But oh, wouldn’t a glass of wine have been lovely!
Why not? she asked herself. Why not go with him, and receive some coins for his exertions? Exactly as she would have had she drunk too much wine or downed too many thumbs’ worth of brandy, she could not remember why one mode of behavior was better than the next. Whom would it hurt if she gave herself into this or some other man’s grip and—in a warmer room than the one she was going home to—invited him to strip her many layers of dulling, obliterating fabric and show her lonely breasts and belly to a windowful of moon? Did she not need, as deeply as any man, to be touched, to be held close and kept warm? Why did women lay such strictures on themselves? At that moment, and many a moment to come, she could not remember. All she knew was that she was so tired of thinking.
Had the young man turned back to her instead of heading, she suspected, for some place like the Levee or Printer’s Row where many a gentleman tickled an unresistant woman into laughter, who knows where she might have gone with him, and what she might have discovered she could become.
THE NEXT morning she spent bent over her work, wielding her curved knife with a nearly irresponsible vigor born of remorse, when she felt a tiny shift in the air, the way one unaccountably feels eyes upon one’s neck, though from behind and out of sight. That, like a plucked string, was the infinitesimal atmospheric vibration she perceived. What could she think but that their warden or his warden, either Winkler’s officious son-in-law or Winkler himself, was striding towards them across the littered floor.
But there came a swell of laughter—a small ripple at first, as if the laughers were uncertain how to react—and then more and more of her neighbors joined in, stopping their work to gaze into the middle distance. Before she could even change her focus from the pile of leaves on her desk, there came the scraping of a bench being moved slowly and laboriously, with an awful squawk of wood against wood, and then she nearly fell off her own bench when finally she saw: Her brother Asher, little imp, daring creature, was climbing, bare knees first, onto the seat. In one hand he clutched a book.
Asher’s eleventh birthday had very recently come and gone with no celebration, as they did not much mark those occasions at home with their parents. He had somehow managed, in the face of scant food and trying weather, both inner and outer, to keep his clarity and—what could one call it but his shine? Though she had hardly taken notice lately, she saw through the eyes of her fellow-workers, a few of whom had heard of him but had never seen him, that his radiance, his wholeness of being, were intact. He removed his cap, which he placed carefully by his side—the bench was wide and he was narrow. He looked straight into Chaya’s stricken face and then, without a word, he pulled his knees up to make something to lean his book against, and began to read.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
“Asher!” she called out in the tone she used for correction.
But he ignored her. “There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.” His accent was faint, his emphases imprecise, but his confidence held every sentence together.
Her bench-mates, even the ones who understood no English, delighted, clapped their hands. She was confused. Was confounded. There were appreciative murmurings from the women, a few of whom flattened their palms to their bosoms and deeply inhaled, as women are wont to do when they are overwhelmed by the charm of someone or something (more often than not, as now, an adorable—an ideal—child).
She left her seat and hurried to him. When he closed his book, she claimed him, clutching him to her, not for the credit his performance might bring her but because he had accomplished what she thought he had hoped to: He had cleared her dimming vision and restored himself there, at its center. He reminded her why they had come to this difficult place and why, in spite of all, she could not take him home again. He had always had unusually unblinking eyes—like a cat’s—and he turned them full upon her now. Very simply, and too quietly to be overheard, he said, “You don’t let me read to you any more.”
She opened her mouth to defend herself and closed it again, rebuked by the truth.
“I have new books you never saw and you don’t even care.”
All Chaya could do was hold him to her, though she was the one in need of comforting, and shake her head. A murmur of approval surrounded them like smoke.
THAT IS how Asher—who had barely heard of Cuba and never of Ybor City, Florida, or of the Yiddish performers in several factories in New York—became a Reader. He did Shakespeare; he did as much Dickens as the day allowed, and if he could find one somewhere on his afternoon jaunts when he was done with them, the day-old newspaper. “Mayor warns of economic woes,” he intoned, in as loud a voice as he could summon. Fortunately, cigar-making is a quieter business than shirtwaists-sewing or die-stamping. Where those were all clattering, stuttering machines, the background music at Winkler’s was only the inaudible hiss of knife around leaf rib and the small thump to even the packets of finished stogies against their wooden stations. “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive,” and “Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street of Salem Village,” and where Asher mispronounced ocular deception and Claus of Innsbruck, few, if any, of his grateful listeners could tell the difference.
To Chaya’s surprise, though he did not cheer, neither did Winkler object. He must have decided that Asher, der kleyner yingl, pacified his slaves, kept them awake and attentive and—best of all—cost him nothing. To her further surprise, her fellow workers, especially the women who were not at home with their own children as they would have wished, were sufficiently enchanted that, without complaint, they contributed from their own puny wages. Each week they flicked a coin into a cigar box, and Asher, beaming, emptied it into his palm and then into his pocket. He tried not to gloat but his tight little smile gave away his pleasure.
And so, as the year advanced from dark December toward the light of a sweeter season, they began their slow, word-by-word, page-by-page ascent into a life that would have been preposterous to imagine.
13
HAD THERE been a competition at the time Asher embarked upon—or was abducted into—his celebrity, the city of Chicago would have won the laurels for speediest city on earth. It was called, again and again, a go-getters’ town. Its cable cars ran faster than New York’s; this had been calibrated; it was provable, by those who cared. Its skyscrapers—a lovely word, so graphic, so arrogant—were taller and more original, its politicians more corrupt, its ladies of the night (and dusk and dawn) more numerous and, it was whispered, more innovative. Scandals broke out more frequently than rain showers: the drug-mad son of a famous industrialist, dead by his own hand in rooms above a red-light crib. Bankers in bed with elected men. News reporters bought with a few rounds of mediocre whiskey. There were a few streets on which brothels alternated with saloons, punctuated by thriving pawnshops, all so unapologetically that it was a market zone as public as Maxwell Street.
Though little of this was apparent to her in the work-worn dimness of that year, it was certainly made clear to Chaya in the bright light into which they had begun to hurtle without realizing it. Asher had been the factory’s Reader for a few months when, smirking, Winkler’s s
on engaged him to amuse his guests at a party.
In spite of his unprecedented accomplishments, Asher was a young boy, and frightened.
“You do,” Chaya advised him, “exactly as you do on the cigar factory floor. Do as you like—that is what they want you for.”
From what height did this sudden confidence descend?
She had begun to suspect the two of them were made of different stuff than the Winklers and Yanowitzes, and that, in spite of their penury—every thin cent went toward bread and milk—was not something to regret. The Owners had the wit for making deals and enforcing obedience; they were, at heart, employers, and would always have servants to command, while she and her brother had a somewhat frailer constitution: So driven to words, books, the ineffable objects of the imagination, what they trafficked in was invisible. If the Winklers or their children were born with silver spoons in their mouths, the Shaderowskys were born teething on syllables, which were less solid but cost nothing. Apparently there was a place, however minimal, however subtly maligned, where both types could meet.
In the wild bazaar on Maxwell and Liberty Streets, on Morgan and Taylor, that throbbed with commerce as many hours of the day as light prevailed, there were two kinds of merchants. There were the staid and steady, who hawked their gloves or their fish or their findings—who stood in one place barking out reports of the falling barometer of bargains, half-price as the day advanced, then quarter when dusk closed in and began to envelop what they had failed to sell.
And then, like fireflies, there were the entertainers. Someone with lithe step could always be seen darting through the crowd, entreating, inquiring, planting suggestions of desperate need where none had been before: “You must own this!” “You cannot dare go home without that!” They thrived on surprise and innovation. More than once, a boy on a high-wheeled bicycle careened through the aisles, peddling hats that he balanced on a stick. When a shopper inquired about one of them, rather than soberly lowering his poker, he would alarm his customer instead by thrusting it upward, making a cap or a bonnet tumble saucily down right into his hand. Just so, there were stilt walkers, hawkers of birds who lifted off an index finger and faithfully returned at a whistle, singers with accordions, fiddlers, harmonica players, drummers: This was the adventuring class, unperturbed at looking foolish, subject to unmotivated grinning, liable to own a tambourine, in every way cleverer—dreamier—than the ones who stood still and waited for customers to come to them. Asher was an artist like these. He was made to wander the aisles of the bookshop rather than the market, but he was closer to their spirit of self-delight and irrepressible self-promotion than to the sturdy entrepreneurs who owned the pushcart and oiled its wheels, kept its inventory and worried about its take. He was not the salt of the earth, Asher Shaderowsky. He was unadulterated spice.
ASHER
14
ASHER WAS now, his sister told him, public property. Whatever that meant. For his first party he was given a dollar and a dinner. Chaya’s Mr. Winkler had a son named Chaz who had a wife and on their anniversary he seemed to think Asher would make an enticing “amuse-bouche.” Asher heard a muse bush and wondered if he was, somehow, to impersonate a hedge. And which muse? Clio? Thalia? Mel-pe-money? It made no sense, but a dollar was a dollar.
He and Chaya were greeted at the back door of a house that looked like a miniature bank or what were those pillars for? He watched the maid whisk her eyes up Chaya and down again, lingering over her collar, which, true, was thready, but clean, and raise her nose to sniff as if they smelled foul—he heard the sniff. Did she think she was the mistress of the house? He opened his mouth to remind her she was only a maid but his sister widened her eyes with warning and he wilted.
He had brought Ariosto to read, a little Orlando Furioso because it was full of jagged sounds, exercise for his tongue. Chaz’s son, a pudgy overgrown boy at least, say, twenty, stared without apology as if Asher had come directly from the zoo. Asher sat on a tall chair like a toy Buddha, ankles crossed and knees akimbo—a kimbo! What was a kimbo?—and bore being pelted with questions. “Who was the third president of our great nation?” “Don’t you know that?” he asked before he singsonged, “Thomas Jefferson,” and “Where would one look for the River Ganges?” which he took a while to parse because he had never heard the name pronounced. Wasn’t it Gan-gess? Apparently not. It was rude to ask things just to catch him in not-knowing. The questions were cheese in a mousetrap and he had to snatch carefully lest he be caught.
“Well,” Mrs. Chaz Winkler murmured to her husband out of the side of her mouth as if Asher couldn’t hear her. “Well, the poor shortpants is a little Jew. They know too much by half.” She wanted me to hear her, Asher thought. When you overheard something, that meant you heard too much.
“But our son, who reads badly, is also a Jew, as are you and I, my dear,” her husband replied bleakly, “and I don’t notice that our intellects have been much improved by it.”
What’s worth a dollar? Asher asked himself as, dismissed, he and Chaya fled down the wooden back steps into the yard. If he asked for two next time—if there was a next time—it might be worth it. That was when Chaya told him he was now public property. If he did this kind of thing he would be fingered, she said, like yard goods.
Yard? Like the grass they were crossing? Goods? Bads, more like it. How unsensible, this language, whose strangeness only ceased when he was asleep.
15
AT THE other parties that followed, as Asher was handed from one to another delighted friend tired of tableaux vivants and in need of “original” entertainment, Chaya stood beside her boy in a hall as large as half the common room at the Fields of Zion, and watched the guests giving their overcoats to those whose lot it was only to handle things that did not belong to them. Every surface shone with the gleam of their effort—tabletops, doorknobs, floorboards that showed between the lushly flowered carpets. Bowls of flowers, carefully arranged, chattered their thanks to the parlormaids, or so she fancied. The fringes of the table shawls, paisley, velvet, lace, quivered with the breeze of their hasty passing. Electric lights, dim but steady, warmed the rooms through which they hurried, obedient, carrying to, carrying away.
Chaya found that, identifying herself with them, she regarded those workers as the subjects and the owners of the houses as the mere objects, blank, faceless, whited out to the color of ash. The day she found herself fascinated by how easy it would be to raise, unseen, a long declarative scratch in the mahogany hall table of Mrs. Miles Cantwell—why did this not happen more often, it would be so easy to incise a wound with any sharp stick!—she began to worry about herself.
The Winklers and their friends should have put her out. Furious, subversive in her heart, she was a spy for their ill-wishers. Rather than the awed peasant girl she was certain they saw in her, if they bothered to see anything—the keeper of that little genius boy—she had begun saving up grievances to become their nemesis.
And little by little, as the winter began to thaw, Mrs. Gottlieb stirred from her hibernation. On the day Chaya discovered her sitting, though weakly, on the edge of her bed, she was beyond gratitude. Asher leaned into her empty bowl of a lap, one small elbow on each of her hidden thighs, and stared into her eyes gravely, like a doctor come to pronounce her cured.
16
CHAYA’S FELLOW cigar-makers—not the skilled elite who worked upstairs on the Clear and Seed Havanas or the ten-centers who were well paid in dollars and self-respect, but the peons with whom she struggled for penny-wages—had been threatened, after they submitted a brief list of demands: for longer work breaks (often they had none), for the right to use the toilets when they needed to, for a mere penny more per packet of stogies. They had been told that they were easily replaced, and worse, that their names would be made available to other cigar shops and they would never be employed again. An old, crude story, all of it, and all of it well comprehended. Ill-used, they could hardly feel unique, could only roil about and protest to each
other. They were captive and they knew it.
That, one indignity piled on another, was why they decided to strike. Chaya was not deceived by the reputation of organized labor simply because it had its own sufferings—stogie-makers, women all, were not allowed in the union. Their product was considered close to shameful, casually assembled in the eyes of the purists and sold for less than a song, and so they were only a sad band of wives and girlfriends who, after weeks of whispering, gathered one morning before work outside the south factory door to plan their campaign of refusal.
It was a travesty, even Chaya could see that, to try to intimidate Winkler and family when they could hardly catch the eye of the union, white men mainly, a few Slavs, a few Spanish-speakers, indifferent to the peasants downstairs with their jangly languages, their sloppy handiwork, their voices. Once she saw Mr. Winkler’s son cover his ears and mutter, “The noise those pigeons make! If I didn’t have a headache after a trace too much brandy last night, I would have one now after a morning down here!” How fortunate for him that Asher shut them up a few hours a day, piping out, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” That was so perfect for the moment that Chaya asked him to repeat it.
But her coworkers did their best, and she loved them for it. They managed to spread the word to two other factories nearby that employed women like herself at the bottom of the stack, where their grievances collected like the muck that thickened the air on the factory floor. They would not stop work but would demonstrate first, civilly, knowing that without support they could not really strike. They would carry signs and picket and hope that, at the least, embarrassment—public shame, even—would weigh on their bosses and chip, even modestly, at their greed. Chaya had never carried a sign before, but not only did she march with a splintery stick in her closed fist and feel how it caught the wind like a sail and threatened to fly away, she had lettered the board herself: FAIRNESS FOR ALL!! it said. Sara carried WE DESERVE TO BEHEARD.
The Lake on Fire Page 11
