“He’s my favorite because he’s not my daughter’s, she should live to be a hundred and twenty, please God. She favors Albert. He’s just like her husband. And with Jacob she was always nervous because he looks a little like me. Much finer, I should say. But something, there is. When I was young, I even argued like Jacob. All right.” He pushed aside his plate. “So you’re going to come with me.”
“I told you I’m too ill.”
“Is that right?” He put the glass teacup laced with silver back on the trolley. “I can’t force you. Of course, if you’re not there, God in heaven only knows what I might say to your Jacob. An old man. You know, his mind wanders and his tongue with it.” Now he looked at her with a straightforward gaze, letting her see the backside of his anger, the tail flicking at her. He would tell everything, and then there would be endless questions. Her mother-in-law jubilant, Jacob furious. To sell a box of jewelry, to buy train tickets, to make arrangements, a person needs to be unnoticed.
“It’s a miracle, Zaydeh. I’m feeling much better. If you go downstairs, I’ll dress. Please send Annie up to help me.”
She wouldn’t think about where she was going. She was not dizzy and she wouldn’t faint on the threshold like her mother, for she knew that tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, she would go to Shmolnik’s herself to sell her jewelry. She’d be on the train before night. A person was always on her own. Anything else was delusion.
Outside in the darkness, the carriage stood in front of the house. The horses’ breath blew at the light of streetlamps, the driver taking a nip of something in a bottle. Children were calling, “Penny for a guy,” and men carried torches. From behind the carriage, the ghost of the first wife came strolling toward the streetlamp as if she were out for a Sabbath promenade, but if she thought that Emilia would greet her with open arms, then she was mistaken. A person, even a ghost, can’t come and go without so much as a by-your-leave. The grief at such partings becomes tiresome.
There was someone else accompanying the first wife, a woman rather older but just as dead. In the fashion of religious women fifty years ago, she wore a bib and apron, the bib embroidered in green and gold, and a turban covered her hair. She wasn’t wearing a cloak. Why should she—do the dead feel cold? Emilia drew her fur collar closer around her neck.
“Sholom aleichem,” Zaydeh said to the first wife. “And to your friend, too.”
“Aleichem sholom,”the other woman said, as if the dead could speak just like ordinary people. And so they can when the time is right. “Your wife is famous up there.”
“My wife? You know her.”
“Not personally. But everyone heard how she taught Deborah the prophetess to sing ‘A Woman of Valor’ in the mama-loshen. Come on. There isn’t much time. We have to go.”
“You’re not here to take him,” Emilia said. The carriage might soon carry her into the fog, but she was still here in front of the house. And at least on this night the house was hers and she was the possessor of its keys. “I won’t allow it.” She put her arm through Zaydeh’s as if she had no intention of forgetting him the minute she stepped on the boat. Zaydeh tried to disentangle himself, but she held on tighter. “I won’t allow it, I’m telling you. There’s no use in your even trying.”
The old woman laughed. “Don’t worry so much. I’m here for your sake, my girl. Let’s get into the carriage. I have something to say to you.” She turned to the first wife. “But, Mrs. Rosenberg, you please hurry.”
Emilia let herself be led into the carriage, bewildered by all the comings and goings in this world and the next, which she couldn’t seem to understand or govern, as the ghost of the first wife left her again, waving good-bye and walking away into the night.
Frying Pan Alley
In the front room, there was a blue vase on the mantelpiece and beside it a school picture. The dresser stood next to the table; on the dresser were the dishes and, on the top shelf, books. It had begun with two volumes of fairy tales received in return for making a maternity dress, and now there were fifteen books, each one protected by a quilted cover that Nehama had sewn from scraps. The used-book sellers were impatient with her because she thumbed through every page to make sure they were all there. Just buy already, it’s a good price, they’d say. Are you a librarian?
In her shop, she’d let a person look from beginning to end and not stand like a copper over a vagrant. That would be if she had a shop, which she wouldn’t, for she was sure that her husband would be coshed in Dorset Street. The sages taught that the yetzer-hara, the instinct for survival, arises when a person is born, but the yetzer-hatov, the selfless impulse, develops only with maturity. If its growth was stunted, then the yetzer-hara grew large to compensate, and Nehama herself could testify to its success in acquiring a certain expertise.
Firecrackers were exploding just as they had on her wedding night while she crept from her bed and stood before the dark window, crying because she loved her husband and couldn’t tell whether he smelled of tobacco or sweat or anything at all. Sparks flew up above the rows of chimney pots now as then. The children were outside, enjoying the fireworks, while Minnie and Lazar, she and Nathan ate their supper, fortifying themselves for their night of work. The front room must smell of fish and onions tonight, but for Nehama there was just the sensation of grease and the taste of salt; the slippery texture of fish and onion were the same to her tongue.
“What do you think of the war?” Lazar asked, his round cheeks puffing as he chewed a good-size bit of potato and onion.
“My grandmother cut off a boy’s toes to keep him from the draft,” Nehama said. “At least he lived to have children.”
“But that was the czar. We were slaves then. Can we let the Boers shell our towns? No.” He slapped the table. “Here free men should fight.”
“Are you going to fight with your pressing iron?” Minnie laughed.
“Don’t laugh,” Nathan said. “His iron is heavy enough to clobber someone. Just don’t drop it on your foot, Lazar.”
“I got the Daily Mail,” he said. “They have a reporter right there. You think a sweatshop is anything? Listen to this.”
But before Lazar could read, there was a knock at the door, and when it opened, Mrs. Cohen from down the alley stood in the doorway with her boy Morrie holding a stick of wood over his shoulder like a soldier’s rifle. She had a simple, square body covered by a coat too threadbare for even the pawnshop. Her cheeks were chapped from the fall wind, her nose wet as she wiped it with the back of her hand.
“Good evening, good evening,” she said. “Sholom aleichem. Don’t get up, Mrs. Katzellen. I’m just here for a minute. No, please. Not even a cup of tea.”
“Do you want me to turn over your coat?” Nehama asked. Last year she’d made over a Shobbos dress for Mrs. Cohen, creating a waist for her with darts and tucks. “I’m too busy, now. But in the slack season…”
“I need to tell you something,” Mrs. Cohen said. “I was at Shmolnik’s …”
Right away Nehama knew that something was wrong. It had to be if it involved Shmolnik. “What does he want from me?” Nehama said.
“Him? Nothing. It’s nothing to do with Shmolnik.”
“Then what?”
“I’m trying to tell you. Morrie was waiting for me and looking outside at the parade.”
“And?” Minnie asked. She went to the stove, her wooden spoon dripping melted chicken fat as she put another serving of potatoes onto her plate.
“He heard your girls talking. Tell them, Morrie.”
The boy looked down at his scuffed boots. His face was dirty, his ears stuck out under his cap. Everyone knew that the glazier paid him a penny to break windows when the trade was slack. “They said as they was going to Dorset Street.”
“What?” Nehama asked. She couldn’t have heard right. A person’s nightmare doesn’t suddenly turn into a supper of fried fish and the snotty-nosed neighbor boy, who has a crush on Libby, speaking of doom in the half-Yiddish, half-Cockney English
of the alley.
“Something about singing like Jinny what used to live with her grandma next door,” the boy said. “Does Jinny sing? That’s not what I heard.”
“Shh.” His mother cuffed his ear.
“That’s ridiculous,” Minnie snapped, pouring fresh tea into Nehama’s cup and pushing it into her hands. “I shouldn’t say it, but everyone knows your Morrie makes up stories.”
“Is it true, Morrie?” his mother asked him. “If you’re lying, tell me now and I won’t say anything. Otherwise I’ll use that good stick for your backside, don’t think I won’t.”
“I heard what I heard,” he muttered, his face so sullen that no one could think he was lying.
“The girls went to the Jews’ Free School,” Minnie said, taking her shawl. “They said they’d be burning the guy on the bonfire there. I’ll run out and fetch them.”
Lazar was still holding the Daily Mail, opened to the photograph of ruined houses in Ladysmith. “I’m sure the girls are fine,” he said uncertainly.
“Stay here in case they come home,” Nehama said, hardly seeing as Mrs. Cohen and her son left. How could she see when she was dreaming the worst of dreams? “I’m going to look for them in Dorset Street.”
“You think Gittel is really singing in some public house?” Nathan asked, already standing up and shrugging on his jacket. “Our Gittel what’s so shy?”
“It’s my fault. Don’t you remember? I said that Jinny sings for her supper. I shouldn’t have mentioned her name. Not even in a roundabout way. A girl that does what she does.” Nehama threw her shawl over her head.
“So maybe Gittel misunderstood and it gave her an idea. Then the important thing is to find her.”
“Where are you going?” she asked him.
“If she’s in Dorset Street, God forbid, I’ll bring her home. I’ll be all right, Nehameleh. People there know me.”
And she knew them. God forbid he should see it and realize what she’d been. “In the damp, you’ll catch your death. Do I need to nurse you back to health in the middle of the busy season?”
“Don’t look so scared. You think I can’t do it? You think I can’t take care of my daughter and my wife?” His voice was sharp, the bitterness returning.
“Of course not. But shouldn’t I think about your health? All right, if you don’t care, then I won’t say anything. Come on. Let’s go. Better the last mile together. Am I right?”
Her mind was running on ahead of her, down the alley, past the school, up Bell Lane, where there was a small wooden sign in Yiddish between the kosher butcher and the German blacksmith’s. When she came to the sign, she would turn back into what she’d been. She must—so that everything she knew could guide her. Nathan would only have to take one look and he would hate her, but all that mattered was that she get her daughter out of a room as bright as a gold tooth biting down. Then she would atone for being the selfish mother in the court of King Solomon and she would offer her own heart to pay off her outstanding debts.
CHAPTER 9
The Song
NOVEMBER 5, 1899
The Horn and Plenty
The door was open, the gas jets making a cave warm and light, only five steps down. Gittel stood at the bottom of the stairs, cold air at her back, Libby’s fingers gripping her arm. The smell of beer and sausages made her stomach peculiar, and she suddenly didn’t want to know which of the slack-jawed women standing at the bar might be her mother. But it didn’t matter what she wanted, only where she belonged. The pub was bright with lion glass lamps, colored posters of music hall singers winked in the gas jets, and on the wall was a bill for the new melodrama at the Victorian, set in India. Women stood at the counter, talking and dipping a finger into glasses of gin for their babies to suck on.
“An’ is she no better?”
“Nor won’t be till she’s gone.”
“A great expense the burying is. Our Davey lay dead on the table six days till we found the money for him.”
“It wants doing respectable. With mutes and plumes and that.”
Gittel listened to the accordion, the hiss of taps, the click of conversation, the clang of a metal ring tied to a rope and flung against a hook on the back wall. Ringing the Bull, the game was called. In Roman times the hook had been a horn. On one side of the pub was a map of London 1807, at the far end a door marked in black paint, PRIVAT. If only she could just take one step inside, she’d be all right. She’d sing and bring the money home so her tatteh wouldn’t have to sell coffee and be coshed and rolled in the street even if she had to come back here to stand with her first mother somewhere at the bar. But her feet wouldn’t move, and Libby was whispering that she wasn’t going to catch it on Gittel’s account and she’d go herself in a minute. Help me, Gittel prayed, and her prayer was answered in the way that prayers can be in the days of science, with the voice of a neighbor rather than an angel, for there are immigration laws to prevent the sudden arrival of strangers sent by God incognito to a dusty tent.
“Over here.” It was Mrs. Dawes from next door standing there at the counter, the frills of her cap rising like petals, and beside her was Jinny, with her yellow hair and a lacy bodice not quite covering her chest. Gittel made her way to Mrs. Dawes, trying not to be dazzled by the green walls and the three-tone posters, the stripes of Jinny’s dress and the peacock feather eyeing her from a glass behind the barman, who kept order with a butcher’s mallet.
Mrs. Dawes had two living grandchildren, one that lodged with her and Jinny, who rented a bed by the night in Dorset Street. Jinny’s nickname was Star to rhyme with car. Her dress was striped like a streetcar, and men rode her, people said. Gittel wasn’t certain what was meant, though it made her skin hot, as if her teacher were telling her to get the yardstick and hold her hands out for discipline while the whole class looked at her.
“Hello, Libby. Hello, Gittel. Are you sleeping on your feet, then?”
Gittel blinked. “Hello, Star,” she said, putting her hands in her pockets.
“A rum guy, that is,” Mrs. Dawes said. “Looks more of a dolly-mop than our Guy Fawkes.”
“It were her mother made the guy’s dress,” Libby said in an angry voice. “And we ought to go now, Gittel, and throw it in the fire. Remember?”
“Right. Off with you girls,” Mrs. Dawes said. “Your mother don’t want a pot of beer, and there’s nothing for you two in the Horn and Plenty.”
Gittel put her hand on the old woman’s arm. “I want to earn some money. Can you tell me who I ought to talk to so I can sing like Star?” She hated the sound of her nervous, squeaky voice. No pennies could come from that.
“A good girl, that is,” Mrs. Dawes said. “Thinking on your mum. That’s as it ought to be. But our Jinny don’t sing, she—well, she sews trousers. Don’t you, Jinny?”
“Oh, yes. Trousers. You can take a quid out of a good pair of trousers, you can.”
“I could do that. Mama taught me to sew,” Gittel said quickly. Not one of the women looking at her curiously was familiar. Her other mother wasn’t here, and she couldn’t go to the next pub and the next. Her legs wouldn’t hold her up. Maybe God meant her to wait, after all, and appear on the stage with a bouquet of flowers and help out now by sewing so that she could rip out any mistakes. “Could you get me some trousers, Star?”
“You see the Squire over there, Gittel. Him as is sitting at the little table near the back door.” Gittel nodded. She’d noticed the watch fob on his vest, and how he was knitting like a sailor. “The Squire gets me any number of trousers, he does,” Star said. “For a little girl like you, he’d have a good price. Ten quid, I’d say.”
Six months’ rent—a fortune. But Mrs. Dawes was shaking her head, the frills on her cap fluttering like Mr. Wordsworth’s daffodils. “I don’t hold with little girls having any truck with trousers. You’d best wait till you’re thirteen, like our Jinny did.” She reached down and ran her fingers along Gittel’s face as if she could steal away some of the softness
for her own. “But you can sing a little song for the Squire and I believe as he’ll give you a few pennies to take home to your mum, and enough left over to stand us one.”
Dorset Street
Nehama was forty-one years old now, and the street didn’t look much different from when she was seventeen. Smoke from the bonfires crept up to the roofs and hung among the chimney pots, listening to what went on behind the gaping doorways. Shadows moved in holes where doors had been stolen off hinges. There still wasn’t more than a single streetlamp. Over there the waxworks was new and the fortuneteller’s sign, though the Horn and Plenty was where it had always been.
She couldn’t remember much about the first time a man lay on her for money. She knew that she didn’t want to understand what was expected of her, but that was no impediment. She was led behind a door marked PRIVAT in black paint. The room had a tiny window, the man a vague shape, as if the fog were as much inside as outside. The Squire came to the room afterward and laughed at her for trying to cover herself while he picked up the money. But England was a free country, he said, and as soon as she’d paid off her debts she could go on her way.
She didn’t remember where she slept or if she slept, only that she came out of a stupor after some days, stiff and sore as she stood at the counter in the Horn and Plenty with a pencil and a Christian tract. On the back she added up her debts, glancing now and then at the map of London. Someone beside her was eating winkles with loud lip smackings, and Nehama believed that she herself would never eat again. Always it came back to the dress.
You couldn’t profitably go on the game—or the turf as they called it then—without a dress that caught the eye. The Squire had provided the fancy dress, and his niece followed Nehama wherever she went to make sure that she didn’t sell or pawn it. Her earnings, even with what she could pick from a man’s pocket, were never enough to buy herself out.
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