None of this was Chaya wise enough to understand while she stood quaking and, shamed, tried to turn her back on them. When somehow they heard why she was being detained, they were as scandalized as churchgoing matrons: So she was the sister of a “boy arsonist”—she held dangerous political opinions, while they, as decent as their sainted mothers, held none at all. “But listen,” one woman shouted back—she was undoubtedly as young as Chaya but her sweet face was worn, her makeup smudged and patchy. “They could knock down all them factories for all I care, they just make rich men richer!” So, they were political after all.
“Yeah, but who’d make your unmentionables, darlin’? The stuff you love don’t just fall out of the sky.”
“I don’t care. More power to that kid, I hope somebody gives him a medal.”
FINALLY, AFTER far too long—Chaya took the insult as it was intended—Gregory came, without an attorney, to post bond for her; her little brother was beyond the reach of bail, having been deemed a menace to civilization, if Chicago was said to have such a thing. She was merely accused of being a co-conspirator, and thus, on the assumption that the other half of the conspiracy was penned up in safety, she could be considered disarmed. She desperately did not wish to leave with her boy still in that downstairs dungeon. Gregory, out of patience, led her firmly along the corridor toward the exit.
She wanted to cry out for pity at what Asher must be undergoing in that wretched cell to which they were abandoning him with no defense against the vile men who would tower around him. A clean-haired, clear-faced young boy in crackling new boots, good leather, which would make him appear to be wealthy. Whether they poked and prodded or left him alone, he would be so frightened she could hardly bear to imagine it.
“I should have known,” Gregory said to her bitterly as they settled themselves in his brougham, “that in the end you would choose your brother over—” Clearly he wanted to say me, but instead chose something less personal but larger: “—your marriage. Does it occur to you there is something unhealthy about that?”
This revision of reality would not do. “I have made no such choice.” She could feel the stiffness of her reply in her very posture against the leather seat. “And, may I remind you, you have spoken ill of Ned far more than I have—understandably, since you had the misfortune of growing up beside him.” She looked out over the sleek, dark heads of his horses, seething at such willful misunderstanding. “You know what Ned has done, the hurt he has caused. Did you expect no response?”
Gregory still did not look at her but kept his eyes straight ahead. “He set off an explosive, Chaya. He tried to destroy—” He shook his head as if to dislodge the thought. “Are you truly ready to defend such a heinous thing?”
“He is not a thing, he is my brother. I have never asked Asher to do harm to anyone, and certainly not to your brother, whose word is worth less than nothing. Whatever poisons Asher has drunk up have begun as—” She did not know quite what to call them. “Your dear Ned enjoyed humiliating him and his poor friends and you very well know that. He enjoyed making Asher into a little fool.” She swallowed hard. Ned’s betrayal, his contemptuous, noxious double-dealing—she lacked the vocabulary for such treachery. Gregory, who had the words, had called his brother a buzzard who did not bother to wait until his carrion cooled.
“But a bomb! A firebomb, Chaya. Whatever Ned’s sins, do you favor anarchy now? Is that what you call just?”
“It was midnight. Ned was safe at home—or, knowing his habits, perhaps in some other place where he ought not to have been.”
“Chaya.” Gregory put his hand over hers, gently. “What have we come to? Are we truly antagonists now?”
Their headline had read: WEDDING JOINS COUPLE’S SEPARATE WORLDS: SOCIALIST SOCIALITE, JEWISH CINDERELLA CIGAR WORKER JOINED IN HULL-HOUSE CEREMONY, SWEAR COMMON GOAL: ELIMINATE POVERTY, REFORM ECONOMY.
On the story went. It had been a long time before she understood they were being mocked. Now, to account for his coldness, Chaya strained to imagine how it felt to be Gregory, who had cast his lot with her and her ideals—publicly, irrevocably—and, condone them or not, who was going to be held to account for them. Could she not spare some pity for him? But it was only her brother’s face that hung before her, more vulnerable than any grown man’s.
How far from his past could a man’s good character and worthy intentions take him? Out of love and loyalty, how could she defend the indefensible? And who was responsible for seeding another’s conscience? There was no one with whom she could speculate about such questions. There was no one unless it was Gregory.
When they arrived at home, they turned their backs and walked away from one another.
AFTER A long interval spent in their half-furnished parlor in silence, knowing she would soon be caught up in a frenzy of testimony, claim and counterclaim, forced to see her boy alone in the docket, beyond her negligent care, she opened the door of their bedroom carefully, as if she were stealing her way out of rather than into it.
Gregory was seated in the lap of his armchair staring straight ahead. He had left carefully unfolded on the side table beside him the Tribune, as if to salt her wounds.
MIDNIGHT BLAST INJURES TWO: BOY BOMBER LINKED TO CONSPIRACY.
The maid had brought her incessant gift of tea, which sat ignored beside him. Gregory looked at Chaya without expression.
“Gregory? Darling?” Her voice felt rusty.
A missed heartbeat. How familiar his rhythms were to her, how telling this hesitation. “Yes, Chaya.” Usually he smiled when he saw her. This would be, she understood, only a fraction of her punishment.
“What are the things I am permitted to do while I am—under—bond.” Saying such a word was so alien that it was as frightening as touching a gun, being forced to pick it up and feel its cold weight in her hand.
He sucked his teeth, which a gentleman never did, and in the insult she heard his disgust. “I would imagine you are at liberty to do more or less as you like. What did you have in mind?”
She shook her head, blank. The question had only been a way to test the coolness of the water that lay between them. “I hadn’t anything particular in mind. I only wondered.”
He shifted in his chair, whose pillow rose like a blister where his weight had been. Gregory always wore his tie and jacket at home. It made her itch to think of sitting at ease in a tight collar and vest. What a good boy he was. “I wouldn’t go out in the street and organize a strike just now, or carry a petition to the mayor, but short of that sort of thing—” He was not looking at her while he spoke. He was pointedly looking at nothing. “And I should stay a good distance from Harrison Street.”
She smiled at him wanly—“I think I shall just . . .”—and cast around for something that would not provoke his suspicion. “I shall just go down and walk along the water. The lake, I think, will do me good.”
He made no move to join her. “Take a wrap, then. It is colder outside than you might think.” He turned away from her and steepled his fingers before him, as final a dismissal as any word he could have said.
ASHER
44
HE WAS yanked, hustled, pulled along by a very large man whose belly stretched out the front of his tan uniform so that he looked more pregnant than Chai. And he was not being gentle, Asher understood, because he was so rageful: The man was a cop and he had the shirt of a bomber in his fist. There were memories, always memories, in this city, wounds and scars, and who cared if the arsonist hardly came up to his shoulder. He pulled a cell door open and flung Asher in so hard he stumbled and almost fell.
Two men stared at him, one a graybeard, the other young and slender, catlike, which served him well because he was a second-story man, proud of it, who made sure Asher knew in his first ten minutes that he nicked jewelry and vials of morphine and any cash he found lying around, all in the dark. Me too, Asher thought but didn’t say, but I’ll bet you don’t give yours away.
The older man was sullen and
didn’t boast about his crimes. He looked, Asher thought, like a pirate, face rugged, skin tough and stubbled like dead grass. Turned out he didn’t have much English, though he grunted a lot to show, or pretend, he understood.
What had he done to land him here? the young man asked. Asher thought they might have been friends under other circumstances—he had a pretty face and a vain look about him but his sharp gaze had nothing vicious in it. Asher suspected the man would be a fancy dresser.
“Oh, I tried to blow up a building,” he said as casually as he could. It occurred to him that he had become two people; one was watching the other from a distance.
“Why the hell d’you do that?” the burglar asked, almost respectfully. He was a pacer, he walked while he talked, circling like a dog readying to lie down.
“I had a grudge.” The word was heavy, ugly in his mouth: Gruh-d-je. Trudge. Sludge. Judge. “I had what you could call a score to settle.”
The young man laughed with delight. “What happened to the building?”
Asher had to say, “Not much. At least I think. I didn’t get to see it very well.”
“Aw, kid,” the burglar said, shaking his head. “I hope you didn’t kill nobody.”
That was when Asher felt his two selves join again. Please, please, he prayed to no one in particular. “The only person I wanted to kill wasn’t there.”
“You sorry? You could get yourself a hell of a sentence for that, you know.”
Asher sighed. He was going to be an uncle soon and because of his grudge, Chai might be alone without her husband. And he’d be here, or worse: wherever they sent people after they were convicted. He felt his two selves separating again, the stupid, reckless one and the one, anger spent, brimming with regret. He sank into silence, slid down the wall to sit on the concrete floor, knees bent in front of him to make a hedge and keep the two men out. Hours, a few more hours, maybe even overnight—he slept—but how could you tell, clangor all around, and shoutings, and vile curses.
And then the guard appeared, a jangle of keys bouncing at his waist, and opened the cell door. “Out with you, fella. Yer goin’ home now.” He was hurried along the corridor, down some stairs, roughly, and pushed into a windowless room where the warden—he assumed it was the warden—sat behind a battered desk, swiveling, a little left, a little right, in his chair. The guard slammed the door behind him. Nothing they did in this place was delicately done.
“Say hello to yer uncle here, sonny. Yer a lucky kid.”
His uncle. Off to the side where he had not seen him stood Ned Stillman in an overcoat with a shining fur collar. “His sister’s brother-in-law, to be exact,” Ned said to the warden with a wink. “No matter.” He turned to Asher. “So aren’t you going to say thank you? This isn’t a favor every man would do you.”
Asher was too stunned to speak.
“Come on, now. We’ve fixed up your little prank with these boys, and they’re willing to send you home with me. Which is very generous, considering.”
Asher’s face was beginning to redden as if he had been running.
“The only thing I couldn’t get them to do—because they’re being exceptionally understanding, don’t you think—is, they can’t wipe it off your slate. It’ll be there, kind of like a bit of a scar till you become of age. Nothing too ugly. I wouldn’t worry, if you keep that little nose clean from here on in. I told the man here, he’s so precocious, this boy, he isn’t but twelve years old—or is it thirteen now?—and he has a criminal record! What do you say now, Mr. Shadow?”
Mr. Shadow said nothing. He was trying not to cry. This serpent, this asp, was taking his triumph from him. Was manhandling his motives. What would he have to do to drag Ned Stillman’s name into the muck where it belonged? Really kill someone? This was the way it was done: If you didn’t want embarrassing publicity, between gentlemen you could undo anything that happened. If you didn’t like to look like you had lost something, you could close your hand and crush it and make it look like a favor. Wink and turn it around and no one would ask any questions. He would throw himself in the lake before he coughed up any thanks.
The machine rooms at the Stillman boiler plant, as it turned out, had suffered something less than annihilation. This Ned explained, grinning, in the two-horse brougham he had parked at the door. It had taken three brooms and a plethora—a plethora!—of dust cloths, frequently replenished, to settle and collect many layers of plaster dust and bruised and broken wood. The gray surfaces of the steel-sided machines nearest the window would be forever pocked. “But, I tell you, Asher, I had to bend down so far to see the pocks I could have licked them if I was hungry.” The Bohunk cleaning woman had been terrified into a stupor, all her English gone, but was unhurt, and the watchman had been busy trying the doors to be certain they were locked. “Lucky man was all the way down at the far end of the building, out of range of your”—Ned looked for the best word—“mischief.”
Asher wanted to spew the worst words he could, accuse, condemn, humiliate this man, chin sunk in the fur of some slaughtered beauty, but his defeat was total: He was a boy, too young a boy, and could not prevail. He had had his petty victories, bags and bagsful of material goods, valuable trivia he had fingered, fisted, fanned out among his minions to buy them another day. But who was the victim this afternoon, and who the winner? The headline this time would shred his dignity and feed it to the rats in the alley: WUNDERKIND EXPLOSION SAID TO BE VANDALISM: CRIMINAL CHARGES DISMISSED.
So much for the Anarchist conspiracy. Instead, the Ned Stillmans who owned Chicago did what they wanted to, no one could steal a mark on them. He, Asher the child, was nothing but an irritating shadow who had cost this snake a few hours of his time, three brooms, and many dustcloths, frequently replenished.
He looked out over the twitchy ears of the horses that were taking him home. (It was not his home, he wanted to but did not say. He had no other.) Plethora, a plethora of dustcloths. He began a list of words that sang their syllables to him. He knew a Greek word for “angry.” Agriamo. And one for “calm.” Sungaleiao. What could be as beautiful as that? Listen! The satisfaction of it! Or was it Sungaleniao. Some day he would go to Athens and the Peloponnesus. He would see the Aegean and the Acropolis. He would change his name, Asher-to-Asclepius, and wear a toga that would not itch like these miserable woolen knickers.
45
HOWEVER FINE the neighborhood, with its small grassy yards and its shapely houses, stony Italianate, wooden Germanic, they could not see the lake from where they lived. Chaya walked and walked and sat on an icy bench and walked again until she was so chilled she thought her fingers and toes would crack off like frozen twigs. What she felt was like an illness, the kind that made her wish she could sleep until it had done with her. And what kind of damage was this despair wreaking on her baby?
When she opened the front door she found Gregory seated in his slender-legged parlor chair. He looked at her very strangely, as if he hardly recognized her.
“What is it?” She was alarmed. “Has something happened?”
“He is upstairs in his room. Sulking.”
“What? Who?” Hands still quivering with cold, she had been removing her hat. Now she stood still with her arms upraised, like a woman posing for a Mary Cassatt painting.
“Your baby brother. Who else has a room up there.”
“What are you talking about?” His tone was still contemptuous, and she felt herself being teased, the way he compelled her to eke out this information one syllable at a time. “How could he be home? When I was there they wouldn’t allow me to see him!”
Gregory was tamping tobacco into his pipe. Chaya thought, If I have to wait for him to light it, I shall throw something at him. Lighting up was a slow, contemplative business during which everything stopped—that always gave the smoker an advantage.
He was not looking at her. “Why don’t you ask him yourself.”
She took to the stairs so quickly she nearly tripped. The scritch of Gregory’
s match followed her, and his first quick deep puffs to make sure the flame had taken.
Asher’s door was closed but not locked, which she took as an invitation. She gave him the respect of a quick knock but she was already inside before he could respond. “Darling boy,” she began, to forestall his thinking she was going to berate him.
He came to her in a rush and hid his head against her breast. “Please, Chai, please don’t say anything. I’ve already said everything to myself.”
She kissed the top of his head, which still smelled vaguely of that jail cell. Every kind of trapped smoke, mold, and all the putrid things that rise from the common bowl. Or she imagined it so, having come herself from the same pit. Probably he had no smell at all.
“But I won’t say I’m sorry. I know how it looks and I know it was—” He flung his hands out to the side as if to show her how empty they were. “Are you going to make me apologize?” He looked, at one and the same time, so young and, in his exhaustion, so old, the first faint shadows like bruises under his eyes—she could see what Asher would look like years from now when, perhaps, he’d have found a better way to work at dismantling his enemies. He took a deep, wavering breath that she thought might have hurt him. “Can you be sorry you did something and not sorry at the same time?”
“Sorry because it was wrong or sorry because it wasn’t very”—she looked around at his towers of books, which were his true domain—“effective?”
“No!” Petulant. “Because I got caught. But when you do a—a thing for the revolution—you’re supposed to say you did it. You take the credit and the blame. I wanted Ned to know it was me. I wasn’t going to hide it.”
The Lake on Fire Page 34
