Asher nearly leaped over the railing as if there were a fistfight down below, and he the intrepid rescuer. The coiled, hardy, ample, ready child. Chaya held him still with both her hands.
HOWEVER AFRAID she might have been for him, she could see how the pleasures, for Asher, piled up. They climbed up the wide step of the cable car and it was a wonder, grinding and lurching, all shuddery wood and metal clanging against metal. He watched with huge eyes as a boy only a few years older than he rode hanging precariously over the side, his whole face invisible behind his waving hair, and she could see the calculation with which he tallied how long it would be before he could do the same.
The thronged streets were so thick with moving bodies it seemed they could be borne up, shoulder to shoulder, and never touch the ground. Though he was so excited that his cheeks turned red and stayed that way, the crowds were difficult for Asher because, whatever the age of his radiant mind, he was a smallish boy who wore the crown of his tweedy cap no higher than a grown man’s middle. He was buffeted by so many gesturing passersby—male; the women he passed were far less demonstrative—that he finally walked holding it to his side. Around State and Madison Streets, Chaya affronted his pride by clutching at his arm, though she knew she was equally in need of protection.
But could it be survived? Chaya spent a long dispiriting day at the mercy of the shopkeepers of her new city. Some few establishments were called “department stores.” She thought them, in conception, really elephantine general stores, with many, many counters on which and under which to display their wares in cool light and, to one who had come fresh from the tumult of pushcarts, the frozen silence of a museum.
These buildings were wrapped in glass, their broad windows vistas into separate little worlds. Dress forms—but with blank-featured faces and stiff, false hair—stood draped in unaffordable fashions, and around them had been placed props, to advance the notion that these dolls were somehow related to the world in which their viewers lived: In one it was a grove of autumn trees dropping their leaves in a carefully disheveled circle, in another stood stacks of books as though the beautiful, eyeless clothes-hanger of a woman, when she was not standing in a humanly impossible position, was a dedicated reader.
The department stores were huge and many-storied and so impressed with their own grandeur that it was not easy to remember that their fortune was made by merchants, not royalty. In their show windows hung signs inviting the most respected customer to enter and be welcome. But when she approached the proper authorities in Marshall Field’s, at the Boston Store and, a few blocks north and west, in another called The Fair, she was forced to watch her interrogators run their eyes, with no attempt to hide their insolence, from the rucked-up top of her head in its plain sailor (for this city seemed to be wind and more wind) down her plain white waist with its hopeful placket of yellowing lace to her navy twill skirt and, unsmiling, to her worn shoes, in whose every crease she carried, like a souvenir, the dry dust of the Fields of Zion.
Her hair, which was thick and ungovernable even without those wild gusts to irritate it, bristled out from under the short brim of her hat. Her outfit was beyond redemption and could only, those eyes suggested, be discarded, as if it were contaminated. Her bearing, humble at best, abject at worst, must hardly have seemed capable of the airs necessary to intimidate their respected customers while seeming to indulge them. Her interlocutors had, she was certain, come to their positions from a background not much more exalted than hers; all the more inviting, she began to understand, to put her in the place they had so recently vacated, and keep her there. Many who stood behind the counters were men; they looked out at her blankly, as if she were barely there.
But add, for an extra frisson of unsuitability, this complicating factor: She had an accent, unfashionable, unplaceable, but surely, by their lights, without charm. Had it been French, her stock would have risen. But it decidedly was not French. The first pinprick of disappointment began to burrow under Chaya’s skin, not at the inconvenience of being without work so much as a suspicion that she had built elaborate plans upon the imperfections of strangers.
And so she turned to the smaller shops, thinking that their scale would, after all, better suit her temperament. These lined State Street and Wabash, and the old neighborhood along Lake Street, where, apparently, Marshall Field’s had begun as a modest haberdashery that led the march south and at the same time led modesty into gigantism. But she was turned away by these as well, as though the selling of shoes or millinery, ladies’ undergarments or even candy, loose or by the box, took some extraordinary skill or refinement that such as she could not dare try to imagine. Some very nearly said “No” before she had finished opening the door. In more than one she heard the tinkling of a friendly little bell that turned out not to mean welcome at all, but suspicion. Others led her a long walk through their motives, her motives, the motives of the wretched powers that run Chicago, only to smile sympathetically and, as firmly as any, repeat “No.”
A few proprietors informed her, with a patience and consideration that were surprisingly respectful, that she had come at a particularly bad time when sales had slackened: They worried that the city—indeed the entire nation—was declining toward a disastrous “depression.” She had never heard that word used to describe anything but the way she was feeling as she dragged herself and her throbbing feet from door to door.
Asher had held her hand, as he’d promised, until she entered these shops, and then had slunk off to lean his small self against the building to wait for her. Once he called forth the wrath of the proprietor of a shoe shop, Ladies and Gentlemen Invited, because he was visible from inside—or rather, the small seat of his pants and his poignantly narrow shoulders could be seen touching the window. The man—a large, pugilistic sort crammed into a jacket narrower than he, which made him look like a boy with a mustache who had outgrown his clothes—ran to his door and, flailing his arms, shooed Asher away. An onlooker would have thought he had caught the child stealing.
“That was unnecessary,” Chaya dared to say to him as stiffly as she could before taking the door handle and preparing to follow. “He was not hurting anything.”
“Soft hearts, young lady, lead to soft profits.” He was eyeing his window for damage. “And soft profits are the death of enterprise.”
She looked around at his stock of dusty boxes, of boots lined up like an army ready to march, of chairs unoccupied and his single bored clerk slouching at the rear. “Enterprise?” she echoed. “What a grand name for this”—she knew a very good word for what she saw, though she had no idea how to pronounce it—“this mous-oh-leum!”
All he did was, cruelly, laugh at her. She tried hard to flounce out the open door with outrage, but what she had to hear was even crueler. “Take yourself on back to Germany, lady. We don’t need foreign scum ruining our city.”
Bad enough that she was hardly German, but she did not have a clue what scum meant. But neither, she understood, was it a promising thing to be called. Asher was sitting flat on the ground below the visibility of the shopkeeper next door—Antler’s Dry Goods and Carpets, Foreign and Domestic—and she dusted off his bottom so vigorously he must have thought she was angry at him.
“It’s all right,” he reassured her and reached into his pocket. “Here.” He held out a folded paper, light blue, containing a set of black bootlaces scored like a rat’s tail. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get you some nice shoes. Your shoes look like you walked to Chicago in them.”
Chaya, not too appalled to laugh out loud, led her little brother around the corner onto a narrower street where they did not have to consider the irritability or suspicion of unlucky shopkeepers, and pulled them toward a peculiarly bright horizon, away from the signs of commerce. In fact, the air was growing more translucent with every step, as if they were walking into a pearl. Then—she never, in all the years to follow, forgot what this was like, the sight that burst upon her like a blow that lanced a blister of hardship and f
ear—there was the lake! They had been plying the streets of Chicago hand in hand like Hansel and Gretel in the dark wood under the beetling cornices of tall buildings all day, and had never thought to turn to the east.
Now they hurried across Michigan Boulevard, past its private houses, gray granite, built right to the corner. On the far side it was half swampy, half striped with railroad tracks; many impediments prevented their drawing close enough to touch it. But as they came near the azure water, Asher pulled his hand from hers and, whooping, ran as far toward it as he could. She should have scolded him but she was every bit as aghast as he was. Here was a treasure, and they had not even suspected.
Far out, the sky met the lake in a thick unwavering purple line the color of a nasty bruise. But no, that was wrong because it brought to mind ugly things, called up pain and accident, while this was so lovely, the colors so unlikely, she vowed that when “depression” came upon her—when she forgot the glory of all that man has not made—she would bring it to the water and be freed of it. Here in this place where air and water, two parts of the same mysterious substance, merged in utter silence, each became the other.
This lake was so serene, so much flatter than the shore, that she felt as if she had come to the end of solid earth, and was gazing, quite unexpectedly, over the edge into another realm. And the color of the horizon, she decided—it was time to search for joy—was the color of lilacs. They had no such bush on the farm, but a large one grew beside the door of her old school in Christa, so laden with those lavender flowers-made-of-flowers that its branches bent humbly toward the ground. She would have to master these jabs of homesickness, the faces of her Mama and Papa that made her wince with guilt. When she felt them, she promised herself, she would come to the lake and throw them in the way, on Rosh Hashanah, you were commanded to empty your pockets and fling what you found there—crumbs become sins—into moving waters.
WHEN THEY were home again—how quickly Mrs. Gottlieb’s flat had become home—and when Chaya had answered the widow’s earnest, worried questions about where they had inquired and how they had been treated, when she had removed shoes so painful that she wondered if she could put them on again tomorrow, Asher demonstrated that he had learned the plat of downtown streets and could have named for their concerned landlady every single shop into which his sister had tried to insinuate herself and her indispensability.
“That’s very fine, but weren’t you bored?” Chaya asked him. “Admit it, Asher, wouldn’t you rather stay here and find some friends to play with?”
Asher pinned her with that gaze. Since he had never had to go in search of playfellows, she had never thought about the peculiar impression her little brother would make on children his own age. Hadn’t he been the odd little sultan of their community, where he was already known? He had had his brothers and sisters, always. Hadn’t he, the nervy boy, his nose in everyone’s business, inspired amusement, affection and—perhaps it should be called tolerance? In his assorted interferences and curiosity he had been a challenge, an incitement, but a benign one, surely. She lacked the words for any of that, lacked them in two languages, but she could feel it: He was strange and strangely loveable.
But here on Liberty Street, around the corner on Maxwell? Would they eat him up out of jealousy? Out of bewilderment? Would older children, who could read, who went to school—would they allow him into their circle? Chaya saw them roughly playing, careening between the pushcarts, calling down the curses of the housewives they lurched into as they ran. Many were already working, she saw them selling everything from hats to brooms to bridles. Their voices were sharper than their elders’, their cries sliced through the air like wind instruments, harsh but clear.
Did he refuse to stay at home because he could guess how hard it would be, or did he simply prefer to be his sister’s shadow?
Asher was going to be a lonely boy.
SHE PULLED a chair from the row that composed her bed, dropped into it hard and sank her inflamed feet in a basin. At first they were so sore that even the water hurt. Asher was reading his book of jungle tales with his elbows on the table and Mrs. Gottlieb was fussing over the stove. They cost her effort: She had hauled the water up four flights of stairs for them. But she was relieved, Chaya could see, to have voices and movement in her house, and though they might not have been her Nachman, they came between her and her loneliness. They made her necessary.
Chaya could not exactly have said why she would not look at garment work. Something about its predictability made her recoil, and though she did not like to seem vain, there was something about joining the ranks of the thousands of girls bent over their machines—tied to their ceaseless movement—that repulsed her. Or, since she found that she shivered at the thought of using one, perhaps she was afraid of the machines themselves. Pesye’s cousin Fanya, who lived with her family in Cleveland, came once to the farm for a visit when she was unable to work because she had had an accident with her machine that, after infection and other hazards, cost her her right thumb! Chaya was not prepared to sacrifice a limb or a digit, even to pay the rent.
But their downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Seychek, gossiping with Mrs. Gottlieb at the water pump in the yard, told her there were openings in the cigar factory where her brother’s daughter worked. No sooner had Chaya heard this than—lacking any idea of what such a manufactory would be like, or the recognition that there may well have been nearly as many women at such work as there were in the garment shops—she found her way to
A. H. WINKLER’S HAVANA CIGARS
which was a broad, nondescript three-story building in a deserted-looking neighborhood a long walk from the trolley. She would discover at the end of the day that the quiet of its streets was only the result of the hundreds of workers’ immurement inside those factories: Had they been connected to a dynamo, they could have powered all of Chicago. And when they emerged, the street was transformed, a hive without a queen.
Here she had no reason to regret her dress; she needed no hauteur with which to impress the customers. The less interesting her demeanor, she quickly surmised, the more she must have seemed a promising worker who would not complain or demand or otherwise attract attention. The only thing she would have to do, though she could not yet have imagined it, was to allow herself to be overworked, underpaid, insulted, derided, and, from time to time, afflicted with a response she could not name until someone called it an allergy (a lovely word that sounded like a lullaby!) to the tobacco dust that hung in the air. The murk was like the fog that routinely shaded the farm in the spring when it was cool at night and warm in the morning. But this fog did not burn off.
When she climbed the stairs and entered the “floor,” she saw dozens of people—men, women, and a few suspiciously young children seated on boxes to elevate them—bent over wooden, desk-like tables, some facing each other, some beneath long windows that were covered with a sickly greenish-brown slime as if they were stagnant water. Chaya watched them bundling their cigars quickly but with great care, lining up tops and bottoms and binding them tightly, to be put in boxes that could be bought for next to nothing. The restaurants, the theaters, the dinner tables of Chicago were clotted with cigar smoke, unapologetically, from the humble to the grandiose. But at this point early in their creation, she wondered who would put such a rank thing in his mouth. One by one they could smell sweet, but together, and far from completed, they stank so badly she almost gagged.
The sour smell, grassy-turned-rancid, lifted Chaya off the sore soles of her feet. Surely the stockyards were worse, but this would take getting accustomed to. She barely existed in the eyes of A. H. Winkler, a jowly man with a shiny face and such heavy eyelids he seemed in danger of falling asleep as he spoke. He assigned her a salary: half the wage for six weeks and then if she proved satisfactory—at this he opened one eye wide as if to challenge her—a “raise.” The raise he promised was a small inducement, but she was without alternatives and so she smiled and nodded, though he wasn’t so much as look
ing at her for a response. Then, with a wave, he assigned her a sallow, freckled girl named Sara to instruct her, and ceded to her no rights to lag, complain, refuse, demand, or go anywhere near “that union,” or out she would go, “through that door the way you came in.”
Sara, who looked as if Mr. Winkler’s intimidation had worked perfectly on her, sapping her of whatever vitality she might have arrived with, took her to a little desk, sat herself down and as Chaya craned over her shoulder, and with barely a word, made her stogie, the lower-caste relative of the substantial Havana, lumpier, less well-wrapped and much cheaper—the people’s cigar, priced to sell to those who could not even afford it but bought it nevertheless.
“These are easier for you when you’re new. Upstairs they make ten-centers and Havanas.” She laughed. “We’re not in Havana last I noticed but I don’t care. I’m going up there soon.”
She removed a moist brown leaf from beneath a piece of damp cloth, stripped its spine in two viciously accurate slices, cut it with a cunning, lethal, moon-crescent of a knife, stuffed it with short unruly fragments over which she nonetheless had perfect control—“Not too loose, not too tight”—stood it in a mold that squeezed it hard, wrapped it, folded this side over that and that over this like a baby blanket, making little half-turns, dipped her finger into a cup of paste, applied it invisibly, lovingly smoothed the tip with her index finger as if she were testing a dog’s wet snout for its state of health and—there it was, a snub-nosed, slightly dewy, simultaneously soft- and hard-sided projectile fit for nothing but a man at leisure who did not mind its stink and, worse, its after-stink.
The Lake on Fire Page 7
