Baker Towers

by Jennifer Haigh

  A crew was already waiting. The driver signaled. Gears grinding, the machine opened its jaws.

  LUCY HAD BEEN WORKING at Miners’ for three years when Leonard Stusick came home. She was trimming Dorothy’s hedges on Polish Hill when he drove up to his mother’s house in a U-Haul truck. The sight of the truck moved her in a way she couldn’t have predicted. She was like a shipwreck survivor clinging to her raft; overhead, the rhythmic chop of helicopter blades. Crossing the street to greet him, she felt her eyes tearing. They both wondered what was wrong with her.

  He had finished his residency that spring. Like Lucy, he could have gone anywhere; yet he, too, had chosen Bakerton. Months would pass before they spoke of why. First they would work together on the pulmonary ward at Miners’; dance together at the fire hall and watch the fireworks at Dago Day; then drink too much and wake up together, awkwardly, in Lucy’s bed.

  Later it would seem as if she’d always known it. The others had been mere filler: the college boys, the men in Pittsburgh, the long series of thrilling disappointments, from Steven Fleck onward. All those years she’d been passing time, waiting for Leonard to grow up.

  The wedding was held at St. Casimir’s, where the bride had been baptized, where both sets of grandparents had been married. Joyce Hauser, visibly pregnant, was the matron of honor. Her husband gave the bride away.

  George Novak paid for the wedding: the polka band, the hall rental, the three elderly cooks at the Polish Legion, who spent the morning stuffing cabbage at lightning speed. The whole affair cost half what he’d paid for his new Cadillac, and it brought him greater pleasure. It was the hometown wedding he’d never had.

  The news had shocked him at first. Arthur was twenty-two, barely old enough to vote. You’re just a kid, George had told him. What’s the rush?

  Come meet Susan, Arthur said bashfully. Then you’ll understand.

  And he had. Susan Jevic was lovely in ways George found achingly familiar: her intelligence and kindness, her sincerity and warmth. Don’t worry, he reassured Marion, who had boycotted the whole affair. Arthur will be fine. Any boy would be fine, married to such a girl. George thought of himself at that age, the summer he had come home on furlough. The summer he should have married Ev.

  They hadn’t spoken in years, not since his foolish proposal. She had told him not to phone her; sick with shame, he had obeyed. Instead he made weekly calls to his sisters, angling for news of her. It was Joyce who’d told him about Leonard, that he’d been accepted into the medical school at Penn.

  George tracked down the boy easily enough, took him out for a couple of steak dinners. Leonard was bright and earnest, serious and polite, without the stubborn streak George saw in his own son. For his part, he was grateful for the company. Since his divorce he dined alone at lunch counters or ate sandwiches standing over the kitchen sink.

  He’d offered the boy a job at Quigley’s, stocking shelves on Sunday afternoons, unloading trucks late at night. When the hours became too much for him, George had simply mailed in the tuition checks, a thousand dollars here and there, from the college fund Arthur would never spend. It’s nothing to me, he told Leonard, and this was true. He could drive his Cadillacs for four years instead of three. The money meant nothing at all.

  He did it for Ev, for Gene and for himself—the young man he’d once been, full of ambition, hungry to learn. Your dad was my friend, he told Leonard, who’d agreed not to tell his mother. He would want me to help.

  A HUNDRED GUESTS attended the wedding. After dinner, they lined up for the bridal dance. The band launched into a joyful mazurka. The bride sat on a chair in the middle of the dance floor, and Joyce removed the bridal veil. The crowd clapped and whooped as Joyce replaced the veil with a babushka. She tied a lacy white apron at Susan’s waist.

  They danced together first, the teacher and her student. The guests waited, clapping in time with the music. The line wrapped twice around the dance floor.

  Susan danced next with her sister Irene, grown gray and stout; then a long series of blue-eyed Jevics. She danced with George Novak, then Dorothy, then Arthur’s handsome uncle Sandy in his white leisure suit. She danced with Lucy Stusick, with Leonard, some Scarponi cousins she couldn’t name. Her co-workers from the library, then Jerry Bernardi, who’d driven there in his hearse. The Poblockis took their turns, the Wojicks and Klezeks and Yurkoviches. She danced with every man, woman and child on Polish Hill.

  Each guest slipped a dollar into her lacy apron, then joined the circle around the floor. Spinning round and round, Susan didn’t notice the commotion, the decorated monstrosity her brothers had brought in through the back door.

  Her sister Irene danced first in the trough—her second-eldest sister, old enough to be her mother, as a few guests pointed out. She was joined by Sandy Novak. A slight bending of tradition—Arthur was his nephew, not his brother—but Sandy felt entitled. When Lucy and Leonard had eloped, he’d lost his rightful chance.

  In the spring the wagons came. Black wagons, small and square, their looping wheels delicately webbed. The men driving were paler than the Irish, quieter than the Polish. The women wore dark dresses. After the English and Irish, the Italians and Hungarians, the Poles and Slovaks and Ukrainians and Croats—after all these, came the plain.

  Wagons on the back roads, to Coalport, to Fallentree. Horses were tied outside the A&P. Boys in dark pants chased one another through the parking lot. The plain weren’t given to chatting, but if you were friendly and persistent—like Arthur Novak, in his plain-style beard, who made a good living repairing their farm equipment—you could sometimes have a word. Land was cheap in Saxon County; industry had moved into Lancaster, forcing the prices up. Back east, environmentalists had raised a fuss about farm runoff into the Chesapeake. Here, plain farmers would not be bothered. After a hundred years of bony dumps and streams running red, no one minded a little manure.

  The plain built houses, or fixed what was there. In town they bought lumber and hardware, shingles and paint. Wheat grew, feed corn, acres of soybeans. The land grew over, softened and greened.

  Each year the scarred places shrank a little. The green spread slowly, planted and harvested by the plain. The green covered, but did not fill, the dark world that lay beneath.

  Excerpt From Heaven

  NEWS FROM THE HEAVEN

  The Bakerton Stories

  Jennifer Haigh

  BEAST AND BIRD

  Every Sunday morning, at seven o’clock promptly, the two Polish girls crossed the park and walked fifty blocks downtown to church. Early morning: the avenue wide as a farmer’s field, the sunlight tempered with frost. The girls were bare-legged, in ankle socks and long coats, their blond hair dark at the ends from their morning ablutions. The younger, Annie Lubicki, was also the prettier. She had just turned sixteen.

  Knowing less, Annie listened more than she spoke. Frances Zroka was three years older, a city girl from Passaic, New Jersey. Occasionally she went on dates. Annie had seen her waiting at the curb—wearing dark lipstick, nylon stockings instead of socks, a pocketbook looped over her elbow. Annie had never been on a date. She spent her free day looking in shopwindows, or sitting alone in the park.

  The girls walked quickly, both excited. A date had taken place the night before. Frances offered each detail delicately, like the tinned butter cookies Mrs. Nudelman favored, each in its own dainty paper cup. The young man had taken her to a restaurant. “He wore a fancy shirt, with cuff links. You know.” She pantomimed buttoning at her wrists.

  “Yes,” Annie said, because an answer seemed to be required. She might have guessed what cuff links were, but she wouldn’t have been sure. She was a girl to whom people gave instructions. Mrs. Nudelman directed her in English and in Polish, which Annie understood; and sometimes in Yiddish, which she did not. The repetition didn’t bother her. She liked knowing what was expected, the exact requirements of serving and washing up, which in the Nudelmans’ kitchen were precise indeed.

  Church bell
s rang in the distance. in a few hours taxicabs would clog the avenue; the neighborhood women would crowd the bakeries, wealthy matrons, beautifully dressed. But for now the girls owned the sidewalk. They could have danced there, if they wanted to. They could have turned cartwheels in the street.

  “This way,” said Frances, pointing down a side street. “it’s quicker.”

  They turned a sharp corner, Annie glancing over her shoulder looking for landmarks, knowing it was hopeless. At home in Pennsylvania she could find her way through a forest at night. The woods were full of helpful markers, simple and unmistakable. Water flowed downhill. The sun rose in the east. City streets had their own order—surely they did—but to Annie the patterns were invisible. Her first weeks in New York, she’d gotten lost daily. Kind strangers had returned her to the apartment. Now she could locate the fish market and the butcher; by retracing her steps, she could find her way back. Any further exploration of the city terrified her.

  “He paid for everything,” Frances reported. “After dinner we had lemon cake.”

  The bells grew louder, and Annie recognized the church halfway down the block, the familiar towering steeple. As always, her friend had been right.

  In the street they tied scarves over their hair.

  THEY WERE SERVING girls, employed by families on the Upper West Side. The families, the Nudelmans and the grossmans, lived one floor apart. The girls inhabited the back corners of the apartments, small square rooms identical except for their color. Her friend’s room had pink walls. Annie’s was painted white.

  She had come to New York three days after Christmas. A slow train had delivered her to Penn Station, a ten-hour journey from Bakerton, Pennsylvania. Until that day she’d ridden only coal trains; the rickety local had standing space for passengers in the rear. Because the Nudelmans had paid her passage, Annie had a seat in a compartment. At the halfway point she ate an apple and a boiled egg, the lunch her mother had packed.

  She was the eldest of nine children. in school she’d gone as far as the eighth grade. After that she’d kept house. Her father was a coal miner, and her mother preferred outdoor chores. The family garden covered an acre. There were chickens and a Jersey cow. Her mother milked, gathered, fed, and butchered; she hoed, watered, picked, and weeded. Certain plants she set aside for medicine, to soothe colic, rashes, dyspepsia, croup. Annie was the cook and the cleaner, the bather and the mender. Mondays and Thursdays she washed tubs of laundry—coal-black overalls, dozens of diapers. On Tuesdays she baked six loaves of bread.

  A neighbor had told Annie’s mother about the job in New York. Her own daughter kept house for Mrs. Nudelman’s brother, who owned a glove factory in Newark. Mrs. Nudelman wanted a Polish girl like her brother’s: quiet, a hard worker, a girl who did as she was told. The Nudelmans would feed and keep her. That they offered wages in addition, Annie’s mother found incredible. it was late fall then, the outdoor chores finished. She could manage the house herself until springtime, when Annie’s younger sister Helen would leave school.

  Mr. Nudelman had met her train at the station, a square little man with a round beaming face. “Miss Lubicki!” he said, sounding elated, as though he had made a great discovery. He took her small suitcase and steered her by the elbow through the crowd. All the while he peppered her with questions. Was this her first visit to New York? As the train approached the city, had she seen the Empire State Building? Annie groped for answers, unused to such attention. He listened intently to her replies and nodded sagely, as though she’d said something profound. His quick dark eyes unnerved her, so she kept her eyes on the feather in his hat.

  The taxi ride passed quickly. She clutched the door handle as they cruised the wide avenues. Cars were rare in Bakerton. When one climbed the hill where her parents lived, her younger brothers ran into the street to stare.

  Mr. Nudelman led her into the elevator, a contraption she recognized from the movies. He pulled shut the metal grille and the little cage rose noisily, a low grinding of gears. At the apartment door Mrs. Nudelman greeted her in Polish. She was a stout woman with a high bosom, her hair hidden by a flowered scarf. She showed Annie down a long corridor, past a series of closed doors. “My son’s room,” she whispered, stepping quietly. “He isn’t well.” Behind her Annie rose on tiptoe, conscious of her heavy shoes.

  The apartment was not large, but its luxury astonished her. Thick curtains draped the parlor windows. There was a sofa with a curving back, covered in burgundy velvet. Matching chairs flanked the fireplace. The dark wood floors were softened by carpets, intricately patterned: fruits and flowers and diamond shapes, outlined in green and gold.

  Mrs. Nudelman led her into the kitchen and flicked on an overhead bulb. Annie blinked. For a moment it seemed the light had tricked her eyes. The kitchen had two of everything: two sinks of gleaming white porcelain; in opposite corners, two separate stoves. One stove was for noodle pudding and custards; the other for cholent and brisket, for roasting lamb and frying kreplach. “Simple,” Mrs. Nudelman said in English. Meat was cooked on the big stove. The smaller one was for everything else.

  Annie stared in silent wonder. Her English was as good as her Polish; she used them without preference, as she used her two legs. But Mrs. Nudelman spoke with a strange accent. Perhaps somehow she’d misunderstood.

  She listened intently as Mrs. Nudelman repeated the instructions in Polish. There were two sets of pots, two dish towels, two drawers of spoons and forks. Two complete sets of dishes: fleishig plates with a red stripe around the border, milchig plates rimmed in blue. The dishes were to be washed in different sinks, dried with different towels. Meat was to be sliced on one counter, cheese on the other. if ever Annie made a mistake, she was to tell Mrs. Nudelman immediately. This was the most important thing.

  Annie nodded, keeping her eyes on the floor. She thought of the Klezek boy at home, who heard voices; a neighbor lady who scrubbed her hands until the skin cracked and bled. if Mrs. Nudelman were poor, her madness would be simpler; wealth permitted this elaborate variant. Annie’s family had chicken soup on Sundays, meat on Christmas and Easter. There was nothing to keep separate. Her last supper at home had been fried cabbage and noodles, served on mismatched plates.

  As Mrs. Nudelman talked, a boy appeared in the doorway behind her. He wore black trousers and a white shirt, open at the throat. He was perhaps Annie’s age, tall and slender. His dark hair was wild, as though he’d come in from a storm.

  “This is my son, Daniel,” Mrs. Nudelman said in Polish. She spoke to him briefly in Yiddish. The boy smiled at Annie and bowed his head. Pinned there was a small black cap, nearly hidden by his curly hair.

  WEEKS PASSED. IN the apartment Annie lived softly. She had never imagined rooms so easeful: the hissing radiator in her bedroom, the reliable heat of the bathroom tap, the clean simplicity of the gas stoves, the high smooth bed all to herself.

  Outdoors was another matter. There wasn’t any outdoors.

  Her first free afternoon, she followed Mr. Nudelman’s directions to the park. A handsome stone wall screened it from traffic. Its lawns were clipped, its paths neatly paved. Annie sat on a bench and stared up at the sky. She thought of her mother, who would have lived as happily out in the open, slept in the field like a horse or a dog.

  In New York the outdoors had furniture. The outdoors was just like the indoors.

  The next morning she mailed two envelopes off to Bakerton: a letter for Helen to read to their mother, and one for Helen alone. in the first envelope she placed the bills Mr. Nudelman had given her, enough to buy flour and sugar, a little coal for the stove.

  During the day she didn’t think of her loneliness. She thought fleishig and milchig, red stripes and blue. She lived in horror of making a mistake, though what the consequences would be, she couldn’t begin to guess. Preparing supper was her greatest anguish, the most taxing hour of the day. Serving did not unnerve her. it pleased her to move neatly around the table, silent as a ghost. Her employers scarcely
noticed her. Their attention was focused, always, on their son. From soup to dessert, Daniel was questioned: what he had learned at school or read in the newspaper; his opinions and observations; the quality of his sleep and digestion; his worries, his plans. Poor Daniel, Annie thought as she cleared the table. She looked forward to cleaning up, the cheerful business of washing and drying. The dirty dishes she piled on a small table in the kitchen, afraid to place them on the countertop.

  She preferred simple tasks, where the potential for error was slight: washing floors, mashing potatoes, chopping a mountain of carrots for the sweet stew Mrs. Nudelman loved. Then she could settle in and enjoy the warmth of the kitchen, the wash of sunlight from the window above the sink. The radio played Mrs. Nudelman’s favorite programs, serials and news reports and, each day at noon, a musical revue. The announcer spoke in a booming voice: From atop the Loew’s State Theatre Building, the B. Manischewitz Company, world’s largest matzoh bakers, happily present Yiddish Melodies in Swing! Between songs came a torrent of words, some English, some foreign; in the announcer’s sawing accent, they sounded nearly the same. The audience erupted periodically in raucous laughter. Annie listened intently, longing to share in their good time.

  At night, the floors washed, she took tea and cake to Daniel, who studied late in his room. She knocked softly, opened the door, and set the plate and saucer at the corner of his desk. He wore round spectacles, a wool sweater over his white shirt. He didn’t speak, just nodded courteously. in the morning, outside his door, she found the dishes on the floor.

  SHE’D BEEN AT the Nudelmans’ a few weeks when she met Frances in the lobby downstairs. Another serving girl: Annie knew it immediately, without knowing how she knew. “Well, of course,” Frances said when Annie told her this later. The daughters of the building had dark hair. All the serving girls were blond.