City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (16 page)

The locals would come and spy until they got used to them: hard-faced farmers, carrying shotguns, or girls in blousy flannel uniforms from a nearby convent, peering through the foliage at them as if they were carny freaks, or dangerous animals.

They didn’t care. After a few weeks, their clothes began to turn ragged around the edges. They grew thinner, and browner, and began to take on the look of the hills around them. They went bathing naked in an abandoned quarry, and climbed the sheerest cliffs, and Esther learned to identify birds, and to play poker, to set up a tent and chop wood and start a fire—all of the great, frivolous things she would never need to know again.

They spent whole blissful hours, too, reading out in the sunlight, all their Dickens, and Hardy, and George Eliot, Shakespeare, and Byron and Keats and Alfred Lord Tennyson. They were more impatient with
Madame Bovary
and
Anna Karenina,
they didn’t understand why such women didn’t use their considerable free time to better their minds—though Esther was moved by the hot tears they shed.

But most of all they talked—talked about everything under the sun: about the theories of Marx, and the science of psychology, and the philosophies of Pragmatism and Social Darwinism, and above all the Revolution. Esther was the youngest, and she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to keep up, but instead she found it exhilarating. It was like the teahouses, only better, even better.

As the days went by, and the summer wore through their shoes, they began to wonder why their idyll could not last forever. Pauline and Clara plotted rent strikes, and shop walkouts back in the City, and they dreamed of the One Big Strike—but they all hated the idea of their extended camp-out ending. Esther was aware that more than a few of them were falling in love, and she felt that she loved them all herself, more than she had ever loved anyone else.

The nights began to turn colder, the trees along the great grey cliffs slowly dulling and thinning out. The night before they were to go back they sat around the fire one last time, and sang the old songs from home, from everybody’s home:

—and then Pauline read them a lecture she had copied down at the Henry Street Settlement, from a Professor Davidson whose ideas were currently setting the ghetto on fire:

“All great world movements begin with a little knot of people who, in their individual lives, and in their relations to each other, realize the ideal that is to be,” she read—and the women seated on the logs they had cut around the generous fire smiled shyly at each other.

“To live truth is better than to utter it. Isaiah would have prophesied in vain, had he not gathered round him a little band of disciples who lived according to his ideal,” Pauline continued, her teenaged voice rising a little unsteadily, but determinedly, into the crisp, autumn night.

“Again, what would the teachings of Jesus have amounted to had he not collected a body of disciples who made it their life-aim to put his teachings into practice?

“You will perhaps think I am laying out a mighty task for you, a task far above your powers and aspirations. It is not so. Every great change in individual and social conditions begins small, among simple, earnest people, face to face with the facts of life. Ask yourselves seriously, ‘Why should not the coming change begin with us?’

“You will find that there is no reason why the new world, the world of righteousness, kindliness, and enlightenment for which we are all longing and toiling, may not date from us as well as from anybody. A little knot of earnest Jews has turned the world upside down before now. Why may not the same thing—nay, a far
better
thing!—happen in your day, and among you? Have you forgotten the old promise made to Abraham, ‘In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed’?”

All of them were weeping silently, joyously by this time, even Pauline, as she read the last words of the lecture. Esther felt shivers from the cold night, from all the emotions running through her, and she thought something that she had never thought consciously before, which was that she was glad she was alive. Without another word, they embraced each other and went back to their tents, to fold up the few possessions they had, and strap up their precious piles of books.

Fannia had brought along a camera, and in the morning, before they left, they all posed for a photograph in their best clothes to commemorate the summer. Esther was chosen to take the picture, for she had the best eye, and the steadiest hand. She stood at the bottom of the Palisades, peering up at them through the camera on its tripod as they made their way down the cliffs—city girls, edging their way myopically, determinedly down the dizzying heights in their long, white summer skirts, strung out along the cliff ledges like so many mountain goats.

And after that, and after that Clara found Esse a place at the new Triangle factory, working on a machine. It was a little better in the big, new factories. There was more air, and the work was much steadier. Otherwise it was the same grind, day in and day out, working for somebody else. It was where she worked right up to this day—rising from her rough half-sleep, covered in sweat, troubled by all the restless, shifting images from her first day.

It was the Monday after her trip to Coney Island. Time to get up—time for the first day of the new season, down at the factory. Nothing changed, she thought, in all these years, since that first day on Division Street, nothing at all—she had been sleeping on a couple of chairs, then, too.

She corrected herself: nothing had changed, but everything had changed, because she had learned how to do it.

The household was already up around her: her mother, cooking at the little iron stove where a fireplace had once been. Kapsch replaced at the table by Cuti, the plasterer, neat as a pin, eating his breakfast, waiting placidly for his turn in the warm bed; her father still sleeping in the bedroom, his snores reverberating around the little apartment.

This world is too much for me—

They were the words she used to cry herself to sleep with, back when she was just starting. And now, she knew, it wasn’t true—something which filled her both with immeasurable pride and sadness at the same time.

“Esse, you want you should eat?” her mother asked, shuffling over with a small bowl of porridge and a cup of tea.

“Yes, Mama.”

Esther moved quickly about the room with a practiced economy, folding up the bed litter, moving the chairs back. The flannel nightgown hung heavy and wet on her—much too heavy for the late summer heat, but there was no other privacy, with the
roomerkeh
already up. She crumbled a lump of brown sugar over the porridge, ate it down in neat, rapid mouthfuls, then grabbed a skirt and a shirtwaist, some underwear, and slipped out to the hall bathroom.

It wasn’t really a bathroom at all, the room no bigger than a closet. There was barely space to stand up in beside the tiny sink, the indescribably filthy toilet. Her father liked to rail against the neighbors and their Irisher daughters—big, dirty, cowlike creatures—for not keeping it clean—

“A curse upon the goyim, they have made a misery of the world with their filthy ways!”

—though the fact was anyone who wanted to could get in from the street, or from the whole other world up on the roof. There were always stories of unspeakable things happening in the toilets, and she made sure to turn on the light and check behind the door before she went all the way inside.

When she was done she came back into the apartment and checked herself in the mirror: a dark striped skirt, faded and washed almost purple; dark stockings; an old white shirt-waist. She twisted up her thick, wavy brown hair, and pinned it firmly to her head. The factory wasn’t as bad as a mill, where a girl with long hair could easily be scalped by the machines, but there were risks just the same. She looked, for just another moment, before her father might catch her, at the rest of her image in the mirror:

The face too plain, she thought, the nose too long, her teeth too crooked, the only redeeming feature her large brown eyes. She fiddled with her hair, tugged at the dress over the body she was also dissatisfied with.

He seemed satisfied enough with it
—the sudden, unbidden thought making her smile.
He seemed to like what there was. My dybbuk, out on Coney Island—

It was late, she knew, without even looking at a clock. She moved toward the door, picking up her old
shmatte
of a hat.

“Good-bye, Mama.”

“Esse—”

“I don’ know what time I’ll be home. Maybe a meeting, I don’ know.”

She brushed aside her mother’s concerns, entreating arms literally extended, still rubbing her hands fearfully together.

Better you should have worried more back then, when I needed you.

Down on the street, it was the best time of day in the summer—the only time when it wasn’t too hot. She hated going out so early in the winter, when it was still cold and dark, and in the clear, smoldering autumn she only regretted all the more bitterly that she would be cooped up the rest of the day.

But in the summer the sun was shining, the heat only beginning to shimmer up from the paving stones. The sidewalks were already teeming with people, the streets jammed with pushcarts, wagons and trucks and automobiles, all creeping forward.

She walked rapidly, dodging up and down off the sidewalks, through and around the crowds. She prided herself on her ability to maneuver through any streets—on walking like a human being, a real New Yorker, instead of one more greenie. In the bad weather she might take the horse car, then the trolley to Greene Street, but in the summer she was just as glad to walk, enjoying the last few minutes before she had to be inside.

With every block she walked the buildings grew: bigger, wider, starker, blackened stone and brick and steel, rising up from the sidewalks like cathedrals. Soon, the streets began to widen—new, planned, industrial blocks. She turned down a short, broad street with an alluring swath of green at the end of it: the park at Washington Square, bright with flower beds and trees, a glimmering fountain in the middle, and on the other side a graceful, Florentine bell tower.

But everyone was streaming toward the newest and tallest building on Washington Place, where the Triangle factory waited, up on the eighth and ninth and tenth floors. They were pulled in like flotsam to a whirlpool: young women, some only girls, dressed in the same long, dull skirts and shirtwaists. Scores of men in white shirts and black vests and yarmulkes.

In the lobby there were two thin elevators, with the company’s credo posted prominently above them: if you don’t come in on sunday you needn’t come in on monday. The lifts hissed like jackhammers, scooping up a dozen men and women with each trip. The rest shuffled in place, edging slowly forward toward the next load.

Esther pushed past them, joining a thinner stream of people at the stairs. It was a long climb up to the ninth floor but she always felt trapped in the elevators, and if you were more than five minutes late the floor supervisors sent you home for a half-day without pay like a recalcitrant schoolgirl.

She climbed steadily among the crowd, cheek to heel, saving her breath, feeling the strength in her legs, in her back. She liked to pretend, sometimes, that she was climbing up a mountain somewhere, making her way up one of the Alps, above a little Swiss resort and a clear blue lake—though this morning thoughts of the Steeplechase began to fill up her head again. Such a thing it had been, she had never done anything like that before in her life. But she wasn’t sorry; she wasn’t sorry even if she never saw him again. He was hers now, that boy—her dybbuk.

On the eighth floor some of the women and the cutters peeled off—those men who could make a dress or a shirt with one long, elegant sweep of their shears. Going all the way up to the tenth floor were the boy clerks, and the women on the switchboards, and the pressers, biceps bulging from their work on the heavy, steaming machines.

She got off on the ninth, squeezing through the one small, unlocked door with the other machine operators. As soon as she opened the door her spirit ebbed. She didn’t know what she could expect, exactly, but there it was—the same shop floor; the open, reeking barrel of machine oil that sat by the door; the long rows of benches where the operators, nearly two hundred and fifty of them, at the height of the season, would be packed in, hip-to-hip. Already she could feel what it would be like by midday, her body crammed into that unnatural, numbing position over the machine, like she was stuffed into a little box.

She hung the shapeless nub of cloth that was her hat on a wallpeg—where all the outside clothes were hung, like children’s coats in the back of a classroom. Then she made her way over to her place on the benches with the peculiar hop-skip they all used to navigate between the rotating axles and the baskets of cloth on the floor, seating herself finally behind the machine that she knew like one of her own limbs by now, and could use with even more agility.

The door to the shop opened, and another gaggle of women came in: Italian girls, who walked the few blocks over from the West Village and Little Italy together, laughing and singing. They were singing even now: the latest show tune that had drifted down to the dancing academies, and the wine gardens:

—a strange little song, all words, like American songs always were—nothing like the doleful songs from Russia, packed with sheer emotion. They made you tap your feet and snap your fingers whether you wanted to or not, and now the other girls began to pick it up, in a tremulous range of accents and pitches, humming or adding words they made up themselves: