City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (30 page)

In the winter he got work shoveling snow, following the horse carts through the deep slush tracks in the streets of Jewtown and Little Italy. He hoisted it up into the back of a wagon, heavy with frozen garbage and gravel, where two men with more seniority stood waiting to pack it down. When the wagon was full, they trudged over to the East River and shoveled it out again in the late winter afternoon: the snow turning over white blue and silver and white again as they dropped it through the ice, into the dark river that ran below them like a half-remembered dream.

On a clear day, he could see the ruddy-faced women from the House of Refuge, over on Welfare Island. They sat outside on their break, smoking cigarettes against the workhouse wall, in their shapeless, gray-striped smocks and kerchiefs. And once there had been a houseboat lodged in the glinting ice, a thin trail of smoke curling up from its smokestack. A lone woman had come out on the deck, hanging clothes on a line there—a thin, dark figure, pausing in her task to stare back at them, the diggers, shoveling snow into a river.

When there was no snow he worked as a jury-checker; he worked as a puller-in, yanking passersby off the sidewalk into the low-tin-ceilinged haberdasheries along Baxter Street. He worked for bucket shops sponging the beer dregs off bar tops; he rummaged through ash cans for unburned bits of wood and coal; he ran through the back courtyards of tenements with the other bummers, screaming “Line! Line!” for clothesline to hang—when they would just as soon have hanged themselves.

He didn’t require much. For a penny he could get a hard roll, and for another penny he could get a coffee over at the charity stand on the Mulberry Bend. He could sleep on barroom floors, or on half a bed in a dank, flooded basement. In the summer he bathed in the public saltwater baths on the North River, and in the winter he went dirty.

In the
Chasir Mark
on Hester Street, the men and women lined up every day with the tools of their trade, sorting themselves out in an unspoken hierarchy: carpenters with their hammers and T squares, then masons with their trowels, washerwomen with their basins. On down through the nurses and bakers, the chimney sweepers and the threadpullers, down to the greenest day laborers.

He stood there all day, with no tools at all to show for his toil. Watching the mad bustle of the
Chasir Mark,
the Pig Market, where it was said one could buy everything in the world except a pig: the children selling shoestrings, and matches, and penny notebooks; women selling little paper packets of horseradish they ground in the street; men peddling old peaches for a penny a quart, cracked cups for a penny apiece, cracked eggs for a penny a dozen; until he marveled that there was any such thing as trash in the ghetto.

One morning, instead of buying a hard roll, he used his penny to get a paper and answered an ad for a cutter at the Triangle factory. He wasn’t sure exactly what a cutter was, though he reasoned from the salary offered that it was some sort of skilled labor.

“How hard can anything in America be?” he told himself. “After all, I can already shovel shit.”

At the factory he waited all day outside the office of Mr. Bernstein, the general manager. Finally, when his stomach was all but rolling over from hunger and he thought he could stand it no longer, the man had flung open his door, asked without any further formalities:

“Name?”

“Joseph Kay.”

“Uh-huh. If he was Garlic in the old country, here he’s Mr. Onions.”

Bernstein grabbed his right hand, turning it over, probing his callouses, wiggling the fingers.

“I don’ know,” he shrugged. “Tough enough, but flexible? And the fingers? It’s a
goyishe
hand.”

“Mr. Bernstein,” he interrupted, thinking about
Luck and Pluck,
and
Ragged Dick,
and summoning up all his courage. “Mr. Bernstein, I can
do
this job. I
know
I can.”

The general manager shrugged again.

“Well, sure you can try. All right—let’s see if you’re a cutter.”

He took him down to the eighth floor, where the pressers’ irons sizzled against the back wall, the cutters peering down suspiciously at them from their high tables.

“Now this one is a cutter?”

“He’ll eat the head from our bones. Bringing in children!”

Yet they left off from their work, craning their necks to see past the patterns that hung over their desks on a thin wire clothesline.

“Benny—bring me some old
shmatte,”
Bernstein commanded, and at once a boy in knee breeches and high socks scuttled forward, handing him a long, thin scrap of green cloth. He thought Mr. Bernstein might be displeased, since there was a wide blotch of oil right in the middle of the material, but instead he nodded with satisfaction.

“Good—this won’t miss much.”

He pointed to the nearest cutter’s table, its slanted top nearly level to Joseph’s chin.

“As soon as Morris is finished with this job—you do.”

He watched the man intensely, knowing this was his only chance to even see how the job was done. Morris was a gaunt, balding man with enormous ears who looked too short to so much as reach the cutting table—but before Joseph knew it he had hopped up on a soapbox, already covering his table with layer after layer of fine material.

Next he plucked four patterns off the thin metal wire that ran the length of the cutting tables, laying them out over the fine lawn before him—four perfect outlines of a woman’s shirtwaist. His hands flew over them again, moving faster than a street monte dealer, arranging and rearranging the patterns until he had left as little extra cloth as possible.

When he was satisfied, Morris the cutter picked up a short, stubby knife, pressed his left hand down on the patterns, and sliced through the fabric with one long, fluid motion. He sheared through the longerine as if it were paper, one pattern after another, producing four perfect shirtwaists in a matter of seconds. Then he flipped the finished waists up over the wire and pushed the remaining scraps through a slot into the bin below—his table already swept clean, and ready for the next batch of lawn.

“Now you,” Bernstein told him.

“All right,” he said, his mouth already dry.

Another cutter protested from down the line—“What does a chicken know about these things?”—but the rest of them were quiet, restlessly arranging their lawn, stealing glances down at Joseph.

Bernstein piled up a couple more layers of the spoiled cloth, threw a pattern over them, then pressed the knife down into his palm. It felt like an oysterman’s blade, thick and round, and Joseph grasped it firmly. He took a deep breath, thought of what Ragged Dick or Mark the Match Boy might have done, and plunged right in.

He placed his left hand firmly on the cloth, then ploughed around the shirtwaist pattern just as he had seen the cutter do it. The knife caught, but he kept going. The fine, papery material balked and bunched, shredding around the fine metal borders of the pattern, but he forced it back in line.

“Lookit that!” someone breathed, in a tone of wonder.

He could feel Mr. Bernstein and the cutters moving in around him, watching in silent fascination. But he didn’t let it distract him, he didn’t stop until he had brought the knife around the entire pattern in one, continuous motion, just like he had seen Morris do, then shoved the scraps down into the bin and left the finished waist. Only then did he look up, triumphant, into their astonished faces.

“Gottenyu!”

“Now
there’s
a natural-born cutter!” someone exclaimed. Then they all dissolved into laughter.

The room revolved around him. Joseph looked down at the table and saw a tortured blob of material—a jagged, child’s copy of a pattern. One of the cutters snatched up the first layer and began to parade it around the room.

“That’s murder on a piece of cloth!”

“A horse couldn’t do better,
maybe!”

They went writhing about the room with laughter and relief, dancing with the hideous cutout until the pressers and the women at their machines looked up and started to laugh, too.

“Oh, miss, miss, what a fabulous dancing partner you are! Only—I must say—you are looking a little bit
shredded!”

Even Bernstein was smiling, around the unlit stub of cigar in his mouth.

“All right. So you’re not a cutter,” he said. But he had provided them with such a laugh that Bernstein gave him a job as a floor boy right there, sticking a broom in his hands.

“Here, this is the only piece of equipment in the shop I trust you with!”

He spent his days sweeping up the great piles of scrap and lint that fell like rain between the rows of operators. He hauled oil to the machines from the big barrel on the ninth floor; scuttled underneath the benches to replace the greasy, black leather belts that tied the machines to the central axle—

He loved sliding himself under the benches, deep down among the machine girls, among their skirts and petticoats. He loved how they smelled, even amidst the machine oil and the clouds of lint and dust. He had never been around so many girls before: sloe-eyed Italians with olive skin, milky-white Jewish girls with their thick, curly nests of hair. He loved just watching them come in to work in the morning, laughing and singing, mothers coming in with daughters, sisters with sisters.

His favorite task of all was at closing time, when they had to be searched. At five minutes to nine, every night, Mr. Bernstein would go around making sure the fire doors on all three stories of the factory were closed and padlocked. Then he and the foremen and the floor supervisors and the errand boys would station themselves at the elevators, and the stair doors, and everyone in the factory would have to go by them, and hold out their bags and pockets for inspection.

It soon became Joseph’s greatest, secret pleasure. Many of the girls preferred him—knowing at least he wouldn’t leer or pinch at them, or make some remark. They always complained, but he was convinced they liked it, at least with him. They held open their handbags—and he would stick his face right down into their lovely, velvet depths, turning over the little clues he found—a scented handkerchief, lipsticks and powders, the photograph of a man. Gently, curiously handling and sniffing at their most intimate possessions.

“What are we looking for, anyway?” he asked Mr. Bernstein after a few weeks on the job.

“Dolt! Don’ch you know already? Any piece of cloth you find. Anything that belongs to the company,” he told him, clouting him lightly over one ear.

“Anything at all?”

“It’s all the company’s. You’ll see.”

A week later the felt dealer came by, and Joseph had to help him cart away the tons of leftover cloth under the cutters’ tables. When the cutters finished each stack of lawn there were always at least a few useless corners left, like leftover pie crust, no matter how carefully they had plotted their patterns.

These leftover bits were all swept into the enormous wooden bins beneath their tables—along with everything the boys swept up from the shop floor, and every piece of lawn ruined beyond repair. It didn’t look like much by itself, but at the height of the season it took the felt dealer’s two burly sons to help him push and yank each bin over to the elevator, then out to the curb and the scrap wagon and then, with one last, great heave, dump them over into the open cart. Dozens of bright little triangles of cloth escaping, flitting off down the street in the afternoon breeze . . .

“Everything has a value,” Mr. Bernstein explained to him, as solemnly as if he were disclosing the secrets of the pyramids. “That is the key to mass production—everything is worth something.”

—and in that instant it was clear to Joseph how things worked. It fit in perfectly with the philosophy of the
Chasir Mark.
Everything—the factory, the tenements, they
themselves
—everything was made up of such little pieces, and it was only a matter of rearranging,
redistributing
them for profit.

Soon afterwards, he was promoted to expressman, carting goods and running errands all over town. He liked being out on his own, even though it meant he had to spend more time away from the girls. He would pad down into the cool, dark subway station like a thief, and stand in the middle of the platform, between the express and the local trains as they came in. He would wait until they pounded into the station together, letting the whoosh of the stagnant tunnel air sweep over him. Ecstatically sounding out the words on their windows:

INTER-BOROUGH RAP-ID TRANSIT
—

The promotion enabled him to rent a single, first-floor room, looking out into an airshaft: a bed, and a chair, and a bathroom in the hall. He bought a new two-dollar suit in the
Chasir Mark,
and a black bowler hat to go with it, and went to eat every Sunday at the cafeteria the society ladies had set up on Grand Street, where you could get a full dinner with a schooner of beer and an after-dinner smoke for fifteen cents.

How the taste of the fat melted in every limb! A bit of brisket, some corned beef A lump of sugar, held under the tongue. White bread, and cinnamon rolls, and poppyseed rolls—

The place had flowers on each table, and white tablecloths, and its respectability attracted many of the single factory girls. He would eye them from his table, hoping to talk one of them into coming back to his room—hoping they would at least meet his eye. They almost never did, but that was all right, too. Mostly he was just happy to watch them, sitting and eating in their best Sunday clothes, he in his suit, feeling more and more
oyshgreen
—more ungreen—every day.

In the factory Joseph followed Mr. Bernstein everywhere, paying attention to every word he said, for he was certain that it was through him he would make his rise.