Uprising

“Tell me about the fire.” Mrs. Livingston stares at the young woman standing before her the young woman who has barged into her house uninvited, unannounced. Mrs. Livingston is known for her kindness and charity; her friends say that Mrs. Livingston will listen to anyone who is troubled or lonely or sad. Even beggars in the street. Even women of ill repute.
But Mrs. Livingston cannot hide her disgust at the sight of this young woman with the dark bobbed hair, her trim body swathed in a fine fur coat.
“You’re one of the daughters,” Mrs. Livingston finally says. “Harriet?”
Harriet nods. Slowly.
“Then you were there,” Mrs. Livingston says. “You saw
what happened.”
“I was five years old,” Harriet says. “All I remember is smoke and flames and people screaming. And being carried to safety.”
“Yes, you got out safely,” Mrs. Livingston says. “Unharmed.”
“So did you.”
Mrs. Livingston does not disagree. What good does it do to speak of scars no one can see, of grief that never lifts? What would Harriet know of harm?
“Ask your father about the fire,” she says harshly. Then she considers this, curious in spite of herself. “What does he say? The same things he said in court, when he had a lawyer feeding him lines?”
“He won’t talk about the fire,” Harriet says. “He’d like to pretend it never happened.”
Mrs. Livingston can believe this.
“Read the newspapers, then,” Mrs. Livingston says. “There were plenty of stories written at the time.”
Mrs. Livingston herself has not read any of them. She couldn’t, back then. But she is always amazed at how much other people know, because of the papers: girls who were away at Vassar or Bryn Mawr or Smith in 1911, who can recite the exact number of the dead; women who spent their 1911 all but chained to sewing machines in other factories in the city, who can describe exactly how the flames leaped from table to table, from floor to floor.
“I’ve already read the papers,” Harriet says. “In English and Yiddish, what little I can read of Yiddish. But it’s not enough. The newspaper stories are just paper and ink. It’s easy to think it’s not real. I want… flesh and blood.”
Charred flesh, Mrs. Livingston thinks. Spilled blood.
Her legs tremble; she leans against the balustrade of the hallway stairs for support. But she does not really want to stay standing. She thinks there is sense in the ancient customs of grief- rending one’s clothes, throwing oneself to the ground, and wailing to the heavens. Even now, all these years later, she is not above longing for that.
“Why do you want to know about the fire?” she whispers. Harriet does not answer right away. She stares past Mrs. Livingston’s shoulder for a moment, then brings her gaze back to Mrs. Livingston’s face.
“I’m twenty-one now,” she says. “I can vote. Do you remember talking with me about women getting to vote?”
Mrs. Livingston remembers three young girls taking a five-year-old to a suffrage parade. She remembers the three girls being mad for suffrage, each one topping the other marveling at the glories that would come when women had a voice in government. Who would have guessed that the five year-old was paying such close attention?
“And,” Harriet says, “my father is not a young man. Someday I will inherit . . . .”
“Blood money,” Mrs. Livingston spits out.
“Is it?” Harriet asks.
The question lies between them. It is amazing how two words can fill a room. Why do I have to be the one who tells her? Mrs. Livingston wonders. But she knows. Of the three girls who took the five-year-old to the parade, she is the only one still alive.
“How did you find me?” she asks, which is not quite answering the question, not quite agreeing to talk.
“I hired detectives,” Harriet says. When Mrs. Livingston raises her eyebrow doubtfully, Harriet adds, “My father gives me a generous clothing allowance. But I will not be wearing new clothes this year.”
“So it was shirtwaist money that found me,” Mrs. Livingston says bitterly. “Nobody wears shirtwaists anymore,” Harriet protests, then seems to realize what Mrs. Livingston means. “Oh. Er-Ye-es. Shirtwaist Investments.”
Mrs. Livingston hears the waver in Harriet’s voice, the shame and guilt. The sins of the fathers…, she thinks. But something has changed; she is no longer capable of turning Harriet away. She no longer sees Harriet as just one of the daughters, a formerly pesky five-year-old. She sees her as a twenty-one-year-old who would rather know the truth than have new clothes.
Mrs. Livingston sighs.
“The fire is not the beginning of the story,” she says.
“What is?” Harriet asks. “The strike? I read about the strike, too.”
She is so young, Mrs. Livingston thinks. But Mrs. Livingston
had been young once too. Before the fire. Before…
“You wouldn’t have seen any of our names in those newspaper stories,” Mrs. Livingston says.
“Bella and Yetta and Jane,” Harriet chants, her voice taking on the cadence of a five-year-old again. “Bella and Yetta and Jane.”
Mrs. Livingston closes her eyes, and for a second she can almost feel her two friends on either side of her, the way they used to walk, their arms intertwined. Then she opens her eyes, and it is only a balustrade she is clutching.
“We did not know one another for long,” Mrs. Livingston says. “We had so little time.” This is both a lament and an accusation. After all these years, she still wants the story to end differently. Three girls meet, become friends, struggle, find happiness, and have their lives go on and on and on until they are three old ladies in rocking chairs.
It just didn’t happen that way.
Mrs. Livingston stares off into the distance, off into the past, off into a time when she didn’t know the fire was coming. “The story begins like so much else,” she says slowly.
“With hope. Hope and dreams and daring…”