Blythewood

An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

I HEARD THE bells that morning as I was entering Washington Square Park. I stopped just past the arch and looked south
to see if the sound might be a streetcar but I didn’t see one. Then
I looked north, through the arch and up Fifth Avenue, listening
for the bells of Grace Church playing the quarter hour—but it
wasn’t the tune they played. And if the bells weren’t from Grace
Church or a streetcar, that meant they were
my
bells, the ones I
heard inside my head, the ones I’d been hearing for the last six
months whenever something bad was going to happen.

I felt a tingling on the back of my neck and knew there was
someone behind me. I whirled around to find Tillie Kupermann’s laughing face, her fresh-scrubbed cheeks rosy in the
cold winter sunlight, her red curls already escaping from her
Gibson Girl pouf. With her starched white shirtwaist tucked
neatly into her slim dark skirt, you might have taken Tillie for a
Gibson Girl, until you noticed the darning stitches on her collar or that instead of a tennis racket or a golf club she was carrying a tin lunch pail.

“Wrong shoulder,” she chirped, slipping her arm in mine.
“Everyone knows the devil sits on your left shoulder. And besides, I know you, Avaline Hall. You’re on the side of the angels.”

I laughed at that and let myself be led by Tillie through the
park, past a group of young men—law students, I thought, from
the books under their arms and the rumpled look of their tweed
coats and trousers, on their way to the law library next to our
building. One doffed his hat, revealing hair slicked back with a
quantity of brilliantine pomade, and called out to Tillie as we
passed by:

“I enjoyed your speech last night at the union hall, Miss Kupermann. You’ve converted me to your cause.”
Tillie’s mouth quirked into a smile. I tightened my grip on
her arm and tried to keep her walking, but she swirled around
to face the men, her skirts swishing above her ankle-high boots
to reveal a provocative glimpse of red stocking. “So the next
time we strike, you’ll be on the picket line with us?” she asked
with a brazen smile.
The pomaded young man clutched his hat to his breast.
“On the picket lines, in the Jefferson Market courts, to the very
depths of the Tombs themselves, I vow to defend your honor,
m’lady.”
Tillie tilted her head back, her slim throat gleaming white
in the morning sun. “I don’t need anyone to
defend
me, sir. But
if
you
are ever in a scrape don’t hesitate to call on me!”
His companions hooted like owls at Tillie’s comment as she
turned smartly on her heel, and I heard the pomaded gentlemen
mutter something in Yiddish that sounded like
farbrente maydlakh.
Tillie laughed out loud and kept walking, so quickly I had
to skip to keep up with her.
“Tillie,” I hissed, “talking about striking could cost you
your job! I thought the strike was settled last year. And what’s
this about you giving a speech last night?”
“The strike was settled without us getting half our demands. We still don’t have a union shop . . .” Tillie listed off her
grievances as we crossed Washington Square and headed down
Washington Place past peddlers selling shiny copper pots and
pans, and food carts hawking roasted potatoes, chestnuts, and
pickled herring. “There’s still work to be done! You should
come to the meetings.”
I shook my head. Tillie knew I would never go to her union
meetings or Marxist classes. Mother had raised me to keep my
head down and never talk to strangers—especially young men,
whom she’d regarded with deep suspicion. I would never banter with the young law students as Tillie had just done. They
might spend their days just one building away from the factory
where Tillie and I worked, but they were worlds away from girls
like us, and I didn’t have Tillie’s hope that those worlds could be
bridged.
“What was that he called you?” I asked as we neared the
factory on the corner of Greene Street.
“
Farbrente maydlakh
,” she said, fingering a lock of my
chestnut hair, a far less dramatic shade of red than Tillie’s own.
“He meant both of us,
bubbelah
, because of our hair. It means
‘fiery girls.’”
z
o
Z

“Come on,” Tillie said, pulling me toward the staircase. “If
we’re late Mr. Bernstein will lock the doors on us. I’ll race you.”
She was off in a flash of red stockings that stayed just out of
reach for nine flights of stairs. We were out of breath and bent
over with cramps of laughter, gasping, but we managed to slip
through the door a minute before Mr. Bernstein, the foreman,
closed the door, locking it behind us. We hung up our coats
in the dressing room and hurried to our machines. Tillie was
at the end of the back row, a much better place than my spot
against the wall below the windows overlooking Washington
Place for getting out early at closing time, when all the girls
bunched up at the door waiting for Mr. Bernstein to check their
purses for stolen lace or ribbons,. When I was settled, I spared a
moment to look down the long sewing table to where Tillie sat.
She was helping a new girl find her place—a wan slip of a thing
in an oversized dress who couldn’t have been older than twelve.
Her hands were shaking as Tillie put the scissors in them.
“Don’t worry, Etta, I’m going to look after you,” she told the
girl, with a smile that warmed the unheated loft. They were the
same exact words Tillie had said to me on my first day here four
months ago.
I’d been even more of a mess than little Etta, driven to take a
job in the loud, crowded factory after my mother had died. The
only work I knew was trimming hats. Mother had had clients
among the richest women in the city—“the four hundred,” as
she called the cream of New York society. She’d had a deft hand
and keen eye for knowing just where to add a feather and tweak
a brim and which ribbon suited which color of felt. We didn’t
have a lot of money, but we managed. Mother always said it was
better to be a pauper than a slave to money, and although she
sometimes lapsed into melancholic silences, she always rallied
herself when she saw me looking worried.
Until the day she saw the man in the Inverness cape.
It was my sixteenth birthday. Mother had promised me a
walk in Central Park after we delivered one last hat to a client
on Fifth Avenue. As we were leaving, my mother abruptly halted on the sidewalk, staring across the avenue at the entrance to
the park. Following her gaze I’d seen a man in an Inverness cape
who’d lifted his Homburg hat in greeting. His face, dappled by
leaf shadow, was indistinct but I could feel the intensity of his
gaze. I found myself unable to look away. As I stared at him I
heard a bell begin to toll. I thought it might be coming from
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. My mother grabbed my hand and
dragged me toward an approaching omnibus. She’d pushed me
on, despite my protestations that she had promised me a walk
in the park. She had refused to answer when I asked who the
man was. “No one,” she insisted, and then repeated, “No one.”
Each time she said “no one” I heard the bell toll. It kept
tolling as we rode the omnibus down Fifth Avenue and eventually I realized that the sound wasn’t coming from one of the
churches—it was coming from inside my head. It faded after
we’d ridden south of Fourteenth Street, leaving a faint ringing
in my ears.
That night my mother had complained of a chill in her chest
and sent me to the chemists for a bottle of laudanum. From that
day on, she began to drink it regularly. She went out less and
less, sending me to deliver hats to our clients, but always warning me not to talk to strangers. Before she got sick, my mother
would spend hours in the local libraries—the Astor, the Seward
Park, the Hudson Park branch—looking through strange and
obscure books while I read the histories, novels, and poetry she
recommended, and also as many of Mrs. Moore’s novels about
girls’ school as I could find. But after she got sick, she sent me
out for books and then spent her days reading on a chaise longue
in front of the window. No matter how many times we changed
apartments she always managed to find one that overlooked the
river, which she said reminded her of her beloved Blythewood,
the girls’ boarding school she’d attended north of the city on
the Hudson. She kept an engraving of the school on her bedside
table, where another woman might keep a photograph of her
husband. But my mother had no photographs of my father, nor
would she ever tell me anything about him.
Nor would she tell me who the man in the Inverness cape
had been. “No one,” she repeated when I asked. “No one.”
When I told her that I had heard a bell in my head when I
looked at him, she looked frightened, but then she squeezed
my hand and said, “That’s because you were born at midnight on New Year’s Eve. You’re a chime child. The bell will
warn you when you’re in danger.” I’d thought she was raving
from the laudanum—after all, the time on my birth certificate was 12:15. But one day about a month later I was delivering a hat to a client and I heard the bell again. I rushed
home and found my mother on the chaise longue, an empty
bottle of laudanum and a long black feather from one of her
hats lying by her side, her body as cold and lifeless as the
winter wind coming in through the open window.
When I told Mother’s clients that she had died of consumption, they closed their doors on me and found someone else
to buy their hats from. If I’d told the truth—she’d died of an
overdose of laudanum—they would have done the same, even
if drinking laudanum wasn’t catching.
Though maybe it was.
In the weeks after she died I’d sometimes pick up the empty
green bottle that I’d found lying beside her and turn it over in
my hand, looking into its mouth as if it were a green pool on a
hot day. What oblivion had my mother sought there? Might I
find relief from the bells I heard?
I knew well enough where to go and what to tell the chemist—I’d done it often enough for Mother—but so far I hadn’t.
Instead, I’d put the bottle away, along with the black feather,
which didn’t seem to go with any of the hats she’d been trimming, and found work at the Triangle Waist factory.
On my first day I was so clumsy with the scissors it was a
wonder I didn’t cut off my own fingers. I don’t think I’d have
made it through the day if Tillie Kupermann hadn’t taken me
under her wing and shown me how to trim the loose threads
without nicking the fabric. Later, when I was promoted to the
sewing machines, she taught me how to sew a straight seam.
She covered for me when I had my spells—as I’d come to think
of the moments when I heard the bells—and never asked what
caused them. I had them less when I was with her.
When little Etta was settled in her work, Tillie looked up,
saw me, and stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes. Suppressing a laugh, I ducked my head and picked up a sleeve from
the basket at my feet, smoothed it out on my machine, and focused on sewing a straight seam. When that one was done I
dropped it in the trough that ran down the middle of the table
and picked up another. And another, and another. I sewed the
same seam on hundreds of sleeves each day, as if I were a girl
in one of mother’s stories, condemned by a jealous goddess to
perform the same silly task over and over again—sorting barley from millet or gathering fleece from bloodthirsty sheep to
break the curse and win back the handsome prince. But at the
end of each day all I had for my labors were calloused fingertips
and a constant ache in my back.
Besides, how would a prince find me here? Even if I could
bring myself to defy Mother’s rules about not speaking to boys,
the only males here were the arrogant cutters on the eighth
floor, the stoop-shouldered tailors, and the runners who delivered the baskets of unfinished sleeves—raw-boned lads just off
the boat from Italy or Poland who hardly spoke English. I rarely
spared the time to look up when they dropped off my basket.
Today, though, one got my attention by knocking it over.
“Clumsy boy!” I cried, bending over to retrieve the fallen
sleeves. “If those get soiled Mr. Bernstein will take it out of
my
pay.” As I grabbed for them, he seized my hand. A vibration
went through my entire body, an electric current that flared
and sparked like the wires that ran above the streetcars, and a
bell sounded inside my head—not the deep bass note I heard
when something bad was about to happen, but a sweet, high
treble bell.
“You have to go,”
he hissed in my ear, his warm breath,
which smelled like apples, spreading heat through my body.
I looked up into dark eyes flecked with gold, skin the color of
a fresh peach, and black ringlets falling over a high, sculpted
forehead. My whole body shuddered like a bell that had been
struck. My hand, which looked small in his, was trembling. For
a moment the din of the factory—the whirr of the sewing machines, the shouts of the foreman to hurry up, the street noise
from the open windows—all receded. I felt as though the two
of us were standing alone in a green glade starred with wildflowers, the only sound the wind soughing through the encircling forest. . . .
But then the sounds of the factory came rushing back and
I remembered where I was—and
who
I was. A poor girl who
made seven and a half dollars a week at the Triangle Waist factory. I wasn’t
going
anywhere.
“I’m not the one who has to go—you are!” I shoved the basket into his hands and glanced quickly around the room to see if
Mr. Bernstein was near, but he was on the far side of the room
talking to Mr. Blanck, one of the owners, who had brought his
daughters in today to see where their papa made all the money
to keep them in pretty frocks and lace pinafores. The sight of
these girls, with their smooth, untroubled faces and clean soft
hands, steeled me. I turned back to the dark-eyed youth who—
idiot!
—was still crouched beside me.
“We’re lucky that everyone’s looking at the pretty girls,
but in a moment Mr. Blanck will look over here and see that
precious seconds are being lost in the production of his fortune. I will be fired and then I will starve to death—but before
I do, I will track you down and sever every one of those silly
curls from your head. And”—I picked up a pair of scissors—
“I can’t guarantee I’ll spare your scalp. Understand?”
I snapped the scissors for emphasis and he started back, his
mouth gaping. I bent my head down to my sewing machine and,
willing my hands to stop shaking, sewed another seam. And
another and another, until the shadow he cast was gone.
I worked steadily until lunchtime, when Tillie came to share
her stuffed cabbage with me. I told her I had to work through
lunch to make my quota because the idiot new boy had put me
behind.
“There’s a new boy?” Tillie asked through a mouth full of
cabbage.
Usually Tillie’s undisguised interest in the male gender
amused me but I had no time for it today. “Dark-haired lad,”
I answered, biting the words off as I tossed a sleeve into the
trough. “Italian, I think, or maybe Greek. A right proper idiot.”
“Oh,” Tillie said. “I’ll keep an eye out for him. Did you see
Mr. Blanck’s daughters? They had such lovely dresses.” She
sighed. “And their hats! One had an entire bird on the crown!
Do look at them if they come through again. Maybe you can
copy it for me.”
I owed Tillie much more than a copied hat, but the longing in her voice reignited the longing I’d felt when I looked at
those girls, not for their dresses or hats, but for the lives that
I imagined went with them. Time to read a book, or sketch a
picture, maybe even go to school. My mother had tried to educate me with her old books and trips to libraries and museums,
but I knew it wasn’t the same as an education at a real school
like the ones Mrs. Moore wrote about. And my mother had told
me enough stories about her beloved Blythewood to conjure
images of girls in white tea dresses and straw boaters having
tea in a garden or studying in deliciously cool rooms lined with
books.  .  .  . But now that my mother was gone whatever faint
dream I’d ever had of going to Blythewood had faded to ashes.
“A knock-off hat won’t make you look like those girls,” I
said, the words escaping my mouth before I knew I was going
to say them aloud.
“Oh,” Tillie said, sounding like a wounded bird. “Of course
not. . . . I didn’t mean . . .”
And then she was gone. I looked up to see her retreating
back, an uncharacteristic stoop in her slim shoulders, and felt
a sharp pain in my own back, just below my ribcage. I started
to go after her, but then remembered that if I didn’t make my
quota today I wouldn’t have the money to pay this month’s rent.
I’d make it up to her after work. I’d make her that hat out of
Mother’s old trimmings.
I bent back to my work, my head full of feathers and ribbons, and let the rhythm of the machine lull me into a stupor
that shut out the bells and the idiot runner and Tillie’s hurt
voice. The next time I looked up at the clock on the wall it was
half past four. Only fifteen minutes to closing time. I only had
two more sleeves to make.
As I looked down from the clock I noticed a man standing
beside the Greene Street door speaking with Mr. Bernstein. A
tall man in an Inverness cape and Homburg hat. A man who
looked just like the one whose appearance had heralded my
mother’s decline into laudanum addiction and death.