Sometimes she thought her clever husband was maybe just a little bit of a dumbhead.
There were more running boards over the big puddle in front of their house. She went across very slowly so she didn’t step in, stopped halfway over when she saw her vati standing outside the front door, waiting for her. She knew what it was as soon as she saw him.
He held the letter out to her in his broad brown hands. “It’s for you,” he said. “It’s from Micha.”
She sat down at the table. News like this you couldn’t read standing up. There were three pages in Micha’s careful hand on onionskin paper. She read it through quickly, a word here, a word there, looking for clues.
“What does he say?” her mutti almost shouted.
“Come on, girl,” Vati said.
She read it out loud to them. Micha had a job now, he was manager of a big hotel in New York, America. He was going to be very rich very soon. He said other things that could not be true, about how many motor cars there were, and buildings taller than Toompea Castle, trains that ran in the air.
“He wants me to come to New York,” she finished. “He has sent me a shifcant.” She picked up the envelope and shook it, and the ticket dropped onto the table, and they all stared at it, like it was alive and poisonous.
“When?” her mutti said.
She picked up the ticket and stared at it. “Next week,” she said.
Her mutti sat down hard on a chair and started to wail. Etta gripped Sura’s arm like she was holding on for her life. Her vati went to the synagogue to pray. Even little Bessie started to cry. One by one her neighbors came by to pay respects. They talked to her mother, to Etta and her sisters, but her they didn’t talk to. She was a ghost. No one who went to America ever came back.
While everyone howled and prayed, she leaned over and stroked the baby’s tiny head with its down of black hair. “I’ll miss you, bubeleh,” she whispered. She had helped her into the world, kept her safe on her first terrible night on earth, and now she would never even see her grow up. Somehow that hurt her more than anything else.
But there it was, nothing more to be done.
Stop it, Sura, she told herself. Micha needs you in Golden Medina. Got to go help him shovel gold off the street.
She listened to her mutti and Etta crying, but she didn’t have any tears left for herself. You’re a woman, Sura, got to go and do whatever a man tells you that you got to do. That is just the way it is.
5
The Grand Central Hotel, Park Avenue, New York
Micha had never seen such a place; it wasn’t a hotel, it was a palace. A wonder in a city of wonders. Every day he spent stumbling around in a dream.
There was no gold lying around in the street, like some people had said, but then he had never believed those stories anyway. But how could he explain in his letters this place where he worked? Perhaps only the czar himself would not be amazed.
The hotel was granite and cast iron and red brick, tall as the tower of Saint Nicholas’s Church in Tallinn, with great columns either side of the entrance. But it was what was inside that made a person catch their breath: marble on the floors, and not just one color—it was red and pure white, with blue-and-gray veins, like nothing he had ever seen, ever imagined. There was a stairway of mottled-gray marble and chandeliers of polished brass studded with crystals that glittered as if they were made of diamonds. And they were lit with electricity, not candles. And no one here even stared at them as he did, as if it wasn’t the most extraordinary thing they had ever seen. There were gilt-framed mirrors and carmine plush chairs and even a stone fireplace the size of a kitchen, where the guests could warm themselves, the snow melting off their boots onto the slate.
He glimpsed these glories only through cracked doorways, of course. His uncle Max told him that a janitor’s job was to keep things spotless and be invisible. “They want to see everything clean,” he had said to him his first day. “They don’t want from seeing you clean them.”
For now, the front of house was an impossible glory, but one day perhaps, Uncle Max said, when there was an opening, he would get him a job as a bellboy or perhaps waiting tables in the restaurant. But first, he had to learn him English. “Work hard at night school. Then we’ll see.”
Micha also saw parts of the marvel that the guests didn’t see: the ladies’ entrance, as Uncle Max called it, on Fortieth Street, where certain ladies came and went; and, of course, the alley at the back, where the food carter and the laundry van made deliveries, and where the rubbish stank in the bins just like it did for poor people.
For now, that was his domain, the dirt. Maybe he was a somebody back home, but in this New York, his job was to mop floors, clean spills, take out the trash.
The only people he ever talked to were the Polish laundry driver or the kitchen hand from Minsk. So that one day when he saw a girl in a blue velvet coat and button-up boots, smoking a cigarette, leaning against the wall among the trash cans, he supposed she had come out the ladies’ entrance. Well, that was none of his business. He lowered his head and got on with emptying the trash.
She said something to him, and so he said to her, “Sorry, I don’t have English,” like he said to everyone, thinking she would go away, but instead she held up her cigarette and signed to him that she needed matches.
Micha shrugged and shook his head.
“Oh, I get it. You don’t speak English, right?”
Micha felt his cheeks flush hot. He wasn’t supposed to talk to the hotel guests, especially female ones.
“What are you? Russian? German? Oh God, why am I even asking you that? You don’t speak English, so you don’t know what you are.”
He could feel her watching him. American women scared him, a little. They were not like the girls in Russia. They smoked cigarettes, and they looked right at you instead of down at the floor, like a good girl should.
“I guess I shouldn’t be down here, right? You probably think I’m a working girl. It’s all right, I won’t bite.”
Micha remembered her now. He had seen her the day before, in the corridor on the top floor. She had checked in to the hotel with a man in a fancy fur coat, and they had so much luggage they needed two bellboys to fetch it all. She had been carrying a baby in a wicker bassinet.
“He doesn’t like me smoking, so I come down here,” she said, and tossed the unlit cigarette in the alley. He watched it skitter behind one of the cans. “Oh sorry, I guess I just made you more work.”
She turned and gave him a look. He looked down at his boots.
“Jesus, men. They all want to tell you how to live, what to do. I thought this one was different. But men aren’t different, are they? They’re all the fucking same. I can say fuck, right? I mean, you don’t know what fuck means, so you won’t get offended.”
Something scurried behind one of the trash cans. A rat, he supposed. He dared a glance back at the woman. She was very pretty and very young, not much older than his Sura, with a bruised plum of a mouth and eyes it hurt to look at. She looked as if she was halfway between laughing and crying and couldn’t decide which.
“I better get back to the kid,” she said. She lowered her voice to a mock whisper. “He thinks I’m not a very good mother.” She startled him by reaching out a hand and giving his cheek a playful squeeze. “Don’t look so sad. America’s not such a bad place when you get used to it. Watch out for the girls, though, they’re all crazy. And thanks for listening. What’s your name, anyway?”
He stared at her.
She pointed at herself. “Clare. Clare.”
“Micha,” he mumbled.
“Okay. Well, have a nice day, Mickey. Don’t do anything I’d do.” And then she was gone.
Haapvinni
Everyone in the shtetl came out to say good-bye. There was a procession right along the street, all come to see off the brave girl who had saved her sister and her baby and was now going to a better life in Golden Medina. For this one day, she was as famous as the cz
ar.
With Ivor gone, her vati had to borrow a neighbor’s horse and wagon for the ride into the city. He stopped there on the road at the edge of the shtetl, so much crying and kissing like she couldn’t believe, Sura hugged good-bye to neighbors she had said barely a word to all her seventeen years. Even Mr. and Mrs. Gutnik waved their handkerchiefs and scarves and shouted mazel tov. Her sisters and her mutti cried and cried and wouldn’t let her go, neighbors had to tear their fingers off her coat. Etta fainted in the mud, and her husband had to carry her home.
Then it was over, and her vati grabbed her arm and dragged her up onto the running board, and they set off for the long bumpy ride into Tallinn. In the distance she could see the black steeple of Saint Nicholas’s church and the white smoke pouring from the new power plant. Her vati sat there beside her, stone-faced. Not a word.
She realized that Yaakov, love of her life, had not even looked at her, had eyes only for Etta. That is the way it should be, she thought.
That is the way it always was.
The ferry was waiting down by the dock, the same ship that Micha had sailed away in. There was a small knot of other families already there, saying their good-byes too. Sura stood there with her little bundles, the potato latkes her mother had made her for the journey, a feather mattress bundled up and tied with stout rope, a little brass samovar.
“We will say the Tefilat Haderech,” her father said, and he got down on his knees there in the wet mud, and they said the wayfarer’s prayer together, side by side.
She kissed his hands. “Good-bye, Vati,” she said. “Be good to Mutti.”
He had always looked larger than life to her, but suddenly he looked so small, standing there in his black brimmed hat and threadbare coat. She waited for some other word from him, and when there was none, she turned and made her way toward the gangway.
“Sura,” he said.
She turned expectantly.
“Send money when you can.”
“Yes, Vati,” she said, and that was the last she ever saw of him.
6
The Grand Central Hotel
Uncle Max said there was a problem with a window up on the ninth floor, right at the top of the hotel. The service elevator was broken again, and they didn’t let him use the one for the guests, so he had to walk all the way up there, the third time that day. What did he know from fixing windows? Still, he would have to learn if he wanted the job. Better get this done, or he would be late for night school again.
He kept his head down. How many times did his uncle Max tell him: “You stay away from the guests. If you see them, you don’t talk to them. If they talk to you, be polite, keep your eyes on the ground. Like they are a Cossack, or one of the czar’s soldiers.”
He found the room, 908, got out his skeleton keys, but the door to the room was ajar, and he could hear a baby crying inside. It was her room, he realized. He knocked, and the door swung open wider.
Such a beautiful room it was: the carved oak chairs upholstered in stamped leather, beautiful carpets, the velvet hangings on the walls were the color of burnished gold. There was a marble mantel, even frescoes on the walls, like in a palace.
The door to the bedroom was wide open, and she was sitting on the end of the bed, all hunched over and smoking a cigarette. There were tears running down her cheeks onto her dress, but she wasn’t paying them any mind, and not to the baby either, who was crying and kicking her little legs in the bassinet in the corner.
She looked up and saw him, and he took a hurried step back. She was tearstained and bright eyed, such a look on her face, it scared him.
“Mickey,” she said.
He pointed to the window, pantomimed trying to open it. She nodded, as if she understood.
“Oh, the window. That’s why you’re here. I thought you must have heard the poor little Yankee trollop crying into her baby’s crib.”
He looked past her at the infant. Not right to let a baby cry like that, he thought. She followed his gaze and turned around. “The cause of all my problems,” she said, and went over and scooped up the child. Straightaway the sobbing stopped. She patted the infant’s bottom and held her to her cheek. “I know what you’re thinking. But I do love her. I’m all she’s got now.” She gave a bitter laugh. “All she’s got. I guess that’s why she cries all the damned time.”
Micha understood barely a word. Suddenly she crumpled, sat down hard in the middle of the floor, the baby in one hand and her cigarette still poised in the other like she was at a cocktail party. He didn’t know what to do, just stood there. He couldn’t run away, he couldn’t touch her, he couldn’t do anything. She was a woman, she was a guest.
The baby started up her crying again.
“You don’t understand a thing, do you? Not a damned thing. Because if you did, I wouldn’t be telling you.”
She hurled the cigarette across the room, still lit. He scurried across the room to retrieve it before it burned a hole in the carpet.
“He’s left me, Mickey. Just walked out and left. Because men can do that, see? That’s part of the deal.”
Micha stubbed out the cigarette in one of the onyx ashtrays. The tip was smeared with bright-red lipstick.
“I can’t go back to Boston. Can’t go back home neither. I’m a married woman, not Pa’s responsibility anymore. And I can’t stay here after the end of the month, because that’s all we’re paid up to, and I don’t have any money. So here we are, me and baby, all dressed up and no place to go. Who’s going to want me now, Mickey, a rich man’s tart with a kid to support? We’ll be out on skid row.”
Micha backed out of the room. He wished he understood more of what she was trying to tell him, but she was using too many English words and her accent was different from his teacher’s. He knew a tart was some kind of cake. But where was skid row?
She wiped her face with the back of her hand and sniffed. “My God, what am I doing? Sniveling on the floor in front of the help. George would be horrified. ‘Clare dear, what on earth do you think you’re doing?’ I think you’d better go, Mickey.”
Micha shut the door. He hurried away down the corridor. He felt sorry for her, she was so young to be so unhappy. He hoped his uncle Max didn’t find out what had happened. He mustn’t lose his job, with his Sura arriving next week.
He must remember to ask his English teacher where skid row was and what a rich man’s tart tasted like. Oh, and the window, he had forgotten about the window. He would come back tomorrow and try and fix it.
7
Sura woke from a black and bottomless sleep to shouts and screams. She thought the ship must be sinking. She threw herself out of her bunk, turned right around on the spot, trying to remember where she had put her clothes. Everyone was clambering over each other to get to the companionway.
Some of the people were laughing. Why were they laughing if the boat was sinking?
She put her sheepskin coat over her nightdress, let herself be carried by the press of people along the narrow aisle between the rows of bunks, then up the companionway to the third deck. It was still dark, and the bitter cold took her breath away. There was fog all around, and the water was oily and flat. Everyone was standing at the rail, pointing at something in the distance.
Then she saw it too, a speck of light in the distance. As they got closer, she could see it clearer: a woman with a spiky crown, her hand outstretched and holding a torch.
“What is it?” Sura said to the woman beside her.
“It is the Liberty statue,” she said. “It is New York!”
“What is the Liberty statue?”
“It is gate to America,” someone else said. “It says underneath that everyone is welcome.”
“And welcome to have an opinion, also!”
“Even poor people.”
“Even poor people?” Sura said.
“There’s no poor people in America,” a man in a black sheepskin hat said behind her. “Everyone is rich!”
“It is the pla
ce where dreams come true,” a Polish woman said.
As they got closer to the harbor, it was like the whole sky was lit up for miles.
“America,” people said; impossibly bright, impossibly big. It was cold and she did not have on enough clothes, but she stayed up on deck anyway, glad to be away from the fug of people and smells, not wanting to miss anything about Golden Medina.
Already people were streaming back up the companionways with their bundles and bags, eager to get there. There was music playing on the upper decks, the rich people dancing. Soon I will have music to play too, Sura thought. Soon I will dance and drink yellow sparkling wine.
Here I am, at last, in the place where dreams come true.
Micha had not meant to fall asleep. He had finished his work for the day and gone into the little cupboard in the basement, where he kept the mops and buckets and brooms, to change out of his uniform. When he was dressed, he sat down on a wooden stool and closed his eyes for a moment—so good to take the weight off his feet. He had never worked so hard in all his life like he worked in America.
He woke with a start, for a moment he couldn’t remember where he was. What time was it, how long had he been in there? He jumped to his feet, fumbling for the door handle. His first thought was how late he was going to be for his English night class. Then he remembered he had promised Max he would fix the stuck window in 908 before he went home. He had better do it first, late or not. He picked up his little box of tools and stumbled up the stairs.
At least the service elevator was fixed. As he rode it to the top floor, he leaned against the grille and closed his eyes. These long hours were really knocking him out.
The elevator juddered to a stop. Micha pushed open the gates, then took a step back again as if someone had pushed him in the chest. He couldn’t see anything out there; the whole corridor was full of smoke. He fumbled for a handkerchief in his pocket to cover his mouth and his nose.
Loving Liberty Levine Page 3
