Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [60]
Since then they had explored New York, and while there were many other areas where immigrants lived in substandard and often hideously overcrowded tenements, the terrible sights they’d seen in Five Points were not encountered again.
There were the mansions on Fifth Avenue, beautiful quiet squares with elegant houses, and shops crammed with goods they’d never seen before. Central Park was vast and magnificent, and there were buildings so big and grand they could only stand and stare at them. They marvelled at the elevated railtrack on which the train chugged along over their heads, and at the new, amazingly tall buildings which people called skyscrapers.
The sheer volume of traffic — carts, cabs, carriages and omnibuses — was staggering, as was the number of restaurants, oyster bars and coffee shops. It was such an exciting, noisy, vibrant city, and the huge mixture of different nationalities, all with their own languages, customs, music and cuisines, created an alluring and mesmerizing circus of delights.
Beth felt that if they could just get work and a decent place to live she was sure they could be very happy here.
‘I wasn’t suggesting we live in Five Points,’ she said indignantly, for she was growing tired of her brother seeing the worst in everything. ‘You’ve got to stop comparing everything to back home, Sam. We were really lucky that the Langworthys gave us a home after the fire. But that kind of luck is rare. I sometimes think we might have been served better back then if we’d been forced to live the way most people do; that way we’d be more worldly now. And if you hadn’t escaped out of steerage every day on the ship, you might have learned a thing or two about ordinary people.’
He shuddered, and Beth sighed inwardly. It was only in the past few weeks that she had discovered her brother had failings, and she wasn’t sure he could overcome them.
It wasn’t so much that he was a snob — he didn’t actually look down on people. He just believed he was due the better things of life and refused even to consider doing any kind of manual work. He was mesmerized by wealth and in the thrall of anyone who had it, and because he’d charmed himself into second class on the ship so easily, and been favoured by the wealthy customers back at the Adelphi, he couldn’t see why his charm wasn’t working here.
But Beth could see why. New Yorkers were by and large loud and often aggressive. Sam’s appeal was his good looks, soft voice, the twinkle in his blue eyes and his very Englishness. He would do very well with just that if he were already rich and living on Fifth Avenue, but for a man looking for work he needed to project himself as strong and capable.
Jack was working in a slaughterhouse on the East Side. He said it was the hardest work he’d ever done, a stinking, horrible job, but the pay was good and he’d made many friends there. He’d offered to get Sam in too, but Beth knew her brother would sooner die of starvation than work there.
It had been so good to see Jack today. They had made a pact on arrival in New York that they would meet one month to the day on Castle Green, which was close to where they disembarked, at half past five.
Beth hadn’t really expected Jack to turn up — a whole month in a new city was enough to make anyone forget hasty promises. But there he was, looking very smart in a checked jacket, well-pressed trousers and polished boots. He told her he’d managed to get off a couple of hours earlier by telling his boss a relative of his was arriving from England.
He was honest enough to say he was living in a tenement, sharing a room with six other people, but he pointed out that he’d lived in similar places back