City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (63 page)

This night, it was the early boat. There were just Little Tim and Cousin Florrie, his legislative aides, with him. They stood together on the dock, smoking cigars. Big Tim had even sent Photo Dave and Sarsaparilla on ahead. Tonight he wanted no more company than his brooding kinsmen, to lift at most one glass, and ponder the dark water, and try to get some sleep before he returned to Manhattan, the Place of the Whirlpool.

The boat was running late. Sullivan looked behind him, up the hill, even though he didn’t think he should. The lights were still on in the capitol, which surprised him a little. The session should have been wrapped up by now, so that his fellow legislators would have time to make their final arrangements, time to say their fond farewells, and make a last stop at their favorite saloon or whorehouse. Burn any last incriminating papers or receipts—

But the lights were still not out—and now, as if in a bad dream, two men were hurrying down the hill toward him, half walking, half running, as fast as they could go without tumbling down the slope. Big Tim felt a premonitory twinge in his groin.

“Here’s trouble,” Cousin Florrie grumbled as the messengers descended.

The two men recognized the waiting figures on the end of the dock, and began windmilling their arms. Just then the grand steamer
Annie Moore
hove into view, moving leisurely down the slow current of the Hudson.

“There’s trouble wit’ the hours bill!” one of the men was hallooing. “They need you up the hill! Mrs. Perkins says—”

“Not that old crow again,” Florrie moaned.

Big Tim glanced at the elegant white boat finally pulling up to the dockside. Inside, he knew, was light and warmth and rest. Inside was a cushioned seat, and a bed if he needed it, and a quiet glass of beer and a good book. He looked back up the hill at the capitol.

“You got to come now!” one of the messengers was shouting, still running toward him. “They’re callin’ a quick vote, an’ we’re at least three shy. They need you!”

The settlement in the garment strike had gone over well, and Mr. Murphy had given Big Tim the nod to go ahead and pass the hours bill. It wasn’t much, just a limit on how many hours the employers could force defenseless women and children to work every week. But it was something, it was something the people who lived and worked in his district might actually feel every day, and Big Tim had actually felt good when he had locked up its passage just before his departure.

Or so he’d thought. Obviously, something had gone wrong, that was just the way it happened sometimes, despite the most careful work. There was always some dog in the manger, some venerable senator or assemblyman who could be bought back for the price of a beer or a quick cozy. It didn’t much matter, they could always ram it through again next session, or next year. That was just the way these things went, and he had a boat to catch.

Except. Except. Sullivan could picture the skinny, rail-backed Yankee lady, with her black tricornered hat so like his old Ma’s, standing stoical and expressionless as her beloved hours bill went down to defeat. And he thought on his sister in Clinton Street, leaning over the table so tired she could not rise to make supper.

“Now, boys, it looks like we’ll be on the hell-bound boat after all,” he told the relations.

Big Tim Sullivan huffed into the assembly chambers, his breath coming in short, rusty stabs. Little Tim and Cousin Florrie held him up under the arms, their own breath reverberating raggedly. Mrs. Perkins strode across the assembly to them, stern Yankee face melting in relief.

“I knew you’d come,” she said, in a fond, maternal whisper. “I knew you wouldn’t let us down.”

“Now, Mrs. Perkins, don’ch you worry about a t’ing,” he puffed benignly, charmed despite himself. “It’s all in the bag. I won’t let you down on this one.”

Al and Bob came up, looks of anxiety and professional embarrassment on their faces. In the chamber behind them there was near chaos, the representatives of the people shouting and pointing and standing up in their chairs as Al’s men tried to stall the vote, demanding roll call after roll call.

“I dunno what happened, Tim,” Al said miserably. “We had two to spare, dead square, but then the wheels came off it.”

“In the senate, it’s the upstaters,” Bob told him. “The City stayed firm, but they got to the damned farmers—”

“Ah, but they always do,” Big Tim assessed, rubbing his hands at the thought of doing what he did best. Cousin Florrie and Little Tim began stripping him down for action, peeling off his hat and coat and scarf.

“They played us for flats, ran the boodle caravan by right under our noses, an’ waited for the last minute to play their hand. Smart, smart! But they can’t win, don’ch you worry, Mrs. Perkins. We’ve got truth an’ joostice an’ good Christian morality on our side,” he told her—already figuring who owed him favors, and who he could blackmail, and who he could out-and-out intimidate into doing the right thing.

“We’ll get yer fifty-four hours for you and the poor workin’ girls!”

Down to his vest and shirtsleeves, Big Tim Sullivan waded eagerly into the tumult on the assembly floor, looking for votes.

She met Sadie at the settlement house on the Day of Rejoicing in the Law, when even the
goyishe
politicians were allowed into the synagogues, and there was a carnival air throughout the East Side. Sadie stood by the door of the settlement, brazenly smoking a cigarette, one hand on her hip. She wore a grand, volcanic black-and-white hat, the tattered red hussar’s jacket flung over one arm, a single, rattan suitcase by her feet.

She smiled broadly when she saw Esther, and waved to her, fingers sticking out of a lacy black half-glove.

“So here I am, like one more penniless greenie,” she joked, though Esther could see she was nervous.

“You’ll be all right here. No one would dare try anything with you.”

“
Ach
, but to be reformed! My soul bleached white. I should have let the Lutheran missionaries have the work, they take such pleasure in it.”

“It won’t be so bad. You can learn things—”

“Oh, yes. Like what?”

She dropped the cigarette and ground it out beneath one boot heel, a little stream of smoke trickling out ruefully between her bow lips.

“Well, to cook, and to sew—”

“I already know
that.
Even whores know such things.”

“But there’re other things.”

“Like what?”

“Well—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” she told Esther, a brittle smile on her face. “I can learn about the Constitution, and how to keep my teeth clean, and serve tea, and write a good English sentence. And all so I can sew shirts in a shop.”

“It isn’t so bad—now.”

“Oh?” Sadie laughed, still teasing her but serious, too. “Isn’t it?”

The strike had been all but settled. The Triangle was one of the few shops still holding out, but Clara was sure it would soon have to give in, too. Everywhere else, they had won recognition of the union, and better pay and better hours, and a fair division of the work during the slack season. And all of it still meant working fifty-four hours a week, bending over the machine until her back ached, the needle pulsing through her finger.

Esther had liked working in the union office—organizing things, arranging speakers, filing papers, writing up grievances. She had even come to enjoy speaking to the other strikers, and at the rich women’s clubs, once she found her voice. It had seemed like a real life—how a person worked, instead of being one more part of a sewing machine.

And this was what she was wishing on Sadie—if she was lucky, and could get steady work as an operator. How different it would be—from the dangerous, drifting hours out on the streets, from saloons, and midnights huddled under the elevated, and strange men with whiskey breath. What would
she
take, Esther wondered, to let strange men put their hands on her and take her to bed? Even with all of it—the syph, and the pimps, and the fear of having your throat cut one night in a lonely room—even with all of it, how much worse would it be to be a real whore?

“That’s all right. Don’ch you think I never thought about this before? That’s all whores do, is wonder where they’re going,” Sadie told her, touching Esther’s face with one of her half-gloved hands.

“At least this will be mine, my decision, such as it is. At least I got away from
him
, that has to count for somet’ing.”

“Yes, it does. Of course it does.”

Esther wanted to leave her with some consoling words—something inspiring, like she used at the union meetings, or the society teas. She wanted to tell her that it didn’t need to last forever. That there was a new day coming, and maybe soon she would be able to get a real education, or start a family, or at least work in a decent place, where she was respected and paid a living wage. Sometimes, when she started on these spiels for the union, her old vision for Orchard Street would come spinning back to her—the broad new streets, and the clean, expansive tenements, the happy people walking out to work in the morning—and the hope and the dream would come shining through in her face and her words.

That was all right for the rich women and the factory girls. But Sadie, she knew, would know better.

“Good-bye, good-bye, dear! Don’ be a stranger!”

Sadie kissed her impulsively on both cheeks, and Esther smiled and kissed her back

“No, never!”

She left her at the settlement house with her one bag, walking backwards and waving to her until she was far down the street. Sadie waving back from the doorway, still joking, her gray eyes still smiling, sweeping her arm over her head:

“Good-bye! Good-bye! Don’t forget me! When you see me next I will be as clean as the driven snow!”

Her mother’s eyes, always so fearful and evasive, now stared unseeing at the stained gray ceiling above the kitchen table where she lay. A fly crawled unmolested along her forehead. Esse’s father sat in a chair beside the table, rocking slowly back and forth while he said Kaddish, but nothing broke her awful concentration.

From the sidewalk Esther had spotted the black smudge, planted like a giant thumbprint across the front of the tenement. The boarded-up windows—nuggets of smashed glass glittering in the street, crunching under the feet of the hurrying, oblivious pedestrians—all the usual signs of a small, passing disaster in the City. Esther spit through her fingers and looked away when she passed such things on other streets—but now she could not.

“They said it started in the walls,” her father told her. “In the electric wiring, but I know it was those Irisher cows across the hall. Why they didn’t succeed in killink all of us, I don’ know. There was smoke all over, an’ I wanted to go upstairs—get up on the roof, the quickest way.”

“That was smart thinking,” Esther said, noting that his
luftmensch
’s genius for survival was still intact. Of course he would know the quickest way out of any trap.

“She didn’t know if the fire ladders would reach so far. She said we had to stay an’ fight it, we had to fight for our things.”

The old reb snorted.

“Fight for what? A bowl, a pan? A sewing machine? I went up on the roof. When it was over and I came back down, she was like this. They said her heart gave out.”

Hanging off one of the kitchen chairs, Esther saw a small, singed towel, embroidered with one of her mother’s cheerful
ongepotchket
sayings:
Happy sunshine!
She turned away from him, dismayed as ever at how much more cynical, how much more callous he was in reality than even the cantakerous old fool of her daydreams.

She looked down at her mother’s face—so gray and hollowed out that she thought if she were to apply just the slightest pressure, it might crumble under her touch.

A life lived for others

She straightened up, faced the old man.

“So. What will you do now?”

“What should I do, with a son who is dead to me and a daughter who will not do her duty?” he said, with his routine bitterness. “What can I do, where can I go, when every hand is turned against me?”

“That’s up to you,” Esther told him. She turned to Kapsch the
roomerkeh
, who was loyally sitting
shivah
next to her father in a three-legged chair—the only other surviving piece of furniture in the charred apartment.

“The place is yours, so far as I’m concerned,” she told him. “
He
won’t be able to afford it, not even a piece of it.”

“You are an unnatural woman,” the reb hissed at her. “Where will you go now? Back to your pimp, wherever he’s keepink you?”

His words gave her a certain epiphany—not that it much mattered anymore.

“Was it you who put him up to it? Was he doing your dirty work, spying on me?”

The old man said nothing, swallowing his anger and looking down at the floor.

“Ah, but how can that be, since after all he’s dead to you?” she asked him. “How can a dead son do such things?”

“I must have done some great sin to be cursed by the Upper One with such children,” he spat out. “One of them a monster, an’ the other with a lump of coal for a heart!”

“Yes, it’s all from God, isn’t it?”

Esther leaned down so he had to look at her, holding his chin in her hand and gazing into his eyes.

“You know, Poppa, if God lived on the earth, people would break all his windows.”

“More blasphemy from you! At such a time!”

Ignoring him, she bent over her mother and touched her, once, on her decayed cheek, then straightened up to go.

“And what about me? What about me, then?” he demanded, tears running down his bearded cheeks. He looked like a little old man seated there, suddenly not ferocious at all.

“You? You’ll have to get acquainted with the face of a coin.”

She walked out of the apartment and shut the door gently behind her. She paused in the hallway, and noticed the
mezuzah
there that she had always sternly neglected. It had been blackened by the fire, along with the whole length of the doorway, and was hanging loosely from the ashy wood. She moved to touch it—whether to salvage it or tear it off, she wasn’t sure—but again she could not.