She scurried down the hall, back to the double elevator doors. She decided to look for Mr. Blanck on the ninth floor first. She knew that was where Bella worked, and it’d be good if she could warn Bella that she’d be a few minutes late getting out to the street, especially if it took her a long time to find Mr. Blanck.
Passing Miss Mary’s desk, Jane was surprised to notice that the woman had vanished, leaving the telephone receiver hanging off the hook.
That’s odd. She seemed like such a conscientious sort.. ..
A different elevator operator came up this time, a swarthily handsome Italian man.
If Bella’s precious Pietro looks anything like that, no wonder she can’t forget him! Jane thought. Then she had to hide her face so he didn’t see her giggling at her own wickedness.
The elevator buzzed annoyingly. Again and again and again.
“Eighth floor’s going crazy,” the elevator operator growled. He scowled at the panel of lights that kept flashing at him as he shut the door behind Jane and the elevator began its descent. “Hold on a minute! I’m coming! I’m coming!”
“They’ve probably all got spring fever,” Jane said. “And it’s Saturday.”
“Yeah, yeah,” the operator grumbled, letting her out on the ninth floor. “But do they gotta take it out on me?”
The ninth floor was not what Jane expected. After the cleanliness and elegance of the tenth floor, she wasn’t prepared for this dim, dirty space with the tables and the machines and the girls packed in so tightly together. The room was huge, but the tables stretched from one side of the building to the other. By the windows, there wasn’t even space to walk around the tables. And shirtwaists and shirtwaist parts were piled everywhere, mountains of fabric by each machine.
No wonder Bella felt so overwhelmed, coming here from her tiny little village in Italy, Jane thought.
Jane herself felt a little overwhelmed.
“Excuse me. Do you know where I could find Mr. Blanck or Bella Rossetti?” she asked the girl at the nearest sewing machine.
The girl looked up blankly, and said something that might have been “I don’t speak English” in some other language. Just then a bell sounded, and the machines stopped and hundreds of girls sprang up from their machines all at once. It spooked Jane a little, the darkness of the room and the foreign jabbering and the girls moving like machines, themselves. But then one of the girls stepping out of the cloakroom began to sing, “Ev’ry little movement has a meaning of its own”—one of those popular songs that you heard everywhere, nowadays. Some of the other girls joined in, and they all seemed so light-hearted suddenly. Saturday afternoon and the sun was shining and work was over; these girls looked happier than anyone Jane had ever seen at a formal ball.
Then, two tables away, Jane spotted Bella heading down the aisle between the tables and laughing and talking to the girls around her.
“Jane! What are you doing here?” Bella shouted over to her.
“Looking for you and Mr. Blanck,” Jane said.
“Well, we wouldn’t be together!” Bella called back merrily.
Jane worked her way through the crowd toward her friend. She explained about Millicent and Harriet and the shopping, and how long it would take her to get down to the sidewalk. Then Bella said, “Oh, wait, you have to meet my friends—this is Annie and Dora and Josie and Essie and Ida. And come here—” She pulled her back down the aisle between the tables. “This is my boss, Signor Carlotti. This is my friend, Jane Wellington, Signor Carlotti, and she knows proper Italian and proper English.”
“Hello,” Signor Carlotti said.
“I am a factory inspector,” Jane said, suddenly inspired to lie. “If I were to interview the girls in this factory, would they tell me that you treat them with respect? Are you fair to all your workers?”
At the first word out of her mouth, Signor Carlotti’s face changed—first, to awe at her upper-class accent, then to fear.
“Oh, er—yes! Yes! Of course!” Signor Carlotti exclaimed.
It was all Jane and Bella could do, not to double over giggling as they walked away.
“Maybe he really will change how he treats you, Monday morning!” Jane whispered.
“Oh, do you think so?” Bella asked wistfully.
Across the room, strangely, Jane heard Yetta’s voice now. She couldn’t make out the words, but Yetta seemed to be calling out in great excitement, from the midst of the crowd of girls getting ready to leave. Maybe she was talking them into another strike. Maybe this one would work-maybe Yetta would get her dearest wish.
“Doesn’t Yetta work on the eighth floor?” Jane asked.
Before Bella could answer, screams came suddenly from the back of the room. Screams—and a great burst of light.
Bella
Bella couldn’t tell what had happened. It was just like her first day of work, when everyone else was yelling and running and knocking over baskets and trampling shirtwaists they didn’t bother to stop and pick up. And, for a moment, just like on that first day, Bella couldn’t understand the words everyone else kept saying. The English part of her brain shut off, the Yiddish words in her brain evaporated, even the Italian she heard around her sounded garbled and foreign.
Then she smelled smoke, and the words made sense.
“Fire!”
“S’brent!”
“Fuoco!”
Jane clutched her shoulders.
“Where do we go? What do we do?” Jane asked. “We always had fire drills at school—where have they told you to go in the event of a fire?”
Bella didn’t know what a fire drill was. People were crowded in all around her, shoving and pushing from behind, blocking the way in front of her. The tables on either side of the aisle seemed to be closing in on her. She was penned in, just like a goat or a pig.
No better than an animal, Bella thought, and somehow this seemed all of piece with not being able to read and wanting only food and Signor Carlotti spitting on her and Signor Luciano cheating her. I bet back home your family slept with goats and chickens in the house, Signora Luciano had sneered at her once, and Bella hadn’t even understood that that was an insult. But now she’d seen how other people lived; she’d seen what Jane and Yetta expected out of life. She refused to think of herself as a hog in a pen waiting to be slaughtered.
“This way!” she said, grabbing Jane’s hand and scrambling up on top of the nearest table.
From there, she could see the fire. It was blowing in the back window, one huge ball of flame rolling across the examining tables stacked with shirtwaists. The flames kept dividing, devouring stack after stack of shirtwaists, racing each other down the tables.
Where are they trying to get to? Bella wondered.
The first flame leaped from the examining table to the first row of sewing tables.
“It’s coming toward us!” Jane screamed behind her. “Where do we go?”
Bella looked around frantically. Girls were packed in around the doors and elevators. Only a handful seemed to remember that there was another way out.
“The fire escape!” Bella screamed back, grateful for that day so long ago, before the strike, when she’d actually seen where the fire escape was.
The aisles were still crowded. Bella leaped from one table to the next, and somehow Jane managed to follow. Bella leaped again, suddenly surefooted. Except for the smoke burning her eyes and throat, she could have been back in the mountains near Calia, jumping from rock to rock.
“I’ve got to—make sure—Harriet and Millicent—are-all—right,” Jane panted behind her, as they cleared another table. She began coughing, choking on the smoke.
Bella bent down and snatched up a pile of shirtwaist sleeves. She held two over her mouth and handed the others to Jane.
“Here. So you can breathe.”
They kept racing across the tables. And it really was a race, because the flames were speeding toward the fire escape window too. Through the smoke, Bella could barely make out t
he progress of the fire. The flames are going to get there first-no, we are!—no, look how fast the fire’s moving . . .
They reached the end of the tables and jumped down to the floor. The flames were reaching for Bella’s skirt, so she lifted it up as she ran for the fire escape. She had one leg out the window, balanced on the metal railing, when Jane grabbed for her arm.
“Wait—is that safe?” Jane asked.
She’d actually stopped to peer down at the rickety stairs, at the flames shooting out the eighth-floor window, at the eighth-floor shutters that seemed to be blocking the path of all the other girls already easing their way down.
“Safe?” Bella repeated numbly. Anything seemed safer than where they were now. But she pulled back a little, reconsidering. She shifted her weight back from the foot that was on the fire escape to the knee perched on the windowsill. And in that moment, the fire escape just . . . fell away.
“Madonna mia!” Bella cried. Jane grabbed her, pulling her back in through the window. “The other girls—”
Jane shook her head, maybe meaning, Don’t ask, maybe meaning, I saw it all, them falling I can’t even begin to tell you how awful it was. . . . Bella tried to remember who’d been ahead of her on the fire escape—Dora? Essie? Ida? All of them? The boot of the girl immediately in front of Bella had had a fancy silver buckle, the kind of thing a girl would have been proud of, the kind of thing she would have gone around showing off, making sure her skirt flounced up to display it as much as possible. Had Bella seen that buckle before?
“Bella! Where’s another exit?” Jane cried out.
But Bella couldn’t think about anything but a fancy silver buckle.
Suddenly Yetta was there.
“Greene Street stairs!” Yetta was screaming. “Go!”
Bella grabbed her friends’ hands and took off running again. But Yetta pulled her hand back.
“You go on!” she screamed. “I still have to—”
The rest of Yetta’s words were lost in the crackle of advancing flames.
The smoke rose and fell and shifted. One minute, Bella could see ahead of her, a straight path to the partition by the door. The next minute, she was groping blindly forward, tripping over people who had fallen. She’d dropped the shirtwaist sleeves she’d been using to cover her mouth and nose. She grabbed up another stack, but just before she pressed it to her face she noticed that these shirtwaist sleeves were already burning. She dropped them to the floor, and began to sag toward the floor herself.
But she was still holding Jane’s hand. Jane yanked her back up.
“The stairs—” Jane gasped.
They stumbled forward. Bella pulled her wool skirt up over her head, blocking out the smoke and the flames. Immodest, she thought, an English word she’d just learned. She didn’t care.
Jane grabbed a bucket of water from a nearby shelf and flung it toward the fire, and some of it splashed back onto Bella. None of it seemed to reach the fire. Or, if it did, it didn’t make any difference. The flames kept shooting forward. There were no more buckets left on the shelf, only some tipped over empty on the floor.
“The girls will be so scared,” Jane breathed, and Bella knew she meant Harriet and Millicent, waiting in their father’s office upstairs. “I’ve got to—”
She stopped, looking down.
“My skirt,” she said.
A ring of flames was dancing along the bottom of her skirt. She stepped forward and the flames flared.
“We’ll put it out,” Bella said.
Jane began rushing toward a vat by the stairs.
“Water—”
“No, no! That’s machine oil, sewing machine oil!” Bella screamed, pulling her back. The dark oil was bubbling over, running down the sides of the vat. The fire was beginning to race along the streams of oil. Bella had to jump past it. And then Jane was on one side of the flames, Bella on the other.
“Jane!” Bella screamed.
“Go on!” Jane screamed back. “Go get the girls! Make sure they’re safe up there!”
“But you—”
“I’ll go another way!” Jane said. “I’ll meet you later!”
Bella whirled around. The pathway to the stairs was closing in. In a second it would be gone.
Bella ran forward.
Yetta
Yetta had burst onto the ninth floor shouting, “There’s a fire on the eighth floor! Get out!” But there was so much Saturday-afternoon chatter, so many people crowded in between the tables and machines and towering stacks of shirtwaists. She doubted if anyone heard her.
The fire arrived only seconds later.
“Get out! Go!” Yetta screamed, grabbing shocked girls and shoving them toward the stairs. Having just seen the fire fly through the eighth floor, she could look at a stack of shirtwaist parts and know exactly how quickly that would turn to flame. “Go now!” she screamed. “You’ve only got a few minutes!”
Yetta didn’t know when a second voice joined her own, a deeper voice urging just as loudly, “Don’t stop to get your hat! Don’t stop to get your gloves! Go!”
She looked around, and it was Jacob. He must have followed her up the stairs.
“What are you doing?” she screamed at him.
“The same thing as you!” he screamed back, then kept hollering, “Go! Go!”
Together they shoved girls into the elevator, lifted numb women to their feet. Yetta took great joy in slapping a dazed Mr. Carlotti.
“Snap out of it!” she screamed at him. “Get out of here!”
When the smoke cleared a little with the breeze, Yetta saw Bella and Jane—Jane? What’s she doing here? No time to find out . . . They were standing practically in the fire, so close to the fire escape that Yetta couldn’t understand why they weren’t climbing out. Yetta rushed toward them, ready to scream, “Just go out that window! Now!” So what if the fire escape didn’t go down all the way to the ground? If it got them past the eighth floor they could climb in the windows on a lower floor, escape that way.
But when Yetta got over to the window, the fire escape seemed to have vanished.
There was no time to ask why or how. No time even to wonder.
“Greene Street stairs!” Yetta screamed. “Go!”
That seemed to be enough to bring them back to life, get them moving. But then Bella grabbed Yetta’s hand, pulling her along too. Yetta wanted to go with her friends. In a matter of moments they could be down on the street, walking home. They could walk away from Triangle, this nightmarish place. They’d never have to come back again. They could get other jobs. They could all three hop a train west, live somewhere else. Yetta didn’t have to be a shirtwaist girl anymore.
But people were dying here. Yetta could help now.
Yetta pulled her hand back.
“You go on!” she screamed. “I still have to help the others!”
Bella and Jane disappeared into the smoke. The smoke shifted a little, and for one instant Yetta could see clear across the room to the Washington Place door. Workers were clumped up against that door, just like they’d been on the eighth floor.
“They must think it’s locked!” Yetta screamed at Jacob, who’d suddenly appeared beside her. “They don’t know it opens in!”
How would they know? How many of them had ever used the Washington Place door? Yetta started racing across the room, gasping for breath. She had such a clear image in her head: She would push the panicky girls aside, turn the knob, jerk the door in toward the factory . . . And then everyone would stream out, safe.
“Pull it toward yourselves!” she started screaming as soon as she got close to the door.
Nobody seemed to be listening.
“I’ll try it!” Jacob yelled.
Together they fought their way through the crowd. They took turns grasping the doorknob, yanking it, turning it, twisting it. But their hands slid off the knob; the knob didn’t budge.
“This one is locked!” Yetta yelled in Jacob’s ear. “It’s locked!” she
screamed at all the other workers clustered around. “Go another way!” She started pushing the other girls back from the door, yelling, “Take the other stairs! Take the other stairs!”
Jacob slid his hands down around Yetta’s shoulders, pinning her arms to her side.
“Yetta,” he whispered, his mouth right against her ear. “They can’t.”
Then Yetta looked back.
She’d seen the fire take over the eighth floor, starting from one small spark in a scrap bin and advancing throughout the entire room. That hadn’t prepared her at all for the ninth floor, where flames spilled in through the windows on every side. In the brief moments that Yetta had spent tugging on a locked door, the flames had taken over. The route that Yetta and Jacob had used just a minute before was blocked by a wall of fire now—a wall of fire sweeping ever closer.
Yetta and Jacob couldn’t get back to the other stairs, either.
“Jacob,” Yetta said, and she was ashamed that the word came out as a whimper. “I don’t want to burn.”
She remembered what Rahel had said about the pogrom in Bialystok: This one girl—she might have been you or me. One minute, she was just standing there. ...The next minute she was covered inflames. A human torch. Gone in a flash.
“Not me. Not my life. Please. I don’t want to go that way,” she whispered. She wasn’t sure if she was talking to Jacob or to God or just to herself.
“You won’t burn,” Jacob said
It seemed like an impossible promise. What else could happen, with the door locked, the flames beating mercilessly nearer? But Jacob was lifting her up—higher, higher, higher— into unbelievably fresh air.
He was lifting her toward the window.
Yetta remembered the woman with the burning hair who’d jumped out the window on the eighth floor. She squirmed in Jacob’s arms.
“No! Not that either!”
“There’s a ledge,” Jacob said.
And then, somehow, they were both standing on the ledge, just outside the window. The fire still raged behind them, but the cool breezes soothed their faces—the same breezes that had seemed to call and tease her earlier. Odd, how they were a comfort now. Yetta looked straight up into blue sky, into puffy white clouds sailing leisurely toward the horizon. Down below there were fire trucks and firemen and crowds screaming, but Yetta couldn’t hear any of the voices. Her world had shrunk, for the moment, to blue sky and the feel of Jacob’s arms around her.