Deadly (2 page)

I see death whenever I pass a brown horse.

What are these entities that weaken us and make us
die? How is it that death is here on earth? How does it enter people's bodies and sicken them, kill them?

If we knew how to fight death, could we have saved Benny's life?

I can't help thinking of my big brother at this time, the start of the new school term. He was nearly the same age I am now, a high school boy. We were walking home from temple when that brown horse came from nowhere and trampled right over him, that man charging down the street in such a hurry, he didn't stop, he never stopped to see what he had done to Benny. I can still feel the wind of the horse, its closeness to my face as it sped by. We were talking together, none of us saw it. Marm cried out and Papa scooped Benny up and ran home with him.

I'll never forget the terror on Marm's face when she brought Dr. Barnes, and Benny's cries when the doctor straightened his leg bones and bandaged the bloodied skin. In the next weeks, the unhealed sores turned green and spread over my brother's battered legs. How useless were Dr. Barnes's visits, with his Blood Cure and his Cooling Glass and his Silver Mend. He couldn't make those sores go away.

Benny got so much worse, and Papa stayed with him, never left his side. He sat with him all day long, feeding him
and washing up after him. He changed his bandages, releasing the sour, infected smell of poor Benny's wounds. Every night in this front room, I slept beside my brother. I curled my head into his back and listened to his low moans until that final night, when the sounds ended.

I'll always think there was some way we could've helped him, if only we knew how.

I
spend
my free nights assisting Marm, delivering life, watching young mothers struggle, and I feel somehow that I'm not really helping, that I don't understand how to lessen the pain these new mothers endure. The Radlikov birthing last night was particularly hard on poor Kat, who pushed and moaned from that place of isolation where all birth-giving women seem to go. I spread warm cloths over her forehead and rubbed her from shoulder to waist and squeezed her hands as if I could squeeze out the child myself. Marm positioned her properly and told her happy stories of good births. For hours she cried and rested and cried until, at last, a boy came out. But the afterbirth didn't follow; instead, the waves continued. Marm boiled water and cleaned her tools. I tried my best to soothe Kat by pressing warm towels into her lower back.

Marm felt the girl's belly; she helped Kat push again. Out came a second little surprise! We all gasped when we saw that inside poor Kat were two tiny boys each no bigger than my shoe! It was my first twin birth—I never imagined what it might look like, a woman borning two separate creatures the way animals litter two, three, and four. We laughed and wept with Kat, we bathed the newborns for her and her husband, and we went home.

I spent the day in school exhausted.

I feel, when I am holding a birthing woman for hours on end, like I'm trying to physically absorb her pain with my own body, to take her burden from her through my hands and mind so it won't hurt so much, so she won't scream and cry, so she will just think of the baby who is coming. Afterwards, if all went well, I feel empty, tired deep down in my bones.

T
he army
check came; it always comes just as we begin to reach into the kettle where we keep our rainy-day pennies. Even though we've been receiving the check every month for years now, it stirs up feelings for us, especially for Marm, ones she can't talk about, and she sends me to cash it at the grocer's as quickly as I can. I put the stub with the others inside the beautiful book Papa gave me just before he left for war. That book is the most precious thing I own. I hope one day I can understand even a few of all these mysterious subjects:

Year Book of Facts in Science and Arts, for 1897, Exhibiting the Most Important Improvements in Mechanics, Useful and Natural Philosophy, Chemistry,
Astronomy, Zoology, Botany, Mineralogy, Meteorology, and Geology, Along with Obituaries of Eminent Scientific Men

The brown ink of the inscription has faded, his only writing to me that I have:

Darling Prudent One—
May this book make the world
more transparent to you.
                       
Your papa, 1898

I study his elegant penmanship, and wonder how he learned it, since he was a machinist in Nolan's Ball Bearing Factory, and before that a newsie on the street. I must ask him about his interest in scientific matters when he returns, for I don't know how it began, and Marm won't say, even though she gave me my first tablet and got me started on drawing and writing, copying from Papa's book.

I remember watching the clock, seeing the moment it went from 1899 to 1900, the thrill of that instant, that shift in time. All the bells in town rang; our neighbors banged on the walls and filled the streets with noisemakers and hollered
about the new century. Marm handed me that tablet, the one with the red silk cover. She said, Prudence, you need to start keeping a record. You must write events like these down. Time passes in a steady march, nothing ever gets in its way, and you must remember things.

I knew she meant that I must write for Papa. And I did that, for years.

I don't know when I stopped writing for him, and started simply writing.

Remember. I must remember him. He has dark, curly hair, and his features are small and sharp in his perfectly oval face. He is taller than Marm by a few inches, but not as tall as Benny. He's a serious man, but he laughs with his whole face. His hands smell of metal and gefilte fish, which he makes sometimes himself in the meat grinder. He calls me Oh Prudent One, and says he named me for the sensible look on my face when I was born.

I wonder, every day I wonder, where I could write him a letter. Missing in the Field—how can one address a letter to a person who is missing?

Better not to wonder such things at all.

Marm always tells me how my father's father fought in the Civil War for his adopted Northern city; he cut off his
long black beard and died somewhere in the South a hero, defending a hill. I don't know if he ever told anyone he was a Jewish soldier; I imagine he couldn't yet speak English. Marm has never had patience for the religious; when we sat shivah for Benny after he died, she didn't accept Mrs. Zanberger's gifts of food or Rabbi Samsfield's spiritual help. Papa wanted to continue the prayers, I think, but she asked our neighbors to leave and ended the shivah two days early, which began an argument with my father, who went to the Spanish War shortly after, and has not returned.

I still hear bits of words from the arguments Papa and Marm had after Benny's death, words like “gone” or “God” or “go,” though I can't remember whole sentences, or meanings. I have to wonder if their arguing was what caused him to leave us.

I think Marm couldn't endure her thoughts about Benny anymore and my father didn't understand that. Every day, until I was eight years old, Benny and Papa sat with us here in this very room where I sit. Benny's long legs and arms took up the space beside our stove, the way he settled himself, all angles, nearly a man. Under the window I slept beside him, his head at my feet, which he would tickle to wake me in the morning before he went off to work with Papa in the factory.
At night they brought us fresh rye bread and chopped chicken livers to eat and served them when Marm was too tired to cook. Their laughter filled our lives, and now they are both gone. A quiet has grown over us like a heavy fungus, every year another inch of thick white matter, covering us.

Neither Marm nor I can bear to speak of them.

She wrote so many letters to the government looking for my father after the war ended. Their return notice claimed soldier 3040, Gregory Galewski, Missing in the Field. His body has not been found, they said. He will come home someday; I store in my heart that hope. I am grateful the government began to send us my father's pay after they declared him missing; they send pay to Mrs. Finkel's family too. We all so very much need the money. I must get a job, and soon.

M
arm suggested
I go to the employment agencies to look for work, as well as checking the boards and the newspapers. I sent letters to six job advertisements in the
American
, and two from the board, but no one has made any offerings. I feel it has nothing to do with my skills, as I can type faster than any girl in our class, and I've told no one that I'm Jewish, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I know I shouldn't despair, but I can't help hearing that little squeak of fear that nothing will ever change, that I'll be at Mrs. Browning's School for Girls for the rest of my days, learning to draw portraits and tally numbers in French and paint with watercolors and fashion a proper skirt.

Tonight, as I was preparing for bed, I took down my hair and began to do my hundred strokes when I noticed a long gray growing from my temple, the length of the rest of my
hair. Resisting the urge to pluck it from my head, I stretched it between my hands and examined it. Its color is the opposite of the rest of my hair, a stark white in the raven blackness, its quality so different, like wire nestled in a bed of silk threads. How is it that a sixteen-year-old girl is growing gray, and what causes the hair to change color so abruptly? Maybe I'm becoming someone else, and will wake with a whole head of grays one morning, and a new name. I'll be like Dorian in that Oscar Wilde story, only the opposite will happen to me; I'll become old before my time.

When I consider my hair or nails, these things I can see growing on myself, I wonder why cells take certain shapes. Marm brought home a special edition of the
Scientific American
where a man named Dr. Golgi explained his experiments with cells and the nervous system. The magazine described a cell as a structural unit of living matter, with walls and a little nucleus inside—and I must say, I can't quite see it. I can't see it as a thing alive, not flat as in a drawing. What does it look like, exactly? How is it these cells make up a face, or a body, and not some other form? The very idea of cells, that it takes many hundreds of them to make us, intrigues me. If they are many, and separate, how, then, are we held together? Is it simply gravity, or is there some sort of glue?
Perhaps it's the bones that hold the cells together somehow? But the article said even bones are made of cells—leaving me utterly perplexed. The article did not provide enough answers, and not knowing makes me fear that I may burst into a constellation of infinite points at any moment.

I wish we could afford to buy the
Scientific American
more often; that is another reason to have my own money.

O
ld Mrs. Zanberger
fell in the hallway in a dead faint this week. Her mass filled the narrow space, all those years of sweet challah bread, potato latkes, and rugelach, all the stews she makes for her ever-changing boarders, and the breads and fruit pies she sells, layers of it building up, stretching her skin. It took Mr. Zanberger, and the latest boarder, and two of the Moskowitz boys to pick her up and take her in a carriage to the hospital, where they kept her. Marm made her an apple basket and told me to bring it to her. She was in the heart ward with a dozen other women, six beds to either side of the long room, and hers at the end. She was sitting up, trying to embroider. I looked at her closely, the dusty circles that dragged at her puffy eyes, her lips white and fingers swollen, the chins that lay on her chest. I had the chilling feeling I could see her dying one cell at a time.

“When are you getting married?”

She interrupted my examination of her with the question.

I stammered out an answer. “I'm very busy with school.”

“You're going to end up like your mother, never able to meet a nice Jewish man because she doesn't go to services. She'll spend the rest of her days lonely if she isn't careful.”

I reminded Mrs. Zanberger that we are awaiting my father's return.

She gave me her knowing look and said, “The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, is coming. I told your mother about the High Holy Day services. You'll be there, yes?” I knew Marm had excused us, as usual, but Mrs. Zanberger didn't wish to take no for an answer.

I shrugged and nodded and shook my head.

Her little eyes found mine, and she said, “Jews are a happy people. Come to service, sing with us, it'll make you smile. You're too serious, just like your papa was.”

Is. I wanted to correct her: Just like your papa is. But I didn't.

I often see the Jews spilling out of temple, their children singing Hebrew songs and dancing in the streets. But when I see them building their succhas for the holiday, I feel the
religion like a name someone else called me, one I knew didn't belong to me.