by Lynn Austin
My lungs felt as if they might burst from holding my breath. I reached behind Grandmother and opened the door to flee inside. I stood in the foyer breathing deeply. It smelled like heaven. I could see that it had once been a lovely, gracious mansion with elaborately carved fireplaces and a broad, sweeping staircase. The unusual woodwork that decorated all of the windows and doorframes resembled thick, coiled ropes.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing as a settlement house,” I said after inhaling and exhaling a few times.
“Twelve years ago, Miss Addams visited a settlement house in London, England, called Toynbee Hall. The idea is that if educated people live and work among the poor, both classes of people will benefit by learning from each other. Jane decided to do the same thing after she returned to America. By getting to know these people—experiencing how they live—she can learn what the causes of poverty are and try to eliminate them.”
“I’d like to meet Miss Addams. She sounds very dedicated.” But not quite sane, I added to myself.
“Unfortunately she is going to be out of town all this week. Perhaps the next time you come.”
The next time?
I started to remove my hat, but Grandmother took my hand again and said, “We won’t be working here today. I just wanted you to see Miss Addams’ house.We’re needed in the public kitchen down the street.”
I drew a deep breath before venturing back outside, as if I was about to plunge into deep water. Thankfully, the café was just a short walk around the corner on Polk Street.
“We’ve opened a small restaurant,” Grandmother explained, “where we serve simple meals such as soups and stews along with home-baked bread. The neighbors can buy a nutritious meal for ten or fifteen cents.”
We walked through a small dining room filled with mismatched tables and chairs and into the kitchen in the rear. Grandmother introduced me to the two immigrant women who were washing and drying a sink full of dishes, but they didn’t seem to understand much English.
“You’ll need this,” Grandmother said, handing me a well-worn apron. She tied another one around her own waist.
“Um … what do I have to do, exactly?” I had never washed a dirty dish in my life, and I had no desire to disturb my record.
“Well, today we’re serving a noon meal of soup and bread, so we’ll need to get started on those right away. Do you want to help make the bread or cut up the vegetables for the soup?” I stared at my grandmother. “What’s wrong, dear?” she asked, caressing my hair.
“I don’t know a thing about cooking. Mrs. Hutchins did everything for us back home, and the cooks provided all of our meals at school.”
“You mean they didn’t teach you any practical homemaking skills at that school?” I shook my head. “How do they expect you to manage a household of your own when you get married and have a family?”
“Madame Beauchamps expected us to marry well and have servants,” I said with a shrug. “In fact, she spent quite a lot of time teaching us how to manage a household staff.”
“I see.” Grandmother tried not to show how disappointed she was, but I detected it just the same. “Why don’t you have a seat, then,” she said with a sigh, “and you can just observe today.”
Guilt draped over me like a very heavy coat. I recalled Aunt Matt’s condemnation of the spoiled women in Aunt Agnes’ crowd, and I rebelled at the notion that I was just like them.
“I-I’d be happy to help,” I said with a gulp, “but you’ll have to teach me how.”
The back door opened and two more immigrant women joined us, chattering away in a very guttural language and toting large baskets filled with vegetables. My grandmother introduced the women to me, but their names sounded like gibberish. It shamed me to realize that I already had forgotten the names of the first two women. Were my memory skills reserved for the rich? Had I not considered these women worthy of the effort? My shoulders sagged a few inches lower beneath my guilt overcoat.
The two newcomers washed their hands, then put on aprons and went to work as if they knew exactly what to do. One of them removed what appeared to be an elephant bone from a huge pot on the stove and began cutting off the cooked meat. The process looked so disgusting to me that I had to turn away. I would never be able to eat food that required so much handling on my part.
The other woman set the vegetable baskets on the table. I recognized carrots, onions, and potatoes, but there were several other lumpy things that looked as though they belonged in a witch’s cauldron. I was quite certain that I had never eaten any of those things, nor did I want to sample them now.
“You would like to cut up?” one of the women asked. She offered me a knife.
“I guess so.” I selected an onion since the skin was flaking off and it looked as though it would be the easiest thing to peel.
“I’m going to start the bread,” my grandmother said. “If you need help with anything, just ask Magda.” The vegetable woman smiled at me when she heard her name.
The onion’s first layer came off fairly easily. Unfortunately, there were several more layers beneath it—and each layer proved more and more difficult to remove and more and more malodorous. The closer I got to the inside of the onion, the stronger the acid-like fumes became, until my eyes began to sting and stream with tears. I reached up to wipe them so I that could see what I was doing, but the onion juice was all over my fingers, and the moment I touched my eyes, the stinging turned to fire. They burned so badly that I dropped the onion and dug in my pocket for a handkerchief.
“Oh my! Oh dear!” Tears poured down my face as if my one true love had just jilted me.
I blew my nose and blotted my eyes—in time to see Magda turn away to hide a smile. I was not pleased at all to be the object of her amusement, so I picked up the onion again, determined to conquer it. The watering and stinging began in earnest the moment I did. If only my arms were longer so I could hold it farther away from me.
The last piece of skin finally slipped free and I set the brutish onion on the table with a victorious thump.
“Now you must chop,” Magda said. “Like this …” She set one of the potatoes she had skillfully peeled on the chopping board and deftly hacked it into soup-sized pieces. I watched—and silently bid good-bye to my fingers.
But I refused to give up. I pinned the slippery thing to the board, drew a deep breath, and sliced into it. Fumes exploded from the cut onion like fireworks.
“Oh! Ow! Ow!” I gasped. I was quite certain that I’d been permanently blinded. I dug my fingers into my eyes, rubbing them— forgetting the important lesson I already had learned—and immediately made matters worse.
“Splash some water on your eyes, dear,” my grandmother coached, leading me like a blind woman toward the sink.
I threw water on my face as if it were on fire, soaking my hair and the front of my shirtwaist in the process. When the burning and stinging finally stopped, I lifted my face from the sink—and there stood Louis Decker, offering me a towel, his brow furrowed in concern. “Are you all right, Miss Hayes?”
“Where did you come from?” I asked in horror.
“I help out here sometimes. And these are two of my friends from school. I’d like you to meet Curtis and Jack. This is Mrs. Hayes’ granddaughter, Violet.”
Wonderful! More witnesses to my humiliation. Any pride I’d had in my appearance was thoroughly humbled as I greeted Louis and his two friends—soaked, red-eyed, and tear-streaked. I accepted the towel he offered and dried my face with it, wishing I could cover my head and run.
“It’s wonderful to see you again, Miss Hayes,” Louis said graciously.
“Yes … Nice to see you too.” I sniffed. My nose wouldn’t stop running. He gestured to the onion that sat waiting for me on the chopping board.
“I always leave onions to the experts.”
It was a bit too late for that piece of advice.
“We need these many more,” Magda said, setting two more of the unpeeled monsters
on the board beside mine. “You like for me to chop?”
“Yes, please.” I hung my head in defeat.
“Maybe you try this, yes?” She handed me an ugly brown lump with hairy tentacles sticking out of it. We could have played Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral? with the thing, but I wasn’t in the mood.
“Is no smell in that one,” Magda assured me.
“Good. Thank you.”
Louis and his two friends donned aprons and began to work too. The sight of men doing women’s chores astonished me. One of them added more wood to the fire in the huge kitchen stove. The other one began scrubbing out the pot that had held the elephant bone. Louis picked up another knife and began peeling potatoes for Magda now that she had taken over the onions. The fumes didn’t seem to bother her in the least.
“I’m amazed that you would come here and help out this way,” I said. “It’s … it’s so kind of you.”
Louis dismissed my praise with a shake of his head. “It’s not enough to call myself a Christian if my faith doesn’t lead to action. In fact, that’s exactly how Miss Addams herself describes this place: an experiment in translating Christian values into social action.”
I looked down at the misshapen lump in my hand and was ashamed to admit that I lacked Louis’ zeal.
“Miss Addams comes from a wealthy family,” he continued. “She inherited quite a lot of money when her father died. She could be living in luxury, but she wanted to do something useful with her life. So she chose to live here and help make the world a better place. I want to do the same with my life.”
I didn’t want to interrupt Louis to ask what I was supposed to do with the mysterious mass, so I listened intently, nodding in all the appropriate places. I was willing to pitch in and help like the others— but I had no idea what the thing in my hand was, let alone what to do with it. When he finally set down the potato and took off his spectacles to clean them, I took advantage of the pause.
“Um … Louis? Do you know what I’m supposed to do with this?”
“You peel it—like a potato.”
“Thanks.”
I had watched him and Magda peeling things, and it didn’t appear all that difficult. But as soon as I dug my knife into the tough outer skin, the wretched animal began to bleed all over me! The more I peeled, the harder it gushed.
“Miss Addams was raised a Quaker,” Louis said, oblivious to the carnage I was wreaking. “They taught her to study society’s problems and to work hard to correct injustice.”
A beet! The cursed thing was a beet! And I knew enough about beet juice to know that it was as unforgiving as India ink.
“It’s what Jesus would want us to do. ‘What doth the Lord require of thee,’ ” Louis quoted, “ ‘but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.’ And the Apostle James wrote, ‘For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.’ Our Lord said that if we give even a cup of cold water in His name, we do it unto Him.”
I had tears in my eyes again, but not from the sermon or the fumes. My hands would be indelibly stained from the beet juice by the time I finished, and I was supposed to attend a party with Nelson Kent tomorrow night. But how could I lay the thing down and quit when Louis’ soul-stirring speech was meant to inspire me to sacrificial service? I would be worse than a heathen.
“Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the poor.’ And if we turn aside and allow the poor among us to suffer, then the quality of all our lives suffers.”
He went on and on, barely pausing for breath until he’d finished peeling and chopping the last of the potatoes. He tossed them into the soup pot with the meat from the elephant bone. By this time, Magda not only had dealt with all of the onions, but had scraped and chopped a basketful of carrots as well, and added them to the soup. My grandmother was covering a mound of yeasty bread dough with a towel and putting it into the warming oven to rise—and all I had to show for my morning’s efforts were discolored hands and a few poorly peeled beets.
“Do you want help with those?” Louis asked, gesturing to the mound in front of me waiting to be peeled.
“Are they supposed to go into that pot of soup too?”
“No, I think one of the Russian ladies is going to make borscht out of them.”
I nodded as if I understood, but I had no idea what he was talking about. “Yes, I could use some help,” I admitted meekly. Louis picked up a beet and happily resumed his sermon.
“The settlement house helps people from a variety of races and backgrounds—Germans, Irish, Swedes, Italians, Poles, Russians, Greeks. Jesus looks past our ethnic and class differences and makes us into one new family—His kingdom, here on earth.”
He continued in a similar vein as we attacked and conquered the beets together, but my mind drifted away from his lofty orations as I tried to think of a remedy for my stained hands. Lye soap, perhaps? It might remove the beet juice, but it would be at the expense of my skin. Which fate would be worse: red-stained hands or coarse, rough ones?
It sounded like one of the questions Ruth Schultz and I used to ponder: “If your one true love took your hands in his, and you had to choose between having dry, scrub-maid hands or skin the color of beets, which would you choose?” I tried to decide which fate Madame Beauchamps would tell me to choose, but she would be horrified that I’d found myself in this predicament in the first place. I would have to keep my gloves on tomorrow evening, which was not a socially acceptable thing to do when dining, but I saw no other way out of my dilemma.
We finally finished peeling the last beet. It seemed as though I had been in this kitchen for days. Louis removed his wire-rimmed spectacles again and polished them on his shirttail, which never seemed to stay tucked into his trousers. Once again, in spite of his vigorous efforts, the glasses looked just as smudged when he wrapped them around his ears again as when he’d started.
“It’s almost lunchtime,” he said. “We’ll start serving the noon meal soon.”
Indeed, the aroma of bread and soup had begun to fill the kitchen while we’d worked. My stomach rumbled with hunger. But when I recalled the nauseating smells that awaited me outside, I questioned the wisdom of eating anything at all. Hadn’t I suffered enough humiliation for one day without losing my lunch in the street on the way home?
I helped carry stacks of bowls and spoons to the serving table while Louis and his friends lifted the soup pot from the stove.
“This is the part I love,” he said. “Serving the needy, seeing their faces, offering that ‘cup of cold water’ in Christ’s name. It makes all the hard work worthwhile, doesn’t it?”
I glanced at my ruined hands and knew I couldn’t answer his question truthfully. My stained nails looked as though I had murdered someone with my bare hands.
“I admire you, Mr. Decker. I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone quite like you.”
“Please, Miss Hayes. God deserves all the glory, not me. I’m just His servant.”
“You’re a very good one, then.”
As it turned out, my help wasn’t required. When the doors opened and scores of hungry people came inside for a bowl of soup and a piece of bread, there were plenty of servers for the job. I watched my Grandmother and Louis and the others feeding the hungry and offering kind words of encouragement, and I doubted that I could ever dedicate my life to this work the way they were doing. What was wrong with me that given the choice I would rather be served than serve?
When the crowds left, we sat around the table in the kitchen where I had worked all morning and ate a bowl of soup for lunch. It was surprisingly delicious. I would have to write a letter to Ruth Schultz and tell her that my most adventurous meal might now be elephant soup. But when we’d all eaten our fill, I eyed the towering stacks of dirty soup bowls with dismay.
“We can help wash up another day,” my grandmother said, resting her hand on my shoulder. “We have another job to do now. Let’s go fetch our hats.”
“Are we leaving?”
/>
Grandmother nodded. I recalled my earlier experiences with onions and beets and didn’t know whether to be happy that I’d escaped dishwashing or if an even worse fate awaited me.
“Where are we going?”
“A woman I know named Irina is ill. I’ve offered to bring some soup to her and her family. Louis is going to come with us. Here, you can carry this.”
She handed me a loaf of bread wrapped in a kitchen towel. Louis already had the lunch bucket of soup in one hand, and he offered my grandmother his other arm. I drew a deep breath, inhaling the delicious aromas for the last time, then braced myself to walk outside.
The stench of the neighborhood had worsened in the afternoon sun. I usually reserved my prayers for bedtimes and Sunday church services, but I began to pray silently that this task wouldn’t take too long or be very far away. Otherwise, my lunch was going to make a quick encore appearance.
I noticed the children as we walked. So many of them were ragged and barefooted, and so many of them were working rather than playing. Older girls aged eight or nine rocked babies and chased toddlers. Young boys, still in knee britches, hauled stacks of firewood on homemade carts.
“Where do they find wood in the city?” I asked Louis.
“They scavenge for it behind warehouses or along railroad tracks. Then they have to sell it all. They don’t make much money, but every spare penny helps their families. A lot of our Sunday school boys work downtown all day selling newspapers or shining shoes.”
Grandmother linked arms with me. “This is what hurts me, Violet— seeing all these children who have to work so hard when they should be in school getting a good education. Thank the Lord that you had a safe, happy childhood—these children certainly don’t have one.”
I thought I finally understood why my grandmother had moved to Chicago after my grandfather died instead of staying in Lockport and taking care of Father and me.
“Older children who should be in school are forced to find work in factories,” she continued. “And much of the work that’s given to women and children is either piecework or done in sweatshops.”
