In the Midst of Wolves

Once I realized that my father was never coming back (I think I understood this before my mother did), I figured I’d better get a job. My mother hadn’t been raised with the idea of working and she just couldn’t accept what had happened. We had no friends or family in New York City, and I felt responsible for the two of us. Now don’t suppose that I resented this responsibility; I accepted my mother’s role as a lady and wanted more than anything to let her stay that way. What was disturbing, though, was how she started to slip away from the present as the fact of my father’s permanent absence became inescapable. She spent her days at the piano. I not only needed a job; I had to prepare meals and do whatever household chores were required.
My first job was piecework for some of the garment shops a few blocks south. The woman in the apartment across the hall helped get me started. I sewed artificial flowers–violets, forget-me-nots, and other small varieties–for women’s hats. Child labor was still legal then, but just to be safe I told the shop owners that my mother was unable to leave the apartment because of her health (which technically wasn’t a lie) and that I was just picking up the work and dropping it off for her. I got paid a little extra for delivering the finished goods from the seamstresses in our building; usually the shops hired boys to do that.
At two cents a bunch, you have to sew a lot of flowers to make any money at all, so I gave up school. Thankfully, there were no visits from truant officers. I met Tommy on my front steps a few months after I started working (he tells that story better than I do), and later he even helped a little with the sewing. He wouldn’t be proud to have you know that, but it’s true and I was grateful for his help. My fingers got pretty sore, doing that all day. No matter; I became skilled enough that I was “promoted” from flowers to ladies’ gloves, which paid a little better. I did this, all told, for almost three years, though I had to fill in with odd jobs, like cleaning up after the horse-drawn trolleys. All of this probably wouldn’t have sustained us for even that long, except that Tommy, who was working as a newsboy by then, generously shared his earnings with me, and that my father at least had had the heart to leave some money behind. Or maybe he’d forgotten it was there.
Expert at “running the numbers” even then, Tommy figured out that the sewing wouldn’t make enough to pay bills and feed my mother and me, even if I were able to do it twenty-four hours a day. I had to find another job. There weren’t many options, though. An idea finally occurred to me. Once in a while on a Saturday, Tommy and I would take the train down to Coney Island and (while he made some extra money picking pockets, as if I didn’t know) I’d sneak into the horse races at the Sheepshead Bay track. I loved watching those magnificent animals–a different species, almost, from the spiritless creatures that pulled carts, wagons, trolleys all across the city. I wondered if perhaps I could get a job at the stables. The name I remembered seeing most often at the track was “McLaren.” I bought an old but serviceable bicycle, found myself a pair of trousers at a church rummage sale, and set out for the McLaren stables in Brooklyn. You won’t get if you don’t ask, I reasoned; but you’d better believe I prayed about it, too.
I know that God made it possible for me to get that job. Of all the people I could have first spoken to when I showed up at McLaren’s Thoroughbreds, old Sam McFee, the stable foreman, was the only one who wouldn’t have shut the door on me. Years later he told me I reminded him of his granddaughter. Good thing! Anyway, he told me that working in the stables was very hard. I told him I was willing to work as hard as he needed me to. He said that I would have to work as hard as the boys, and that my work would be judged more critically because I was a girl. I told him I understood, and I would be grateful if he gave me a chance. In the end, he took me on. Who would have guessed that I would love being there?
I should also tell you that, although it won me many shocked and disapproving looks, especially as I got older, I definitely learned to like wearing trousers. I felt so much more capable in them. Skirts make me feel very confined and vulnerable. Who could win a horse race sitting side-saddle?