want to be
found when Jesus comes.
She opened her eyes and looked around. She could think of no worse place to be when Jesus came, and she knew He was coming. Every nerve in her body told her so. She squeezed her eyes shut and saw the words emblazoned in gold thread.
Go to no place where you would not want to be found when Jesus comes.
Thanks in equal parts to her mother and her sister, Violet had had the motto memorized by the age of six. She thought about that day and the horrible pain. It was washday, so it had to have been a Monday. Her mother had just finished filling the copper tin when Daisy accidentally knocked into it, sending boiling water down her sister’s backside. It truly was an accident. Violet was convinced of that, but pain was pain. In spite of her mother’s home remedies, angry blisters rose up from Violet’s skin.
Every night for a week, Violet balanced on a stool bending over the kitchen sink while her mother carefully tended to her burns.
“Read the first two words for me,” she’d say.
“Do nothing . . .”
“That’s right, and the next couple?” Her mother would pass a needle over the flame of a candle.
“. . . that you . . .”
“Good,” she’d say. “Keep going.” She’d slowly inserted the needle into the first blister. Stick, pop, squeeze until the wound was drained of fluid.
“. . . would not want to be doing . . .”
Her mother would move onto the next blister and start again.
“. . . when Jesus comes.”
“Close your eyes and see if you can say it back for Mother now.”
And so it went for seven days, and by the end, she had the motto memorized.
* * *
Violet pulled on Stanley till he got up from his seat and followed her out the side door. Given a choice between coward and sinner, she thought coward the more favorable option.
“What’s going on?” Stanley asked, stopping to let his eyes adjust to the sunlight. “It was just starting to get good.”
“You’ll thank me when the Pearly Gates open up to you, Stanley Adamski,” she said, as she pulled him toward home.
* * *
School had let out by the time Stanley and Violet got back to Providence from downtown. Hungry from all that walking but hesitant to return to their own homes just yet, they found themselves on the widow’s porch steps.
“Go ahead and knock,” Stanley said.
“Third time this week. Maybe we’re making pests of ourselves.”
Stanley pushed past Violet. Just as he raised his fist to knock, the back door swung open.
“Well, hurry up.” The widow ushered them into the kitchen and headed toward the stove. “Don’t want my pączki to catch.” The children exchanged confused glances. “Doughnuts. I already have some cooling on the sill. Give them a few more minutes, or you’ll burn your tongues.” She picked up a fork and tipped one up. “Perfect,” she said as she flipped all the golden confections frying in the pan. “Stand back,” she warned. “The lard’s very hot. Violet, you set the table, and Stanley, you pour the milk. Nobody makes pączki better than me!”
After the incident with Myrtle Evans at Murray’s store, the widow Lankowski had waited for the children to start showing up at her door. She didn’t have to wait long. She took to baking sweets and ordered extra bottles of milk to have on hand when they came calling. She thought both were in sore need of a mother’s love, though in Violet’s case, the widow held out hope that Grace would eventually come around, poor soul. The same could not be said for Stanley. She just had to look him in the eye to know. If his dear matka were still alive, maybe things would have been different, but with only Albert in the house, the boy had no chance at all.
God had not seen fit to bless Johanna Lankowski with her own babies. She’d pocketed that hope twenty-five years earlier, on the day two miners dropped her husband Henryk’s broken body on her front porch steps. Of course, she had been young enough to marry again but never considered it, even though there had been a few offers. She’d submitted to Henryk’s will without complaint, as God required a wife to do, but she vowed not to make the same mistake twice.
Fortunately for the widow, she’d come to America as an eighteen-year-old bride with a gift for languages and lace-making. Back in Poland, her father, a teacher, had taught her German in honor of her paternal grandmother, and English, so she could read the works of William Shakespeare in his native tongue. Her mother, like most mothers in the mountain village of Koniaków, taught her the art of needle lace, so she could help out when they came up short at the end of the month. She took to the crochet hook like a baby to the breast, quickly mastering the scallop, swirl, and petal patterns handed down from her ancestors. Soon, she began creating her own openwork designs, inspired by nature. In winter, she studied frost blossoms on the windowpanes and reproduced their intricate shapes. In summer, she collected feathers and mimicked their lines. Much to her mother’s delight, several of Johanna’s cloths adorned the altars in the local Catholic churches, and some of the wealthier women hired her to make baptismal gowns for their children. She could turn cotton string into a work of art as easily as she could turn a page, and although needle lace was her specialty, eventually she could imitate any style of European lace set before her, including point, pillow, and bobbin.
After Henryk’s death, she took a job at the Scranton Lace Curtain Company on Meylert Avenue, down past the Sherman Mine. They specialized in what the English called Nottingham lace because the looms that originally produced it came from that town. The seamless fabric created on the factory’s machines looked homemade to the untrained eye, but Johanna could tell the difference. No heart. No life. The Lace Company’s curtains and tablecloths were too exact, too smooth for human hands.
In spite of her aversion to machinery, the widow quickly moved through the ranks from operator to winder, apprentice to weaver, jobs more often assigned to men than women. As a female, she still did not earn enough to keep herself. Males made a better wage since they had households to support and women could always marry. She took in sewing to earn extra money. At first, she mended a variety of goods, but slowly, she became known in Scranton for her ability to repair damaged lace by hand. Soon, the wealthy wives from all over town started sending their torn curtains and tablecloths to the widow Lankowski. One day Mrs. Dimmick, wife of J. Benjamin Dimmick, the president of the Scranton Lace Curtain Company, sent a servant to the widow’s home with an heirloom cloth. It seemed one of the children had gotten his hands on a pair of scissors and cut a gash across the middle.
“You’re wasting her in that factory,” Mrs. Dimmick told her husband after the widow had stopped by their Green Ridge home to return the repaired tablecloth. “I dare you to find the damaged portion.” Mrs. Dimmick handed the cloth to her husband. “I’m sure you have customers who would pay dearly for such attention to detail. Better yet, there are many who still prefer one-of-a-kind creations.”
By the end of the week, the widow started working from home for the self-supporting wage Mrs. Dimmick encouraged Mr. Dimmick to offer her.
*
