Ellis Island & Other Stories (21 page)

At seven, she jumped out of bed and began a ritual of washing, looking, and the application of mysterious creams and oils, which she applied not only with her hands but with towels, cotton, little brushes, and strange womanly pompadores, none of which I had ever seen before that morning. “What are these pompadores and things?” I asked. She refused to answer, because either she was too absorbed in the daubing and stroking, or she could not believe that I did not know, or she didn’t want me to know. I have never been able to fathom the uses and complexities of the little tubes, jars, cylindrical brushes, Arabian tools, and Oriental implements that women use, and I imagine that it is because they do not actually make any sense whatsoever.

By eight, she was pulling herself into a fortress of clothing that she would have to dismantle an hour later when she started work at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts (“What is Brooklyn?” I asked) as the figure upon which would be based the realization of a five-ton marble statue entitled “Liberty in the New World.” As she laced up her boots, she spoke at triple speed of how difficult it was to be a nude model. No one knew her name—her
real
name—she said, just as no one knew mine. She made a lot of money, and it was all in the bank, waiting out the few years until she would return to Ohio as a rich woman, the honor of her family. Her eyes said that she would never go back, ever, but I didn’t challenge her. I merely asked about Ohio, and was told that it was the place in America which produced the majority of fine-arts models. I believed her, and, as I learned later, it was true.

She left at a run. Her footsteps on the stairs went round and round and down and down, as if she were running on a corkscrew, until a door slammed in a miracle of banging glass which did not break, and I was left alone in the studio, sitting on the bed. The stove had gone out, and when the wind rose to match the morning industry of the city’s six million hands, I decided to fling myself onto the street as Martha had done. To be flung out or to fling oneself out of doors seemed to be the pattern of daily life in this country.

But before I could jump through the lintels, the caretaker arrived and put me to work with a broom. He took me by the shoulder (I was so sick of that already that I almost punched him) and volunteered to get me a job. I didn’t understand his eagerness to help me, and he was vague about what I was going to do, but I was grateful nonetheless. He used the telephone to call his cousin, who was going to get me the job. I had never seen a telephone, or, in fact, heard of one (we were cut off from many modernisms; my education had been strictly rabbinic, and then, after I went my own way, classical). When he began to scream at the box on the wall, standing right up against it, I could not decide if he were a lunatic or if I didn’t know something that perhaps I should have known. After he was done, I asked him if the machine on the wall was a talking telegraph.

“No,” he said sarcastically. “It’s a pepper grinder.”

“Then, then why,” I asked sheepishly, pointing at it, “why did you talk to it—”

“Him.”

“I’m sorry. To him”—I looked at the telephone again—“to him, as if, as if…
he
were alive?”

“Talked to what?”

“To him,” I said, indicating the telephone.

“To
he,”
said the caretaker authoritatively.

“To
he,
” I repeated.

“I didn’t talk to he. Do you think I talked to he? You must be imagining things.”

“I apologize,” I said, and started to back off.

“Apologize to he,” said the caretaker.

I made a low bow to the telephone, and went to sit quietly by the window.

After a short time, the cousin (who said that his name was Herman Lerker) came in, carrying a wool jacket for me to wear. The two men exchanged a few words, and we were off. We ran down the stairs and hit the street at a fast trot, just the way I wanted. Everything was alive with morning, and I saw for the first time that the city was blue and gray. The colors and textures of the building stone were unfamiliar, like a new kind of cloth that one has never before seen, and the light was magically cold and revealing, so that paintings, prints, and drawings were suggested at every turn. For the city held winter like an armature, and was filled with the subtle and reluctant beauties of commercial civilization—that is, color, form, and movement which innocently combine only to rear up like a lashing wave. I was impressed, too, by the health of the horses. Never had I seen such full-bodied, shiny-coated, sweet-faced animals. (They flicked their thick brown tails like buggy whips.) I was told that we were to join a street crew in Brooklyn, and that I was to be an assistant fire tender.

It was snowing in Brooklyn—a fitting expression of the easy silence that clasps the borough and contains it like a crystal palace. We traveled along a tree-lined street bordered by fields and gardens; the trees were young and yellow and beginning to accumulate dry snow in a thicket of arches. As the snow began to swirl in occasional halfhearted squalls, one could not see far in any direction, and I was reminded of Rabbi Legatine. I hadn’t eaten, and was still giddy with amazement from the night before, but I was ready to work, to redeem Elise from the Island.

We came to a line of wagons and construction machinery. Twenty or thirty men were using pick and shovel a little way down the street, now visible, now whited out by the snowfall, I was taken inside a tarpaper shed mounted on a wagon. There, I met the crew boss.

“Absolutely perfect,” he said when he saw me. “Couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds, and he looks strong, too.” I didn’t know what he was talking about; nor did I understand English measures; but I was delighted to receive a compliment. “What’s your name?” he asked, ready to enter into a tattered logbook whatever words I spoke.

Rabbi Koukafka had said that Jews were not wanted for manual labor. Furthermore, I had had outstanding luck as Guido da Montefeltro and as Hershey Moshelies. I thought that the unfamiliar tumult in which I found myself required an active defense, at least in the beginning, since, for me, America was a dreamworld. And I had customarily (perhaps habitually) been willing to do my share in the nurturing of confusions. Therefore, I thought for a while, and (with what I assumed was deceptive nonchalance) arrived at a name for a heroic and dependable American worker.

“Whiting Tatoon,” I said, staring toward the blue Pacific. (Actually, I was staring toward the gray Sheepshead Bay.) The crew boss wrote it down.

“Okay, Herman,” he said. “Take Whiting out and show him what to do.”

I was introduced to several men in the snow

“This is Whiting Tatoon,” Herman said. “Our new fire rider.”

“Pleased to meet you, Whiting,” declared one of the men.

“Hello, Tatoon,” said another.

I was very proud. In the blink of an eye, I had become Whiting Tatoon, fire rider (whatever that was). If only my family had been alive, and I could have written to them. I pictured myself returning to Ellis Island and being announced to the Commissioner: “Whiting Tatoon, fire rider, is here.” I was then led to a stupendous machine, the function of which I could not discern.

A steel ring roughly ten feet across formed a base for three graceful legs supporting a tall cylindrical tank about twenty-five feet high. Projecting from the bottom of the tank were six evenly spaced nozzles. I climbed an attached ladder to a platform facing a maze of dials, levers, and valve handles. Herman took about an hour to teach me how to operate this machine. Its function was to melt the frozen roads so that the crews could dig them up. I was told that when everything went right the machine could do several miles a day. I had only to make sure that I made the road hot enough, but that I did not boil it, for then the mud and macadam would run right off the shovels. “How does it move?” I asked.

“You drive it,” said Herman. “That’s why you have to be light. It won’t go with a heavy man.”

As I was about to start it up and begin work, I saw Herman running away. I called out to him and asked where he was going.

He turned and yelled, “Just don’t let it explode.”

It looked dependable enough. The pressure was up. The gas/fluid mixture was balanced. The valves were clear. I sparked the primer flame and fired each of the six jets. At first they came on gently and burned comfortably orange. Before moving the main throttle, I strapped myself to the platform and leaned out like a window-cleaner. Then I moved the main lever, and the fire swelled into plumes several feet long. The lever was only on two, but it could have been pushed to ten. Even at two, I had to take off my jacket and my shirt. The heat rose past me as if I were standing upside down in a waterfall of flame. I moved the lever to five. The fire roared. Almost as tall as a man, the plumes were white and silver inside, yellow on the outside. They sounded like a storm at sea, and the pavement below them was boiling.

When the lever reached seven, the steel ring left the ground and the entire machine became as light and delicate as a feather on the wind. With slight shifts of my weight, I could make it go this way or that. If I touched the lever lightly, the plumes roared up and the machine would rise. I wondered what would happen at ten, but contented myself with swaying back and forth over the road in even sweeps, applying a bath of heat so that the men behind me (who seemed intent upon keeping a good space between themselves and the machine) could do their work. After three hours of this, I realized that I had been airborne all the time, that I directed the thing as if by second nature, and that, as long as I was alert to my own movements, there was no danger of tipping over.

We had lunch in the tarpaper shed. The workers were freezing cold, and held their hands around their tea mugs for the warmth. I, on the other hand, sat comfortably by the door, shirt off, drinking ice water. What a job! I wondered why no one else did it, and was grateful for my luck. I couldn’t think of anything more exciting or pleasurable than to fly about all day on six plumes of flame, turning, and swaying, and singing in the snow, while I followed a path that I had laid down in my imagination. Why, I asked myself, was this not the most sought-after job in the world? In the shed, the workers looked sullen and mean, and made me feel as if I were a king interrogating the lowliest of his subjects, saying, “Why won’t you be a king? I’m a king, and I love it. Why aren’t
you
a king?” They didn’t want to talk about it because, indeed, they were afraid to be fire riders.

Of what were they afraid? Did they fear that the machine might explode? That it would tip and crash? That they might be tempted to move the lever to ten and soar into the sky? In questioning them, and by intuition, I discovered that although they feared all these things, they were most afraid of the
fire itself.

Somehow, perhaps through accident or ignorance, I was not. I loved to drive that machine, and I can still feel it roaring and swaying. I was the fire rider, the one who directed the flame, the man who flew. It was a good lesson, and I enjoyed it immensely.

I am glad that I enjoyed it immensely, for it did not last long. We got back to work after lunch. I repressurized the apparatus and started it up. Lifting slowly off the ground, I discovered that I felt extraordinarily at ease. I could maneuver it with the utmost precision. I could even make it dance. For an hour or two, I heated up the road just as I had done in the morning, but then we came to a crossroads of cobbles. The men would have to pry these up, and all I had to do was fly over them once or twice to melt the ice between the cracks. As soon as I had done this, I turned the corner onto a wide snow-covered street. I was alone, and had to wait twenty minutes for the others, so I flew down the road. How easy it was! I pushed the lever to eight, and sped along five feet above the ground, as fast as an express train. Tilted forward slightly, the machine was as steady as a stone pier. I moved the lever to ten.

The machine exploded with a crack and a roar. My head bent back from the acceleration. Wind and snow blinded me, and then I saw that I was flying above fields, trees, and houses. As I passed over a skating pond, the children fled in all directions. (What a pity that I frightened them.) I was sorry that I had ruined such a wonderful device, and sorrier still that my career as Whiting Tatoon, fire rider, was over. But perhaps it was for the best, as I next found myself in a place of such strange and yet familiar beauty that it was (in its way) a balance for having ridden fire.

I awoke in a snow-covered garden, among many gnarled and blackened fruit trees lined with ice and powder. This was so like a Baltic orchard, complete with walls to keep out the wind, that I was not sure that, after a long drinking bout, I had not dreamed my trip to America while lying half conscious among the fruit trees. And the fact that I do not drink only served to make me suspect that perhaps I had. Though my face was reddened from the explosion, I could see no evidence of America. As I tried to get up, two hands gently pushed me down, and someone said, “Don’t move. We’re calling the rabbi.”

“Oh God!” I said as I saw my rescuers. They were Hassidim in round hats and old-style coats. They had about them a certain animated quality which made me think that underneath their heavy black clothing they were made of engines, springs, and rubber. There were three of them, adolescents with ridiculous silken beards. Energy glowed from them as if
they
had fire-burned faces, and when they spoke in their squeaky voices it was like birds in the morning.

Undoubtedly, I was home again, and had only dreamed of America. “No!” I screamed, and closed my eyes with all the muscles of my face, trying to emulate sleep. “I want to go back!”

“Meshugah,”
I heard one of them say.

“Meshugah,”
said the second one.

“Meshugah,”
confirmed the third. “I hope the rabbi comes fast.
He’ll
know what to do.”

“What rabbi?” I asked.

“The Saromsker Rabbi,” they said proudly. “Rabbi Figaro.”

I turned to the three boys. “First of all, ” I said, with tremendous authority, “I myself made up the Saromsker Rabbi, when I was on the Island. Secondly, no rabbi in his right mind could be named Figaro.”