Read Online A House of Tailors by Patricia Reilly Giff - Free Book Online Page A

thread.”
    â€œForty for me,” I said.
    â€œAll right,” he said, almost smiling.
    I had to smile, too. He had forgiven me for Mrs. Koch. And someday I would be going home to Breisach after all.
    1 August 1871
    My dear Dina,
    I am taking a quick moment to write to you. I have been working on my trousseau with Mama and Friedrich: sheets and pillowcases with lace that we are crocheting by hand at night, petticoats with pleats and borders, . . .
    We have discovered something. Friedrich has that magic in his fingers that you have. He sews beautifully, and better still, he loves it. Even at the age of ten he tells Mama that someday he will take over the business and she can rest and eat lemon cookies with Frau Ottlinger.
    So it is Franz who now has the picture of the Fifth Avenue Hotel and Madison Square.
    Krist sends his best to his “almost sister.” And I send my dearest love to you.
    Katharina
    My dear Dina,
    Last night I dreamed about you. You were laughing. It makes me happy to think that.
    Love,
M.

fourteen
    Everything ached: my feet, my wrists, my spine from leaning over the machine. But the worst was my neck. When I lifted my head to reach for another pair of trousers, I could feel a stabbing pain that began in the back of my head and went through my neck so that I wondered if I’d ever stand straight again.
    But every stitch I took was one stitch closer to passage on a ship. Too bad I had no idea of the cost.
    Each week the Uncle gave me American paper money, and I went straight to the trunk and tucked it behind the torn lining.
    Barbara spent her days going from kitchen to roof, washing, then dragging baskets up to hang wet shirts and diapers. She swept the dusty apartment and cut vegetables for that night’s supper. In between she did the finishing work on the trousers, sewing on buttons, snipping threads, or catching openings in the seams that I had missed.
    At home that never would have happened. We sewed slowly and carefully, pressing each seam as we went along with irons that waited for us on the stove. But here everything depended on speed.
    Barbara was the only one of us who seemed happy. Maria spent hours crying and throwing her blocks because her molars were coming in, and the Uncle spent his evenings taking over where I left off, yawning, his face determined and grim.
    â€œSomeday,” he said to Barbara, “things will be different. I will have a shop and life will be easier.”
    I thought the same thing as I raced the machine down the long seams of the trousers:
Someday I will be home. I will open the door and there they will be, looking up at me, surprised
. . . .
    Barbara smiled and nodded at both of us, then took five cents to buy a little green plant for the windowsill. “Watch,” she told us. “It will bloom this winter. Better than anything else we could spend it on.”
    The Uncle and I looked at each other. For once each of us knew what the other was thinking. We even smiled, quick smiles. Neither of us would have spent five cents on a plant.
    Barbara patted Maria, patted me, and patted the Uncle’s head as he sat sewing. She even patted the leaves of the little plant.
    And she sang, all day, every day. It was an American song about a small brown jug. And Maria and I joined in when she got to the part
Ha, ha, ha, you and me, little brown jug, how I love thee!
    Sometimes Kristel, the girl who lived downstairs, brought up coffee and small squares of biscuit, and we’d stop for a half hour, but most of the time Barbara and I were alone, bent over our work as Maria crawled through the piles of trousers that the Uncle brought home once a week. She threw her blocks or sucked on rags dipped in sugar to make her forget about the pain in her gums.
    The piles of trousers never seemed to diminish. To get to the bedrooms, or the kitchen, or out the door, we had to climb over them.
    And the Uncle rolled his eyes at me when I tried to speak English.