City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (13 page)

The shorter man looked her over, twisting up his face.

“What’s your name?”

“Esse. Esse Abramowitz,” she told him—hoping suddenly that it was all a mistake, that she was at the wrong address, or the position had fallen through, and she could go home to her mother. But she would have no such luck. The shorter man stared at her for a little longer, then shrugged his shoulders.

“I guess,” he said finally.

“This
can fell sleeve lining?” the bearded man still asked incredulously. “You be lucky she can pull strings.”

“Her mama paid me,” the short man shrugged again. “What’s it my trouble?”

“lt’s a black year on you if she ruins one of my coats, that’s what it is,” the taller boss snorted. He looked at her again.

“So thin and small, like a dried-out herring,” he sighed. She heard one of the women sewers give a short, hard laugh.

“All right,
feller
. Over there—let’s see your work.”

Esther squeezed onto the only open stool around the table, between the two men on the machine. She started to squirm out of her coat but the taller man seized it by the collar and shoved it roughly up around her ears.

“Don’t get so comfortable,
pitsel.
Let’s see what you can do first.”

He plopped another coat down on the pile on the table. It was a good coat, too, she recognized, thicker and better cut than anything she or anyone she knew had ever worn, and her hands were shaking as she picked it up.

“C’mon, still yourself a little!”

Much later, she understood that he was hoping she
would
damage the coat—at least a little. Then he could squeeze her first weeks’ wages as a string puller out of her for nothing. What they would have done then for money, how it would all have worked out, she did not like to think about. But she had always had a way with a needle. Not so fast as some girls, not so adroit as the fine ladies’ seamstresses but agile enough, delicate enough. With her coat still on, she pulled one of the needles out of the wax paper, threaded it up, and started to sew.

Don’t twist! Small, false stitches at first—

The tall boss paced and tsked and tapped his foot impatiently, but she took her time, just like her mother had said. The machines on either side of her made her head ring; the men smelled heavily of onions, and themselves. They glanced contemptuously at her but she kept sewing carefully, deliberately, smoothing the silky lining and stitching, stitching and smoothing.

“You finished already?”

She held the heavy coat up to the boss. He tore it from her hands, flung it back down on the table and went over every stitch with his own needle-probing and testing, craning his head right down to the lining. Finally he stood up, an enigmatic, almost pleased expression on his face, and she was afraid he had found some secret flaw, some beginner’s bit of ignorance.

“All right,” he said, and brought a whole armful of coats over from the corner, threw them down in front of her without another word. Beyond them she could see the lips of the other sewing women twisting dourly.

She dropped her eyes to the work in front of her—pausing only, this time, to shrug out of her coat in the stultifying room. She was sewing before it landed at the foot of her stool.

They worked for hours, without any break. Once, one of the younger women—after squirming in noticeable discomfort for half an hour—tried to get up to use the toilet across the hall but the boss, Mr. Himmelfarb, waved her back onto her stool.

“Oh, no!” he told her. “You
pish
on your own time, not mine!”

The girl sat glumly back down and Esther, whose own bladder felt close to bursting from the tea her mama had made her that morning, pulled her legs together under the table until she thought her knees would pop.

They didn’t break until a man came in selling more tea, and hard rolls. Esther didn’t know what time it was, but she was sure it was well into the afternoon. The others all bought the rolls, but she just had a cup of the weak, flavorless tea, and nibbled at the chunk of challah her mother had torn off for her. The women across the table stared and gestured openly at her—particularly the older one—but she couldn’t follow what they were saying in the rapid amalgamation of English and Yiddish and Italian they used, and she kept her head down.

They went back to work as soon as they were finished eating, without another break for the rest of the afternoon or evening. From time to time the boss, Himmelfarb, would stalk in and sort quickly through their coats. When he found a mistake he would curse and scream at them, waving his arms around. Then he would tear out their flawed work, however miniscule and undetectable the mistake, flinging it back on the table for them to do over again.

Esther worked more carefully than ever—afraid she might break down and cry if he yelled at her like that, afraid that her hands might betray her under the constant repetition of the job. At first, she had enjoyed the challenge of the coats: their size, the fineness of the linings—so much more intricate and difficult than the secret garter belts. When she finished one, she could not help holding it up to look at her work—even when she heard the snorts of derision from the older woman across the table, the giggles of the other sewers.

Yet as the afternoon wore on, she began to feel dizzy from her hunger and the close air of the shop, the musty cloth and the odor of the men. The unchanged baby crawled its way back and forth, back and forth across the coats, bawling and coughing. The work became even more numbing and endless than the garters, and there was no mama to make her a cup of tea or talk to her, not even the lulling chant of her father reading the Talmud. She stopped holding up her coats to look at them.

She had no idea what time it was, or if it was still light outside. There were no windows in their room. She learned to listen for the sound of the church bells, to distinguish the tingling of the quarters from the solid gong of the hours. These sounds were the only remaining tie she had to the world—the only indication that something existed outside this cave of coats—and once she learned to decipher them she carefully counted off the hours: four, then five, then six. Picturing the streets outside, imagining the sidewalks filling up with men and women, coming off the elevateds. What her mother was doing at home.

Finally—she counted out seven chimes of the church bell, and rose to go. No one else moved. Unnerved, she made as if she had only stood to stretch her back and knees, the way the others did, then sat back down.

She finished the coat she was working on, and looked up again. Still—nobody moved. The boss only hurried over with another coat, then another one after that.

The bells counted out eight, then nine. Still, they sewed. The other women worked with their heads almost to the coats, too exhausted even to make fun of her now. Esther’s arms had begun to tremble with fatigue, she was petrified that she would tear a lining, or miss a stitch. She forced herself to work carefully, slowly, until she did not think she would be able to finish another coat.

Finally—finally, finally—the rest of them stood up as one. They were out the door, down the long, dark hallway and the slanting stairs and gone—even the poxy baby, gone—before she could get her coat on.

“Twenty-seven,” she reported shyly to Himmelfarb as he went about the room, piling up more coats wherever he could find room, labeling them for the expressmen to take to the factories.

“What, what?”

“Twenty-seven coats.”

“You think that’s somet’ink to brag about? You’re a beginner, you get paid by the week.”

“But
they
work by the piece!”

“They have experience!” he yelled in her face. “They are grown-ups, with families to support! You’re still a child, from a greedy mother.”

She stumbled back down the pitch dark street, gnawing at the little bread she had saved. She was certain, on her way home, that she could never do this again. She would plead with her mother to let her work with her again at home, and if she couldn’t she would go someplace else—run away out West, do something,
anything,
but this.

When she got home, though, it was not her mother, her smiling, nervous face that greeted her, but her father, scowling through the door. Mama sat behind him on a chair, face suffused with worry, rubbing her tortured hands together.

“What do you mean, coming home at an hour like this!”

He pulled her roughly inside by her elbow.

“Amerikanerin!
What kind of unclean things have you been up to?”

“I was working!” she shouted back—shocked at herself. It was the first time in her life she had ever raised her voice to her father.

“You work until seven!”

“Nobody moved!”

“Liar! Do you think I believe a dog because it barks?”

“Nobody moved, and they kept giving me coats, and I did them!”

“Liar!” he said again—but already she could see that the anxiety and the rage were fading. He was contented—as long as she was actually sewing coats.

“That’s how you work!” she screamed at him, infuriated now not by his suspicion, but by his indifference. “You—you
angel!”

He slapped her face then—not too hard, she noticed, but even this was an insult. It was not anything like the way he had hit Lazar, the night he left.

“Wild-head,” he told her, almost affectionately.

He sat down calmly at the tiny dinner table while her mother bustled around the kitchen, hoping the worst of the storm was over. Esther stood where she was, amazed that there was no more to be said.

“Well?” she finally blurted.

“Well, three extra hours,” he said, beginning to eat. “That’s not so bad.”

“Not so bad for you!”

“You have better things to do?”

She sat numbly at the table, realizing for the first time in her life how little he thought of her.

“It’s not what was contracted. He’s paying me by the week, not the piece.”

“So? You do it for now,” he said reasonably, his mouth full. “You learn the trade. Then you see.”

Her mother had made her favorite meal, pierogis covered in butter, and a kasha knish on the side, but when she laid the plate before her Esther could barely eat any of it. In the room of coats, the last couple of hours, she had been so hungry she thought she might pitch headfirst into the pile on the table and sleep until the next morning. But now she pulled away from the table and began to sob in the corner, shouting at them as they sat at their meal:

“Nobody cares! Nobody cares!”

Her mother started to rise and go to her, but her father stopped her.

“Let .her blow from herself for a while, if that’s what she wants,” he said, so of course her mother sat down, shooting worried looks over at Esther for the rest of the meal.

She cried to herself for the rest of the evening, ignoring her dinner and her mother’s attempts to console her again.

“There is no place for me in this world!” she sobbed to herself in the corner, hoping they would hear her, but they didn’t—at least they made no sign of it.

Later, she lay dry-eyed in the darkness, staring at the ceiling—and from where she was, she could hear them talking in their bedroom:

“Be reasonable,” he was telling her. “What do you want from me? To walk the streets like those other great scholars? Giving advice on chickens?”

“No,
gold meine—“

“She is a child, she would only fill her head with ice cream soda, and
Amerikaner
books!”

“She is still young—”

“Do I ask her to walk the streets for me? It is a decent trade, sewing. Remember:
‘She shall be brought before the king in raiment of needlework.’ “

She lay in the dark, on her two chairs, and listened to him say that. She listened to him use her words against her, and she never forgave him. She concluded then and there that he was indeed some kind of angel—one of those that were always hovering just above the concerns of men and women, holy enough, pure enough, but essentially
indifferent.
It was up to her to go out and work eighty hours a week in a sweatshop on Division Street.

That night—the night of that first, unendurable day—Esther was sure that she could not possibly go out to the suffocating little sweatshop on Division Street again. And yet, when her mother came shuffling into the kitchen before dawn to start the fire, she got up, and combed her hair, and drank her tea.

This time she made sure to tear off two large chunks of the challah, refusing to notice her mother’s consternation over how she was feeling. She went out to the filthy hall bathroom to change, barging in before anyone else on the floor could. She had to get to work.

That second morning she reached the shop on Division Street before seven, but the others were still already in their places, and Himmelfarb the boss scowled at her.

“Like a born Mrs. Vanderbilt, she comes an’ goes when she chooses!”

He plopped a full new load of coats into her arms. Esse nearly bent under the weight, but she took them without saying anything, and sat down on her stool between the two machine operators.

By midmorning it seemed to Esther that she had never known a world beyond the pushing of a needle through felt and cloth. She had thought her anger would carry her through the day, but even it dissipated into mindless fatigue. She tried counting the bells again, but now that only made the hours drag by interminably. She tried not to think at all—but the realization wormed its way up into her head, unbidden and unavoidable, that she would have to do this not only for the rest of the day but again the next day, and the day after that, again and again, for the rest of her life.

When the lunch break finally came, she tried moving her stool quietly over to the other women, but they kept talking about her and laughing, in between their gulps of tea and bread. Leah, who was the older woman, seemed to hate her the worst of all. It was her baby crawling endlessly through the waves of coats, and Esther realized that she must be at least twenty years younger than she looked.