Uprising (27 page)

Sometimes, if Jane found an interesting story, she'd read it out loud for all of them. They'd been captivated for several nights by a romance tale in a
Ladies' Home Journal,
only to discover that the last page was missing.

“That's it?” Jane cried, staring in dismay at the ragged edges of the torn-out page. “That's all we get?”

“Oh, you know what was going to happen,” Bella said comfortingly. “Serena was going to marry Mr. Godfrey, and they were going to live happily ever after.” Her eyes glowed in the lamplight. “I love stories like that, don't you?”

“Maybe Serena convinced Mr. Godfrey to use part of his fortune to set up a union shirtwaist shop,” Yetta said. “And everyone bought his shirtwaists and all the evil shirtwaist factory owners who abused their workers went out of business and—”

Bella hit Yetta in the face with a pillow.

“Not now,” she said. “I'm trying to imagine how they would have described the final kiss. Maybe, ‘He turned his smoldering eyes to her and . . .'”

Yetta had pretended all along that she wasn't really
that
interested in the story, but she took the magazine from Jane and flipped through it, just to make sure that the missing page wasn't in there somewhere.

“Nobody's eyes smolder in real life,” she complained.

“Yours do when you talk about the union,” Jane pointed out.

“Really?” Yetta stood up and looked in their sliver of mirror, but it was too dark to see anything but shadows. She sat back down on the bed. “It doesn't do any good. Any time I bring up the union at work, the other girls say, Yes, and I've still got debts from the strike,' or ‘What use is it?' And there are so many new girls straight off the boat who don't even know what a union is.”

“That was us, not so long ago, and
we
went out on strike.
We
fought for the union,” Bella said.

“We lost,” Yetta said.

“Next time, you'll win,” Jane said. “People are still recovering. These things take time.”

But Yetta was already recovered. Her cough was gone. Her greatest affliction now was the restless longing that so
often threatened to overwhelm her. Sometimes, sitting at her sewing machine, the feeling of wanting to hop a train west or stand up on a table or throw a sewing machine out the window came over her so strongly that she was afraid she'd actually do it. Any one of those things, or all three in succession, one after the other.

Bella gave her friend a hug, as if she could sense Yetta's distress. Jane turned her attention to a newspaper, one only slightly stained with pickle juice.

“Maybe I can find a good story in—oh, wait! Take a look at this!” She pointed to a small story at the bottom of a page. Yetta squinted at it in the dim light.

“S-suff-rage puh-rad-de,” she began, sounding out the words.

“Very good. There's going to be a suffrage parade here in New York City, just like the ones they've had in London. . . . Oh, we should go! May twenty-first—that's Saturday!”

“Saturday,” Bella said. “Work. Remember?”

“Oh, right,” Jane said, collapsing the newspaper in her lap. “I forgot.”

Yetta sprang up from the bed and paced in the narrow space between it and the chairs.

“No, no—we should be able to do this,” she said. “It's the slow season, remember? Lots of times they send us home with no work, anyhow. So you just tell Mr. Carlotti and I'll tell Mr. Kline, we can only work a half day Saturday.”

“They'll dock our pay,” Bella said.

“They'll probably dock our pay anyway,” Yetta said. “We haven't gotten full wages in weeks.”

“They'll fire us.”

Yetta stumbled a little in her pacing. She righted herself, planted her feet firmly.

“Then we'll get another job,” she said. “Listen, it's not so much to ask, to go to a parade on a Saturday afternoon just once in our lives, to call out our support for suffrage. In Yiddish, there's a saying,
‘Beser tsu shtarbn shteyendik vi tsu le
h
n af dikni.'
It means, uh, ‘Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.' I don't know about you, but I
can't
live on my knees, always hunkered down, always worried about everything. And that's why I'm going to that parade, whether anyone else goes or not.”

She expected Bella and Jane to make some sort of joke to lighten the mood, to give themselves a way out—maybe something like, “You think we could die at this suffrage parade? Then, no thanks!”

But they both nodded solemnly.

“I'm going,” Bella said.

Yetta turned to Jane. She shrugged.

“I don't always know when Mrs. Blanck wants me to take the girls, but—I'll do my best.”

Saturday afternoon, sneaking out at lunchtime, Yetta and Bella felt like prison escapees. Mr. Kline and Mr. Carlotti had lectured them about taking their jobs seriously, about how many other girls would be happy for the work, about how they were lucky to have jobs at all, this time of year. But they never actually forbade them to go.

“We could do this anytime we wanted,” Yetta said, as the elevator zoomed down to the ground.

Bella was counting her pay for the week. It didn't take her very long.

“Not if we want to keep eating,” she said grimly.

But when they stepped out into the sunshine, she was grinning too. It was hard not to. Yetta felt so free and happy. Jane was waiting for them at the corner.

And beside her, dressed in as much lace and as many frills as a china doll, was a little girl.

“I had to bring Harriet,” Jane said, frowning apologetically.

Bella instantly bent down to Harriet's level.

“Hello, Harriet. I'm Bella. How old are you?”

“I'm this many,” Harriet said, holding up five fingers. She placed her other hand on her head. “And I'm this tall!”

While the little girl was distracted, Yetta leaned in close and whispered in Jane's ear, “Won't you get in trouble if Mrs. Blanck finds out where you're taking her?”

“Oh, no,” Jane laughed. “Mrs. Blanck wants her daughters to be modern American girls. I've convinced her that suffrage is part of that. I just don't think she'll tell her husband.”

“She should tell him to treat his workers better, too,” Yetta said.

A shadow crossed Jane's face. Yetta wasn't sure if Jane was thinking about her own parents, how her own father had hired strikebreakers and said it didn't matter if her mother knew or not. Or if Jane was thinking about how it'd been impossible, even working in the Blancks' house, to find out any information about Triangle that would help the union. Jane's sleuthing efforts had completely failed.

“Mr. Blanck wouldn't listen to anything his wife said about his business,” Jane said. “They're totally different worlds, his work and his home.” She grimaced. “He's actually
a really good father. A lot better than mine ever was.”

Yetta didn't want to think about Mr. Blanck or Jane's father today. She was actually glad when Harriet piped up self-importantly, “Millicent got to go to a birthday party, but I get to go to a parade.”

“That's right,” Jane said, patting Harriet's shoulder. “But first, I need to introduce you to my other friend. Yetta, this is Harriet. Harriet, this is Yetta.”

“I'm very pleased to meet you,” Harriet said carefully, looking to Jane for approval.

“Uh, yeah. Me, too,” Yetta said. Then, to prove that socialist, suffragist immigrants could also have manners, she added, “Jane's told us a lot about you.”

“That's Mademoiselle Michaud to her,” Jane corrected.

But Harriet was already clapping her hands, crying out, “Bella and Yetta and Jane! Bella and Yetta and Jane!”

Yetta leaned close again and whispered to Jane, “Will she do this all the way to Fifth Avenue?”

“We'll take the trolley,” Jane whispered back, “so we get there faster.”

Harriet was actually still chanting when they climbed down from the trolley, into the throngs of people milling around on the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue. But Yetta could easily tune out the little girl's singsong in all the noise of the crowd.

“Can you believe all these people want women to vote?” she marveled to Bella. “This is for us! They want us to have a voice!”

Policemen cleared the street, and then the parade began. Row after row of women dressed in white carried huge signs:
VOTES FOR WOMEN; NEW YORKERS FOR SUFFRAGE; POLITICS MAY BE DIRTY, BUT WOMEN ARE GOOD AT CLEANING UP AFTER MEN!

Between the rows of marchers, cars full of even more suffragists glided along, draped in yellow bunting and decorated with jonquils and daisies. The cars made Yetta think of the strikers' automobile parade, her own moment of glory.

“I was in a parade like this once,” Yetta told Harriet, because Jane and Bella already knew. “I rode in one of the cars.”

Harriet blinked up at her.

“You must be really portant,” she said.

“When we can vote, we'll all be important,” Jane said.

Across the street, a small group of men were jeering, “Go home and wash the dishes!” “Does your husband know where you are?” “I'd just as soon let my dog vote!” Yetta wanted to rush across the street and tell them off Why don't you wash your own dishes? Does your wife know where you are? I bet your dog could vote better than you do!

Then she noticed that there was another group on the sidelines, a group of women, holding up signs that said,
NO VOTES FOR WOMEN!; NO TO SUFFRAGE; KEEP THE FAIRER SEX ABOVE THE FRAY!
She nudged Jane and muttered, “Do those signs say what I think they say?” She was hoping that her reading skills had just failed her. “Why would any woman
not
want to vote?”

Jane winced.

“There's a whole club, the New York Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage,” she said. “I read about it in the newspaper. They say women voting would destroy family life, or just be unnecessary, because women would always
vote exactly like their husbands or fathers. But really”—she was carefully not looking at Bella or Yetta or Harriet— “they don't want their servants to have a vote. They don't want female immigrants voting.”

Yetta felt her face burning. She watched a woman passing through the crowd, handing out fliers that said suffrage now! in big print at the top. Yetta shoved her way through the crowd and grabbed the woman's wrist.

“How can I join your cause?” Yetta begged. “How can I help?”

The woman jerked back a little in surprise, but she spoke firmly as she moved on through the crowd.

“We meet the second and fourth Thursday afternoons of every month at—”

“I can't meet on a Thursday afternoon,” Yetta said. “I work. I'm a shirtwaist girl.”

The woman stopped.

“A shirtwaist girl? Were you in the strike?”

“Yes. Till the very end.”

The woman was looking at her with respect now— respect and sympathy.

“Then—here. Help me pass out these flyers,” the woman said, handing her a stack. “And next year—if we don't have the vote by then—next year, come back and we'll put you
in
the parade!”

Yetta gave out the flyers until they were all gone. Then she found her way back to her friends.

“When women have the vote, fathers will want to send their daughters to college, just like boys,” Jane was saying as the last of the parade went by.

“And girls won't feel like they can't go into banks, like they have to hand over all their money to the men in their family,” Bella said.

“And we'll vote to make work fair,” Yetta added.

Jane glanced warningly down at Harriet, clearly trying to remind Yetta that she couldn't say too much in front of the little girl.

“What do you think will happen when women can vote?” Jane asked the girl, to distract her. Harriet tilted her head to the side, considering.

“I'll get a pony for my birthday,” she said, as if “women getting to vote” was just another way of saying “wishing.” “And the pony will have wings, and I'll ride that pony right up to the sun, and the sun will give me flowers. . . .”

“It's fun to daydream, isn't it?” Bella said, smiling.

But we're not just daydreaming, telling ourselves fairy tales, playing little-girl let's-pretend,
Yetta reminded herself.
Please, God, let it someday be true! Someday we really will be able to vote. Someday Triangle will be a closed union shop. And someday I won't be so restless. Someday I'll be able to sit back and say, “Yes, everything worked out....”
Hope surged in Yetta for all those somedays, which seemed so far off. At least she knew a date for one hope: Next year, she
would
march in the suffrage parade.

J
ane leaned against the side of the Asch Building waiting for Yetta and Bella to come out after work. It was November now: The summer had melted away in a blur of trips to the beach with Millicent and Harriet, reading lessons and hot nights lying on the tenement fire escape with Yetta and Bella, ice cream cones shared three ways because they only had enough money for one. Autumn blew in with a flurry of falling leaves, and Jane had begun playing a memory game with herself: A year ago at this time, I refused to get out of bed to go watch Wilbur Wright's aeroplane.
A year ago, I hadn't even met Yetta. A year ago, Eleanor Kensington asked me if I wanted to join the picket line with the strikers....
She knew Yetta and Bella played a similar type of game, but Bella's anniversaries were about death and disappearance, and Yetta's only reminded her of disappointment.

“Y-you're Yetta's friend, aren't you?” someone stuttered nearby. Jane turned and recognized the chestnut hair: It was Charles Livingston, the law student Yetta had harassed back in the spring. “Tell Yetta I have an answer now.”