Beyond the Pale: A Novel (38 page)

“Happy?”

“You’re not happy?”

“Oy, Rose, once I got in the binders’ union I thought I was going to be all set. Then I see the local for the gluers is like a ladies’ auxiliary, almost only for social reasons and to get the scraps from the men or run their errands. And they keep telling me how lucky we are even to have a women’s local.”

“This is such news it should make you unhappy? You sound just like one of those street corner Isaiahs: Woe unto the unorganized!”

“It’s important.”

“I know it’s important but you have to relax a little, at least enough to finish your soup.”

A young woman in a brown shirtwaist and black tie walked by our table and smiled at Rose before she joined a group in the back. I watched Rose’s gaze. “Would you like me to dress like that?”

“Like—? Oh. No, it stands out too much. People call that look ‘the new woman’ but they aren’t being complimentary. I like how you look now, don’t worry.” She squeezed my hand.

“Okay, I’ll go back to worrying about the League.”

“What’s to worry about the League?”

At last maybe she was interested. Or maybe she was being polite. “The League wants to organize women so we can join the AFL, but the AFL doesn’t do anything good by women that I can see. The anarchists say that’s because even the workers are stuck in the idea of private property.”

Rose shook her head, raising her eyebrows. “How’d the anarchists get into this?”

“I think what they mean is—,” I was trying to get it right while I traced a circle on the greasy table, “when men believe women belong to them they become a kind of capitalist. If the men are half capitalists and half workers, no wonder they never get anywhere.” I noticed Rose’s bowl was almost empty while mine was still full. I took a couple of spoonfuls. “That’s why anarchists say they’re for free love. Free love would be like a general strike against the property laws of marriage.”

“A strike against marriage. I don’t think that’s going to go over well with the girls in my shop. Besides, it might sound good, Chava, but this free love they talk about, they don’t mean it for us. I know what goes on in the shops. Every once in awhile some boss starts in on us about ‘free love’—how if we want to sign union cards, we can’t just go halfway.”

“Bosses twist everything for their own selfish ends.”

“And you think the anarchists are so pure?”

“Well, Emma Goldman—”

“All right, maybe Emma Goldman. But she’s a woman. I agree with you, you know. We’re not fighting.” A waiter came by to take our plates and Rose waved him away. He shrugged off towards the kitchen. “If girls got the same wages as men then the men would have to take us seriously, that I get. But if a woman didn’t get married, she’d have to take care of her children alone, or depend on whether a man liked her enough to help out, since he might not even be the father. That would be awful for women.”

“You—”

“What, Chava?” Rose wiped at her upper lip, careful to remove the little borscht mustache.

“You surprise me, that’s all. I didn’t think you—”

“You don’t think I listen? You think you’re the only one here trying to figure out what’s what? I just like going to the theater better than to your friends’ speeches. So much of what they have to say is all the same. Marriage, free love—both don’t sound so good to me.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” I rested my cheek on my fist, looking into her eyes. For all her talk about eating enough, I saw circles under her eyes too. They made the blue more delicate, echoing.

“For someone so serious you certainly have a talent for making every conversation into a joke.”

“I’m not joking, Rose. How many do you think there are, like us? There can’t be more than a handful. At the League, maybe a few, I think.”

“I’m sure, at your League.”

“So what other women besides—like us—are going to have the time and dedication to organize women? So many girls our age are married or giving all their attention to trying to be. Can you imagine if every girl decided not to get married or have relations with men? That would be a real general strike!”

“Shh,” Rose warned, as a man stared at us from another table. She lowered her voice. “Who would ever call for such a thing? I heard they arrested Emma Goldman just for talking about preventing unwanted pregnancy. And you could never get enough women to agree.”

“I don’t know—”

Rose made a quick, angry gesture with her hand because I forgot to whisper. I lowered my voice and started over. “I don’t know. If you want to change things, really change them, which end do you start with? Striking for better conditions? Making settlement houses? What makes a difference?”

It annoyed me to see Rose smiling at me, even though I knew she was loving, loving us, sitting in a café like everyone else, trying to solve the world’s problems when we were only greenhorn workers. Everything was going so fast, and I could never tell whether it was spinning in a circle that trapped us, or was moving us towards the future.

G
UTKE FOUND HER JOURNAL
at the bottom of her midwife’s bag and opened it for the first time that year:

Even with my talent for visions, I never would have guessed half of what happened. I suppose that’s part of why I started writing this diary in 1900, to see if an ordinary life had a pattern. Now I’m not sure that my life has been either ordinary or special, unfolding according to a particular plan. Still, when I thumb through the old pages, I recognize myself: Gutke Gurvich, born in the shtetl of Orgeyev, the fatherless bathhouse attendant, the midwife who married a woman masquerading as a banker and came to America. I am the pattern of my own experience. Yet that’s really nothing more than saying I am the sum of my memories.

Memories. For every one I recorded, fifteen slipped away. On the steamship I spent days on deck peering into the waves, trying to make out the creatures that moved under the surface, visible for moments as I bent over the railing. I found why I disliked traveling, why I hung back from so many of Dovida’s invitations to join her in Vienna or Milan. In transit we enter one of God’s antechambers, a fluidity in time where one’s soul is either entirely in the present moment, unfastened from the past, or absorbed only in the goal, the destination. Travelers share no history, no place with each other—or all history, every place. Living out of steamer trunks made me dizzy, as if I had entered the realm of pure vision on which human hands had painted a flimsy veneer—here is your stateroom, madam, and here is your dining table—while the stench of steerage crept in through the portholes.

It made me wonder about heaven, traveling with Dovida. By her, everything had to be first class. She was a successful banker and I was her wife, uncomfortable in even the plainest Paris fashions she bought me for the trip. We even had a ketuba, the Jewish marriage certificate, inscribed by a friend of hers in Hamburg, that I carried in a small wicker box with my treasures: my mother’s candlesticks, the field stone and talis vest Milcah gave me, Pesah’s oil menorah and the multicolored shawl she sewed. Dovida gave me jewelry, pearls and bright gems. Blue ones I liked particularly but she was always chiding me for throwing them in the trunk with the rest of my clothes. I wore the gold ring. If the rest was stolen, my sympathy would have been with the thief. Money was good for buying safety for women like us. If Dovida had tried to go as a man in steerage, she never would have lived to see the shore. But first class was a harder masquerade than being Dovida’s wife. After all, there was nothing untrue about our intimacy. Did every woman who got money through marriage feel this same unease?

To me, the steamship reflected the world’s tiered conception of heaven and hell, whether Christian or Jewish. In the hold below, the mass of sinners, whose crime was poverty and desperation, prayed for relief from the crowding, the agony of their passage. In the middle decks, uncomfortable but hardly in pain, were those who lived in purgatory, counting every kopeck, balancing the small pleasures of adequate ventilation and relatively clean facilities against their fear of sliding into the abyss and their constant envy of those above them, whose parties they could actually hear. On top, the blessed reaped the rewards of industry and luck, of willingness to take advantage of others and circumstance, of turning opportunity into profit. Suppose in heaven everything was reversed? Those who sailed with such comfort would be thrown into the fiery pit, while those who had endured the hold were crowned as martyrs, heroes of the human condition. Did God really intend eternal reversal to stand as justice? I’d think God would have as many reservations as I did about the ultimate foolishness of glorifying any one at the expense of any other.

I didn’t like the journey but it did give me days to think, one luxury I was grateful for. Dovida had sailed from Frankfurt to New York once before, and many times in the Mediterranean and Black Sea. The ocean was simply another language she had to master, a dialect of winds and swells, and as with any other language, she was quickly comfortable.

Now I want to tell something else about Dovida. If being born a Polish Jew and a woman placed her in a narrow chamber, she found the door into the world by doing all the things that rulers traditionally allowed Jews to do: translate and handle money. She was the perfect product of our Diaspora, appearing to be at home everywhere, speaking any language, changing even her sex to suit the necessity of her ambition. But embracing the whole Diaspora in her own person, moving from place to place, always a guest, never rooted, had its costs. She, who professed not to believe in scripture, who admitted to being a Jew only because, as she said, it was written on her body—her olive skin and gorgeous nose—became as fastidious as the Orthodox. When I returned from a birth, she demanded I bathe before we touched, afraid of birth secretions and blood. I often thought her antipathy to dirt came from a fear that if she ever touched the ground she would weep for years over her lost tribe.

“Tribe?” she looked at me in disbelief. “Gutke, this is the twentieth century. We are not going to herd goats in the deserts of Judea. I, for one, take great pleasure in considering myself a citizen of the world. Commerce is a world without borders. Nationalism is an old superstition that we are now in the position to overcome.”

“And so, Mr. Citizen of the New World, where is your home?”

She looked at me thoughtfully. “You are my home. Didn’t you know?”

It was a big responsibility being someone else’s home. Dovida was my comfort and delight, but Kishinev had been my home, the place where my life was shaped. And New York became home, the place I’d chosen to come. The streets, the people, the Henry Street Settlement House, our building on Suffolk Street, all these were parts of my home. But I also understood what Dovida meant when she talked about the twentieth century. In a blink, everything has changed. When I was a child in Kishinev, keeping a diary would have marked me as a witch if anyone had found out. Here, now, not an eyebrow would be raised. Every day, twenty diarists pass through Henry Street, along with all of Miss Wald’s reformer friends. Nurses, poets, organizers—all women. And so many like Dovida and me.

When, from time to time, I run into someone from Kishinev whose birth I attended, I feel as if my home has traveled with me, as if I am really part of a tribe. Today Chava Meyer, Miriam’s second daughter, showed up at Henry Street, almost grown. I recognized her odor before I recalled her name, that smoky, slightly metallic scent. Not unpleasant but a little unsettling. She unsettles me, this young woman. Possibly because I know that we share the same feeling for women. I don’t know how I know it, but I know. Just as I know that any minute now she’ll be back to question me.

W
E RETURNED TO
H
ENRY
S
TREET
a few minutes early. The girls’ literary club leader told us that they were discussing Tolstoy’s story, “Kreutzer Sonata,” that night. I never would have expected them to pick something about sex. Both Rose and I had read it in Russian a couple of years ago. The man at the bookcart didn’t want to sell it to us and I had to give him a big spiel about the American Bill of Rights. First he said the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to Russian literature, but finally he gave in—since I was such a scholar and patriot, I could have it, but no bargaining and don’t blame him. Another nudnik. Rose and I were then very excited to read the story and disappointed when it was just men talking on a train, Tolstoy expounding about abstinence and the sanctity of mothers, how sexual relations debase human beings and drive them insane. Which was why this splendid Russian killed his wife: sex made him crazy and jealousy drove him to murder. What an excuse!

I made my apologies to the club leader, saying I was going to take a look at their library, I didn’t feel very talkative tonight.

“You’re looking for Gutke, right?” Rose whispered.

I nodded. “You don’t mind being left alone?”

“If you don’t mind leaving me with all these new girls,” she said, flirting with her eyes, scanning the room, which was filling up with girls about our age.

“Jealousy is a bourgeois male emotion.”

“Go, go on. At least this time you have a good reason.”

I picked through the books in the library. I wasn’t looking at their titles but at their bindings, flipping open some of the more beautiful ones to see how they were put together. I was holding up the pages of a volume of Emma Lazarus’s poems with an engraved frontispiece when I heard someone clear their throat behind me.

What came over me? A sudden panic, the way I had felt when we were trapped by fire in the alley in Kishinev, cold and hot at the same time. Gutke looked so familiar standing there, as tall as me, but wider, stronger. I stumbled towards her, heaving, not crying, exactly, but gulping and discharging air as if I hadn’t drawn a breath in ten years. She embraced me, one hand around my ribs, the other over my shoulder, patting my back.

“Please forgive me,” I said, finally pulling away.

“What’s to forgive?” Gutke motioned to the green wingback chairs separated by a little table. “Why this room isn’t full of people studying now I don’t know.”