The fire alarm was going off. He took a step into the hallway, saw shadows running about, carrying dogs, bundles of clothes, and suitcases. A woman was screaming. How could there be a fire? Uncle Max said that the owners had boasted to him that the building was fireproof.
He was buffeted by people running for the stairs: a businessman clutching a carpetbag, who went leaping down the stairs three steps at a time, like he was trying to fly; a man wearing a derby hat and striped pajamas, making a plaintive whining noise, his wife trying to follow, clutching the hands of two terrified children; a fat man in a dressing gown, a lit cigar clutched between his teeth.
Where was the fire, where was all this smoke coming from?
Micha was about to follow everyone down the stairs, he didn’t dare use the service elevator again. But then he thought: No, the right thing is to make sure everyone is safe. So he ran down the now-empty hallway, banging on all the doors. “Fire! Fire! Wake up, wake up. Get out.” There was the clang of fire trucks in the distance.
He reached 908, banged on the door, couldn’t believe when he heard the baby crying, still inside. How could she still be in there? He tried the door handle. Locked. He fumbled in his pocket for his skeleton keys, remembered they were still downstairs in his overalls. He banged with the flat of his hand, then his fist. “Fire!” An English word he knew, not so different from the Yiddish.
He heaved his shoulder against the door, no good, so he kicked with his boots until the lock splintered. The smoke was getting thicker now; he really couldn’t see a thing. Hurry, Micha, get them out and get out yourself.
He pushed his shoulder against the door and it flew open.
It was easier to breathe inside the room; there was not as much smoke as in the corridor. He called out for the lady, couldn’t see her, only the little baby screaming in the bassinet.
The smoke was getting thicker, pouring in along the ceiling, flowing like water. He heard timbers in the wall cracking, splitting from the heat. A part of the ceiling came down in the passage right outside the door; flames were licking toward him along the walls. It was like a live thing, this fire. How could it move so fast?
He yelled out again. Where was the woman, where was she?
He scooped up the baby, ran out into the corridor. There was a fire escape right outside, through the window. He heaved on the latch, forced it open enough so he could squeeze himself through and onto the landing. He looked down, eight floors of shaking iron between him and the ground. The baby was screaming now, eyes squeezed shut, her legs and arms held out rigid from her body. “Shush, beibi,” he said, for all the good it would do.
He hesitated, one leg over the sill, the rest of him still in the corridor. Should I go back and try once more to look for the lady? A blast of heat hit him in the face. He panicked. She isn’t here, Micha, get yourself out of here before it’s too late.
Another part of the roof came down, and he yelped and started down the fire escape, leaping from one step to the other, one hand on the railing, the other clutching the baby to his chest.
He was halfway down when he heard someone screaming somewhere above him, up there on the top floor. Straightaway he knew it was her. He looked up, but it was too dark to see anything, and there was so much smoke.
How could she still be up there? Micha looked down into the alley. There was no one down there to help, smoke was even pluming out of the windows underneath him. If he went back up, they could all die—him, her, the little baby. But he had to do something.
He started back up the fire escape, his boots clanging on the iron. Up to the seventh floor, breathless, shouting for someone to come and help all the way. He saw her, for just a moment, fighting with her bedroom window, but it was jammed shut, the same window he was supposed to fix.
“The fire escape,” he shouted up at her, but she couldn’t hear him, and what difference could it make now even if she could? There was black smoke pouring out of the window he had come out of, flames as well, roaring like a train going past, scorching the bricks black. The fire escape gave a lurch under him as a wall collapsed inside. Any moment, the whole building would come down.
He turned around and clattered down the fire escape as fast as he could.
Hoses snaked across the street. Micha splashed through the pooled water, stared in numb astonishment at the fire trucks skewed across the street, the policemen holding back the crowds that had gathered along Park and Fortieth. There were people milling all around him, sobbing and crying.
He looked up. Pillars of thick smoke poured into the night sky; there were flames roaring out of all the windows above the fourth floor, even as he watched another section of wall crash down into the street. A policeman grabbed him and pushed him away. “Get the hell out of here! What do you think you’re doing? Can’t you see the damned place is about to come down?”
Micha started to run. Once he had started running, he couldn’t stop. He stumbled along block after block, people streaming past him the other way, toward the fire, eager not to miss the spectacle, but Micha ignored them, hugging the baby tighter to his chest. He ran and ran and didn’t stop until he reached Delancey Street.
“And what have you got there?” Tessie Fischer said when she saw him.
“Do you have milk, please?”
He saw over her shoulder a gaggle of children. How many was it, four, five? He could never remember, and all in one room not much larger than his. She sniffed, could probably smell the smoke on his clothes. “What have you been doing, Mr. Levine?”
“I seen trouble tonight like I couldn’t tell you.”
She peered in at the bundle he had in his arms. The little girl mewled and wriggled. “And what is it you’re doing with that little thing?”
“I found her.”
“Found her?”
“In the street.”
Tessie frowned, had heard of such things, of course; plenty of working girls in the ghetto threw their babies out with the dirty water.
“My wife arrives from Russia tomorrow. We can look after her.” She stared at him as if he had gone mad. Perhaps I am mad, Micha thought. Saying it out loud, I sound like a crazy person. “She always wanted a baby,” he said, as if that made every kind of sense.
Tessie’s husband was shouting at her from inside, “Who’s that you’re talking to, come back in here, woman.” So the man next door has found a baby, he could see Tessie thinking; with so many children in the world, why make it my business? “Wait here,” she said.
She went back inside, came back a moment later with a little bottle of milk. “Don’t let Moishe know I gave away some of our milk,” she said.
“What do I do?”
“Remember to warm it. Not too hot now. And I hope your wife’s not as meshugga as you are,” she said, and shut the door.
He had nowhere to put the little girl to sleep but next to him on the mattress on the floor; he had nothing to change her with but some old towels and a sheet that he tore into strips. What did he know from babies?
He started shaking all over, shaking so much he couldn’t help it. He had to wait until the shaking stopped before he could give her the milk, then he walked grooves in the floorboards trying to get her to sleep.
It was hours before she stopped her fretting, but even when she was finally quiet, he couldn’t sleep. He lay beside her in the dark, listening to the sound of her breathing, but he could still smell the stink of the smoke on his clothes, and when he closed his eyes, he saw the woman’s hand pressed against the window, banging on the glass, the last thing she ever did before she died.
How was she still in the room? He should have looked better, maybe she was in the other room asleep on the bed, maybe drunk, or perhaps she was in the bath and didn’t hear the alarm. He supposed he would never know, no one would.
I could have saved this little mite’s mother for her, he thought. If I had been a little braver, not just stood there in the room for so long, like a schmuck.
Or if I’d
fixed that window, maybe she could have got out and climbed down the fire escape. He burrowed the heels of his hands into his eyes, tried to stop himself seeing it all again, tried to stop himself remembering. If only he could have those few moments back, do it all over again, but this time do it better.
8
Ellis Island, New York
The ground felt as if it were still swaying beneath her feet, and her head was dizzy with fresh air again, the clean salty air. Now everything smelled so good because the boat had smelled so bad. She had been poked and prodded by men in uniforms and white coats ever since they landed, and there were people everywhere shouting in languages she did not understand. But at last she was ready, she had her samovar and rolled-up feather bed, and her precious landing card was pinned to her coat.
She hesitated at the top of the stairs, stared out the window at the bigness of Mrs. Liberty, so green she was. Left stairs for New York, everyone said. Right stairs for everywhere else. And middle stairs? Oh, you don’t want to go down the middle stairs, girl.
He’ll be waiting for you at the “kissing post,” someone told her. And they were right; he was, down there in the Great Hall. Like a different man he looked, only just after Hanukkah when she saw him last, on the dock at Tallinn, but now it was like hugging a complete stranger. He looked thinner, his nice suit was crumpled, his black hat battered and ragged at the rim.
This is your new life now, Sura Levine, she thought. Better make the best of it you can.
Battery Park
What is the difference between being terrified and being so excited and amazed a girl cannot think or speak, just stares openmouthed like a simpleton or I don’t know what? Not so much difference, Sura thought, holding tight to Micha’s arm as he pushed his way through the crowds outside the pier.
She had never seen so many people, so many horses, so many carriages. And motor cars, so many it made her head spin, all polished and black-painted. But they were nothing compared to the train that ran through the air, the one that Micha had written her about in the letter. So it was really true. He called it the Third Avenue Elevated.
They even rode on it. It rattled along, high above the people, the wheels shrieking and grinding, the carriage shaking and twisting so she was sure it would crash down into the street. And such streets! Micha had not lied to her. Everywhere there were buildings taller than the castle tower in Tallinn, so that even though it was afternoon, she could not see the sun in the sky.
“You like it?” Micha asked her.
She couldn’t answer him. How to like or not like? She could be astonished, only. It was like nothing she had ever imagined. She wanted to shut her ears and her eyes so she could get her breath. But she couldn’t, because everywhere there was something new to stare at: people with black skin like coal; long carriages full of people drawn by horses; the sun glinting in the windows of buildings, so many windows it hurt the eyes.
They got off the railway at Delancey Street. There were so many people, like she never saw in one place before in her life. It was all pushcarts and noise and hustle-bustle. She was shoved every which way, held tight to Micha’s arm or she would have been swept away, like in a flooded river. There were a thousand smells in the air, a million. And all the different languages all around her: Russian, German, English, even the Yiddish they spoke a hundred different ways, so many accents and ways of speaking.
“Here is home,” he said to her.
They walked up so many steps that by the time they got to where they were going, she was out of breath. Their apartment was on the fifth floor, Micha told her. She had never been in a building so high.
And such an apartment it was. After Micha’s letter, after everything she had heard about Golden Medina, she had expected at least a palace. But when she walked in, it was just a dank little room with a tub for washing and two little windows with a view of iron stairs.
And no furniture, only a mattress on the floor for sleeping and some old wooden crates for sitting. Walls so thin she could hear everyone in the whole building, all shouting like nobody’s business. And the noise from the street, like an army of Cossacks having a battle down there.
For this, she had sailed halfway around the world in a rusty, stinking old ship. She wanted to sit down and cry.
“I have something for you,” Micha said.
He looked so excited. Be a good wife, Sura, she told herself, like you promised yourself. Smile at him, look to your husband like you’re happy.
He went out, crossed to the door on the other side of the landing, and gave it a knock. A woman came out and handed him something, a bundle wrapped in a blanket. She was not much older than Sura, but she looked wrung out, like an old rag that had been washed too many times.
Micha came back with the bundle, nudged the door shut behind him. He had such a look, like it was a million dollars he was holding. She had never seen his face shine like this.
“Don’t you want to see what I got for you?” he said.
She went over, moved aside the folds of the blanket.
“She’s asleep,” he said.
Sura was too astonished to say anything.
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” he said.
“It’s a baby.”
“I wanted to make you happy, Sura. All I ever wanted was to make you happy.”
9
Back Bay, Boston, Massachusetts
George Seabrook was interrupted in the middle of his morning’s correspondence by his butler, Frankston. There was a gentleman at the door to see him, Frankston said. By the name of Turner.
“Show him in,” George said, and put down his pen. He blotted the letter he was writing and laid it aside.
Alfred Turner did not look like a private detective; an accountant perhaps, with his wing collar and pince-nez. He stood on the other side of George’s desk, fingering the kettle curl of his gray homburg.
George invited him to sit.
“What do you have for me, Turner?”
Turner unfastened the buckles of the battered leather satchel on his lap and took out a sheaf of notes, written in a bold copperplate hand with blue ink, and laid them on George’s desk. George picked them up and leaned back in his chair to peruse them. The leather creaked under him.
He read them through quickly. “New York?” he said.
“As you see from my notes, she and her . . . companion . . . were briefly in Concord. They checked in to the Grand Central Hotel on the eleventh of this month. Their reservation is until the thirtieth.”
“The child?”
“She has the infant with her. It appears to be in good health.”
George laid the report back on his desk, covering it with the flat of his hand as if he was shielding it from prying eyes. “And her companion?”
“He has recently left the hotel, boarded a first-class compartment on a train bound for Philadelphia. He had another lady with him. They seemed . . . comfortable with one another.” There was a long silence, punctuated only by the loud ticking of the German carved oak clock on the mantel.
“Can I be of further service to you, sir?”
George had almost forgotten he was still there. “No, Turner,” he said. “Thank you. You have done very well. You have my gratitude, for your sterling work, and your discretion.”
“Thank you, sir.” He buckled the briefcase, bowed, and took his leave.
George Seabrook stared at the handwritten pages fanned out on the blotter in front of him. Finally, he crumpled them in his fist and hurled them across the room. Damn you, Clare. Damn you to a hundred kinds of hell.
“So you found her? Found her in the street?”
“Yes, a foundling,” Micha said. “In a doorway, down an alley. I heard crying. What can I do? I cannot leave her there. What hard heart would do that? Tessie told me it happens a lot. There are loose women here, jezebels, harlots. A child is an inconvenience to them.”
The baby stared up at her. Oh, look at those beautiful green eyes, Sur
a thought. Even if we keep her, with such eyes, how could anyone ever think she belonged to us? “The poor little darling,” she said. “What must she be thinking?”
“I guess she is thinking: At last there is someone who will take care of me.”
“We have to get her milk, and cloths for diapers. What have you been doing to her? Do you know nothing, Husband?”
“Tessie gave me milk and a bottle. She has had lots of babies.”
“So the poor little thing has been passed around like old fish.” She held her, sniffed at her. Oh, the new-baby smell of her hair. She remembered that smell from the night she brought Bessie into the world. “No one is going to pass you around anymore, bubeleh. What place this is, America, a woman leaving babies in the street like potato peelings.”
What a place, yes. Nothing in America was as she thought it would be; never such big buildings, never so smelly, never so many people, never such poor, never such rich. And all living together.
And this place her husband lived. Nothing like his mother’s big house in Tallinn with so much bedrooms and the shop downstairs and the nice furniture, all comfortable and nice smelling.
But then, like a miracle, here was Micha with something better than gelt, better than a big house: a baby that was hers, just for herself. It was everything she had prayed for to the God she thought had been punishing her for thinking so much like a bad wife.
“Do you really think we should keep her?” she said.
“Look around you, bubeleh. Children are everywhere. No one wants her. If we take her to the police, she’ll be in the end an orphan. You want that for her when she can have a good home with us?”
“She’s so beautiful. Are you sure she was left? There is no mother out there in the street looking for where it is she left her baby?”
“You don’t leave a baby like you leave your dog tied up to a post. What mother does such a thing?”
Loving Liberty Levine Page 4
