For the Love of Mike

by Rhys Bowen

  “I’m Lanie,” she said. “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.”

  I squeezed myself onto the vacant chair beside her. The chair had a broken back and rickety legs. I hadn’t been told to remove my shawl and now I was glad to notice that most of the other girls wore theirs too. Some of them wore gloves with the fingers cut out. The atmosphere was decidedly damp and chill. From the depths of the room came the sound of coughing.

  “You’ve worked a machine like this before?” Lanie asked over the noise of the treadles.

  Luckily I had. It was identical to the ones at Mostel’s. I nodded.

  “We’re doing sleeves,” she said, pointing at the huge stack of dark blue bombazine. “All you have to do is the side seam, then pass them on to Rose. She’s setting them in the bodice.”

  I turned to the girl on my other side. She was petite with red curly hair and she gave me a bright smile. “Another redhead. Now I won’t feel so much like a freak.”

  I smiled back. “We redheads must stick together.”

  I started sewing. By the time the clock on the wall rolled around to lunch, my fingers were stiff and cold and my back was aching from sitting on the uneven chair with no support. A bell rang and chairs scraped as we got to our feet.

  “Did you bring your lunch with you, Molly?” Rose asked as we joined the throng of girls making their way to the exit.

  “Not today. I wanted to see what the other girls do.”

  “As you can see, we all leave,” Rose said. “Nobody wants to be down here, breathing this rotten air, for a second longer than necessary. When it’s nice we eat our sandwiches in a churchyard—only don’t tell my father. He’s a rabbi. He’d die of shock to hear that his good Jewish daughter was hanging around a church.”

  I laughed. “And when it’s not nice, like today?”

  “Then we go to Samuel’s Deli on the corner over there. You can get a bowl of soup with matzoballs or liver dumplings for a nickel. It’s good and filling.”

  We joined the line waiting to be served, then carried bowls of clear soup with what looked like three small dumplings in it to the counter that ran around the wall. It was already lined with girls standing and eating.

  “Can you make room for two hungry people, Golda Weiss?” Rose said, shoving another girl in the back.

  “There’s no room, Rose. We can hardly breathe here.”

  “Then hold your breath, we’re hungry and there’s nowhere else to go.” Rose elbowed her way in to a few inches of counter, then grinned at me.

  “So how do you like it so far?” she asked. “Isn’t it fun? Like being on holiday, huh?” She rolled her eyes.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” I said.

  “Ain’t that the truth. I tell you, Molly, if I could find something else to do, I’d be out of here like a shot.”

  “What else is there for poor girls?” I asked.

  “Only walking the streets, which makes more money, so I hear, and I understand it may even be more pleasant.”

  “Rose Levy—if your father could hear you talking like that!” The girl Rose had elbowed aside spun around to look at Rose in horror. “You ask for trouble, you know. You and your mouth.”

  “Just joking, Golda. For God’s sake we need to joke sometimes, don’t we?” Rose rolled her eyes again and looked back at me. “They all take life too seriously. Most of them just try to keep going until their parents make a match for them—hopefully with a guy who can afford for them not to work.”

  “Their parents make a match for them? They don’t choose their own husbands?”

  “That’s how it’s done in the old country.”

  “So will you marry someone your parents choose for you?” I shuddered as I thought of the great, clodhopping louts that my parents would have chosen for me.

  “Not me,” Rose said with a look of bravado, “only don’t tell my father. I aim to be a lady writer and support myself.”

  “You do? Then you must—” I had been about to say that she must come and meet my friends in Greenwich Village, before I remembered that nobody must know I wasn’t a poor Irish girl just off the boat.

  “I must what?” she asked with interest.

  “You must keep going until you succeed,” I said lamely. “Have you written anything yet?”

  “Lots of things, but mostly just for me. But I’m hoping to get a weekly column in the Forward someday soon. I’d like to write articles exposing the injustices in this city.”

  “Like the treatment of girls in sweatshops?”

  She looked at me curiously. “You’ve only been here one morning and already you notice that we’re not justly treated?”

  “Paying for the company’s power and the use of the company’s mirror?” I said. “And that cold, damp room. Do they bring heaters in when it gets really cold?”

  “They brought in two oil stoves last winter, but what good were two stoves for a room that size? The W.C. froze. That’s how cold it was. I tried complaining to Mr. Lowenstein himself, but it didn’t do any good. He told me if it was too cold, he’d shut down the place until the weather warmed up again. None of us can afford not to work.” She chopped off a big piece of matzoball and chewed it with satisfaction. “I’m the only breadwinner in my family.”

  “Is your father sick?”

  “No, just religious.” Again that wicked smile. “I told you, he’s a rabbi. In the old country he was well respected. He ran a big shul and we lived well. Here there are too many rabbis and no one earning enough money to make donations.”

  “So he won’t try and get a real job, just until you’re settled here?”

  “You haven’t met my father. God will provide, like Moses in the desert. I tell you, Molly—if I didn’t work, we’d all starve and God wouldn’t care.”

  I looked at her with admiration. She was clearly younger than I, probably still not even twenty and yet she had taken the responsibility for her family on her young shoulders.

  “I’m just not good at keeping my mouth shut,” she went on. “This is the third shop I’ve worked in. I can’t seem to shut up when the foreman is being mean to a girl or they are cheating us again.”

  I found that I was staring at her in amazement. It was like looking at myself.

  “What?” she demanded. “Have I spilled soup down my chin?”

  I laughed. “I think you and I are going to get along just famously.”

  On the way back from lunch, our stomachs satisfied and our bodies warm, I had to remind myself that I must not become too intimate with any of the girls, even Rose. Least of all Rose. Because one of them could be a link in the chain that smuggled designs out of Mostel’s and into Lowenstein’s and I ultimately would have to expose her.

  As we made our way down the slick, crumbling steps and ducked into the workroom the foreman was waiting for us, hands on hips and an indignant expression on his face. “Late again! Won’t you girls ever learn?” He pointed at the clock on the wall behind him. It showed twelve thirty-three. “That will cost you ten cents. At this rate you’ll end up paying me by the end of the week.”

  “We can’t be late,” I blurted out. “I looked at the clock at the deli and we had five whole minutes to cross the street.”

  I felt Rose dig me in the ribs.

  “Late on your first day and argumentative too? Dear me, that’s not a good sign, Miss Murphy. I’ll have to dock you twenty cents so that you learn to keep your trap shut. Now get to your machines, all of you!”

  As Rose and I made our way down the line of machines she whispered to me, “I should have warned you—if you oppose him, he fines you, so it’s not worth it.”

  “But I’m sure we weren’t late. How can we have taken eight minutes to cross one street?”

  “We weren’t late. He puts the hands forward on the clock. He does it all the time. And he turns the hands back when we aren’t looking so that we work later at night.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. That’s disgusting. Does the owner know?” />
  “Oh, I’m sure the owner knows all about it,” Rose said. “He turns a blind eye, if he didn’t order it in the first place.”

  “It’s terrible. We should do something. They can’t treat us like that. It’s just not fair.”

  Rose smiled and shook her head. “You’re new,” she said. “You’ll learn that a lot of things aren’t fair.” She leaned closer to me. “Oh, and another word of warning—don’t let Katz get you into the backroom alone. He’ll claim there is something wrong with your work, or pretend he needs to give you a talking-to. All he wants to do is to force himself on you. He’s tried it with a lot of girls.”

  “I still hear talking!” Katz’s voice shouted. “Someone want no pay this week?”

  We got down to work. I watched the clock carefully all evening to make sure that Mr. Katz didn’t try to move the hands backward. I was dying to catch him at it. But he didn’t go near it.

  It was raining and a cold wind was blowing as we staggered up into the fresh air at seven o’clock.

  “I’ll see you bright and early then,” Rose said. “He likes us in our seats at six thirty, although our day officially starts at seven.”

  “If that was one day, I don’t know how I’ll manage a whole week,” I said. “My back is so stiff from that broken chair. I pointed it out to Katz and he told me I could bring my own if I wanted.”

  Rose waited for a group of girls to go past, then pulled me closer to her, under an awning out of the rain. “If you really want to help change things, some of us are trying to get a union going. There’s a meeting on Wednesday night.”

  I had promised myself I wouldn’t get involved. I shook my head. “I’d really like to, but . . .”

  She nodded. “I understand. It’s a big risk. If someone snitches on us and the bosses find out, nobody would hire us again, but I’m willing to take the risk. I’m educated. I can think for myself. If someone doesn’t speak out for these girls, nothing will ever change.”

  “You’re very brave.”

  She laughed. “Maybe I’m just stupid. Me and my big mouth, huh? But I feel it’s up to me—most of these girls are peasants, they can’t even read and write. They don’t speak English well, and their families are desperate for money. So they shut up and put up with all of this. We won’t get nothing unless we unionize. My brother was with the Bund in Poland.”

  “The Bund?”

  “It’s a radical socialist group, working to change the old order—justice, freedom, equality for all people. Many Jewish boys were involved, even though it meant possible prison or even death. My brother had to keep his work secret from my father—my father would never have approved.”

  “What does your brother do now?”

  “He lies in an unmarked grave. He was executed when one of their group betrayed them to the secret police.”

  I touched her arm. “I’m so sorry. So many tragedies in the world.”

  “That’s why I’m doing this work with the union. Someone has to make sure my Motl didn’t die for nothing. Someone has to make sure this country is better than the last one.” She draped her shawl over her head. “Think about it and let me know if you change your mind. You’d be a real help, because you speak good English.”

  “So do you.”

  “Ya, but I sound like a foreigner—a newnik. Nobody’s going to take me seriously. The union loves English-speaking girls. There was this English girl who came a few times. You should have heard her talk—oy, but she talked real pretty. Just like the queen of England. ‘We’re going to make these petty tyrants sit up and listen to us,’ she said.” Rose did a fair imitation of upper-class English speech. Then she laughed. “Real hoity-toity, she was. I got a kick out of her.”

  “She’s not there anymore?”

  Rose shook her head. “Nah. She only came for a few weeks, then she didn’t show up no more. I expect she’d found something better—a girl like her from good family. I don’t know what she was doing working in no lousy sweatshop to start with.”

  I was getting a chill up my spine and it wasn’t from the drips that were falling on us from the awning.

  “What was her name?” I asked.

  “Kathy,” Rose said. “I remember it because none of us from Europe can say that ‘th’ sound proper. We called her Katti and she kept correcting us.”

  “And when did she stop showing up?”

  Rose put her hand to her mouth, thinking. “Must have been about three, four weeks ago.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “I think I will come to this union meeting with you after all.”

  Thirteen

  There were lots of girls called Kathy in the world, I told myself. I shouldn’t read too much into this—but it did sound a lot like her. I would try to ask for a description, without seeming too interested, of course. And at the union meeting maybe I’d find out more. In the meantime I had to remind myself that I was being paid to discover a spy. Sometime in the next few weeks, someone was going to deliver stolen designs to Lowenstein’s.

  By the time Wednesday night rolled around, I was more than ready to attend the union meeting, and not just because I wanted to find out if the English girl called Kathy was the Katherine I was seeking. As I watched injustice after injustice going on at Lowenstein’s, I realized that I couldn’t just sit quietly and do nothing. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t get involved, but I wasn’t very good at following my own advice. Someone had to do something and that someone was me.

  If Mostel’s had been purgatory, then Lowenstein’s was hell itself. The dark, dank cold went right through clothing and bones to the very soul. To sit hunched over machines, eyes straining in the gloom, fingers numb and chilblained, with the constant sound of coughing over the clatter of the treadles was enough to break even the bravest of spirits, and these girls had been through so much before that their spirits were already broken.

  On Friday evening the bully Katz wound back the clock hands twenty minutes so that we’d stay to finish the workload and he wouldn’t have to pay us overtime. I saw him. So did several other girls, but nobody said a word. I also watched him smirk to himself as he passed by to his office. I sat there fuming, longing for a chance to get even with him. I’d help get these girls unionized if it was the last thing I did!

  The bell rang to signal seven o’clock, which was really seven twenty. Tired girls stood up, stretched cramped limbs, stamped cold feet, snatched up belongings, and got out of there as fast as they could. As I followed Rose to the door, a hand grabbed my arm. “Not you, Murphy. I want a word with you.”

  I looked around to find Katz smirking at me.

  “What have I done?”

  “These sleeves,” he said. “Call yourself a seamstress, do you? I don’t know what the standard of work is like in Ireland, but it must be pretty bad.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my sleeves,” I said angrily. “I stitched a nice straight seam and I finished my quota.”

  “Not what I’ve been seeing,” he said. He turned and disappeared through the door into the back room. “Call this a nice straight seam?” He held up a sleeve and waved it at me.

  I stomped into the back room after him. “Let me see that. I’ll tell you if it was my work or not.”

  I snatched the sleeve from him. “Why, this isn’t even my sleeve. I don’t start my work that way, and look, the threads aren’t even cut. Little Becky cut every one of my threads today.”

  I looked up and he was still smirking. I realized then that I had been tricked. The sounds in the workroom were dying away.

  “I like ’em feisty,” he said, coming toward me. “A good fight makes the conquest all the sweeter, and you look like a lusty girl who enjoys it, am I right?”

  I was so frozen in horror that I didn’t react quickly enough. He pushed me against the cold wet brick wall and pinned me with his body, his knee thrust between my legs. As I opened my mouth to scream, he forced his mouth onto mine, his tongue into my mouth, his hands groping at m
y body.

  I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t believed he could be so strong. I tried to shake myself free from him, but he held me pinned like a butterfly to a board. Revulsion flooded over me as I felt him getting excited and impatient but I fought to remain calm. If he wanted to take this amorous attack one stage further, he’d have to move to lift my skirt and then I’d go for him where it hurt. I was finding it hard to breathe. Then I felt him trying to shift me along the wall to where bolts of cloth lay piled on the floor. If he got me that far, he could throw himself on top of me. I wasn’t going to let that happen. I managed to get my hands up to his face. I couldn’t reach his eyes, but I grabbed his long, curling hair, and I yanked as hard as I could.

  He reacted just enough for me to break free of his mouth.

  “Let go of me or you’ll be sorry!” I gasped. “I killed the last man who tried to rape me.”

  “I don’t kill so easy,” he said, laughing. “Like I said—the harder the struggle, the sweeter the conquest.”

  “Molly? I’ve been waiting for you. Are you ready yet?” Rose’s voice echoed behind us, unnaturally loud.

  Katz spun around. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Keeping an eye on Molly and making sure she gets home safe and sound,” Rose said calmly. She walked over to me, linked her arm through mine, and dragged me away. “Let’s go home now, Molly,” she said. Then she walked with me calmly out of that door and down the long, empty workroom.

  “Thank you,” I stammered. “If you hadn’t come back for me, I don’t know what might have happened.”

  “I hung around,” she said. “I thought he might try it. I’ve noticed him looking at you. He tries it with all the pretty new girls.”

  “He’s disgusting,” I said, wiping my mouth with my hand and fighting back a desire to vomit. “The owner should be told. He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.”

  “Mr. Lowenstein doesn’t care about anything except quick profits,” Rose said. “How often do you think he even shows up here? Hardly ever. And Katz gets the work done on time for him. That’s all he cares about.”