Modern Girls (2 page)

“I do,” I said.

Mr. Dover’s laugh was deep and sincere. I didn’t see the point in false modesty. Since grammar school, I’ve excelled in mathematics.

“You enjoy working with numbers?” he asked.

“Very much, sir,” I said. “If you do the numbers properly, you’ll always get the expected outcome.” My mind alighted on
May 24
and the expected outcome, the horrific, dreaded outcome. “I find it much less complicated than—well, just about anything else.”

“How refreshing to meet a girl who knows her strengths. So many girls try to hide behind ignorance.”

I didn’t want him to think me unkind, so I didn’t point out that for many of these girls, the ignorance wasn’t exactly feigned. Instead I said, “I find, sir, there is nothing to be gained from that.”

Mr. Dover nodded sagely. He was old—probably a full ten years older than me, making him twenty-nine, maybe even thirty—and he projected an air of confidence that comes from privilege and age. “Are you planning on marrying anytime soon, Dorothea?”

A heat crawled into my cheeks as I considered how to answer him. I tried not to fidget, but I found myself tugging my dress, making sure my knees were more than well covered and my belly was hidden. Could others tell? I wasn’t used to discussing such intimate matters with a man with whom I was not well acquainted. Mr. Dover must have sensed my discomfort, as he immediately corrected himself. “What I am given to say is that since Mr. Herbert left, I have been overwhelmed trying to perform the duties of head bookkeeper as well as manage the rest of the affairs of the office. I recognize the superiority of your work, and I would like to offer you the position of head bookkeeper, but I’m afraid you will leave us soon to start a family.”

With a flinch, I wondered what he suspected. But no, I
realized, he was speaking in generalities. A ray of hope rose through me, an honest smile that couldn’t help but bubble to the surface. Was he promoting me?

“I have a beau,” I said, “but we are not yet engaged. I would also hope, sir, you would perhaps consider keeping me on even if I do marry.”

Getting married, which I had longed for during these past three years in which Abe and I dated, was fast becoming a necessity. May 24 to August 16. How much time did that give me? Could I convince Abe to marry me? Would he pretend the child was his? Even as the picture painted itself in my head, I knew the ridiculousness of it. Abe would no more marry me and have another man’s child than he would run for president. He would be humiliated. Abe would despise me if he knew the truth. No, it was essential Abe never find out.

Mr. Dover said, “I’m afraid that would be up to your husband, now, wouldn’t it? So how about it? Would you like to be the head bookkeeper? I’ve interviewed some men for the position, but I have decided you are significantly more qualified.”

As he spoke, my mind did the math. How long did I have for Abe to reasonably think the baby was his, just early? A week? Two at the most. How long till my belly protruded, till my shame was declared to the world?

“I should add,” Mr. Dover said, “that this comes with a raise. You’d be earning twenty-three dollars and fifty cents a week.”

I perked up. Abe and I hadn’t married before now because we couldn’t afford it. More money meant we could afford a place to live that much sooner and perhaps this would convince him it was finally the time to marry. Trying to hide my excitement, I simply nodded at my boss. I knew I probably wasn’t more qualified than the men, just cheaper. Yet this was a substantial raise, and I was pleased. This could be my salvation.

“That’s a yes?” Mr. Dover said, a hint of tease in his voice.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Thank you, sir.”

“Very good.”

Right then the front door to the office opened again, and Florence bounded in, followed by her pals. “Irene, I can’t believe you left my clutch behind. You took the lipstick from it and then didn’t bother bringing it?”

“Sorry,” Irene said.

Florence stopped abruptly when she saw Mr. Dover. “Well, well,” she said, her voice suddenly overflowing with syrup. Looking suspiciously at me, she stepped closer to our handsome boss. “Mr. Dover! Fancy seeing you at the tabulation tables. Have you a sudden call to work the numbers yourself?” She tried to bat her eyes seductively, but she merely looked like she had an eyelash caught beneath her lid.

Mr. Dover spread his charm over the women. “As long as you’re here, I have good news.”

“Oh?” Florence said. She beamed at Mr. Dover, but as he stood and glanced around, she gave me a look full of arsenic.

“I’ve promoted Dorothea to head bookkeeper. She will take over for Mr. Herbert, so you will all now report directly to her. Dorothea, you may move your belongings to Mr. Herbert’s table.”

Under the watchful eye of the girls, I gathered my sweater, my purse, and the lunch—which was a little awkward, juggling the sandwich and napkin. Holding them all in front of my stomach, of which I was suddenly so aware, I moved to the head of the room. A single table faced the office, like the teacher’s desk in grammar school. Nothing distinguished it except for its location and that it had a chair instead of a stool, and yet, a swell of pride rushed through me as I turned and faced the room, seated in my new location.

Mr. Dover said, “Congratulations, Dorothea, on work well-done. I’m confident we’ll see more of the same in the future.” He nodded at the girls, and then retreated to his office behind my new post.

The girls stood speechless, looking to Florence for cues on
how to react. Irene timidly said, “Congrats, Dottie. You deserve it,” before Florence’s narrowed eyes had her sputtering to silence.

With a self-satisfied smile, I ostentatiously glanced at the large ticking hands of the clock on the wall between the windows and said, “You girls better hurry along. Lunch ends in eighteen minutes.”

“You haven’t eaten much of your sandwich,” Florence said. “I knew that Yid food tasted terrible.”

With great show, I picked up the sandwich again and took a large bite, the meat flaccid in my mouth, as I pointed to the clock.

With a sharp intake of breath, Florence spun around and strode from the room, the other girls trotting to keep up. How long would it take Florence to realize she still didn’t have her clutch?

I sat down, chewing slowly, hoping that would make the sandwich go down easier. I threw back my shoulders, feeling taller somehow from this vantage point. This was my solution. Abe would be proud of my promotion, proud of my raise. And perhaps we could marry—soon!—in time to solve the problem before anyone but me knew it existed.

Yet even the idea of a solution didn’t stop my stomach from mutinying completely. Without even thinking, I grabbed the wastebasket next to my desk and crudely unswallowed the contents of my stomach. Tears threatened.

Two weeks. I had only two weeks.

Friday, August 16

I couldn’t stop sweating.
How many
Shabbeses
have I made in August?
I wondered. If Dottie were here, she’d calculate, without even paper and pencil, the number of August
Shabbeses
I’ve had in my thirty-nine years. Except she’d be wrong. Because I’ve seen forty-two years of
Shabbeses
, not thirty-nine. Only Perle—the one who has been by my side since we were in the cradle back home—knows the truth of my age, but Perle can be trusted to take my secret to the grave. The point is that this was not my first August
Shabbes
, but still I suffered so.

The sweat rolled from me like water streaming from a pump. With the dishrag I wiped my forehead before holding the chicken over the gas flame of the stove, just long enough to singe the bird. The smell of the gas stung my nostrils. I leaned toward the window over the kitchen sink, but even the breeze up here on the fourth floor wasn’t enough to cut the smothering closeness of the humid air.

With well-practiced hands, I pulled the pinfeathers from the carcass, but wooziness washed through me, so I moved to sit at the small kitchen table.
Kashering
a chicken was no difficult task, but it was important to be meticulous with the required steps; one small nick in the wrong place and the entire chicken would be rendered unkosher, inedible. Preparing chickens for
Shabbes
I’ve been doing since my hands were large enough to grasp the feathers, and of all
the things that changed when I came to America, cooking chickens wasn’t one of them. True, here I had a gas stove and a sink with a running tap, a vast improvement over a wood-burning stove and water retrieved from a well. And back home in Russia, there were
Shabbeses
when we had no chicken, but—thank God—they were few and far between.

Why was I so tired? I had my suspicions. Whispered among the women, referred to vaguely, was . . . What did they say? About how a woman’s body changed. Her courses stopped coming. And it had been nearly three months since last I had my time. But wasn’t forty-two too young for this? Of course that other possibility—the other reason a woman’s courses stopped coming—had crossed my mind, but that was ridiculous. Forty-two was definitely too old for
that
.

My leg throbbed more than usual, the old injury flaring even though no cloud was in sight. My leg was as good a barometer as any on a ship at sea. I cut the fowl’s nails, sliced off its head, and, turning back the skin at the nape, chopped the neck as close to the body as I could.

A commotion on the street distracted me for a moment, but who had time for such nonsense? I needed to focus on my task. I couldn’t afford another chicken if this one wasn’t
kashered
properly.

The sweat dripped down the back of my neck, into the collar of my dress. I attempted to wipe away the perspiration, but didn’t want the chicken juice to drip into my hair. While bathing would be a proper way to usher in the day of rest, it was a luxury reserved for a less busy day.

My skin itched and the dampness not only cloaked me but seeped within. Trying to disregard my discomfort, I made an incision just below the bird’s breastbone. Wrenching my hand inside the hole, I pulled at the fat and entrails until they yanked loose. Yet as my hand freed the greasy viscera, my stomach churned in a familiar way.

How could it be? I’d never heard of digestion troubles as a symptom of a woman’s change. They were a symptom of . . . “No!”
I said out loud, before making sure the boys weren’t there to hear me. Of course if they were there, they would merely assume I was speaking to them. It was the word I uttered most to my three sons.

Shaking my head to force out unpleasant thoughts, I waited for the feeling to pass. It subsided—a bit—and I fished out the entrails, placing them in a bowl. Deborah went to the new butcher the next block over, who
kashered
the chicken for her, but those chickens were three cents more a pound, and I had better things on which to spend my money. For nineteen years, I’d been keeping a secret stash, tucked in a tea tin at the bottom of my delicates drawer. Whenever I had spare change, it went into that tin. Just this morning, as I dropped a nickel in, I realized I had reached ninety dollars. If I had paid someone else to
kasher
my chickens, my tin would be empty. Besides, how could I trust someone else to
kasher
my meat properly? Some things must be done by oneself.

Looking back at the chicken, I removed the liver from the gall. This was the most delicate step; the gall is not kosher, and if it broke, I wouldn’t be able to use the liver. This was one of the most important duties of being a wife, and I had no idea how Dottie was going to manage it when she made her own home with Abe. So many things Dottie never learned. Chasing her father around, looking after her brothers, daydreaming with her fashion magazines. Yet, lack of
kashering
skills aside, Dottie had done well for herself. Working in Midtown, with all those numbers. A bookkeeper was a respectable job. Dottie would do something with her life. It was for her I saved my pennies. But still. A woman also had to know how to keep a home. Although, at the pace Abe moved, there was time to teach her before he proposed.

I dumped the entrails in a pan and covered them with water. These would sit until after
Shabbes
, when I would use them to flavor the stew I would make on Sunday for the coming week. The head I would save to make a soup, but for now, I took the chicken and let it soak so I could sit and enjoy my cup of tea and the morning mail. I had a letter from my brother Yussel I was anxious to read.

This was my only moment to myself, when Ben was at work at the garage, Dottie at her office, and the boys had been shooed off to play. On most mornings, I’d sit at the table, spread open the
Forverts
, the daily Yiddish paper, and consume the news as if it were a morning snack. But when I had a letter from family, it was as if I had a feast.

Using a table knife, I gingerly slit open the envelope, not wanting to rip even a single word. Pulling out the thick sheet of paper, I smiled at the still-childish scrawl in which my baby brother wrote. The Yiddish lines slanted downward, as if trying to escape the page. No one would know, looking at this writing, that Yussel was a learned man of thirty-three years. A glance at the top told me the letter was written less than three weeks ago. The mail moved quickly these days.

“Dearest sister,” the letter began. “At the outset I can write you that Gerda, the children, and I are healthy, and we are hoping to hear good things from you and to see each other in good health. I received your letter Friday morning and read with pleasure that you are well. I am pleased to hear of your work with the Women’s Committee of the Socialist Party, a worthy cause to support. But I beg of you, please do not worry so for us.”

Yussel wasted too much time on pleasantries. I brushed my hand across the creases of the paper, trying to make the words easier to read, but the sweat on my arm blurred the ink. Alarmed, I blotted the page and dried myself on the kitchen cloth. The letter continued: “Tensions are building between the Free City of Danzig and Poland over Danzig’s seeming embrace of Germany, but so far it has no effect on us Jews. The Poles are only interested in the Poles. If anything, I’m profiting from the politics, as my business is flourishing with the new demand for photos for identity cards. My studio is so busy that I have taken on a second apprentice.”

Was Yussel telling the truth? Or shielding me from his hardships? Even the American newspapers reported on the Poles’ discrimination against the Jews. Frustratingly, though I am the
elder, Yussel tries to protect me, and it was clear my brother needed to get out of Poland. It was no better than Russia, although at least in Poland no one was trying to conscript him. Warsaw had always been meant as a temporary stop, on the way to the port in Danzig. In 1924, Yussel had saved enough money to bribe Russian officials for a passport, yet he arrived in Poland only to discover that the United States had closed: No visas were being issued to Jews. So he settled in Warsaw. Married. Had a son and two daughters. And he waited.

“We hear alarming news from Gerda’s relations in Munich, and they are working with the relief organizations to leave. Priority is being given to the Jews fleeing Germany. Perhaps if we had settled there instead of Warsaw, we would have better luck obtaining visas. I have been in contact with—” My attention was diverted by the pounding of feet on the stairs leading to the apartment. I recognized the lumbering footfalls of Alfie and the gentler ones of Eugene trailing behind.
Just ten minutes,
I pleaded to no one in particular.
Continue on up to the roof and give me ten minutes of peace.

But who gives a mother peace? The steps stopped and the door opened so forcefully it banged against the wall behind it.

“You need to slam the door so?” I bellowed to Alfie in Yiddish.

“Ma,” he called back.

“Wipe your feet. Don’t go bringing the street into the house.” The way we yelled at each other, you’d think we lived in a Park Avenue mansion, and not the two-bedroom apartment that was about as big as a streetcar. My eyes didn’t leave the letter, though. I read, “I have been in contact with the HIAS representative and he believes a visa to Cuba is attainable. Luckily between the studio, the money from Gerda selling eggs, plus what the children bring in, we have plenty to soothe officials who may be less than eager to grant us papers.”

Alfie came into the kitchen. “Ma, I need two cents to buy the paper,” he said in English. Eugene trailed behind him, his eyes
half-hidden by his cap, not that he ever looked folks in the eye. That boy. As shy as a bride on her wedding night.

“There’s a paper on the dining table.” It irritated me that my younger boys refused to speak in our own language. My English was fine—I understood everything said to me—but I preferred to use my mother tongue, and I wished my children had the courtesy to respond to me in Yiddish.

“Yitzak has gone to
yeshiva
,” Yussel wrote, “fulfilling the dreams of Mama, may her memory be a blessing. God willing, we will be far from Hitler and the insanity of Poland soon. Write, dear sister, as soon as you can, if you haven’t written until now. Be healthy, both you and yours. From me, your eternally devoted brother, Yussel.”

Alfie hopped a few steps to the next room, before saying, “Not the
Yiddish
paper, Ma. I need the
Herald Tribune
.” Coming back to the kitchen, he pulled at my sleeve and pointed to the kitchen window. “Don’tcha hear ’em?”

With an exasperated sigh, I set the letter down. I would reread it five more times today, trying to understand the meaning behind the words. But now, I gave my attention to my boys. Tilting my head slightly, I let myself tune in to the noise of the street, the noise I had been trying to ignore. It rang out clearly. The newsboy called, “Extra, extra! Will Rogers and Wiley Post killed at Point Barrow! Extra, extra!” His voice grew louder and softer as he walked closer to and then farther from the apartment on his march up and down the block. I groaned as I heaved myself from the table, my leg twitching in pain as I hobbled to the window. It wasn’t easy to see through the blackened glass—how many times had I scrubbed the bottom clean only to have it clouded over with dust and ash before I’d finished the top pane?—but looking down, I couldn’t miss the flood of children.

“Your father will have an English paper when he gets home,” I said, distracted by the children who were pouring out of doors, tumbling down steps, and running through the streets to hear the news. All those children and my leg was throbbing and the
chicken entrails, soaking beneath my nose, made my stomach seethe.

“Ma, I can’t wait,” Alfie said.

Eugene piped up behind him. “It’s Will Rogers, Ma. Will Rogers! And he’s dead.”

Some actor who wouldn’t have known these boys from Adam dies and they’re all up in arms?
Will Rogers.
Feh.

But all those children. Swarming. Massing in the road. Children everywhere. Every apartment on Tenth Street housed throngs of children. In my own house, there were four. Seven-year-old Eugene. Nineteen-year-old Dottie. Izzy at seventeen. And ten-year-old Alfie. Oh, Alfie. Joey would have been ten as well but . . .

The sounds echoed through the street and the children scampered about. No doubt the children outnumbered the adults.

The roiling in my stomach threatened to erupt, and I was grateful I hadn’t eaten yet, that there was nothing to return. That nausea that was so familiar and so unwelcome. Despair settled over me.
Please,
Hashem
, let this be my change.
Seeing all those children brought a deluge of unwelcome thoughts. Thoughts of Joey; thoughts of Yussel—who was a twelve-year-old boy last I saw him—trapped in Europe; thoughts of what this sickness I was experiencing might be.

The voice of the newsboy faded as he made his way down the street again, pausing at each newly outstretched hand.

All those children.