Beyond the Pale: A Novel (48 page)

“Only her,” I said, motioning to Rose.

“She’s done picket duty too,” Rose said, reaching out her hand. Mrs. Guss grinned as she handed me a pickle.

“Glad to help you girls,” she said in Yiddish. “I was a seamstress before I married. Pickles are easier, even with the smell. Come by any time for a nice pickle, all right?” We nodded with our mouths full, the pickles so cold they tasted like garlic icicles.

There were a few seats left at the Thalia. Rose and I had read about Mother Jones. She’d been a hero to coal miners for years, and that night she told us that every strike she’d been in was won by the women. The men in the audience looked a little doubtful, but they clapped for her just the same. I suppose you could think of the sweatshops like mines, of women going into their bleak, dangerous caverns, forced to hard labor that no one recognized, every day.

I was confounded by how many women were in the streets, how many were willing to march right up to the mayor’s office, how many linked their arms when the company gorillas charged the picket lines. Pauline called it a fantastic awakening. She picketed by Triangle Shirtwaist every day, except when they sent her to raise strike funds from the wealthy. The rich were among us so often I began to remember lines from the Dickens novels I’d read in Kishinev. We were the smudgefaced poor, holding out our hats, begging “please, ma’m, for the suffering widows and orphans.” Emma Goldman wrote that wealthy women were just trying to get our sympathy for the vote and that when we got the vote, they’d turn their backs on us. But we needed their help, didn’t we? Some even got arrested on the picket lines—the judges hated that.

I weighed fifty different opinions in my mind. Some days I felt despair about the babel the strike had created, but on other days the idea that girls could have such power exhilarated me. Probably that was what gave so many the strength to go on—the other women. I hated having to spend so much of my days tinkering with machines, while Rose was pounding the pavement in the cold.

Usually she was home from picketing by the time I returned to Essex Street. They didn’t bring scabs in for the night shift, thank God for small favors. But one night, instead of Rose the first thing I saw was Aaron’s uniform, Aaron holding his hat in his hand, his head bowed, looking at the floor. I wanted to beat on him, the way I’d seen police beat on the girls, but I managed to hold my temper.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I must have the wrong address. This is a striker’s home.”

His face was ashen. Aunt Bina was sitting at the table with her hands folded, staring at the side of his head. “Tell Chava, go on, tell her what you told me. If I hear it again, maybe I’ll believe it.”

“Rose is in jail.”

“You arrested your own sister?”

“Not me! My partner. I didn’t even know she was there.”

“How could you not know?”

“I didn’t know where she was working.” He pulled at the bottom button on his jacket.

“You knew she was working somewhere, that she was out on strike with all the other girls. You and Irene were here for Shabbes two weeks ago. How could you not know?”

“I’m supposed to say, ‘Sorry, Sergeant, but I need a desk job until the strike is over’? They need every man out there—”

“I bet they do.”

“Listen Chava, I don’t like it.” He stared up at me for a minute and I could see he had groomed his mustache into handlebars, like the Irish. Then he looked at Bina, pleadingly. “I thought being on the force, I could help keep the other men from using their batons on the girls, talk reason to the strikers.”

Bina shook her head. He turned back to me and I could see why he wouldn’t look at her. His stepmother was crying.

“Reason? You thought you would be the good police, who help us all through times of civic strife?”

“You can’t understand—”

“I understand exactly,” I said, pulling a chair up facing him. And I really did, experiencing a rush of understanding for Aaron I had never felt before. “You think that the law in a democracy is basically good, with a few leftover injustices that can be fought using the law, and being a policeman is honoring democracy, am I right?”

“Basically.” Aaron looked confused and held his hand up as if to say something.

I didn’t want to hear his version. “And that having a good guard helps the prisoner, and you could be that good guard?”

“Yes, I think that—”

There, I had him. “The idea of a good guard destroys real progress, Aaron. The prisoner comes to depend on the guard and forgets to make alliance with the other prisoners—”

“What?” He turned back to Bina. “Ma, what’s she talking about?”

She sighed and wiped her cheeks with her apron. “Darling, I know you want to change the world but you’re not going to change Aaron. Maybe instead we should try and get Rose out of jail?”

I jumped up. How could I have been so wrapped up in fighting Aaron that I would forget Rose? “I’ll go right to the strike office. I’m sure I can get the bail money—”

“I brought money for bail, Chava,” Aaron said softly.

“You?”

He looked like a combination of thug and whipped puppy. “Irene’s—we’ve been saving everything because—”

“Irene’s expecting,” Bina said.

“Since when?”

“Two months,” Aaron cleared his throat again. “I don’t want to go down to the jail—”

“You’re ashamed to see your sister?”

“I have to get home to Irene. I’ve been working double shifts.” He stood and threw an envelope on the table. “This should be enough.”

“Chava shouldn’t go down there alone, Aaron,” Bina said.

“Then wait for Pop to come home, or Harry.”

“We don’t see Harry much these days, except when he scuttles in like a cockroach with piecework for your mother,” I said, looking at the envelope lying on the table, grubby from Aaron’s grip.

“Don’t start about Harry now, Chava,” Bina said.

“I’m sorry. It’s a hard time.”

“It’s hard for all of us, Chava,” Aaron said, extending his hand, as if to shake hands was to make peace.

He may have been my cousin but there he was in uniform. A man in a uniform who arrested his sister. “I can’t. Not while you’re dressed up as police.” My voice was almost apologetic, which I regretted.

“All right then. Mama, I—”

“Don’t whine. Go to your wife.” Aunt Bina stood up, looking around the room for some work she could do next.

“I’ll bring by some food later this week.”

“We’ve accepted the bail money as retribution but we don’t need your charity,” I said.

“This is
my
family, dammit.”

“Don’t swear, Aaron. And I agree with Chava on this. We don’t need charity from you. If you want to be family, be family. Invite us for Shabbes—”

“Don’t arrest your sister—”

“I gotta go.” He shoved his hat on his head, stuck his hands in his pockets and left. We could hear him moving like thunder down the stairs.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Bina, I can’t help it. I can never believe he joined the police.”

“I understand, sweetheart. This strike—”

I picked up the envelope. “I’ll be fine at the precinct, don’t worry. If Uncle Iz comes home, tell him to meet me there.”

“Be careful.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” Rose kissed me on the cheek, a proper, cousinly kiss.

“Actually, you have to thank Aaron. It was his money.”

“You took his money?”

“I consider it part of the union’s bail fund. He’d never donate $40 any other way.” Rose laughed, linking her arm with mine as we left the precinct station. “I’d have been here a little sooner but I was arguing with him.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “We were singing and sharing stories. It wasn’t so bad.”

“You want to go back?”

“Not a chance. I want to go to the deli for a pastrami sandwich.”

“First, we have no money, and second, your Mama was going to send your Papa down to chaperone us. We have to get back before he leaves.”

“You’re no fun.”

“Fun! How can you talk about fun?”

“If I didn’t talk about fun, I think I’d go out of my mind. You know what I heard?” Rose’s breath came out in frosty gasps as she struggled to keep pace with my stride, talk and look in the store windows all at the same time.

“How would I know?”

“One of the judges, Olmstead, told a girl she was ‘on strike against God and Nature’ and sent her to the workhouse on Blackwell’s Island for thirty days.”

I stood still. “Oh God—”

“They’ve sent fifteen or twenty girls to the workhouse already.” Rose caught her breath and looked me in the face. “Thank you for coming to get me.”

“You knew I would, didn’t you? Even if Aaron hadn’t given us the money, I would have found it. I would never let you spend a night in jail if there was anything I could do.”

“That’s why I’m thanking you.”

“Oh.” I blushed and pulled her along the street with me. It was too cold to stand still.

What Rose Didn’t Say

I am always instinct

when they write this drama—

appetite, kindness, sociability.

I grumble to get out of bed early,

walk in a circle

yet I do the picket duty.

I fix my hair, wear

my best clothes on the line.

If a girl is taunted

I link arms with her, try

to keep us clear

of bullies and police.

But if the police raise their batons

I stand firm.

It’s not what you’d call courage.

I’m too soft for courage.

Like so many of the girls

I rise to embrace

what’s mine—

an ordinary, loving life.

We learned in night school

the Constitution of the United States

says: pursuit of happiness.

Happiness is my courage.

It fills me unexpectedly

in tenements where

life is lice and broken promises.

Pleasure is my answer.

What difference, then,

a night in jail?

I talk to prostitutes, other strikers

about what clothes they like, which colors,

what they hope

in private.

I could want to save the world

but the world is going to listen to me?

Maybe it’s selfish, this thing radicals deride

as a yente’s tendency

to only work “for me and mine”—

but I do my part.

It’s a bit part,

a member of the crowd scene,

a walk on, and that’s fine.

Where would all the heroes be

without me?

T
HE TEMPERATURE WAS
front-page news along with the strike, the coldest winter anyone could remember. I would stand on the corner of Delancey with a group of women, selling the
Call
, shifting from foot to foot, afraid if I stopped moving my shoes would freeze to the sidewalk. The newspaper donated two editions for the strikers’ relief fund. All over the East Side women were out with white banners across their chests, supporting the strikers.

This was the least I could do while Rose was picketing. I sold papers before going to the bindery, and as soon as my shift was over I started again with a fresh bundle. Gutke saw me early the morning of the last day of December and bought three copies. She rubbed my cheeks until a little warmth came up in them, pulled my coat collar tight around my throat. At moments like this, I thought Gutke was my personal guardian. She always stayed exactly long enough to cheer me without interfering. Maybe Mama sent her. Who knows? I liked to think Mama still remembered me in the corridors of the dead.

I had only seven papers left to sell, though I had already turned to ice. I’d promised Rose I would take her to the Anarchists’ New Year’s Eve Ball—I was a stiff enough partner even without frostbite. How long could the strike last? What the judge said, “On strike against God and Nature,” came back to me. Nature fought as bitterly as any capitalist. We were lucky to have heat and food; so many were freezing to death now. They said the poor only had two bad times a year: summer and winter.