Those small sweatshops were the past, they were the old country, like we’d never left. America, everybody knew, was in the modern factories, where dozens of girls sat together and earned a respectable wage, not subcontracted out to tiny shops that took their profit out of your skin.
Not that the factories were any picnic—women there could still end up blind, coughing, and sick, but it was more congenial, friendlier, and most important for me, had lots of girls together in one place. We needed to get out of the small shops, and Shayna was the one with the skills to get us hired. Lots of these factories broke down the work so that you didn’t need much skill, but nonetheless, it was useful to sew more beautifully than a machine.
When we walked into Shlomo Cohen’s, they barely gave us a second glance.
“Mister,” I said to the foreman, “we’re looking for jobs.”
“And you can keep looking,” he said to me, but when Shayna pulled out a blouse she had stitched and embroidered on the ship coming to America he sang a different tune.
“This is something special,” he said, addressing Shayna this time. “We can use someone like you, and you could go far here, maybe be stitching samples in a little time.”
“And my sister,” said Shayna firmly.
He shrugged. “And your sister.” We were put to work on the spot.
So, we worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, at Cohen’s shop, one of the smaller factories, only about fifty girls, and we got by. There was always work. You could hear sewing machines on the Lower East Side every hour of the day and night, every day of the week, Sabbath or no Sabbath. The Italian girls worked Saturdays and the Jewish girls worked Sundays and most of us didn’t observe so much and we worked any day we could. That was the way of the New World—even the most pious would eat ham sandwiches in the New World. And be glad to get them, too.
Shayna’s talent shone through. She was made a tucker on the ladies’ skirts, a high-paying job, with the possibility of becoming a sample maker, where she could follow a garment from fabric to its final form, doing almost the same kind of detailed craftwork she had done with our mother.
On one side of me was Ruthie, another girl like me who could run up a seam but not much else. Ruthie had bright blue eyes and she laughed like the shop was a party. Something about her black brows and brown braid reminded me of Yetta, and I started spending less time with Shayna. Shayna would stay late, so eager she was to become a sample maker, and I would walk home with Ruthie instead. We would eat dinner together, talk. She was like me, no interest in the young men, but she was friendly enough to me. She said my eyes were like awls. And she said this like it was a good thing.
Ruthie was a firebrand, had been at gymnasium back in Riga and had become a Bundist, a revolutionary. Like many of her comrades, she was also a freethinker.
“No gods, no masters!” she would tell me passionately, before stabbing her finger with the machine’s needle. “These others,” she’d say, swinging her arm around to take in every girl in the shop, “these others are only interested in catching a rich man, but I have bigger dreams! Look here, here is opportunity for a world not bounded by fears of superstitious whispers! Here we can cast off such foolishness, do away with rich men and cruel gods together! We can throw away fears of demons and see evil’s true face, the faces of depraved men!”
I was so captivated by her speech that despite what I knew she had me half-ready to forswear any belief in God or devils as well. I had never been very political, but in the company of someone like Ruthie, I found myself stirred by visions of justice, by a world aflame with possibility, the blossoming of a new era in the New World.
Ruthie always told me that she became a Bundist after learning of the misery suffered by the poorer members of her father’s shul. Back in the old country, her father was a rabbi and a Zionist, a man who believed that safety and justice for Jews would be found only in our return to our ancient land. I half think Ruthie became a Bundist in part to anger him. Ruthie had Shayna’s sense of excitement along with some real order to her thoughts. She’d had to leave Riga when the police found out that she’d been the author of certain pamphlets.
After work Ruthie would let me practice my English on her, or we’d go to the movies or wander the streets, arm in arm. Never was the Lower East Side so wondrously beautiful as on those nights, especially after it had rained and washed away some of the smell.
On my other side in the factory was Rose, who had been abandoned by her no-goodnik husband and left with four children. One day she came in with more lines in her face than usual. Her youngest, Fanny, had been up all night with what Rose claimed was the croup.
“The croup is bad,” I said, “but not terrible. You can paint her throat with iodine.”
Rose nodded, but she didn’t look less worried. I almost put it down to a mother’s heart, but still I kept pushing. “I can come over after work and help you.”
“No!” she cried fearfully, and then subsided. “No, I can do it myself.”
“Rose,” I said. “It’s not the croup, is it?”
“How can you know?” she asked.
I was pleased—close observation can take the place of any more mysterious power when necessary. “I know,” I said.
She looked around furtively and edged closer to me. “You mustn’t tell anyone,” she whispered. “I can’t afford to stay home in quarantine.”
I knew then what the next words out of her mouth would be.
“Scarlet fever,” she whispered.
“Rose,” I said. “I can help with that.”
“How?” she asked, a little suspicious. “I can’t pay.”
“So who said anything about payment? I’m offering to help.”
I put all I could of myself into the broth I made that night, and I had faith in it, even though the ingredients I got here were not quite the same as those I would have used back home; vinegar and red pepper were easy enough to find, but I searched hours in the markets for myrrh gum. For double measure I made up an amulet for the baby as well, and added into it something new that I found in the markets: powdered foxglove. When Rose saw the amulet her face lit up.
“Now,” I said, handing over the amulet and the medicine, “you must be sure to give Fanny hot baths—she needs to sweat out the illness.”
I prayed every night that the child would recover. I had done everything I could, but there is no knowing with scarlet fever. It can recede only to come back worse than ever. But Fanny did recover, and Rose believed it was my doing.
She came back to me when her sister was in trouble. Her younger sister, she told me, had started walking out with a worthless boy, and wouldn’t take anybody’s words of warning, even their father’s. Rose was worried the girl would fall pregnant, and then what would become of her?
“I can help with that,” I said.
“I will pay you,” she said.
So I made up pessaries for Rose’s sister. “It’s good you had the brains to come to me early on,” I told her. “It’s easier now than later.”
Little by little I built up a group of women who knew me—Rose’s sister had a friend with female troubles, that friend had an aunt with a sick child, the aunt had a friend with a child coming after two miscarriages who wanted every amulet and charm I could provide for her. After a few months I was able to stop working at the shop, and that week, Ruthie came to live with Shayna and me. The family she boarded with had decided to move to Boston, and it seemed only natural for her to come stay with us. In fact, it was no trouble at all, because Shayna was home less and less. When I asked her where she was going, she would just tell me that she was spending time with some of the better seamstresses from the shop, that they were giving her tips on becoming a sample maker. As I was so busy lately, I was just grateful that Shayna had made some friends. Between my work and Ruthie, I barely got to see Shayna some weeks. Ruthie and I often had the room to ourselves. I was grateful that Shayna understood.
About a month after m
oving in with us, Ruthie left the shop as well, putting her troublesome writing to good use. On the Lower East Side, there were so many newspapers! She was hired as a writer by Der Schturkez, a socialist paper put out by immigrants who had come to America after the failed 1905 rebellion. They made even Ruthie look mild.
I’d hoped the three of us could celebrate together, but when I went to Shlomo Cohen’s to pick up Ruthie and Shayna, only my friend was there. I couldn’t find my sister with any of the other girls, but I wouldn’t let it ruin the evening. Ruthie and I went uptown and waited for standing room tickets at the opera, even treating ourselves to a glass of wine each at the intermission. At the bar, I leaned over and saw my sister on the arm of Johnny Fein.
Johnny Fein had a handsome face and he dressed well, but he was a dangerous man to know. He ran numbers, drugs, women. His girls came to me for help all the time. But he never had any trouble getting a pretty girl on his arm. He wouldn’t have had much trouble even if he’d been a tailor, I think, because of his sharp features and lantern jawline, but it didn’t hurt that he always had a lot of money to flash around, and he was flashing it that night, treating Shayna to a bottle of champagne. I hadn’t seen them in the standing room section, that was for sure. And Shayna didn’t see me now, as I turned away and went to find Ruthie.
We missed the final act of the opera, as I was staging my own melodrama outside with Ruthie as audience.
“How long—how long do you think she has been walking out with him? With a criminal?”
“Calm down,” said Ruthie. “You’re doing nobody any good tearing your hair out like this, least of all me. This is supposed to be a happy occasion, remember?”
“Happy? I should be happy with my sister, my baby sister whom I’m supposed to protect even now, sipping from the cup of iniquity? Willingly chaining herself with fine gold and silver filigree to a man of evil? How could I not know?”
“I can’t imagine,” Ruthie said dryly, “why she wouldn’t have mentioned it to you.”
“Such a man! A man to make small children scream and run away in the streets!”
“He gives the children candy,” said Ruthie. “They like him.”
“Yes, well, I imagine he gives Shayna candy as well.” I subsided. “But she will have some talking to do when she gets home tonight.”
She did not come home until very late indeed, that night. She and Johnny Fein must have gone to a dance hall after the opera. I waited up, and when Shayna came in, I launched into her. Ruthie tried to make herself not be there by curling up in a chair in the corner.
“Girl! We did not come all the way to the New World so that you could get yourself killed by hanging on the arm of a shtarker like Johnny Fein! What do you think you’re doing?”
Shayna gasped. “Witch!”
I snorted. “You think I needed witchcraft? I saw you all right—I saw you at the opera house! You know, I looked for you to celebrate with us after work, but you were already gone. I thought you were out with the girls—some girls!”
“What do you care where I am?” she asked plaintively. “You’ve been happy without me, I could tell! I’ll do what I like!”
“I guess I know now why you were really staying out so late!”
“You know nothing about it!” Shayna yelled back, her shock and quailing gone. “Nothing! My Johnny is a hero! You should have seen how he was with that Cohen!”
“So tell me. How was he? A brutal thug? Because that’s what he is at other times.”
“Not a thug! You don’t know! You were over on the other side of the shop with that dirty atheist you call a friend—”
“Ruth is sitting right here!” I shouted. “Don’t you dare call her names! If not for her advice I would have dragged you home the minute I saw you, and this is the thanks she gets!”
“You be quiet and listen to me for once, Deborah!” Shayna dismissed my interruption. “There was that Matthew Cohen putting his hands all over me and calling me filthy names and nobody near who could help. But one day Johnny came in and told Cohen that was no way to treat a lady and offered me his arm to walk home. He’s been a perfect gentleman. You never noticed any of it from the first day to this, and now you want to tell me what to do?”
I felt terrible. I had seen the way Matthew Cohen eyed Shayna, and I knew he thought he was such a big man—son of the owner and all, palling around with a brutal goniff like Johnny Fein. They both thought they were big men, real Americans, calling themselves “Johnny” and “Matthew” when everybody knew they had been born “Yakov” and “Moishe.” But I had not been paying enough attention to the danger Shayna was in. Even so, I was not going to let my guilt get in the way of a fight. “So Johnny Fein claims you and that turns him into a righteous man?” I said. “If you’re really this stupid you deserve to end up like the rest of his girls!”
“What do you know about what I deserve? You’d rather see to every other woman in town than to me,” Shayna blasted back. “I’ve always come last for you! Your customers, Yeshua, Yetta, and now Ruth! You’re not Mama, and if you weren’t so unnatural, you would see yourself how Johnny really is!” She gestured over at Ruthie, who was trying to make herself unseen. “And you have your friend,” Shayna said. “You leave me to mine.”
“Unnatural?” I yelled back. “Fine! You won’t have the bother of my unnatural help ever again!”
Shayna stormed out, slamming the door, and didn’t come home again until early the next morning. In general she stayed out later and later, and soon she didn’t come home nights at all. I barely saw her—just a glimpse in a crowd, really, at a dance hall, maybe. But she was still a tucker at Shlomo Cohen’s shop and that, I thought, should tell her something. If Johnny Fein really meant right by her, wouldn’t he have pulled her out of factory work by now and made an honest woman of her?
“Your Johnny, the hero,” I said sharply to her one morning when she was still sleeping at home. “Why are you slaving over a sewing machine in that factory if he’s so righteous?”
Shayna pressed her lips together and glared at me. “I like it there well enough,” she said. “I like the girls, the talking. And it’s good to make my own money. I suppose you’d miss it if I stopped paying my share of the rent!”
“It’s not your own money that bought you that ring,” I told her, pointing at her finger wearing a golden ring with a real sapphire.
She twisted the ring around and said, “Johnny says I shouldn’t talk to you so much, anyway. You don’t understand.” She walked out.
Oh, but I understood. I understood, and I’d seen this sort of thing before. It started with opera and new hats and dance halls and sparklers on your wrists and fingers, but that wasn’t how it ended.
Weeks later Shayna came home wearing a scarf around her head, shadowing her face. A scarf of the highest quality, no question, but a scarf nonetheless, like she was a greenhorn.
I have sharp eyes, though. I can see through shadows and scarves, and I could see the bruises she was covering.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked, as if it wasn’t obvious.
“Nothing,” she muttered, drawing the scarf tighter around her head.
“That’s not nothing,” I said, jabbing a finger at the shiner over her right eye.
“So I slipped,” she said. “You know how clumsy I am.”
I snorted. “I know how clumsy you were when we were girls, but even then you never wound up with bruises on your face. Let me help you.”
“I don’t want your help!” she said harshly, and turned away from me.
“You must wait, my love,” said Ruthie, which was pretty rich talk coming from the girl who counseled violent revolution. “She’ll come back to you eventually.”
She did.
I had a nice piece of meat made for dinner, and I had enough for three or even four, when Shayna came in, her eyes red from crying.
“Shayna meydle,” I said. “Baby girl, what has happened to you?”
She waved her ha
nds vaguely and sat down at the table, her head bent.
“I’ve done a terrible thing, big sister.”
“Nothing so terrible that I cannot solve it,” I said. I didn’t have the heart to give her the tongue-lashing she deserved. Ruthie ran to the kitchen we shared with the other tenants to make some coffee, leaving us alone.
“I am through with Johnny Fein! Through!”
“Good,” I said. “But tell me what has happened to you.”
“What has happened to me? Better you should ask what I have done!”
“I’m asking,” I said, coming to the end of my patience. “I can help, but I must know the ill.”
“You think I am crying tears?” Shayna said. “These are not tears streaming from my eyes! This my heart’s blood for what I have done!”
“Stop squawking and tell me what is happening,” I said sharply, but Shayna only drew breath to wail again.
Ruthie came in with the coffee and intervened in what was clearly going to become hysterics. “Tell us,” she said quietly.
Shayna told us.
“I have meant to talk to you for a long time,” she said, “for weeks, but I haven’t had the nerve. Johnny is a man with a temper like a demon, and he does not like to be crossed. Better that I should wait for him to tire of me than bring down his wrath on us.”
“I can take care of us,” I interjected.
Shayna smiled wanly. “I’m sure you believe so, but even you cannot turn aside a bullet. A few days ago, I was working in the shop, waiting for Johnny to come pick me up. But he came in late, and he came in with Matthew Cohen.
“They’d been out drinking and gambling that afternoon—I could tell—and Johnny told me that as I was a sporting girl I’d want to know about a bet they made. But I didn’t! I didn’t!” she sobbed.
Burning Girls and Other Stories Page 24