“They didn’t look fine to me, they looked decidedly peaky,” Sid said. “I had an uncle who died after eating a bad oyster. I’m not taking any chances with you.”
“So I had to settle for lobster instead. Even Sid had to agree they were still swimming around with great vigor and positively radiated health. So I’m going to prepare a true Boston lobster feast tonight. Whom should we invite?”
“Someone who won’t mind plunging the damned things into boiling water,” Sid said, laughing.
They swept me along Patchin Place, caught up in the excitement of frivolous living. It was moments like this that reminded me how very hard it would be to leave them and move to a place of my own.
That afternoon, while Sid and Gus were in a flurry of preparation for tonight’s lobster feast, I made myself look respectable and businesslike, secured my hair in a bun with twenty or more hairpins, perched my one respectable hat on top of it, and set off to present myself to Mr. Max Mostel. As I followed the Bowery southward, and then turned onto Canal Street, my confusion and curiosity grew. This was not a respectable residential area—it was full of factories, run-down saloons, the occasional seedy boarding house. Certainly not the kind of area in which I expected my clients to live. When I came to Number 438 it wasn’t a residence at all. The bottom floor was half open to the sidewalk and I could hear the sounds of hammering and sawing going on inside. A newly made chair was being varnished just inside the doorway. I asked for Mr. Mostel and was directed up the staircase around the corner. A business then, not a home. I went up the dark and narrow stairway, one flight, two flights, then a third, until I came to a doorway with a sign on it: MOSTEL AND KLEIN, LADIES FASHIONS. I knocked and entered a packing and shipping area. Men were staggering around with large boxes and depositing them on a primitive platform outside a back window to lower to the street. I asked for Mr. Mostel.
“In his office. Up two more flights. Go through the sewing room and you’ll find the stairs at the end,” an elderly man gasped as he paused to mop his brow.
Up another flight that ended in a closed door. I knocked on this and eventually was admitted into a long gloomy room full of young women sewing, row after row of them, their heads bent low over their work. I had been in a room like this before, when I had briefly tried my hand at any job I could get. I hadn’t liked it then and I didn’t like it now. The room resounded to the clatter of the machines. A hundred pairs of feet worked the treadles while one hundred needles flew up and down. There were bolts of cloth piled along walls. It was airless and lint rose from under my feet, causing me to sneeze. This made several of the girls glance up, look at me, and then go back to their sewing again, as if they begrudged the second they had wasted. Nobody said a word as I walked the length of the room until a male voice roared out, “Hey, you—where do you think you’re going?”
I imagine that every sweatshop employs at least one male bully to strike fear into its female workers. This one—sallow, sagging, and with the sort of face that had a perpetual leer—was rather more repulsive than the one I had encountered before. Luckily I was in a very different situation this time. I eyed him coldly.
“I am on my way to see Mr. Mostel. Would you kindly find out if it is convenient to see me at this moment?”
“You want to see Mr. Mostel? Miss Hoity Toity, ain’t we! If it’s about a job, I’m the guy you see. The boss don’t see no stinking girls.”
“Fortunately I bathed this morning and don’t happen to be a stinking girl,” I said, hearing the titter of laughter from some of the workers who understood English. “But I received a letter from him this morning, asking me expressly to call upon him.” I was about to hand him my card, when I remembered that I should be discreet and confidential. No need to let this greasy man or any of these girls know who was calling on the boss. “If you would direct me to his office, please.”
“Follow me,” he said, “and don’t blame me if you get your head blown off.”
He led me up another flight of stairs, negotiating boxes of thread and trimmings on almost every step. He knocked on the door and opened it gingerly. “Young lady to see you, sir. Says you wrote her a letter.”
I stepped past him into a cluttered little office. There were more bolts of cloth stacked in the office and a dressmaker’s dummy displaying a frilled blouse and black skirt. Max Mostel was seated at a cluttered desk. He was a big podgy man with heavy jowls, sweating in a pinstriped three-piece suit. A cigar stuck out of one corner of his mouth.
“Yeah? What do you want?”
I handed him my card. “You wrote to me. Here I am.”