Barren Island

by Carol Zoref

  How can there be more than one moral scale on which things are measured? If you need more than one, it means that none are complex enough for our very complex human condition. It means having greater scales and lesser scales for greater or lesser people. Why is it possible to be so disgraceful?

  The history of Jew-hating goes on and on, and our parents had told us plenty. My goyishe friends insist it ended when Nazi Germany collapsed. This is their careless way of denying that Jew-hating is resilient. And that they might be guilty of it themselves. Interesting, you think, that I am willing to call them friends? I refuse to let their ignorance drive me away. What is the worst that can happen? Nothing worse than what already has.

  Am I saying too much? Am I being impolite? Should I care?

  I will not worry until at least one of them admits to an anti-Semitic thought. On that day I will reconsider everything. I am 80 years old and still waiting.

  The noise level further up 2nd St. was staggering, even though the Yiddish theaters running as far north as 14th St. would not open for hours. Sidney brought the boys to Schacht’s Appetizing, where the smells of whitefish and pickled herring were intoxicating. Noah, still hungover from the night before, had to step outside, but Sidney and Yorgos scarfed down their bagels and lox in a few big bites. They turned again on 9th Street, over to 4th Avenue and its row of bookshops. Outside, in front of each store, people were browsing through cases of used books. How fine it must be, thought Noah, to browse through books on the way to work. He thought about our father walking to the factory, about there being nothing between our house and his work other than the unavoidable smell.

  The old Astor Library, Sidney told them, home now to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, was one block over on Lafayette Street. Noah told Sidney about our father spending more hours in vain than anyone should have to at HIAS trying to get the family out of Zyrmuny.

  This walk was all it took, according to Noah, for his universe to grow larger. “Someone takes you along one day,” he later told me, “and the things you believed impossible, because someone said they were, as if their saying it made it so, are the things you’re doing. You’re doing the impossible. You are walking down a street in the city because you can, looking at whatever and whoever you want in any which way you want and for as long as you please. And nobody cares a damn about what you’re thinking, so you don’t worry either. And you don’t worry about what they’re thinking, especially about you. Nobody notices you have a hangover; nobody notices if you’re walking north or south; nobody can tell if you like girls or you like boys. Maybe they notice if you are wearing a black felt hat and pais and a beard. Or a yarmulke. Or if you have black skin.” Noah was wearing dark blue pants and a grey newsboy cap over his short brown hair; he had the same olive-complected skin as our mother. “It was one of the best moments of my life,” he told me, “all because I was walking down a crowded street and nobody cared.”

  A couple of hours later Noah and Yorgos were back at the Mulberry Street social club meeting with two representatives of the Longshoreman Union, one of who was doing all the talking. The other one sat at another table playing solitaire. The third table was empty. “The point is this, fellas,” said Mike Sierra, a black-haired, overweight man whose flat nose had been broken at least once. “The stevedores don’t mix up with the municipals. The municipals means civil service, which means the city, which means someone else’s turf. If you think I’m gonna wage a union battle on account of thirty-seven glue workers, you’re younger than you look.”

  “First off, they don’t work for the city on Barren Shoal.”

  “All trash workers do.”

  “They’re not garbage men.”

  “Excuse me: glue guys.”

  “It’s a rendering plant. Half of them are butchers.”

  “So hook up with the food workers union.”

  “This is not some kind of Upton Sinclair thing,” said Noah. “They don’t trim meat. And they’re not garbage workers either.”

  “So what the hell are they?”

  “What the hell difference does it make what they are?” asked Yorgos. “You guys run the docks. If you say a barge don’t get loaded, no one loads it. If you say a barge don’t dock, it don’t dock. What more do you need?”

  “To know what’s in it for us.”

  “Thirty-seven members and a toe-hold in Jamaica Bay,” said Noah. “When the city develops a port there—wait five years and you’ll see, it’ll be the biggest commercial port on the eastern seaboard—you’ll control it from start to finish instead of watching from the bleacher seats, eating peanuts instead of steaks. Not just the docks but the....”

  “Why in hell should we go through you?” asked Sierra.

  “Because if you don’t, someone else will. We’ve got people in there; you got no one.”

  Noah and Yorgos returned to Barren Shoal at dawn on Monday with a promise from Mike Sierra to make an exploratory trip to Barren Shoal. They brought a stack of blank membership cards that Sierra wanted signed in advance as a gesture of good faith.

  They also returned with Joey, of all things, who had managed to sneak over to Manhattan without their knowing. I could hear them arguing with him in the yard before I even got out of bed. At least they had the good sense not to grill Joey on the barge ride back over or at the dock.

  “Where the fuck you been?” asked Yorgos.

  “I got a meeting too,” he said proudly.

  I tip-toed to the window to listen better.

  “Oh yeah? With who?”

  “None of your fuckin’ business.”

  Yorgos kicked some dirt at Joey.

  “With my brother.”

  “Which damn brother?”

  “Massimo. And the longshoreman.”

  “We were with the longshoremen,” asked Noah. “Who does Massimo...”

  “On Thompson St.”

  “What’d they want?” said Yorgos. “How you know they’re longshoremen?”

  This time Yorgos kicked Joey in the rear.

  “Enough already with the kicking,” said Noah.

  “Were they brown shirts?” asked Yorgos. “Were they wise guys? Where’s Massimo now? Why’d he bring you? Why didn’t he come back with you?”

  “Just about how you can’t get no union interested. They asked other stuff I don’t know.”

  “About what?” asked Noah.

  “About Barren Island. If there’s union talk over there, too. They told Massimo to get me outta there so they could take him out for a girl. They said they would bring him back by speedboat. I went myself to the dock and slept on the barge.”

  “Told him to keep you outta the way or all of us?” said Noah.

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.” The more they asked him, the more he got confused.

  “I’ll fuckin’ kill you if you ever go there again without my say so,” hollered Yorgos. “You hear me? And you tell me every damn thing that Massimo says. I swear I’ll kill you. Now get away from me. You stink like hell.”

  “Should we tell Mike Sierra?” Noah asked Yorgos.

  “You’re gonna talk with that gorilla Massimo and find out? He don’t think we’re worth pissing on. If we gotta worry, we’ll worry. Either they’re gonna kill us or drag us in. Or nothing. It could be a big nothing. They might have something else cooking we don’t know crap about. If they wanna talk, they know where we live. And I got nothing else for Sierra until he comes over.”

  “What about those cards?”

  “Just because I told Sierra I could get them signed don’t mean I will.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. These longshoremen don’t fool around,” said Noah. “They bust up fascist rallies with knives and cracked heads. Maybe they talk union, but they also talk about who’s just over from Italy because they shot a bunch of brown shirts outside some church in Naples.”

  “That’s why we want Sierra, you retard, and not some pussy union that’ll make nicey-nice with the bosses.”

 
“What about Stanley Morrow?”

  “What the hell, Noah? It’s two years already and he’s never set foot on Barren Shoal again. He’s another one who thinks he’s too good for us. He thinks Barren Shoal is a stinking disease.”

  “You don’t know crap about what Morrow thinks.”

  “Morrow thinks we’re just a step up—a very small step—from the scavengers. That’s what he thinks.”

  Yorgos was proud about getting an introduction to Mike Sierra through Parson Otis, the barge captain who brought his father The Daily Worker. He was proud about getting the longshoremen interested in Barren Shoal. As Noah tells it, Yorgos was already scripting a future for himself as a union boss, someone who would hold meetings at social clubs on Mulberry Street over little cups of espresso.

  “We don’t know a damned thing about Mike Sierra. It’s one thing to go through Uncle David. It’s another to deal direct. We don’t know what the hell we’re doing.” Noah had not told Uncle David about talking with another union.

  “The bosses know Sierra, at least by reputation. That’s what matters.”

  “What about the men at the plant? Shouldn’t they choose?”

  “Who’s to say otherwise?” said Yorgos. “You, Noah? When you’ve got DeWitt’s old dick in your mouth?”

  Noah turned red. I could see it all the way from my window.

  “It’s not like that,” said Noah.

  “The hell it’s not. Which is why from today on, other than opening it to suck off DeWitt’s shriveled up prick, you keep your fuckin’ mouth shut and let me deal with the unions.”

  One minute they were talking union and the next Yorgos was blackmailing Noah. Yorgos did not say how he found out about DeWitt, but Noah understood that he had to leave Barren Shoal. He did not know how; he did not know when. But that was when he knew.

  Mr. Paradissis had plenty to say when Yorgos came home from the factory that night, all of which he shouted in Greek. We could hear their voices going back and forth until Yorgos slammed out the door. Noah, Sofia, and I were already in the yard.

  “What’s your father so worked up about?” asked Noah.

  “None of your goddamned business, you little faggot.” Yorgos threw a mean glance Noah’s way. Then the moment passed. “I’m on the inside, working my butt off, while you’re at school planning a revolution.”

  “Joey’s been on the inside even longer,” Sofia reminded them. They ignored this the way that we all ignored the faggot comment. It was the first time I remember hearing someone use that word. I somehow knew what it meant, but did not think that Yorgos was doing anything other than calling Noah a bad name. I did not put it together with what I read in Noah’s journal about Mr. DeWitt.

  “We’re not planning a war,” said Noah. “It’s about reform. You can’t just sit on the crapper reading The Daily Worker. We’ve got to be in there with the union—I don’t care which one—if we mean to get it done.”

  “What’s this we business?” said Yorgos. “I don’t see you picking up the butcher’s knife.”

  “Boyle won’t have me in the factory or I would be. You know that as good as me.”

  “So make your father quit and you take his place.”

  “Fat chance. Who’s to say Boyle would take me?”

  “All the Pessara boys are in: Massimo’s in, Nick’s in, Vince is in. And Joey here, right Joey? Why not the Eisensteins, too?”

  “All four of them together earn only twice what a cutter does.”

  “Says who?” asked Joey. Nobody answered.

  “Boyle gets four huge guys for next to nothing plus one, tiny house,” Noah continued.

  “I didn’t even ask about money when I started,” Yorgos realized. “You think he’s gonna pay my father’s wage?”

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  “How are we gonna eat?”

  “Ask Joey.”

  Two weekends later an unfamiliar motorboat moored at the pier. The captain neither blew a horn nor rang a bell to announce its arrival, nor did anyone appear on the dock to greet it. Joey was poking around like he did every day, even Sundays, as if going through garbage was a religious ceremony. The captain politely asked Joey where he and his companions might find “two young fellows named Noah and George.”

  “I told them I don’t know no George,” reported Joey, “but if they stayed put I would get them Noah. I wasn’t bringing no strangers around. One’s a hot mama, big hat, fancy looking. You shoulda heard ’em crossing the water. I didn’t know what was coming so fast.”

  “Well screw me,” said Yorgos. “How the hell’d they find us?”

  “Who?” asked Sofia.

  “C’mon, Noah. You other three: wait here.”

  “The hell I will,” said Joey. “I’m the one that’s come for you.”

  “First say who they are,” insisted Sofia.

  “I’ll stay back,” offered Noah.

  “No sir,” said Yorgos. “You get your butt down there with me.”

  There was no way that Sofia and I would wait at home, not when strangers appeared. We never had visitors on Barren Shoal. Either you were there all the time or you were never there at all. We hung back until the boys were way down the road. Then we took off after them, always keeping a hundred yards behind until we caught up with them at the water.

  Gray and Lois were just like Noah described: Gray was tall and blonde and pale; Lois had dark, wavy hair. He was wearing a seersucker suit; she was wearing a long-sleeved white blouse, a yellow linen skirt, and a broad brimmed hat that shaded her face. Even their boat was handsome: a triple cockpit mahogany hulled runabout, like the ones on the society pages. No wonder they crossed the bay so fast.

  “George! Noah!” Lois took off her straw hat and was waving wildly when, suddenly, she flinched and dropped to her seat, as if something had stung her in the eye. She fanned the hat in front of her face, pausing only to remove a handkerchief from her purse.

  “How did you find us?” cried Noah.

  “What are you doing here?” called Yorgos.

  “We thought it would be one hell of a fine day for a picnic,” said Gray. “Grab this, George.” He passed a box of ice to Yorgos. “And for Noah,” he continued, handing over three bottles of gin and a bottle of vermouth. “Now Lois, dear, please remove yourself from the boat and bring the basket.”

  “I will do no such thing,” said Lois, crossing her legs and getting more comfortable, all the while still fanning herself. “That basket is grotesquely heavy and that dock is grotesquely dirty. And what in heavens is that awful smell?”

  “That’s from the horses they bring ...” Joey started to explain.

  “No need to enlighten us,” Gray interrupted. “Grab this basket, if you will, and we’ll set off. There is a shore here, yes? Perhaps soft sand like we enjoy in the Rockaways?”

  Sofia, who was standing at the edge of the conversation, squeezed between Joey and Gray. “I’ll take the basket,” she offered.

  “I bet you can, little lady,” said Gray.

  “She’s my sister,” said Yorgos. “She’s Sofia.”

  “And as strong-minded like her brother,” replied Gray, addressing his remarks to Sofia. “And this would be?” he asked, turning to me.

  “Marta. Noah’s sister.”

  “Aha! Which leaves only....”

  “I’m Joey.”

  “And whose brother might you be?”

  “You don’t wanna know,” said Yorgos. “And they don’t neither.”

  “I don’t know about no picnics,” said Joey.

  “Well this is your lucky day,” Gray continued. “Welcome to the first annual Barren Shoal Invitational Seaside Picnic and Cocktail Extravaganza. Lead on, George.”

  Lois was still sitting in the motorboat. “How do you stand this awful....”

  “We’ve come all this way, Lois. We’ve brought all this food. Not to mention three extremely fine bottles of London gin to share with George and Noah. And now their beautiful sisters and their
handsome friend.”

  “Oh, brother,” said Lois, sighing.

  “You do drink gin, I hope?” Gray asked Joey. “Because you will be soon enough.”

  “Now be a dear, Lois, and get out of that damned boat. And remember your hat.” Gray held out his hand to help Lois; Noah reached over to steady her onto the pier. “Hates the sun, Lois does,” said Gray. “Turns her brown as a bean.

  “Let’s be off, then, shall we?” he continued. “The air here is rather fetid.”

  “Yeah,” said Joey. “Smells real good on Sundays when there’s no horses in the furnace.”

  Yorgos thumped the box of ice at Joey’s feet. “You wanna come, Stupid, you can carry this.”

  Yorgos and Lois led the way, followed by Gray and Noah, then Sofia and me, and finally Joey at the rear. Yorgos and Lois were laughing, but Noah and Gray were serious, tilting their heads to better hear what the other had to say. What could be more serious, it turned out, than Noah asking Gray for help? He had decided to apply for jobs to the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Projects Administration. He asked to use Gray’s mailing address so that our parents would not know. Or Yorgos. Or anyone.

  “What’s all this,” asked Mr. DeWitt when we passed the factory gatehouse. He was standing outside, his arms folded across his barrel chest and a half-smoked cigar between his lips.

  “None of your damn business,” said Yorgos.

  “Family friends come to visit,” said Noah.

  “Mighty fancy friends,” said Mr. DeWitt. “Rubbing shoulders with the quality?”

  Noah blushed up to his ears. “It’s not like that, Mr. DeWitt.”

  “Like what?” asked Gray.

  Noah told me long after how rough it was to realize who he was and what that meant, especially on Barren Shoal. Not that it was easy anywhere else. This was long before the whole Civil Rights time, the whole hippie time, and that riot at the Stonewall bar that, by the way, is just two doors down from the bar where the boys first met Lois and Gray. Coincidence? Fate? This was the 1930s and Noah suffered. Not that the suffering has ended. People hang on to cruel ways.