There was no response, neither threat nor—how could they be surprised?—acquiescence. Nor did the union deign to acknowledge them with as much as a word or a gesture. They marched during the short time allotted for their midday dinners, careful not to overstay it. They marched before work and after work, and one day someone brought a newspaper that reported their “nonstrike” with a snide laugh: “The women stamped about the periphery of the buildings like frantic chickens in a barnyard denied their feed. As usual, like Carmen, the pretty ones looked prettier for being peeved.” Finally, most patronizing of all, the owner of a factory that faced theirs on Cullerton Street, John Senning—an old man as different from Winkler as could be imagined, white-haired, slender and stiff-cravatted—sent down to them a vat of hot cider “to warm your cold-hearted disloyalty,” they were told by his lackey as he set it in the middle of the circle of pickets. They only stared at it, too deflated to drink, knowing themselves the object of derision and all the more fury-driven for that. Sara seized the kettle in both bare hands and, heavy though it was, turned it upside down until all the cider had run into the slush and melted it into puddles so pink they looked like blood many times diluted.
But as Chaya turned to go up to her work, gibbering angrily to herself about power and its obverse, a voice behind her called, “Pardon me, miss,” and she turned her bitter face back toward the street. She felt vixenish and liked it. There stood a young man, beautifully clothed in soft, heathery wools of a kind not generally seen on the factory steps. “I believe we’ve met,” he called to her, and removed his hat, while she riffled the empty pages of her memory, incapable of imagining such a thing. He was decidedly not the rake who had issued that lewd invitation the night she had slumped, failing, against the factory wall. Who, though, would she have had occasion to know who in any way resembled this man? One of the parties where Asher had played Fauntleroy, perhaps? He came towards her a step. “The evening on which you arrived in Chicago with your little brother, do you remember? Miss—Shadow—I think.”
Her face, she could feel, turned as pink as that spilled cider with mortification. When she could find her voice, she was quite compelled to ask, “Whatever has brought you out today, sir?” Was he, she wondered, one of the owners of these sties? Such a comfortable prince, every hair in place, the kind of young man who could afford to change his shirt twice in a day if his business so demanded. He looked as if he could be the grandson of John Senning.
His answer startled her. “I read about your efforts in the Tribune.” He frowned and she saw that he was running the yielding brim of his hat between his fingers as if he were less than wholly collected. “And I hazarded to think your group might enjoy some moral support. This must be very difficult.”
Truly? She checked his face for incipient laughter at their expense. “You are not here to deride us like the rest?”
“I am not.” He smiled, that same benign, undemanding benison she now remembered from their first encounter. Had he been the devil masquerading as a man, she’d have trusted him entirely for the way his smile rearranged his features so ungrudgingly. “I support your efforts entirely,” he said, “and I only wish I could bring some influence to bear on the men who hold the tillers of these pirate ships.”
She hardly had time, just then, to consider what it entailed for a man like Gregory Stillman to indict these men as the pirates they were, but she would have as much time as she needed when the moment cooled. Now all she could do was wonder at how such a gift could be given to someone who had never prayed, not an instant, in her life.
“PLAYING” THE parties with Asher was like drinking poison for Chaya. She could hardly expect a child to have a conscience about such things; he was properly delighted to be a star that burned in the perfect center of every eye, to be stroked and fed like a cherished pet for his repertoire of tricks and—realistic enough—to actually contribute to their pathetic little household fund. He might have been uniquely literate but, too, he was very good with numbers.
At one party he elicited terrific applause simply for reading a bit of Sophocles in his young boy’s unbroken voice. “‘Tis plain that thou art brooding on some dark tidings!” Clearly it gave great pleasure to the hosts and their friends to take sympathetic notice of Asher’s impoverished clothes, his run-over shoes and rather dilapidated cap, even the stains on his shirt collar whose permanence had long since been confirmed in the hottest water Chaya could produce. She believed the discrepancy between the richness of his mind and the poverty of his circumstances sent a collective shiver up the spine of the men and women who sat on the same delicate chairs that were used for chamber music recitals and, in all their absurdity, tableaux vivants. He was better than an organ-grinder’s monkey.
They were finally freed from the kitchen: Their hosts heaped their plates as if in obeisance to someone touched by God. Chaya loved the food, how could she not have, but it felt like alms. She tongued a ladyfinger, opened, halved, spread with something the cook called crème fraîche, and closed again. It should have been bitter but its sweetness blazed on her tongue.
AND TO complicate her anger, she had begun to be courted by Gregory Stillman, whose motives she mistrusted but whose decency and concern, not to mention his out-and-out beauty—his forthright gaze, the sharp angle of his cheekbones, the way his hair lay on his neck with a kind of vulnerable softness she had only seen in young boys—undermined her antagonism.
On the day of the nonstrike, before she resumed her bench at Winkler’s, he had said, with his usual courtesy, “I would be privileged to hear more about your grievances. I cannot promise to be more than a sympathetic ear for your qualms.” He smiled at himself as if to make his proposal casual. “Just a shoulder on which to lean, if leaning might relieve you.”
Chaya, blushing, eyed that shoulder beneath its tweed and imagined what it would feel like bare beneath her own bare hand. She told him that she was forced to go every evening from Winkler’s to her buckeye, where, if it happened to be unfinished, Yanowitz could complete her day’s humiliation. Could reject her careful work if his mood was sour. Could deny her the few minutes it took to walk to the wretched toilet until she sat at her bench clenched against shame. Where, in effect, he could practice the drill of a “big” as opposed to a “little” boss, in case the occasion were to present itself whereby he could embitter the lives of two hundred instead of ten of them.
Thus Gregory Stillman heard every injury Chaya could conjure from memory, nor could she have said which was the stronger, embarrassment at her self-pity or the refreshment of speaking, for once, to someone other than a fellow sufferer. She watched him carefully as she ran through her brief of pains and was thrilled to see his lovely dark-blue eyes actually shine with sympathy at her recital. There was power in weakness, she saw, if it was focused, like a mirror that, aimed at the sun, could set paper afire.
He volunteered to travel with her, sometimes by hack, sometimes in his father’s carriage drawn by matching bays, from her large factory to her small—that was the best he could do. This eased the travail of getting herself to Yanowitz’s and it gave her a chance to sit tight against him, thigh to thigh, though there were layers of winter wool between them, thick as a bundling board. She could not decide whether he was as good a man as he seemed, or was a practiced dissimulator who understood that some women are wooed more effectively by vulnerability than by mastery and menace. Stories were rife, as she sat at her cigar board wielding her little blade and pinching her leaf ends with callused fingertips, concerning young women who could not tell the difference and sinned themselves into captivity, motherhood, or both.
There was, just then, to pique her guilty conscience, a young man named Hirschl, so thin she was certain he was consumptive, who spoke with her whenever they touched shoulders on the whining staircase at Winkler’s, or, rather, tried to speak but was—in spite of that conscience—rebuffed. She hated to admit that he repulsed her, his deflated chest over which his shirt belled out empty as a
sheet in the wind, his thin curls, his shoulders hunched protectively, everything about him earnest and unhealthy. She had the sickening feeling that he was searching for one last love before he lay himself down for eternity. When he spoke to her, asking a moment, just a moment of her time, she smelled his sad, moldy breath and thought of graveyard dirt. Gregory had about him the delicate, tampered-with scent of whatever it was men doused themselves with after they bathed. It shamed her to think of him bathing, but there it was, ineradicable as it was indecent. “Please,” she said to Hirschl, and passed quickly down the stairs, pulling her skirts away, flattening herself to the wall.
ONE SUNDAY afternoon, having heard from Chaya that Asher was to work—odd how the words work and play were interchangeable when they concerned entertainment—at the home of a Harry Carter, Gregory came striding toward them, broadly smiling. “I didn’t tell you that Harry is my cousin,” he said with a grin, and stood closer to her than he ought to, given the number of eyes that surrounded them.
That information only made her want to inch away.
Harry Carter’s grand granite house—guarded by lions, heads on paws, which made them more amiable than threatening—possessed a library, which Asher very quickly discovered. When the dessert course arrived, though little boys were expected to bend toward it like sunflowers to light—so said Mrs. Harry Carter, looking anxious—he was missing.
Chaya feared he was rifling the bedrooms upstairs but when she learned that one of the downstairs rooms contained thousands of volumes, she was not surprised to discover him lost in a cavernous brown leather chair, book against bent knees. He was immersed in the verses of Pliny the Younger. “Next week,” he said, “when I read at one of these, I’ll give them this. ‘The living voice is that which sways the soul.’ Isn’t that nice? But—Chai, what does that mean, sway? How can the soul sway?” He moved his shoulders as if they were being stirred by the wind.
Chaya imagined the pious ones back at the farm, bobbing as they prayed.
She held him firmly by one undulating shoulder. “Do you have anything in your pocket?”
He scoured her face. It was neutral, which he took for approval she would not put into words.
“Thucydides.” Thusi-dides, he said, but she did not have a better idea. It was a small green gold-tooled volume, ringed with fleurs-de-lis, so soft to the touch that, when he handed it to her, smiling with the avidity of a victor at an auction, she found its covers to have the exact texture of a fresh leaf of tobacco.
“He won’t miss it,” Asher said triumphantly. “I’ll show you.” He stood on his toes, reached up to a wide shelf of someone called Wilkie Collins, and pulled down a book. “The whole room is like this.” He held the book upside down by its covers and Chaya saw what so disgusted him: how, hanging down, the uncut pages buckled and made little tents on which the letters seemed to crawl like ants.
“He ought to give one of his help a sharp knife and a month’s leave from kitchen duty,” Chaya said, laughing.
“He needs to hire me,” Asher answered, and stuffed the Thucydides in his pocket, where it made a suspicious bulge no one would inspect because who knew what small boys carried—rocks, penknives, the skins of snakes they’d killed. “I could slit the whole lot of them open in a week. But what difference would it make?”
“Asher,” she began, not certain where she was going. Could she really defend those vain and empty-headed children?
“Chaya, why don’t these people make you mad? All you do is work and work so we can eat and they’re spending their money on seeing who can load up their tables with more—trifles. That’s all they do, trifles. And they pay money for me to come and make them laugh at me because I read books. Doesn’t it make you sick?”
She had never heard anything so adult from Asher, so critical, so disillusioned. She thought he had loved his plate piled with ruffles of ladyfingers and whipped cream like any boy. But this was someone else emerging. She only looked at him in astonishment. When had she stopped knowing him?
ASHER
17
A CRYSTAL saltcellar. A jeweled bird that cast light all about. A diamond clip, shaped like a butterfly, that somehow—he was exceedingly fast, his fingers adept as a set of pincers—he removed from a deaf old woman’s hair, untangled and released without a single suspicious tug. Asher called them souvenirs, the small gifts he gave himself and—oh, may she not put on her police face!—gave to Chaya. More, even, than shopkeepers, these people deserved the losses. It was a matter of balancing the forces of the world.
At first he kept them in a corner of Mrs. Gottlieb’s parlor, in an empty milk box on which she had placed a hopeful green plant he and Chaya had kept alive, had watered in her name, through the worst of winter. Later they would become his calling card, his candy. But not quite yet.
NOW. IN the morning, before Asher set out, he would line up his catch, beautiful, beautiful, on the kitchen table, meticulously spaced on the worn cloth: Faded-gold pocket watch initialed TBW in a bower incised by a steady hand, delicately removed from the bedside table of a man whose initials were not TBW. Many-hinged bracelet of square-cut sapphires with a defective catch that fell so easily into his hand, late-season apple from a branch. Evening bag beaded with pearls, cool and intricate beneath his stroking finger—pure frivol. Quill-and-bone pen of possible historic interest, though it was doubtful any pawnbroker would be impressed.
If there was ever a profession devoted to the moment and eager to be unimpressed, it was pawn. He had heard about these shops from an older boy who also ran the alleys, who said it was magic how they changed objects into cash—there was a whole row of them on Wabash behind flashy windows full of shine, above them three balls floating like bubbles, but solid.
“You come in here, you can be any kind of pirate you want to be,” his first pawn man told Asher, a huge fellow with basset eyes and a terrier’s mouth-obliterating mustache who made spark-quick decisions about the value of anything Asher put down before him. Was he guessing or was there a book you could learn that from? The man didn’t seem to think it odd that he had to lean over the counter even to see the boy. “You can con people to get their stuff. You can steal your grandmother’s silver, or get it nice, in her will. You can bring me a .22 or turn in your wedding ring.” Asher laughed. His .22, his wedding ring! “This profession, we can’t afford to be curious about it. Don’t matter where it comes from, don’t matter why you need the cash money.” Asher had dropped a small rainbow of pilfered jewelry on the counter. The man fingered it lightly; maybe it was telling him something, the feel of it, its weight speaking out numbers. “You never look in nobody’s eyes, follow me? Last thing you need behind this counter is sympathy.” He made a mock-sour face and shook off the idea with a twitch of his shoulder. “Sympathy.” He made a little sound of disgust and held one of the bracelets to the light. “Fiver for the lot.”
Sympathy was the word that did it. Asher listened to the man’s contempt. Probably only last-gasp people came in here, like Christians going to a church when they needed something from God. Why should the pawn man make that seem like a sickness? The word opened wide and took Asher in: He had an idea—new, a light breaking, a sunrise, his spark-quick decision—about how to take the sympathy that brimmed over in him unashamed and do something solid with it.
MONDAY MORNING, the day after a performance, stomach full of pheasant and praline—served in the kitchen, but served, at least—he shoveled the weekend’s take off the table and into his lumpy bag.
Up Liberty Street, around the corner to Maxwell, six blocks east, seven north. The bright-white clock tower of the Dearborn Street depot had four faces. He passed, too often, a frozen dray horse collapsed into a pile like a boulder, free, at least, of the flies that would veil it in summer—if a horse died in hot weather with its feedbag on, the sound of squealing meant rats at the ready—until he was speeding up the wide steps of City Hall. This was his favorite place, better than the Pacific Garden Mission, far more pleasa
nt than the rear door of the Harrison Street Police Station, where he was in danger of being discovered and hauled in himself. The building, a whole block of it, was a hulk, pillared halfway up its façade, dignified and ugly. The doors were too heavy, like safes. They were worse than that school, barred with lead, unwelcoming. He struggled. But then came a blast of warm air and, cold-strafed, he breathed it in. Gratitude, gratitude! He was poor but he was nimble.
And the endless dark river of men—mostly men, rumpled and redolent—found it worth their while to rise if they were still lying down, and flock, hope-struck, around him. On punishing winter nights, by the hundreds, in vests, in shirtsleeves, cheeks striped from sleep on a hard surface, they lay, sat, stood, unacknowledged, unofficial guests of the city of Chicago.
A few were dark-skinned. Some spoke languages Asher heard only as music. The first time he saw them he laughed out loud—it was like a parade! They milled, they shifted from foot to foot, sometimes amiably, sometimes irritably; they started fights like small fires that were doused as quickly as they had begun. Most—nearly all—wanted work. A very few, he supposed, were too lazy or too particular or too starved for strength. Desperation bound them and separated them, both. Their shoes gaped, their collars were rubbed raw by the filth of their necks. The pockets of their dusty, shiny-elbowed jackets and shapeless, outworn trousers were empty.
And their stomachs empty too—no pheasant, no praline—because, though the colossal building was hospitable, with its speckled granite floor and its intricate wrought-iron gates, it was so only up to a point. It sheltered them and asked nothing in return except that they not go foraging on the upper levels where official matters took place—there were no soup lines, no dippers of water. “Not enough water in the goddamned stinking river for these poor wretches,” Asher had heard one of the clerks say to another early one morning as they shouldered their way through a clot of sleepers. Wretches, riches, not a second of silence between.
The Lake on Fire Page 12
