The house on Henry Street

by Lillian D. Wald

Her first love went to my comrade, whose beauty and humor and goodness captured her Celtic heart. During our second year in the tenement Miss Brewster was taken seriously ill, and one evening we had at last succeeded in forcing Mrs. McRae to go home and had locked the door. Unknown to us the dear friend remained on the floor outside all through the night, trying to catch the sound of life from the loved one.

Bringing up a large family, with no help from the “old man,” and with stern ideals of conduct and integrity, was not easy. Some of her children, endowed with her character, gave her solace, but she was too astute not to estimate each one properly.

When we moved from the tenement to our first house Mrs. McRae and her family gave up the basement rooms, which were rent free because of her janitor service, in order to be near us, and she spread her warmth over the new abode. When, some years later, she was ill and we knew that the end was near, one close to me in my own family claimed my attention. Torn between the two affections, I was loath to leave the city while Mrs. McRae was so ill. She guessed the cause of my perturbed state and advised me to go. “Darlin’, you ought to go. You go. I promise not to die until you come back.”

Letters kept up this assurance and the promise was fulfilled.

Times were hard that year. In the summer the miseries due to unemployment and rising rents and prices began to be apparent, but the pinch came with the cold weather. Perhaps it was an advantage that we were so early exposed to the extraordinary sufferings and the variety of pain and poverty in that winter of 1893-94, memorable because of extreme economic depression. The impact of strain, physical and emotional, left neither place nor time for self-analysis and consequent self-consciousness, so prone to hinder and to dwarf wholesome instincts, and so likely to have proved an impediment to the simple relationship which we established with our neighbors.

It has become almost trite to speak of the kindness of the poor to each other, yet from the beginning of our tenement-house residence we were much touched by manifestations of it. An errand took me to Michael the Scotch-Irish cobbler as the family were sitting down to the noonday meal. There was a stranger with them, whom Michael introduced, explaining when we were out of hearing that he thought I would be interested to meet a man just out of Sing Sing prison. I expressed some fear of the danger to his own boys in this association. “We must just chance it,” said Michael. “It’s no weather for a man like that to be on the streets, when honest fellows can’t get work.”

When we first met the G⸺ family they were breaking up the furniture to keep from freezing. One of the children had died and had been buried in a public grave. Three times that year did Mrs. G⸺ painfully gather together enough money to have the baby disinterred and fittingly buried in consecrated ground, and each time she gave up her heart’s desire in order to relieve the sufferings of the living children of her neighbors.

Another instance of this unfailing goodness of the poor to each other was told by Nellie, who called on us one morning. She was evidently embarrassed, and with difficulty related that, hearing of things to be given away at a newspaper office, she had gone there hoping to get something that would do for John when he came out of the hospital. She said, “I drew this and I don’t know exactly what it is meant for,” and displayed a wadded black satin “dress-shirt protector,” in very good condition, and possibly contributed because the season was over! Standing outside the circle of clamorous petitioners, Nellie and the woman next her had exchanged tales of woe. When she mentioned her address the new acquaintance suggested that she seek us.

Nellie proved to be a near neighbor. There were two children: a nursing baby “none so well,” and a lad. John, her husband, was “fortunately” in the hospital with a broken leg, for there were “no jobs around loose anyway.” When we called later in the day to see the baby, we found that Nellie was stopping with her cousin, a widower who “held his job down.” There were also his two children, the widow of a friend “who would have done as much by me,” and the wife and two small children of a total stranger who lived in the rear tenement and were invited in to meals because the father had been seen starting every morning on his hunt for work, and “it was plain for anyone with eyes to see that he never did get it.” So this one man, fortunate in having work, was taking care of himself and his children, the widow of his friend, Nellie and her children, and was feeding the strangers. Said Nellie: “Sure he’s doing that, and why not? He’s the only cousin I’ve got outside of Ireland.”