HENRY PICKED up the milk cans in a number of towns and she asked him to let her off in Columbia City, which was the next town over, so that, if anyone came asking questions of the stationmaster in Christa, he wouldn’t have seen a girl carrying a sack stuffed full—she had looked in vain for the Gladstone with which they had arrived and had “borrowed,” instead, twelve dollars in coin from her father’s hiding place behind The Coming End of the Capitalist Monopoly, which he did not have sufficient English to make sense of.
SHE STOOD alone on the platform—Columbia City was no metropolis—trying to look casual, as if she made this trip frequently, off on a visit or to shop for things she could not find near to home when, craning to peer down the track, she heard from behind an empty baggage cart, “Chai! You left me!” and out sprang her little brother, arms wide in triumph. He nearly knocked her over diving at her. Here, to complicate her escape, was a small short-pantsed boy, dark hair shining, knobbly-kneed, vibrating with energy.
He was not asking absolution for following her. “Where were you going without me?” His outrage was not child-sized: When he stamped his dusty boot he looked like a petulant little man. Should she be angry or pleased that he simply would not be abandoned?
However he had tracked her down, here he was as solid as Chaya, casting his shadow beside hers in the fresh morning sun. And so she chose to be pleased—flattered, even, though it might have been the hope for adventure that had brought him and not his need for her or his bone-deep love. From inside the station a tiny high-pitched bell announced the arrival of the train. Asher nearly leaped with pleasure as it crept toward them.
Her own knees were watery. Car after car came worming out of the distance and pulled beside them far, far more colossal than she had somehow remembered—heavier, noisier, obliterating the horizon. Brutal. Thrilling.
When they had been helped up the high steps—the conductor picked her brother up and swung him right past her like a light valise and took her hand with surprising gentleness, giving a little bow as he did so—Asher had found his first teacher. He tapped the man’s uniform at the top of his dark-blue thigh and asked about the silver ticket punch that dangled from his belt beside a tangle of keys, “What name is that?”
The man laughed from very high above both of them, and they were off. By the time Chaya had settled herself and her sagging bag of belongings, Asher had the conductor in thrall, and had sat tight against the engineer a while and, careening like a drunk, walked the length of every car. By then, in that peculiar way he had of staring at a thing as if he were a camera and committing it to his voracious memory, he had learned every word in the conductor’s vocabulary from clerestory to sandbox to standpipe, to trailing truck and coal tender.
Asher’s profile, beside the dusty window, was sharp as cut glass; his eyelashes, more lush than his sister’s, were separate as though they were always wet, his eyes and his nostrils black and comically round. He was—was this blasphemy?—like a boy in the funny papers! And every time he opened his mouth to speak he made a little popping sound like her snap-purse opening. It was the small noise, not quite moist, she would think later when she had met more than a few, of a gourmand anticipating a morsel of something delicious.
Her dual—no, triple—acts of thievery, abandonment, and kidnapping, had exhausted her. She had executed in fastidious Yiddish a simple note that, contrary to every pleading by her consoling side, refused apology, and left it propped against the pillow (stuffed with their own chickens’ feathers) on her parents’ bed:
Dear Mama and Papa,
I am not yours to give away. So I am going to hide for a while. Please do not look for me. I promise to keep myself safe. Some day I may even make you proud.
Your loving daughter,
Chaya-Libbe
Then, like Jonah who escaped into sleep at the bottom of the ship that bore him from Tarshish, Chaya hid from what she had done and, finally, from the knowledge that she could not imagine where they were going and how they would survive there. She had said, No. Yes was not something she could afford to think about. When, reluctantly, she woke to clamor and flashing lights, what she saw was the chaos of engines, freight cars, wagons and cables, thick and daunting, and tracks that scrolled to the left and right in a shining script that she had no trouble reading. They had arrived in Chicago and no one would be there to greet them.
6
ALL THEY had eaten on the train was a piece of unbuttered brown bread Chaya had ripped off a loaf in the bread box—why she hadn’t taken the entire loaf she couldn’t imagine, unless it was some vague gesture of contrition for the way she was about to slip so secretly out of their lives—and a sweet the conductor had offered to Asher, which Asher unwrapped with great ceremony. Listening to the rumble of her hunger, she concluded that she was going to have to do for them whatever might be demanded if they were to survive here. This category was no longer merely abstract: She was a confirmed sinner laying plans for further mischief and they had not yet even arrived at the station. This, she understood, was why the doomed farmers of the Fields of Zion had refused to persist in city life; they thought their resistance would keep them good.
They stopped tantalizingly close to their destination and sat, and sat, and sat still longer in gathering heat, while Chaya restrained Asher from rushing to leap off the train. Her legs had begun to feel as inert and heavy as fence posts. In fact, theirs had subsided right beside another train that was also stopped and when, without a lurch, it began slowly to inch forward, she had the illusion that they were the ones moving. The faces in the other cars seemed calm and peaceful, all those lives floating by in silence, going away from Chicago just as they were arriving, and she was seized by a fearful curiosity—why were the others retreating just as they advanced? Was that an omen, a warning that she might fail here, and take her Asher down with her? But they might, she reasoned—these days there was a debating society toiling in her brain—be going on a day visit or to fulfill a family obligation. Why must she assume that because she was fleeing they were fleeing?
Then, with a ferocity that would have knocked her down had she not been seated, pinned in place by perspiration and exhaustion, she wished her mother were there to comfort her, and her father to let her lean against his shoulder. How could she not recall how different were his dusty, time-worn vest and jacket from the spruce outfits of the men and women beside them, and there in those passing windows? The hats! She could just see, above the seat in front of her, a spray of dark purple feathers and the very top of something extravagantly leafy; there must have been a virtual garden below it, combined with a rookery. She hadn’t seen it earlier—perhaps the woman had defied propriety by removing it for the trip and had replaced it as they approached the station. What would Pesye or Fraydl have looked like in a concoction like that, or any of the women who never removed, in public, the headscarves that they trusted to keep them safe from a world of lust and provocation? She giggled at the idea.
Mama, possibly—she had, or could have had, in a different life, a certain bone-bred elegance: She was tall and her posture was proud, which sometimes made her seem unbending. But Chaya could see her in a hat like that, though under Father’s severe tutelage, she could hardly imagine her daring to want one. That was the kind of constraint that kept them ordinary. A crown, a brim worn up or down, she knew, expressed a woman’s most secret self; it was practically an organ of the body, plain if her dreams were plain, abloom with life if she herself was vital! If ever she was rich, she would own a hat for every mood.
They weren’t moving. If only to contain her apprehension, she made herself concentrate on everything she saw: the shiny brown valise that sat on its own seat upright, like a child. The pull-down shade rolled up at her window. The gay checkered suit jacket of the portly man across the aisle, complete with a carefully folded handkerchief in the breast pocket, which matched the dark green of the plaid but which, though he was perspiring in the stilled train, he did not use. He was, she was su
re, what she had heard called a “drummer,” a man who travels with a case of samples and sells things far from home. Did his feet drum on the ground as he walked? Did he drum on the ears and nerves of shopkeepers or housewives until they surrendered and bought of his goods? There were customers’ men and, undoubtedly less privileged, the back-door men who wandered down their lane with their cunning cases of needle-and-thread and lengths of dry goods, and the occasional ball or toy soldier to make the children cry and wheedle until their frugal mothers surrendered. They had received one recently who clambered up in a wagon, and on the wagon what did they find but the extravagant addition of a photographer’s necessities. The children had convinced Mama that they needed a portrait, and now, Chaya realized with a little inner grimace, that would be their only record of Asher and his evil sister more enduring and objective than memory.
What she had come for was to entertain spectacle. Having lived so long at the end of that washboard road where nothing offered color and movement, she admitted to herself, and proudly, she had come to be provoked. And if that meant that she left goodness behind, well, they would see about that.
IT WAS June of 1891 on the day that same kind conductor handed them down onto a little wooden footstool so that they might meet the ground gently, and there in the late afternoon she was overwhelmed with the certainty that they would be safe here in the province of strangers. (In her inflamed state, it took little to overwhelm her.) And this was illusion too, perhaps, but she felt the very rhythm of her perceptions change. So much passed so quickly that had it been music, it would, all of it, have been staccato. Her nearly weightless little brother pulled her along like a dog at the end of a tether.
And then, what was their initiation into the city’s strangeness but a real dog, only a dog not restrained by any tether. As they inched down the platform alongside the great army-green flank of the train, a dog as tall as a horse came running, loose, toward them and then, having nearly knocked them down, right past. He was the color of a bale of hay, but shining, and his tail ended in a long elegant spiral. This was a rich man’s dog, and when he got to the end of the platform where it entered the station, he stopped and looked back, over his dog-shoulder, teasingly, with imperious eyes, to see if his rich man was coming. Still no one came rushing forward; he loped, then, casually, arrogantly, into the station and when the two of them saw him next he was sitting, quite demurely, before the information booth, his feet together, waiting to be caught up with. No rules, Chaya thought (which, of course, was not true, only the dog had long since eaten the instructions and taken them into his muscles). No prohibitions. Beauty, free to run everywhere. Who did she think she was and what did she think she wanted or needed, not to say deserved?
AS TIME passed, she would think about those things long and hard and each time she reached an answer, she watched it change and change again. She only knew that she was not angry any more, she was apprehensive but not at war with her possibilities. Anticipation seized her. So this—hopeful expectation unsupported by the most rudimentary detail—was what had gripped the Am Olam pioneers when they disembarked on the New York shoreline! Now—not when the motors of the SS Stettin cut off but here in Dearborn Station, Chicago—she was certain her real life had begun.
WHAT SHE had not foreseen was that this first glimpse of Chicago, bursting on all her senses, a riot of color and shape and movement, would nearly drive her baby brother mad with excitement. Given his voracious nature, there were simply too many things to be seen, counted, ordered, remembered.
He studied the departure times posted at the gate of every track: Springfield 2:48, Kankakee 4:15, a long skein of numbers, unwinding. And in the waiting room, when she bent to inspect the guidebooks for travelers, he guzzled down the names of the newspapers on the stand and said them back one by one under his breath. Their existence was so exciting he named each like the discovery it was. “Tribune! Times! Herald! Daily News! Evening Mail! Hotel Reporter! Inter-Ocean!, Evening Journal! Neue Freie Presse! Staats-Zietung!” She watched him with the greatest alarm: He thrummed like a little motor, but a motor running too fast for safety. His bright eyes darted everywhere at once, and he balled his fists and then unballed them—he was ten years old, still in short pants and a cut-down shirt, courtesy of his brother Yakov, with a wide, frayed collar, and a good many ineradicable food stains. His cap had been knocked askew by someone whose carelessness could only be forgiven if he was late for his train.
Yet there were things he did not notice or, if he did, he remained more placid than perhaps he should have. While he was memorizing the names of the newspapers his sister, in rather inelegant fashion, knelt to the ground before the travelers’ guides with her skirts bunched before her as tightly as she could arrange them so that she could slip into her bag quite invisibly Glossop’s Street Guide, Strangers’ Directory and Hotel Manual of Chicago, and pull the strings tight with inspiring finality. She was already so devious, she reasoned, that she granted herself license to do whatever needed doing to survive. That was a great relief: She would draw the line at hurting another. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need seemed a capacious motto that could suffice for her needs.
Asher saw her tuck away the unsanctioned green pamphlet. Instead of making note of it, he told her, “I looked and seven of the engines are the same.” Perhaps actions seemed too illusory for notice; they were not facts. They made their way against a strong current of men, women, and even traveling babies done up in their best bonnets. “Three are different, and I also have to find out how they get from the front of the train to the back so they can leave. Do you know how?” He tended to whine when he needed to know something. Asher’s hunger. She shook her head, disappointing him. “How can I find out?”
She told him, too impatiently (and, if he had been any other kind of child, alarmingly), that she couldn’t think about such things before they had an address to retire to. She didn’t like to frighten him, in case he had some hidden part that froze with anxiety beyond her capacity to see it, but (as he should have appreciated) facts are facts. To assuage him, she took him to a counter and with one precious coin, bought him a tumbler of milk and a muffin, of which she begged a bite.
Then she studied her Glossop’s and was staggered that, far beyond her capacity to have imagined, they had come to a city so bedizened with theaters, music halls, opera houses, restaurants, hotels and public parks—all except the last wildly unaffordable, given the pitiable sum her kleptomania had provided. There were instructions that amused even as they depressed her, for there was no way their warnings and directives could affect two such beggars, and she vowed that if she ever lifted them from penury, she would write a guide for the impoverished. They had come here to be joyous in their freedom, but joy this side of heaven, she reflected, had a steep price attached. “When (as you ride into the city in a ‘palace on wheels’) the omnibus agent calls for your baggage checks (which he certainly will do before reaching the depot), have no hesitancy in giving them up, designating where you wish baggage taken. You will be agreeably surprised to find your ‘luggage’ at your hotel within a few minutes of your own arrival. This admirable feature is all owing to the Frank Parmalee Omnibus Service, which is most efficient, accommodating and entirely trustworthy. Place yourself in their charge and you have nothing to fear.” What would Mr. Parmalee make of Chaya’s bulging burlap bag before he deposited it in the nearest waste can?
So, while Asher continued to whip his attention from one set of memorizables to another—the name over the shoeshine stand, Jasper’s, Home of the Slick Shine; the barbershop (which, since it was called Foote’s, should have belonged to the shoe man); the bar (While Away), and the restaurant lit by the white of its tablecloths (The Metropolitan)—Chaya’s mood wavered like a fever chart from exhilaration to gloom to absolute terror and back again to a slightly hysterical delight. She searched in vain for some desk that might give aid to confused travelers; wished, hopelessly, for an office of HEAS like
the one to be found up a flight of stairs at Castle Garden. But, of course, that was a gathering point for immigrants by the thousands (and for all she could appreciate at the time, there were similar offices for other nationalities as well). Dearborn Station, she understood from her purloined Baedeker, was not the largest in the city. Could there be more assistance at another, where the trains arrived from greater distances?
For all her desperation, she could feel herself maturing on the spot, like an adolescent who can feel her limbs lengthening, and that gave her some strength, built upon no foundation except her capacity to get them into interesting trouble that she had no idea how to get them out of. She was a fast-growing plant, and she would simply have to master blooming. How they could have used some real such plants back at the farm, rooted in soil. She was rooted nowhere, but she would be, she had faith—they would be, without resort to prayer or begging (though perhaps to petty theft!), and soon. She would be a girl in one of Miss Singlet’s cheering novels; though they foundered, they never failed.
She studied her Glossop’s for more information than it could give her, chiefly: Where in this teeming city did the Jews live? The little book was more inclined to leap from a history of the birth of Chicago, c. 1837, to the fact, recited with pride, that its 4,711 manufactories employed 152,280 men, women, boys, and girls to the not very helpful disclosure that Asher and she had been but two riders on the 463 regular passenger and suburban trains which entered and left the city daily. She detected in the publishers of Glossop’s Strangers’ Directory and Hotel Manual a penchant, familiar to her in her brother, for disconnected facts whose mere existence was their justification. But the listings of retail establishments—sculptors, portrait painters in oil colors, charcoal renderers of landscape and animals; dyers and scourers; purveyors of artificial limbs, birds, goldfish, and popcorn (wholesale, on the ear or shelled); architects and detective agencies—were of little use to her, as was the sudden pronouncement of a lively editorial voice bristling with advice: “Avoid the unsolicited proffers of strangers as you would that of a savage Zulu or a mountaineer Afghan. They are equally to be feared. For any and all desired information not found in the Guide consult the hotel clerk; for what that human storehouse of knowledge don’t know is beyond the scope of ingenuity to find out.” Mr. Glossop was clearly impressed. Onward he marched, with advice irrelevant to the two of them and their seed sack luggage. Asher clutched his own favorite book, which his sister doubted would prove particularly useful in their new home. It was not the Red Fairy Book or the Blue; it was surely not the Bible; it was Hopkinson’s Book of Forest and Jungle, Illustrated. Some children need one blanket to comfort them. Asher needed his “exhaustive compendium of curious animals and daring expeditions” to keep him secure far from the vine-entwined habitats of four-legged predators.
The Lake on Fire Page 4
