— 20 —

Most evenings Selig and Moishe sat in the front room, reading The Jewish Daily Forward. Carsie would sit by the kerosene lamp, pick up her sewing and say, “Read to me, Selig. Read to me like Papa used to. While I work.”

And Selig would read. “Carrie Nation was arrested again, here in New York, I see. Seems she was getting a lot of attention at a rally and when the cops went to break it up she got feisty.” Often he read somber bits and commented. “Queen Victoria’s died. Well, well. I wonder how it will go for her darling Czarist granddaughter now?” And, “Oh, listen to this! A woman named Maud Willard tried to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel yesterday, it says here. But she took her fox terrier with her and the dog fell across her face as they pitched down. Killed them both—broke the dog’s neck and suffocated poor Maud. I wonder what makes people do that sort of thing?”

On a hot, still evening, Selig looked over the top of his paper. “Was it not Emma Goldman who delivered Naomi last spring?”

“Yes,” Carsie said. “I’ll never forget her—or that night. But, why do you ask?”

He leaned to the glow of the kerosene lamp to study an article in the Daily Forward. “Because she’s been arrested in Chicago for plotting with the man who shot McKinley.”

“Impossible. That woman was far too kindhearted to do anything of the sort.”

“You women,” Akselrod sighed. “Always with the opinions. Once you start thinking for yourselves, you never stop.”

Carsie smiled at him. “Remember, Selig. That I think for myself was your idea. You helped the genie escape from her bottle.”

——

In January of 1902, Osher Melnick formed a partnership with Isaac Harris and Max Blanck and moved his business uptown, to the second floor of a building on the east side of Washington Square. He took a room at a nearby hotel in order to enjoy the company of Rose Freedman. Melnick’s partners disapproved of his affair with Rose Freedman, a finisher at the shop, who electrified Melnick’s soul. He insisted to Varda that the hours he put in at the coat factory demanded he be closer to his work than their flat on Canal Street.

For Carsie and Lilia, the day’s work at Melnick’s new coat company began each morning at seven-thirty. They left the flat at six-forty-five to catch the horse car, changed for the number five trolley that took them across Houston and up Sixth Avenue, where they walked across Washington Square, a peaceful residential area.

Stanford White’s Washington Arch graced the eight-acre park at the foot of Fifth Avenue, and along Washington Square North town houses made up a row of red brick buildings with free-standing white marble porches supported by Doric columns. Facing the park to the east were the buildings of New York University, in the same block as the Asch Building, at the corner of Washington Place and Greene.

The girls entered the building from the Washington Place side, the foyer’s elegant marble floor leading to an innovation neither girl had experienced before they came to business uptown—an elevator.

Somehow, the morning trek made their work more satisfying than doing the same thing at their flat or in Melnick’s, and they felt a bond with the other women their age who worked at the coat company, immigrants who spoke Yiddish—many of whom had come from Russia, all of them somehow finding the same corner of America. The day’s work was scheduled to end at six in the afternoon, but during most of the year Carsie and Lilia stayed until nine each night except Friday and Saturday. To keep them there, Melnick fed them apple pie for supper.

Carsie worked as Melnick’s assistant, Lilia as a cleaner—snipping sewing machine threads off the finished coats. She was the eldest of those working in the “children’s corner” where she and three other girls sat, clipping the long bits of thread, folding the coats and placing them in large cases.

On a snowy afternoon in February, Carsie sat at her desk updating inventory numbers, when she smelled smoke. She ran to the back where Lilia worked, sweeping around the cutting tables, but the odor diminished. She watched Lilia for a moment, pleased at how her sister had changed since they had bought her glasses. Lilia could see a few feet in front of her and could read without holding the book so close to her nose.

The stench of smoke came again, and Carsie ran to the stairwell. The smell was stronger there, and mounting. “Lilia!” she called from the stairwell doorway. “Take the children and alert the cutters—we need to get out. There’s smoke coming from below. Go.” The employees of Melnick Coat Company watched the pumper wagon irreparably drench everything on the second floor.

Osher Melnick had not yet arrived when the fire company left. He had slept in that morning, after a night of dancing with his mistress. By noon the company he had built over the past ten years lay in ruins. He suspected the fire had been set by his partners’ hired hands—probably Paul Kelly’s men. He supposed Harris and Blanck had wiped him out to get rid of him as a partner, and to end his affair. Insurance would pay for his losses, but his reason to live uptown, near Rose, had been reduced to ashes.

But at that moment, the woman he needed to see was Varda, who knew more about his wrath than his joy.

——

That evening Carsie and Lilia talked with Selig and Louis about the future. Selig agreed to wait until the autumn of 1904 before they married. Louis agreed to wait for Lilia, too, and his wait would be long. Lilia would not turn eighteen for another six years. With the day’s fire, the girls’ jobs at Melnick’s coat company had ended. Louis had taken a position as an apprentice at Lord and Taylor in the menswear department, and Selig realized the time approached for him to quit Monk Eastman’s gang and find salaried work.

“Speaking nothing but Yiddish holds us back,” Carsie said. “People uptown speak English, and I, for one, plan to live uptown.”

“Yeh,” Selig snorted. “How’re we going to live uptown? You don’t even have a job.”

“You’re the one who is always telling me to think for myself, Selig. Well, I’ve been doing some thinking this afternoon. I’m going to take English lessons and start my own millinery business. If there’s anything in this world a lady will never be without, it’s a hat.”

——

After only a week out of a job Lilia found work with Melnick’s partners in a company they owned on the eighth floor of the Asch Building, a firm called Triangle Waist Company. The firm made a new blouse called a shirtwaist and business had burgeoned in the last six months, as the shirtwaist—a sheer high-necked blouse worn with a tailored skirt—had become popular.

Lilia’s newest job put her on the cutting floor at Triangle, sweeping fabric dust, collecting wicker baskets of scraps for the rag dealers, and distributing supplies to the cutters. Now that she had glasses she could see well enough to find her way around the shop with little trouble. Her starting wage was a dollar and a half a week—a long week, consisting, more often than not, of seven days, especially during season, which ran from April to September. On Saturday afternoons Isaac Harris posted a sign over the elevator that read:

IF YOU DON’T COME IN ON SUNDAY

YOU NEED NOT COME IN ON MONDAY

——

Over the following week the villagers came to wish Max Siegel well, pressing slips of paper into his hand, slips bearing proverbs he should remember on his journey. The baker, next door, brought “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,” and the general storekeeper, “While I can run, I’ll run; while I can walk, I’ll walk; when I can only crawl, I’ll crawl. But by the grace of God, I’ll always be moving forward.” Nakhimov gave him this one: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” That was his favorite—it cheered him, reminding him that he had come close to living his last had it not been for the kindness of these people. He would miss them, he thought, as he stitched Carsie’s locket into the lining of his coat.

On April 4, 1902, two years to the day after his accident, he signed the bar over to Hod Nakhimov, who had begun to enjoy being publican more than farrier—hefting a keg of lager was easier than fighting a horse to stand still—and struck out, walking with a catch in his gait. Having lost the two biggest toes on his right foot to frostbite as well as three fingers, he was grateful to walk at all.

The trip over the Carpathians and across the continent took nearly six months in the warm weather, and towns along the way were hospitable. He paid the quarryman and his wife a visit on his second day out, leaving them with a hundred rubles of the Federation money for their trouble two years ago. In Romania he found a group of Fusgeyers aiming to board a boat to America. He walked with them for three weeks. They carried guns and lanterns and supplies for emergencies. Important to Siegel, too, they kept kosher, and he felt safe in their company. The thought that he might see Carsie before Chanukah was enough to keep Siegel putting one foot in front of the other.

——

“Hats,” Carsie said to the Frenchwoman who stood in front of her. “It’s all I can think to do—to make hats.”

“That,” Madame Anya Pelletier said, “is the mark of a professional. When hats are all you can think, when they are all you dream, when you no longer want to clean or have babies or please a man, but only to make hats.” She held a finger in the air to make her point. “Then you are a milliner. Let me see your fingers.” She inspected the fronts and backs of Carsie’s hands. “Yes. Bon. The hands, they will do fine—nimble and dry. Some rules, we have. First, I am Madame. It is the only thing you will call me. Then. You sit here.” She scraped back a wooden chair at the foot of the table. “When I think you are good enough to move up, and there is an empty chair, you move up. It can take years. Are you willing to spend years to learn a fraction of what I know about the millinery?”

Carsie nodded. She had not thought the process would be as formal as that—that there would be social strata even here, or that she would start at its bottom.

——

She walked home from the Socialist Literary League in bad sorts. Her fifth English lesson had been difficult—the lesson on variations in pronunciation and meaning. An English word might be used in several ways: a bandage wound around a wound, and there was no time like the present to present a present. You prepared chicken in a kitchen—or was it the other way around? A hopeless tongue, English, she thought, impossible to learn. What other language permitted that kind of craziness? Not even Russian was this bad.

She did not feel like working on hats tonight or listening to Selig read his silly selections from the Daily Forward, or arguing with Shalva about doses of tonic, or taking Naomi to Mrs. Petrow for her feeding, or doing the boarders’ laundry. None of it. Every day was the same dull routine in the same cramped flat in the same colorless neighborhood, and she wondered whether her life would ever be different.

She glanced around as she walked: men in doorways who had sat there since that morning, women who looked so tired they might drop where they stood, and children who stole vegetables because the family couldn’t afford to buy them. Who might save these people from the brutalities she knew lay ahead of them, she wondered. “...a wide-brimmed hat with heat-curled feathers...,” she mumbled. “...velvet bows and ties and a beadwork top...the position of the collar seam at the back of the neck can be fixed by the eye and should be indicated by a light chalk mark...raise the arms of your client...in joining the pieces of the pattern care must be taken...”

When she arrived at the flat she unpinned her hat and put it on a hat stand as usual, tied on an apron, and stabbed at the embers in the stove, bringing them to life. Then she took out a piece of butcher paper and sat down to write.

She wrote what she had seen and smelled on the street that afternoon, telling of the poverty and how it made her feel, wondering whether life in the Tenth Ward would ever improve and questioning that the wrongs could be righted. When she was done, she folded the paper and addressed the outside to the Jewish Daily Forward.

Writing the piece improved her mood, and after she posted it, she took Naomi to Pearl Petrow’s flat for her feeding, then boiled potatoes and cabbage for dinner, doled out a dose of tonic to Shalva, and tended to the boarders’ laundry.

After dinner it occurred to her that writing a protest had started her journey out of Russia two years ago—the protest then had been her father’s broadside to the Czar. Had it been only two years since the journey had begun? It seemed a lifetime. She took sad comfort in knowing America permitted people to speak as they felt. Poor Papa, she thought. He would have loved America. Here you could say whatever you felt, and publicly. This time there would be no aftermath to fear.