Uprising (7 page)

“Padroni don't give anyone anything,” he said. “They
loan
the money, and expect a lot of money back in return. Pietro probably wasn't paying fast enough.”

My three dollars and ten cents today instead of four or four-twenty-five,
Bella thought, stricken.
Pietro was paying back my share too. Maybe it's because of me?

But the padrone wouldn't know that she got less money today. By the time Bella got paid, he'd already kidnapped Pietro.

“That reminds me,” Signora Luciano said. “Your rent is due today. And because I lost a boarder, and Pietro skipped out without paying, I'll have to raise my rates. It's . . . three-fifty now.”

She held out her hand, waiting. Bella could see the dirt under her long, scraggly fingernails. Dirt as black as night, as black as Signora Luciano's soul.

“But—I only made three-ten this week,” Bella protested. “I don't have that much money. I can't pay. Please, I beg of you—”

“Then you'll have to help us with the flowers, won't you?” Signora Luciano said. “Here. Get to work.”

She held out wires, leaves, and petals, cheerful-looking things meant for grand ladies' hats. But Bella knew they were really chains, handcuffs, shackles. If Bella so much as touched one of those wires, she'd be chained to the sewing machine all day at the factory, chained to the flowers every evening.

“No, please,” Bella moaned, but she was only a girl, alone—what could she do? Pietro was gone. No one was there to protect her anymore.

She gazed beseechingly at Signor Luciano, at Nico, at Rocco, but the men kept their heads down, carefully ignoring her. And the boy just shrugged, helplessly. Only he had the grace to look ashamed.

“Take it!” Signora Luciano ordered.

Bella took the wires, the leaves, the petals. She let Signora Luciano show her how to wrap everything together,
creating the illusion of a flower. She let Signora Luciano scream at her when her fingers fumbled with the wires, when she dropped the leaves, when she accidentally smashed the petals.

The old Bella wouldn't have stood for this,
Bella told herself.
She wouldn't have let anyone yell at her like that, not without yelling back. She wouldn't have let Signor Carlotti cheat her, either And she would have found some way to save Pietro from the padrone. . ..

But she knew none of that was true. The old Bella was courageous and daring and fierce only because she hadn't known any better. She hadn't known any better than to come to America.

That was worth it,
she thought, blinking away tears.
It's worth it to work so hard, to be so hungry and tired and cold. Everything's worth it as long as my family has food.

But that was hard to believe when the wires squirmed in her hands, when Signor Luciano and Nico leered at her, when Signora Luciano yelled at her, when everyone she loved was so far away.

When she felt so completely and utterly alone.

W
e should have asked her about joining the union,” Yetta said.

Rahel gave her a sidelong glance.

“That girl was worried sick over her boyfriend—couldn't you see?” Rahel said. “She was in no frame of mind to hear about her rights as a worker, her importance to the union. And I don't think she understands English.”

“It was her brother she was waiting for—brother or cousin or something like that,” Yetta said.

“Oh, Yetta, didn't you see the look on her face? That girl's in love.”

Yetta hated this, when Rahel made her feel like a little child who knew nothing of the world.

“The union's more important than love,” Yetta said stubbornly.

“Yetta, Yetta, Yetta,” Rahel said in a singsongy voice, playfully swinging around a lamppost. “Let's see what you say when you fall in love.”

“Won't happen,” Yetta said.

Rahel snickered in response and skipped ahead. It was a cold night, but they were both in high spirits because they'd just come from a lecture by a famous socialist. They'd heard
how the workers really had all the power, so much more than the bosses—all they had to do was unite. Several other girls from Triangle had been in the audience, girls who nodded and clapped at all the same moments that Rahel and Yetta nodded and clapped. They'd felt united, there.

“If the Italian girls knew what was good for them, they'd want to join the union too,” Yetta said. “I think that was the girl who got cheated today.”

“Who hasn't been cheated?” Rahel said, spinning back around to face Yetta. “Who hasn't had their pay docked for being a minute late? Who hasn't had the clock set back on them, so you work and work and work and quitting time never comes? Who hasn't been forced to work overtime for no pay, and been told, Oh, here, you can have an apple turnover for your supper—aren't we generous?' Three hours overtime, and all you get is a measly turnover! Who hasn't had a supervisor follow them to the bathroom and say, You're taking too long in there! You're stealing time from the company!' Who hasn't been charged for the electricity, for thread, for needles? Who hasn't been charged for torn shirtwaists that the contractor himself ripped?”

“Rahel for union leader!” Yetta cheered, her voice echoing slightly off the tenements around them.

Rahel laughed.

“Oh, you know they'd never let a girl be in charge,” she said. “Those big union men, they look at us like we've got fluff for brains, and they pat our heads and say, ‘Now, now, you know it's impossible to organize girls. They're just working for pin money, just working until they get married. Girls can't be depended on in a union.'”

“Then fight the union men,” Yetta said. “Fight the union
men, fight the bosses—fight the world!”

Rahel looped her arm through her sister's.

“You would, wouldn't you?” she said, laughing again.

They'd crossed over now from the section where mostly Italian people lived, to an area where it was all Jews. They passed a Yiddish theater, and Yetta heard a burst of laughter when someone opened the door. The streets were crowded with people going to the theater or dances or movies or lectures or night school. In fact, there were more people out walking in this one block than had lived in Yetta's entire shtetl back home. She remembered how shocked she'd been when she'd first got to America, by the noise and lights, the beardless men, the giggling girls who didn't seem to know any of the rules about how females were supposed to behave. Now it all delighted her. In spite of her empty stomach, her aching feet, her threadbare clothes, her lousy job—in spite of everything, Yetta could still feel a burst of love for America, for New York, for the Lower East Side.

Back in the shtetl, she'd faced such a narrow future. Her parents and the matchmaker would have married her off to someone just for the status he could bring her family. If her father had had his way, it would have been a scholar, someone who'd spend his days with his head bent over the Torah while Yetta milked the cows and baked the bread, birthed the babies, and squeezed a living out of every little coin. No— that wouldn't have been a living. This wasn't quite living either—spending her life hunched over a machine, a supervisor always yelling at her, the work always piling up. In the factory, she was little more than a machine herself. But so much more was possible here. She was taking night-school English lessons and going to lectures and classes, and she
could feel her mind opening up, her dreams opening up, her future opening up.

Maybe she and Rahel would be union leaders together.

“That Italian girl,” Rahel said, staring off into the distance, past the throngs on the sidewalk. “I suppose she will get married. She'll get married and have babies and quit the factory. Maybe the union men have a point. How can we ask her to fight and struggle and suffer when she's just going to quit? When she won't benefit from anything we're fighting for?”

“Because maybe she'll have daughters,” Yetta said fiercely. “And maybe her daughters will work in the factory. She wouldn't want her daughters being tricked and cheated. She wouldn't want her daughters to work a full week and have nothing to show for it. She wouldn't want her daughters to starve.”

“Oh, Yetta, you have all the answers, don't you?” Rahel said. But she didn't sound proud or impressed. She sounded wistful, the same way she sounded sometimes when they whispered together in the night. Remember how Mama used to tuck us into bed when we were little?
Remember how she polished the Sabbath candlesticks until they gleamed? Remember how Papa would lift us up on his shoulders and cry out, “The richest man in town can only wish to have so fine a family as ours!”

Yetta didn't have an answer for that. It didn't matter, though, because Rahel had turned away from her.

“Oh!” she cried out, her cheeks suddenly coloring up. “Mr. Cohen!”

A tall, well-dressed young man was coming toward them. On a sidewalk full of couples and clusters of friends, he was walking alone.

“Miss Rahel!” he said, then said something in English that Yetta didn't quite understand. What did “It's such a
treasure to see you” mean? No, wait. “Pleasure”? He thought it was a pleasure to see Rahel?

“Your English is perfect,” Rahel said, with a trilling kind of laugh that Yetta had never heard Rahel use before.

“Thank you so much. Thank you,” Mr. Cohen said with a little bow, then he walked on.

Rahel stood still, watching him. Yetta watched Rahel.

“Who was that?” Yetta demanded.

“Mr. Cohen,” Rahel said. “He's in my English class.”

Rahel was in a different English class than Yetta, a more advanced one, because she'd been in America longer. That was something else that made Yetta feel like Rahel would always be far ahead, that Yetta could never catch up.

Rahel sighed, as Mr. Cohen disappeared into the crowd.

“He's so . . . don't you think he's handsome?” she asked.

Handsome? Back home in the shtetl, it wasn't much worth noticing who was handsome and who wasn't. Girls didn't have a choice. They just married the man their parents told them to marry, and hoped he wasn't too hideous. But in America . . . what was Rahel thinking?

“About the Italian girls,” Yetta said, her voice sounding rough and unnatural. “I think the bosses are trying to make us hate them. You know how they alternate us at the sewing machines so you have to lean past someone Italian if you want to speak Yiddish? And I think it's the bosses who start all those rumors about how the Italians hate
us.
That girl didn't seem to mind at all that we were Jewish. . . .”

Yetta waited for Rahel to correct her, to say they weren't Jewish anymore, they were socialists, unionists, revolutionaries.

But Rahel wasn't even listening.

J
ane eased the heavy front door shut and tiptoed across the marble foyer. It was late—all the servants had gone to bed hours ago. She could see a thin strip of light on the floor, the only thing that showed under the door of Father's study. It would be nothing to tiptoe past that door. Jane inhaled deeply, just in case she'd have to hold her breath. But the inhalation brought with it a huge whiff of cigar smoke—also coming from Father's study—and Jane began to choke and cough.

The door sprang open, and Father stood there brandishing a fireplace poker over his head. He lowered it, a bit sheepishly, when he saw that it was only Jane.

“Young lady!” he said gruffly. “Where have you been? Why isn't Miss Milhouse accompanying you?”

Jane finished coughing. She backed away from the larger billow of cigar smoke that had appeared when Father opened the study door.

“I was . . . I'm returning from an educational lecture,” Jane said. “I went with Eleanor Kensington, who's a Vassar student and very mature, and so Miss Milhouse's presence wasn't required.”

Very innocent,
Jane told herself, and it was. She was telling
the truth. But she felt guilty, as if Father wouldn't approve if he knew the whole truth. If he knew how Jane had finagled to avoid taking Miss Milhouse along. (None of the college girls had chaperons constantly babysitting them—why should Jane?) If he knew that Eleanor swore sometimes—she said “Dash it all” just like a boy—and maybe wasn't as reputable as Jane implied. If he knew that the lecturer tonight had talked about women's rights. (What did Father think of women's rights?) Or if he knew that she and Eleanor and Eleanor's friends had gone to an ice cream parlor afterward that maybe wasn't perfectly clean and maybe wasn't perfectly socially acceptable.

Jane's friend Pearl had introduced her to Eleanor Kensington three months ago, and it had become common for Eleanor to invite Jane along for lectures and symposiums, academic talks and social commentaries. At first, Pearl had gone too, but Pearl yawned and squirmed and elbowed Jane to whisper, “Would it be rude to leave early? This is
so
boring. . . .”

Jane thought a lot of it was boring too. But a lot of it was fascinating, and had set Jane to wondering about everything. Was the speaker right, the one who claimed that there was enough wealth in America that
no one
should have to live in poverty? (Who would care to work as servants, then?) How about the speaker who said that alcohol was the root of all evil? (Jane had thought it was supposedly money—though Eleanor and her friends had looked the quotation up in the Bible and said it was actually the
want
of money that was evil, which wasn't exactly the same thing. Jane was still thinking about that one.) And then there were all those women's rights lectures. Would the United States be a better place if women could vote?

Jane favored her father with what she hoped was her most innocent-looking smile.