The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  Asher, impatient, said, “You loved him. You wanted her to marry all this.” He waved his hand at the roomful of goyim. That word he heard often enough from Mrs. Gottlieb. That and yenem—hostilely, them. Yenem was ugly but he loved the word alien, the liquid sound of it and the drama, and here she was in Alienland where in her ordinary life she would never have set a foot.

  Two frail-looking women were sawing at a violin and a cello, first a droopy melody and then something gay and a little marchlike, repeated and repeated while Gregory came forward and, alone, Chaya walked the short distance to stand before him. Her face still looked blank to Asher, neither sad nor happy. More likely frightened, and she should be. But she would never tell him what she was feeling any more. He knew she would not trust him to be kind.

  Everything was hushed. This was what Chaya called good taste now. Asher preferred riot. When he was asked to carry in the wedding ring Gregory had placed in his hand, he walked with rare care to the front of the room where Miss Addams was in charge of “joining them” in the basketed flower garden they had constructed. There were her spectacles slipping down her nose the way they always did. She wore her regular clothes, something between a brown and a black with a reluctant little gush of lace at the throat, and a shawl full of curlicues to be fancy.

  “I am, I know, not the ideal person to unite two loving people in marriage because I have not myself had the pleasure of such a union. But what I believe to be more important is what I understand of the force of unity in the face of many difficulties.” She smiled benignly out at what was, for the moment, her congregation and asked what made it possible for two people who had been strangers—utter strangers going their own ways!—to meet by chance and regard each other with curiosity. What made it possible to discover that they were walking toward the same horizon, step by step around obstacles, into unknown avenues, both of them leaving behind the narrowness of their separate histories. Asher heard a rustling where Gregory’s mother sat. She was having trouble sitting still, her face twitching with affront. He imagined that Chaya missed their mother today, but when he taxed his own memory, he could not see her.

  What made it possible, Miss Addams went on because those weren’t really questions, was imagination, the daring to imagine a different future. Then came a cascade of all they hoped for together, and in her voice they became a whole army brigade, overthrowing this and obliterating that and Asher thought about the men on Division Street and looked around him at the silks and the velvets and the stiff collars and the disapproving faces and he thought, Maybe Chaya has wriggled out of her past but won’t it take more than imagination to put aside the comforts that keep that Steal-man soft?

  Miss Addams insisted you could take having too much and use it, spread it like a balm, for the people who have too little and by believing it, like the prophets of a new, blended religion, this charmed couple would prevail, holding hands the whole time. She was right, she probably didn’t know much about love—neither did he—but the woman couldn’t miss an opportunity to spread her gospel even among these nonbelievers. She smiled at them with the warmth of a small fire you could warm your hands over, and was silent. Then came a snort from the vicinity of the groom’s family, this time, from beneath some mustache, a very masculine thump of derision. It was amazing the bunch of them had not pushed their way out or shouted down their hostess, who beamed at them with—was it really?—innocence.

  Asher was so rapt he forgot it was time to hand the wedding ring to Gregory. “Ash!” his sister whispered, a fierce awakening, and he fumbled it and it fell onto the carpet, which was complicated by entwined Persian flowers. The cat, intrigued by the glint of gold, leaped up and began circling it for the kill, and then they were allowed to laugh. Chaya sagged against Gregory, pricked by the laughing so that the terrible bloating air of all this properness fizzed out and, thanks to his clumsy fingers, he recognized her again.

  Then—where had he come from?—a man with a camera shot off a fierce explosion of light. Miss Addams stared at him sternly and said, “If you please, sir, you will exit as rapidly as you entered, and by the same door. And I do not want to see the result of that intrusion folded on my table tomorrow morning.” The man raised one hand to say, but not mean, “Pardon me, madam,” and backed out. A wind of murmuring went up: The Tribune? The Times? The Herald? Were his sister and Gregory so famous that someone would write a story about this wedding and put that picture at the top? Who would want to see it? Because it was a “scandal”? Was the man with the camera like the bad witch at the christening banquet for Sleeping Beauty? Was he the uninvited?

  After all the words, the new Mr. and Mrs. Stillman went out onto the porch and, from there, stepped into a victoria garlanded with yellow and blue flowers, a yolk-yellow bow at the rear like the bow on the fanny of a girl. They looked dazed, riding on a flood of cheering and clapping, and rode away for a ceremonial tour of the city. Why the clapping? They had not done anything.

  It took one cross look from Mrs. Gottlieb to keep Asher from leaping in between them. Chaya had told him once how he was weaned: “Shoyn.” Finished. Their unsentimental mother. Some things echoed: finished again. She didn’t remember if he had cried. This time, dry-eyed, slouched against one of the porch pillars watching them go, he wanted to kick Gregory or kick the horse or the wheels of the carriage. Kick something until he hurt it and it hurt back. He wondered if it was time for him to learn to smoke.

  AND NOW what would be changed? He and Chaya had walked down the stairs at Mrs. Gottlieb’s, trying not to trip and fall, carrying the little they owned, and now they would live “for a little while,” Chaya promised him, upstairs at Hull-House. She called this a compromise because she had not liked the rooms Gregory lived in—“You would not have liked them either, Asher, I promise you”—and neither of them wished to rent, let alone buy, the sort of house Gregory’s parents foresaw for them, armored in stone, all echoing halls and slippery floors, the kind where Asher had performed so many Sunday afternoons. He would sleep in his own room now, small—she said cozy—down at the far end of the hall. Usually it housed a maid.

  “Housed?” he challenged. “That is too small to be a house. I hope the maid was no bigger than I am. She would have to live bending over.” He could see she felt guilty for leaving him. He didn’t argue.

  This was what being married meant, then—you left your brother to go and sleep in a high wide bed with someone you hadn’t even known a blink or two ago. But there was one thought he could hide in. It didn’t make him less lonely but if he could leave himself out of it, it seemed a good thing: If people were only their real selves without the masquerade of their clothes, then she and her husband could at least see each other truly. He knew (he had heard in his alley and had seen in one particular book he should not have been looking at) that married meant sometimes being naked. He was happy for her, then, but—he thought about this as he shook the wrinkles out of his new pants and hung his jacket shakily from a hanger—he could not pretend to be happy for himself.

  29

  THEIR MODEST honeymoon finished—no European grand tour but (Asher in tow) a few weeks at White Pines, Gregory’s family’s New Hampshire summer house, which was not grand, praise be, but rustic in what she did not recognize as the common affectation of the wealthy: simple, aged furniture, worn upholstery, musty books on the shelves (enough to keep her brother satisfied), mysterious sporting equipment in every closet and an obligatory moose’s head glowering from the wall above the stone fireplace—Chaya woke to confusion.

  Every day but Sundays, for so long she shuddered to contemplate, she had hurried out of her bed—she had exchanged her train of chairs some months ago for a cot that felt like bones loosely bound by a thin layer of flesh—and washed in chill or heat, dressed with memorized movements, arranged her unsleek hair without ever seeing it, dabbed her mouth with tea that had not steeped long enough and a round of bread, and gone.

  She knew every inflection of Chicago dawn, different i
n each season—cool purple turning gold; tranced a dull fog-gray so many days, locked under cloud, or pearly with snow about to let down as if the sky were a trapdoor that silently, invisibly opened. The rising light was almost something she could touch, so frail, such magic in its endless changes, its creep and recoil and opening up. It was the medium everything lived in, like water in the sea. Only when she arrived at Winkler’s would the dawn be frank and full, and then she had to stifle it, climbing the stairs into deadening gaslight. A dozen women from the south and the west poured forth from the trolley alongside her, and climbed the stairs with a clatter like an army in boots.

  Today there was no need to leap from her bed, whose light sheet lay across her like another layer of air. Gregory slept turned from her, deep in some dream, miles away, out on a lake, perhaps, or up on a mountain. She dressed slowly, taking time to adjust her new shirtwaist, which would need breaking in to be wearable. She twisted her hair; disapproved. It had looked so lovely for the wedding, lilies of the valley securely pinned, after a kind of attention she never had time or occasion to give it; had as many minutes as she needed, now, to brush it and rearrange it, pin up an escaped curl, fasten a black velvet choker at her neck, Miss Addams’s gift, a cameo with an anonymous profile in ivory facing whatever she might like to imagine. She looked at her face and saw, at leisure, no one she knew: a woman carefully arranged, ornamented, ready to begin her life again, safe, replete. Spoken for. Renamed.

  Gregory slept on, little gusts of breath rising from his pillow. Asher she would not disturb. His door, at the end of the hall, was still closed. She hoped he was relishing the chance to be alone. When she put him to sleep last night, he was surrounded by towers of books. Then down the long stairway silently, on the carpet runner that ate footsteps. She could feel the sun warming her shoulders. In the kitchen, faces awaited her, cheerful, serene.

  Breakfast in Miss Addams’s wide, bright kitchen: a blue bowl of orange marmalade, heaped glowing like chunks of amber; fresh ruddy tomatoes and fleshy cheese, sweating slightly, in banked slices; a glory of bread with crust that crackled at the touch. Eggs whipped into a pale froth by Cook, and poured with a hiss onto the griddle, then spread in a perfect, self-contained circle. Amazing, Chaya thought idly, to keep from thinking anything else, that eggs know how to make a shape like that, like something seamed, and keep it. They must be the most disciplined of foods. Look, their edges are secure!

  “I have cinnamon buns,” Cook told Chaya, raising a blackened muffin tin like a celebratory glass. “Dear, you should have one, they came out perfect this morning, just for you!” Cook had a face round as a clock, and her colorless hair stood straight up from her forehead like a cock’s comb. Her skin always looked slightly floured.

  What had she done to deserve the peace of this table, those clean blue-checked curtains, the long cabinets behind which stood every size and shape of bowl, stacked and ready for filling. That giant woodstove with its paws of polished chrome in which the cat was, just then, contemplating her face, then slowly, luxuriously, raising a leg to wash her cheek. She made a lapping sound, as if she were drinking milk.

  Chaya had trouble swallowing the lovely crumbs; soft though they were, her throat was tight and dry, unaccustomed. Didn’t Sara and Stuka deserve this early morning sweetness?

  “You don’t like it, then?” Cook prodded. She was all pride where her offerings were concerned. Hands joined before her chest as if in prayer, she looked pierced with disappointment.

  “Oh, I do! I’m not—” Explaining would sound ungrateful. The buns were a gift. If she were able to think into tomorrow, she would know she could not go on feeling this way. One could not be eaten by such foolish guilt forever before it became a self-indulgence—Gregory had called it her vanity—but that would be worse, like putting a death behind her. By now she’d have finished two packs of stogies, tightly wrapped and tucked in the little box she kept on her right, next to the paste pot. The sound of gossip, jaggedly accented, would surround her, syncopated by the tap of the packets as the girls finished them off and stored them. The girls, the women, the grandmothers, who had wished her well and would—she hoped—miss her too.

  Cook and Miss Gates with her sharp nose and her eyepiece that dangled like something broken over her chest, one of the Schumacher ladies, and perhaps at any moment Miss Addams herself (though she had undoubtedly eaten already and was at her desk in the study, attacking the day’s demands)—all of them clucked with sympathy, or were careful not to cluck, for the bride disappointed by her marriage.

  CHAYA BEGGED Miss Addams to put her to work. She had told her how peculiar it was not to go to her factory. She felt, she said, as if she had left her leg in a trap, escaping.

  “Yes, of course. But that would be unseemly, wouldn’t it? To report to the factory now, as the wife of Gregory Stillman. And you have no need—”

  “Yes, I agree, it would.” She wasn’t entirely sure what unseemly meant but she could imagine her mother-in-law’s expression at the idea of her persisting at her cigar bench. She had already been subjected to advice about the best way to remove the nicotine from her fingers. Vinegar would do it, a generous soaking draught that rankled like smelling salts. “And I can’t pretend to like being bound to the work. It was very unpleasant.”

  “You look unconvinced, Chaya.”

  Whenever she spoke with Miss Addams with her slightly tilting head, Chaya felt her own head balancing in the opposite direction. It was, she supposed, a sort of sympathetic compensation.

  “I feel—disloyal. I know that’s foolish. There isn’t a one of us who wouldn’t leave if she could. Just say goodbye and never come back.”

  Miss Addams always looked as if she understood, though the more frequently she used that frown of pained comprehension the less Chaya thought it should be trusted. It was, she knew, an arrogant prejudice to feel even the most creeping superiority but she could do little to shake it off. This heroic woman did her best but, like Gregory, she lacked the feel of labor in her own hands. She worked hard for the attention of her donors—it was expensive to rescue so many lives, to feed this furnace of enterprise and optimism—but that was work in the presence of laden tables, of sherry and claret, of men in smoking jackets shaking one’s hand earnestly at the top of the stairs and promising a check. She had never had to be abject before a Winkler or a Yanowitz. Saying goodbye, without explanation, to her two gruff employers had given Chaya greater pleasure than anything she had done in a very long time. Though she didn’t think they cared much—Winkler shrugged his sweaty bulk as if he’d been overcome by a hiccup and Yanowitz muttered about how hard it would be to find a better employer—it was more thrilling, she told no one, than the spreading joy she felt receiving Miss Addams’s blessing at her wedding.

  What Miss Addams did for the neighborhood, those hundreds and more hundreds whose lives she sweetened, she did for them. One had to be a little beneath her, or a lot. She would never condescend; still, one had to need. Certainly there was plenty of that to go around. But where, Chaya wondered, very much alone with her double knowledge, did it leave her?

  Gregory sat, daily, at a small elegant desk under a dormer or at the lovely library, writing his book. He still would not show it to her, which was just as well; having stolen that stultifying preview she was afraid to read more.

  As for Asher, he had called the trip to New Hampshire his “vacation,” and had happily gone back to the Midway, from which he continued to bring home gifts like a cat depositing mice and birds at her feet. She could not hurt him by reminding him that she no longer needed these sweetmeats. Gregory thought Asher, jealous, was courting her; she worried less about his psyche than at the more immediate possibility that his collar would be grasped one day by a constable’s hand for appropriating, at will, anything he found amusing. Like the little gifts he had fingered into his sack at Doreen’s shop in Christa, the presentations were minor: a peacock feather, a fan edged in black Spanish lace, a bar of soap engraved with the
body of an elephant, and, once, a plaster globe the size of a melon with Chicago denoted by a giant golden star that seemed to have fallen on the Midwest from some galaxy. She would never succeed in disabusing him of his belief that if he could manage to get something into his pocket, of great value or none at all, he had earned it.

  “I recall that Gregory said you have a particular love for reading.” Chaya and her benefactress were moving—Miss Addams rarely stood still—through a corridor, between overseeing the distribution of milk to infants who lacked it and the establishment of three Italian women at spinning wheels where they were to create thread for an exhibition of native crafts and national pride. The women, who wore aprons as though they were planning to cook and not spin, walked backwards before their benefactor as she approached, dipping their heads with respect; they looked like boats being tugged clear of a looming ship.

  Though the day’s particulars changed endlessly, Hull-House was always teeming. The many languages that flew through its rooms made a sort of song that did not trouble Chaya because the cigar shop floor had been like that, open to so many who were still at home only in their native tongues. Their attempt at English syllables made no sense if she didn’t concentrate, and only a little when she did. Miss Addams had learned a fraction of everything from Italian to Hungarian, though most of it emerged sounding alike. She spoke an odd, effortful poly-language ineluctably of middle America. Mostly she used it for soothing.

  They were in the neighborhood nursery now, where Miss Addams had scooped up a squalling baby in a huge dingy bonnet that must recently have belonged to an older sister; it slid comically down over the girl’s round black eyes. “There, you funny thing,” Miss Addams said amiably, lifting the brim and making a face. The child quieted and pulled the hat back down with a wheezy laugh.