The Banished Children of Eve (57 page)

“But he didn't make me pay.”

“Not yet, he didn't. But the likes of him never gave away a drop of sweat without figuring on being repaid, one way or other.”

Although Margaret didn't say anything more on the subject to Mrs. O'Sullivan, she was glad that Cunningham wanted to see her again, happy that someone would come looking for her. She felt she did owe him something, some kindness, not just in consideration of the fare, but in view of the time he took to get her safely to Mrs. O'Sullivan's.

When
they reached the third landing, Mrs. O'Sullivan put the bag down. “Now let me have a good look at ye,” she said. “You're the image of your mother.” They entered a small, airless room, the only light coming through the open front doorway. Children's screams came from below, high-pitched and happy.

“I'd offer you tea, but there's no lighting a stove on a day such as this,” Mrs. O'Sullivan said.

“No need,” Margaret said, “I'm not thirsty at all.”

Mrs. O'Sullivan walked into a back room. On the wall above where Margaret sat was a picture of Jesus pointing to His Sacred Heart. From behind, a shiny, brown-bodied insect scurried out, quick, furtive movements, something instantly repulsive about it. Margaret resisted the urge to reach up and squash it. Another one followed. They moved in a zigzag pattern toward the floor.

Mrs. O'Sullivan returned with a bottle of whiskey and two teacups. She poured a fingerful into each cup and handed one to Margaret. Margaret sipped the whiskey. A strange edge to it, unlike the whiskey at home. No great drinker of the stuff, but she had had enough to know this was different, watery, with a rough aftertaste. Whiskey made in haste, no hint of peat fires, no slow process of distillation; it was to be drunk, not sipped.

“Tell the truth,” Mrs. O'Sullivan said. “'Tis not at all like ye expected.”

“No, but it's fine, fine, I'm grateful for it.” Margaret thought that Mrs. O'Sullivan had been speaking of the whiskey.

“Haven't met a one yet ain't been nearly killed by the shock of the place. Don't matter how many times ye write and spell it out to them, there's no understanding New York till it's been seen with your own eyes, and that's why I didn't bother you with long descriptions. But don't worry, the time goes quickly and then one day ye wake up and can't imagine ever having lived anywhere else.”

Margaret
nodded. She was having trouble staying awake. Mrs. O'Sullivan talked on, a soft flow of words. The whiskey and shadows were overwhelming. The day felt as if it had begun a year ago. She hadn't slept much the night before.

She had slipped up to the deck and watched the lights of the city through the mist. What had she expected to find? A child's dream, already lost.

Mrs. O'Sullivan's boys were grown now, one a longshoreman, the other a grain shoveler in Brooklyn. They were patriots, too, she said, in the tradition of Margaret's father, attended all the meetings at Hibernian House on Prince Street across from the cathedral, and been sworn into The Organization by Michael Corcoran himself. Margaret made no mention of her father's transformation.

Finally Mrs. O'Sullivan said, “You must be tired. We'll talk business tomorrow.”

She led Margaret through one bare, windowless room with a mattress on the floor into another about the same size, this one with a window that faced out onto a brick wall. There was a wide bed by the window, iron-framed, a prominent sag in its middle. Margaret undressed and lay down. Downstairs, someone was playing a fiddle. Music for a jig. The music of home. Voices and singing, the loudness of people when they drink. The noise died down a bit. She drifted off to sleep.

In the morning, the heat was so intense that Margaret thought the stove must have been lit. It hadn't been. Mrs. O'Sullivan had already left for work. The mattress in the middle room was occupied by a body beneath a sheet. Margaret moved past quietly. She opened the door to let the light in. The same crowd of children was playing around the privies. She went down and filled a pitcher from the slow-running tap, then went upstairs and lay down again. The heat was like a fever. She fell in and out of sleep, constantly waking from unremembered dreams. It was almost totally dark in the room when Mrs. O'Sullivan woke her up. They ate bread and salted fish by the light of a paraffin lamp. Mrs. O'Sullivan said that Margaret could share her bed for a dollar a month.

“What about
the middle room?” Margaret asked.

“'Tis taken.”

“I know. I saw someone sleeping there when first I got up, but then she was gone.”

“You'll hardly ever see her. Kathleen Leahy is her name. She cleans offices. Works nights, every night. A perfect tenant. If she ever decides to move, I'll give you first claim on her spot. It'll cost two dollars.”

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 thumbs 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.