City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (23 page)

“Sure, why would they be? Lookin’ like that, can’t even comb your hair—”

He reached out and grabbed one breast, holding it absently in his hand, like a vendor weighing a melon.

“You used to be such choice goods, Sadie Mendelssohn,” he said—then smiled at her.

“Here, here. Take another dollar.”

She was crying now, but he gave her the dollar and folded her hand up over it.

“It’ll be all right. I’ll take care of everything. You take that dollar, getcha self somethin’ nice. Somethin’ to fix yourself up. Okay, now.”

He smiled his benediction at her, running his fingers through her hair. She’d had such nice hair once, too; thick and brown and shiny, with a streak of red.

It was the first thing he had noticed when he saw her, the long, brown-red hair framing her face, pale as the moon, when she reached out for him under the Bowery el. Her hand on his coat, gentle and timid:

Give me a penny, mister?

—that ancient solicitation of the old hot corn girls. He’d wanted to laugh, wondering what her next line could possibly be. Then he’d looked closely at that pretty white face. The fine blue veins visible even in the poor light under the tracks. He’d had no trouble deciding to take her in hand.

Now he could barely stand her. Those rooms over McGlory’s saloon—the last time she had undressed for him, he could actually see the fleas, jumping off her body. How disgusting she was, how dirty and corrupted, especially compared to his pure Esse—

“There’s something else,” she said hesitantly.

“See? I thought there was,” he covered, feeling the sweet, red rage building up inside him. “I knew there was.
Tell
it.”

“Your father sent someone by. He wants to meet with you.”

“My father?”

He could not have been more surprised if she had said she really did have a lover.

“I don’t have a father!”

“That’s all he said,” she said quickly. “Your father wants to meet with you. You want to know where?”

“I know where to find him. You piece of earth—when was this? Last night? Last year?”

“Today, just. Before I came over.”

“Loch in kop,
whattaya waitin’ to tell me for?”

But he was distracted now, wondering what the old man could possibly want.

“All right. I’ll be around maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day.”

“Ah, Lazar!”

He smirked at her.

“You don’ like it, you can maybe go work in the factories. With my Esse, huh? You’d like that, wouldn’t you, little Sarah? No whiskey, no float. Just twelve hours wit’ the sewing machine, an’ then maybe citizenship classes on your day off? Huh?”

He kept taunting her until she bowed her head, then he pulled her to him and kissed her roughly on the mouth— and after a few, reluctant moments, sure enough, she responded, her body trembling slightly against him, hand shyly clutching his coat the way she had that first time.

Gimme a penny, mister?

He thought of all the other mouths that had kissed her since. All the mouths just since that morning, lips greasy with eggs and beefsteak, bits of it caught in their moustaches—

“You be good,” he told her, breaking off the kiss as abruptly as he had started it, and walking away from her—a joke, she knew, and a warning.

She watched him go: a small, compact man, in a neat suit and bowler, walking into the shadows under the el. A train rumbled in, and a whole new crowd of men in dark suits and bowlers spilled down the steps, and he was lost among them.

Yet from where she stood, she could see her whole future. He was right about her hair; it was getting gray no matter how many times she combed it. She could dye it but soon, she knew, she would not even be pulling in enough for McGlory’s. Then it would be the rough trade down on Cherry Street, then down by the waterside, humping sailors one-legged against a wall.

It would only be a matter of time then before she had a case. She had seen the women down there, offering themselves behind the Water Street bars for the price of a whiskey, or a draught of opium—anything to kill the pain. Women she had worked with under the el not six months before, screaming in agony, their minds already rotted away.

The crowds of men streamed past her, looking for a fresher face. She watched them pass, looking to be sure that he was really gone. He was a clever one; she never underestimated him, but after a long time she was confident that he wasn’t coming back, and she took off her limp black hat, and unpinned a small patch on the inside lining.

She counted out the dollars she had concealed from him there. She had actually managed to hold back money from him, to lie to him successfully, and now she weighed the money in her hand, and wondered what she was going to do about this development.

Gyp walked back over to the Lodz synagogue on Hester Street, where he knew he was most likely to find his father at this hour, attending a funeral or a
mincha.
It was a red-brick, hunchbacked old church, once the home of some forgotten Protestant sect that had long ago moved uptown. Milling around out front was an aggregation of old men, the wealthiest among them in new brown derbies, the rest covering their heads with velvet yarmulkes. They wore leather shoes soft as house slippers, with no laces or buttons, and striped shirts and baggy trousers cinched halfway up their bellies.

The younger men sat slouched on the front steps, defiantly smoking and wearing American suits. Wandering around between them were beggars even more ragged than the old men. Most of these were former rabbis, Gyp knew, who had lost their congregations and their families. They subsisted on apples and cheese, bits of herring or chicken that mourners and pious pushcart peddlers would put on their begging boards. They kept up a pretense of collecting for charity, always sure to make an appearance at any funeral, rattling their little collection boxes and calling out:
“Isodoh tat zel mimovess!
Charity saves from death!”

Inside the synagogue it was dark and cool, the old church sanctuary lit only by the
Ner Tamid
oil lamp and
yahrzeit
candles. The Torah ark loomed dimly up between the windows of the east wall, signs of the zodiac painted along the upper galleries. It was a close, musty place, filled with the smell of old books and sweat and candle wax, and for a moment it overwhelmed him with memories, as only a smell can—taking him back to his days in the
bes midrash
when his father had had the old synagogue on Forsythe Street.

There was a steady murmur of prayer. More old men were swaying back and forth up front, in the slanting, crudely painted pine benches: a funeral service, or a memorial for one of their steadily declining number. One by one, they stood, hobbling back through the room, pausing at the aisle for the
shammes
to make the small, ritual cuts in their coat lapels with a straight razor. As they shifted slowly past him, Gyp could see how many times the lapels on their suits had been cut, and stitched up, and cut again.

The last man out had a face like a stone. He walked steadily, without the aid of a cane, a surprising hint of color in his cheeks and a brisk, lively glint of hatred in his eyes. His father.

“So—what make you?” he asked conversationally when he spotted Gyp, as if it had been hours instead of years since the last time he had seen him. As if Gyp did not know that the oldest incisions on his coat had been made for him.

“How goes the life of the
beggerin?”

“I thought I was dead,” Gyp said, and his father looked up at him, supremely cheerful in his hatred.

“So you are. So you are. Mebbe, then, you are my golem. My own monster.”

“Did you want something?” Gyp said, gesturing at the others. “Or did you just want me to hang around with the rest of the
lomdim
an’ the
loaferin?”

The old man laughed crudely, and wiped the spittle away from his beard.

“No, no. I have somet’ink in mind for you, my golem,” he said, rubbing his hands together thoughtfully. “That’s why I brought you to life.”

“Cut it out with that golem stuff—” Gyp started to say, but his father was distracted. Some of the other old men hailed him as they talked, lingering in the door of the synagogue, but he did not deign to reply.

“What a feast of corpses!” he hissed merrily to Gyp, unconcerned that they could hear him.

He still considered himself vastly superior to the rest of them, Gyp knew, even though he had been going to the Lodz synagogue every day for over ten years—even though it was practically the only synagogue on the Lower East Side that would tolerate him, since the rift over the Grand Rabbi from Cracow.

Chrystie Street had never seen anything like it, the day the Grand Rebe had arrived. He was carried along in a chair with velvet cushions: a short, round young man with a placid white face, dressed in a frock coat and silk top hat, and held high above the clamoring crowd, so everyone could see him.

All the elders of the synagogues had walked on ahead, carrying torches and the Torah scrolls, their congregations and anyone else who wanted to following behind, holding up banners and blowing on shofars, banging on pots and pans from their kitchens and anything else that would make a great noise. Thousands more had shouted and clapped and gaped from the sidewalks, and even the Irisher cops had craned their necks that day, to get a look at the great man.

Afterwards there had been celebrations throughout the Lower East Side: great feasts of blintzes and knishes, and latkes smothered in sour cream, and whitefish, and sponge cake; and the men and the older boys had drunk their fill of slivovitz and plum brandy.

Even his father had indulged. He had only the small congregation over on Forsythe Street, but he had argued more fiercely than anyone else for bringing the
roy
over from the old country, and as he walked ahead carrying his torch, his son saw for the first time in his life that his face was wreathed in happiness.

Yet right from the start, Gyp had sensed trouble in the pale, stupefied face of the Grand Rebe, lurching along in his chair. Probably it was doomed to begin with, there were far too many little congregations burrowed into abandoned churches and former storefronts and old stables throughout the East Side for their rabbis to surrender power to some medieval potentate from Poland. There had been arguments over everything, and eventually the Grand Rabbi had accepted a better offer: presiding over the sanctity of the large kosher meat businesses. But even then, the old man had argued that they should all bend their necks to him.

“After all, he is from the old country, who is to say he does not know best?” he had argued. “Is not everything else more pure there? Maybe his turning away is a judgment on us—maybe we should offer him more!”

“Why should we submit ourselves to this Grand Butcher? This authenticator of sausages?” the elders had scoffed.

They had driven his father out, in the vituperative struggle that followed, and for a time there had been a small sliver of the congregation that had gone with him, and set up another synagogue in the front of another old grocery store. For there was never any argument in any synagogue that didn’t end without at least a few Jews splitting away to form their own congregation.

But eventually these, too, had drifted away from his father. He was too stiff-necked, and he dreamed too much of the old country, and besides he insisted they revere a man who spent all his days seeing to it that the necks of chickens had been properly cut.

“I wan’ch you to do sometink for me,
oytser,”
his father continued to mock him in the synagogue now, his eyes positively beaming.

“What?”

“lt’s your sister, Esse. She’s on wit’ somethink.”

“You mean with her Socialists and
appokoros?”
Gyp snorted. “I tell you what, I don’ care if she eats pork at noon, right in the middle of Delancey Street—”

“No, not that, you plague upon my head!”

He leaned in closer, the scent of onion rankling on his breath.

“Somethink else. She got a boyfriend somewheres. Maybe a
shaygets.”

Gyp made himself laugh, despite the cold feeling deep in his stomach.

“A
shaygets,
is it? Well, whaddaya know. Afraid she won’t work herself to death so you can lay about gabbin’ with the rest of the
gaonim?”

“Listen, golem! Can’t you see I’m black with worry?” he said, grabbing the lapels of Gyp’s fine suit. “Do this for me, and mebbe I’ll bring you back to life for good. Hmm? Your family restored to you. Eh?
Mein ben yochid.
You could come over for dinner on
Shabbos
and everything. Lazar.”

Gyp carefully peeled his father’s dirty fingers from his suit, bending them, hurting them a little as he did it, letting him feel his superior strength. Careful not to let the old man see how much the mere mention of his real name had surprised him—just as he must have figured it would.

“I would rather
be
dead than to ever sit down to another meal with you,” Gyp told him. “You understand me?”

“Lump of stench—have you no heart? I know you are determined to kill your mother an’ me, but don’t you have a care for your sister?”

“A care? I hope for your sake she’s with the rottenest pimp she can find.”

Yet even as he said it he could imagine throwing that possibility in his father’s face. And even as he said it, he could feel the possibility clutching coldly around his vitals. It was Esse who had cried for him when he left and still dreamed of shaping him into something—

And before that—that time up in the apartment when both their parents had been out. He had had to tell her then. He had walked right up to her, and put one hand on her hip, and she had not turned her face away