Uprising (24 page)

“See? She understands,” Bella said, flashing a glance at Yetta.

“It's not that we mind sharing,” Yetta said apologetically. “It's just that the rent works out to two dollars a week, and we still owe the landlord extra from when we were on strike. And potatoes are five cents a pound, and with the three of us, it'd be ninety cents a week for milk, and—”

“And Yetta and me, we're only making six dollars a week, each,” Bella said. “If we're lucky and the bosses pay it all.”

Jane had been thinking,
Those are such small amounts of money; what are they talking about?
Until Bella chimed in with their salaries, which were small too.

I'm a burden,
she realized.

“Oh!” she laughed, uncomfortably. “I didn't—you should have told me. But it's not just that. It's—I mean, it takes money for everything, and I didn't know that. It's not just for buying your way into society or for winning a proper husband. That dead horse and the girl's eyes and the ragamuffins—if I had money, my own money, I could have helped them, even the boy who tried to steal my ring. Maybe he was starving, maybe that was why he had no morals. Maybe no one ever taught him that stealing was wrong.” Jane saw that Yetta and Bella had no idea what she was talking about. They looked totally confused. “I just want to
do
something, like you did with the strike.”

“Not that that worked out so great,” Yetta muttered.

Jane clutched at her head, knocking out hairpins and destroying the last vestige of her attempt at a hairstyle.

“I'm just so confused!” she moaned. “Maybe I'm just trying to justify going back to my father, if he'll even let me come back. Maybe I want you to say, ‘It's all right to go home. It's—'”

“It is all right to go home,” Bella said. “I miss my family too. If I could go back to them—”

“But I don't miss my father,” Jane said. “I miss his money. It's not the same. His money is evil. But I still miss my flowered wallpaper and my clean glass windows and the orange juice from Florida and—and—and—you probably think I'm a horrible person. Maybe I don't really want to help the boy who tried to steal my ring. Maybe I don't even care. Maybe it's all about me. I want to go to college and I want to take a grand tour of Europe and I want to have real roses on my table—”

Yetta leaned in close.

“So earn the money yourself,” she said fiercely. “Earn your own money and save it. And then use it however you want.”

Jane blinked back tears.

“I'm not like you,” she said. “I'm not brave and courageous and strong. I couldn't sit there all day at the sewing machine. I don't even know how to sew!” She remembered what Eleanor had said, the scorn in her voice when she hissed,
“What's my choice? Working in some factory as a shirtwaist girl?
No, thank you.” Jane didn't want Yetta and Bella to think that she was similarly scornful. “Don't you see?” she wailed. “I'm useless. I was raised to be totally dependent on others.” She shoved a tangled strand of hair out of her eyes. “I can't even do my own hair! Just a few nights away from home and I stink and I'm filthy and my hair's a wreck and I don't understand how you can do it, staying so clean and tidy and—and
cheerful—
-living in these circumstances.” She waved
her hand wildly, the gesture taking in every chip and crack in the room, every belch of smoke from the stovepipe that layered filth and ash on every surface, every ice crystal creeping up the insides of the windows.

“We're not
saints,”
Bella said, at the same time that Yetta muttered, “I'm not cheerful.” The two girls exchanged glances, and then Bella ventured, “Yetta heard of a job you could do. Not sewing. Something that uses what you know. How you were raised.”

Yetta sat down at the table.

“The Blancks need a governess for their daughters,” she said. “Someone who can teach them to get along in society.”

Jane gaped at her.

“Oh, my heavens,” she said. “You want me to be Miss Milhouse.”

It was funny, actually, in a cruel way. Having escaped her jailer, Jane was now expected to become a jailer.

“You want me to teach other girls to pull their corset strings so tight they can't breathe,” Jane said. “To speak only when spoken to. To lower their eyes and simper and say ‘Oh, you beast,' when boys flirt, whether they like it or not. To always let men think that they are smarter and stronger and better. . . .”

“Maybe you could be a subversive governess,” Yetta suggested.
“Pretend
that you're telling them all those things but secretly tell them the truth. ‘Unions are good.' ‘Women should vote.' ‘Girls are as smart as boys.' Maybe you could even spy on Mr. Blanck for us, let us know what he's planning for Triangle.”

This appealed to Jane. The thought of being a servant
was horrifying, but espionage—that was glamorous. She remembered hearing rumors about one of the other girls at her finishing school, that the girl's grandmother had been a spy during the Civil War. The notion seemed too incredible to be believed, but Jane had not been able to stop herself from staring when the old woman came to an end-of-term singing concert. Jane was disappointed in the woman's steel-gray hair, her wrinkles, and her prim black dress with the cameo pinned at the neck. She looked entirely ordinary. But maybe that was the secret of being a good spy.

“Begging your pardon,” Bella said, pulling up her own chair at the table. “I think what's wrong with Miss Milhouse is that she doesn't love you. I'm sorry!—I'm sorry if that's hurtful. But listen to me. I had brothers and a sister who had runny noses all the time and were rough and tumble and never left me alone for a minute. And I loved them. I loved them with a love that was so deep and so true that I crossed the ocean, I came to America, trying to save their lives. And then I lived with the Lucianos, and their children had runny noses and they were dirty and the baby cried all the time, and I hated them because they weren't Giovanni and Ricardo and Dominic and Guilia. I don't think I would have crossed the street to save any of
their
lives, so—”

“Not even Rocco's?” Yetta asked.

“That came later,” Bella said, with stiff dignity. “Later I liked Serefina, too, and I'm sorry that the baby died. But when I hated them, at first, that wasn't good, and if I had been their—what's it called?—their governess, I would have been very mean to them. So, spying or no, whatever you tell them, what you should decide on, is whether or not you think
these are children you can care about. Because children should have people who love them.”

This was the most Jane had ever heard Bella say, in her lilting accent that made even English words sound foreign. But Jane understood what she meant. She twisted the ring on her finger, traced the clean swoop of the engraved
J
with her thumbnail.

“My mother loved me,” she said. “My father—I don't know. It never really seemed like it.” That was hard to admit, that her own father might not love her. Even if he was a horrible, evil, strikebreaking man. She went on. “And Miss Milhouse—you're right. She's never loved me.”

Jane thought how easy that had made it for her to run away. Other girls had living, loving mothers telling them to tighten their corsets and to marry the wealthiest man who made an offer—or the man with the most impressive European title. And of course they listened, because their mothers loved them, and they loved their mothers.

Maybe love could be a trap, too.

Jane felt dazed, and no less confused. But she nodded solemnly at Bella, at Yetta.

“Thank you for your advice,” she said. “I will remember it. I don't know if anyone would hire me as a governess. But I will try. I will try.”

Yetta and Bella worked hard getting Jane ready to meet the Blancks. They decided she should wear the serge dress she'd given Bella, back in December.

“You mean, you can let out the seams again?” Jane marveled. “Just like that? You didn't cut the dress down to fit?”

“Cut in haste, repent at leisure,” Yetta said, waving scissors at her reprovingly.

“Oh, is that a proverb in Russia, too?” Jane asked.

“No, I learned it in my English class,” Yetta said. “But I don't really understand it—isn't leisure good? Isn't it something you want? Like time to have fun? Why would you repent while you were having fun?”

“Leisure can also be just, time to stop and think,” Jane said. “What the proverb means is that if you do something in a hurry, without thinking about it, then when you do stop and think, you'll regret it.”

Like running away from home?
Jane wondered.

She pushed that thought aside, because Bella and Yetta were so merry, fitting the dress back together, trying out new styles for Jane's hair, showing her how to polish her boots until they gleamed.

“What will we do about a hat?” Bella moaned.

Jane thought of the rows and rows of hats sitting on shelves back at her own house. Hats with feathers, hats with flowers, even one with a little stuffed dove tucked along the brim . . .

Bella seemed to be thinking along the same lines.

“If you'd just remembered to wear one when you came here,” she scolded.

“You always had such beautiful hats when you came to the picket line,” Yetta said dreamily.

“But they're tainted, remember?” Jane said. “Bought with my evil father's evil money . . .”

“So was your dress and your boots and that blanket, and you brought those!”

“I do like that warm blanket,” Bella said. “I'm glad you brought it.” She was the one who'd been sleeping with it at night, because she was the one who had to sleep on the bed improvised from chairs. Worst bed, best blanket—it seemed only fair.

“Wish you'd bought a blanket for me, too,” Yetta joked.

“And maybe one of those soft pillows . . .” Bella said.

“And I've always wanted to try orange juice. I wouldn't have complained if you'd brought some of that,” Yetta added.

“I
had some at Jane's house,” Bella bragged. “Isn't that what you gave me, in the mornings? And those sausages—I wouldn't have minded if you'd brought us some of those sausages!”

They were teasing her, and that was all right. She hadn't known: They craved luxuries too. They were poor girls, but they were still girls; they wanted the frilly dresses and ruffly skirts and glorious hats that Jane had always taken for granted.

“Since I'm taking the serge dress back from you, Bella, you should have my day gown,” Jane said, holding out the stained lace dress she'd been wearing for days. “I think it will come clean.”

“Oh, I've got the shirtwaist and skirt that Rocco gave me for Christmas,” Bella said, reaching out and touching the lace edging on one sleeve. “Where would I ever wear a dress like that? We should hang it on the wall, to show people that we've got more clothes than we need.” Tears glistened in her eyes. “I never thought, back in Calia, that I'd ever have so much in America.”

It was strange: What was poverty to Jane was untold riches to Bella.

“I know!” Yetta said, bolting upright. She rushed out the door, and came back a few minutes later holding a hat out in front of her, like someone proudly displaying a trophy.

“Sadie across the hall said you could borrow it, just for tomorrow,” Yetta said. “Prettiest hat in the building, don't you think? Try it on!”

The Miss Milhouse voice that seemed to have taken up residence in Jane's head hissed,
Absolutely not! It's undoubtedly crawling with vermin, a hat borrowed from a strange girl in a tenement. And, anyhow, see how the velvet's worn thin at the crown and the fake chrysanthemums don't begin to cover it? And you know chrysanthemums are dreadfully out of style this season.
... But another voice in Jane's head, the one that was getting stronger, said that it was incredibly kind of Sadie-across-the-hall to loan her best hat to a stranger. Jane reached forward, took the hat, and placed it on her head.

“Perfect!” Yetta said.

“Lovely!” Bella agreed.

So Jane was in borrowed and resewn finery when she stood on the front step of the Blanck home. It's much smaller than my house, she told herself, to make herself feel better about the borrowed hat and the made-over dress. Except— was her “house” the Wellington mansion or the tenement she shared with Bella and Yetta?

A butler opened the door. He looked appropriately scornful, as if he knew about the tenement, knew that chrysanthemums were out of style on hats.

“Yes?” he said.

“I understand that Mrs. Blanck is looking for a governess,” Jane said.

“Servants' entrance is at the back,” the butler said, beginning to shut the door.

Jane stuck her foot in the door.

“I want Mrs. Blanck to understand that I know how young ladies should behave,” she said. “That I can
show
them how to act. And which door to use.”

The butler looked chagrined and let her in.

“Don't tell Mrs. Blanck I don't know proper butlering,” he said. “I'm such a greenhorn, I keep thinking they're going to fire me. At least you have the accent right.”

“I don't have an accent,” Jane said.

“Exactly,” the butler said. “You sound like a proper American.”

Jane decided it wasn't worth protesting that she
was
a proper American.

The butler led her to a gaudy, overstuffed parlor and went to alert Mrs. Blanck. Jane wondered if the servants at her own house had kept secrets from her and her father.
Of course they did,
she thought, remembering how Mr. Corrigan had kept the secret about taking Jane to the strike rally. But this made her see things differently, once again. Maybe being a servant wouldn't be so bad. She'd have allies.