Epitaph

by Mary Doria Russell

  “It’s pretending, that’s all,” Sadie said. “There’s nothing wrong with pretending.”

  SEVENTY YEARS LATER, long after memories of Wyatt Earp and Johnny Behan had faded and died, Sadie Marcus could still recall that childhood voyage in moments of crisp clarity.

  Her miserable mother dashing across the deck to vomit over the side while seabirds hovered and dove and squabbled for the results.

  Her cheerful father’s face shining with excitement as he told about a galley fire quickly doused with soup.

  The endless Brazilian forest with its uncountable tree trunks—like the masts in Brooklyn harbor!

  Whales, rising and falling in vast mounds.

  Hordes of seals, sunning on rocks.

  Penguins were the best of all, formally dressed for a party that could begin only after they waddled to the edge of the rocks and tumbled into the ocean.

  “You see, Sadie?” her father said, lifting a hand toward those awkward, comical birds as they flew through the gray-green water, fiercely graceful and suddenly swift. “Everything changes when you are in your proper element. That’s what your mutti don’t understand.”

  Sadie stood tiptoe on a roll of canvas, resting her forearms on the rail the way her father did. She was fascinated by his hands and wrists, crisscrossed by shiny pink brands burned into his skin by baking sheets and kettles and ovens.

  “Your mutti, she wishes we stayed in Brooklyn,” he said. “But in America? You can start over. You can change where you live. Change what you do. Change your name even! In America, you just gotta find your proper element and you will succeed.”

  She was shivering beneath layers of flannel and knitting. Her lips felt thick from the cold, and her face was chapped by wind that had started its own journey in the Antarctic. It was worth mere discomfort to stand at her father’s side, listening to his brave words.

  “Your mutti gonna see. We gonna buy a nice little building on a corner. Corners is always good for a bakery. We gonna live upstairs, and we ain’t gonna need no drunk Irishman to share the rent. No more boss who takes the profit! We gonna offer fine pastries and cakes, not just bread and rolls. Lotta money in San Francisco. Lotta rich people gonna want me to cater their parties . . . She’ll see. Everything gonna be fine!”

  And it truly was, for a while at least.

  RUIN IS STRONG AND SWIFT

  SAN FRANCISCO.

  It was newer, bigger, brasher, noisier than Brooklyn. San Francisco was willing to give anyone a second or third or fourth chance, and immigrants from around the globe were taking the town up on its offer. Chileans and Chinamen. Bengalis and Brazilians. Jews from all over Europe. Ex-convicts from Australia, ex-Confederates from Mississippi, ex-slaves from Georgia. Mohawks from New York, Cherokees from Oklahoma. Huge Hawaiian laborers, dapper Italian musicians, suave French thieves. Educated or illiterate, dirt-poor or well-capitalized, respectable or on the run—everyone in San Francisco had come for one reason only: to make a fortune in the foggy, chilly city that had mushroomed into existence on top of a boomtown’s mud and dung.

  When the Marcus family arrived in 1868, the bay was jammed with shipping, and the dockside warehouses were as full as the brothels. New buildings climbed up and over the hills, straining to accommodate a quarter million ambitious men and a few thousand very tired women. Swells with money swanned around town in top hats, frock coats, striped pants, and brocade vests, shoes buffed to a mirror shine twice daily by bootblacks who earned a very decent living from the filthy streets. Watching this swaggering peacock parade, the former Hyman Markuse suspected that every man in town was running from a fuming brother-in-law, or a forlorn fiancée, or a cheated business partner somewhere back in Argentina, or Scotland, or South Africa. But what did that matter? In San Fransisco, anyone could leave a disappointing past behind and get rich.

  There were, by then, more than a hundred bakeries in town, but after two decades of sourdough, the city was ravenous for soft white bread, elaborate cakes, and fancy pastries. With his pay from the Hosea Higgins, Henry Marcus bought a used oven, jammed it into a tiny shack, and sent the kids out with a pushcart to sell pastries. Sophie was mortified and fretted about the children’s safety, but nobody came to grief and cash began to accumulate. After six months, he was able to rent a storefront. Sales doubled.

  Half a year later, he took a mortgage on a corner lot and built a fine two-story building, just as he had planned. Like Mr. and Mrs. Marcus themselves, the apartment above the bakery steadily gained bourgeois weight, its rooms filling with heavy furniture, the upholstery well-stuffed, the wood deeply carved. To Henry’s immense satisfaction, Sophie’s attitude toward their newest home softened along with her widening hips. She loved shopping and not for nothing was San Francisco called the Emporium of the Pacific! Henry took pleasure in his wife’s pleasure, never complaining about the expense. Hattie didn’t care about clothes, but Sadie! She grew more beautiful by the year, and it was a joy to see what a princess she was becoming. What did it matter if all those pretty shoes and ribbon-trimmed skirts were ruined by San Francisco’s mud? The girls were growing. Sophie got plumper every year. They always needed new.

  For Henry himself, success meant buying great stacks of books and magazines and newspapers, though he often fell asleep before reading very long. He had to be up well before dawn to make sure that Nathan had the ovens going because . . . Well, admittedly: Nathan was a disappointment. He didn’t like working at the bakery but couldn’t seem to hold a job anywhere else. He’d come home complaining that he’d been cheated or ill-treated by his boss. After a few weeks, he’d quit in a huff and then mope around the apartment until his mother’s nagging became more tedious than looking for a job.

  Even so, Henry didn’t worry. He was making enough to support them all and even sent money to relatives in Posen—until everything went bust in the Panic of 1873.

  “GOOD TIMES NEVER LAST, but hard times always end.” That was Henry’s motto in the early days of the depression. The Marcus bakery remained solvent longer than many more impressive businesses, for there are times when man does live by bread alone. There’s always a market for a baker’s basics, even if his customers wait until the end of the day to save pennies on stale loaves.

  “We gonna be all right?” Sophie asked whenever she heard of another local business going under.

  “Sure! Everything gonna be fine!” Henry would say, and then he’d send her and Sadie out shopping, so they wouldn’t worry.

  By the end of 1875, Henry had laid off all the help. Alone in the shop, he worked the ovens, the counter, the till, the supply room. Too tired to collect due bills, he got into trouble when he failed to pay his own.

  Only dour and wary young Hattie saw growing exhaustion beneath her father’s resolute cheer. One morning, she got out of bed when her father did—before daybreak—and went downstairs with him.

  “What about school?” he asked.

  “I can read and write,” she said, tying on an apron that went around her twice. “I can add and subtract. What else do I need?”

  Before long, he stopped thinking of her as a child. Even when Hattie was small, she had seemed older than Sadie. Now, plain-faced and flat-chested at thirteen, Hattie was everything her beautiful sister didn’t need to be: realistic, practical, good with numbers. Give that girl a ledger and she would follow a dime to hell.

  When the bakery ran out of flour one morning, Hattie set herself to cleaning up the books. She was determined to figure out how much they owed the mill and why they’d gotten behind on paying for this essential.

  “Is this everything?” she asked, waving at the papers stacked in neat, grim piles on the desk. “No other bills? No money hidden somewhere?”

  “That’s all of it,” her father said.

  She stared.

  “I swear!” he cried. “That’s everything!”

  “Well, we aren’t bankrupt yet but we’ll be lucky to make the mortgage payment this month, Papa.”

 
“Hattie, please! Don’t tell your mother. She don’t gotta know. There’s a man—he gonna buy the bakery. He gonna let me rent the apartment. Our name stays on the building. He gonna give me a salary.”

  “Don’t sell,” she said. “Not yet, anyway. I wish I’d known sooner, but now that I do . . .” She looked him in the eye. “You can’t spend anything without my permission, Papa. You can’t say yes just because Sadie pouts. And Nathan has to find work. He brings in money or he moves out.”

  “He has a job! He works here.”

  “Now and then,” she admitted dryly. “Papa, he’s lazy and unreliable. He eats like a horse and drinks like a fish. Would you hire him if he weren’t your son?” His hesitation was her answer, and she nodded tightly. “You want to fire him or shall I?”

  “All right!” Henry cried. “Do what you gotta do. Just—please!—don’t tell your mother.”

  NATHAN WAS GIVEN TWO DAYS before he’d be kicked out of the house. When he protested, Hattie told him, “You pay room and board or you move out. And if you go crying to Mutti, I’ll tell her about that shiksa you’re seeing.” Just to be sure Nate wasn’t holding out on the family, Hattie followed him to whatever odd jobs he got after that. “I will pick up his wages,” she informed the fools who were willing to hire her brother, and there was something so implacable about that skinny, hard-eyed girl that his bosses handed over the cash.

  Sadie moaned and complained about getting up early to help with the baking before school, but Hattie was not above using guilt as a bludgeon. “The Crash hurt the business. Papa can’t afford to pay assistants. You want him to die of apoplexy, he’s working so hard?”

  Give Sadie her due. She’d always been good in the kitchen and had a real flair for the fancier baking. No one who shopped at the Marcus bakery was giving lavish receptions anymore, but a plate of pretty petits fours and iced bonbons could make an afternoon tea more special. Sadie loved decorating the little cakes, but she really shone behind the counter after school, flirting shamelessly with the customers, bringing in mobs of moonstruck admirers. “I was thinking of you when I made these crullers,” she’d whisper to a goggle-eyed young man, who’d buy a dozen. Dark eyes flashing, she’d lean over the counter and offer a tiny sample of a torte she’d made. “Here,” she’d say. “Try this and tell me what you think.” The whole torte would sell.

  “That’s my Sadie,” Henry would say. “She got them eating out of her hand!”

  “Idiots,” Hattie would mutter, but even she liked what Sadie did for the bottom line.

  SLOWLY, IN FITS AND STARTS, the economy improved. By 1877, Hattie’s ferocious economizing and strict management had placed the business on a solid cash basis. The threat of bankruptcy receded.

  If Mrs. Henry Marcus had been kept strictly ignorant of how and why this had been achieved, she was correct in surmising that Henry’s mood and outlook had improved. Which is why she thought it was perfectly reasonable to make a completely ridiculous suggestion on a chilly night in 1878, when she and her husband were getting ready for bed.

  “We should buy the girls a piano.”

  One shoe on, one shoe off, Henry stared. Sophie was as round and sleek as a sea lion under the covers, but her voice was firm with the sort of resolution that every married man recognizes and dreads.

  “If Sadie gonna get a husband, she gotta get some accomplishments, Henry.”

  San Francisco’s men still outnumbered its women a hundred to one. In Henry’s observation, all a female needed to get a husband were two of those and one of the other. Four limbs? Desirable, maybe. Not required.

  Stalling, he toed off the second shoe and bent over to pull off his stockings.

  “I had a piano,” Sophie reminded him coyly, “and such a husband I got!”

  Wasn’t music got you a husband, Henry thought, but he’d have yanked his own tongue out with pliers before he said as much.

  “Both girls should take lessons,” Sophie persisted. “Hattie, she gotta get some graces or she never gonna get married. You treat her like a son, Henry.”

  He slid into bed beside her and made a grave tactical error. “And how you think we gonna get a piano up them stairs?”

  Sophie had clearly thought this through. Sitting up, she warmed to her topic, which involved blocks and tackles and windows, and what several ladies at the synagogue had done for their daughters in similar circumstances.

  “I’m not listening!” Henry warned, but the very fact that she’d raised this bizarre notion was oddly comforting, so he let her rattle on, thinking all the while, She don’t know. Thanks, Gott! Hattie didn’t tell her!

  “Sophie,” he said finally, turning down the light and speaking the truth, “the last thing in the world this family needs is a piano.”

  “DORA’S MOTHER INVITED ME and Hattie to a concert!” Sadie announced at dinner a few nights later. Dora Hirsch was Sadie’s best friend at school.

  “A piano concert?” Sophie asked innocently. As if she hadn’t already talked to Mrs. Hirsch about this. “And who is playing?”

  Sadie looked blank. “She told me but . . . I don’t remember. Some lady.”

  “Never mind who’s playing,” Hattie said. “Who’s paying?”

  “We’re to be Mrs. Hirsch’s guests,” Sadie said primly. She made a face at Hattie. “‘Guest’ means she pays, we don’t, idiot.”

  “Sadie!” their mother said sharply. “Don’t call names.”

  “Can’t beat the price,” their father admitted. “All right. Why not?”

  “I’ll tell you why not,” Hattie said. “Mrs. Hirsch is a piano teacher, and there’s no such thing as a free sample. She’s fishing for students.”

  “So, good!” Sophie said, passing kugel to her husband. “We got two students for her. I told you, Henry. The girls need to play piano so they can get husbands.”

  “I’m not getting married,” Sadie declared, just to stir things up. “I’m going to be an emancipated woman. I’m going to ride a bicycle. And vote.”

  “And how are you going to make a living?” Hattie inquired. “You think Papa is going to support you while you’re out voting and being emancipated?”

  “It would be a mitzvah for the girls to take lessons,” Sophie pointed out. “Evelyn Hirsch is a widow. She needs the money.” She waited a moment before adding piously, “Maimonides says the highest form of charity is to help that someone should make a honest, good living.”

  Henry glanced at Hattie.

  She looked at him narrow-eyed, then shrugged. “Fine,” she said. It’s on your head, she meant.

  “They can go to the concert,” Henry told his wife, “but that’s all.”

  SO SADIE AND HATTIE MARCUS accompanied Mrs. Hirsch and Dora to some lady’s piano recital a few nights later. And to her mother’s delight, Sadie came home simply dying to take piano lessons.

  Everything about the recital had thrilled her. That dress! Ivory satin, gleaming in the limelight. The lady’s hair! Sweeping smoothly upward, adorned with tiny flowers and pearls. Her creamy shoulders. Those jeweled bracelets flashing as her hands moved. The rapt attention of the audience, all eyes on the performer. The waves of applause! With the sudden, certain emotion of adolescence, Josephine Sarah Marcus became unalterably determined to tour the world as a concert pianist. New York, Paris, London—they were out there, waiting for her!

  All she needed was a piano.

  Everything might have turned out differently if Henry Marcus had simply told her, “We can’t afford it,” but he had never been able to say no to Sadie. What he said instead was “I don’t got time to shop for a piano.”

  Big mistake.

  For the next week, whenever he sat down, Sadie pounced, and it was “Can we look for a piano this afternoon, Papa?” He came up with excuses. He was making inquiries, he told her. A customer thought she might be willing to sell him her piano. Two days later: “The lady changed her mind.” That kind of thing.

  But Sadie wouldn’t let it go. Her whole future
depended on this. Her father was cruel and neglectful. He obviously hated her. Well, she hated him. If she could not have a piano, she did not want to live.

  Every supper ended with hysterical tears, dire threats, slammed doors. Hattie stood it as long as she could before marching Sadie into the back room of the bakery and showing her the books. “We’re barely making a living,” she said, and she had the figures to prove it. “Papa’s killing himself, and you are a selfish pig. There isn’t going to be a piano. So quit asking.”

  Sadie sulked for a few days before shifting the terms of the discussion. “We don’t need to buy a piano,” she told Hattie. “Mrs. Hirsch says I can practice at her house. Can we afford just the lessons, Hattie? Please?”

  Hattie had not been thrilled by the concert. She was routinely up at four in the morning to work at the store and had fallen asleep halfway through the recital, bored senseless by a Mozart piece that sounded like an endless repetition of Deedle deedle deedle deedle. On the other hand, being asked—please—for permission to do something . . . Well, now. That was thrilling. That was not something Hattie wanted to let go too quickly.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  For the next three weeks, Hattie’s citadel was stormed. In the end, she agreed to pay Mrs. Hirsch twenty-five cents a week to cover Sadie’s lessons but only because she expected that the expense would be short-term. “She’ll give up inside a month,” Hattie predicted, but to everyone’s frank surprise, Sadie kept going to Mrs. Hirsch’s week after week, month after month.

  When questioned, she rarely remembered what she was working on, but honestly, what was there to remember? Five-finger exercises. Scales, up and down, up and down, with that awful metronome clack-clack-clacking away. On the other hand, she could play simple melodies by ear after she got Mrs. Hirsch to run through them first, “So I’ll know how they should sound when they’re played beautifully.”

  Of course, Evelyn Hirsch knew that old trick. Perhaps one student in a hundred was alive to the instrument—pulled forward by the piano itself, not shoved at it from behind. Sadie Marcus had a good ear, but she was the kind who’d never learn to read music well. Eventually her progress would stumble and come to a halt. Until that day arrived, however, Mrs. Hirsch saw no reason to inform Mr. Marcus that his daughter was wasting his money. Evelyn Hirsch was, after all, the sole support of her family, and two bits was two bits.