by Anna Solomon
“You thought your mother might be here,” she said loudly, for the thought had come to her loudly, and given her a shock. She had not often thought of Samuel as the son of a mother.
He looked down at her. “So what?”
So what. She didn’t know. She’d meant to accuse him, she supposed, but of what? So he’d been a child. So he’d known his mother. So his beautiful mother had been the one he preferred, even after she’d run away. Minna had not been so forgiving. She waited for him to shrug, or look away. But he kept his eyes on hers. She could see him trying not to blink.
“So I’m sorry,” she said.
His gaze held. “I never asked you for anything.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want your consolation.”
Minna nodded. Her throat hurt. With time, she thought, she could break his face apart. She could make it half a face, an ugly face. She would refuse to long for him.
“That’s just as well,” she said. “I never wanted to console you.”
THE team pulled slowly up the long hill. It was still early: the crickets made their sound, the grass was tipped with pink, long shadows followed the wagon. The horse and mule had never looked so alike as they did now. Minna envied them their likeness, and their calm; she envied the clarity of the task ahead of them. She wished Samuel were on horseback, and would disappear quickly. She could feel the colonists watching her watching him. She smiled, held up a kerchief, and began to wave it. She waved excitedly, almost exuberantly. If anyone had known her, they would have known that she was close to weeping. But they didn’t know her, so she kept waving. She thought of Ruth’s wig, and the dead child she would not speak of. Of the gloves Galina wore to cover her bitten nails. Of her aunt’s dark dresses. Of Liesl’s mourning, which would be silent. She thought of her mother, who’d left her daughter and gone off to her own disguise, and of Samuel and Jacob’s mother, whom Minna had been brought to replace, and of Rebeka, the last morning, her gasping laugh above the tea tray.
Who knew what any of them wanted? Who knew what they were good for?
At the crest of the hill, the wagon seemed to pause. But that must have been the light playing tricks, because the next minute it was gone and one of the women whose son had been sent off to the State Agricultural College rushed up to Minna, beaming, gave her a hearty clap on the shoulder, and offered her his empty bed.
TWENTY-NINE
MINNA might have stayed at the colony. For two weeks she slept in the bed of the boy who was in Brookings learning about manure and horticulture and how to tell the difference between a good cow and a bad cow, and also, it would turn out, how to fall in love with a gentile girl from the town, whom he would marry and settle with in Brookings, where he would open a dry-goods store named Lawson’s—instead of Lowenstein’s—and seldom use his knowledge of horticulture.
But his parents knew nothing of this yet, so their pride and joy in their son was still intact and they showered Minna with its excess. Their younger children asked why Samuel had left without her and she made up a story about steamboats and rabbis and ranch hands and babies, a story so long and convoluted that by its end, the question had been forgotten. The colony children were brave in a way she hadn’t known children to be. There were few rules to obey, or fail to obey. They prayed with the adults as matter-of-factly as they did their chores. They played and studied and ate all together, and ran through each other’s houses, and milked the same cows. It was as if any one child had as much right to another family as to his own. The girls Minna’s age were not yet married. They took her to make cheese with them, and to bathe. They made fun of large breasts, and small ones, and told their jokes in front of her, and did not sneer when she laughed though they must have known she didn’t understand all their English words. They had secrets among them, but you could tell from the way they rolled their eyes and flirted with their skirts that the secrets bore no shame.
It was this, the obvious triviality of their agitation, the way they rehearsed the telling of gossip more than they told it, which put Minna at ease. No one asked her to explain herself. She was made official onion cutter.
Then, one day, the Baron de Vintovich kept his promise and arrived. The colonists welcomed him with great cheers, and a marching band of children banging pots and pans, and that night, they gathered around the piano to hear him play and sing. Some of the children sang along, slapping the piano’s sides and stomping their feet, until they were hushed—for the Baron did not look pleased at the accompaniment. Nor did he look pleased at the hushing, which was, of necessity, somewhat loud. The Baron was a short, square man with a pointed beard on his chin and a smile that appeared to cause him pain. He’d descended from his wagon in a long cloth coat, which he wore unbuttoned as if to remark upon its indulgence and which flapped around him as he walked. Now he sat at the piano bench, his feet barely touching the floor, his mouth open so wide you could see his tongue quiver as he crooned, with all the humor of an opera singer: Like Oscar Wilde I flirt with the girls, I should utterly blush to murmur, The most liberal man that is on the road is the Hebrew clothing Drummer. Some of the colonists seemed to know the song. They nodded along and smiled and generally made a good effort to cover their alarm, though as it became increasingly clear that the Baron was not a man to notice his effect, their faces fell into wincing. In winter as well as in summer, he warbled, He is out on the road, In his style à la mode, You might think him a sport or a Bummer. Minna was the only one still smiling. It was funny, really, if you hadn’t expected him to be an advanced example of humankind. So za great Baron de Vintovich was a stout, disagreeable man. Minna could have guessed as much. She thought, Good for Samuel, that he didn’t have to see this. She kept smiling. She did not think to herself, I am seeking an advantage, but she must have known, some part of her must have understood. And indeed, when the Baron finally arrived at his exalted, ear-piercing conclusion—His expenses so large, To the firm he does charge, That Hebrew clothing man!!!—he looked up, and it was Minna’s smiling face he saw (for he was the sort of man who could locate praise in a bowl of teeth) and everyone in the room could see him fall for her.
What a phrase that was. He fell for her. As though the man had swooned off the piano bench. Yet his ardor was unmistakable. Even the Baron could not summon an affectation to mask it. He stood, and took her hand. Minna felt the color rise in her cheeks. And though there was fright in her blushing, at the fact of his hot, fleshy hand on hers, and embarrassment, for the colonists stared, she continued to smile. The Baron rode in a freshly painted wagon, hired in Pierre, with red velvet seats and a fringed roof. He had a small entourage of bespectacled men to assist him. Most importantly, he was bound for Chicago, to make an offer on a bridge that would cross the Missoury. For the Baron’s wealth was not mysterious, as they’d wanted to believe. He was a railroad tycoon.
MINNA bid the colonists farewell from a thick cushion of brushed velvet, her lap covered in a lambskin though the morning was warm, the Baron next to her waving with only his fingers. The colonists looked less stunned now, and more judgmental, and Minna could see that she was not excluded from this judgment. They felt betrayed, she supposed, and confused in their betrayal, for they had never known anything about her nor had she made them any promises. That girl, they might say, do you remember that girl? She guessed she would be a story for them whose details were debated each time it was told. Had she truly been taken with the Baron? Had she been stupid, or shrewd? If she was stupid, did that make her more forgivable? What did she even look like? Did anyone recall?
En route to Chicago, when the train ran stretches of his track, the Baron took her hand and cried, “Here! Now! Do you hear that rail? How smooth? You feel it, yes? Only the best on the Baron’s rail.” Wink. “One must be ruthless to be the best.”
Minna tried not think about the Baron’s ruthlessness. She demanded her own compartment on the train, and did not allow anyone but the porter through the door. She murmured nonsense about m
odesty and allowed the Baron only to touch her hand. It turned out to be easy to say no in a way that appeared to promise yes. It was easy to mislead a man who you trusted would not blink if given the chance to mislead you. In the evenings, they sat at a table set in silver and ate pot pies and fruit tarts and rolls so light you could eat ten before feeling full. How marvelous and silly and sad those rolls were. If there was a draft in the dining car, the Baron would drape his long coat over her shoulders. He spoke of claims and contracts and “the fucking government” with its fancy regulations and bought Minna her first glass of champagne. He told jokes and she laughed. Sometimes she felt a stab between her breasts, a reminder of a task she’d forgotten, and she would sense all her duties coming to find where she had gone, knocking at the car windows, tugging on her skirts. Images of Max eating a cold pancake with his hands and her father fussily nailing lacy trim onto the birdhouse as though her mother might return to eat seeds and Galina smearing lip paint onto her cheeks. She thought of herself, as a girl, leaving the houses she was meant to clean. But she couldn’t hold the pictures still, or summon guilt, or even pity. She pictured the girls at the colony, who might be pulling warm eggs from nests, or dipping their fingers in butter, or watching boys, or falling asleep thinking of boys. She might have stayed, and pretended to be one of them. But she would never be a girl like that. They were no more possible than the Baron himself, who in his desire to kiss her and save her from hunger and want would save her from freedom as well. She kept smiling at him, laughing. If memory was only a dream, the present, when necessary, could be dismissed as an addled remnant. You didn’t have to count it away; only to keep your thoughts loose, as in hunger, or heartbreak.
And when the train pulled into the Great Central Depot, you didn’t have to explain yourself. You could ask one of the bespectacled men for a not insignificant bit of money, wait for the Baron to become preoccupied with his discovery of a (carefully placed) tear in his coat, and walk, calmly, into the crowd.
THIRTY
MAX died some time before Samuel’s return. He might have died as Minna lay under his son, or as she laughed at a joke she didn’t understand, or as she let the Baron take her hand for the first time; as she left Max in her slow, cowardly way, he pardoned her by dying. It was a violent, vengeful death, but it began quietly, in the middle of one night, when a mouse chewed through the door’s string, severing Max’s connection with the railroad tie outside and locking him in the house. Max was trapped for who knew how long, already weak with his fasting, refusing to break a window for who knew what reason except perhaps God, who might have heard his prayers. If so, He sent a cruel answer, for it was Fritzi who kicked the door through, Fritzi who’d been driving cattle northward again, who couldn’t help but drive them through Max’s land, just to do it and to have done it. When he didn’t see Max anywhere outside, then saw the cow’s udders hanging almost to the ground, he went to knock, and when Max shouted from the other side and Fritzi lifted the tie and flung open the door, Max’s sense was not that he’d been saved but that he was being attacked, and when he saw the hundreds of head of cattle lolling their greedy way through his grass, he ran toward them wildly, waving his arms, screaming. And when the cows did not find him frightening enough to warrant even a dent in their course, Max told Fritzi that he had a gun inside, the very one Fritzi had given to Jacob, and that as long as Max owned this land, Fritzi would not set foot on it again. And Fritzi’s arm, swinging his father’s rope, that arm might have looked to Max like the arm of one of his sons, for he did not run. Or maybe he didn’t run because he knew it would make no difference, that the rope would catch him neatly around the arms and pull him hard to the ground. Fritzi rode—a hundred feet? a thousand?—and Max’s head hit a pile of stones.
Samuel found Max in bed, under a blanket, with a note. What the note said, Minna always wondered. Had Fritzi thought only to give Max a scare, or to kill him? Had he believed Max’s lie about Jacob’s gun still being in the house, or did he only choose to believe it to justify his prank? Did he imagine himself to be a character of a cowboy in one of his books, dragging a character of a Jew?
His note, of course, would not have answered these questions. It would have offered only the facts, and even then, only the facts as he knew them to be and wanted them known. Samuel would have had to fill in the details, and what he left out, or what Ruth suspected he left out, Ruth must have guessed at. For it was Ruth who wrote Minna a letter, after Minna, for the first time in her life, didn’t simply disappear but sent back word of her whereabouts.
We were relieved to receive news—Chicago! Very sophisticated. Not all are cut out for this life. Indeed. I fear I may be the first to tell you that your husband—or was a divorce announced? I do not mean to pry, but people have asked, as they do—has suffered a terrible fate . . .
Ruth described the scene between Fritzi and Max, then concluded:
. . . I hope you will forgive the messenger, my dear. You are bound to find a suitable husband in the city. (Speaking of which, did you hear of the Baltimore sister who took one of the fraudulent potions that con man was selling? It was meant to find her love, apparently—but she nearly died, she fell so ill.) Thankfully, you are more sensible than that, Minna. I do believe this to be true. And so I will leave you with this tidbit, applicable, I believe, even in the most urban environs:
“The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost.”
Isn’t that lovely?
It has given me something to ponder, in any case. Here, the crops grow well. The children improve. Health is in good order. We are sorry for your loss.
THIS was in July, again—after Minna had discovered the pleasures of boardinghouses, in particular that of moving from one to the next only to find it the same, the sharp old mistress, the chalky stains on the doorknobs from where they bumped the walls, the plain, clean, narrow bed dressed as if in bandage: the surprise, and humor, and satisfaction, in having one’s expectations so precisely met. She signed the logs as Losk. She could do anything. Mostly she sat in her various and identical rooms, reading books available for rent at the desks downstairs. In hallway mirrors she inspected the short, fuzzy hairs growing at her scalp, replacing what she’d lost in her winter hunger. The wind turned warm and the old mistresses dropped their fees and the Baron’s money lasted a little longer, then it ran out and Minna pawned her wedding ring. She expected her palms to sweat, but she was calm. She watched the dealer spin it around his thumb and declare it impure, copper stained in gold. She thought of Max, who would not have inspected the ring at all, who would have simply handed over the crystal doorknob he thought he didn’t need, accepted the ring, and walked out. The dealer looked at her with pity, and without curiosity, and she didn’t tell him that she was a widow, though it would have made her more respectable—though it was, perhaps, what she’d always wanted: the virtue of marriage, without the burden of its charge; the assumption of ruin without its shame. She found that she didn’t care what he thought, perhaps because Chicago was a big city, or because she’d given up some idea of her own goodness.
The dealer gave her a week’s board for the ring, and when that ran out, she returned her last book. She walked through Maxwell Street. She pretended to be aimless, though she knew that she couldn’t afford to be, that eventually she would find herself at the shirt factory, lined up like other girls she’d seen, girls who looked like the quiet, sick girls on the boat. And though she dreaded this moment, she decided there would be some rightness in it, in the firm brush of elbows and hips, the falling in step behind another pair of boots, the giving in to the press of the herd toward the door. She thought it might be true, what Samuel had said, that she’d wanted too much to be different.
She paused in the middle of a market square. There was the street that led to the factory. There was the American sun, making the carts and doorways and even the stones underfoot look clean, though they were as filthy as carts
and doorways and stones anywhere else. There was the smell of tomatoes, as in Odessa, the summer before. There were men who looked like other men, every one of them like another. She heard her name called. Minna!!!! And in the seconds that followed, because she couldn’t find a single face turned toward her, and because almost no one in the city knew her name, she wondered if, by letting go of her pride, she’d found faith. She looked up. But before she could find God, or even the sky, her eyes were drawn to an open window, where, next to a tall red geranium, a thick, strong arm was waving. Faga’s arm. Faga’s enormous bust. Faga’s loud mouth opening again to shout her name.
MINNA would stay in Chicago a long time. She stayed long enough to find work shelving books at the Public Library, and to pay her share of Faga’s rent, and to develop new debts, of her own choosing, and new habits, like that of being late, always, and of wearing hats, everywhere, and of being unusually slow at market to pick which eggs she would buy, and which bread, and which beans. She stayed long enough to receive many more of Ruth’s letters, including one that told her how the “crickets” Minna heard at the colony in fact turned out to be the firstborn of the grasshoppers, which one day that summer covered the sun and fell like a hail up to the colonists’ knees and ate the children’s clothes off their backs and devoured their crops and ran them back to towns and cities to buy and sell and bank; and another letter, the next year, which reported that Samuel had married one of the girls from the colony and made his father’s farm a success and that the old mule was still alive. Minna stayed long enough in Chicago to fall totally, helplessly, sick with influenza, and to recover, and to read newspaper headlines about the Baron de Vintovich laying tracks across the continental divide. She stayed long enough to see Little Egypt dance her belly dance at the World’s Fair Midway, and to think she saw Jacob in a clown costume only to lose him in the crowd, and to hear a man called Turner talk about the end of the frontier. She stayed long enough to see the century change, and to see her first Indians, in threepiece suits and homburg hats, outside a courthouse, and to sit in the dark of the Bijou Dream Theatre next to a man, watching Bronco Billy Anderson shoot and dance and flee his silent way through The Great Train Robbery. And at the end of the film this man, who sold nuts at the market and had asked one morning why Minna looked for so long but always bought the same thing, almonds roasted with no salt, and who Minna would know for many years though she would not marry him, pulled her out into the chilled air that blew off the lake that looked like but did not smell like an ocean. He said, “So that’s the Wild, Wild West,” and Minna smiled and said, “Yes. It’s just like that.”
