Uprising (30 page)

Beside Yetta, Jennie began to scream.

“Stop it! This is a fireproof building!” Yetta yelled at Jennie.

But we're tinder,
she remembered.

Yetta slammed her hands against Jennie's shoulders and screamed, “Go!”

The aisle between the sewing machine tables was narrow, and the wicker baskets where they stacked the shirtwaists kept snagging their skirts. And other girls were blocking the aisle, some screaming and hysterical like Jennie'd been. One girl fainted right at Yetta's feet. Yetta reached down and slapped her, jerked her up.

“No time for that!” Yetta screamed. “You'll die!”

Across the room, Yetta saw a spark land in a woman's hair. In seconds, the woman's whole pompadour was aflame. Everyone was screaming, but Yetta thought she could hear this woman's screams above all the others. The woman lurched across the room, slammed into one of the windows. No—slammed through. She'd thrown herself out the window.

We're on the eighth floor,
Yetta thought numbly, and now it was her turn to freeze in panic and fear. Sparks were flying throughout the room now, landing everywhere. Anyone could be next.

Hands grabbed Yetta from behind.

“Yetta, come on!”

It was Jacob.

Jacob and Yetta shoved forward, toward the Washington Place stairs, pulling along Jennie and the girl who'd fainted. Yetta glanced back once more and was relieved to see that Mr. Bernstein, the factory manager, had had some of the men pull a fire hose out of the Greene Street stairwell. He stood over the worst of the flames, pointing the hose confidently.

No water came out.

“Turn it on! Turn it on!” Mr. Bernstein was screaming. Yetta wasn't sure if she could hear him or if she was just reading his lips. “Where is the water?” he screamed again.

Not a drop. He flung down the hose and ran.

Now Mr. Bernstein was rushing through the crowds of girls, some still heading toward the cloakroom to get their hats.

“Don't worry about your hats!” he screamed. “Just get out!”

He was slapping and punching the girls, beating them as though he blamed them for the fire. No—he was goading them toward the doors, toward the elevators and the fire escape. He was only slapping the hysterical girls, like Yetta had done with the girl who'd fainted. He was trying to save their lives.

We are on the same side now, Mr. Bernstein and me,
Yetta marveled.

She shoved against a girl who'd dropped her purse, who'd seen her coins roll under the table.

“Don't stop for that!” Yetta screamed. “It's not worth it! Save your life!”

She and Jacob together pulled the girl up, lifting her past the table, toward the door. There were already dozens of other girls crowded around the door, screaming in Yiddish and English and what Yetta now recognized as Italian. “Open it! Open it!” “Oh, please, for the love of God!”
“Madonna mia, aiutami!”

But it was locked.

Some of the girls were pounding on the elevator door, too, screaming for the elevator operator to come to them. Miraculously, the elevator door opened, and the crowd surged forward, sobbing and praying and screaming.

“Just wait—just wait—I'll come right back!” the operator hollered.

The doors were closing, but Yetta shoved Jennie forward, shoving her on top of the girls already in the elevator. Saving her, at least.

“Will he
come back?”

Yetta asked Jacob, and Jacob shrugged.
Yetta couldn't just stand there and wait. She wasn't going to stand still while the flames raced toward her, while others pressed their faces against a door that might never open. She grabbed Jacob's hand and pulled him along, circling around the fire. She looked back once and saw that someone had managed to open the door to the Washington Place stairs; the door opened in, toward the crowd. Maybe it hadn't been locked after all. Maybe it was just the weight of the crowd pushing forward, pinning it shut.

But it was too late to go back now. Flames were shooting across the path they'd just crossed, speeding across the oiled floor, licking up shirtwaists and fabric scraps and wicker baskets. The air itself seemed to be on fire, the flames living on fabric dust.

“Fire escape,” Yetta moaned to Jacob, and it was so hot now that her words felt like flames themselves, painful on her tongue.

“No good,” Jacob mumbled back. “Doesn't go all the way to the ground.”

So they didn't head for the window near the airshaft, where people were climbing out one at a time, onto the rickety metal railing. What was left?

“Greene Street stairs,” Jacob whispered.

Those were back by the table where the fire had started, where it now burned the fiercest. But there was a partition wall blocking off the stairs and the elevator from the rest of the room. On a normal workday that was where the guard sat, inspecting purses and glaring at the girls as if he thought they were all thieves. Today, maybe that partition was enough to keep the fire away from the stairs.

Yetta and Jacob raced on, skirting the flames, still
pulling along hysterical, senseless workers who didn't seem to know where to go. They passed a desk where the bookkeeper, Miss Lipshutz, was shouting into the mouthpiece of a telephone, “Please! Somebody listen! Somebody's got to tell the ninth floor! Hello? Somebody—please!”

A spark landed on the sleeve of Yetta's shirtwaist, and she watched in horror as it sputtered and shimmered and burned straight through. She could feel it singeing her skin.

Jacob slapped his bare hand onto Yetta's sleeve, starving the flame.

“A dank,”
Yetta whispered, but there was no time for him to say, “You're welcome,” because they were at the doorway to the partition now, shoving their way behind it.

No flames here.

Girls were still standing by the freight elevator door, the only elevator they were normally allowed to use. They were pounding on the closed door like they thought that was their only chance. It was so hot behind the partition that Yetta could barely breathe.

Can people melt?
she wondered. In her mind she saw wax dripping down from Sabbath candles.
My life, melting away ...

“Stairs!” Jacob screamed at the girls by the elevator door.

He jerked open the stairway door and it opened out, making another obstacle in the tiny vestibule. Yetta and Jacob shoved the girls through the doorway and scrambled in behind them. The stairway was airless and close and still hot, but there were no sparks flying through the air. Through the window in the stairwell, Yetta could see the workers scrambling down the fire escape, teetering precariously on the metal railings, struggling past the metal shutters.

“Hurry!” Yetta screamed at the girls around her. They
were sobbing hysterically, clutching the railing, clutching each other. They were yammering away in some language Yetta didn't recognize, or maybe it wasn't a language at all, just witless jabbering.

“The fire!” one of them managed to say. “What if it's everywhere?”

“There's no smoke coming from down there!” Yetta screamed at them, pointing at the landings below them. “Go down to the ground! You'll be safe! The flames are going up, not down!”

Up.

Yetta glanced up to the landing above her, remembering what the bookkeeper had been screaming into the phone:
Somebody listen! Somebody's got to tell the ninth floor!

They didn't know. One flight up, on the ninth floor, where two hundred and fifty girls worked, where Yetta had worked before the strike, where Bella worked now—up there, they had no idea there was an inferno raging beneath them, eating up the air, climbing higher and higher and higher.

Almost on their own, Yetta's feet had already started slapping down the stairs, once she finally got the jabbering girls moving. But now she stopped.

Bella,
she thought. My other friends.
My sisters. My comrades. My union.

“What are you doing?” Jacob screamed, already three steps down.

“Somebody has to tell the ninth floor!” she screamed back. “I have to!”

She turned around and began clattering up the stairs.

P
apa's taking us shopping! Papa's taking us shopping!” Harriet chanted, bouncing up and down joyously in the elevator on the way to Mr. Blanck's office at the Triangle factory.

“Hush. Everybody knows that,” Millicent said scornfully.

“She's just excited,” Jane said mildly. She patted Harriet's shoulder, trying to calm her down, and gave Millicent and the elevator operator a sympathetic smile. Harriet's chanting was a bit maddening. But, as always, it was hard to know the best way to handle the girls. Miss Milhouse would have scolded Harriet soundly; she would have taken it as her personal mission to stifle the little girl's exuberant personality. And she would have praised Millicent to the skies for her tidiness, her aversion to noise and mess, her ability to sit or stand still practically forever without squirming or exclaiming.

Personally, Jane thought Millicent was in danger of becoming a priggish bore. And she worried that someday somebody
would
stifle Harriet's exuberance.

“Make it be like a stream,” Bella had advised her, when Jane had asked for help. “You don't want to chop her off—
bam!”
She'd slammed the side of her right hand against her
left palm. “But make it go a good way.”

“You mean, I should try to channel her enthusiasm into positive outlets?” Jane asked.

After Jane explained what “channel,” “enthusiasm,” “positive,” and “outlets” meant, Bella grinned and nodded: “Yes, yes, exactly! You say what is in my heart for that girl!”

Now, as the elevator zoomed upward, Harriet began tugging on the elevator operator's jacket.

“Mister, you didn't know we were going shopping, did you? Papa's taking us as a treat, because our mama went to Florida for the—what's it called?—social season. And she took the car with her, on the train, so we had to take a taxi cab to get here, and the taxi cab's still waiting outside, for us to come back. Except Madam'selle Michaud's not going shopping with us, just Papa, and—”

“Harriet,” Jane said warningly.

“She's okay,” the elevator operator said. “You're the Blanck girls, right? The boss's daughters?”

“Our papa and Uncle Isaac own the whole factory,” Millicent bragged. “They employ more than seven hundred people.”

“Millicent!” Jane shot the girl a reproving look.
Remember what I've told you about bragging?
she wanted to scold. But she'd always hated Miss Milhouse correcting her in front of other people, so she'd vowed not to do that to Millicent or Harriet. It was just really tempting at times like this.
First thing Monday morning I need to have a little talk with both girls. . . .

The elevator was gathering speed. Harriet clutched Jane's hand.

“What if the elevator goes all the way through the roof?” she asked.

“Silly, that would never happen,” Millicent scoffed.

“Why not?”

“Because—because it wouldn't be proper,” Millicent said. She lowered her voice, as if that would keep the elevator operator from hearing. “If we went through the roof, the people below us could see up our skirts.”

The elevator operator's face turned red, he was trying so hard not to laugh.

Jane sighed.

“There are scientific reasons the elevator would never go through the roof,” she said. “Because of how the elevator's made, how it works.”

“How does it work?” Harriet asked.

Oops. Jane had been afraid she'd ask that. Somehow elevator mechanics had not been in the curriculum at Jane's finishing school.

“Next week we can go to the bookstore and find a book that explains it all,” Jane said. “Or maybe you can find one with your papa.”

“The elevator runs on a cable,” the operator said. “The cable goes up to gears, and those are on the roof. Maybe sometime you can ask your papa to show you the gearbox. But if you want to go to the roof, you have to use the Greene Street stairs. That's the only way to get there.”

“Thank you,” Jane said, smiling gratefully at the operator. He was a pimply boy, maybe a little younger than her. A year ago, he would have been completely invisible to her, but now she wondered about his life. Which country had he
come from? Did he bring his family with him, or was he all alone? Was he supporting a widowed mother and a younger brother and sister or two on his salary as an elevator operator? Did Mr. Blanck and Mr. Harris pay him more or less than they paid their sewing machine operators?

“Tenth floor,” the operator announced, bringing the elevator to a halt and sweeping open the barred door. “Where your papa the boss works.”

He had the slightest hint of mockery in his voice, just enough for Jane to hear. He even gave her a conspiratorial wink, which was much too forward, but somehow Jane didn't mind. She winked back, and stepped out onto the polished wood floor of a spacious reception area.

“Miss Mary! Miss Mary!” Harriet cried, running over to one of the desks.

“Oh, sweetie, Miss Mary's busy right now,” said the short, frazzled-looking woman behind the desk. “The switchboard operator didn't come in today, so Miss Mary has to do all her typing
and
connect every call that comes in. The eighth floor can't even call the ninth floor without my help.”

Harriet inspected the telephone switchboard behind the woman's desk, the wires hanging slack.

“So if you plug in this wire here, then—”

“Oh, sweetie, don't touch,” Miss Mary said, gently pushing Harriet's hand away. “I really don't have time—I'll explain it to you some other day.” She looked up at Jane. “You're the governess, right? You can just take them into Mr. Blanck's office, and then go tell him they're here.”