21

GINNY HADN’T SLEPT well. She forced herself out of her bed, its springs squealing, and blinked like an owl at the thin light through her transom window. She forced herself to get moving quickly though, washing up and doing the best she could with her hair in what for her was record time; though still close to an hour. At the house she’d had hours to get ready for the evening’s customers, often taking long baths with one of the other girls to save hot water. Miss Gertie had insisted on cleanliness, a tradition held over from the great madam Mary, whom Ginny had only heard about in legend. The girls had all enjoyed that indulgence. They’d do hair and makeup for one another, often experimenting with exotic looks. At times they’d dress up, picking clothes from Miss Gertie’s extensive collection. There were always those customers who liked a girl dressed as a nun, a teacher, a schoolgirl, or a maid.

Ginny thought of Mike as she put her hair up. He’d never asked her to try on any of the costumes. He’d liked her the way she was. She’d given him that, whether he’d realized it or not, given him her true self. Ginny smiled wickedly as she recalled his one weakness, a fondness for white corsets, with matching garters and black stockings. She’d taken them when she left Gertie’s. It was tempting to put them on and imagine he was there. Her hand stole down her belly and she closed her eyes, imagining it was Mike’s.

But the image of Johnny Suds came flashing behind her eyes. Ginny took a deep breath and did her best to banish Suds to some particularly hellish corner of her brain. The urge to write in her diary about her experience brought the sudden realization that she’d left it behind at Gertie’s.

The loss hurt for only a moment, when she remembered that this was a new life she was embarked on and that it was only right to put aside the things of the past. Mike was the only thing worth saving from those days, but even that reunion would have to wait a little longer. Ginny had a full day before her, so with a final check in her flaking mirror she set out to find a job.

She had been a competent seamstress by her mother’s standards and like most girls had learned to sew as soon as she could handle a needle and thread. When she’d left home she’d taken her sewing kit with her—a small pair of scissors, two thimbles, and a few needles of various sizes folded into a leather case with a corduroy lining and a brass catch. Ginny tucked it into her handbag before closing the door behind her.

Her breakfast was a roll she’d saved from dinner. It was a little hard now, but still soft in the center. She nibbled at it as she walked west and north, not knowing where she was headed precisely, only that she didn’t care to work on the East Side in what she’d heard were the most horrible sweatshops—cramped, dark, and smelling of unwashed bodies. She was determined to find work in one of the new, tall loft buildings she’d heard about, where they had windows and air and elevators, a modern place where a girl could feel like a human being. She knew such places existed, but wasn’t sure exactly where, only that somewhere around Washington Square there were a few.

Ginny kept her eyes open, searching for HELP WANTED signs. Walking west on Washington Place, heading toward the leafy cool of Washington Square Park, Ginny was lost in thought when a girl, no more than a teenager, burst from a doorway and ran into her. Ginny had a brief impression of red eyes, cheeks damp with tears, of a hurried apology, and heels clicking on the flagstones as she ran off. Ginny stood as if woken from a dream, watching the girl disappear around the corner of Greene Street. Looking back at the doorway, Ginny could see no cause for such an hysterical exit. It was an ordinary New York doorway although to a hulking, modern loft building that bellied up to the sidewalk, climbing skyward with stony indifference. Ginny felt curiously drawn to the place, the mystery of the crying girl like a magnet, pulling her hand to the brass latch, and guiding her into the lobby.

She looked about, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, a pair of men waiting at the doors to two narrow elevators and a sign for something called the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. What caught her attention were the words above the elevators: IF YOU DON’T COME IN ON SUNDAY, YOU NEEDN’T COME IN ON MONDAY. Ginny thought it a perfectly sensible sign, if a bit sinister. She hadn’t experienced a Sunday with no work for her entire adult life. Even at home, there had always been chores after church. It was a day like any other to her and so long as she was paid for it, a day not wasted.

The elevators hissed and groaned until the doors of one opened, disgorging a dapper salesman with a bulging valise, two yarmulked tradesmen in black vests and white shirts, their sleeves rolled up on hairy arms, and a boy pushing a handcart stacked with boxes towering so high over his head that he had to peer around as he wheeled it out. Ginny stepped to one side to let the boy pass and was bumped from behind by a distracted-looking tradesman rushing for the elevator. They did a shuffling dance of mumbled apologies, which somehow carried Ginny into the elevator where a second later the door was yanked closed and the brass gate clattered shut.

“Floor,” the operator said without looking at any of his passengers. He threw over a lever at his right hand and they began to rise. The man who’d bumped her mumbled, “Nine,” to the operator and Ginny decided in that instant that that’s where she’d go. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was listed as occupying three floors; eight, nine, and ten on the elevator directory, so nine seemed as good as any.

Ginny counted the floors as they slid by the gate, trying to remember if she’d ever been so high and deciding by the fourth that she hadn’t.

“Nine,” the operator intoned as the car bounced to a stop. The tradesman pushed out first and disappeared through a door to what appeared to be an office, leaving her standing beside an open barrel of machine oil, the hard, maple floor around it black with drippings.

Like a mechanical hive, the place hummed to the beat of hundreds of machines. Rows of them receeded into the unnatural gloom of the factory floor, clattering and whirring in staccato bursts. The whole place vibrated; the floor beneath her feet and the oil in the barrel. A curtain of lint danced in the air to their incessant beat. Women were hunched over them, heads held low, feet pumping pedals, hands feeding fabric under blurring needles. Walls of windows let in light and air, but the billows of lint were not to be overcome. The machines farthest from the windows were in perpetual gloom. Gas jets burned halos in the clouds and Ginny could feel their heat even though the nearest was several feet away.

“C’mon,” a man’s voice said beside her, startling her. He turned and walked to an empty machine near the end of a row. A pile of material sat stacked next to it.

“I am seeking employment,” Ginny said to his back as she followed. The man turned and looked at her as if she might be insane. Ginny smiled, trying to appear firm yet affable, professional and pretty all at once. She wasn’t sure if she pulled it off.

“Yeah,” the man said.

“You have work, I take it,” Ginny said. She was doing her best to sound like a woman of some education might, a woman of experience and worth. The man looked her over and turned back to the pile of fabric with a slight shake of his head. “We got woik, an’ ya don’ gotta put on airs ta get it. Youse wanna woik; ya shows me what ya can do,” he said over his shoulder. “Sew dese up,” he told her, separating some fabric and tossing it on the chair in front of the empty machine. “Lemme see what ya can do, den we’ll talk about it.”

Ginny got herself settled in. She got the feel of the machine, working the pedal to get some sense of its speed, the way the thread fed from the bobbin and checking if the needle was true. The man watched her for a moment, then stalked off down the row of machines, hands behind his back, bending now and again to examine a shirtwaist with a critical eye. Ginny set to work, trying her best to sew like the others, head down, feet and hands moving with practiced economy. She felt slow and awkward and was sure the women around her noticed, their sideway glances giving them away. Toward the bottom of her little pile though, she started to develop a rhythm and for a few rows of stitches felt she actually deserved to be there.

The shop foreman returned before she was done and hovered for a minute or so, watching silently. He picked through the shirtwaists she had finished, pulling at the seams and turning them inside-out to examine the work. “Six a week. Not a penny maw,” he said before she’d finished the last piece. “Dis heya’s yaw machine. Youse get heya at seven, woik ta seven.” He looked at his watch. “Half a day’s gone awready. Fawty cents fer t’day.”

Ginny said nothing. Six a week was what she’d hoped to make even though it was laughably less than she’d been accustomed to at Miss Gertie’s, where she’d easily make double that in an evening.

“Youse make a mistake, ya get docked,” he went on. “Youse ruin a piece, youse pay fer it.”

Ginny nodded. It was no worse than she would have expected. She thought of the crying girl who’d run into her on the street and wondered as she settled in to her work if the girl she’d run into had come from here, from this factory floor and this very machine. She couldn’t imagine what might have driven her off. To Ginny this was a great and exciting opportunity, the start of her new life, the beginning of her new self. The noise and dust and bent backs of the factory were just part of the path that would take her away from her old life and, with a little luck, into Mike’s.

He’d set her on this course. She’d been primed like an anarchist’s bomb and Suds had set her off. She shuddered in disgust at the thought, but had to admit a certain debt to the man. Though Ginny had wished it would be Mike who would take her away, she was now at least free, at the beginning of a new life. All that remained would be to work hard and find Mike. As Ginny guided shirtwaists through her machine, those things seemed virtually accomplished.