The City Beautiful

by Aden Polydoros

  “A gift,” I echoed blankly, then recalled what Raizel had told me in class. “You don’t mean... You really read palms?”

  “That’s only a facet of it. I don’t normally read the fortunes of men, but...” She held out her hand, palm up. Her expectation was abundantly clear.

  Palm-reading was all superstitious narishkeyt she should have left behind in the old country. And yet... If she did have some kind of gift, what would she see in the lines on my hand?

  Thief. Dishonorable son. Shanda.

  I laid down my spoon and rose to my feet. “It’s very kind of you to offer, but it’s nearly midnight and I need to get up early.”

  As I began to turn away, she seized my wrist. In any other situation, it would have been considered a bold transgression.

  “Your lifeline is branched,” she whispered.

  “I said, I don’t want to do this!” I tore my hand away, suddenly nauseated. The stench had returned, muddling my thoughts. Scorched meat. Scorched skin. I thought of the shreds of gray stringy beef floating in the stew, and I wanted to retch.

  “Alter,” Mrs. Brenner said pleadingly, reaching out to me. “Please, wait. Just listen to me. When I opened the door to you yesterday morning, I saw that a darkness had crept over you. I thought it was grief, but it’s different now, Alter. It’s spreading.”

  Oy gevalt, she was utterly meshuge. Before she could say more, I wished her a hasty good-night and fled the room. As I fumbled to unlock my door, I glanced back, half-certain I’d find her lurching down the hall behind me. Thankfully, she wasn’t that persistent.

  I eased the door shut to avoid waking the others and twisted the lock. When I turned around, Dovid was sitting at the edge of his bed.

  “Back rather late, aren’t we?” he asked. I couldn’t see his face, but I had the uncanny feeling he was grinning at me.

  I rested my back against the door, a bit afraid Mrs. Brenner might begin pounding. Her words had shaken me to the core. I took a moment to regain my breath before answering. “I visited a friend after class. What of it?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “A friend next door?”

  I groaned. The walls really were as thin as I thought. “No, a different one down in the Levee.”

  “Oh, so that kind of friend.” Dovid chuckled. “Visiting the brothels now, are we, Alter? You never cease to surprise me.”

  “Not that kind of friend,” I snapped, mortified by his implications.

  Across the room, Haskel grumbled in his sleep and buried his face into his pillow. “Will you two be quiet?”

  “Not that kind of friend,” I repeated, softer now. “And Mrs. Brenner and I were merely talking.”

  “It didn’t sound like a mere talk.”

  “Just go back to sleep.” I yanked off my ribbon tie and slung it over the trunk with my overcoat and waistcoat, too exhausted to bother hanging them up. I stood by the window to make use of the shallow light. By the time I had wrangled myself out of my shirt and tzitzis, I had calmed down enough to at least fold the garments.

  “Oy,” Dovid muttered as I leaned down to unbutton my shoes.

  I swiveled around, angry words already welling on my tongue. “What is it this time?”

  “Your back. There’s a bad rash.”

  I reached behind me, tracing my fingers down my spine. The skin felt cool and slightly waxen, numb to the touch as though it wasn’t really mine at all. It didn’t even hurt.

  I twisted around to see myself in the washstand’s oval mirror, but all I could make of the rash was a stain a shade darker than the surrounding skin. There was something familiar about the way it crept down my spine, vanishing past my trousers’ waistband.

  “It’s nothing.” I didn’t want to think about that now. I was tired. So tired. I drove the thoughts from my head and ripped at the shoe buttons with the buttonhook, yanking so savagely that one of the abalone rounds snapped free and rolled under the cot. Lovely.

  I collapsed on the bed and stared at the ceiling, because to sleep on my side meant that I would wake with a clear view of Yakov’s empty cot. Through the wall, I could hear Mrs. Brenner moving around in her flat. The floorboards groaned beneath her feet. She could have been doing anything in there.

  I sighed, folding my arm over my eyes.

  All that about darkness was shtuss. She would have made good company of Motke the Meshugener, who had wandered the streets of Piatra Neamţ harassing travelers he was convinced were possessed by the dybbukim of his loved ones. A survivor of the brutal pogroms that had spread across Russia over a decade ago, Motke had seen the faces of the dead and broken everywhere he looked—his wife, his friends, his neighbors. I remembered him as a strange, shrunken man, his shoulders hunched as though burdened by a terrible weight. Even in Romania, he had been unable to find solace from the ghosts that haunted him.

  I could sympathize. More than once since arriving in America, I had followed a man in the crowd, drawn by my father’s familiar gait or the wink of sunlight across his gold-rimmed spectacles. But no matter how many times I caught the stranger by his shoulder, the moment he turned around, the illusion was shattered.

  Ghosts were fleeting in that manner.

  13

  The next morning, I left early to avoid running across Mrs. Brenner in the hall. I waited outside until Raizel appeared. She was walking with her mother, a bespectacled woman in a plum-purple dress, whose long, somber face was shadowed by a straw hat adorned with enough silk violets to plant a garden.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Ackermann,” I said when I came up to them.

  “Good morning, Mr. Rosen,” her mother said with a brief nod of acknowledgment. “Raizel told me about your roommate. You have my condolences.”

  She was short like her daughter, but her gaze was cool and confident, and she held her head high, which made her seem taller. When I asked to speak with Raizel for a moment in private, I saw the briefest glimmer of a smile before she caught herself.

  “I’m afraid that would be improper,” she demurred, before glancing over at Raizel. “But my ankle is rather bothering me, you see, and I would like to rest here a moment. I suppose that if Raizel prefers to walk on ahead, provided she keeps at an appropriate distance...”

  “I understand. Have a good day.” I suppressed a smile and continued on my way. After a moment, Raizel caught up with me.

  “Well?” Her gaze burned with expectation. “Did you learn anything from that acquaintance of yours?”

  “He told me that he knows where the Whitechapel Club is, but he insists on taking me there. We plan to go tonight.”

  “Aaron was my friend, and I owe it to him to find out what happened to him.” Her sepia-brown eyes sparked as sharp as thorns. “I’m coming, too.”

  “What about your parents?” I couldn’t exactly imagine Mrs. Ackermann permitting her daughter to crawl out the window in the middle of the night.

  “Trust me, they’ll never find out.”

  I hesitated, unsure if I should mention the stranger who had chased me last night. I was beginning to suspect it had all been in my head, a product of stress and exhaustion. “Raizel, something very strange happened yesterday. I think someone was following me on my way home.”

  “You think?”

  “Chasing me, I should say. Just...when you sneak out tonight, be careful, okay?”

  Despite its dilapidation and squalor, Maxwell Street had always felt secure and familiar to me. I could read the signs on the walls and speak to everyone I passed. But everything had changed now. I didn’t think I would ever feel safe here again.

  * * *

  Work proceeded as usual. I typed up the articles waiting for me on the Linotype’s tray, double-checking after each sentence that I had made no mistakes. Once I had affixed the lead letter-blocks into their metal frame, I had Mr. Weiss check my work.

  He grunted in
satisfaction. “No mistakes this time.”

  “There won’t be any from now on,” I assured him.

  At lunchtime, I went down to the kosher deli two streets over to buy the newsmen’s lunches. The shop was run by a nice Dutch family who had come over a number of years ago. They had two daughters, one my age and the other a couple years younger than my eight-year-old sisters. Hanna, the little one, ran up to me as soon as I entered, tugging at my tzitzis like I was a dog on a leash.

  “Hanna, stop that,” the eldest daughter, Sarah, called from behind the counter. “It’s disrespectful.”

  “Alter! Did you bring me anything?” Hanna craned her head up at me, brown eyes brimming with excitement.

  With her braided hair and inquisitive gaze, Hanna reminded me so much of my sisters that it almost hurt. Every week or so, I had gotten into the tradition of bringing her things I found while emptying the office’s rubbish bins. Used paper she could draw on, empty ink jars, worn-down pen nubs she turned into jewelry.

  I searched my pockets for something I could give her. No luck. All I found was a piece of lint.

  “Nothing today, but I’ll try to bring you something next week,” I said.

  “Aww, all right.” Pouting, she sulked off.

  “You spoil her too much,” Sarah said as I stepped up to the counter. Her smile betrayed her feigned disapproval. “She’ll be heartbroken when your sisters arrive.”

  “But she’ll gain two new friends then.” I passed her the slip with the lunch orders, along with the money the newsmen had given me. As she prepared the meal, I studied the array of pickled salads and cuts of meat behind glass.

  “You must be broiling in that coat,” Sarah said as she wrapped up my sandwiches in newspaper.

  “I’m just feeling a little chilly.”

  “I thought you Russians all had ice water for blood.”

  “I’m from Romania,” I reminded her.

  “Oh, for a moment I thought that accent...” She chuckled sheepishly.

  “It’s an easy mistake to make.” The dialect of Yiddish spoken in Romania was a lot more similar to other Eastern dialects than it was to the kind spoken in Holland.

  “Maybe you’re coming down with a flu. You don’t look so good.”

  Her words made me aware of the lingering ache in my muscles and the dull headache that I’d carried with me through the day. I tugged my overcoat a little tighter around myself. “It’s because I’m sick of people telling me I don’t look so good.”

  “Forgive me, Alter.” With a smile, she cut a slice of babka from the loaf cooling on the counter, wrapped it up, and slipped it in with all the rest. “Consider it on the house. We don’t want you wasting away just yet.”

  14

  Long after Dovid and Haskel had gone to bed that night, I lay awake, listening to the leaden tick of the brass clock. Distant bells rang. I counted the tolls until they struck eleven.

  Slipping out of bed, I retrieved my clothes from the steamer trunk. My eyes had long-since adjusted to the darkness, and I needed only the frail moonlight to guide me. For attending Shabbos dinners and banquets hosted by the burial society, I had acquired a secondhand dress coat. Lighter clothes were more expensive and required frequent professional cleaning, so while my everyday trousers and waistcoat looked rather somber in the daylight, they made suitable evening wear. I stuffed my sole necktie into my pocket with my watch. On my way out, I stole Haskel’s bowler cap and snatched the antler-handled straight razor from the dish beside the washbasin. Not the best weapon for self-defense, but it would serve in a pinch.

  In the corridor, I knotted my necktie and buttoned my shoes. I slipped my watch chain through my waistcoat buttonhole and straightened the fob, a Romanian silver leu whose details were worn to shadows. I checked my father’s watch for the time, held it tight for comfort. Time to go.

  With the straight razor nestled in my pants pocket, I walked three blocks from the tenement until I reached the chevra kadisha, where Raizel and I had arranged to meet. As I passed the unfinished shul, an eerie orange glow rippled across the building’s high windows. Strange. The builders should have gone home by now. Shadows flitted across the walls within, thrashing movement, the silhouettes of flailing limbs—was there a person in there? And that light...

  As I leaned into the fence to get a better look, I had the sudden prickly sense that someone stood behind me and swiveled around.

  It was a young man engulfed by a fawn-brown Inverness cape that was twenty years out of fashion. His mahogany hair spilled from under his cap, framing dark, intelligent eyes and delicate features.

  “Pardon me,” I said. “Do you need something?”

  “Really?” The boy arched an eyebrow.

  I took a closer look at him. “Wait a minute. Raizel?”

  “You may call me Rainer,” she said triumphantly, giving a tip of her cap.

  I turned back to the shul, but the windows were black and unlit. I knew I hadn’t imagined the blaze.

  “Well, aren’t you going to say something?” Raizel asked with a touch of annoyance.

  “Did you see a glow in the window just now?” I asked.

  “Uh, no.”

  “It looked like lantern light. And that there was someone in there.”

  A rumble came overheard. Raizel glanced up, a hint of a smile on her lips. “The reflection of lightning, I imagine. Are you ready to go?”

  “This is a terrible idea,” I said as we began walking. “And you look like a fourteen-year-old wearing his father’s clothes.”

  “That’s because I am wearing my father’s clothes.”

  “They’ll never let us in.”

  “Can you be any more pessimistic?”

  “I’m being realistic.”

  “Maybe they won’t let you in with your shtetl talk, but when I speak English, I sound like a cultured American.” She said it with a hint of sarcasm, but it stung like an insult anyway.

  “A cultured American?” I lifted my eyebrow. “How very bourgeois of you.”

  She huffed. “You know what I mean.”

  “Besides, I imagine you sound more like the Kaiser,” I said, earning a sour look.

  “If we’re going with Prussians, I prefer Marx,” she declared.

  We continued down Maxwell Street. It was three kilometers to the corner of LaSalle and Calhoun, where Frankie and I had arranged to meet, and I planned on walking the entire way. However, only minutes after we left the neighborhood, Raizel chased down a passing hansom cab.

  “Wait, it’s Shabbos—” I began.

  “Consider it pikuach nefesh.” Raizel dug through the pockets of her borrowed coat. She handed the driver some coins, and when he tipped his hat at her and called her sir, she turned and gave me a smirk of satisfaction.

  We sat side by side in the cramped compartment, close enough that her shoulder brushed mine each time the carriage turned a corner. Our parents would never have permitted us to be alone like this, but it felt natural to me.

  I thought there must be something wrong with me. I could appreciate Raizel’s beauty, now more so than when she wore a dress. Still, the sight of her didn’t fill me with buoyant exhilaration or send my heart galloping the way it had with Frankie, Yakov, and a dozen other boys throughout the years.

  “Raizel, were you and Aaron close?” I asked, wondering if she had felt the same way about Aaron as I had felt about Yakov.

  “Are,” she corrected bluntly. “And yes, we’re friends. We’ve been friends for years now, ever since I moved here.”

  “I’m surprised Mrs. Brenner hasn’t tried matching you with him.”

  She chuckled. “I can assure you, if she did, we’d demand a divorce within a fortnight. We’re not close in that way. We’re just... Aaron always takes me so seriously. The newsmen at the Arbeiter-Zeitung are pleasant enough, but they call
me their little Nellie Bly, and it’s like they see me as a novelty. It makes all my hard work feel unimportant. But when I told Aaron I got an article published, you should have seen his face, Alter. He was so happy for me and so impressed. He bought two copies and had me autograph one of them. He’s always been that way. When he started talking about Jack the Ripper, I didn’t want to crush his hopes. I wish I told him what I really thought about his idea.”

  When we were a block away from Calhoun Place, a barrage of thunder cracked open the floodgates to the sky. Rain poured down in violent torrents, pummeling the hansom cab’s roof and sending the coachman cursing at the sky.

  As the carriage slowed to a stop, I began to rise. Because Raizel was seated closest to the door, she stepped out first and held it open to me, rain be damned.

  “How gentlemanly of you,” I said as we hurried onto the sidewalk.

  “Indeed. You ought to curtsy.”

  “I’m not a ‘cultured American’ so that’s asking too much of me.”

  “You’re never going to let that go, are you?”

  I grinned. “I’m afraid not, Marx.”

  Violent gusts tore at my coat flaps. As I fled across the street, I clutched onto my borrowed hat with both hands, knowing that Haskel would murder me if I destroyed it. By the time we found shelter under a building’s eaves, my clothes were soaked through.

  Frankie waited at the corner of Calhoun and LaSalle, in deep conversation with a middle-aged man wearing a houndstooth suit that hugged his narrow frame. As we neared, Frankie narrowed his eyes and said something to the man, before striding forward to meet us.

  “What’s going on here?” Frankie kept his voice low and tame. “You didn’t tell me you intended to bring a crowd.”

  “I’d hardly call one other person a crowd,” I said, before Raizel butted in.

  “My name is Raizel. I’m with the Arbeiter-Zeitung.”

  A flicker of surprise passed over his face. “Ah, you’re a girl. You were smart to wear a disguise. And the Arbeiter-Zeitung... If I’m not mistaken, that’s a workers’ paper.”