Uprising (19 page)

But now . . . Bella had not known it was possible to stand shoulder to shoulder with another girl, one from Poland or Lithuania or some other place Bella had never heard of, both of them holding signs high over their heads, both of them longing just as strongly for exactly the same thing. Both of them completely connected. It did not make up for losing her family—that was a pain that still weighed her heart down, would never stop weighing her heart down—or for the anguish of losing Pietro, of being cheated by the Lucianos. But the strike was something to hold on to, something to hope for and dream about.

It was a reason to live.

Bella became one of the best strikers. She struggled through snowdrifts up to her knees to get to the picket line, she held her sign high even when the winter winds gusted so strongly they threatened to carry it away—and threatened to carry her away. Bella had never known such a fearsome winter, but she set her face against the icy wind, let the snow fall on her hair, and called out again and again and again, in three different languages, until her voice was hoarse, “Justice for shirtwaist workers! Justice for shirtwaist workers!” Even when she didn't completely understand everything, she cheered as loudly as anyone else when there was good news about the strike: Twenty thousand shirtwaist workers walked out on strike in Philadelphia, in support of their fellow workers in New York. The union and the rich women threw a reception and dance in the strikers' honor. The
New York Call
began planning a special strike edition that the strikers could sell to raise more money for the union. Bella begged to be one of the strikers who got to sell the papers.

“I didn't think anyone could be more
farbrente
than Yetta,” Rahel said, one morning as the three of them shivered over breakfast. “But you might be.”

“What's
farbrente?”
Bella asked.

“It means you're a fervent girl,” Rahel said. “Someone who'll do anything for her cause.”

“Hurray for the
farbrente
!” Yetta cheered. “Hurray for us all!”

Rahel abruptly turned back to the cupboard, as if intending to search for more food on the bare shelves. Or as if she
didn't think she herself was
farbrente,
and didn't think she deserved the cheer.

It was interesting living with the two sisters, who looked so much alike and yet were so different. Rahel was quiet and self-assured; Yetta was excitable, always very happy or very disappointed or just very loud. She was very everything.

Three other girls lived in the tenement with them, but they were gone early in the morning and came back late at night, so Bella barely saw them. But Bella knew that they were Jewish too. She noticed that no one else in the tenement crossed herself when she prayed, no one mentioned a single saint, nobody worried that they didn't have a horned lucky charm hanging by the door to ward off evil spirits.

“What's ‘Jewish' mean, anyhow?” she asked Yetta once as they were trudging toward the union hall.

“We're God's chosen people,” Yetta said. “And . . . we're still waiting for our messiah. You have Jesus, but we're still waiting.”

“I'd share,” Bella said.

Yetta laughed, though not in a cruel way.

“My father could tell you a million reasons why that wouldn't work,” she said. “I just can't explain it. Back home, girls weren't supposed to learn much about religion. We were just supposed to keep the house and fix the food and earn the money so the men could be holy enough for all of us. But I think ... I think there are different ways to wait for the Messiah, different ways to be holy. I don't think anyone understands God well enough. I think I want to live a million years so I have time to think about all of it!”

“Good luck with that,” Bella said. She tried to step over
a particularly high snow bank blocking the sidewalk. The snow flowed over the top of her boots—she'd stuffed cardboard in the toes, just so they'd stay on, but the boots were still too loose around her ankles. “Sometimes,” she said, “sometimes I pray that God will let me die young.”

Yetta stopped in her tracks.

“Don't say that.”

“Oh, I wouldn't kill myself,” Bella said. “That'd be a mortal sin. But if God let me die, I'd be in heaven with my family.” Running through the village with my brothers and sister . . . baking with Mama . . . hoeing the beans with Papa . . .

“But you'd have to wait a million years before you got to see me again,” Yetta said. “And I don't know how it works, if Jews and Italians go to the same place after they die. We might never see each other again!” She peered earnestly up at the sky, a thin gray strip barely visible between the towering buildings. “Please! I beg of you! Don't let Bella die young! We need her for the strike!” she yelled up at the heavens. Then she glanced back at Bella and punched her in the arm. “There. I canceled you out.”

Bella was glad that the streets were virtually empty, that everyone else had been driven away by the snow. She clutched Yetta's arm, because, without coats, they had to huddle together for warmth.

“I think I'm forgetting them,” she said softly. “My family, I mean. It's been so long since I've seen them—sometimes I forget they're dead. I forget to grieve, because I think they're still there, back home in Calia. Is that ... is that . . .
evil?”

Yetta bit her lip, already so pale and chapped from the cold.

“Rahel would know what to tell you,” she said. “She'd have the exact right words to say to make you feel better, to tell you what to do.”

“I want to know what you think,” Bella said.

Yetta tilted her head close to Bella's.

“I don't think it's evil, how you're forgetting. Sometimes I think I'm forgetting my family, too, and I know they're still alive. I hope. It's natural, when they're so far away, to forget, to mostly just think about life here.”

“If I'd stayed in Calia, I probably would have died too. With my family,” Bella said.

Yetta took her by the shoulders and shook her so hard her teeth rattled.

“But you
didn't,”
she said. “You didn't stay there, you didn't die—you were saved! Isn't that worth something? Isn't that worth living for, here and now?”

Christmas was not a holiday for Jews. Bella probably should have figured that out, but it was still odd, waking up December twenty-fifth to nothing. The union hall and the picket lines were closed for the day, but there were no songs, no rejoicing, no giggling little brothers running around banging on pots and pans. And, missing that, Bella knew that she would never truly forget her family.

“If you want,” Yetta said over their measly, cold breakfast, “you could go to your synagogue—er, temple, er—”

“Chiesa,”
Bella said. “Church. But, no.” She couldn't bear the thought of sitting in a pew alone.

Just then there was a knock at the door. Rahel sprang up to get it quickly before it woke the other girls.

Rocco Luciano stood out in the hallway, a mashed, poorly wrapped package under his arm.

“Buon Natale,”
he said.

Bella wanted to hug him. But she didn't—she reminded herself that she was still angry with the entire Luciano family.

Rocco held out the package.

“Signor Carlotti told me you were living here now,” he said. “I got you your very own shirtwaist and skirt. So you can look American like all the other girls. . . .” His eyes got big then, as if he'd just noticed that Bella was wearing the blue serge dress. She and Yetta and Rahel had ripped out some of the seams and resewn them; it fit quite well now, and looked very elegant, Bella thought.

“Oh,” Rocco said sadly. “You already look American.”

Bella unwrapped the package and held up the clothes. They were the cheapest shirtwaist and skirt possible, undoubtedly bought second- or third-hand from a peddler's cart. A month ago, Bella would have considered them an incredible gift. But now she refolded them and started to hand them back.

“Rocco,” she said, “you should give this to your mother.”

“Wouldn't fit,” he said.

Bella tried not to giggle at that.

“Then sell them and give her the money for your family,” she said. “For your brothers and sisters and the baby—”

“The baby died,” Rocco said.

Bella saw the effort he made to keep his face still while he said that, not to let any sorrow break through his expression.

“I'm sorry,” she said softly.

Rocco shrugged.

“It was just a baby. Babies die all the time. Just about all the babies on the whole block died. The nurse said it was whooping cough.”

“I'm sorry,” Bella said again. There was nothing more she could say about the Luciano baby, because she'd never once taken it in her arms and cradled it against her chest. She'd never loved it. She'd just listened to the baby cry and resented it, resented the way its misery mirrored her own.

“But our baby—I thought he was going to grow up,” Rocco said. “I thought I'd get to teach him how to shine shoes, and show him the best corner for selling newspapers. . . .”

Bella remembered that she'd sometimes seen Rocco lean over the baby, letting the baby suck his finger. She remembered that Signora Luciano yelled at him when he did that, because he was wasting time he was supposed to be spending making flowers.

Rocco seemed to shake himself, shaking off his old hopes.

“I'm sorry about your family, too,” he said. “And I promise, for my family, I will repay all the money my father owes you. Here's the first part.”

He held out one penny. Bella hesitated, then took it. She placed the shirtwaist and skirt neatly on the table. She patted Rocco's head.

“Thank you,” she said, quite formally. “Thank you for the gift and the repayment. I accept your promise. But, Rocco—if your own family is hungry, spend the money on them. Or if they need medicine, that comes first. I can wait. I'm fine.”

“You're out on strike,” Rocco said.

“And that's why I'm fine, don't you see? I'm standing up for myself.”

Rocco squinted, as if this was a new concept, a girl standing up for herself.

“Oh,” he said. “I wanted to tell you, too ... I found out what Pietro did with your money, that he said he was sending to your family. He was using it to pay off the padrone for your ticket to America. He told his friends he wanted to wait to tell you about your family until the debt was all paid, because he wanted some good news to give you with the bad.”

Bella blinked.

“Then . . . then
he
didn't cheat me,” she said. Tears stung at Bella's eyes—this changed everything. Pietro had hidden the letter to protect Bella, not to take advantage of her. All that time Bella had been daydreaming about Pietro, maybe he'd been daydreaming about her, too.

“Oh, Rocco,” Bella said. “This is even a better present than the clothing.” Rocco recoiled a little, and she hurried to add, “Though the clothing is
magnifico,
it's so kind of you to bring me a present at all.”

Rocco nodded stiffly, but he soon slipped back out the door.

“What was that all about?” Yetta burst out as soon as he was gone. Of course, she'd understood nothing, because Rocco and Bella had been speaking Italian.

Bella started to explain, but the story shifted in the telling. She couldn't make Pietro's secrecy sound noble and kind.
Just because I am a girl, I don't have to be protected that much,
she thought.
That just made things worse when I did find out, that my family had been dead for so long and I didn't even know it.

“If Pietro ever comes back and we get married,” she told Yetta and Rahel, “he's going to have to promise not to keep any more secrets like that.”

And this was something different about Bella, maybe from being on strike and standing up for herself. She wasn't the terrified girl she'd been when she'd first come to America. She wasn't as easily fooled or as desperate as she'd been when Signor Luciano was stealing her money.

But she was glad that she'd be able to daydream about Pietro again.

Y
etta crowded into a rented hall with Rahel and Bella and hundreds of other workers, to listen to the union officials talk. A new proposal had come in from the manufacturers who hadn't settled yet—even Triangle.

“It's really quite generous,” the union man said from behind his podium. “Shorter hours, fairer wages, four holidays a year with full pay, no more petty fines and charges for thread, for needles . . . It's almost everything you've been asking for.”

“What about the union?” Yetta yelled out. “Are they going to recognize the union?”

After all the time she'd spent picketing and trampling around in the snow, her voice was too hoarse to carry to the front of the room. But others picked up her cry: “Can we keep our union? Will they give us a closed shop?”

“What's a closed shop?” Bella whispered.

“It means that the factories will only hire union members. If they can hire anyone they want, why would they bother negotiating with us?” Yetta said. “Why would they bother following any of the rules they agree to if they can just hire nonunion workers and treat them however they want?”

The man at the podium held up his hand, trying to silence the questions.

“Now, now,” he said. “You have to be willing to compromise. You can't expect to win everything. That's, uh”—he looked down at his notes, as if he needed extra help—“that's the one concession the manufacturers weren't willing to make. No closed shops, no union recognition. So we'll just have to make the best of the circumstances. Now, if you're ready to vote on this fine proposal—”

“Voting's no good without the union!” Yetta shouted. “What do you think we've been fighting for?”