The Wedding Dress

It was a $35 room, one of the best in the hotel in the year 1930. From the open window of the twelfth floor facing the sea, the Sergeant looked down on the body still lying on the concrete sidewalk of Surf Avenue. He shook his head and turned back to the room. He walked over to the unused bed and read the note once again.

My name is Clara Hentzel and I am 34 years old. I shall be dead when you read this and I will not leave this world by my own hand without a word of explanation. I am not a fugitive, I do not have a husband or children and I am not physically ill. I have no living relatives and no one will mourn my passing. I am simply tired of living. I can no longer look back to my past nor forward to my future with happiness. I am sorry to have caused the City of New York any trouble.

Clara Hentzel

The case, if there ever was a case, was never solved. The police checked to see if she was wanted, and she was not wanted. That was the whole point; they might just as well have stopped there. Clara Hentzel was not wanted and had never been wanted. That was why she lay in a bloody heap on the concrete sidewalk of Surf Avenue.

When she stood on the sill of the open casement window, she gathered the billowing skirt of the silk wedding dress in the crook of her arm like a bride leaving the church at the end of the ceremony. She looked back at her note lying on the unused bed. It didn't tell the whole story. How could it? Thirty-four years! Could her whole life be told in those few words? She had counted them, just as a good German woman would count them back in the empty flat on Bushwick Avenue before taking the trolley car to Coney Island.

She paused a moment and looked to the east before leaping. There were two sides, weren't there? On this side-her side-were the streets of golden opportunity, where everyone is king. On the "other side" (and that's what they called it), lay the dark side that her mother and father came from.

A lifetime can be relived in a very short time. Time makes its own rules, and we must follow them.

Hermann Hentzel from Freiburg and Henrietta Junger from Dusseldorf met on the "Ariel" that sailed from Hamburg in 1894. Their families were poor, and they were sent to America to a "warte" uncle. Waiting uncles pledged for immigrants entering Ellis Island, housed them in unspeakably barbaric living quarters, and rented them out as indentured chattel. Hermann and Henrietta fell in love on the "Ariel," and the captain, a strict Lutheran, married them. Clara was well on her way as the newlyweds stared in open-mouthed wonder at the Lady in the Harbor as she held her torch aloft on the foggy morning of December 24th, 1895.

They were hard-working young people with a baby coming. Mama applied lace in a blouse factory; Papa was a steam-fitter. By the eighth month of Mama's pregnancy, they were earning enough to rent their own apartment on Bushwick Avenue. To do this, they had to pay off the warte uncle, but it was worth it. Now they were their own people and what they owned was theirs. They would never apply for citizenship. America would never be their homeland, and the unfulfilled dream of going back to where they came from, so tempting in the beginning, would fade and finally die. There would be no land they could call home.

Mama had a hard time with the baby, and the mid-wife told her to forget about having any more children. Papa named it "Clara," his mother's name. He lost interest in the child quickly, a girl after all. He lost interest in Mama as well, drank more than he should, and came home drunk and abusive at times. On pay-day he would gamble. There were times without much money or when the pay envelope had been drunk away. Mama rented a used sewing machine with the option to buy and did lace applique at home. As a child, Clara would often fall asleep at night to the clicking of the sewing machine. A "stitcher-maschinen," Mama called it. Mama never mastered English, could never buy food in an "Englischerstube." She would walk miles with Clara on her back to the German pork store for pig feet or to the Deutsche Delicatessen for blood sausage.

Mama was determined that Clara graduate from elementary school. "Study hard, Clara, be a goot studenten; you must get the diploma." She would look at Clara nervously in those early years as she studied under the light above the dining room table and question her--"It goes goot, Clara, nein?" With few friends and her father gone most of the time, she was rarely distracted, and it did go "goot."

She hated her father for the way he treated Mama and her. He would come home dirty and disheveled at best, smelling of sweat and lubricating oil. At worst, he would stumble in smelling of liquor and cheap perfume. Those were the wicked times, for in the middle of the night, after the fighting was done, Clara could hear them through the paper-thin walls, making love in the bedroom next to hers. How could Mama let him? So long as she lived, Clara swore she would never let a man treat her so.

Clara was not a pretty girl. Pale skin and pale brown hair. She wore dresses her mother made from patterns she had brought from Germany. They made her look older than her thirteen years. She was square of stature with stocky legs and walked with a heavy gait. She was the tallest girl in her elementary school graduating class. Clara was finished with school. Some boys went to High School, but most girls stopped at the eighth grade. To go further, a child must have a special talent or be blessed with wealth. Clara was blessed with neither.

F. W. Woolworth didn't ask for much. A good strong German girl with an elementary school education could be depended on for honesty and accuracy. Mr. Mankowski installed her at the cosmetic counter.

"So, what I mean is, it's not good to haff a beauty in the cosmetics. Scares off the customers. You gotta have plain-and tell me, Bella, where you gonna have plainer than this Clara Hentzel?" "What's she gonna wear, Bernie .... them Heidi-kleiders?" "A white coat Bella, like a druggist wears. Makes her look official -- she tells 'em "Lilac Cream" or "light Egyptian," it's like a prescription."

Clara could have worked there forever, but she had loftier goals. She could read and write. It was an accomplishment rarely achieved by children of immigrants at the turn of the century. The "office" was the place to be-look at Mrs. Mankowski; she had a part in the future of F. W. Woolworth. Why? The schreib-maschinen!! Yes, Mrs. Mankowski could operate a typewriter. It carved indelible words on the whitest of paper out of the most childish thoughts. Yes, if Clara could operate a typewriter, it would be a magic carpet. Mama and Clara, free at last from Papa.

She worked hard at F. W. Woolworth, was accurate with the change and helpful with advice to ladies who could not decide between "Lilac Cream" and "light Egyptian." "Madam would do well to buy both, while they are on sale."

"Mrs. Mankowski, if you ever decide to buy a new typewriter, I'd love to buy the old one." The seed festered in Bella's mind a month or two, then she consented. It was easy; she told Bernie the old one was broken. It was an L. C. Smith and weighed 57 pounds, and Clara carried it home under her arm. Mama looked up from her stitcher-maschinen.

"Vas is dass, Clara?" "A schreib-maschinen, Mama. It is for making words." "Ach, vott a country, no? Can it make Deutsche?" "Yes, Mama." Mama placed her hands to her cheeks in wonderment

Clara mastered the typewriter quickly; she also taught herself how to repair it. Both talents would be her ticket to a career as an office worker. She was 30 years old now. No longer a fraulein, she had attained the condition of 'unmarried woman.'

Papa's death was only one of many during Prohibition. It was not a surprise to either Clara or Mama. He had been poisoned by raw alcohol at the Shipyard Saloon. Mama called it 'Weltgeist,' which is the spirit of the time. First it was his stomach, then his bladder. He went blind just before the end. Though Mama was devastated and lost all interest in life from that day forward, it was a renaissance for Clara. Things seemed to look up. The American Book Company hired her as a personal secretary for Harvey Siegel, the Personnel Manager who shared one with nine other people.

Harvey would have preferred someone more attractive than this stocky, blank-faced woman dressed in black. But she was capable and had typed a model resume on her very own typewriter, and now, with his own personal secretary, he was in a position to exchange her for another. He did so in the most callous way possible. A blond from the bindery with only a rudimentary knowledge of English and none of the typewriter machine had caught his eye, and when Clara had to say home for two weeks and nurse her dying mother, he replaced her.

"I go see Papa now." Mama said this to no one in particular, but the words, for all their ambiguity, were her last. Clara heard them and understood. Mama was not the kind of person who could unlove anyone, regardless of their faults, and for better or worse she would spend her final moment hoping to see Papa again. As she held the two death certificates, Clara thought "How strange it is, I never knew their names until the very end. They were always Mama and Papa, they were even Mama and Papa to each other."

Mama's final act of love on the stitcher-maschinen was a wedding dress for Clara. A dress of silk and Irish linen with lace applique. Mama had never had a wedding dress of her own. She kept it a secret from Clara through the years, and it turned up only after her death. In the final years of her life, Clara would look at it often.

Strange how the mind can compress time. The highs and lows of Clara's life flashed before her, floor by floor, with crystal clarity. How long it took, she thought. At one point she caught the startled eye of a fellow guest in a room below hers. She wished she'd brought a bouquet.