The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  Mrs. Kelley-Wischnewetsky, a socialist like Gregory, was so fierce that Chaya was put off by her the first time they met. Large, handsome as a man, with hooded eyes and sensual lips, she spent the first two courses at dinner raging, though no one was refuting her. She had causes, and anyone could realize they were good ones—reducing the servitude of women and children in factories and, invisibly, in sweatshops, and the deadly length of the workday for both. Chaya, easily brought back to the smell and feel of her cigar bench, sank in her seat under the weight of full recall. Her fingers twitched, her nostrils, summoning up the thick sweet-sour air, withered in self-defense.

  They were seated at dinner in the long wooden dining room, where Cook was laying out steaming bowls of turnip and shepherd’s pie. Chaya, intrigued by Mrs. Kelley (or was it Wischnewetsky?) and her denunciation of the soullessness of employers, offered her own testimony, shyly. “But you see, there are a lot of pieceworkers like myself who had no choice but to work day and night, otherwise we could never have paid our rent!”

  Clearly, Mrs. K-W—who could be blamed for simplifying her allegiances?—knew this territory well, but, like Gregory, it was unlikely she had lived it firsthand.

  “What did you work at?” Mrs. K-W asked abruptly, as if she were interviewing Chaya for yet another position. She did not much seem to value the niceties that usually accompanied her class.

  Chaya, trying not to be cowed, took a tiny bite of turnip for fortification and explained how she had dragged herself through the double shift, long hours at Winkler’s, evenings at Yanowitz’s buckeye. “Those were the days,” she confided, “quite recent days, actually”—and she looked at Gregory who was listening, rapt—“when I saw no sun early or late. I was a cigar-making machine, and if I had any mind at all, it was in total eclipse.”

  “You see! You are only proving my conviction, dear!” the older woman said triumphantly, as if her misery had been the result of Chaya’s own foolishness. “If your hours had been restricted—and only our eight-hour law can hold them in check, trust no employer to restrain himself—some other young woman could have had the other part of your employment, do you not see?”

  Chaya saw, but she also remembered the trivial weight of the coins that slipped from the envelope into her hand on payday. She was intrigued watching Mrs. K-W, who, though much more vociferous, seemed entirely at ease and affectionate with Miss Addams: Who was this vivid, outspoken, upper-class sympathizer, who cared more about her convictions than about her dinner, which sat hardening before her, barely touched, while she played, with relish, a long scale, hitting every kind of note from disgust and disappointment to a searing, contemptuous fury?

  What was most wonderful about her was that, for all her righteous anger—or perhaps fueled by it—the woman seemed to crackle with hope and optimism as if they were an electric current. Miss Addams, though always busy, was quietly and efficiently so; she seemed positively tranquil beside Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky, who was full-voiced and turbulent and who, Chaya thought with regret, had not much approved of her in her innocent victimhood.

  BUT SHE was mistaken. The very next evening, Mrs. K-W tapped her on the arm as she was taking her seat at the dinner table. Chaya felt frail as a child beside her.

  “Mrs. Stillman—”

  The name was camouflage, alien and absurd.

  “Do you think we might have a word?”

  And so they talked, unceremoniously standing in the doorway, and Chaya, both flattered and terrified, allowed herself to be pressed into an army of “reformers”—what chutzpah in the word!—from which she knew, by instinct, there would never be release. Surely Miss Addams had alerted her friend to Chaya’s hunger to be of use.

  First she was treated to a lesson in the two meanings of the word determined. “Either one’s life is determined—hunger, disease, desperation—because the forces of greed and self-interest are aligned against one, or one lives a life determined to overcome those forces. I make this sound simple. It is not simple. There are, in this city, sixty-six thousand employers and I have twelve inspectors. But it is possible, if one finds a place to plant one’s feet.” Chaya nodded dumbly. So she was “one.” But had she not, as a worker, always been faceless, countable by number, not by name?

  All it meant, her recruiter told her without hesitating to see if she understood that she was being pressed to join Mrs. K-W’s righteous army, was that she would go out with a pen and notebook to study the sweats, the sort of hellhole Yanowitz had run in his own rooms. She would have to talk her way in—admittedly a daunting challenge—and then she would observe, and assign numbers and checkmarks to a variety of categories. “Indoor toilet? Functioning indoor toilet? One does not guarantee the other, believe me. Ventilation? Light? Type of power if it is a garment shop—foot? Steam? Gender and ages of the workers?” Mrs. K-W ticked them off with a terrible dispassion, though when she spoke, her color rose as if she were facing a furnace. “You will find little boys in the can factories with unbound bloody hands. You will see children roasting before ovens to make crackers like the ones we ate with our dinner. The list, as you no doubt know from your own experience, is nothing if not a description of the circles of hell.” She seemed almost to take satisfaction from having so exhaustively organized the potential horrors. But, it seemed, the law to limit hours and ages, which she had fought for with the ferocity of an angered mother bear, made it illegal for owners to deny her access. That would be her shield.

  “But will I be safe?” Chaya asked. “Won’t they be—” She stopped to imagine herself being chased from doorways, threatened with weapons. She knew men like Yanowitz.

  “Angry? Indeed. Resistant? Only as far as you allow them to be. Will it be dangerous?”

  “Yes?” Chaya realized she had been standing on her tiptoes, which did not enlarge her voice.

  “Yes, it may be. And you are a—what shall I say?—a slight and inexperienced young woman. Obviously.” She gave a little half sniff that sounded like disdain. “But I sense, Mrs. Stillman, that your anger may be equal to theirs, and we might as well tap it. It will be healthy for you to turn it to some use besides regret.” Mrs. K-W’s dark-eyed gaze was unwavering, like one of the massive golden statues at the Exposition that stared into the distance as if it were the future and she had been fashioned to command it.

  34

  CHAYA DARED find herself disappointed that, for the first thirty days, Mrs. K-W assigned her no more than clerical duty, but she’d have been terrified to venture into what they called “the field.” Having lived at the Fields of Zion, when she heard that word she still pictured meadows bounded by wooden fences.

  At the end of each day when the twelve inspectors returned to the office—which was just downwind of Hull-House, quite nearby—she inscribed their notes in a giant ledger. Every inscription attested to such pain that even the bare inked notations could restore the seen: The factory whose windows were painted black not only to forestall observation but, she assumed, to punish its workers. The boy of no discernible age, operating in no familiar language, whose clothing stank of excrement. The girl beaten by the owner with a stick for sewing a bad seam and then, having caught her finger in her machine, fined for bleeding on the garment.

  On and on it went, the litany of inhumane employers and fearful workers, spiced all too frequently by threats to the inspectors, their notebooks confiscated, and one who was actually thrown down a flight of stairs. Mrs. K-W sued on her behalf, though she was hardly surprised to win nothing but an editorial rebuke for her “socialistic attempts to curb and fetter the rights of capital.” “The Tribune,” her mentor told Chaya wearily, “was founded on two principles from which it does not waver. They should decorate its masthead: ‘Know where the money is, follow where it leads, and never apologize.’” She could be quite merry in spite of all. “‘And where it does not lead, find out who is abandoned.’ Which sound like invitations to reform but actually describe the way to the plutocrats’ fortunes, which will, with
their assistance, be left undisturbed.” Her smile conveyed no pleasure. “Oh, Mrs. Stillman, I should be better at my numbers, shouldn’t I? I suppose that makes three principles, a suitably asymmetrical number. The holy trinity of our age!”

  Chaya wondered if serving as one of Mrs. K-W’s inspectors was too easy, a kind of atonement. She didn’t think she was gloating; quite the opposite, she was only willing to lend her weight to the balance. She went out a few times with a Mrs. Donaldson, a rather formidable lady in a hat so heavy with adornment that she was amazed the woman could hold her head up but who stared down the floor bosses in a way Chaya could hardly imagine emulating.

  Another time she accompanied a very slight young man named Doster who reminded her a bit of Gregory in that he was lovely to look at and polished in manner, but who seemed daunted by his task. “I have been here before,” he confided as they made their shaky way up a long external stairway on Wells Street, “and this supervisor boxed my ears with a rolled-up newspaper.” She stared at him, embarrassed. “Of course I am prevented from raising a hand, except to defend myself. But I was tempted to lay him out right there beside his mangle.” Chaya was sure it did him good to envision such a victory but she doubted he could have executed it; his assailant must have carried three times his weight. “The girls on the floor just looked away, they turned their heads.” He spread his hands wide and she could see that his nails were bitten to the quick. “It is a grim task, reporting what we see, my dear. Are you certain you want to do it?”

  She assured him she did, though she cowered mightily inside. How she wished Gregory were volunteering his whole self like this young man, instead of summarizing purgatory from a distance, even at the cost of his very clean fingernails. “I can only hope my best is good enough,” she assured Mr. Doster. Just to hear herself say it she told him, “I have done some hard things myself but this will be, I think, a test of a different kind.”

  THE FIRST week she was nauseated much of the time from the combined stench of perspiration (they were called sweatshops for a reason), fish and fried onions from lunch pails, the air dense with fabric finish, and the stink of scorch thick across it all. The pressers’ steam raised a cloud that sucked every breath of air from the small rooms, and the hiss that flew out obliterated half of every sentence. Cigar-making had been a party compared with the manufacture of clothing, any kind from winter’s to summer’s to the miscellany’s between.

  The first evening, returned from her investigations, she immersed herself in the copper bathtub in the room at the end of the hall where green plants flourished on the washstand because the air was damp. The filth of what she had walked through would not wash off; she understood that. How, how could one human commit such sins against another? It was a naïve question but there was something almost comforting about asking it, as though some time there would have to come an answer.

  “AH,” MRS. Kelley-Wischnewetsky had said to her when she returned to the office undone, “may you never become immune to your disgust. May you stay inconsolable.” Was that a blessing or a curse? Nothing she had lived with at Mrs. Gottlieb’s had prepared her for the lurch of piss and occasional vomit, of dead dog in the street and spoiled food in the kitchens of the apartments she passed, and the front-room shops where workers spent their days. Mrs. Gottlieb’s—orderly, maintained with pride, childless—had she but known it, was a palace.

  That first night, exhausted though she was, she thrust herself thirstily against Gregory as if she had spent the day crossing the desert on her knees. His body was what she needed, live, taut, healthy. He smelled so good, so fresh and untainted. He had the sweet neck of a boy and the hard chest of a man, and nothing in his life had begun to ruin him. Everything about him, and their bed, their crisp sheets, the lamplight in which they made soft shadows, was clean. She lay beside him shuddering with relief, opened herself to him as if his healthy body could save her, worried, at the same time, that her sudden ardor would offend him.

  Could you exchange your disgust for the body’s pleasure? Death for life? Could dismal reality be an aphrodisiac? She remembered reading somewhere (and being shocked) about a woman who had made love rapturously after the death of her mother, because that way she could assert their terrible difference: She was still alive. She made love to Gregory for the sake of hope. The worse her daily rounds, the more miserable the indictments that went into her pebbled notebook and thence into the ledger, the more she needed to be touched by immaculate hands, and was ashamed. If ever she stopped feeling such shame, she would know she had lost herself, for whatever small thing that was worth.

  As she drifted off into the shallows of sleep, it occurred to Chaya, vaguely, an idea with the timid imprint that water might make, that everything anyone did was a sort of exchange. Needing the buoyancy of passion in a clean place to erase the day’s darkness. Escaping from one reality into another—wasn’t that, in some way she was too tired to explain to herself, why Gregory loved her? Why, when all was said and done—in spite of his failure to be a “natural socialist!”—she loved him? The thing that led the lives of the poor into their deaths was that they did not change, minute to minute or year to year.

  That was an abstraction she made so that she could sleep. But what she had seen that day was nothing theoretical: She had been sent to check on a woman who was said to have absented herself from work because she was sick and—the shadow of Mrs. Gottlieb’s shop, emptied by typhoid, loomed over her—they needed to know what caused her affliction for fear she might have brought smallpox to the factory floor, or tuberculosis. She readily allowed Chaya into her apartment, which was horribly strewn with anything one might dare name: crusted dishes, undergarments sagging over the back of a chair, a pail to catch what must have dripped from a leaking roof. There was even a dog, so mangy its back was bare, a sickly pink. The woman was young, with very fair hair not loose but pulled harshly back, punishingly so; she might have been pretty if she had not been so sallow and forlorn. “You have a baby,” Chaya ventured, which she supposed sounded like an accusation. “No, no baby.” Vehemently. “Me only.” Chaya insisted, it was in her notes, and she took it upon herself to move through the apartment, touching more than she’d have liked to and listening hard, and that was when she heard a weak mewing. A cat amidst all this wreckage? A cat with that dog lying there watching her?

  No cat, though. She listened hard and, on the odd chance, pulled open the closed door of a closet and there was the baby, lying on a shelf like a package awaiting delivery. He was snuffling and flailing in his stained little shirt, frail hair plastered to his head, and when she touched his forehead he was burning. His mother cried out to her and, had Chaya not gathered him up and held him against her own chest, she’d have taken the woman into her arms and wept with her. She remembered Mr. Doster saying that they were forbidden to make physical contact with their “subjects” and she thought how vicious she would seem if she took the baby from its mother and insisted she follow, because she could suddenly see that the girl—she was really just a girl—was burning too.

  And so she reported what became an “incident,” not a mother moored in pain, and never heard anything of what came of that. Of them. Had she betrayed or saved them? Wasn’t that the worst of what separated them one from another? That there was a system, an attempt to make some order out of chaos, but it was not sensitive enough to hear the voices of the souls it hoped to serve?

  It hardly surprised her that she awoke one morning having dreamt she was standing on a bridge at the great white Fair, and when she turned full front she was serenely smiling though she had no arms.

  ASHER

  35

  NEXT IN the round of party-givers came Gregory’s brother Ned, Chaya’s least favorite relative. Precisely because Gregory hated him, she explained to Asher, he had no choice but to attend. Asher failed to understand this, but he took a deep, edgy breath and offered himself up to share her sacrifice. On the night of the party, he smiled, he dressed up in the suit he h
ad worn to her wedding and a tweed cap he was instructed to remove at the door. He ought to have alarmed her with his sudden willingness but she was elsewhere, lost in herself.

  Ned greeted them—later for the gritting, the grilling and gutting—at the door. He was gracious in his own house, his square cheeks pink with health, or, perhaps, alcohol. “There is the boy we so rarely encounter these days!” Sour-sweet with whiskey and cigars, his breath smelled combustible, so soon, before all the carriages had even pulled up close to the door. He clapped Asher between his shoulders, just where, Asher thought, the guillotine would once have fallen. Heads falling into baskets like cabbages. Blood flying out, staining the knees of the executioner. This man, Ned Stillman, made him see violence. Was it his rough voice curdled to coyness? “To what do we owe the honor of your presence, iddle kiddo?”

  “I am your brother-in-law,” Asher grimly reminded him. It took an effort not to leap at the man’s throat. “Don’t you remember, I come with the bride?” I’m here to skim your rooms of their fancies, he did not say. To pocket what I can of yours, to poke and pilfer. Iddle kiddo. “Do you have some chocolate?” he asked, because they would expect such a question from a boy with a wide collar spread like white wings, gull wings, over his chest.

  No one had much to say to him, child that they still saw, and he leaned in on their chatter: whom they had seen at the opera looking worryingly pale, fogbound Venice to which someone had sailed in harrowing weather, and London more crowded than ever but oh, the gorgeous feast at the house of—whoever—in Highgate.