The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  “Her name,” she told Sara with more solemnity than she intended, pushing back the top of the rattan carriage to give her friend a better view of her sleeping child, “is Beryle. For my little brother.”

  “That’s pretty, Beryle.” Sara looked confused. “But your brother—his name is Asher.”

  Chaya sighed at the length of the story that needed telling. Trying to explain was like embarking on a journey with many milestones to pass before the destination materialized out of the haze of distance. Simply, she refused to believe he was dead. She had been correct about her parents; she knew she was right about Asher, though she could not have justified her optimism. The authorities had never made a definitive ruling on the fire. Arson? Accident? So many vagrants were sequestered on the Exposition grounds, anyone could have set it off with a careless match, an ill-tended cooking fire, a blaze for warmth on a brutal evening. Perhaps they’d have settled it had there been liability claims, but the buildings were officially condemned, which did not elicit the utmost effort from the inspectors.

  More conflagrations had followed, massive ones in early summer, though whether one should call them disastrous or inconsequential, who could say? They destroyed nothing of value. If anything, the destruction saved the costs of demolition. Had any lives been lost in the Court of Honor fire? No one could hazard so much as a guess. All that remained was charred, unreadable. There was only this fact, and it was equally illegible as a message: Asher had not been seen after that night.

  Chaya told the barest story to her friend, seated on a bench near the pond in the park. Sara was pink-cheeked and healthy-looking in her new motherhood. Both her thin, lank hair and her figure had thickened as she thrived. Her cigar-making days behind her, like Chaya’s, she was gratefully devoted to the life she had always believed she was destined for. Her only dissatisfaction concerned the hours her Joe was condemned (she suspected he enjoyed them) to the firehouse. He had not yet encountered anything he would call danger. Sara had become a praying woman, though: Clearly she and Chaya had different standards for danger. “But, Chaya,” she said, indignant, “could your boy have been so cruel that he would just—leave—and not let you know where he was going?”

  Chaya rocked the carriage in which her baby had begun to stir. She looked straight ahead, at nothing. “Cruel is the word, yes. But if I don’t believe that—” The question, or one of the many, was, Could he have hated her so? Hated Gregory? To vanish as if he had been a sheet of paper loosed from one of his beloved books, blown away by the wind? Might he have thought she would dissuade him from leaving? These meditations put strain lines on her face, which Gregory tried to kiss away. But the balm of his lips could not penetrate her grief, and her sense that she and her brother had done to their love, their bond, something gravely wrong. She remembered Asher’s alarm, the first time she dressed herself in Gregory’s proffered finery, that she looked unfamiliar, too much one of “them.” Her glorious boy—she had known it, she had always known it—was too rigidly himself to bend. He belonged to himself and not to others. Not even, apparently, to her.

  Miss Addams, when she heard about Asher’s sudden departure, had shared her hopefulness. Mrs. K-W, however, whom Chaya had thought incapable of despair, turned out to possess an imagination for disaster. Once she had confessed to Chaya that she believed parents loved their children—or needed them, perhaps—more than their children, once grown, loved them. “And you have been, in a sense, your Asher’s mother. Hence”—she had deeply sighed for both of them—“disposable.” Now her face, which tended toward full disclosure, clouded. “Oh, my dear, with his sense of injustice, you don’t think he would have—intentionally—”

  “Never.” Adamantly. “He was too—he was—” Beyond her comprehension. But not beyond life.

  BERYLE WAS awake now, and crying out to be picked up. Sara touched her lovely face gently with a fingertip; the baby had Gregory’s faceted lips and Chaya’s uncle Dovid’s slanted gray eyes. Her gown and hat were embossed with threads in a sweet seed design. The outfit had come, as a peace offering of sorts, from Faith and Edward Stillman. One small step at a time she had been allowed back into the presence of Gregory’s family where, in truth, except for the sake of appearances, she had no desire to dwell. And there she found that Asher’s name had been expunged. Nor was her night in jail—so strange to recall that she sometimes considered that she had dreamed it—a shame to which anyone would ever dare allude. (A shande, it was, a scandal, in her first language. She wished she could say the much-used word out loud to someone but she did not even murmur it to her Mama and Papa, for discretion’s sake.)

  And then there was this: The absoluteness with which her brother and his name were absent from the room when she brought Beryle to visit her grandparents had led Chaya once to consider the possibility that the Stillmans had somehow arranged his disappearance. Had such a heinous idea ever crossed Gregory’s mind? If she dared to voice it, she might as well pack her belongings and leave the house. The unasked question lay like a shadow between them.

  Before they—she—returned to his parents’ presence she had wrung one concession from Gregory: that if she was not treated with respect, they would leave Chicago to forge a different life. Would investigate the city where her parents seemed content or try New York, where they would enjoy a welcome anonymity. She could see that the prospect hurt him, but, weighing the pain of losing them, not only wife but daughter, he yielded. Chaya did not think of herself as a hard woman, but some things, she had finally learned, she could not turn away from or negotiate.

  And Mrs. K-W was tonic for her. After a proper interval for sympathy, she asked when—not if—Chaya was prepared to return to what she called “actual” work.

  She did not know, she had told Mrs. K-W, but she would be back. “A few months, I think. I am nursing so often just now it would be difficult. But I will, I promise you, pick up my notebook again and get on with it. I must—you understand—or I will hate my life, which deserves my gratitude. Please believe me.”

  Mrs. K-W looked at her levelly. Her alphabet of responses, when it came to commitment, ran from A to C and stopped there firmly. “Try to remember one thing, Chaya, even if the rest eludes you. Our families—we owe them everything we can give. But they are individuals, and individually they often fail us.”

  “Yes?” She had listened skeptically. “And we fail them.”

  “But the collective—the distressed to whom no one appears to owe anything—they will always console you. To make the lives of strangers less onerous—”

  Is inadequate. Is necessary but not sufficient—that was a new phrase, a judgment like hubris, and a useful one. Strangers were not beloved clear-eyed boys constructed of jostling syllables and passionate generosity. Her worthy thief, her wordy Robin. What was it about this country—or these times?—that induced so many people to vanish? Should it be called defiance or hope and restlessness? Was it hope and the promise of relief?

  Once, at Winkler’s, she had listened to a story so sad she could not see her moving fingers through her tears. Anya’s father had separated from her mother when their poverty had become insupportable, and left Belarus when Anya was a young child. Just recently she had heard from a relative that he might be here in Chicago, and after many inquiries she made her way to his cobbler’s shop, which was as small and dark as a cave. And there he was, seated over his last, cutting tool in hand, serenely humming. He was grizzled and unkempt, he had grown wretchedly thin and had to bend close over his work to see what he was about, but, though she had not seen him for fifteen years, there was no mistaking him, his hooded eyes, the sharp curve of his nose, his narrow-lipped mouth. Anya was a frail, pallid girl with apologetic eyes at the best of times. She had stood in the doorway of the tiny shop and asked in a timid voice, as if she were reduced again to childhood, if he was Meyer Shkolnitsky and if he had a daughter. “And he looked at me straight. Not a word. He never stopped working, he had a boot in his hands and he never put it down.
That was all he had for me. Well, I am no beggar so I didn’t say a word, I walked away. I let him be.”

  The women at their cigar benches gasped. “I know he was frightened I would want something from him. That was his first thought. And then his only thought. That was what his life did to him. So when I came back a few days later to see if he really meant it, the shop was empty.”

  Was there nothing she could do? her shopmates demanded, wounded themselves.

  “But no. For what? What would be the point? My pride? Some things you can’t get with a threat. When he’s dying, let’s see if his boot comes to comfort him.”

  When Chaya told this story to Gregory, his eyes too clouded with tears, and again she understood that what was most deeply hidden in her husband—his caring, vulnerable self—was hers alone to see.

  And, he insisted, my dear, my very dear, no matter what befalls, there will be music. You cannot silence it.

  FROM THEN on—forever—Chaya would search the newspapers, beyond reason but not beyond hope, for word of a young prodigy who had solved a vexing problem or invented a machine or, more likely, written a book unlike any before it.

  Or she would hear that, excavating around the old fairgrounds to clear the way for a park—one building had been saved but the rest had gone green, to shrub and wind-stroked prairie grass—among the tarnished souvenirs they’d unearthed—the tiny silver spoons, the tarnished emblems of celebration—they had found bones, long ones and short, entangled with a belt buckle, a few workaday buttons, the all-but-devoured brim of a cap.

  Unless, one morning, she would reach for the mail that lay stacked on the glowing mahogany table in the hall, that table with its clever delicate legs, and find a letter from her brother. No one could impersonate him. No one could guess what he would find worth telling her.

  Chaya. Chaya-Libbe. Sister.

  This California has 5 major cities, mostly with Spanish names—San, San, San. A ragged rocky coastline of ocean (not lake) where you mostly can’t swim. It is called Pacific but it is not peaceful for a minute, it should be called Martial (il mare, si?). The opera house in San Francisco is nicer than the one in Chicago. It has more boxes and more gilt (not gold!) on the balconies. I am almost 5 feet tall and I have let my hair grow as long as a girl just to confuse people. I have 184 books and keep them in the order of the alphabet. There are not so many poor starvers out here, everyone believes they will turn a corner and discover they are rich. It is not so old and not so cold and the light is brighter everywhere. Also, it is all hills. Every green place smells of something called eucalyptus leaves that are strong and cutting. Breathing it feels like cold air in my nose. You hardly need a coat here, a jacket is good enough and there is a whole season just for rain. Fog, too. Fog, fog, and fog, but then it gets clear and you can see down to the water from the top of your street. There are snails on the ground sometimes, disgusting to step on. There are many Chinese people because we are facing Asia (and possibly other Asians as well but I can’t tell), and fishing boats in the harbor. I can pick up fish every day and cook it. Sometimes I put breading on it. I almost forgot the seals! Nothing is shinier, noisier, slipperier (slippery word). They look just like the rocks they lie on. Then suddenly a seal-rock will slide into the water! You would like them. What did you name your baby?

  Your brother,

  Asher

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Bottomless thanks to my first readers, critics and enthusiasts both: Carolyn Alessio, Susan Bielstein, Rona Brown, Janet Burroway, Rob Cohen, Marv Hoffman, Ben Kintisch, Elinor Langer, Natania Rosenfeld, Bobbi Samuels, Sharon Solwitz, and Meg Wolitzer. Also to Tsivia Cohen, Maggie Kast, Garnett Kilberg-Cohen, Peggy Shinner, and Sandi Wisenberg for Sunday afternoons around the table.

  An extra helping of gratitude to Mike Levine for fanning an uncertain flame, to Sarah Gorham for appreciating its heat, and to Edith Milton for her loyal and lucid attentiveness across the years.

  CREDIT: SIGRID ESTRADA

  ROSELLEN BROWN is the author of the novels Civil Wars, Half a Heart, Tender Mercies, Before and After, and six other books. Her stories have appeared frequently in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and Best Short Stories of the Century. She received an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the Howard Foundation, as well as two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1984, she was selected as one of Ms. Magazine’s “12 Women of the Year.” Some Deaths in the Delta was a National Council on the Arts prize selection and Civil Wars won the 1984 Janet Kafka Prize for the best novel by an American woman. She now teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives in Mr. Obama’s neighborhood, overlooking Lake Michigan.

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