Beyond the Pale: A Novel (41 page)

“Everyone should want everything,” Rose surprised me by saying. “Even if we know we’ll only get a little bit, we wouldn’t get that much if we didn’t start out wanting.”

“Just so,” Dovida agreed. “I know I’ve been luckier than most and now I try to give back some of what I’ve gotten. You know, Chava, if you don’t mind, I have a friend who owns a bindery that’s been doing very well. I could ask him to consider you for their next opening.”

“I—”

“Let Dovida ask for you, Chavele,” Gutke said. “It couldn’t hurt.”

“You’re going to just pester me until I agree, aren’t you?”

“Of course,” Rose took my hand, “of course we will, love.” It was my turn to let my mouth fall open.

Gutke and Dovida got the pleased expressions of parents at a wedding, looking at us.

Stone Soup

A
T THE
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EW
W
ORLD
B
INDERY
they already had enough gluers. The foreman was surprised when I said I didn’t sew, and he motioned across the room. “Ever worked on a folding machine?”

“It wasn’t my regular job but I know how.” Really, I had only stood beside the machine and watched in the early mornings, before the books piled up for glue. Sometimes, not always, they let girls work on the folders. I thought every shop had a list of machines girls might be allowed to operate: sewing, typewriting, pressing, folding—nothing with a blade, like the devices used by cutters and book trimmers. Maybe they were afraid to let us near anything sharp? The thought amused me but the foreman was confused by my smiling, so I stopped.

He brought me over to the senior folder, Al. He looked Irish, and disappointed, when he saw me. Because I was a girl, a Jew or so plain? Al grunted “all right” to the foreman and started to explain what he wanted. By the loading dock were stacks of paper delivered from the printer, full sheets with sixteen separate pages arranged on one. If you put the sheet into the folder the wrong way, the book came out with its pages backwards, Al explained. I understood this already. I used to make folding models on my lunch hours, figuring out how the pages of a book ended up in the right place.

It was a very delicate operation, folding: a dance of straps and rollers, the turn of a cam shaft. It looked like a sculpture to me, the whole idea of industrial production neatly played out on an asymmetrical metal bar. I watched Al, who moved his arms as if he were another part of the machine, steady, pumping. He went by the rhythm of the machine, if not its grace.

“Grace,” Rose laughed at me later that day, “an actress is graceful, the drape of a skirt, graceful maybe, but a folding machine? You spent too many hours inhaling glue and tobacco fumes. Don’t make a face. What else have you done in America? Your brain doesn’t work so good anymore.”

“That must be why I still bother to talk to you,” I glanced behind as we walked down Pitt Street. No one was paying us any notice. I took her arm. Lots of girls walked arm in arm, holding hands, swinging them. Rose said that sometimes she’d see girls in her shop rub their cheeks against each other, sigh and give each other moony, tender looks—and then within a month one of them would be engaged to marry.

“You wouldn’t—,” I said.

“I’ve already lived with enough men, thank you very much. Besides, you smell better than any man I’ve ever met.”

“Even Dovid?”

She slapped me on the behind.

“C’mon,” I said, “if you run with me to the corner I’ll buy you an eggcream.”

She held her skirt up, running after me, laughing.

But we still lived with men. When Uncle Isadore played with his watch chain at night, I thought of Dovida, sitting in her big plush chair, her feet up. Was being a man—or a woman—just acting, a series of gestures we learned?

“Daydreaming again, huh, Chava?” Aaron hit the back of my chair with his book. “Now that you make $8 a week you just like to sit back and take it easy.”

“I haven’t noticed that you do anything around here besides read your books.”

“I’ll have you know that today, this very day, I took the entrance exam to join the police force. Imagine getting $30 a week! And as soon as I pass the naturalization exams, even more.”

“I remember that Judas betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver and then had to hang himself.”

“You have to resort to Christian stories to insult me?”

“Children!” Isadore broke in. We turned to glare at him. “All right, all right, I know you’re not children anymore—so stop behaving like children.” He looked at Aaron, tapping his long nails on the table. “So how was this exam you took?”

Aaron shrugged. “An exam. All in English but I understood everything.”

“Do they ask whether it’s better to hit a striker in the ribs or in the head?”

“A lot you know. They don’t have anything about strikers in the exam.”

“Chava, leave Aaron alone. If he’s made up his mind, his mind is made up. We have to respect his choices.”

“Thanks, Pa.”

“But I didn’t say I approved.” He sighed, looked at Aunt Bina, who was sewing by the air shaft. “We going to have dinner tonight, missus?”

“Where’s Rose?” Bina replied. She relied on Rose, and me, more and more to take care of household things. I didn’t mind exactly, except that it was because she was always sewing for Harry, and Aaron and Uncle Isadore hardly did anything to help around the apartment.

“How should I know? I can barely keep track of myself, let alone these young people who board with us now,” Isadore said.

“Chava?”

“She should be home from work any minute, Aunt Bina. When I stopped by Hester Street earlier they said they were only working an hour overtime tonight. Do you want me to go back and see?”

“No, I want you to put on water for potatoes and chop some cabbage.”

“Potatoes and cabbage again, Ma?”

“You, Aaron, are not making $30 a week yet, I notice.”

He made a show of standing, getting a new book, plopping himself down with his head in his palms, nodding over the page. He still looked like any young Talmud scholar, only clean shaven.

Isadore picked up the paper and went back to fiddling with his watch chain. I was halfway through the cabbage—it looked good on the outside, but had a little pocket of green worms, not too much to throw away—when I heard slow steps on the stairs. I put down the knife and went out to the hall, watching Rose’s hatpins reflect the light from the gas jet on the third landing.

As she lifted her head I saw she’d been crying. I started down, met her on the middle step, clasped her shoulder.

“Nu?”

“Nothing. Fired again. Laid off.”

“So soon?”

“They waited until the last minute to tell us, as we were putting on our hats. They said to come back for our pay next Friday. But by next Friday the shop will be empty. I’ll never see that money.” She stamped her foot in frustration, then sniffled, wiping her nose on the back of her hand.

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, Chava, sometimes—.” She walked past me to the door. I stood on the landing, looking at shadows for a minute, listening to Rose tell her parents the bad news. Aaron rushed past me.

“Where are you going?”

“Somewhere it isn’t all potatoes and cabbages,” he yelled, already halfway to the next floor.

The cabbage—I returned to the kitchen. Isadore was pacing. Rose had pulled up a chair next to Bina’s. I started chopping again, glad that Leon was on overtime all week, even if he was willing to do it for free in order to keep his job.

“It’s not good,” Isadore was mumbling. He looked at us as if he hadn’t seen us in months. “Mrs. Petrovsky, you’re ruining your eyes and your back. You girls, you’re ruining your youth. I left Odessa in the prime of my life and four years later I feel like an old man. It’s my duty—it would be my pleasure—to see that you, missus, never picked up a needle again.” He grabbed the overcoat that Bina was working on out of her lap and threw it on the floor.

“Isadore—.” Bina started to protest and then reconsidered, folding her hands in her lap, watching him.

“At home I had my own shop, my own house. To be reduced to this—.” He gestured at the stained walls, the pile of cabbage in front of me. Then he slumped into a chair, never taking his eyes off Bina’s face, shaking his head back and forth, as if his thoughts could be dislodged like dirt from his ear.

“At home we had a few wonderful years, of great luck and privilege,” Bina said slowly, picking up Rose’s hand and stroking it. “But the whole street where your shop stood was burned out two years ago.” She took a breath, making a dry smacking sound in her mouth. “Our fates catch up to us. You know, my Great-Aunt Rokhl told me that the Orthodox believe you can change your name when you’re fatally ill and the Angel of Death won’t recognize you.”

“That’s nonsense,” Isadore said, reviving a little.

“Exactly my point. At least here we can hope for change, real change, not just a good spell between pogroms and the Tsar’s edicts. You, thank God, still have your job.” She held up her hand to quiet him. “And Chava is now making $8 a week for the first time. Leon’s still working and Harry pays me now, in addition to giving us board like Leon—”

“Oh Mama, Harry’s a parasite!” Rose exclaimed.

“A parasite. What a way to talk about your brother. You’re upset, I know. Go change, wash your face.”

“Mama—”

“Go.”

Rose looked at me and we traded identical shrugs. As she went into the other room, Isadore spoke. “She’s right about Harry, I think.”

“You too?” Bina said.

“I don’t like the way that boy’s turning out. He only shows up when he wants to take advantage of you.”

“The money he pays me contributes.”

“Contributes!” Isadore said, pacing again. “Maybe it’s just as well Aaron is leaving City College for the police—we won’t have to support him anymore.”

“At least he should start paying you back, once he gets that awful job,” I said, peeling barely edible potatoes.

Bina stood to retrieve the overcoat from the floor, as if it had merely slipped from her lap. “He has his own life to start now.” She inspected her stitches, made a sour face and started up again. “As soon as Aaron gets that job, he’ll move out.” Her hand was flashing with a needle again. “I think he has a girlfriend.”

“A girlfriend?” Isadore turned to stare at her.

“Sit, Isadore, all that pacing makes me nervous. He’s twenty-three already. He would have two children by now at home.”

“Why doesn’t he bring her to meet us? What’s wrong with him?”

“It’s not him, it’s us. I think he must have an American girl he met at school. He doesn’t want to bring her here.”

“A minute ago you were telling me everything was going to turn out fine, and now you’re saying my own son is so ashamed of me he won’t bring his girlfriend here?”

“Isadore, I don’t know what to tell you. It pains me too. Talk to him. Tell him we can arrange a meeting in a café if he likes. We’ll put on our best clothes and try not to look too green. I only hope she’s Jewish.”

“He’s going with a shikse?”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t even know if he’s going with anyone. Ask him yourself.”

“All right, all right. I’ll ask him tomorrow.”

I threw the potatoes in the boiling water. “But Aunt Bina, even if Aaron leaves to start his own home, is it right for him to leave without giving anything back?”

“‘When the father gives to the son, both enjoy good fortune. When the son gives to the father, both curse their luck,’” Isadore said.

“It’s not like you to fall back on proverbs,” I said, catching his eye for a minute.

“Sometimes the proverbs say it best,” Bina said. “A man is a man, he makes his own way.” She cut the thread, made a quick knot and turned to get another coat from the pile.

“What about the women who made his way possible?” I asked. “And what about daughters? They don’t just drift off, even the married ones.” When I started talking to Bina, Isadore took the opportunity to find his pipe.

“It’s different with daughters, you can see that. Every day I thank God for Rose.”

“You should tell her.” I wondered if Rose was listening from the other room.

“If she doesn’t know in her heart, what good would telling do?” Bina glanced to the door, sharing my thought with a half smile. “Chava, you know I try and keep up with you girls, with the world, but my people never talked about how they felt for each other. They would bring on the evil eye if they were happy, and if they were unhappy, well, unhappiness was familiar. At least they had their family, their place in the world. Now everything turns inside out one minute, sideways the next. I often think it’s better for everyone if I stay steady and quiet.”

“Too many women stay quiet, if you ask me.”

“What do you mean by that?” Bina stared at me.

“No disrespect, Aunt Bina, I’m sorry. I just mean there are so many women working. If we all got together, think of what we could do.”

“That’s your League speaking, isn’t it?” Bina rethreaded the needle.

Isadore made a show of packing and lighting his pipe, sucking loudly to get it started. He never liked it when I talked about the League.

“But it’s common sense,” I said.

“You’re right, dear, and hard to accomplish, isn’t it? When we were girls in Kishinev, your mother and I were told that if all the Jews kept Shabbes two weeks in a row, the messiah would come. You’d think when so many more people were religious, they could have agreed, just for once, to all keep Shabbes two weeks in a row—if only to see.”

Rose came out of her room in a clean shirtwaist and a skirt with big buttons down the side. “Jews could never agree about anything for a day, let alone for two weeks in a row,” she said.

Isadore snorted, lighting another match. “You see how much you women understand?”

“What don’t we understand?”

“The reason it didn’t happen was because if they all had done it—just, as you say missus, to see—and the messiah
didn’t
come, they’d have to give up their faith. So there was always someone who took it upon himself to keep that calamity from happening. It was faith in the messiah that was important, not the messiah himself.” He puffed out a cloud of smoke and picked up his newspaper with an air of having completely won the argument. Aunt Bina nodded her head back and forth, as if commenting maybe yes, maybe no. I sighed.