Grace's Pictures Read Online Free PDF Page B

oil lamp on the table by the window.
    The stories in the newspaper were confusing. Where was Queens? The Brooklyn Bridge?
    And the positions listed. She knew what a seamstress was, but she’d never sewn. A piece maker? A typographer? What strange factory names she saw. She wouldn’t know what to do in a factory.
    By the time Grace turned out the lamp, she had resigned herself to accepting whatever the reverend drummed up for her after all. Lots of people needed maids, it seemed. And since that’s what the reverend had in mind, she might as well get some experience with whatever he found. Later perhaps she could expand her possibilities, but she had to get started somewhere.She could cook, or at least she imagined she could. The cooks at the workhouse just stirred watered-down buttermilk into gruel and baked bricks of black bread. How hard could that be? Sweeping wasn’t hard either. She could do that.
    She was determined to. Becoming a maid instead of a workhouse inmate would mean she could leave her old self behind and become something different altogether. Someone much better, much more important.
    She slipped beneath the cool bedsheets. As she settled down to sleep, she prayed, desperately hoping God would hear her, for Ma’s sake. God, change me. The past eight years rotting away in a workhouse would not steal her hope.
    She rolled over and thought about Ma again. Grace had gotten away to America like Ma wanted, though at a great cost to Ma since she had to marry a peeler to get Grace out. Feeny might not have been there the day Grace and her mother were evicted, but he was still one of them, and Grace had not an ounce of affection for any policeman.

    The next two days were spent getting an acceptable work outfit together for Grace.
    “Where did you get your clothes? If you don’t mind me asking.” Mrs. Hawkins was altering some donated clothing for Grace.
    “My mother. The only proper skirt and petticoat I ever had. They were in better shape when I left. Not new, but they suited me fine.” Grace flinched when the woman tapped pointed pins against her skin.
    “The journey takes a toll. Even so, Grace, those clothes seem a bit old-fashioned to me, like what my Irish granny wore.”
    Mrs. Hawkins was perhaps a bit past middle age, sixty or thereabouts. Grace didn’t see how her clothes could have been that old. “Well, I like the color, even a bit faded.”
    “Hmm.” With pins sticking between her teeth, the woman kept working on the replacement dress that was the very shade of New York’s pavement.
    Although the reverend had not mentioned it, Grace felt disapproval from people on the street. Obviously Americans didn’t like color. There was little of it on anyone’s frame.
    On Sunday, wearing the rather ordinary gunmetal-colored dress, Grace attended services at First Church.
    “Did you have a pastor at home, Grace?” Mrs. Hawkins spoke from underneath her large-brimmed hat.
    “I . . . uh . . . There was a father.” She had a vague image in her mind of what the local parish priest looked like. She didn’t want to admit that the bulk of her religious training had come from workhouse chaplains who read prayers in the dining hall.
    She sat on a hard wooden pew bench between Mrs. Hawkins and Annie. First Church was as foreign an experience for Grace as anything so far, and she understood little of what was happening. Candles, choirs, robes, even the prayers and hymns were unlike any she’d ever heard. She bowed her head and tried to follow what the others did and absorb the feeling of the place, if not the meaning.
    The reverend’s voice rang out strong but still as caring as when he’d spoken directly to her. A kind of peace flowed from the pulpit and reached out to her. She liked it there, a place where no one stared at her, a calm in the midst of the squall of the city.

4
    JUST BEFORE OWEN LEFT FOR WORK Monday afternoon, his neighbor Otto knocked on his door. “Come, come. You have telephone