South Braintree Square was empty at half-past ten when Harry Dolbeare, a piano tuner, finished a cup of coffee at Torrey’s Drugstore on the corner and started up Washington Street to Cuff’s Music Store. Cuff had called him the day before to see about the felts on a secondhand upright, and Dolbeare told him he would have a look at it. As he reached Gregor’s Restaurant he noticed a black touring car turning left from Holbrook Avenue to Washington Street. He could see two men in front and, although the rear side curtains were up, three more men in the back seat. One of the men in back was leaning forward talking to the driver. Dolbeare had never seen any of them before, or the car either. They looked to him like foreigners, maybe some of that Dago bunch from the Fore River shipyards. Tough tickets, the lot of them, he thought to himself after the car had passed him.
At 11:15 Lola Hassam, a hard-faced woman in her forties, got off the train from Quincy with Julia Campbell, the old woman who rented one of her two rooms in the Alhambra Block there. Lola now called herself Lola Andrews, her name before her divorce, although some people said she had never been married. At various times she had been a waitress, a cleaning woman, and a practical nurse. Men often used to come to her room in the Alhambra. Since things were slack in Quincy, she and Julia had decided to come to South Braintree and look for work in one of the shoe factories.
They crossed the tracks by the gate-tender’s shack at the end of Railroad Avenue, walked down Pearl Street past the double pipe fence in front of Rice & Hutchins, and continued another twenty-five yards to the lower Slater & Morrill factory. Julia Campbell was developing cataracts, and she took the younger woman’s arm going downhill.
About thirty feet from the factory they passed a black touring car parked at the side of the road. A dark stocky man with high cheekbones was bending over the raised hood adjusting the motor. Lola Andrews saw another man sitting in the back of the car, a pale, sick-looking sort of fellow in a khaki overcoat.
The men paid no attention to them and the women walked up the steps of Slater & Morrill. Once inside they could not locate the employment office. As they stood there undecided, a middle-aged man in a business suit came down the corridor and asked them what they wanted.
“We want work, mister,” Lola Andrews said. The man said that three months ago he could have given them both jobs. Now they were not taking on any new help. She was not to be put off so easily, insisting she had heard in Quincy that the factory needed people. He told her she had heard wrong. “Isn’t this Rice and Hutchins?” she asked him finally.
No, he told her, Rice & Hutchins was up the road.
When the women again passed the touring car, the pale man in the overcoat was standing behind it and the dark man had crawled underneath and was working on the motor from below, his head and shoulders just visible through the spokes of the front wheel. Lola had almost to step over his feet to get by. He had a screwdriver in his hand, and just as she was opposite him he glanced up at her.
“Pardon me,” she said, “could you tell me how to get to the factory office?”
He crawled out from under the car, stood up, and asked her what factory she wanted. When she told him Rice & Hutchins, he pointed out the brick building and told her to take the driveway to the left; that was the office up there.