Triangle, by Katharine Weber, provides a beautiful fictional complement to Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David von Drehle which I read in 2003. The latter provides a sociological and cultural perspective on the tragic fire that killed 146 people, mostly young immigrant women trying to earn a living and send money to family left behind in Europe sewing shirtwaists for pennies per piece.
Triangle fascinated me from the beginning with its first person account of the Spring Saturday when young seamstresses were finishing their last pieces of the day, tucking their meager wages into their stockings and turning their thoughts toward the freedom of their one day off on Sunday. Esther Gottesfeld and her younger sister Pauline were both talented and hard-working, performing the fairly high-skilled task of attaching the sleeves to the shirtwaists, one working on the right and the other on the left sleeve. Each sister would take home $6 to $8 for six days of producing as many as 300 shirtwaists per day. Although it wasn't much, it provided them with a modest living and some money left over to send to their family in Belarus.
Non-fiction accounts of the fire assert that management was at least partially responsible for many of the deaths due to unsafe conditions, insufficient access to exits and doors that may have been locked to ensure that the girls didn't leave early of take breaks from the heavy air resulting from thousands of pounds of fabric, hundreds of noisy, oily sewing machines and the close quarters of hundreds of women. Another contributing factor was the rapid growth of buildings in Manhattan, resulting in hundreds of workers on the ninth floor and firemen whose ladders only reached to the seventh.
The fire, which had begun on the eighth floor and had allowed most of its workers to escape, burst into the ninth floor workroom causing immediate chaos. As smoke filled the room and fire blazed all around, Esther and Pauline are separated. Pauline and Esther's fiance perish while Esther is able to escape.
The novel takes place in New York in 2001 as Esther, now 106 and the last known survivor of the Triangle fire, is in her last days at a nursing home. Her granddaughter Rebecca and her significant other, George a famous composer are spending Esther's last days with her. Ruth Zion, a historian researching the fire and its aftermath, has notes from multiple interviews with Esther from which she has ascertained truths about the fire and discovered more about Esther's experience than Rebecca had previously known. Throughout the book, in a seemingly unrelated manner, George's music is explained as well as his family history of Huntington's disease.
I finished the book a little after midnight last night and found myself confused and contemplating the story. Upon rising this morning I actually reread the last chapter and felt that I understood it a little better, but want desperately to talk to someone else who has read it. If you have read it, e-mail me if you want to talk about anything that might prove to be a spoiler to my blog readers.
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