Mary Emma & Company

by Ralph Moody

  After Mother had made three or four tries, she turned the collar around, smoothed it out, and started ironing from the other end. The ripples still ran ahead of the point, and when she reached the part she’d ironed first she left a little pleat between them. “Hmmmm,” she hummed as she looked down at it, “there seems to be a little knack about it that I haven’t quite caught onto. I wonder how the Chinese laundrymen make them come out so smooth and shiny, with a sharp, straight fold at the top. Hmmmm, I have an idea they must press them very lightly at first, then fold them over while they’re partially damp.”

  Mother tried three or four collars that way, but it didn’t work; every time the mark of the collar band showed through the outside. Then she tried ironing some of them out flat and stiff before she made the fold, but that didn’t work either. Grace and I had stopped watching her when she finally sang out, “There! There! I knew there must be some trick to it, and I guess I’ve discovered it.” She took the collar she’d just ironed by the buttonhole tabs, stood it up, and drew it into a circle.

  The back of the circle sagged inward as if it were tired, and the tips flared out like the eave corners on a Chinese roof. Mother looked at it sort of sorrowfully for a minute and hummed “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.” Then she perked up and said, “Well, that’s that, but I think I know what the trouble is. If I remember correctly, I’ve heard a man’s stiff-bosomed shirt referred to as a boiled shirt. That must mean that they use boiled starch to stiffen them, and I used cold starch on these. Well! Aren’t we fortunate that we started in on these collars instead of those stiff-bosomed shirts with their little pleats? Ralph, if you’ll be real careful you might iron a few towels while I’m making the boiled starch. Always test the iron with your finger before you start, so as to be sure it won’t scorch. I’d like to make a good big dent in this ironing before the evening is over.”

  By midnight I’d finished the towels, and Grace had done the sheets, pillowcases, and part of the underwear. But all the fancy shirtwaists and ruffled things were yet to be done, and Mother was still working on her first collar. She must have made half a dozen different batches of boiled starch, but none of them worked right. Her last try was the best, but it wasn’t very good. The collar ironed smooth, and it stood up all right, but it didn’t have any shine to it. I’d just finished the last towel when Mother held the dull-looking collar up in her fingers, shook her head, and said, “It’s beyond me! I’d give a cookie to know how the Chinamen do them to make them come out so smooth and glossy.”

  “Would you give five dollars?” Grace asked quickly.

  “Gladly!” Mother answered. “The success of our whole business might rest on our ability to do these in a professional manner.” She stood for a minute or two, studying the collar as she pinched her lip with a thumb and finger. “Hmmmm,” she hummed slowly, “I wonder if it would be honest for us to send this first batch up to Sam Lee in the morning. If I spend any more time in experimenting we’ll never be able to finish the fancy work by Thursday. Now you children run right along to bed; it’s past midnight already.”

  “And I suppose you don’t need any rest?” Grace asked.

  “I shall have plenty of time to rest after Thursday,” Mother told her. “Now you children run along.”

  Grace could be as stubborn as a donkey, and sometimes she even tried it with Mother. Instead of putting her iron back on the stove she reached into the basket for another piece of underwear, and said, “I’ll go to bed when you go.”

  “Gracie!” Mother said. She didn’t say it loud, but there was a tone about it that didn’t allow for any arguing.

  Grace and I went to bed as soon as I’d banked the furnace for the night, but I don’t think Mother went until three or four o’clock. Next morning there were five or six shirtwaists ironed as neat as a pin and laid out on the dining-room table.

  13

  Tricks of the Trade

  SAM LEE’S laundry was squeezed in between the D & H Grocery and Uebel’s drug store. Sam could speak only a few words of English, but we’d been good friends ever since I went to work at the store, and we always waved to each other when I passed his window. Wednesday noon when I was on my way home from school I looked in to wave at Sam, and for a second or two I thought I must be going out of my head. Grace was standing behind his counter ironing a collar, and Sam was standing beside her, jabbering and making hand signs. They were so busy that neither of them saw me until I’d watched them for several minutes, and it didn’t seem to me that Grace needed very much jabbering. She was going at the job as if she’d done it all her life.

  The iron Grace was using was about three times the size of the ones we had at home. And resting on its top there was a long pole, fastened to the ceiling by an oval spring that pushed down on it. On the counter beside her there was a copper can that looked like a pint-sized perfume squirter without a bulb. As I watched Grace picked up a wet collar, snapped it out straight with both hands, and stretched it flat on the ironing board. Then, with one hand pushing up on the pole, she lifted the heavy iron onto the middle of it, and rubbed briskly back and forth until the linen shone like polished steel. As quick as a wink she swung the iron back onto a resting shelf, picked up the copper can, put her lips to the tube, and blew a narrow line of mist along the edge of the collar band. With a flip of her fingers she folded the collar along the softened line, swung the iron back, and slowly ran its point along the fold. As the hot iron moved along it, the finished collar rolled up behind in a perfect circle, and it hadn’t taken Grace more than three minutes to do the whole job.

  Sam and Grace saw me when she picked up the finished collar and stood it on a shelf beside a long row of others. They both motioned for me to come in, and I don’t know which of us was the proudest, even though Grace tried not to show it. I wanted to climb right over the counter and hug her, and Sam bowed toward her two or three times as he grinned and chirped, “Plitty good, plitty good. Missie plitty good.”

  “Hmmff,” Grace sniffed, “there’s not much to it if you have the right kind of things to work with and somebody shows you every move to make. Sam’s going to give me some of his starch, and he’s written down the place where we can get more of it, along with the rest of the things we’ll need. Now keep quiet till I get this last collar done, and you can help me take them home.”

  As soon as Grace and I were on our way home I said, “I knew Sam was a good Chinaman, but I didn’t think he’d give his secrets away like that.”

  Grace sniffed, and asked, “Who says he gave ’em away?”

  “You said yourself that he showed you every move to make, and that he wrote down what kind of starch to use,” I told her. “If that isn’t giving away secrets I don’t know what is!”

  “Nobody gives away the secrets of their business,” she said. “I bought ’em. For five dollars.”

  “Whewwww!” I whistled. “Five dollars! That’s as much as he gets for doing up two hundred and fifty collars. Why did you give him that much? It’s more than we’ll get for all the collars and cuffs in a dozen baskets of laundry.”

  “Because it was worth it,” she said. “And because he’s too smart a man to sell anything for less than it’s worth. Don’t ask so many questions, and hurry along! You’ve got to go up to the Square before school time and find out why they haven’t delivered our load of coal. If we have to keep on buying it by the bag, the cost will make this five dollars look like chicken feed.”

  When we got home and Grace showed Mother the collars I didn’t know for a minute whether she was going to laugh or cry. “Oh, Daughter!” she said in a husky voice as she held one of them up and looked at it. “You don’t mean to tell me that you did this all by yourself! Beautiful! Beautiful! Do you think we’ll be able to manage the stiff-bosomed shirts?”

  “Sure we can,” Grace told her. “About half the trick is in getting a lot of pressure on the iron, and even with our light ones we can do it all right if we set a board low enough that we can bear down good
and hard.”

  Mother puckered her lips as if she were going to whistle, and blew out a long, slow breath. “Oh, Gracie dear,” she said, “this takes a tremendous load off my shoulders. I was so worried! We couldn’t possibly have sent the collars and cuffs and shirts back washed but not ironed. And it made me feel like a criminal even to think of sending them out to a Chinese laundry and then pretending we had done them ourselves. You know, Chinese laundrymen use a strong bleach that rots linen quickly and makes collars crack at the fold. That’s why these were sent to us.”

  “Sure. I know it,” Grace said. “That’s why we’re going to charge five cents apiece for collars and cuffs.”

  “Oh no, dear! Possibly three, but not five!” Mother said as if she were shocked by any such idea. “I don’t believe that any of the Chinese laundries charge more than two.”

  “Well, even if we did learn how from a Chinese, we’re not running a Chinese laundry,” Grace told her. “And how many times could they send a collar to Sam before it would crack?”

  “I know, I know,” Mother said as she held the shiny band of linen up to the window and watched the light glint off it. For a moment she pinched her lips together, then said slowly, “Gracie, are you sure that Sam Lee didn’t have you use some special sort of starch for these? They don’t have that glaring, glassy look that one usually sees on work from a Chinese laundry.”

  “I don’t know,” Grace told her. “I only know that he took it out of a can on the top shelf, instead of out of the barrel, and he strained it through a piece of silk.”

  “Hmmmmm. Hmmmmm,” Mother hummed. “I think that five dollars was an excellent investment. Let’s not make up our minds right now, but five cents might not be too outrageous a price to charge for work such as this.”

  I didn’t have any more chance to see what was going on at our house until after eight o’clock that night. When I went to find out about our coal the man at the yard said that, because of the storm, we might not get it before the week was out. Lots of other people must have been waiting for coal deliveries, too. That afternoon we had orders at the store for twenty-three bags.

  I thought my back would break before we’d finished the last delivery, but it was worth it; Mr. Durant said I’d earned an extra fifty cents, and my pay would be two dollars for that week.

  When I got home that night our house looked as if the Ladies’ Sewing Circle were having a fair in it. There was hardly a chair or table in the whole house that didn’t have petticoats or corset covers or blouses or shirtwaists laid out on it, and Grace even had the piano covered with carefully folded stiff-bosomed shirts. She and Mother were so busy that they barely looked up from their ironing boards when I came in, and the kitchen table was piled with more fancy things yet to be done. When Muriel started to put my plate and napkin ring on one corner of the table Grace snapped, “No, he can’t eat there; let him eat in the pantry! He’d be sure to slobber, and we haven’t any time to wash and starch that stuff all over again.”

  I started to tell Grace that I didn’t slobber any more than she did, but Mother straightened up from her board and said, “I know how exasperated you are, Gracie, but we are not going to have this bickering in our home.”

  I’ve seen Grace take some wicked tumbles off horses, and one time she had the calf of her leg ripped open on a barbed-wire fence, but she never cried when she got hurt that way; it was only when she had her feelings hurt, or when she was so mad she couldn’t help boiling over. That night it might have been a combination of both. She swiped tears out of her eyes with the back of one hand, crumpled up the corset cover she’d been working on, and threw it back into the basket. “That’s the third time I’ve done this cussed thing over,” she half cried, “and every time I mess it up when I get to that insertion in the yoke. What in the world do women have to have all this lace and Hamburg embroidery and beading and frills and ruffles and fiddle-de-dee on their clothes for? Just to show how rich their husbands are and to make it hard to do up?”

  “I know just how you feel, dear,” Mother told her. “I went through the same thing when I was learning at the laundry, but as you get more accustomed to it you’ll like the frills and furbelows. And just think how fortunate it is for us that the ladies like them too. If their clothes were of the ordinary variety, almost any sort of a washerwoman could do their work for them, and there’d be no reason for them to send it to us.”

  As Mother talked she went around to Grace’s basket, picked up the crumpled corset cover, and spread the yoke out on the board. Then she reached for her iron and ran the point smoothly along an edge of one of the half-dozen strips of inserted lace. “You see, Gracie,” she said, “it has to be done with the very tip, and just along each edge, so. Hmmmmm, I don’t think this piece will have to be done over at all. Let’s see if we can’t sprinkle it a bit and straighten it right out.”

  I wanted to help with the work, but there were no more towels or stockings to be done, and Mother said that Muriel and I should go to bed and get our rest. We went as soon as I’d tended the furnace, but if Grace and Mother went at all they didn’t sleep very long. They were both at their ironing boards when I came downstairs next morning, and there were still enough pieces on the kitchen table that Muriel had to give me my breakfast in the pantry. When I left for the store Mother told me to hurry right home at noon, that I’d have to go to Medford Square and find some sort of boxes for packing the laundry. I had better luck than Mother expected me to. Mr. Felton, at the men’s shop, gave me thirty brand-new suit boxes. One corner was a bit water-stained, but they were just as good for our use as any others. He didn’t charge me a penny, and told me to come back if we needed more.

  Grace lined the boxes with tissue paper and laid in shirtwaists and guimpes and jabots, while Mother checked them off on the lists and put a price after each one. And before putting down some of the prices she’d stop to bite the end of the pencil for a minute. “Let me look at that jabot again before you close the box, Gracie,” she’d say. “My! There must be eight or ten ruffles to it . . . and all that lace! Hmmmmm. Hmmmmm. There was an awful lot of work went into it, but it’s just a jabot. Do you think we’d be justified in charging fifteen cents for it, or do you think it would be better to call it a dime?”

  “Fifteen cents!” Grace would say, and put the cover on the box before Mother could change her mind. I don’t know why Mother kept asking her questions like that, because Grace always picked the highest price.

  I went and borrowed Al Richardson’s sled for the deliveries, then had to wait for Mother to write notes to the ladies. I think that writing the notes was an even harder job for her than doing the washing and ironing. Both of them were long, and she had to start over two or three times before she had them just the way she wanted them.

  Even then, Mother wasn’t too sure. “My!” she said as she read the first note over, “I hope I’ve been neither too blunt nor too apologetic, but we just couldn’t afford to continue doing up sheets and towels and pillowcases at laundry prices. But even with those rates for the flat pieces, these bills seem unreasonably high. Gracie, are you positive you added these columns correctly? Four dollars and eighteen cents seems an outrageous amount to charge anyone for a single week’s laundry.”

  Grace could figure quicker than lightning in her head, and she could think up arguments faster than anybody I ever knew. “Hmmff,” she sniffed, “both bills together come to only eight dollars and nine cents, and they cost us two-forty for coal, three quarters for the gas meter, and a dollar for soap, starch, bluing and tissue paper, to say nothing of the five dollars we paid Sam Lee. That’s four dollars and fifteen cents all together, and leaves us $3.94 for our labor. Between us we’ve put in more than eighty hours on the two batches, and that’s less than five cents an hour for our time. Do you think that’s too much to ask?”

  “Well, putting it that way, no,” Mother said, “but we were slowed up somewhat by having the plumbers here—and I wasted nearly a whole evening exper
imenting on the collars. I’d hate like everything to injure our prospects by starting off with our prices too high.”

  “And wouldn’t we injure both our prospects and our self-respects if we started off with them too low?” Grace asked. “Don’t I remember your saying that . . .”

  “You’re right! You’re right, Daughter,” Mother said quickly. Then she folded the note over, with the bill inside, passed it to me, and said, “Just give this to Mrs. Humphrey when you take the boxes to her kitchen door, and don’t wait for the money unless she tells you to; sometimes people in their circumstances prefer to mail a check rather than to pay their bills in cash. Now run right along, and do be careful not to spill anything off the sled. If you should have an accident, bring the boxes straight back; I don’t want that we ever deliver a garment that isn’t in perfect condition.”

  Mother didn’t need to have worried so much about her prices; they didn’t frighten either of the ladies a bit. Mrs. Humphrey asked me to come in and gave me a handful of cookies to eat while she read Mother’s note and looked the things over. When she’d finished, she went into the front part of the house, brought back her handbag, and took out a five-dollar-bill. When I saw what it was I said, “I’m sorry but I didn’t bring any change with me; you could have your husband send a check if you’d like to. Mother said . . .”

  She didn’t let me finish, but passed the bill out to me and said, “You take this to your mother and tell her I’m very much pleased with her work. I didn’t expect her to do flat work at laundry prices. You tell her I’ll talk to her more about it when we see each other at church.” Then she gave me some more cookies, and I ran all the way home with the five-dollar-bill.