The Singing Fire (27 page)

—Isaiah 54:1–7          

CHAPTER 5

In the Street

1898

Frying Pan Alley

The old theater in Prince’s Street never reopened, but there were Yiddish plays in Vine Court Hall, sometimes in the Standard, and matinees in the Pavilion, a beautiful theater with seating for thousands. There was even talk of a regular season of Yiddish plays there. The old theater, which had seemed so grand years ago, sat only seven hundred. Well, God in heaven stays the same and everything else changes. Nehama had lost two back teeth, and a bigger theater was needed for the countless newcomers who arrived every month, squeezing themselves into the one square mile of London where Yiddish was still the mother tongue.

Now she had to decide what to do with the knotted handkerchiefs filled with coins and hidden under the loose board. The coins had accumulated slowly and surely, like the reading of books, a little bit here and a little bit there, over eleven years growing like a child, like their only daughter standing on a crate while Nehama pinned the hem of her new dress. Gittel’s hair was dark and neatly braided, her eyes golden. She was singing quietly, it came as easily to her as breathing, and when she felt shy and didn’t sing, she might as well be holding her breath, her face pale and still, her eyes fixed on a distant point, maybe even, God forbid, on the next world.

Nehama worried about her daughter. What mother doesn’t? Gittel
was just a child now, but in two years she’d be finished school and what then? A sewing machine wasn’t for her. No—a person doesn’t live like a pig in a sty so her daughter should live like that, too. There would have to be something better. That was why Nehama intended to have a shop. Then her daughter could study in peace and quiet in their rooms upstairs. She’d become a pupil-teacher and then a teacher and she’d live like a human being. If the prospect of life at a sewing machine or the counter of a pawnshop was too much for some people—Mrs. Levy, for example, or whatever her name really was—then Nehama would lift heaven off its hinges to make sure that
her
daughter wasn’t driven to God knows what.

“A cobbler’s daughter I am not, hammering nails I cannot,” Gittel sang in a murmur, her eyes far away, as if she was dreaming of ruffles. “No, Mama, no—a cobbler I won’t marry.”

Nehama took out a pin from the hem and tucked it in again, making the dress a bit shorter. She had drawn and cut the pattern, copying the style from a magazine she saw at the library. Gittel’s dress was almost the same as the one in
La Nouvelle Mode
, a little simpler in design but with more intricate stitching at the cuffs and waist, and if the fabric was cheap, her daughter didn’t notice. For Passover, of course, there had to be something new. A dress and a pair of shoes—the shoes were to be a surprise, beautiful smooth leather, not nearly new but brand-new, hidden in the workshop behind the finished coats.

Nathan was using chalk on the wall. “Look, Nehameleh. If we get another machine, we could make four pounds a week over the year.”

“Yes?” She stood up for a minute to look at the figures. “This is a lesson for you, Gittel. You see here—twenty-five coats a day. That’s what your
tatteh
thinks. For that you need eight, maybe nine hands, and are they all going to be quick? You take the chalk, Gittel.”

“Mama—I don’t like doing sums.”

“Am I asking if you like it? Get off the crate and take the chalk. Here. Fifteen coats a day makes thirty bob. Write it there. Now do the sum—you can do it.” Nehama waited, hands on her hips, while Gittel slowly wrote the numbers on the wall. “Exactly right. You see what it is, Nathan? There’s less profit than what we make now with two machines completely paid off.”

“Number one. We could buy a machine outright with what you’ve
put away.” Nathan raised a second finger. “Number two. With me as boss there’s twenty-five coats at least, I promise you.”

Nehama shook her head. “What I put away is for my shop. It’s going to be in the high road.”

“You can dream anything you want, but a workshop we have and it only needs another machine.” He crossed his arms and frowned as if they were at their sewing machines. But in the front room he wasn’t the boss of her.

“I know every penny that I put away under the bed. God help you if I find
a groschen
missing.” Nehama glared.

Gittel turned her head to look over her shoulder at her mother. An argument about sewing machines was much less interesting than the hem of a new dress. “Am I going to have a ruffle, Mama? You promised me. Even Shaindel’s Pesach dress has a ruffle, and her family just came.”

“And you promised me to study. No more books from the library until I see a good report.” Nehama made her voice stern, yet how could she deny her daughter the new free library when she herself came to it every
Shobbos
like a thirsty man in a desert?

“I won’t get my report until after Pesach, and I need a ruffle on my dress now,” Gittel pleaded. “You made Libby’s dress with two ruffles.”

There you had it. What does a girl see? Not the complicated stitching, not the hours spent making the pattern just so. “Enough talking about dresses. You’ll have what you have and that’s all. Take this off and study.”

“But everyone’s jumping rope in the alley, and if I beat Libby, she’s got to give me her new rope.”

That’s how it is with a daughter. She thinks you hold her life in your hands and all you have is water trickling away. “Such a bargain. All right. For a little while. Then you come home with some milk and you study.” She’d barely buttoned the last button in the back of Gittel’s everyday dress before her daughter tore herself away.

“A professor’s daughter, I am not …” Gittel sang as she flew out the door. “But reading books, I can do. Yes, Mama, yes—a teacher I will marry …”

The last verse was Nehama’s invention. You can never start too early giving your daughter the right ideas. “Don’t think I’m forgetting,”
Nehama called after her. “If you want to go to the theater, you have to do your homework.”

“We need another sewing machine,” Nathan said. He tore a sheet of newspaper and stuffed it into the toe of his boot where it was cracked. “When Shmolnik has one in his pawnshop, I’ll get a good price from him.”

“Then you get a loan from him, too,” Nehama said.

“That’s crazy. We have the money. Why should we pay interest?”

“I don’t know from ‘we.’ If it’s you that’s getting a machine, then it’s you that’s paying the interest.”

“All right, all right.” He pulled her toward him. “Then
we’ll go
to the theater. I hear there’s a new play in Vine Court Hall.” He kissed her as if it were still
Shobbos
. When you have just one child, you don’t get too tired for a nap without any sleep.

“Don’t think you can get a new sewing machine that way,” Nehama said, turning to get her shawl.

“All right.” He jammed his foot back into his boot. “Do I like the new drama anyway? A play with Jewish kings, that was something. Now it’s always peddlers. Nothing but peddlers.”

“Never mind. I don’t want to hear. I have things to do.” She threw on her shawl, picked up a jug, and went outside.

There on the bench sat Mrs. Flacks, who wrote love letters in Yiddish. If ugliness were a trade, she’d be rich. The widow that lived in the cellar sat with her and Pious Pearl the beigel lady, who didn’t look any older than she had ten years ago, though her foot was broken. Her husband, on his way to play cards, pressed a finger against one nostril and with the other blew into the mud of the street. And before he reached the end of the next house, he was a ghost, a white sheet of fog that muffled the clang of church bells. It was Sunday, and in the alley children played while their mothers talked. The boys were peeking through a cocoa tin with a hole at one end and a postcard pasted at the other. The girls jumped rope, singing:

There come six Jews from Juda Spain
In order for your daughter Jane.
My daughter Jane is far too young
To marry you, you Spanish Jew.
Farewell, farewell, I’ll walk away,
And come again another day.
Come back, come back, you Spanish Jew,
And choose the fairest one of us.
The fairest one that I can see
Is Gittel Katzellen, so come to me …

As Gittel jumped in, the girls laughed and squealed, turning the rope faster and faster, the drizzle soaking their frayed dresses. Nehama waited another minute, watching her daughter, boots a size too big, black braids flying, eyes narrowed against the rain. She was concentrating on her feet, and no matter how fast the other girls turned the rope, she didn’t miss a step. Nehama could still feel the weight on her right hip where she’d carried Gittel as a baby. A daughter doesn’t know that she is always a part of her mother, the most vulnerable part jumping carelessly in the fog.

Minnie stood in the doorway, keeping an eye on her daughter, Libby. The two girls jumped together, and when Libby tripped, they both went out. “Girls!” Nehama called. “Here’s the jug for milk. And remember, Libby. Make sure that Gittel gets the milk from the spotted cow. It has the fattest milk. Don’t forget, I’m telling you.”

“Did you see, Mama?” Gittel asked. “It was Libby what tripped, not me.”

“I saw,” Nehama said. “Just be careful with the milk. Go on, girls.”

She slipped a slice of cake into the pocket of Gittel’s pinny, watching the girls go off with their jugs, Libby running pell-mell, Gittel with her watchful, deliberate walk after she said, “Good-bye, Mama. Goodbye, Auntie Minnie,” as if farewells must always be taken seriously.

“Don’t do it, Nehama,” Minnie was saying. She pushed back a strand of damp red hair.

“What are you talking?” There were gray strands in Minnie’s hair, like tendrils of fog.

“Pious Pearl wants for you to get her new crutches.”

“So? I didn’t know that was a crime,” Nehama said. A tile fell off the roof and broke at her feet. Sparrows rushed to steal the exposed hay.

“The crime is when she’ll sell them for drink.”

“Maybe she needs it more than the crutches.”

Minnie rolled her eyes. “There’s no talking to you.”

“Talking you do plenty. Listening is something else.” Nehama had a list in her pocket. Number one was Pious Pearl and her crutches. Number two was Pious Pearl’s youngest, a boy with a stutter who should go to the Jews’ Free School. And Mrs. Flacks, who’d arrived with her husband and children a month ago was number three. The husband had gone to America, and the middle daughter needed ointment for her eyes. Four through seven were other neighbors with other needs. None of them was deserving. The lady visitor who came from the Jewish Board of Guardians to inspect their moral hygiene said so. But Nehama knew what it was to be undeserving. If you listened to the
yetzer-hara
, the evil inclination, the instinct for survival, you could hear it gasping for a breath of air among the flames of this world. Nehama drew her shawl over her head and stepped out into the fog and the rain.

Black Lion Yard

There were no secrets among the Jews of the East End. How could there be when they lived in each other’s armpits? No, the problem was that everyone was a tailor, and when it came to a secret, he considered himself a bespoke master who could elaborate a few rumors into a whole suit. Concerning Gittel’s first mother, people said that she was a lady. A grieving widow. Everyone agreed on that, and Gittel had heard it herself from Mama. A lady what was well spoken, well read, and well mannered. Quality. Then she ran away, and there were any number of stories about why and where. But it was the whispering that Gittel noticed most, and when Mama and Aunt Minnie whispered, she heard pieces of sentences, parts of questions, like What can a person do on her own? and Remember what goes on in Dorset Street. Then just as she thought she’d hear the whole story for once, Mama would say,
Shhh
, little pitchers have big ears, we’ll talk later.

So out of the cabbage leaves of many conversations, Gittel sewed the mixed-up coat of her life. Mama told her that no one knew anything and that
loshen hora
, malicious gossip, was the worst sin, so Gittel should just keep her own counsel, but a person couldn’t help wondering about her own mother who’d left her. Maybe she cried too much. Yes, she had been a crybaby, a homely, howling baby, and her mother took one look and said, This child belongs here, and off she went.

Carrying her pitcher, Gittel walked straight ahead, moving neither to right nor to left, and the grown men carrying racks of shirts back from the rag market in Petticoat Lane walked around her, muttering until she gave them a peculiar look with her golden eyes.
Thpoo, thpoo, thpoo
, they spat, averting the evil eye.

“Do you think as there’s a place for cows in heaven?” Gittel asked. The streets were more cheerful on Sundays. Everyone was hooking it: the Jews by working and the gentiles by going to market while the bells in the foundry chimed a tune.

Libby shook her head. “Don’t be an idiot. Whatever do you want to ask something like that for? Come on, Gittel.” She was a year older than Gittel, and whatever she didn’t know, her older brother told her. He was out in the world, fourteen and apprenticed to a bookbinder.

Somewhere the spring air wafted the odor of green shoots, but here it was kippers and barreled cucumber, and a good smell it was, almost as good as the eating of it. At the corner, a boy was buying toffee from a stand. He wore the thick corduroy suit given out by the Jews’ Free School.

Gittel wiggled a loose molar. “The men have to study Torah all day in heaven, poor sods. But Pious Pearl, when she dies, she’ll be having schnapps from morning till night.”

“Don’t say ‘sod.’ It ain’t nice.” Libby swerved to avoid the muck falling from an open window above. “When you go to heaven, you’ll have to sit at your real mother’s table.”