Uprising (31 page)

“Where is Mr. Blanck?” Jane asked.

“Oh, he was just down on the ninth floor—no, wait, back
in the storeroom? I'm sorry, I'd look for him myself, but—” The harried secretary gestured at the papers strewn across her desk, the bill poking out from her typewriter.

A contraption beside the typewriter buzzed, and Miss Mary looked over at it expectantly.

“What's that?” Harriet whispered.

“Oh, it's the new telautograph,” Miss Mary said. “‘The latest in business machinery,' is how it's advertised. Looks like there's a message coming from the eighth floor. They write something on a pad of paper downstairs, and this pen is supposed to write the same thing on this pad right here.”

“Like magic,” Harriet breathed.

The pen didn't move.

“It'd be magic if it ever worked right,” Miss Mary snorted. “Probably isn't anything anyhow, just the girls downstairs playing with it on their way out the door.”

Miss Mary turned back to her typing, and Jane shooed the girls toward Mr. Blanck's office.

“I want to go see the showroom!” Harriet said, skipping down the hall. “Madam'selle Michaud, you'll love it! You can see all the latest fashions before Paris!”

“That's because even Paris doesn't know as much about fashion as our papa,” Millicent said, agreeing with her younger sister for once.

“Some other time,” Jane said. “Miss Mary said to wait in his office, remember?”

They turned in at a doorway, but the sign on the door said
ISAAC HARRIS, not MAX BLANCK.

“Uncle Isaac!” Harriet called.

A man behind a desk waved, but there was another man
with him, a dapper-looking gentleman holding up samples of delicate embroidery. Jane flashed an apologetic look at Mr. Harris and pulled the girls away.

“Look, you can see into the pressing department from here,” Harriet said, pointing past a break in the wall into a vast open space, where rows and rows of weary-looking workers stood over ironing boards. Each one of the irons was connected to the ceiling by an odd array of tubes.

“Is Papa afraid those workers are going to steal his irons?” Harriet asked. “Is that why the irons are tied up?”

Jane didn't have the slightest idea, so she was glad that Millicent answered first.

“No, silly. The gas comes down those tubes and heats the irons,” Millicent said. “Papa says we must never ever go in there, because one of those irons could blister our skin in an instant.”

And does he care at all about the workers operating the irons?
Jane wondered bitterly.
Some of them look no older than Millicent!

“Quick, now,” she told the girls. “Into the office. Wait right there.”

She was infected suddenly with some of Miss Mary's franticness, or maybe she was just tired of hearing the admiring tone in the girls' voices every time they mentioned their papa. Or maybe it was the sight of the haggard workers hunched over their irons, girls who looked entirely too young, who would probably look entirely too old after just a year or two on the job. Regardless, Jane was ready to be done working for the day, ready to be out in the fresh air, arm in arm with Bella and Yetta. She was pretty sure that
she and Bella had finally convinced Yetta to go with them to visit Rahel and Rahel's new baby. It would probably be a touching family reunion.

Yes, Yetta will be so much happier if she'll just forgive her sister for getting married,
Jane thought.
My father and I, on the other hand. . .

She hadn't forgotten her promise to Mr. Corrigan to write her father a letter. She'd written him many, many letters, actually—she'd just torn them all up.

What is there to say?

Jane pulled the door shut on Millicent and Harriet, catching barely a glimpse of Mr. Blanck's imposing mahogany desk, of the lovely arched windows behind the desk. Harriet was scrambling into the huge leather chair.

“Harriet! A young lady would never put her feet up on the desk!” she heard Millicent cry out, in scandalized horror.

Jane decided to let Millicent wage that battle on her own. Secretly, she was thinking,
Oh, Harriet, maybe you should go on being the kind of girl who puts her feet on desks. Better that, than hiding under them . . .

She scurried down the hall, back to the double elevator doors. She decided to look for Mr. Blanck on the ninth floor first. She knew that was where Bella worked, and it'd be good if she could warn Bella that she'd be a few minutes late getting out to the street, especially if it took her a long time to find Mr. Blanck.

Passing Miss Mary's desk, Jane was surprised to notice that the woman had vanished, leaving the telephone receiver hanging off the hook.

That's odd. She seemed like such a conscientious sort.. ..

A different elevator operator came up this time, a swarthily handsome Italian man.

If Bella's precious Pietro looks anything like that, no wonder she can't forget him!
Jane thought. Then she had to hide her face so he didn't see her giggling at her own wickedness.

The elevator buzzed annoyingly. Again and again and again.

“Eighth floor's going crazy,” the elevator operator growled. He scowled at the panel of lights that kept flashing at him as he shut the door behind Jane and the elevator began its descent. “Hold on a minute! I'm coming! I'm coming!”

“They've probably all got spring fever,” Jane said. “And it's Saturday.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the operator grumbled, letting her out on the ninth floor. “But do they gotta take it out on me?”

The ninth floor was not what Jane expected. After the cleanliness and elegance of the tenth floor, she wasn't prepared for this dim, dirty space with the tables and the machines and the girls packed in so tightly together. The room was huge, but the tables stretched from one side of the building to the other. By the windows, there wasn't even space to walk around the tables. And shirtwaists and shirtwaist parts were piled everywhere, mountains of fabric by each machine.

No wonder Bella felt so overwhelmed, coming here from her tiny little village in Italy,
Jane thought.

Jane herself felt a little overwhelmed.

“Excuse me. Do you know where I could find Mr. Blanck or Bella Rossetti?” she asked the girl at the nearest sewing machine.

The girl looked up blankly, and said something that might have been “I don't speak English” in some other language. Just then a bell sounded, and the machines stopped and hundreds of girls sprang up from their machines all at once. It spooked Jane a little, the darkness of the room and the foreign jabbering and the girls moving like machines, themselves. But then one of the girls stepping out of the cloakroom began to sing, “Ev'ry little movement has a meaning of its own”—one of those popular songs that you heard everywhere, nowadays. Some of the other girls joined in, and they all seemed so light-hearted suddenly. Saturday afternoon and the sun was shining and work was over; these girls looked happier than anyone Jane had ever seen at a formal ball.

Then, two tables away, Jane spotted Bella heading down the aisle between the tables and laughing and talking to the girls around her.

“Jane! What are you doing here?” Bella shouted over to her.

“Looking for you and Mr. Blanck,” Jane said.

“Well, we wouldn't be together!” Bella called back merrily.

Jane worked her way through the crowd toward her friend. She explained about Millicent and Harriet and the shopping, and how long it would take her to get down to the sidewalk. Then Bella said, “Oh, wait, you have to meet my friends—this is Annie and Dora and Josie and Essie and Ida. And come here—” She pulled her back down the aisle between the tables. “This is my boss, Signor Carlotti. This is my friend, Jane Wellington, Signor Carlotti, and she knows proper Italian
and
proper English.”

“Hello,” Signor Carlotti said.

“I am a factory inspector,” Jane said, suddenly inspired to lie. “If I were to interview the girls in this factory, would they tell me that you treat them with respect? Are you fair to all your workers?”

At the first word out of her mouth, Signor Carlotti's face changed—first, to awe at her upper-class accent, then to fear.

“Oh, er—yes! Yes! Of course!” Signor Carlotti exclaimed.

It was all Jane and Bella could do, not to double over giggling as they walked away.

“Maybe he really will change how he treats you, Monday morning!” Jane whispered.

“Oh, do you think so?” Bella asked wistfully.

Across the room, strangely, Jane heard Yetta's voice now. She couldn't make out the words, but Yetta seemed to be calling out in great excitement, from the midst of the crowd of girls getting ready to leave. Maybe she was talking them into another strike. Maybe this one would work-maybe Yetta would get her dearest wish.

“Doesn't Yetta work on the eighth floor?” Jane asked.

Before Bella could answer, screams came suddenly from the back of the room. Screams—and a great burst of light.

B
ella couldn't tell what had happened. It was just like her first day of work, when everyone else was yelling and running and knocking over baskets and trampling shirtwaists they didn't bother to stop and pick up. And, for a moment, just like on that first day, Bella couldn't understand the words everyone else kept saying. The English part of her brain shut off, the Yiddish words in her brain evaporated, even the Italian she heard around her sounded garbled and foreign.

Then she smelled smoke, and the words made sense.

“Fire!”

“S'brent!”

“Fuoco!”

Jane clutched her shoulders.

“Where do we go? What do we do?” Jane asked. “We always had fire drills at school—where have they told you to go in the event of a fire?”

Bella didn't know what a fire drill was. People were crowded in all around her, shoving and pushing from behind, blocking the way in front of her. The tables on either side of the aisle seemed to be closing in on her. She was penned in, just like a goat or a pig.

No better than an animal,
Bella thought, and somehow this seemed all of piece with not being able to read and wanting only food and Signor Carlotti spitting on her and Signor Luciano cheating her.
I bet back home your family slept with goats and chickens in the house,
Signora Luciano had sneered at her once, and Bella hadn't even understood that that was an insult. But now she'd seen how other people lived; she'd seen what Jane and Yetta expected out of life. She refused to think of herself as a hog in a pen waiting to be slaughtered.

“This way!” she said, grabbing Jane's hand and scrambling up on top of the nearest table.

From there, she could see the fire. It was blowing in the back window, one huge ball of flame rolling across the examining tables stacked with shirtwaists. The flames kept dividing, devouring stack after stack of shirtwaists, racing each other down the tables.

Where are they trying to get to?
Bella wondered.

The first flame leaped from the examining table to the first row of sewing tables.

“It's coming toward us!” Jane screamed behind her. “Where do we go?”

Bella looked around frantically. Girls were packed in around the doors and elevators. Only a handful seemed to remember that there was another way out.

“The fire escape!” Bella screamed back, grateful for that day so long ago, before the strike, when she'd actually seen where the fire escape was.

The aisles were still crowded. Bella leaped from one table to the next, and somehow Jane managed to follow. Bella leaped again, suddenly surefooted. Except for the smoke burning her eyes and throat, she could have been back in the
mountains near Calia, jumping from rock to rock.

“I've got to—make sure—Harriet and Millicent—are-all—right,” Jane panted behind her, as they cleared another table. She began coughing, choking on the smoke.

Bella bent down and snatched up a pile of shirtwaist sleeves. She held two over her mouth and handed the others to Jane.

“Here. So you can breathe.”

They kept racing across the tables. And it really was a race, because the flames were speeding toward the fire escape window too. Through the smoke, Bella could barely make out the progress of the fire.
The flames are going to get there first-no, we are!—no, look how fast the fire's moving . . .

They reached the end of the tables and jumped down to the floor. The flames were reaching for Bella's skirt, so she lifted it up as she ran for the fire escape. She had one leg out the window, balanced on the metal railing, when Jane grabbed for her arm.

“Wait—is that safe?” Jane asked.

She'd actually stopped to peer down at the rickety stairs, at the flames shooting out the eighth-floor window, at the eighth-floor shutters that seemed to be blocking the path of all the other girls already easing their way down.

“Safe?” Bella repeated numbly. Anything seemed safer than where they were now. But she pulled back a little, reconsidering. She shifted her weight back from the foot that was on the fire escape to the knee perched on the windowsill. And in that moment, the fire escape just . . . fell away.

“Madonna mia!”
Bella cried. Jane grabbed her, pulling her back in through the window. “The other girls—”

Jane shook her head, maybe meaning,
Don't ask,
maybe meaning,
I saw it all, them falling I can't even begin to tell you how
awful it was. . . .
Bella tried to remember who'd been ahead of her on the fire escape—Dora? Essie? Ida? All of them? The boot of the girl immediately in front of Bella had had a fancy silver buckle, the kind of thing a girl would have been proud of, the kind of thing she would have gone around showing off, making sure her skirt flounced up to display it as much as possible. Had Bella seen that buckle before?