Читать книгу A Child is Born - Charles Yale Harrison - Страница 5

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Samuel Blumgarten, agent and collector for the Gibraltar Life Insurance Company, industrial department, was making his weekly rounds in Red Hook. He climbed two flights of stairs in a Walker Street tenement and knocked sharply at a door. He waited for a moment. The hallway was filled with the soapy odor of Monday morning washing, stale food and tenement hallway odors. He felt slightly ill and knocked again impatiently. Margaret Roberts heard it above the sizzling boiler of clothes on the stove and shouted, “Come in.” The agent walked through the parlor and into the kitchen.

“ ’mornin’ Mis’ Roberts. No rest for the vicked, huh?” He opened his long collection book and thumbed the pages.

“ ’M’m, you’re two veeks in arrears, Mis’ Roberts.”

He spoke with a sing-song Jewish accent.

Margaret Roberts got her premium book down from a shelf over the gas range and gave the collector some money.

He looked at it.

“This is only vun veek. Dun’t let your insurance fall too far beck.”

He had suspected that Mrs. Roberts was pregnant for some time but this morning there was no mistaking it and this reminded him of something he must say to her.

“I—I vould like to talk to you for a liddle vile, Mis’ Roberts. You see, de cahmpuny is making a special drive and in order to make it wery attrective for our policyhulders ...”

“Mr. Blumgarten—I’ve got all the insurance I can pay for now....”

“Yes, but hev you got all you nid, ha, Mis’ Roberts?”

The agent sat on a kitchen chair and turned the pages of his collection book.

“Now I dun’t vunt to be poisonal, but, you see—I—I—you vill soon hev anodder beby—anodder liddle moud to fid, und in dis voild—”

Margaret Roberts went on poking the boilerful of steaming soiled clothes with a long wooden stick. The words of the eager little agent streamed through her ears and were lost somewhere.

This was Monday and all morning there would be an endless parade of agents and collectors coming into the hot kitchen, and each would bully for more money or wheedle her into buying another piece of furniture, pay off arrears on the milk bill, buy a gramophone ...

In a daze she heard the rapid, cunning little words ... “protection ... in your hour of nid ... b’lieve me Mis’ Roberts a dollar is your bast frendt....”

Meaningless words, part of the ceaseless, irritating, depressing reality which is poverty.

The sing-song voice of the agent was relentless.

Little by little some words began to affect her.

“... in a few months ... and ven he grows op von’t it be fine to hend heem a chack ... ‘ven you ver a beby,’ you vill say to heem ... education ... dot is, I hope” (and here with a flattering smile) “dot it’s a boy. Eef his mudder vunt provide for heem, whu vill?”

She leaned up against the wall near the gas range and wiped a wisp of hair from her smarting eyes.

She was listening to the agent now. Aware of the interest he had aroused, Blumgarten continued:

“... und den vot vill it cost? Tvendy-fife cents a veek! Vot is dot? T’ree cents a day. Vot is t’ree cents a day?”

“Notting!” he answered himself triumphantly.

There was no resistance in Margaret Roberts now; she looked with a far-away look at the ceiling.

Mr. Samuel Blumgarten took some application blanks from his coat pockets and began to look for a clean one.

Yes ... she would do everything for that little tumbling one within her. Her boy would escape this squalor. She thought of her husband’s sagging worn face when he returned from work, the noise of Walker Street, of the fighting drunks on Saturday night, of the discomfort of the soapy-smelling kitchen on Monday morning, vague, indeterminate plans ...

Maybe, maybe—perhaps salvation lies in the words of the excited little man who fumbles in his pockets for a piece of paper—maybe her boy will be a fine big important man with a bronzed, strong face and will wear smart clothes when he grows up and people will say Sir to him and he will do things that will be reported in the newspapers....

Blumgarten wrote on a piece of paper which he rested on the kitchen table.

He asked a few questions.

“... how old are you, Mis’ Roberts?”

She did not answer at first. He repeated the question. She smiled and said:

“I am thirty-two next September.”

“Mm-m. B’live me, you dun’t look it, Mis’ Roberts. You look so-o young. Sign here, plis.”

The pen scratched laboriously across the bottom of the paper. Blumgarten folded the application and put it into his pocket. He beamed on the woman.

“Und ven in tventy years from now de cahmpuny brings you a check for de muny, Mis’ Roberts, you’ll denk me—you’ll see.”

Mr. Blumgarten skipped his plump five foot three body down the malodorous steps of the hallway out into the cleaner-smelling air of the street, where he took a deep breath of relief. He passed a white hand across his brow and made a rapid mental calculation. “T’ree dollars commission,” he said to himself. “Not so bed—not so bed.”

2

Michael Doyle, business agent of Local 34 of the International Longshoreman’s Union, sat at his oak roll-top desk in the union’s headquarters in Red Hook.

He was a short, powerfully built man with shrewd, dark eyes which peered out from sockets surrounded by little rolls of red and white flesh. On his paunch there rested an ornate watch charm with the insignia of his fraternal lodge, an elk’s head with bloodshot, ruby eyes. He was dictating a letter to his stenographer....

Michael Doyle was a power in Red Hook. He controlled the stevedore’s union. He saw to it that the poor in his district got a hamper of food each Christmas. He was a political district leader; he hobnobbed with the great of the land and had quite forgotten that he came to New York as a frightened Irish immigrant boy thirty years before with the pinch of an Old World famine on his white little face. Now all that was gone.

In his union, a little group of malcontents called him “Umbrella Mike.” But this was jealousy he told the reporters when one of the trouble-makers was found in the hallway of his tenement with a cracked skull.

The insurgents in his union said that he was called “Umbrella Mike” because of the way he accepted graft from the shipping companies in his headquarters in MacDougall’s saloon. There, while receiving his friends among the shippers, he used to hang his umbrella on the bar-edge and they would drop their contributions into the folds. And in this manner, his enemies said, he was able to say he had never taken graft from any man.

His power in the union was unchallenged. Members paid their dues, once in a while there was an increase in wages.

Once a year Mr. Doyle chartered a river steamer and the whole union together with their families sailed up the Hudson, drank Mr. Doyle’s beer, listened to Mr. Doyle’s speeches on unionism and came back the next day and voted for Mr. Doyle as head of the union.

But there was a time when Mr. Doyle did not have everything his own way. The soreheads, as he called them, said that Doyle accepted graft from the shipping men. This was called “strike insurance,” they said.

His enemies got hold of cancelled checks and had photostatic copies made of them.

Some newspapers made a hullabaloo of the matter; a few of the shipping companies thought that they could get along much better without the help of Doyle and decided to get rid of the union altogether.

Headlines flared. Editorials were written.

The anti-union shippers remembered that they had had strikes when other companies had none. Doyle was arrested on a charge of conspiracy to restrain trade.

Doyle was sentenced, after a sensational trial, to a year’s imprisonment and a fine of five thousand dollars.

In jail, the insurgents charged, Doyle was treated royally. He had, so it was reported, a private office, a secretary, and business visitors. Often he was allowed to slip out at night and visit his home or friends. While in jail he remained the business agent of the union.

Upon his release from jail he was presented with a grand piano from his brothers in the union, who met him on the steps of the jail and made speeches denouncing the enemies of labor.

A few nights after his release from jail his home was robbed and the following day the papers reported his losses. One paper wrote:

“Two robbers entered the home of Michael ‘Umbrella’ Doyle late yesterday. After tying the colored maid, they ransacked the house and took silverware, jewelry and furs valued between eight and ten thousand dollars.

“Included in the loot was a sable coat belonging to Mrs. Doyle, valued at three thousand, seven hundred dollars, a diamond pin set with five stones valued at two thousand, five hundred dollars, a string of beads worth two hundred dollars, three silver cigarette cases, pearl earrings, and a number of smaller articles of jewelry, in addition to five hundred dollars’ worth of silverware taken from the dining-room.

“When Mr. Frank Logan, president of the Independent Shippers Association was notified of the losses of the business agent of Local 34, he remarked that this was evidence of the wealth which Mr. Doyle must have gained through the ignorance of Brooklyn’s dock workers. He advocated the open shop as the solution of the labor troubles which have beset the shipping business during the last three years.

“When interviewed at his offices in the Red Hook section, Mr. Doyle replied as follows:

“ ‘Sure I own jewelry and live in a swell house. What of it? Don’t the dock union know it? They think a lot more of me because I dress like a gentleman. They say, “Well, there’s some class to our boss, ain’t they?” I spend money, sure I do. But most of it is for the good of the service, as the police department calls it. Nobody can tell me about the way to put up a front to the whole class of workingmen. The more front you expose the more they will think of you. During my term of office, I increased wages for my men over twenty per cent—ain’t that worth a few luxuries? You bet it is!’ ”

All that was three years ago and peace reigned in the union now. Doyle’s grip over Red Hook was secure.

3

Margaret Roberts’ two daughters were playing in the street in front of the Walker Street tenement. Miriam was seven years old and Gladys not quite six.

Bright cunning faces. They sat on the stoop of the house and rolled a little rubber ball to each other across the stone step. They sat with grave faces utterly absorbed in the meaningless game.

Near by two little Italian boys, sons of the corner grocer, stood watching them. The girls sat on the top steps with their bony little knees spread apart. Tony, older of the lads, walked up to Miriam. The ball stopped rolling.

The girl looked into the black shining eyes of the lad.

“C’mon, let’s play doctor. I’ll be the doctor and you be sick and me brudder’ll be a doctor, too....”

Miriam shook her head.

“No, we don’t wanna.”

The boy was insistent:

“Aw, c’mon.”

Margaret Roberts put her head out of the window up above and called out into the street:

“Mir-i-am.”

The little girls jumped up and ran into the hallway....

“Mrs. Henrietta Smithers, national secretary of the American Children’s Rescue Society yesterday spoke on ‘Happiness in the Home’ at the Astor. She declared that the aim of her organization was to spread sunshine in the homes of the needy.

“‘We make it our business,’ Mrs. Smithers said, ‘to popularize the idea of a happy home, a home where the child is not looked upon as unwanted, a care or trouble, an economic burden, but a blessing and a joy, the rearing of whom is a sacred privilege.’”