A Star for Mrs. Blake (11 page)

Mrs. Minnie Seibert appeared to be staring at the young woman on the bus but actually she was in deep contemplation of the woman’s hat, a navy pillbox that had a veil dotted with pearls. The pearls were nice, but it was the feathers that interested Minnie. She was certain they were hackle feathers from white stag roosters, of the same breed that she and her husband, Abraham, raised on their poultry farm outside Bangor—a high-priced feather that took well to dyeing. You could see these were of superior quality because of the true colors in the turquoise and teal that were fanned out on the navy blue hat like the tail of a miniature peacock.

Minnie was certain that she knew the wholesaler who sold the feathers to the milliner who made the hat. His name was Max Bodenheimer, the biggest feather man on the Lower East Side, who paid sixteen dollars a pound for the leavings Minnie’s girls collected and packed, which Abraham drove down to the city twice a year. Max Bodenheimer. It had to be. And since Minnie had gotten on the bus at the corner of Broome Street, in the heart of the eastern European Jewish ghetto, and this young lady had boarded there as well, she had to be a
landsman
also—another Jew.

“Iz dos Park Gas?”
Minnie said in Yiddish.
Is this Park Avenue?

The woman replied in English: “Not yet, but soon. How far are you going?”

“Street number forty-two. Hotel Commodore.”

“I get off at Fifty-seventh. I’ll tell you at your stop.”

“A dank,”
Minnie replied automatically, but the woman did not acknowledge her thanks.

That hat must have cost her a pretty penny, Minnie thought, running
her eyes over the blue suit with white trim and the open-toed pumps. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, but already she was some kind of professional who knew her way around. She carried a case for a musical instrument, maybe a clarinet, and a smart leather portfolio. She wore her copper hair in waves and on her lips a thick layer of confident red. Minnie hadn’t worn lipstick in ages. It would never have occurred to her. She was past lipstick and everything it suggested.

This person, however, took it upon herself to make her own rules. She understood Yiddish, but refused to speak it. What was wrong with the new generation who thought they were Americans
only
? Minnie had lived in this country thirty-eight years, she was an American, too, and she liked nice things, just like this lady with the clarinet. They’d had a house full of treasures in Russia—silver candlesticks and gold jewelry—and her father had been a physics teacher, before their homes and shops were burned down during the pogroms. As a child Minnie had been spat on, and her eight-year-old brother was kidnapped for three days by drunken peasants who tied him down until he agreed to be baptized as a Christian, but he never gave in and was rescued near starvation by their father and uncles. Minnie had seen what it cost to be a Jew in Russia at the turn of the century, which made it all the more precious in this day and age. There was a lot not to like about chicken farming in Maine, but within their tiny group of ten families they could live a Jewish life. Why didn’t this free American citizen respect history enough to at least answer in her own language?

The bus sped uptown a mile a minute, even faster than the crazy traffic. Bessie Reiss, the cousin Minnie had been staying with on Houston Street, was the head bookkeeper in a glove factory, a
bale-boosteh
who didn’t take orders from anyone. It would have been nice to have her sitting beside her now. But Bessie had to go to work, so she’d put Minnie on the bus with instructions that once they turned onto Park Avenue it was
nishtikeit—nothing
. “Just keep your eye on the street signs and get off at number forty-two and ask anyone.” But without Bessie or the teeming comfort of the old-country neighborhood, where you could talk to anyone in four languages, Minnie
quickly lost all sense of where she was, and entered instead a familiar world of worry. She worried she’d get lost. She worried that she’d miss the breakfast at the hotel, the first big event of the pilgrimage. And the itinerary clearly stated,
“It is important for you to attend, as this will be an opportunity to meet the other members of your party.”

It was barely eight in the morning and already like a steambath. Even the hot air coming through the half-open windows of the bus was a relief. Minnie wore her best bright-pink-and-green-flowered cotton frock, which came down to the ankles, with a scoop neck and puffy sleeves. She carried a borrowed needlepoint handbag and a cardboard suitcase, and wore a white brimmed hat that brought out her naturally arched brows and deep-set slate-gray eyes. She had always been told she was the prettiest of her sisters, which led her to carry herself with no small amount of vanity, and had made it a long fall to the poverty of the chicken farm, unproductive land they had bought cheaply, where Isaac had been born in a ramshackle house held together with tarpaper.

By then the girls were married and moved to Bangor, in order to get away from their father’s rants against capitalism, nationalism, Orthodox religion, and the illusion of romantic love, and because deep in their souls they knew the egg business, at least the way their inexperienced cooperative went at it, with trial-and-error methods and naïve utopian ideas, was hopeless. In a household that believed you could live a Jewish life of virtue without accepting Yahweh, late baby Isaac was still a gift from God for his mother. The two were deeply entwined in ways she’d never felt with anyone, not even her beloved parents. With the raising of an eyebrow, they would both go into spasms of hysterical laughter, unable to explain. When she was hurting, she didn’t have to say a word—Isaac was there to lift the burden or to surprise her with a “science experiment,” usually involving worms. She believed he was “a genius,” like her father had been, and embraced Isaac’s dream of becoming a pharmacist with such fervor that she took in tailoring and saved for years in order to buy him a chemistry set. He was the love of her life.

When Isaac joined the army, Minnie was distraught mainly because
he’d won a scholarship to the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science and she fretted that while he was gone the money would somehow evaporate. It was easier to worry about the scholarship than about the war, but she was somewhat mollified because he volunteered to be an ambulance driver, which meant he’d serve behind the lines. Abraham forbade Isaac going. “Patriotism is idiotic!” he yelled. “Your loyalty is right here. To your family.” Isaac replied, “I’m an American. I’m going.” His father took the sugar dish and threw it down so that it shattered on the floor. It was just a piece of china but the whole house seemed to shake. Minnie felt the impact through the soles of her feet and in her body, where it stayed.

Block by block the familiar neighborhood was slipping away and Minnie’s apprehension grew. Storefronts covered in Hebrew lettering that had pickle barrels outside, tiny pocket-sized
shuls
, alleys packed with pushcarts, Orthodox men with their minds immersed in Torah, patrolling the streets in big beards and black hats, gave way in the wink of an eye to an endless barren street stretching far into the morning light—with a church on every corner. Although piano makers and newspaper publishers and even department stores had moved into the fancy cast-iron buildings on lower Park Avenue, to Minnie Seibert, New York City was a looming skyline of crosses. She’d grown up in Russia with a deep-seated fear of crosses because they meant death to Jews, and just last winter Gottlieb, their neighbor in Maine, had found a burning cross outside his house, left by the Ku Klux Klan.

Desperately in need of some sort of refuge, Minnie leaned toward the woman on the bus and tried once more in Yiddish.

“Gefelt mir dayn kapeleyush.”
I like your hat.

The woman didn’t look up. “Thank you,” she said briskly in English.

Minnie decided she had nothing more to say to this girl. She had what her grandmother would call “a fresh mouth.” Even sitting down she was too busy to be polite. Or maybe she was embarrassed talking to an out-of-towner. She appeared to be involved in the pages she had taken from the portfolio. Minnie was amazed to see that they were music. The woman was reading music on the bus.

For some reason everything had stopped at Thirty-fourth Street.
The bus didn’t move, like it was trapped in cement. Something was going on. There was the unsettling howl of sirens and passengers had gotten up and crowded the windows. Outside, a well-dressed businessman was sprawled motionless on the sidewalk, and a policeman was waving cars away to make room for an ambulance. Minnie couldn’t look. If the screaming sirens didn’t stop, she’d jump right out of her skin. Isaac promised her that he’d be safe. He wrote from France to say he loved what he was doing and there was no cause for worry. His job was exciting and important. He’d pick up the wounded from a dressing station that was way behind the lines and drive at terrific speeds over country roads to the hospital in Verdun. The dressing station itself was supposed to be a safety zone. It had a big red cross on the roof, the international sign for hospital. Instead, the Germans used it as a target and bombed it from the air, just as Isaac and another driver were loading a casualty.

The bus was lurching forward but her heart was beating fast and her underarms were slippery with perspiration. She was going to be late for the breakfast. And she’d forgotten all about the Gold Star Mothers badge! She found the velvet box in her needlepoint handbag and opened the top. She’d pasted Isaac’s military portrait on the inside cover so she could see him whenever she opened it. His hair was so short and plastered down and
parted neatly
, for the first time in his life. His smooth young face was half turned away so the eyes were looking back at her, gently sharing the sadness of their separation.

A loud buzzer sounded inside the bus and Minnie flinched. The young woman had pulled the cord.

“Your stop is next,” she told Minnie.

Minnie stood and hastily gathered her things, unaware that her fellow rider had glimpsed the soldier as he went back inside his box, and watched her pin the red, white, and blue badge on her dress. Minnie had all she could do to hang on to a strap as well as the cardboard suitcase and purse. When the bus jerked to a halt and the doors swung open, the young musician turned her face up to Minnie, who was swaying over her, and whispered shyly, “I’m sorry about your son.
Megn Got treystn du tsvishn der aveylim
.”

Minnie’s eyes were smarting. The Yiddish words
—May God console
you among the mourners
—were from the old, old Hebrew, said to mourners in order to reassure them that God will take responsibility for their consolation. The rabbi who came from Bangor when Isaac died told them that when you grieve, you are not alone. You are with God and everybody else who grieves throughout time. Minnie had stopped believing in that god, but she knew a miracle when she saw one.

And here was another: people were lined up behind her, politely waiting for the Gold Star Mother to be the first one off the bus. The young musician looked embarrassed, as if she were the reason for this alarming pause in the pulse of New York. She seemed unsure of what she’d said—if she had said it right, or if maybe it would have been better not to have said anything at all. Minnie let go of the strap and got her balance. She reached down with one hand and rested it tenderly on the woman’s head—on the hat, actually—as if she had been one of her children; as if she were giving her child a blessing.

“Here she is!” Cora Blake cried as Mrs. Minnie Seibert joined the table. She took Minnie’s hands in both of hers as if they were old friends. Their letters certainly had been intimate enough. As the first one to respond to her note of welcome, Minnie had a special place in Cora’s personal pecking order.

“How are you?” she asked. “How was the trip?”

“Tiring,” Minnie said.

“And your husband?”

“We’re still married,” Minnie said wryly.

“Did he understand?”

“All I can say is—I’m here.”

Cora smiled and touched her arm. “You’ll be glad. You’ll see.”

Minnie looked around. They were in the Dutch Room, a dining hall set aside by the Hotel Commodore for the pilgrims, a hodgepodge of ugly green chairs set around dozens of tables filled with several hundred chattering females making a din louder than the traffic in the street. She noticed there were Christian angels painted on the ceiling … but what else was new?

Still standing, Cora tapped a water glass to get the table’s attention away from the alluring American breakfast of grapefruit sections, sausage, bacon, waffles, eggs-as-you-like-them, smoked fish, toast, Ralston cereal, stewed prunes, pastries, coffee, and tea, which General Perkins himself had approved.

“This is Mrs. Minnie Seibert!” she announced triumphantly, as if Minnie had just won a race.

Smiling faces looked up in welcome and Minnie was introduced to Mrs. Selma Russell, an elderly Negro she immediately felt sympathy for because she seemed so burdened, even though she was sitting down, which reminded her of the family of black furniture movers who had driven their belongings from Bangor out to the farm. Nobody else would take the job because they’d be going back with an empty truck. Then there was Mrs. Katie McConnell, with short flaming red hair and bad teeth—Boston Irish, Minnie thought. When Cora whispered that Katie had lost
two
sons, Minnie’s heart went out to the poor woman.

“But she doesn’t talk about it,” Cora added, and Minnie nodded in confidence.

Then Cora explained that the lady next to her in the olive drab army uniform was Lieutenant Lily Barnett, R.N., and that their liaison officer, Lieutenant Thomas Hammond, would be joining them shortly. There was one more in their party, Mrs. Genevieve Olsen, who would arrive the day of departure and join them on the ship. Nurse Lily stood and invited Minnie to an empty chair. She was very solicitous. “Sit next to me,” she said. “How are you feeling, Mrs. Seibert?”

“I’m fine,” Minnie said, adding suspiciously, “Why do you ask?”