City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (55 page)

They weren’t much better at dancing than they were at sewing, being very young, and green, and Mr. Bernstein had all he could do to contain himself. But allowances had to be made, he knew, and he forced himself to be patient, and Kristol and Podhoretz to keep their hands off the new girls.

The scab girls got an hour for lunch, and breaks for tea. And every morning, they pushed back the long heavy benches, and set up the phonograph, and even gave out little medals for the best dancers. Bernstein supposed the time didn’t really matter anyway, their work was so poor and slow, though he was certain that he could find chickens who did a better waltz.

The phonograph began to wobble, the tune suddenly uncertain, needle scratching across the tinny metal record. Podhoretz kicked at the table to get it back in groove, but the needle only skittered all the way across the record and the music went out. In its stead, they could hear the commotion outside, echoing down the canyonlike streets. The scab girls began to drift away from the dance floor, over to the windows.

“Girls, girls! All right, girls! Back to work! Don’ch you wanna see who got the medals?” Mr. Bernstein said loudly, clapping his hands.

They ignored him. All the girls now—and Kristol, and Podhoretz, and the rest of the floor supervisors, too—throwing open the windows and gazing eagerly down at the strike.

There was a crowd waiting for them. Esther could see right away this wasn’t one of the crowds of the idly curious, the often sympathetic onlookers who had gathered early on at the picket lines, before it became old hat.

They were cops, mostly, sweating freely in their long coats, and Pinkertons, hands shoved deep in their pockets, hats pulled down menacingly over their eyes. Just to one side was another group they recognized immediately: a bunch of gangsters, with their whores in tow, leering together at the women as they marched into position around the Triangle building.

When the marchers came into view, a shout went up, and they began to call out all kinds of crude insults. The cops making circles with their thumbs and forefingers, and poking their nightsticks obscenely in and out.

The women swung into a long line, in double file, slowly circumambulating the building. Clara marched defiantly up and down the pickets, exhorting the other strikers.

“Keep going, keep going—they can’t bother you so long as you keep moving,” she reassured them, glaring over at the cops as if daring them to try it.

“Sing! Sing!”

They broke into a long, solemn chorus of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” but the police and the gangsters only began to jeer at them again.

“Why don’cha go home and wash the dishes?” a man’s voice yelled out.

“The dishes were done before I left the house. Are you satisfied now?” Clara yelled back.

“Oh, what beauties! You want more, I’ll give you more, all right!”

“We’re your sisters and wives and mothers! Have some respect!” —but this only brought another chorus of catcalls and raspberries.

“If you was my wife you wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week!”

She wanted to be as brave, as bold as Clara herself, but she was not. She wanted to say a prayer, or sing along, but her mouth was too dry, and the words would not come. The faces of the cops and the gangsters seemed to her empty of any spark of humanity—like nothing so much as the grotesque, heavy-lidded heads of wolves and clowns and pigs that hung on the walls in Luna Park. But the grim faces of the women marching with her, Clara yelling her defiance, seemed no more real. As she marched around with the rest, Esther knew then that she did not truly believe in anything—in the righteousness of their cause, or the religion of her father, or anything else, anymore.

The morning she had come home, after her night at Coney Island, he had been waiting. Usually at that hour he was already at the Lodz synagogue, debating the great questions of Talmud with some of the few scholars who would still talk to him. But this day he had been waiting, sitting in a chair right out in the kitchen. Her mother beside him, wringing her hands in the kitchen towel.

“Is there any depth to which you will not debase yourself?”

But she saw that there was no ritual cut in his lapel. No sign of mourning—for she was still their servant, and she knew there was nothing she could do, nothing at all, that they would care so much about.

“Your son you declared dead over a pot of stew. But you can still take money from me.”

She did not believe in anything, anything at all, save having as much fun as she could out on Coney Island. He was right—her soul was barren, as barren as this cold, wet day, and if she could go back to that ludicrous whore’s hotel right now, with her boy, she would go, she was sure of it.

The cops made little beckoning, baby sounds through their teeth.

“Come on, honeys. Come on, sweeties, come to Daddy!”

“
I’ll
give youse a raise, all right, long as you do me a favor—”

“Ignore them! Keep marching. Sing!” Clara yelled at them.

My God
, Esther thought, watching the eager faces of the police, tapping their sticks in the palm of their hands.

My God, they really want to do it. They really want to beat us.

One of the gangsters made a gesture, and the brightly dressed whores flounced into the line, each one attaching herself to a striker. They looked like something from nature at first, like mating birds—the picketers in their respectable gray and black marching clothes, the whores in their thick makeup, red and yellow and sky-blue dresses, as bright as if they were in a dance hall. Smiling broadly, scooping up the strikers’ hands in their own arms. The strikers were thrown off stride by this approach, still wary, but confused by their friendliness—

Esther saw a prostitute attach herself to the woman in front of her, folding her hand into both of her own like an old friend. Suddenly, the picket sprung back, crying in pain, dropping her sign and clutching at her bleeding hand. The hooker laughed, holding up her hand, where she clutched a mottled piece of glass, jagged on one end and stained with blood.

All along the line, the whores poked savagely at the strikers with hidden needles and hairpins, little knives and pieces of glass—all the tricks of their trade. The strikers faltered. More signs fell to the ground, and the line began to dissolve as they pulled back from their tormentors. They were stronger than the whores; it was easy enough for them to break their holds, but now they had come to a standstill, and everything was chaos.

“Keep moving! Keep moving! Back in line!” Clara implored them. She wrenched a whore away, pushed her into the street, tried to get the line moving again. Other strikers were lashing back now, some of them even hauling off and punching at the hookers. But this was just what the police wanted:

“Lookit the horis, fighting over their corner!”

Esther had been overlooked so far in the melee. She had continued marching, stepping politely around the struggling women, feeling vaguely absurd. But now one of them was moving toward her—mouthing the same lines the rest of them were saying, sticking dutifully to the scenario that they were all whores. She wore red ribbons in her graying brown hair, a tattered red hussar’s jacket wrapped around her shoulders.

“Hey,
girlchik
, this is my corner,” she said wearily, the voice familiar—and Esther, bracing herself for the assault, looked closely and recognized the woman his brother had once brought around.

“I know you,” she said—and to her surprise the woman stopped where she was.

“I know you. Your name is Sadie. It’s Sadie,
isn’t it
?”

This could only mean that her brother must be here, in that pack of jeering, smirking creatures, baiting them with the foulest insults she had ever heard.

“Listen—” The woman was struggling to say something more, holding up one hand as if to ward off a blow herself.

So this is what she is come to
—looking so tired, so wrung out and patched together. That her brother should do such a thing—

But where was he? Where was he?
She stood on her toes, looking over the crowd.

“All right, that does it!” a huge, moustachioed sergeant at the front of the police confirmed exultantly. “Let’s clear
all
these whores off the street, boys!”

The police charged, gleefully whooping and waving their clubs, smashing at everyone around them, knocking down whores and strikers alike with their sticks until some of the pimps actually felt obliged to run in and rescue the merchandise.

“Oh, come to Papa!”

“Get ’em, get ’em,
get ’em! Filthy
whores!”

Ahead of her, Esther saw the big sergeant grab a small young striker around the waist and lift her up, pinioning her against him, then rubbing her repeatedly up and down his front like a rag. Lazar’s woman was caught now between the police and the strikers—still trying to say something—the cops jostling her as they charged into the line, knocking her off balance.

“Come on, you sluts, we’ll give you work!”

“This is not your job, this is not your job!” Clara kept yelling at the cops. One of them charged right up to her, clubbing eagerly at her head. She deflected his blows only with her arms and the high, wide hat she was wearing.

“Tell us
our
job! Dirty
whore
!”

“The law! The law! You’re supposed to uphold the
law
!”

Clara backed up, squaring off, and pointed left and right at their badges.

“I see you! Number 457! Pendergast! I see you! 306! Nash!”

Another cop charged at her, and gave her a thwack with his club so hard on her left side that it knocked her down. She rolled over quickly, though, and got back up on her feet, dodging away as he tried to kick at her.

A blue coat suddenly loomed up in front of Esther, its shiny brass buttons right in her face.

They got all dressed up for this
, she thought idly, noticing the shine on the brass, his name, kaehny, on the little silver plate.

He grasped both her arms and kissed her, right on the mouth, his breath hot and rancid with the smell of his chewing tobacco. He grinned at her, then pulled her to him, nearly folding her in half as he tried to kiss her again. She bit back hard at his lips, forcing him off—and he stepped back and took a full swing at her head with his club. She was only just able to get her arm up, partially deflecting the blow.

“Cut me, will ya, ya
gawd-damned
whore!”

She staggered away, her head ringing, the pain pulsing in her upper left arm. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him coming after her, lifting his nightstick, and she tried to duck, tried to cover her head again although she could barely get her arms up.

“Try me on, you
yok
!”

Kaehny the cop howled in pain, reaching futilely around, dancing up on his toes. Clara was behind him now, plunging a long hat pin right through his thick winter-duty coat, into his backside. She held it there, laughing openly at him as he swatted desperately, comically behind himself with his club.

“Yah, how’s that for a prick,
chachem
?”

“Devil! I’ll teach ya—”

Kaehny swung from the hips at Clara, but she just moved out of the way—the swing so hard the cop’s hat fell off. Esther thought he looked suddenly so much younger, so much less sinister—his long, homely freckled face and his red stringy hair uncovered. Her only concern was for Clara, though, and she gave the cop a good, swift kick in the back of his knee, folding his leg under him and sending him sprawling into the gutter.

“That’s it! Fight, fight, you might as well!” Clara called out wildly, cheerfully, pulling Esse back toward the building. “They’re going to give it to you anyway, you might as well get something back from the bastards!”

Everything was frenzied now, nightsticks and blue elbows and fists flying. The sidewalk was littered with huge, flattened hats, lying out on the pavement like great dead moths. One by one, the strikers were being clubbed to the ground, dragged off to the waiting Black Maria the cops had pulled up. The few women who were still up were kicking and punching out ferociously at the whores, and the cops, and the gangsters.

“Come along, you goddamned tramps!”

The big sergeant came at them. His hat was gone, too, dark hair slicked down miserably with sweat on his forehead. All the fun was out of him now. He was huffing and puffing strenuously, and there was nothing in his eyes but low, grim menace.

“You have no right to arrest us! You have no right to arrest
any
of us!” Clara shouted at him—for what new, invisible tribunal, Esther couldn’t guess. She put her hand on Clara’s forearm, steadying herself, waiting.

The sergeant started for them, one hand gripping his club until his knuckles whitened. He raised it over his head—and Sadie, her brother’s woman, came up suddenly at his side, and plunged the sharpened comb she carried into the cop’s neck. He gasped in pain, and swung around, chasing after her.

There were too few strikers left by now, though, and too many cops. Three more officers tripped Sadie up, clubbed her to the ground and hauled her off. Esther felt another ringing blow to the back of her head. They were all around her now, and the next thing she knew she was pitching forward on the sidewalk. Two more cops grabbed her arms before she could rise, scraping her along the ground before they picked her up and chucked her into the back of the paddy wagon.

“Here, here—you all right?”

Some of the younger girls in the wagon, mostly Italians, were trying to help her, but she could see that they were badly hurt themselves—most of them bleeding from the mouth, their noses and teeth smashed, one girl’s arm hanging limply.

“I’m all right—it’s not so bad—”

She lay where she had been thrown—staring out the back of the wagon where she could see Clara, still backed up against the building, all alone now.

“It’s not fair! It’s not fair!” she was yelling, almost triumphantly, as if she had finally proven her point.