So as Essie had no reason to stay, no place else to go, and owed the landlord for a week, she jumped the rent and followed Martha to Swandyke, setting herself up at the Pines and making enough to pay for Sophie’s keep. “Money I pay. It’s only right,” she told Martha. The woman had grown bored after a while, with only Sophie to tend, and so she had opened a restaurant, the Dinner Bell. Sophie was big enough to help now, to put out the forks and spoons and dry the dishes. Lately, however, Martha had gotten tired of running a restaurant and fretted about staying in Swandyke. Essie knew it wouldn’t be long before Martha herself left. Then Essie and Sophie would have to move to Denver.
On Sundays, when both the hookhouse and the restaurant were closed, Essie visited her daughter, who’d been told that Essie was a friend of her mother. When it was cold, the three met in the shuttered restaurant, but when the weather was nice, they picnicked in a remote spot in the mountains. Those were Essie’s happiest times, when Sophie toddled among the wildflowers, picking off the blooms and dropping them into Essie’s lap. Essie gave cunning little dresses to her daughter, made on her own fingers, and more than one mother had wondered how Martha’s girl could be so finely dressed. In fact, the wife of the Fourth of July superintendent had asked the name of Sophie’s dressmaker.
“I wouldn’t know, lady,” Martha had replied. “Sophie’s mama sends her clothes to me by postal.” When Martha told Essie the story, the two had laughed at the stuck-up woman’s interest.
“Why’n’t you tell her to give a look at the Pines? Why’n’t you?” Essie asked, and they laughed again.
At the window, Essie stared through the willows, which were just red sticks bare of leaves, looking down the trail the children took to school. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of Sophie, who was in first grade, as the little girl trudged along with her speller. Essie knew it was a speller, because she gave the words to Sophie when they met—cat, hat, rat. The girl almost always got them right, because she was bright. But then, her father had been bright—not that it had taken much intelligence to lure Essie away from the life on Orchard Street.
There were no children on the trail now. The school day was only halfway over. Essie knew that because the noon whistle had awakened her.
She yawned and scratched her stomach, then pulled her hand back, because she was sore from the beating she’d taken the night before. For no reason, that man had punched her in the stomach. She’d screamed, and he’d hit her a second time, and then pulled back his arm to fist her again, but the scream had brought Miss Fanny and the other girls. They hustled him out of the hookhouse and told him never to come back. Essie ruminated over the fact that none of the johns had come to her rescue, only the women, but she wasn’t surprised. She didn’t expect much from men.
The beating had come as a shock, however, because it was rare. Essie felt safe in the whorehouse, safer than she’d been in the days she’d worked over the sewing machine in the dress factory. The man who owned the place would lean against the girls as they worked, putting his hands on their breasts, and his sons would lie in wait for the women when they went to the bathroom. More than one girl had wet herself as she sat at her machine, waiting for the men to get bored with staring at the employees and go back to their offices. Essie knew of one seamstress who gave in, and months later, a different girl was sitting at her sewing machine. It was told around the factory that the first one had fallen into the river and drowned.
The son with the hair in his nose and ears had come after Essie, all honey-mouthed, with a pomp of manner. She tried to ignore him, but he wouldn’t leave her alone. So when he slipped his fingers into her shirtwaist and tugged at her breast, she grabbed his hand, white and slippery as lard, told him to go shave the hair in his nose, and laughed at him, laughed so hard and so loud that the other girls looked up from their machines. When they saw the man, his face flushed and perspiring, trying to disentangle his hand from Essie’s blouse, they laughed, too.
“Your ears you should shave, too,” another girl called, and the man glanced around to see who had spoken, but all the seamstresses were bent over their machines.
Of course, others had been let go for less, and there were bets about how long Essie would keep her job, but it didn’t matter, because she left of her own volition not long afterward.
Essie massaged her neck, which was sore, too. She wondered what had gotten into the man who’d hit her, because most of the johns were polite. They were miners and laborers from the gold dredge, docile, well-mannered unless they were liquored up. They came for the intended purpose, but some just wanted to talk, to be with a woman for a time, pretend she was a sweetheart. They were lonely, lonelier even than the hookers. Essie talked to them about their growing-up times, their dreams, their miseries. Hooking wasn’t a bad life. In fact, it was a pretty good life. And she had a room all to herself! There’d been a time, back when she slept with eight people in a three-room tenement, that she’d never even dreamed of such a luxury.
Of course, Essie had her regulars, and they brought her presents—cigarettes and chewing gum, bracelets and silk stockings. And they were so respectful—well, most of them anyway. She liked that about the clientele at the Pines. They made you feel you were doing them a favor. And in return, Essie made them feel they were her special customers. “This hour, I have been in heaven,” she would tell them.
Dropping the curtain, Essie turned and let the quilt slip onto the floor, and then she made up the bed. The sheets were dingy, but they were almost clean. Miss Fanny didn’t like to change them more than once a week unless it was absolutely necessary. Essie folded the quilt and set it at the end of the bed. It wouldn’t do to have some impatient man stomp it in his hurry. She opened the window a little to let out the stale air, then shined up the room, dusted the chipped enamel bed, the dresser. She straightened the calendar and the picture of a bowl of fruit, and set the washbasin and pitcher and dirty towel beside the door. Just the week before, she’d taken down the ruffles that she had pinned over the door and on the cord of the single lightbulb that hung in the center of the room, washed and ironed them, and now the ruffles hung as stiff as petticoats. She wasn’t slovenly like some of the other girls. Oh no. Most men didn’t notice, but some did, and they preferred Essie for that. In fact, most men preferred her. She was the most popular girl at the Pines. “Why, you could work in any whorehouse in Colorado,” a john told her by way of compliment. And Essie had taken it for one.
Of course, the remark was no surprise to Essie, who had always appealed to men. She was something of a beauty, with her long neck and long fingers, and exotic-looking, a little like Theda Bara, who Essie thought was also Jewish. But it wasn’t just Essie’s looks. Nor was it her figure, which was still young and ripe, although she was closer to thirty than she was to twenty. No, it was the air of happiness that surrounded her. Essie’s smile could make the sun shine, and when she laughed, she made a sound like tinkling bells. Her happiness felt like good fortune, and it made a man glad to be with her. Why, if you hadn’t known better—and none of the men had—you’d have thought she’d been raised up without a care in the world. “Essie, I bet you never knowed a bad day in your life, not even one,” a john had told her.
“Why, aren’t you just right! Aren’t you!”
But he was wrong. I should live so lucky, Essie thought.
The first memory Esther Schnable had was of her mother, Emma, lying on the table moaning. The neighbor women were crowded into the kitchen, watchful, nervous, critical, as the midwife fussed and coaxed the woman. Esther’s mother wouldn’t have a doctor. It wasn’t proper for a man to see her like that, and besides, a doctor charged ten dollars. If she was lucky, the midwife would ask only two dollars, maybe one, and she’d clean up the baby and check in later to see how the mother was doing. All the women felt that way.
Emma sucked in her breath and twisted her face in pain, raising her back a little, then relaxing as the spasm passed, and the women clucked and smiled and recalled
their own labors.
“With Etta, a whole day it took. Pains like you never got,” a woman bragged, pulling her old crocheted shawl around her, although it was hot in the kitchen.
“Such luck you have. My Isaac weighed twelve pounds, maybe thirteen. Tore up like a newspaper, that’s me,” a second woman said.
The others shushed them, but it did not matter, because the woman on the table cried out and didn’t hear them.
Outside, Esther’s father sat on the stoop with a handful of men, smoking, coughing, because Abraham Schnable, working in the dank basement of a factory, had begun to develop small lesions on his lungs, the mark of what was called the “tailor’s disease.” Over the calls of vegetable vendors and pushcart hawkers, the shrill voices of women bargaining over the price of fish and the sellers pleading poverty, he heard his wife’s last scream and reacted with a combination of pride and pity—pride because of Emma’s fecundity, which was really a sign of his own maleness, and pity because he loved her and was sorry for the pain he’d caused.
“Maybe you get a boy this time, eh, Abe?” One of the men poked Esther’s father in the side with his elbow.
“One that’s goinna live,” someone added. Of the six children Emma had already borne—all girls—only Esther and her sister Rachel, nearly three years older, were alive.
Now the two little girls sat forgotten in a corner of the front room. Rachel shivered and cried softly, and it was the younger girl who was the strength for both of them. “What if something happens to Mama?” Rachel whispered.
“It won’t,” Esther replied. She didn’t know of the two babies before her who were born dead or recall the two others born after who’d lived such a short time, didn’t understand death the way Rachel did. Besides, even at that age, Esther was an optimist, with a sunny disposition that charmed both family and neighbors. She lowered her voice, as if Rachel didn’t know what was happening, and confided, “Mama’s going to bring us a baby. It’s going to be a brother.”
“Oh, so now you’re a prophet,” Rachel said.
But Esther was right. More screams, more moans, and they heard the midwife announce, “A boy, Mrs. Schnable! Such a boy!” And the neighbor women cooed and laughed in their relief, and one went downstairs to tell Abe.
The father burst through the door of the dingy apartment and looked at the boy, examined the raw little thing with his eyes pinched shut and his hands and feet stretching in all directions and said, “My Jakob. My boy.” Then he went to his wife and patted her hand and told her she’d given him a son, as if she hadn’t known. He called the two little girls then and said, “Your brother. Come. Him you greet.”
Esther rushed to look at the little bundle, but Rachel held back and muttered, “A boy. Now he won’t want us. We aren’t his kindela no more.”
In 1906, at age thirteen, Esther got a job in the dress factory. Rachel had gone to work at the same age, when the father announced, “Learning for a girl, who cares? We got to buy glasses for Jakob, got to buy him clothes so the kids don’t make fun of him.”
“Nobody makes fun of him, Papa,” Rachel said.
“Mind your business,” the father replied, and coughed. The consumption had taken hold now.
“Money we need,” Emma, her mother, confided, and Rachel had nodded, resigned, for, like others in the neighborhood, the Schnables scrambled to make a living. Abe could work only a little now, and he spent most of his time in a chair in the front room or, in nice weather, sitting on the stoop, gossiping and reading the newspaper. Emma did custom sewing at home, and without Rachel’s income, she could not have made the weekly payments on the precious sewing machine. Emma also kept the apartment clean and did the laundry and cooking for three boarders. She, Abe, and Jakob slept in the bedroom, the girls in the kitchen, the boarders in the front room.
So Rachel went off to the factory, and in a few years, Esther followed. Esther didn’t mind quitting school as much as Rachel had, because this younger sister was not much for books and learning. She liked the idea of earning money and didn’t brood over her life the way Rachel did. Esther believed there were good things in store for her, although she couldn’t have said why. If she’d thought about it, she would have understood that a Jewish girl born to immigrant parents on the Lower East Side of New York City didn’t have many opportunities. But part of Esther’s optimism was that she was caught up more in dreams than in reality.
Once, she and Rachel walked uptown, walked up Fifth Avenue all the way to Central Park. It was the first time either of them had left the neighborhood, and they were awestruck at the sights. They went into a department store and watched as shoppers stepped onto a staircase that actually moved, carrying them to the floor above. They stared for a long time before Esther dared Rachel to ride it.
“We go up. How do we go down?”
“There’s got to be a down way. And if there isn’t”—she shrugged—“we’ll stay in the store forever. Us. That’s something, eh?”
So they stepped gingerly onto the escalator, which swept them to the second floor, and there they found a second escalator and went on up to another floor. But a man caught them, took in their shabby clothes, asked what they were doing in the place, and told them to go back where they’d come from. Rachel was mortified, but Esther only vowed to make herself a fine dress, a black skirt with a white waist, and return.
Farther up Fifth Avenue, they stopped to gawk at a stone mansion where a family was gathered around a great table in the dining room, sitting under a chandelier that glittered like a starry night. “We should only live so good!” Esther exclaimed.
“Oh, and why should we? We’re poor Jews from Orchard Street. Us, we’ll never be anything,” her sister replied.
Rachel went home morose, bitter about their state, but Esther viewed poverty only as a temporary condition. She saw no reason why she, too, shouldn’t live in a stone house with electricity and servants. She did not know how she would manage these things, only trusted that they would happen.
At work, she told the other girls about the houses and carriages she had seen on Fifth Avenue and the people, dressed in rich silks and heavy velvets and furs, even the children. “A fur coat she had, all white like snow falling, and her not any older than Jakob,” she said, and the others shook their heads in amazement. “Me, I’m going to have a white fur coat, and it’s not going to be rabbit, either. And a chandelier like stars. I’ll live in a house with a chandelier.”
The others laughed at such a preposterous idea, and Rachel, listening, turned red with shame, for what hope did Esther have of leaving Orchard Street, or Lewis, or Hester? “You make a fool of us all,” she said. But then, thinking it over, Rachel told Esther that maybe she was on to something. “If we ever get out of here, it’ll be you. Papa isn’t going to amount to anything, and Jakob, what does he care about us? He can be a doctor, and you and me he’d let live in the tenement.” And so the older sister pinned her hopes on the younger one. The only way out of the Lower East Side that she could think of was for a girl to marry well, Rachel told her sister, and why shouldn’t Esther make a good match? After all, she was a beauty, with her dark hair and smoldering eyes, long neck and long fingers.
Rachel herself wasn’t likely to marry well. She was short and broad, with a face as plain as a loaf of bread, and indeed, her parents had already picked out her husband. This happened when Rachel was nineteen, and she was excited. She hadn’t met the man yet, although she’d seen him, a squat fellow with close-set eyes and hair covering the backs of his hands. Benjamin was a butcher, the son of a butcher, a good catch. “You’ll never go hungry,” the marriage broker said, and the parents laughed, but nonetheless, they found that a compelling argument. Of course, Rachel had no feelings for the man yet, but what girl did when she married? Love came later, after the wedding, after the children. That was the way it was. Marrying for love was a sure sign of trouble ahead.
Esther thought Rachel’s intended was nice enough but dull, but then, so
was her sister, which made them a good match. Benjamin visited Rachel, although the two were never left alone, because the girls were kept strict. The father and mother sat in the room with the young couple, Abe reading the newspaper and Emma sewing, Rachel shy, and the butcher tongue-tied and embarrassed.
“Eh, you see here the newspaper tells us they found the man what robbed the shoe store over on Columbia Street?” Abe remarked. “What you think of that?”
Benjamin only flushed and made darting gestures with his arms, and Rachel came to his rescue. “God should strike him dead for stealing from a poor man,” she said, and Benjamin nodded emphatically.
The three women made Rachel’s wedding dress from white silk, with a bit of lace around the neck. Emma, who collected her daughters’ unopened pay envelopes every week, handing over only a dollar to each for expenses, was extravagant, giving Rachel enough to buy a pearl necklace, and for Esther, pearl earrings. “Where do we buy such fine pearls?” Rachel asked. She had never purchased a piece of jewelry, never owned so much as a paste brooch, in fact.
“Not from a pushcart,” Esther replied. “We go to a jewelry store. They got different, better.” And so the two girls, neither knowing a pearl from a quartz pebble, went into a store, where they bargained the clerk down from ten dollars to eight for the necklace, and he threw in the earrings. “A bargain. Do I know a pearl when I see it?” Esther asked, but in fact, they could have bought the pearls from a pushcart for half that, and as for being real pearls, it was best that Esther really didn’t know a pearl when she saw it.
The wedding was held in the tenement, which was filled with relatives and neighbors, and after the ceremony, the guests ate cake and drank wine while a photographer took a picture of the newlyweds, standing stiff and solemn, a little apart from each other. Rachel looked scared, and indeed she was, for neither girl knew what would happen to the bride on her wedding night. Still, Rachel was happy, because she was anxious to leave the crowded tenement for her own home. And it was the first time since Jakob was born that Rachel was the center of attention. But she would miss Esther, her sister knew as she passed the cake, pressing it on the guests, for it would be unthinkable that any would be left. As Esther neared Rachel, her sister took her hand and whispered, “Tonight…” but she could not say more.
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