The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  “You will come to the wedding and I will finally meet your Gregory!”

  A flush of something that had no name—a brew of fear and embarrassment, perhaps—warmed her cheeks. She sighed. “And you will meet Gregory.”

  And what would her father say—pray God or if not God, good fortune—were he to meet her beautiful suitor? A landsman in spirit? A big-hearted, helplessly devoted servant of decency? Or would he see a wealthy, coddled son of the ruling class, a cousin-once-removed of the Czar? A goy, uncircumcised. Would he think his daughter had gained a world or had given one away?

  SHE HAD asked Gregory if she might see what he was so diligently writing, his chair pulled up close to the window for the bleak Chicago light, but he refused her. “When it is farther along,” he promised. “When it is a clearer expression of what I hope to say.” Pretending to be abject, feigning anger, nipping at his ear—nothing she did prevailed against his obstinacy.

  She stayed away a while and then begged him again, but he was resolute. Was it terrible, then, one evening when she was awaiting his return from a meeting with Miss Addams’s benefactors, to go to his desk and very carefully, barely breathing, pull out the brown pebbled leather book whose pages he worked at so faithfully?

  Perhaps it was terrible, but she did it nonetheless. She opened the covers, trembling, and read standing, as though the appearance of casualness would cancel her transgression. Asher stole objects, solid material possessions which cost their owners dearly; she was, she reasoned, a thief of nothing but words, robbing him invisibly, leaving no scar, not even a fingerprint. If you loved someone, it was your obligation, if he would not enlighten you, to follow where he went each day.

  But her reward—that would take a while to calculate. Oh, Gregory! She felt the same disappointment scored with relief that had entangled her when he so proudly showed off these poor-man’s rooms. His need so overpowered his natural endowments that (this was the saving paradox) she felt a burden lifted, even as she patronized his innocence. For here was the inescapable fact: His writing was dutiful, speckled with numbers, fierce, at times, with his passion for change, for what he called betterment, by way of the sacrifice of those least likely to hear him. The word capital recurred and recurred, never to be praised; the socialism he had studied at the identical fount at which her father had drunk showed itself full of fury but fatally dry without faces, hands, bodies to give it blood. Gregory’s words lay heavy, inert, like bread made of deficient yeast, wholesome but unappealing. She could not imagine anyone willingly raising it to his lips. He was saving himself, she supposed, but who would follow?

  It was surely not easy to write convincingly of the insults and indignities she had borne, she and her neighbors and long-lost family. Perhaps there were some who could do it: She had heard Miss Addams speak, and she had a remarkable talent for giving body to the spirit that moved within her. She had met and nurtured so many actual people! But Gregory’s was all conjecture; it was abstract, its assertions theoretical. Those were not words she knew very well; she only recognized, in these earnest pages, what was missing. Chaya narrowed her eyes to call forth his eager face, the warmth of his eyes on hers, the peculiar way he fixed her gaze, challenging her to look away as if willing her to stare back, to recognize his avidity, would be enough to hold her fast. His writing was exactly like that. It was shaped by the force of his wanting. She suspected that his pages fell in some parched place halfway between scholarship and sermon, though she recognized that she knew nothing of either. They would not—this she trusted—make the bones rise and dance, or the dust sing. The abandoned would stay lost.

  But she could love him better for that. What was wrong with her, she dared to wonder, that every time she found Gregory wanting, he became more dear to her? His vulnerabilities must be some kind of recompense. He had, and could not leave behind, his breeding, his education and financial comfort, even his beauty—she did find him beautiful, from head to foot and, with irresistible pleasure, in between—and then he had his humbling decency, his wish that he could give it all back and gladly go bare. To be so competitive embarrassed her. But (voices jangled at each other as she stood beside his desk listening for his key in the lock) competition was not the precise word for this welling tenderness, this desire to protect him from his defects. Did she think she deserved a monopoly on neediness? Was it arrogant to want to level the ground between them?

  Oh, loving someone was not simple! Those novels her teacher pressed upon her at school, though they pitted very dissimilar suitors against each other, each to represent a different world, still did not begin to hint at such confusions. Asher should have taught her some of love’s complexities, the endless shifting of power. She was more experienced but he was the brilliant one; she was steady and competent; he was the happy one, the one with wings. But this man, this man—his regrets and appetites and insistences, and all he did not suspect about his failings, made it impossible to deny him. Every inch of stature he lost made it easier for her not to crane her neck to look up but, instead, to gaze levelly into this face and find his richly blooded, willing lips and kiss them, strength for strength, passion for passion.

  When, a few hours later, Gregory lowered himself into bed beside her, he did it slowly and delicately, as if it were a rowboat in danger of tipping, because he was a considerate man and did not want to disturb her. Chaya, awake, her eyes closed, did not fail to take note of that.

  CHAYA AND Gregory stood, hands joined, looking out over the lake just before evening. The sun was so deep a red that, had it been a painting, she’d have thought it a wishful fantasy. A perfect ball, edges precise, it was dropping toward the western horizon with surprising speed. To the east, its colors, reflected, lay across the water: The entire sky was aflame.

  “Hard to believe,” Gregory whispered, “that we are moving and not the sun.”

  This she had heard, but she wished she had had the education that could explain such an unlikeliness. Who was responsible for such a discovery? Copernicus? Galileo? Not to know such a thing was to enter the world unready.

  The surface of the lake was cut a thousand times by tiny waves as if a boat had gently stirred the water, and the sun, moving or not, was casting red-orange fire across it. One long moment, hot to the eye, and flame rippled across the restless surface, burning the tips of the little waves.

  “Gregory,” Chaya murmured against the rough shoulder of his overcoat. “You cannot imagine how happy I am.”

  Gregory laughed. “That doesn’t sound like you, my sweet. Aren’t you obliged to count the people over on the west side who are never free to see the lake?”

  “No, today I am not the center of the world.” She put her face against his, coquettish, to be kissed. “Today the sun belongs to everyone. Fire is—” She sighed and considered. “A mystery. Like music, I think. Nobody owns it.” Gregory’s hair was glossed pale with reflected light. The man she loved gave off a modest glow. She stared until it was quenched. “And that,” she announced, “is all the philosophy I have!”

  Chaya watched darkness seep out of the sky and take away the water. “Today I am nothing but grateful.”

  “I WOULD prefer a small wedding,” Chaya told him, knowing she was defending herself from scrutiny and possession by his family’s tastes. More to the point, weddings were said to be the obligation of the bride, and on this ancient rock her little ship was snagged and splintered. She was not prepared to suggest a rabbi to officiate (she wished she dared, and then looked away from her cowardice).

  But the more she thought of her wedding day, not to say her marriage itself, the more she longed for her family. Not in a single stroke but gradually she seemed to have revised her memory of what she had thought her mother’s abandonment: Had she not wanted to keep Chaya safe, hadn’t she thought she was securing her and keeping her close? There were too many contradictions to settle the question; she only knew what she had felt but now, flickeringly, regretted: that her life did not include her Mama and Papa
and her darling brood. Surely they had to be there with her. They could pay not a penny toward the wedding and she would not apologize, no matter what tradition demanded. There would be no way to make them comfortable, since she was barely so herself, but they would be with her. She would claim her true self, swallow her misgivings, and be proud.

  About the modest wedding, “I concur,” Gregory told her amicably. “Though I will have to fight our first skirmish with my mother over that. Not a skirmish, actually—I suspect it will be a serious battle with cannon and artillery. But I should be quite as relieved as you if we were to keep this simple.” Clearly it would not be his first encounter with his parents’ displeasure. He had, quite pointedly, not discussed with her their response to his announcement of the engagement. As yet, no invitation to meet with them privately had been forthcoming; no public notice had been paid. Anticipating no such occurrence, news reporters were not bent double at the keyhole listening for a story.

  Chaya tried to imagine anger among such tightly controlled, tastefully silent people. Possibly they simply stopped speaking? Or they might use sarcasm, say terrible things, induce him to be ashamed of her. Ned she could imagine being cruel, but her parents-in-law-to-be would have some other means of showing their disapproval. Lovemaking was only one of the new languages she would have to master.

  Then there was the question of where they would live and, even sooner, of how Chaya should conduct her affairs before the marriage. She was not yet the beneficiary of Gregory’s wealth. (Whether, living where he lived, he was any longer its beneficiary was an interesting question she dared not raise.) If she were to leave her work, she would seem a kept woman. Not seem: be, especially now that Gregory was receiving some return of virtue on his investment. The deeper problem—that she could not abandon her servitude without feeling traitorous—she refused to confront. Conscience, as Mrs. Gottlieb had warned her, was not only costly but its moral dilemmas were debilitating, and with Asher gone, she had hardly the strength to wake each morning.

  And then, and then again and again . . . her Mama and Papa, her Dvorele and Yakov, her Beryle, her Yitzhak, her Masha. Were they all to come to Chicago, at least for the nuptials? She could not even dare ask if, exhausted by failure, they were ready to emigrate, this time not to a new country but to a new city. They should not have to become her husband’s burden. It was time for her to make a visit. She had added inches to her brothers and sisters in her imagination, filled out their bodies, deepened their voices, at least a bit.

  Her eyes grew redder every day she went to work without Asher. Her friends asked where their little Reader had disappeared to but all she could do was shake her head and shrug.

  Until one Monday morning, a woman she did not know well, one of the Italians who conveyed warmth without much language, called out to her as she was arranging her tools—like a surgeon, she laid out knife, clippers, paste pot, rag in their exact places before she could begin—“Your brother—I seen him! He so bello—so beauty!”

  “What? Where did you see him?” Chaya had leapt up and rushed across the room where she nearly knocked over the woman’s desk. “You’re sure it was Asher?”

  “Sure, sure I sure.” He was at the Fair, she managed to say. He was a prince.

  “A prince?”

  “Si! Bellissimo! People come, they laughing. They love!”

  She threw herself upon Winkler’s mercy, pleaded for the morning off without penalty. This took an explanation that was difficult to make credible: that the Reader who had sat daily entertaining his serfs had no fixed address, that he was a wild boy, and lost. It was easier for Chaya to say all this—incriminating, peculiar, perhaps damning—because she knew that she was going to tell Winkler very soon that she was finished with his shop for good and all. A tide of guilt washed over her at the thought: So this is what it feels like to leave desperation behind. To have privileges. To have immunity from reprisal. Well, maybe Sara could stop working too. What kind of wages did firemen make?

  She fled as if she were being pursued, up the quaking wooden stairs to the Alley L, which took her to Sixty-Third Street, and down and, scraping in her purse for the fee, she half walked, half ran in and across the endless Exposition grounds until she came to the long confusing swathe of the Midway. It was too early for the crowds to have arrived; she had had to wait, in fact, for the ticket takers to open their little windows and set out their huge circles of tickets. Now she was going to have to calm herself and walk slowly and peer with concentration at every one of these unlikely entertainments. It was more of a soup than a carnival: The Indians sat beside the Orientals who sat beside the Dahomeyans, some of them moving around and talking, agitated, others morosely stationary on rugs and chairs. Perhaps when the masses of visitors showed up it was less artificial and depressing. Exhibits need viewers.

  Her heart beat so hard she wondered if a woman her age could expire from excitement, and—if she saw him there, somehow a prince, whatever that meant—from joy.

  ASHER

  24

  HOW THEY had left Christa. How they stole away in a wagon, hidden between milk jugs, and he was carried around by the train conductor while she sat stock-still at the window: Asher remembered almost nothing of it, so much had overwhelmed him since. He could hardly stay in his seat now. The train was so much faster, grander, than the Ls around town. “It’s thicker!” he called out to them. “It’s tough. The Alley L is a chicken and this is a bull.”

  “If you don’t remember riding to Chicago,” Gregory prodded, “what do you remember of your old home?”

  Asher hesitated. “Home?” He had run up and down the aisle a few times. “What’s the difference between a home and a house?”

  Gregory stared back at him. He often stared like that, nothing to say. Did he speak a different language? Meanwhile, what an idea, moving inside something bigger that was also moving! It was like the earth rotating while it traveled around the sun. “Watch!” Asher cried again and again, though his sister had lost patience. She thought there was nothing to see.

  But he stopped for Gregory’s question. “I don’t know if I remember a house or a home. I’ll remember when I see it.” His eyes flickered with doubt. “Is it a park? The farm. Or a—where there are different animals? Something zoological?”

  “Wherever did you get such ideas?” his sister asked him. “I’m surprised you don’t remember more. You already knew so much when we left.”

  He shook his head under the neat haircut she had paid for, first ever not by her hand. “Knowing goes forward, remembering goes back. I’m not so good at that.”

  She was always surprised to discover that his genius had rules. She thought he had broken every tether.

  “Will I know my mother and father?” He was swaying in the aisle as the train swayed, a dance. He exaggerated the movement.

  That stung her. How could he not know them? “Oh, I hope so, dear. They will be very hurt if you don’t remember them.”

  He escaped up the aisle again. “I won’t lie if I don’t.”

  “I’m sure he won’t,” Chaya murmured to Gregory. “He does terrible things—I believe he would steal from his grandmother if she happened to be rich—well, and if she wasn’t buried in Ekaterinoslav!”

  Asher was stopping at every seat and making a mental chart of destinations: three for Galleon, one for Sturgis; a large family with two boys—twins near his age, with whom he played eye tag—were en route to Columbia City. A man in a funny white suit—he said it was a sailor suit—was going all the way to Door County up at the top of the state. (He saw a door at the county line that the train would have to pass through, very big, wooden, with panels and a knob. Huge. How fine!)

  How far was it between the stations? How fast were they traveling? When another train passed them, he held his breath—was their speed doubled? Halved? Surely something happened between the two trains, but what? They shook at its passing and a roaring noise rushed in. It wasn’t enough to memorize some things; that
didn’t work for everything.

  There were so few people in the fields as they swept past, it all seemed horizon. Green, brown, green, green, yellow. Squares and lines, hedges and stands of unidentifiable light-killing trees and in the distance, farmhouses with and without porches. A small girl in a blue dress stood still and waved at him when he finally made himself sit and look out. Maybe people were waving all the way along and he hadn’t seen them. She was surrounded by brown cows, dark as rocks in the field. He waved at her, already wistful that she was grabbed back into distance.

  Asher could not imagine Gregory on a farm. What little he could call to mind with Chaya’s help (dust? mud?) would soil the man’s perfect cuffs. Chaya laughed, a nervous little laugh, and told him Gregory had insisted on coming home with them because, she said shyly, he loved her and must know where she began.

  “You didn’t begin there. Are we going to Zhitomir?”

  She told him that wasn’t the point. Gregory had even convinced her not to warn her parents of the visit, even if she’d known how to. “Let me have an unposed portrait, not a stiff one, everyone in their Sunday best.”

  “Our best is on Saturday,” Asher rebuked him coolly. What did he know of them? And why did Chai seem so different with Gregory? That tinkly laugh was someone else’s.

  The station in Christa was almost familiar, brick and limestone, fancy, with a castle turret on one side. He liked its friendly shape.

  But down at ground level, the world slowed. He watched Gregory walk to the end of the platform to find them a hack. Asher had never seen him at such a distance—every movement was smoothed by confidence—the way he raised his arm, the words he spoke. The soles of Gregory’s shoes seemed to walk an inch off the ground. No wonder Chaya was in his vest pocket.

  Did he remember Main Street? Not much of it—one shop called Doreen’s Mercantile, under a yellow awning—that was, or was not, where he first felt the kleptomaniacal itch in his fingers. “I used to get you ribbons there!” he called out to Chaya. “Didn’t I?” She nodded but did not look happy at the thought. Was the town rich or poor? It was hard to tell, it was so plain compared to Chicago. It was like a simple painting—he had seen a whole house of paintings at the Fair, had slept in it one night in a long hall full of golden frames and slickened scenes that glowed when the light hit them just right. You could see where the paintbrush had licked them. Christa was like the kind of painting that showed one thing at a time, not a scene that went back and back. There were trees up and down the street, dark ones, light ones, nudged by the breeze—in Chicago you had to go to a park to see so much leafage, so much greenery (greenery, scenery)—but here there were only a few streets and behind them you could see where the fields began, so soon! A narrow place. Most of the roads that veered off the main street were dirt: ridged, wrinkled, lumpy. Wagons tipped to this side and that, waddling as they went.