The sun was coming up when Libby gathered the dresses, put them in a basket, and put on her shoes. “You keep working, Mama,” she said. “I’ll take them down Hester Street.”
A mile and a half it was to schlepp them all the way over. If it works, it will be worth it. No more slave wages, and no more hat pins. And maybe next week, liver and onions for dinner.
By the time Liberty got there, the streets were already crammed with pushcarts and hawkers, and just bedlam: herring smells, cheese smells, body smells. And everything waved in her face: towels, tablecloths, bananas, silk stockings, salt fish bundled in a Ukrainian newspaper, Italian sausage wrapped up in a picture of Mussolini.
You want a yarmulke, you want an apron, you want a pickle, you want, you want?
No sooner had she set her bag down on the sidewalk and took out the dresses, there was some mother fingering the material with her grubby hands. “What’s that you got there?”
“Look at the label,” Liberty said. “You’ll never find anything this good anywhere in the street.”
“What do I know from labels? It’s schmatta only.”
Liberty snatched it back, but now there was another woman grabbing at it, pointing at the label. “Lilian, you wouldn’t know a brick from a pound of butter. How much?”
Soon Liberty had a crowd around her, and women were waving pennies in her face, and she was snatching back the dresses and bargaining. Three, four women at once.
“Because you got a fancy label doesn’t mean I have to pay you a fancy price!”
“For what I’m asking, you can’t get anywhere. You buy this good, you have to go to Bloomingdale’s or Saks even!”
“I could make myself for a dollar!”
“You want to sew yourself, lady, and have everyone laugh at you? It’s up to you.” She snatched the dress out of the woman’s hand and turned to her next customer.
She saw a policeman making his way through the pushcarts. She took back all the dresses and threw them in her basket. She ran off down a side alley.
“What’s wrong with her?” one of the women said.
“Look, she’s seen the officer coming.”
“They got to be stolen,” another woman said.
When Liberty stopped and looked back over her shoulder, three of the women had followed her down the alley. They were all holding out money.
By lunchtime, Sarah had made half a dozen more dresses. She was sewing the zipper on the last one when she heard Libby on the stairs. She came in, her wicker basket full to bursting still. She put her head on her arms, exhausted.
“Why are you back so soon?” she mumbled. “Couldn’t you sell any of them?”
“I sold them all, Mama. You have to make more.”
She sat up. “All of them?”
“You should have seen their faces when I sold the last one. I had a queue of women there. They made me promise to come back this afternoon.”
“This afternoon?” She frowned. “But where is the money?”
Liberty hefted her basket onto the kitchen table. “I used every penny to buy more material. You have to keep going. Here, give me a needle and thread. I’ll sew the buttons, Mama. I think we’ve got ourselves a business.”
45
It looked lovely, this Washington Square, snow dusted on every branch, every bench, every wall, every gate, and all finely powdered on the grass. But it was not lovely, the winter, if you had no money to stay warm while you watched it from inside. Out there, the bums froze in the doorways or huddled in miserable rags by the drum fires under the Brooklyn Bridge.
Liberty climbed the steps to their apartment and clumped in, clapping her hands together to keep the blood moving, wrapped her arms around the boiler in the kitchen, closed her eyes, and sighed like it was a long-lost love. “So cold today,” she said. “This New York. It is always too cold.”
Out the window someone’s gray shirts had frozen on the laundry line strung between the windowsills in the courtyard, like three startled ghosts.
“Soon it will be summer, and you will tell me it’s too hot,” Sarah said.
“Too cold, too hot. It is always too something. They should call it Too York.” Warm in here, at least, away from all the busyness. The walls of their walk-up had disappeared behind piles of gingham and cotton, racks of dresses on wire hangers, baskets of fabric scraps. It was noisy with the clacking of two treadles on the linoleum floor. Sarah had hired another girl to help her; Irena, a Polish girl, still had mud on her boots from her shtetl in Miles-from-Anywheresky, which was what Sarah called her little village—even she couldn’t pronounce the name.
“We need another machine, Mama,” Liberty said.
“That means another girl.”
“We can afford it.”
“We got three girls, even four, it is still only pennies we are making.”
“We can pay the rent, and we have plenty to eat. What do you want to be, Mama, Rockefeller?”
“Why not? This is not a life. What we had before, that was a life.”
“I don’t care about what we had before. That’s gone now.”
Sarah pushed back from her machine to stretch her aching back. “I want more for you than this, bubeleh.”
“What we need is a shop.”
“A shop! We cannot afford.”
“You want rich? We’ll never get rich working in this cramped-up apartment. It doesn’t have to be big, somewhere with a shop window and a workroom. We could sleep in the back of it and give up this place, save on rent. I can’t keep walking up and down the Bowery. Every week I need a new pair of heels. In a shop, the people would come to us.”
“How could we ever pay for a shop?”
“I been thinking. We can make a lot more if we buy material straight from the wholesaler, cut out the middleman. That is where all our profit goes.”
“Wholesalers won’t do business with small fish like us.” Sarah shook her head. “They won’t make business because we are not big fish, but only way we can be big fish is if we make business with them. And this is supposed to make sense to a person how?”
“There has to be a way.”
“You think of a way, you tell me.”
Liberty had only just got warm. The thought of going back outside again made her shudder. But her mama deserved more than this. There had to be a way, and if there was, she would find it.
There were derelicts sleeping in filthy piles of snow between the girders of the Elevated, empty quart bottles lying next to them. One, with three day’s growth of gray stubble and an open sore on his bald head, was lying sprawled on his side with his trouser fly wide open. A hot-dog seller was pointing at him, making jokes about him with his customers. The poor man was wearing a suit, though it was smeared now with all kinds of unspeakable muck. Liberty supposed it was what he had been wearing for the last job he ever had.
I wish I could help him, she thought. One day I will, or people like him. It can’t always be about me.
Away from Penn Station it was different. Suddenly she was in the Garment District, all of America had their clothes made right here, or so they said. There were deliverymen everywhere, banging around the street with their garment carts, delivering racks of clothes to the stores or loading them onto trucks—God help anyone who got in their way. She wondered if any of them was Frankie’s brother, so long since she had seen those boys she probably wouldn’t recognize them now.
She turned down a side street and found the place she was looking for in a row of three-story buildings, all with white pillars out front, stoops with stout enamel-painted doors. There was a single brass plate on the wall beside a door that said “Davidson’s & Co.”
She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and went in.
Under her coat, she was wearing a Liberté original, a burgundy suit that accentuated her sleek hips, menswear wool with silk fringe, decorative buttons, a faux flower on the lapel. She was proud of it, and proud of her mama for designing it. Maybe I live in a w
alk-up, she thought, but I still look like one of those women on Broadway that have to have something flashy when they get out of their limousine.
But if she was feeling sure of herself when she walked in, the look the receptionist gave her stopped her cold. The eyes behind the rimless spectacles reminded Libby of her teacher at the Florence Nightingale public school on Delancey Street. She had her hair in a tight bun, and she was wearing a shirtwaist that would have been fashionable twenty years ago.
“May I help you?”
“I have an appointment with the manager.”
“At what time?”
Libby glanced up at the clock. “At eleven o’clock.”
“And your name is?”
“Liberty Levine. Miss Liberty Levine.”
“And what company are you from, Miss Levine?”
“Liberté Fashion House.”
“Liberty Fashion,” she said, scribbling on a pad.
“No, Liberté. The emphasis is on the third syllable. It’s French.”
The receptionist gave her a hard stare. Was it supposed to intimidate her? She might be Libby Levine from off Bleecker Street right now, but she still remembered what it was like to be Miss Liberty Dewey from the Arlington Apartments, and that was the look she gave her right back.
“One moment,” the woman said, and moved away.
Liberty took in the office: a desk in the middle of the room with a pipe rack and a Remington typewriter, several bookshelves stacked with ledgers and thick-spined manuals, some filing cabinets. The men and women in the office were pretending to ignore her, but she could see them all smirking to themselves. Just another pushy good-for-nothing, who does she think she is?
She saw the receptionist whisper something to a woman sitting at a rolltop desk at the far end of the room. The woman checked the diary that lay open on the desk and shook her head. She heard her say, loud enough to hear even from the other end of the room: “Well, there’s no Miss Liberty Levine in the appointment book for today.”
The receptionist smiled triumphantly. She walked back to the reception desk. “I’m afraid—”
But right at that moment, a man walked out of the corner office. He was blond, young, and slick, exactly the sort of man Frankie had told her always to avoid. He wasn’t wearing a suit jacket, and he had his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal the thick fair hair on his arms. The red silk tie was tied in a Windsor knot under a patterned suit vest.
“Liberty?” he said as he came toward the front of the room. “You wouldn’t be Liberty Dewey, would you?”
Everyone in the office looked up from what they were doing. She felt her cheeks burn, and it was an effort to keep her composure. How did he know her old name? “It’s Levine now. Liberty Levine.”
A cock of his head. “Is it? All right.” He grinned again. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Well, it was a long time ago. I guess we’ve both changed quite a bit. You have an appointment, do you?”
“At eleven o’clock,” Liberty said.
“My secretary must have forgotten to write it down in the book. My apologies for keeping you waiting. Please come through.”
Liberty followed him into his office. She spared the receptionist a quick backward glance. It was petty to enjoy such moments, of course, but the look of dismay on her face was a picture.
It was a busy office: folders scattered over the desk; a large black telephone; a full in- and out-tray; a glass ashtray, sparkling clean. The young man sat down behind the desk and leaned back, his fingers interlocked over his chest.
“Sit down, Libby,” he said, and hearing him use the diminutive of her name startled her.
She stared at the carved wooden nameplate.
HENRY MURPHY
MANAGING DIRECTOR
“That won’t help you. It’s not my name.”
“Should I be worried?”
“I’m filling in. I’m the assistant manager. Jack Seabrook.” He tapped his nose.
Ah, the nose. There seemed to be a kink in it. She remembered now.
“I can’t be expected to remember every boy I beat up when I was a little girl,” she said.
He grinned. “I let you win.”
“Of course you did.”
“You’ve changed.”
“So have you,” she said. “I think you could take me now.”
As they talked, she tried to remember if they had ever come across each other after that first meeting at the wedding; but she couldn’t recall, it was too long ago. She remembered Jack’s father had come to the apartment in the Hundreds once, but he hadn’t brought Jack. She was surprised that Jack could still remember her, unless having a girl make his nose bleed when he was twelve years old had been such a mortal blow to his pride.
Jack Seabrook the man bore no relation to Jack Seabrook the whining, mealymouthed kid she held in her hazy memory. Although he looked every inch a lady’s man, he had the sober demeanor of his father, someone who knew what he was about and had a stout checkbook to back him. Perfect teeth, perfect hair; she would have been wary even if she didn’t know whose son he was.
“I can’t believe you remember me,” she said. “That was a long time ago.”
“Ten years or so. A lot has happened.”
“How’s your father?”
“The same. The old man never changes; the world just revolves around him.” There was a glint in his eye, something else lurking behind that charming smile. What was it? “I was sorry to hear about Uncle Billy. I was away at school at the time. I never found out what happened to you or your mother afterward. My father wouldn’t talk about it.”
“Dewey should have followed his own good advice about a man never investing more than he could afford to lose. He came up short on quite a lot of stock margins, and he’d forgotten to pay his life insurance premiums. An oversight in the office. We had to move out of the apartment, and everything was sold off to pay his creditors. I still don’t think it covered all his losses.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Mama and I both went back to Levine. Pretended we were choosing a fresh start instead of having one dumped on us.”
He nodded as though that made sense to him. “That was a bad time. Did the old man ever offer to help?”
“Your father? I’ve no idea. Mama never mentioned it. Even if he had, she would have been too proud to take anything.”
Liberty felt his steely blue eyes appraising her.
“It’s quite a surprise having you just walk in like this today. I couldn’t believe it when I heard my secretary say your name like that. I thought: How many redheads called Liberty can there be in New York?”
“Only two, far as I know. Me and the old girl with the oversized candle out by Staten Island.”
“She’s a redhead?”
“She was, before the seagulls got to her.”
He grinned. “How can I help?”
“I didn’t know this was your firm.”
“It’s not, it’s my father’s. I finished business school last year, so he sent me here to learn the ropes. I think that was how he put it. Actually, he’s testing me out to see if I have what it takes. Murphy reports back to him weekly, I believe.”
“And Mr. Murphy is . . .”
“Away on business today, in Boston. You picked the right day.”
“Did I?”
“I don’t think you would have got past the fearsome Miss Riley otherwise. So tell me why you’re here.”
“I want to place an order. My mother and I are in the fashion business. We’d like forty cases of cashmere.”
His expression didn’t change.
“When do you think you can deliver them?”
Jack brought a yellow pad of paper toward him and unclipped a pen from his vest pocket. “First things first. What is the name of your company?”
“Liberté Fashion. Not Liberty. Liberté with an accent on the third syll—”
&
nbsp; “I know how to spell it in French. How long have you been in business?”
“Six months.”
“Six months. And how many people do you employ?”
“Three. Including Mama and myself.”
“And your premises are . . .”
“In Greenwich Village. Where we live.”
“And what is your annual turnover?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t been in business long enough to have an annual turnover.”
He put down the pen. “You realize that Davidson’s is one of the largest dyers and importers of textiles in the United States.”
“That’s why I came here. We don’t want to do business with amateurs.”
He ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek. “The thing is, we have never before sold to any company not listed on the stock exchange, let alone a shoestring operation in lower Manhattan. And you want me to give you forty cases of cashmere on credit?”
“I believe thirty days is usual.”
He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “You have a nerve.”
“Yes, I do,” Liberty said. “In my experience, you don’t get far without one.”
He said nothing. Liberty heard the clock ticking on the wall behind him and a freighter sounding its horn on the Hudson River. “I agree,” he said. “Let’s go to lunch.”
“To lunch?”
“I’m hungry. When I’m hungry, I eat. What about you?” He was already on his feet and reaching for his jacket and coat, which were on a hook by the door.
She got a little clumsily to her feet, nonplussed. “What about the cashmere?”
“We’ll talk about it over lunch. That’s usual.” He opened the door. “After you,” he said.
Liberty thought he would take her to some fancy place with red plush and mahogany walls, where he would order lobster Newburg and French wine—no one cared about Prohibition anymore—and that he would then try to seduce her. Noblesse oblige.
Loving Liberty Levine Page 24
