Uprising (35 page)

“They could have enforced the rules about smoking,” Mrs. Livingston says. “They could have had fire drills. They could have told us the fire had started. They could have—”

Harriet whips up out of her chair.

“Lots of factories were like Triangle!” she hisses, right in Mrs. Livingston's face. “That's what factories
were,
back then— they were crowded and noisy and busy, and there wasn't any money for extras, because the factory owners had to compete with every other factory owner. A few pennies here and there could be the difference between staying in business and starving on the streets.”

“Extras?”
Mrs. Livingston asks. “Something that could have saved one hundred and forty-six lives is an extra?”

Harriet collapses back into her chair.

“No,” she whispers. White-faced, she stares past Mrs. Livingston's shoulder. “In March 1908, a furnace overheated in a primary school in Collinwood, Ohio. The exits were defective and people panicked. More than one hundred and seventy children burned, suffocated, or were crushed to death. February 1909, a wooden theater in Acalpulco, Mexico, caught fire during a film, and three hundred people were killed. November 1909, in Cherry, Illinois, there was a mine explosion and fire, and over two hundred and fifty miners died. Shall I go on?”

“No,” Mrs. Livingston says.

“Why is my father the worst criminal?” Harriet asks. “Why is the Triangle fire the one that everyone remembers?”

Mrs. Livingston wants to say,
We should remember them all, everyone who's lost.
But the numbers are overwhelming. Harriet
has clearly selected these tragedies—
memorized
these tragedies—because of their death counts. Mrs. Livingston cannot think about one hundred seventy dead children. She cannot think about three hundred people going out for a night on the town, excited about seeing a moving picture, then meeting the end of their lives. She cannot think about being trapped under the ground, dying there. She can only remember Yetta and Jane, can only miss and mourn them.

“I think ... I think people remember the Triangle fire because of the strike,” she tells Harriet. “People had cheered us on. They'd donated money to our cause, they'd bailed us out of jail, they'd marveled at our courage. We weren't faceless and anonymous and easily forgotten after the strike. And then so many of us died so young, so tragically, so soon after. People felt like they knew us. They took our deaths personally.”

Harriet absorbs this. She's slumped over in her chair now, utterly defeated.

“Come here,” Mrs. Livingston says.

She leads Harriet up the stairs, pushes open a door.

“Ssh,” she warns.

Inside the dim room, in two beds, there are two little girls sound asleep, deep into their afternoon naps.

“My daughters,” Mrs. Livingston whispers. “Yetta is four and Jane is two.”

Harriet nods, her eyes brimming with tears. She seems to see the beauty of the sleep-tangled dark curls, the peaceful rise and fall of each little chest, the fierceness in the way Yetta hugs her favorite doll, the soothing rhythm of Jane sucking her thumb. She stands there watching the little girls until Mrs. Livingston beckons to her and they tiptoe back down the stairs.

“You have to understand,” Mrs. Livingston says, settling back into her chair. “They can't ever replace my friends. They don't make up for anyone I lost. But they are ... a way to carry on. A way to remember that isn't sorrow and grief.” She pauses. “Rahel has a daughter named Yetta too.”

Harriet stares down at her lap.

“I went to college because of Jane,” she says. “Over my parents' objections. They said it wasn't necessary for a girl. Pah! Did my father need a college education to become the Shirtwaist King?”

Mrs. Livingston smiles at the inflections in Harriet's voice, so reminiscent of Yetta's accent, so clearly an imitation of Mr. and Mrs. Blanck. Harriet looks up, her eyes blazing.

“But I remembered Jane talking about girls going to college, about how they should get an education, just as much as boys. I think I remember it better because of how she disappeared, after the fire.”

Mrs. Livingston nods, accepting this. Agreeing. “There were all those laws passed because of the fire, to improve working conditions,” she says. “Yetta would have been so proud of those. And the Red Cross fire relief committee helped Rahel bring their family over after the fire, just before a pogrom destroyed their village. It's so wrong, it shouldn't have worked this way, but . . . Yetta's death accomplished so many of the things that she'd wanted to accomplish with her life.”

“It's a shame she didn't live to see what happened,” Harriet says. “And I wish Jane had seen me graduate from college.”

Mrs. Livingston tilts her head thoughtfully.

“The fire led to a few other good things—Charles
Livingston became a labor lawyer, a passionate one. He's done so much good in his field, although I wish he wouldn't tell his story quite so often, about how he was inspired by his experiences rescuing dozens and dozens of shirtwaist girls. . . .” Her eyes twinkle—mocking and forgiving, all at once.

“Is
that
who you married?” Harriet asks. “The detectives didn't tell me, but I assumed—”

“Oh, no!” Mrs. Livingston laughs. “Me and Charles? No, no, no. My husband is Italian. He just changed his name because—”

Harriet gasps.

“So Pietro did come back for you? How romantic!”

“Not Pietro,” Mrs. Livingston says. “Although he did send a letter after the fire, asking if I was all right—and inviting me to his wedding in South Carolina.” She shrugs. “I got a much better husband than Pietro. I married Rocco.”

Harriet almost falls off her chair in surprise.

“The little boy?” she asks. “The one who kept paying you pennies for his family's debt?”

Mrs. Livingston smiles.

“He grew up,” she says. “Rather nicely.”

Harriet still appears scandalized.

“He's only two years younger than me,” Mrs. Livingston adds. “I just always thought of him as a little boy. Until I . . . started thinking of him differently.”

“And I guess this way he didn't have to worry about paying you any more pennies,” Harriet muses. She looks around, her eyes taking in each detail of the spacious parlor: the new sofa, the paintings hung over the fireplace, the gleaming crystals encircling the lamps. Mrs. Livingston's house is not
extravagantly furnished, but it's clear that she's come a long way from being a poor shirtwaist girl who thought a single red rose was the ultimate in luxury.

“But how ... ?” Harriet begins, and hesitates, because it's impossible to phrase her question politely.

“After the fire, the Livingston family was so helpful,” Mrs. Livingston says. “Charles's parents were just as appalled and horrified as he was, and they wanted to
do
something. They asked me for advice about how to make a difference for ‘those poor people on the Lower East Side.' And that just happened to be the same day that Rocco's parents kicked him out because they'd found out that he was going to school instead of shining shoes and selling newspapers all day long. So I suggested that the Livingstons take him in and pay for his education. They adopted him, and now he's a doctor.” She grins mischievously, in a way that makes her look like a teenaged shirtwaist girl again. “People are always a little confused by the name Rocco Livingston.”

“I guess this way you don't have to worry about dealing with Signora Luciano as your mother-in-law,” Harriet muses.

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Livingston says. “The Lucianos forgave Rocco when he set Papa Luciano up with his own grocery store a few years ago. They're so different now. We go over there every Sunday, and Mama Luciano is always nice to me, unless I suggest that my mother would have used more oregano in the pasta sauce. . . .” She knows she cannot explain to this American girl what it is like to go to the Lucianos' each Sunday. It is a little bit like going back to Italy, except an Italy where there is always enough to eat. Some weeks, Mrs. Livingston lives for those Sunday visits.
And some weeks, she can only see the people who aren't sitting around that table, the ones who weren't as lucky as the Livingstons and the Lucianos.

“What did you do right after the fire?” Harriet asks. “When you didn't have your friends to live with, when you didn't even have a job anymore . . .”

“Rahel and her husband took me in,” Mrs. Livingston says. “I was their baby nurse, their store clerk. I did what they'd wanted Yetta to do, except that because of me their children speak Yiddish and English with an Italian accent. And I began mixing in Hebrew with the Latin prayers at church.” She rolls her eyes, to let Harriet know that nobody minded this. She can make the stories of that time in her life sound so light and funny, a comical mishmash of Italian and Jewish culture. What she remembers most is crying on Rahel's shoulder, and Rahel crying on hers. But they always ended up laughing afterward, wiping away tears and agreeing, “Yetta would think we are fools and
schmendriks,
crying like this.” So maybe the funny stories aren't lies.

“Then,” Mrs. Livingston continued, “I helped Rahel take care of her parents when they got here, sick and old and baffled by America. And I went to school. It sounds like nothing to a college graduate, I know, but I did earn my eighth-grade diploma.”

“Jane and Yetta should have been here to see that, too,” Harriet says.

Mrs. Livingston nods.

“I think they know,” she says.

Harriet squints at her doubtfully.

“You act like you can know what their last moments
were like,” she says. “How do you know they weren't cursing God's name, cursing my father's name, screaming in misery and pain and terror the entire time?”

Her voice cracks. Mrs. Livingston can tell this is a question she's been longing to ask ever since Mrs. Livingston finished her story.

“I can't
know,”
Mrs. Livingston says. “But I feel it. I am certain. Just as certain as I am that I saw my mother in the flames and smoke. After the fire I had dreams, Yetta and Jane each coming to talk to me, to tell me not to be sad anymore. And Rahel had some of the same dreams. We were finishing each other's sentences, describing what Yetta had said, how she apologized for never seeing the baby. And . . .”

“Yes?” Harriet says.

“Remember all those letters Jane had tried to write to her father?” Mrs. Livingston asks. “She didn't know this, but I kept all the letters she tore up and threw away. I pulled them out of the trash. I had such respect for the written word then—it seemed like a sin not to keep each and every one. I glued them back together. When I could read them, I learned . . .” She swallowed hard. “Every one of them began with some variation of, ‘Don't worry about me, Father, for I am alive and well and happier than I've ever been. . . .'”

Harriet winces.

“Those letters were all written before the fire,” she says brusquely. “How could they give you any idea what she went through that last day?”

“I put the letters in a big packet and I got Jane's signet ring from the morgue and I took them all to her father. And ... he had had dreams too. He knew, somehow.”

Mrs. Livingston can tell that Harriet—a modern, bobbed-hair girl, a college graduate—is not convinced by dreams and coincidences. She probably thinks that Mrs. Livingston imagined her mother in the smoke, too.

“Did Mr. Wellington regret driving Jane away?” Harriet asks. “Did he regret hiring strikebreakers, making his fortune over the top of dead bodies?”

Her voice is still harsh and angry, judging Jane's father. “When Mr. Wellington died,” Mrs. Livingston says, “he left most of his fortune to the suffrage movement.”

Harriet raises one eyebrow, in surprise.

“Was that enough?” she asks. “Did he earn his atonement?”

Mrs. Livingston frowns.

“Why are you asking me? I'm not a priest. I'm not a rabbi. Who am I to decide?”

Harriet toys with the fringe of the antimacassar on her chair.

“My father,” she says, “was defiant on the witness stand. He was acquitted of any responsibility for the Triangle fire because he could afford to hire Max Steuer, the best lawyer in the city. And Mr. Steuer tricked the shirtwaist girls on the witness stand into sounding like liars. My father and Uncle Isaac collected more than sixty thousand dollars in insurance money, even above the costs of the fire, money they didn't have to share with anyone else. Two years later—” Her voice grows thick. She tries again. “Two years later my father was fined for once again locking his employees into his factory during the workday. He's lucky there was not another fire.”

Mrs. Livingston feels a blast of fury sweep over her, as
if, with Yetta gone, she has to experience the indignation on her friend's behalf as well as her own. How could someone learn so little from his worst mistakes?

“He was fined only twenty dollars,” Harriet says. “And the judge apologized for fining him at all.”

She sounds so forlorn and sorrowful that Mrs. Livingston cannot hold on to her fury.

“The world,” she says dryly, “is not a perfect place even yet.”

“Bella,” Harriet says, and Mrs. Livingston recognizes the same pleading tone that Harriet had had in her voice as a five-year-old. “What should I do? When I come into my inheritance, should I give it up like Jane did? I—I'm not that brave or that good. I wouldn't know how to survive being poor. But how can I keep taking money earned from . . . from evil?”

This, Mrs. Livingston realizes, is what Harriet has really comes to ask her. The details of leaping flames and screaming, terrified girls were only previews to what really matters: now. What can any of us do now?