Beyond the Pale: A Novel (39 page)

“They must have reserved it for us.”

She laughed from her belly, the kind of easy laughter I hadn’t heard in a long time. “Once in awhile,” she said, “something that’s meant to be, is. You didn’t know I was going to be back here tonight, did you?”

“I just hoped—”

“Hope is good,” she nodded. Her long, gray wool skirt, black laced boots and plain white shirtwaist gave her an air of dignity. Most women her age on the East Side still wore a wig or a kerchief but Gutke had her own hair in a stylish pompadour. She looked healthy, vigorous and sharp, and she smelled like black bread and hot samovars. I found my hands enclosed by her soft palms. Looking down I wondered if that was how she held a baby’s head, guiding it through.

“So,” she said, “tell me everything.”

“Didn’t I tell you everything already?”

“Only that you were learning English at night and are a factory worker in a—a bindery, right?”

“Yes.”

“What do you hear from home?”

“Not too much. There was another pogrom in Kishinev, not as bad as the first.”

“I heard.” Her shoulders went to her ears and back. “A bad century.”

“It’s just begun.”

“Indeed, we can always hope for better. That’s why we all come to America, isn’t it?”

“My sister Sarah doesn’t want to come. She’s decided to go to gymnasium in Warsaw and become an artist.”

“You seem disappointed.”

“I am. I wanted her to join me here.”

“For her, or for you?”

“For both of us. For me. I suppose I was thinking it would be like having a little bit of Mama back again.” I had to swallow to continue. “And it seemed important to get her out of Russia, to keep her safe.” I stopped, trying to figure out which need belonged to whom.

Gutke was quiet, looking at me. “God willing, Sarah will be safe in

Warsaw. And your sister Esther—she’s a mother now, am I right?”

“Exactly right. Two girls and a boy so far. She married Nathan and they run a little tavern. She writes twice a year, at Pesach and Rosh Hashanah.”

“What does she say about your brothers?”

“Abe married in Palestine. He has two girls and stopped living on a farm. I don’t know what he does there but he seems to be settled. Daniel, we don’t know if he’s dead or alive.”

“Not dead, I think.”

“How do you know?”

“Just a feeling, a smell really. Death has a very distinct smell. “

I shuddered.

“I’m sorry. It’s from being around all these nurses here.” Gutke gestured to the walls, as if the settlement workers were hiding behind the roses in the wallpaper. “So let’s talk about you. You’re living still with the Petrovskys? Not engaged to be married yet?”

I squared my shoulders. That’s what every yente always asked. “I’m not interested in getting married.”

“What then?” At least she didn’t press.

“I want to keep working at the bindery and do organizing.”

“Organizing? Very good, very good. What kind of organizing?”

“How many kinds are there?”

She smiled. “All kinds. Here, for instance, they organize for children’s health and education. Many women your age are organizing for women’s suffrage. But you—”

“Yes?”

“You have other ideas, am I right? A dream you can’t quite put a picture to, about union work, how women organized into unions will change the world?”

I felt breathless, though she was the one talking. “It’s not just for better conditions, it’s to own the means of production.”

“I don’t mean to be unkind,” she said chuckling. “Here in America, and in Russia too, these words are on everyone’s lips. But I’ve never heard of a factory yet where the workers unthroned the owners, took it over and made a success.”

“It’s possible—.” I gripped the armrests of the green chair to keep myself calm.

“Yes, possible. Dovid and I argue about what’s possible all the time. Usually I take the side you want to take so don’t mistake me. It would be a miracle to live to see a real revolution, a welcome miracle.”

“It won’t be a miracle. It will be the result of educating the workers and changing the world ourselves.” I felt a twinge of embarrassment for sounding so much like one of those street corner bombasts.

“Chava, I may look to you like an old woman who doesn’t know what’s happening in the world—”

“I never said—”

“Let me finish.” She shook her head. “You must have read in the papers how in the western railroad strikes the government called in troops and shot the workers, and in the end the strike was lost. The world is too complex now for simple solutions.” She stared off, rubbing two fingers against the side of her cheek.

“The unions are all we have.”

“You mean the ideal union in your mind, not the AFL I read about in the dailies.”

She was right about the union in my mind. “It’s true that Sam Gompers doesn’t want to antagonize manufacturers. He just wants a better life for working men and doesn’t seem to care about women.”

“So you are unionist and a feminist too.”

“I’m not sure I know what a feminist is.”

“You believe in suffrage?”

“Of course.”

She raised her eyebrows, smiling. “You see how you say it, as if your certainties were the truth and anyone who made the slightest bit of effort to understand would agree with you.”

“But it is true, I mean—”

“You’re eighteen now?”

“Don’t patronize me because I’m young.”

“Not at all, Chava, not at all. But you will admit there’s a difference between the young and the old?”

“Yes.”

“This is our biggest difference: I don’t believe anything I used to believe anymore, and not because I don’t want to. I mourn the loss of the certainty you carry. And yet I have a sense, maybe now more of a wish than a belief, that all of us, pushing, needing things to be better, will actually make the world better in spite of ourselves.”

We both sighed, catching the wind of our thoughts. Something she just said—our biggest difference. I pushed my tongue against my teeth.

“What is it, Chava?”

“Dovid—”

She peered at me intently. “What about Dovid?”

Suddenly I was scared. What if I was wrong? What if I made up the whole thing? I was just a child then and so much was happening.

Gutke interrupted my thoughts. “Let me ask you something personal, if I may?” She fingered a button on her sleeve and kept looking at me.

“Anything.” I was relieved.

“Your cousin Rose. In the tenement, you must have to share a bed?”

“We’re lucky it’s just two of us in the bed.”

“And are you glad it’s the two of you in the bed? I’m not being too frank, am I?”

“No. No, you’re not being too frank.” I wasn’t wrong after all. It seemed so hard to put the words into the air. “I—am very glad to be with Rose. We share—everything.” I looked down at a threadbare spot in the carpet underneath Gutke’s chair.

Gutke cleared her throat. “Everything? Touch?”

I raised my eyes to the level of her lap, which made me even more uncomfortable, so I looked past her shoulder. “Touch,” I whispered.

“But not the literature club.”

“I was looking for you,” I protested, finally looking Gutke in the eye.

“I’m only teasing. So, your question about Dovid was,” she paused and looked past my right ear—could it have been as hard for her as for me?—”is Dovid really a man?”

“Yes. On the train I was sure you said Dovida.”

“Did I? Dovida.” She made a soft clicking noise in the back of her throat. “Moving back and forth, between lives, I make mistakes sometimes. Hardly ever, since we came to New York. People, women, sometimes guess. Lillian Wald, she knew from the minute she saw Dovid and me together.”

“She did?” I had pictured Lillian Wald as someone too busy to notice the social details of people’s lives.

“Nurses get a lot of experience you wouldn’t begin to imagine.”

“Oh.” Then I had another thought. “Is Miss Wald—?”

“That’s not for me to say. Besides, don’t you think you’ve learned enough for one night?”

I blushed. But what did I learn, exactly? In the hallway there was a sudden rush of voices, girls talking in clusters, walking by.

“Here’s your cousin now,” Gutke said, standing, extending her hand. “Rose Petrovsky, yes?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know your last name, Miss—?”

“Mrs. Greenbaum, I go by here.” She turned and winked at me. “But you may call me Gutke.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“The same. You and Chava must come to dinner with Dovid and me. We have so much in common. Next Saturday night?” Gutke found a scrap of paper on a side table and wrote out the address as Rose and I exchanged glances. “Unless you want to come to the literature class instead.”

“We spent half the time arguing about whether Tolstoy was an anti- Semite,” Rose said, both scornful and perplexed. “We can come back for the literature club another time. Next Saturday will be delightful.”

“What’s this?” Rose asked, fishing a crumpled wad of yellow paper she saw poking out from under our bureau. It was Wednesday evening, and we had a rare moment alone with all the men out and Aunt Bina called downstairs for an emergency consultation about a neighbor’s sick daughter.

“Only something I wrote. Leave it,” I said.

She was already smoothing it out on the bureau.

“Please just leave it.”

“When did you become a writer?” she asked, sitting down on the bed.

“I’m not a writer. I’m a bookbinder, at least I was until yesterday. Sometimes words go through my head. Doesn’t that happen to you?”

“Maybe,” she said, not really listening. She started to read aloud. “‘I do not come from a beautiful people.’ What’s this about? You don’t think I’m beautiful?”

“You know I think you’re the most beautiful woman in the world. Just give it to me!” I felt like a bug some child had trapped in a jar.

“No. What made you write this?”

She wasn’t going to let up, I could tell, so I gave in. “After I was laid off yesterday, one of the English workmen they kept on said he was glad they laid off most of the Jewish women, because the Jews are so ugly.”

“He said that to you?”

“Not directly. To another man but so I could overhear him.”

“I thought Harriman’s was a Jewish place.”

“They had plenty of goyim working there, the skilled men.”

“So you decided to agree with him?” Rose put on her coldest face and rearranged her skirt.

“You’re tormenting me, you know. I don’t agree with him. I was thinking about your literature club, and I was trying to imagine what it is the Jew-haters see, that’s all. It was just for myself.”

“I want to hear what you wrote. Read it to me—no, I don’t trust you—you’ll tear it up. I’ll read it myself.” She smoothed the paper again and cleared her throat. I turned and stared at the wall. “‘I do not come from a beautiful people. The women of my race have long faces, or squat square ones with thick eyebrows, high foreheads, receding hairlines, chin and lip whiskers even among the young. Many have long, humped and hooked noses. We tend to be extremely fat or alarmingly thin, covered with freckles and moles, yellow-complexioned and wide-hipped.’” She stopped and gave me a look. “You really think this?”

“Rose, I told you, I was just trying something out.”

“All right, let’s see where you went with it. ‘We are likely to sweat and hunch. Not known for grace, few of us are dancers or athletes. We vary from blond to very dark, we have in fact intermarried with every other race in the world and been violated for generations in the places of our exile and Diaspora. Still, we are thought to be marked, and visible to each other by the very character of our ugliness.’”

I started pacing with my hands clasped behind my back.

“Stop that,” Rose said. I stood in front of her and let my arms hang down.

She gave me a sharp glance and continued.

“‘We are nervous. Often enough our generosity rouses suspicion: what guilt, what bribe lies coiled within our gifts? But when we withdraw, and are anxious to have enough for ourselves, we are called misers, usurers, petty. Typical. We are typically ourselves, laughing too loud where no one else hears a joke, abstaining in the midst of everyone else’s pleasure, escaping whenever we can whatever fate you think is our justice. So we write theories, make music on street corners and study mathematics. We explain ourselves only to each other. If you overhear us, you never understand.’”

It was just a page, but her reading seemed to take a century. Rose looked at me as though she didn’t recognize me. I stared at a hole in my left shoe and mashed a small insect into the floor.

She laid the paper on the table and drummed with her fingers. “It’s strange to think of you thinking like this. You know what I mean? But it’s also wonderful.”

As I exhaled, I realized I’d been holding my breath.

She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “You should be writing books, not binding them.”

“I’m not binding them, in case you forgot.”

She pretended not to hear me. “Maybe you could send your writing to the
Forward
or the
Call
. They publish literary pieces.”

“It’s not much of a piece, Rose. It was just an experiment.” I reached for the paper. She had already folded it into neat quarters and ignored me.

“Maybe you’re not ready. Or maybe you’re afraid?”

“I’m not afraid. But that piece of paper doesn’t make me any more of a writer than being a good dancer makes you a ballerina. Once in awhile I try to talk things out with myself on paper, like our night school teacher recommended. It’s not meant for anyone else.”

“You won’t even share it with me?”

“I—you found it even when I thought there was nothing to share. You are always finding me, what can I do?” I lifted my arms and threw them back down to my sides, in a gesture of helplessness.

She laughed and reached to pull my hair back from my forehead. “I love finding you,” Rose said, and brushed her cheek against my cheek, moving towards my lips. Appetite surged in me but just as we were about to kiss, we heard her mother’s breath, heavy, rasping slightly from the stairs, and the sound of her key.