“Why would you call the rent ‘Bella’s money? Why not Nico’s or Benito’s or—” Bella couldn’t even think of the names of all the male boarders. She was dizzy suddenly; she had to grip the door frame. “You sent my money to my family, didn’t you? On Saturday, didn’t you go right away to the Banco di Napoli and send the money for me? Didn’t you?” She was screaming at Signor Luciano now, her voice mixing with the baby’s wails.
She saw Signor Luciano exchange glances with his wife. She heard Nico’s voice rumbling behind her. “You ought to tell her the truth, Luciano.” And then other people in other tenements were banging on the walls, calling out, “What happened to the girl’s money, Luciano?”
Signor Luciano glanced around frantically, like a man suddenly finding himself on trial for a crime he thought was secret. Signora Luciano stepped between her husband and Bella. Her bloodshot eyes gleamed red in the lamplight; her mouth was an ugly gash in her cruel face.
“What does it matter what he did with your money?” she asked, her voice filled with venom, with contempt. “Your family is dead.”
• • •
“No!” Bella wailed, her voice as panicked and desperate and full of pain as the baby’s cry. “My family—I’ve been sending them money since I got here. . . .” She was clutching at a twisted logic. Her thoughts flickered like the light from the kerosene lamp. Even if Signor Luciano weren’t honest, even if he’d been stealing her money, even if he’d lied all along, her family had to be alive because she’d wanted to send them money, she’d tried, she’d hunched over the sewing machine for so many hours, so many days, so many weeks, always imagining her brothers eating grapes, her mama pouring out grains of wheat, her sister with a new ribbon in her hair . . .
“It’s true,” Signora Luciano hissed. “They died right after you left home. Some fever, I guess. Or the malaria. Pietro had a letter about it. He knew, but even he didn’t tell you. He was enjoying it too much, you batting your eyes at him and giving him all your money. ... He had a lot of money to go out drinking with, didn’t he?”
“No!” Bella wailed again. “Pietro, he—”
But she was too choked up to say anything else. She couldn’t stand another minute of being near this horrible woman, listening to these horrible words. She whirled around, grabbed the doorknob, stormed out of the apartment. The darkness of the landing enveloped her, but she could still hear the Luciano baby crying—louder now, as if he’d taken on her pain along with his own. She clutched the railing and raced down the stairs, out the front door. Out on the sidewalk she stepped in snow, the crystals of ice crunching beneath her stockings, sliding up against the bare skin of her legs. For the first time, she stopped, seeing the danger in the icy glitter. She had no shoes on, no coat.
What does it matter ... ? Your family is dead. Signora Luciano’s cruel voice seemed to echo up and down the street, off the fire escapes, the pavement, the walls. Such a cold place, New York City, so cruel . . .
Bella didn’t know that she’d pitched herself forward into the snow until she felt someone lifting her up. It was Serefina, placing Bella’s boots on her feet, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders.
“Rocco sent me,” the little girl said. “He says to come back.”
“No,” Bella said, the word coming out like a sob. “It isn’t true, don’t you see? I can’t stay in a room with a lie like that.”
Serefina stared up at her, old-lady wisdom in her little-girl eyes.
“Then keep moving,” she said. “Keep moving or you’ll freeze.”
If I freeze to death and my family is dead, then we’ll all be dead in heaven together, Bella thought. But she couldn’t let herself believe that her family was dead; they needed her to stay alive and make money so they would stay alive too. She stumbled to her feet, because doing otherwise would be like admitting that Signora Luciano was right, that her family was dead.
“Leave me alone,” she told Serefina, her words as slurred as a drunk’s.
She lurched away down the street, frozen puddles cracking beneath her feet. She had no plans, no destination in mind. Nightmarish faces leered at her out of alleyways and she took off running, blindly, desperately, terrified. She remembered the stories she’d heard on the boat about girls captured and sold into white slavery, girls used by horrible men for horrible deeds.
“Mama wouldn’t want that to happen to me,” she sobbed, and she ran harder, faster. She’d stop and collapse against a building to catch her breath, and then something would frighten her again: a shadow on a wall, a cruel voice still echoing in her head. Your family is dead. . . .
That, she couldn’t run away from. But she tried. All night long she tried, darting down alleys, stumbling over bricks, falling and struggling back up over and over and over again. She was surprised to see the first rays of daylight fall across the tall buildings, surprised that such a thing as daylight still existed.
“My job!” she gasped. She had to get to work, had to earn money for Mama and the little ones, because if Signor Luciano hadn’t sent any of her money, surely they were terribly hungry now. She could picture them all huddling inside their one, bare room, the winter wind howling outside the door. They would be so hungry by now that maybe they were boiling plain water just to pretend to themselves that they had food, maybe they were even . . .
“No!” Bella screamed, and the people around her on the street stared at her as though she were a madwoman. She grabbed the coat of the person nearest her, a man with a long beard and long curls on either side of his face.
“I’m lost—how do I get to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory?” she demanded.
The man stared at her blankly, uncomprehending and maybe a little afraid. She tried out the language she’d heard at work, words and rhythms she’d been absorbing for months but had never attempted herself.
“Triangle factory—where?” she asked.
“Ah,” the man said, nodding, looking a little less frightened. “Where the girls are striking. Turn right here, then left. Go straight for five blocks? Six? Until you see the pickets . . .” He pointed, gestured, held up fingers for the five blocks, the six. “Are you a striker?” He was looking at her sympathetically now, as if that would excuse her odd behavior. “Here. Take this.”
He pressed something into her hand, and then he slipped back into the crowd before Bella thought to look to see what it was: one thin, precious dime. She slid it into her pocket, thinking, For Mama and the little ones. This could help until payday. . . .
She struggled through the crowd toward the factory. It was hard walking alone in the clot of people, with no Pietro, no Nico, no Signor Luciano to lead the way. Bella pursed her lips and muttered to herself, “I don’t need them. . . .”
The buildings around her began to look familiar. She’d reached the corner opposite the factory. But she still needed to fight her way through the strikers, fight her way all alone while they called out “Scab! Scab!” and pleaded “Don’t go in there! Please don’t!” She leaned against the wall, gasping for breath and gathering her strength and nerve.
“Bella,” someone said beside her.
It was Rocco Luciano.
Bella narrowed her eyes, glared.
“Get away from me,” she snarled, an entire night of anger and fear boiled down into four words.
Rocco grabbed her arm.
“I’m sorry about what my parents did,” he said. “I didn’t know. You have to believe—they were good people, back in Italy. But here, it’s always the money, the money, there’s never enough money.”
Bella tore her arm away, out of his grasp.
“You think my family is rich?” she asked, her voice coming out in ragged gasps. “You don’t think they needed the money more?”
Rocco looked down, as if ashamed to meet her eyes. Bella saw the cowlick at the back of his head, a little boy’s cowlick.
“I have the letter,” he said. “It was in Pietro’s things when he left.”
Bella grabbed
at him, as desperate now to cling to him in the surging crowd as she’d been willing a moment before to shove him away forever.
“Where is it? What does it say?” she begged.
Rocco held out a thin, battered envelope. It looked as though it had traveled from far away, but Bella could make no sense of the scrawlings on the front, the arcs and loops of letters she’d never had a chance to learn.
“I can’t really read Italian,” Rocco said. “But this word here is “Calia”—he pointed to lines of official-looking ink near the stamp— “and the letter inside is signed by a priest. Father Guidani, I think?”
“Our priest,” Bella breathed. “In my village.”
She tightened her grip on Rocco’s sleeve. He unfolded the letter and they both stared at it.
“Maybe it doesn’t say they’re dead,” Bella said in a tight voice she barely recognized as her own. “Maybe it says they were delighted to receive the money Pietro sent for me, they have enough food to last the winter, they’ll have Father Guidani write again in the spring. . . .”
Rocco was silent for a moment, then he said, “Bella, I don’t think so. I think that word right there—”
Bella snatched the letter from his hand.
“I’ll have someone else read it to me,” she said. “Someone educated. Someone who wants my family to be alive, who doesn’t want all my money for their own family. A priest . . .”
“The priests around here are Irish,” Rocco said. “They only know English. But at the bank—”
“I’m not going to the bank!” Bella snapped. The bank was part of Pietro’s world, Signor Luciano’s world—how could she trust the men there? She thought of Signor Carlotti, her boss. He probably knew how to read and write. But he’d known Pietro, he’d cheated her himself, he’d lied to her— how could she believe anything he said?
Was there anyone in the entire city she could trust?
Bella’s eyes fell on the strikers walking their path across the street, the strikers who’d yelled and jeered at her every day for the past three months. But there was one girl in that lineup of picketers who’d once shown Bella the best way to snip threads from shirtwaists, who’d walked her home when Pietro vanished, who’d stopped another striker from hitting her.
Clutching the letter against her chest, Bella dashed out into the street.
“Yetta!” she screamed.
Yetta
Yetta was sick of society women and college girls. They came down to the picket line in their fancy cars, cooing and simpering and wrinkling their noses in distaste if so much as a speck of mud attached itself to their fancy skirts or fancy boots. They moaned, “Oh, you poor thing,” as if Yetta and the other strikers were the damsels in distress in some movie at the nickelodeon—as if the strike were being put on just for their entertainment.
Rahel said the society women’s money was keeping the strike going.
“They’ve made so many donations, they’re paying our bail and court fines when we’re arrested, they’re hiring our lawyers—and you heard that Mrs. Belmont put up her house as a guaranty to get girls out of jail, didn’t you?” she asked, when Yetta complained. “Her house is worth four hundred thousand dollars. Four . . . hundred . . . thousand . . . dollars!”
Yetta had stared at her sister in disbelief.
“So now, because of their money, the judges are sentencing girls to the workhouse rather than just fining them,” Yetta argued. “Thank you so much, that’s so much better, going to the workhouse!”
She herself hadn’t been sent to the workhouse yet, but she knew that she would, the next time she was arrested. She’d been arrested too many times.
“Anyhow,” she told Rahel. “Their money isn’t keeping the strike going. Our spirit is. Our spirit and—and God.”
She wondered if Rahel would comment on the fact that Yetta was talking about God again. But Rahel was staring off into the distance once more, as if she’d forgotten Yetta, forgotten the strike.
There was, actually, one outside girl who’d shown up at the strike that Yetta liked: Jane Wellington. Jane came for the first time in early December. She didn’t say “Oh, how awful!” or “How do you survive?” or “You’re so brave!” She didn’t say much of anything. But when Yetta was telling her about the strike, there had been one moment when it seemed as though she understood, as though a girl who had a fur muff and a gold ring and a hat with six ostrich feathers could actually know what it was like to be in Yetta’s battered, holey-soled shoes. Then Jane got scared off by a common bum, and Yetta thought that was the last she’d see of her. But lately Jane had been coming back, mostly on her own, without any simpering, giggly friends. She’d walk alongside the strikers, not saying much, and once, when another girl said, “Thank you for coming,” Jane had shrugged and said, “I’m not really doing anything. Just watching.” And Yetta liked it that Jane knew that, that she understood that the strike was for the strikers, not society women who were just bored with trying on dresses and throwing parties and whatever else society women did.
Now Yetta shouldered her sign in the early winter dawn, steeling herself against the cold that stole in through her boots, her thin jacket, the tattered hat that had been through more battles than most soldiers. She’d taken the early shift on purpose, because it was the hardest and the coldest and the worst, and she wanted to spare the other girls if she could. But she couldn’t ignore the cold herself. And her stomach was growling because she’d eaten only once the day before, and not at all yet this morning—she knew Rahel was worried about being able to afford food. Which was worse, to tap into the strikers’ emergency relief fund, or to use up the money they’d been saving to bring the rest of their family to America?
Yetta clutched her sign as if it were holding her up, not the other way around. She needed food to be able to think clearly enough to decide how to buy food. Yet another dilemma worthy of Papa’s Talmudic thinking. She shook her head fiercely and glared at all the fancy cars in the street. Maybe one of them belonged to Mr. Harris or Mr. Blanck, and maybe she could go out and talk to them directly.
Please, you were once poor immigrants yourself . . .
She did not think that anything she could say would convince such heartless men, who would let their workers stand out in the cold for three months.
“Yetta!” someone called—or maybe they didn’t, maybe Yetta was so tired and hungry that she was imagining things now. But she turned her head just in time to see a flash of color, cars slamming on their brakes, a girl collapsing before a shiny bumper. And then horns were honking, their ah-ooo-gahs sounding like despairing geese. A man jumped out of the car that had hit the girl, crying out, “Saints preserve us! I didn’t even see her. . . .” But the girl was standing up again, looking around, dazed. It was Bella, the Italian girl who’d started out as a finisher with Yetta all those months ago.
And the bosses drive their workers to throw themselves in front of cars, Yetta thought.
Bella didn’t seem to notice that she’d just been hit by a car. She kept wading through the traffic, calling out, “Yetta! Yetta!”
She wants to join the strike now, Yetta thought. In spite of herself, she imagined how much the society women would love this story: And one girl was so desperate to walk the picket line that she got up from being hit by a car and took up her sign right away. . . .
But Bella was sobbing, waving a piece of paper over her head. She had never been one to show up at the factory in the latest fashions—in fact, Yetta suspected that Bella still wore the same clothes that she’d worn over from Italy, and no one did that. Even the poorest girl somehow managed to buy a shirtwaist and a skirt and a pair of high-button shoes. But now Bella looked worse than ever. Her hair was tangled and it stuck out all over the place, as if she’d purposely messed it up instead of pulling it back into a pompadour or knot. She clutched a dirty, tattered blanket around her shoulders—and was that just a nightshirt beneath the blanket?
“Per favore, per favore,”
Bella cried, and a bunch of other foreign words that Yetta didn’t understand. Yetta shrugged helplessly, and Bella shook the paper in her face.
“What . . . say?” Bella tried again, this time in passable Yiddish. “These words here . . . what them?”
Yetta glanced at the paper, what she could see of it in Bella’s quivering hands.
“It’s in Italian,” a boy said helpfully, suddenly appearing at Bella’s elbow.
“I only know how to read Yiddish. And a little English,” Yetta said apologetically. “Maybe Rosaria—” She looked around, but none of the Italian strikers were picketing that morning. She saw the man from the car that had hit Bella walking toward them, alongside Jane Wellington. “Jane knows how to speak Italian. Maybe she can read it too.”
The man was apologizing and lamenting, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you scared me! I thought I’d killed you! And then when you got back up and walked away, it was like a miracle from the Lord Himself. . . .”
Bella ignored him and thrust her paper at Jane, jabbering away.
“She wants you to read that,” Yetta translated.
Jane looked overwhelmed, but she took the paper. She looked at it, looked up.
“It says people are dead,” she said in a frightened whisper.
Bella stood there, looking from Yetta to Jane, uncomprehending.
“Tell her in Italian,” Yetta commanded. She suddenly felt as though the cold seeping in through her clothes had finally reached her heart.
“‘Mi dispiace informavi che Angelina Rossetti, Dominic Rossetti, Giovanni Rossetti, Ricardo Rossetti e Guilia Rossetti anno perdutto la vita.’ I regret to inform you that Angelina Rossetti, Dominic Rossetti, Giovanni Rossetti, Ricardo Rossetti, and Guilia Rossetti have lost their lives,” Jane read in a choked voice.
Bella’s face was still uncomprehending. “They’re dead,” Yetta said in Yiddish.
Bella staggered back, like one hit by an unbearable blow.
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