The Crimson Thread (5 page)

Balancing Act
 

Paddy was waiting for her on the high, gated front steps of J.P. Wellington’s luxurious Park Avenue townhouse, his expression eager. “This is good,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon, but I came out just now to check, just the same.”

            “She got fired,” Seamus explained.

            Bridget opened her mouth to tell him the story, but he cut her off. “It’s fate,” he said. “And it only proves that you were meant to get this position for which I have put you forward. Seamus, go water the horses for me. I am going inside to introduce Bridget to the head seamstress.”

            She began to climb the steps, but Paddy put his hand on her shoulder to stop her. “We go in the servants’ entrance,” he said, steering her down several steps to a plain doorway slightly below street level.

            He whisked her through a kitchen bustling with busy servants and up a narrow flight of stairs into the front hallway. He paused only long enough to whisk a piece of lace off an end table and draped it around her shoulders by way of improving her plain, sweat-stained blouse.

            “Da, no!” she objected. “They’ll recognize it.”

            “Nonsense! Do you think they know every piece of lace in this grand house?” he replied, adjusting the material evenly on her shoulders/ “Button up your collar there.”

            He led her down the elegant hall with its sparkling crystal chandeliers overhead and thick, plush Asian rugs beneath until they came to a set of carved wooden doors whose brass handles had been polished to a rich gleam. Paddy banged on the door with his rough fist, and Bridget cringed a little. Surely this sort of thunderous noise was not fitting in such a fine and silent home.

            “Enter,” came a low-pitched voice.

            The woman who sat behind the ornate desk in the study was possibly the thinnest woman she had ever seen who wasn’t falling over faint from starvation. On the contrary, this woman seemed quite alert, with probing eyes below a wide forehead under a high nest of upswept gray hair.

            “Allow me to introduce my daughter, the greatest seamstress New York will ever see, Bertie Miller!” Paddy announced in a booming voice as though she were the star attraction at some theatrical entertainment.

            Bridget’s head snapped around to stare at her father in surprise.

            Bertie Miller!

            The greatest seamstress New York will ever see?!

            “What sort of name is Bertie?” the woman asked, eyeing Bridget critically. “Is it…Welsh?”

            “French by the way of Wales,” Paddy said. “It’s short for Bertrille.”

            Amusement played in the woman’s eyes. Unlike the man who had interviewed her father, Bridget had the distinct impression that this woman was not fooled for a moment. No doubt she knew an Irish brogue when she heard one. “Have you brought any samples of your work?” she asked.

            “No,” Bridget replied.

            “All our things were lost at sea when the ship we were sailing was nearly shipwrecked in a storm,” Paddy jumped in to explain.

            Bridget couldn’t believe she was hearing this latest fabrication, it was so wildly untrue. The entire trip had been days of dull, sometimes nauseating rocking under a monotonously overcast sky without a drop of rain.

            Paddy stepped forward, stretching out his arms proudly. “Fortunately, this very shirt I’m wearing survived the tempest. It was made by her hand.”

           
Survived the tempest
! Bridget tried not to let her face reveal her shock at this bold-faced lie. Her mother had made the shirt he wore! It was hard to accept the fact that her father could be such an outrageous liar. But maybe that was too harsh. He was an avid storyteller, and all good tale tellers sometimes lost the line between truth and fiction. To him, anything might be true; it was only a matter of which version of the story he was telling. She almost had to laugh when she thought of how he objected to her flights of fancy, when she’d probably inherited her imaginative ways from him.

            “Of course, she made this garment some years ago, when she was only a child,” he went on. “But the workmanship has held up very well, weathered the storm beautifully. Come examine it for yourself.”

            The woman came out from behind the desk, revealing herself to be exceptionally tall. She examined Paddy’s sleeves and collar. “It is indeed well done,” she concluded.

            “This girl is a wonder,” Paddy went on. “Not only can she sew a perfect seam, but she can spin thread, tat lace, embroider, and weave. If you take her on, you will thank me for the rest of your days.”

            “Is that so?” the woman asked skeptically.

            “Mark my words,” Paddy assured her, deliberately missing the disbelief in her tone.

            “I would work very hard and do whatever you want,” said Bridget sincerely, hoping to bring some small sense of truth and reality into the proceedings.

            “Have you any reference?” the woman asked.

            “We are newly arrived and this would be her first employment in America, and, as I mentioned, the many testimonies she brought from home were all lost at sea,” Paddy said.

            A tight, pinched smile formed on the woman’s lined lips. “I see.” She turned her attention to Bridget. “You will start as my assistant. I hope that is not too menial a position for one as gifted as yourself.”

            “No, ma’am, not at all,” Bridget answered.

            The woman nodded. “You may call me Margaret. I will call you Bertie. We will begin tomorrow morning at seven sharp and work until six in the evening. We will be making the clothing for Mr. Wellington’s eldest son and his three daughters, who are fashionable young women.”

            “Yes, ma’am.”

            “Mr. Wellington’s fortune has been made in the textile industry,” Margaret continued. “Fabrics and clothing are of the utmost importance in this household. Your work must be beyond reproach. You are being taken on in a conditional capacity, subject to dismissal if your work does not meet my expectations. Is that clear?”

            Bridget swallowed hard and immediately hoped the sharp-eyed Margaret hadn’t noticed. She’d thought her clothes-making skills were sufficient until Mrs. Howard had ripped her vest apart. Now she was no longer as confident.

            “Oh, you’ll be more than happy with her work,” Paddy interjected.

            “I’m speaking to your daughter now, Mr. Miller,” said Margaret. She returned her attention to Bridget. “Any number of girls here applied for this position. It is an excellent opportunity. You are being offered it based on your father’s recommendation. Mr. Wellington believes in employing members of the same family. I suggest you do your utmost to make the most of this.”

            “Yes, ma’am.”

            “Will you be requiring a room?”

            “Yes, she will!” Paddy answered for her.

            “No, ma’am,” Bridget disagreed. “We have little ones at home who require tending at night.”

            “Still, it would be good for her to have quarters in case she’s ever required to stay late and work on important garments,” Paddy insisted. “Work will always come first.”

            Margaret glanced uncertainly from father to daughter. “You may use the smallest maid’s room on the top floor at the end of the hall. It will be cleared out for you by tomorrow, but you will be free to go home in the evening if you choose, as long as you return promptly in the morning. I will tolerate no lateness.”

            “That’s more than fair. Thank you,” replied Bridget.

            “Ad one more thing,” Margaret added. “Please return that doily around your shoulders to the hall table before you leave.”

            Bridget flushed with mortification. Why did she let her father persuade her to do these things? “Yes, ma’am,” she mumbled, not even able to meet Margaret’s eyes.

            “Very well, we will see you tomorrow,” Margaret said, dismissing her.

            Bridget turned and left through the tall wooden doors. When they were again in the hall, she exploded at her father in a furious whisper as she yanked the offending lace from her shoulders. “Why did you tell her I was an expert seamstress?”

            He stepped back as though she’d struck him. “You should be all smiles and thanking me,” he replied. “You got the job, didn’t you?”

            “And why did you tell her I needed a room? Have you forgotten about Eileen and Liam?”

            “That room is important. You want to live here and become part of the household. Liam can go stay at the firehouse with Finn or board with me in my room in the carriage house. They won’t even notice him.”

            “What about Eileen?”

            A thoughtful, slightly guilty look passed across his face. “I saw Mike O’Fallon last night. He has a sister who lives upstate who might take her on for a bit.”

            “No!” Bridget objected forcefully. “Eileen stays with us. We’re her family! I’ll not have you fobbing her off on strangers. We wouldn’t know how she was being treated. We might never get her back.”

            “That apartment costs money,” Paddy reminded her. “I’m sure Mike’s sister is a fine woman.”

            “Our apartment rent is paid to the end of the month, isn’t it? So, we’ll keep Liam and Eileen there until then, and I’ll think of something in the meantime.”

            “All right,” he agreed. “You three sleep there until the end of the month, and then we will discuss this again. At the moment, you might thank me for getting you this fine position.”

            “Thank you,” she said as she put the piece of lace doily back onto the hallway table.

“How are you, my babe?” Bridget greeted Eileen as she came in the door almost an hour later. She scooped the girl into her arms.

            Bridget saw that Eileen had been changed into a clean jumper. “You’re doing a good job, Liam. Sorry you have to stay here all day. A boy of eleven should be in school. Go outside and play for a while. Da gave me a whole dollar for supper, so I bought a beef bone, vegetables, and milk for a proper supper, and there are three eggs for the morning, too.”           

            “Thanks,” said Liam, racing out the door.

            She found the old food-stained jumper and, with Eileen toddling beside her, washed it in the hallway sink, wrung it, and headed back to the apartment. She set Eileen on their shared mattress with a rag doll she had fashioned for her. “You play here while I hang this on the fire escape to dry,” she instructed her sister.

            Shoving open the window, she climbed out onto the metal perch and hung the dripping cloth over the railing. The heat and clatter of the outside immediately assailed her. How different this world was from the one she had just left, and yet only blocks apart.

            What would she wear to work tomorrow? What would the others in the household think of her in her shabby skirt and cloddish boots? She worried about the “fashionable” young daughters of J.P. Wellington. What would they be like?

            “Are you lost in the American dream?”

            “Huh! What?” she sputtered, startled from her thoughts.

            Ray Stalls was slightly over her head and to her right, climbing down from the roof on the fire escape beside the one she was on.

            “What are you doing out here?” she asked.

            “I like to sit on the rooftops and read,” he answered. “It’s cooler up there. These fire escapes are new, you know. The government made the landlords put them in not more than ten years ago. Before that, when these wooden tenements started to blaze, you were trapped like a rat inside. The landlords don’t care about the poor people who live in their buildings; they never would have put them in if they didn’t have to. I find them convenient for getting around.”

            “What are you? Some kind of burglar?” she asked, thinking of the cash he’d produced the night before.

            He chuckled scornfully. “If I were that, I would not be swinging around the monkey bars here in this neighborhood. What would I steal?”

            She flushed slightly, admitting to herself that this was true. She felt foolish fro not realizing it herself.

            “Have you sobered up yet?” she asked.

            He gazed at her with that steady, deep stare that so unnerved her. “Are you really that stupid?” he replied.

            “I beg your pardon” she exclaimed, scowling indignantly. “I’ll not stand out here and be insulted by the likes of you, who go around swinging around on a building in the early evening and who was seen staggering drunk the night before.”

            “I wasn’t drunk, you sill girl,” he stated, his mouth quirking up at the side in an ironic grin. “One of the men I was talking with told me that the cops were looking for your father and your brothers. You can thank me that the three of them are not rotting away over in the Tombs.”