Mis' Bingy stood up, waiting for me, hushing the baby back and forth on
her hip.
"I use' to feel like that when I was a girl," she says. "You'll get over
it." She kept saying that, several times. "You'll get over it, Cossy,"
as if she thought it was some comfort.
"That's what I'm afraid of," I says, after a while.
We transferred at Eighth Street on the way down, because there was
something else I'd heard about and I hadn't ever seen yet. We walked
east through the square, under the arch, and I asked a policeman for
what I was looking for, and he showed me: The top story where the fire
had been in a factory. The girls had told me about it, and I told Mis'
Bingy, and we stood and looked. That was where they had jumped from.
That was where they had hit the sidewalk, a hundred and eighteen of
them, smashed or burned to death.
"It might have been you, Cossy," Mis' Bingy says, staring up and
swinging the baby.
"It _was_ me," I says. "I felt like it was me when I heard it--and I
feel like it was me now."
But I didn't want to cry for that. While I looked I got still inside,
still and sick, and sure. I guess I felt like I was every factory girl
in in New York. The hundred and eighteen wasn't the worst off--I knew
that now. I wondered how many of them some Carney had chased, to "help
them be a little less lonesome." I wondered how many of them could talk
English. I wondered how many of them ever had it in their heads for a
minute that there was anything else for them only just what they had.
Then I thought about that Greek god of beauty and song. And them hundred
and eighteen and most of the other girls and Mis' Bingy and me never
even knew there was such a guy.
Two days later Mis' Carney come back. The landlady had a book agent,
entertaining him in the parlor, so I had to take her right up to our
room. It was nice and clean, and Mis' Bingy always combed her hair and
changed her dress after dinner, just like she had at home afternoons,
when she'd got the dishes washed up. She was making lace by the window,
and the baby was on the floor. It was late, and we'd got a whole pie tin
of wieners sizzling over the gas-jet.
"Mis' Carney, you meet Mis' Bingy," I says. But Mis' Carney hardly
looked at her. She bent right over the pillow that Mis' Bingy's work was
on.
"Do you mean," Mis' Carney said, "that you are actually making the lace?
Here in New York?"
"Yes, ma'am," Mis' Bingy says. "Ma taught me--in the old country."
"Have you any of it made?" Mis' Carney says.
Mis' Bingy opened the washstand drawer and took out what she had, tied
up in a pillow case. Mis' Carney set on the bed and took it in her
hands. After a long time she looked up at me, and her face was lovely.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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