City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (64 page)

No
, she thought.
Let it stay. I won’t be a hypocrite. For all the good it will do, let it stay.

She walked back outside. It was the beginning of Purim now, and the streets were filled with children wearing long, bent noses and princess crowns, tricornered hats and wizards’ robes festooned with stars and moons, gleefully scaring the
goyishe
kids.

She looked back up at the narrow slat of a tenement, and thought coldly enough that a few more fires, and maybe her dream would come true—that they could level the whole thing, and put up modern, shiny buildings. And yet, she wondered, if such a thing should ever happen, if they ever found themselves in such a bright and shining place, would there be any place for the costumed, cavorting children all around her? Would there be any place for them at all?

Gyp waited until she came out of the settlement house: wearing her black tricornered widow’s hat, an umbrella clutched primly in one hand. Rigid, straight-backed figure striding on obliviously through the dark, littered streets. He followed her—staying just far enough behind, feeling the hot rage roiling within him.

He didn’t know what he would do to her yet. He had just traced Sadie to the settlement house the day before. He had waited and waited for her, and he hadn’t seen her come out yet, but he had seen
her
—the social worker lady who ran the place—walking out fearlessly in the evening, even after midnight.

She turned toward the west, cutting across the Bowery on Hester Street, then back down toward the Mulberry Bend. She stopped at another settlement house, then one of Big Tim’s saloons. He stuck back in the shadows—the streets growing steadily more deserted, the
Chasir Mark
all closed up for the night now.

In the Bend, there were no streetlights, no one to stop him. All the myriad Italian storefronts, in every front hallway, all closed up now, it was so late. Nobody left on the street, just a few mothers rocking their fussing babies. He moved in, gripping a knife in his pants pocket, but still unsure of what he was going to do. Scare her into producing Sadie? Cut her? Do her right here on Mulberry Street?

All he knew was that it was time for people to stop interfering with him. He gripped the knife in his pocket. Coming up swiftly behind her now, letting his feet flap loudly on the pavement—hoping to terrify her, freeze her with the sudden noise.

Instead she whipped around, brandishing her umbrella at him like a sword. He pulled up just before he impaled his stomach on its end, his fists still clenched in the air.

“I know you! I know who you are!” she shouted at him—in a voice impossibly large, and louder than a fishwife’s. Already, the women rocking their babies were stepping forward, men with hands in their pockets walking out of the shadows where they had been sucking on their dry clay pipes.

“I know who you are:
Lazar Abramowitz
!”

She yelled out his name like a curse, like an alarm—still shaking the umbrella at him, keeping it on him as he tried to get around her. Lights were going on all over the tenements now, in the rows and rows of crooked little window squares. More people were coming out, moving toward them, sleepy Italian voices rising mellifluously through the night.

“Lazar Abramowitz! Lazar Abramowitz!” She kept yelling his name—his damned name.

“I know who you are!”

—still suspended there, at the end of her umbrella. Wanting to do anything, to shut her up—

No that is not my name That is not who I am at all Not at all—

“Lazar Abramowitz! Don’t you come threatening me—trying to keep that poor girl whoring for you!”

He retreated back up the street—while she kept bellowing absurdly:

“Lazar Abramowitz is menacing me out here on the street!”

He backed up a few more steps, then turned and began to hurry away in the night—then to run, racing down the sidewalk, his name chasing after him.

He walked most of the night, not even sure where he was going—trying to think what to do next. At the end of it, he found himself back across the street from the settlement house with its scrubbed brick walls and neat little window planters. He stared up at it, thinking about Sadie inside, and wondering why he really wanted her back at all.

What he really wanted, he knew, was another
dow
over at Mock Duck’s. To float away, into that lush, immaculate world. That was all he really cared for, not some Bowery whore, not even getting revenge for his broken head anymore. Just that blissful spot down in a Chinatown basement, reeking of damp wool—where
she
might be, pure and sweet and girlish, looking at him with such kindness, as he put his hand on her hip—

He turned away, staggering blindly back toward something—Mock Duck’s, or some Tenderloin dance hall, or a stuss game. Back to the next bit of business. He was through with her, and with that fool Kid Twist.

Why did he hit me Why did he hit me like that, anyway? What a thing to do!

It was time—now that he could be humiliated by a whore and a lady social worker. Time to go back to Mock Duck’s and sink into a new
dow
full of the greasy black hop, and maybe never come back. It was time—and looking back toward the settlement house one last time, back toward the mottled, dawn skyline, he saw the dwarf.

It was the same one, he was sure of it—the one who had posed as a newsie at the rat pit. Lingering by the settlement house himself, right outside the windows. Looking up for something, or someone, a single rose held ridiculously in his fat, tiny hands. He put it down, among the other flowers in the window planter, and scurried off, his little legs moving with surprising quickness.

Gyp was too startled to move for a moment—and then he followed, his big strides catching up quickly as the dwarf scrambled, unawares, back toward the subway station. Concealing himself easily among the milk wagons, and the produce trucks, and the pushcart vendors, all trundling their goods out for the start of a shiny new day—until he saw just where the little man was headed.

They stood in the Hall of Life, staring down into the incubator at the baby girl—almost up to full size now, squirming and struggling with normal, blind, infant energy. Esther resolutely ignoring the breathless, rustling commotion behind them.

The incubators were piled one on top of another—an impossibly small, red infant in each one. Pink diapers for girls, blue for boys. Their eyes no more than slits, waving arms and legs toward the single, wan lightbulb in each of their glass boxes. Tiny tubes running to their arms, and mouths, and noses.

The hall, dim as twilight, housed all the premature babies in New York. All the babies—blue with anemia, yellow with jaundice, wracked with pleurisy—that the hospitals, not believing in incubators, had handed over to Brinckerhoff and his mad doctors. All the babes pushed out onto the beds of dazed and uncomprehending prostitutes, or lifeless tenement women, or hapless middle-class girls in secret boardinghouses. Addicted from the first moment of life to laudanum or alcohol or benzene, scooped up and trundled over to a hospital mostly for form’s sake, and then on to Dreamland. Yet still to
live
, somehow to
live
—in the warm, glowing glass boxes.

Up at the front a barker cried out over and over again:

“Come see the struggle for life! Come see the eternal struggle of Man! Five cents!”

There was no need for him. Already, they smeared the glass with their fingers and their cheeks and noses: straining to see the babes, their tiny chests heaving up and down, the tiny eyes even blinking open, staring at the single, warming lightbulbs bright as the sun.

The miracle of life—but that wasn’t the attraction. The City was lousy with life, teeming with life. It pushed its way up through every sidewalk crack, swarmed in every basement, scuttled inside each tenement wall.

Instead, the crowd kept running back and forth across the room, pants and skirts rustling obscenely as they rushed to catch the climactic struggle.

“Hey, I got one over here!” a pimply-faced teenage boy called out, and they all hurried over, bobbing and ducking around each other to see the little red infant. Its tiny heart, clearly discernible in the emaciated chest, gave one more heave, then lay still.

“It’s dead! It’s dead!”

Some of the women screamed or affected to faint, but more people pushed in, taking their place. Somehow, the infant raised its left arm—and the heart started again, for one beat, then another, and another. It stopped—then started—then stopped, the child’s left leg kicking spasmodically a few times before it lay still.

“Over here! Over here!”

The doctor and nurses, who had been busy across the room, now hurried over. They pulled the incubator out of the viewing gallery—though everyone could still see the doctor in the room just behind it, trying to massage the heart back into beating with a single finger, half as long as the child’s whole chest. Working gently over it until at last the boy’s skin had turned as blue as the diaper he was wearing, and he stayed motionless on the little operating table.

The tiny corpse was covered with a handkerchief-sized white towel, its incubator pulled out of line to be examined, sterilized—a new one, complete with another, struggling child inserted into the wall.

“She’ll be going home soon. She’s almost ready.”

Esther stayed where she was across the room, adamantly ignoring the spectacle. Its outcome easy enough to discern from the crowd’s low moans—as if they were surprised at themselves, to be so disappointed by the boy’s death.

“Oh, look at her!”

She leaned in, smiling at the large, healthy baby girl, identifiable only by a number above her incubator. Kid leaned over watching
her
—watching her small, bent shoulders that only he knew were dimpled—and he loved her.

All his experiences, even the things he had reveled in, back in the City—his midnight Bowery walks, and the theater galleries, and the sawdust barrooms and tattoo parlors and the rat-baitings; all the can rackets, and the trimmer balls and the nights with shy and large-eyed factory girls, picked up in cafeterias—all the
savory
of his previous life—seemed to him nothing now but a strange and meaningless existence. All of his life—even from its beginning, living among the corpses back in Old Zagare—now seemed dim and distorted and unreal, compared to being with her now.

That was why he had picked up the shovel back at the rat-baiting. This was where it had led—no matter that he had done it without thinking, or that he had saved some weird carny dwarf instead of a newsie. Pushing forward in the endless, blind crawl of life. That must be it, or what would it be? It had led him here—all of it had led here—and he would not go back, he would not move on. He would stick.

He reached down, held her hand surreptitiously in the twilight hall, whispered, “I love you,” close to her ear.

“What?”

“I love you,” he insisted, as earnestly as he could say anything—and she laughed and clutched his hand as they stood there, watching the red infants struggling for life.

“What is this—my
dybbuk
getting sentimental?”

“I love you and I only want you, I don’ care.”

“Yes,” she murmured, teasing him. “Yes, yes, my Rockefeller prince. You just want me ’cause you’re stuck out here, an’ I’m the only girl you got for now.”

“No, no—it’s not that. I love you—”

“Uh-huh. If my brother doesn’t kill you or me or the both of us first.”

“Esse, you don’ understand,” he swung her around, looking her sternly in the face—trying to force her to take him seriously.

“I love you. Stay with me—marry me. Like the eye in my head I will treasure you.”

“You’re just saying that because you saw the kids,” she smiled. “Such notions. Besides, maybe I want to live, just all on my own. Maybe I want to live, just for me. What do you say to that?”

“Whatever you want to do,” he told her, very gravely. “I mean it. You live any way you want to live, just so long as you live with me.”

“So? We will live together then like nobody has ever lived before?”

“Why not?” he told her earnestly. “Why not? Doesn’t everybody? Doesn’t everybody we know? There is nothing now like it was before!”

“Ah, my birdie boy,” she sighed, still smiling. “What a dreamer you are.”

She thought of all those smiling faces in the Gallery of Disappearing Men—all those ebullient, confident men—and she wondered what they had told their wives and sweethearts. Believing it, no doubt, with all their soul—at the time.

“My
dybbuk
—my dreaming devil,” she told him, touching his face. “Well, tell me more, you may seduce me after all. It’s been known to happen.”

They strolled outside, the late-afternoon sunshine slanting down in their eyes, making them squint as they walked out of the twilight world of infants.

He heard the news about Charlie Becker in his saloon. Mr. Murphy had Little Jimmy bring it down—looking splendid as a cardinal, careless as a spring day.

“The jury convicted him,” Jimmy announced in his suave, slightly amused voice, as if he had been reading the rhymes to one of the songs he liked to write.

“I see, I see. Well, that’s no surprise,” Big Tim thought out loud, which was not at all like him. “After all, Whitman threw everybody else into the Tombs, an’ threatened to warm up the chair if they didn’t finger him. Tell me, is he plannin’ to go after anybody else?”

Jimmy shrugged, thin shoulders barely stirring the shoulders of his immaculate pin-striped suit.

“You would know better’n me, chief. Word is it’s Becker an’ Becker alone’s gonna take the splash.”

So Murphy had gone ahead and let the strong-arm lieutenant drop. Whitman, the idjiot Reform D.A., was already busy drumming up a campaign for governor in the papers: