Before she left the island for New York she was an apprentice seamstress, working on odd jobs at Odalisque, an offshore factory for the Rubinstein brothers of Seventh Avenue whose family had operated sweatshops since the early 1900s, and had turned to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic for cheap labor once Samuel Gompers and the Ladies Garment Workers Union began to make inroads.
Offshore sweatshops were out of sight, out of mind of the federal regulators, the quality control was assured thanks to Saul Finkel who had a good eye for missed stiches, and was as honest as the day was long.
Saul who had an eye for the women as well as for the errant stitch, immediately noticed Adalina, the young beauty from Aguada, a lovely, demure-looking figure of burnished copper, a girl who had inherited all the best genes from the Spaniards, Dutch traders, English merchant marines, and Portuguese slave traders who had visited or had business with the island for three hundred years.
Somehow her bloodline was never darkened by those slaves who worked the sugar cane and sisal in the hills - somehow her family had always found ways to seduce the conqueror not the conquered and the results were a family of remarkable beauty.
Adalina was also a good worker, highly efficient and productive whose garments were sewn to order perfectly each and every time. When Mr. Finkel came over to her station to supervise her work, she smiled broadly, giving the old Jew something to think about and moreover something to want.
And so it was that contrary to company policy and against the unwritten rules of proper corporate behavior, he became her suitor and her lover - in a commercial transaction of course, beneficial for Ada who saw the affair as a paid way to New York, and equally favorable for Saul who had to return to his sour-smelling, warty wife Esther whom he was not about to leave for a Puerto Rican chippie, no matter how alluring.
Figuring to curry favor with his New York bosses and tired with what had turned out to be a sexually diffident and financially expensive affair, he encouraged Ada to go to New York, work for the Rubinsteins, and make her way in America. The idea of a whole cold, blowy, dingy factory full of Jews like Finkel was distasteful and gross; but she was confident that with her growing commercial savvy and continuing feminine allure, she would bide her time until some rich, white, Anglo-Saxon businessman noticed her and made her his princess.
The South Bronx apartment which she shared with five other girls from the island was a cold water walk-up on East 130th Street in Spanish Harlem. Except for the brutally cold winters and the tenements, it could have been any barrio in Puerto Rico. Ada's double life - shithole in the Bronx, hellhole on Seventh Avenue, coming and going by subway, had to change. She didn't come all the way to New York for this.
Getting noticed was part of Ada's fortune. She had to do nothing to attract the attention of men who found her tempting. This meant hands all over her in the elevator to and from the fourteenth floor, and whistles and clicks from the homeboys on the streetcorner; but it also meant favors from the butcher, the handyman, and the police sergeant at the precinct; so little by little but most assuredly, she parlayed those favors into something bigger than the barrio and its tatted-up gangbangers.
'I'm tired of being a spic', she said to Isabella, another restive visitor from the island, and with that her plan to get up and out of the 'hood and into silk sheets and Lamborghinis began. She was reminded of the movie Maid in Manhattan where a beautiful Puerto Rican maid is noticed by a political candidate, they fall in love, and her dream of white America becomes real. 'I am Jennifer Lopez', Ada thought, but she was not about to wait for a dreamy Ralph Fiennes to discover her. Proactivity was to be her MO.
Yet there is virtually nothing that a poorly paid seamstress in a Seventh Avenue sweatshop can possibly do to act on the American dream. Forced cultural isolation, forced imprisonment in the leaky, drafty, unwelcoming shithole of the South Bronx, and forced labor at the hands of the Jews downtown was her nightmare.
Where there's a will, there's a way, and Alderman Ricardo Gonzalez hailing from her home town of Aguada, noticed her, propositioned her, and called for her in a tricked out limo that escaped the New York City fleet rules, thanks to one colleague's passionate advocacy for Latino 'street culture'. Ada was unimpressed and undeterred. Let this greaseball have his way and I'll be on mine. The idiot Gonzalez liked to show off his women, and made her his aide-de-camp who accompanied him to City Hall and meetings of the City Council.
His mistake was that he badly underestimating the appeal of Ada and overestimated his own sexual influence; and so it was that Langford Alling Harper, representative from the Silk Stocking district of the city noticed her. Now, Harper, a handsome, well-to-do patrician whose family had been early settlers in Manhattan, wealthy Wall Street bankers, and one of New York society's perennial favorites, needed no paid comfort.
He had mistresses up and down Park Avenue; but like all men who are never sexually satisfied and are always on the lookout for new adventures and conquests, when he saw this beauty of copper and gold and burnished mahogany, he couldn't resist. He, like all men of a certain station, immured in a very staid and predictable life, wanted to taste life on the wild side.
Never having had to resort to commercial sex, the smarmy business of actually paying for it, he was rather naive when it came to Ada who knew him and what he was about from the very beginning. She would work on his side of the street first - flowers, simple jewelry, a touch of finery - then walk on hers. Cash payments, small bills, every month; and then to his side again, Vanguard account, offshore holdings, real estate deeds.
Harper, like Alderman Gonzalez before him, couldn't resist the temptation to bring Ada as his aide-de-camp to the yearly family financial roundup, bringing the New York Harpers, the cousins from Hawaii and the the distant aunts and uncles from Beacon Hill one of whom, Badger Farnsworth of Farnsworth & Farnsworth ship builders and international merchants who made their money from the Three-Cornered Trade (molasses, rum, and slaves) who took a particular shine to Ada.
'Give her a chair on the Board', said old Badger, 'give it some color'; and so it was that Ada became a member who sat quietly and respectfully at first, but who thanks to a canny but surprising insight into business affairs especially a recognition of the offshore potential of her recently devastated island of Puerto Rico (there is always money to be made from disaster), she became less of a pretty burnished mahogany face and more of a contributor, the rewards for which were significant.
Had anyone bothered to look, they might have been surprised at just how easy it had been for this barrio seamstress to have risen to high so quickly; but keeping their own counsel, they preferred not to know and take the lovely Miss Sanchez at face value. The older members wondered if she might backslide for a night or two and comfort them, but by then the circle had been closed, and there was no room for anything but money and the furthering of the interests of the family.
'What a great country', Ada remarked to a friend she hosted at the Russian Tea House; but the friend, diffident and unimpressed thanks to her breeding and longstanding renown as a daughter of one of New York's first families, only smiled. Ada knew the look and smiled back. The door to the magnificent life of America was easy to open if you knew the right combination.
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