“About the Italian girls,” Yetta said, her voice sounding rough and unnatural. “I think the bosses are trying to make us hate them. You know how they alternate us at the sewing machines so you have to lean past someone Italian if you want to speak Yiddish? And I think it’s the bosses who start all those rumors about how the Italians hate us. That girl didn’t seem to mind at all that we were Jewish. . . .”
Yetta waited for Rahel to correct her, to say they weren’t Jewish anymore, they were socialists, unionists, revolutionaries.
But Rahel wasn’t even listening.
Jane
Jane eased the heavy front door shut and tiptoed across the marble foyer. It was late—all the servants had gone to bed hours ago. She could see a thin strip of light on the floor, the only thing that showed under the door of Father’s study. It would be nothing to tiptoe past that door. Jane inhaled deeply, just in case she’d have to hold her breath. But the inhalation brought with it a huge whiff of cigar smoke—also coming from Father’s study—and Jane began to choke and cough.
The door sprang open, and Father stood there brandishing a fireplace poker over his head. He lowered it, a bit sheepishly, when he saw that it was only Jane.
“Young lady!” he said gruffly. “Where have you been? Why isn’t Miss Milhouse accompanying you?”
Jane finished coughing. She backed away from the larger billow of cigar smoke that had appeared when Father opened the study door.
“I was . . . I’m returning from an educational lecture,” Jane said. “I went with Eleanor Kensington, who’s a Vassar student and very mature, and so Miss Milhouse’s presence wasn’t required.”
Very innocent, Jane told herself, and it was. She was telling the truth. But she felt guilty, as if Father wouldn’t approve if he knew the whole truth. If he knew how Jane had finagled to avoid taking Miss Milhouse along. (None of the college girls had chaperons constantly babysitting them—why should Jane?) If he knew that Eleanor swore sometimes—she said “Dash it all” just like a boy—and maybe wasn’t as reputable as Jane implied. If he knew that the lecturer tonight had talked about women’s rights. (What did Father think of women’s rights?) Or if he knew that she and Eleanor and Eleanor’s friends had gone to an ice cream parlor afterward that maybe wasn’t perfectly clean and maybe wasn’t perfectly socially acceptable.
Jane’s friend Pearl had introduced her to Eleanor Kensington three months ago, and it had become common for Eleanor to invite Jane along for lectures and symposiums, academic talks and social commentaries. At first, Pearl had gone too, but Pearl yawned and squirmed and elbowed Jane to whisper, “Would it be rude to leave early? This is so boring. . . .”
Jane thought a lot of it was boring too. But a lot of it was fascinating, and had set Jane to wondering about everything. Was the speaker right, the one who claimed that there was enough wealth in America that no one should have to live in poverty? (Who would care to work as servants, then?) How about the speaker who said that alcohol was the root of all evil? (Jane had thought it was supposedly money—though Eleanor and her friends had looked the quotation up in the Bible and said it was actually the want of money that was evil, which wasn’t exactly the same thing. Jane was still thinking about that one.) And then there were all those women’s rights lectures. Would the United States be a better place if women could vote?
Jane favored her father with what she hoped was her most innocent-looking smile.
“And really,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I’m coming home much earlier than if I’d been to a dance.”
Father scowled at her anyway, his thick black eyebrows beetling together. Jane had seen pictures of her father when he was young and handsome—she could understand why her mother stared at him so dreamily in their wedding pictures. They’d been a lovely couple, Jane’s parents, back before Mother had taken sick and faded away. Now Father was potbellied and balding and fierce, and Jane was more than a little afraid of him.
“You were with Eleanor Kensington?” he muttered. “Of the shipping-interest Kensingtons?”
“I suppose,” Jane said. “She’s Pearl Kensington’s cousin.”
“Ah,” Father said, and Jane understood that he had just begun a calculation in his head, judging the Kensington family’s financial and social status relative to his own.
“They live near the Vanderbilts,” Jane said.
“I see,” Father said. Eleanor had been judged acceptable. “Does she perhaps have a brother?”
Jane blushed. This was new, Father asking about eligible males, instead of simply counting on Miss Milhouse to shepherd Jane through the complexities of courtship. Jane felt a sudden pang of missing her mother. Surely, even as an invalid, Jane’s mother would have cared enough to ask, “Was that boy kind enough when he asked you to dance? Did his eyes sparkle when you said yes,’ or was he just playing his role?” and even, “Do you think you could love him?”—rather than treating the whole marriage campaign like a military maneuver, a series of battles to be won or lost based on flounced dresses, tasteful décolletage and discreet flirting (but not too much! Oh, no, not too much!).
“Eh? Is there a brother?” Father repeated awkwardly. Maybe he was blushing too.
“Eleanor’s brothers are older, and already married,” Jane said, trying to keep her voice steady.
“Ah,” Father said again.
Jane wondered what would happen if she told him what the lecturer had said tonight about marriage.
“Women are not chattel, to be traded off like cattle or hogs!” she’d thundered out. “We’re not trophies, to be placed in glass cases! We’re human beings, and we deserve to be treated as such. We, like our husbands, should be allowed to own property. We, like our husbands, should have a say over the money we earn. We, like our husbands, should have a determining voice in the guardianship of our children. And we, like our husbands, should have the right to vote!”
Afterward, in the ice cream parlor, Jane had spooned butterscotch sundae into her mouth and listened to the debate swirling around her. Eleanor said the speaker had been particularly brave to take on the issue of marriage, since Mrs. Belmont, who’d just donated a new headquarters for the suffrage movement, had forced her own daughter to marry against her will.
“Just because she wanted a royal title in the family, she made Consuelo marry that horrid duke, who just wanted her money,” Eleanor had said. “Even though Consuelo was in love with someone else, and sobbed all the way to the wedding. That’s the worst fad, rich Americans marrying off their daughters to dusty old counts and such. It’s barbaric, I say!”
Jane hadn’t heard of anyone objecting before. Her old friends thought royalty was romantic.
“Wouldn’t you want to be a duchess?” she’d ventured timidly to Eleanor.
“Not unless I loved the duke. Not unless I loved him, regardless of whether he was a duke or a prince or an industrialist or a common old Joe.”
“In other words, no,” one of Eleanor’s friends joked.
And then they’d been off on another topic. The ideas flew by so quickly, Jane felt like she was watching a tennis match. Her head swam, but it was wonderful. Who’d known there were so many things to think about?
Now Father cleared his throat.
“We’ll have to be very careful with this matter,” Father said. “It will be important for you to make a good match. Something like that could make a big difference in my business.”
A year ago, a month ago—maybe even a day ago—Jane would have been flattered that he thought anything about her was important. That he noticed her at all. But with the women’s rights lecture still echoing in her ears, she heard him differently now.
So—marrying me off could make a big difference in his business? Jane thought. What about the difference it would make in my life? He does think I’m chattel—just something to trade for something else he wants more!
Jane tried to ignore the ache in her heart. She stared past him into his study, with its dark wo
od, its leather chairs, its cloud of cigar smoke. The whole room reeked of power and masculinity. Once, when she was four or five, she’d tried to hide under his desk during a birthday party game of hide-and-seek. Father had come in unexpectedly and scolded, “Now, now, this is no place for a little girl! Out!” Perhaps he’d only meant that he didn’t want children ruffling through his business papers, that he didn’t want party games interrupting his work. But Jane had understood him to mean much, much more. She’d looked down at her lacy white party dress with the pink-ribbon sash and felt ashamed, as if she’d been trying to pass herself off as a boy. As if she’d been trying to pass herself off as important.
Jane had mostly done everything she could to avoid his study ever since.
But she wasn’t a little girl anymore. And what use was it to go to women’s rights lectures if she just stood there, silently, while her father decided her entire life?
“But, Father,” she said slowly, trying to keep the tremble out of her voice. “Maybe I’m not really ready yet to think about ... any of that. Maybe I won’t be ready for years. Maybe I’d like to ... to go to college first.”
“College?” Father growled, as though he’d never heard of such a thing, even though he had his own Yale diploma hanging on his study wall.
“A college for women,” Jane said hastily. “They have lots of them now—Vassar, Smith, Barnard. . . .”
Father was scowling and shaking his head.
“Why, that’s preposterous,” he said. “Almost as preposterous as women wanting to vote.”
Well. So that was what he thought of women’s rights. A year ago, a month ago, maybe even a day ago, it wouldn’t have mattered. But now, somehow, it did. Somehow it made Jane feel that he’d always see her as he saw her when she was five: a frilly, useless, annoying girl in a frilly, useless, annoying dress.
Jane had just finished hearing dozens of reasons why women should be allowed to vote, dozens of reasons why women should be allowed to go to college. But right now she wasn’t capable of telling her father any of them. She could only swallow hard and tiptoe away and hope she made it to her room before she began to cry.
Bella
Bella trudged along listlessly behind Signor Luciano. She’d lost track of how much time had passed since Pietro disappeared—weeks? Months? Years? It was hard to keep track of anything when her life was just one constant, exhausting blur of work—making shirtwaists all day in the factory, making flowers at the Lucianos’ table all night and on Sundays. She was so used to being yelled at that her ears seemed to ring constantly with angry voices. Signora Luciano: “Surely you can make more flowers than that! If you don’t, I’ll throw you out in the streets. Don’t think I wouldn’t do that.” Signor Carlotti: “Faster! Faster! Faster! Don’t you know there are hundreds of girls arriving at Ellis Island right this minute, who’d love taking your job? And they’d do it cheaper, too, I’d wager.” Signor Luciano: “Hurry up! You make me late for my job, I’ll be fired.”
Oops. Signor Luciano was yelling that right this minute. Bella forced herself to step a little faster, before he followed up his words with a slap or a punch. She’d loved walking to and from work with Pietro—it’d been the best part of her days. But now Signor Luciano and the boarder Nico took turns escorting her. Nico was actually worse to walk with, because he was always leering at her and trying to touch her; at least Signor Luciano only hit her.
Don’t think about any of that, Bella told herself. Think about the money.
This was the only part of Bella’s life that gave her any joy anymore: the moment on Saturday afternoon when she carried a handful of coins and bills home from work. Sometimes it added up to four dollars, sometimes it was three—in bad weeks, when there wasn’t much work or Signor Carlotti blamed her for a lot of ruined shirtwaists, it was only one or two. But she placed all that she could into Signor Luciano’s rough hands: “For sending to my family. Back home. In Calia. You’ll send it for me?”
“Oh, yes,” Signor Luciano always said. “Of course. I’ll go to the Banco di Napoli right now.”
It was the only moment all week when she actually liked Signor Luciano. Suddenly his moustache didn’t seem so scraggly; his eyes didn’t seem so beady; she forgot all the slaps and punches, pinches and pokes he’d given her throughout the week. Sometimes he even patted her head in a grand-fatherly way, murmuring, “Such a good girl, sending money home to her mama . . .”
Bella wished she could take the money to the bank herself, that she could watch the bank officials writing out the directions for where the money should go. She even wished she could write out her own directions: For my mama, Angelina Rossetti, and Giovanni and Ricardo and Guilia and Dominic, in Italy in the village of Calia. It’s such a small place you can’t miss them— they’re in the last house in the last piazza. ...I am sending money and love and I miss you. ... But she couldn’t do that. Even if she knew how to write, they’d never let a girl in a bank. She had to trust Signor Luciano.
He jerked on her arm and slapped her—she’d gotten lost in her thoughts and was lagging again.
“You make me late, so help me, I’ll . . .”
Signor Luciano broke off. They were nearly to the Triangle factory, but the crowd around them had closed in tight. No one was moving now.
“Out of the way! Let us through!” Signor Luciano snarled, shoving forward. When that didn’t work, he began pounding on the coat-covered backs in front of him.
One of the men turned around, his own fists bared.
“Quit it! We can’t get anywhere either! It’s the factory!”
“What about the factory?” Signor Luciano growled.
“It’s closed down!”
Bella gasped. Signor Luciano let out of string of swear words.
“It can’t be,” Bella protested. “I was just there yesterday. Nobody said anything about closing down!”
She thought about yesterday—yesterday’s misery as opposed to all the miserable yesterdays that came before it. There had been one odd event. In the middle of the afternoon, a man had stalked into the room and ordered them to stop their work. He screamed for a few minutes in a language Bella couldn’t understand, then ordered them to start sewing again. Once upon a time, Bella would have longed for someone else who spoke her language, someone she could lean over and joke with: “What do you bet they dock our pay for all the time that took? Think they’ll cut out fifty cents or a dollar?” But Bella was long past jokes. She just felt a stab of fear—what if they did dock her pay?
She was frantically cramming another shirtwaist through her sewing machine when Signor Carlotti leaned down close.
“Did you understand that, what Mr. Blanck said?” he asked, speaking slowly and loudly as if, for once, he really wanted to make sure Bella understood. “If you want to join a union, join the Triangle Employees Benevolent Association. You join any other union, you’re gone.”
He made a motion with his forefinger across his neck, like someone slashing a throat.
Bella shivered and nodded, though she still didn’t know what a union was; she certainly didn’t know what an employees benevolent association was. She understood that what she was supposed to do—what she was always supposed to do-was to keep the shirtwaists moving through her machine. What else did she need to know?
But now, if the factory were closed . . .
Signor Luciano was still swearing.
“Now I’ll have to walk you back, I’ll really be late to my job. . . . And how are you going to pay the rent? The signora and I can’t afford to run a charity, you know.”
“The—the flowers,” Bella said. “If the factory’s closed, I can make flowers all day long. All day, all night . . .”
She could barely choke out the words. It was like volunteering for a death sentence. And if she worked at nothing but the flowers, how would there ever be any more money to send home to Mama?
She is not an honest woman, Signora Luciano, Pietro had said, that very first day. She w
ould cheat you. Every week, there would be a reason she wouldn’t pay. . . .
Ever since Pietro vanished, Bella had tried not to think of those words, tried not to calculate how many thousands and thousands of flowers she’d already made without receiving a cent, always being told, “If you work a little faster, maybe, just maybe, you’ll make enough to cover your rent. . . .”
Bella pressed forward, wanting to see for herself if the factory really was shut down. She managed to slip between two men’s elbows and come up for air beneath the ostrich feather of some woman’s hat. Now she could see the factory doors at least. There were indeed chains linked around the door handles, below a sign she couldn’t read. The crowd around her was growing more and more unruly, people talking in louder and louder voices. Bella could figure out only a few of the words, mostly the ones that were repeated over and over again: “union . . . strike . . . union . . . strike . . .” She saw Yetta and Rahel, those girls who had walked her home the day Pietro vanished. What was Rahel saying?
Now. It is time now. . . .
Signor Luciano jerked Bella back by the hair.
“Come along,” he said. “If I lose my job because I’m late from walking you home, I’ll, I’ll . . .”
“Mi scusi,” a voice said behind them. Bella whirled around—it was Signor Carlotti.
“I couldn’t help overhearing,” he said. “If you think it’s proper, I could escort Signorina Rossetti back to her abode.”
Bella had never heard Signor Carlotti call her a signorina; she’d never heard him use words like “escort” and “abode.”
“Who are you?” Signor Luciano growled.
Signor Carlotti bowed slightly, tilting the brim of his top hat.
“I am Signorina Rossetti’s employer,” he said. “She’s one of my best workers.”