Uprising (21 page)

“I'll stay with Bella,” Yetta said. She looked around for her Italian friend—her fellow fervent striker—but Bella had tactfully slipped away, to let the sisters talk by themselves. Yetta knew how Bella respected family, how she grieved and longed for the sister she lost, the brothers, the mother, the father.
And I just shoved my own sister away,
Yetta thought with a sudden pang.
My sister, my only sister, my only family in America . . .

But she couldn't take anything back.
Rahel is the one who's leaving,
Yetta reminded herself.

“Bella and me, we'll be fine,” Yetta said. Somehow she managed to keep the heartache out of her voice. She forged on with false cheer, fake certainty. “Everything will work out. We'll go back to the factory. Just not quietly. Not meek as mice. And don't worry—I'll still give you money for bringing our family over.”

Rahel reached out for Yetta, then drew her arms back when Yetta flinched. Yetta wondered which argument Rahel was about to throw at her: maybe “But Bella's not family! She's not even Jewish!” or, “They'll fire you if you're not
meek as mice!” or even, “Mr. Cohen and I won't need your money! We'll bring the family over all by ourselves!” But Rahel surprised her by clutching her hand and saying, “Don't go back to Triangle. Go to one of the other shops, one that settled early, that agreed to recognize the union.”

Yetta pulled her hand away.

“I
will
go back to Triangle,” she said, and it was like taking another vow. “I'm not done fighting there. I don't know how I'll do it, but I'm sure—I can still do
something
to change that place.”

Maybe it was easy for Rahel to give up on the strike, to just walk away. Rahel hadn't been beaten as many times as Yetta had; she hadn't spent as much time on the picket line. She'd mostly sat in the union office, shuffling papers. She hadn't been spat at; she hadn't had a policeman tell her she was the same as a streetwalker. Hadn't the strike made any difference to her at all?

“I can't stop you,” Rahel said, and it was almost like she was saying Yetta wasn't her sister anymore, that she was letting her go. She was agreeing that they would take completely different paths for the rest of their lives.

“Good,” Yetta said, and she turned her face to the wall, away from Rahel, so her sister wouldn't see her cry.

J
ane's father hadn't come home in December. He sent a telegram saying that his business trip had to be extended unexpectedly; he had to miss Christmas. The letter that followed the telegram said he was sure Jane was too busy going to parties to care about his absence.

Jane wasn't going to parties. That was the only rebellion she was capable of to refuse to put on sparkling dresses, to refuse to make polite chatter, to refuse to mince across a dance floor. But in her battle of wills with Miss Milhouse, that also meant she wasn't allowed to go to the picket line, wasn't allowed to give any money to the strike fund, wasn't allowed to buy coats or food for Bella and Yetta.

Jane had made an unpleasant discovery: She was a very rich girl, but she had no money.

Money she could control, anyway, and wasn't that what really mattered? The twenty dollars she'd crammed into Bella's hands as Miss Milhouse shoved her out the door had been the last of the birthday money Jane's father had given her, when he thought she'd spend it on a new hat or a necklace or ring. Jane had plenty of silks and furs; she ate oranges that came up by railroad from Florida, oysters from Cape Cod, caviar imported
from Russia. But Miss Milhouse controlled Jane's clothing budget; the cook and the housekeeper ordered everything else. And her father went over every bill with a gimlet eye.

As soon as Jane could manage to escape Miss Milhouse's attention even for a minute, she sneaked down to the garage to talk to Mr. Corrigan.

“Please, if you could just take some food to those girl strikers—take some from the pantry. Cook will never miss it,” Jane said.

Mr. Corrigan had his head under the hood of the car. He was very slow about leaning back from the engine, looking over at Jane.

“Cook,” he said, “has counted every bag of flour, every carton of salt, every pound of potatoes. Aye, she'd miss it if we took so much as a dried pea.”

Jane had not bothered putting on a coat when she sneaked out of the house; she'd thought that might look suspicious. She shivered in the cold garage, and wondered why it was fashionable to wear such a thin, gauzy dress in the wintertime. Was it just to show off the fact that Jane's father could afford a fine furnace, strong enough to heat their entire house?

“Then
buy
some food for them, and I'll pay you back when my father gets home,” Jane said. “If you could buy Bella and Yetta each a coat, too—I know you probably don't know much about women's fashions, but I'm sure anything warm would be marvelous. . . . Maybe your wife would be willing to help you?”

Mr. Corrigan took off his chauffeur's cap and ran grease-rimmed fingers through his thick hair.

“Miss Jane,” he said, and Jane knew that she should scold him for being so familiar, but she didn't. “Your father pays me
twenty-five dollars a week. I have seven children. I'm all for supporting the girl strikers, but I don't have the money to go buying any of them new coats, not when my own children are wearing last year's, with the hems let down. And I'm not taking food out of my own children's mouths just on the promise that you'll pay me back when your father gets home!”

Jane had not known that Mr. Corrigan had seven children. She didn't know that her father paid him only twenty-five dollars a week. Why, she had hats that cost twice that amount!

“I
would
pay you back,” Jane said.

Mr. Corrigan ducked back under the hood of the car, attacking some part of the engine with a wrench. He twisted and turned: he grunted and his face turned red with the exertion. He lifted out some metal contraption that, for all Jane knew, might be the entire engine. The metal was covered with grease and grime and it scared Jane, somehow, to see what filth and ugliness lay beneath the gleaming, polished exterior of her car.

Mr. Corrigan looked over at Jane.

“I can't lose my job,” he said. “I can't, not with seven children to support. Miss Milhouse says I'm not allowed to drive you anyplace now without her permission. But some night, if Miss Milhouse is sleeping—and you're sure she's asleep!—and you want to go to one of those strike meetings . . . I'll take you.”

Jane saw that this was the best he could offer—that as far as he was concerned, it was a lot to offer. So that was how she got to go to the meeting at Carnegie Hall. But the rally was a big frustration. She couldn't really listen to any of the speakers because she was so busy looking around trying to make sure that no one who might know Miss
Milhouse would see her, and trying to see if Yetta and Bella were anywhere in the crowd. She did spot Yetta at the last moment, and she felt such a ridiculous surge of hope: Maybe Yetta could tell her what to do to fight Miss Milhouse, how to survive without any money in her control. Wasn't that sort of like what Yetta was doing in the strike?

Jane elbowed and edged and—once—actually kicked her way through the crowd, fighting her way over to Yetta. But Yetta only stood there with her face like a vault, closed and locked tight.

“How's the strike going?” Jane said.

“Fine.”

And then Jane babbled on while the crowd swept Yetta away: Yetta moving forward, making history, changing the world, while Jane's life was so small that she'd had to put laudanum in Miss Milhouse's tea just to get out of the house.

Do I want to help Yetta, or do I want her to help me?
Jane wondered, standing alone in the swirling crowd.

Either way, Jane had failed.

Jane's father finally came home in February. Jane heard him at the door, and she rushed down the stairs immediately. She knew she had to get to him first, before Miss Milhouse had a chance to poison his mind against her.

“Father!” Jane cried, and threw her arms around his shoulders.

“Eh? What's this?” Father said, turning abruptly, the way he would if he thought someone was picking his pocket.

Jane gave him a peck on the cheek, though she couldn't remember ever kissing him before. He always kept her at
such a distance, with his cloud of cigar smoke and his gruff-ness. And his grief. Surely it was mostly his grief over losing Mother that made him so unapproachable.

“Yes, of course I want the luggage sent up to my room!” Father growled at the butler, ignoring Jane. “Did everyone forget their jobs while I was away?”

Jane clutched at her father's arm. He shook her away.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “Why are you acting like a strumpet?”

Jane looked up at him and made a feeble attempt at batting her eyes. She'd seen other girls manipulate their fathers—“Oh, Papa, please, it's just a pair of kid gloves. . . . They're so darling, don't you agree?” She knew she should start with the sweet talk, the declarations of how she'd missed him, how Christmas had been so empty without him. But now, faced with her own real glaring, growling father— a hundred times more irritable than she'd remembered— everything she'd planned to say died on her tongue.

Father frowned suspiciously.

“You want something, don't you?”

“Th-there's a strike,” Jane stammered. “Of shirtwaist girls. Girls who make shirtwaists. And the bosses are really mean to them, and I just want to help, by giving them food and warm coats, so they don't get too sick to walk the picket line—”

“Humph,” Father said. “If they go back to work, they can buy their own food and coats.”

“But they can't afford it, don't you see?” Jane said. “They don't make enough money.”

Father lifted his cigar from his mouth, looked around, yelled: “Mrs. O'Malley! Did you move my ashtray?”

The housekeeper bustled in, apologizing, “Sorry, sir, I'm so sorry, one of the maids was just cleaning it—”

Father stalked into his study, flicked the ash into the fireplace. He turned back to Jane.

“Miss Milhouse was right. You have fallen in with a dangerous, socialist crowd. She was very wise to nip this in the bud,” he said.

Jane saw that she'd made a huge mistake. Miss Milhouse had obviously written to Father while he was away. Jane should have done that too. She'd been counting entirely too much on the power of batted eyelashes, the effect of a daughter lovingly kissing her father's cheek.

Father sat down at his desk, as if he expected Jane to know that she'd been dismissed. She stood on the threshold of his study. She'd been trained practically since birth to know what she was supposed to do now: slink back to her room. Fluff her hair and freshen her face and come down to dinner to make polite conversation as if nothing had ever happened. She'd been trained to know her place just as surely as the servants had. Whether her father was away for a day or three months or a year, she was still supposed to jump back into proper position the minute he returned. Just as, someday, she'd be expected to play that role for a husband. She was supposed to be as easily controlled as an ashtray.

Jane stood on the threshold and looked back and forth— foyer or study, white marble or dark wood ... She felt like she was making a momentous decision. The other time she'd felt this way, deciding to bring Bella home, she'd been impulsive, like someone tossing a coin into the air, letting chance determine her fate. That decision could have gone either way. This
time, Jane wanted to be sure she knew what she was doing.

She swallowed hard and stepped forward, into her father's study.

“I have
not
fallen in with a dangerous, socialist crowd,” she said. “What they say is true. Those girls don't make enough money. And their bosses have paid off the police and other . . . other
thugs
to beat them up. It isn't right.”

Father blew out a thin stream of smoke.

“Girls shouldn't be walking the picket line,” he said. “For that matter, they shouldn't be working in factories.”

“What would you have them do to survive?” Jane asked.

Father was rifling through papers, lifting them from one stack into another.

“Their fathers or brothers or husbands should take care of them,” he said, without even looking up.

“What if they don't have fathers or brothers or husbands?” Jane asked. She was thinking of the Italian girl, Bella. But something caught in her throat, a cry twisted. “What if that was me?”

Father slammed his hand down on his stack of papers.

“For heaven's sake, Jane, this is ridiculous!” he fumed. “
You
would never be in a situation like those girls. They're not like you. I'm not sure what stories they've told you to get your sympathy, but I can assure you, it's really none of your business and probably mostly lies, besides. They're very calculating, those Jews.”

“They're not all Jewish,” Jane said. “They're Italian, Irish—”

“Immigrants,” Father said, biting down on his cigar. His lip curled up in disgust.

“Some are Americans!” Jane said. “And anyhow, I've seen the police beating them, it's not just stories I've heard—I've seen it with my own eyes! The girls are doing nothing more than walk around, and they get punched and kicked ... and they're
girls
!”

Father smashed his cigar down into the ashtray Mrs. O'Malley slipped onto his desk before tiptoeing back out.

“It's unfortunate that there are girls involved,” Father said. “But that's how it is in business. It's not some polite little game of croquet. Why, I've hired strikebreakers myself.”

Strikebreakers,
Jane thought dizzily.
The people beating up the strikers.
In her mind she could see fists hitting faces, heads jerking back, bodies crumbling to the ground.
My own father would hire such cretins, arrange such attacks?