He held both her hands, and tightly. “Why do you demean yourself this way? Why do you advertise what you are not? Have you ever taken stock of what you are? This is not becoming, you know. There are those who deserve your pity far more than you do. It begins to be—” He sighed, hard. “Self-indulgent.”
“Not becoming,” she muttered. “Becoming what?” Trying to encourage her, why did he have to make her despise herself so?
“Do you know Shakespeare’s Othello?”
She was beyond patience by now. “Of course I do not. You are mocking me again. Where do you think I’ve spent the past years—at Yale University?”
He ignored her sarcasm. He had a habit of plunging his head like a horse bucking, to remove the hair that hung like a low-hanging branch against his forehead. He did that now so that he could keep a fierce hold on her hands. “Desdemona loves Othello, who has been a great general, a brave man. She says, ‘I love him for the dangers he has passed.’”
She looked at him critically.
“May I not love you precisely because you have not spent your years at Yale University—and yet you are the woman you are.”
With great difficulty, she did not ask him to flatter her by describing that woman. Instead, she backed away and assured him she would think more about his invitation, but that he should not press her on it. She saw the surprise, which became affront, in his face. “I have been known to run away from”—she had to search for the word, which she had never had occasion to use and whose vowels she could not quite separate—“coercion,” she warned him, which was not meant to sound as coquettish as she feared it did. She was remembering Fraydl’s nephew and the prospect of marriage to a reptile which, if only Gregory knew it, was what had brought her to his city.
So this was the test those young women in Mrs. Humphry Ward’s novels were put to. A pity she had read and not believed them so long ago.
MRS. GOTTLIEB could not fail to wonder what implausible connection Gregory and Chaya were entertaining. That evening over their soup, thin but consoling, Chaya laid out her trepidations. “He doesn’t love me for myself, he loves me for everything I don’t have. He hasn’t known anyone who’s as different from him as I am.” She seemed, as she spoke, to be discovering a way to think about this. “That’s as bad as loving someone for all she does have.”
“He loves you, Chaya. Forget this what you have, what you don’t have, what kind of narishkayt is that. I can see he is a tender man.” At this her eyes filled: Nachman was with her, proof that a good man’s memory could outlast the years.
“I worry,” Chaya told her. “I wonder if the prince loved Cinderella because he plucked her out of the ashes, not in spite of it. Because she was her terrible sisters’ servant while he was riding around the forests on the castle grounds and going to parties and drinking champagne and—whatever things they do at the castle. That would make a man feel much better about himself.”
Whether or not Mrs. Gottlieb knew who Cinderella was Chaya couldn’t tell. But her scruples were lost on the widow, who had a simple standard. “Chaya, do you want to spend the rest of your life, day and night, sorting tobacco? That’s better than living over there in a big house with servants to pick up after you?” She was smiling with benign tolerance for Chaya’s narishkayt. “I know a seamstress who said her missus wouldn’t even bend down to pick up a pin. She did it and she was happy to do it because she had so much work, the most gorgeous fabrics you ever saw, making such beautiful dresses.” Her landlady was at the table, for once sitting down and not busying herself all around the kitchen. She blew on her soup gently. “You’ll excuse me but the truth is, he would have to be a terrible man—a man who beats his wife, or maybe he cheats on her with other women, God forbid—to make it so hard to take your little brother and your two old schmattes you have hanging there, and your thin old jacket that lets the cold bite through—and go let yourself learn how to be a real lady.”
“And then have to be grateful forever.”
Mrs. Gottlieb laughed, a sound Chaya had rarely heard. “Listen to you, Chaya, darling. So what’s wrong with grateful? He gives you what to thank him for, you thank him. Is that so hard?”
She was becoming impatient with Chaya, as Chaya’s mother would have been. Who else could she irritate with her hesitations?
“And then there’s my yingele!” She sighed in Asher’s direction. He was sitting across the room on one of the chairs that were Chaya’s bed, holding down the pages of his dictionary with his elbows. “You can throw away this boy’s life for some maybes, some principles? Darling, haven’t you learned yet, principles cost money? They’re expensive. The ten commandments, all right—I would never turn my back on those, you know that, and nobody’s asking you to steal or kill nobody. But this is a polite young man—”
“Not Jewish,” Chaya reminded her slyly. “His uncle is a priest.”
“Where did that come from all of a sudden? Socialists don’t care about that. I know what you think about the Jewish business, you’re loyal but, you’ll pardon me, not too loyal. Have I ever seen you in shul?” She smiled slyly back. “Chaya-Libbe. Why do I have to take his side when every girl in Chicago would give anything for a look from those eyes? Here is this fine fellow and he’s inviting you home to meet his family. He wants to give you and your brother a future, and he isn’t afraid his family should see you. What could be simpler?”
A great many things could be. She mistrusted him and she mistrusted her mistrust.
“One more thing,” Mrs. Gottlieb said, pushing back from the table, getting ready to stand up. She had lost weight during her long siege but she was still a solid woman in her plaid apron. “I hope you’ll forgive me for this.”
“Please.”
“You talk about all the things you don’t have, you’re coming from Liberty Street, you don’t have no education, you don’t this, you don’t that—”
“Yes?”
“So I have to ask you, darling, and you know I don’t like to hurt your feelings. But you do a good job running yourself down like your worst enemy. After such a bad advertisement on yourself—tell me, my foolish girl, who do you think you are that this wonderful man isn’t good enough for you, that you should throw him away like this.” She was blushing at her daring. “You asked me, I told you.”
Chaya hugged her landlady tight by way of absolution and let her go to attend to the dishes. When her words came back to Chaya, as they would with alarming frequency, she heard them not as a challenge to her unwarranted conceit but in all their straightforward clarity: Who did she think she was? She had not the first idea how to answer.
ASHER
19
SO: THIS was the time to investigate something that had been nipping at him since the day Miss Jane Addams mentioned it—there was a university growing south of the city. There would be a million books there. There would be professors who might have astounding things to say. He talked his way onto an ice wagon where he huddled beside the driver, feeling the breeze flow over him like cool water. From where they rode, he could see the lake, which was still too miraculous to believe. Why was it not called an ocean, along with the five major and—how many minor seas were there? Today, gray-brown as weathered iron, it beat angrily against the shore, but shattered like breaking glass as it fell back. What would it be like to be cast into such water? He knew the order of the English kings and the genus and species of more animals than he would see in his lifetime, he knew bits and pieces of a dozen languages, but he couldn’t swim. This was an oversight he would have to repair when the weather warmed.
“IS THAT the university?” Asher asked the ice wagon driver as they neared a huge clearing.
“That’s the Exposition,” the man told him. “That’s the big fair. Couple of months ago, you wouldn’t have believed this, it was something like a swamp, all dunes and marsh and mess.” He looked in all directions, where Asher saw half-finished buildings, a horizonful of men working in groups, lifting and swirling an
d heaving like the builders of the pyramids, uncountable. “They’ll never get it up when they say, but they might just die trying.”
“Oh, let me down right here!” Asher cried. “This is something to see!”
He stood in the cold and watched men dragging timbers across what remained of the snow. He watched teams of bundled workers raise giant frames of wood, fix them in place, cover them with a skin of hemp and plaster and then—much later, not all in a day—decorate them like frosting a cake. White and more white, they dazzled when the sun shone. The men hoisted statues of women as straight up-and-down as corpses, covered with what looked like stone, white, heavy, who held the roof of one building on their heads. They wore long narrow dresses that hung in soft folds, and stared ahead as if they were under a spell. Dozens of men on ladders and hoists hung angels and made fancy ruffles at the top of pillars. He knew those shapes: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian.
THE FIRST day, he tried to bring them a piece of wood that lay near him, to help, and was yelled at. Finally he was content to watch from a distance. Men swarmed, intent as ants, though not in straight lines. Every thing on earth, big and little, could be rearranged, could change shape, could become something huge and seamless. They were making the hugest buildings in the world. Maybe he would be a workman when he was bigger. This was heaven!
He snuck as close as he could before voices shouted at him again, “Boy! Move away! Go back!” This was heaven.
Later, a cold rain came down so thick it was hard to see. They worked wet, they worked dry, they called out orders to each other and lifted their feet from the soup of slimy ground onto the slick new sidewalks and, at the end of the day, only when it was full dark, some of them went inside their house across the street, a long, low, wooden building no one had bothered to paint, and warmed themselves by the stove.
He stood in the doorway. How could he not.
“Hey, look there! Is that somebody’s boy? Come in out of the cold, boy. You look drownded.”
No one claimed him. He was mute with respect.
“You’re a little one,” called out a man with water drops shining in his mustache, merry, not mad. It was ice melting. “Did you come to sign up with us? ’Cause all the jobs are gone!”
They laughed and took him in. They were a good lot. Some, far from home, said they missed their sons, who were younger or older or the same age as he. They ate tough beef and potatoes, offered him beer, were surprised that he seemed to be able to read, which some of them could not do. Those who could enjoyed finding harder and harder things for him to show off—first, the newspaper, then a book called Mechanics of Solid Frame Construction. Someone had a Bible. He opened it anywhere and didn’t hesitate, pronounced hard names like Jehoshaphat and Zerubbabel without sounding them out. “Abinadab. Zuar. Issachar and Zebulun. Zelophehad.” He liked the zs. The syllables tickled.
Reluctantly, he went home to his sister but came back in the morning, slipping, free, between legs on the horsecar, and then another and another morning. No one on that old farm could do the things these men did. Everything they built came out even. Nothing they stood up collapsed, nothing was crooked or sagging.
He was their mascot. They called him “Imp” and “Genie.”
Sometimes he remembered he had come south to see the university. That could wait: Weren’t universities usually very old? A few weeks, a few months older, it would still be worth the trip. This city they were building was the most exciting thing he had ever happened upon. When it opened—the men in the bunkhouse promised thousands and thousands of visitors, arriving by land and by sea from everywhere in the world—he could be Robin Hood of Chicago again, with a whole new population to devil and undo.
20
WHEN SHE heard Gregory making his way up the stairs, trepidation made Chaya so tired, so very, very tired, that she wanted only to crawl onto her bed of chairs and cover her head with her quilt.
True to his promise, he carried a very large box, which he placed with such care on the kitchen table that she thought it might be breakable. Left to her own devices, whom could she afford to patronize but the peddlers’ wagons and the cheap shops along Jefferson Street, whose slick fabrics and bulging seams would give away their provenance. Without a word she loosened the tape that held it safely shut and removed the top of the box and saw that he had brought her a dress swaddled in enough paper to wrap all the fish in the market. But she refused to speak.
Poor Gregory, he would be right if he were offended. Nor did she like very much the ungrateful person his insistence was forcing her to become. He watched her in identical silence, only his fingers twitching with impatience. His eyes, the eyes she loved, burned with anger that she should consider it an indignity to accept something so beautiful from his hands.
She had begun to move in a trance impenetrable by rational thought.
And the dress was lovely, of course, a sort of purple with a reddish tinge. Finally he forced himself to speak. “I believe this is what is called magenta.” He looked to Mrs. Gottlieb as if she could be of help. “I thought it would complement your complexion.” Magenta. The word was new to Chaya, and beguiling. It sounded like a country in South America. The fabric was a burnished shot silk, modestly high-necked and simply, girlishly, draped. It would almost fit, though without having taken her measure, the amplitude of its bosom made her smile at her suitor’s wishful inattention. If she were to wear it, she would be grateful that the hem was a trifle too long so that no one would glimpse her boots, which were the only ones she had, so worn they resisted any shine. Somehow it would be too shameful to point them out to Gregory; there was something intimate about her feet, though she could not have said why. And they were one detail too many for him to notice.
Finally she managed to mumble without inflection, “Thank you, Gregory, this is very—magenta, yes. It is beautiful.”
How could she blame him for looking at her with such perplexity? “One would think I had brought you the dress you would wear to the guillotine, Chaya. I see that you are no friend to my intentions, which causes me to wonder if—”
But, in a muddle of principle and desire which, like chemicals that should not be combined, threw up a fog she could not see through, she came to huddle in his arms. She looked over his shoulder whose tweed bristled against her chin, and saw those parental cameos glaring at each of them, first at her, then at him.
“My dear girl,” he was saying, “I am not trying to distress you. But you seem not to have any capacity for—” Chaya could see him searching for the word, and waited with great curiosity to hear what it was she lacked. “For pleasure.”
Holding the dress before her, she felt its suppleness as if it were made of woven grasses.
But weep she did when, after Gregory had gone, Asher asked her, “Chaya, why did he bring you that dress? It looks like it’s for somebody—” And he stopped there and looked away.
“For somebody what?”
“Else. The kind of person we hate at the parties. You know what I mean.” He looked at her with a ferocity she had not seen before.
They had watched a cook named Darlene beat her head with a serving spoon in frustration at Harry Carter’s soirée when Mrs. Carter shouted that she had allowed the crème anglaise to separate but had served it anyway. Together, they had cringed and tried to send waves of sympathy across the kitchen to make certain the cook knew that they were not them, they were her. “That is not fair, Asher,” she responded. “I am not your ‘somebody else.’ That is too simple.” Her loyalties, so much like his, divided like one of Darlene’s wetted knives through butter.
WITH GREAT relish, Mrs. Gottlieb tucked and prodded, and decorated her old hat into unrecognizability—a skill Chaya had not imagined for her—with scraps made into satin lilacs that flopped against each other in profusion, white and lavender, spiced with a bit of purple saved from the excesses of the dress.
“You could just as soon go naked if you don’t have a gorgeous hat.” Mrs. Gottlieb seemed to e
at the word gorgeous. She smacked her lips around it.
To complete the impersonation, Chaya borrowed a perfect pair of long kid gloves that felt all too much like tobacco leaves, except that they were off-white, fastened with a pearl. Mrs. Gottlieb had worn them on her wedding day, they were half a century old, and when she tenderly unwrapped them from tissue that crumbled in her hands Chaya knew that she was being entrusted with her landlady’s highest hopes.
SHE HADN’T dared tell them that, along with his presentation of the dress, Gregory had renamed her just in time for the occasion as if that, too, were a gift: “Chaya-Libbe would be”—a delicate hesitation—“a trifle hard for people to say, I think. They consider themselves sophisticated but they have had so little traffic with—”
Her heart seemed to turn over in her chest. She stared at him. “With?”
“Well, dear, for all their travels, their grand tours, I fear they would stumble over anything they consider—exotic. Off their well-worn track. So what would you think if we took the first letters—C and L—and put them together to make a thoroughly comprehensible, easy-to-say new name? Just for them. You can be Ceil. My sweetest, what do you think?” He seemed to comb her face for a response but she understood that, however sincerely he believed he was giving her a choice, only one answer would be acceptable.
What would her mother have thought, who had named her for her own mother, whom she had lost just before Chaya was born? She knew that what her mother had wanted for her was safety. Even her mistakes—oh, Shimmie!—were meant to seal her against need. Which meant that her mother would want what Mrs. Gottlieb wanted for her. Would it be worth giving up her name to have it? It was shameful but, her thoughts ragged and unkempt, she said nothing.
CHAYA AND Asher lived on a wooden street: houses, stairs, paving blocks, a turn to the left, a turn to the right, just north of where the great fire had begun only twenty years before—a neighborhood made of tinder. Not far away, probably less than a mile, all of Prairie Avenue seemed to have been quarried. It was a fortress of stone: brick, granite, sandstone, slate. She lived amidst refuse so ubiquitous it had become as natural to her as a field of blowing wheat.
The Lake on Fire Page 15
