City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (38 page)

This evening, there was something else in the air—an extra edge, a barely contained excitement you could see in everyone’s faces, hear in their voices: there was a strike coming on.

A strike, it seemed to Esther, was indeed like a natural phenomenon—like the thunderstorms she sometimes saw, slowly building across the Hudson. The union tried to organize everything, to strike at the optimum moment, but there was really no directing it. It came on when the anger and the frustration in the shops had built up to the boiling point, and then there was no stopping it, or predicting where it would end.

This one had been building ever since the start of the new season, two weeks before. The operators had been shaking out early, despite all the supposed advantages from the new, rationalized factories. They had been driving everybody down—cutting the prices for piecework, cutting wages for the regular operators—even shaking down the pressers and the cutters, the indispensable princes of the business.

The office was more crowded than ever now, everyone trying to see what they could find out, or put their two cents in, or just drawn by the general excitement in the air. There was supposed to be a meeting later, over at the Talkers’ Cafe, and little Rose Schneiderman, and Leonora O’Reilly, who always spoke like she had a tear in her voice, were coming over, along with the society ladies, Miss Marot and Miss Dreier from Brooklyn, and Mrs. Perkins the social worker. There were even rumors that men from the union’s executive board would be there.

“We’re nearly ready,
bubbeleh!
Two years of building, two years of planning,” Clara breathed, her eyes dancing.
“Now
we make our move.
Now
we make the big strike, we get the
momzers
to recognize us!”

“Really? But how?”

“You’ll see,” she said. “Come with us tonight.”

“All right,” Esther agreed, even though it was another sweltering evening, and she was so tired. She had so wanted to go home and maybe read a little, then climb into her bed of chairs to dream of her
dybbuk.

“All right,” she repeated, this time more enthusiastically. After all, Clara said it was the big strike, the one they had always hoped and prayed for, making wishes in a New Jersey hay field the summer they had all camped out on the Palisades—making wishes for anything, anything in the world they might want on the clouds drifting by, pregnant with rain in the orange evening sky.

Yet out on the hot, crowded street, her enthusiasm wilted as quickly as the real flowers the barefoot little girls tried to sell her.

The false ones were better, the bright metal flowers that pricked her mother’s skin and made her hands fester Blood-red grapes on a shop window hat

What good would it do?

She had to ask herself: they could strike all they wanted, the biggest bosses were happy to see them walk out—just long enough to squeeze the smaller operators. Even if they won something—a few more cents in the rate, slightly better conditions—it only made it easier to clear out the little shops, which couldn’t afford the better rates. Then, when they had eliminated the competition, the big factories would cut their wages again.

Against such people, how could they do anything?

She worried it as she moved back down Delancey Street. Past the winos with their buttermilk. Past the mothers nursing their babes in the shadow of the elevated, and the pink paper roses, and the slices of coconut swimming in their dirty water. Past all the blank, ignorant faces, rushing somewhere, blindly, into the night.

The Talkers’ Cafe was no more than a large storefront on East Broadway, in the shadow of the high clock tower of the
Forward
building. Two rows of little tables and cane chairs, each of them filled with journalists and cloakmakers, anarchists and socialists, single-taxers and Zionists, Zwangwillites and assimilationists and all-purpose kibitzers. All arguing and declaiming furiously under the low tin ceiling of this Babel.

“Look at these
loaferim!”
Clara said loudly as they walked in the door, gesturing at the men in their shabby coats and ties, who peered up, dazed as moles, through the clouds of their cigarette smoke.

“All day long they blow from themselves, and still not one of them with enough sense to tie a cat’s tail!”

Esther made sympathetic noises but secretly she loved the teahouses: these parliaments of tailors and pants pressers, hunched over their samovars and their chessboards. It was here that she had first learned to think, and to listen, and to talk.

So many Sundays past, she had spent the whole day in one such cafe or another. She went early in the morning to stake out a good table and sit for hours, slowly sipping lemon-flavored tea through a lump of sugar held under her tongue. She ordered white bread, or maybe a poppy-seed roll, and smoked cigarettes and read the newspapers, in half a dozen languages, that hung from sticks along the wall. The whole day was hers, to read, or dream, or watch the other idlers.

Up front, there was always a table full of the
Forward
’s staff. From time to time, a grim-faced delegate from the
Arbeiter Zeitung,
the
Forward
’s great rival, would march in and deliver a long, esoteric harangue in Yiddish—until at last the
Forward
staff rose as one and pushed him physically back out the door. Then they would put their heads together, and a few minutes later send their own emissary across the street to the
Arbeiter
’s cafe and fling it back in their faces.

They argued, gloriously, all day, over everything from religion to the medicinal attributes of celery tonic to the inevitable triumph of socialism. Such a noise—such a raging symphony it was: of sarcasm, and cigarette smoke, and bitter, heartfelt passion over the size of a poppy seed. All to reach a perfect, theoretical conclusion, tottering there somewhere in the sky, above their heads. Above this tawdry world, where they sat dragging out cups of cold tea and bits of kaiser roll.

Sometimes she wished she had the nerve to join them in their harsh, slashing men’s debates. They would be disdainful of her at first—a little
fifer
of a machine operator like herself. Soon, though, she could imagine them won over by her careful logic, her calm, insistent voice, the lack of casuistry or personal insults in her arguments. Just like her father would be won over.

She never did join in—though she was just as happy to spend the day by herself, reading or trying to think. She tried to savor each moment in the close, overheated room, but of course the more she tried to appreciate them the heavier they weighed. As the hours slouched by she started to think about the next day, and work. When evening came, she ordered a slice of lemon pie, perhaps, or chocolate raspberry cake—a final treat to herself. But it always turned sour on her tongue. Buried in its sweetness lay the end of the day, the end of Sunday, and the end of what little time she could call her own.

Tonight the women pressed in together, in the dim back room, knees bumping politely under the table: Esther next to Clara, and then Clara’s friend Pauline Newman, the formidable Leonora O’Reilly, little Rose Schneiderman, the society lady Miss Dreier, and Mrs. Perkins, the social worker. A couple more she didn’t know, and whose names she was too shy to ask again. They sat debating the strike over and over again, fervent in their argument, yet cool and calculated as any group of Tammany politicians. Always, they returned to the same impasse:

“Don’t you see? They’re forcing us out anyhow. We have to do it
now,”
Clara insisted, rattling a sugar cube behind her teeth.

“We have to do it?” shrugged Leonora O’Reilly. “We don’t have to do anything, much less on their timetable.”

“But they’re going too far. They’re driving down the rate every day. Even the
shadchens
are getting mad.”

“If they’re cutting the rate now, they
want
us to go out, so they can have the excuse to crush us.”

“But if the rate’s too low even for the
shadchens,
who are they going to get?” Clara asked triumphantly. “Who will scab for them then? We got more girls than we ever did before, we got a strike fund—”

“How far does that get us? We want recognition for the union, not just another nickel on the rate. They’ll fight us to the death for that. You know they will.”

They all fell silent, considering such a prospect. Everyone at the table knew what a strike would be like.

“They will bring in the gangsters, and their whores, and the police will let them do what they want,” Leonora continued. “You know that. They don’t care if it’s women and children out on the line, and if you think your sex will save you from anything, think again. It will only make them worse.”

She was right, they knew: going out on strike meant giving up the last vestige of their respectability. It meant leaving themselves exposed—to the cops, and the company thugs, and the crowds of jeering, smirking men. A major strike like this meant being treated like whores, with whores. It meant they would be fair game for whatever anyone wanted to do to them, and a small but palpable current of fear ran around the table.

“At least we have the society women. They can help us,” Clara said weakly.

“Them!” Leonora O’Reilly snorted. “Listen, there’s one thing I’ve learned: if you ever let anyone do for you they will do you!”

She caught herself then, and they all shot glances over at Miss Dreier and at Mrs. Perkins, who sat perfectly composed as ever in her tricornered hat.

Mrs. Perkins, she knew, was a professional social worker. A woman from some old Yankee family up in Massachusetts, who had a college education but who had for some reason decided to come down to work in the City’s slums. She held a niche all her own in the settlement house, and no one was quite sure of what to make of her—not as rich as the real society ladies, but certainly different from the rest. She never said very much, but Esther had noticed that she listened to everything very intently, eyes glistening determinedly in her sharp, Yankee face, as if she were trying to memorize everything that was said.

They all deferred to her, and to the other ladies. Often they found the society women unbearably smug and condescending, but their power was undeniable. A few years before they had organized a boycott against those department stores that didn’t let their women clerks sit down or go to the bathroom on their shifts. The response had been stunning, the owners forced to back down within weeks.

No one knew if they could do the same thing to the factories—if they would have the interest or the staying power for a big fight. If their concern extended beyond the counter girls, right in front of them every day.

“I think,” Mrs. Perkins said in quiet, measured tones, “that you would have support among society—as far as that goes. I know you would have it from me.”

—and the rest of the table visibly relaxed, glad despite themselves to hear it. A little rustle of hope went through the working women.

“There.
We
have
to do it now!” Clara jumped in.

The argument went on for hours, finally winding down after midnight, still unresolved. The women unbent themselves slowly from their little cane chairs, wearily contemplating the fourteen-hour day ahead. The majority was leaning to a strike, but no one wanted to go out just now. The new season was starting and some money was coming in, and anyway the men who ran the union executive board hadn’t bothered to come down after all.

But if not now, when? When would it ever change?

—though secretly, Esther had to admit she was just as glad no decision had been made. She was sure she was a coward, but she was still glad she didn’t have to think about it just yet: the gangsters and their jeering whores, the policemen’s heavy wooden billy clubs. She should be braver, she knew, but what misery this life was.

“Good night, sweetest,” Clara told her when they reached the street corner. She hugged her, then kissed her once on each cheek.

“Wait—I have something for you.”

Esther pulled a small package out of her purse. She had almost forgotten, after all the nonsense about the hat, and everything else. It was not wrapped as nicely as Clara herself would do it, she knew—but she had done it up in her favorite, red paper, and tied it round with a bright yellow bow.

“Here you are,” she told her. “They’re the sonnets. I found them in the
Freie Bibliothek.”

Clara carefully opened the package. Inside was a small packet of notepaper, folded over, on which Esther had written out some of Shakespeare’s sonnets that Clara had first introduced her to. She had written them out in her best hand, going over them painstakingly, late at night—though now she blushed to see her own writing:

“Oh, but it’s fine!” Clara said, looking up at her and smiling warmly.

“I’m so glad,” she said, looking down at the pavement, grateful when, for her sake, Clara changed the subject:

“Tell me—did you get through much last night?”

Their Socialist Literary Society was working its way through
Great Expectations,
all of them now trying to puzzle out who Pip’s mysterious benefactor was as he rose through London society.

“A little. I had to get ready for the meeting. Who do
you
think it is?” Esther asked.