Israel (22 page)

East Broadway was a mass of happy people hurrying to New Year's Eve festivities. Abe let himself be swept along through the chilly darkness to Chatham Square. He angled eastward and left the crowds behind as he headed toward the river. He stopped into a saloon on South Street near the Fulton Fish Market to get warm and have a drink.

The saloon had no name. It was dimly lit, it lacked tables, and it sported pale green peeling walls, sawdust on
the floor and a long, splintery bar where dockhands and fishermen lifted glasses of whiskey and beer. The saloon stank of smoke and spoiled catches, but a whiskey here, even on New Year's Eve, was only a dime. Elsewhere, Abe knew, you could pay two bits for a drink on a holiday.

Tonight the saloon was packed with Irish, Portuguese and Italians elbowing for a place at the bar. Abe was the only Jew. If the other men had recognized him as such there could have been trouble, but Abe was clean-shaven and hatless. He knew from past experience that Italians and Portuguese often mistook him for a fellow countryman. Nobody would bother him nor even speak to him.

Abe had started coming here every night around October. It was a waste of money, he knew, but he indulged himself anyway. Whiskey helped him relax after working all day on Allen Street. He didn't like the goyish saloons very much, but there were no better cheap places around and certainly no bars in the Jewish neighborhoods.

Abe wouldn't have gone to them even if there were. He wanted no company when he drank. He preferred to drift back in time to those days when he and Haim shared a bottle of schnapps before falling asleep in the back of their shop.

Taking the bottle to bed with him was still the way that Abe most liked to drink, but he was once again crammed into an extra bedroom with another boarder. As was usually the case, he and his roommate were jockeying for favor with the family. Abe could just hear the outraged howls and demands that he pack up and leave if it was known that he drank.

He couldn't face having to move again. While it was one thing to be rich and hated, it was quite another to be excluded from the rest of the world when one was poor. Once he'd had his savings to keep him company. Now that he had nothing, he could feel himself growing old. Once
he'd been envious of the happy family life of his landlords; now he was just bitter and often preoccupied with sour musings on why he was a failure.

Besides, it was expensive to move. Each family asked more rent than the one before, especially now that garment workers were making more money. A boarder was at the mercy of the landlord family. Abe had increased his weekly savings out of his heftier salary. In the four months since the strike ended he had cached away forty-eight dollars, but moving again would cut into these savings.

Forty-eight dollars, another beginning. So many beginnings. If only he were a better man, or at least tougher, but his misery tormented him.

If he was a good man, why was he so unhappy? Was it because he'd been a fool? Perhaps lending the money hadn't been a good deed, but only a stupid one. In that case he truly had lost everything, including his self-respect. He had no peace, no peace at all.

Abe leaned heavily against the bar. He'd not eaten since the morning, and his three whiskeys went straight to his head. The blessed numbness began in his lips and tongue and finally crept through his brain, dulling his jagged pain. He paid the bartender and went outside. The sidewalk seemed to sag beneath his feet as he walked toward the river. From some far tower a clock chimed ten.

The night seemed crisper and the stars brighter than before, but Abe was no longer cold. The weather, like the anguish, was on the far side of the whiskey.

He walked south on Front Street, past dark buildings and deserted docks. From the shadows came the rustling of rats. He also heard the water slapping against the pilings, and occasionally himself, laughing out loud for no particular reason. He heard nothing else. This part of the city was deserted on New Year's Eve.

He walked all the way to Battery Park and loitered there, leaning on a railing, letting the wind sing to him as he
gazed out at the inky chop of the bay. The lights of Ellis Island glimmered in the distance. The whiskey was holding sway within him; for a moment it made him dizzy. He imagined that the suddenly unsteady ground was the heaving deck of a steamship. He thought about the day he'd first set foot on American soil.

For one brief but horrifyingly intense moment he thought about hurling himself over the balustrade. The black shifting water below seemed to yawn like a mouth, promising blessed oblivion after brief moments of icy agony. Abe went so far as to tighten his grip on the wooden railing. His leg muscles tensed for the leap—

He turned away and began to walk rapidly home. He would not kill himself. What if Haim someday found out?

On Wall Street he passed a group of celebrants. They wished him a happy New Year and allowed him several pulls from their flasks. The whiskey fueled him for the rest of his long walk home. It was well after midnight. Abe's first decision of the New Year was to buy himself a flask.

Winter softened into spring. Abe was putting in his days at Allen Street and more and more nights at the waterfront saloon. He was saving less money now and spending more on whiskey. He didn't care. It was the thought of a drink that got him through the day.

In April Abe discovered that God had not forsaken him after all. The miracle occurred on a Wednesday afternoon. Abe would remember not only the heat and unpleasantness of the sweatshop but also the way the April wind drove the cleansing spring rain against the black window panes. The sound of the rattling glass was a reminder that in a hairsbreadth God can change everything; that His alone is the power to renew the world by renewing a dream.

It was a little before five o'clock and the shop was
steamy as the pressers feverishly worked their irons. A shipment of coats had to be gotten out before the end of the day.

The manufacturer's foreman was not there. He was less and less in evidence these days. Mostly he just checked in with de Fazio at the end of the day. Stefano was able to get more out of the men through their loyalty to him and the union than the foreman could.

Stefano himself no longer worked a pressing machine. As union representative he spent his days overseeing shop productivity and watching out for his members' interests. Stefano counted every garment finished by every worker and kept a careful tally of each man's total in a ledger.

Abe, sweat-sodden and exhausted, was waiting for the long day to end two hours from now. The humidity, combined with his hangover from the previous night's bout of drinking, had left him extra thirsty. He'd already drained his tin can of drinking water and thought about going to fill it, but the sink was on the far side of the loft. In the few minutes it would take to complete the errand he could press three more coats.

I'll do ten more coats and then get the water, he decided. When those ten were done, he told himself just ten more. He was very thirsty now, and he used his discomfort as a goad to force himself to keep up the pace.

Ten more and I'll have a nice, cool drink; ten more; ten more. It was tricks like that that got a man through the day.

His corner of the loft, where all the pressing machines were grouped together, was as cloudy as a Turkish bath. Abe could not see past his own machine. He could hear the hiss and sigh of his neighbor's pressing irons, but the man himself, who'd been hired to take Stefano's place, was lost in the fog.

As Abe worked he found himself absentmindedly reaching for the drinking can, only to remind himself that
it was empty. At that point he'd fall back on his “ten more coats” ploy to keep himself going. A few minutes would pass, his thoughts would move onto other things and he once again found himself reaching for the can out of habit.

It was during one of these intervals that Abe, reaching out, found his hand colliding with that of another worker. The man tilted the tin can as if to assure himself that it was empty and then dropped something into it.

“Some of us heard what happened,” the man said in Yiddish. “It was a mitzvah, what you did.”

Abe tried to see who it was, but the sweat in his eyes combined with the clouds of vapor rising off of his machine to obscure the man's features.

“You should take this from a few of us with thanks,” the man added, and then he was gone.

Abe pawed at the tin can. Inside it he found wadded together five crumpled, soggy dollar bills.

He stared at the money and then squinted after the man who'd given it to him, all the while shaking his head in disbelief. How did that fellow, whoever he was, find out what had happened?

Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. Abe half turned. It was the new man who worked Stefano's presser. “1 heard what you did,” the man said in English thickly tinged with Polish. “I'm grateful to join a union, and I know it's thanks to you.” He shook Abe's hand, pressing a dollar into his palm. “I saved this out of my first few weeks' pay.”

Before Abe could think of a reply, he was distracted by two other men who stepped out of the steamy fog to drop money into his tin can and then silently disappear.

“Abe, this is for you with thanks,” yet another man said, dropping money into the tin. The two right behind him only nodded shyly, smiling as they added their contribution to the can.

“For you, Abe.”

“Thanks, Abe.”

“To make it up for what they pulled on you, Abe.”

He watched his shoulders slumped and his baggy undershirt hanging from his scrawny frame. He stared in stupefaction as a procession of men glided like ghosts out of the steam fog to pay their respects. Some spoke to him; others gripped his hand or shoulder in affection; many merely nodded gruffly, but all dropped currency into the tin can.

He stood dumbstruck, a mute, enchanted spectator. Not me, he thought in wonder. It's not me they mean. He realized he was sobbing; then he began trembling like a lover in the throes of passion, a suitor finally the recipient of sweet ardor too long unrequited. He did not think about the money. He was content to bask in gratitude, as warm and dazzling as golden sunshine. They were all clapping him on the back. He was the center of attention.

I'm a hero, Abe gradually realized. In the dazzled far reaches of his thoughts Haim reared up, smiling affectionately.

“Hero!” Haim was saying, “I'm proud of you, hero.”

Stefano de Fazio suddenly appeared at Abe's side. The stocky Italian put his arm around Abe's shoulders and guided him away from the pressing machines toward a relatively cool area of the loft given over to long work tables piled high with finished garments. This was where the union representative maintained his “office.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” Stefano gently slapped Abe's cheek. “You feed me all kinds bullshit, eh, my friend? Why I got to go uptown to headquarters to find out you never got your money back?”

Abe didn't know what to say. The Italian had taken to wearing a suit with a vest and tie to work, a different one every other day. Abe had begun to think of Stefano as a superior, which only added to his tongue-tied awkwardness.

“I didn't want to cause no trouble,” Abe finally stammered. “Didn't think it would help any, and—”

De Fazio shook his head disapprovingly. “We ain't greenhorns, right? The squeaky wheel gets the grease, Abe. You got to talk up if you want your due.”

“I didn't want no trouble,” Abe repeated. “Making trouble never helped nothing.”

“You never had trouble before, Abe? I mean, what's the big deal if you complain?”

“For you, I meant. I didn't want trouble for you with the union.”

Stefano stared at him for an instant. “You're not kidding, are you? Sweet Mary, you're not.” His rotund features brightened with genuine pleasure. “That's nice, Abe, really. I got to tell the other guys about that kinda loyalty.”

“Here, you mean?” Abe asked, puzzled. “These workers?”

“Nah,” Stefano laughed. “These guys I got. I mean at the other locals. There's an election coming up, right?” Abe stared blankly.

“Anyway, I figured something wasn't right about you saying you got your money on account of the way you were down in the dumps. I asked myself, ‘Why ain't he happy 'stead of sad?' So I went uptown and found out all about it.”

“They threw me out and the guard beat me.”

“They told me.” Stefano made a face. “I gave them a piece of my mind about that.” He straightened the knot in his necktie.

“So they gave you back the money, Stefano?”

“Nah, I didn't ask for it back. It woulda taken too long to work it all out, going through channels.”

Abe had no idea whatsoever what de Fazio was saying. “That Miss Grissome,” he began obliquely, “she didn't make no trouble for you, I hope?”

“All you worry 'bout is causing other people trouble.” Stefano ran his hands through his glistening black curls. “You were afraid of Miss Grissome—She is just a bookkeeper, my friend. You let the guard that works for your union rough you up, and you take it quiet 'cause you're afraid a bookkeeper is gonna make trouble.” He scowled. “Ain't you ever stood up to anybody in your life?”

Abe considered the question, stung that what he considered heroic stoicism might be viewed by others as cowardice. In Russia he'd been respected for his circumspection, but also for his ability to speak up for himself. There was the time he defied the village rabbi, and once he argued with the tax collector, and hadn't he valiantly stood over the body of his fallen captain, defending the officer against the rioters of St. Petersburg?

“I guess I never stood up to any Americans,” Abe said. “To fight with Americans would be like making a fuss in somebody else's house, you know, Stefano?”

“This ain't somebody else's country, it's ours,” de Fazio told him. “What are you behaving like a guest for?”