Haymarket (6 page)

Lizzie had moved to Chicago only a few years before them and supported herself by working at home as a dressmaker. “You don’t have a lot of choice,” she told Lucy, when they discussed job possibilities. “Some saloons have begun to hire female servers, but the wages are low and the jobs are, how shall I put it, of ‘questionable character.’ ”

“Meaning what?” Lucy asked, her eyes mischievously alight. “That I have to get the customers drunk?”

“Exactly. Though the standard description is ‘Encourage the male patrons to imbibe, using all female wiles necessary.’ ”

“If that’s the case, I might at well sit in a fancy brothel and make some real money.”

“Of course, you could always try factory work.” Lizzie’s frown made her opinion of that option clear enough. “The women put in a minimum of ten, a maximum of fourteen, hours a day.”

“Those are farmhand hours,” Lucy said indignantly.

“But
without
room and board. One of my friends makes lace collars for twenty-two cents a dozen; a twelve-hour workday brings her in sixty-six cents. She has a complexion like chalk from malnourishment.”

“But that’s slavery!” Lucy stormed. “I thought they’d freed the slaves.”

Lizzie gave her a quizzical look, not knowing whether Lucy’s remark was offhanded or meant to inaugurate an intimate conversation.

“Some stories are far worse, believe me. Another girl I know is a carpet-sewer. Her hands are blistered and raw but she has to keep going to support her invalid husband, disabled on a construction site. The boss makes her sew the carpet borders for free—they’re ‘chucked in,’ part of the job, he told her. They’re always ‘chucking’ things in,” Lizzie added with a sigh. “My friend Mary Perkins makes coats for a living and has to dampen them in starch water and iron them without any extra pay. She works half the night, near every night, just to keep food on the table. Count yourself lucky, Lucy, that you’ve got a man who brings in money. There are lots of women living alone in this city who are starving to death.”

“I’m determined to work,” Lucy said dejectedly. “I must.”

“Then you’d best be thinking about being a domestic. Like it or not, that’s about all that’s open to you.”

“Is there any such thing as a part-time domestic? Then I wouldn’t have to live in and could come home to Albert.”

“I’ve heard of such jobs once in a while. But too many Irish girls are in need of a bed and willing to settle for room, board, and some second-hand clothes. Why should the fine ladies hire someone who won’t be there to light the fires in the morning and turn off the gas lamps at night? Ah, Lucy, you’d never last anyway! You don’t have the gift for kow-towing, I can tell.”

“I don’t have many gifts,” Lucy said quietly. “Never was given a real education, just taught my numbers and how to write a more or less complete sentence. But I got plenty of grit and energy,” she added, her spirits rising
with her words. “Maybe I could become a burglar or a mugger.”

“That’s a man’s field,” Lizzie said with a laugh. “And there’s a long waiting list.”

“Well then, I got no choice. I’ll just have to find out if any such thing as part-time domestic work exists.”

“Give it a try, why not! But stay away from the employment agencies. They’re mostly fly-by-night. They take your ‘application fee’ and then disappear. I’ll get the name of a respectable intelligence office for you, a place that specializes in matching up servant girls and employers.”

Lizzie was as good as her word, and one afternoon Lucy took herself to Mrs. Burke’s Intelligence. In one room sat three or four elegant, impatient ladies bedecked in velvet dresses and overskirts of lace. One wore a white llama jacket, usually reserved for evening, her face painted with a compound of bismuth and arsenic that gave her skin a fashionable deathlike pallor. In an adjoining room, which had no chairs, a horde of unhealthy-looking young girls, most of them newly arrived immigrants, crowded together hoping to be picked, on any terms, for one of the few jobs available.

The woman in the llama jacket strode into the room where the girls waited, looked them over with the barest glance, and announced in full voice, “This is disgusting! There isn’t a single one in the whole lot fit to enter a decent house.” With that, she swept up her skirts and turned to leave. “And how would
you
know what a decent house is,” Lucy yelled after her, “all gotten up like a whore!” Within seconds, a burly man appeared from nowhere, grabbed Lucy hard by the arm and pushed her out the front door.

That decided her. She’d stay at home and take in piecework; better lower wages than the daily humiliation of having to cater to the whims of idle women—or the predations of their sons and husbands. Lucy had learned sewing as a child and become skilled with the needle, able to make braid rosettes, velvet or ribbon trimmings, tarlatan interlinings—even Medici collars. She was confident she could succeed as a dressmaker, especially since Lizzie could promise a network of fellow seamstresses for contacts, advice, and customers. The downside of working at home was finding herself forced, against all inclination, to attend to a string of household chores that an outside job would have obviated.

During their first year in Chicago, Lucy and Albert were able to afford only a few pieces of furniture for their flat. A large metal bed with a roll-up mattress took up most of the smaller room; a washstand with bowl and pitcher for daily ablutions (with a strip of oilcloth underneath to catch any spillover), one straightback chair, and a footlocker for storing clothes consumed the rest of the space. The second room, the “living” area, had two kerosene lamps; two squat, undersized armchairs (bought thirdhand from a German peddler); and on the wall, one of the popular “chromos” of the day—a color lithograph that reproduced an oil painting of the western plains. Most of the remaining space was soon given over to Lucy’s dressmaking. Albert folded a board over the washtub and pinned oilcloth around it to create a worktable for her. Lucy crocheted a bureau scarf to cover the table when not in use and, as an added nicety, sewed curtains for the window to conceal the garbage-strewn back alley it faced out on.

The kitchen alcove, dominated by a small ice chest and a large coal stove, made up the rest of the flat—and generated most of the repetitive chores that Lucy so deeply resented. Once a day, she had to lug fresh water into the house and more than once had to carry out cooking slops, dirty dishwater, and lamp soot, as well as collect human waste from the outdoor privy in a small shack behind the tenement. She also had to make frequent trips to the local lumberyard to buy kerosene for the lamps; filling and wiping them, plus trimming and replacing the wicks, were daily, sometimes twice-daily, necessities. The coal stove required even more attention—laying and tending fires, sifting and emptying ashes, scraping and blackening the stove’s surface to prevent rust.

To escape spending what remained of her day in shopping for food and preparing it, Lucy avoided the markets and relied instead on the numerous street peddlers who conveniently passed near her door. It wasn’t just a matter of conserving time: Lucy had heard the growing rumors—soon proven true—that the leading grocery stores were artificially dyeing decayed fruits and vegetables, then wrapping them in colorful gauze; and that meat was being adulterated with everything from ground entrails to wood chips. Food from the vending carts was usually fresher and less contaminated. From the peddlers, often Italian immigrants, Lucy could buy dairy goods, a variety of produce and meats, ice and coal; and from the Alsatian Jewish peddlers, the occasional personal item or inexpensive piece of clothing—a decorative hair comb, woolen stockings for winter.

Within a few months Albert and Lucy had become more or less acclimated to the city, Albert more, Lucy less. The basic routines of newspaper life had long been familiar to Albert and although the
Chicago Times
operated on a far larger scale than anything he’d previously known, he found the expansive new challenges exhilarating. The
Times
offices were located in the Haymarket area of Randolph Street, near the heart of the frenzied downtown commercial district. Yet Albert managed to maintain his own calm rhythm.

After the first few weeks, Lucy rarely went downtown. When she did, on some special errand to find corset stays or the like, the deep canyons and the smoke-darkened sky invariably brought back feelings of uneasiness. She couldn’t understand why, and that annoyed her. On the ranch, she’d always been intrepid, even nervy, as quick to chastise faintheartedness during a flash flood as she was fearless in facing down a drunken cowhand.

This anxious new sense of unease was so unfamiliar that Lucy decided it couldn’t possibly be a true part of her. She sternly admonished herself to stop being foolish and weak and decided that she would act like the Lucy of old—the Lucy of Johnson County—and thereby hasten her return. She was determined to stay away as much as possible from the strangely intimidating menace of the central city.

Both she and Albert were coming to terms with Chicago, in their own distinctive ways.

One morning in late September, as Albert was at his typesetting station laboring to master the “shooting stick”—a tool for unlocking pages of type from the metal frame that held them together—an employee from another department burst into the room shouting the news that “the financial house of Jay Cooke and Company in Philadelphia has suspended operations!” Everyone realized at once that the economic disaster long feared had come to pass. All work in the typesetting room stopped as the men huddled together, speculating in hushed tones about the likely firings soon to follow, how extensive they would be, and who would be left standing when the smoke cleared.

Within a few weeks, it became apparent that the devastation would
be widespread. The collapse of Cooke and Company precipitated a stock market panic that radiated out into a rash of brokerage, insurance, and bank failures. A full-scale crash was at hand. Seemingly overnight, an army of the unemployed, many evicted for nonpayment of rent, was wandering the streets of Chicago, and every other major metropolis, in search of work, food, and shelter.

Albert and Lucy considered themselves fortunate in comparison with their neighbors. Within a few weeks of the economic collapse, all the families in their tenement were to varying degrees in straitened circumstances. Lucy managed to hold on to some of the piecework she’d been doing for a nearby textile mill, though at reduced rates. And Albert, too, was able to continue working. The
Times
did fire a fifth of its employees, but Albert, known for his speed and dexterity in composition, was among those kept on, though with a cut in pay from sixty to forty-two dollars a month.

Of all the families, the worst off were Joe and Margaret Hennessey, devout Catholics with five children, who lived in the cramped basement quarters. Joe was a stonecutter, Margaret a pieceworker. Both lost their jobs within a week of each other. Having no savings, having barely managed the rent each month, the Hennesseys were terrified of actual starvation. They immediately pawned their only two items of value: Joe’s silver belt buckle, bought with money he’d earned as a young man working in the Butte, Montana, mines; and Margaret’s cherished enamel brooch, her mother’s parting gift when, at age fifteen, she had emigrated from Ireland.

The Hennesseys’ three eldest children contributed a modicum of money from part-time work. Their nine-year-old peddled wooden matchboxes on the street and their eleven-year-old worked as a newsboy. Sheila, fourteen, belonged to a posse of teenagers who picked rags after school, collecting bits of cloth from factory discards and reselling them for conversion into paper or for use as upholstery stuffing. The three children’s combined pennies and nickels were enough to put eggs, thin slices of cheap meat, crackers, and black coffee on the table in the morning.

Providing food for the rest of the day was problematic. Margaret sought help from the Chicago Relief Society, but it initially turned her away; on the basis of its “scientific” formula for determining who was or was not worthy of aid, the society adjudged the Hennesseys capable of being self-supporting—if the family mended its “irregular habits and spendthrift
ways” (specifically cited were Joe’s use of tobacco and Margaret’s having once taken the children, at two cents a head, to view the mound of melted metal from the Great Fire on display at the Relic House).

“You mean to say,” Lucy sardonically asked Margaret after she’d recounted what had happened, “they didn’t reprimand you for having breakfast
every
morning?” She encouraged her to make a second appeal and—perhaps because an unusually harsh winter had set in, with people found every night frozen to death on the streets—the society did, when Margaret reappeared, partially relent: it agreed to provide the Hennesseys with a food basket and some firewood every other day. But Margaret couldn’t abide the lectures on abstinence and hard work that accompanied the hand-outs and after a month refused further help from the Society.

Lucy and Albert insisted on giving the Hennesseys a “loan” of two dollars a week, all they could spare, and every other week Lizzie Swank chipped in half a dollar from her own meager income. But bad luck continued to dog the family at every turn. They had long been relying on credit not only for grocery purchases, but for almost every item in their barren flat—including the dishes, the pots and pans, the stove, and above all, the precious Singer sewing machine. Unable any longer to meet payments, they watched helplessly as their household items were repossessed one by one. The sewing machine was the last to go, and Lucy held a tearful Margaret tightly in her arms when the collectors arrived to take it away.