Tumbleweed by Eddie Doherty

Author:Eddie Doherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ISBN 978-1-897145-76-0
Publisher: Madonna House Publications
Published: 2016-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

13

“Anything can happen in New York,” she kept saying as the train brought her close to the great city. “Anything at all.”

She fancied she might become a secretary to the president of some big firm in Wall Street. She might become a buyer for a department store, and travel constantly to and from Europe. She might become a great journalist or a famous author.

Ever since she was a little girl she had remembered stories her father had told her about New York, and stories she had read of the city’s fascination.

A few days after she had added herself to the millions of inhabitants of the city, she woke from her dreams to find herself a worker in a cheap laundry, and a resident of Ma Murphy’s boardinghouse. It was close to the Hudson River, the wailing tugboats, and the great ocean liners.

She was no longer the Queen of Toronto’s Russian colony. She was “Katie the Polack.” And her pay was only eight dollars a week.

Eight dollars a week! She tried hard, desperately hard, to save something out of that for her son, her sick husband, her mother, and her brothers. But even though she went without food, she had to pay the rent—and there was never more than a dollar to send any one of her dependents.

She organized the laundry girls, and called a strike.

“I have told the story of this strike many times,” she says, “not because it is interesting in itself, but merely to point out that the only people who came to help us on the picket line were the Communists.

“Where were the Catholics? I don’t know. Perhaps they were in the Waldorfs of America, discussing plans for Catholic charity drives at $2.50 or so a plate. Certainly neither the clergy nor the laity were interested in our fight for a decent wage, or in our pitiful weakness and poverty. It was inconceivable to me that this should be so. Yet it was so. It was inconceivable also that the believers in atheism, the people who had wrecked holy Russia, were the only ones who cared what happened to us. They were there constantly during the strike, with coffee and doughnuts, and sympathy and advice, and even ready cash now and then. They were there, and I began to fear for America.”

The strike was lost. Catherine became a waitress, going from one restaurant to another, after the fashion of waitresses. The tips were always better somewhere else—yet they were never enough to support those wretched ones who must be supported. And they were never enough to keep a girl in decent clothes, to pay her room rent, or to give her any sort of luxuries.

Maybe journalism would pay better, Catherine thought. She tried to prepare herself by taking extension courses in journalism, literature, history, short-story writing, and other subjects at Columbia University, and did manage to get a job on the New York World.

“I was a sort of leg woman to the society editor,” she explains, “but I couldn’t bear writing about some debutante’s party dress with gold-leaf adjectives.

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