City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (37 page)

It seemed to float there, beneath the fanciful legend etched into the glass, parisienne creations. It was a broad straw, with a delicate, white organdy band, and bunches of blood-red felt grapes, just in time for the last weeks of the summer. The organdy finer than lace, the grapes darker and rounder and more tempting than any picked off a fruit cart.

The creations, she happened to know, came not so much from Paris as a scab walk-up off Rivington Street, but for this hat she didn’t care. She feared that if she’d had the ten dollars, nothing in this world would have prevented her from buying it—not the class struggle, nor the union, nor even the knowledge of the half-dozen or so girls, just like herself, sewing fourteen hours a day in an unlit, sweltering room.

She was already late for the union offices over on Clinton Street, and she would have pulled herself away and gone onto the hall if the saleswoman hadn’t come into the window. She was the
tokhter
of the shop, Esther knew, tall and plump, decked out in the finest striped-silk maroon waist. She stepped out into the window to fetch the straw—and as she did, she spotted Esther out on the sidewalk and gave her a long, appraising look.

It was the worst look Esther had ever had—worse than any she had ever received from her father, or the floor supervisors at the Triangle. It was a look filled with such contempt, with such pity, that Esther had to go in then, pushing her way through the shop door before she knew what she was doing.

“Ex-cuse me! Ex-
cuse
me!
That hat!”

The saleswoman stared at her. At that moment the mother of the shop poked her head from behind the counter—their plump, matching faces filled with surprise and suspicion. But it was too late; Esther had to go through with it.

“That straw—” she insisted.

“What do you want with it?” the younger woman asked. She held it up casually in one hand, the dazzling red grapes and fine organdy mesmerizing Esther so close.

“Yes, mmm, well, maybe to
buy
it.”

“We have somebody who’s interested in this one. Somebody to pay real cash—”

“Was there somethink else you wanted to luke at,
mam’zelle?”
The older woman pushed forward, her accent from Paris by way of Kiev.

“Somethink in a different
price
range,
purr-ted?”

Esther stood her ground.

“No!
That
one!”

She pointed to the hat in the daughter’s hand, suddenly as imperious as any of the
sheyne yidn,
the beautiful Jews who usually frequented the shop—wives and daughters of the most prominent rabbis, and landlords, and the executives of the Pants Pressers Bank.

“It’s new—”

“Ouay, madame.
It’s fresh from our
I’lltellaya.”

“Are you thinking of trying it on?” the daughter asked incredulously.

Esther opened her bag, and deliberately pulled out her mirror. She let the pocketbook dangle in front of them while she pretended to look over her nose-enough so they could clearly see the roll of two hundred dollars, union dues fresh from the bank. When she put the mirror away and shut her bag, both mother and daughter were beaming at her.

“I would like to see it!” she commanded.

“Of course,
m’ambadam!”

The mother ushered Esther into one of the plush clients’ chairs, and clapped her hands. Another young woman came out of the back of the shop, with a conveniently long, thick roll of hair that could be parted or bunched to fit almost any head size. The proprietor of the shop sat her down by the window and worked the beautiful hat back and forth over her head, Esther cringing with each fold she made in it.

“This should give you some
edie-yay, mammon,”
she cooed, marching the girl back to Esther.

“Of courze, her head shape does not have the mature
butay
of a lady sooch as yerzelf . . .”

The girl took short, dainty steps back and forth in front of Esther, trying to walk like the most elegant uptown mannequins until she was trembling in her high heels. Esther let her do it for as long as she could, trying to gaze indifferently upon the immaculate hat. Finally, she gave another, imperious wave of her hand.

“All right. I will try it!”

The mother nearly ripped the straw off the girl’s scalp. She and the daughter were all over her, hands flying above her head.

“If
m’azam
will allow . . .”

She settled back luxuriously into the soft felt cushions of the chair, letting them gently unpin and lift off her own frayed, shapeless hat. They didn’t question it: there were always people showing up with money made overnight, and as long as they had actually seen the cash they would believe her. Lovingly now, they gathered up and smoothed out her hair, settled the new hat on her as delicately as a feather and fastened it in place with one long, thin pin under a bough of the perfect grapes.

“And—
walla!”

They held a mirror up in front of her. It was even better than she had imagined: the straw gleaming palely in contrast, the grapes and the organdy rich and vivid as a painting. Under the hat, her face no longer looked too round, the way she hated it, but long and elegant. She stared yearningly at herself in the glass.

“If you will allowze me,
mamdam—“

She let them fuss over her again, the older woman pinning it up first to one side, then the other, carefully bending the brim, setting it back and forth over her head until she looked like a different portrait each time.

“I don’t know. It could be amusing,” she finally forced herself to say.

The mother and daughter of the shop stayed where they were. She felt a little surge of panic when they didn’t move to unpin the hat. She stood up and waved the mirror around her head, as if she were examining herself carefully.

“It
is
late in the season,” she tried to hedge. “Maybe it isn’t quite right—”

The two women stayed rooted above her, and Esther thought she saw the first hint of suspicion in their faces.

“All right!” she said desperately. “Please—wrap it up, while I write out my address for you. I want it delivered.”

The women were instantly wreathed in smiles again. They pulled out the pins, finally lifting off the hat that now sat like lead upon her. The mother handed her a fountain pen and an exquisite little address card, with the name and address of the shop in raised lettering.

“Merzey, magnum!”

She turned away to help her daughter with the wrapping, fussing over a confetti of light blue and white ribbons. Esther doodled distractedly on the perfect little card, fingering the thick roll of bills that was not hers at all, but the collection from some three hundred and seventy-seven women in the union—wondering how she would get out of this without completely humiliating herself.

Just then two statuesque actresses from the Thalia breezed in, laughing and exclaiming. The mother and daughter looked around—and Esther squeezed between them, pretending to recognize someone out on the street.

“Oh, my goodness, that’s Rachel,” she exclaimed. “What
is
that girl doing?”

The daughter of the shop tried to go over to her, but the actresses were
kvelling
over something, and she could not get past them.

“Do be a dear and finish wrapping, I just have to see what the girl is doing with my son!”

Esther glided on out the door, the fine note card and fountain pen still in her hand, and raced down Delancey as fast as the crowds and her long skirts would let her. She did not stop until she had reached the settlement house on Clinton—and only then did she realize that her bag was still open, the collected dues of nearly four hundred women exposed to any vagary of the street. Miraculously, they were untouched—through no fault of her own.

Maybe he’s right,
she thought, of her father.
Maybe there is no limit to the evil I can do.

The settlement house where the union had its offices was a scrubbed, determinedly cheerful red-brick building, six stories high, pigeonholed with rooms for all the countless causes and preoccupations of the Lower East Side: for all the landsman’s clubs and English classes, the Socialist reading societies and women’s health clubs, the numismatic societies and trade unions and amateur theatricals. Up on the roof there was an outdoor gymnasium, entirely enclosed in wiremesh fence, where women in baggy sailor’s suits pushed medicine balls at each other, and huffed around and around a tiny running track.

Esther had never been interested in the track. Instead, when Clara first brought her to the settlement house she had signed up for a citizenship course. There she sat in a windowless classroom with sixty other students, learning the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. Rising at the end of each class with her fellow students, housewives and little girls and men in gray beards, all to recite the poem to the flag together:

She had liked it all right, at least the parts about the Constitution, but the course was at night, and her fellow students fell asleep at their desks after working their fourteen hours. They snored right through the teacher’s droning, uninspired presentation, and there were many times in that crowded, overheated room when she, too, felt very close to sleep.

What she longed for was a real education. That would be something, she was sure, that would transform her—draw her up past all her fear and self-loathing. Clara, she knew, had been offered a full college scholarship by a wealthy couple who had been impressed by her fiery speeches. She had turned them down, insisting she could take no such privilege as long as it was not available to all the girls. Esther admired her terribly for it—though she was sure that if she had ever had such a chance she would have taken it, and all the other girls be damned.

“The paper said,
‘Buona paga, Lunga stagione’
—union shop.”

“Then he tol’ me to go home—”

Inside the hall, a long queue of women stretched down a staircase from the office. A longer line than usual, mostly Italians today, arms stained halfway up to their elbows, red or tan or black, from the color of the cloth they had worked on. Quietly telling each other their grievances while they waited to tell them to the union.

Not one of them wore a hat like the one she had come so close to buying today. Why would they? She had never seen a hat anything like it at the Triangle, or any other shop she had worked. The thing would be dreck before the day was out—from the lint and filth alone, if Podhoretz didn’t bash it in on purpose when no one was looking. That she could even have considered doing such a thing made her deeply and irrevocably ashamed of herself. And yet—in all her wickedness—her greatest regret was that she did not have the hat.

“Say hire for piece—now for week—”

“Oh! How he grabs!”

Esther moved past them, up the stairs to the front desk, where Clara was sitting among the women—patiently writing, translating, noting their complaints. Grievances over rate and wage cuts. Grievances over unsafe conditions. Grievances over being docked for using too much thread, or fired because you wouldn’t let the foreman squeeze your breasts or because you didn’t like being screamed at like an animal all day long.

“And ten cents less!”

Every day, the lines on the stairs grew longer. More grievances, carefully written out in longhand, typed in duplicate, filed in their crowded, metal drawers. Why they bothered to collect them all, Esther never knew. They might as well be piling them up for God to read, for all the attention paid.

“Don’t put up with their dog’s tricks! You’re worth what you work for!” Clara was proclaiming to a young thread puller, holding her arms out like the Christian missionaries who came down to the neighborhood to convert them. The girl, who looked like she had just stepped out of a convent, took a step back, her face full of doubt and confusion.

“Ah, Italians, we need Italians!” Clara complained, turning aside to Esther. “They don’t understand this
mama-gab—“

“I know, I know—”

It was Clara’s constant complaint: more Italians. More Poles. More Russians, more Bohemians, Ukrainians, Portuguese, to spread the word of the union. Yet from what Esther had seen, most of the other women were just as glad to hear the Jews like Clara. They were the
fabrente maydlakh,
the fiery girls, and they spoke to the other women through more than words. She had seen such a glow of righteousness before only in the faces of the Hasid rabbis and their followers, dancing down Norfolk Street in their ecstasy, oblivious to the hail of insults and spit from the nonbelievers.

“America for a country, and ‘Dod’ll do’ for a language,” Clara repeated her old plaint, then turned her full attention on Esther.

“What have you got for me?” she asked—and then exulted when she saw the money Esther had changed into bills at the bank, from the endless pennies and nickels and dimes she had collected and meticulously recorded—and then nearly cast away in a moment.

“Good, good! More than I expected!”

Clara pulled her back into the inner offices, locked the dues away in the safe. Already, Esther was feeling a little better. It made her heart jump just to see her old friend, and Esther always felt a jolt of exhilaration when she visited these crowded little rooms, pungent with the smell of ink and blotters, luminous yellow balls of light hanging from the ceiling. And everywhere were women—all women, most of them no older than herself—bustling around the metal file cabinets and battered wooden desks. Men were supposedly in charge of the union, they sat in committee somewhere uptown, but here, in the office, it was almost solely women. Some of them even wearing tweed jackets and ties, or bobbed hair, writing, arguing, conferring.
This
was where something important got done. Something urgent and manly and
real,
beyond the endless assemblage of shirts.