Calvary Alley
Copyright© 2024 by Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice
Chapter 9: Buttons
The Lavinskis’ flat on the second floor had always possessed a mysterious fascination for Nance. In and out of the other flats she passed at will, but she had never seen beyond the half-open door of the Lavinskis’. All day and far into the night, the sewing-machines ran at high pressure, and Mr. Lavinski shuffled in and out carrying huge piles of pants on his head. The other tenants stopped on the stairs to exchange civilities or incivilities with equal warmth; they hung out of windows or dawdled sociably in doorways. But summer and winter alike the Lavinskis herded behind closed doors and ran their everlasting sewing-machines.
Mrs. Snawdor gave her ready consent to Nance trying her hand as a “home finisher.”
“We got to git money from somewheres,” she said, “an’ I always did want to know how them Polocks live. But don’t you let on to your Uncle Jed what you’re doing.”
“I ain’t goin’ to let on to nobody,” said Nance, thrilled with the secrecy of the affair.
The stifling room into which Ikey introduced her that night was supposed to be the Lavinskis’ kitchen, but it was evident that the poor room had long ago abandoned all notions of domesticity. The tea-kettle had been crowded off the stove by the pressing irons; a wash-tub full of neglected clothes, squeezed itself into a distant corner, and the cooking utensils had had to go climbing up the walls on hooks and nails to make way on the shelves for sewing materials.
On one corner of the table, between two towering piles of pants, were the remains of the last meal, black bread, potatoes, and pickled herring. Under two swinging kerosene lamps, six women with sleeves rolled up and necks bared, bent over whirring machines, while Mr. Lavinski knelt on the floor tying the finished garments into huge bundles.
“Here’s Nance Molloy, Pa” said Ikey, raising his voice above the noise of the machines and tugging at his father’s sleeve.
Mr. Lavinski pushed his derby hat further back on his perspiring brow, and looked up. He had a dark, sharp face, and alert black eyes, exactly like Ikey’s, and a black beard with two locks of black hair trained down in front of his ears to meet it. Without pausing in his work he sized Nance up.
“I von’t take childern anny more. I tried it many times already. De inspector git me into troubles. It don’t pay.”
“But I’ll dodge the inspectors,” urged Nance.
“You know how to sew, eh?”
“No; but you kin learn me. Please, Mr. Lavinski, Ikey said you would.”
Mr. Lavinski bestowed a doting glance on his son.
“My Ikey said so, did he? He thinks he own me, that boy. I send him to high school. I send him to Hebrew class at the synagogue at night. He vill be big rich some day, that boy; he’s got a brain on him.”
“Cut it out, Pa,” said Ikey, “Nance is a smart kid; you won’t lose anything on her.”
The result was that Nance was accorded the privilege of occupying a stool in the corner behind the hot stove and sewing buttons on knee pantaloons, from eight until ten P.M. At first the novelty of working against time, with a room full of grown people, and of seeing the great stacks of unfinished garments change into great stacks of finished ones, was stimulation in itself. She was proud of her cushion full of strong needles and her spool of coarse thread. She was pleased with the nods of approval gentle Mrs. Lavinski gave her work in passing, and of the slight interest with which she was regarded by the other workers.
But as the hours wore on, and the air became hotter and closer, and no enlivening conversation came to relieve the strain, her interest began to wane. By nine o’clock her hands were sore and stained, and her back ached. By a quarter past, the buttons were slipping through her fingers, and she could not see to thread her needle.
“You vill do better to-morrow night,” said Mrs. Lavinski kindly, in her wheezing voice. “I tell Ikey you do verra good.”
Mrs. Lavinski looked shriveled and old. She wore a glossy black wig and long ear-rings, and when she was not coughing, she smiled pleasantly over her work. Once Mr. Lavinski stopped pressing long enough to put a cushion at her back.
“My Leah is a saint,” he said. “If effra’boddy was so good as her, the
Messiah would come.”
Nance dreamed of buttons that night, and by the next evening her ambition to become a wage-earner had died completely.
But a family conclave at the supper table revealed such a crisis in the family finances that she decided to keep on at the Lavinskis’ for another week. Uncle Jed was laid up with the rheumatism, and Mr. Snawdor’s entire stock in trade had been put in a wheelbarrow and dumped into the street, and a strange sign already replaced his old one of “Bungs and Fawcetts.”
Things seemed in such a bad way that Nance had about decided to lay the matter before Mrs. Purdy, when Dan brought the disconcerting news that Mrs. Purdy had taken her brother south for the rest of the winter, and that there would be no more visits to the little house in Butternut Lane.
So Nance, not knowing anything better to do, continued to sit night after night on her stool behind the hot stove, sewing on buttons. Thirty-six buttons meant four cents, four cents meant a loaf of bread—a stale loaf, that is.
“Your little fingers vill git ofer bein’ sore,” Mrs. Lavinski assured her. “I gif you alum water to put on ‘em. Dat makes ‘em hard.”
They not only became hard; they became quick and accurate, and Nance got used to the heat and the smell, and she almost got used to the backache. It was sitting still and being silent that hurt her more than anything else. Mr. Lavinski did not encourage conversation, —it distracted the workers, —and Nance’s exuberance, which at first found vent in all sorts of jokes and capers, soon died for lack of encouragement. She learned, instead, to use all her energy on buttons and, being denied verbal expression, she revolved many things in her small mind. The result of her thinking was summed up in her speech to her stepmother at the end of the first week.
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