City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (58 page)

Mrs. Perkins had come to see him the day before, in that same triangular black hat that was so much like his mother’s. She was all business, though, stern and foreboding, and she brought one of the society women, a Miss Dreier, a veritable goddess with her fine silk dress and flashing blue eyes.

“You’ve got to help the strike,” Mrs. Perkins had told him, as flatly as ever. “That’s all there is to it. This is too much; you’ve got to do something.”

“Well, now, you know the Organization strives to be impartial in labor disputes,” he had tacked miserably. “After all, there are many disparate interests in the City for us to—”

“Tim Sullivan, that’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told in your life, and you know it,” she cut him off. “You have the police out on every corner clubbing those women—and pimps and their whores, too.”

Big Tim sucked in his breath abruptly, but she went right on, spelling out the reasons again why Tammany should support the strike as objectively and straightforwardly as any district leader.

“I know—you get money from the owners. So where are they going to take it, as long as you control all the votes? If you let the strike down here, you might as well turn fifty thousand votes over to the Socialists.”

“I don’t know, ma’am—”

“Another thing,” she said, brushing off his objections. She stood up, and Miss Dreier rose with her. “One more thing you should know. If you don’t see that this strike gets settled and call off the police, the society ladies are going to march. That’s right; they’ll be right out on the picket line, with the strikers. See if they’re not.”

And here they were, marching down Broadway, large as life. Big Tim hurried on down to City Hall, where Mr. Murphy was already waiting in the mayor’s office. The Little Little Napoleon was there, too, sitting stiffly behind his huge desk, trying to cozy back up to Mr. Murphy— though Sullivan happened to know it was far too late for that. For the time being they let him stay, since it was, after all, his office.

“Jesus, Charlie, have you seen it out there?” he said, collapsing on the mayor’s couch as soon as he came in. “They’re cuttin’ down women an’ babes-in-arms like they was known felons.”

“Yes, it is concernful,” Mr. Murphy said calmly, swaying back and forth in one of McClellan’s impeccable little Windsor chairs.

He gave no indication that anything was amiss, and it occurred to Big Tim that he sat there like the engineer of a highly volatile machine, constantly, imperturbably checking the gears and the gauges.

“They are marchin’, you know. They’re on their way.”

“Yes.”

“Marching?!” the Little Little Napoleon barked. “What are they marching for?”

“For right here. To give you a petition, I think.”

“What? That’s outrageous! Am I some common criminal, to be served their summons?” McClellan fumed. “I won’t allow it! Why haven’t the police dispersed them already?”

“Oh, only because there’s a few dozen women from the society Four Hundred marchin’ at the head of the line,” Sullivan informed him. “Or do you want yer new, progressive police force clubbin’ the wives an’ daughters of the richest men in New York?”

The Little Little Napoleon seemed as flummoxed as his old man had been during the Seven Days.

“I’ll—I’ll do something. Call out the militia, then!”

“You’ll do exactly what we tell ya,” Big Tim said blackly, fixing the mayor with a look, “if ya ever want to hold so much as an alderman’s post in this town again.”

“Why not let them present their petition?” Mr. Murphy shrugged. “That way you’ll look all the more judicious to the working press.”

“Ah, but Jay-sus, we got to do somethin’ more about this,” Big Tim insisted, shaking his head.

“Why?” Mr. Murphy asked. “Why not just let the strike run its course, and see where we are then?”

“Because it’s past all that now,” Big Tim told him, thinking again of the grimacing cop punching that young girl in the mouth. “Because if we let it go this time, they won’t forgive us.”

“Do you really think that’s true?” Murphy asked again, actually curious—the man of science, the perfect political engineer. “What are the owners gonna say if we back a settlement?”

“Why don’cha ask their wives? They’re right outside there—”

There was a tremendous noise, just beyond the graceful Georgian windows of the City Hall. An enormous throng was pushing its way down Broadway, sweeping aside the last, tentative cops, forcing them back into a thin blue line right under the mayor’s office.

“We can always get money,” Big Tim said, repeating Mrs. Perkins’s arguments. “Where’re the owners gonna go with their boodle, anyway? We got to hold on to the Organization.”

Mr. Murphy stood up and walked unhurriedly over to the window, where he peered out through the drapes at the mass of strikers and society ladies, singing and shouting up at the mayor’s office with one voice. He watched them for a little while, his cold, engineer’s eyes unblinking.

“Well, some adjustments may have to be made,” he conceded.

There was a crowd to greet them at the gates when they got out of the Tombs, a mob of ladies to press garlands of roses and little medals upon them. The Sisters of the Eagle, one of the wealthy women’s lodges, sang three choruses of the “Marseillaise” for them, and a long line of undergraduates from Barnard College—bareheaded and clad in austere white shirtwaists—gave them three long, solemn huzzahs.

They stood politely, listening to all the speeches and the tributes. Clutching their flowers, still disoriented to be back in their real clothes and out in the sunlight. Afterwards they marched uptown to a reception at the Colony Club, and a huge dance at the Hippodrome, the vast indoor circus Brinckerhoff and Bet-a-Million Gates had put up on Forty-third and Sixth, with its block-wide promenade and electrified gold-and-silver elephant heads.

They walked in to thunderous applause, the cutters and the other male workers bowing low before them. Each one was paired off at random with a partner—and then they went slowly spinning and turning around under the great vaulted ceiling—still dizzy from the prison, the women and the male cutters alike moving deliberately, conscientiously through all the steps they had learned at the dancing academies on Norfolk Street.

At the Colony Club, they sat stiffly at little round tables with gilt-edged chairs, the strikers sitting right beside Miss Morgan and Mrs. Harriman and Mrs. Belmont—the working women distinguished by the little medals that hung around their necks on red, white, and blue ribbons.

Waiters trucked out trays of chicken and carved roast beef, bowls of lobster bisque, and glasses of syrupy red and green tonics. The strikers ate hesitantly at first, afraid it might still be charity. Glancing over shyly at the rich women they were seated with, afraid to even try struggling with the salad lettuce. Then the waiters brought out the cakes—huge, splendid, chocolate layer cakes, still warm, and moist, and slathered with icing—and they lost all their inhibitions, plunging into them as soon as the plates reached them.

It was all a dream—a last-year’s lemon pie
, Esther thought, watching them. The wormy bread and raw gruel, her time in the dark room—everything from the prison was already impossibly far away. She fingered the medal that hung down between her breasts: a laurel wreath, inscribed on a shiny copper surface.

Is this how you forget?
she wondered, for she was certain that she had forgotten nothing in her life, not one of her woes.

Mrs. Perkins, noting their delight with the chocolate cakes the same way she quietly observed everything, kept the staff bringing out more and more of them while the speakers marched up to the podium. There was Miss Dreier, and Leonora O’Reilly, who cried on cue, and Mother Jones, who told them, “This is not play, this is fight”—her eyes glittering, arms outstretched like a martyr as she talked. And Clara, who let them have it, as usual, “though you might not want to hear it, about the thousands of girls out there who can’t go on any longer. They’re down an’ out at present, an’ there ain’t a bit of fire in their grates nor a piece of bread in their cupboards, while they are out on the streets fighting for dear life.”

There was audible sniffling in the room, handkerchiefs fluttering like rousted pigeons among the tables, and Mrs. Perkins returned to the podium, and asked for their attention again.

“Now I would like to turn the floor over to one of the striker women,” she said. “A regular girl, someone who has not been a leader previously, but who showed undaunted courage in facing the terrors of the workhouse. I would so like for her to come up here and talk about her experiences.”

To her shock, Esther saw that she was looking straight at her and offering her hand. She thought that it must be a mistake, that the moment she presumed to stand up and move toward her it would be discovered, and she would be left standing mortified in front of the entire room.

But no—it was her. Mrs. Perkins stayed there, holding out her hand, a small, sympathetic smile on her sharp, Yankee face, and slowly, haltingly, Esther stood up and walked to the podium. She grasped the hand—surprisingly rough, and stronger than she had expected—and let Mrs. Perkins help lift her up the step to the speaking podium. She stood there, staring down at the room full of her fellow strikers from the shops and the factories, and the society women—all of whom burst into applause.

“I never thought so many things would happen to me,” she began, her voice already faltering.

The rich, well-dressed women stared back, their eyes large and wet. The strikers looked up at her, too, but they were more interested in their great, fat pieces of chocolate cake. No more than fourteen or fifteen years old, many of them—just girls still, happily tearing through their cake and their glasses of milk. She looked out at them, and she thought of all she had been through in the prison—of the beatings, and the dark room, and their cruel violation in the warden’s office, and she could not go on—the tears streaming freely down her cheeks.

“It’s just that—” she began again, but the words would not come. She wanted to tell them all she knew. She wanted to tell them how it was, going in the black of night to a subcontractor’s shop on Division Street, or working forty hours of overtime every week at the Triangle, during the rush. She wanted to tell them how terrible the apelike, jabbering faces of the cops had been, and how frightening it was on the picket line. She wanted to tell them that all these young girls digging enthusiastically into their chocolate cake had hearts and minds, too, that they weren’t just married to their machines, but dreamed of better things, finer things. She wanted to tell them how much they—how much
she
—longed not only for food, and shelter, and better wages, but also for knowledge, for books and music, and flowers and time to do just as she pleased.

She wanted to tell them all these things, but she could not find the words. She looked over at Mrs. Perkins, her hard face suffused with understanding now, looked back out at the wealthy, weepy women, and the girls plowing through their milk and chocolate cake at the little, golden tables, and she had no words, there were no words for how she loved them, or what they had been through. There were no words for her life.

They moved together, in one slow, sinuous motion. Esther scarcely able to believe that they were here, doing this now, after so much wishing and hoping. Feeling him behind her, feeling his hands, playing over her breasts, her hips, her neck and open mouth. Feeling him with her—

She stretched, and shimmied with pleasure, a little fearful, more than a little proud that she could do such a thing. Proud that she could defy her father, defy the cops who had called her a whore, defy them all. Defied and defiled, she didn’t care anymore. She was just glad to be back out here, in the strange little elephant hotel. There would be things to settle later.

He ran his hands down her straight, soft back, over her shoulder dimples, holding on to her. Running his hands tenderly over the bruises along her thighs, her jaunty, uneven hips, her ribs—the angry strawberries everywhere she had been beaten. Gently moving together, up and down, easy as the waves on a mild day. Just glad to have hold of her, just glad to have her back, certain now that he loved her.

The woman surprised him one afternoon up in Albany, coming out of the great Romanesque pile that was the capitol. He was thinking about Mrs. Perkins’s hours bill, and he didn’t notice her until she was right beside him, laying a gloved hand demurely on his arm. She looked smaller than she did in the newspaper photos, and she was wearing a veil, but there was no mistaking her. It was the wife of Charlie Becker, currently fighting for his life in court over the murder of Beansy Rosenthal.

“Pardon me.” She had gone up to him, waiting until he was alone. A small, composed woman, modestly dressed, with a warm, sympathetic face just making the turn into middle age.

“Pardon me, Senator Sullivan, I wanted a word,” she said softly, and then how could he deny her? A sweet, sad woman like that, her weariness etched in her face. A schoolteacher, no less, who worked overtime teaching the backward children’s classes up at P.S. 90.

“The overage children have always appealed to me,” she said, smiling shyly under her veil. “You know, Charlie liked them, too. He always took a great interest in my schoolwork. Sometimes, if his hours permitted, he would come to class, and help me collect papers, or write out report cards.”

“Ah, did he, ma’am?” Big Tim had murmured like a regular idjiot while Helen Becker went on, quietly, breathlessly making her plea.

“You know, I still do all the housework. The cooking, the cleaning—that doesn’t sound like someone who’s very rich, does it, Mr. Sullivan? Certainly not someone who made a fortune on graft like they say in the papers.”