The Spirit Room (53 page)

“
No. I truly think it was outside on the street.” Izzie crossed her arms.

“
Are you sure?”

“
Yes. I’m sure. Perhaps I should go now to the Children’s Aid Society and speak with Mr. Fielding’s acquaintance. I can’t sit here any longer.” She bolted up and looked at Anna. “Perhaps we can try this evening.”

“
Maybe the planchette.”

“
All right.”

The
dang
planchette. It was all too much like the old days at the Spirit Room. This trick and that. Giving people just the tip of the iceberg, but nothing more. A grandfather with cows. Memories of a mother. How on earth was she going to find her sisters?

“
I’ll get Roland. He’ll take you over there. You can send your telegram to your husband on the way. I’m sorry, dear. I’m sure your sisters are surviving somehow. You’ll find them. I know you will.”

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THAT NIGHT, after Mrs. Fielding’s attempts at the planchette yielded nothing but more contradictions, Izzie asked to be excused and skipped dinner. She lay on the sofa in Mrs. Fielding’s study in the dark. She missed Mac. She missed his tall, warm body, his lemony smell, and the way he looked at her with his brown eyes. She missed the way he said her name. She wanted him to be here, to hold her, to help her look for her sisters. Of course with his Water-Cure Institute nearly ready to open, he couldn’t be with her, but she didn’t care about that right now. She wanted him with her in the dark.

She pulled the blanket up to her chin. What she had heard from Mr. Charles Brace at the Children’s Aid Society earlier in the day had discouraged and scared her. Children without homes usually ended up in trouble, he’d said. They slept in cellar doors or wagons or any covered spot. They started out as hucksters if they were cunning enough. Homeless children, along with children from poor homes, sold things to passersby on the streets—tea cakes, baked pears, candy, hot corn. “You’ll see them on every corner,” he’d told her.

Or they hawked things home to home—matchsticks, vegetables, scrub brushes, pins. If they got even more desperate, they’d scavenge from the docks, a bit of sugar or coffee, or things from private doorways, perhaps an umbrella, even the brass doorknob itself. Then they’d try to sell it. “That kind of thing can get them into the juvenile house of correction.”

Izzie stared at the study window glowing with streetlight. Tears rolled out of her eyes and streamed down her face. Clara and Euphora couldn’t end up in a juvenile house of correction. They just couldn’t.

“
All in all, it’s harder for girls,” Brace had said. “They’re not as free as the boys to sleep out. Even the very young girls can end up in the brothels. It’s a hard fact. I hope your sisters don’t end up that way, but it’s a hard fact, hard as nails. If they are lucky, they’ll end up in one of our municipal orphanages, even though they aren’t officially orphans. We’ve got an adoption program that sends orphanage children to farms in the Midwest. We ship them by train. I’m quite proud of that. But I’m sure you’ll find them before that possibility comes up.”

When Izzie explained that Clara and Euphora were used to working and were both industrious, he softened a bit.

“
Maybe they’ll both get work, but the city is teeming with thousands and thousands of immigrants looking for jobs. They’re pouring off those boats every day like pounding rain. Some young women piece their living together and stay in a cheap boardinghouse. If you are going looking, I’d start with the orphanages and boardinghouses. If you go to the rotten tenements, Five Points or Corlears Hook, take a man with you, and I wouldn’t worry about the brothels right away. It takes a while for good girls to make their way there.”

Izzie wiped her eyes with the corner of the blanket. That voice in the morning. What had it said? “In the gutter.” The tears started again. She cried hard until she was too weary to cry anymore. Starting tomorrow she would look everywhere there was to look, every orphanage, every boardinghouse, every doorway, every corner.

Thirty-Eight

CLARA LOOKED DOWN the twenty-two rows of women leaning over sewing machines, eleven on each side with an aisle down the middle.

“
I’ve got a waiting list of twenty-nine ahead of you that can all do the work just fine.” Mr. Stebbins crossed his arms over his barrel chest.

“
I have training. I worked with a milliner in Geneva. She taught me the machine.”

“
Doesn’t matter I’m afraid. I know you are here because of my friend, Mr. Hogarth, but it still doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t be fair if I took you ahead of the twenty-nine. I told him that plain and clear.”

A seamstress nearby sneezed. Clara’s shoulder jerked up.

Mr. Stebbins gave Clara a head-to-toe scan. “You’re not sick are you?”

She shook her head.

“
You might find outwork. Here’s a place to try.” Stebbins walked to his desk, dipped a pen into an inkbottle and scratched something out on a scrap of paper. “I’ll put you on my list, number thirty.” He opened a ledger. “What’s the name again?”

“
Clara Benton.”

He wrote her name and “Hogarth” after it about half way down a page. “I’ll tell Hogarth when your name comes up. It might be six months, a year. Maybe sooner. The girls come and go.” He handed her the scrap of paper.

Hell-fire
. Six months to a year. And this was a factory where she had an introduction. She looked up at the row of large filthy windows.

“
Thank you, sir.”

“
I’m sorry I can’t do more, Miss Benton. That’s the way it is.”

On her way back to the boardinghouse, Clara got lost. At breakfast that morning, two of the lodgers told her how to find Stebbins’s factory, but warned her not to ask strangers on the street, especially men, for directions or anything else. She could be duped and raped, they told her. They’d all heard stories recently. So when Clara became disoriented, and there were men on every block who whistled and cackled at her, she walked on and on searching for streets named with numbers. She could follow those. But for a long, wearing time, she wandered only streets named with words—Bowery, Henry, Forsyth, Eldridge, Orchard, Allen—until finally, there was First Street, then Second, then Third. When she arrived at Thirteenth Street, she explored in one direction, then the other until she found her new home.

<><><>

THE WOMEN AT THE BOARDINGHOUSE had explained all about work to Clara a number of times over breakfast. If she were employed in a factory on a regular basis, she could earn three or three and a half dollars a week, maybe even six dollars on a sewing machine, twice what she’d get for the outwork. Before Clara inquired with the piecework man from Mr. Stebbins’s scrap of paper, she wanted to try some of the other factories. She made up her own list by asking everyone at the house the factories they knew, where they had worked in the past, where they worked now, where friends or family worked.

When Sunday came, Clara went to the Hogarths to visit Euphora. She sat with her sister on a wood bench at the worktable in the middle of the kitchen. They drank warm milk and Euphora told Clara all about the Hogarths and Clara told Euphora all about Hannah and the girls and women at her lodging house. Euphora moved about the kitchen as though she’d been born there, thought Clara. Her little sister had learned well how to handle pots and stoves, vegetables, meats, flour, things Clara knew almost nothing about.

Euphora’s tiny pantry room was finished. She had a mattress and several quilts, a small chest for her personal things and a couple of hooks to hang her clothes on. A shelf held a few old books and a round blue atlas that the Hogarths had from a son who had grown and gone away. It didn’t feel like a pantry at all anymore, but a cozy nest. Even though Euphora seemed a little lonely, she was safe and that was good enough for now.

<><><>

DURING THE NEXT THREE WEEKS Clara and Hannah set out together every morning. They’d walk together in the cold, Hannah showing Clara the way to a factory address. Only one of them would go inside to inquire. They knew no one would hire both of them at once and they agreed it would be devastating if a foreman picked one over the other. They walked back and forth and uptown and down visiting any factory that hired females. They crisscrossed the Bowery time after time, watching the young men and women on parade there. It was different than Broadway, Hannah told her. “These are the young people who work in the shops and factories. They’re more ours than them on Broadway. But I want to find my husband on Broadway, not here.”

Hannah went on to describe the variety and minstrel shows and oyster shops and ice cream parlors, the balls at Tammany Hall, the dance halls, and firehouses.

“
They call the young men Bowery b’hoys with an “h” after the “b” in boy. I don’t know why, and the girls are gals,” Hannah said.

In their odd brash dress of stripes and checkers and gaudy colors—bright reds, pinks, yellows, and green with maroon—they seemed confident, these b’hoys and gals, like the world belonged to them. The gals wore trim hats, not bonnets that hid their eyes, and they strutted up and down in bands with other gals or they hung on the arm of a swaggering b’hoy. Clara felt envious. They had work, money to spend, spirited clothing, and each other.

“
Don’t you want to be one of these gals, Hannah, free and roaming, not someone’s wife? Don’t you wish that was us parading like that?”

“
It would be fun, I suppose, but not for long.”

During those first weeks of trying to find work, she and Hannah asked after bookbinding and book sewing, umbrella sewing, type rubbing, straw sewing, shirt sewing, both by machine and hand. Sometimes toward the end of the day Clara got so tired and chilled that she’d cry on her way to the next factory. Hannah would lead her by the hand to a Negro woman or a child at the street corner and coax her into buying a sweet potato or baked pear or hot-corn and while they shared it, Hannah would say hopeful things. “It’ll be the next one. I know it will.” “It just takes time.” “We can always do the outside piece work and keep each other company.”

The food and Hannah’s spirit warmed Clara. She’d dry her eyes, then trudge into another factory and ask another foreman for work. “Come back in April. Maybe I could use you for a month.” “I don’t need any more girls.” “How old are you anyway? I don’t take them under sixteen.”

Late at night, Clara would listen to the sound of Hannah weeping quietly in bed and then Clara would whisper back to her new friend the same things Hannah had said earlier. “It just takes time. It’ll be the next one.”

When it was time to pay the rent at the lodging house, Clara loaned Hannah the money for another week. Then Clara visited the man Stebbins had recommended and brought home a sack of muslin strips to make shirt cuffs. Hannah sewed with her each night by candlelight.

Every day for the next week, they visited factories. At night they made a few cents on the piecework. When they were finished with the cuffs or sleeves or collars, in the dark, before they slept, they’d take turns saying the bad names they would shout at the foremen if only they could.

“
Stinkpot.”

“
Pig.”

“
Booger.”

“
Rat.”

“
Swine.”

“
Beast.”

“
Shit.”

Then they’d giggle until Clara was so exhausted she’d miss a turn and then they’d both fall asleep. Once they discovered the name calling, Hannah didn’t cry anymore.

<><><>

ON CLARA’S FOURTH SUNDAY VISIT TO EUPHORA, she saw right away that Euphora’s face was sallow and her mouth tight. It was the same look Euphora would get when Papa was stewed to the ears and yelling at Billy.

“
What is it, Euphora? What’s wrong?” Clara stepped into the kitchen.

“
Mrs. Hogarth wants to talk to us together.”

“
What about?”

“
She wouldn’t say. Only that we had to be together. Do you think she has to let me go?”

“
I don’t know.”

Biting at a fingernail, Clara followed Euphora to the parlor.
Tarnation
. Mrs. Hogarth was going to tell them Euphora couldn’t stay there? What else could it be? What would they do now? Without a job, how could Clara take care of Euphora? How the blazes could they find another domestic situation for her sister? They didn’t know anyone to ask.

Mrs. Hogarth was sitting with quilting work by the coal fire. She held a red and blue patch between the two fingers on her left hand, and a needle and thread in her right.

“
Girls, come in and sit down.”

Euphora took a seat on a small pink sofa and sat close to her, leaning into her sister’s shoulder.

“
Clara, I understand our friend Mr. Stebbins couldn’t take you on now at the umbrella factory. I am sorry, but he tells us you are on his waiting list. Can you make do until your name comes up?”