Melting the Snow on Hester Street Page 19

  ‘I knew it! Because I could see it in your face. You have the kindest face of anyone I ever laid eyes on … The sweetest, kindest face … Won’t you come in? You and your gentleman friend. Come in – please. We’ll have tea …’

  40

  ‘I never mentioned the letter, Mr Gregory,’ Eleanor said. ‘Because it wasn’t anything. It turned out to be from a crank.’

  ‘But it arrived on Isha’s birthday?’

  She shrugged. ‘Just one of those things.’

  ‘So, what did you do?’

  ‘What did I do? Well – everything changed. These things … they send you a little crazy eventually. The fan mail, the fans … these sort of things. You have no idea, Mr Gregory, quite how many lunatics are out there. Not until they start to write to you. We haven’t touched a piece of fan mail since that day. Neither of us. We were united on that at least.’

  ‘I can understand it.’

  ‘But Max and I had the most horrible fight. Max wanted to forget. Everything. He never wanted to go through it all again. You see? He wanted to pretend it had never happened. Whereas I … The letter had the opposite effect on me. Whereas it encouraged Max to turn away. Despair. I realized then – that I had never given up. Maybe that letter was from a crank – a poor, sad, lonely crank,’ she added, remembering briefly his crumpled face. ‘Maybe so. And maybe I would never find my baby. But until there was proof. Proof, Mr Gregory. I would never stop hoping. Never stop looking. That was when I hired the detective. The second detective. The one before your father.’

  ‘But you didn’t stick with him?’

  ‘Oh! I would have done. He was in LA. And he was pretty good. But then Max discovered I had appointed him.’

  ‘He didn’t like that?’

  ‘And there was another fight.’ She laughed. ‘We almost killed each other. He told me … the searching was going to send me mad. So.’

  ‘So? You came all the way to Reno, huh? So hubby couldn’t reach us?’

  She shrugged. ‘Something like that. But that was seven years ago, Mr Gregory. And we haven’t come any further.’

  Mr Gregory bridled. ‘But, as you know,’ he said, ‘as we discussed … It’s very hard to make any progress as long as you keep so much back.’

  ‘I am telling you everything I can!’

  ‘You say so. And yet, I still don’t even know why you left New York. I don’t know why the police were coming after you.’

  ‘I told you. Matz was an activist.’

  ‘I don’t even know when Matz Kappelman died. Or even if he died. Or even if he ever existed. Nothing makes any sense.’

  ‘Of course it makes sense!’

  ‘Mrs Beecham,’ he sighed. ‘I do, truly … I think I do begin to understand how much you have suffered.’

  ‘Oh,’ she laughed. ‘Do you, Mr Gregory?’

  ‘Well. Perhaps I don’t. How could I? But how do you expect me to make any progress when you won’t tell me the truth? Mrs Beecham, this endeavour of ours is hampered, and will continue to be hampered by your refusal to tell me the whole truth.’

  ‘Because there are things I cannot tell you,’ she said quietly. ‘Why won’t you simply accept it? After all this time? Why won’t you simply work with what we have? I don’t want to tell you my life’s story. What does it matter? I just want you to find my daughter.’

  Floor Eight

  41

  New York, 25 March 1911

  Matz had come home when his wife and daughter were already sleeping, and by the time they awoke he had already left. It’s what he often did. Since the day Eleana released him from that prison cell he had become still more passionately, angrily political. Now he belonged to the radical union, Industrial Workers of the World (as popular with the authorities as its name suggests), and he dedicated every moment he could to its cause: plastering the city with IWW posters, organizing and speaking at illegal street meetings, evading the police, or sometimes going out of his way to take them on. He had become quite a dab at escaping their clutches – quite literally: once in New Jersey and once in Pittsburgh, he had leapt from a moving police wagon and disappeared into the crowd. Matz Beekman’s name was beginning to resonate with authorities, and with the IWW too. Loved and loathed, he was, depending on whose side you were on. Matz Beekman could never do anything with a faint heart.

  The twenty-fifth of March 1911 started the same as any number of mornings at Allen Street, with Isha unwell again, and Matz who knew where?, and Eleana, afraid of running late for work at Triangle, trying to extricate herself from her daughter’s embraces.

  The garment workers’ strike was long since over. For a while, in the beginning, it had looked as if the strikers might prevail. The sight of the women picketers being beaten by the police had, briefly, attracted the sympathies of high society. Money had been raised. Lunches were given. But society’s attention span being what it is, society soon became distracted. The Triangle owners meanwhile, with more to lose, stuck to their guns. Their stunt with the kurve had proved a point that hardly needed to be made. In a city with so many new immigrants pouring in every day, there would always be other workers, willing to work for less. Triangle factory employees had been at the forefront of the strike, but they returned to their work defeated, their union demands rejected

  Not all of the workers returned. Eleanor returned. And with a $1 raise too, thanks to Blumenkranz. But Matz was barred from the premises. Amen. He was a troublemaker and they did not want him back.

  He continued to play piano at the nickelodeon on Hester Street, but the pay was not enough to feed a family, even such a small one as his, and so Eleana continued at Triangle. Six long, back-breaking days a week. It was life. They were used to it. Matz worked where and whenever he could. He worked six nights a week at the nickelodeon – and more if he could get it. Otherwise, he was consumed by his politics. It was dirty work. IWW members were regularly battered – and to death – during their police skirmishes. And that, too, was life. Violent and dangerous. Sometimes Matz didn’t come home for several nights and Eleana and her mother would sit up waiting, fearing the worst. Eleana believed in the fight. But she longed for someone else to fight it.

  Sometimes, increasingly so, if Matz failed to return home in time for his work, Eleana would bundle up their young daughter and they would head round the corner to the nickelodeon together. Between them, they would sing and dance and play piano for the packed audience in Matz’s stead.

  The previous evening had been one such night. It was the second night in a single month that Matz had failed to turn up, and the proprietor’s patience was running dry. Whether he supported Matz’s cause – and Mr Listig did: what man with eyes and a mind would not? – he asked Eleana how he could be expected to run a business when one of its most vital ingredients could not be relied upon to turn up? His customers had come to watch the movie. And to listen to Matz. Not to his wife and daughter, no matter how delightfully they performed.

  ‘Next time,’ he said to her, ‘next time – tell him he needn’t bother to come back.’ And one day, for all Matz’s crowd-pulling charm and talent – one day Mr Listig would mean it. But not that night, at least. Eleanor sang and played piano as delightfully as she always did. Isha, merry exhibitionist that she was, danced with the usual vim and everybody loved her for it.

  But she woke wheezing on that sunny, fateful Saturday, coughing and fighting for breath. Eleana finally left her in her and Matz’s still-warm bed, and walked the familiar streets to work with her cousin Sarah. Sarah was a machinist at Triangle too. She worked upstairs from Eleana, on the ninth floor.

  It was a beautiful, clear morning and it was payday. Two reasons to celebrate, the women agreed. With luck, Matz would be home this evening. And with a bit more luck (they both laughed), Sarah’s husband Samuel would not.

  Just another morning: except it was Saturday, and sunny. So better than most. Sarah had seen a hat she wanted to buy in a shop window. They talked about whether she could make some
thing similar for herself.

  ‘It won’t be so pretty,’ Sarah said.

  ‘No, I don’t I suppose it will.’

  They walked in silence, thinking about the day they might afford to buy shop-made hats, until Sarah said: ‘How is it with Blumenkranz then? He seems to be leaving you alone lately, no?’

  ‘You have noticed? Isn’t it marvellous!’

  ‘I think he’s looking at the new girl – the one who sits beside me. Just a shy little thing, she is. Frightened of her own shadow.’

  ‘Yes! So I heard … I want to kiss her for it. Poor darling …’

  ‘He was breathing all over her yesterday.’

  ‘Thank God for that, eh?’

  Sarah smiled. ‘Well, you can tell Matz. The problem is finished with.’

  ‘Ha! Except I told Matz he left. Months ago.’

  ‘You told him that?’

  ‘And don’t go telling him different, Sarah. Or God knows …’

  ‘You know his brother’s in the police now – did you know that? His brother’s a sergeant at Mercer Street.’

  ‘Do I know it? He only mentions it a hundred times a day.’

  ‘He can get away with anything, then. With a brother in the police. He can do whatever he likes …’ Sarah slid a sly glance at her cousin. ‘If he doesn’t already.

  Eleana didn’t reply. She didn’t know how much Sarah knew, and she didn’t much want to enquire. Least said on the matter, the better for everyone. Not even Dora knew the truth.

  ‘Well,’ Sarah persevered, unsatisfied. ‘Because everybody knows how he trails after you, Eleana. Nettie saw him pushing you up against the cloakroom wall last month. It’s a wonder you didn’t scream. Except Nettie said—’

  ‘Please, Sarah.’

  ‘You should find work somewhere else.’

  ‘Ha! And I should buy the mansion next to Alva Belmont, shouldn’t I? And set up a school for fairies.’

  ‘Well,’ she smiled. ‘It’s not a bad idea.’

  ‘If I could find work elsewhere, don’t you think that I would?’ Eleana snapped.

  ‘You should tell Matz. It’s not fair on you Eleana. He needs to stop fooling around with his politics and look after his family.’

  ‘Ha! And I should buy the mansion next to Alva Belmont, and set up a school for fairies …’

  Sarah giggled. ‘It’s not a bad idea,’ she said again.

  ‘In any case, I wouldn’t want Matz to stop … Not really. He looks after us in his way. And someone has to fight – for everything that’s wrong in this world, for our children, if not for us. I admire him for it. And so should you. And God forbid I allow that schmendrik to curtail him. Over my dead body, Sarah. I can manage Blumenkranz myself. I have been for years.’

  ‘Well well,’ Sarah sighed, losing interest. The two of them must have had the same conversation a hundred times. ‘Perhaps it’s all finished now in any case.’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps it is …’ she said, with a tired smile.

  And then, a little later, a few blocks further on, another familiar exchange: a maternal competition between them. Isha, it could not be argued otherwise, although eighteen months older, was not so advanced in the learning of letters as her cousin Tzivia.

  ‘She can’t help it,’ Sarah said seriously, trying to be kind, but then again, enjoying it too much. ‘Isha misses so much school, being sick. Poor darling.’

  ‘Poor darling,’ Eleana mimicked her. ‘Poor darling, indeed!’ She added: ‘And poor Tzivia can’t help how badly she sings.’

  ‘Of course she can sing. How dare you!’

  ‘Tzivia is a lousy singer. Probably the worst I have ever heard.’

  ‘She’s an excellent singer.’

  ‘Tzivia’s a dreadful singer,’ Eleana said cheerfully. ‘When she sings, the whole of the Lower East Side holds its head in pain.’

  ‘Neyn, sha-shtil!’ Sarah snapped.

  And they walked on in companionable silence, smiling, thinking pleasantly about singing, and reading, and the unassailable superiority of their own small daughters.

  Just another day then.

  The sun was shining. Blumenkranz had found a new, shy girl to occupy his heart and mind, to push against the cloakroom wall when he thought nobody was looking. And it was payday.

  42

  The Triangle Waist Company factory was a productive enterprise – in fact, one of the most productive textile factories in New York. It employed 600 workers, most of them young immigrants, and it packed them all, six gruelling days a week, into the three highest floors of a ten-storey building on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place. There was a showroom for buyers, and offices for the brother-in-law owners on the tenth floor, so the majority of the workers crowded into the two floors below.

  Eleana’s station was on Floor Eight. Seated in long rows all around her, cramped and bent in the heat and relentless noise, there were 250 other machinists. A section of the room was given over to the pattern cutters (where Matz had worked previously). The cutters worked at high tables, beneath long wires draped in paper patterns which looked, from a distance, like party bunting, and they worked without machines but with space enough between them to slash freely at piles of fabric fifty layers thick or more. It meant that on Eleanor’s floor there was space for a hundred fewer heat-and-noise giving sewing machines, a hundred fewer bodies. Conditions on the ninth floor were more cramped, if it were possible, and hotter, and even noisier.

  She worked, as she always had, beside her close friend Dora, heavily pregnant now. Dora had married a cloak-maker who made three times more money than she made in a week, and she was counting the hours until she could leave the factory for ever. As soon as the baby was born, her husband had promised her.

  ‘It’s going to come early,’ Dora said that morning, patting her swollen belly. ‘I know it. Three weeks to go, El! Not a day longer. I’m willing to wager it. What do you think? Do you want a wager?’

  Eleanor was happy for her friend. Of course she was. But she dreaded the day of her leaving. The noise and the heat, the backaches, neckaches, headaches, the cruel monotony – it would be much harder to endure without Dora beside her. Too bad. Too bad she hadn’t married Lionel the cloak-maker. Except, of course, it would have been impossible. She couldn’t imagine being with anyone but Matz.

  As she squeezed in beside Dora (every inch of space had to be fought for on the production floor), she pulled a face. ‘The baby may be two weeks late or more, you know. Much more.’ She winked. ‘I swear little Isha took eleven months to come to the boil.’

  ‘Then she must be an elephant.’

  The starting bell clanged. The two women – every woman in the room – reached automatically into the trough behind their machines and took up a first piece of cut cloth for the day. Not a moment of production time was wasted.

  The women were forbidden to talk once the machines had started up. The noise made it almost impossible in any case. Dora and Eleana worked in silence, without pausing, without looking up, until the bell clanged for lunch.

  Another day.

  43

  Management might have barred him from ever working there again, but the boy at the service entrance wasn’t management. When Matz turned up that afternoon, face covered in bruises, clothes covered in dried blood – frantic, desperate – it was as if President Taft himself had come to call. Possibly even better.

  ‘Why, if it isn’t Matz Beekman!’ the boy cried warmly. ‘I know you! I heard you speak when we striking. Feels like a long time ago now. But you fired us up, Mr Beekman. You fired us all up.’

  Matz needed to get a message to his wife. He desperately needed to do that. ‘You come out on strike with us, did you?’ Matz said levelly, glancing behind him at the street – and then approaching the boy’s raised desk.

  ‘I sure did …’ The boy nodded sadly. They had truly believed things were going to change, back then. And yet here he still was, and his sister too, up on the ninth floor, and his m
other two tables behind her. Nothing had changed. ‘You better watch out,’ he said, glancing back at Matz. ‘They’ll be down in a bit. Early closing today … What in hell are you doing here anyway?’ He laughed. ‘Looks like you’ve been through something … You got blood all over you. And dirt. What have you been up to?’

  ‘Nothing much. In a fight with the bull,’ Matz mumbled. ‘That’s all.’

  The boy nodded approval. ‘Good for you. Seems like they prob’ly came off the worse …’

  Matz looked away. Couldn’t hold the boy’s gaze. Couldn’t bring himself to think about it, not yet. Even so, the image of the man flashed before him, his body slumping on the sidewalk, and the blood seeping from his head … and then not seeping but gushing. Like a goddamn river. How could a man’s head hold so much blood? It was impossible.

  ‘I’m in a fix,’ he muttered. ‘I’m in a bit of trouble.’

  ‘I guessed it!’ The boy laughed his warm, open laugh. ‘Else why would you want to come back to this stinkhole?’

  Matz nodded.

  ‘Well, I hope you’re not thinking you’ll be getting your job back here any time soon. Getting to the end of the busy season already. They’ve been letting people go … And troublemakers like you, first out the door!’

  ‘I’ve come for Eleana – you know her? I need to fetch her out … It’s kind of urgent.’ The boy frowned. ‘Eleana?’ he repeated. ‘Can’t say I know an Eleana. But you know how it is here, don’t you. The girls – they come and they go.’

  ‘My wife,’ Matz said.

  ‘Oh! … Well. You don’t say, huh? … Your wife? And she works here at Triangle, does she?’ He laughed.

  Matz glanced behind him at the street again. Still nothing. ‘I need to fetch her,’ he said.

  ‘You’d have thought they’d’ve got rid of her, though – knowing she was married to you!’ The boy looked at Matz with frank admiration. Nudged him, half awkward, half playful. ‘Y’old troublemaker!’ he said. ‘It’s what you are! You want to go on up there?’