Uprising (29 page)

“Oh, Miss Wellington, I couldn't do that,” Mr. Corrigan said. “That'd be stealing.”

It was amazing, Jane thought, the way rules tied people in knots. How people trying to do something right could end up causing harm. As if there weren't already enough harm done in the world by people who didn't care. And by people who wanted to do evil.

Impulsively, she threw her arms around Mr. Corrigan's shoulders, hugging him as she'd once tried to hug her own
father, as she'd never been able to hug her mother. There were rules against such things, rules prohibiting a rich girl from hugging a servant, rules prohibiting a governess from hugging a chauffeur. But suddenly she didn't care.

Mr. Corrigan hugged her back.

“Come back and find me again sometime,” Jane whispered. “Maybe sometime in the spring. I'll be fine, you'll see. Come back and tell me about your daughters..... She would have said “and my father, too,” but her throat had closed up.

“Aye, I will,” Mr. Corrigan whispered back. “That I will.”

I
t was another long winter. One night, after slogging through icy slush all the way home, after peeling off wet boots and trying to warm numb fingers over a stove that seemed incapable of putting out any heat, Bella mumbled, “It's worse this year, isn't it?”

“What is?” Jane said, replacing the blanket they always stuffed under the door now, to cut down on drafts.

“The cold,” Bella said. “It doesn't make sense. Last year, there was more snow, and we were outside picketing. This year, I'm inside the factory all day, but my fingers seem stiffer, my feet ache more, I can't stop shivering. . . .”

“It's because last year we had hope,” Yetta said. “Because of the strike. What's there to hope for now?”

“Spring,” Bella said. “Rahel's baby to come. You to save enough money to bring your family over from Russia. Jane to save enough money for college. Pietro to come back. Rocco to finally finish paying off his debt. Jacob to try again to ask you out dancing. The union to be strong again . . .”

“Oh, Bella, those things are all so far off,” Yetta said. “Or impossible. Or things I don't even care about.” She slammed a pot down onto the stovetop. “Don't you ever want to have
everything right now? Not to spend your whole life wishing for someday?”

Bella looked from Yetta to Jane, really peering at them, as if she wanted to memorize every detail: Jane's pale porcelain skin, Yetta's wind-chapped cheeks, their wind-whipped hair, their eyes rimmed with red from the icy, sooty air of winter. Her dear, dear friends, so cold and beaten down.

“You're right,” she said. She backed away from the stove. She'd hadn't bothered removing her coat when she'd come in, so she didn't have to put it back on now. She did have to shove her feet back into her wet shoes. “I'm just—I'll be right back.”

The wintry blast almost knocked her over as she struggled out the front door. She lifted the collar of her coat against the wind, thinking,
Isn't that something we can be grateful for now, Yetta—that this winter we actually have coats?
But coats were like food, a basic need.
Don't you want more out of life than potatoes and bread?
Yetta had asked her, all those months ago. And Bella did. The longer she was in America, the more Bella longed for.

She passed peddlers hunched against the wind, selling hot chestnuts and hot rolls straight from the bakery and hot potatoes wrapped and kept warm in ashes. The smells swirled around her and her stomach growled, but she kept walking. She needed to go where the rich people shopped, so she slipped onto a trolley. She felt so extravagant placing her nickel into the slot—extravagant and scared, because she wasn't used to getting around in the city by herself. Before, she'd always had Yetta and Jane, and before that, Signor Luciano or Nico or Pietro. But she sat up straight in her seat,
and fixed the people around her with a determined stare, and nobody bothered her.

She waited until the conductor called out “Fifth Avenue,” and then she stepped back down to the frozen street. She was glad she hadn't had to rely on reading signs—she was getting better at puzzling out letters and words, but she still had a long, long way to go. Now she ignored the signs and just looked in shop windows until she came to one displaying a huge bouquet of daisies and carnations and all sorts of other glorious blooms that had no right to exist in the wintertime. Bella wasn't used to shopping in stores, only at peddlers' carts. But she boldly pushed her way through the door.

“Yes?” the woman behind the counter asked, raising her eyebrows disdainfully.

“Roses,” Bella said. “Do you have any roses?”

The woman pointed, as if words would be wasted on someone as poor as Bella.

There was only one rose left, in a vase off to the side that had obviously contained many more roses earlier in the day. The rose leaned out from the vase a little sadly, its petals just beginning to droop.

Bella caught her breath.

“How much?” she said.

“Fifty cents,” the woman said.

That was a fortune, worth hours of work to Bella, earned from dozens and dozens of shirtwaists shoved through her machine. It was too much, but Bella wasn't ready to give up yet.

“That rose will be dead tomorrow,” she said. “It's almost closing time. Nobody else will buy that—you'll just throw it out in the trash.”

The woman gasped, offended.

“So you think I should give it to you, just like that? This isn't a
charity!
We're a fine establishment, not meant for riffraff like you.” She gave a short, cruel laugh. “If you want the rose so much, come back tomorrow and get it out of the trash!”

Bella kept her head held high, though her cheeks burned.

“Ten cents,” she said. She had to concentrate very hard to come up with understandable English. “I buy it for ten cents.”

Another woman came out from the back of the store, an older lady with a willowy frame and elegant gray hair. The store clerk complained to the older lady, “Can you believe someone like
that
has come into our store? And she's trying to
barter
for our flowers! Shall I call the police?”

The gray-haired lady looked at Bella. Bella stood frozen, poised to run if the clerk picked up the phone to call the police.

“Sell her the rose,” the gray-haired lady said. “Five cents.”

Bella couldn't believe her good fortune. She would have been content to plunk her nickel down on the counter, grab the rose, and run away. But the gray-haired lady insisted on wetting a cloth and gently wrapping it around the stem, instructing Bella, “Now, place this in water as soon as you get home. . . .”

Bella nodded dumbly, her English abandoning her entirely.

Bella sheltered the rose inside her coat all the way down the street, on the trolley, back to her tenement. When she reached the apartment, Yetta and Jane sprang at her, crying out, “Where have you been!” and “We were so worried!” Bella fended them off.

“Just wait to see,” she said, opening her coat slowly, drawing out the rose.

Yetta and Jane fell silent.

Bella placed the rose in the same glass they'd once used for storing the artificial roses from Rahel's destroyed hat. The other two clustered around, as awed and respectful as if she were lighting a candle in church. For a moment, all three of them just stared at the flower, admiring its deep, dusky red petals, the graceful arc of the leaves. Then Yetta broke the silence.

“You went out in a snowstorm to buy a flower?” she asked. “You spent money on a rose?”

“You wanted something to happen
now,”
Bella said. “And you”—she turned toward Jane— “you wanted real flowers, not fake. So I . . .” She gestured at the rose, as if its beauty could speak for itself.

“Well, thank you, but—” Jane cleared her throat. “I can live without fresh flowers in December. I've discovered there are lots of things I can live without. You should have kept your money for yourself. Do you want me to pay you back—?”

“And me?” Yetta offered.

“No, no,” Bella said. She wanted her friends to understand. “Yetta, you are saving for your family and, Jane, you are saving for college and Europe, and me, there is nothing for me to save for. So I can pay for our nows,' because we are not so poor that we cannot have anything. I cannot buy roses every night, but, sometimes. Roses and maybe tickets to the nickelodeon and maybe, next summer, that Coney Island place I keep hearing about . . .”

It was like she'd conjured up a spell in the icy room, like
the rose was a magic wand. Both her friends had dazed, slightly dreamy expressions on their faces. Even Yetta was speechless for once.

“So, tonight we are
comari di
Triangle
e rosa
!” Bella finished.

For the rest of the evening, they gathered around the rose as if it were a roaring fire. They stared at the rose while they ate their potatoes and pickled herring; while Jane read to them from the newspaper they'd found frozen onto the sidewalk and carefully thawed out over the stove; while Bella told the story, again and again, of going in search of the rose and standing up to the surly sales clerk. In her retelling, the clerk practically grew fangs and horns, the gray-haired lady all but swooped in with wings and a halo. And her friends laughed and laughed and laughed and told her again and again how brave she'd been.

In the morning, the rose was frozen, its stem caught in ice. Bella spread the petals across the kitchen table to dry out, and all three of them tucked petals into their pillowcases. Just that one rose carried them the rest of the way through the winter.

It made everything else they hoped for seem so much closer.

Y
etta was listening for the bell on the time clock, waiting to finish her day. It was a Saturday afternoon in March, and the spring breezes were back. She'd heard them rattling the windows when the machines were shut down for lunch; she knew that as soon as she stepped outside, they'd tease at her hair and tug at her hat. This year, the breezes seemed to carry a slightly different message:
Another year past and what do you have to show for yourself ? So you can read English a little bit better, so you handed out a few suffrage fliers—do you think that that's enough?

What would ever be enough for Yetta?

“I think they set the clocks back again,” the girl beside her muttered. “It's got to be past quitting time!”

“And that's why we need a strong union, why we need a closed shop,” Yetta muttered back.

The girl rolled her eyes at Yetta.

“Don't you ever give up?” she asked over the clatter of the machine.

“No,” Yetta said, but she grinned at the girl, and the girl grinned back, and Yetta thought maybe, just maybe, they'd inched just a little closer to the solidarity Yetta longed for. This girl's name was Jennie, and she was new.

The bell finally rang, and Yetta and Jennie both stood up and stretched, reviving cramped muscles, unhunching rounded shoulders, stamping feet that had gone numb on the sewing machine pedal.

“I'm going dancing tonight,” Jennie said, mischievously tapping out a rhythm on the floor. “What are you doing?”

“Um ... I don't know,” Yetta said. “I haven't decided yet.”

Bella and Jane had been nagging her to go visit Rahel and the new baby, a little boy they'd named Benjamin. Bella and Jane had already gone once, but Yetta had had a cold then and only sent her regrets.

Well, really, I wouldn't want the baby getting sick because of me,
Yetta told herself.
Maybe I'm not well enough, even yet. . . .

“I bet that cutter who watches you all the time would take you dancing,” Jennie said. “All you have to do is just . . .” She pantomimed cozying up to an invisible man, gazing up adoringly at the invisible man's face, fluttering her eyelashes.

Yetta blushed.

“There's not a cutter who watches me all the time,” she said, but she couldn't help glancing toward Jacob's table. Jacob hadn't said a word to her about dancing since she'd turned down his invitation, all those months ago. But he did seem to find lots of reasons to walk past her sewing machine, to ride in the same elevator with her, morning and evening. Even halfway across the room, she could instantly pick out his figure in the cluster of cutters standing around laughing and talking and smoking. Jacob was bent over the table, smoothing out the layers of lawn fabric ready to be cut first thing Monday morning. There had to be at least a hundred and twenty layers of the gauzy fabric spread across the table, each one separated from the others by sheer tissue paper. Jacob handled it all so gently,
almost lovingly. Above his head, the tissue-paper patterns dangled from wires, so when he stood up it was like watching someone across a forest, half hidden by hanging moss and low branches.

Suddenly Jacob and the other cutters jumped back. One of the men sprinted over to a shelf on the wall and seized a red fire pail. Jerkily, he raced back and threw the pail of water under one of the tables, at the huge bin of fabric scraps left over from days and days of cutting out shirtwaists.

“Not again! Those cutters and their cigarettes,” Yetta said scornfully. It was clear what had happened: One of them had dropped a match or a cigarette butt or a still-burning ember into the scrap bin. At least someone was smart enough to keep buckets of water around, if the cutters couldn't be stopped from smoking.

But then there was a flash, and Yetta saw the flame jump, from under the table to the top of it. More men grabbed buckets, desperately pouring water onto the flames, but there'd been only three buckets on that shelf, so they had to run across the room for more.

The water was nothing to the fire. The flames raced the length of the lawn fabric; they sprang up to the dangling paper patterns and danced from one to the next, the patterns writhing down to ash and spitting off more flames. In seconds the fire had gone from being something to scoff at under a table to a voracious beast ready to engulf the entire room.