A House of Tailors (6 page)

thirteen

“What is it?” Barbara asked. “Are you sick? Come inside. Tell me.”

I sank into a kitchen chair, shaking my head, the Uncle's angry face in my mind. What would he say? And just as bad, the money, my savings that I had counted on for going home, had flown away.

Barbara brought me a glass of cold water with chips from the icebox. I gulped most of it down as I watched Maria in her high chair mimicking the face I made as I sobbed. She reminded me of Friedrich when he was a baby, mouth coated with cookie crumbs, laughing—a handful!

I'd never see Friedrich again, never see any of them at home again.

Through the archway into the hall, the sewing machine sat on the worn rug like a huge black beetle. That was where I'd spend the rest of my life, and it was my fault, all my own fault.

I told Barbara the story of Mrs. Koch. “How was I to know I was in her dressing room instead of her bedroom?”

She didn't say, “You should have known.” She didn't say, “You shouldn't have been in Mrs. Koch's closet anyway.”

I hadn't told her about eating a little of the jam, which Aunt Ida had suddenly realized from a bit on my chin that I hadn't noticed.

And I hadn't told her that Aunt Ida had sat in the kitchen trying to catch her breath as I watched, thinking I'd have to send for the doctor.

“Do you know the word for
Doktor
in English?” I asked.

Barbara blinked and shook her head. “Are you that sick?” she asked.

She clucked over me the way Aunt Ida had clucked when she'd first seen me that morning. “I would have been terrified to try on the hats,” she said, as if I had accomplished some brave feat.

I ran the cool glass over my forehead. It had been a long hot march back from Aunt Ida's kitchen.

“We'll take a walk,” Barbara said. “We'll find the ice cream man and sit in the park. . . .” Already she was looking into her pocket, frowning as she pulled out a few coins.

I didn't know American money yet, but I could tell from her face it wasn't enough for all of us.

I shook my head. The coarse brown fabric was piled up on the chair in front of the machine, waiting for me. I'd have to begin now anyway. “Go ahead,” I told her. “Take Maria.” I waved my hand at the black beetle. “I'll sew.”

To show her I meant what I said, I went into the hall, pulled out the chair, and began to pin a pattern to the fabric. I told myself I'd have to be starving in the street to wear such a scratchy thing.

I heard a banging at the door.
Now what?
I wondered. “Coming,” I called. “Coming right now.”

I could hear the Uncle roar. So he had heard about what had happened. How was it he was home in the middle of the day, though?

I took a deep breath and went to the door.

The Uncle was bent over almost double, and on his back and over his head lay piles of trousers. Dozens of them.

He straightened up, the trousers sliding onto the floor. He held up his hand. “You are nothing but trouble.”

“Don't worry,” I said. “If I ever get money enough, I will take the ship straight back to Hamburg. And from there I'll go to Breisach, even if I have to walk all the way.”

“And worse than trouble,” he muttered. “Always with the mouth.”

I bit my lip. I remembered Mama shaking her head, telling me the same thing.

“Never mind,” said the Uncle. “Now that service is out of the question, I have taken myself to Mr. Eis, who sells trousers.”

I looked at them, a mound halfway to the ceiling.

“All you have to do is seam them together,” he said. “If you begin every morning and work until dinnertime, we might get a dollar a day.”

We
. He had said
we
.

I began adding in my head.

“Seventy-five cents for me,” he said, “twenty-five for you.”

I opened my mouth. “Fifty.”

“Don't forget. It is my machine, my thread.”

“Forty for me,” I said.

“All right,” he said, almost smiling.

I had to smile, too. He had forgiven me for Mrs. Koch. And someday I would be going home to Breisach after all.

1 August 1871

My dear Dina,

I am taking a quick moment to write to you. I have been working on my trousseau with Mama and Friedrich: sheets and pillowcases with lace that we are crocheting by hand at night, petticoats with pleats and borders, . . .

We have discovered something. Friedrich has that magic in his fingers that you have. He sews beautifully, and better still, he loves it. Even at the age of ten he tells Mama that someday he will take over the business and she can rest and eat lemon cookies with Frau Ottlinger.

So it is Franz who now has the picture of the Fifth Avenue Hotel and Madison Square.

Krist sends his best to his “almost sister.” And I send my dearest love to you.

Katharina

My dear Dina,

Last night I dreamed about you. You were laughing. It makes me happy to think that.

Love,
M.

fourteen

Everything ached: my feet, my wrists, my spine from leaning over the machine. But the worst was my neck. When I lifted my head to reach for another pair of trousers, I could feel a stabbing pain that began in the back of my head and went through my neck so that I wondered if I'd ever stand straight again.

But every stitch I took was one stitch closer to passage on a ship. Too bad I had no idea of the cost.

Each week the Uncle gave me American paper money, and I went straight to the trunk and tucked it behind the torn lining.

Barbara spent her days going from kitchen to roof, washing, then dragging baskets up to hang wet shirts and diapers. She swept the dusty apartment and cut vegetables for that night's supper. In between she did the finishing work on the trousers, sewing on buttons, snipping threads, or catching openings in the seams that I had missed.

At home that never would have happened. We sewed slowly and carefully, pressing each seam as we went along with irons that waited for us on the stove. But here everything depended on speed.

Barbara was the only one of us who seemed happy. Maria spent hours crying and throwing her blocks because her molars were coming in, and the Uncle spent his evenings taking over where I left off, yawning, his face determined and grim.

“Someday,” he said to Barbara, “things will be different. I will have a shop and life will be easier.”

I thought the same thing as I raced the machine down the long seams of the trousers:
Someday I will be home. I will open the door and there they will be, looking up at me, surprised
. . . .

Barbara smiled and nodded at both of us, then took five cents to buy a little green plant for the windowsill. “Watch,” she told us. “It will bloom this winter. Better than anything else we could spend it on.”

The Uncle and I looked at each other. For once each of us knew what the other was thinking. We even smiled, quick smiles. Neither of us would have spent five cents on a plant.

Barbara patted Maria, patted me, and patted the Uncle's head as he sat sewing. She even patted the leaves of the little plant.

And she sang, all day, every day. It was an American song about a small brown jug. And Maria and I joined in when she got to the part
Ha, ha, ha, you and me, little brown jug, how I love thee!

Sometimes Kristel, the girl who lived downstairs, brought up coffee and small squares of biscuit, and we'd stop for a half hour, but most of the time Barbara and I were alone, bent over our work as Maria crawled through the piles of trousers that the Uncle brought home once a week. She threw her blocks or sucked on rags dipped in sugar to make her forget about the pain in her gums.

The piles of trousers never seemed to diminish. To get to the bedrooms, or the kitchen, or out the door, we had to climb over them.

And the Uncle rolled his eyes at me when I tried to speak English. “Kristel is teaching me,” I told him.

“Kristel barely speaks English herself,” he said.

I narrowed my eyes at him. When I reached home in Breisach, I would never speak English again!
Never!

One afternoon, covered with bits of thread and lint from the fabric, I decided I had had enough. I finished the pockets on a pair of pants, pushed my chair back, and stood up, rubbing my neck and shoulders.

I looked into the kitchen. Barbara's hair was limp and her face shiny with perspiration.

I went in and stood beside her, moving her hands from her work. “Let's go for a walk. Let's sit in the park.”

Barbara stood up and began to heat the flatiron on the stove, her hand on her back. “It's too much to get Maria ready,” she said.

“I'll take her with me gladly,” I said, bending down to look under the table as Maria peered out at me.

Barbara reached into her pocket. “Take a penny,” she said. “Go for a walk. Go alone. You'll be able to do twice as much afterward for the rest.”

I felt my face flush. How generous she was. But I was as worried about saving as the Uncle. I shook my head. “Keep your penny.”

She smiled, though, and dropped it into my pocket.

I touched her shoulder, then brushed myself off, picked up the bottom of my skirt to straighten it out, and at the last minute went into the bedroom to put on my hat in case I saw the boy in the tailor shop.

Heaven!
I had left the hat at Mrs. Koch's house and never even missed it.

I put on the other one, the one I had worn the day I arrived in Brooklyn, and went down the stairs. The door to Kristel's apartment, which she shared with her mother and four sisters and brothers, was open. I waved at her.

The door to the apartment below was open, too, and I peeked in. Dust motes and smells of old food and milk filled the air. The pan under the icebox had overflowed not once but many times, leaving stains on the floor, and sometimes puddles that spread under the table. And today Mrs. Haberton lay on the sofa, her face red with fever. Her son bent over her.

I went by quickly, down the stairs and out the door. It was cooler outside, a beautiful fall day, with a sky so blue it almost hurt to look at it.

Homesick weather.

To make it even harder, I could hear women sitting out on their stoops talking. I could understand every word. Of course, they were speaking German. After all, as the Uncle had told me, many of the German immigrants came right here to this section of Brooklyn called Bushwick.

Two boys ran ahead of me, chasing each other, so close to the dray horses clopping by that I raised my hand to my mouth. But after a moment they reached the other side of the street, safe. Laughing and pushing each other, they could have been my brothers. I felt an ache in my throat.

But after a few steps I told myself to stop thinking about home for an hour. I heard the whir of wings and looked up, shading my eyes. A streak of gray went by overhead: birds beating their pale wings against that blue sky. Pretty. I wondered what they were called.

The ice cream man's cart with its striped umbrella was just ahead of me. I could almost taste the cold drizzle of ice in my mouth.

Forget about home, I told myself. Forget about trousers with their four endless seams, their two pockets, their three buttons.

Forget about all of it.

With my carefully chosen ice cream, I sat on a bench, eating it as slowly as I could to make it last. Katharina would love it. I wondered why we'd never had it at home. Maybe because we were never outside at this time of day, always working in the sewing room.

A moment later the boy from the tailor shop sat down next to me, an ice cream in his hand, too. His teeth were white and straight when he smiled at me.

“My name is Johann,” he said, wiping the drips off the side of his cup with one finger. “John now.”

I didn't answer him. In Breisach I would never have spoken to a stranger.

“In America it's different,” he said, almost as if he had walked into my brain and looked around to see what I was thinking.

I couldn't help smiling, but I kept my eyes down.

“Your name is . . . ,” he began.

I took a taste of my ice cream.

“Hedwig?”

I shook my head.

“Anna Maria?”

Another shake. Another taste of ice cream.

“Juliana?”

I smiled. It was my favorite name.

“Ah, Juliana. That's my grandmother's name. She lives in Freiburg.”

Freiburg. Grandmother's house.

I turned to him. Ice cream forgotten. Manners forgotten. “Where?”

“Water Street.”

Not far from the Rhine. He knew the swell of it on a stormy day. He knew the barges, and the small birds that hovered over the water looking for fish. I rubbed my eyes with my thumbs.

“How long have you been here?” he asked.

I shook my head. “It seems like forever.”

“Yes.” He nodded. “I am here three years.”

He was older than I. Maybe just those three years. I wanted to tell him about the terrible pains in my chest when I thought about Breisach, about how when I awoke in the morning I didn't want to open my eyes in such a strange place.

But I thought he must know it, too.

“And sewing . . . ,” I began.

“I want to be a locksmith.” His face lighted. “To make beautiful heavy keys, thick locks.” He broke off. “And you?”

A locksmith, I thought, like Papa. “I don't want to sew, either.” But then I thought about the hats I had made, the excitement of choosing fabric, the planning, adding lace, or flowers, or feathers. But that was different, not the same as the drudgery of the long seams, the endless hems, the boring pockets. Fashioning hats didn't count as sewing.

We were silent, watching the horses clop by, listening to the oompah-pah of the German band playing music on the corner. And then we saw a funeral carriage, its sides made of glass so we could see the coffin inside, and people walking behind.

“Dead from the smallpox, I guess.” Johann turned toward me. “It's getting worse every day. The health department comes to knock on people's doors and take the sick to the hospital.” He shook his head. “It's to stop the spread of the disease, they say, but most people who go to the hospital die, packed in tight with very little care.”

I thought of the red ribbons Barbara and I had put around the apartment even though the Uncle said it was nonsense.

My ice cream was gone. The time had gone, too. I had to get back before the Uncle did, to make a dent in that pile of trousers that was waiting for me. I nodded at Johann; then I stood up and started down the street.

He called after me. “Come back tomorrow, Juliana.”

I thought I just might do that. I might even tell him my real name.