From the bed, Bella cried, “Stop it! I’ll just go!” She spoke in Yiddish, so only Yetta understood. But Jane and Miss Milhouse stopped screaming at each other as Bella threw back the covers and struggled to free her legs from the bedding. And then Bella slipped down to the floor and stood on her own two bare feet. She took a tentative step forward, only a little wobbly.
“No! You’re still sick!” Jane pleaded.
“Oh, please,” Miss Milhouse said scornfully. “Did you think she was some stray puppy I’d let you keep? We’re just lucky she was too sick to stab us all to death in the middle of the night and steal your best jewelry.”
Yetta was glad that Bella didn’t understand English. Yetta reached out to steady Bella, to hold her up. She intended to get Bella out of here safely even if she had to carry her out in her own arms.
“Miss Milhouse!” Jane said, in such a cold, hard voice that it sounded almost like an imitation of the older woman’s. It was like a whip cracking in the room. “You will leave my room this instant. You will pack up your things and leave this house as soon as you can. You will not take any family silver or jewelry. You are no longer employed here. And—no, you will not get any references. You ... are .. . fired!”
Everyone froze. For a moment Yetta thought they must all look like one of those tableaux she’d seen at the Yiddish theater: Yetta clutching Bella’s arm, holding Bella mid-sway; Miss Milhouse squinting her mean old eyes at Jane; Jane standing tall with her clenched fists and her pursed lips and her barely contained fury.
Then Miss Milhouse began to laugh.
“Oh, that was very amusing,” she said, her voice rippling with mirth. “You’re even more foolish than I thought! You can’t fire me! You’re just a girl. You’re nothing. Just a bit of fluff your father’s going to use to marry off, to enhance his business. That’s all you’re worth. That’s all any girl is worth. That’s why these girls”—she gestured condescendingly at Yetta and Bella—“these girls are worthless.”
Jane sagged against the wall, as if the air had gone out of her lungs.
“I’ll tell my father to fire you!” she said, but her voice was thin and reedy now. Even Yetta could tell this was a hollow threat.
“And whom do you think he’ll believe?” Miss Milhouse scoffed. “Moi, his longtime, faithful servant? Or you, his useless, troublesome daughter, who wants to consort with guttersnipes?”
Yetta saw no point in listening to any more of this.
“Could you please tell me where you put Bella’s clothes?” she asked, as haughtily as she could. “Bella and I shall be leaving now.” She thought her English teacher would be particularly proud of that “shall,” even though her accent was as thick as ever.
“Oh, please, you don’t have to!” Jane protested.
“We need to get back to the strike,” Yetta said firmly, and that sounded so wonderful all of a sudden, to be out in the bracing wind, carrying a sign, telling the whole world the truth, instead of standing in this overheated, overdecorated room, being falsely polite.
Jane’s mouth and cheeks quivered, as if she was trying very hard not to cry. But she whirled around and dashed toward a large wardrobe at the opposite side of the room.
“The clothes are right in—” she began.
“I had them burned,” Miss Milhouse interrupted. “They were filthy and probably crawling with vermin. I couldn’t allow them to be kept in this house.” “What?” Jane said.
Yetta swallowed hard.
“You could have just washed them,” she said. “Those were probably the only clothes Bella owned.”
Something made her want to cup her hands over Bella’s ears so she didn’t have to hear any of this, even if she didn’t understand.
Jane swung open the doors of the wardrobe and began pulling out armloads of dresses.
“She can have some of my clothes, then,” Jane said, her voice swooping dangerously toward sobs. “She can have anything she wants, because Miss Milhouse stole her clothes-yes, that’s right, it was stealing, taking another person’s belongings—and maybe Bella’s clothes weren’t worth as much as jewels or silver, but if that was all she had . . .”
Jane had practically buried herself in ruffles and frills and lace, and layers and layers of shiny taffetas, silk-embroidered net, heavy velveteen. Yetta had never seen so many dresses in one place, even in a store.
“None of your clothes would fit, and besides, why would a working girl need a party dress or a day gown?” Miss Milhouse asked, putting a particularly scornful emphasis on the words “working girl.” “Just give her a penny or two. I’m sure that’s more than her clothes cost.”
“I won’t send her away in a nightgown and bare feet!” Jane said. She pulled out the plainest dress in the stack, a dark blue wool serge, and shook it at Miss Milhouse. “I haven’t worn this all season, and it’s a little small, so it could probably be cut down to fit. And she can have a pair of my boots—Yetta, do you want a pair too? Yours look a little . . . worn.”
Yetta could feel the holes in her boots, the sore, blistered places on her feet where the holes rubbed, even through her stockings and the cardboard she’d used to try to block the holes. She could feel the slush that had invaded her boots, so that her stockings squished a little every time she took a step and her feet were always wet and cold. She tossed her head.
“My boots are fine,” she said. “I bought them with money I earned myself. I don’t need charity.”
“See?” Miss Milhouse said. “Girls like that don’t ever appreciate what you do for them.”
Yetta regretted her pride the minute she saw Jane bend her head down, hiding her tears in velvet and silk. But Yetta couldn’t back down now, not with Miss Milhouse staring so disdainfully.
It took an unbearably long time to bundle Bella into the blue serge dress, which hung on her small frame in an almost comical way. She kept having to tug the neckline back into place, because the dress threatened to slip off her shoulders entirely. The too-large boots were no better: They flapped on her feet and almost tripped her going down the stairs.
“A coat!” Jane cried. “You can’t go out in this weather without a coat!”
“You are not giving that girl one of your coats!” Miss Milhouse snapped. “She didn’t have a coat to begin with!”
“Then Mr. Corrigan will drive Yetta and Bella back to their homes,” Jane insisted. “And here, take some money—”
She crammed dollar bills into Bella’s hands, which neither Bella nor Yetta bothered to count until they were both sitting in the car, Yetta getting her third automobile ride of the day.
“Twenty dollars,” Bella said. “It’s a fortune. I’d have to work a month for that much money.”
Yetta looked back at the Wellington mansion. She thought she could make out Jane’s sad face in one of the windows. And then Jane ducked her head down, as though she were sobbing.
“You couldn’t pay me any amount of money to live in that house, with that woman,” Yetta said. “A million dollars wouldn’t be enough!”
Bella shrugged, the dress slipping sideways off her shoulders once again.
“Jane took good care of me,” she said. “And now . . .” Her voice was very soft. Yetta had to lean in close to hear. “Now I have nowhere to go.”
Yetta didn’t even know the whole of Bella’s story, didn’t know how she’d ended up in America all by herself, how she’d come to be sobbing in front of the Triangle factory over a letter from Italy. But she immediately put her arm around Bella’s shoulders, and the two of them huddled together against the cold of the Wellingtons’ car.
“You can come and live with Rahel and me,” Yetta said. “Girls like us, we stick together.”
Jane
Jane stood with her face pressed against the glass, watching Bella and Yetta leave. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
“It goes without saying that you will be confined to your room until your father returns home,” Miss Milhouse said behind her. Her voice w
as as cold and hard as the icy window-pane. “And you can rest assured that he will receive a full report of your indiscretions. Such impertinence! Such behavior! I am simply appalled!”
Miss Milhouse whirled on her heel and left the room, jerking the door shut behind her.
Jane threw herself across her bed, ready to sob into her pillows. And then she experienced something odd. It was like she could see herself from above: a girl in a crumpled dress lying on a messy coverlet and scrambled sheets, her shoulders shaking helplessly, her pompadour trembling.
Fluff, she thought. Useless. Only worth marrying off not even worth that if I can’t stop sobbing and act normal. . .
Another scene came into her mind: the last time she’d visited her mother’s sickroom. Mother was always so fragile, too sick for Jane to hug. That day, she’d been like a shadow in her bed, a wisp in a lacy nightgown. Mother had weakly clasped Jane’s hand and murmured, “Ladies like us, we’re too delicate for this world. . . .”
But she’d been sick. Jane wasn’t. Jane knew about other kinds of women now: women who stood up and spoke out for suffrage, even when men threw rotten tomatoes and tried to boo them off the stage. Women—and girls!—who walked on picket lines, demanding their rights, even when bums spit at them and police beat them. Miss Milhouse would call those women unladylike or shameful or lower-class; she’d think they deserved the rotten tomatoes, the spit, the beatings. She’d expect Jane to agree.
Willfully, Jane shoved against the pillows, pushing herself back up.
“No,” she said aloud, and it was a denial of so many things.
She grabbed the paper she’d written Bella’s translation on. She flipped it over, held it against the nightstand, and began making notes on the back:
1. Buy coats for Bella and Yetta.
2. Have. Mr. Corrigan deliver them along with hampers of food. He’ll know where they live because of dropping them of today
3. Go down to picket line and join in. Carry a picket sign . get arrested if I must.
4. Convince Father to make strike donation. . . .
Bella
Bella had never been part of anything before except her family. Even in Calia, her family had had to struggle so hard to survive that they existed only on the outskirts of village life; in church, they sat at the back, not quite able to believe that they belonged in such a holy place, in the same room as something as grand as the gilded cross. Since she’d left Calia, Bella had always been an outsider: among the families on the ship, in the factory, at the Lucianos’, on the street. She spoke the wrong language, wore the wrong clothes, trusted the wrong people.
But now . . . Bella had not known it was possible to stand shoulder to shoulder with another girl, one from Poland or Lithuania or some other place Bella had never heard of, both of them holding signs high over their heads, both of them longing just as strongly for exactly the same thing. Both of them completely connected. It did not make up for losing her family—that was a pain that still weighed her heart down, would never stop weighing her heart down—or for the anguish of losing Pietro, of being cheated by the Lucianos. But the strike was something to hold on to, something to hope for and dream about.
It was a reason to live.
Bella became one of the best strikers. She struggled through snowdrifts up to her knees to get to the picket line, she held her sign high even when the winter winds gusted so strongly they threatened to carry it away—and threatened to carry her away. Bella had never known such a fearsome winter, but she set her face against the icy wind, let the snow fall on her hair, and called out again and again and again, in three different languages, until her voice was hoarse, “Justice for shirtwaist workers! Justice for shirtwaist workers!” Even when she didn’t completely understand everything, she cheered as loudly as anyone else when there was good news about the strike: Twenty thousand shirtwaist workers walked out on strike in Philadelphia, in support of their fellow workers in New York. The union and the rich women threw a reception and dance in the strikers’ honor. The New York Call began planning a special strike edition that the strikers could sell to raise more money for the union. Bella begged to be one of the strikers who got to sell the papers.
“I didn’t think anyone could be more farbrente than Yetta,” Rahel said, one morning as the three of them shivered over breakfast. “But you might be.”
“What’s farbrente?” Bella asked.
“It means you’re a fervent girl,” Rahel said. “Someone who’ll do anything for her cause.”
“Hurray for the farbrente !” Yetta cheered. “Hurray for us all!”
Rahel abruptly turned back to the cupboard, as if intending to search for more food on the bare shelves. Or as if she didn’t think she herself was farbrente, and didn’t think she deserved the cheer.
It was interesting living with the two sisters, who looked so much alike and yet were so different. Rahel was quiet and self-assured; Yetta was excitable, always very happy or very disappointed or just very loud. She was very everything.
Three other girls lived in the tenement with them, but they were gone early in the morning and came back late at night, so Bella barely saw them. But Bella knew that they were Jewish too. She noticed that no one else in the tenement crossed herself when she prayed, no one mentioned a single saint, nobody worried that they didn’t have a horned lucky charm hanging by the door to ward off evil spirits.
“What’s ‘Jewish’ mean, anyhow?” she asked Yetta once as they were trudging toward the union hall.
“We’re God’s chosen people,” Yetta said. “And . . . we’re still waiting for our messiah. You have Jesus, but we’re still waiting.”
“I’d share,” Bella said.
Yetta laughed, though not in a cruel way.
“My father could tell you a million reasons why that wouldn’t work,” she said. “I just can’t explain it. Back home, girls weren’t supposed to learn much about religion. We were just supposed to keep the house and fix the food and earn the money so the men could be holy enough for all of us. But I think ... I think there are different ways to wait for the Messiah, different ways to be holy. I don’t think anyone understands God well enough. I think I want to live a million years so I have time to think about all of it!”
“Good luck with that,” Bella said. She tried to step over a particularly high snow bank blocking the sidewalk. The snow flowed over the top of her boots—she’d stuffed cardboard in the toes, just so they’d stay on, but the boots were still too loose around her ankles. “Sometimes,” she said, “sometimes I pray that God will let me die young.”
Yetta stopped in her tracks.
“Don’t say that.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t kill myself,” Bella said. “That’d be a mortal sin. But if God let me die, I’d be in heaven with my family.” Running through the village with my brothers and sister . . . baking with Mama . . . hoeing the beans with Papa . . .
“But you’d have to wait a million years before you got to see me again,” Yetta said. “And I don’t know how it works, if Jews and Italians go to the same place after they die. We might never see each other again!” She peered earnestly up at the sky, a thin gray strip barely visible between the towering buildings. “Please! I beg of you! Don’t let Bella die young! We need her for the strike!” she yelled up at the heavens. Then she glanced back at Bella and punched her in the arm. “There. I canceled you out.”
Bella was glad that the streets were virtually empty, that everyone else had been driven away by the snow. She clutched Yetta’s arm, because, without coats, they had to huddle together for warmth.
“I think I’m forgetting them,” she said softly. “My family, I mean. It’s been so long since I’ve seen them—sometimes I forget they’re dead. I forget to grieve, because I think they’re still there, back home in Calia. Is that ... is that . . . evil?”
Yetta bit her lip, already so pale and chapped from the cold.
“Rahel would know what to tell you,” she said. “She’d
have the exact right words to say to make you feel better, to tell you what to do.”
“I want to know what you think,” Bella said.
Yetta tilted her head close to Bella’s.
“I don’t think it’s evil, how you’re forgetting. Sometimes I think I’m forgetting my family, too, and I know they’re still alive. I hope. It’s natural, when they’re so far away, to forget, to mostly just think about life here.”
“If I’d stayed in Calia, I probably would have died too. With my family,” Bella said.
Yetta took her by the shoulders and shook her so hard her teeth rattled.
“But you didn’t,” she said. “You didn’t stay there, you didn’t die—you were saved! Isn’t that worth something? Isn’t that worth living for, here and now?”
Christmas was not a holiday for Jews. Bella probably should have figured that out, but it was still odd, waking up December twenty-fifth to nothing. The union hall and the picket lines were closed for the day, but there were no songs, no rejoicing, no giggling little brothers running around banging on pots and pans. And, missing that, Bella knew that she would never truly forget her family.
“If you want,” Yetta said over their measly, cold breakfast, “you could go to your synagogue—er, temple, er—”
“Chiesa,” Bella said. “Church. But, no.” She couldn’t bear the thought of sitting in a pew alone.
Just then there was a knock at the door. Rahel sprang up to get it quickly before it woke the other girls.
Rocco Luciano stood out in the hallway, a mashed, poorly wrapped package under his arm.
“Buon Natale,” he said.
Bella wanted to hug him. But she didn’t—she reminded herself that she was still angry with the entire Luciano family.
Rocco held out the package.
“Signor Carlotti told me you were living here now,” he said. “I got you your very own shirtwaist and skirt. So you can look American like all the other girls. . . .” His eyes got big then, as if he’d just noticed that Bella was wearing the blue serge dress. She and Yetta and Rahel had ripped out some of the seams and resewn them; it fit quite well now, and looked very elegant, Bella thought.