Four Years in the Underbrush: Adventures as a Working Woman in New YorkAnonymous
History
Four Years in the Underbrush: Adventures as a Working Woman in New York
Anonymous
Women employees -- New York (State) -- New York
There came a time when I all but gave up hope of finding out. It was
near the middle of the day, after I had run down everything that had the
slightest semblance of a clew. It was in a tenement below Brooklyn
Bridge, one of those tall, narrow tenements, jammed between other tall,
narrow tenements. Dark and smelly, with crooked stone steps and slimy
stone walls. The flat in which the family lived was on the next to the
top floor, and by much searching I discovered a woman who knew them, and
who also could speak enough English to tell me all she knew. Having
begun with this woman, after four hours’ fruitless search I came back to
her.
Sure, she would show me the flat in which the Kouschmitzky family lived.
She had been there when the ambulance came for the mother, and the
officer had handed her the key. Having failed to learn anything by other
means I thought there might be a chance of getting her to remember some
fact, some clew overlooked or forgotten, by taking her into the flat.
We had hardly set foot in the rooms before her baby on the top floor
began to yell. Mother-like she was out and running up the stairs before
I caught my breath. Realizing that there was nothing for it but to wait,
I dragged a chair to the one window showing a light nearest daylight,
and sat down.
I was so tired that I must have dozed off for a second or two. Something
aroused me, and listening I became conscious of a faint sound, something
in the room stirring. The door of the flat was shut, the sound was
between me and it. My heart in my mouth, I rose noiselessly to my feet
and stood listening, listening hard.
The sound was more distinct though still faint. It was as though
something, something soft was being dragged across the floor. Listening
breathlessly I located the sound and turned my eyes toward the bed.
The dirtiest baby I had ever seen came crawling out. No floor-cloth was
ever dirtier than that youngster’s clothes. And it was as full of
chuckles and coos as its clothes were of dust. Never a cry nor a whine.
It cooed when I spoke to it, chuckled when I took it up. When the
neighbor came racing back and gave it a sup of her baby’s milk it
gurgled with delight.
If my memories of the influenza epidemic could all end as my search for
that baby did! There would be no long line of coffins before a church in
the tenement districts waiting for burial. Neither could I call to mind
a closed door, leading to the front room, the one room in the flat in
which there was outside air.
The mother had died in Bellevue, two small children were still there.
The two older girls—both had been working before stricken down by the
“flu”—refused to go to the hospital, stubbornly remaining at home. It
was my second visit—made not because it was part of my work, but on my
own initiative, in the hope of persuading them to go to a hospital.
Failing in this, I asked:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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