The Property of a Lady (33 page)

Missie sat down in front of the treadle machine, staring at it in bewilderment. A young boy ran past and thrust a basket heaped with cut and basted fabric at her.

The Irishwoman watched her shrewdly. “Sleeves,” she said. “You’ve done ‘em before, haven’t you?”

Missie shook her head. “I’ve never even seen a sewingmachina
before,” she confessed, “but I needed the job. I’ve a little girl to keep, you see. I thought I could learn.”

The woman sighed. “Course you can learn,” she said, “we all had to learn once. But you’d best not start on sleeves. Here, I’ll show you how to thread up your machine and what to do, and then I’ll get Sammy to change your basket for straight seams. Them’s the easiest.”

She was kind and practical and Missie found the machine wasn’t difficult to work after all; in fifteen minutes she was sewing a straight seam. They were on piecework and she said guiltily, “But I’m taking all your time. You must be losing money helping me.”

“I’ll make it up,” the woman said, smiling. “I know who you are. You worked at O’Hara’s alehouse,
and
you worked harder than anyone he’s had before. I’ve seen your little girl, she’s lovely. My name’s Mrs. McCready—Georgie to me pals. Well, best get on with it then, before the foreman catches us yapping.”

The noise of the treadle machines and the fierce hissing of the big pressing irons, the clouds of steam, the shouted orders, and the press of bodies in the ill-lighted loft seemed to crowd in on Missie, but she put her head down and went to work; by eight-thirty the pile in her basket was beginning to diminish and she felt pleased with herself. Until Sammy came rushing by and filled it up again. By ten o’clock the noise had given her a headache, and the close press of bodies and dust was nauseating. Still, she knew she was lucky to have a machine within sight of a window. Mostly they were given over to the cutters and their big tables and enormous shears. At ten o’clock there was a ten-minute break and she joined the other women hanging out of the windows, smoking illegal cigarettes—cigarettes had caused serious fires in some sweatshops and many people had been burned to death. Missie hung her head out too, grateful for the icy air after the stifling workroom. Too soon it was back to the machine and the endless basket of “pieces.” By twelve her back ached as
well as her head and she felt exhausted. Apart from the ten minutes, she hadn’t stopped work in five hours—and even so, her basket had only been changed once, while everybody else’s had been refilled several times.

“Don’t worry,” Georgie told her kindly as she ate her bread and herring, “you’ll get quicker as you get used to it.”

At six-thirty they filed silently from the room, most too weary now for chatter and smiles.

Missie felt as if she had been sewing seams in her sleep, but she was at Zimmerman’s promptly again the next morning, and the next. When it was over she waited in line triumphantly for her three days’ wages. It was piecework so she didn’t know exactly how much she had earned. “Too slow,” the foreman said curtly, handing over her money. “Don’t come back next week.”

Missie’s mouth dropped open with shock. “Oh, but I’ll get better,” she promised, “I’m learning.”

“There’s no time here for learners,” he said curtly. “Move on.”

She stepped out of the way so the next girl could be paid, feeling like crying, but crying would not get her a job. Nothing would, it seemed.

“Try the market again Monday,” Georgie whispered as she passed her. “There’s always another sweatshop needing workers.”

She opened her hand and stared down at her three days’ wages. It was exactly five dollars.

Missie sat opposite Zev in the Ukrainian café after supper on Sunday night, feeling like a failure. “I really tried, Mr. Abramski,” she said sadly, “but I wasn’t quick enough.”

He shrugged. “You should not be working in a sweatshop, a girl like you,” he said with a spark of anger. “I cannot let you do this, Missie.” He coughed apologetically. “Excuse me, I meant Mrs. O’Bryan.”

“Oh, no, please, call me Missie, everybody does,” she said quickly.

His dark eyes lighted up. He smiled and said, “It would be pleasing if you would call me Zev.”

She looked at him, thinking how seldom he smiled and how sad his dark eyes were, and she suddenly realized how
young
he was. Somehow she had always thought of him as just Zev Abramski the pawnbroker and never as “a young man.” She thought guiltily that she was so full of her own woes that she had never even asked him about himself, only if he was a happy man, when he so obviously was not. She wondered what had caused the sorrow that lay behind his dark eyes. Leaning forward, she said impulsively, “Tell me about yourself, Zev. I know you were born in Russia, but where?”

Zev took a deep breath. He felt as if he were trembling inside. In all these years he had never,
never
told his story to a living soul. He only communed with the dead, in his dreams.

He drank deeply from his wineglass, wondering how to
begin. How did people express their deepest fears, tell of their degradation, expose their innermost feelings to another? He stared into Missie’s lovely violet eyes, warm, gentle, encouraging, and suddenly she leaned forward and took his hand. It was as if that one warm human touch unleashed a quarter of a century of pent-up pain.

He told her everything, about his family in Russia and their escape from the pogroms and how, as a boy of seven, he had found himself alone in New York. And then he stopped. He just could not go on.

She squeezed his hand understandingly and he trembled. After calling the waiter, he ordered another bottle of the rough red wine. He poured some and tipped up his glass, drinking deeply as if it were water to give himself the courage to continue.

“How can I tell you what it felt like?” he asked hoarsely. “A child, all alone in a new country whose language I did not even speak? I was too afraid to ask for help. I waited until some more people emerged from the hall and followed them. I walked and walked but it seemed to me I was getting nowhere, that I would never arrive because there was nowhere to go.

“When night fell I found myself in a maze of streets. They all looked the same, tall, narrow brick buildings with stone stoops. I slept under a stoop that night. The next day I walked again. I did not cry anymore. There were no tears left, just a terrible gnawing hunger. At night I rooted among the garbage for potato peelings, rotting fruits, and bones like an animal. And by day I walked. One night it began to rain, a hard lashing curtain, and soon I was soaked to the skin. Only my feet in their new boots from my uncle were dry. I found a cardboard box under a bridge and climbed in. I felt secure surrounded by my four cardboard walls, I was asleep in an instant. I was awakened by someone hauling on my collar and screaming at me. I saw a face, red, distorted, fringed with a matted gray beard. It was
his
box, his
home
I was sleeping
in, and I knew he meant to kill me for it, like a mad territorial beast. I jumped out and ran away, running and running into the night.

“It was suddenly colder the next day and the rain turned to snow. I turned up my collar and kept on walking because I knew if I stopped I might never get up again. I asked myself, ‘And what is there to get up for?’ I would be better off dead. Then I saw a group of men and boys carrying shovels; they were being sent to clear the snow. I ran over quickly and joined them. The pay was fifty cents a day for as long as the snow lasted. I worked alongside the men, saying nothing, just shifting the snow endlessly, and at the end of the day I collected my fifty cents and went across the street to a diner and bought myself two frankfurters with sauerkraut. My first American food. I stuffed myself full of bread and I must have drunk a quart of milk and then I went outside and threw up. I thought, ‘Such a waste, my fifty cents all gone.’ The snow stopped after a week, but by then I had food inside me, and I had found a warm grating to sleep over where the steam came up from the diner’s kitchen.”

He hesitated. There were things he could not tell her, things he would never tell anyone about the men who had dragged him screaming from his warm hideaway, molesting him, and how he had bit and scratched and punched and fought until he had escaped; how he had run through the night across a great bridge, pausing in the middle, praying for courage to jump into the deep, dark, silent water below. But he was a coward and so he lived.

“Eventually I came by the Lower East Side,” he said. “I saw an old man, a peddler, trying to push his little cart, but he was white-bearded and feeble. I ran across to help him, pushing it all the way to Rivington Street. For that he gave me a smile and a dime and asked me whose boy I was, and where I lived. I told him no one’s and nowhere. He stared at me for a long time and then he said, ‘So, it’s
an orphan, and speaking Yiddish only. I am old, I need a helper. Stay by me and help with the cart and I’ll pay you each day fifty cents and bread and pickle for your dinner.’

“That night he took me home with him. He himself lived in a basement room on Stanton Street, but there was a lean-to shed where he kept his pushcart and that is where I slept. I worked six days a week and earned three dollars, I had a roof over my head and food in my belly, and at night in my shed I was safe. I was one step away from an animal, but at least it was a step.

“Mr. Zametkin was seventy-five years old. He had left his wife and family behind in Poland thirty years before and come to America to seek his fortune. He never found it and therefore he never sent for them. He heard many years later that their village had been destroyed in the pogroms and they had all perished.

“For three years I lived in the wooden shed on Stanton Street, freezing in winter and boiling in summer. I was not happy, I was not unhappy; I was just a ‘being’ who existed. I cannot remember ever laughing,” he added quietly, “but nor do I remember crying anymore. I never went to school but I learned bits and pieces of English on the streets.

“One morning as usual I got the pushcart ready, loaded with the eyeglasses and scissors and padlocks and keys and bits and pieces that old Zametkin sold, and I waited for him to come to the shed as he did every morning at six-thirty. But this morning he did not show. After a while I walked around to his room and knocked on the door. There was no reply. It was never locked and so I went in. He was lying on the floor with his head bleeding and his eyes staring wide. I had seen that same frozen look in my father’s eyes and I knew he was dead. More—somebody had killed him, hit him over the head, murdering him for the few dollars he carried on his person. I heard noises at the door and looked up; there was a sea of faces, all staring
at Zametkin and then back at me, and I knew what they were thinking. That it was me who had killed him.”

His voice faltered and Missie stared at him, spellbound, squeezing his hand tightly.

“The police came and took me away. I went quietly. I did not know what to say to them, only that he was my friend, that he was kind, that I worked for him and I would not do such a thing to old Mr. Zametkin. They put me in a cell and left me there. There was no window, just four stone walls, oozing water and slime. They turned off the lights and left me alone in the dark for a long time; I did not know whether it was day or night nor how much time had passed. I could hear the rustle of cockroaches and the whimper of rats and feel them brushing past me as I cowered on the bench. I felt the whole place was alive, seething with vermin. Every now and then someone came and thrust a plate of food at me and a tin mug of water, but I could not eat. No one came to see me, there was no one who cared. I fell into a despair so deep that nothing could remedy it.

“Then suddenly they came and turned on the light. Out,’ they said to me. ‘You are free.’

“They had caught the real murderer. He had killed a second man and this time someone had seen him. I was back on the streets again, verminous, filthy, and alone.

“I went back to my shed but it was already occupied by someone else’s pushcart and there was a padlock on the door. I slept that night on the street again, and the next day I went to the public baths and asked to be deloused. I came back to Rivington and asked among the vendors if anyone needed help. I worked a little here, a little there. And then someone told me that Mr. Mintz the pawnbroker was ill and needed somebody to watch over his business. I was twelve years old and not a big boy, but I did not have the look of the young. I was already an old person and Mintz knew this. He took me as his assistant and let me sleep in the shop. His wife had died the year
before and his only daughter had left home as a young girl and never spoken to him again. He never knew where she went or what became of her. For three years I looked after the business, earning five dollars a week. No raise was offered and I was too afraid to ask for one in case he gave the job to another. And all the while Mr. Mintz drank himself to death in the back room. When he died I was the only one to follow his coffin, and then I went back to the shop and continued as I had always done. Mr. Mintz’s money was in a bank and I never touched it; I just signed a new lease with the landlord, telling him I was twenty-one even though I was only fifteen, and I carried on the business just like before. Nobody knew any different because I had been there so long already.