by Suzanne Weyn
Finn put his shoulder into it but quickly discerned the cause of its refusal to move. “It’s painted shut,” he announced.
The room suddenly felt unbearably airless and foul. It swirled in front of her eyes, and she could feel the blood draining from her face.
Water! She needed water. And air!
Rushing from the room, she ran down the hall, searching for the sink Da had referred to. It was deep and chipped but a welcome sight. She braced herself against it and began to pump. Instead of the sparkling well water she was used to, rusted liquid trickled down. It was disgusting, and she couldn’t stand to drink it.
The faint feeling threatened to overtake her, so she sat on the floor to avoid falling and injuring herself, letting her head hang between her knees. Maybe she was simply tired from the many days at sea. But this was not what she had expected, not at all.
“So you like New York City. I can tell,” said a thickly accented male voice in a mocking tone dripping with irony.
Lifting her head, she took in the slim man leaning against the wall across from her. He wore baggy trousers belted at the waist with a worn leather strap and an equally baggy white shirt with the long sleeves rolled to the elbows. His forehead was wide under wild, thick dark hair. She wondered if his flat, crooked nose had ever been broken. She decided it must have been, for she’d seen broken noses before.
Bridget estimated that he might be twenty, maybe a little younger. The world-weary hardness in his dark eyes struck her as inconsistent with the high-strung energy evident in his leanly muscular frame.
The hallway had gone oddly quiet, as if, having cooked and eaten their meals, everyone had retired early for the evening, even though the late summer sun still filtered through the grimy hall windows. The apartments that moments ago had teemed with life were now closed and erupted in only occasional bursts of loud conversation.
The young man stepped forward so that he was in front of the filtered sun shining in from a small hallway window. It haloed his form, making him seem surrounded by an unearthly haze and throwing his face into shadow. It also now required her to squint against the light when she looked up at him.
He tossed her something small, and, reflexively, she raised her hand to snatch it out of the air. It was a red and white mint wrapped in wax paper. “Sometimes a little sugar is all you need,” he said. “Don’t you think so, princess?”
She stared at him sharply. Why had he called her princess? How could he know that it was her secret fantasy—that she was somehow royal despite all the evidence to the contrary?
He couldn’t. She was being ridiculous; it must be her overactive imagination again.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
His accent was so thick. Where was he from? She had never known anyone who spoke like this.
“No, nothing. I’m sorry; it’s nothing.” Looking down, she undid the mint’s wrapper but hesitated before popping it into her mouth. Hadn’t Da warned them to be wary? Who knew what was in this mint?
Bridget wrapped the mint up again with the intention of returning it. Despite the kindness of the gesture, the fellow unnerved her.
When she raised her head to speak to him, he was gone.
In the morning they unbundled the last of their supply of cheese and bread and had it for breakfast. Then, using the tools Paddy had brought with him, they began work on the tenement apartment, scraping the walls, fixing the cabinets, and repairing the planks in the floor.
While Da and the older boys worked, Bridget and Liam hauled in buckets of water and did their best to scrub everything down. “Don’t be playing in that,” she had to scold Eileen again and again, as the little girl insisted on splashing in the rusty water.
Finn chiseled into the paint sticking the window shut. Once it was opened, the sounds of the street below poured into the place.
Unlike the quiet countryside that they’d come from, the clatter of horses’hooves on the cobblestone streets, the squeak and grind of wagon wheels, the call of the pushcart peddlers selling their wares, and the din of chattering people were relentless. “See?” said Paddy brightly. “Mike O’Fallon wouldn’t let us down. He found us the finest place in all the Five Points.”
Bridget, Seamus, Finn, and Liam exchanged dubious glances. “This is the finest place they’ve got?” Seamus asked, and then he burst into laughter at the sheer absurdity of the idea. His hilarity proved contagious, and soon they were all convulsed in peals of laughter, even Paddy. Eileen, not getting the joke, clapped her small hands and laughed along with the rest. She finished off by splashing exuberantly in the wash bucket, drenching herself and causing even more laughter.
By midday they were famished. It suddenly struck them that there was no goat to milk or hen’s nest to raid for eggs. Paddy took out his small leather pouch of coins. “Go down to the street and see what you can get for this,” he instructed Bridget, placing a twopence in her palm.
“Won’t I need American money?” she questioned.
He shrugged. “Try to find a peddler from the old country. He might want to be sending it home to his family.”
Bridget climbed down the five flights of stairs and went again into the busy street. It was mobbed with people who seemed to think nothing of bumping into her and pushing her aside in their hurry.
Peddlers called out, advertising their wares. The variety of things they had for sale was impressive: fiddle strings, suspenders, pocketbooks, used clothing, even rags. They had items for sale that she couldn’t even name because she had never seen them before.
The food-selling carts were farther down the block. Before she reached them, she lingered a moment over several carts selling sewing needles, buttons, and thread. The variety of texture and color in the threads was astounding. One spool stood out from the rest, almost throbbing with vivid energy. The silken thread was a vibrant crimson red.
“How much for that thread?” she impulsively asked the peddler. Surely she couldn’t buy it, but she asked nonetheless, not sure why she had spoken.
The man had been counting out some bills and looked up at her, slightly startled. “What’s that, Bridget?”
She gasped. “How did you know my name?”
The peddler laughed, not unkindly. “I could tell from your Irish voice, your brogue. That’s what we call all you Irish girls—Bridgets. What can I do for you, Bridget?”
She pointed at the thread. “How much?”
“A dollar a yard. It’s from China and worth every penny.” He looked her over, assessing her ability to pay his price. “It’s more than I’m guessing you have.”
An American dollar waved in front of her eyes. “Give her a yard of the crimson thread.”
Bridget whipped around to see the same strange young man from the day before. “No, no, please,” she declined. “I couldn’t take it. I have no need for—”
Too late.
The thread was measured, snipped, and wrapped around a wooden spool.
The peddler handed it to the young man, who then pressed the spool of thread into Bridget’s hands. “Crimson red is a royal color. It suits you,” he said.
He looked into her eyes, and she felt he was seeing every secret thought, every doubt, every hidden longing she had ever harbored. She felt shaken to her core.
“I cannot accept this,” she said softly.
He didn’t take his eyes from hers as he replied, “Someday you will pay me back.” With that, he turned away from her and disappeared into the crowd.
CHAPTER THREE
The Fighting O’Malleys
Work at the Paper Box Factory kept the family from starving that first week, but Paddy and the boys loathed it. Paddy, Finn, and Seamus were used to working the fields, but as backbreaking as that work was, they discovered that they preferred it to the airless, hot, cramped factory where they were constantly harassed and upbraided by a foreman to work faster.
“The most miserable landlord back home never spoke to me the way that foreman does. I do
n’t know who he thinks he is,” Paddy complained almost daily.
“The guy on the loading dock keeps calling me Mickey,” reported Finn angrily. “He calls anyone who is Irish, Mickey. I’d like to punch him.”
Seamus, whose job was to fold and stack boxes from the moment he arrived until he left in the evening, never had much to say. He usually fell asleep almost immediately, sometimes curled on the floor, still in his boots.
“Poor thing,” Bridget remarked to Finn one evening when she watched Seamus snoring on the floor. A boy of only thirteen shouldn’t be working so hard.”
“It won’t kill him,” Finn said as sat on his mattress, sewing a button back on his shirt. “I was working the farm with Da at thirteen.”
Bridget sighed uncertainly. “Somehow it’s not the same.”
“Can I work when I’m thirteen?” asked Liam eagerly from a corner of the apartment, where he and Eileen had been watching a spider crawl across the floor.
“Pipe down and don’t be rushing it,” Finn chided him mildly. “Working is no great joy, not the kind of work we’re doing.”
“Maybe when you’re thirteen we can have you in school,” Bridget added hopefully.
After two weeks of unsuccessful searching, Bridget found work as a seamstress in a private shop run on the top floor of a tenement down the street. Finn had found the notice advertising for seamstresses in the local paper and directed her to it.
She hated having to leave Liam home in charge of Eileen. He was so young to be stuck with babysitting duty all day. But what other choice did she have? “Now you have a job—taking care of Eileen,” she said as she went out the door for her first day at work.
He waved away her remark dismissively. “This isn’t a job.”
“Well, it’s a big help, anyway,” she insisted, giving both Eileen and Liam a kiss.
“Bridgey, don’t go!” pleaded Eileen, wrapping her arms around Bridget’s neck.
“I have to,” she said, slipping from the frowning child’s grasp. “You be a good girl for Liam, and I’ll be home at suppertime.” She hurried down the stairs, worried and unhappy to be leaving an eleven-year-old boy in charge of three-year-old. It wasn’t fair to either of them.
She found the address and showed the owner, Mrs. Howard, her worn sewing needles and told her honestly that she had learned to sew from her mother and that she sewed all her family’s clothing.
“You’ll be doing handwork, so I won’t need a deposit against breakage of one of my sewing machines,” said Mrs. Howard, a stern-faced woman. “I’ll expect you to use your own needles.”
“Thank you so much, ma’am,” Bridget said, feeling incredibly lucky. “When should I start?”
“Right now,” Mrs. Howard said, gesturing toward a narrow flight of stairs leading to the top floor.
Bridget’s new job was to sew men’s vests in a windowless room with about twenty other women. There were only five sewing machines, which the older, more experienced women used to sew men’s caps and shirts. Everyone else was relegated to doing handwork. Bridget was eager to learn the machine and hoped she could get a chance someday.
They were paid by the item, so it was in their best interest to put their heads down and work hard. This, combined with the claustrophobic atmosphere and the heat of the crowded space, kept conversation to a minimum. There were occasional eruptions of gossip and other talk, however.
A slightly plump, darkly pretty girl named Maria, with big brown eyes and curly, nearly black hair, just a few years older than Bridget, sat beside her. “I saw you in the street once before, you know. I remember your hair. Bellissima! You are so lucky. Some Italians have red hair too. They’re mostly from the north, though. My family is from the south, so I have this dark hair, same as everyone else.”
“Red hair is not so uncommon in Ireland,” Bridget told her without looking up from her sewing.
“I know that. I’ve seen other Irish redheads,” Maria replied. “Their hair isn’t as beautiful as yours.”
“You’re very kind. Thank you,” said Bridget, blushing just a little from the praise.
“I saw you talking to that Ray Stalls,” Maria continued.
“Who?”
“By the sewing supply cart. You were talking to him.”
“His name is Ray Stalls?” Bridget asked, trying not to sound too interested.
“That’s what he calls himself,” said Maria, “but that can’t possibly be his name, can it?”
“Why not?” Bridget inquired. Why should Maria think it wasn’t his real name?
“You’ve heard him talk!” Maria said. “No one who talks with such a thick accent is named Ray Stalls. He’s made that name up to be more American.”
Bridget’s lips parted in surprise. “Can you do that?”
Maria threw her head back and laughed. The disturbance made the other women look their way. Some scowled at them, others smiled.
“Of course you can change your name, silly,” Maria said, whispering this time to draw less attention. “People do it all the time here in America. Sometimes the officials do it for you.”
“What do you mean?” Bridget asked. “Someone changes your name?”
“It happens all the time,” Maria confirmed. “My name is Maria Papa. That’s the right name, because the official at Castle Garden wrote it correctly on my papers. But I have cousins in this country named Pope, and Popa, and Papal. The officials made a mistake on their papers, so now they have new names.”
“That’s terrible.”
Maria shrugged her shoulders resignedly. “It’s not so bad. New country, new name. But a name like Ray Stalls—he made that up. He just wants to make people believe he’s a real American. Or maybe . . .” She scooted her chair closer and dropped the volume of her voice conspiratorially. “Maybe he’s hiding from someone.”
Bridget replied in an equally hushed tone. “Who would he be hiding from, do you think?”
“Use your imagination,” Maria urged. “He could be escaping a wife or even the law; maybe he’s a fugitive from the government of his country, a political exile.”
“What country would that be?” Bridget wanted to know. In the last three days she’d realized how incredibly naive and uninformed she was regarding the other peoples of the world. It made her feel very young and stupid; such feelings were new and unwelcome sensations to her.
“I don’t know,” admitted Maria.
“He’s German,” an older woman with snowy white hair in a bun informed them sharply, glancing up for a second from her machine. Her name was Hilda, and her accent was the same as the one Ray Stalls had.
“What’s his real name?” Maria asked boldly.
“I don’t know. Nobody knows,” the woman replied. “Sometimes he lives in the basement of my building along with the other men who pay two cents a night for a spot to sleep. They’re like animals, packed in so tight.”
“But I met him in my building,” said Bridget.
“Ach!” the woman grunted gutturally with an irritated wave of her thick hand. “Who knows where he goes or what he is up to? He seems to be everywhere. You girls stay away from him. He is trouble.”
Bridget sat forward in her chair, interested. “Why do you say that? What kind of trouble?”
“He disappears for days on end, and then suddenly he is back,” the woman told them. “He reads books, dangerous books full of wild ideas. I hear that he shoots off his big mouth in the saloons. Someday he’ll go too far and they will ship him out of here. It is called deportation. In this country if you are an immigrant and you make the government mad . . .” She smacked her hands together briskly. “Poof! You are gone.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “They ship you out.”
By the end of her first day, Bridget was weary to the bone. Her shoulders ached from hunching over her sewing, and there was numbness in her legs from sitting for so long. She had completed only two vests in eight hours. But at twenty-five cents a vest, she felt rich with a fifty-cent p
iece in her pocket.
On the way home, she stopped at a vegetable cart for five potatoes and then entered a butcher shop to get a beef bone for soup. When she’d made her purchases, she had twenty cents left. Stopping for a small glass bottle of milk for Eileen brought it down to fifteen cents.
Still, having money in her pocket and a bag of food to show for her day’s work made Bridget forget about her aches. Her footsteps felt light as she hurried up the five flights to her apartment.
She arrived to find Liam on all fours, barking and pretending to be a dog chasing Eileen. The little girl ran in circles, shrieking with laughter, shouting, “Doggie! Doggie!”
Bridget put down her bag of groceries and scooped Eileen up in her arms. “Is the mad dog chasing you?” she asked playfully.
“Doggie!” cried Eileen, pointing at Liam, who barked in response. “Liam is funny!”
Bridget circled around the nearly empty apartment, not eager to sit again so soon after her day in a chair. “How did it go today?” she asked Liam.
He lay spread-eagled on the wooden floor. “All right, I suppose, but it’s tiring taking care of a baby.”
“I not baby!” the girl objected. “I this many,” she added, holding up three fingers.
Bridget rubbed the back of her hand tenderly along Eileen’s cheek and glanced at Liam sympathetically. “I suppose you really should be in school, shouldn’t you? It’s bad enough that Seamus is shut up in that box factory all day.”
“I wouldn’t mind school. I want to read, like Finn. But who would take care of her if I went to school?” he replied, lifting his chin toward Eileen.
“That’s the problem,” she admitted. “I’ll go down to the mission soon as I can to find out if there’s anything to be done about it. Maybe there’s someone who cares for little children around here, and as soon as I earn some money we can hire her. That would let you go to school. They have free schools here, you know.”
Setting Eileen on the floor, she crossed to the stove and lit it. A few pieces of sooty coal had been left from the previous tenant, and they had piled the broken floorboards inside to supplement it. “You know, I hear that a lot of tenement apartments don’t even have a stove,” she told Liam. “And some still have outdoor toilets that everyone in the building must share and only one sink on the ground floor. Mike O’Fallon really did find us a good place.”
