1910
The photograph of Reginald Goodman resembled a turtle: large body, small head. His hair was parted in the middle and waxed, and he wore round spectacles at the tip of his nose. Goodman owned Goodman’s Beard Wax out of Pittsburgh, and now, according to the papers, he was buying Earthshine Soaps.
The news came as no surprise—they’d all heard the rumors.
“Do you think we’ll be out of work?” asked Maria.
“Maybe they’ll spare us. We’re cheap labor. The machine workers get paid twice as much for the same hours. And all because they have a little wee between their legs,” Betsy said.
“To think that one’s wages are determined by your privates,” Maria said.
At that moment, the foreman descended the stairs from his platform. He rarely came down to the floor unless there was a mechanical issue or an injured girl. He stopped in front of Opal’s station. “Follow me,” he said.
It’d been a week since she’d plucked Jagr’s poster from that board. How quickly he had tracked her down. Why is one always surprised by endings when that’s what we’re marching toward all along?
She considered her options. She could run, but she wouldn’t get far.
The foreman would call for the help of the machinists, who would quickly overpower her.
She could pretend to pass out or call “Fire!” or fight with her fists, but what good would that do her?
To call a woman the weaker of the beasts was simply an observation of muscle mass.
Opal followed the foreman up the metal stairs and past his platform.
From this vantage point, the floor of the factory looked different, smaller and more massive at once.
She could see all the girls toiling below.
Up this high, she could see right out the window to the cityscape, to Union Terminal in the distance, the train station that resembled a giant table clock.
What would she say when she saw Jagr? I’m sorry wouldn’t quite cover it.
She hadn’t meant to hurt him as she had.
She’d miscalculated the strength of his drugs.
She thought of all she’d have to do for him, all he’d make her do.
Maybe it’d be no different from the life she’d led with him before—always having to apologize for the ways she’d failed his expectations, always getting out in front of these apologies by trying to please him in the first place.
As she followed the foreman, she considered how she’d describe this moment to Madame de Fleur.
What details would she remember? The stubble on the back of the foreman’s neck.
The cracks along the walls shaped like veins, as though the factory were a living, breathing thing.
She wanted to ask her if those on the Other Side always knew the ending.
She wanted to ask if those on the Other Side were ever wrong.
Did they long for anything other than what they desired in life?
How could they be so certain without their bodies to guide them?
Could they love without a body? Were they freer that way?
The foreman led her down a narrow corridor, past the room where she could see the machine operators taking a break. Their lunchroom had windows and electrical lights, a water jug, an icebox to keep their lunches cool. Finally, he led her into yet another room with green carpet, a large oak table.
At the far end of the table sat, not Jagr, but Bertie Tuttle.
Relief washed over Opal with such intensity, she felt as high as she did on laudanum. She might very well float out of her shoes.
The foreman shut the door behind him. Bertie motioned for Opal to sit. On the wall hung a portrait of Bertie’s father. He resembled something of a walrus with his mustache and his hair parted in the middle.
“Your cure worked,” Bertie said. She had read milk was the key to a healthy pregnancy. She sipped some now from a pint bottle.
“Thank the spirits,” Opal said.
“I’m not thanking anyone. Not yet anyway.” Bertie emptied her pint, then looked like she might vomit. She bent forward and pulled a newspaper from the handbag at her feet. “And now I need something else from you,” she said.
“Morning sickness?” Opal asked.
Bertie shook her head.
“Beard wax,” she huffed. “It’s my father’s factory.
Once the baby arrives, Charles won’t need to sell.
I can finance him. He can do whatever he wants.
” She explained that Charles believed there wasn’t enough money in soap anymore, not enough value.
Too many competitors. Too little profit for too domestic a product.
He had bigger dreams—electronic appliances, plastics, pharmaceuticals—and that was the problem, his ambitions.
She’d told him she was pregnant. She begged him to keep the news private until she was further along, and still, he moved forward with the sale of the factory, despite the promise of the baby.
“I don’t think he believes me,” she said.
“That you’re pregnant?”
“That it will take. That it won’t be like…” She paused and seemed to look directly at that portrait of her father. “Like the last few times.”
“I’m sorry,” said Opal.
“I don’t want your pity,” she snapped, then softened. “It all feels so silly, to be sad for something I never even had. I don’t even know that sadness is the right word.”
Opal understood what she meant.
“I know he has a mistress,” Bertie said. “A desperate working girl from what I hear,” she added, “as though it isn’t humiliating enough.”
The girl is not at fault, Opal wanted to say, but did not. Because she knew Amanda Mahooney, who was desperate, but not in the way Bertie assumed.
Just last week, Amanda had sat with Opal in the lunchroom when the other girls had left. Her fingers were slender, but her nails were bitten to the stubs. “He says he loves me, but … He says…”
“Heartache?” Opal asked, trying to understand.
“I’ve gotten myself into some trouble,” Amanda said. She looked downward, scrutinizing the table, and Opal realized what she’d come for. A cure for her shame.
“You don’t have to explain.”
“You probably think I’m a terrible person.” She chewed her lip as though she’d wanted to eat herself up, bit by bit, devour herself completely.
“Brave to admit what you want. That’s a difficult thing to do, wouldn’t you say?”
Amanda nodded gratefully. “Will it hurt?” she asked.
“It will,” Opal said. “At first. But then you’ll feel much better.”
“Because I won’t be in pain?”
“Because you won’t be afraid.”
A few days later, when the other Earthshine workers stood in the coatroom, dressing to go home, Amanda’s coat hung abandoned on the hook.
“He probably sent for her again,” Betsy said.
“Who?” the newest girl asked—but the rest of them already knew. Amanda Mahooney was the woman Dixie described as trim and salacious.
“Charles Tuttle, you dummy. Amanda’s the employee of the year.”
But there, in that green-carpeted room, Opal didn’t share all that.
What good would it have done to turn Bertie against poor Amanda Mahooney?
She wasn’t to blame. Bertie adjusted her gloves, pulling them up at the fingertips, then down at the wrists, and then she made a fist, as though she’d caught a mosquito in her grip.
“I need to ask you for another favor,” Bertie said.
“A love potion?”
Here, Bertie laughed so heartily she nearly lost her breath.
She loosed herself from her perfect posture and doubled over.
When she regained her composure, tears wetted her cheeks.
Opal hadn’t known Bertie could release herself like that, and it made her more fond of the woman.
“I haven’t laughed like that in a while.
It feels good, you know?” She heaved a breath.
She removed her gloves and wiped her tears with them.
Then she pushed the newspaper forward. “I need you to talk to the other Earthshine Girls. It’s my father’s factory, you know. It means something to me.”
Opal must have looked confused.
“Organize them, whatever you want to call it. Like these women at the shirtwaist factory in New York.” She now pointed to the article about the Shirtwaist Strike.
After eleven weeks, the strikers finally negotiated an ending to the ordeal.
In the photograph in the paper, the women linked arms. They looked flushed and victorious, but their tight, straight smiles revealed anger simmering still.
“Convince them to strike,” Bertie said. “They’ll listen to you. ”
Opal’s silence forced Bertie to continue. “They will fire every single one of you Earthshine Girls, you know. Old Goodman plans to bring in his own workers. He’s moving them here from Pittsburgh. From his beard wax factory. Beard wax,” she scoffed.
Bertie stood and faced the portrait of her father.
She touched the canvas tenderly, as though smoothing his hair.
“My father introduced us,” Bertie explained.
“At the time, the prospect of marrying Charles seemed promising. He can be surprisingly sentimental. A portrait of his first wife hung on his wall. It still does. He’s afraid removing it would betray the woman, and I’m not jealous.
I told Charles, at the very start, I do not want to be a common wife.
Let me work with you, I told him, like I worked with my father.
I wrote some of my father’s advertisements, you know.
But I think it’s different when it’s your wife.
Some men claim to want an equal until they realize the logistics of it. ”
Something about facing that portrait allowed Bertie a moment of such candor. She seemed to notice this and turned her back to the painting. “Queen City’s Soap. It’s not contested. Pure and clean, your dirt’s arrested,” she recited.
“That was you?” Opal said. “That rhyme always stuck in my head. You have a knack for jingles.”
“Charles calls it a hobby.”