by Peter Quinn
Mrs. O’Sullivan patted Margaret’s hand. “Don’t worry yourself about finding work,” she said. “It’s taken care of. I talked to the boss at the shirt-finishing factory where I work, and he said to bring you in Says I, she’ll be here first thing in the morning. One other thing,” Mrs. O’Sullivan added. “Don’t ever have this door unlocked. There’s them would steal the pennies from a dead man’s eyes to get the money they need for drink.”
On the wall, above the picture of the Sacred Heart, at the periphery of the lamplight, Margaret could sense the insects hurrying along in the shadows.
They reported to work soon after dawn the next morning. The streets were quiet and empty as they walked to East Broadway, and it seemed to Margaret a different city from the crowded one she had seen from atop Cunningham’s cart. The shirt-finishing factory was housed in an imposing building of red brick. They waited outside in a casual line of about thirty women, and Mrs. O’Sullivan introduced her around. A few of the women were German, but most were Irish. Kathleen, Sheila, Anne, Maura, Angela, Lucy, two Peggys, there was no chance she could keep them all straight. Standing apart, by the gutter, were four colored women, the first Margaret had ever seen, three of them dark, one light-skinned. Try as she could, she couldn’t stop staring at the darkest of them, a woman with skin that glistened, and high cheekbones that made her face look as if it had been chiseled from coal. She had wide, round eyes, and pupils the color of peat. None of the other women in line so much as glanced at the colored women, who talked among themselves, arms folded, their faces alert and serious.
The doors to the building were thrown open, and they went in single file past a man in a booth who handed each of them a piece of paper marked with a number that matched one of the numbered bags of newly sewn shirts piled in a room off to the right. Each woman rummaged among the bags until she found the one she was looking for, then took her bag over to a desk by the staircase and handed the man sitting behind it the piece of paper. He checked it against the bag, wrote the number in a book, and had the woman sign next to it. The women carried the bags to the second floor, a vast space with columns set at intervals, but no intervening walls. There were iron tubs in rows on the side of the room. In the middle were six steam boilers set on brick bases, the fires beneath flickering behind iron gates. Black pipes carried the steam up into the walls.
Margaret followed Mrs. O’Sullivan and watched her as she opened the hatch on one of the boilers, her face turned away from the steam that shot out, and shoved the shirts in individually. Closing the hatch, she went over and brought back one of the iron tubs. She pulled the shirts out, picking at them, shaking them in the air. When the shirts were all in the tub, she took the tub to the far wall, along the length of which ran a large sink. The sink was filled with hot water and starch in which she soaked the shirts. She wrung them out and filled the tub again. She and Margaret climbed another flight of stairs. The third floor was another large space, but here there were clotheslines strung between the columns. The heat almost knocked them over when they entered. The women tried to string as many of the shirts on the line as they possibly could. The sweat ran from Margaret’s forehead into her eyes. It blurred her sight.
“It’s the hot air from the steamers,” Mrs. O’Sullivan said as she hurriedly pinned shirts to the line. “Dries the shirts in no time, and come winter, you’ll welcome the heat.”
Margaret and Mrs. O’Sullivan went down to the first floor, took another bag, and repeated the process of steaming and starching. The shirts on the third floor were dry by the time they got back. They took them down and hung the new ones. They carried the tubs of dry shirts down a narrow hallway in which they had to stand against the wall to permit women coming from the other direction to get by. In a room half as large as the drying room was a big coal stove. There were a dozen irons resting on it, and ironing boards arranged around it in three rows.
From below came a pounding noise, a thunderous banging of machinery that made it almost impossible to talk as they ironed. Mrs. O’Sullivan stamped her foot on the floor and shouted, “’Tis a shoe factory down there.” She pointed at the corridor they had just come down. “That brought us across into another building.” They carefully folded the ironed shirts and took them back to the first floor. The man who had handed out the numbered tickets gave each shirt a quick inspection.
“Missing a button,” he said. He took one of Margaret’s shirts and threw it aside.
“It was when I got it,” Margaret said.
“Then you shouldn’t have taken it.” He wrote 14 on a piece of paper and handed it to her. “That’s all you’ll be paid for. We don’t pay for damaged goods.” She crammed the paper into the pocket of her dress.
They went back for another bag of shirts. On the second floor, Margaret burned her fingers on the steamer. They pulsed with pain. In the ironing room, the sweat ran down her legs, puddled in her shoes, soaked her blouse, and matted her hair to her head. She finished her next load and handed it in. The man didn’t pull any out. He wrote 16 on a slip. A penny for every five shirts. Six cents so far. She sat on the bottom stair. The clock read 11:30. Quitting time was seven that evening.
In a room beneath the stairs, two of the colored women were pinning shirts. The other two were moving up and down the stairs with buckets of coal and starch. They moved from floor to floor, keeping the stoves tended, the sinks full, putting the tubs, irons, and ironing boards in order, sweeping the floors, mopping where they were wet.
Mrs. O’Sullivan stopped where Margaret was sitting. The older woman’s wet blouse clung to her breasts. “Better get a move on,” she said. The muscles in Margaret’s calves were taut and sore.
The dark-colored woman whom Margaret had admired earlier came down the stairs carrying two empty buckets. Mrs. O’Sullivan was blocking her way. The black woman stood waiting for Mrs. O’Sullivan to move. Mrs. O’Sullivan ignored her.
“You’re in the way,” Margaret said to Mrs. O’Sullivan.
“It’s a white man’s right to stand where he wants, and the last time I looked, I was still white.”
The black woman stood with her eyes straight ahead. The perspiration dripped from her chin onto her dress.
Margaret stood up. “Very well,” she said, “I’m ready.” She made room so that the black woman could pass.
Mrs. O’Sullivan watched the dark-skinned woman go into the room with the other colored women. “You’ll learn,” she said to Margaret.
“To be rude?”
“No, about niggers.”
“She was doing nothing but her job.”
“She’s here because she wants your job. Niggers will steal any job they can.”
“She’s got a job of her own.”
“She’s got a job because when they tried to bring niggers in to work with us, we refused to work, all of us, even the German girls. The niggers were willing to work for half what we get, and the owner said that was his business, that it was his right to strike any deal with an employee that he cared to. But we knew what it was. Soon as he had enough niggers he’d cut our wages, too, so we stepped down, the lot of us, and the husbands and brothers of some of the girls came and stood at the door with us, and we let it be known the first nigger tried to come in would get something else besides a job. Finally the owner agreed not to hire them except as pin girls and sweepers that get paid a daily rate, a child’s wage, and more than a nigger deserves.”
“They have to feed themselves, don’t they?” Margaret said.
“Not on our bread.” Mrs. O’Sullivan went up the stairs. “Don’t waste your sympathy on them,” she said.
On Sunday the factory was closed, and Mrs. O’Sullivan took Margaret to Mass at St. Mary’s on Grand Street. Cunningham was waiting in front of the grocery when they came home. The day was warm, but not humid and oppressive the way it had been. Cunningham offered to take both of them for a ride. Mrs. O’Sullivan said no.
Margaret was delighted he had come back. He had his thum
bs hooked inside his galluses and stood in front of his cart as if it were a coach. She didn’t try to hide her enthusiasm. She put her arm through his and said, “I hoped you’d come.” In the preceding days, as Margaret had walked to and from work with Mrs. O’Sullivan, sharing her table and bed, the two of them on the same sagging mattress, the loud wheeze of the woman’s snoring keeping her awake, the hope had become progressively stronger.
Mrs. O’Sullivan stood with her missal in her hands. “Be careful,” she said.
Margaret handed the older woman her own missal. “Take this for me, please.” Mrs. O’Sullivan took Margaret by the wrist and whispered to her, “You owe him nothing, remember that, nothing.”
They rode up Grand Street to Broadway, then north. To the east and west the streets gave way to sky and masts, here and there a glimpse of water, but the avenues unfolded into a steady vista framed in masonry. The traffic flowed at a faster pace than on the day Cunningham had taken them from Castle Garden. There were far fewer carts or drays, mostly coaches and traps with well-dressed occupants, a few with their attendants in livery. As they proceeded northward, the dense, unbroken blocks gave way to fields salted with lonely-looking houses. Cunningham named the churches and the squares they passed, the homes of the wealthy. They stopped in front of the new cathedral, massive walls of granite surrounded by a wooden framework. Cunningham helped her down. The watchman by the gate in the construction wall knew Cunningham, and he let them through. They walked up the stairs to the entrance and peered through the empty portals into the unroofed nave. It wasn’t a church yet, not a proper one, still an unconsecrated shell, but already it had a holy feel.
They rode north again, along the eastern section of the seven-mile wall that enclosed Central Park. There was planking strewn about, and mounds of raw earth that made it look as if a great explosion had just taken place.
“The rich had it all set to build mansions on both sides of the avenue, with the park as their backyard,” said Cunningham, but Mayor Wood stopped ’em, a man of the people, Mayor Wood.”
“I’m not interested in politics,” Margaret said.
“Here ya gotta be, at least a man does, it’s his bread and butter. He can’t afford not to be interested, especially the Irishman. We all got an interest in keepin’ the likes of men like Fernando Wood in power.”
“Mayor Wood is Irish?”
“No, but being a true Democrat he’s careful to listen to the will of the people, and since a good number of the people in this city are Irish, he heeds our wishes.”
Cunningham began to discuss the city’s politics. Margaret admired the hills and meadows in the park, new stands of trees emerging from the chaos, ponds and lakes in the process of construction. Cunningham turned from the park, and after a drive through some half-constructed streets, they reached a real wood, wild and overgrown, with none of the landscaped symmetry of Central Park.
“This is Jones’s Woods,” he said. “A little ways up and we’ll get a view of the river.”
They came into a meadow that ran in a slight incline toward the river. Cunningham tied up the cart. Ahead was a wooden pavilion. A band was playing, and people were dancing. Cunningham went up the stairs without a word to Margaret. She stood outside, uncertain if she should follow. He came back in a few minutes with two mugs of beer. He drained his in one long gulp. They walked together to the end of the meadow, and it wasn’t until they stepped up onto an immense outcropping of rock that the river came into view. It surged beneath them, a torrent of fast-moving water pushing toward the harbor.
“Over there is Blackwells Island.” Cunningham gestured with his empty mug at the wooded shore opposite. The roofs of several buildings poked through the trees. “The workhouse, the city prison, and the lunatic asylum, they’re all over there. New York’s got two insane asylums now. You know a city is on its way to being something when it’s got to have two madhouses.”
They strolled back to the pavilion, and Cunningham kept going inside for more mugs of beer, and Margaret kept hoping that he would ask her to dance, but he didn’t. They sat on the steps and listened to the musicians, Germans in purple uniforms with silver braid, and Cunningham talked politics. It was dusk when they finally left. The woods were already dark.
She half wished that he would kiss her, pull off into the woods, stroke her hair, embrace her, bury his head in her shoulder, confess some passion for her. She would kiss him back. She wasn’t in love with him, but she felt so lonely she wanted to stay awhile longer with him, share some intimacy, words, gestures, even silence, open herself to the possibility of discovering in him a gentleness others didn’t see and finding in herself the first stirrings of real attachment.
Cunningham moved the cart slowly through the woods. From behind came the faint sounds of the German band. “The Protestants love the niggers,” he said. His words were badly slurred. “Take a nigger over an Irishman any day, even got a home for nigger kids on Fifth Avenue. That’s because they know they can run the nigger’s life, cuz he ain’t got enough sense to run his own, and they’re afraid of the Irishman cuz of the opposite. They know in their heart of hearts, even if they don’t ever admit it, we’re every bit as good as them.”
At the word heart he thumped his chest the way the priest did when he said the Confiteor.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
The room was hot and close when she slipped into bed. Mrs. O’Sullivan was facing the wall. As soon as Margaret lay down, the older woman said, “Well, did he try to get back his fare?”
“He was a gentleman.”
“Never was a cartman who was a gentleman. Either he had too much to drink or he was in a hurry to get over to Greene Street to get what you wouldn’t give.”
“He said he was going home.” He hadn’t told her where he was going. They had raced down the avenue and he had sung in a loud, drunken voice:
De Camptown ladies sing dis song,
Doo-dah! doo-dah!
Camptown racetrack five miles long,
Oh! Doo-dah-day!
“For some of them, Greene Street is home,” said Mrs. O’Sullivan. “The whores are the only family they’ve got. Well, at least he didn’t leave you with anything you have to carry into confession.”
Margaret saw Cunningham twice after that. Both times they rode up to Jones’s Woods, with the same result. He had too much beer, talked politics, and drove her home. Once winter came, she never saw him again.
The following fall, in 1860, a girl from the factory said she was applying for a job as a servant. The demand had picked up greatly, and the call for domestics was getting well ahead of supply. Mrs. O’Sullivan advised Margaret against following the other girl’s example. “It’s a kind of slavery,” she said, “living your life under the eye of your master.” But Margaret thought Mrs. O’Sullivan’s view was influenced by the loss of the rent she would suffer.
Margaret bought a dress from A. T. Stewart’s for her interview at the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestic Servants. Though she got it at a steep discount, it had still cost her a month’s salary.
Mrs. Bedford examined her application form as they stood in the vestibule of the house.
“I see you have experience as a resident domestic.”
“Yes, ma’am.” A small lie. She had cleaned houses in Cork City, but never lived in.
“I don’t want an inexperienced girl. This is a well-ordered household, and it’s important that any new help be able to master the routines.”
“You can count on it, ma’am.”
She cleaned the bathroom last, then relieved herself in Mr. Bedford’s bowl.
Mea culpa. Another offense against Mrs. Oswald’s Commandment No. III.
It was almost time to serve Mr. Ward his lunch. Glancing at the mirror, Margaret adjusted her cap. After lunch she would sweep downstairs and polish the hallway floors—a nearly impossible task to keep them shined and spotless, free of the grime and dirt continually tracked in on boots
and shoes. As she came down the stairs, somebody gave the front-door knocker a loud rap.
She opened the door. It was a workman in overalls, standing with cap in hand.
“I’m here to check the gas connections.”
“The connections?”
“The pipes. Make sure they’re tight.”
“All right. Go below and I’ll let you in.”
He put his cap back on and went down the stoop. Margaret stood at the door a minute. Odd, a tradesman coming to the front door instead of going below, but nobody knew his place anymore. Miss Kerrigan’s complaint, and there was truth in it, the way some of the merchants dunned Mr. Bedford about bills, coming right to the front door, like invited guests, and demanding to see him.
Miss Kerrigan was getting Mr. Ward’s lunch ready when Margaret came into the kitchen.
“The gas man is here to look at the pipes.”
Miss Kerrigan went about her work. “Sure, we have no problem with the pipes. Tell him not to waste his time.”
Margaret walked to the front of the house and opened the basement door. The man was standing in the well beneath the stoop.
“The pipes is fine,” she said.
He stepped inside and removed his cap. “This is an inspection, ma’am. Once every three years. You was notified by post.”
He was on the short side, but taller than she. His dark hair was unparted and combed straight back from his forehead. He smiled at her, rows of white, even teeth, and blue eyes, a lovely soft color.
“It’s getting warm out,” he said.
An American from the sound of him. But it was an Irish face. What was the harm in having the pipes checked? She would stay beside him the entire time, never giving him the chance to take anything, which some workmen weren’t above doing, although this one didn’t look the criminal type.
“It is indeed,” she said.
JULY 11, 1863
Let the Reader confess too that, taking one thing with another, perhaps few terrestrial Appearances are better worth considering than mobs. Your mob is a genuine outburst of Nature; issuing from, or communicating with, the deepest of Nature. When so much goes grinning and grimacing as a lifeless Formality, and under the stiff buckram no heart can be felt beating, here once more, if nowhere else, is a Sincerity and Reality. Shudder at it; or even shriek over it, if thou must; nevertheless consider it. Such a Complex of human Forces and Individualities hurled forth, in their transcendental mood, to act and react, on circumstances and on one another; to work out what is in them to work. The thing they will do is known to no man; least of all to themselves. It is the inflammablest immeasurable Firework, generating, consuming itself. With what phases, to what extent, with what results it will burn off, Philosophy and Perspicacity conjecture in vain.