“It’s very late,” she said. “I have something very important to finish here and then I must get back to the factory floor.”
“I did not mean that we should talk now. Perhaps after work we might have a coffee together.”
“That’s impossible. I must get home. My children will be waiting.”
She thought of the way Aaron stood at the front window each evening, his eyes raking the street, his bright hair blazing in the circle of lamplight. But always, as she approached the front door, he darted away, and when she came into the room he would be sitting at the table, clutching a pencil and earnestly absorbed in his homework, his eyes lowered against her greeting but following her movements stealthily as she bent to kiss Rebecca and to greet Malcha and his cousins.
“It will take only a few minutes,” Eli Feinstein persisted. “And it is very important. Otherwise I would not bother you. It concerns your girls in the factory.”
Leah considered, intrigued now by the man’s urgency and calculated air of mystery. David, as always, would be working late at the library and Malcha would have the dinner ready. Joshua Ellenberg, who worked afternoons as a messenger boy for Rosenblatts, could tell them that she would be late.
“All right,” she said finally. “I’ll meet you downstairs then.”
“No. Not downstairs,” he replied swiftly. “Someone would see us there. At the Cafe Royale. I will be waiting for you.”
He strode away before she could object that the Royale was blocks out of her way and there was, after all, a coffee shop right next door.
But then she shrugged, surprised to recognize that her annoyance had turned into anticipation and surprised, too, that the design over which she had labored most of the day was finished within minutes.
“A ruffle at the neck. Of course, that’s it,” she muttered to herself and tore the finished drawing off her pad without giving it another glance. Charles Ferguson would not approve of such swift work, she thought, but then Charles Ferguson was not working at a double job ten hours a day.
Leah woke each morning in the cold grayness of earliest dawn and thrust her shivering body into David’s old winter coat and the fleece-lined boots Malcha had brought with her from Russia. It was Leah’s job to shovel the coal into the kitchen stove and coax the fire into life so that the kitchen would be moderately bearable when the children carried their clothing in to dress. By that time Malcha would be up, preparing breakfast, thrusting pots of water onto the stove so that there would be warm water for washing, and searching for the inevitably missing set of underwear.
In their bedroom, Leah and David dressed in the heavy silence that now shrouded their life together. In the exhausting pace of the last year, they had surrendered the need for words, as though talk would squander the energy so desperately needed elsewhere. David was attending classes both days and evenings now, carrying out a double program mapped out by Professor Thompson. He left early in the morning and often did not return until late at night, and then sat up for hours at the long table, reading and writing. Often, as the light of dawn streaked across the sky, Leah awoke alone in bed and walked through the silent flat to the table where David still sat, driven at last to sleep over his books. His head rested on pillows of papers and his pencil slid limply in his fingers. Her heart would turn over then, and she would lead him to their bed with the tenderness of a mother guiding a somnambulistic child, tucking him beneath their blankets still dressed, with a new day’s beard sprouting harshly on his chin. Sometimes at such an hour he awoke and they made love too swiftly, observing still the silence that had become their secret language of determination and despair.
Leah, too, followed a relentless schedule. Rosenblatts, the factory to which Charles Ferguson’s friend had recommended her for employment, was a mile away and she walked there each morning, joining the crowd of hurrying workers that poured out of the east side tenements only to regroup and reassemble in West Side factories and lofts. Leah was in charge of a group of twelve girls whose job it was to add the trimmings to the garments that were manufactured in other parts of the factory.
They sat in rows before her, smocks shielding their dresses from the debris of threads and cuttings which their machines spat out. Leah had insisted, since the accident with the bobbin, that they gather their hair up in snoods or kerchiefs, and sometimes, as she watched their bent heads enclosed in the colorful cloths, she was reminded of the kerchiefed heads of the women huddled in their separate section of the synagogue in the Russian village of her girlhood, staring at the pages of prayer books they could not read. But of course the girls who sat before her in the Lower Manhattan factory were young, some of them almost children. When they rushed into the factory in the morning their cheeks sparkled with color and their eyes burned with the brightness of dreams and hopes. Over the noise of the whirring machines, they chatted about young men, dances, the weddings of their friends. The high-buttoned shoes that pumped the treadles whirled, in the evenings, across the scarred floors of the dancing studios that had sprung up in the parlors of the larger apartments. But the most precious hours of their young years were spent in the narrow workroom of the factory under Leah’s watchful eye. Too often, her heart thudded heavily as she reprimanded a girl whose chatter had caused her to damage a garment. Sometimes the young culprit would be only ten years older than small Rebecca, and Leah, thinking of her black-haired daughter, hardened her resolve that Rebecca would never sit behind a sewing machine while the days of her youth drifted by.
Leah was also charged with designing some of the less important items manufactured by Rosenblatt and Sons. Each week she brought her designs for bodices and chemises up to Arnold Rosenblatt’s glass-enclosed office and handed them to the pale secretary who shivered slightly each time the harsh buzzer on her desk sounded. It was common knowledge in the factory that the idea of using waste fabric to manufacture cummerbunds had come from Leah Goldfeder’s drawing board. Twice, during the year, Leah’s pay envelope had contained an extra ten-dollar bill, which was Arnold Rosenblatt’s grudging acknowledgment of the value of her work.
“Ten dollars!” Shimon Hartstein had snorted. “Do you know what kind of a profit that pig Rosenblatt got from those cummerbunds? He should be ashamed. The rich bastard!”
“Shimon,” Malcha remonstrated weakly. “Bitte.”
“English! Speak English!” he shouted and Leah’s sister swayed silently, fearfully in her rocking chair.
Malcha did not understand this angry, energetic businessman with his pomaded moustaches who had mysteriously replaced the shy, softly bearded young Talmud student she had married. The bridegroom of her marriage bed had delicate white flesh that lay loosely on his arms, but the man who had plucked her out of the crowds of immigrants at Ellis Island had held her in an embrace of hard muscle and spoke in a language she could not understand. Sometimes, watching the Hartsteins together, Leah wondered if Malcha were really glad that she had come to America—but she knew that her older sister, always quiet and quiescent, would never complain. She had, since her arrival, dutifully set aside her marriage wig and her dark hair had grown in again so that it hung once more about her shoulders as it had when she was a girl in Partseva. But the hair had lost its sheen just as Malcha, alone and lonely for too many years, had lost her vitality and initiative. She moved as a marionette might, set into motion by the manipulations of a benign puppeteer. Her parents had wanted her to marry Shimon and she had dutifully stood beneath the marriage canopy. Shimon had gone to America and for five years she had huddled in waiting. Now Shimon and her younger sister had propelled her to New York to run their household while they disappeared into the tumultuous world outside, and Malcha, mesmerized by the obedience that had become habit, did so with neither protest nor complaint. Malcha would not have so casually made plans to meet Eli Feinstein at a café.
“But what does it matter?” Leah thought, adjusting the broad-brimmed straw hat so that it cast a slight shadow across her face, concealing the fatigue.
“So I’ll meet Feinstein for coffee and be home an hour late.” She was nagged by the worry that Aaron would spend that hour waiting at the window, an unread book balanced before him. What was wrong with the boy? she worried plaintively, washed anew by the curious currents of irritation and concern that thoughts of Aaron always set in motion.
“Good night, Mrs. Goldfeder.”
Surprised, Leah looked up and saw pretty Bonnie Eckstein, who always had such difficulty threading her machine. What was the girl doing here? Leah knew she had left fifteen minutes earlier because she remembered sliding her hands across the girl’s unresisting body. Once, years before, there had been an epidemic of petty pilfering and the factory girls had smuggled fabric and patterns beneath their clothing when they left. It was because of this that Arnold Rosenblatt insisted that each worker be searched by the forelady in charge of the section, a task which Leah performed with abhorrence, feeling herself as humiliated as the girls whose bodies she touched with swift impersonal fingers.
“Did you forget something, Bonnie?” Leah asked.
“Yes. My gloves.” The girl picked up her hands to display the thin white cotton gloves she wore. She was fair-skinned and the color rushed to her cheeks with startling redness. Her gloved hands flew up to button her open jacket, but not before Leah saw the edges of a distinctive blue muslin which had been distributed for cutting only that day. It was obvious now that Bonnie had left the factory with the others, waited until she assumed the building was empty, and hurried back, using an excuse of a forgotten item to get past the watchman, and taken the fabric. The girl’s frightened eyes followed Leah’s stare and she threw her hands up to her face, blocking the tears that had begun to gush down across her mottled skin.
“I know it’s wrong but I didn’t know what else to do. I must get some more money. My father has trachoma and he can’t even take the pushcart out anymore. My mother’s still sick from the last birth and I have two little brothers. The small one has bronchitis. He coughs and coughs and there’s no medicine. What can I do? I’ve got to have some more money. I thought maybe I could stitch the material by hand and sell the shirts. I didn’t know what else to do. If Yossi doesn’t get the medicine he’ll die. I know it.” Certainty of the worst gave a strange strength to her words. She stopped crying and looked at the woman who stood before her, so tall and calm, her black hair a gentle crown beneath the straw hat. On the floor above them the cleaning woman moved with padded steps and they heard the light thud of her heavy water pail as she set it down.
“How old are you, Bonnie?” Leah asked.
“Sixteen,” the girl replied. She was fifteen but added the extra year automatically.
“Bonnie, you must give me the fabric and I will put it back. Tomorrow I will teach you how to operate the embroidery machine. That work pays more, and Maria Calderazzo is leaving soon to be married. You can take her machine. But now, your brother must have the medicine. There is a nurse at the Irvington Settlement House who will help you. I will give you a note to Mr. Ferguson, whose studio is on the second floor of the Settlement House, and he will help you find the nurse.”
She wrote a few words to Charles Ferguson, explaining the situation, and gave it to the girl, who seized her hand briefly, relief and shame flooding her face again with a harsh redness.
“You must never do anything like this again, Bonnie,” Leah said firmly. “Never. There are other ways.”
“Yes, Mrs. Goldfeder. And thank you.”
The girl closed the door gently behind her and Leah, standing motionless for a moment in the dim light of the empty factory, heard the clatter of her feet as she rushed down the stairwell. She put the muslin in the storage cabinet and wondered sadly if they should lock all the cabinets each evening.
The incident with Bonnie had made her late for her meeting with Eli Feinstein and she walked quickly, still thinking of what had happened. She wondered what she would have answered if the girl had pressed her about those “other ways” to ward off poverty Leah had so easily mentioned. What were the “other ways” to find money for food and clothing for the armies of men and women who had brought trachoma with them as a part of their portable legacy after generations mired in the poverty and misery of the old country. The settlement houses and welfare agencies could do only so much and many of the immigrants were unaware of their existence. There had been, after all, no “other way” for her neighbor, Yetta Moskowitz, who had been deserted by her husband and left alone with four children. Heavy and clumsy with the weight of her pregnancy, Yetta had placed her head on a pillow within her open hissing gas oven. It was there that her children had found her dead hours later. The building rang with their anguished wails and the youngest complained over and over that she was hungry and her mother would not wake up. Always, Leah would remember that Yetta Moskowitz had used a carefully laundered, newly ironed pillow slip, embroidered in the thick blue satin thread of her dowry marks, for her final comfort. Her hair had been newly washed and the scent of lemon mingled with the acrid fumes of gas.
Thinking now of the Moskowitz children, dispersed among relatives, Leah reached the corner of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street and pushed open the door of the Cafe Royale.
The sounds of the mournful violinist floated above the bubbles of conversation that sparkled upward from every table. Scraps of Yiddish tumbled over arguments in French and collided with stern pronouncements in Russian. A tall blond man stood up and read from a tattered copy of Eugene Onegin. The two blonde women with him, both dressed in pale blue suits, clapped in unison and their gloved hands created a wondrously soft, sweet sound. A young man, wearing a suit and a vest from which a pocket watch dangled, waved across the room to a pretty girl in a high-waisted red dress. She joined him at the table he shared with three men dressed in work clothes, glasses of tea standing before them. They continued their argument without looking at the girl, who slid quietly into an empty chair and touched the young man’s hand with her own.
At a small table a one-eyed artist sat, sketching the café’s patrons. They drifted across his pad in gray pencil lines and Leah, glancing automatically at the artist’s work, saw the figures of the bent newspaper readers, the arguing clusters of men, the groups of pale girls who sat together and watched the clock that would eventually drive them back to their barren bedrooms at the end of dimly lit boarding-house corridors. The waiters drifted from table to table, uneasily balancing glasses of tea and coffee and chunks of cake on the scarred aluminum disks that served as trays.
Cigarette smoke wreathed the warm room in a gray cloud that made Leah’s eyes smart. Suddenly her name was called and she felt Eli Feinstein’s hand on her shoulder, guiding her to an empty chair at a table where two glasses of tea had already been set down, next to two clumsy pieces of honey cake on which bright golden nuts nestled unevenly.
“I hope the tea isn’t cold,” he said. “You were so late I thought you weren’t coming.”
“I was delayed. Something at the factory.”
“Oh?”
“Nothing very important,” she said and was stung by the memory of Bonnie’s cheeks reddening in shame and despair. Suddenly, without meaning to, she was telling Eli Feinstein the story.
“It’s not so unusual,” he said when she had finished. “The girl is very young and very poor. A sick father. A sick brother. What can she do?”
“Yes. Still, it is not right to steal.”
“Nor to be stolen from. Her youth is stolen for poor wages. Her dignity is stolen. In a way this is why I wanted to see you, to talk to you. Think of how it would be if there were a fund at the factory for girls like Bonnie, a fund they could borrow from if there is such sickness in the family or they need help for other reasons. It’s been done in other factories where the workers have been organized.”
“You’re talking about a union,” Leah said. “Please. Do not play word games with me. You must say what you mean.”
She sipped her tea. Eli Feinstein had sweetened it himself and
she was surprised that he knew she took two sugars. Smiling, taking another drink, she looked at him.
“Once on the street I saw you buy a tea from a peddler. I saw that you take two sugars. I noticed.”
“Then you have noticed that I am a forelady. Foreladies are not good people to talk to about organizing unions.”
“I thought perhaps a forelady with eyes such as yours might be different,” he said. “A forelady who hates the examination of workers, who thinks of ways to protect them, who worries about a little finisher with a sick brother. Such a forelady, I thought, might be induced to care even more. Maybe she would organize her caring so that it means something. Was I wrong, Mrs. Goldfeder, was I wrong to think that you cared about your comrades?” His voice was gentle but certain, playing against her feelings knowingly and expertly, a skilled fiddler wielding his bow against a recalcitrant instrument.
Leah looked up at him, fending off his words. The café violinist, who had wandered from table to table, cradling the café sitters in the cocoon of his mournful tunes, had gone to sit with the one-eyed artist and count the coins he had collected in the cup which dangled from his waist. It was the music that had unnerved her, she thought, the music and the use of the word “comrade.” The music had swept her back to her wedding to Yaakov in Odessa and she remembered how they had sat in a circle then, the bridegroom and bride clasping the hands of their assembled friends while the violins played and they sang of bright tomorrows, of days of peace when comrades would stride forth together. There had been no tomorrows for Yaakov and the violins had been stilled; the comrades and the promises vanished, when the streets rang with agony and were littered with bloodied bodies.
Leah's Journey Page 8