Barren Island

by Carol Zoref

“What about everything and—”

  “I’m not the only guy you’ll ever kiss. But that doesn’t mean you’re in love with me. I’m the guy you’re learning with. If anything, you’re in love with the idea of me.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  The only thing I could feel was my mouth moving.

  “You’ve confused me with the person going to fight the Fascists.”

  “What about the boy who plants flower boxes, and smuggles money? The boy who touches me?”

  “You hardly know me.”

  “I know what makes you laugh, what you believe in...”

  “The FBI knows more than that.”

  “What’s the FBI know?” asked Miss Finn, now in earshot.

  “Nothing,” said Ray. “They don’t know a goddamn thing.”

  “Raymond,” said Miss Finn. “The walls have ears. Even in museums.”

  We did not go to Brooklyn for the holidays that fall, nor did I return to the warehouse. Brooklyn was a purpose that had disappeared. It had been so easy for Ray to dismiss me. It was more humiliation than I could bear.

  After a time I had some success in not thinking about him, just enough to feel miserable when I did, as if I had to forget about him all over again every time. I did not move into Noah’s room like I thought I might, but I sat there a lot doing homework, listening to the opera, to Walter Winchell, even to Father Coughlin. Then my father received a letter from Mr. Schwartzbart to please come. On a beautiful blue Saturday in April, I accompanied him to Manhattan.

  “The young lady,” said Mr. Schwartzbart, motioning to me, “should wait outside.” He waved me away with the handkerchief he had been using to blot his face.

  People were crowding by the bulletin boards and waiting in a doorway for their numbers to be called. I took a seat on the bench in the hall. I only had to wait for ten minutes.

  One of my mother’s brothers, it turned out, had been conscripted into the Soviet army. The chances of him returning alive were as close to none as Mr. Schwartzbart could say without saying there was no chance at all. The other brother was working in a munitions factory in a labor camp in Poland. The chances of him returning were less than zero. In everything but fact he was already dead. Unless someone went from America to Galicia and married the two brothers’ wives, there was no way that U.S. emigration would allow the unskilled women and their children into the country. But no one could marry them until they were legally widows. Which they were in a de facto way, even though this was agonizing to admit. My aunts and cousins were stranded. My grandparents, who might have tried escaping on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Harbin, where they had people, stayed to help care for them.

  “What am I going to tell your mother?” asked my father. He was already steps ahead of me, crossing Lafayette St. to 4th Ave. He was not really asking me; he was asking the air. And why not? Was there anyplace else to look for answers?

  He slowed down at the crosswalks to wait for me, taking off again as soon as we reached the other side. At Union Square, where 4th Ave. merged into Park and we entered the subway, I thought about Noah jumping up at the rally the year before and my father dragging him off the platform. It would be easy to say in hindsight which one of them was right, but it would bring me no closer to the truth. When we got off at 34th St. I thought about Tosca as well. I still have questions swimming around in my head about protests and opera, about politics and art, but I had such hopes for them.

  At 39th St. we turned west and paid a surprise visit to Uncle David, who was now in a shoe factory where he got work as a cutter when the shirt factory, also on 39th St., shut down. The factory was a block away from the Metropolitan Opera House. So many things took place on 39th St., of all the hundreds of streets in New York City. What did it mean? It meant nothing. It was simply a fact. At the shirt factory, Uncle David had worked his way up from cutter to stitcher to pattern maker. Now, at the shoe factory, he was a cutter again.

  The one and only time Uncle David got lucky that I ever heard tell of was the day the shirt factory closed. Uncle David and some of the other workers were milling about in the street, wondering how a factory could go from extra hours one week to out of business the next. A man he knew from the subway, who not only worked on the same street in Manhattan but who lived the next block over in Brooklyn, told Uncle David to come upstairs, there might be an opening in the shoe factory where he was a foreman. Uncle David, who had the softer hands of a garment worker, soon acquired the thicker calluses required for cutting shoe leather. To hear my Aunt Sara tell it, his fingers bled at night right through the calluses. How was it possible for him to bleed at home without him bleeding at work on the leather? I did not dare ask.

  We rode up the big freight elevator, one large enough for the horse-drawn carts that carried goods onto and off the production floor. The same horses, of course, which would sooner or later end up on Barren Shoal.

  Our entrance created a minor fuss. Just a couple of years earlier, before the new labor laws, no one would have thought much of a girl walking through a factory, especially one who had been kissed. No more. Not that this prevented minors from doing piecework at home, just like farm children milked cows and dug potatoes. Families had to eat, social progress or not. And now for the biggest cliché of all, but also the one and only thing I know for sure: life is hard. I apologize, but there you have it.

  The shoe production floor, unlike the reducing plant, smelled of things being made, not things being boiled beyond recognition. We passed stacks of uncut leather, tins of aged glue, and thick, oily rounds of shoe polish as beautiful as wheels of cheese. Uncle David, in his vest and tie, was at a table cutting. My father did not dare interrupt before he finished the piece he was working on.

  My grandson, the anthropologist whose name is also David, has written many scholarly papers on the nature of work, but has never made a thing in his life that did not start with pre-cut pieces. This does not take into account, of course, the toil, the many hours he bends his brow to his studies. Besides which, I love my grandson. But my David has never worked a job where he has to wash his hands before he goes to the bathroom, never mind wonder if there is a place to wash at all. They say writers should write what they know. So should scholars. David cannot know what it is like to stand on his feet all day until he has stood there, his arches aching and the balls of his feet swelling and not enough time between one week to the next for the swelling to disappear. He cannot know what it is like to bend over and stitch until the eyes sting. No one can until they have done it day after day. Year after year. It is not only a matter of wearing down the body. Knowing that one’s days will be spent at the cutting table or sewing machine affects the heart, the brain, and the soul. Summer jobs do not count because summer jobs end. My grandson, of course, disagrees. I cannot blame him. Nor would I have it any other way. Nobody wants their loved ones to suffer.

  Uncle David asked his boss if he could clock out ten minutes early, it being almost lunchtime anyway, and the boss said something about not coming back ten minutes early to make up the time, that the time would come out of his pay. My uncle said something about what he could do in ten minutes that the boss could not do in ten hours and my father said David and gestured in my direction, as if I understood their innuendo. Why not say what they meant to say? Even if what they said—like most of what most people say—was stupid. I do not say this with malice, but there is no virtue in concealing what I think. At the risk of repeating myself: I am 80 years old now and can say what I want. Even when I repeat myself.

  “I’ll give you the nickel tour,” said Uncle David, leading us away from the foreman.

  “Look, David, I’ve got to....” my father began.

  “News can wait, can’t it, Sol?” My uncle understood that things had gone from bad to worse. “You’ve got to start somewhere, no matter your calling. With shoes you start with the skins, a skill dating back thousands of years and never a pretty one on account of how bad the raw skins smell. The only
way to work them soft is to smoke them, which stinks them up worse. Leathers come to the factory from all over the country, so they look different depending on what the animals are eating. The hide of a cow eating hay in Colorado looks different that the hide of a cow eating corn in upstate New York. You’ve heard the saying ‘you are what you eat’? This is truth for cows, never mind people.”

  And for Joey, of course, you should pardon me.

  “We buy the tanned pieces of leather—whole skins so we know exactly what they are—on wood flats like this one from a jobber. He gets them from a tanner or maybe a middleman, depending on the size of the operation, some outfits having consolidated on account of business being so slow. They get the hides raw from places I don’t even want to think about.”

  My father was standing so close to Uncle David that their shirtsleeves were touching. David coughed a little to clear his throat, maybe worried he had insulted my father by insulting his trade. “Never mind all that: it’s once the skins get to the factory that the crafting begins,” he continued. “This is good leather here, but not the best. Top-of-the-line leathers give you shoes soft as gloves. I won’t even tell you what they cost because you wouldn’t believe me anyway and you’d go home and tell your mother that Uncle David is a liar and she’d give me some kind of argument, putting those highfalutin ideas into your head about the price of a pair of shoes. Feel these.” He slipped off one of his own shoes and held it out to me. “Go ahead, feel the leather.”

  Not like gloves, but almost. “I made these by hand from a top-grade skin I bought direct from a salesman. Out of a job now, that guy, except for the sample skins he was able to take with him when his boss folded. The samples tell you something about the grade of the lot and the quality of tanning. That way the factory knows what it’s buying before taking a shipment.”

  The cordovan-dyed leather shifted colors from bright burgundy to almost black when he tilted it under a light. He took a moment to admire his own handiwork and coughed some more. “This poor sales guy must have an apartment filled with samples because he’s on the street every day, selling them by the piece for next to nothing. The skin I took has enough that I also made a pair for Sammy. Who says the shoemaker’s children go barefoot, eh? The lady downstairs complained she could hear Sammy walking, his step is so heavy in these new shoes, but they make him happy. A little happiness isn’t so terrible for a boy like Sammy. What do I do? I talk to that lady, make her a pair of shoes, and now she’s happy too. Why make things hard when you can make them easy. Am I right, Sol?”

  “We need to talk,” my father replied.

  Across the room were rows of cardboard boxes stacked high against a wall. There were hundreds of them, waiting to be packed with shoes.

  “I’m explaining something, Sol,” said David. “This factory mostly makes ladies’ shoes, plus a little of this and that. Every shop has its specialty: some only ladies, some for men, others the children. But with how things are now, so many out of work and no one with too much money except the people who buy custom-made, you got to cut everything just to stay open. Now look around,” he continued. He was unstoppable. “You see eight different departments, eight different specialties, maybe ten people in each group. There used to be more, maybe twice as many, before the layoffs.”

  Nine men were working in staggered stations at a long wooden table. Each of the stations was illuminated by an incandescent light bulb suspended from a long, black cord. Dusty metal lampshades reflected what little light they gave.

  “Here’s Mr. Linder, our master cutter, from Leipzig. He handles every single skin like it’s an angel in the making. He can show the biggest oaf how to make an angel, too. The second seat is Mr. Goldberg from Warsaw, a jigsaw master who gets more out of a single piece of skin than almost anyone, even if he can’t show anyone else how, not if his life depended on it. This young fellow here,” he said, stopping in front of a man who looked close to his age and kissing him on the cheek, “this is Mr. Singer, our floor manager, the same man who got me this job, my subway companion, originally from Kielce.”

  Mr. Singer wore a shirt and tie; he had a stain of indigo ink above his lip, just like Mr. Schwartzbart at HIAS. He was wiping his hands on a cloth.

  “You missed a spot,” I said, pointing to my own lip to show him where.

  “A permanent stain,” said Mr. Singer.

  “I’m....” I did not know what I was. Sorry? Embarrassed? There was no reason to feel anything, but I felt both. Just because. That is what I mean by being younger than Sofia in every way. I did not even know how to be comfortable being wrong, even about things that hardly mattered.

  The stitching department contained more long tables with more dangling bulbs. This was where the upper sections were sewn.

  “Miss Tsipkin from Bialystok, Mrs. Babel from Odessa, and Mrs. Kopelev from the Ukraine are the senior stitchers, responsible for all these other fine ladies as well as the stock fitters in the next row, who prepare the soles. The lasting department, under the watchful eyes of Roth from Tarnopol and Zweig from Vienna, is where the uppers and the linings are attached to a last—this wooden shape is the last—so the sole section can be fitted to the upper in the next department by the bottomers. It’s in these two departments that trouble makes itself known. Roth and Zweig make certain it’s fixed. You don’t throw away shoes and stay in business.

  “Finally come the finishers, where the shoes are polished and the heel and toe pads go in and the name and brand of the shoe gets stamped on the sole. If it passes the watchful eyes of the finishers, which it better because Mr. Singer spot-checks them too, it goes on to the treeing department for laces and buckles and bows and all those little touches that the ladies like. Sturdy isn’t enough: people like pretty. Including poor people. And why not?

  “In the old days, one worker was responsible for each pair of shoes, start to finish. ‘Whole garment,’ they called it, like a tailor used to make a whole shirt or even a whole suit of clothing instead of breaking it out to cutters for jackets and legs and so on. As if people come in parts that someone assembles. Those days are gone except for tailors who work for society people. For them, only custom-made. The owners say the machines work faster and they’re right, but no machine makes a better shoe. Which is a whole lot of talking that gets us nowhere.

  “Are they stitched or are they cemented?” Uncle David continued, further delaying the reason for our visit. “Stapled? Nailed, like the old days? The truth is that glue, no matter how strong, never holds like stitching. Every shoe you see here,” he said proudly, “is sewn by a lady who knows the sound of her Singer machine like the cry of her own baby. She hears trouble before she sees it. Maybe a thread gets knotted or the needle splits or runs off track. If she doesn’t stop fast, the whole shoe can get ruined.”

  “Enough already, David. We’ve got to talk,” interrupted my father.

  “Go on,” Mr. Singer told my uncle. “The young lady can wait over here by my desk. There are things about shoes that I can tell her too.”

  My father pulled Uncle David away to where I could see them but not hear.

  “Did you know that people in northern Europe, by the end of the Stone Age, were sewing animal skins together to make leather thongs?” asked Mr. Singer. While he spoke he turned part of his attention to a short stack of papers, cross-checking style numbers against size numbers to make certain, he explained, that they did not stitch too many size 4’s, a small size for ladies, and not enough 6’s and 7’s, the most popular sizes. “All the shoes, all the clothing was made by hand until spinning and weaving machines were invented in the 1700s. A Frenchman invented a sewing machine in the early 1800s, but he never got success in the U.S. The tailors and seamstresses were against it. At least until Mr. Isaac Singer—my namesake but no relation—introduced a foot-powered machine for stitching simple seams. Plenty of folks objected, but the fact was the Singer sewed a stronger stitch. That’s how we ended up with factories. That was only fifty, sixty years ag
o. Not so long.”

  I remember my parents turning fifty, never mind me today turning eighty. Another platitude. But what can you say about mortality that has not been said?

  Mr. Singer rolled up the stack of papers, knotted a piece of black thread around them, loaded them into a pneumatic tube, and closed the cylinder trap.

  “Press,” he said, pointing to a brass lever.

  I pushed it down and the roll of production sheets sped straight up the tube from Mr. Singer’s desk into another tube braced against the ceiling. We watched the roll racing through short glass tubes sandwiched between the longer brass tubes until, finally, it arrived at the office on the mezzanine.

  “Lots of sewers owned their own machines, even at the small factories,” he said. He pulled another stack of papers to the center of his desk. “They had to, like a carpenter owns his own tools. When I was a boy, you would see people on the Lower East Side carrying sewing machines on their backs. People worked so hard, like mules. Lots of men and women sewed in their apartments; children, too. A family would take turns so that the one machine never stopped except when everyone sat for the evening meal, if even that. They couldn’t afford to stop. The machines were expensive, the families were poor. Now we got this Depression. But we also got the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in 1900 and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1914. No more children working in factories; no more barricaded doors; no more Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fires.” Mr. Singer’s voice choked as if those women had been trapped in that fire last year.

  “What if a factory closes? What good is the union then?” I asked. After all, it was Mr. Singer, not the ILGWU or the ACW, who found my Uncle David a new job.

  “Smart girl,” he said, with a smile and a shrug. “When the union can’t help like they want, we do how we can.”

  My father and Uncle David were solemn when they returned to Mr. Singer’s desk.

  “Our brothers,” Uncle David said to Mr. Singer. “One into the army, the other in a work camp, their families still in Zyrmuny.”