She went slowly up the stairs thinking of a new word she had learned that very week: It was prig. What, she had asked, did it mean exactly? “One who is self-righteous,” Miss Addams had told her. “Or arrogant, perhaps. One who thinks himself—herself—rather more pure of heart than another and is, ah, I suppose you might say, stiffened by it.” She smiled, one eyebrow critically raised. “Oh my, I hope I haven’t accidentally described myself!”
“Never!” Chaya assured her. “You can laugh at yourself, which is more than I can do.”
Prig then, Chaya should not have mocked those household decisions, she scolded herself. Gregory did not deserve sarcasm for what might be her blindness. She resolved to apologize but first, quite sincerely, she needed to sleep.
ONE THING more, an accoutrement to their house, which she neither expected nor approved. They had not fully moved themselves in, they were establishing the order of the rooms when, at the top of the stairs, out of what felt to her like nowhere because her presence was a surprise, there came their newly arrived maid Colleen to ask if she would enjoy a cup of tea. Chaya told her as gently as she could that she would not but she seethed at the need to speak with a single soul just then.
When they married, Gregory promised they would not have servants and the question never arose until they left the simplicities of Hull-House. Though he told her he wanted to protect her, especially in her current state, from the need for menial labor, she feared he meant that he liked things done as a maid would do them. Life is short: Chaya would not have dreamt of ironing their sheets. He had got the serving maid for her for her birthday, like another gift in a box, prettily wrapped. She hated to offend him by saying she did not, did not, want her. “Her name is Colleen,” he had said, “but sometimes servants are renamed, if that does not please you.”
She, who would not become Ceil, had looked at him very long and hard, her husband who allegedly walked the same road she did. “She is not a horse,” she told him. “Nor is she a slave. How could you dream of renaming her?”
He had shrugged. “My grandmother had a woman named Stevie, which she thought barbaric, and so she became Sarah. Informally rechristened, you could say. She didn’t appear to mind.”
How difficult it was for him—for both of them—to give up their habits. Every family Gregory knew had “help.” “Do you think she would rather have no employment?” he asked guilelessly. “Or be indentured in one of those factories you abhor?” Again, the best she could manage was to try not to judge him, in return for which she had to trust that he would do the same for her.
ASHER
40
HE HAD done his good deed for Donlan and eleven of his friends—not grand enough to induce a swagger but still an achievement that made Asher’s face go warm with pleasure. It had been an exertion.
But, after a week of satisfaction just short of gloating, when he took himself down to the fairgrounds (which he had begun to think of as the Burial Grounds) there was Donlan, there were Waldo, Marco, Bakitis, and an assortment of others, sitting around fire in a basket and, tiring of that, wandering aimlessly between the stripped bones of the buildings.
When he heard what had happened he felt a dry fury, his mouth parched into silence. They had worked at Ned Stillman’s factory a week, been given their wages fair and square, and dismissed. “Out the door same way we come in,” Marco snapped, scraping his gloveless hands together the way he’d have squashed an insect. “Pretty nice boiler works too. Some handsome machines. Everything workin’ full tilt. They’re not starvin’ over there but we’re back where we started.”
“Worse,” threw in Waldo. “Puts you back worse than you was. No explanation neither.” His face was pink with cold, which made him look feverish. “Guy in a nice white shirt and collar comes and says, ‘So long, fellas. You can get your pay envelope over by that window and don’t count the pennies, it’s all there.’ Not even a thanks or a sorry.” He spit at his own feet. “Guess your friend or what was he, your uncle, didn’t think you’d ever find out.”
Or, Asher thought, he didn’t care. Or—this was hard—he did. Only a nasty man would play a trick like that, as if it was a game. He could see that Donlan didn’t want to complain in case his feelings would be hurt. They were not just bruised but bleeding. Meddling, he had made things worse. Whenever he ran and fell—when he was little, he would race around the fields until he tripped and all the air got flattened out of him—that was what this felt like. When you got older, most likely a punch to the gut would do it. No breath. Lights popping behind his lids. “Rat bastard,” was all he could say, feeling how limited was his vocabulary of insults. “Jesus Christ!” The worst of curses wasn’t good enough. He would apologize, though—did and was told he didn’t need to be forgiven, he’d done his best. He kicked the basket full of fire and kicked it again until it rocked and nearly fell over. Couldn’t cry before his men, he was no child, but all the way home, running partway to work off the energy of anger, swinging onto the Alley L, tumbling off before the fare collector got to him, he boiled with fury. The iddle kiddo was going to make the man—the liar, the hypocrite, the bully—dearly pay.
He was lucky to arrive at Hull-House when he did: later, and Chaya and Gregory would have been gone. The last of their belongings stood heaped in a wagon box behind two splotchy workaday horses, guarded by the driver while they were saying long goodbyes inside. He supposed he’d have found out their new whereabouts easily enough, courtesy of Miss Addams, but—he wavered, faint at the thought—they would have gone on without him. Had they searched for him? Hadn’t they cared that he was not there with them? Without closing his eyes the farm loomed, deadened, deserted. Turn your back and the world disperses. While he sat like a cur in the dark they would have departed. That set him trembling.
By the time his sister came out on the porch, saw him and, with a little shriek, came running, he had made himself look nonchalant—the word like a slouch, that lovely non-sha-laahhnttt—leaning against the wagon as if she had kept him waiting.
41
GREGORY BROUGHT home a scrap of the news and gave it to Chaya as she was pinning up the last curtain hem in the nursery. It was a Sunday and he had been with his parents for an early breakfast, from which her condition blessedly exempted her. He told them she was sleeping.
“Should we be surprised,” he began dryly, and stood tight against her back to press her to him.
She laughed—“Gregory, I have pins in my mouth! Do you want me to swallow them?”—and pulled free. “What should not surprise us?”
“He’s fired them all. Ned. A week and they are out the door.”
“Oh, no! Asher’s men?”
Asher had been strutting like their old barnyard rooster.
“Every one of them. Turned out onto the street, and no apology either.”
“Ned was with you?”
“No, the hypocrite’s in church this morning. You know, he gives his wife that little present to show off with—the family pew. Father told me. He thought it exceedingly amusing, the whole thing. ‘That child’s little divertissement,’ he called it. He likes to refer to Asher as the ‘self-appointed hobo.’”
Chaya sat, her legs suddenly too weak to hold her. Whatever was a divertissement? And did it matter? “So much for good faith. Of course there was no way to compel him, but those men must have felt themselves without choice to let themselves be led by—” She shook her head. The little meshiach. The baby Moses.
The nursery would be simply furnished but full of color, to tickle the eye. May she (she secretly prayed for a girl) be spared genius. May he (though a healthy boy would be satisfactory) be glorious and ordinary, unburdened by the weight of too much facility, too much confidence. May her child be spared too much longing.
Asher was up in his new room, unpacking books. They had never spoken about his devotion to what was left of the Fair; somehow his dignity demanded that it simply be accepted as a fact, like weather, like a passing fever. To tell him this
would be cruel. Not to tell him would be patronizing.
She found him asleep on the floor between the leaning towers of his stolen library, stretched out, at ease, with his old German dictionary under his hand. She sat for a long time and watched his breath rise and fall, poor half-fledged pigeon, and tried a dozen sentences to see if there were a single one she might plausibly utter that would contain admiration, pity, and anger in equal draughts. Her brother-in-law Ned Stillman was not one jot less heartless than his power allowed him to be, nor did he possess sufficient imagination to know how to be different. But she was the messenger this morning, and because she knew Asher to be immoderate in his need, she was the first one he would hate.
But she could not read him. When she told him what she had learned of Ned’s perfidy, he narrowed his eyes to sullen slashes as if he were searching out something visible but very distant, and said in a cold voice, “Oh, I already knew that. And he is going to pay for it.”
“Asher? My sweet?” How could she not reach to touch him.
“Don’t call me that. I am not sweet.” He was still on the floor, his knees pulled up before him, dark stockings bunched around his ankles.
“You did a kind thing. And brave—it was brave of you. Almost as if you were a one-man union!” She hadn’t quite thought of it that way before.
He would not engage her glance.
“But you can see, this is all so much more complicated than one person can solve. Even a heroic person. You are like—you are trying to be an entire fire brigade, Asher, but no one can put out every fire alone.” She was trying to be gentle, but he did need to hear this admonition. “I’m afraid, dear, that there is a huge—an abyss, really—between our wills and our power.”
He did not really seem to be listening. Something in his face, his skin, or perhaps it was the air around him, did not resonate.
“I thought that every single day when I went off to make my catalog of those hellish sweats for Mrs. Kelley. If willing alone could shut them down . . .”
He sighed and clicked his tongue against his teeth. “We aren’t poor any more. Your will and your power got you Gregory.”
She had to think about that for a long minute; it seemed harsh to remind him that it was Gregory’s house in which he had just been sleeping. “No, actually, Asher, that is not the way it happened. His power, perhaps. My—” She had no word she liked for that exchange of wills. “You make it sound as if I struck a calculated bargain, and that is not fair and it is not so.”
Her brother only smiled, with a vacancy that showed he was humoring her.
“All I can say is that I am so sorry. Your friends deserved better. But Ned Stillman is a hard man, and if he has a conscience, it is not available for everyday use. Now—” She turned from him to the splay of books in which he sat. “Can I help you with these?”
He continued to consider her in silence, as if the dense, peculiar life had been sucked out of him. “I thought you mustn’t lift anything.” Mired, slow, like a boy at the edge of sleep.
“Oh, Ash, one book at a time! I am sturdier than that.”
He fixed his gaze on the front of her dress, where a modest curve was just beginning to disturb her buttons. “What do you think it looks like now? Is it bigger than”—he looked around, then at his own hand, which was clenched as if against pain—“my thumb?”
“Oh, yes!” This jollity felt like a conversation in another language. “They say it is shaped something like a seahorse, can you imagine that? A tiny curled-up thing just floating in a kind of ocean. And, of course, it is no ‘it,’ it is by now a ‘he’ or a ‘she’ or . . . well, that is too mysterious even to try to imagine.”
But Asher looked no less burdened. He continued to stare, his forehead creased above his eyebrows, those tender dashes. It was impossible for Chaya to guess whether he was regarding the past and what he had tried and failed to accomplish, and why, or was straining forward toward what would come, what he might compel—try to compel—to happen after today.
“I shall have Gregory find someone to build some lovely shelves for your books,” she told him, hopelessly. “And if you would like a desk—”
“Some big pillows,” Asher said, gesturing around him. “The Moroccans and Tunisians and the Turks—I especially liked the Turks—at the Fair, they all sat on fat pillows. Close to the earth. I don’t like chairs, they seem—”
“Chairs? What do you mean?”
“Shaky. You can’t trust them.”
“Asher.” The sound of him concerned her: Shaky was indeed the word for his face, his voice, his toes, which had begun to twitch the way a dog runs in its sleep.
“They fail you. Sometimes they come crashing down. I want some cushions covered with, you know what I mean—those carpets they use. Like gardens, all twined up.” He laughed. “Wool gardens. Made of knot flowers! Are they or are they knot?”
She thought it would help her, if not him, if she could put her arms around him, assure him he was not as alone as he looked.
“Aren’t you going to laugh?”
The best she could do was stretch her lips wide. “Knot flowers! Funny.” Barricaded by a blue Longinus, by a dark green split-spined Marvell and, maroon, Rumi in translation, her boy stayed flat on the bare floor, out of her reach.
ASHER
42
LETHARGY. BEAUTIFUL sound. Why wasn’t it a girl’s name? Lethargy. A lullaby. And he had been tranced like a baby sung to sleep until, when the setting sun gilded his new room through its curtainless windows, his sister long gone back to her smug busyness, he woke decided. Some invisible machine had threshed this out while he slept, discovered an action to match his anger. He knew what he was going to do, knew it with such urgency it was as strong as anything his body wanted. He sat on the floor watching his hands and arms turn to gold. How, now, to make it happen?
Asher riffled through the faces of the men who shared his furies, the shiverers at the Fair, the Ists ranged around the steamy room on Division and, with a puff of relief, came upon the one he would speak to. The man, always in the front row of the Anarchists’ side, was barrel-bellied, his hair a no-color between blond and gray. He was amused-looking behind a wiry beard: If he were a painted portrait it would be called The Contented Man. But Dietrich was the most discontented man in any room and he was famous for it. He swore he had lost more jobs than anyone in Chicago. “I am a very good machinist. The best. Only my mouth condemns me.” He smiled when he spoke, the way the serpent must have smiled: What he said was seditious. (Asher went to his lexicon for that.) “The fire next time must purify their hearts. They may blame it on a cow if they like, or vandals, or on an angry God. But we should be the ones responsible. We will cauterize this city, this nation, with the heat of our righteousness!” Cauterize! Not caution; not caught. The man was doubling his vocabulary. “We have been too cowed”—cowed?!—“by the hysteria after Haymarket. For years now we have not dared to rock or shock or overturn so much as a vegetable wagon. Cowards! Hypocrites! When are we going to remember the strength in spreading terror?” He spat out the word terror with such guttural force Asher could feel how it must have scraped his throat, emerging.
So it was straight to Dietrich that he went. Bent down at his hairy ear and told him his hope, his plan. Dietrich nodded slowly, in his own unhurried rhythm, beard scraping the top of his chest. Took a long look at him (how itchy to be scrutinized; to be, like it or not, assessed! He had been raked by a thousand eyes in his celebrity, but all that felt ancient now. Felt trivial, to be a child ventriloquist). “Yes, my little foot soldier,” the old man said in his scratchy accent. He hugged his belly the way, these days, Chaya was touching hers. Lovingly. “I think I can teach you a few things.” Think was sink. The things were sings. His other language had left smudges, like Yiddish but not quite. “If I tell you what you will need, can you get it? You have ways?”
Yes.
“If I tell you how to assemble this thing, you are sure you know to follow the d
irections?”
Yes.
“Tell me.” Tenderly, in case it was a secret that had to be cajoled out of him. “Is someone helping you with this, my good little man?”
No. No, no.
“This you are sure?”
“This I am sure. Of. Sure of it.”
“You are alone?”
Asher sighed, impatient. “I am alone.”
Dietrich stirred, his weight sandbagging him to his seat. “Come, then, with me elsewhere. We shall discuss this where there are not around so many thirsty ears.”
He thrust a puffy hand at Asher who, gasping with effort, hauled him up, then ducked out of his way for fear Dietrich’s belly might tip the old man forward and crush him flat.
“You know Most?”
Asher shrugged. “Most? Most what?”
“No, no, Johann Most.”
Asher looked all around him as if someone were there to be introduced. “Does he come to the meetings?”
“No, no, he is a leader when it comes to sabotage. For this he has undergone prison, has suffered—great pains. He has made a book about revolution, very good, very important. The science of revolutionary warfare.” He said revolutionary with a flourish, his voice rising. “You read, yes?”
Asher laughed. “I get by.”
“Then you should find it. Swallow it down, good medicine. It would make you strong.”
He nodded, thinking, Hurry on up, old man. I’m not reading, I’m doing. Finally.
“All right, now you listen to me. Most, I trust him, he does not believe in dynamite, it is too dangerous for most people. You he would certainly advise against it. All you would do, you would blow off those little hands of yours first thing.” He took hold of Asher’s wrist roughly, turned it up and back as if he were measuring its strength.
The Lake on Fire Page 32
