples Nightingale?
I ask for water, clear my throat, and say: “This is 1913. Your lives
can change. Think of your children.” Workers stare, disbelieving. When
their doubts claw me, I hear my mother whisper: “Lucia, even crows
must breathe.” So I take a breath, plant my feet as singers do, and go on.
When women kiss and thank me and men's work- roughed hands press
mine, then the torments of this path, the jail slabs where I've slept, the
2 Pamela Schoenewaldt
betrayal of friends, and the ache for those abused when I'd sworn they'd
be safe, all these things have their purpose.
If our maps show rivers, lakes, or canals, I ask to see them, even
when the shallows reek and oil slicks the water. I stand on shorelines
and feel my body easing after so many hours of work. Inside laced shoes,
my feet are bare again. I'm wading in the Bay of Naples, that warm scoop
of blue held in a green embrace, watching the bright bob of fishing boats
and hearing peddlers' cries. It's my last summer in Italy, and I'm still
Lucia Esposito, passing out of childhood and content enough with my
life. Mamma and I are servants to Contessa Elisabetta Monforte in her
rosy villa that juts into the bay. I was born in the kitchen and never in
my fourteen years slept anywhere but on a narrow cot with Mamma.
Where else would I go? Lemon, orange, fig, and golden plum trees
filled the orchard. Lilacs and bougainvillea climbed our walls. On Sun-
day afternoons, our half- days off, we took bread and wine to the great
flat rock turned like a stage to the cone of Vesuvius. If Nannina, the
cook, was in good humor, we'd have chunks of cheese and earthen
bowls of pasta with beans. Tomatoes and sweet peppers that birds had
nibbled were ours. Ripe lemons dropped from trees; we scooped them
in our skirts.
“I saw lemons at the fruit market,” says a young man from the union
hall.
“Were they as big as two fists, with dimpled skin?” I ask. “Heavy as
melons and nearly as sweet? Were the skins warm from the sun and the
flesh inside cool as a sea breeze?”
“No,” he admits, “nothing like that.”
It would be hot on those afternoons along the bay, but not the
heavy, coal- thick heat of American cities. Summer in Naples brought a
soft, wrapping warmth. Our linen shifts, thin with age and damp with
sweat, pressed like veils against our bodies. Mamma was beautiful at
SWIMMING in the MOON 3
twenty- eight, with gentle curves, creamy skin, almond eyes, and waves
of tumbling glossy black hair. Young men with baskets of mussels cut
from the cliffs of Posillipo rowed by our rock, calling: “Come out with
us, Teresa. You can bring your sister if you want.”
She ignored them or answered back so brusquely that once I asked
if it was a mussel diver who had pushed her into the seaweed when she
was just fourteen and made her pregnant with me. “No, it was someone
from a costume ball. The bastard wore a mask.”
“Sing to me,” I'd beg in times like these, when anger darkened her
face and her body shook. Then she'd turn toward Vesuvius, the brood-
ing mound she loved so much, and sing “Maria MarÃ?,” “Santa Lucia,”
or “SÃ?, mi chiamano MimÃ?” from La Bohà me, her favorite opera. She'd
soften as she sang, letting me unpin her hair, wind it into braids and
loops or loosen it across her back. In my earliest memory, I'm plunging
my small hands into that silky mass and drawing them up like dolphins
from the dark waves.
On those Sunday afternoons, children played on jetties, fishermen
mended their nets, and lovers nestled between rocks. All were en-
chanted by her voice soaring and dipping like a seabird, weightless as
wind. I leaned against her shoulder. She held me close, our skin melted
together, and she was all that I needed.
I never saw signs that her mind was so fragile, or else I read them
wrong. Her sudden rages, the precious porcelain figurines that slipped
from her hands by seeming accident to smash on marble floors, the
count's threats to send us both away, and tense conferences between
Contessa Elisabetta and Paolo, the majordomo, were the familiar tex-
ture of my days. What did I know of other mothers? Only now, looking
back, do these signs speak to me as clearly as black woolen clouds over
cornfields tell of coming rain.
If I thought of my future in those days, I imagined us both in ser vice
4 Pamela Schoenewaldt
to an aging countess. “Lucia, if you read and do sums, you could man-
age a great house when you're grown,” Paolo said once when we were
alone. A wide smile cracked the solemn face he wore in public rooms,
and I was thrilled. But what would Mamma do without me? No, I'd stay
in the villa forever.
What would I do without the rock of Paolo's steady watching out
for us? Once I mused aloud how sweet our lives would be if he were
my father. Mamma and I were dusting the sitting room perfumed with
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Swimming in the Moon by Pamela Schoenewaldt. Copyright © 2013 Pamela Schoenewaldt. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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