Uprising (23 page)

“My father would,” Jane whispered. “My father is an evil man, and I never knew it until your strike. It's all wrong— everything I have was bought with blood—I can't go back, I can't. How can your strike be over?” The last part was a wail. For a moment Bella feared that Jane would just fall over, right there in the snow. She reached out a hand to steady the other girl.

“You ran away from home?” Yetta asked. “For our strike?”

Something like surprise crept over Jane's face.

“Why, yes, I suppose I did,” she said. “That's what it's called. Running away from home.”

“Where will you go?” Bella asked.

Jane turned to Bella in amazement.

“Bella? You speak English now?” she marveled.

“I learned it in the strike,” Bella said. “Some. But you— go where?”

Jane slumped against the building behind her.

“I don't know,” she admitted.

For a moment, Bella forgot that Jane was a rich girl. She forgot that Jane lived in a huge mansion with marble floors and puffy beds and servants waiting on her hand and foot. She only remembered what it was like to be alone and afraid, cut off from family, betrayed.

“You come home with us,” she told Jane.

Y
etta pulled the last shirtwaist from her machine and slid it into the trough that ran the length of the table, ready to go to the next girl. Sewing was boring—there was no other word for it. Somehow it seemed worse since the strike, because her thoughts darted back and forth with each thrust of the needle:
Maybe I shouldn't have been so mean to Rahel, maybe we shouldn't have come back to Triangle, maybe I could have tried harder during the strike to keep it going if only I'd been out picketing that last day... what if this is all there is to the rest of my life, watching a needle go up and down?

She felt every bit as restless as she had back in the shtetl, milking cows. Only weaker. She still wasn't fully recovered from the illness she'd had at the end of the strike, and the filmy dust that hung in the air of the factory only made her cough worse. Bella had told her about the babies who'd died from a cough—what if something like that happened to Yetta?

When Yetta began thinking like that, she wanted to hop a train and head west, she wanted to jump up on the table and call out for another strike, she wanted to hurl her sewing machine out the window and laugh to see it smash against the sidewalk. She wanted extravagance, drama, revenge. Life.
But she had no money—no money to take a train, no money to survive a strike, no money to repay the bosses for a smashed sewing machine.
Don't you know? In America, money is God,
the painted woman had told her, after beating her up during the strike. Yetta still didn't want to believe that, but it was hard not to.

Yetta stood up from her machine, turned around, and almost ran into one of the cutters.

One of the many bad things about coming back to Triangle was that Yetta now worked on the eighth floor, where the cutters had their tables. They took up half the room, strutting around with their sharp knives drawn, smoking endlessly even though there were signs on the walls forbidding it. Once Yetta had even seen a cutter drop his cigarette on a pile of shirtwaist collars, and all he did was laugh when his assistant had to throw the collars to the ground and stomp out the flame. He didn't even get in trouble. Those cutters! So what if they could slice through layers and layers of fabric with a single stroke? So what if they held the entire company's fortune in their hand every time they made a cut with their knife through the expensive material? They reminded Yetta all too much of the men back in her shtetl who thought they were holier than everyone else. Besides, she hadn't forgiven any of the cutters for the way two of them had beaten up the contractors who'd first called for a strike, way back in the summertime.

This cutter seemed younger than the others, maybe not so cocky. He had brown hair curling at his temples, and honey-colored eyes—in another mood, Yetta might have called him handsome. Now she regarded him sourly.

“Excuse me,” she said briskly, trying to step past him.

He touched her arm, stopping her.

“You're Yetta, aren't you?” he asked. “The one who has a rich girl staying with her?”

Yetta pulled her arm away.

“More like a poor girl,” she said, snorting in a most unladylike way. “Jane didn't bring a penny with her when she ran away from home.”

At least Jane had provided a bit of a distraction. She was fascinated by everything in the tenement: the bed improvised from a board laid across two chairs, the bathroom shared with three other apartments, the gas heat that could be purchased by placing a penny in the meter on the wall. And she wanted to talk endlessly about how it might be possible that bosses and workers could get along, that factories could be run to respect everyone. Still, she didn't seem to understand that the potatoes she ate cost money. And Bella and Yetta were too timid to mention it, too afraid of appearing inhospitable.

“We don't want to sound as greedy as Mr. Harris and Mr. Blanck,” Bella had argued, when Yetta suggested hinting to Jane about the rent due at the end of the week.

Sometimes, Yetta thought she and Bella should just kick Jane out, send her back to her pretty clothes and her show-offy mansion, where she belonged. But then Yetta would hear Jane sobbing at night, sobbing the way Yetta wanted to sob, because the strike was over and the world wasn't fair and Rahel had moved away, moved apart from Yetta. . . .

“Maybe you should tell the rich girl to get a job,” the cutter said.

That made Yetta laugh out loud.

“I can just see her, sitting at one of these machines. . . . She thinks it's awful that we don't get a break for tea every afternoon,” Yetta said.

“Does the rich girl have fancy manners?” the cutter asked.

Yetta shrugged. “Of course. She's rich. She holds her pinky like this even when she's just drinking water.” Yetta extended her pinky, curled her other fingers in, and pretended to drink from a teacup. Secretly, Yetta wondered if she should copy Jane, but that would probably look silly, an immigrant shtetl girl putting on airs.

“Does she speak any foreign languages?” the cutter asked.

“French, Italian, and—what's it called?—Latin. She went to some big finishing school.”

The cutter leaned closer.

“I heard Mr. Bernstein talking—you know, he's Mr. Blanck's brother-in-law. He says Mr. Blanck's wife is looking for a governess for their daughters. Someone who could help them get along in society. Learn how to socialize with the goyim.”

Yetta had never thought before about Mr. Blanck having a wife or daughters. It was like trying to imagine the devil's family.

“Well, maybe I'll tell Jane to apply for that job,” Yetta said, shrugging. “Thanks, I guess.”

The cutter smiled.

“I'm Jacob, by the way.”

Yetta tilted her head.

“Where were you during the strike?”

“I—I just started here,” Jacob said. “After the strike. After it was over.”

His eyes darted left, then right. Yetta thought he was lying.

“But
during
the strike—where were you then?” she challenged.

He looked too healthy to have walked any picket lines or skipped any meals to save money for the strike. He actually had rosy cheeks.

“I was in another shop,” Jacob said. “One that settled right away.”

Yetta shrugged.

“If you say so,” she muttered, brushing past him.

“I wasn't a scab!” Jacob yelled after her. “I wasn't! Ask anyone!”

Yetta wasn't in the mood to listen.

J
ane lay in bed long after Bella and Yetta left for work. She could hear echoes of what Miss Milhouse had told her back in the fall when she wouldn't get up in the morning:
Really, Miss Wellington, you must expunge yourself of this torpor.
But that bed had had crisp white sheets and an elegant white coverlet; this bed had a rusted frame, a single worn, grayish sheet, and a stained, tattered quilt that Yetta's grandmother had made back in Russia. Jane could hear what Miss Milhouse would say if she could see Jane now:
Really, Miss Wellington! Such squalor! Such degradation! Such foolishness! You'll be ruined in society if anyone finds out where you are!
She could hear her father's words echoing in her mind:
Would you have us all living in hovels, wearing sackcloth and ashes, eating
gruel?

She knew exactly how her father and Miss Milhouse would view the tenement, with its cracked walls, its chipped sink, its hovering stench of rotted food and unwashed bodies. It had taken great effort for Jane herself not to wrinkle her nose in disgust the first time she'd stepped in here. But then Bella had said, “See our vase of flowers?”—pointing to a cheap glass on the table with two crumbled roses sticking up. “That's
all that's left from Rahel's beautiful hat, after the strike,” Yetta muttered. The flowers were fake, of course, but somehow they transformed the entire tenement for Jane. Suddenly she saw past the cracks and the chips and the cheapness. She saw the beauty of two battered cloth roses, the ingenuity of beds rigged from chairs, the cleverness and courage and triumph of two girls living on their own. And now, even hearing the echoes of Miss Milhouse's criticisms and her father's taunts, she could see the triumph and courage and nobility of Jane Wellington, lying on a rusty, tattered bed in a tenement instead of amid perfect, fluffy pillows in a mansion.

But what was she supposed to do next?

Just to prove that she could get out of bed, Jane sat up and eased away from the tattered quilt. She slid her feet into her boots right away, because the floor was bare wood and full of splinters, as well as icy cold. She did not have to bother about changing clothes because she'd been sleeping in her dress—it was all she had.

“Could I possibly borrow a nightgown from one of you?” she'd asked the first night, and both Yetta and Bella had looked at her blankly. It appeared that neither of them had an extra. One nightshirt, one dress, one shirtwaist, one skirt—Jane had a hard time understanding such limitations. But now she had just one dress herself.

She made a feeble attempt to comb and pin up her hair, but she had no skill at that. Without maids, she was as helpless as a five-year-old. She dealt with that problem by turning away from the small sliver of broken mirror that hung on the wall. She slipped out the door and out to the street-some fresh air would do her good.

But the air in the street was bitterly cold and hardly fresh. There was a rancid smell of some foreign food cooking; an organ grinder's monkey bent down and defecated in the street; strangers' bodies pressed against hers disgracefully. The crowd parted, and Jane found herself on the curb. Someone pushed at her and she lost her balance, falling forward onto horsehide. Oh—a horse was lying in the street, ready to break her fall. How fortunate. The horsehair was soft, and Jane stroked it in relief. Then she realized that the hair was strangely cold and still to be attached to a living horse. The ribs below the horsehair moved neither up nor down.

The horse was dead, its rump half rotted.

Shrieking, Jane scrambled up. A gang of filthy-faced, snotty-nosed ragamuffins laughed uproariously to see her screaming. One laughed so hard he rolled in the street, right on top of the monkey's droppings. A little girl with tangled curls stared stupidly at Jane, her eyes seeping with some unknown infection.

Does no one have money to take away the dead horse from the street?
Jane wondered.
To put those ragamuffins in school? To fix that girl's eyes?

When Jane was little, she'd been fascinated with a stereoscope her mother kept in the parlor. You looked through two eyeholes at two separate pictures, and somehow the pictures merged into one that was three-dimensional and looked so real you felt you could reach out and touch it. With the stereoscope, the two pictures, separately, always looked somewhat alike: two views of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, say, or two views of the Grand Canyon. But Jane's mind was working now like a different kind of stereoscope. In her mind, she held the view of the dead horse, the
ragamuffins and the seepy-eyed girl alongside her memories of seeing the shirtwaist strikers calling fervently for justice, seeing her dozens of dresses strewn across the floor the day she'd offered one to Bella, and seeing an image of herself, lying in bed. With the stereoscope back home, Jane had always had trouble focusing, bringing the pictures together exactly. She was having the same trouble now.

One of the ragamuffins stopped laughing and appeared to be patting her hand comfortingly. No—he was trying to worm the ring from her finger.

“Oh, no, you don't!” Jane roared. “My mother gave me that ring!”

The ragamuffin had the ring off her finger and was about to slip it into his own pocket. Jane grabbed for it desperately, and succeeded only in swatting it away. It flew through the air, sparkling, and landed in the smashed monkey dung.

Jane did not hesitate. She snatched up the ring and raced away through the crowd—shoving, elbowing, kicking with all her might—until she was back in the tenement.

She slammed the door as hard as she could.

When Yetta and Bella got home, Jane was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the vase of artificial flowers and turning her ring over and over in her hands. She'd scrubbed the ring in soapy water—scrubbed it and rinsed it and scrubbed it and rinsed it, again and again and again—but still she stopped and examined it every few minutes to make sure there was no filth caught in the engraved
J
on the ring's surface. As soon as Yetta and Bella opened the door, Jane said, “I need money. Money of my own.”

Both of the other girls stopped in surprise, and then Bella rushed over to hug Jane while Yetta quietly closed the door.