Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [65]
‘Still worried about money.’ Sam chuckled again. ‘And we’re working in a saloon! Papa would turn in his grave.’
‘I think he’d be proud that we’ve been brave,’ Beth said indignantly. ‘Besides, the saloon is just a first step. We’ll find a way to make our fortune.’
∗
Fortunes, Beth found, weren’t made so easily. By October, six months after they’d arrived in New York, she was still playing three nights a week in Heaney’s and by day she worked in a second-hand clothes shop on the Bowery. In a good week she earned as much as thirty dollars, but the good weeks were rare; mostly it was only around eighteen dollars. Yet this, she had discovered, was far above what most women could hope to earn. Most single women worked as cleaners, shop assistants and waitresses, and all were badly paid and worked very long hours.
For married women with children, there was no choice but to work at home for people who exploited their desperation to earn some money. Some did piecework for garment manufacturers, working a fourteen-hour day at least in crowded, badly lit rooms. Others made matchboxes and got everyone in the family to help. Women like this were lucky to earn a dollar a day, and most got half that.
Beth didn’t take her second job because of the money, but because she was lonely at home all day with nothing to do. She had gone into the second-hand shop close to Heaney’s one day to see if she could find a new dress. Ira Roebling, the old Jewish woman who owned it, was very friendly and chatty, and by the time Beth left the shop, with a red satin dress in a parcel, she’d given Ira a potted version of her life story, heard some of Ira’s, and had been offered the job.
Ira had come over from Germany back in the 1850s with her husband and his parents. They had owned a very successful pastry shop for years, but a year after both her in-laws had passed on from old age, her husband died in an influenza epidemic, and without him Irma couldn’t manage the baking of the pastries. She turned to selling second-hand clothes because she loved clothes and had many contacts prepared to sell her their old finery. With each ship bringing in new immigrants, there were always people wanting cheap clothes, and just as many who wanted to sell theirs.
Ira was a shrewd, some said mean, old girl. She gave the very lowest price for clothes and sold them for the highest. Beth guessed her to be in her sixties, though it was hard to tell as she was slender, strong and very energetic. She always wore black, including a felt cloche hat which she never took off even when it was hot. But however eccentric she was, she was funny and quick-witted. Beth had seen her cast her black shoe-button eyes over a row of figures and add them up in a trice, and she never forgot anything, not the name of a customer, nor an item of clothing in her shop. The number of people who came in and out during the day just for a chat was testimony to the esteem in which she was held in the neighbourhood.
Ira did most of the selling, and Beth sorted the clothes into sizes, did the odd repair and generally kept the shop in order. This was no mean feat as it was crammed from floor to ceiling with stuff. There were huge boxes of shoes, all jumbled in together, and one of the first things Beth did was tie them up in pairs and sort them by colour and size. She often tried clothes on too, something Irma actively encouraged, for as she pointed out, they couldn’t sell things unless they knew what they looked like on.
Ira lived above her shop, and her three rooms were just as chaotic. During the summer when it was unbearably hot, Beth wondered how she didn’t pass out from lack of air, for she never opened her windows for fear of someone climbing in and robbing her. But although Ira was mean in many ways, never throwing anything out and haggling with customers over prices till the pips squeaked, she always gave Beth something to eat at midday. Sometimes it was delicious chicken soup she’d made herself, but