The City Beautiful

by Aden Polydoros

  She was as noble a figure as the Statue of Liberty that had greeted me when I arrived at Castle Garden two years before. But in her resolute pose and raised arms, there existed an undeniable hostility, as if she were preparing to march into battle. A goddess of war.

  “Alex, wait,” Frankie called after me as I continued down the path.

  I ignored him, although I knew that would do little good. He caught up within moments.

  “We all thought you were dead, you know.” Frankie kept pace with me. “Dead or worse, but look at you. With those tzitzis, you look like a regular mensch.”

  To emphasize his point, he tugged at one of the tassels hanging from the garment’s four corners. I slapped his hand away and kept on walking, refusing to acknowledge him.

  “Oh, come now, where are you going?”

  “Leave me alone, Frankie.”

  Desperate to escape him, I entered the next building I came across—the Krupp Pavilion, a fortresslike structure whose tower was adorned with decorative eagles and the red, white and black flag of the German Empire.

  Once I passed through the double doors, the temperature plummeted. Cold air radiated from a towering indoor fountain that sprayed water over coiled copper tubing, trickling down by some new science to form blocks of ice at its base.

  Frankie clung to my trail, following me past riveted metal machines, past imposing cannons and naval guns, past armored plates and display cases of mortars and bullets. Someday, these weapons might be used in war, but now they only served as the backdrop for a waking nightmare.

  He cornered me behind a massive steel ship propeller, leaning close enough that the heat of his breath fanned across my cheeks.

  “One night you’re there, the next you’re gone. No goodbye. Not even a word. And you’ve been here this entire time, hiding.” In the dusky shadows, Frankie’s eyes were as luminously gold as the constellations of dust motes floating above our heads. “Look how shabby your clothes are, you good mensch. Look at your shoes... You think no one sees the candlewax stoppering their holes? You’re looking thin. You’re looking unwell. You’ve fallen on hard times, haven’t you, bubbeleh?”

  “Go jump in the lake,” I growled, and pushed past him, heading for the exit.

  “Just last week, they found Victor in the Chicago River,” Frankie called after me as I threw open the doors and stumbled into the deliriously bright sunlight. “Or what was left of him anyway. Some bastard gutted him like a fish.”

  I froze in the entrance of the Krupp Pavilion, chilled to the bone although the sun beat hot on my face. One hand still on the door, the knob cold against my palm. As Frankie’s words echoed in my head, I turned and looked back into the chamber. He stood beneath the naval gun, his form in darkness.

  “Victor is dead,” Frankie repeated. “Victor. The kid with the chipped tooth. Velvel. You remember him. I know you do.”

  His blunt statement had a gravitational pull, drawing me back into the room. The door swished shut, blanketing us in the cool dim.

  “He’s dead?” I whispered so softly that only I could hear, because saying it aloud would make it real.

  “I knew that would get your attention,” Frankie said, his voice as tight as a garrote. “He looked up to you, Alex, do you realize that? I still remember how he followed after you like a baby duck. When you left, he visited the hospitals and morgues, searching for you. He cared.”

  I waited for Frankie to tell me that it was a lie, just a cruel way to take me by the scruff and yank me around and force me to confront the past I had spent the last year trying to forget. He stared at me, anger buried shallowly in his gaze, his mouth a tight line. And I knew he had told the truth.

  Somehow, obscenely, Victor’s death felt like justice. Like punishment. For what—who knew? For fear and weakness. For surviving when my father hadn’t.

  “I don’t go by Alex anymore,” I said at last. I had tried using that name for a while, just another way to leave behind the shtetl. Maybe, deep down, I had felt that if I took another name, an Americanized one, I’d finally break free of this darkness that followed me everywhere. I should have known there was no escaping it.

  “Alter then.” He studied me with those magnetizing tawny eyes of his, eyes that had haunted my daydreams since the day I met him. “Say we get out of this heat and talk more over cold drinks? You must be burning up under all those layers.”

  We walked along the canal. We made an odd pair, I supposed, me as I was and Frankie in his fine clothes, his golden watch chain glinting. His thick accent betrayed him as a member of the tribe, but that was the only proof—he kept his head uncovered and his sideburns shaved. Nobody would suspect he had grown up in a household even more religious than my own.

  I stared at my feet as I walked, avoiding looking into the sun-spangled water. Each time we crossed over a bridge, I thought, Is this it? Is this where Yakov fell in?

  “You look different.” Frankie’s gaze lingered on me. “Do you know what ‘alter’ means in English?”

  “To change.”

  “To be changed.”

  “It’s been a year,” I said.

  “That’s not what I mean.” But he didn’t tell me what he meant, and I didn’t ask. I felt trapped, bound tight by his familiar glances. He looked at me as though he could see under all my layers. His hand rested on my shoulder, hovering light as a hummingbird, and it was all I could think about.

  “You look different, too,” I mumbled, my eye drawn by the glimmer of the double Albert watch chain draped across his slim waist. An attractive bloodstone fob hung from the center chain, directing the gaze from silver button to silver button, then downward still. “Who’d you steal your clothes from?”

  “For a good mensch, you’re still damn rude. Someone ought to teach you some manners.”

  I flushed at the heat in his low purr, annoyed by him and his knowing smirk and by the betrayal of my body. I hated how nervous he made me, like I was balancing on the edge of a rooftop. He’d always had that effect on me, filling me with dizzying exhilaration one moment, then sending me into a nervous, stuttering panic the next.

  “Have you been here before?” I asked, once we had continued farther down the boulevard. He seemed to know where he was going.

  “Oh, all the time.” His gaze flicked down to my clothes, and his smirk only grew. “Some of us aren’t living hand-to-mouth. Some of us have risen in the world.”

  Risen or not, it soon became clear to me that Frankie hadn’t climbed above his old habits. As he brushed his hair out of his eyes, the sun shone upon the fresh scabs marring his knuckles. I had a feeling the heavy silver rings he wore on his fingers weren’t just a way to flaunt his newfound fortune, but a handsomer alternative to the brass knuckle-dusters he once carried tucked in his pocket. Even now, I wouldn’t doubt he had something a bit more dangerous than a watch hidden on his person.

  Yet I followed.

  7

  Two years had passed since the day I met Frankie, but our first encounter was engraved in my memory like a knife wound. It was only days after my father had died. The medical examinations I had endured at Castle Garden had sapped my last reserves of strength. After an exhausting journey from Manhattan, I had turned up at the Chicago address my father had made me memorize.

  It was supposed to be the home of a landsman, a good man who would help us find work. Instead, I arrived at a scorched plot. The tenement had been destroyed in a fire two months before, and our friend from Piatra Neamţ had been taken with it.

  I walked aimlessly, dragging my trunk behind me. It was early January, and the winter chill sucked the air as dry as a bone. I had bundled myself in three layers of clothes and tugged on my warmest fur hat, but even that wasn’t enough to keep out the wind.

  As I wandered up and down the streets, I turned bitter and angry. I never should have come here. My ancestors hadn’t li
ved and died on this land, hadn’t bled into its soil.

  I wanted to curse at my father, scream and shout. It served him right to die like that, feverish and so weak at the end that he was croaking nonsense. He should have known; he should have known! This was what happened when you went places you didn’t belong.

  I stopped to rest my aching legs and sat down on my trunk along the roadside. If I cried, the tears would freeze on my cheeks, so I yanked at my hair instead, trying to tear out fistfuls. Maybe if I bled, I’d feel something more than this wrenching grief.

  “Look at that hair,” a boy said in Yiddish. “He’s so fresh off the boat, I’ll bet he still smells like fish.”

  My heartbeat quickened as I looked up to find myself surrounded by a group of teens. They were dressed like gentiles, and most wore no hats, as though to spite the nasty weather and spit in the face of tradition.

  “When did you land?” The boy stepped to the front of the crowd. His dialect was of the east, Lithuania or the like. In spite of his unkempt hair and uncovered head, his musical cadence suggested he had been educated in a yeshiva. The Talmud had no punctuation marks. When reciting its texts, one raised and lowered one’s voice to replicate the natural pauses provided by commas and periods, stopping for emphasis or to take on a questioning tone. It was singular to yeshiva students.

  His contradicting qualities made me wary. I rose to my feet and wrestled my trunk onto its wooden wheels.

  “Can you understand me?” the boy asked, stepping in my way. The others crowded around me, boxing me in. “Hey? Don’t you know Yiddish? What about Russian? Vy ponimayete menya?”

  “Leave me alone,” I said, and tried to step around the pack leader. He grabbed my coattail, bringing me to a halt with ease. I reached down to pry off his hand, but my fingers wouldn’t move properly.

  “Easy there. Oy, you’re practically frozen. What happened to your gloves?” Then, almost absently, he took my hand between both of his and rubbed it firmly to restore the circulation. His palms were warm and rough, a startling contrast to his long, agile fingers, the fingers of a scribe or ketubah painter. As he moved onto my other hand, either not caring what the other boys might think or just entirely oblivious to it, he continued talking to me in that mesmerizing lilt of his. “The name’s Frankie, and this is my crew. You look like you could use some help. Are you all alone here?”

  Maybe it was the way he massaged the feeling back into my hands, or his yeshivish cadence, or those magnetizing bourbon-colored eyes, but something told me I could confide in him.

  “I am.” The words were like spitting out stones, heavy and choking. “My name’s Alter.”

  “You don’t look like an old man,” he teased, turning my name into a pun. “Hey, Victor, give him your gloves before his fingers fall off.”

  The short kid with the chipped tooth passed over his gloves, which were more holes than leather. Mumbling thanks, I slid the gloves on.

  “Do you know of a boardinghouse around here?” I asked. “One where they speak Yiddish?”

  “Why would you want that when we could get you a bed for next to free?”

  Narrowing my eyes, I waited for Frankie to laugh. When I realized he was serious, I licked my lips, my mouth drier than I cared to admit. He thought he was so smooth, but I could see his sharp edges.

  “Who’re you working for?” I demanded.

  Frankie lifted his eyebrows, scowling as though I had offended him. “I’m no one’s grunt. I work for myself. It’s something the Americans called entrepreneurship. There’s an attic down in the Levee, all made up with beds from a boardinghouse that got shuttered.”

  “Actually, it was a brothel,” Victor added helpfully, earning a reproachful look from Frankie.

  “Shut up, Victor. Nobody wants to know that.” Frankie turned back to me. “I rent the place. Split between us, it’ll only cost you thirty cents a week. Best part is, I can get you a job, too.”

  I wasn’t sure if I could catch something just by sleeping on used mattresses, and I wasn’t ready to find out.

  “Thank you, but I’d rather not get syphilis. I can find my own work, and my own bed, too.” I stripped off the gloves and tried to hand them back to Frankie, but he refused to take them.

  “You’ll find work down in the sweatshops, will you now?” His voice was barbed with hidden knowledge. He looked me over, his gaze burning through my clothes. “That’s a handsome coat. Shabby but a good cut. You’re a tailor’s son, aren’t you?”

  It stunned me how close he came to the truth. Before my father opened his own workshop, he had been a cloak-maker. When our entire fortune was lost to the surging waters of the Bistriţa—a shipload of fabric and ready-made clothes gone in an instant—he returned to his former career. The coat was a gift made by his own hands, its elegant cut proof of his fine craftsmanship.

  “That’s what I thought,” Frankie said, as though he could read it all in my face. He leaned forward, his breath wafting from his lips in cold vapors. “You’ll do lovely in the textile mills, bubbeleh. Working sixteen hours a day, fourteen if you’re lucky. The dye baths will burn the skin off your hands, and you’ll come home stinking of piss and chemicals. It’s so dark in those places, your eyes will go bad, too, if your body doesn’t give out first.”

  Later, I would find out that before running off to Chicago, Frankie had worked with his father at a garment factory in Manhattan. He described it so vividly, a shiver passed through my body.

  “What’s in it for you?” I eyed Frankie’s shabby clothes. His trouser hems were fraying to bits, but he had nice leather boots that hardly looked broken in.

  “Nothing. I just know a lamb to slaughter when I see one.”

  Frankie’s blunt words shocked me almost as much as his description of the sweatshops. I sputtered for a response. “I—I’m not a—”

  “Trust me, you are.” A smile surfaced on his lips, but it never reached his eyes. Something in his voice made my stomach clench. The way he said it, he seemed to know from experience. As though he had seen it before, over and over again, what happened to boys with nowhere else to go. “You just don’t know it, and you won’t until someone licks their chops clean of you. But don’t worry, boychik, I won’t let that happen. Stay with us, and we’ll make a wolf out of you yet.”

  Slowly, I relented. I didn’t know English, and I wouldn’t last long in this weather. I could hear him out at least.

  “What exactly do you do?” I asked.

  Frankie’s smile warmed. “We take from those who have more than enough to give.”

  8

  Frankie and I drank sweet iced cocoa at a teahouse in the Java Village, with a view of Ireland across the midway. The air was cooler in the shadow of the black-roofed huts, a pleasant breeze rolling off Lake Michigan.

  The Java Village’s novelty thrilled me at first, but the entire setup began to feel shallow the longer we sat there. The Javanese men and women looked downtrodden under the stares of other tourists. I was used to being stared at, too, but somehow this was different.

  “Is there a Russia exhibit?” I asked Frankie once we were seated, wondering if Yakov might have gone there. “Or somewhere Jewish?”

  “Somewhere Jewish? You mean like a shtetl?” He burst into laughter.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “A shtetl. Oh, I can see it now. Students studying in some dim yeshiva. A Torah dedication, so the tourists can watch us kiss a scroll and parade it down the midway. So they can tell we’re Jewish, everyone will be wearing prayer shawls and yarmulkes, or perhaps a Judenhut, if you want to add that delicious medieval undertone.” He cocked his head. “I suppose maybe they’ll even add a bit of scandalous excitement with a blood libel accusation, or bring in some Cossacks so we can re-create the Khmelnytsky Uprising. Now, that would be an attraction.”

  “You can attempt to contain your sarcasm,” I
said dully, but I caught the gist of what he was saying. In other words, the only time we were interesting was when we were accused of atrocities or being slaughtered in prodigious numbers.

  One hundred thousand killed by Khmelnytsky’s Cossack army, thousands more raped and tortured. The massacres had happened over two hundred years ago, but the wound they’d made in our cultural history was left raw and festering, like a fault line that may begin trembling again at any moment.

  “Me? Contain my sarcasm?” Frankie quirked an eyebrow. “That’s asking too much of me.”

  “Frankie, why did you come here?” I asked, after he had stilled his laughter. A horrible idea occurred to me. “Don’t tell me you’re working this place over?”

  “That’d be a bit hard with all the Columbian Guards crawling around, wouldn’t you agree?” Smirking, he nodded to a blue-uniformed man strolling down the midway. “Look at them. With how they strut about, you’d think they’re the Okhrana, the secret police back in Russia. I wouldn’t dare try anything with them around.”

  I remained unconvinced.

  After a moment, he chuckled. “Oh, Alter, you should see your face. All right, I confess. I was on the train for work, not pleasure. This whole place is infested with cops, but not the platforms. I have the crew working them over. I’m simply there to collect.” He glanced at his pocket watch. “I can’t stay long. They’ll be worrying where I am, and that’s when mistakes get made.”

  I set my glass down. Just listening to him made me lose my appetite. I knew the kind of mistakes that could get made when feelings were involved. If one weren’t careful, it could end in blood.

  “You’re shameless,” I said, without much vigor. It was hard to justify judging him when I was guilty of his same crimes. True, I had tried to do teshuvah for my mistakes, but nothing would simply erase the pain I had caused.

  “Shame is a word people use to try to control you.” Frankie tapped his fingers against his cocoa glass. “But enough about me. Something tells me you aren’t here to enjoy yourself. Unless, in your old age, this look of constipation has become your natural expression. Honestly, I can’t tell.”