City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (12 page)

“Sweet dreams, Esse.”

“Sweet dreams, Mama.”

She hurried back to the bedroom. Esther waited until Abady had dressed and left, then she got out one of the little towels her mother had laid out for her. They were nearly threadbare, but in her few spare moments around the
tzatzkes,
she had painstakingly embroidered them with bright sunsets and rainbows, and sayings in Yiddish like “A life into your eyes!” and “Peace upon you!”

Esther pumped herself a sink full of water and unpinned her hair. She lowered the top of her bathing costume, then the white slip under it, the green and gold scales painted on it shimmering away beneath the water, where she would wash it along with her hair. Before she did, she paused for a long moment again, before the tub, thinking about the day just past.

Outside, the elevated sped by, rattling the dishes and shaking everything else in the apartment. She gathered up her long dark hair and dipped it down into the water. It was lukewarm, almost cool, a relief on a night like this. She lowered her hair all the way into the water, and began to wash.

The
roomerkehs’
room was more a cave than a real room, with a long curtain instead of a door, little blue curtains that Esther’s mother had sewn and hung over the interior window, and a single bed that took up nearly the whole space inside. Her mother didn’t let Esse go in to clean, but she had glimpsed a small shaving mirror nailed to the wall inside, a single shelf—with three small towels, three collars, and three straight razors laid out along the shelf. The very thought of it—those bare possessions, laid out so simply— always filled her with despair.

But now, though she could not see, Kapsch peeked out through the little blue window curtains, watching intently as she washed herself. She stood solemnly before the wooden sink, her white skin radiant in the darkened room. She swung her long hair down into the water, emerged again with her eyes closed.

He took in every part of her: Her bare calves, and ankles. The long, gracious sweep of her neck as she bent over; her round, white, dimpled shoulders; the gentle curve of her body under the slip. He watched ecstatically from the window as she dipped her hair down again, ducking back into the lovely and enveloping darkness, dipping it down again, white and black, white and black in the dim light.

This life is too much for me

Esther lay in the dark on her crude litter, all her exhilaration from the day and the night—all her satisfaction over her own daring—seeping away from her now. She ran a hand searchingly over her nightgown: her breasts, her legs, her stomach, her sex—every place he had touched her today. What did it mean? What was any of it for?

She never even saw herself—outside of her nightgown, at least. A glimpse of thigh, of pale white flesh, glowing in the mirrorless darkness of the hail toilet. She was only a head that walked around, filled with worry, trying not to think about how tired she was all the time.

This life is too much for me. There is no place in it for me

You know what your place is

Her father’s voice. Ever since he had stopped talking to her—speaking to her only when she had goaded him beyond endurance, like tonight—she had made up her own conversations with him.

She had thought of these make-believe conversations originally as a test, a way to win him over with the logic of her arguments, and at first the made-up father in her mind had been everything she wanted him to be: wise and rational, merciful and abiding.

But somehow, as time had gone by, the father in her mind had become just as angry and obstinate, just as cynical and caustic as the one snoring now in the next room:

The first thing you must learn is what you are.

I’m no donkey for you to ride, that’s for sure!

But what are you? A woman without a family is not a woman. A woman alone is nothing, she will never enter into the Kingdom of God—

And how should I have a family—working all the time, with you on my back?

If only you knew how deep is your ignorance, then you would be truly ashamed.

I only know what you let me learn!

—reduced once more, even in her own mind, to a ranting child. Lying on her pallet of chairs, she felt herself miserably small and insignificant. Wrapped up in her sheets, in this tiny apartment, like her mother before her.

How he had betrayed her:

“She shall be brought before the king in raiment of needlework . . .”

She had been thirteen—late for work outside the house, though she had not become a woman yet. At the Triangle Shirtwaist Company off Washington Square, where she worked now, there was a corner on the tenth floor they called the kindergarten. Girls of eight and nine worked thirteen hours a day—fifteen, at the height of the season—pulling loose threads off the finished waists. When the factory inspectors came around Mr. Bernstein told them, “Quick, girls! Into the boxes!”—and they made a game out of it, diving into the big cardboard boxes, giggling and pulling the shirtwaists over their heads.

Of course, she had already been working on the secret garters for years, at home with her mother. Her father had no idea what they were doing; he could not have imagined anything so immoral as a garter belt even in America or he would never have let them under his roof, and so they conspired to conceal the work they did to earn his daily bread.

It was good work, as those things went. They could make five hundred in a day, depending on the season and how long her mother could hold up. She sewed on the lace, and Esther added the tiny hooks and eyes around the fringe, and wondered how anyone could wear such a flimsy, frilly thing.

Once she tried one on, when her mother went out to buy dinner and her father was still at the synagogue. She pulled it hurriedly up under her dress—but no matter how she tugged and twisted it hung limply on her girl’s waist, and fell down around her ankles, and she quickly stepped out of it and flung it back on the table, feeling vaguely humiliated.

She almost never left the apartment in those days. She only got out to use the library, or maybe, during the slow seasons, to go to the public school—a big, drafty classroom with fifty other kids, reciting the impossible admonitions on the blackboard by rote:

I must keep my skin clean

Wear clean clothes,

Breathe pure air,

And live in the sunlight—

At home, her mother brought her tea, and bread with maybe a little quince jam, smiling at her over her needle and thread as they worked through the endless piles of silly underwear. And when she was tired, and her hands were cramped, her mother let her go and hop around the apartment a few times. And when she was bored, her mother would tell her stories from her own childhood, and sometimes Esther thought it wouldn’t be the worst thing to do—sewing next to her mother for the rest of her life. And other times she thought it would be like the story she had read in the Seward Park library, about a man who was walled up alive.

While they sewed, her father sat by the window, chanting and rocking back and forth over his books, paying no attention to them.

“Your father has no acquaintance with the face of a coin,” her mother told her when she asked what he did for a living.

“He is a
luftmensch
—a higher man,” she tried to explain to her.

Esse did her best to figure this out. At supper, she watched her mother put aside the best cut of meat, the biggest portions for him, eating her own food very slowly, so there would always be some left over for him. Breaking away from her work to bring him cheese and cucumber sandwiches in the afternoons.

He accepted it all, unquestioningly. He did not even seem to notice when it was brought to him—reaching for the sandwiches as if they had been provided by God. His eyes never strayed from the words in front of him.

“To give wine to a Talmud scholar is like pouring it out on an altar,” her mother would say. And when she was older and asked why, all her mother could do was talk about when they had first met, back in her village, her eyes dreamy with the recollection.

“Oh, but he was so beautiful! A beautiful boy. Not even a beard yet; a
yeshiva bocher,
with his cheeks like peach fuzz, hurrying off to class every day. I remember the first time—I thought I was very bold—I touched his cheek. Oh, I knew then he was made for sornethink
fine!”

Sometimes, when he was in the mood, he might read with her for a little while. He preferred trying to teach her brother Lazar, no matter how little he wanted to hear. But sometimes, usually at the start of
Shabbos,
he might sit her up on his lap and read to her from the
Gemara,
or the Bible. He never went over the great conundrums of the
Mishnah
—those were reserved for Lazar, as much as he resisted—but it was all right. She loved simply tracing the Hebrew words with him. Their favorite verse together was a psalm, which she was soon able to pick out every time:

“She shall be brought before the king in raiment of needlework.”

From over at the kitchen table her mother would smile to see her, there on her father’s lap. She would not listen to her recitation but would turn away to light the
Shabbos
candles, wearing her wedding dress, the shawl over her head, holding her hands firmly over her eyes while she recited the prayer.

The same year that Lazar left, her father had been thrown out by his congregation, in the great controversy over the Grand Rabbi from Cracow. Her mother’s tiredness and her hands made it impossible for her to sew all day. She had to switch to threading the tassels, and then the sharp, colorful
tzatzkes,
and someone had to make up the money.

The night before her mother took her to the shop, she was almost too nervous to sleep. She got her up while it was still dark out, and they made tea as silently as they could in the kitchen, so as not to awaken him. She noticed that her mother made it thicker than usual, and made Esther drink two cups, and eat a thick chunk of challah. She pulled off another big chunk of the bread for her, wrapped it in wax paper along with a thimble and a pair of scissors, and three extra needles. Then she led her out into the dark.

It was a freezing morning, and there was still snow on the sidewalks. All the way over her mother held her close to her, Esther walking half-dazed, leaning into the warmth of her thin, sheltering body.

As they walked, she rehearsed her:

“Remember—whatever you do, don’t twist the linink. And take your time. He wants you to rush, but take as long as you need. Do it right, and he can’t take the money out.”

Esther nodded. They had practiced it the previous Sunday, over and over, on an old coat of her mother’s, but she had trouble thinking straight now, and it was impossible for her to believe that her hands could do any such thing. She wanted nothing so much as to bury her head into her mother’s coat, and go back home.

The shop was on Division Street, a narrow, lightless block under the blue steel tiers of the Manhattan Bridge. It was lined with rotting wooden tenements, doors and windows all boarded up. She trailed behind her mother as she searched for the number, their breath billowing up in the darkness.

Finally, she found the door she was looking for—another tenement, a small puddle of light leaking out from under the door.

“All right now, don’t be scared,
bubbeleh.
My big girl. It’s nothink you can’t do. Remember:
Don’t twist.”

She nodded mechanically, her mind blank as the snow.

“You work to seven, that’s the contract. Keep track of how many you do. All right?”

Esther nodded again, and her mother hugged her and kissed her cheeks. She hustled away, turning to wave from the end of the dark street.

“Good-bye!” she called back. “Good-bye! Oh, my good girl! Good-bye!”

She waved until her mother had turned the corner, then turned back to the dilapidated tenement. A knob hung from the front door like a distended eyeball. She pushed it back, shook and twisted at it until the door swung grudgingly open.

Already, she could hear the hum and whir of the machines. She followed the sound up two listing staircases and down a hallway, with no real idea of what to expect. There was another battered door, and when she pushed it open she found herself in a world of coats.

Brown coats, black coats, ladies’ and gentlemen’s coats. They lined the walls, hung from the doorjambs, the water pipes, the window frames. They piled up chest-high all around the room, up to the ceiling in places. A baby in diapers, its face and chest covered with red splotches, crawled and teetered along their crest like it was riding the waves out at Coney Island.

It was not yet seven o’clock in the morning, but there was already a full team of men and women hard at work around a narrow table—three young women and an older one doing needlework, two men with gray beards on the machines, stitching collars. They barely lifted their heads when she came in, and went quickly back to their work.

Esther stood where she was, not sure what to do or how to talk to them. Finally, a tall, stooped man in another long gray beard and a yarmulke stepped in from a back room, through a curtain of still more fine, finished coats.

“What,” he demanded, already gesturing impatiently with his hand.

“I—to fell sleeves. From Mrs. Abramowitz,” she stammered out.

“You’re
the new feller hand?” the man ejaculated. “Look, her mother’s milk is still fresh on her lips!
Schmuel!”

He shouted back through the forest of coats, and another, shorter man came from the back room.

“She one of your lost sheep?” The man with the beard jerked a thumb at her. “The one the mama sent?”