Chapter Twenty-Two
Polly
New York, New York
I am back in the factory in Brooklyn. My hands hold a piece of machinery over two parts of a soldier’s shirt, ready to stitch the arm and body together.
My fingers appear so youthful that I’m taken aback for a long moment.
Then I return to myself and the factory, remembering there is work to do.
Even though I just turned seventeen, I’ve been promoted to this machinery position, placing me in charge of the girls who were sewing the shirt uniform sections by hand.
I am proud; after all, I came to this country all alone from Russia only five years ago, without a word of English.
But sometimes, I wonder. Is this the sort of success for which my father sent me to America?
After all, I send back home every penny I can, but no one else has come aside from Ben, who I’ve never seen, as he was sent to Chicago.
Would my father truly believe this factory work and the pittance I’m able to ship to my family is worth the sacrifice he forced upon me—giving up my hard-won academic scholarship to the Gymnazia at Pinsk?
An education that could have me well on the way to an actual profession, like teaching, by now?
Finishing up the last shirt in my pile, I stare down the row, wondering when the others will have pieces ready for me.
Woman after woman, girl after girl, all bend low over their work areas, squinting to use needle and thread in the low light of this grubby factory.
The more shirts we make, the more money we make.
And I, for one, will be in dire need of more money soon.
I glance over at my friend Sidonia, who heads up another machine and another row of girls and women and is my main ally here at the factory.
We smile at each other, and Sidonia gives me a playful shimmy.
A nod to our Sunday afternoons spent in the dance halls with all the other young people.
An activity I haven’t felt up to for several weeks.
“You wanted to talk to me? Come to my office now,” a low, deep voice says quietly.
I do not need to glance up from my machine to know who stands beside me.
It is the new foreman, Frank, the one with the dark swoop of hair and piercing blue eyes I used to find attractive.
The one who was the focus of my daydreams. Until six Saturdays ago.
My heart pounds and my palms sweat as I follow him, every eye upon us.
Earlier today, I asked to speak with him privately, but now I regret it.
I’d felt certain that he wouldn’t act here as he had that Saturday, but seeing him up close, I’m not so sure.
I become even less positive when he closes the door behind us, and I am faced with this man—this monster—alone.
My fingers instinctively flutter to my cheek and then my eye, where the bruises he gave me have barely healed.
Six weeks ago, I accepted his invitation to Coney Island, walking on air that this man I fancied might actually fancy me back.
Heedlessly, I’d followed him to an empty cottage near Coney Island where he’d “left a few things.” When I resisted him, his fists came out.
Frank faces me, his hands on his hips. Staring me up and down with now-reptilian eyes, he says, “Came back for a little more of what I gave you?”
He hasn’t moved toward me, but I feel the menace coming off him as if he stood an inch away.
“No,” I say, backing away. But then I stop. “I came to demand you do your duty.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You got me pregnant,” I answer, trying everything in my power to stand firm and keep my voice from wavering.
What I must say next is odious to me, but what other choice do I have?
My distant and cold cousin Lena, with whom I now live—after moving to New York from Massachusetts a few years back—has made it plain she does not condone unwed mothers and would toss me out of the apartment I share with her and her family if she knew my situation.
She doesn’t like me as it is. “Now you have to marry me.”
“You? You think I’d marry you?” Frank starts laughing, a horrible, raspy sound. “Anyway, there are probably a dozen guys who could have knocked you up. A Yiddish whore like you.”
I hold back the tears. “You were the first and the only. It is your duty.”
The laughter stops, and his smile vanishes. He takes one long step toward me, and I can feel his hot breath on my face. Just as I did that terrible Saturday night. “I will never, ever marry you. In fact, I won’t keep you on as an employee. We don’t employ unmarried pregnant girls at this factory.”
In one rough movement, he spins me around and takes a hold of my shirt collar from the back.
Slamming his office door open, he pushes me down past the rows of girls and women and marches me off the factory floor.
The squeal of chair legs on cement sounds out as my fellow factory workers scramble to follow us. To watch this awful spectacle.
We reach the main factory door, then the heavy metal gates through which I’ve passed for the past year. Holding me with one hand and opening the gate with the other, Frank pushes me outside—and toward the rough sidewalk.
A stifled cry sounds out from a girl standing behind him, and a grumbling begins to build. “Pearl.” I hear Sidonia call out my real name—not the name I call myself in the dance halls or in the factory—as I fall to my knees.
Frank turns away from me to them. “Any one of you that steps through these gates to help Polly here will suffer her same fate. A shove to the ground and a firing. Do you understand me?”
As I push myself to standing, brushing pebbles off my bloodied knees, I watch as the girls and women file back into the factory.
Sidonia shoots me a pitying look—she knows what Frank did to me—but scurries back inside.
Jobs are scarce, and these women and girls support not only themselves but their families.
And now there is a terrible stain upon me, one they will not want to spread to themselves.
Even as word about my condition spreads throughout our area.
Alone, I limp away from the factory, toward an uncertain future.
—
Gasping, I lunge forward in my bed. I am suddenly, terribly awake, although the painful tentacles of the familiar dream still have a hold on me.
My head throbs, and when I reach up to touch my face, I feel something wet around my swollen nose.
When I remove my hand, my fingers are sticky with metallic-smelling blood.
Lucky’s first punch landed square on my nose.
He must have also struck me in the eye and on the forehead before I hit the ground, because my temple throbs and I cannot fully open my left eye.
My bedroom door opens, and the Lion tiptoes in, a cloth in one hand and a basin in the other. She settles the items on my nightstand and sits on the edge of my bed. Dipping the cloth into the water, she wrings it out and dabs it around my nose. “He got you good, Polly.”
“Don’t I know it,” I answer, clutching my temple. Even the slight increase in illumination from the hallway light makes my head pulse in excruciating pain. “I feel worse than a night up drinking with Dutch.”
“Lucky ain’t no Dutch.”
“So I’ve learned.”
“The hard way,” she mutters, unnecessarily, I think.
“Is Virginia back?” Never mind my head, I need to know she’s okay.
“Not yet.”
“Any word from her?”
“No,” the Lion says. “And I’ve got my network listening.”
The Lion has a fierce clan of women like her. Women on the fringes who’ve been welcomed in by someone else on the fringes. They keep tabs on each other and all of us.
“I’ve got to make sure she’s okay.” I try to sit up, but it’s too painful.
“We can’t let him take our girls,” the Lion says. She is the closest to crying I’ve ever seen her—except that one fateful time. “Can’t let him corral every girl in the city into one big group and dole them out through bookers to different brothels or men every night. That’s not right.”
With the Lion’s words, the dream returns, along with the terror and anger and sorrow and shame I felt when Frank tossed me out of the factory.
Emotions that have followed me ever since, fueling my future.
I will never allow my girls to experience that.
I will never permit my girls to be treated in the dismissive, subhuman manner I endured.
I didn’t choose to be in this business—my father’s decision to ship me off to America and Frank’s rape and my cousin Lena’s eviction and the rumors about my pregnancy and a back-alley abortion took care of that.
But I did choose to run my house differently.
And I have no intention of letting anyone—even Lucky Luciano—take that away from me.