They were in deep water and she wasn’t a swimmer. “It was a lot of things, I’m sure, my sweet. I wonder if you understand all of it.” She wished she could say, I know, I know: how public hunger met private hunger, and scrambled all her loyalties together, the men at the Fair, the man in her bed. The man who treated her like a child’s toy. All that—all she could not say—had been tinder for his flame.
She would have to know before too long if Gregory saw how impossible it was to parse this and be done with it, because Asher was—riding home from the jail, Gregory had said it, and how much dignity it must have cost him—Asher was her first, her original, her unchangeable love.
“You have both done damage,” she finally said, “and you both need to be forgiven.” Then all she could do was hold her brother while he cried.
46
CHAYA HAD lived all her years without the habit of confiding her sorrows. Looking back, she recognized how she had had no true friends—none, at least, to whom she had opened her heart. Asher was not exactly a friend. At the Fields of Zion, the girls near her age had found her strange. With her books and her refusals, all she had suppressed of words, of judgments, had somehow prickled her skin and made her too spiny to be much loved. At Winkler’s, she had had Sara, but Sara, born to be contented, conformed to a different—simpler? luckier?—pattern. Chaya, like it or not, was cut on the bias. There was Gregory, of course, but now he was responsible for the way her throat was clotted with tears so sharp they possessed edges. She felt herself alone in their bed even while he lay, turned away, beside her. What had she done that was so terrible that she drew such punishment from the man who loved her?
SHE CAME into Hull-House one morning to meet with Mrs. K-W, a sheaf of reports under her arm. There was a small office downtown for the staff of factory and sweatshop inspectors, but Miss Addams had, for some reason, requested that they meet here today. Mrs. K-W, seated, looked at Chaya long and hard and ventured, “I hope your baby is not responsible, dear, for causing you to look like a newly docked refugee from the famine.” (Her family had become host to an inundation of relatives from Ireland—that was the Kelley part of her—who were still arriving empty-handed, one step ahead of starvation. Beside them, refugees from the Ukraine had looked well-fed.)
“Oh, it isn’t the baby,” she responded, embarrassed. She tightened her hands around the Pumpkin, which could already help to steady her.
Mrs. K-W listened to her confidences respectfully. Her own marriage, Chaya knew by reliable hearsay, had ended with blows struck and struck again. It was unimaginable that anyone dared lay a hand on this formidable woman, but those were the stories; apparently she had been less forbidding in those days. Her husband, this Wischnewetsky, Lazare, had been a Russian-Polish doctor, a Jew, and when he suffered reverses, a violent man.
“Chaya,” Mrs. K-W offered. “Do you know how this sounds to someone, you understand, who has had to reconcile herself to far more damage than coldness and—what would you say of Gregory just now?—this sort of vengeful unforgivingness?”
Chaya felt like a child, balling her fist to knuckle the irritation she was not certain she deserved. “No, I don’t know.” She sighed. “How does it sound?”
Mrs. K-W was in the habit of turning a button between her fingers while she thought. Her dress had more of them than Chaya imagined she had patience for. “I think—I could be terribly wrong, it goes without saying—that your husband wishes he had been able to wreak some violence on that dreadful brother of his. Of course, being civilized, he could do no such thing. But when your brother attempted this act of—what would you call it? Reprisal?—Gregory was overcome by an overwhelming sense of guilt, as if he had executed it himself. Does that not seem plausible to you?” Mrs. K-W’s voice was always emphatic. “And to add to that, the boy was so very daring! Foolhardy, perhaps, but—definitive.”
Chaya sat stunned by this circumlocution. If Gregory was secretly grateful to Asher for doing what he could not do himself, why was he so vengeful? She shook her head in confusion. Perhaps one had to have a university education to understand this.
“There is,” Mrs. K-W said with some satisfaction, “an alienist named Freud—Sigismund, I believe—who practices abroad—who has recently advanced some quite intriguing theories that describe peculiar displacements of anger such as the one I propose. I am reading some of his essays—they will soon, I have heard, become a book available to anyone—because, as the entire world seems to know, I have myself had a good deal of it to cope with.” She could, by now, give a bitter little laugh at her marital history. “And they are filled with unlikely ideas that, even as they run counter to logic, seem to make an odd sense.” She twirled her button absently, looking more perplexed than Chaya had ever seen her. “Peculiar, I know, but they advance, I should call it, a different logic.”
She had not felt so inadequate, so uncomprehending, like a child, for years.
“Think on it, dear. Instead of defending your brother to him, you might even, gently, suggest to your husband that you understand how complicated Asher’s actions might be for him. Just—drop the idea into his ear and see if it yields a more sympathetic response.”
Chaya nodded at this and thanked her mentor. What worried her was that the woman who so confidently prescribed this novel attitude had barely escaped her own marriage intact, pulling her children behind her, out of the advancing fire of her husband’s aggression. Some people seemed incapable of despair. Or they were simply too busy to let it stop them.
CHAYA AND Mrs. K-W were finishing their work together when Miss Addams entered the room where their damning documents were spread across the dining room table. Mrs. K-W was very close to submitting their findings to Governor Altgeld, who was eager to forge a law to restrain the rapacious. Chaya was nearly dizzy with the alternation of her fortunes, joy at this triumph—“Pending,” Mrs. K-W cautioned—and fear for her own household, its sullen man, its sullen boy.
Miss Addams stood beside her, looking purposeful. “Chaya,” she interposed quietly, without excitement. “I believe I have some interesting news for you.”
It was a moment she would often try and fail to recover in its innocence, its ordinariness. “I have had a visit,” Miss Addams said with a cryptic smile, “from someone I think you will want to see.”
Chaya stared blankly at her. She was eager to go home to try this new theory on Gregory.
“I asked her to return at ten, just now, because I knew that you and Mrs. Wischnewetsky would be here.” Her smile grew broader and more personal. “Will you step into the parlor with me, please.”
Perplexed and a trifle irritated, Chaya rose and followed Miss Addams and the vague trail of her morning talcum. They turned the last corner into the dim front room and at its far end, her back to them as she studied a painting of men clutching the sides of a capsized boat—a depressing sight, Chaya had always thought, not expressive of Miss Addams’s optimism, unless the men were about to be saved—was the tall, unhealthily gaunt figure of her mother.
She was alone—where were the children?!—and, whether from hunger or emotion, she looked near collapse. Instead, she sagged in her daughter’s arms, murmuring the very words Chaya had dreamed when Asher and Gregory and she made their journey back to the farm: “Meyne tokhter! Meyne sheyne tokhter!” She placed a tentative hand against Chaya’s stomach and closed her eyes with satisfaction.
Miss Addams dipped her head respectfully and left them to each other.
47
“I SEE—” her mother began in the only language they had ever shared—“the newspapers.” She stopped as if to ask if her daughter understood her.
“It’s all right, Mother,” Chaya told her. Her Yiddish still came easily though she might have expected it to stir slowly and, so long disused, rip itself out of her, bearing shreds of skin. “You can speak like always. I haven’t forgotten how.” Everything she had suppressed was a pebble in her gullet. “Tell me how you found us.”
“
Us,” her mother said, meditative. “There must be an ‘us’ or you wouldn’t have this.” A glance at the front of Chaya’s dress. “A man at your father’s place, he saw a newspaper that said Asher Shadow—it sounded like Shaderowsky, it sounded like our little meshugene. Who else would be so smart? You should see what they said. The police. Do I have to believe this boy would try to explode a bomb? An anarkhista?”
“It’s very complicated. I’ll explain it later. You’ll see him, you’ll see that he is still the sweet boy you knew.” It was a lie, or almost a lie; such words should burn her lips. “But how did you know to come here?”
“The news—Miss Jane Addams, they asked her, she said this is a good boy, he wants the best for everybody.”
They had sat themselves on the hard horsehair sofa in Miss Addams’s parlor. The business of the house, which rarely halted, seemed to go on behind a curtain, dimly audible. She and her mother held each other’s hands in silence, laving their faces with concentration. Oh, her mother was so worn, she had gained—no, lost—more years than the time that had passed. The skin beneath her eyes had been hollowed out, as if the Stillmans’ cook had gouged her flesh with the little instrument that scooped out balls of melon. When her mother removed her hat, her ears looked huge, a dog’s ears, where they poked out of her graying hair, which could only mean that her face had become pinched and shrunken.
They were living in Cleveland. The farm had broken up last year, everyone scattered, because of a terrible occurrence. She could hardly say it without doubling over with the pain.
She tried and stopped, wiped her flowing eyes, tried again. The milk they had sent off in those cans—the same innocent dull-silver cylinders Chaya had crowded between on her way to the train—had gone off harboring diphtheria, that scourge, that slaughterer. Had taken death to market. And how had they known the tainted milk was theirs, since so many farms contributed to the giant milk company’s vat for bottling? Because Beryle, who loved to skim his share out of the pail before it went into the cans, the only one who liked it warm and bubbly, had taken sick. Suddenly, after dinner, after a perfectly normal morning playing in the orchard, his throat had closed, just closed, all black inside, spotted gray-black. Running sores erupted on him everywhere, like bites from some vicious animal, and nothing they could do would stop them. Fraydl, dear Fraydl, gone. Then Fraydl’s little Chaike—the same symptoms, but she got better. Masha, her sister, though, was out in the beys olam, under a stone, along with her Beryle. And Mutkele, the baby Gittl had by that Shimmie. Taken before the sun set. Why they didn’t all perish she could not say. “Because we buried them so fast, it could be. You know, the goyim don’t put theirs in the ground so quick.” She kissed her fingertips. “A little gift.”
Mystery solved, those four new, lonely graves accounted for. Such random cruelty that if you believed God was watching, you would abandon Him as He abandoned those children. Quick-footed, noisy Beryle silenced. And Masha, who laughed all the time. She was glad she had never believed.
“Disaster,” her mother said, whispering as if she might still be in danger. “We were afraid, it was not safe to stay there. We already auctioned some things before. It was easy to go.”
“You ran? You ran away?” She didn’t mean it to be a rebuke. Or perhaps—she would sort it out later—she did.
“Better say we escaped. Who knows who would come looking? Blaming? Who knows if we were what they call guilty. I don’t know. What is a crime?” She clawed at her daughter’s face with her weary eyes. “It could happen to anyone. We kept our cows clean. No one could say—they were healthy.” She stopped to count her losses. “First you go, Asher goes, then my little Beryle. For what?”
Chaya felt disembodied, as if she were looking down at herself and her mother from far above. The visible Chaya, she was sure, bore little relation to the one that was listening. None of her guises felt real to her: The child in Zhitomir playing in a shady courtyard. The girl grown sullen on the farm. The exile, fleeing. The breadwinner at her cigar desk, nothing but yellow-stained fingers, palms, moving parts. The woman made love to the first time, secretly, one long sweet afternoon. The bride of an august family. The chastened woman, making a slow peace with her unyielding husband. Or suffering him to make that peace with her. The wife awaiting this child that made an alien shape under her clothes. Where—what—was she among all these? Some creature who pretended to contain all those fragments? All she could do was watch. But she was Asher’s sister, always. That was her one fixed pole. She had always been and would always be Asher’s sister. Now she would try to be a daughter again.
Strangely—her mother looked almost abashed—they were doing well in Cleveland. “The streets aren’t made of gold, but this is what we came here for. What your father promised. This makes sense. I am so glad to be—to look out the window and see streets. Buildings made out of stone! To have neighbors so close. To have a store to buy what we need. And the goyim, they don’t bother us.” She gave Chaya the saddest smile. “You knew. We were not so good at making things.”
So she had been right to imagine her mother as miserable as she had been.
“No more pretending to love a cow. The sickness—it didn’t surprise me, Chayele. Always there was too much on the farm that could go bad. Things that could get soft when they should be hard, hard when they should be soft. So much was rotting, all the time. I was always waiting for some—” She closed her eyes against it. “Some plague. Not boils, not darkness, not frogs. But something. And it befell.”
Chaya sighed hard. “There are plagues here too, mother. This city.” It was impossible to convey the decadence she had seen. Where would she begin?
Her father, through a friend of a friend of a friend, had found work as a bookbinder for a Yiddish press. A miracle. “These books are—” Her mother smiled ruefully. “I don’t know if you’ll like this, Chaya—they are socialist books. He binds them and also he reads them! Your father is so happy to be angry again. He was not made for the barnyard, keeping the peace between the hens and the roosters.”
She laughed and squeezed her mother’s hands. “My husband will be very happy to have another socialist in the family. He is rather outnumbered just now.”
Her head spun with the pleasure of sitting face to face with her mother, forgiven—perhaps forgiven; some day she might hear otherwise—for abandoning her, and then—when she stood after such concentration, she was nearly dizzy—of leading her home in a comfortable carriage. No more bouncing blue wagon to deliver them to their destination muscle-wracked and bone-sore. She kept her mother’s hand in hers.
Gregory was not at home. He was off, she remembered, interviewing a Reverend Stead, a minister visiting from England who was passionate about all that ailed Chicago; he had gone out this morning in high spirits at the prospect. Happy to be angry, her mother had said—oh, Gregory would adore her father!
Nor was Asher anywhere to be found, but she was accustomed to that. She walked her mother through the half-furnished rooms of her new house, seeing them through her astonished eyes. The carpet’s rich colors were finer than any planted field’s. She had begun to arrange her new dishes in the sideboard, behind beveled glass. Her mother removed a sprigged teacup, blue and yellow against white, and turned it tenderly in her hands. It was almost enough to reconcile Chaya to their loveliness, and to its expense, how her mother thrilled to what she had achieved. Given what her mother—her entire family—had survived, could she be blamed for loving this modest opulence, still so alien to her daughter? Finally it was her moment of harvest.
But no Asher presented himself for the best reunion of all. “Well, he will be back,” Chaya said as casually as she could, though she knew how unpredictable were his goings and his comings. “He’s rather independent, Mother.” She sighed, exasperated. Of all the times to be gone. “He is still his own strange and unlikely person. Wait till you see his roomful of books. But he’s grown so much, you may not recognize him.” His lengthening legs, his flinty
elbows and fine-trimmed hair. “Our little man is in long pants now. Let us hope he comes home tonight for dinner.”
48
HER MOTHER made it clear: They would not be a burden on Gregory. It was important for her to know they had not come begging.
That had hardly crossed her mind. Instead, she was imagining the room that would some day hold all of them, Shaderowsky and Stillman. It was unkind but irresistible to find the prospect grimly amusing. If Gregory and she, not to mention his parents and brother, ever returned to cordiality, there would come a moment when her Mama and Papa would button themselves into their modest finery, scour the children’s faces till they reflected light, put a rein on Yakov, who was given to eruptions of energy and—what to do with Asher? Leave him at home? Throttle Father’s politics into silence? He and Gregory could share a wink across the table that wretched capitalism had laid with riches: sugared pecans, foie gras and mousse in silver and pewter and Limoges on lace.
Sometimes she wished Gregory and she had moved to some distant city to start fresh, invisible lives. Perhaps that was the solution: San Francisco, New York, anywhere they could go around all that they could not, here, climb over.
At six, Gregory came through the door breathless with excitement. Chaya watched him enter, cheeks blushing with the cold, eyes still lit with the pleasure of having spent his day warmed at the fire of a man more appalled by Chicago than even he. Reverend Stead of Great Britain, who had come intending only to be a visitor to the Exposition, as an adjunct to his verbal lashings, was compiling a virtual street map of brothels, pawn brokers, and saloons, which he intended to advertise to the world and shake under the noses of the city’s officers. Chaya saw Gregory in the front hall stop to remove his coat and hat and, preparing to confront her, quite visibly rearrange his face into hostile blankness. Unsmiling, he entered the parlor where she stood, flushed with pleasure, beside her mother.
The Lake on Fire Page 35
