The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  When he told Chaya how City Hall was being opened as a shelter, she pulled Asher onto her lap and instructed him in her doubts: What if these men, starving, freezing, despairing, rioted instead? What if they set fires, if they stormed the granite havens on Prairie Avenue, on Grand Boulevard and Ashland, and took their vengeance? Chicago had had its fire, thank you. It had had its Haymarket. Its jails were full of the bitter dregs of reprisal and refusal. Far safer to be kind, she told him. “Do you see that, Asher? Do you see?” Magnanimity was a better protector of property, someone had decided, than force; thus the dormitory of the lost.

  “Not sympathy?” Asher asked. That softness the pawn man mocked.

  “Hardly,” his sister answered drily. “They’re trying to keep things peaceful.”

  All the more reason Asher walked among them, trying hard not to breathe their rankness. “Here!”—the green-stoned bracelet. “Look!”—the pocket watch, the pen, and for one crone huddled away from the men in a gray horse blanket, back slumped against a wall under portraits of the city council, the evening bag whose beads clicked like an abacus when she pressed it to her cheek.

  He distributed the bounty randomly, with an open hand. “Pawn it. Trade it for supper,” he suggested to a man so thin and lined he was like a twig torn from a tree branch. Who would hire him for a day’s work? He was a consumptive German named Johannes, a man who had worked until the work ran out, who would take it to his favorite pawn and buy his dwindling way to a month of dinners and a new suit in which he would likely be buried, and soon. “Get yourself some shoes that hide your toes.” Once or twice when someone asked furtively where he had gotten this booty he understood why the pawnbroker kept silent. But mostly, they closed their hands around what they chose to see as a gift, a lottery hit, a heavenly reward. They said thank you, made gracious by good fortune. “Stay safe,” murmured a man with leprous fingers who tried to keep them hidden in his pocket. “Have you eaten today?”

  “I don’t need much,” Asher said truthfully. “I have to stay small to get into tight corners. Maybe I’ll be a jockey when I’m older.”

  There was almost a gaiety in it. There was surely a sense of power. Older, not bolder. His mentor was Robin Hood, whom Asher had met in a book he could not allow himself to steal from the shop whose owner, friendly and inviting, did not deserve to be robbed. (Sympathy extended in many directions. Burglary was an exacting business.) Praying it wouldn’t be sold, he visited The Adventures of Robin Hood and His Merry Men until he had memorized the best parts.

  And in the soot-dimmed glow of the lamp on the table, he took instruction in the sad facts: Some people were fat as dog ticks while others sickened and starved; some people slept secure under a lofty quilt while others shivered in lake wind and tried to protect their ears, those tender blossoms, from being eaten by frost. It was all too simple. “None of it is fair,” he told his sister, who squeezed him slightly too hard with satisfaction. “You think so too?”

  “I do.”

  “It all needs rearranging.”

  “True. Do what you can, Ash. Just stay safe.”

  “Stay safe, play safe. Stray safe.”

  “It isn’t funny.”

  “Who called it funny?”

  “My little echo,” she said and closed her very tired eyes. “My dream. My perfect mirror.”

  MRS. SLANSKY, two floors down, had been housing her daughter Manya in the late months of her pregnancy. Manya’s husband, whose permanent occupation seemed to be unemployment, had beaten her one time too often. He had become a drunk by what Chaya, lawyerlike, called entrapment: by frequenting the saloons that cleverly provided free lunch with their beer, their whiskey—by learning to like their true product until a bargain had become a thirst. Manya was a narrow-shouldered, huge-eyed, terrified-looking thing to whom Chaya wished she could give lessons in self-defense. But her scrawny body was bulbous now with her fifth child—the others raged through the tiny, dark apartment like penned horses—and if she needed instruction, it was in surviving her labor, not practicing fisticuffs at the hands of an unmarried girl who knew nothing about the tides of marital strife and forgiveness.

  Chaya-Libbe woke Asher just before dawn to tell him she was running up to Maxwell Street to get the midwife and would not see him until tonight. His plan for the day was to inject himself into the crush of soft bodies at Marshall Fields’s or the Boston Store or perhaps wander through the Palmer House, attentive to possibilities.

  It was not so strange to see boys out of school in the year 1893. Shins cracking like icicles in the cold, vagabonds of all ages rattled loose around the city; a whole population slept under bridges, in hallways. They were orphans, they were remnants of homeless families that could not manage to stay together; they were odd lots and broken sizes whose circumstances had failed them and forced them into ingenuity.

  So many were employed—self-employed—as runners and couriers and carriers that Asher did not attract much attention. And by now he knew that no matter the decrepitude of his clothing he never looked like a ruffian. He looked like people’s sons and grandsons, or the sons and grandsons they dreamed of. When he volunteered among the most burdened and the least able-looking shoppers and travelers, he earned their gratitude along with their nickels for maneuvering their packages for them, tucking them into cabs, walking beside them as they loitered at the counters, holding their purchases, smiling without cease.

  Then, creeping them along, crawling them patiently, he managed to insinuate his small boy’s fingers into their newly bought goods and remove the smallest items while they were engaged with yet another salesperson. Jewelry, unobtrusive, was best. He would withdraw a pair of gloves (not to be bartered; to be worn) or an ivory comb, a pigskin wallet. The only useless object he had ever lifted was one of those foolish money clips. To give that to one of the men at the mission or at City Hall would be to mock him, unless the man had a bitter sense of humor.

  It was at the Palmer House that he got pinched, caught in his tracks not for stealing but for poaching on the territory of the bellmen, who had seen him too often and resented his pocketing their gratuities. They had run him off before; like bad weather, he returned, the little worm with the quick legs and the pretty face. This morning, hefting the packages of a dowager home early from spreading her largesse around town, he looked ready for the picking. He could see nothing around his armload, beneath which he had to cant backward for balance.

  A policeman was alerted by a small, pencil-mustachioed young man in a red organ-grinder’s-monkey jacket and a matching pillbox. Asher was facing the bank of elevators, holding the old lady’s shopping bags with his back to the lobby. With a shout of warning, something approximating See here!, he was seized by dark blue arms, searched—flush this day with a wristwatch studded with diamond chips, a black silk scarf dripping with fringe, a mink collar glistening with improbable health, given how long the animal had been dead—and then ungently thrust into a police van to mild applause from the lobby. The bellman who had called in the constabulary rushed to assist the dowager, whose packages had tumbled unceremoniously around her feet when that sweet little boy was taken. Such rudeness! Her eyesight was insufficient for her to have seen what was sequestered in the child’s pockets. She shook her head under its befruited hat. The speed of events in Chicago was exhausting. Indianapolis was much less upsetting. She could not wait to check out and go home.

  IN THE van, Asher was caught between the desire to charm, which rarely failed him but did not seem promising just now, and terror at what awaited him at the stationhouse. Miraculously, he had never before been arrested: He had been frightened away, had hidden and been hidden, had been warned, but had never yet been trapped and captured. Hanging around the pawns, he had heard some formidable characters explain that they had begun as innocent perpetrators of misdemeanors—clipping bananas off pushcarts, tussling with the wrong gang—and were now the felons he saw before him, whom he could (or could not) judge for himself.

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nbsp; “Can you find my sister?” He could barely speak loudly enough to be heard above the clatter of the horses’ hooves against the stone blocks of Wabash Avenue. “I have to talk to my sister!” It would not help him to explain that he stole only to give it all away—no one would believe that. What, he begged of himself, panicked, would Robin Hood have done, separated from his Merry Men? Robin had been caught once in a church, betrayed just as he had been, though by a monk, not a monkey—a smile to himself in spite of all. But his band had found and rescued him and put the monk to death most unprettily. How would Chaya find him? His face seemed to erupt in tears; they did not flow from his eyes so much as seep through his skin, everywhere at once. How long would it take for her even to know he was missing? He let himself be a little boy—why not?—and, hemmed in by the walls of the police van which let in a trickle of light only at the top, through mesh, he cried and cried until he had a fierce case of hiccups.

  The old policeman riding with him said without menace, “Take a deep breath and hold it as long as you can.” When a gigantic hiccup broke through anyway, with a sound like a snapping whip, both of them laughed. “When we get where we’re going,” the constable said in his brogue, his dewlaps, like a beagle’s, quivering with amusement, “we’ll get you some water and you can drink it upside down.”

  “Upside down?” Asher saw himself suspended by his heels, the rest of his larcenous treasure falling from his pockets: small coins, a miniature clock he was saving for himself, two keys to who-knew-what.

  “Not to worry, kiddo. I’ll show you. It’s crazy but it works.”

  BY THE time the police wagon had got to Harrison Street (Asher was frustrated; he liked to count every turn, keep track of every street crossed, and he could see nothing from where he sat), he had concluded a sweet little deal with the old policeman: everything in his bag and pockets in return for which, a block before Harrison, the wagon pulled over to the curb at Van Buren and, while the guard conducted a conversation about a wobbly wheel with the driver, whose horses lazily turned their heads to watch, he slipped as sinuously as a mink out the rear door, which was unlocked, though not exactly open. Asher still had his bag for another day, empty now, but not for long.

  18

  ASHER DID not spend every Sunday in the precincts of the privileged, and on those liberated days, Chaya found herself a great deal more alert than she had been before Gregory Stillman insisted his way, so quietly yet so authoritatively, into her sight.

  Those Sundays had continued to be the only time, morning and evening, when she was not at work. When she came upon herself in a mirror larger and less murky than Mrs. Gottlieb’s, she saw a figure shrinking like an apple too long in the larder and a face gone gray with fatigue. Complaint was a luxury, she understood, but that did not relieve her, it only burdened her with the need to be grateful, and gratitude should not be a duty.

  But she was not alone: Hopelessness had begun to spread its stain from one coast to the other; there were rumors of marches of the unemployed in New York, of frozen corpses discovered in every northern city, of robberies increasing and prostitution burgeoning as the sole means of securing a solid room and a warm bed. Had life on the farm been worse or better? She had lost her compass and could not say.

  Meanwhile, shrunken or not, she was being wooed.

  Later it seemed absurd—then, it did not—that she thought she could and should make their atrocious rooms look sufficiently appetizing to invite Gregory across the threshold.

  There was nothing she could do about the regrettable shade of green of their walls—the kind of green that punishes public places, only scuffed and chipped, with an old layer of pink wallpaper unscrolling like parchment here and there—but she whirled around in the half-light before work, trying her best. Since Chaya had never seen Gregory’s lodgings, she was, for better or worse, not as embarrassed as she should have been. Of course she assumed he lived in the manner of Asher’s hosts: in warm, glowing rooms adorned with objects that demanded (and received) careful dusting, keepsakes fetched back from journeys abroad—wooden elephants, jeweled birds, paisleys for his tables—sets of books in glassed cases, a bed on which a duvet covered lace-tipped bedclothes, an armoire in which hung his lovely, unostentatious tweeds. But she had never seen all that, and so his life remained a stage-set in her mind, unspecific because glimpsed from the last row of the farthest balcony, while hers was all she had and, by main force, she compelled herself not to be so ashamed of it that she could not invite him to visit her there.

  When, trying to keep a quaver from her voice, she asked if he would visit her at home, he cast her a look so boyishly pleased she was almost embarrassed for him. It was exhausting to suppress so much curiosity—so much desire—so as not to seem self-indulgent. And now Gregory was nearly on his way. She spent more than she should have for clarion-red tulips—tulips in March!—to place in the middle of the blue cloth, laundered to the thinnest veil, that covered the table. She dusted, futilely, in every corner, and took ammonia to the windows, whose grit clung to their other side, forever immovable; she spread soapsuds on the paint-peeled moldings and left them grayer than they had been.

  But on the evening when she expected Gregory’s first visit, she forced herself to stop trying to improve what was not improvable and sit, breathing slowly, simply waiting. She heard him climbing their dark stairs, slowing as he came. When she opened the door to his knock he was breathing as hard as a racer. Slim and athletic though he was, the first thing Gregory said, trying not to look burdened, was, “If exercise is a healthy enterprise, my dear, I think you shall live to at least a hundred and ten!” He held out to her, with a melting gaze, a bunch of blue delphiniums that she imagined poking out of the snow like a dozen flags of some unknown country. It was not meant to be a contest, she knew, but her red blossoms paled beside them.

  She watched as her poor rooms registered on him and thought she saw him decide to meet the challenge with more good cheer than it deserved. Was this the sign of a sweet and generous man or an unlikely striver attempting sympathy after a pain that could hardly be shared? She watched his eyes light on whatever they could discover on which to lay a compliment or about which to invent a question: Mrs. Gottlieb’s portrait, a bit of lace that she had brought from her first home, the modest green plant Asher and Chaya had nurtured for her. She could see how hard he was trying, sure he had come prepared, no matter what he found, to seem at ease.

  Mrs. Gottlieb was keeping herself busy in the other room out of courtesy and because, truly, there was so little space. Asher stared at them with an unreadable look. But they were not a page of text, were not numbers on a map—surely they were giving off fumes of longing, with which he was unfamiliar.

  Gregory took her, then, to sit with him in a lovely tearoom, across a tiny round marble table. She had decided to be honest about her misgivings. “Could you have imagined how poorly my brother and I are faring? Tell me honestly, if you can.”

  He paused to ask her what kind of tea she preferred, but she hadn’t a clue as to the difference between Assam and Darjeeling. Wasn’t tea simply tea? He smiled patiently and ordered for her. “Am I surprised?” He had a most winning frown when he was put to thinking hard that made him seem more worried than perplexed. Gregory was clean-shaven; she told herself the skin of his cheeks looked pampered and then she told herself that was not fair. “It isn’t that I have never been in rooms like yours, you know.”

  Chaya looked skeptical. No one in that tea and confectionary shop, she imagined, retired to a dim fourth-floor flat and went to sleep on a train made of wooden chairs. Self-pity made it difficult to appreciate how hard Gregory was trying.

  “I am writing a book, Chaya,” he said, a declaration that seemed to make him sit up straighter, just as the smell of her exotic tea was rising in her cup. “You must know this if you wish to know me. It is a secret from my family—you’d think it a memoir of my life of crime!” At that, he grew suddenly merry. Had she as generous a spirit as hi
s, she would have considered what kind of difficult soil he had sprung from, what kind of cost accrued to such a labor. But truly, helplessly, she was occupied only with herself. “I dare to call it a work of prophesy and, when you see it, I hope you shall agree.” Such an ambition from so modest a man! Did he expect congratulations? She stared back at him, her face clean of expression.

  “It is a consideration of poverty as the necessary outcome of capitalism, not the incidental. I sit daily in the Newberry Library searching out my proofs, of which there have been many, even before Herr Marx told us so. I would rather say it is in the spirit of Tolstoy.” He stopped for a breath, his face pink with conviction, and Chaya thought how her father would adore him. “But, you see, I am also out and about in rooms precisely like yours—they are my evidence—and so you would have to be living in far worse circumstances for me to be shocked.” Slowly, inhaling with pleasure, he sugared his tea. “Dismayed for you, dear, but not so astonished as you may fear.”

  She considered this. “Gregory, I do not want to seal myself off from everyone more fortunate but—” She tried to read his expression but it yielded nothing. “I would like to be”—it felt foolish to say this—“to be happy. But, please understand, I do not have the time!” She looked away and fixed her eyes on the gauzy white curtains at the windows. Sweet, they were. Modest. “Not the time and not the light.”

  Gregory only smiled at what had cost her pain to say. “Then can’t we meet as equal seekers? Can’t we try to separate what is temperament from—what would you call it? Circumstance?”

  “You were born to optimism, dear friend. You must not let me infect you with my confusions.”