Trio 2: Short Story

On the street in Brooklyn where I grew up, there lived a woman by the name of Sadie Josephson. When she was seventy-five her husband died, leaving her only a little insurance and an old house. What could she do? She went into business for herself, the only business she really knew after fifty years of marriage. She became a laundress. And a good one, too.

For blocks around, the housewives who didn’t have their own washing machine preferred her to the local laundromat ten to one. She got the laundry clean clear through, not just on the surface. She also ironed it, and she didn’t cost that big a penny more, either. Even the housewives who had their own washer and dryer would now and then turn to Sadie to get the sparkle and warmth, the human touch, that no machine could give. For Sadie did everything by hand.

She would pick up the bundle of laundry in a bright-red toy wagon, the same one in which her three boys, now middle-aged and far away, had ridden, and then she would tow it back to her house. There, in the basement, she would fill as many of her four sturdy oaken washtubs as she needed with steaming water; take up her washboard and bar of strong yellow soap; and getting down on her knees, commence to scrub away.

She was a little woman, only five feet tall, with wispy-white hair and thin arms and small hands. But she never let that hair get in her eyes, and in those arms she had great strength. Nor did she ever scrimp it. She scrubbed a sock just as hard as she scrubbed a towel or a sheet. You could say that in the tubs all laundry became equal.

After the scrubbing Sadie would pull the corks out of the tubs, letting foamy rivers dash down the drain, and then she would plunge the big, dripping clumps into tubs of fresh water and rinse each piece over and over until it was soapless. Then, with a wicker basket heaped full, up the stairs and out she’d go to the greenhouse in her backyard. Here her husband had once grown many kinds of flowers. Now the flowers were gone, and dozens of clotheslines, with hundreds of wooden clothespins clinging to them like little birds, stretched from one end to the other.

In a corner of this greenhouse was a coal-burning stove that cast a circle of warmth. And within this circle stood Sadie’s ironing board, looking like a faithful, spindly-legged horse, and on top of it, plugged into a long extension cord, her heavy iron. Here she would stand for hour after hour, pressing the iron down hard on the board as if to leave her mark on some stubborn surface, not singing, not even humming, but just ironing in a green, almost devout quiet.

When someone’s laundry was ready to come home, ordinarily Sadie would bring it in the red wagon. But my mother always sent me to fetch ours, to save the old woman the journey. And always, seeing that greenhouse of laden clotheslines, I would feel what a shame it was, what a wrong, that someone so old should have to work so hard. It seemed to me that the lot of the laundress could only be described by the first big word I had ever learned in school—“servitude.”

One day, as she placed the stack of immaculate laundry in my arms, I could no longer refrain from letting the old woman know how my spirit cried out against this lot of hers. “Sadie,” I said, “I wish I was rich. I would deliver you from this servitude this very moment.”

She bent down and kissed me on the head. “Would you, darling?” she said.

“That is sweet. But you see, I don’t want to be delivered! I am quite happy to do my laundry. I feel good in my heart, and I’m a burden to nobody.”

I blushed deeply. It was terribly embarrassing to have one’s noble wish so gently refused, to have one’s eyes opened to the truth that one person could actually thrive on what struck another as so utterly wretched. Sadie saw this, and comforted me with her philosophy:

“God, He lights two candles in each of us,” she said. “One is strength, and the other is hope. Sometimes a big wind comes along and blows out one or the other—only one or the other, because God never allows the wind to blow out both. And so, when the strength is blown out, we relight it with the hope; and when the hope is blown out, we relight it with the strength. In me, today, both candles are burning. They will always burn.”

Then with a brisk nod and a smile, she shooed me off into my day.