Sex Wars (12 page)

When he reported back to Graves, the older man shook his hand warmly and clapped him on the back. “If we had more with your courage,
Anthony, this city would be a far safer place for innocent young men who come here to make their fortune and too often lose their souls.”

“I would like to do more, sir.”

“There’s always more to do of the Lord’s work, Anthony. But you should marry. It’s the only way to avoid temptation in the long run.”

“I would like to, sir. But I’m only a salesman. Matrimony is expensive.”

“That it is, young man. You have no idea how expensive.” Graves sighed. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another. It never stops.”

“I would like for it to start, sir.”

“With your stalwart faith, how can you doubt?”

Nice words, but Anthony was left to return to his dismal boarding-house as impoverished and lonely as ever. He could imagine a blissful married love, but he wondered if he would ever reach that state. All he saw ahead of him were hardscrabble times in the dry goods trade and boardinghouse after boardinghouse into old age. He felt trapped in a path that led nowhere.

M
RS. STONE HAD MOVED
out. She said it was improper for Freydeh to manufacture such things. She would not even pronounce the word. She could not have her good name linked with such an enterprise, but Freydeh heard on the street that Mrs. Stone’s cousin had a room for her over in Little Germany where they ran a family beer parlor. She could help out and get her room and board free.

They needed the space now far more than they needed a boarder. Freydeh bought the pure rubber in sheets from a dealer, saying that she was manufacturing dress shields. Probably he didn’t believe her; certainly he didn’t care. They hung the sheets over a rack. Then they would take a sheet and spread out the rubber on a metal table they bought from the widow of a doctor. They cut the pieces to various sizes, then fitted them over forms they had made. Then they dipped the condoms into a vulcanization
solution made from sulfur and white lead from the pharmacy so that the condoms would not be affected by temperature or become sticky. That was when they had to cook it on the stove.

She had learned lots of American words for condoms. Sometimes they were called capotes or baudruches or safes, French secrets, English letters, cundoms, cundrums, rubbers, gents protectors, skins, sheaths or envelopes. Some men preferred caps that covered only the head of the penis, but they were more difficult to make and had to fit very tightly. What Sammy and she made were full-length sheaths. Condoms were still made of intestines, but those were mostly inferior to rubber—except for the goldbeaters, thin and fine as silk. That took skill neither of them had, and they had no access to slaughterhouse products. First they had to master the process of vulcanization, sizing, sealing the edges. Finally they succeeded in making some product. Sammy tried what they considered their first successful condom, pouring water in. “No leak. Look, Freydeh. Watertight.”

“So, Sammy, we done it. Now we only got to produce a whole lot of them and then we start trying to sell them.”

Then he began to snicker. “This would be one weird-looking gent who could wear this.”

Freydeh sighed. “We have to cut better. Yah, he’d lean far to the left and bulge in the middle. I think we need cutting guides. Like dress patterns.”

“It’s hot work.”

“So is working in a laundry, but if we can make a bunch of them and sell them, we’ll do a lot better than that…” She wiped her forehead with a cloth dampened in the water Sammy had poured back into the enamel basin. “Did you ever go down to the river and bathe? Mrs. Goetz was talking about that—how they have bathing piers set up in the East River.”

“Yeah, I done that. They only open them in the summer, and they don’t like you to hang around too long. But it feels good on a day like this.”

“They say it may rain tomorrow and cool things down a bit.…In my old village, we used to bathe in the river, us girls. There was a
mikvah
of course—a ritual bath. But I liked the river better. It wasn’t no big river like the ones you have here. It was twenty feet wide and ten feet deep. I never felt so free as when I was splashing around in that river.”

“It’s great in the river here. Maybe we can go tomorrow?”

“You go, Sammy. You’re still a kid. You should have some fun. I’ll stay here and cook rubber.”

“You should go too. It gets awful hot in these tight streets. Stinks too,
worse than the rest of the year. It feels good to cool down for a little while.”

“Maybe. I’ll see.”

“You work all the time. You work for Yonkelman six days a week. You come back here and you work on the rubber. Then when we have any time we can get away, we go running around looking for Shaineh.”

“Is the life too hard for you, Sammy?”

“I only run errands. Sometimes he just sends me back here. Sometimes I sit around waiting. It’s easier than what I was used to on the street. But you, you’re like one of the horses that draw the trolleys—you’ll work till you drop in your tracks.”

“That’s sweet of you to worry about me.” She mopped the sweat from her forehead. It was running down her back, gathering under her breasts. “It’s just I can almost see what I want, but it’s still so far away, I’m running all the time to get closer. But okay, I’ll go with you tomorrow. We’ll dip ourselves in the river and wash the sweat off. I promise. Now we have to work faster. We can’t do one every hour.”

“Every hour! Freydeh, it took us a month to do this one.”

Mrs. Stone had told her she should not let Sammy call her by her given name, but she did not mind. Mrs. Stone kept saying he should be grateful. No, she wasn’t sorry to have that woman gone. She didn’t worry about Sammy taking advantage of her. They needed each other. They had settled in like a real family. It made her life less bitter to have him there. She felt from him in return a strong loyalty. Gratitude could turn sour, could turn into envy or resentment; she had seen that before. But loyalty was something that could last, like a well-made pot. Forget about boarders. She needed to put all her effort into trying to get launched in her new business. She didn’t want anyone interfering, telling her she was a bad woman. She didn’t think it wrong. Most women had more babies than they could raise or handle. Childbirth was dangerous and infants were fragile and weak. Children died in this neighborhood every day of a dozen diseases, they died of hunger, they died of thirst, they died of beatings, they died of the cold—half before they reached the age when they could care for themselves, ten or eleven. A good many of them were thrust out or ran away, like Sammy. No, she didn’t think something that might limit childbirth was a bad thing. She wished she had children, but most women had the opposite problem, far more babies than they could feed or care for. People like Mrs. Stone could not succeed in making her feel guilty for the work she had chosen.

The next afternoon, Sammy reminded her of her promise. She was embarrassed. “What do people wear?” In the shtetl, she and the other girls had simply hung their clothes on a bush or spread them out on the rocks. They would post a lookout, who would come in later and be replaced by one of the girls who had splashed around already. Finally she put on her cotton dress. It needed washing anyhow. She would wear the dress into the water. She wanted to be modest. Flaunting her body was not the way her dear mother had raised her.

She was nervous as they trooped to the East River, passing through the German section where both goyish and Jewish German-speaking people lived mixed up. Then they had to pass through the Irish section. Sammy clasped her hand in his and his other hand closed around a blackjack she had seen him slide into his pocket. Often Jews were attacked in these streets. They walked quickly through air like heavy woolen blankets pressing on them. They could smell the fat-rendering vats and the reek of blood from the slaughterhouses. Acid rose in her throat and she swallowed it down. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea, Sammy.”

“Just keep walking like you own the place. And don’t talk. If they hear you, they’ll know you’re Jewish. Keep quiet if anything happens and let me do the talking.”

Kids on stoops eyed them suspiciously and groups of men turned and watched them. But the only hail they got was from a couple of guys who yelled obscenities at Freydeh, saying what they would like to do to her. She only knew that because Sammy briefly, gruffly explained and they walked faster.

At last they got to the baths. She was nervous about how it would be. Sammy went in one door and motioned her to go to the women’s door. It was free but the towel cost a nickel. A German woman was blocking the entrance until each woman paid. Then she was handed a towel—thin as a piece of paper but it would do, it would have to do—and the German waved her through.

The baths were out on a pier in an elaborate floating building, the women’s on one side and the men’s on the other with high wooden fences enclosing them off from each other or from any observer. A square pond was open to the water below and the sky above. She walked gingerly along a floating dock that moved under her feet, that rolled with each passing boat. There was no collection of bathing beauties in fancy long woolen suits here, such as she had seen in the windows when she had strolled along Fifth Avenue. These were stout neighborhood women and their children,
splashing about the way she had with her sisters and friends, in her own little river back in the Pale. They were dressed any which way in whatever they dared get wet. The German woman at the door had told them all in German and English they could not wash themselves, but everyone was doing so anyhow, as best they could. She had a little piece of soap with her, made from suet and wood ash from the fireplace. For once all the women were getting along, the Irishwomen, the Hungarians, the Germans, the tough American-born. She heard two women speaking Russian and dog-paddled over to them. She suspected they were Jews because she had not met a Russian in New York who wasn’t. Yes, one of the women was still wearing the shaytl, the wig worn by all married women back in the Pale except for a few freethinkers and prostitutes.

She greeted them in Russian and then in Yiddish, so they would know who she was, and she told them where she came from.

“Is that near Vilna?” the younger of what she guessed were two sisters—the one not wearing the shaytl—asked her. “We’re from Odessa.”

“About three hours’ journey by horse. Have you been here long?”

“A year last month. It’s lonely for us. So many many people and so few speak the mother tongue. I’m Giborah. That’s Hetty.”

They compared notes. Giborah was unmarried. Hetty’s husband worked as a peddler and so did she. Giborah had been betrothed, but her fiancé had been murdered. “Which shul do you go to?” Hetty asked her.

Freydeh didn’t want to admit she didn’t go to shul. “I went to a German one on Allen Street, Beth El, but it was strange. All in German with little Hebrew and no Yiddish. All the melodies were different.”

“I know what you mean,” Hetty said. “We go to a tiny shul in a storefront on Orchard Street, but it’s real.”

“She means like we’re used to at home,” Giborah said. She was maybe two, three years younger than Freydeh and so thin there was just skin over the bones of her hand. Her hair was light brown and almost straight. Her gray eyes were watering from the river—it was none too clean, but it was better than not being washed. Hetty was round. Her face was plump, her chin perfectly rounded, and her eyes were gray-blue. Giborah did most of the talking for both of them.

Freydeh reminded herself to thank Sammy for making her come to the river. Maybe Shaineh had found that shul. She had always been a good girl and attended regularly with their parents and other siblings, long after Freydeh refused to go because it was superstition and she was a bold freethinker. There were not many of their countrymen here in New York, so if
Shaineh was looking for a shul where she could feel at home, that might be a place she would visit. Maybe ask for help. “I would love to go to your shul with you. It would make me feel more at home.”

Giborah squeezed Freydeh’s shoulder with her bony hand. “You come along, absolutely. You come to our flat Friday just after supper. We live at 71 Grand over the kosher butcher. The fourth floor back. You find us and we’ll walk to the shul.”

Hetty nodded. “It’s good to find a landsman, believe me. You come.”

Freydeh promised she would be there Friday next week for sure. She would try not to hope too strongly, but she could not help wishing it were next Friday already. She used her little bit of soap, washing herself through her clothes and washing her hair, long and dark and heavy, loosened on her shoulders and then soaking wet. She wrung it out like a mop and then pinned it back to dry. The day was so hot, it should dry fast and then she could put it up properly. It was not seemly for a woman her age to go about with her hair loose. Men would stare.

The attendant was calling to them. “You been in long enough. Come outta there. Your time is used up.”

“There’s enough water in the river for all of us and ten times more,” Freydeh called back. Hetty and Giborah were scrambling to the planks to get out, but Freydeh was not easily intimidated by another woman. She had the confidence of her physical strength.

“Your time’s up. Now come on out or I’ll take a hook to you.”

Hetty and Giborah were motioning to her to come out. She did not want to shock her new friends by making a scene, so serenely and slowly she paddled to them and hauled herself out of the water. She could dry herself sort of with the towel, although of course almost all of them had to put their wet clothes on again, as she did. All but Hetty. She had brought a voluminous black gown she could step into, making her wet clothing into a bundle she could carry in a basket. Freydeh suspected they had more money than she did—three of them working. Someday she would have more than three dresses, two wool and one cotton, and maybe even a bathing costume.

When she got outside, Sammy was waiting for her, his tattered clothes steaming in the sun. Like her, he had gone in as he was. The women looked at him with disapproving glances. “This is Sammy,” she said. They looked from her to him. There was little physical resemblance. “He’s my adopted son.”

Hetty nodded. “Parents dead?”

“Yeah.” Sammy preferred that story. But he was staring at her. When they had walked a block, he said, “That was a big lie you told.”

“Not such a lie.” She shrugged under her wet dress. Water vapor was rising from her as if she were a stove with a kettle heating on it.

“I don’t know what that means.” He kicked a stone into a puddle of horse urine. The streets around here weren’t paved. In hot weather, the wind blew dust into the faces of pedestrians like them.

“It means we’re a family. Unless you don’t want to. You don’t have to.”

“For how long?” His chin was still dug into his chest.

“Families are forever. Till they die.” She looked around carefully. “We have to pay attention. We’re in the Irish now.” She touched his arm.

She stopped to buy eggs. They came in fresh every morning but she had to buy the cheaper ones, packed in brine. The better eggs were packed in bran. Someday.