The Singing Fire (45 page)

“I’m looking for my daughter,” Nehama said, catching her breath. “For you, I don’t have time unless you’re here to tell me where she is.”

“Who are you talking to?” Nathan asked.

“A ghost from the
heim
. You see her earrings—just what my father’s customers wore to
shul on Shobbos.”

“No, I don’t see anything but the Horn and Plenty.” Nathan followed her gaze.

“Excuse me,” Nehama said, pushing past, but the ghost wouldn’t let her by. There was a hand on her arm, and although most people will
tell you that a ghost is transparent and one can merely walk through, Nehama was stuck.

Nathan was whistling her grandmother’s lullaby, looking curiously from Nehama to the space where the ghost stood. That was the power of a ghost, to make people stop in their tracks and forget why they were there.

“What do you want from me?” Nehama asked.

“I know what’s going on. Your grandmother told me. All she cares for is your well-being.”

“Then let me go, already.” If she stood in one spot much longer, someone would knock her down to steal her boots, and while she was lying there like a corpse, her daughter would be alone among the vultures.

“She didn’t deserve what you said.”

“It’s none of your business.” In the street, children with bruised faces were throwing stones against a wall. “I have a daughter, my only child. I have to get her.”

“And what about the next time she goes looking for something? You’d better listen to me.” The door to the Horn and Plenty swung open and closed on the sound of an accordion. The wind was rising. “A child in the court of King Solomon has questions to ask. Who will tell her how to find an answer if not you?”

“You mean my Gittel.” The wind was calling.

“It isn’t easy to have two mothers.”

“I had six—my mother and all my sisters.”

“At least you knew them.” The wind pulled at their shawls in the darkness.

“But not my grandmother, and she started everything.”

“Just so.” The wind pushed the sign back and forth, swinging on one bolt. “What’s she to think? That you’re like my sons, who don’t remember me? I’m telling you, it’s as if someone never lived at all. God in heaven, how can we bear it?”

“Just let me go, I’m begging you.” Nehama felt the grip on her arm loosen. “You can tell her I’m sorry. Tell her it’s all right. I know about the baby.”

There was only the door. And the wind opening it.

The Horn and Plenty

“Give us a little song, then,” the Squire said, puffing on a fourpenny cigar. His face hung in fat pouches, like that of a rich man’s dog. Behind his head was a poster of Lottie Collins kicking up her heels, “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay” printed across the petticoat.

Gittel stood on his table. The air was heavy with beer and smoke, yellow as fog. On the Squire’s left was the man with the accordion, on his right a onetime soldier whose bare arms were tattooed. Gittel’s eyes darted from her boots to the arms. Jews didn’t have tattoos. The table shook as someone stumbled against it on his way to the front for another pot. The accordion squealed. She crossed her arms over her chest.

“Never mind the row. I’m listening.” The Squire nodded encouragingly.

The table was sticky and her feet itched. If she were at home, Mama would take off her shoes and socks to rub her feet with a piece of cotton as if she were polishing shoes and making them shiny and lovely.

“Sing ‘Hearts of Oak.’ I heard you do that one,” Mrs. Dawes urged.

Gittel had sung it in the spring concert, but she was all done with concerts now, wasn’t she? Her mouth clamped shut as if she was afraid of swallowing the rancid smoke from the Squire’s cigar.

A man with a fresh scar on his cheek held out a pot of ale. “Pretty chavy. Come and have a tiddley.” As he put the rim of the cup to her lips, she took a sip. The foam was so nice, she was startled by the bitterness, and he laughed as she spat into his hand. The beer on his fingers smelled like old hay in a privy.

She looked down at her boots, black and stiff and heavy like every girl’s, the toes scuffed, the laces frayed, and next to her boots the Squire’s knitting wool trailing silver. A famous singer would have soft slippers that would make no sound as she walked onstage during the overture. She’d sing in a voice without fear that carried to the cheapest seats at the top of the gallery, through the roof and to the moon. And while she sang, it wouldn’t matter who was listening.

“You’re having us on, Mrs. Dawes,” the scarred man said. “This
girl’s a mute as sure as I’m alive. Look at them pleading eyes. Here you are, dearie.” He gave her a penny and another sip of ale. Something brown floated in the glass. If only her stomach would stop tipping bile into her throat she might be able to sing on her own, but she was afraid she’d throw up in a minute.

“Give us a song,” Mrs. Dawes said in a low voice, pinching Gittel’s arm.

The Squire smelled of cod-liver oil and mustard plasters, an old man odor, a sick man smell, and his hand on her leg made her feel cold. Gittel would pray for nothing, now, let anyone have the guy in his dress to burn if only she were home.

“Stow kidding, Granny. You had your joke. So off you goes,” the Squire said, patting Gittel’s knee under the hem of her dress. She shuffled her itchy feet.

Mrs. Dawes leaned her head close to Gittel’s. “Throwing away money like dirt in the street,” she whispered, “is for them as has it. Open your mouth, my girl.”

Gittel stared at the door marked
PRIVAT
. Whoever painted that door didn’t know how to spell. Keeping her eyes on the uneven black letters, she clasped her hands behind her back as if for recitation. This was her theater and the sticky table, her stage. She took a deep breath so she could sing loud enough to cover the sound of Libby crying. Her eyes on the door she was facing, Gittel imagined the
e
that she would add to the end of the word
Private
as she began to sing in a quavering voice:

Of friendship I have heard much talk
But you’ll find that in the end,
If you’re distressed at any time,
Then money is your friend.

The Squire tapped the table in time to the beat of Gittel’s heart, smiling as he reached into his pocket to put a half crown into Mrs. Dawes’s cup. Coppers were landing on the table or on the floor, Jinny gathering them up while Mrs. Dawes carried her cup around the pub. Gittel held out her dress like a bowl, and coins fell into it.

If you are sick and like to die,
And for the doctor send,
To him you must advance a fee,
Then money is your friend.

In and around the odor of wet beer and the scent of dried sweat, Gittel could smell linden trees in bloom, rosebushes and a fast-flowing stream. As the Guy Fawkes parade wound its way through Whitechapel, the worlds were very close. As it is written, blessed is God, life of all the worlds.

Whitechapel Road

On the day that Emilia had run away from the East End, there was fog and cold and darkness. It was still night though the sun would rise in an hour. She’d walked down to Whitechapel Road in her cloak and a shawl over it, one of the ubiquitous red shawls that Jewish women wore in the East End, so that she didn’t look out of place, a woman hurrying in the darkness, perhaps to a pawnshop. And that was where she’d gone. To Shmolnik’s pawnshop. There she’d begged him to take her books and give her some money for them. This he’d done, and the money had hired her a hansom cab to Soho, paying her rent until her milk dried up. She hadn’t even known that her breasts were leaking milk but imagined that the rain was soaking her to the skin. She’d walked in her stocking feet, forgetting to wear boots, and when she arrived at the pawnshop, her stockings were in shreds, her feet stinking of muck. She went to Soho, newspapers tied around her feet with string.

This time she rode in a carriage much finer than a hansom cab, having four wheels and two horses. Everything was the same and different, the carriage slowed by the changeless ragged crowd, the posters pasted to walls still promoting the latest Yiddish melodrama but in lurid colors, the street-drawn bus painted with advertisements for Nestlé’s milk and Cameo cigarettes. Beside her sat the ghost of the old woman, Zaydeh opposite. He was dozing, the new plaid cap over his eyes, his head down on his chest, breathing slowly while the carriage inched forward. The street was jammed with carts and carriages and walkers on foot shouting and singing, children running, girls with long
braids flicking in and out of the fog, and one of them could be her daughter.

“Is it so terrible to hear your husband give a speech?” the old woman asked.

“No, it’s quite painless,” Emilia said, feeling her will separate from her like a soul that slips away into the irretrievable darkness.

“I have something here.” The old woman looked at Emilia, her eyes full of suggestion. The next world delights in leaving hints. Emilia shrugged. “It’s yours, no?” The old woman opened her hand. In it was the cameo brooch, but Emilia didn’t reach for it. She wasn’t sure what she might touch if she reached for the hand of a strange ghost.

“That’s my mother’s. Where did you find it?”

“In a room over there.” The old woman gestured up the Lane. “You know how it is. Everything is sold down from street to street until it ends up in the river and then it comes back up again. It’s a fine cameo.”

“You keep it. Or sell it. Whatever you like.”

“Are you sure? It’s very nice to wear on
Shobbos
.” The ghost held the cameo against the green-and-gold bib above her apron. Perhaps it was only the ghost of a cameo.

“It’s from Paris.”

“You don’t say.” The old woman looked at her with feigned astonishment. “I thought it came from Minsk.”

Zaydeh snored. But it didn’t matter if he was awake or asleep. It was all the same to her now. “My mother told me about it just once. The trunk was packed and we were sitting on the steps of our house. She began with the story I heard a hundred times.”

The old woman was nodding as if she’d heard it, too, and even in the next world, where stories are repeated from the days of creation, they said enough is enough.

“I didn’t need to hear it again. How all was well until her first husband died. He was a miller, and during the Polish rebellion he provided boots and coats; my mother and the baker’s wife carried the stuff to the rebels hiding in the woods. But this time she told me that one of the Polish officers fell in love with her. After he escaped, he sent her the cameo from Paris. It was outrageous, a gentile officer, a member of the gentry, falling in love with a Jewish wife.”

“Still, a gift isn’t a sin. Your mother would want you to have it.”

Emilia shook her head. Didn’t they know anything in the next world? “He found her again in Minsk a few years after she remarried. I was about three then. She was very angry with my father because he made her leave her son from her first marriage behind though he expected her to look after his two from his first wife. You met her.”

“Mrs. Rosenberg, you mean. Yes—we have some people in common.”

The carriage slowed as the parade came down the Lane into White-chapel Road. The tailor’s guy teetered in the float, then straightened up as someone tightened the ropes. “I can remember him. It’s my earliest memory, a visitor with a large blond mustache waxed shiny. You see, my mother had an affair with this officer. He wanted her to run away with him, but she wouldn’t leave me behind. In after years she broke down inch by inch.”

The old woman looked at the cameo, a profile of the goddess of youth feeding meat to the eagle Zeus. “Don’t blame yourself.”

“Why would I?” Emilia asked in a huff. After all, guilt, like grief, was no one else’s business. “She told me about it when I got into trouble because she wanted me to know that we were alike. They say that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but a person isn’t a piece of fruit. Right?”

The old woman smiled. The turban she wore was gold, and it shimmered as they passed through the light of a streetlamp. “Does a fruit have eyes to see? Of course someone might say that a person who can see the dead and not the living might as well be an apple.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Emilia asked. How like the dead. They wouldn’t call a spoon a spoon, but an implement for carrying God’s will between the worlds.

The ghost of the old woman looked out at the street as if watching for someone in the parade. Maybe one of the girls flirting with the young tailors. “I was a second wife, too. Just like your mother. When I got married, there was a baby.”

“Yours?” The old woman still held the cameo in her half-closed fist.

“First she was someone else’s, then she was mine. I loved my stepdaughter so much I nearly fainted, but she was sickly. After she grew up, she told her children that I saved her life. I nursed her, and my milk ran like cream—it was a miracle.”

“How did you have any milk?”

“A good question. I’m telling you the miracle was that she held on to life until I got pregnant and had milk to give her. Then she got strong from it. But that isn’t how she told the story. What she said was that if you love your baby, then milk runs like cream.”

“You see? A person shouldn’t listen to old stories.” But the ghost of the old woman didn’t take the hint and continued with no sense of tact at all.

“My youngest grandchild grew up and had a baby but no milk. From my story, she was filled with guilt and I’ve never forgiven myself.”

Emilia crossed her arms. With grief one must be firm. “Jacob always says the teller of a story means one thing by it, the listener hears something else. It can’t be helped.”

“Not a stupid man, your husband.” The old woman wiped her eyes. Someone might be surprised that the dead can cry, but aren’t all tears those of the Shekhina, the divine presence weeping with us in our exile?

“Here,” Emilia said, handing over her handkerchief. She’d swear that she heard the old woman blow her nose.

“A lot of girls in that crowd. I hope their mothers are watching out for them.”