Yetta was confused about whose side she should favor. The chauffeur’s—the poor, powerless worker scolded unfairly by his unreasonable boss? Or the woman’s—the charitable socialite, nobly donating her car to the cause for the day, seeing beyond superficial details like paint to seek justice, sisterhood, unity?
Yetta had felt confused by many things in the past several days, ever since Bella collapsed at her feet. She felt vaguely guilty, as if she’d done something wrong and didn’t even know what it was. Confiding in Rahel hadn’t helped.
“Oh, that poor girl,” Rahel had murmured. “You should have brought her home yourself.”
“She’s a gentile,” Yetta said.
“She’s your fellow worker!”
“No—she’s a scab!”
“You said yourself you don’t think she understands about the strike or the union,” Rahel argued. “We can’t know the troubles she’s seen—imagine, if that were our family.”
Yetta didn’t want to imagine such horrible things. That was why she refused to read the news from Russia in the Yiddish newspapers. She didn’t want to know about pogroms starting up again when she needed to devote all her mind, all her strength, all her spirit to the fight at hand, the fight she could win: the strike.
“Ride with us, Yetta!” someone hollered from the next car up.
“All right!” Yetta yelled back, but she took a few moments to survey the entire lineup of cars parked along the sidewalk. This is what everyone would see, the gleaming cars—millionaires’ cars, millionairesses’ cars—packed full of plump society women and scrawny, desperate, underfed shirtwaist workers. This was the newest way the rich women had decided to support the strike: with an automobile parade, an idea they’d taken from the suffrage movement in England. Each car carried a different sign on its side: THE POLICE ARE FOR OUR PROTECTION, NOT OUR ABUSE; STRIKERS SEEKING JUSTICE; VOTES FOR WOMEN. Yetta was starting to come around to the suffragists’ point of view. If these women could vote, they would vote to help her. And if Yetta herself could vote . . .
Amazing, Yetta thought. Back home I couldn’t have chosen my own husband. And here I’m thinking about choosing presidents, governors, mayors, laws . . .
She laughed, suddenly giddy, and scrambled into the car with her friends. The seat of the automobile was luxurious leather, and a delicate glass vase was mounted at the front, filled with fragrant roses. It’s December 21, Yetta thought. How could they have roses in December? But the most surprising thing in the car was the person behind the wheel: a woman.
“That’s Inez Milholland,” Yetta’s friend, Anna, whispered. “She drives her own car. All the other women have chauffeurs, but she drives herself.”
“Ready, girls?” Inez asked merrily. Inez was young, perhaps only a few years older than Rahel. But she drove confidently, steering her car away from the curb, honking at the people they passed.
My first ride in an automobile, and the driver’s a woman, Yetta thought. And it’s part of our strike! She wished she could somehow go back in time and visit her old self back in Russia, sitting on her milking stool. Just wait until you see what’s going to happen to you in America! Yetta wanted to tell her old self.
Beside her, Anna was talking about a strike fund-raiser she’d gone to at the Colony Club, an exclusive club for rich women. They’d invited a handful of strikers to tell about how the police and the bosses were treating them.
“There were seven forks stretched out beside each plate,” Anna said, her voice deep and awed. “Seven! Every time the waiters brought out a new food, we had to use a different fork. Can you imagine?”
“How much money did you raise for the strike?” Yetta asked.
“One thousand three hundred dollars,” Inez said from the front seat. “But it’s not enough. We’ve got to do more.”
Yetta decided she liked this Inez. The automobile was really only inching along, no faster than a horse and wagon, parading slowly through the streets of Lower Manhattan. But Yetta felt as though she could feel time speeding by, see the world changing before her eyes: walls falling down, bridges being built. Anna, who probably didn’t even own a fork, had gotten to go through seven in one meal; Yetta, who hated rich people, had found one she actually admired. And she was riding in an automobile with a woman at the wheel!
On the sidewalks, people turned and stared, then cheered. Yetta didn’t know if they were cheering for the strike or the signs or just the strange sight of carloads full of excited, giddy girls parading down the street. She hoped Mr. Blanck and Mr. Harris were watching through their office windows.
You cannot hide us away in your factory, cheating us in private, Yetta wanted to tell them. We’re telling the whole city what you do, how you treat us, how girls’ lives and health are sacrificed so you can make your millions!
“Did you hear?” Anna asked her, almost shouting over the noise of the car and the crowds. “They say Triangle’s moved most of its manufacturing out to Yonkers.”
“And other companies are going to Philadelphia,” said another girl, Sadie.
That wasn’t how it was supposed to work!
“Then we’ll have to extend the general strike out to Yonkers and Philadelphia,” Yetta said. “All shirtwaist workers everywhere will have to join us.”
She spoke bravely, as confidently as ever. But what if that didn’t happen? What if the strike failed? What if all they had to show for their bravery and hunger and frostbite and bruises was a single ride in a fancy car and a single meal with too many forks?
“Justice for shirtwaist workers!” Yetta screamed out the window, trying to outscream her own thoughts. “Support our strike!”
Men on the sidewalk waved their hats at her; women and children clapped. But one man seemed to be peering at her too closely, his eyes squinting together. He had the ruddy coloring of an Irishman, and Yetta didn’t know any Irishmen, but he called out, “Yetta? Is that you? Please! I have to talk to you!”
Then Yetta recognized him: He was Jane Wellington’s chauffeur.
“Stop the car!” she told Inez. “Let me out!”
Inez braked and Yetta scrambled out, wincing as the slush on the street soaked through the holes in her boots. On the sidewalk, the chauffeur bowed slightly, as if Yetta were one of the fancy society women herself.
“Miss Wellington sent me,” he said. “The girls picketing at Triangle said you were in the automobile parade. It’s about that poor Italian girl—”
“Bella? Is she all right?” Yetta asked.
“She’s been sick for a week,” the chauffeur said. “She’s better now, but Miss Wellington can’t understand a word she’s saying, and Miss Wellington’s father is coming back from his business trip tomorrow, and Miss Milhouse says the creature—pardon my language, I mean, the girl—has to be out of the house by nightfall, and Mrs. O’Malley, the housekeeper, she wants to fumigate the whole room, and Miss Wellington has been just like a little tiger, I didn’t know she had it in her, she says she’s not about to throw some poor, sick girl out in the streets when she’s just lost her whole family and been hit by a car her own chauffeur was driving, but, you know, Mr. Wellington’s a hard, hard man and—”
“What do you want me to do?” Yetta asked. She’d gotten lost somewhere between the first Miss This and the Mrs. That, and her English just wasn’t up to keeping track of a mister, too.
“Come and help Miss Jane talk to the Italian girl,” the chauffeur said.
Out of the corner of her eye, Yetta could see Inez Milholland’s shiny car turning the corner, the parade going on without her. She could hear the other strikers calling out, “Yetta! Come on!” And yet she could see the pleading in this man’s eyes, his desperation.
I wanted choices, she told herself. How can I think of deciding on governors and mayors and laws if I can’t even decide this?
“Please,” the man said.
Yetta turned on her heel.
“I’ll meet you back at Triangle!” she called to her friends.
“Tell Rahel I’m just . . .” What? Atoning for my sins? Helping a fellow worker? Trying to win her approval? The car was out of sight before Yetta could decide how to put it.
“My car—I mean, the Wellington car—is just around the corner,” the chauffeur said. “I’m Mr. Corrigan, by the way. Miss Wellington will be very glad to see you. That Miss Milhouse her father hired to take care of her when her mother died is just a . . . well, she’s a word I can’t use in front of a young lady like yourself. You’re one of those shirtwaist strikers, are you? We’re all so proud of you, the whole city is—”
“Not our bosses,” Yetta said dryly. “Not the police.”
“Well, the rest of us are. Other workers. Did I tell you that my niece works in a coat factory?”
They had reached the Wellington car by then. Mr. Corrigan held the door open for Yetta, once again acting as though she were some fine high-society heiress.
Is it because he thinks of me as a friend of Jane’s, and therefore practically her equal, not just another immigrant who still has the dust of Ellis Island on her shoes? Yetta wondered. Or is it because he’s so impressed by the strike?
Yetta really wanted to know the answer, but it wasn’t something she could ask. She slid onto the leather seat, which was every bit as fine as the leather seat in Inez Milholland’s car.
Who would have thought I’d have my second automobile ride the same day as my first? Yetta marveled. Who would have thought I’d become an expert on leather seats?
Mr. Corrigan drove her into parts of the city she’d never seen before, where the mansions sprawled across entire blocks and elaborate gates and fences protected vast yards from the street. Yetta began to feel less and less like a proud shirtwaist striker; she became more and more aware of the holes in her boots. One house she saw seemed to have an entire forest contained in one wing. “That’s the Vanderbilts’ famous conservatory,” Mr. Corrigan said, when he saw her staring at it. But Yetta was most puzzled by the wreaths and bows and greenery that seemed to be hung on every house.
“What are those for?” she finally asked.
“You mean the Christmas decorations?” Mr. Corrigan asked. “Haven’t you ever seen ... Oh. I don’t suppose you have.”
And then Yetta felt even more alien and out of place.
Even Mr. Corrigan had fallen silent by the time they pulled into a long, curving driveway in front of one of the huge mansions. This is a mistake, Yetta wanted to tell him. I barely know Bella. I can’t help Jane—not if she lives in a house like this. . . . Still, Yetta held her head high as Mr. Corrigan opened the door for her and extended his hand to help her out of the car.
“The butler, Mr. Stiles, will show you up to Miss Wellington’s room,” Mr. Corrigan said.
“Thank you,” Yetta said in her haughtiest voice, as though she’d never in her life crouched in cow manure pulling milk out of a cow’s teat, as though she’d never had to live on four dollars a week, as though she didn’t have a single hole in either boot.
Inside the mansion the ceilings were high and echoing, and the butler who came to the front door wore such fine clothes that Yetta was certain that he must be Jane’s father, that “hard, hard man,” back from his business trip early. Fortunately, before Yetta had a chance to say anything, the butler said, “Miss Wellington has been awaiting your arrival.” He whisked Yetta across acres of marble floor and up a grand staircase that seemed to stretch into the heavens; it was that far between the first and second floor.
Jane’s room could have held three or four of the tenement apartments like those Yetta and Rahel lived in. But Jane surprised Yetta by clutching her hands as soon as Yetta walked in the door.
“I’m so glad you came,” Jane said. “I haven’t been able to talk to her at all. Her letter was in Italian, real Italian that I could read, but I guess she only speaks a dialect. And I don’t think she knows any English at all. . . .”
Bella was in a bed the size of a boat, her head propped up against a pile of pure-white pillows. Her face was nearly as pale as the pillows, and her tragic eyes burned like embers. Yetta found that she didn’t know what to say to her in any language.
“My letter,” Bella said in Yiddish that was a bit garbled, but perfectly understandable. “I want my letter back and she won’t give it to me. Why doesn’t she understand my English?”
“That’s Yiddish you’re speaking,” Yetta said.
“No, it’s not,” Bella said irritably. “It’s the English I learned in the factory.”
“It’s Yiddish! You must have learned Yiddish because there were so many of us Jews in the factory. Listen”—Yetta switched languages—“English sounds like this.”
Bella stared up at Yetta, her eyes seeming to grow in her pale face.
“I don’t even know what Yiddish is,” she said, in Yiddish.
Yetta started laughing first. She wasn’t even sure what she was laughing at: the Yiddish that Bella thought was English or the fact that Yetta had thought that Jane’s butler was her father or the fact that she was standing in this incredible mansion with holes in her boots. But after a split second, Bella started laughing too, and together they laughed and laughed and laughed, until somehow it made sense for Yetta to throw her arms around Bella’s shoulders and whisper, “I’m sorry about your family.” Bella nodded then, with tears threatening in her eyes, but the laughter was still there too.
“What’s so funny?” Jane asked, her voice a little prickly, sounding like Yetta had back in the shtetl when Rahel went off with the older girls and left Yetta behind.
She has this huge house, Yetta thought. She has this huge room. And she feels left out and jealous just because she doesn’t understand two immigrant girls speaking Yiddish?
Suddenly Yetta didn’t feel so bad about the holes in her boots.
“Bella learned Yiddish by mistake,” Yetta said. “She thought she was speaking English.”
“Wish I could learn a new language just by mistake,” Jane said. “I’ve been studying Italian for weeks, and it’s totally useless.”
“You were able to translate Bella’s letter, weren’t you?” Yetta said comfortingly.
“Yes. It’s right over there on my desk. I went back through it with the phrase book and wrote out the translation word by word, just in case I was wrong,” Jane said. She gestured helplessly. “I was hoping I was wrong.”
“But you weren’t?” Yetta asked.
Frowning, Jane shook her head.
Yetta walked over to the desk—another grand affair, painted white with gold trim—and picked up two sheets of paper and brought them back to Bella. The tears swam even more deeply in Bella’s dark eyes. She clutched the original Italian letter to her chest.
“When?” she asked. “When did it happen?”
Yetta translated. Jane came over to the bed and peered down at the second sheet of paper.
“It says Guilia—Gull-ia? Gui-uh-lia?—I’m not sure I’m saying that right. She succumbed to a fever on July 2, Giovanni and Dominic on July 3, Ricardo and Angelina on July 6,” Jane said grimly.
“July,” Yetta told Bella. “The first week of July.”
Bella gasped. She said something rapidly in Italian-something that sounded like swear words. She was sitting straight up in bed now.
“If Signor Carlotti paid me, first week,” she said, switching back to Yiddish, “Mama and the little ones would have had food, they would have been strong enough to fight off any fever—the blood of my family’s deaths is on Signor Carlotti’s hands!”
“Signor Carlotti didn’t pay you for your first week?” Yetta asked.
“No. He said I was a”—Bella searched for the right word—“learner.”
“That’s why we’re on strike,” Yetta said. “We’re trying to stop Signor Carlotti and the other bosses from doing things like that, cheating us, not paying us what they owe.”
“I strike too, then!” Bella said. “I—” Her Yiddish failed her. “Vendichero la mia famiglia!”
> “Avenge my family,” Jane said. “That I understood.”
Yetta had not even been trying to persuade Bella to join the strike. But Bella was already shoving the bed covers back, struggling to climb from the heap of pillows as if she intended to join the picket line right that moment, in her frilly nightgown.
“Wait! Where are you going?” Jane asked. “You’ve been sick—you had a fever yourself. You can’t—”
At that moment a tall woman pushed her way into the room. She wore a lovely gown of pearl gray silk, and her silvery hair swept regally away from her face, but there was something ugly about her, an angry set to her mouth, a coldness in her eyes.
“Miss Wellington, really!” she snapped. “This is simply scandalous! It’s bad enough that you’re associating with that Italian girl, but now, entertaining another vagrant in your own private quarters—it simply isn’t done!”
“Bella and Yetta aren’t vagrants,” Jane said stoutly. “They’re working girls.”
Yetta heard the admiration in Jane’s voice, and suddenly even the holes in Yetta’s shoes seemed like badges of honor.
The woman fixed Yetta with a glare that seemed to scorn holey shoes, Jews, Italians, immigrants, and anyone else without marble foyers.
“And you!” the woman practically spat at Yetta. “Even if Miss Wellington has temporarily taken leave of her senses, then I would think a working girl would know her place! What if I rang up your employer and had a little discussion about your behavior—invading our home, taking advantage of Miss Wellington’s innocence and naiveté? How much of the Wellington family silver have you managed to slip into those pockets of yours?”
The woman couldn’t have hurt Yetta more if she’d slapped her.
“I haven’t touched your silver! And anyhow—I’m on strike! The bosses don’t own me, they don’t have any control at all over what I do outside of work! I can go anywhere I want!” Yetta argued hotly, just as Jane hissed, “Miss Milhouse! You must apologize this instant! Yetta is my guest! I invited her into my home!”