Except then, in his own way, he abandoned me, too, and now, at age thirty-two, I was truly left all on my own, left with my idealism in shreds and my father’s secrets to unravel even if I didn’t yet know it.
They always say that bad things come in threes, don’t they? But who are they? And where do these superstitions come from? I don’t believe in superstitions, old wives’ tales, or, as I had told Mr. Cartier as we looked at the Hope, I didn’t believe in luck—good or bad—or anything really that I couldn’t touch, taste, hear, or smell.
Like my father, I believed in logic. “Reason,” he always said, “will never disappoint you.”
Except that in succession, starting in September 1909, I had suffered three tragedies and with them a total loss of confidence and hope that reason would win out.
The first was work-related. I was investigating what I called “tenement babies” for the World, where, under my pseudonym of Vee Swann, I’d been one of the few female news reporters for the last eight years.
While there were laws in New York City forbidding children under fourteen to work in factories, there was none to stop parents from exploiting their young children’s ability to work at home. If, that is, you could call the squalid and stinking tenements homes.
Children as young as three and four were put to work making artificial flowers, pulling bastings, and sewing buttons and tapes on gloves to bring in extra money, penny by penny.
My friend, social reformer Mary van Kleeck, had written an article for Charity Organization Quarterly about the issue in 1908:
The evils of the system—intense competition among unskilled workers in a crowded district, low wages, unrestricted hours of work, irregularity of employment, and utilization of child labor—are the very conditions which make the system possible and profitable to the employer. Any effective attempt to improve conditions must therefore be an attack upon the sweating system. The manufacturer or contractor, whose employees work in their home, escapes responsibility entailed by the presence of workers in his factory. He saves costs of rent, heat, and light; avoids the necessity of keeping the force together and giving them regular employment when work is slack. And by turning the workers’ homes into branches of the factory, he escapes in them the necessity of observing the factory laws. Instead of the manifold restrictions which apply to employees working in the factory, he is here responsible only for keeping a list of his home workers and he may not send any goods, which are named in the home work law, into a tenement which has not been licensed.
In my effort to research the injustice she’d outlined in her paper and write about it for the World, I’d gone undercover, as I often had before. In June 1909, I moved into a tenement on Ludlow Street, posing as a widowed factory worker.
As Vee Swann, I always wore a disguise. My cousin Stephen had gone to college with a woman whose father was one of the top costume designers on Broadway, and he’d helped create my alter ego’s look. My wig was black, without any waves and with a bun that sat at the nape of my neck, nothing like my own auburn-red curls that I normally wore high on top of my head. As Vee, I also wore thick glasses. They were clear—since my eyesight was perfect—but no one looking at me would ever have suspected I wasn’t half-blind.
As Vera Garland, I dressed well, indulged in jewelry, and always wore a light dusting of face powder, a brush of lipstick, and dabs of L’Étoile perfume that I purchased at the cosmetics and perfume departments of Father’s store. But Vee Swann indulged in no such vanity. When I was reporting, I wore no makeup and donned only inexpensive dresses and shoes that I bought downtown. Even the least expensive clothes at Garland’s were too fine for Vee.
I moved into the tenement with a small collection of belongings, bringing only two of my most worn dresses and oft-mended stockings. I pared down my necessities to fit into one ripped carpet bag I’d bought from a beggar in the streets.
After a few days of getting settled and watching the comings and goings in the tenements, I befriended my neighbors, the Danzingers, whom I’d chosen to write about as an example of thousands of similar families. They included a mother and a father and four children all younger than ten. Two boys and two girls. All of them worked at home before and after school and over the weekends.
In the process of researching my piece, I fell hopelessly in love with seven-year-old Charlotte. This little girl made artificial roses out of rough red felt from dawn to eight a.m. and then went back to work as soon as she got home from school in the afternoon. Often she worked after dinner and late into the night. Charlotte was a winsome child with wide chocolate-brown eyes and a spattering of freckles across her nose. She spoke in a sweet, lilting voice and loved to laugh at her own jokes. We often sat on the front stoop of our building during her brief break after dinner, before she had to go back to her sewing. Charlotte would regale me with stories about the fairies who lived in the rocks by the East River and left children gifts during the night.
Early on, I started keeping wrapped candies in my pocket and would reward her with one at the end of each story. I began to notice that she would never eat the candy, just tuck it into her sleeve. Only after the fifth story and the fifth candy would she finally eat one.
Curious, I asked her why.
“I want to make sure there will be a candy for all of us plus Ma, before I have mine,” she answered while glancing up at the tenement window.
After that, I always gave her all five at one time, so she could enjoy hers with me on the steps.
I also bought secondhand books for her and her siblings to share, always picking out those I thought Charlotte would like the best.
To thank me, she made me little gifts of flowers with hearts embroidered on them. Her ability with needle and thread for one so young surprised me, until I discovered she’d been sewing since she was three.
“One day,” she’d said as she handed me the third flower, “I’ll have given you enough for you to have a bouquet.”
“And I’ll put it in a jelly jar and keep it forever,” I said, kissing her on the forehead.
Charlotte moved my heart with her sweetness, sense of humor, and stubborn determination to do well in school no matter how tired she was, so she could write stories when she grew up. They’d all be about the fairies, she told me.
That summer, on Sundays when she had more free time, I helped her make a book to write her stories in. We sewed together the pages I’d bought for her and adorned it with a cover of blue felt.
She kept the handmade book in my apartment.
“So Pa won’t see it and get mad,” she’d told me. “He doesn’t like me imagining all the time. He said it makes me work slower.”
Her father was a drunk and a brute, and he didn’t like my involvement with the family. He said the gifts of books and candy were me looking down on them. That they didn’t need my charity. I never paid attention to his admonishments, which only increased his ire. He wasn’t used to women not obeying him. But it was good for Charlotte, I thought, and her siblings to see that Leo Danzinger didn’t scare everyone.
When Charlotte became ill that last Wednesday in August, I tried to intercede and persuade Danzinger to allow me to call her a doctor. He’d been drinking, as he usually did at night, and refused, slurring his words as he told me it was a waste of money. That Charlotte would sleep it off.