City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (15 page)

“I understand you to the depths of my being, as only one who has long suffered can,” she wrote. “From the bottom of my soul, I promise you: we shall be friends forever, in joy and sorrow! What is sweeter in life than the sympathy between woman and woman? What is purer than the gratitude of hearts? What greater than the harmony of minds?”

She had signed it, “Yours, in friendship and socialist comradeship,” and when she had finished her whole body was shaking. She had been as shy about slipping it to her as a schoolgirl—but finally she had managed to push it into Clara’s coat pocket when no one else was watching. The next day, Clara had stopped her in the hall, out by the bathroom, and stroked her cheek with her hand this time.

“Such a nice letter. You are certainly a person among people,” she’d told her, and after that Esther was sure that she would do anything in the world for her, follow her anywhere.

It was Clara who first took her to the union, over at the hall on Clinton Street. It was late, after work one night, but the place was still full of people bustling impressively about, and nearly all of them women—some of them girls no older than Esther herself. Clara put up the few cents for her first dues, taught her how to hide her union card in her hat, and they went to the meetings together after that.

Esther liked them at once, even though they were always jammed into drowsy, overheated halls, endless successions of speakers gabbling away at them in Yiddish, Italian, Portuguese, German. She liked that there was advice on how to get on in this life, liked looking over all the choices of classes and lectures on hygiene, child-rearing, literature, the social graces. She liked the sound of the word “International” in the union title, how it implied that there was a whole world of girls just like herself out there, all somehow banded together. Even when she was bone-tired, during the height of the rush—when she felt she could no longer lift another stitch—she went to the meetings, or one of the lectures at the settlement houses, to let herself be sustained and comforted by them. She liked that it would make her father wonder where she was, so late at night.

On her own, she might have been content just to keep going to the meetings. It was Clara who insisted they had to bring the union home, right into their little shop.

“Look at how he pays us,” she sighed. “America the thief!”

“But what can we do?” Esther asked. “The union is supposed to help
us.”

“We can build the union right here in this shop!”

They decided first to clean up the abominable bathroom in the hall, and keep it clean. It was their little project at first, but soon Clara had rallied the rest of them around it. It was a small thing, just a clean bathroom, but it was the first time Esther had ever been able to go to the toilet where it wasn’t loathsome and dank and foul. It was the one place she could be alone and Clara encouraged her to take breaks, even bought her cigarettes she could smoke while she sat in there, thinking and resting—the one, tiny space she had carved out of the world for herself.

The others spoke of the union furtively at first, whispering to them when Himmelfarb was in the back. But soon they were talking of it openly, even the men. Himmelfarb gave them a black look whenever he heard them, but there was nothing he could do.

“It’s the height of the season, he needs all his hands,” Clara reminded them again and again.

“But what about when the season’s over? Then what?” one of the other women wanted to know.

“Then he’ll throw you out anyway like a lump of cholera, won’t he? Better you should at least get what you can now.”

The shop was busier than ever. Himmelfarb sweated them routinely until midnight now, yelling and screaming, frantically counting and recounting his coats. They worked all
Shabbos
day, until Esther daydreamed about seeing her mother again in her wedding dress, covering her eyes after she lit the candle. She knew the others were looking to the two of them to do something.

“But to risk that money, now, at the rush!”

“It
is
the rush.
Tochises afn tish
—this is it!”

The next day, Clara demanded a raise in the rate. She took a vote at lunch, while Himmelfarb was out at the factories. They all went along, even the men at the machines, slowly raising their hands like shy white water plants, reaching for the light. When Himmelfarb came back in, they all stood before him in the front room, Clara and Esther a little out in front—and eyes blazing, Clara told him they wanted a nickel more for each piece.

“You should go and put a knife in my children’s throat, askink a rate like that,” he sneered at them.

“We know you got it,” Clara said right back to him. “I know what you get from the factories.”

“Yap! Go bluff a dead rooster, not me. My head is still on my shoulders.”

“All we want is what we got coming,” Esther spoke up, not sure where she got the courage, gratified by the radiant smile Clara shot her.

“We don’t get it, you can sew your own coats.”

“My shirt has turned to linen from fright.”

He stomped out the front door—locking it behind him.

They stood where they were, frightened and exhilarated, and completely at a loss for what to do next. Some of them thought he would refuse, and others thought he would give in, and all of them thought he would be back in a few minutes—that he had locked them in just to frighten them.

Half an hour dragged by, and there was still no sign of Himmelfarb. They felt almost drunk with their freedom—to be standing and talking as free as they pleased, in this tiny, suffocating room, where they had always worked so hard! An hour went by, though, and then another one, and they began to feel a little nervous. One by one, they drifted back to their tasks.

“The higher the rate, the more coats we want to get done, after all,” one of the men rationalized, whirring the engine on his little machine.

“Mebbe it’s some kind of trap—”

“We should just walk out, right now,” Clara said, tapping a thimble against the table. “We made an offer, he turned it down.”

“We don’t want to wreck his contracts,” Esther reasoned. “After all, he has to pay us out of something.”

“That’s right,” another one of the men spoke up. “He’s only doin’ what he has to do to stay in business.”

“A disease he is,” Clara snorted. “Besides, we’re not dogs, we just want what’s coming to us.”

They worked on through the afternoon as usual, without a break. For a while still, they were very jolly, trading jokes and insults about Himmelfarb as they worked, but then one of the women killed that.

“What if he’s on the other side?” she said, nodding toward the scarred wooden door of the shop. “What if he’s list’nin’ to everythink we say?”

“What if he is?” Clara challenged. “We got a right to talk.”

After that, though, they lapsed into silence, concentrating on the coats before them—wondering when Himmelfarb was going to return. Esther picked up the bells, slowly tolling away the hours. When they reached seven o’clock they began to talk among themselves again, trying to figure out what there was to do.

“Do you think he’s coming back with some gangsters?” the phlegmatic little underboss who had been Esther’s
shadchen
wondered. The others looked up, alarmed.

“America is not Russia,” Clara insisted.

“America!” The presser snorted. “A land where the lice make money, and good men starve!”

They fell silent again for a while.

“Mebbe he’s tryink to starve us.”

“No—he’s just bluffing. Wait him out!” Clara commanded.

They worked on—past eight o’clock, nine o’clock, before they decided that someone should try the door. The presser and the men who worked the machines put their shoulders into it, but it was heavy; reinforced with metal bands and hinges against thieves and factory inspectors, and they couldn’t get it to budge. They all tried it together then, but there wasn’t enough room to make their collective weight felt.

They retreated to their stools and benches, sweating and panting and nearly distraught—and went back to work.

“We’ll do the same work we always do.”

“Dat’ll show him.”

“It’ll show him we are bargainink in good faith.”

“You can have all the good faith you want, it still don’t impress the devil.”

“Say, do you think he forgot about us?”

They worked furiously again for a while, but soon they began to tail off, slowed by worry and exhaustion. Finally, when the church bells chimed midnight they all stopped and tried the door again. It still would not budge. The men went into the forbidden back room then and pushed aside the
mizrach,
the view of the temple wall that was the sole ornament Himmelfarb had in the entire shop, hung over a boarded-up window on the east wall. They knocked out the slats that covered it, and leaned out into the cool, dank air of the alley.

“Help! Help!” they cried together. “We are locked in here! Do something! We will starve to death.”

From the front room the women could hear them yelling, over and over again, until some of the girls began to laugh, it all seemed so ridiculous. But the whole street was made up of sweatshops, and illegal tenements, and there was no response—no sign that anyone heard them at all.

“Help! We want to go home to our wives and children!”

Finally Clara strode to the back, and pushed the ineffectual men away from their space at the window.

“Fire! Oh, God,
fire!”
she shouted at the top of her lungs, in a voice that seemed to make the foundations shiver.

“Fire,
fire! My God, it will kill us all!”

There was another long silence. Then, at last, they could hear the sound of the fire bells approaching, the roar of the local hook-and-ladder company pulling up to the curb below. The men came trotting around the back: hulking young Irishers with huge moustaches, who grinned to see them waving desperately from the shop window.

“Hallooo! Jews up a tree!” they jeered.

“Lookit—twelve of ’em! Whatsa matter? Did Jesus get away this time?”

“Help! Help us!”

“Oh, yeah? Where’s the fire?”

“Please—help us!”

The firemen finally condescended to run the long, wobbly ladder up to the window. One by one, they came down: a straggly line of men and women, hunched over, groping their way slowly down the ladder in the cold moonlight.

“Lookit this—like rats desertin’ the ship,” the Irishers continued to taunt them.

“Did you ever see such a thing? Jews on the highwire.”

Clara had thought they should bring all the coats they could carry with them, just to make sure they had something over Himmelfarb. But the rest of them were worried he would have them arrested for stealing and anyway they needed both hands and feet on the rubbery ladder. They stumbled down to the bottom, with the Irish firemen still laughing all around them, then walked home to their beds freezing and exhausted.

But when they came back the next morning, there was nothing there. The shop had moved. Somehow, Himmelfarb had had everything carted away during the night, after they had gone. The little rooms were now completely bare, stripped of all the coats they had once held as completely as if no sweatshop had ever existed there. Even the
mizrach
was gone.

They asked all around for Himmelfarb for weeks after that, but nobody had heard anything. He had changed his name, or moved to another city, or thrown himself in the river, for all they knew. Esther and Clara were able to scramble around and get work for the rest of the season. The others went off to different shops, and she never saw anything of them again, either, in the vast, changeable sea that was the garment industry.

She worked with Clara at one small shop or another for years after that. Clara was more and more in demand as a speaker for the union, going into shops all over the City for the union, but they still kept in touch, still told each other whenever they found a position.

In the slow season, they went to the settlement house, or to improvement lectures together, or Clara took her to the library. Not only the Seward Park branch, with its endless line of Jewish children waiting patiently outside, but also the great central library uptown, where Clara instructed her in all the great authors to read: Hardy, and George Eliot, and Dickens and Tennyson and Keats.

The next fall Esther had made a connection in women’s cloaks, with a nice Italian girl named Gina she knew from the shop after the one on Division Street. Putting up everything they had saved, they were able to open up a subcontracting shop of their own. Esther asked Clara in, but she turned them down. She had bigger plans than that, she was saving up her money to go to medical school—once she had finished making the revolution.

“God bless, go make a million dollars, but no,” she told them. “I’m a worker, that’s who I am. Never a boss.”

They hired on four other girls—teenagers like themselves—and they did everything they had always wanted, everything she and Clara had always talked about. They let them take toilet breaks, and a real lunch hour, and share in the profits. They all worked hard, and they even made money for a while.

Then the season ended, and they were swept away like all the other small operators. By the time the next season came around they didn’t have the money to open again, and then there was another Wall Street panic, and there was no work at all, no work to be had anywhere, and Clara got the idea they should go and camp out in the open air, so their families could at least make some money letting out the extra rooms. They had got Gina, and Clara’s friends Pauline and Fannia, and Clara Rukus, and Martha Holman, who was a bookkeeper, and Alma Nitzchka, who brought her little boy with her. They had taken bedrolls and cooking pots, a big canvas tent they had stitched themselves, and books—piles and piles of books—and gone up to take the Edgewater Ferry over to the Palisades.

It had been bliss. Pure bliss—like sleeping out on the roof, only much better. They scrounged work wherever they could get it, taking in sewing from the little New Jersey villages, or picking vegetables, and they shared whatever they had between them. More friends had come to visit on Sundays, and brought along fruit and bread, and dried fish, a bit of cake, and most especially beans—sack after sack of baked beans. They had eaten beans that summer until they couldn’t stand the sight of them, cooked in a big pot over an open fire, like they were cowboys.