Beyond the Pale: A Novel (40 page)

The house on Suffolk Street was only five blocks from our tenement. I’d read in the
Forward
that the Lower East Side was the most crowded place on earth—visiting an individual home at the edge of our neighborhood made me more than uncomfortable, as though I was being called in front of a Russian provincial governor. I could make out the Jarmulowsky Bank building, where I’d been saving for Sarah, poking up like a giant across Seward Park. I took the scrap of notepaper out of my pocket to make sure I had the right address. I looked at Rose, who was biting her lip. The jacket I had given her years ago looked out of style already. It strained across her breast and, unless the day was very cold, she left it unbuttoned. I had considered getting her a new one out of my savings before I sent the money to Sarah, but now I was laid off. Rose had a new job over on Hester Street for a small contractor, who knew how long that would last? In our apartment it was as though everyone was holding their breath, waiting for something terrible to happen—or for anything to happen at all. One of us could lose a job, one of us could get a new one. Like the new seesaws in Seward Park, we didn’t go anywhere, only up and down.

Rose and I took a deep breath together. “This Dovida really dresses like a man?” she whispered.

“We’re only going to have dinner with my mother’s old midwife. It will be fine, you’ll see.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

Dovida answered the door. She was wearing pleated trousers with a long watch chain, a shirt with cufflinks, a tie. She still had a well-trimmed mustache.

“You must be Chava and Rose,” Dovida said warmly. “I never would have recognized you. You’ve grown into beautiful women since our last encounter at the train station. Come in, come in!” She spoke in English, with a better accent than mine. Her voice was husky, probably from cigar smoking, and she had a spicy smell, something like cinnamon.

Rose’s mouth hung open. She was usually so composed, always knowing the right words to say. I pushed her gently from behind and she seemed to wake up.

We came into a hallway painted a light blue, nicer even than the Henry Street house. Maybe because the air was full of delicious and familiar smells, tsimes and flanken, I thought.

“Gutke,” Dovida turned her head, “our guests are here. Come out of the kitchen.” This she shouted in Yiddish. Gutke appeared, wiping her hands on her apron, flushed with cooking, an ordinary baleboste.

“I’m so glad you came.” She embraced me and then hugged Rose. “Dovid, take their coats, be a host. I’m just putting some finishing touches on dinner. I’ll join you all in a minute. Go, sit, talk to each other.” She shooed us into a parlor that reminded me of Rose’s house in Odessa. Dovida put our coats in a hall closet while we settled into the soft, fancy furniture.

“So,” Dovida said, again in English, wrapping the watch chain around her fingers, “how do you find America?”

“By sailing west,” I said. Rose slapped me lightly on the knee.

“I’ll have to remember that,” Dovida chuckled, “very clever. It’s a silly question, nu?”

“No, not silly. Just big to answer.” I felt I was smiling too wide and tried to recompose my face to be serious, adult.

“We’ve been here almost four years,” Rose said, “and all we’ve seen is the East Side.”

“We went on a picnic once to Central Park,” I reminded her.

“Yes,” Rose said, “we went on a picnic once to Central Park and twice I’ve been to Macy’s department store. I know this is a big country, but by me, Odessa was better.”

“You forget—,” I started.

“I don’t forget. We came to escape pogroms and ended up going from sweatshop to sweatshop.”

I’d never heard Rose describe our lives so angrily, certainly not to a stranger. Was it because Gutke and Dovida’s house reminded her of home, too? Dovida’s black eyes shuttled back and forth between us.

“America is certainly more than sweatshops,” she paused, as if she was going to say something else, but instead moved her hand to her mustache, stroking it the way men do, as if they have important thoughts growing in their facial hair.

“Yes?” Rose prodded.

“I was just thinking about how I live.” She paused again and fixed her gaze on Rose. “I gather you knew about my disguise already?”

Silence fell on us like tobacco dust in a sudden breeze. For a minute everyone’s words were choked down. Finally Rose cleared her throat.

“It’s a very good disguise—.” She hesitated, unsure how to address Dovida. “Mr. Greenbaum—,” she tried, but Dovida waved her hand in the air.

“Exactly the problem. How shall we discuss America and sweatshops if you don’t know what to call me?” Her hand went back to her mustache. “Let’s try ‘Dovid,’ all right? Mister is too formal for friends of Gutke’s.”

“All right,” Rose said, but she didn’t say “Dovid.”

Personally, I preferred Dovida, yet I could see the problem about calling her the wrong name in front of others. I decided to steer the conversation away from sweatshops for the time being. “Are there many women who go about disguised as you do?” I asked.

“It depends on what you mean by many. In Europe I knew—,” she paused, squinting, while her fingers made a count, “maybe nineteen or twenty in the last thirty-five years. Here I’ve met, or know of, nine, yes, nine, I think. Of course there must be at least a dozen or two workingclass women I wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet. So, more than a minyan, not enough for a union.”

That she said minyan surprised me. I had an image of my papa’s shul on a quiet Saturday morning, with women dressed as men, davening. If women wore pants, could they also put on tfilin? Would God accept their prayers as though they were men, or consider them abominations? Did God look under your clothes to check your sex?

“Did you ever join a minyan?” I asked.

“I don’t go to shul very often, but once when I was in Vienna I was moved to go one afternoon. It was very hot and the synagogue was quiet and cool. The rabbi enlisted me in a minyan for the evening service. I couldn’t very well refuse.” In her smile I saw a wistfulness for Vienna more than any idea of how shocking her story was.

“No one ever suspects you?” Rose asked.

“Women do, once in awhile, though mostly I fulfill their dream of a perfect gentleman, and they want so to believe that a perfect gentleman exists that they convince themselves I’m it.”

“Perfect gentleman don’t exist?” Rose asked, unconvinced.

“I’ve never met one. Some appear to be, of course, in front of women. We all know about the rules of etiquette between the sexes. But I can assure you that when men are together, especially in the upper classes, good ones are as rare as the philosopher’s stone.”

“The what?” Rose asked. I admired how she was never embarrassed to ask about a word she didn’t understand.

“Ah—alchemists thought there was a magic stone that could turn lead into gold. Our species seems to have a fascination with metamorphosis—changing things entirely,” she added quickly, “like a caterpillar into a butterfly.”

“Or women into men?” I asked.

“Well, men aren’t as exquisite as butterflies and certainly not as precious as gold, but that’s the general idea. Appearances—,” Dovida wound her watch thoughtfully. “Take the case of our ‘ideal gentleman.’ Women can usually sniff the impostors out, but more often than not they hold their noses and dive in, believing the appearance to be more real than their own knowledge. I sometimes think gentlemen are more likely among the socialist types, who actually believe in equality.”

The way she said “socialist types” made me uneasy. I glanced around at the room and realized again how rich Dovida must be. On her own, Gutke would have been living in something like our tenement on Essex Street. Yet I wanted to know everything. How she did it, how she got that mustache, how she hid her breasts, how she talked, if she was afraid, ever.

“You look perplexed, Chava?”

“No, I just don’t understand how you do it.”

“How I do what? Oh—.” Dovida looked down at her lap and laughed. “The art of illusion is everything. Appearances, that’s what we were talking about, wasn’t it? Most people are concerned first with self-protection. Protecting their wealth or their religion or their selfimage, whatever it may be. I look to see what they’re protecting, and I make myself as agreeable as I can. It’s actually remarkably easy to make people think you’re a man. You just have to act like one, which is sometimes repugnant to me.”

“Why repugnant?” Rose asked.

“Don’t you often find men repugnant?”

Rose bit her nail. I could see she was thinking about all the sweatshop Romeos, or maybe her brothers. I had an impulse to put my arm around her. Finally she looked back at Dovida. “Yes, I often find men repugnant.”

“Yes, I know,” Dovida said softly. “When I was young all I wanted was my freedom. Being a man with money seemed like the surest way to be free. But I can see that both of you believe men with money are your enemies, am I right?”

“Well, yes,” I admitted.

Dovida’s head bobbled slightly. “It’s not pleasant to appear as a villain to the very people you care most about. Of course, not everyone I care about thinks I’m a villain—.” She directed this to Gutke, who was standing in the doorway, folding her apron.

“Already with the politics. Now you all have to come eat dinner and not upset each other. It’s bad for your digestion.”

“We’re not upsetting each other, dearest. Are we, girls?”

“No,” Rose said, “though maybe confusing each other a little.”

“Come,” Dovida said, extending her arm towards Rose in a courtly way, “come eat and we’ll try to banish confusion and care.”

The dining room table was of heavy, dark wood with claw feet the same as the enormous sideboards. A blue oriental rug lay under the table and a small chandelier glittered above. All the place settings and dishes matched, and there were two crystal glasses by each plate. Gutke looked at my looking.

“The food will be familiar, I promise,” she said.

And it was. Gutke had prepared a wonderful feast, plates of lettuce with sliced cucumber, which she called a salad, green beans, tsimes and flanken. Even at Pesach we rarely ate as well. The prunes in the tsimes were as fresh as the ones from our own plum tree in Kishinev. I took a second helping while Rose beamed at me. Dovida offered us wine—wine like this I never had before, not syrupy or sour at all. It tasted like the wine of psalms. Both Rose and I let Dovida fill our glasses as often as she offered.

“So, Chava, Gutke tells me you’re a bookbinder.”

“I was,” I sighed between mouthfuls. “I got laid off this week.”

“There’s a slow season for bookbinders?” Gutke asked.

“No, but the factory, Harriman’s, never seems to be get enough business. Now people say there’s going to be another depression. Almost all of us got laid off.”

Dovida nodded. “They’re right. A depression is already starting.”

“How do you know for certain?” Rose asked as she took a piece of white bread to sop up the gravy on her plate.

“It’s my business. Did you know that people can make a lot of money in a depression?”

“No.” I reached down to pick up my napkin. For a second I thought I saw the carved wooden dragon spin the ball at the end of its claw.

“It’s true. For one thing, a depression drives down the cost of labor, since people will work for any wage they can get. For another, it deflates prices—stocks and lands. So if you have money and you pick the right things to buy, when the economy gets better, the value of your possessions might have doubled or tripled.”

“So you think capitalists make depressions?”

“I know they do.”

“Is this dinner table talk?” Gutke interrupted.

“We’re stuffed already from your wonderful cooking. We’re just letting out a little hot air.”

But I didn’t think of it as air. “How can we stop them?”

“Stop them?” Rose looked at me as if I were fantastically naive. “Maybe we should write a letter explaining that it’s too hard for us to go through another of their depressions, and they’ll send a telegram right back, apologizing.”

Dovida laughed. “You can’t stop them. When there
is
too much suffering—so much that people start to revolt—that’s a threat to social stability. Then someone, the government or the manufacturers, tinkers with the money supply until they can say ‘Look, we’ve done you all a favor and gotten you through to a new prosperity.’ Of course, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds.” She bounced her knuckle off her lip. “And sometimes it backfires. In the future I think depressions will be less severe. They have too much potential for causing revolutionary fever.”

“So they’ll have little depressions, just long enough to crush the unions but not so long that everyone rebels?” I asked.

“Exactly. That’s what I think. There are other interpretations.”

“Like what?”

“Enough,” Rose said. “This is as bad as going to a socialist lecture.”

“Exactly,” Gutke said.

“My apologies, ladies,” Dovida bowed her head to the side, as if she were an uncle. “Let’s have our coffee and Gutke’s wonderful poppyseed strudel in the parlor. And don’t you start cleaning up, Gutke. I’ll do it later.” Gutke narrowed her eyes but she left the dishes. Dovida brought out coffee and dessert on a lacquered tray. It was odd to see a man do a woman’s domestic chore, even knowing who this “man” really was.

“Where do you work?” Rose asked Dovida when we were settled again.

“I have an office on Wall Street and I travel a lot.”

“Too much,” Gutke said.

“I am getting a little old to be wandering around the world—and a little bored.”

“I’d like a chance to be bored like that,” I said.

“In the end, most people find their lives are with the ones they care about,” Gutke said, sipping her coffee.

Dovida’s eyes wrinkled at the edges, smiling. “She’s been trying to tell me this for years. But I’ve been stubborn. Actually,” she glanced away from Gutke, “I’m glad I was stubborn. I have hundreds of stories now, to entertain us in our old age. And now I can give up my stubbornness.”

“You always want everything,” Gutke scolded, cutting strips of the poppyseed pastry.