The Daring Ladies of Lowell (4 page)

“I’d rather surprise them by learning everything I can and moving up in the world.”

“Alice, don’t tell me you’re shrinking back like some little mouse,” Lovey said.

Alice shook her head emphatically. “My mother taught me to take risks and be brave when it
counted,
not just to play.”

She regretted her words instantly when she saw the expression on Lovey’s face.

“My mother—,” Lovey began, looking a bit lost. She stopped.

“Maybe we’re both trying to be brave but in different ways,” Alice amended.

“I’m sorry for drawing you in like that,” Lovey said slowly. “It matters to me that you like me. Please forgive me.”

They stood awkwardly in the crowded room, hovering at some kind of crossroads. Lovey clasped her hands in front of her so tightly, the tips of her fingers were white.

“I’m being self-righteous,” Alice said finally. “I’m sorry, too.”

The look of relief on Lovey’s face held no artifice. “Thank you,” she said.

Alice held up a small green passbook, unable to contain her pride. “See this?” she said. “I just deposited my pay, and I will add a dollar every week. My father
will
get out of debt, and I
will
be independent.”

“I’m happy for you,” Lovey said. “I’ve never had the discipline myself. But—oh dear, I hope you saved a little for shopping in the company store.” Her usual teasing mode was back again.

“Maybe,” Alice said cautiously. “Will I be able to buy something worthwhile for a dollar?”

“Come with me,” Lovey replied, breaking into a grin. “I will be your guide.”

T
he company store was dazzling. Alice walked the aisles, amazed at the array of velvet bonnets, colorful shawls. She stared a long time at a showcase of bracelets adorned with glittering chips of colored glass, then watched as the other girls tried things on, preening and laughing in front of oval gilt-edged mirrors. Lovey was admiring a bangle of gold and silver on her wrist, her eyes dancing.

Then Mary-o was twirling on her toes in front of them. “Isn’t this beautiful?” she said. She had donned one of the scarves, a beautiful piece, made of light silk shimmering with many shades of blue. “When I went home the first time, all the neighbors sniffed and held up their noses,” she confided. “I was a factory girl, not genteel enough for them, nobody important. But now they see me as a grand city lady, coming home with new fashions and ideas. Now I am somebody,” she finished proudly, twirling again in the beautiful shawl.

“She will buy the shawl,” Lovey murmured. “And then complain all week that she has no money.”

Guiltily, Alice stared at an array of splendid bonnets and fingered the dollar in her pocket. She reached out, lifting one from its stand, holding it aloft. What gave it that shape—was it wired buckram? Yes. It had an arched crown and sloping sides that formed a halo over a woman’s face. The outer covering looked like tan silk, with edging strips of brown velvet. The bonnet was topped with a sheer cream-colored bow that matched the ties for under the chin. Alice caught her breath. She had never seen anything like this.

“It’s muslin, of course,” Mary-o said. “But it looks a little like silk, no one except you will ever know. Here, try it on.”

The girls watched silently as Alice put on the hat and Mary-o tied the strings in an artful bow. “Look at yourself in the glass,” she said.

Alice stared; she was not used to seeing her own reflection. She hardly registered her wide-spaced deep-blue eyes; her precise, delicate features. She noted only that her smile was one of startled pleasure; she was looking at the bonnet.

“It’s the most splendid thing I’ve ever seen,” breathed Mary-o.

Lovey turned to the salesclerk behind the counter. “How much for this hat?” she asked.

“It’s a copy of a very expensive one that is the latest fashion,” the clerk replied. “The buckram on this one isn’t as sturdy, of course. But it is a great bargain.”

“How much?” Alice repeated.

“Fifty cents.”

Her hand went into her pocket. Would there ever again be a moment quite like this? Out came the dollar, which she flattened smooth onto the display case.

“Then I shall buy it,” she said in a firm voice.

“I have no box; you’ll have to wear it home. And mind the weather, any rain or snow will ruin it.”

“I will quite possibly never take it off.”

Lovey laughed that full rich laugh again, enough to buoy them all as they left the store and headed back to the boardinghouse.

A
n errant puff of wind caught them halfway home, swirling under the brim of Alice’s hat, tugging it enough to loosen the ties and blow it aloft. She snatched for it in vain. “No!” she cried, horrified. The bonnet was heading for a brown puddle of mud; it was gone. She couldn’t bear it and closed her eyes.

“Ma’am?” A reedy, hesitant voice.

Alice’s eyes shot open. A tall, gaunt man with long limbs and thinning white hair in a coat with sleeves that exposed bony wrists was standing next to the puddle, her hat safely in his hand.

“Thank you,” she said gratefully. He seemed in a hurry; he mumbled something, handed her the hat, and started to move on.

“Hello there, Dr. Stanhope,” Lovey said breezily. “You certainly came along at the right time.”

“Yes, Miss…” He seemed at a loss for words, glancing from one girl to another.

“Cornell. Don’t you remember us? You gave us all those nasty smallpox injections a few weeks ago.”

“Indeed. Good day,” he said firmly, nodding his head and walking quickly away, leaning on a cane. He walked in something of a jerky fashion, like a marionette on strings. Perhaps it was because of the cane, or perhaps he was just conscious of the bemused stares following him.

“He’s a strange one,” Lovey said. “Not exactly crusty, but as reserved as a stone.”

“Who is he?” Alice asked.

“Benjamin Stanhope, the company doctor. How he ever got this job, I don’t know. Taking care of hundreds of women? He can’t stand to connect with anybody. I’ll wager he’s never lifted the skirts of a female patient to see what goes on past her britches, that’s what I think.”

Delia tittered. “Lovey, how shocking of you. Well, he’s all we’ve got. He gives us pills, anyhow. And he saved Alice’s hat; that speaks well for him. Let’s get home, and, Alice, tie those strings tighter this time.”

The winter sun faded quickly as they trudged on through the town, down a cobblestone road, past a row of neat houses built especially for the mill agents. How warm and cozy they looked, with lights glowing inside. Alice spied a woman through one window, reading under an astral lamp. She looked content, calm, without worry. Someday that will be me, she promised herself silently. Someday. She held tight to the ties of her bonnet, now knotted firmly under her chin, as she climbed the stairs of the boardinghouse. Her elegant hat would not escape again.

A
lice heard it first in her dreams. Coughing. Dry, tired coughing, the deep kind that leaves one’s chest heavy and sore. She didn’t want to be pulled from sleep. Weeks now of working at the mill had taught her to jealously guard her rest. But the coughing pulled her awake. She lay, stiff, listening. Weary heaves, smothered, as if into a pillow.

Then a stirring; Alice squinted. Lovey was standing, wraithlike in her white nightgown, holding Tilda’s head up with one hand, a cup of water in the other. Tilda moaned in her half sleep as Lovey whispered something to her. She took a sip, then fell back onto her pillow.

“Is she sick?” Alice whispered over slumbering Jane’s form as Lovey crawled back into her bed.

“Probably, but she won’t admit it.”

“She should go to the doctor.”

“She can’t do that; he’ll tell the owners.”

“Why?”

Lovey pulled herself up onto one elbow, her voice patient. “You know they don’t want sick girls here; it makes them look bad. The doctor has to report right away when it happens. We’re supposed to be the young, healthy workers of modern industry, remember? She’d be sacked immediately.”

“That’s outrageous, they owe us decency.”

Lovey sighed. “You’re beginning to sound like me.”

T
ilda was determinedly bright, though pale, the next morning as the girls took turns washing up, filling pitcher after pitcher with water at the basin. Sunday meant leisurely scrubbing. It meant good manners; lowered voices; stockings without holes. Sunday was church. The sermon at Saint Anne’s usually set everybody dozing.

Jane was standing last in line for the water basin, her thin hands clasped tight. “None of you take worshipping the Lord seriously enough,” she declared.

“Mainly me, of course,” Lovey said.

“Yes, mainly you. And I’m suspecting that you’ll be searching the pews to see if Jonathan Fiske is down from Boston. Am I right?” Her voice turned disapproving. “You flirt with him every chance you get; we’ve seen you. Don’t you have any sense of decorum?”

“Decorum? Janie, you think that bothers me? I’m announcing right now, I’m going to disappear for an hour or so today, and don’t any of you tell,” Lovey replied. She winked to the others, as if it were the most ordinary plan in the world.

“That’s much too daring,” Delia breathed, a look of concern on her face as she tried to dry Ellie’s newly washed hair with a damp towel.

“You’ll come to a bad end,” mumbled Jane. “And if you’re the one who brought crackers in here last night, you should clean them up, or we’ll have mice.”

“Oh, leave me be,” Lovey said impatiently. “There’s little enough fun in our lives.” She grabbed a wet washcloth from the soapy water and hung it on the clothesline strung across that corner of the room. “Anyway, I’m getting some religion. I’m going to the Methodist camp meeting with Mary-o tomorrow night; anyone want to come?”

“Again?” blurted Jane. The others were silent.

Lovey laughed. “Last time, I assure you. I just want to flirt with the preacher. At least he won’t be warning of fire and brimstone.”

“Those revivalists make cheap promises.” Jane was standing her ground.

“They talk about glory; your God is all about hell. Plus, they’re more entertaining.”

The silence grew uneasy, broken only when Lovey shrugged and sauntered out, heading for the dining room.

“H
ow do you feel?” Alice asked as quietly as she could of Tilda at breakfast.

Tilda sat across from her, spooning in mush as if the utensil weighed ten pounds. “Much better, thank you,” she said. But she rested the spoon on the lip of the bowl and seemed at a loss for what to do next.

“You should try to eat more,” Alice began, and stopped. Vacant, empty words to someone as exhausted looking as Tilda.

Dutifully, Tilda picked up the spoon and plunged it into the mush. “Some good news for you,” she said, her lips widening into a bright smile. “Coming tomorrow, I’m giving you more looms. You’ve become quite fast, and you should be proud.”

Before Alice could respond, Mrs. Holloway broke in. “You’ll need to wait until Tuesday,” she said as she put a platter of bacon on the table. “Alice has to get one of those smallpox injections tomorrow morning.”

“Aren’t you lucky,” Lovey teased. “You get to pay a visit to the dashing Dr. Stanhope. Remember—he won’t look directly at you, so be sure he aims right and gives you the shot in your arm and not somewhere embarrassing.”

Tilda started to giggle, triggering a coughing fit. She pushed back from the table and hurried to the front door, banging it shut behind her.

No one else moved. Not quite knowing why, Alice pushed her chair back against the rough floorboards and followed.

Half doubled over, holding on to the ice-covered railing, Tilda was coughing so deeply it sounded as if her insides were being wrenched apart.

“I’m all right,” she gasped. “I just have to get it out.”

“Get what out?”

“The cotton.”

“The
what
?”

Tilda’s hand went to her mouth. A second later she slowly spread her fingers wide, staring at its contents. A white ball.

“You are coughing up cotton?” Alice asked. Cotton. The fiber the mill girls spun, carded, wove into wonderful patterns and weaves. The magical source of their emancipation from the farm.

“We all do, sooner or later,” Tilda said calmly. She tossed the cotton ball into the bushes and turned back into the house, leaving Alice speechless, shivering on the porch.

T
he doctor’s surgery was housed in a small building with closed shutters off the main road, on the edge of town. Alice stepped through the front door Monday morning into a vacant, silent room permeated with a faint, acrid smell. She had never had one of these vaccinations, and wasn’t sure she wanted it, but had been told there was no choice. So that was that. She would concentrate on other things to ask the doctor.

A door creaked open. The same strangely constructed man who had rescued her hat stood staring at her from behind large spectacles, looking alarmed.

“May I inquire as to what you want?” he asked, not unkindly.

“I’m told I must have a smallpox vaccination,” she said.

“Well, indeed.” He seemed uncertain what to do next. The white doctor’s jacket hanging on his frame was too immaculately clean, and Alice wondered how many people actually came to see this strange man. “Come in.” He gestured toward the door, fixing his gaze on the far wall of the sparsely furnished room as she entered. “It will only take a moment.”

S
he winced as the needle went in, her heart pounding. Such a strange way to be kept free of disease. “It is safe, isn’t it?” she asked timidly as Benjamin Stanhope withdrew the needle from her arm.

He gave her a hint of a smile. “Everybody asks that, right after the injection,” he said. “But yes, it is. It saves many lives, and we’re fortunate to have it.” His voice had become less jerky.

“What is in it?” she said, staring at her arm.

“It’s miraculous, really. It’s material taken from a cowpox lesion. A little bit of it gives immunity. All the work of a brilliant man, Edward Jenner, about forty years ago—”

“Could I ask you about something else?”

A flicker of alarm in his eyes. She suddenly had the crazy idea of saying, Nothing to do with what is under my skirt. Lovey would have said it in an instant, and she would have gotten away with it, too.

“It’s the air in the mill,” Alice put forward instead.

“The air in the mill?”

“Yes. You know, the quality of it.” Surely she wasn’t telling him something new.

“Well, yes. It does leave something to be desired,” he said. His voice sounded as if it needed oiling.

“One of the girls in the boardinghouse coughed up cotton yesterday.” She waited, searching his face for some shock.

But Dr. Stanhope’s expression held steady, barely changing. “Yes,” he said.

“You aren’t surprised?”

“It happens every now and then.”

“So what can be done about it? What will happen?”

He began dismantling his injection equipment, wiping the needle with a cloth and putting it back into a narrow leather box resting on a table. “Most will be fine,” he said. “You are a young and healthy group of women.”

“And the others?”

“Lung problems, perhaps.” He snapped the leather case closed, stood, and replaced it on a shelf above the table, his back to Alice.

“Is it because of the bad air?” Pulling responses from this man was getting frustrating. She rubbed her arm, which was getting sore.

“All of you there are breathing in lint, especially the girls who suck thread through the eye of the shuttles that feed the thread into the looms. I understand they do it to get the job done faster.”

Alice remembered watching Tilda performing exactly this maneuver, lauding its efficiency. She thought of her own scratchy throat in the steaming hot room where she worked, the constant tickle and the constant wish that she could open a window. And she remembered something. “The girls were joking last week about something they called the kiss of death. Is that—”

“Yes, that’s what they call it.”

She caught her breath. “Does that describe it correctly?”

Reluctantly, he turned to face her. “I call it one of the hazards of mill work,” he said.

“Doctor—wouldn’t it be the right thing to tell the mill owners how dangerous it is?”

“Miss…Miss—”

“Barrow.”

“Miss Barrow, any health alarm could deprive the girls of their jobs. In this time of economic want? You would want me to do this?”

His indignation sounded practiced, almost as if he were reading from some handbook. This wasn’t hard to decipher—the man was afraid of losing his own job. He worked for the mill owners, same as she did, and Tilda, and all the others. “I wish you felt you could,” she said.

Wordlessly he unbuttoned his crisp white coat and hung it on a hook on the back of the surgery door, smoothing out the very few wrinkles marring its spotless surface. Underneath he wore the same coat exposing his knobby wrists that Alice recognized from when he had saved her hat.