Mr. Corrigan glanced nervously back at the house, at the huge windows staring out at them, where anyone could be watching.
“I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “I’m not allowed.”
“Fine!” Jane shouted. “Be that way!” Her father’s tainted money had bought the car, too, and bought Mr. Corrigan’s services. She slipped back out into the snow, slamming the car door behind her. She began stomping off down the snowy driveway.
“Wait!” Mr. Corrigan called. “You don’t have your coat!”
Jane shrugged, and kept going.
“Then”—Mr. Corrigan chased after her and placed one of the lap blankets from the car around her shoulders— “at least wear this!”
Jane knew she should shove it down in the snow, because her father’s money had bought the lap blanket, just like everything else. But it was warm around her shoulders, and it made her feel a solidarity with Bella, who’d also huddled in a blanket in her moment of tragedy: Bella had lost her entire family, and now Jane had to break away from her father, because he was an evil, evil man.
Jane tramped through the snow, past mansions and monstrous estates. Some of them were houses she’d always admired and secretly envied, but now when she glanced toward the twists of wrought-iron gates she thought she saw the twisted faces of workers who’d toiled and starved just so the industrialists could have a fine gate. It was like seeing the grimy engine beneath the car’s gleaming exterior: Suddenly she could see how all the glitter and elegance, all the excess and opulence, had been built on the backs of workers like Bella and Yetta, workers calling out for justice.
And workers like Mr Corrigan trying to support seven children on twenty-five dollars a week, because that’s all my father pays him.
Jane walked all the way to Eleanor Kensington’s house, blocks and blocks away.
She pounded the knocker of the front door, and it wasn’t until the butler came to the door and fixed her with a disdainful stare that she realized how disheveled she must look, how many rules of polite society she was breaking. It was late afternoon, maybe even early evening by now; the Kensington family would be preparing to sit down to their dinner. The time for social calls had ended hours ago.
“I must see Miss Kensington. Eleanor,” Jane said. “It’s an emergency.”
And then she realized that Eleanor probably wasn’t even there; she’d be back at Vassar. And Jane didn’t have train fare with her. She didn’t have any money at all.
But the butler was stepping aside, letting her in.
“Your card?” he asked.
Jane had forgotten about the whole rigmarole of presenting an engraved name card, of waiting to find out whether a friend was “at home” to receive guests—it all seemed so unbearably ridiculous that Jane didn’t even feel embarrassed.
“I said, this is an emergency! I didn’t have time to bring my cards with me. Just tell Eleanor that Jane Wellington has to see her!”
The butler retreated. Jane watched the snow from her boots melt onto the Kensingtons’ Persian rug. What money bought that rug?
Shipping interests . . . Are there strikebreakers for shipping interests?
Miraculously, the butler reappeared quickly, and silently led Jane up to Eleanor’s room. Eleanor was sitting there in a deep-red ball gown, while three maids fussed over her hair.
“You’re lucky you caught me,” Eleanor said. “I just came back from Vassar for the Van Renssalaers’ Valentine dance. I’m going back to school tomorrow morning—and won’t I be tired!” Her eyes took in the gray blanket around Jane’s shoulders, the slush-stained ring around the bottom of Jane’s dress. “I assume you’ve decided not to go to the ball?”
Jane had not been invited. Perhaps she would have been if she’d gone to all the Christmas social events, if she’d been nicer to Lilly Aberfoyle all those months ago when they were having tea.
“I don’t care about any stupid dance,” Jane said savagely. “This is about the shirtwaist strike. I found out that my own father has hired strikebreakers before. He’s just as bad as the shirtwaist bosses! Everything we have is tainted!”
“Hmm. That’s an interesting perspective,” Eleanor said. She watched in her huge dressing-table mirror as one of the maids pulled a ringlet down to its full length, each hair gleaming like gold.
“I-interesting?” Jane sputtered. “It’s appalling! Horrifying! Devastating!”
Eleanor looked at the maids hovering around her.
“Girls, Jane and I need some privacy,” she said. “You can come back and do my hair later. That way I can be fashionably late and make a big entrance.” The maids froze around her, as if they feared being fired if they didn’t finish Eleanor’s hair immediately. “I said, go!” Eleanor commanded. The girls scattered.
When they were gone, Jane demanded, “Has your father ever hired strikebreakers?”
“Oh, probably,” Eleanor said, toying with a ringlet. “Dockworkers are a pretty rough crowd. So are shipowners.”
“But, then—did your father get upset about your helping out with the shirtwaist strike?”
“He thought it was sweet that I was concerned about the less fortunate girls. But he didn’t really take much notice of it.” Eleanor shrugged. “He doesn’t think girls and women matter much.”
“But that’s not what you think,” Jane argued. “You think women should vote. You think we should have rights. You think the shirtwaist girls deserve justice. You think strikebreakers are wrong. You think—”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Eleanor said impatiently. “You know what I think. I don’t agree with Father about much of anything.”
Jane stared at Eleanor’s elegant red ball gown, the perfect flow of silk.
“But you take his money,” Jane said. “You eat his food, you wear dresses bought with his money, you let him pay for you to go to Vassar. . . .”
“What’s my choice?” Eleanor said. “Working in some factory as a shirtwaist girl? No, thank you.”
Jane narrowed her eyes. “Sometimes, maybe, to get what you want, I bet you even let him think that you agree with him.” Jane remembered the kiss she’d given her own father, and blushed.
“You want me to apologize for being nice to my own father?” Eleanor asked. She sprang to her feet in a flurry of rustling silk. “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m working for all sorts of worthy causes. Some people just use different strategies than others. It’s like . . . Here. Feel this.” She tapped her tiny waist.
“I beg your pardon?” Jane gasped.
“All right, feel your own waist,” Eleanor said. “Feel your corset under your dress, those rigid spines that won’t let you breathe—you hate your corset, don’t you?”
“Who doesn’t?” Jane whispered.
“My point exactly,” Eleanor said. “If I ripped it off now, I’d split all the seams in my dress, my mother would faint, my father would have an apoplectic fit—it’d be quite the faux pas if I went to the ball tonight without my corset. Almost as bad as if I wore that blanket of yours!”
She grinned, trying to make a joke, but Jane didn’t laugh.
“So?” Jane said icily.
“So, instead, I’ve been letting my corset out gradually. My friends and I took a vow at school. Now, every time I go to a dress fitting, I make sure the corset is a little looser, a little less confining. . . .”
“You’re still wearing a corset,” Jane said.
“But eventually I won’t be,” Eleanor said. “Don’t you see? It’s a matter of doing things gradually, changing the world one corset string at a time.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Jane retorted. “But you can’t tell the shirtwaist girls, ‘Eventually you’ll have fair wages, eventually we’ll stop having the strikebreakers beat you up, eventually maybe you’ll be able to afford a coat.’ They’re freezing now! They’re starving now!”
Eleanor sighed.
“Jane,” she said. “Go home. Tell your father you love him no matter what. Tell him you just f
eel sorry for the poor girls who don’t have wonderful, rich fathers like him. You play your cards right, I’m sure he’ll come around!”
Jane felt betrayed. Eleanor was the one person she thought would understand.
“I walked all the way over here,” Jane said. “I thought—”
“I’ll have my chauffeur take you home,” Eleanor said briskly, as if all that mattered was Jane’s transportation.
Jane let herself be led out to the Kensingtons’ car. What else could she do? She slumped in her seat. She couldn’t face the thought of walking back into her own marble foyer: defeated, humbled, lost. Couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t. She leaned forward.
“Excuse me, sir?” she called out to the Kensingtons’ chauffeur, over the rumble of the motor. “I gave you the wrong address. I actually need to go to another location. I’m not sure of the exact street number, but it’s the Asch Building, near Washington Square.”
She would go back to Triangle.
Bella
Bella and Yetta were walking home from work. They’d been back at Triangle for a week now, and Bella was still rediscovering the twinges and aches that went along with hunching over a sewing machine all day. She stretched, twisting her head this way and that, raising and lowering her shoulders. This brought a puff of air up her skirt, but for once it didn’t seem unbearably cold.
“I think spring is coming,” Bella said. “Can you feel it?”
She held out her hand, experimentally. A snowflake immediately landed on her outstretched palm.
“I think spring’s still a long way off,” Yetta said, kicking at the slush on the sidewalk.
Yetta had been in a bad mood ever since the strike ended, ever since Rahel’s wedding, ever since she’d started back to work. Bella had tried again and again and again to cheer her up, and failed each time.
Suddenly Bella heard a screech of brakes out in the street. The sound reminded her of the worst morning of her life, so she didn’t bother looking until she heard someone screaming, “Bella! Yetta! Wait for me!”
It was Jane, the rich girl who’d rescued Bella that awful morning. She came rushing toward them through the traffic, prompting honking horns and more screeching brakes. She was wearing one of her usual fancy, frilly dresses, and her beautiful gold ring gleamed even in the weak winter light. But she looked crazy: wild-eyed, wild-haired, coatless, hatless, and dragging a gray blanket behind her through the snow.
“Where are your picket signs?” she yelled. “I came to help you with your strike. I’ll stand with you every day on the picket line. I will! If I can’t give money, I’ll do what I can. And if I’m arrested—well, fine! That would serve my father right!”
She was sobbing or gasping for air—Bella couldn’t really tell which. In New York, Bella had discovered, people rarely moved out of the way for anyone else. But the crowd on the sidewalk moved out of the way for Jane, as if they were all glad that she wasn’t yelling at them.
When Jane was right in front of Bella and Yetta, blocking their path, Yetta finally replied in a flat voice: “The strike’s over. Go home.”
Jane froze in her tracks.
“What? It can’t be! I’ve been watching the Times every day—”
“The Times didn’t even bother writing about us when the strike ended,” Yetta said, and Bella could hear the barely suppressed rage in her voice. “The Call did, the Forward did— do you want to know what the Forward wrote about Triangle? With blood this name will be written in the history of the American workers’ movement, and with feeling will this history recall the names of the strikers of this shop—of the crusaders.’ And yet the factory can reopen, just like the strike never happened, and do business with stores all over the country—who would do business with criminals like that?”
“My father would,” Jane whispered. “My father is an evil man, and I never knew it until your strike. It’s all wrong— everything I have was bought with blood—I can’t go back, I can’t. How can your strike be over?” The last part was a wail. For a moment Bella feared that Jane would just fall over, right there in the snow. She reached out a hand to steady the other girl.
“You ran away from home?” Yetta asked. “For our strike?”
Something like surprise crept over Jane’s face.
“Why, yes, I suppose I did,” she said. “That’s what it’s called. Running away from home.”
“Where will you go?” Bella asked.
Jane turned to Bella in amazement.
“Bella? You speak English now?” she marveled.
“I learned it in the strike,” Bella said. “Some. But you— go where?”
Jane slumped against the building behind her.
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
For a moment, Bella forgot that Jane was a rich girl. She forgot that Jane lived in a huge mansion with marble floors and puffy beds and servants waiting on her hand and foot. She only remembered what it was like to be alone and afraid, cut off from family, betrayed.
“You come home with us,” she told Jane.
Yetta
Yetta pulled the last shirtwaist from her machine and slid it into the trough that ran the length of the table, ready to go to the next girl. Sewing was boring—there was no other word for it. Somehow it seemed worse since the strike, because her thoughts darted back and forth with each thrust of the needle: Maybe I shouldn’t have been so mean to Rahel, maybe we shouldn’t have come back to Triangle, maybe I could have tried harder during the strike to keep it going if only I’d been out picketing that last day... what if this is all there is to the rest of my life, watching a needle go up and down?
She felt every bit as restless as she had back in the shtetl, milking cows. Only weaker. She still wasn’t fully recovered from the illness she’d had at the end of the strike, and the filmy dust that hung in the air of the factory only made her cough worse. Bella had told her about the babies who’d died from a cough—what if something like that happened to Yetta?
When Yetta began thinking like that, she wanted to hop a train and head west, she wanted to jump up on the table and call out for another strike, she wanted to hurl her sewing machine out the window and laugh to see it smash against the sidewalk. She wanted extravagance, drama, revenge. Life. But she had no money—no money to take a train, no money to survive a strike, no money to repay the bosses for a smashed sewing machine. Don’t you know? In America, money is God, the painted woman had told her, after beating her up during the strike. Yetta still didn’t want to believe that, but it was hard not to.
Yetta stood up from her machine, turned around, and almost ran into one of the cutters.
One of the many bad things about coming back to Triangle was that Yetta now worked on the eighth floor, where the cutters had their tables. They took up half the room, strutting around with their sharp knives drawn, smoking endlessly even though there were signs on the walls forbidding it. Once Yetta had even seen a cutter drop his cigarette on a pile of shirtwaist collars, and all he did was laugh when his assistant had to throw the collars to the ground and stomp out the flame. He didn’t even get in trouble. Those cutters! So what if they could slice through layers and layers of fabric with a single stroke? So what if they held the entire company’s fortune in their hand every time they made a cut with their knife through the expensive material? They reminded Yetta all too much of the men back in her shtetl who thought they were holier than everyone else. Besides, she hadn’t forgiven any of the cutters for the way two of them had beaten up the contractors who’d first called for a strike, way back in the summertime.
This cutter seemed younger than the others, maybe not so cocky. He had brown hair curling at his temples, and honey-colored eyes—in another mood, Yetta might have called him handsome. Now she regarded him sourly.
“Excuse me,” she said briskly, trying to step past him.
He touched her arm, stopping her.
“You’re Yetta, aren’t you?” he asked. “The one who has a rich girl staying with
her?”
Yetta pulled her arm away.
“More like a poor girl,” she said, snorting in a most unladylike way. “Jane didn’t bring a penny with her when she ran away from home.”
At least Jane had provided a bit of a distraction. She was fascinated by everything in the tenement: the bed improvised from a board laid across two chairs, the bathroom shared with three other apartments, the gas heat that could be purchased by placing a penny in the meter on the wall. And she wanted to talk endlessly about how it might be possible that bosses and workers could get along, that factories could be run to respect everyone. Still, she didn’t seem to understand that the potatoes she ate cost money. And Bella and Yetta were too timid to mention it, too afraid of appearing inhospitable.
“We don’t want to sound as greedy as Mr. Harris and Mr. Blanck,” Bella had argued, when Yetta suggested hinting to Jane about the rent due at the end of the week.
Sometimes, Yetta thought she and Bella should just kick Jane out, send her back to her pretty clothes and her show-offy mansion, where she belonged. But then Yetta would hear Jane sobbing at night, sobbing the way Yetta wanted to sob, because the strike was over and the world wasn’t fair and Rahel had moved away, moved apart from Yetta. . . .
“Maybe you should tell the rich girl to get a job,” the cutter said.
That made Yetta laugh out loud.
“I can just see her, sitting at one of these machines. . . . She thinks it’s awful that we don’t get a break for tea every afternoon,” Yetta said.
“Does the rich girl have fancy manners?” the cutter asked.
Yetta shrugged. “Of course. She’s rich. She holds her pinky like this even when she’s just drinking water.” Yetta extended her pinky, curled her other fingers in, and pretended to drink from a teacup. Secretly, Yetta wondered if she should copy Jane, but that would probably look silly, an immigrant shtetl girl putting on airs.