The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  “It’s the typhoid,” said Bella, her hand futilely clamped over her nose. “That’s what I heard from my brother-in-law, he works for the alderman. Those coats we were sending out—he said they must have been contaminated.” She sounded remarkably matter-of-fact about it. Her gossip usually turned out to be true. “Somebody must have reported, I don’t know how. Pearl. That means people caught sick!”

  Mrs. Gottlieb, who knew she ought to flee, had instead sat herself down on the step in a kind of surrender. The single eyebrow had promised the worst and here it was. “And Esther? Does anybody know how she—if she—?”

  Bella, still trying to stanch contagion with her bare hand, said, “You know, her brother died, I don’t know about him neither, and Esther—ai, I don’t want to think!” She moved her hand to her heart. “You know what else I don’t want to think?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “What that Kraswitz knew. That snake, did he care who he killed? I hope it catches him and puts him in the ground.”

  The other operator, a young woman named Nitze, who spoke only a few words of English, entreated them with her eyes to explain what was happening, but there was no way to do anything but pull her into a fierce embrace and then turn her toward the street and gesture her away. “He owe money!” she wailed, turning back to them. He did, and they would never see it, but that was the least of their worries.

  “Sickness!” Bella warned her. She did a little pantomime that would have made them laugh if it were only a game, a twitching and a long shivering stroke of her hands along her opposite arms, with a crazy face to go along with it. She did look like a woman jumping out of her skin.

  Nitze looked as though she thought them both insane. Finally she backed away and kicked up snow as she moved down the street. You could tell from the way she walked that she was in a fury, and used to it.

  Bella, whispering, asked, “Is everyone healthy in your house?”

  Mrs. Gottlieb pulled herself up very slowly to take herself home. “So far, baruch ha shem, everyone is healthy. But I don’t feel so good right now myself.”

  Bella did not make a move to embrace her. “You’re just imagining, Pearl. It’s only natural.”

  She sighed. “Maybe I’m sick because he ran away with four days’ pay.”

  “Better that than the other, dear. Go home and say a prayer. I’m putting some garlic around my neck, if it’s not too late. This whole city is a cesspool.”

  As she had turned to walk the fifty feet that separated the houses, Mrs. Gottlieb had seen the doctor’s wagon pull up before her very steps, and, hurrying down Liberty Street toward Maxwell, a hearse, black with fancy gold lettering, and two plumed horses, black as a bad-luck cat. Chicago hearses made the death-journey almost beautiful, the way their horses knew how to raise their feet and put them down again in perfect unison.

  But just when she thought her landlady was calm about all this, “Chaya-Libbe,” Mrs. Gottlieb murmured, keening from side to side like someone already in mourning. “If I brought this disease home with me to you and your brother! Oh!” she moaned. “I don’t care for myself, my life isn’t nothing with Nachman gone, my eyes are deserting me, I got no more work anyway—but you! You beautiful ones! My yingele!”

  Her yingele didn’t stir at the sound of her moaning. Chaya reached to comfort her but Mrs. Gottlieb held her away. “Imagine, those coats! Those coats must have carried the sickness up north to the stores where they sell them. Strangers at the racks at Marshall Field’s trying them on, paying good money for them! Those coats, they cost like solid gold. Bringing them home and—” It was too much for her and she wept and wept, but still would not let Chaya touch her. “Imagine—I looked at them so hard, every one of them, I ran them through my hands and I couldn’t see nothing. Couldn’t see no death in the cloth, Chaya! A plague right there and I was the inspector and I couldn’t see a single thing.”

  Chaya led her to her bed—Mrs. Gottlieb was hot with what she prayed was excitement and not fever, and laid her down fully dressed, and from the icy water in the pail brought a compress for her head that startled her with its chill. “And that family, what happens now, that whole Kraswitz family, the sister, the cousins? The old lady! To run away in the night like that, so cold, so black, where would they go?”

  Poison in the fibers, poison in the air. Chaya-Libbe had not been there to touch it or breathe it in herself, and she did not believe it could leap so far from their origin that it could find the innocents in apartment 4C, houses away. She would not consider it. She went to her bed—those chairs that punished her nightly—and promised she would not be sick, and neither would Asher.

  While they slept, the river boiled on, bubbling with the refuse of the city. Lay a match upon it and it would have roared itself into furious fire. It was a wonder they hadn’t all died of it a long time ago.

  THEY DID not sicken, Asher and she, but Mrs. Gottlieb hovered for weeks in a peculiar state that Chaya attributed to some elixir of fear and sympathy that she had drunk the day her employer decamped and swept his family away as if they had never existed. She lay in a lethargy, not feverish as she would have been had the disease wracked her; she did not seem to be in pain, her gut, her head, her limbs no way afflicted. Only she lay, insisting on darkness, and slept and woke. Occasionally she called Chaya by the name of her mother or perhaps one of her sisters; she turned away the food they brought and said no more than she asked—not a single thing.

  Chaya never told her that her dear neighbor, Mrs. Seychek—the one who had suggested the cigar shop to her—had perished along with one of her half-grown children. (Hers was the destination of the doctor Mrs. Gottlieb had seen entering the house. How could she not have known where he was headed.) Everything lay under a pall, like a spell of weather that would not pass.

  IN HER own shop, listening hard while her fingers did their repetitive business, Chaya lived the life of hearsay; heard rumors, before winter locked its clamp around them, that Chicago was still the wonderland of pleasure that she had staked their life on. Sundays in a greensward called Lincoln Park, where couples strolled and punted about in rowboats on a swatch of pond, weeknights uptown in the opera houses and music halls—the Haverly, McVicker’s, Hooley’s Theatre, and Shelby’s Academy of Music—gorgeous shows on the stage, dancers in feathers and flamboyant bows, orchestras sawing and soaring, and in their seats, audiences made up of every class and kind, the common to the grand, separated only by the distance of the gallery from the boxes. The streets in summer had been aswirl with comers and goers and children rode the shoulders of their fathers to see above their heads. Even into the uncertain weather of October, sailboats plied the lake, and steamers with crowded decks; regattas ruled the horizon, white-winged and thick as gulls, and across the whole of it one could often glimpse the mayor, a much-beloved Kentuckian named Carter Harrison, astride his horse, wearing a great-brimmed hat and waving triumphantly at his constituents, who gratefully waved back. She had never seen the mayor, her life lived so closely in areas of the city to which it did not seem necessary for him to come, but she had heard descriptions of his legendary romps, and imagined him a sort of king measuring out the bounds of his territory.

  Who were the women, she wondered, who possessed the time, not to mention the wherewithal, to enjoy the set table of this city? Were they the ones with husbands or, at the least, sweethearts who demanded they take some rest, and contributed a part of their wages to the project? Had she managed to be granted a salesgirl’s place, right in the center of so much activity—she recalled that above the tide of strollers waved a giant balloon in the shape of the World’s Fattest Lady (a freak show was coming to the Hippodrome) and clowns on stilts stepped between the dray horses—would she have taken part in those delights that amused the more affluent? In response to threats of insurrection, the cable car had just ceased to cost fifteen cents and could now be ridden for a nickel. Still, if she could have walked there, she’d gladly have done so.

  She had no suitors and she h
ad less than no cash money; she also had not an hour to spare. Sundays she could perhaps have gone to some kind of diversion, but she was so exhausted that even the idea of relaxing on demand seemed a burden. And there was no threshold she could cross that did not cost money she couldn’t spare. If anything, she wondered, now that her landlady had become but another mouth to feed, whether she should try to find a third employer. But it would be no favor to Asher, she reasoned, if she collapsed in the traces like so many of the horses who lay dead or panting in the street—at least winter kept them from turning foul and nurturing nests of flies and their maggoty offspring—and so she kept that day for recuperation.

  She had fallen into a depression only slightly less enveloping than Mrs. Gottlieb’s. With winter rapping its icy fist against the windows and no one making a particular effort to seek her out, she burned as feebly as a candle guttering out. The farm had been no worse than this. If she was going to freeze, she might as well have been with people who loved her.

  One morning she woke to find her lips coated with a rime of frost. When she parted them, they bled. She was in no mood to credit idealism as a stimulant: Liberty Street, a sty from its earliest day, had been named by a joker or a fool.

  She missed so much that her only passion was loss and the anger that accompanied it. What an endless list of deprivations she could make: She missed red. The streets were black and white; gray was nothing but schmutz, that ugly word for dirt. At work her eyes were fixed on the slime of a greeny-brown; their rooms were so bleak during the short hours she was at home that she would not even assign them a color. With an emptiness she never knew she could have felt, she missed music, which hardly existed without cost—carfare, admission, luxuries beyond her. She almost convinced herself to enter a shul if it would mean that she could listen to singing, hear melody, harmony, rhythm; could close her eyes and be salved. But, she remembered, there was, in worship, so much more muttering than singing, so much more swaying than free and joyous movement that it was not worth her angering her father in absentia by joining the pious.

  But most, she missed her boy. Asher had gone feral, except at nighttime. He was nothing to her but anxious obligation: to keep him under a paid-for roof, to clothe him badly but prevent him from running bare, to pray that luck ran with him. He was not the only child who spent the day without a guardian; they teemed in this coldhearted place, unclaimed, unprotected, uncontrollable. Winter or no winter, packs of boys still ran through the market, knocking against pushcarts, stealing fruit, menacing, whether or not they intended to be. At least he did not sleep out under the sky.

  And she was bereft of one last thing: her body. This was a defect in her life that she kept suppressed, buried as deep as she could keep it: simply the need for touch and warmth. Evenings, when she came dragging home from her buckeye, she sat herself beside Mrs. Gottlieb—their sleeping beauty in her hairnet, her skein of creases—and gratefully laved her face and body with water she had first warmed on the stove, a bucketful that she had carried up in the morning lest she have to go to the pump at midnight. Slowly, allowing herself to feel and enjoy the rises and declivities of a living body, though its pulse beat perilously faint, she swirled the soft cloth over Mrs. Gottlieb’s shoulders, under her fallen breasts, along the shriveled planes of her thighs and legs, all the way to her cool splayed toes, and gave thanks that she was alive, perhaps to feel touch in some way that might bring her back to life.

  Chaya had, in her years at the Fields of Zion, been pressed to help perform the taharah on a few—she had only assisted with children—who had died. This was the purification of the body for burial, an affair that utilized a great deal of water, interspersed with prayers and the humble housekeeping tasks of rooting out dirt from under the fingernails, in the whorls of the ears, and anywhere else the soilage of living might have lodged it. Having done those duties, she never again saw her own nails innocently; they had become memento mori. “Master of the Universe,” the women would say in unison, “through mercy, hide and disregard the transgressions of this departed. May she tread with righteous feet into the Garden of Eden, for that is the place of the upright, and God protects the pious.”

  But the departed was a child, one dead of the measles, another of a fall into their pond, having slipped on the slimy shore; she had not had time to transgress! Her sister Sorele had been one of them, gone in an instant, innocent and unprotected. She was not allowed to prepare her and a good thing: She was so grieved, so uncomforted, she knew that if something terrible happened to her, she would not be one of the protected—she believed none of it. Then—she would always silently apologize for what would have been an affront to the living—they would fling enormous gouts of water they’d dragged from the pond, ignoring the motes risen from its silty bottom, pretending God’s own power sanctified and made it clear. “Respect the dead,” her father had instructed her the first time she took part in the ceremony, “but bite your tongue on all that mumbling.”

  At least, she assured herself, Mrs. Gottlieb might still wake if she stung her skin with the cloth sufficiently hard to move the blood around. She could not lay tranced forever, could she? Chaya picked up and scrubbed at the callused hands that had touched so many objects and people in her lifetime, had cooked so many dinners and sewn so many seams, and had so recently felt their way around those dark, doomed overcoats. Perhaps she was sick, really sick with the blight she had breathed, or brought home under her fingernails, but it was easier to believe Mrs. Gottlieb had been laid low by an insult to her pride. Her torpor did not seem physical, somehow; it felt like a refusal. Meanwhile, just to pass her fingers across that flesh, which was warm and still quick, to bathe the sores that sometimes bloomed where she lay too long without stirring—having failed at all else, at least Chaya had not yet finished failing her.

  USUALLY SHE rushed from Winkler’s to Yanowitz’s, one master to the next, with hardly a moment between in which to breathe freely. She walked out the factory door into a street on which the moon alone, with little help from the streetlights, made even the dirty snow glisten like crumbled glass. The city all around was thick with dark; this was not a neighborhood where people lived, its only life the life of capital. These hulks of buildings existed in part to fulfill the needs of the populace, but chiefly to put money in the pockets of men like Winkler, whose pouchy, overstuffed physique seemed to Chaya a perfect representation of his greed. Oily-faced and bulging at every seam of his vest and jacket, perspiring through his shirt on the days when they saw him jacketless, his rolls of neck-fat like a baby’s thighs, only not so adorable, he was as gross as his selfishness in the face of his minions.

  So it was hardly surprising that this night, emerging a little bit later than the others on her shift because she had misplaced a glove in the cloakroom and had spent too many minutes on hands and knees in a futile search for it, Chaya came into the street alone, one hand plunged into her pocket for warmth. Usually she walked a long, bracing way to her buckeye, to Yanowitz’s, where her humiliation was subtler but no less galling.

  But on this night, who can say why, she could not, could not, do it. Here was that entropy, though she had no name for it; it was only a nameless stoppage. She was a mule who would not budge. Her legs locked and would not propel her, though they did not feel particularly weak. She felt the way she had one noontime on the farm when she had been stooped weeding the overrun rows in a punishing sun: Her vision was spotted with sunbursts of light and her forehead went damp, until she felt the earth tipping and her poor, light body about to slip right off it. Now she knew that she must keep her footing and not collapse on the hard-packed snow and so she made her way to the wall of the factory and leaned against it while her vision slowly cleared. She might have closed her eyes for a minute or two while she swayed there. She would not have been surprised if she even dozed on her feet, like a bird on a perch.

  When she opened them, a man was standing a few feet before her, perhaps a worker from Winkler’s, perhaps from a
nother of these sties that contained so many. But as her sight cleared, she saw he was not dressed as workers dress. Some of the high-skilled, high-paid men from up in Havana Golds loved to come to work all dandied up, in slick suits and bowlers that they changed before they sat down, but they overdid it; their crude glamour was only a kind of showing off. This one wasn’t trying to prove anything. By his derby and overcoat, and the shining silk scarf that caught the light at his throat, he would have been one of the managers who came to work attired as the gentleman he—at least in theory—was. “Wouldn’t you like to come with me, gorgeous?” he whispered into the darkness. “We can have us a nice dinner and a glass or two.”

  Just before he came close enough to put a hand on her, she managed to find a sliver of a voice and say, “If you please, sir, you have no reason to approach me.”

  He stopped short and looked closely at her, head to toe, with a sort of patronizing care, as if he had to ascertain what she had said with his own eyes. “Excuse my forwardness, young lady, but I thought you might be in some distress.”

  This was all that passed between them, though it was on her lips to say, “That was hardly the burden of what you proposed to me.” Instead, shamed, though the shame should have been his, she assured him she was in no need of his assistance. With one finger he touched his hat brim to her and turned away. She felt herself shudder with desolation. What would it matter if she allowed him to put his clean, well-manicured hands on her body like Horny Henry, or gone with him to a room above a shop somewhere, or to a hotel, where he might lay her open to the lamplight and enjoy her youth, her quickly wilting, bone-weary youth? She missed her sisters, with whom she had shared a bed for so long that Dvorele and Masha seemed limbs of her own body. Even Asher no longer put his arms around her neck.