City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (59 page)

“No, ma’am.”

“I know Charlie’s innocent. I spent the whole day of the murder with him. We went out to Coney Island together, and had a picnic, and he never once mentioned the name Rosenthal. Does that sound like someone who would have done such a thing?”

“No, no. I can’t say that it does—”

She brushed the veil away, looking into his eyes and trying to smile, the worry coming through instead.

“Any help you can give us would be most gratefully appreciated. We’re all each other has in the world, so far.”

She dropped her eyes, and looking down Big Tim could detect the slight rise of her belly beneath her black dress, in her otherwise slender body. No doubt she was at least several months along.

“I never regretted it, though,” she stammered, her upper lip wobbling. “Despite everything that has happened, I never regretted that we met and married. I never had a woman friend who I confided in. My only friend was my husband. I sometimes wonder why this could not have happened to people who did not love each other so much.”

Big Tim had mumbled something about all the help he could provide, and got the hell away as soon as he could. So Charlie Becker was a model husband, who loved his wife, and liked to collect the papers from the backward children’s class. So what exactly was he supposed to do with that information now?

Out on the streets, the tide was turning now. Every day, more of the bosses crept, humbled, into the union halls, to sign their surrender and agree to recognize the union.

Every day, the society women were out on the line with the striking women and girls, tormenting the cops by their very presence. They tried to sort them out from the strikers, but it wasn’t so easy. The wealthy women exulted in dressing up as much as possible like the working girls, like it was some kind of masquerade. Miss Dreier herself was pulled in, grabbed roughly off the street by her hair. The police sergeant who had arrested her discovered his mistake only at the booking, crying out openly in his frustration: “Why didn’cha tell me you was a rich lady before I arrested ya?”

They boycotted the stores that used scab goods, sat up in the dim, stuffy night court long after midnight with their husbands and their chauffeurs and their personal secretaries, to bail out the union women.

The strikers yelled back now at the cops and the goons, and they ran off the scabs and the whores who tried to break the line. Esther herself went back on the lines, and picketing over at Leiserson’s one evening she saw a striker chase a particularly nasty forewoman right into the lobby of the shop, knocking her down, covering her with punches and kicks and curses, until she was left huddled on the floor, holding her arms over her head.

The great task that remained now was to get the official union leadership, the men who ran the garment unions, to go along—to hold out for full recognition of the union and their rights, instead of settling for another fleeting raise. Esther worked most of the time in the settlement house office now, and she knew how hard a chore that would be. The men were sympathetic, as always—they were leaning, but they were for the most part cautious, suspicious men, as shortsighted as moles, and they were reluctant to fight the strike out to the end.

The Cooper Union was filled with coughing and sniffling and nose blowing. The women stood in the aisles and the windowsills, still wet and cold from the line. Weak with hunger and pneumonia, clutching to seat backs and railings to keep themselves up, leaning eagerly forward to hear what the men union bosses had to say.

Esther sat up on the stage with twenty more women, each wearing a sash that read
WORKHOUSE PRISONER, OR ARRESTED, OR SENT TO THE DARK ROOM
; all beneath one big banner inscribed
THE WORKHOUSE IS NO ANSWER TO A DEMAND FOR JUSTICE
. Dressed up in the best hats and coats they could salvage from the picket lines, a yellow artificial flower, a net of lace—

First Feigenbaum, the chairman of the meeting, spoke, and then Miss Dreier, and Morris Hillquit, the Socialist politician, and a wiry little lawyer who they cheered to the ceiling when he advised them to stay out.

“That’s all right! You’re all right!”

“Why should we go back, we got nothin’ to lose an’ maybe even something to gain!”

“We are starving as we work, we might as well starve while we strike—”

Samuel Gompers himself spoke next, the little, robin-breasted cigar-maker in his skullcap, strutting stuffily on the stage, the women rising to their feet to see him.

“A man would be less than human if he were not impressed with your reception,” he proclaimed. “But I don’t want you to give all your enthusiasm to any man, no matter who he may be. I would prefer that you put all of your enthusiasm into your union and your cause.”

The cheers surged up through the low, crowded, gaslit room, drowning out his next few words—

“. . . there comes a time when not to strike is but to rivet the chains of slavery upon our wrists—”

More cheers, until the crowded, basement hall seemed to shake:

“Yes, Mr. Shirtwaist Manufacturer, it may be inconvenient for you if your boys and girls go out on strike, but there are things of more importance than your inconvenience and your profit—”

The hall was in tumult now, Feigenbaum gaveling for order.

“Please, please! We must debate this rationally!”

—but there was another commotion in the back of the room. A small woman, a striker, was literally carried forward, propelled along toward the podium on the backs and shoulders of the men and women in the crowd. Esther saw at once that it was Clara, her face still puffy and bruised from the beating she had taken, still wincing with every brush against her ribs.

“Who is this?” Feigenbaum asked, but the women drowned him out:

“Let her speak! Let her speak!”

They put her down on the platform, and Esther could see that battered as she was, she was still Clara, the most fiery of the
fabrente maydlakh
, eyes flashing, hands gripping the podium while wave after wave of cheers and applause rolled over the auditorium.

“I have listened to all the speeches,” she told them, when the room had finally hushed—speaking in Yiddish, in her fervor, the simultaneous translations running quickly through the hall, into Italian, and Portuguese, and Bohemian, and English—

“I have listened to all the speeches, and I am one who thinks and feels the things they describe. Like you, I have worked, and like you I have suffered, and I would not have patience for further talk. I move that we fight the strike out to the end!”

There was pandemonium again, and it took Feigenbaum, with an air of resignation, ten minutes to restore order.

“I take it, then, that you want to hold out for full recognition of the union, for everything? You are aware of what that means?”

“Yes, yes!” thousands of voices shouted back.

“Do you give me your word, then? Will you take the old Jewish oath with me then?”

The whole audience rose—those who were not on their feet already—holding up their right hands, smiling, tears glistening, as he led them in the Jewish oath, adapted for the purpose at hand. All of them, the Italians and the Portuguese, and even the Yankees, reciting it word by word after him:

“If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, if ever I forget thee, may my right hand wither—”

Sadie faded back through the crowd of working women outside the Tombs. She could see Esther looking for her, holding a hand out for her at one point, but she hung back, shuffling off to one side—then turned away down Pearl Street. Other whores who had been caught up in the picket line hurried off around her, heads down, arms clutched across the bright tatters of their street clothes.

She wandered up past Canal Street and over to the Bowery, unable to think of anyplace else to go, trying to decide what to do next. She had just stopped under the el to light a cigarette when she felt a hand on her shoulder—startling her so much she almost dropped the smoke.

“What happened?”

The dead, level voice, genuinely seeking information now, but full of implied menace if he didn’t get the answer he wanted. She composed herself before she spoke, fighting down the feelings of guilt and shame he automatically provoked in her, even when she had done nothing wrong.

“What happened out there?” Gyp repeated, already impatient. “You were supposed to get the strikers arrested, not yourself. What the hell were you doin’?”

She turned around deliberately, doing her best to seem indignant.

“Whattaya mean? That fat cop slugged me!”

The hand uncoiled out of the shadows, smacking across her face before she even saw it. It sent her staggering back, but she steadied herself, and stood her ground. Knowing she had to if she was going to survive.

“You don’ know what it is to be slugged yet.”

“Look,
look
what they done to me!”

She thrust her face recklessly toward him, showing the deep, purple bruises fortuitously provided by the matrons, her cropped, disheveled hair—counting on his deep disgust to make him believe her.

Now my disgustingness is my greatest asset—

It worked. He turned his face away, to her bitter satisfaction, too repelled to even look at her.

“Never mind,” he told her. “I got somethin’ else for you to do anyway.”

“What?” she demanded—then more subserviently, when he looked suspicious: “What else can I do?”

“Follow her. Follow her again. You sure you didn’t see nothin’ the last time?”

“No, no—she just went to that
farshtinkener
little cafe of hers,” she said, almost too quickly.

“You sure?”

The hand dug into her shoulder, working its way around her collarbone as if measuring how much force it would take to snap it in half.

“You
sure
?”

“Yes, yes,” she gasped in pain, his one hand more painful than anything the matrons had done. “I told you—just talkin’ with all the
fonfers
there.”

“All right, then,” he told her, letting her off for now. “All right. Follow her. An’ this time—let me know everything.”

“I did!” she made sure to protest, a quick shiver of fear running through her—but he was already walking away, melding with the shadows of the Bowery el.

Out on Coney, Sadie wandered through the grand, chandeliered entrance of Luna Park, the big red heart over its arch, pierced with two leaning crosses like some bizarre Catholic icon—gratuitously labeled the heart of coney island.

Inside, everything glowed orange and white and gold, even in the daytime. A forest of towers and minarets, and flowing arches. And all around her, sticking out of the walls on every side, were the grotesque, leering, heavy-lidded heads: wolves and clowns, apes and pigs and hyenas, sneering down at the passing customers.

She wandered over, through the titillating Dreamland arch; over to the circus tent where she had seen that show that had been so funny, with all the parts played by dwarves and midgets. She walked in again, trying to buy herself time, seating herself in the bleachers. She remembered how all the men had bothered her that day. How she had worn a rented sailor’s suit, and they hadn’t been able to keep their hands off her, grabbing at her knees, her ass, her breasts—

She had looked good that day, she thought, assessing herself professionally—as good as she was capable of looking anymore. They would not find her so appealing today, all bruised and thinned out from prison, even though she had worn a wide, netted hat to hide her mutilated hair.

Sure enough, as the show went on, they kept their distance, no doubt thinking she was one more bit of trash washed up at the Tin Elephant down the beach. She was just as glad—relieved to be let alone for once, to sit watching the shenanigans of the circus freaks down below her while she figured out what she had to do.

It was the same show, the exact same performance, no doubt repeated over and over again, every day: the miniature fire wagon and mounted police, the doll-like midget queen, trotted out to make her same speech—all making their same dutiful efforts to seem just like real people.

It’s ridiculous
, she decided. Not funny or hysterical, but all just ridiculous.

The show was just ending, in the same exact way: all the sad, misshapen little people singing at the top of their lungs, in their high, shrill voices. Until one of them stepped forward, stooped to one knee, and sang in a deep, croaking bass. Another dwarf, the particularly ugly one who had given her a flower, ran frantically up to him—again—and stuck his hand over his mouth—again—making the singer’s bass reverberate like a trumpet.

Everyone laughed, and she stood up, moving just ahead of the crowd to the exit. Out of the corner of her eye, she could still see the dwarf, with his big bubble head and his tiny arms and legs, running up to her. He held up a flower—just like before, just like the one she had cut her finger on.

She had learned her lesson now. She gave him a small smile, and kept moving toward the exit.

“Wait! Wait, you don’t understand!” he called breathlessly, still running alongside her in the ring on his stumpy, inadequate legs.

“I understand,” she muttered. “It’s the end of the show.”

“Wait!”

The dwarf kept running, kept squawking in his high, funny voice.

“I’m in love—” he said, and stopped, gawking up at her. The rose, she saw, was a real one this time.

“What?” she said, looking down at him, wondering why he had not finished what he was saying. People were staring, and she ran a hand up along the side of her head, embarrassed, pushing her hair back under her hat. Her fingers brushed along the butchered ends of her hair and she stopped, grasping what had happened.

“Oh, I see.” Sadie smiled ruefully, remembering now how hideous she looked with her bruised face and chopped-off hair, hideous even under the wide hat; her deteriorating wardrobe. The dwarf just kept staring at her, open-mouthed, big head tilted all the way back on his shoulders.