He would not erase his smile. “But when I met you, Chaya, do you remember? At the train station? You and Asher were here, you told me, to make your fortune. Have you so totally abandoned your confidence?”
She had to close her eyes to remember. “I was so innocent, Gregory. I was so trusting that we would have a life. That we could make a life. You ride with me from Winkler’s to Yanowitz’s. Would you not abandon your optimism if you came upstairs to see us at work? I swear my fingers by now are permanently shaped to hold my cigar knife.” She thought for a minute. “On the farm there was a tree at the edge of the field that was battered by the wind until it was bent over and could never straighten itself. If you can imagine it—I hope I won’t offend you—I feel like that tree.”
Gregory did not answer. Instead he ordered a square of cake, more shades of chocolate than Chaya thought possible, under a thick lace of whipped cream. She tried not to swoon at the pleasure it gave her with her first forkful. She tried and, with a long sweet sigh of submission, she failed.
AFTER THAT, Gregory began to come bearing gifts: a purse so pretty—beaded with little jet pellets like grains of black rice—that she could not imagine endangering it with use. A shawl of the most intricate lace, the light blue of babies’ layettes, more fragile than that whipped cream. She laughed each time he brought her one of these baubles because, highly destructible and costly, they were so impractical when what she needed (though hardly expected him to provide) were shoes and sturdy undergarments. “Do you expect me to wear this to my work?” she asked when he put in her hands a belt held together by a fastener shaped like a golden heart. “Are you mocking me and the life I lead?” She did not like to be ungrateful but she found herself on the edge of anger.
“How could I mock you?” His earnestness! “Your life is genuine. Mine is a shadow, to which I am trying to give substance.” He laughed and whispered, so close to her ear that her short hairs quivered. “The real truth is that your anger is heroic. These little gifts are only sweetmeats. Don’t you think you deserve a spot of sugar now and then? I know you do. You have said as much.” She felt his breath against her neck, moist and utterly soundless. “I am trying to remind you that there are also other lives to be led.”
“Sugar. Hmm.” She cinched the belt around her narrow waist. “And how am I supposed to attain those?” She was forced to ask this, though she had begun to realize what was happening, and to be helpless against it. He was going to fatten her on sweetmeats, one by one.
Gregory, she had discovered, was truly his family’s odd man out. He had trained in the law but refused to practice it. His father and his brother, Ned, were “with” a bank and “in” manufacturing, he told her, those prepositions peculiarly vague, as if there were something nefarious to hide about such connections. Clearly there was, but only to someone to whom great financial success at the expense of the less successful—the only way it could happen, he assured her—was shameful. One of his uncles was a much-respected priest at an uptown Episcopal church; another was chaplain at Yale University, a name familiar to her only distantly. She did not know what she did not know, and knew it—how could anyone even measure what was not there? It would take the rest of her life—if she was lucky—to discover how little she knew.
The first time Gregory kissed Chaya, it was just beside her ear, a gentle, oblique touching of his lips to the skin that astounded her by what it taught her of the connection between the distant outposts of her body, which had never before reported their existence. She had not realized she was electric.
They were standing in the utter darkness outside Mrs. Gottlieb’s door, where the gaslight illuminated nothing. It was silent inside. Her landlady would be asleep. Her brother would likely be reading at the table, in the shade of whichever flowers Gregory had brought that evening. But even if Asher had heard them and sat staring at the rustling they made, her coat pressed against Gregory’s luscious cape, snowy boots against the floor, he could not see them through the door, where Gregory had pulled her to him to pursue his instruction in the way sympathy—or was it concern? curiosity?—can turn, all of them turn, to body. She could feel her blood cresting through places he was nowhere near touching, and her nipples had not been so awake since they were new. If he hadn’t pressed her against something—the wall? the door?—she was sure she’d have fallen.
She had never felt anyone’s lips against hers, had never imagined how they could be both soft and hard, urgent, and that hers would open and want to take in—how disgusting this would have been if she’d thought about it ahead of time—a tongue. But—innocence had its virtues—she had not.
How, she asked herself when, finally, Gregory kissed her fingertips and tiptoed down the creaky stairs and she lay herself down on her train of chairs, could she have lived so long and known so little.
“WE ARE going,” Gregory announced to Chaya one Sunday in April, “to meet someone you will find exceedingly interesting.”
“May I bring Asher, then?” She hated the abjectness of needing to ask. Between the things she did not know and the things she was afraid to do, she sometimes felt like a child herself.
But Gregory was wonderfully natural with her brother; he simply treated him as the adult he seemed, irregularly, to be. “Would you like to come for a ride and a visit with us?” he asked in his ordinary voice, bending his head down—he was very tall—but not stooping as if Asher were a domestic pet. Chaya respected him for the respect he showed by troubling to ask what was self-evident.
Asher, grinning, jammed on his cap.
They sat behind the horses’ heads, feeling the sweetness of the breeze which she thought they had rightly earned for bearing months of murderous winds. The horses did not have very far to go—around a corner or two and then up Halsted well less than a mile. They stopped before the most dilapidated shack, slathered with signs for a circus that appeared to be on its way to town, and, irregularly lettered, GROCERY and FRUITS in the window, a distinctly unpromising offer. An empty cart stood before the door, hunched to one side where a wheel was missing. “Gregory?” Chaya ventured, confused.
“No, Chaya, look on the opposite side!” He had a way of leaning closer to her when he laughed, which was more unsettling than she was sure he imagined.
Across from the weary shack was a brick house, quite clean, with white posts like minor pillars, and a pretty cupola. It was by far the most elegant house, as far as she could tell, for miles around. “This,” Gregory announced with a kind of intimate pride, “is called Hull-House. I want you to meet its proprietor.” He swung them down from the carriage. “There are a host of reasons for you to meet Miss Addams, but chiefly, she will be an inoculant before you meet my parents.”
Again Chaya felt herself borne along on a tide stronger than she was. She had the sense that she was being conveyed out of her life—a life she despised but knew—into another that she dared not try to imagine, nor was certain she deserved.
Given such a lurch of surprise, it was a wonder she could say her name when she was greeted at the door by Miss Jane Addams, who did not yet have the entourage she would gather in time. She was, for a while longer, simply herself, young, hungry, and unassuming.
“Ah, Gregory!” She took his hand into both of hers. “You are as good as your word. You have brought your young lady.”
Chaya had been spoken of. She had been promised. Her knees sagged against each other with fearful confusion.
As the morning wore on, she began to realize that she was not expected to have heard of Miss Addams or of her “settlement house,” since she was quite new to it, and was only at the beginning of her influence in this neighborhood, which was more or less Chaya’s own. The parlor was warm and comfortably furnished, dark in spite of its long windows, its wooden moldings insistent, its carpets intricately flowered. In its later years it would be teeming and hugely significant. They were, as it turned out, seeing a glorious adult in its infancy.
Miss Addams was a small, light-eye
d woman, her plain brown hair wisped into a bun that leaked ringlets, and she held her head slightly to one side, as if she were constantly on the verge of making an inquiry, and—how unlikely!—coyly. She also had the most penetrating concentration Chaya had ever been party to; everyone she knew then seemed permanently distracted, the consequence of too many tasks in too short a day. But Miss Addams—who was busier than most but deeply, richly calm—did not ever trade one object of her concentration for another. When she was attending to you she was perhaps more fully present than you were yourself.
She catechized Chaya—“That is Chaya or Chaya-Libbe? Which do you prefer?”—though gently and sympathetically, about her work: what it consisted of and what it demanded of her soul. “Do you know,” she said, pouring out amber tea and passing it to her, “you have at least one day of the week when you ought to come over here and meet with a group—to sing or to take part in a play. Or you could learn pottery, or cook! We have a lovely kitchen.”
“You have the spirit of a saleswoman.”
“Except that you may leave your purse at home!” Miss Addams answered rather gaily for someone as earnest as she. Though she was quite young—Chaya, not experienced at guessing such things, imagined she was not much over thirty—she had the air of an aunt about her, a perpetual nurturer who made others both subject and object, while she, committed to movement, was not a proper noun so much as a verb. “Here, do have some of this.” She held out a plate of eggy pastry to Asher, who was sitting with uncharacteristic patience. “This is Christopsomo, a bread one of our Greek friends brought to us for Easter.” He took a piece, leaving a trail of crumbs sufficient for Hansel and Gretel to follow home, while he wandered off to count the rooms; for all she knew, and prayed he would refrain, to count the silver. “Do you have books?” he came back to ask his hostess bluntly, with a frown of doubt between his eyes. There were a few volumes piled on a desk but Asher was too voracious for those to impress him.
“Do you read yet, dear?”
Gregory, who had sat patiently to the side while his friend and Chaya investigated one another, winked at her. “This is a boy to reckon with. This boy is ready to join the faculty of the new university. We must tell Dr. Harper about him.”
Miss Addams laughed, but Asher met Gregory’s compliment and her amusement stonily. “What university is that?”
“There is a new institution being built to the south, called the University of Chicago. But, dear—”
He raised one sweet, sharply etched eyebrow, unintimidated.
She was looking him over with great interest. “Have you begun yet at your primary school?”
Asher returned an exaggeratedly long sigh that betrayed the wishful arrogance of uncivilized genius. “I may not bother with that at all. Chaya took me, but we may just not—”
“Asher!” Perhaps she was too abject before this stranger, but Chaya felt she had to defend her own intentions. “What do you have in mind for yourself? Have you lost count of your age?”
He only glared at her, betrayed, but did not answer.
Miss Addams, turning from her brother’s impudence, recited for them such a menu of Hull-House’s activities that Chaya was exhausted simply hearing them named. “And all this is without cost?”
“Without cost to you, Chaya.” She had a bit of trouble with the guttural in the name—such a pure, country Illinoisan, she was—but Chaya was quite accustomed to that. “We are supported by generous patrons who—”
“My family, for example, launders its money here until it is immaculate,” Gregory interrupted, with a bitter edge she hadn’t heard before. “On the one hand, they think I’m mad for giving it my time and effort, but they have followed their friends in unburdening some of their guilt by contributing to keep Miss Addams’s charges out of their neighborhoods.”
“Gregory.” Miss Addams shook her head as if he had proved yet again that he was incorrigible.
“No, truly. You know their motives are mixed when it comes to their generosity. It’s cash on the barrelhead that buys them their virtue.”
She gave him a mischievous look. “I cannot choose to inquire too deeply into their motives. But they could give their money to less worthy causes, you know—or to the racetrack. Or keep it to themselves, for that matter. Credit where it’s due.”
Gregory gazed back at her tolerantly. “All of us trim our desire for purity, don’t we. All of us use each other, for better or worse.”
Miss Addams returned her cup to her saucer, still unfazed. “I didn’t realize you were quite so cynical,” she said with an inflection that put him securely in the corner, and turned to Chaya. “You must be sure to take some of this cake home for Asher. And you must bring yourself back as soon as you are able.”
They were dismissed, so that Miss Addams could get back to her work which, Chaya began to suspect, did not allow her even this one day off: They had been an hour’s work themselves but she had not hurried them by so much as a second. The only part of the visit that hovered just at the edge of disturbance concerned its purpose. Was Miss Addams on display for her sake or had she been brought to her for Gregory’s as proof of his democratic commitment? Asher sat between the two of them as they wound their way back to Liberty Street, clutching a piece of the Christopsomo bread that Miss Addams’s cook had neatly wrapped for him.
“Asher, would you mind leaving us here for a bit?” Gregory asked amiably when they pulled up to the house. He took off so quickly she knew he was grateful to be dismissed.
“Chaya-Libbe Shaderowsky.” Gregory, having finally gotten beyond “Shadow,” said the name with scrupulous care, as if he were a cat stepping into a flowerpot and out again. He leaned close and took her hands into his. “I think I love you. I really do think I love you.”
He did not ask if she loved him. And she felt a little thrill shock its way through her, not of pleasure but of fear.
THAT EVENING, as he sat in the basin on the floor near the stove, while Chaya was sponging his back, Asher said soberly, “That was a nice lady, the one who gave us cake.”
“She is, yes. An important one, too.”
“What makes somebody important?”
She had to think a long moment before she tried to answer. “I—she tries to make people’s lives better. She does everything she can to help.”
He nodded and wriggled a bit under her hands. “Dry my back. What kind of everything?”
“People who are poor need so many things, Ash. You know that.” Apparently he didn’t think himself one of them. “They need food and a house to live in and they need work to do so that they can take care of themselves.”
“I’d like to be important like that some day. Poor people should steal everything extra that rich people have. That’s what Robin Hood did.” He jabbed with his index finger as if it were a gun. “That’s what I’d do.” Chaya blotted the bumpy knuckles of his back and ruffled his dark wet hair that needed cutting, and felt, for the second time that day, fear like a chill run its fingers down her own spine.
SHE HAD not expected it: Gregory invited her to his parents’ house—or, rather, issued an order cloaked as a request. She was discovering that good manners were devious. Insistence could be gentle but still command; the price of refusal was not exactly stated, but one would have to have been blind and deaf not to recognize the urgency behind the proposal.
It might have been that he simply could not comprehend what it would cost her to smile and say, “Certainly,” when he put forth, as casually as he would have to a woman who had dwelled all her life in his world, “My parents are giving a dinner in honor of the organizers of the Columbian Exposition to which they would very much like to have you, Chaya. May I tell them you will join us?”
This in her parlor, with its complaining wooden floorboards and coal-stove smudges on the walls. He had never yet taken Chaya to a public restaurant, unless it was that tearoom or the rathskeller in the park where people shouted out their orders at the bar and shared rough tab
les chummily with strangers. Last time they were there, a lout of a young man had spilled beer on her dress and hadn’t so much as apologized. She could only fancy that she was not worthy of showing among his company, which made her, then, his shameful indulgence, a cut above an immoral one, yet too déclassée for Prairie Avenue.
She was as light-headed at his invitation as she had been that winter night when her work—her life—had overwhelmed her. The room tilted, her vision was splattered with spots. Images flipped before her like the pages of those little books that mimic animation, one by one cascading down to make a moving scene: his mother’s and father’s faces, though she had never seen them. Or if not their faces, then a space darkened by each of them, cameo-like, filled with the sense of their intimidating presence, in full dress. Her empty closet, its pathetic dearth. Her abused, urine-yellow hands and her accent—her inferior, hissing th, nearly but not quite gone, her w’s with a tinge of a v in them, her collapsed vowels. Her frayed chemise, as though they might see its ragged edges. Her ignorance so deep she understood again that she did not even know what she did not know. If only she were bold enough not to care.
“I cannot, Gregory. Please!”
“Chaya, you can. You must.” He enveloped her, always that woolen embrace. He smelled of woodsmoke and pipe smoke.
“I will only look stupid,” she began. “I will—”
“But you will not.” The way he held her, she could hardly breathe. “I have told them about you, that you are beautiful and good—”
“And poor as a beggar? I hope you told them that. Gray as a mouse, badly schooled, and stupid.” And a Jewess, perhaps above all. How much must he hate them to want to bring an alien trailing her Yiddish accent into their house?
“Chaya.”
“What would you have me do, roll a stogie for them, Gregory, to show that I can do something tolerably well? Must I spell out this impossibility for you in detail?”
The Lake on Fire Page 14
