Loving Liberty Levine

by Colin Falconer

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I’d do it for a nickel.”

  “I wouldn’t kiss any boy, even for a dime, even for a whole dollar,” Libby said. She wished only that Joey Robbins would ask her so that she could say no, but no boy ever did. Frankie was the prettiest girl in the class, everyone knew that. The one whose pigtails they always liked to tug on in class to make her turn and look.

  Libby wished she looked more like her mother, with her beautiful dark eyes and long black hair, not long and skinny with this stupid red hair. Her mother kept it cropped short, but everyone could see what color it was. Other kids made jokes about her, called her a goy and told her she was adopted. She never told her mama about it, but it hurt just the same. She looked more goy than Frankie herself, whose father was from a place called Dublin.

  Frankie told her to pay them no never mind and punch them with a fist if they kept it up. Sometimes she’d do it herself. “Don’t you say that to my Lib,” and whack! A real friend, was Frankie.

  “Joey wanted to show me his weenie,” Frankie said.

  Libby laughed like she was being sick.

  “I said, what do I want to see a weenie for? I said, I’ve seen a pink little worm before, my daddy baits his line with them when he goes fishing at Canarsie.”

  Where the Irish lived didn’t look so different from Hester and Delancey if you looked up at the tenement buildings; feathered mattresses hung out of the windows like raggedy tongues gasping in the heat, and rags of every color were strung on the poles and hanging over the street like bunting, or draped over the fire escapes.

  It was the streets that were different; there were no pushcarts or men in yarmulkes or shops selling candlesticks and pickles and challah bread. And the smells were different too; no sour rye bread baking, no tang of herring. Libby would have known Delancey Street even if she were blindfolded.

  Up ahead there was a gang of kids on the footpath playing skully. They all had had their summer haircuts, clippers taken to the lot, some of them with scabs where their mothers had been careless with the shears. They wore long shorts and filthy caps at all angles on their heads, their older brothers, too old for the game, standing on the corners with their hands in their pockets, watching and looking for trouble. Some of them even had cigarette butts dangling from their bottom lips, even though they were not much older than her. She supposed they had filched them from the gutter. Their mothers would kill them if they ever found out.

  One of them called out—she heard him say “Jewboy” and then shout the usual insults, sheeny and kike and she didn’t know what.

  “How do they know I’m Jewish?” she said to Frankie.

  “They don’t. It’s me they’re calling out to.”

  “You?”

  “Sure, me. Which one of us you think looks more like a Jew? You’re the one with the red hair.”

  There was a piece of coal lying in the gutter, and Frankie picked it up and threw it at them. “Go across yoursel’, ya gobdaw dryshite!” They glared at her but shut up, confused.

  Libby grabbed her arm and dragged her away. “What did you say to them?”

  “It’s something me daddy shouts at the people on the stairs. I’ve no idea what it means, but it always works for him.”

  They were almost at Rivington when Libby saw the penny gleaming in the gutter, and she dashed out and grabbed it; another kid had seen it too, but he was too late. She held it up triumphantly to Frankie. “Look what I got!”

  The boy stepped out into the street in front of them and held out his hand. “That’s my penny,” he said.

  “Well, it’s not, because it’s in my hand,” Libby said.

  “I said it’s mine, now hand it over.”

  He was bigger than her, a big goy, perhaps twelve years old, a red-faced and piggy-eyed kid. She’d seen him before; he would stand outside the bathrooms at school and demand dimes from little boys to use them. Most of them didn’t have a dime and couldn’t hold it and ended up wetting their knickerbockers in the class.

  “Go take your nonsense somewheres else, you pig-faced gombeen,” Frankie said.

  “What’s a gombeen?”

  “It’s someone who’s not getting my penny,” Libby said.

  “Would you be after hitting a girl now?” Frankie asked him.

  “That’s not a girl.”

  “Well, it is.”

  “Her hair’s too short for a girl. She looks like a carrot.”

  Well, that did it for Libby. If she was even a tiny bit scared of him before, she was only mad now, and she bunched the penny in her fist and hit him as hard as she could on the nose.

  He put a beefy hand to his face and seemed surprised by the trickle of blood on his fingers. He swung his other fist and took Libby on the side of her head and sent her sprawling. Frankie threw her arms around the bigger boy’s neck and jumped on his back.

  He twisted this way and that, trying to get her off. Libby jumped to her feet, kicked him in the shins, then in the groin, and finished off the fight by poking him hard in the left eye with her finger. He shrieked. Somebody shouted for a policeman.

  They ran off.

  It wasn’t riches, but it wasn’t to be wasted; a penny was a penny after all. They walked down Hester like ladies in furs walking along Broadway, staring at all the pushcarts and shops and trying to decide what to do with it. There were lots of hawkers selling balloons and penny whistles. But why spend their penny there when those were things their mothers might buy for them anyway? They felt sorry for the crippled soldier on the corner of Columbia, with one arm of his jacket pinned to the breast pocket, but they had no use for a necktie even if their solitary penny could buy one.

  Finally, they stood outside a store on the corner of Willett Street; Libby looked at Frankie to see what she thought, but she just shrugged, undecided.

  “You like pickles?” Libby said to her.

  “I don’t mind ’em,” she said. “My daddy likes them with his beer, and sometimes he gives me one.”

  She went in. The man behind the counter had a dirty silk yarmulke and a long white beard. Libby was terrified of him; when she had first come in the shop with her mama when she was four years old, she had thought he was God, he looked so severe and bad tempered.

  She put her penny on the counter.

  The old man took it and held it up to the light, like he was sure it must be tin or a soda bottle top, then turned his scrutiny her way. “What happened to your eye?”

  Libby touched her cheek with her fingertips. It was hot and swollen where the bigger boy had hit her. She would have a shiner in the morning.

  “I walked into a door.”

  “Little pasty-faced schlemiel like you, you can’t afford no bruises,” he said. He picked up his big wooden fork. He stirred his vat of spiced vinegar and brought out a fat green-yellow pickle and slapped it on a piece of brown paper and handed it to her.

  “Dank!” Libby shouted as she ran out. Outside, she tore the pickle in half and gave a piece to Frankie. Sucking on their pickles, they ran across the street and headed back toward the Williamsburg Bridge and home.

  18

  Sarah was shaking when she got home. She knocked on Mary’s door. Mary took one look and led her into the front room and sat her down on the green plush parlor chair. “Whatever’s wrong?” Mary said.

  Sarah shook her head, not trusting herself not to cry, she wouldn’t do that, not even in front of Mary.

  “I know what you need,” Mary said, and she went to the kitchen and came back with two teacups, half full. Sarah took one, almost gulped down what was in it, but then she smelled it and realized it was whiskey. “Dan won’t miss it,” Mary said. “Go on, have a sip, girl, it’ll do you good. Now tell me, whatever’s wrong?”

  Sarah told her about Schonberg, about the man pinching her on the El. It was about then that they heard the girls on the stairs. Mary went to the door and told them to go off and play, it was too early for their dinner.


  “I should go out and see her,” Sarah said. “I’ve been gone all day.”

  “Lib and my Frankie are just fine. Now you drink your special tea and calm your nerves, girl.”

  Chevrons of light angled in through the blinds on the narrow windows; up here on the sixth floor, the noises of the street were muted, almost comforting. Sarah watched motes of dust drift in the yellow sunlight.

  Mary stood there in the middle of the carpet with her hands on her hips, shaking her head.

  “It’s a stupid girl you got here, it’s what you’re thinking.”

  “No,” Mary said. “What I was thinking was, it’s a waste we got here. To be honest with you, I wouldn’t mind a man pinching my behind on the El, but those days are long gone. Dan would rather have a beer than have me.”

  “Mary!”

  “Well, it’s not that I mind. Five kids is enough for me. But I miss him looking at me that way sometimes. I was never the beauty that you are, mind.”

  “I’m not a beauty, Mary. It’s men that are the problem.”

  “It’s men that are the problem around you, or have you not looked in a mirror lately?”

  “I have, and what I see is a worn-out widow with chilblains.” She held up her hands and noticed the rag on her finger where she had put a needle through it. She had quickly wrapped it with a scrap of fabric so she could keep working and not bleed on the goods.

  “I’m twenty-six years old, Mary. What’s the matter with these men?”

  “Well, I know you’re not a girl, but you’re hardly an old crone either. I should love to have looked like you do at twenty-six when I was a colleen.”

  The door flew open, and more of Mary’s kids came tumbling in, yelling and fighting, and she went out and shouted at them to be quiet and take themselves off back to the street and not to come back till suppertime.

  When she came back, she said, “You should do something with those looks of yours before it’s too late. How long has your husband been gone?”

  “Four years only in July.”

  “That’s long enough to be a widow.”

  “What’s the use? Every man who comes around here, courting me, just wants someone to cook and clean for him. And what choice I got? Stan Kronsky, works in a hardware store. Moishe Brodsky, a furniture salesman. Sam Aaron! They don’t got more than what I got. Besides, no decent man wants used goods.”

  “You’re not used goods, Sarah.”

  “Where I come from, a man sees you new in the shop, you’re worth new price. After that, he wants discount.” She stared at the marble-topped table in the middle of the room, the framed photograph of a younger Mary in her wedding dress standing next to her husband, all proud of his big shoulders and big moustache. That was the way it was supposed to be, getting older together, not getting shot all to pieces and not even a body to pray shibah over.

  She swallowed half the whiskey, enjoyed how it burned all the way down. “When I come to America, I dreamed I was going to wear beautiful dresses, not slave every day making such schmatta for someone else. You know what he does, that Schonberg? He pretends he can’t figure, so when he adds up my slips, he always makes mistake, and at the end of the week, I am a dollar short. Always.”

  “Maybe you should find a job somewhere else.”

  “Where somewhere else, Mary? What if there is no somewhere else? Even one week and no money, Libby and me, we don’t eat.”

  “You know, a woman like you, you should be a millionaire’s wife, I’ve said to Dan over and over.”

  “No millionaire life out there for me. I do only what I got to do, every day, for Libby’s sake.”

  Mary got up and went out. While she was gone, Sarah stared at the wallpaper, dark brown with cream stripes. It reminded her of the waistcoat jacket Schonberg wore every day. That disgusting man! How could she go back, how could she face another day?

  Mary came back in holding a long and wicked-looking stainless-steel hat pin. She gave it to her.

  “What is this?” Sarah asked her.

  “It’s insurance.”

  “Insurance?”

  “First of all, Sarah, you got to learn to stand in the train without holding on to the strap. Keep your hands free every second, no matter where you are. And if that doesn’t work, keep this in your hat. If you feel a man’s hands on you, stick him good and hard with that.”

  Sarah stared at the pin with its gleaming point. “I couldn’t use that,” she said, and tried to give it back.

  “Keep it anyway. And never say you couldn’t do it, because you don’t know yet if there’s anything that can happen that’s worse than having a man’s hand on your bottom. All right?”

  Frankie’s mother bribed them a whole nickel to go off and play, and that gave them another problem: how to spend it.

  They went back down to the street, lingered for a long time outside the bakery, staring through the window at the icebox cakes with their candied cherries and whipped cream, but they would need more than a nickel for one of those.

  Then they heard the banana man wheeling his pushcart down the street, the fruit covered with a quilt to keep off the hot sun. “Ba-nan-as, ripe ba-nan-as, if you no got the mu-nee, you no get the bun-nee, ripe ba-nan-as!”

  Libby knew they were a dime a dozen, but they bargained with him for six, three for Frankie and three for her. They went up onto the roof of the building to eat them, so pretty up there, all the sheets of washing like sails straining at their wooden clothespins, the overalls and dresses dancing in the spring breeze.

  The iron of the Williamsburg Bridge cast its shadow over the river. They watched the trains and trolley cars inching over it, the sprawl of Brooklyn on the far side, brown tenements huddled together just like theirs. Somehow up here, life didn’t seem like such a jumble, it seemed like there really was a pattern to the chaos down there.

  “Your ma was crying,” Frankie said.

  “My mama never cries.”

  “I saw her through the door.”

  Libby looked at her sidelong, not sure whether to believe her, felt a bit scared that perhaps she was right. “Why would my mama be crying?”

  “Perhaps she’s missing your da?”

  “My papa died years ago.”

  Frankie was quiet, thinking about this. “What happened to him?”

  “He died in the war.”

  “Was he a hero?”

  “Of course he was a hero. He killed thirty Germans with his bare hands, Mama said.”

  Frankie finished her banana, started to peel another. “My da didn’t fight in the war, because he had us to look after.” When Libby didn’t answer, she said, “Do you remember your daddy?”

  “I remember him carrying me on his shoulders once. At a parade. But every day he gets a bit further away, and I think, maybe I’m remembering, or maybe I’m just making it up. Mama says he was at work a lot.”

  “Was he rich?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Our da works all the time, but we’re not rich. Last night I heard Ma call him a gombeen, and an eejit. She says we could all buy a house on Long Island with the money he spends on the drink. I’d like a house on Long Island. I’d like a house anywhere, I guess. It’d be nice to have a rich daddy, instead of a gombeen. What would you do if you had a rich daddy?”

  Libby finished her bananas and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Down below, people were coming out to sit on their stoops: women with babies; men with their cigarettes and pipes; little kids running in and out of doors with a few coins clenched in their fists, running home again with little newspaper-wrapped bundles from the grocer’s and butcher shop.

  “What I want,” Libby said, “you can’t buy with money.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I want to be beautiful,” she said. “Like my mama.”

  The sun was already set when Libby went downstairs to the apartment. Sarah took one look at her and shook her head. “And what is it you’ve been doing? Look at the dirt on you
. And where do you get that bruise on your face?”

  “I fell over.”

  “Been fighting again you mean. What was it this time?”

  “I wasn’t fighting.”

  “You fight in the street like I don’t know what, then you lie to your mother. What am I going to do with you? Look at you. You need a bath. Anyone think I got myself a schvartze for a daughter, the color of you.”

  Libby hated baths. The bath was soapstone with a hinged wooden cover, and the bottom of it was so rough it made her bottom sore, and she could never get in or out of it without giving her back a good whack on the faucet. The one thing she remembered about their old place in Delancey Street was the wooden tub on the floor; even though it was tiny and you had to heat the water on the stove, at least she wouldn’t get out of it with welts on her back and a sore behind.

  But she did as she was told and sat there while her mother washed her face and hair with soap. Her mama was angry with her and so she was rough, not like usual. Libby winced as she pulled her this way and that.

  “What were you doing after school?”

  “Frankie and me, we went up to East Village. We watched some Italians playing this game in a park with like cannon balls, and then we saw a man shoeing a horse in a garage.”

  “You never thought to come home and help out with the washing and ironing? You’re old enough now. I have no one to help me after I come home from working all day.”

  Libby looked up at her mother, tried not to get soap in her eyes. Frankie was right, something was wrong. Her mama’s eyes were red, like she’d been rubbing them, and there was this hard look on her face, like the rabbi got when he talked about God’s commandments. Still, she was right, she hadn’t given any of that a thought.

  “You can finish washing yourself, and then it’s time for bed.”

  “Will you read me a story?”

  “Not tonight. Now go on and hurry up.”

  “Mama.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t Papa’s fault.”

  “What wasn’t his fault?”

  “He didn’t mean to die in the war. Don’t be mad at him.”