Touched by Fire (15 page)

We hurry into work. Rosie is a floor runner now and says she enjoys it. She really does run from one floor to the other, bringing new pieces to the machinists and collecting their finished ones.

I think she knows everyone’s name in the factory and is often the first one to hear any gossip. She swears us to secrecy before she’ll repeat a single word! We were both given a raise two weeks ago to mark the end of our first year at the Triangle Waist Company. A whole dollar a week each!

There’s no time left for talking or daydreaming. As usual, we take our seats in front of our machines moments before the starting bell rings. Malka works at a different table now.

The pace is frantic all day, typical of a Saturday at the height of the spring season. There are not enough hours left for us to fill yet another back order before Monday. New orders pour in as fast as the shirtwaists pile up at the button machine. Rosie says the machine broke down twice this morning! I doubt that we got our full lunch break today. I’m sure they fixed the clock to get us back to work earlier.

Everyone, especially on a Saturday, tries to get away the second the quitting bell sounds. Sometimes, Rosie manages a quick exit into the dressing room before the other girls. She is so particular about fixing her hair and her hat! The floor girls move between the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors all day, so they are not stuck at the machines, like we are, until the bell rings.

Malka now works on lace runners. Her table is by the windows, which overlook Greene Street, close beside one of the cutting tables. This year, I’m making collars, but Beckie still sets sleeves. She is one of the best workers on the floor.

The afternoon is worse than this morning – one of the foremen complains he has more bodices than sleeves. “Where are my missing sleeves?” he yells. “And why aren’t those collars finished? How can the orders get out?” On and on, he rants at us, blaming the machinists for everything.

We are all going at full speed. Rosie comes down to our floor to pick up more pieces, winks at me, and hurries back upstairs. It must be 4:30 p.m. Here comes Anna Gullo to distribute our pay.
Good, only fifteen more minutes till quitting time!

I tuck my envelope in my stocking top, the way Rosie does. I have just finished my last collar. My workbasket is empty for the first time this afternoon. I glance towards Malka. She is still busy, her head bent. Over at cutting table
two, Isidore Abramowitz reaches for his coat. He keeps it hanging from a peg, under the shelf holding three fire buckets. There are more than two hundred of them, spread all around the factory floors.

Cutters keep their jackets close by so they can be the first ones out at the end of the day. Their assistants finish preparing the tables for Monday. The sheerest fabric, lawn, and tissue paper are stretched across the tabletops. The men stand and chat, waiting for the quitting bell. One of the cutters lights up a cigarette, right below the
NO SMOKING
sign.

There goes the bell. The power is shut off, and the machines are still. We are free at last. I get up gratefully. For a few seconds, the room is silent, then the hubbub begins. Chairs are pushed back, scraping noisily on the wooden floors. Talk is about the evening ahead of us.

Nettie, who still sits next to me, says, “I’m meeting my future mother-in-law for the first time. I’m so nervous.”

“Don’t be – she will like you, I’m sure,” I say.

We make our way, one by one, down the aisle to the dressing room. Mr. Bernstein calls me over to the bookkeeper’s desk, before I can get my coat. Dinah Lipschitz sits between two of the short cutting tables in front of the windows leading to the fire escape.

Mr. Bernstein says, “Please tell Beckie Singer that we expect her to return on Monday, Miriam.”

A terrified cry penetrates every corner of the room. “Fire, Mr. Bernstein, fire! I smell something burning!” Eva Harris, sister of Mr. Isaac Harris, runs screaming across to the desk from the middle of the shop floor. She shouts the words everyone dreads to hear.

Suddenly I see smoke and flames rising up from under the second table. All around the floor, girls start echoing Eva’s shouts of “Fire, fire!”

Mr. Bernstein immediately crosses to Mr. Abramowitz’s table at the Greene Street windows. A fire must have started in the bins. It is weeks since Mr. Levy, the rag dealer, has collected the scraps. Now the bins are full to overflowing. Cutters come running with buckets of water to douse the flames, which are growing faster than the men seem able to quench them.

Only seconds have passed since the quitting bell rang. I’m still here and Malka is too, standing at her table.
What is the matter with her? Why isn’t she running away from the fire?
She is too close to the blaze. Girls jostle and push their way from the aisles into the dressing room, anxious to save their new spring outfits.

I’m going to have to get to Malka. The crowd of girls is piling up at the door of the partition leading to the staircase. I won’t join them without Malka. I run back towards her, shouting her name. She looks up, shocked, as if woken abruptly from a dream.

Is she going to stand frozen like that forever? The way she did when we were little girls and the Cossacks came to burn the shtetl?
Papa cannot come and save us this time. We have to save ourselves! I don’t know how, or where, to go.
Oh, please, Malka, hurry up
. Slowly she walks towards me.

“Run, Malka, run,” I shout and meet her halfway down the aisle. I grasp her wrist. “We must stay together, whatever happens.”

Mr. Bernstein jumps up on a table. “Someone get the fire hose from the Greene Street stairwell. We need more water!” he bellows.

Everyone around us is yelling and pushing to get out by the Greene Street stairs as fast as they can. Girls call out in Russian, Yiddish, English, and Italian for their friends, their sisters, their mothers to help them. They shove, elbow, and kick their way out. Workers run in every direction, from the aisles into and out of the dressing room, to the windows, to the passenger elevators on the Washington Place side. Smoke fills the room. It is everywhere.

For the year I have worked here, not once has anyone told us what to do in case of an emergency. We twist and turn, retching and choking, making our way through heat and smoke. Sparks dart in every direction. The blaze comes nearer. That small tongue of flame from the bins has fanned out, catching hold of one fabric after another. Paper patterns flare up on the wire and fall on tables, onto chairs and
wicker baskets. In some, the delicate fabric pieces left to be finished for Monday feed the greedy flames. Fire bursts out, flying from one surface to another, showing no mercy.

I tighten my hand on Malka’s wrist as a rush of heat and flame comes roaring in. Windows explode. A fiery wave of heat spares no one. More girls crowd at the Greene Street partition.
How are we all to get through that narrow door before the fire engulfs us all?
There are over a hundred and eighty of us working on the eighth floor today.

Mr. Bernstein cries out, “There’s no water coming out of the hoses.”

Still at her desk, Dinah Lipschitz screams “Fire” into the phone, over and over, to alert those on the other floors. She looks up at me and points to the back wall, where someone has opened the center windows to the fire escape. The steel shutters, usually fastened shut, are pinned back. I have never seen them opened before. I pull Malka towards the windows and the single fire escape that serves the whole building. It is attached to the outside wall and starts at the tenth floor. There are girls ahead of us. I need both hands free to climb over the table blocking the window. I tell Malka to stay close behind me.

Then I crawl out of the window onto the skinny ledge of the balcony. From here, it is one step down onto the first rung of the narrow ladder. There is scarcely room for me to stand. Cautiously, I manage to get up and put one foot
onto the slatted, sloping ladder. A girl a few steps ahead of me shouts something. I feel the ladder tremble with our weight. The ladder is flimsy, and I wonder if it will hold to the outside wall.

“Don’t come any farther yet,” she calls out. “Some girls have reached the sixth floor, and they say to wait.” I am poised to go down, but now, step back. I need to tell Malka to stay where she is, but she is not behind me. Girls waiting at the windows scream at me to hurry. I crawl back along the ledge and climb in through the window. I look down the line of girls waiting to escape and ask if anyone has seen her.

I reach the crowd of girls crammed together at the exit to the Greene Street stairs. Mr. Bernstein frantically forces them through the narrow door of the partition. I shout, trying to get his attention to ask if he has seen Malka Pinski. He shakes his head and continues to save as many workers as he can from the inferno.

Did Malka get out? If not, where can she be?
There is no place to hide. We are surrounded by walls of smoke and fire.
Was Malka looking for the Greene Street windows, longing for one more glimpse of sky?
No one could get though those sheets of flame. I call her name once more. She does not answer.

I
can’t breathe. The smoke rising from the smoldering wooden floors and chairs, and the flying sparks that singe my hair and clothes, are difficult to bear. Mr. Bernstein’s shouts grow faint. Among the whoosh of the greedy roaring flames, I hear faint cries for help.
Could some of them be Malka’s?

I am disoriented. I shut my eyes for a second, trying to remember how the shop floor looked before the fire. I cough and cough, desperate for breath. Flames bar my way to the Greene Street exit. After I stumble, I crawl in the direction of the Washington Place door, praying it is the right way. I lift my skirt to protect my face from burning rags and debris, groping inch by inch towards a last way out. If I am wrong, then I, too, am lost. I reach the door. A group of girls are there before me.

“Malka, are you here?” I shout. Again, there is no answer.

Girls nearest to the front beat, kick, and push at the Washington Place door. It will not open. We know the door is always kept locked in working hours. The key hangs beside the door, and only the bosses may unlock it.

“The key is in the lock,” someone shouts. “Why won’t it turn?” The top half of the door is made of glass, crisscrossed by wire. The girls pressed against it beg us not to push so hard. They shout and plead, afraid their faces will be cut by broken glass.
How can we stop, when the flames come ever closer?
Fire corners us like animals about to be slaughtered. We are in a frenzy to get out, to break down the door.

A voice from behind us bellows, “Let me through! I’ll get you out. Stay still.” It is Louis Brown, senior machinist. He forces his way through, throwing us aside to get to the door. He reaches it and turns the key.

“It is opening,” the girls call out as he pulls the door inwards.

“Don’t push,” he shouts, “or you will close it again.” We girls at the back surge forward, leaning against those in front. We cannot help ourselves. Waves of heat threaten our backs. The weight of our bodies, straining to get out, closes the door again. All the factory doors open inwards, for the stairways are too narrow for them to open outwards.

At last, with flames only inches away, Mr. Brown wrenches the door open and we tumble through. Our clothes are
scorched, our hair singed. Some girls have burns on their face and hands. My arms are scraped, my fingers blistered, but we are out of the furnace. I think only moments were left before the flames would have consumed us.

We start our descent down poorly lit, winding, narrow stairs. There is room for only one of us at a time.
How long has it been since the quitting bell?
I can’t tell if it is only minutes or hours. I cling to the hope that Malka will miraculously appear. She might be waiting down below. Perhaps, at the last moment, she got through the partition door.
Did the ninth-floor girls get out in time? Was a warning given? Rosie, please be safe. Please let the Four Fates find each other again!

It is impossible to hurry.
If only the steps were wider!
Yet some girls grasp at a hand to hold for comfort, slowing the descent still more. Suddenly we can go no farther. Crying and gasping for air, we are held up at the seventh floor by a woman or girl slumped across the steps. I try to edge around her, others to step over her. The air is full of smoke. The fire will soon catch up with us. Feet thunder up from below. Voices reach us.

“It’s Police Officer Meehan,” someone calls. We all know him – I have seen him riding his horse around Washington Square Park. He props the girl up against the wall, so we can get by. She has fainted. I recognize her – it is Eva Harris, the boss’s sister, who called out “Fire.” She must
have gotten out right away – unlocked the door and left the key in the lock.

At the sixth floor, there are cries, shouts, and pounding coming from behind the door of a garment factory closed on a Saturday. We do not stop, but as we continue down, we hear Officer Meehan kick through the door.

We reach the lobby of Washington Place at last. It is filled with crying girls, police, doctors, and firefighters. They hold us back, afraid that we will be injured by things falling outside from the upper floors.
What things, bales of cloth?
As more eighth-floor girls come down from the stairs, they tell us they’d climbed down the fire escape to the sixth floor. They managed to smash a window there and clamber through, but had not dared to go down any farther. They had seen that the fire-escape ladder ended not on the street, but above a basement skylight. The smoke-filled yard was surrounded by a spiked iron fence. Afraid to fall into that black pit, they were trapped behind the locked sixth-floor door until Officer Meehan released them.

Numbly we cross the street after a short wait. Ambulances drive up, and fire wagons pulled by horses that rear and whinny stop close to the building. Workers from nearby and ordinary people come in groups to stand and watch. The crowd grows bigger. I lean against a storefront and wait, slumping on the sidewalk. Everything hurts. I close my eyes and say a silent prayer for friends and fellow workers.