City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (11 page)

He moved his hands slowly up her waist, her belly, to places where she had never felt a man’s hands before, and she let him—glad that he had pushed them ahead of the other, groping men, away from their leering eyes. They rose again, and she could see the ocean turning toward them, and the mobs along the beach: the pleasure boats, graceful as swans, with their huge white decks and romantic names—the
Pegasus
and the
Prometheus
and
Anacreon in Heaven.

They encompassed half the earth in a matter of seconds—then they were down again: the other riders chortling and cursing on their own horses, the women screaming. His hands, his hands slid up almost to her breasts, stopping when she flinched, sliding, stroking down her again, and she let him. They were moving too quickly, too high up for anyone else to see, alone among the millions.

“You’re finer than silk and velvet, I’ll give you only dove’s milk to drink—” The seducer’s voice gone now. Only his own words remaining, eager, and uncertain, and a little desperate.

They made the final turn, past the pier, heading in toward the land, the streets and the slouching summer houses on Brighton Beach. Houses of easy virtue, she remembered—like going to see the elephant. He was lowering his face to the open collar of her mermaid’s bathing costume, nuzzling his lips down her neck.

Like a horse,
Esther thought, ludicrously, his lips wet and soft as a horse’s.

He kissed her ear, stroked his hand along her neck, and she let him. They were going a little faster now, coming into the finish, and she knew that she ought to stop him but she was not sure that she could push him away and hang on. She did not want to fall off, plummeting out on the mechanical track on her bottom. She could get electrocuted, she could get run down like that poor woman she had seen in the nickelodeon at Union Square, running out before the King’s horse at the Derby for women’s rights—

Run down by a horse

She leaned her head back into him at the home stretch, looked at him there. His eyes were closed, to her surprise, his face boyish and sweet. She leaned back, and held onto his arms, let him hold her as they swooped down past the last American flags, over the finish line, to another, mocking jockey in black-face who pinned a blue ribbon on both their chests.

Esther struggled off the horse, her legs weak, bare white ankles flashing in front of him again. Kid struggled to get off himself, the burnt-cork jockey jeering:

“Whatsa matta? Too many legs?”

“Wait for me!”

It was too late. She was already wandering out past the finish line. She stopped to find herself on a stage—row after row of bleachers in front of her, every seat filled with laughing men and women, pointing at
her.

A terrible little man in a clown suit rushed up to her waving some kind of club in his hands, mongoloid face grinning hideously. He swung it at her, and she backed away, holding out her hands. He only kept advancing on her, swinging the cattle prod like a baseball bat.

“Piece of wretch!” she shrieked, barely dodging away in time. “Wild animal!”

He laughed, yelling her words back at her in his ridiculous, high, dwarf’s voice while he jabbed at her legs:

“Piece of wretch! Wild animal!”

She felt a terrible shock run through her body, as if a hand had wrapped itself around her heart. She fell back—and cold air rushed mortifyingly up her backside, blowing up the skirt of her mermaid bathing suit and making her jump in the air before the laughing crowd.

“Filth! Get away!”

Kid came running out on the stage, shooing away the dwarf. The mongoloid clown smirked, and scooted around him—but there was something in his face that made him go on to torture the other riders. Kid wrapped his arms protectively around her, guided her out past the Laughing Gallery and its barker:

“Come on in! Only a penny!
You
be the one laughing this time!”

“Little dove, are you all right?”

“Sure, sure,” she said, smiling to reassure him—enjoying how he looked at her so solicitously, so sweetly now.

It was fun,
Esther told herself, feeling her heart pounding wildly. It was terrifying, she had beat it, she had got past the awful little man, had gone through it all and survived.

It was fun, and I liked it

That night Kid took her to Stauch’s for a steak, and they sat in the balcony and watched the dancers shuffling around the huge ballroom under a giant, electrified American flag. Afterwards he wanted her to go to a moving picture at the Sunken Gardens or a show at Henderson’s but it was late, she should have left for home already. The park was already beginning to take on a spectral look, as the music lowered, and the crowds wandered out. Little clumps of debris swirled around their feet like tumbleweeds: used paper napkins, and wax paper, and half-eaten hot-dog buns.

She could
hear
the lights now, the million bulbs, hissing loud as snakes. Couples hurried past, and in the darkness she could see a man’s straw hat bent furtively over a dress, both faces hidden in the darkness.

He walked her over to the train platform, pleading goodnaturedly, not really expecting her to stay, but wanting her to—wanting her to, she could
tell,
underneath it all.

“Just a little longer, bridie mine.”

“No. It’s late, I got to get back.”

Fiery geysers of light shot up into the night—the closing fireworks, raining down in sizzling streams of red, white and blue. The bands struck up a patriotic air.

Distracted, just for a moment, Kid turned back to look for her—and she was gone. Only at the last moment did he spot her again, waving from the train window, holding her shoes in one hand. She had taken them off for speed and run onto the train barefoot.

“My little dove!” he yelled to her, half smiling, his face falling flatteringly. “My little dove. Next Sunday—over at Dreamland!” he hollered, running along the platform, smiling and frowning, unsure if she could even hear him.

“Next Sunday—by the archangel—”

But she only waved at him, smiling, until the packed train pulled out of the station, its passengers smashed right up against the windows, waving frantically to their own Sunday lovers; and the next train pulled in.

It was hotter than ever by the time she got back to Orchard Street, and the whole block was still up. Kids ran back and forth, screaming along the sidewalk as if it were midday, and old people slumped over their windowsills. Mothers walked back and forth under the streetlight, comforting their babies, they turned blue and convulsed in the heat, too exhausted to sleep.

They
would still be up, she knew. Waiting for her.

She walked up the high stoop, passing under the archway with its Star of David superimposed over the old relief of a grinning satyr’s head. It was the star that had convinced her father this was a place where people lived—a kosher building, somehow, as if there were any such thing. Another one of his idiotic, greenhorn mistakes: no man had ever been less equipped to deal with the traps and snares of the New World, but there was no telling him, he was a great scholar.

Inside, Esse felt like she was like climbing up through a giant, human hive. From every apartment, she could hear the squeak of water pumps, the little buzz of conversations, could smell the reek of sausages and cabbage and potato. The voices, in a dozen different tongues, fell away as she approached. There were footsteps on the loose floorboards—doors cracking open to see who it was, shutting again as she passed.

Outside her apartment, up on the fifth floor, she put her fingers to her lips and nearly touched the
mezuzah
next to the door before she realized what she was doing. At the last moment she jerked her hand back as if it had been burned, smiling to herself in secret defiance before she went in.

“The
Amerikanerin
is home,” he announced—to the air or to her mother—as soon as she stepped through the door.

Her parents were sitting at a small table by the windows of their bedroom, her mother hunched over what looked like a little pile of thorns. Her father holding the
Jewish Daily Forward
up to the open, white cheesecloth curtains like a sacrifice, trying to read by the refracted light from outside.

“Why she should come home at all, I don’ know. For her, the dancing never stops. For her, life is a feast.”

This was his way of addressing her, and had been for many months—always indirectly, or through her mother, except for when he lost his temper completely, and called down all sorts of curses and insults upon her head. Or in her own, private conversations—but that was another matter.

“Don’tch you like it, so lump it,” she called back into their bedroom, not bothering to budge from where she was in the kitchen.

The apartment was three small rooms, running away from two back windows that looked out over a tiny, squalid courtyard, then another tenement, then beyond that the looming, black bar of the Allen Street elevated. The room with the windows was her parents’ bedroom. The room where she stood was the kitchen, piled high with trunks and dressers and chests, and then to her right was the
roomerkehs’
tiny room.

Three little rooms, all in a row, moving in that order away from the outside windows. Both the interior walls in the apartment had windows cut right through them—the only way at all that any natural light got into the kitchen or the
roomerkehs’
room.

One of the
roomerkehs,
a salesman named Kapsch, was sitting at the kitchen table now, a slight, balding man, with a permanently quizzical expression on his face. Esse knew he was a little bit in love with her. He gave a respectful little bow from where he sat when she came in, mumbled something she couldn’t make out.

“That I should live to hear such a thing! From my own daughter—” her father was still going on, standing up now and rattling the newspaper at her, advancing on her from the bedroom.

“Don’ bother, don’ fuss,” her mother said, shuffling in nervously around him and rubbing her hands together. Her fingers were pricked and swollen from making the
tzatzkes
all day—beautiful wire roses and lilies and forsythia. They had points as sharp as razors and the dyes, the gorgeous red and purple and yellow colors, got into the cuts and made them ooze and fester.

She might make twenty-five cents worth, winding them together all day. Before that she had worked parting threads of silks to make tassels and before that, of course, they had been able to almost make a living together, sewing the secret garters. But this was the best her mother could do at home, now that her fingers had stiffened up.

“You got anythink to eat? You want somethink?” she asked anxiously, hobbling in to Esther and taking her hands.

“No, Mama. I’m fine, Mama.”

She looked down into her mother’s face, and was filled with pity and disgust. Her cheeks were sunken and sallow, eyes still darting about apprehensively.

“How are your hands, Mama? How are you feeling today?”

“Oh, my hands,” she said absently, evasively, her eyes moving all around the room. “All right. Pushink along, pushink along.”

Still trying to keep the peace. To please her husband

“How you have done for us,” she muttered, looking up at her father. “How you have done for us all.”

He advanced casually upon her, a white-haired old man, his beard full of crumbs from the midday meal she knew her mother had brought him at his desk. The skin around his eyes and cheekbones still surprisingly pink and young, the eyes dark and vibrant with cheerful hate.

“Must I empty my bitter heart upon you?” he said, almost casually, addressing Esther directly for the first time in weeks. “What right do you have to say anything? Coming in here as full of sins yourself as a watermelon is full of seeds!”

“Go to the devil!” she answered, and smiled despite herself at the
roomerkeh,
to remember such sins. Kapsch looked away in confusion.

The old reb started to cough—a low, phlegmatic, indulgent cough—and sat down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs. There was a noise, and her mother shuffled quickly in between them, waving her bruised hands.

“Ssh! Sshh! Now you got the
downstairsikehs
up with your yellink!”

But it wasn’t the downstairs neighbors: just Abady, who took the four-to-twelve shift in the rented room. He was a swarthy, brutish-looking man with a long, drooping moustache, a Syrian Jew who worked on construction crews. He came out in his undershirt and single pair of pants, barefoot and scratching himself, and went on to the hall bathroom without so much as looking at the four of them.

Kapsch quickly excused himself to take his turn in the warm bed. He had the prime, twelve-to-eight shift, while Cuti, the third
roomerkeh
—a fastidious little Italian plasterer—got the eight-to-four. Esther’s mother bustled around the kitchen, coaxing the old man back into the bedroom, putting together her litter for the night.

“Esse, you sure you ain’t hungry?”

“No, Mama.”

“You sure? I can fix you somet’ing . . .”

“No,
Mama, I got no appetite for this living,” she snapped, suddenly feeling deeply tired and sorry for herself. The Triangle would be open again tomorrow, after the two-week summer layoff, and she would be up at dawn. Back at her machine.

“Gottenyu,
why do you always have to tear up the world like a crazy?”

“Oh, Mama!”

“I don’ know. It just seems like you’d be happier.”

She pushed aside the little kitchen table and the trunks, put together the couple of chairs that served as her bed. She placed a pillow and blankets down on them, turned over the edge of the blankets as carefully as if it had been a real bed.

“You sure there’s nothink more I can do for you?”

“No, Mama. You done enough already.”

Sarcasm was lost on her mother, as was despair. She shuffled over to give her a kiss and a quick, tremulous hug around the waist.