The Singing Fire

by Lilian Nattel

  The audience thundered with applause. There were shouts of “Bravo!” from the gallery. The critics were writing furiously.

  “Tomorrow the house will be full,” Solomon Abraham said. He had painted the backdrop.

  “A Jewish mother never lets go.” Jacob lit his pipe. “One might as well make a blessing out of it.”

  Emilia smiled; she could always smile, even if her face was frozen. As Jacob turned to speak to a theater critic from The Times, Harriet asked what she thought of Miss Cohen’s outfit, waving her opera glasses at the Cohen sisters in the box across from theirs. And Emilia answered as if she really cared that Miss Cohen wore a low-cut gown, which would save her on the cost of it but a woman over thirty doesn’t have the neck for décolletage and Miss Cohen was no exception. Then they asked the men to get them something to drink, and Emilia wondered if her mother’s Lady’s Health Tonic had as little flavor as the greenish beverage in her glass.

  In the second act, the ragpicker became an old clothes man, using a loan from the Mutual Friends’ Society to buy a barrow and pay for a route. Mist was blowing across the stage when an old woman came down from the poorest of the houses, its windows covered over with paper. Emilia recognized the house. Of course it wasn’t a real house, just a façade painted by Jacob’s friend. But he must have known it, too, the one with the ruined chimney and the peaked gable next to the washhouse in Goulston Street.

  The old woman was putting her bundle of rags in the barrow, and when the old clothes man offered her a penny for it, she refused. He insisted, she refused again, running back into the house as if she was afraid. And soon the reason became clear to everyone. Something in the barrow was crying, and as the old clothes man unfolded the rags, he found a baby.

  The audience sighed with satisfaction. Every good story has an orphan in it. Handkerchiefs were pulled out, eyes riveted to the stage.

  This baby was a boy, and the old clothes man, whose name was Mr. Angel, made a cradle out of an orange crate, calling the child Moses, for he’d found the baby in a barrow in the fog, which was close enough to a basket floating in a river. End of Act II.

  The applause was satisfactory, the critics lit up cigars. The sculptor left Jacob’s box to go backstage and look at his set, the socialist brother read the racing pages of the newspaper, the cartoonist and the editor went to eavesdrop on the gossip in other boxes.

  “A Jewish penny dreadful. How clever,” Harriet said. “Everyone will love it.”

  Her husband, Solomon, wore his jacket open, the paisley waistcoat rounding across his stomach. “The boy will have a good accent, if you ask me,” he said. “Every hero in a play, even if he’s born in a sewer, has a good accent and gets discovered by rich relations.”

  “Just wait and see,” Jacob said, drawing on his pipe and slowly blowing out the smoke. “In the new drama there are more poor relations than rich ones.”

  “Then the old man will take the baby to an orphanage?” Emilia asked, her throat very dry. “Like the Jewish asylum in Norwood.”

  It was Nehama who’d told her about the orphanage. They were in Goulston Street, walking by the house with the ruined chimney and the peaked gable. Nehama carried the bundle of laundry on her head. Emilia was looking at the nest in the chimney, wondering if the birds would come back to it after their winter sojourn in Egypt. There were carolers singing, and the Salvation Army Band was marching through Whitechapel Road.

  The socialist brother looked up from his racing pages. “A chimney sweep, they always want small children for that. Are you going for a social commentary at last, Jacob? Then let me shake your hand.”

  Jacob laughed as he fixed the loose tobacco in his pipe, arguing with the socialist until the others returned. The editor had good news. He’d heard the manager of the Adelphi saying to the Times critic that the run of the play would be extended for another week.

  “You should consider a novel,” the editor said. “This is new. Very new.”

  “I could,” Jacob said. “I’ve got reams of notes.”

  “Then you must. The only ones writing about the ghetto have been reformers. There’s nothing like this. Jews as Jews. My God, Jacob, you could spend a lifetime on the East End.”

  “One day there is already a lifetime.” Emilia yawned. The ghost of the first wife was shaking her head, but it was too late. Jacob’s smile faded. He turned away, speaking in a low voice to his friends, the smoke of pipe and cigars rising like the business of factories.

  She would have to order a pair of yellow gloves tomorrow and stop borrowing Harriet’s. In fact she would get half a dozen colors. That was all she’d think about and not dare to meet the first wife’s gaze while the conductor led the orchestra in the overture to Act III.

  Onstage, young Moses called the old clothes man Father as he rode on top of the barrow, scrutinizing all that he surveyed. He was a born mimic and the audience laughed as he became the bookie making bets, or Mrs. Teitelbaum, who sold corsets and had a house of her own in a square, two rooms it was, one up and one down, and stairs they had, just like a squire’s, no one should cast an evil eye on their good fortune, God forbid.

  Naturally the boy wanted to leave school and work with his father. But the father wished him to study. An English scholar he should be, not a Rabbi Ragpicker. The son was stubborn. The father shouted, “As it is written, ‘Hear, O my son, what I am telling you and your years will be many.’” And the son, just as angry, grabbed his father’s barrow and called out, “Ol’ proverbs. On’y a penny. Have a heart, guv. Won’t do you no ’arm to take one of my proverbs. Fresh from yesterday they are.”

  That evening, Mr. Angel went to see the headmaster of the Jews’ Free School, who stroked his chin and nodded and then came out with a proposal. There was a wealthy Jewish couple without children who were looking to adopt a boy. Moses would be well educated and have his choice of going into the family business or a profession if he preferred. Mr. Angel shook his head. This wasn’t what he came for. He wished only advice on how to make his recalcitrant son study. How could a person give up his child, his only child? But the headmaster was persuasive. He knew these streets. It would be all too easy for a clever boy to go the wrong way. Didn’t the father already see it happening? A person must wish the best for his child. What did he have? An old barrow.

  Above, on the platform made by the Jewish artist to represent an attic room, a cradle rocked as if it rode in a storm-whipped river. Mr. Angel bowed his head, and the audience watched him age in an instant, his heart broken. They didn’t see the ghost of the first wife on the stage, forgetting that this was just a play, looking up at Emilia with a face full of tragedy, kneeling beside the cradle.

  But Emilia saw a man that was relieved to be rid of the burden of a child. A person should never forget the true facts of the world.

  The curtain fell and rose again on the next scene. The boy had become a fashionable young man, returning to the streets of his childhood with a bemused look on his face. Where he remembered a narrow passageway through a warren of alleys, there was now a model block of flats. But the Lane hadn’t changed. All the types were still there, the beggar, the bookie, the beigel lady, Mrs. Teitelbaum with her corsets hanging on a pole, measuring one of them against the back of a buyer. The Jews’ Free School stood as always, with its front to Bell Lane and its back to Frying Pan Alley, where the children were buying toffee from the stand at the corner. Moses hesitated for a moment, then ran like a boy through a door and upstairs to a forlorn attic room, where his father, alone and sick, cried out with joy to see his son again. They sat and talked, the moon rose above the stage, darkness fell, the sun came up, and the father said that he was proud. Only one thing he asked of his son. That he shouldn’t forget the children surrounded by bookies and pimps eager to teach them a trade. “Remember the first Moses,” his father said. “Remember Moses our teacher.” And he died in his son’s arms.

  The audience cried buckets of tears. There were even a couple of sniffs from the cr
itics’ box. Emilia clapped with them, not knowing what it was she applauded as she thought about her half brothers. The older one was Gabriel, the younger Samael. Those were her father’s sons, of course. The other half brother, the one that was the miller’s son, found his father fallen among the flour sacks after his heart gave out. Mama didn’t know what became of this half brother. He grew up, wasn’t that enough? But surely he had a name. Everyone deserves a name.

  When the curtain rose on the next scene, Moses Angel was the white-haired headmaster of the Jews’ Free School. He sat at the teacher’s desk, under the map of the Empire and the portrait of the queen, telling the boys about his father. “This is how I came to be here. May his memory always be for a blessing,” he said to the boys in their rows of double desks. The spotlight on the old headmaster dimmed.

  One by one, the boys stood up to face the audience, putting on their bowlers and homburgs and tall hats, and it became apparent that they had become men. Then the first of them said, “Whenever people called him the angel of the ghetto, the headmaster would say that he was nothing more than a messenger of his father’s. As it is written in the Book of Proverbs: My son, don’t forget what I’ve taught you here.”

  The audience rose to its feet, and the thunderous applause shook the roof. Emilia whispered to Jacob that she must leave as she was dreadfully tired, but that he should stay among his friends and enjoy his moment. No one else would notice the ghost of the first wife on the dark platform, tearing apart a cradle made from an orange crate. Only the dead can afford to create a spectacle.

  The Jews’ Free School

  Ever since her twelfth birthday, Gittel had known that her first mother couldn’t be a baroness or a princess. No—she must be a singer, like Gittel, but she wasn’t shy and her voice never squeaked. One day Gittel would be sitting in the theater or a music hall and the crowd would hush as a beautiful lady came onstage. She would begin to sing, and then, as she looked over the audience, their eyes would meet, and for the first time in the illustrious singer’s career, her voice would falter as she recognized her daughter. And she would open her arms wordlessly as flowers poured onto the stage.

  The girls’ choir was rehearsing in the Great Hall, still so new that it smelled of fresh pine. The material for the costumes had been donated by the trustees and made up into kimonos by the girls’ mothers. Gittel’s was blue with roses on it. How lovely the blue velvet ribbon would be with it.

  “Girls, girls! Louder, please. I wish the birds to hear you through the new roof,” Miss Halpern said. “Our Yum-Yum is feeling poorly today, so you must come forward and sing her part, Gittel.”

  “I don’t know it, Miss Halpern.” Gittel had been careful to pronounce the h in her teacher’s name, so why was Miss Halpern frowning? She was older than Mama, her hair as gray as the fishmonger’s donkey, her blouse dark and her skirt dark and only a string of pearls for adornment.

  “But I heard you myself,” Miss Halpern said. “I was coming from the drill hall.”

  “Oh, but …” Gittel had come early for the rehearsal, and before anyone else arrived she’d sung every part on her own, standing in the light that came through the stained glass. “I don’t know it,” she said, scratching the back of her neck.

  “Are you telling me a falsehood?”

  “No, Miss Halpern. I swear I’m not.”

  “Come on, then. ‘The sun whose rays are all ablaze …’ Let me hear you, please.”

  Gittel stepped forward. Miss Halpern was waiting, the girls were all watching her, and she was wearing the nicest kimono of all, for Mama knew how to sew and it was just like something you might see on a real stage, but Gittel was now a fish, maybe a whitefish or worse, a carp, with its pouty lips opening and closing while the fishwife scooped it out of the water for someone’s Shobbos, and not a word could Gittel sing for she couldn’t breathe any more than the poor carp, dizzy in the terrible air.

  Miss Halpern tapped her pointer on the podium. “I’m most disappointed, Gittel. I don’t expect defiance from my girls, but we’ll say no more of it. Just step off the stage. If you can’t be truthful, then you’ll not be in the choir. Clara, please come forward.”

  Gittel stumbled off the platform and ran to the cloakroom, where no one could see her among the girls’ coats, her face puffy, her nose running, the beautiful kimono crushed as she kneeled on it. She didn’t mean to lie. She really didn’t. If her other mother was a famous singer, then no wonder she left Gittel behind, seeing that she’d grow up to be a liar. But perhaps it was as Pious Pearl said. Her first mother was a madam in Dorset Street, and the teacher had to find out, oh yes, though she might wear a blue kimono with pink roses, there was no hiding what was underneath, was there?

  Charlotte Street

  Emilia pushed the window a crack to let in the cool wet air. She had to be nimble when people were awake, remembering what she’d said and guessing what she ought to do, but in the night she could just sit, looking at the streetlamps and the shadows of vagrants huddled over grates. Someone with a tray strapped to his chest was selling coffee to nightwalkers. The wind was coming in from the sea as she watched the moon.

  “Emilia—what are you doing?” Jacob asked sleepily.

  She didn’t want to talk to anybody or explain herself. She wished only to watch the moon hanging like fruit on the corner of a chimney. Tomorrow she would finish the sketch for a paper-cut. “Shh. Nothing, I just want some air.”

  He sat up, the moon bright enough to cast his shadow on the wall. “Should I fetch you some warm milk?”

  “I hate milk. Just go back to sleep, Jacob.” She would make a paper-cut of the London moon and send it to her mother.

  Jacob lit the lamp. “You were asleep when I came home from the theater.” On the chest of drawers there was a clock; behind it shadows were cast by the moon. He reached over to the bedside table and found his spectacles and his pipe. “What woke you up?”

  “The baby was kicking.” She looked at the clock. It was three in the morning. The clock was mounted in a bronze casting of Lady Time, her arms raised above her head. There in her hands rested the timepiece. One might wonder if her arms didn’t get tired.

  “Is that a postcard from Minsk you have there?” Jacob asked. “You’re never yourself when you hear from that old servant of your family’s. Those Russians are too morose.”

  “She’s Polish. And anyway I’m drawing the moon.” There was a pencil and a sheet of paper on her lap, a book for a desk. In the picture the moon was hooked on to the side of a ruined chimney, but it was only the start of a paper-cut. She wasn’t thinking of anything else, not of the house with the peaked gable in Goulston Street.

  “Put it away and come to bed.”

  “In a minute.” Emilia was drawing a house, its windows covered over with paper. There she’d once stood, pushed aside by the carolers while Nehama cursed as her bundle of laundry fell. I want to ask you something, Emilia had said. What would you do if you remarried and it turned out that your new husband didn’t want your child?

  The Jews have an orphan asylum in Norwood, Nehama had said as she lifted the bundle from the street. The matron names the babies. There has to be someplace for children to go if they don’t have a mother. But even if I was dead, I would come back from the other world to look out for my child. You think anyone could stop me?

  “I have a meeting tomorrow,” Jacob was complaining. “How can I sleep with you sitting there like that?” He wore pajamas, blue silk pajamas, for he was a modern man. The moon slid behind a bank of clouds. There was nothing more to do tonight. Emilia left her drawing on the window seat.

  “My father didn’t want a child,” she said. She was fair like Jacob. Their heads were golden on their smooth pillows.

  “Then he was a fool.”

  “Do you think so?” When she used to read aloud in the workroom, she’d hear the rhythm of sewing while Nathan and Nehama, their dark heads almost touching, bent over their dark sewing machines. They must be th
ere still, Nehama singing and Nathan working at breakneck speed until the order was done. The baby in the orange crate, its head covered with a dark fuzz, would be there no longer.

  “The child is mine—that is British law.”

  “Take it out if you like.” She pulled up her nightgown so that he could see her bare legs and her bulging navel. She took his hand and held it over her belly. In the street a woman was offering the vagrants a cut rate on her services. “Come on, Jacob. Take the baby and bring it with you to the Reading Room.”

  “I can feel something,” he said.

  “It’s your imagination.” She dropped her nightgown. In the Jews’ orphan asylum, there would be a girl with dark hair, neatly braided, in a row of other girls learning how to mend and scrub and peel potatoes so they could make their way without anyone in the world. “This baby goes where I go.”

  “Not without me. Even reformers admit that Jewish fathers are stuck on their families. And God knows the reports are damning enough. They have no love of Jews, I daresay.”

  “Then why make your wife one?” Her voice was light, as if she weren’t wondering if the girl with braided hair looked like her at all.

  “Exactly because she is the mother of my child.” Jacob kissed her, and her mouth was suddenly hungry for kisses. A woman after her fifth month doesn’t get enough of them, and kisses can swallow disruptive thoughts. “The beautiful mother of my child,” Jacob said.

  A convert immerses herself in the ritual bath, naked before a witness who ensures that even the ends of her hair are covered by the water that changes her from flour into dough. Of course if you are dough already, it will only make you soggy like paste, the thin sort of paste used to put up theater posters.

  Jacob turned out the lamp, and there were no more shadows as he covered her with kisses like the water of a mikva.

  The Other Charlotte Street

  The last new thing of the fin de siècle began when the London fog was at its thickest, yellow sulfur burning the lungs like hellfires. The British had annexed territories with gold and diamonds, and the Boers retaliated by laying siege to British towns in South Africa. The Daily Mail had a correspondent in Ladysmith, reporting the whiz of shells and the shrill of guns, and it was thrilling, this last new thing of the fin de siècle, when war came right into one’s sitting room.