“Does she speak any foreign languages?” the cutter asked.
“French, Italian, and—what’s it called?—Latin. She went to some big finishing school.”
The cutter leaned closer.
“I heard Mr. Bernstein talking—you know, he’s Mr. Blanck’s brother-in-law. He says Mr. Blanck’s wife is looking for a governess for their daughters. Someone who could help them get along in society. Learn how to socialize with the goyim.”
Yetta had never thought before about Mr. Blanck having a wife or daughters. It was like trying to imagine the devil’s family.
“Well, maybe I’ll tell Jane to apply for that job,” Yetta said, shrugging. “Thanks, I guess.”
The cutter smiled.
“I’m Jacob, by the way.”
Yetta tilted her head.
“Where were you during the strike?”
“I—I just started here,” Jacob said. “After the strike. After it was over.”
His eyes darted left, then right. Yetta thought he was lying.
“But during the strike—where were you then?” she challenged.
He looked too healthy to have walked any picket lines or skipped any meals to save money for the strike. He actually had rosy cheeks.
“I was in another shop,” Jacob said. “One that settled right away.”
Yetta shrugged.
“If you say so,” she muttered, brushing past him.
“I wasn’t a scab!” Jacob yelled after her. “I wasn’t! Ask anyone!”
Yetta wasn’t in the mood to listen.
Jane
Jane lay in bed long after Bella and Yetta left for work. She could hear echoes of what Miss Milhouse had told her back in the fall when she wouldn’t get up in the morning: Really, Miss Wellington, you must expunge yourself of this torpor. But that bed had had crisp white sheets and an elegant white coverlet; this bed had a rusted frame, a single worn, grayish sheet, and a stained, tattered quilt that Yetta’s grandmother had made back in Russia. Jane could hear what Miss Milhouse would say if she could see Jane now: Really, Miss Wellington! Such squalor! Such degradation! Such foolishness! You’ll be ruined in society if anyone finds out where you are! She could hear her father’s words echoing in her mind: Would you have us all living in hovels, wearing sackcloth and ashes, eating gruel?
She knew exactly how her father and Miss Milhouse would view the tenement, with its cracked walls, its chipped sink, its hovering stench of rotted food and unwashed bodies. It had taken great effort for Jane herself not to wrinkle her nose in disgust the first time she’d stepped in here. But then Bella had said, “See our vase of flowers?”—pointing to a cheap glass on the table with two crumbled roses sticking up. “That’s all that’s left from Rahel’s beautiful hat, after the strike,” Yetta muttered. The flowers were fake, of course, but somehow they transformed the entire tenement for Jane. Suddenly she saw past the cracks and the chips and the cheapness. She saw the beauty of two battered cloth roses, the ingenuity of beds rigged from chairs, the cleverness and courage and triumph of two girls living on their own. And now, even hearing the echoes of Miss Milhouse’s criticisms and her father’s taunts, she could see the triumph and courage and nobility of Jane Wellington, lying on a rusty, tattered bed in a tenement instead of amid perfect, fluffy pillows in a mansion.
But what was she supposed to do next?
Just to prove that she could get out of bed, Jane sat up and eased away from the tattered quilt. She slid her feet into her boots right away, because the floor was bare wood and full of splinters, as well as icy cold. She did not have to bother about changing clothes because she’d been sleeping in her dress—it was all she had.
“Could I possibly borrow a nightgown from one of you?” she’d asked the first night, and both Yetta and Bella had looked at her blankly. It appeared that neither of them had an extra. One nightshirt, one dress, one shirtwaist, one skirt—Jane had a hard time understanding such limitations. But now she had just one dress herself.
She made a feeble attempt to comb and pin up her hair, but she had no skill at that. Without maids, she was as helpless as a five-year-old. She dealt with that problem by turning away from the small sliver of broken mirror that hung on the wall. She slipped out the door and out to the street-some fresh air would do her good.
But the air in the street was bitterly cold and hardly fresh. There was a rancid smell of some foreign food cooking; an organ grinder’s monkey bent down and defecated in the street; strangers’ bodies pressed against hers disgracefully. The crowd parted, and Jane found herself on the curb. Someone pushed at her and she lost her balance, falling forward onto horsehide. Oh—a horse was lying in the street, ready to break her fall. How fortunate. The horsehair was soft, and Jane stroked it in relief. Then she realized that the hair was strangely cold and still to be attached to a living horse. The ribs below the horsehair moved neither up nor down.
The horse was dead, its rump half rotted.
Shrieking, Jane scrambled up. A gang of filthy-faced, snotty-nosed ragamuffins laughed uproariously to see her screaming. One laughed so hard he rolled in the street, right on top of the monkey’s droppings. A little girl with tangled curls stared stupidly at Jane, her eyes seeping with some unknown infection.
Does no one have money to take away the dead horse from the street? Jane wondered. To put those ragamuffins in school? To fix that girl’s eyes?
When Jane was little, she’d been fascinated with a stereoscope her mother kept in the parlor. You looked through two eyeholes at two separate pictures, and somehow the pictures merged into one that was three-dimensional and looked so real you felt you could reach out and touch it. With the stereoscope, the two pictures, separately, always looked somewhat alike: two views of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, say, or two views of the Grand Canyon. But Jane’s mind was working now like a different kind of stereoscope. In her mind, she held the view of the dead horse, the ragamuffins and the seepy-eyed girl alongside her memories of seeing the shirtwaist strikers calling fervently for justice, seeing her dozens of dresses strewn across the floor the day she’d offered one to Bella, and seeing an image of herself, lying in bed. With the stereoscope back home, Jane had always had trouble focusing, bringing the pictures together exactly. She was having the same trouble now.
One of the ragamuffins stopped laughing and appeared to be patting her hand comfortingly. No—he was trying to worm the ring from her finger.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” Jane roared. “My mother gave me that ring!”
The ragamuffin had the ring off her finger and was about to slip it into his own pocket. Jane grabbed for it desperately, and succeeded only in swatting it away. It flew through the air, sparkling, and landed in the smashed monkey dung.
Jane did not hesitate. She snatched up the ring and raced away through the crowd—shoving, elbowing, kicking with all her might—until she was back in the tenement.
She slammed the door as hard as she could.
When Yetta and Bella got home, Jane was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the vase of artificial flowers and turning her ring over and over in her hands. She’d scrubbed the ring in soapy water—scrubbed it and rinsed it and scrubbed it and rinsed it, again and again and again—but still she stopped and examined it every few minutes to make sure there was no filth caught in the engraved Jon the ring’s surface. As soon as Yetta and Bella opened the door, Jane said, “I need money. Money of my own.”
Both of the other girls stopped in surprise, and then Bella rushed over to hug Jane while Yetta quietly closed the door.
“See? She understands,” Bella said, flashing a glance at Yetta.
“It’s not that we mind sharing,” Yetta said apologetically. “It’s just that the rent works out to two dollars a week, and we still owe the landlord extra from when we were on strike. And potatoes are five cents a pound, and with the three of us, it’d be ninety cents a week for milk, and—”
“And Yetta and me, we’re only making six doll
ars a week, each,” Bella said. “If we’re lucky and the bosses pay it all.”
Jane had been thinking, Those are such small amounts of money; what are they talking about? Until Bella chimed in with their salaries, which were small too.
I’m a burden, she realized.
“Oh!” she laughed, uncomfortably. “I didn’t—you should have told me. But it’s not just that. It’s—I mean, it takes money for everything, and I didn’t know that. It’s not just for buying your way into society or for winning a proper husband. That dead horse and the girl’s eyes and the ragamuffins—if I had money, my own money, I could have helped them, even the boy who tried to steal my ring. Maybe he was starving, maybe that was why he had no morals. Maybe no one ever taught him that stealing was wrong.” Jane saw that Yetta and Bella had no idea what she was talking about. They looked totally confused. “I just want to do something, like you did with the strike.”
“Not that that worked out so great,” Yetta muttered.
Jane clutched at her head, knocking out hairpins and destroying the last vestige of her attempt at a hairstyle.
“I’m just so confused!” she moaned. “Maybe I’m just trying to justify going back to my father, if he’ll even let me come back. Maybe I want you to say, ‘It’s all right to go home. It’s—’”
“It is all right to go home,” Bella said. “I miss my family too. If I could go back to them—”
“But I don’t miss my father,” Jane said. “I miss his money. It’s not the same. His money is evil. But I still miss my flowered wallpaper and my clean glass windows and the orange juice from Florida and—and—and—you probably think I’m a horrible person. Maybe I don’t really want to help the boy who tried to steal my ring. Maybe I don’t even care. Maybe it’s all about me. I want to go to college and I want to take a grand tour of Europe and I want to have real roses on my table—”
Yetta leaned in close.
“So earn the money yourself,” she said fiercely. “Earn your own money and save it. And then use it however you want.”
Jane blinked back tears.
“I’m not like you,” she said. “I’m not brave and courageous and strong. I couldn’t sit there all day at the sewing machine. I don’t even know how to sew!” She remembered what Eleanor had said, the scorn in her voice when she hissed, “What’s my choice? Working in some factory as a shirtwaist girl? No, thank you.” Jane didn’t want Yetta and Bella to think that she was similarly scornful. “Don’t you see?” she wailed. “I’m useless. I was raised to be totally dependent on others.” She shoved a tangled strand of hair out of her eyes. “I can’t even do my own hair! Just a few nights away from home and I stink and I’m filthy and my hair’s a wreck and I don’t understand how you can do it, staying so clean and tidy and—and cheerful—-living in these circumstances.” She waved her hand wildly, the gesture taking in every chip and crack in the room, every belch of smoke from the stovepipe that layered filth and ash on every surface, every ice crystal creeping up the insides of the windows.
“We’re not saints,” Bella said, at the same time that Yetta muttered, “I’m not cheerful.” The two girls exchanged glances, and then Bella ventured, “Yetta heard of a job you could do. Not sewing. Something that uses what you know. How you were raised.”
Yetta sat down at the table.
“The Blancks need a governess for their daughters,” she said. “Someone who can teach them to get along in society.”
Jane gaped at her.
“Oh, my heavens,” she said. “You want me to be Miss Milhouse.”
It was funny, actually, in a cruel way. Having escaped her jailer, Jane was now expected to become a jailer.
“You want me to teach other girls to pull their corset strings so tight they can’t breathe,” Jane said. “To speak only when spoken to. To lower their eyes and simper and say ‘Oh, you beast,’ when boys flirt, whether they like it or not. To always let men think that they are smarter and stronger and better. . . .”
“Maybe you could be a subversive governess,” Yetta suggested. “Pretend that you’re telling them all those things but secretly tell them the truth. ‘Unions are good.’ ‘Women should vote.’ ‘Girls are as smart as boys.’ Maybe you could even spy on Mr. Blanck for us, let us know what he’s planning for Triangle.”
This appealed to Jane. The thought of being a servant was horrifying, but espionage—that was glamorous. She remembered hearing rumors about one of the other girls at her finishing school, that the girl’s grandmother had been a spy during the Civil War. The notion seemed too incredible to be believed, but Jane had not been able to stop herself from staring when the old woman came to an end-of-term singing concert. Jane was disappointed in the woman’s steel-gray hair, her wrinkles, and her prim black dress with the cameo pinned at the neck. She looked entirely ordinary. But maybe that was the secret of being a good spy.
“Begging your pardon,” Bella said, pulling up her own chair at the table. “I think what’s wrong with Miss Milhouse is that she doesn’t love you. I’m sorry!—I’m sorry if that’s hurtful. But listen to me. I had brothers and a sister who had runny noses all the time and were rough and tumble and never left me alone for a minute. And I loved them. I loved them with a love that was so deep and so true that I crossed the ocean, I came to America, trying to save their lives. And then I lived with the Lucianos, and their children had runny noses and they were dirty and the baby cried all the time, and I hated them because they weren’t Giovanni and Ricardo and Dominic and Guilia. I don’t think I would have crossed the street to save any of their lives, so—”
“Not even Rocco’s?” Yetta asked.
“That came later,” Bella said, with stiff dignity. “Later I liked Serefina, too, and I’m sorry that the baby died. But when I hated them, at first, that wasn’t good, and if I had been their—what’s it called?—their governess, I would have been very mean to them. So, spying or no, whatever you tell them, what you should decide on, is whether or not you think these are children you can care about. Because children should have people who love them.”
This was the most Jane had ever heard Bella say, in her lilting accent that made even English words sound foreign. But Jane understood what she meant. She twisted the ring on her finger, traced the clean swoop of the engraved J with her thumbnail.
“My mother loved me,” she said. “My father—I don’t know. It never really seemed like it.” That was hard to admit, that her own father might not love her. Even if he was a horrible, evil, strikebreaking man. She went on. “And Miss Milhouse—you’re right. She’s never loved me.”
Jane thought how easy that had made it for her to run away. Other girls had living, loving mothers telling them to tighten their corsets and to marry the wealthiest man who made an offer—or the man with the most impressive European title. And of course they listened, because their mothers loved them, and they loved their mothers.
Maybe love could be a trap, too.
Jane felt dazed, and no less confused. But she nodded solemnly at Bella, at Yetta.
“Thank you for your advice,” she said. “I will remember it. I don’t know if anyone would hire me as a governess. But I will try. I will try.”
Yetta and Bella worked hard getting Jane ready to meet the Blancks. They decided she should wear the serge dress she’d given Bella, back in December.
“You mean, you can let out the seams again?” Jane marveled. “Just like that? You didn’t cut the dress down to fit?”
“Cut in haste, repent at leisure,” Yetta said, waving scissors at her reprovingly.
“Oh, is that a proverb in Russia, too?” Jane asked.
“No, I learned it in my English class,” Yetta said. “But I don’t really understand it—isn’t leisure good? Isn’t it something you want? Like time to have fun? Why would you repent while you were having fun?”
“Leisure can also be just, time to stop and think,” Jane said. “What the proverb means is that if you do something in a hurry, wi
thout thinking about it, then when you do stop and think, you’ll regret it.”
Like running away from home? Jane wondered.
She pushed that thought aside, because Bella and Yetta were so merry, fitting the dress back together, trying out new styles for Jane’s hair, showing her how to polish her boots until they gleamed.
“What will we do about a hat?” Bella moaned.
Jane thought of the rows and rows of hats sitting on shelves back at her own house. Hats with feathers, hats with flowers, even one with a little stuffed dove tucked along the brim . . .
Bella seemed to be thinking along the same lines.
“If you’d just remembered to wear one when you came here,” she scolded.
“You always had such beautiful hats when you came to the picket line,” Yetta said dreamily.
“But they’re tainted, remember?” Jane said. “Bought with my evil father’s evil money . . .”
“So was your dress and your boots and that blanket, and you brought those!”
“I do like that warm blanket,” Bella said. “I’m glad you brought it.” She was the one who’d been sleeping with it at night, because she was the one who had to sleep on the bed improvised from chairs. Worst bed, best blanket—it seemed only fair.
“Wish you’d bought a blanket for me, too,” Yetta joked.
“And maybe one of those soft pillows . . .” Bella said.
“And I’ve always wanted to try orange juice. I wouldn’t have complained if you’d brought some of that,” Yetta added.
“I had some at Jane’s house,” Bella bragged. “Isn’t that what you gave me, in the mornings? And those sausages—I wouldn’t have minded if you’d brought us some of those sausages!”
They were teasing her, and that was all right. She hadn’t known: They craved luxuries too. They were poor girls, but they were still girls; they wanted the frilly dresses and ruffly skirts and glorious hats that Jane had always taken for granted.
“Since I’m taking the serge dress back from you, Bella, you should have my day gown,” Jane said, holding out the stained lace dress she’d been wearing for days. “I think it will come clean.”