Most of the day, his mother sat at a small table by the window in the front bedroom, on which there stood a Singer sewing machine, bought on the installment plan. There she would do piecework for the garment trade by the hour. Sitting in a little armchair nearby, Anna would do the hand-stitching. It was not so bad in summer, but on long winter evenings, it was another story. The tenement only had gaslight to work by. Even with a kerosene lamp to help them, Salvatore would see the two women peering anxiously at their work, and sometimes his mother would shake her head and say to Anna: “Your eyes are younger. Tell me if this is straight.”
He knew that all over the Lower East Side, Jewish and Italian women were huddled in small rooms, in the same way. Some families set up little sweatshops in their lodgings, hiring girls even poorer than they were to work in shifts round the clock. That was the way the garment industry worked. Anna would arrive from a garment-maker carrying a great pile of unfinished items piled on her head. When the pieces were finished, Salvatore would sometimes offer to take them back for her.
He was on this errand one evening in June when he happened to pass a building from which a crowd of young women were emerging. Most of the girls were Jewish, but they didn’t seem to mind when the curious Italian boy asked them what sort of work they did. They answered his questions cheerfully before going on their way. All the way home, Salvatore thought about what he had learned. At the evening meal, he told his family.
“There’s a factory where they make garments. There are lots of girls there of Anna’s age. They work in a big room with high ceilings and electric light, and rows of sewing machines. The pay isn’t too bad, and they have fixed hours. Maybe Anna could work there too.”
Any such decision would have to be made by his father. And Giovanni Caruso shook his head at the idea of Anna being out of the house; his wife, though, was prepared to consider it.
“Anna is ruining her eyes at home,” she said. “She’ll be blind before she finds a husband. Let me look at this place, Giovanni, just to see what it is like.”
She and Anna went there the next day. A week later, Anna Caruso began work at the Triangle Factory.
Salvatore’s day now took on a new routine. He would shine boots with Paolo until early evening, when he would take Angelo to meet Anna.
The Triangle Factory was in a cobbled street just east of Washington Square Park, at the foot of Fifth Avenue. In the park, standing on a granite plinth, there was a fine statue of Garibaldi. A north Italian, admittedly, but at least an Italian. The great hero had even lived on Staten Island briefly during his years of exile, and it made Salvatore proud that Garibaldi should be so honored in the middle of the city now. Every evening, he and Angelo would wait beside the statue for Anna to appear. Sometimes she’d be told she had to work late; and if she didn’t appear, he’d take Angelo back. But usually she arrived, and then they would all walk home together, once in a while stopping for an ice or a cookie on the way.
Anna was happy. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company, as it was called, occupied the top three of the ten floors of the big square building. The factory mostly made the ankle-length skirts and the white, narrow-waisted, Gibson Girl blouses, called “shirtwaists,” that were fashionable for working girls and women. Most of the work was arranged at long tables where rows of sewing machines were driven by a single electric engine. It was a lot more efficient than the pedal machine their mother used at home. Many of the employees were men, some of them employed in teams under a subcontractor, though there were plenty of girls too. Most of the workers were Jews, maybe a third related in some way or other to the owners, Mr. Blanck and Mr. Harris, but there were some Italian girls too. Everyone complained about the pay and the hours.
“But at least there’s plenty of air and light,” Anna would say, “and the girls are friendly.” Salvatore guessed that she was glad to get out of the house, too.
Another effect of the new regime was to bring Salvatore closer to his little brother.
Angelo was still a dreamer. At school, he learned his lessons erratically, but the one thing he loved was to draw. He would carry a little pencil in his pocket, and use any piece of paper he could get his hands on. When he and Salvatore were on their way to meet Anna, they would often pick different routes. Nearly every time he’d find something that interested him, and he’d start to sketch it, until Salvatore had to drag him away. Often he would notice some fine bit of carved stonework over a doorway, or high up on the entablatures and cornices of the tall office buildings. No one in the family thought much of his efforts, except Uncle Luigi.
“Of course he likes the carvings,” he declared. “Who do you think did those carvings? Italian stonemasons. All over the city. Look at the Americans’ houses—copied from ancient Rome. Now they make tall office buildings—great cages of steel—but they clothe the cages with brick and stone, and add Roman cornices round the top so that they look like so many Italian palazzi. New York is turning into an Italian city,” he cried enthusiastically. “Our young Angelo will be a great architect, a man of honor. That is why he draws.”
This ambitious design was so obviously impossible that nobody paid any attention. But his father did say grudgingly: “Perhaps he could be a stonemason.”
As for Angelo himself, he went upon his dreamy way. Once Anna confided to Salvatore, “You and I will have to watch out for Angelo all his life.”
For over a year, Anna worked at the Triangle Factory without incident.
The year 1910 began on a Saturday. In New York, there was a light dusting of snow. But on Sunday morning, when Rose Master got into the Rolls-Royce and set off downtown, the sky was clear and blue.
There was still an hour to go before she was due to join old Hetty for lunch, but she was leaving extra time to make sure that the arrangements she had made were all in place. As she stepped into the car, she told the chauffeur that she’d be picking up some people on the way. When they started off, she gave him the address. It was at this point that the astonished chauffeur glanced in his mirror and asked her if there wasn’t some mistake.
“None at all,” she said. “Drive on.”
The last thing Rose wanted to do—the last thing she’d ever thought she’d have to do—was get in a fight with old Hetty Master. She’d talked to William about it. “Am I wrong?” she’d asked. “No,” he’d said, “but you can’t stop her.” She’d reasoned with his grandmother, gently pointing out why this luncheon might be a bad idea. But Hetty had been obdurate. And the trouble was, people were already talking about it. Hetty’s name was being mentioned everywhere, and Rose feared, with good reason, that there could be some reference to the old lady in the newspapers. Something had to be done.
So Rose had made her plans. They were subtle, and devious. She had even employed a journalist she knew, a sound man she could rely upon, to draft a story which would have the desired result. With luck, it might be possible to turn the whole business to some good account without personally offending Hetty too much. But whatever the outcome, she was determined about one thing: the Master family name must not be sullied.
Edmund Keller walked briskly down Fifth Avenue. He liked to walk, and the cold air on his face felt good. He’d spent the first part of the morning with his Aunt Gretchen’s family, up on Eighty-sixth Street. Like so many of the inhabitants of the old Kleindeutschland, they’d long ago moved to the Yorkville area on the Upper East Side, where Eighty-sixth Street was called the German Broadway now. Gretchen had died a couple of years ago, but he was still close to her children and their families.
It was only sixty-five blocks or so down to Gramercy Park. He could walk that comfortably on a bright cold day like this. A dozen blocks every ten minutes, going north to south. Walking across town, the blocks were longer, but he only had to get from Fifth across to Lexington.
He’d been invited to lunch by Hetty Master. The old lady must be over ninety now, he thought, so he didn’t want to disappoint her. The last time they’d met had been at his father�
��s, a week ago. The discussion had been all about the extraordinary goings-on with these girls in the garment industry. Perhaps she wanted to talk about that. He really didn’t care. When he’d satisfied the old lady, he was going to walk round to his father’s and stay for dinner.
Fifth Avenue was sedate on Sundays. He passed the red-brick facade of the Metropolitan Museum, and continued down the long strand where the palaces of the millionaires gazed at Central Park. In the Fifties, he crossed to the west side of the street to avoid a crowd of people coming out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. At Forty-second, he noted that the new library with its magnificent classical facade was almost complete. But it was not until he got all the way down to Twenty-third, where Broadway made its great diagonal cut across Fifth, that Edmund Keller smiled with pleasure.
There it was: the Flatiron Building.
There were some tall buildings uptown these days, but it was only when you got to the Flatiron Building that you entered the realm of the real skyscrapers. The Flatiron Building, however, was one of a kind. Over twenty floors high, on a triangular groundplan at the intersection of the two great boulevards, and looking at Madison Square, it was one of the most elegant landmarks in the city. The narrow corner offices were especially prized.
Edmund Keller liked skyscrapers. He supposed it was natural that commercial and financial men in the crowded world of Wall Street should try to get the maximum use out of the sites their offices occupied, which meant building up. In the last twenty years, the development of iron girder construction had meant that the weight of buildings no longer had to be carried by their walls, but could be cheaply and effectively carried by huge networks of steel. Back in the Middle Ages, medieval builders had been able to raise soaring buildings using pillars of stone and complex frameworks of wood, but these structures were massively expensive. Steel construction, by contrast, was simple and cheap.
Yet it was also in the spirit of the age, he thought, that the mighty business titans of America should send their buildings soaring into the sky, so that they could look out, like eagles, upon the vast new continent. And if the summits of the buildings were like mountain tops, he foresaw that the avenues between them would soon be great canyons, down which the daylight would come striding, bold as a giant.
From the Flatiron Building to Gramercy Park was a short walk, not even five blocks. As the butler opened the door, the buzz of voices told Keller that he was to join quite a large company. He did not see that, behind him, a silver Rolls-Royce was drawing up by the curb.
As Rose caught sight of Edmund Keller, she nodded to herself. She’d managed to keep him at a distance quite effectively so far. Once, he’d come round to call at the house during the afternoon, and she’d told the butler to say she was “Not at home.” It was standard social procedure, and he’d gone on his way. A while later he had written a brief letter to say that he hoped to call, and she had sent an equally polite reply to say that as one of the children had measles, this would be a bad idea. He hadn’t troubled her after that. Seeing him entering Hetty’s house now, she thought: Well, if socialist Mr. Keller was coming, that just proved how right she was to intervene. And if he wanted war, he was going to get it.
“This is where we get out,” she said to the two young people who accompanied her. And a few moments later she was sweeping them past the astonished butler.
She was smiling brightly, though as she saw the other guests gathered in the house, she couldn’t help feeling glad that dear Mrs. Astor had died eighteen months ago. Thank God, she thought, that the poor lady wasn’t alive to see this.
The whole, wretched business had begun in the fall. Some of the garment workers in the downtown factories had started to complain about their working conditions. Perhaps they had a case. Rose didn’t know. But in no time, agitators—socialists and revolutionaries from Russia mostly, she’d heard—were whipping them up. The garment workers were threatening to strike, and the factory owners were outraged.
But not Mr. Blanck and Mr. Harris, the owners of the Triangle Factory. They had provided an in-house union for their employees, but they told them firmly that anyone who joined the militant outside union would be dismissed.
Soon the whole garment district was in an uproar, with the workers calling a general strike, and the braver employers, headed by Triangle, locking them out and hiring others instead. Some employers paid thugs to beat up the leading strikers. Tammany Hall, which controlled the police, was on the side of the employers, and there were arrests. But the union used women on the picket lines, and when they were jailed and sent to hard labor, there was some public sympathy. Even the New York Times, which usually supported the employers, began to waver.
Rose didn’t condone the bad treatment or the violence, but these things had to be kept in proportion, they mustn’t get out of hand. And things wouldn’t have got out of hand, if it hadn’t been for a certain group of women. The women in this room.
You had to give it to old Hetty, Rose thought grimly, she’d assembled quite a crowd. There were half a dozen Vassar girls—they should have known better, for a start. Rose was never sure what she felt about women going to college. Vassar and Barnard in the state of New York, Bryn Mawr down in Philadelphia, and the four colleges up in Massachusetts—the Seven Sisters as they were called, like a sort of female Ivy League. All respectable enough, no doubt; but did one really want girls from the old families getting a lot of foolish ideas put in their heads? Rose didn’t think so.
Just look at the results. Vassar girls had been parading round the city with billboards supporting the strike. They’d been living down on the Lower East Side with the poor. All for what? To show they were enlightened? Well, at least they had the excuse of being young. And that certainly could not be said for the next figure to greet her eye.
Alva Vanderbilt—at least that was her name in the days when she’d forced her daughter Consuelo to marry the Duke of Marlborough. Alva always got her way. After she’d divorced Vanderbilt for a pile of money, married August Belmont’s son and built a huge mansion up in Newport, Rose suspected Alva had got bored. So next she’d decided to make herself look important by demanding votes for women. One might argue about the rights and wrongs of female suffrage, but not about Alva’s unquenchable thirst for publicity. And it was wholly typical of Alva, seeing the strike in the garment district, to decide to hitch these unfortunate women to her own bandwagon and proclaim that their dispute was about women’s rights.
To the astonishment of the factory women, she’d started turning up in the courts to pay their fines. She’d organized monster rallies. She’d even shipped in Mrs. Pankhurst, the British suffragist leader, to make an appearance. She certainly had a genius for publicity, and the Hearst and Pulitzer papers were trumpeting the cause. But her shrewdest move had been to go to the woman who was approaching Rose and her two young charges now.
“Hello, Rose. Didn’t expect to see you here.” Elizabeth Marbury was wearing a dark coat and skirt, with a small black hat on her head. She always filled any room she was in. It wasn’t just that she was broad in the beam; it was her presence. Literary agent to Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and many others, she went where she pleased. Having taken up the cause of the women strikers, she’d brought support from the acting profession, and money from the wealthy Shubert family. She’d even hosted a lunch for a group of the strikers within the sacred portals of the ladies’ Colony Club.
At least she hadn’t brought her friend. She and Elsie de Wolfe, the designer, had been living together for years. Women lovers. The fashionable worlds of New York, Paris and London accepted them, but Rose didn’t approve. Elizabeth Marbury eyed Rose calmly.
“Who are your young friends?” she asked.
Rose smiled, but shepherded them past her without explaining. The other people in the room were mostly society ladies, and a few old friends of Hetty’s. Lily de Chantal was in bed with the flu, but Mary O’Donnell was there, faithful as ever, and Rose went to greet her.
For this was what the luncheon was all about. A gathering, a social rally, before the huge event.
Tonight’s meeting at Carnegie Hall was going to be the climax of the last two months. It could even be the start of a general strike. It was actually a union meeting, but if anyone thought that was going to keep people like Alva out, then they didn’t know the rich and powerful women of New York. On behalf of her Votes for Women League, she had a private box.
“I’m sorry, Mary,” Rose said, and Mary looked disappointed.
“We’re only waiting for one more person now,” Mary said. Then, glancing toward the door, she added: “And here she is.”
Even as Rose turned to look, she had an instinct who it would be. Alva Belmont and Marbury were bad enough, but if there was one woman in New York whom she truly hated, one woman she couldn’t forgive … well, she was walking into the room now.
Anne Morgan. She was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a fur stole and, thought Rose, looking pleased with herself as usual. Rose had never liked her, but since she’d taken up with Marbury and de Wolfe, she’d become impossible. They’d all gone to live together in France for a time—in a villa in Versailles. Who did they think they were? Royalty? As for the nature of the relationship, Rose didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. And now Anne Morgan was busy donating huge sums to the garment workers’ cause, funding Russians and socialists, and making a nuisance of herself. God knows what her father thought of it all.
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