Baker Towers

by Jennifer Haigh

  “Daniel is ill,” he said. “Only a cold, but it would be unwise for him to travel.” The doctor had already come and gone.

  Annie nodded, not surprised. The night before, when she’d taken his tea and cake, she’d found the room dark. in a whisper she’d apologized for waking him. Quietly she’d closed the door.

  “My wife is upset. She doesn’t like to leave him.” Mr. Nudelman shrugged. “i told her you’d look after him.”

  Annie laid the table for lunch, but Mrs. Nudelman would not come out of her room. Her husband drank coffee and stared at his newspapers, English and Yiddish. Annie bought them each morning at the corner store.

  “The world,” he said, “is a dangerous place.”

  He sat smoking as Annie cleared the table. At the front door she helped Mrs. Nudelman into her coat.

  “Take Daniel some soup later.” Mrs. Nudelman spoke in a whisper, her face flushed, her eyes red.

  Her husband gave Annie a slip of paper. “This is the telephone number in Newark. if you need anything, please call.”

  From the window she watched them get into a cab. A wet snow was falling. The taxi was yellow, as in her dreams: the car the Ukrainian had driven. if he were the driver, would he speak to the Nudelmans? I know a girl who works in this building. What would he say about her?

  In the kitchen Annie switched on the radio. The announcer joked in Yiddish or English. The audience roared with laughter.

  AT DINNERTIME SHE heated the soup and carried it to Daniel on a tray. His room was dim inside, the curtains drawn.

  “How are you feeling?” Annie asked.

  He sat up partway in bed. His eyelids were heavy, his hair wild, his face coated with a sickly sheen. Annie put down the tray and sat at his bedside. Without thinking, she laid a hand on his forehead. She did this automatically, as with her younger brothers and sisters. He seemed startled by her touch.

  “You have a fever.”

  He smiled weakly. “How do you know? You don’t have a thermometer.”

  She had nursed a brother through pneumonia, the little twins through whooping cough. “i know,” she said.

  The doctor had given him aspirin; there was more in the medicine chest. in the bathroom she found the bottle behind the mirror. She filled a glass with water and wet a towel at the sink.

  “Cold,” Daniel said when she laid the towel across his forehead. “Feels good. My mother left me in good hands.” He shifted in the bed. “She’s not happy about it, i can tell you that. But every once in a while my father puts his foot down.”

  “She wants you to eat.”

  “Always.” Daniel lay back and closed his eyes. “Later. i promise.”

  “I can call your parents. On the telephone.”

  “Don’t.” Daniel sat up abruptly. “Please. They’ll come back, and that will only make me feel worse. i’ll be better in the morning. You’ll see.”

  “All right,” Annie said.

  Outside, the snow was flying. A stiff wind rattled the win dowpanes.

  ON SATURDAY MORNING the city was quiet, the streets snow-covered. Daniel was sleeping deeply, wearing his spectacles. A book lay open on his chest. in that moment Annie felt her freedom. She had nothing to clean and no one to feed

  She put on her coat and wound a scarf around her neck. The elevator was empty, the street quiet. Her breath steamed in the cold. in the avenue, the traffic lights were blinking. There were no cars in sight.

  Why not? she thought, and walked down the middle of the street.

  Blanketed in snow, the park seemed larger, a vast plain of whiteness. i could stay here forever, she thought. A few strangers crossed the lawn, hands in their pockets. On this still morning everyone was smiling, as though the storm had been staged for their amusement. Annie found herself smiling back. For the first time she felt included in the joke.

  When she returned to the apartment, it was nearly noontime. The indoor air burned her cheeks. in Daniel’s bedroom the radiator was steaming. He had tossed aside the blanket. His pajama shirt was dark with sweat.

  She sat on the bed and laid a hand on his forehead. His eyes snapped open. His lips were parched. A fast pulse beat in his throat.

  In the hallway she took the slip of paper from her pocket. As she had seen Mrs. Nudelman do, she took the receiver from its hook and listened for a voice.

  “I tried to phone your mother,” she told Daniel. “it didn’t work. i think i did something wrong.”

  Daniel closed his eyes.

  “I can call the doctor,” she said.

  “It’s Saturday. No one will answer the phone.”

  He was thirsty but couldn’t drink. Water tasted like metal and turned his stomach. Annie brought milk and held the glass as he drank. Heat rose off him like steam from the stove.

  IN THE EVENING she fixed herself a cheese sandwich, ate it standing over the milchig sink. Even alone, she followed the rules. in this kitchen there seemed no other way to eat.

  For several hours Daniel slept deeply, his skin cooler. Then, at midnight, the fever returned.

  In the kitchen Annie put on the kettle. She opened the pantry cupboard and scanned the shelves. The Nudelmans had no garden, no dry, aromatic plants hanging in bunches in the cellar. There was only ground pepper and cinnamon and coarse salt; a bottle, labeled Onion Powder, whose use she couldn’t fathom; and a familiar yellow can. At home her mother kept mustard leaves for this purpose. in the city, Colman’s Dry Mustard would have to do.

  The kettle whistled. Carefully she mixed the paste. She spread it into a clean dish towel and brought it to Daniel on a tray.

  “What’s that?”

  “A plaster.” Annie sat on the bed beside him. “Take off your shirt.”

  His skin was moist and pale, matted with dark hair. He winced as she laid the hot towel on his chest.

  “Leave it there until it cools,” she said. “i’ll come back in a little while.”

  “No.” He reached for her hand. “Please. Sit with me.”

  For a long time she stared out the window, listening to the night noises: Daniel breathing fast and shallow, snowflakes scratching the windowpanes. Outside, the sidewalks glowed beneath the streetlamps; even at this hour, the city was bright. Annie was a sound sleeper; she had never imagined the night was so long. The city was full of restless people, a thousand Daniels lying awake, the horizon burning with their collective heat.

  IT WAS DAYLIGHT when Annie woke. She stirred, her back and legs aching, and found herself kneeling at Daniel’s bedside. Her blouse was wrinkled, her face creased. Her arms and shoulders rested on the quilt as if she’d fallen asleep in prayer.

  She raised her head. in the distance, bells were ringing. Sunday morning, the Mass starting without her. Daniel was fast asleep, his bare shoulders visible above the blanket. His chest rose and fell silently. His hand was tangled in her hair.

  She disengaged his hand. He stirred but didn’t wake. She saw then that the bedroom door was open. Somewhere in the apartment a radio was playing, water running. Somebody was drawing a bath.

  The Nudelmans had come home.

  Annie stood, her heart pounding, and went into the kitchen. A breakfast had been cooked and eaten. in the milchig sink were two greasy plates.

  AT HOME IN Pennsylvania she thinks often of that night: her vigil at Daniel Nudelman’s bedside, the bright silent city closed in around them. There are words for what she’d felt as she watched him sleep, many words in many languages, but the one she knows is longing. Her mind wanders as she punches down the bread dough. She covers it with a towel and leaves it to rise near the stove.

  Her mother speaks to her only in Polish and asks no questions. For several months she’s kept an eye on Annie’s waistline. Spring ended, then summer. Still Annie is thin as a deer. Now the mornings are cooler; the garden offers up its last tomatoes. Her brothers and sisters go back to school. Helen Lubicki walks across town to Bakerton High, the first in the family to do so. She is an excellent student. Now tha
t Annie has returned, there is no need for Helen to leave school.

  “I’ll be studying for the rest of my life,” Daniel had told her. Was such a thing even possible? Like everything she heard and saw in the city, it now seems fantastic, as though she made it all up.

  His hand in her hair.

  In the days after the snowstorm, Mrs. Nudelman had ignored her completely. it was her husband who told Annie the news. “i’m sorry, Miss Lubicki, but we will no longer need your help in the kitchen.” His Polish was awkward; she stared at him, mystified, not sure she’d understood.

  Instantly she thought of the dishes. “Oh, no. Have i made a mistake?”

  “Not at all. Your work has been very good.” He hesitated a moment, then spoke carefully. “But my nephew is coming from Poland. god willing. So we will no longer have an extra room.”

  Years later she will understand the reason. Her brother Peter will die in the war. Her brother John will see the camps, and Annie—married then, with sons of her own—will remember the Nudelmans and the grossmans, the nephew from Poland who was given her bedroom. She will think of Daniel. is he married, too? A husband and father and still studying? Daniel in his separate world.

  Now she sets out coffee, a heavy clay pitcher in the middle of the table, milk and sugar already mixed in. Each morning for breakfast she bakes a dozen apples. Then the young ones leave for school, Helen and John and Peter and the rest, and Annie piles the dishes in the sink.

  Back Ad

  Continue reading for an excerpt from Jennifer Haigh’s new short story collection

  News from Heaven

  Available in hardcover, downloadable audiobook, large print, and e-book in January 2013

  The bestselling author of Faith and The Condition returns to the territory of her acclaimed Baker Towers with a collection of new short stories, centered around the fictionalized coal mining town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania.

  NEWS FROM HEAVEN traces the lives of ordinary people over the course of the twentieth century as they come and go from small-town life. Haigh masterfully captures the human condition and the way in which where we come from—our families and our communities—shapes the people we will become, whether through our determination to change or our resignation to circumstance.

  In “Beast and Bird,” a teenage Polish girl returns to Bakerton from New York City where she has been keeping house for a Jewish family. The family needs the spare room for cousins coming over from Europe, and the Polish girl will learn of the horrors of war. Later, in “Broken Star,” a family secret comes to light too late for a life to be saved, and an adult woman comes to terms with the sister she never knew she had. A middle-aged woman, once nurse to her now-deceased parents, finally finds love with a younger man returned to town in “Thrift.” But in a place as small as Bakerton, news and rumors outpace their subjects.

  The Washington Post praised Haigh’s ability to bring “a refreshing degree of humanity to a story you think you know well” in her novel Faith, and here, in NEWS FROM HEAVEN, she imbues these stories of generations of hometown dreamers and their hopes, both realized and not, with that same refreshing humanity that makes readers want to keep turning the page.

  Throughout this beautiful, expertly wrought collection, Jennifer Haigh displays her incredible skill for telling stories and for getting to the heart of her characters. As the New York Times recently described her, Jennifer Haigh is a “subtle, serious novelist,” and in NEWS FROM HEAVEN, she brings her unerring talent to the art of the short story.

  Praise for News from Heaven

  “The characters in Jennifer Haigh’s NEWS FROM HEAVEN are so vividly drawn, the inner lives revealed so deftly, with such intelligence and sympathy, that fictional Bakerton, Pennsylvania, takes on the additional weight of, say, Winesburg, Ohio.”

  — Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls

  “In her depiction of Bakerton, Pennsylvania’s inhabitants and exiles, Jennifer Haigh has accomplished what James Joyce did in Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio: render a place with such exactitude the landscape, character, and fate are inextricably linked. Haigh is already recognized as one of America’s finest novelists; this collection confirms she is one of our finest short story writers as well.”

  — Ron Rash, New York Times bestselling author of The Cove

  Acknowledgments

  My sincere thanks to the MacDowell Colony and Vermont Studio Center, where portions of this book were written.

  I am deeply grateful to Dorian Karchmar, Claire Wachtel, Michael Morrison, Lisa Gallagher, and Juliette Shapland, who make all things possible.

  Love and thanks to my mother, Elizabeth Wasilko, and to Dan.

  About the Author

  Jennifer Haigh is the author of the critically acclaimed Mrs. Kimble, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for outstanding first fiction. Born and raised in Barnesboro, Pennsylvania, she is a graduate of Dickinson College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short stories have appeared in Good Housekeeping, the Hartford Courant, Alaska Quarterly Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She lives on Boston’s South Shore.

  To receive notice of author events and new books by Jennifer Haigh, sign up at www.authortracker.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  E-book Extra

  An Interview with Jennifer Haigh

  Both of your grandfathers were coal miners. Was Baker Towers inspired by your own family history?

  Yes and no. Where I grew up, everybody had miners in the family, and I never gave it any thought. I was an adult before I considered how miners actually spent their shifts: walking into the mine drift, or later, riding the mantrip; the hard labor in tight quarters, the physical danger, the absolute darkness. It seems incredible, now, that I ever considered this a normal and unremarkable way to make a living. Everything about it is extraordinary.

  The characters themselves are inventions; they don’t resemble anybody in my family. But the details about the town itself, what life was like in the postwar years, definitely came from my parents and other relatives. Baker Towers ends in the Vietnam era, right around the time I was born, so I couldn’t rely on my own memories of the period I was writing about. By the time I came along, the coal mines were already in decline. The era of the company town was past, and the region was on its way to becoming something else. But I grew up hearing about how things used to be, and when I set out to write this book I had a wonderful time interviewing family members about what life was like when coal was king.

  How did the characters evolve from the time you began imagining them?

  The characters really developed a generation at a time. When I began writing, Rose and Stanley were clearest to me. I had a vivid mental picture of what they looked like—Rose very dark, southern Italian; Stanley a Slavic type, big and blond—and I was fascinated by how those two sets of physical traits would combine and manifest in a large family. As far as developing the characters, that happens in the process of writing. Each event in the character’s life changes her destiny in some way, and the writer makes these discoveries over time. One of the pleasures of writing a novel is following the characters over many years, from infancy to adulthood. When the story opens, Lucy is two months old; by the end, she is a grown woman. It’s important to me that the reader recognizes the child in the adult, that the character “turns out” in a way that seems organic and true.

  Does Joyce’s experience mirror your own in any way?

  None that I can think of. The generational differences are very significant. Joyce was born forty years before I was, into an entirely different social climate. A very different set of opportunities was open to her. I never served in the military, or worked in a factory, and I have never held a family together the way Joyce does. Her resolve and competence and moral strength are a product of those life experiences.

  Did you ever consider writing Baker Towers in the fi
rst person, from Joyce’s perspective?

  Writing in the first person is difficult for me. I sometimes approach short stories that way, but I find it too restrictive for a novel. Part of what intrigued me about writing Baker Towers was the chance to show the reader a time and place through several different sets of eyes: Joyce’s, Dorothy’s, Georgie’s, Lucy’s. Without those different perspectives—male and female, soldier and civilian—Baker Towers would be an entirely different story and, I think, a less interesting one.

  How do men and women experience Bakerton differently?

  The obvious difference was work. A man mined coal, and a woman almost never did. Her economic security depended completely on finding a husband, and that reality shaped her life in all sorts of ways. A bachelor could make a living, but an unmarried woman had a rough time of it. She might work in the dress factory, or do housework for wealthy families, or care for her elderly parents, but her livelihood was tenuous and probably a source of worry for her family.

  A man was also more likely to see some of the world beyond Bakerton, or to leave the town completely. Going to away to college was a luxury almost no one could afford, but if you were a young man in the forties or fifties, you likely served in the military, which took you across the country or even overseas, and much increased the likelihood that you would settle somewhere else. Young women stuck close to home. After the World War II, the GI Bill allowed some people to get an education—mostly men, since they were far more likely to have served.

  What are some of the themes and motifs present in the novel that resonate with you?