A House of Tailors Read online

  But this wasn’t even a sewing room. Nails were beaten into the hall wall to hold the large spools of thread. Folds of cloth were stacked on the floor so that I had to take huge steps around or over them.

  Barbara tried to explain. “Poor Lucas,” she said. “All he wants is his own shop, a place to put things, a place to spread himself out, a place where he can do what he loves.”

  “Sewing?” I said. “He loves sewing?”

  She nodded. “Yes.” And as she said it, her face turned the color of the river after a storm. She rushed past me to be sick in a basin in the bedroom.

  A baby, I thought. She was going to have a second baby. I would be sure to tell Mama and Katharina in my next letter home.

  Maria was out of her high chair now, holding a roll with butter and jam, smearing it on the floor and laughing.

  I had to laugh, too, running my fingers over her arms and under her neck. “Mouse fingers,” I said. But all the time I was thinking about the Uncle.

  I had just lost my first battle with him. It wouldn’t be the last one I’d lose.

  nine

  Barbara and I bumped the baby carriage down the stairs to the outside steps. “How hard you’ve worked all morning.” She smiled at me. “We deserve time for a walk.”

  She had worked hard, too, lugging water from the outside hall to the kitchen, washing Maria’s diaper cloths and the Uncle’s work shirts, then going to the roof to hang them.

  But now that she was having a baby, I told myself that from today on I’d be the one to carry up that heavy wet wash.

  I took a breath. How hot it was! Too hot to do anything but sink down on the stoop. Everyone else had the same idea. All along the street women sat outside fanning themselves and their babies with paper. And as I looked up, I could see more of them leaning out the windows on pillows, calling back and forth to each other. Children darted between wagons whose drivers called, “Iceman, fresh ice. Get your ice,” and “Rags. We buy and sell. Any length,” and “Knife sharpener here.”

  The smell of dirt from the horses and rotten fruit was everywhere.

  I had brought dresses with me from Breisach, all wool, and the one I wore today was heavy and clung to my legs. My stockings were wool, too. But I had found a packet of pale pink cotton under the stacks of cloth in the hall, and uncle or no uncle, with Barbara’s blessing I had begun a dress for myself. I had seen a great spool of cotton thread as well, and would knit a pair of stockings as soon as I had time.

  I felt my chin go up as we crossed the street. One thing I knew: I was going back to Breisach. And to do that I had to get money for the passage.

  Barbara was talking, telling me that she had money.

  I jumped, startled. “Will you give it to me?” I asked. “My mother has very little money. But I promise you I’ll send it back as soon as I can earn it at home.”

  She put her hand on my arm. “Enough money for a cup of ice cream, Dina,” she said. “In this heat . . .”

  I did cry then. As I walked along, with my face turned so Barbara wouldn’t see, tears dripped from my cheeks onto the wool dress with its heavy buttons, a river of tears.

  I hated the Uncle; I hated Brooklyn with its sun beating down on my head and on its streets so that everything smelled. And now we were in a shopping area where the butchers’ doors were open and the smell of great sides of beef wafted out to us. Sheep carcasses hung on hooks, and pig heads were jammed one after another into the windows. Some of them had sprigs of green in their open dead mouths.

  It made me want to gag.

  “It’s hard to leave home. I remember how I felt when I first came here.” We walked in silence then. Barbara put her hand on my arm. “Aunt Ida is homesick, too, but for a place she’s never seen. She longs for the prairie, for a small house with her husband. She’s working, saving, so she can join him.”

  I told myself I could do that, too. Work and save. Someday I’d go home to Breisach.

  Sitting on an iron bench in a park, Barbara and I shared a paper cup filled with shavings of ice drizzled with lemon syrup. I had never tasted anything so good. It filled my mouth with its tartness and slid down my throat, leaving a trail of icy coldness. Even Maria was smiling as Barbara held the cup out to her to suck.

  A breeze lifted the leaves of the trees, the park was green, and I felt as if I could breathe again. As I sat there, I made my plans. I wouldn’t argue with the Uncle; it would get me nowhere. I’d sew for him at night, doing the finishing work on the skirts and shirtwaists as he ran up the long seams on the machine: a bit of braid here and there, buttons sewed on in a moment, as Mama would say, “with a red-hot needle and a burning thread.”

  But during the day he had to let me go into service. I was big for my age, a good worker. No one would know how old I was. And that money, at least that money, would be mine.

  I tried to count in my head. Who knew what that would be in American money? I shut my eyes, frowning. A fortune, that much I knew.

  “What is it?” Barbara asked.

  I felt my eyes well up again, but I brushed at them angrily. No more crying. If it took years, then years it would be.

  A thin line of perspiration trailed down the side of Barbara’s forehead; moisture dotted her upper lip. “Let me take the baby,” I said. “Just rest here a few minutes, and I’ll walk with her.”

  I pushed the carriage around the park, looking up at the heavy green branches. Suddenly I was startled by the snuffling of a horse. I jumped, and the two men on the seat of the wagon in the street next to me laughed. They were big men with long dark beards and were a little frightening.

  I started to turn away, but before I did, Maria waved to them, a backward wave that she was just learning. It looked almost as if she were waving to herself. “Hey, little girl,” one of them said, waving back, and smiling at her. “You look like my daughter.”

  I took another turn around the park and went back to Barbara. “Did you see those men?” she asked. “The ones in the wagon?”

  “Maria waved,” I said.

  “They’re from the health department,” she said. “Searching out cases of smallpox.”

  Smallpox. A shiver went through me even in that heat. I remembered stories from home: in the French army across the Rhine River, the disease went from one soldier to another. Men raged with fever, their faces ruined with pockmarks; many of them died.

  Barbara put her hand on my arm. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, looking fearful herself. “We’ll put red ribbons in the apartment. That’s supposed to bring luck against it.”

  We stood up and began to walk again, past a group of houses with shops on the ground floors: a gift shop with cards and flowers wilting in the heat, an empty store with the windows dark and black, a man in black sewing at a table below a sign in the window reading MENSWEAR.

  I pointed it out to Barbara. “That’s what we need,” I said. “A proper shop with shelves to hold the fabric and thread. Drawers to hold the patterns.” I took a breath. “At home—” And then I found I couldn’t finish.

  But Barbara didn’t notice. “You sound like Lucas,” she said. “That’s what he wants. All he wants.”

  I pressed my lips together. I wouldn’t talk about our sewing room at home with the windows that overlooked the river.

  Barbara pointed. “That’s the Schaeffer family’s shop. They tailor men’s clothes. Suits and trousers.”

  Through the window I could see more than one machine, a woman finishing hems, a man bent over running up a seam, and a boy about my age sewing buttons. He brought the fabric with the button attached up to his mouth and clipped the thread with his teeth.

  I opened my own mouth in a little O. A tailor should know better. I could hear Mama’s voice. A bad habit, bad for the teeth, bad for the thread. Use the scissors, Dina.

  The boy saw me watching him.

  Quickly I turned away, but before I did, I saw him wink at me.

  My face flushed. What would Papa have said to that?
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  I went back to the apartment thinking about the boy’s face—a plain face, but friendly. How nice it would be to have a friend, even if it was just a boy who didn’t know how to sew buttons onto a shirt! And when I opened the door I was happier, because there in the hall, waiting for me, was an envelope addressed to me in Katharina’s neat handwriting. It must have taken weeks to get to me. Still, I ran my hand over it, knowing that Katharina and Mama had touched it.

  2 May 1871

  Dear Dina,

  I have so many things to tell you. I wore your hat to Sunday services. Frau Ottlinger has offered once more to buy it, but I will never sell it to her. “It is Dina’s hat,” I told her, “just in my safekeeping.”

  I enclose a new hat pattern. Elise managed to send this with someone who dropped it at our door. She thinks you are still here, and sends love. A beautiful pattern, isn’t it? I studied it carefully. It’s worn down over the face like one of Mama’s dinner crepes. Lace puffs up in back and a single rose is tucked in the center. Too bad it’s straw, that’s so hard to work with, but I just heard of a new machine that will sew straw. Can you imagine?

  The war is over. We heard that the fortress at Belfort held out for one hundred eight days . . . even after Paris signed the peace agreement. Isn’t that amazing? Both armies were so impressed that they left Belfort where it belonged on the French side instead of annexing it as they did Alsace and Lorraine.

  All these months later, I am tortured by the thought that we might have hidden you somewhere closer. But I was surprised to see that soldier lounging in the square, and felt a deep stab of fear.

  I’m sure we have done the right thing.

  Friedrich and Franz are growing every day. Both are learning how to sew. And Frau Ottlinger misses you. She says you both love lemon cookies. Mama doesn’t make them anymore. She says it makes her miss you more.

  Krist and I talk about you, and together we wonder what you are doing. Krist remembers you as a brave girl, as brave as the French soldiers who fought against our soldiers at Belfort. I remember you that way, too.

  Love,

  Katharina

  Dear Child,

  I must tell you I never even realized how much sewing you did for us. I don’t mean the seaming and the pressing and the turning of collars. I mean the odd things, if I may say odd: the seed pearls on a cuff that you’d decide to do on a whim, the extra bands of lace sewn into a sleeve.

  Ah, Dina, I send you hugs.

  Love,

  Mama

  ten

  That night I had my second argument with the Uncle, even fiercer than the first.

  I was reminded of the Prussian and French soldiers with their grim faces and smoking guns. How well I remembered that morning on the bridge with the two soldiers, especially the one with the beard and the terrible eyes. But, thinking of Katharina’s letter, I told myself I must not act like a weak little girl without a brain. I was fighting for a way to get back to my home in Breisach someday, and I couldn’t afford to be afraid of anything. Especially not the Uncle.

  At dinner he told us about his day washing Mrs. Koch’s carriage, her horses, and even the barn in back of her huge house, where they were kept. Dark shadows lay in crescents under his eyes, and the frown lines in his forehead seemed deeper than they had that morning.

  I waited until dinner was over and Barbara had gone back to the bedroom with Maria before I spoke. “Are you ready to see the sewing machine, Uncle?”

  Katharina would have told him to watch out. “Like König the cat, Dina has claws that you don’t see until you’ve been scratched,” she had said once when I had bested her in an argument.

  I followed the Uncle down the hall and watched as he inspected the machine. He spent time running his fingers over the belts, and moved the needle up and down to see that it went smoothly. “Dina can sew while I am at Mrs. Koch’s house,” he muttered to himself. “Barbara will keep the house and help in between. It will work; yes, it will work.”

  Even though he tried not to show it, I could see he was impressed with the way the machine gleamed in the flickering light.

  Why not? It looked like new. And I had begun to organize the fabric he had managed to buy for the time when he had his own shop. I had refolded the pieces so they lay against the molding in neat piles, the heaviest at the bottom, the lightest at the top, matching colors where I could.

  “I will sew for you at night.” I narrowed my eyes just a little, the way I did at home when Franz and Friedrich were bothering me. “I can sew quickly when I need to, but my stitches remain tiny and even and well placed.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. “What do you mean, at night?”

  I took a breath. “I mean to go into service with you and Aunt Ida during the day.”

  His face reddened. “You will work all day and then come home to take a few stitches for me?”

  I raised my chin. “More than a few.”

  He was frowning, the lines in his forehead a washboard. “You will sew for me during the day. There is lots of work to do here, jackets and skirts and shirtwaists.”

  My lower lip went out. “I have a pattern for a hat,” I said. “From Paris.” I didn’t say it was made of straw. I didn’t say how impossible it would be to do.

  The flicker in his eyes matched the gaslight.

  I rushed on. “I know the hats they are wearing in Paris and Breisach this year. I know what I need to make them and how to shape them.”

  I drew myself up. I’d always been tall for my age, but still I came only to his shoulders. “Half the women in Breisach are wearing my hats and I’m only fourteen years old.”

  Not quite the truth. In my mind I could see Mama’s eyebrows raised almost to her hairline, and I looked up quickly to see . . . something. I wasn’t sure, but was he ready to laugh? It was almost as if he could guess the truth. I had made hats once, for Frau Ottlinger and both her daughters, but nothing like the one I had made for myself, which by some miracle had turned out so well. Even I had been able to see that the ribbons that hung down the Ottlingers’ backs were a little crooked as I sat behind them in church.

  I had made two other hats after that, and they had sold. They were better, though the flowers were heavy in front and sparse in back.

  As I was thinking of Mama and home and bending over those flowers to secure them to the felt, the Uncle began to pound his fist on the edge of the sewing machine.

  If he had been about to laugh, he wasn’t laughing now. “Do you think you can come here and tell me how important you are?” he asked.

  Bang.

  “Anyone can see you are just a child.”

  Bang.

  “A child who eats more than the rest of us.”

  Bang.

  “Two pork cutlets at supper. Two helpings of creamed potatoes, two of carrots.”

  Bang.

  His hand must have hurt. He stopped pounding and covered his head with both hands.

  I had an enormous appetite, it was true. Once, at home, it had been my turn to chop the carrots for the stew. By the time I had finished cutting, I had eaten almost all of them.

  For a brief moment I almost felt sorry for the Uncle. He had hoped for dear, good Katharina and had gotten me instead.

  I slid onto the chair in front of the machine and ran my hands over it. “I can easily sew for you at night. I don’t need much sleep. And most of my work is by hand. You can use the machine while I sit at the kitchen table.”

  In my mind, I saw Mama raise her eyebrows again. By the time the cathedral bells tolled nine times every evening, I was yawning. By ten o’clock, I was tucked up in my third-floor bedroom so sound asleep that Katharina had trouble pushing me to my side of the bed to make enough room for herself.

  The Uncle’s neck looked as if it were too big for his stiff collar. He seemed as if he might explode.

  I pulled a spool of pink thread off its nail on the wall so that I wouldn’t have to look at him, looped it under and o
ver the machine hooks, and in one swift movement threaded it through the needle.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “With all this work you want me to do,” I said, leaning over to reach for the pink flowered cotton on top of the pile, “I will need a dress that won’t suffocate me.”

  “I will take it out of your wages when you go into service,” he said.

  “That’s fair.”

  “Fair? You think any of this is fair?” He marched down the hall and slammed the outside door so hard I could see the fabric trembling under my fingers.

  I rubbed my hands on the wool of my skirt. They were damp. And my heart was still pounding.

  But I had won, hadn’t I? I calmed myself by taking deep breaths as I went back into my airless bedroom to pull a simple dress pattern out of my suitcase.

  Kneeling on the hall floor, I pinned the pattern to the fabric and cut it quickly, thinking how glad I was that Mama had filled the bottom of my suitcase with starched white collars and cuffs.

  I stood up, rubbing my back. What an endless day this had been.

  It was much later by the time I sat in front of the machine, my feet on the treadle, and fed the material under the needle. I started by sewing the three pieces of the bodice together, matching the tiny flowers so it was impossible to see where they had been pieced, and then I gathered the sleeves into their openings.

  By the time I began the four long seams of the skirt, I was hungry again. I told myself that I could do without, but I could hear the ice dripping into the pan under the icebox. I knew there was one small cutlet left on a plate.

  I went into the kitchen and sprinkled a little salt onto the cutlet. Then I leaned against the windowsill. People below were still sitting on the steps to keep cool. I was getting used to the look of them: an old man reading a newspaper, a knot of women talking to each other, and even children playing in the dark streets. I closed my eyes and took a bite of the cutlet.