“I was just doing my duty, doing right by Mr. Mostel.”
“I hope that’s how he sees it, because I’m on my way to visit him now, and you can be sure I’ll let him know how you locked us in—just as we’ll be letting the newspapers know all the details too.”
He seemed to deflate like a balloon. “I’m just the foreman,” he said. “They can’t pin anything on me.” And he hurried off. The girls looked at me and laughed.
“Are you really going to tell the police and the newspapers?” one of them asked.
“I might. In fact I probably should, shouldn’t I? It would make people aware of how badly we’ve been treated. Maybe some good will come of it.” I decided to visit Jacob as soon as I’d settled the matter with Sarah.
“Do any of you know where Sarah lives? The frail-looking girl from Russia—quiet as a mouse?”
“Oh that one.” One of the girls nodded. “She lives on Hester. Two buildings from us.”
I noted the address in my little book. “And what about Mr. Mostel?” I asked.
“You’re going to see him too?”
“I might—just to tell him what I think of him and his firetrap,” I said. “Does anyone know where he lives?”
“Oh sure. We go to supper there every Shabbat,” one of the girls said with a laugh.
“He lives on the Upper East Side,” someone else said. “Right by the park. Fancy schmancy. I saw him when I went uptown to the zoo once. He came out of a side street, right across from the zoo. He was riding in his carriage with his family. Very grand.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Are you really going to see him? You sure have chutzpah, Molly. I bet he throws you out.” I heard them calling after me as I made my way toward Hester Street. Of all the Lower East Side, Hester Street was the most bustling street of commerce. Pushcarts made through traffic impossible. It was hard enough for a pedestrian to squeeze between them. Everything from fish to old clothes, from the lyrics to popular Yiddish songs to roasting sweet corn, all crammed in along the sidewalk. I picked up my skirts and stepped daintily through the debris. Sarah’s building was above a kosher butcher shop and the dead animal smell accompanied me up the stairs. I knocked on the front door. It was Sarah’s narrow little face that peeped through the crack in the opened door.
“Molly! What are you doing here?”
“Just come to pay you a visit, Sarah.”
She opened the door wide. “Come in, please. This is so nice of you.” She led me into a small room, that clearly comprised their living space. On one wall was a shelf of pots and dishes. There was a crude bench and table. Possessions were stacked in orange crates and blankets and quilts were folded in a corner. A pale woman sat in the one good chair, a rug over her knees. In the poor light her skin looked almost gray and was so shrunk around her bones that she looked like a marble statue sitting there. Sarah’s sister Fanny sat on an upturned crate at her feet. The place was damp and cold, the wallpaper peeling to show black holes in the walls. It was about the most sorry sight I had seen since coming to America.
“Mama, this is Molly who works with me,” Sarah said, then repeated it in Yiddish in case her mother hadn’t understood. “She was wonderful. She jumped across the roof, like in a circus.”
Sarah’s mother said something. Sarah nodded. “Mama says you must have some tea with us. She is sorry we have no cake or sugar.”
“Oh no, don’t make tea specially for me . . .”
“Of course you must have tea.” Sarah filled a pan from a jug, then put in onto a little spirit stove.
I sat on the bench and looked around again. On the shelf and the walls were some fine little charcoal sketches—street scenes and street urchins.
“You must be the artist, Sarah,” I said.
“My sister Fanny also draws well,” Sarah said. “We had a tutor in Russia who had studied in Paris. He taught us well. He said we both had a gift.”
“That must have made copying Mostel’s designs easy for you then.”
The girls both jumped as if they had been burned.
“What do you mean?” Sarah asked.
“I saw those pages that floated away yesterday. They were Mr. Mostel’s new designs. You were going to hand them to your sister to take to Lowenstein’s, weren’t you?”
Sarah glanced swiftly around the room. “Please. Not here. Mama doesn’t know. She doesn’t understand much English, but—step outside, please.”
I followed her out of the front door. “So I copied his designs,” she said, lifting her little chin defiantly. “Serve him right, mean old man.”
“But Sarah, he was employing you.”