The day after graduation in the June of 1918, when Bella was fourteen, Momma took her to Greenwich Village, to a loft on the third floor of an old dirty building, and Bella got a job working ten hours a day five days a week, and half a day Saturday, for twelve dollars a week. All day, every day, Bella made paper boxes.
But Momma grew happier in these years. Eddie’s birthday was in October, and in 1916, when he was fourteen, he and Wally were to be released from the orphanage. Eddie could now get working papers and contribute to the maintenance of the family. All fall, while Bella was languishing in trade school, Momma hummed and bustled. She found a new apartment on Lorimer Street in Williamsburg for nine dollars a month—Momma now earned nine dollars a week. The apartment was over a candy store, but there were only two stores on the block—one on each corner; in between there were row houses with high stoops. And because it was on a corner, it had windows on three sides, so it was bright and airy, a release from the dark little slum they’d lived in for the past three years. And it had two bedrooms, and electric light! Momma bought two beds for the boys’ room, although the three females still slept in the old double bed.
And the boys came home. There was crying and hugging and a great feast, but Bella remembers none of it. Her brothers were strangers to her, and a little frightening. They were good boys, but somehow they seemed noisy, chaotic, violent, and she shrank from them. Eddie was mature at fourteen; he looked like an adult, and acted like one too. He and Euga looked more like Momma; Bella and Wally more like Poppa. Eddie and Euga had broader, squarer bodies, and Momma’s warm eyes. But their hair and eyes were brown, unlike Momma’s. But Momma’s blond hair was almost completely grey now, and her blue eyes were watery and nearly colorless. Eddie combed his short hair neatly down either side of his head, and he was serious and steady. He had been trained in the orphanage, and he got a job right away, in a printing factory, for nine dollars a week. He was sober and polite and very kind to all of them, but he seemed often to be far away. And as soon as he could, he signed up for high-school night courses; and soon too, he began to bring things home—he bought a mandolin, a banjo, and a huge album for stamps. Bella never understood why her brother liked to do the things he did. But often, on Saturday afternoons after his half-day, when he got paid, as the children waited and watched, Eddie would walk home from work over the Brooklyn Bridge carrying six charlotte russes—one for each of them and three for himself!
Wally too had learned to play these instruments at the orphanage, and after Eddie bought them, the two boys would play together and they would all sing. At first it was fun. The boys knew many songs, but sometimes they would stumble over the words to a song and fall into fits of giggles. Wally laughed a lot. He was fun, he played, and when he got some cards, he showed his sisters card tricks. They had learned many things in the orphanage. But Wally was also—Bella did not know what to call it. When she was an adult, she thought of him as weak. Wally had been three months shy of seven when he was taken from his mother; and returned to her after he was ten. He was thin and nervous, like Bella, like their father; and pale with blond hair and blue eyes. His hair grew wildly, like a springing plant, and fell in his eyes; and his eyes were somehow vacant. (They would remain that way throughout his life.) He would laugh, he’d get almost hysterical, then fall into a fit of weeping. His gestures were quick and agitated, and he was always moving. He often threw tantrums over what seemed to Bella nothing at all. He was sent to the public school, but he did not do well, he was left back three times in the next years, and finally quit to go to work on his fourteenth birthday. In school too, he was unsteady: once, when a teacher criticized his work, he leaped up on the windowsill of the third-story classroom and threatened to jump. And every night after he returned from the orphanage, he would steal a roll or a bun or a piece of cake from the pantry and take it to bed with him. When Momma and Bella changed his sheets every Saturday, they would find crumbled, moldered bread under his pillow. He continued to do this for several years.
But Momma rarely cried anymore. The only thing that really upset her was the boys speaking English, and of course they did: they had forgotten all their Polish while they were away. Momma would cry and yell and weep, but they were funny, they weren’t like Bella and Euga: they would laugh and kiss her, or make a joke and pat her shoulder, and go out with their friends. Then Momma would get hysterical and sit at the table with her head in her arms, crying the way she used to cry. And Bella would go to her and touch her sleeve and say, “Momma, I’ll speak Polish.” And she did, but it didn’t seem to matter to Momma. For Bella, Momma always remained inconsolable. After a few months, Momma gave up: among themselves, the children spoke English. But Bella and Euga went on speaking Polish to Momma.
With the boys back, Bella became suddenly conscious that she was the servant in the house. She was alone: the boys had their friends, Euga had Momma. But it was Bella Momma yelled at when something went wrong, Bella who cooked dinner and did the marketing, Bella who was sent on errands. “Bella, do this, Bella, do that,” my mother says in a high sharp voice, with an accent, remembering. To the others, Momma was kind, easygoing, even loving. To people outside the family, she was extremely courteous. She treated people as if they were special, and everyone liked her. She had a charming smile and manner, and acquaintances greeted her warmly on the street. Only to Bella was she different.
The boys brought the world into their house. Besides the banjo and the mandolin and the stamp collection, they brought news of a different part of the world—the boys they met at work or at school. They made friends instantly, and there was much coming and going in the house. They taught their sisters to play cards and many nights the four of them would play pinochle or bridge while Momma sewed under the lamplight—not entirely content, because they were speaking English, but not weeping either. Then one night Eddie brought home a phonograph, and some records by a singer called Caruso, and made them all listen. Bella could not hear too well, but Euga was awed.
When Bella went to work, things changed again. Momma began to do the cooking again. Sometimes she cooked at night, after dinner, something big like soup or a stew that they could have for the next two nights. And she cooked on Sundays, baking cakes and pies and pastries for desserts for the whole week. And Momma did the laundry by herself now, and whatever cleaning got done. Bella was freed from one part of her servitude. She gave her wages to Momma, who gave her fifty cents a day for carfare and lunch. Since she usually took her lunch, she could save her pennies to buy something once in a while. But in fact she never bought more than hairpins. And at nights she and Momma would go to the movies together. The boys usually went out—alone—something the girls never dreamed of doing; and Euga went to bed early. Momma and Bella would go across the street to a movie and be home by nine or nine-thirty. It was only a nickel, and Momma always paid. Still, the next morning she would have to get up early and trudge with Momma to the trolley stop and ride into lower Manhattan and trudge up the three grimy flights of stairs to the dark crowded loft where for ten hours a day she pasted pretty fabrics to cardboard.
2
MY MOTHER HAD A fixation on education. She went back to work just before my twelfth birthday, standing all day in her bad feet in high heels selling high-fashion hats to middle-class women, to save money to send me to college. And she worked all the time I was in school, and Joy too: she wanted us to have what she hadn’t. When my father was earning twenty dollars a week, she found one dollar a week for piano lessons for me, and another one later, for Joy. She squeezed out fifty cents a year for the WQXR Bulletin, and a dime for the WNYC Bulletin, so I could choose what classical music I wanted to hear on the radio. And at Christmas, she respected my wishes and never gave me a doll, but only books. Unfortunately, Joy and I let her down: neither of us finished college then; but her grandchildren have come through for her. She should, like the Jewish mothers of jokes, be sitting back, her girth uprearing itself, in great complacency, speaking of her grandson the
doctor, her granddaughter the psychologist. But it all came too late, and her interest is distant and minimal, like someone checking in with an old friend, nodding approval at every success story about people she knew a hundred years ago. Like a person acting satisfied that the world works the way it should, knowing all the while that it doesn’t really it doesn’t it doesn’t.
After about a year, Bella got up the nerve to tell Momma she hated her job, although in far milder terms than that, and Momma took her to the sweatshop where she worked, and Bella began to work on the sewing machine. This was a little better at first. She made more money, and she was learning something. She was advanced quickly to the Merrow, a machine that does edging and buttonholes, a prestigious job in the shop. And she had even more prestige because she could fix the Merrow. But after a while, there was nothing more to learn.
“You know, they thought it was so great, but it was nothing at all. It was a simple process of elimination,” my mother explains. “When the stitches were not right, either the belt was loose or worn, or one of the screws needed adjustment. An idiot could have fixed it.”
So that fall, she followed Eddie’s example and began to take high-school courses at night. Because both her parents could speak German, she signed up for German, and also for English literature. The classes were held in a huge room with a high ceiling, and were filled with the children of immigrants—tired, hunched over in big shabby coats, scrawling earnestly in notebooks. This wasn’t Bella’s idea of education. She saw the ads in the magazines: What the Harvard Man Wears: with a handsome clean-shaven American-looking young man in a neat shirt and tie, with a beautiful jacket. Still, she tried. But she could not hear the teacher, and although she religiously did her homework and read the books, she felt very much as she had when she first started school, as if what she were hearing (when she heard anything) was a foreign language. She read War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Vanity Fair, and Zuleika Dobson, but she did not feel she understood what she read, even though she understood the words. She did not do well on exams, and after a year, she gave up night school and signed up instead at Woods Business School. For what could she do with German and English literature anyway? The best she could hope for was to be a secretary. But although she applied herself assiduously to typing and stenography, she had the same problem: she could not hear.
And her days remained the same. She would get up around six-thirty—Euga now went for the morning buns—have coffee and a bun, dress, and walk to the trolley. It was always cold at that hour except in the hottest part of the summer; and the light was always pale, pearly, the air thin. It made Bella feel awful, as if she were part of a servile population that rose before the masters and went out to work in the world while others were still stretching, lingering over a fragrant cup of coffee. Momma and she took the trolley together, and walked together up the four flights to the sweatshop, where the other women greeted them (they always greeted Momma more warmly) and sat down at their machines.
All morning, the foreman watched, hovered, threatened: you could not stop for a minute and stretch without his noticing and scolding; you could not talk to the girl beside you. At noon he blew a whistle and you could stop and stretch a little. Your body felt permanently fixed in the posture you adopted for work, and you had to remind it that it was permitted to move in other ways. So you stretched and wiggled your fingers and moved your shoulders up and down, and smiled at the other girls who were doing the same, and then you’d stand up and walk out into the hall and down the stairs to wait on line outside the single stinking toilet, and back up a story, where you would pull your sandwich from your coat pocket and sit on the steps with the others and eat, the aroma of salami pungent throughout the stairwell. Most of the others were heavy-bodied, tired women who chatted to each other in Polish or Yiddish or Italian, eating their sandwiches and drinking the water they had carried from the sink tap in cracked old cups. Among them Momma bobbed and smiled, she was always in the center of a group of women, and Bella would gaze off into space. Sometimes she would talk with some of the younger women—but they seemed to her older than herself—and hear them describe weekend outings to Luna Park. There were castles and ballrooms there, buildings with turrets and minarets; there were elephants and men in turbans and Vernon and Irene Castle danced there. Bella’s mind would wander in this scene, imagining, and she would sit there longing, longing to go to Coney Island.
Then the bell would go and the women would rise, not eager, their bodies tired and unwilling, but nervous, because they could be reprimanded or docked for lateness, and return to the machines. All afternoon, as in the morning, the foreman watched them closely to see they did not talk to each other, or pause in the work, or stretch, or laugh: and he would shout if he saw anything like this, and often, a woman would be fired. Sometimes a woman would trap her finger under the needle, and scream, and the foreman would bustle over and release her, and if she were badly hurt she would be sent home. She would never return: they would replace her with another woman. Most of the women had families, many children to feed, and they wore shabby house-dresses and old worn coats to work—like Momma. They had greyish hair pulled back in a bun, like Momma’s, and they hunched their shoulders when the foreman spoke to them, and smiled, and said, “Yes, Mr., No, Mr.” Whenever the foreman came close to Bella her heart would beat very fast, and she would bend closer to the machine. But he always said, “Good, Bella.” She hoped he would never yell at her, because she did not know what she would do if he did. Sometimes when a woman was fired, she would burst out crying, and would beg for another chance. She would explain she was only asking for advice about something, something wrong with this fabric, or a machine that didn’t stitch evenly, but the foreman wouldn’t listen. “No excuses,” he’d say curtly, “get your pay and go.” And the woman would leave, all bent over, weeping. It was horrible.
Every night the foreman blew his whistle at six-thirty. The women would stand, their pale faces drawn from the tension of not looking up, not pausing, for all those hours, from the bad air, bad light, the ache in the back. Then they all picked up their coats and handbags and trudged down to the toilet, quiet, subdued from weariness, and stood on line in front of the evil-smelling water closet, before going out into the dark winter night to stand on another line for the trolley or subway. Bella felt like one of a herd of cattle trudging down those stairs, just one more of an infinitely replaceable species seen by the bosses as so many head, treated that way.
Now Euga was working too, although no one called her Euga anymore, but rather Eugenia. She worked in a sweatshop that made hats for famous Fifth Avenue designers, and she was very good at her work. Every morning the two sisters walked together to the trolley stop, and rode to downtown Manhattan; and every night they met at the Manhattan stop and rode home together. But they never spoke of anything serious or upsetting; they never discussed their family. They chatted about fashions and movie stars and gossip about some mutual acquaintances.
Two nights a week, Bella went to Woods. Hard as it was for her, and stupid as it made her feel, she was determined to learn to take dictation and to type, because she knew that she had to get out of the sweatshops. For Bella, the difference between working in a sweatshop and working in an office was huge. The young women she saw on the streets could easily be divided into two classes: there were the ones like her, with long hair, no makeup, wearing longish skirts, usually shabby—something Bella was not. The others had bobbed hair, shorter skirts, and lipstick, and they looked smart, modern. She felt people would think differently about one kind and the other. She was not aware of the word class, nor the social division of lower, middle, and upper, but she knew what she saw.
It was at Woods that she met Sue Corry. Sue was also working in a sweatshop, making knitted sweaters, and was trying to improve herself. She was exactly Bella’s height, and she was also blond, but she had a smart bob and wore light lipstick. Bella was thrilled by her; she knew she could never invite her home—Momma woul
d be shocked at the way she looked—but she never invited anyone home. Sue was eighteen, a year older than Bella, with freckles on her face and a wide easy smile. Bella did not understand why Sue liked her, but she did not question her good fortune in having found a friend. It was Sue who first asked Bella if she wanted to go shopping.
Shopping? What was that? But Bella did not want to betray her ignorance, so she did not ask. Sue said she loved to go shopping on Saturday afternoons, and would sometimes splurge and have lunch out. In a restaurant? Bella breathed agreement, her mind dazed with glamorous images, and they met the next Saturday after work. At first, they walked around Union Square and gazed in the store windows, S. Klein and Mays and smaller shops. They didn’t go in until they reached Woolworth’s, and it was there Sue suggested they have lunch.
They went in and sat at the counter, and a girl handed them two greasy cards listing dishes. Bella studied hers intently: few of the items listed there were familiar to her. But she covered her ignorance with an appearance of being discriminating, and only a few minutes after Sue announced that she would have a bacon, lettuce, and tomato on white toast with coffee, did Bella say, “That sounds good. I think I’ll have that too.” Then the girl brought them their sandwiches and coffee and put the food right in front of them. Bella looked around her to see if other people were looking at them, thinking what smart young women they were. Her heart felt large and generous and she pitied the poor women bent over in their black coats, carrying heavy shopping bags. She was a modern young woman eating out in a restaurant! She and Sue talked of many things. Sue was so interesting! She even had a boyfriend. And she knew about all the latest styles and hairstyles and what the movie stars were like in private. Bella wondered how she came to know so much. But she never asked: she listened and smiled and her eyes opened with wonder.