Beyond the Pale: A Novel (42 page)

“We’re going to be late for class if we don’t leave in ten minutes, Chava. What’s going on with that dinner?” Rose pulled the spoon out of my hand, forked a potato, added some salt. In three minutes the cabbage and potatoes were on the table. I cut slices of black bread and the four of us ate quickly, without looking at each other.

We hurtled through the tunnel faster than a runaway team of horses, lights flashing at us from the walls. I pressed my eyes as close to the window of the front car as I dared. Rose squeezed my hand. Fear and excitement sparked between us. A group of workmen hurried to take refuge from our underground train, ducking into small, scooped-out grottos. This was progress, everyone declared. Thrilling, certainly, but I wasn’t sure about progress. Maybe we were going backwards in time with all these new inventions, trying to hide inside the earth like moles. Going so fast, my brain was thrown around inside my skull, and surely that couldn’t be good. Good or bad, Rose and I had wanted to ride on the train since it opened almost two years earlier, yet it always seemed an impossible extravagance.

Pauline Newman, who was sometimes at the League but usually worked with the Socialist Party, had organized a camp on the Palisades for independent girls out of work that summer, mostly seamstresses, so they wouldn’t have to pay rent. I thought camping out with so many other girls would be a great adventure. But I was still working, and Rose played at being annoyed when I suggested she might like to go without me.

“I thought you liked me a little better than that,” she said.

I liked Rose even better than the idea of a general strike, but I didn’t want her to miss the camp on my account. I considered abandoning my job, even though it was the best one I’d ever had. Then Rose threatened not to speak to me for a year if I quit. Finally we compromised on going for a weekend. We were lucky. The weekend we picked was in the middle of June’s garbage strike. As the rats played tag among piles of fermenting debris on Essex Street, we were glad for any excuse to get away.

Saturday morning Rose waited a block from my bindery, standing guard over the provisions we were shleping, including a big bag of Shabbes evening specials we’d haggled for as the pushcarts closed on Orchard Street. I mussed my hair, pulled my shirtwaist half out of my skirt and ran up the two flights to the bindery floor. I’m not sure Al believed I had to take my cousin to the hospital for her consumption, but I must have looked so flushed myself that I scared him.

“Don’t let it happen again,” he growled. I was rarely late and never sick, so I figured I could get away with a lie once.

After the subway ground to its last stop at 157th Street, we trundled up the deep stairwell, glad, for a minute, to find ourselves blinking, bewildered by the bright day. After we got used to sunlight again, we transferred onto the Kingsbridge trolley to Dyckman Street and walked down to the ferry to Englewood. Luckily, the secretary at the League had given me detailed instructions. Except for our one trip to Central Park, I’d never been past the new Macy’s on 34th Street, and this part of New York was as foreign as another country—a cleaner country, where a few trees straggled along the streets and the buildings weren’t pressing their shoulders together, pecking like chickens at the clouds. Everyone looked like an American and I would have been shy to ask for help. Harry told us stories about uptown goyim who liked to trick immigrants by giving wrong directions, sometimes in order to rob and beat us. I knew he used these stories to support his personal religion of only looking out for himself, but that didn’t mean the stories weren’t true.

As we waited at the dock, I stood by our bags and bedrolls while Rose wandered around the landing slowly, playing with the curls of her hair, damp from the humidity. She was upset about how much the trip cost—thirteen cents each with the transfer, one way—I could tell from how she kicked at the rocks. After awhile she picked one up and put it in her skirt pocket. Then she felt me watching her and turned to meet my gaze, self-consciously tucking in her waist.

Once the ferry got underway, a breeze came across the Hudson and gave us relief from the heat. Children in knickers, families with picnic baskets going to Bloomers Beach, a few tramps heading for work on farms—all leaned over the railing to catch the wind and bits of spray. I remembered how tenderly Rose had fed me the orange when I was sick on the ship. I reached into the bag and found a ripe plum. I wanted to roll it across Rose’s lips, hold it while she bit, to lap the juices dribbling down her cheek, but I settled for the glances we exchanged, the way her eyes held mine as she ate half, licking the exposed purple interior before she passed it back to me.

By the time we climbed the path above Englewood Basin, we were drenched with shvits even though we had rolled our shirtsleeves above our elbows. I didn’t care how muggy it was. I was excited to be in our second American state, New Jersey, which appeared to be mostly river beach, cliffs and countryside. We stopped often on the pretext of admiring the view, though really because it was a long walk. We would have missed the last turnoff if I hadn’t told Rose to watch for a red kerchief on a birch tree, which she spotted. Of course, the girls wouldn’t want the whole city to know they were there.

As we neared the camp I could hear an accordion, someone playing “Tum Balalyke”—not expertly, but well enough that a chorus of girls’ voices were joining in. Rose began to sing. Her face was flushed from the walk and from carrying so many parcels, yet her eyes reflected the blue brilliance of the summer sky.

“What can grow without rain? What can burn and never be consumed? What can cry yet shed no tears?
Come, Chava, sing with me—
tum-bala, tum-bala, tumbalalyke
.”

I’d never liked to sing. Papa used to laugh when I sang Purim songs. Mama said I had a sweet little singing voice but I never believed her. But with Rose—we made a turn in the path and saw a small shtetl of tents. In a meadow dozens of girls circled around the accordion player, while among the tents girls were hanging up laundry, sitting on crates and reading, gathered in groups of two and three, talking, chopping wood, hauling water, peeling potatoes over huge pots. So I started to sing too, and once singing I had a moment of wild, easy happiness. Anything was possible! We were so many, I thought, without knowing which “many” I was thinking of.

A girl with a bad complexion, shirtsleeves rolled above her elbows and one long eyebrow over her brown eyes, approached us. “New recruits!” she said in Yiddish.

I laughed. “Only for tonight. We have to go back to Essex Street tomorrow evening.”

“What a shame. Well, one night’s better than none,” the girl said. “Here, let me carry some of those things.”

“Thank you,” Rose said but I didn’t let her take any of my packages. I felt strong enough to carry mine and Rose’s too.

“Are you Pauline?”

“Pauline Newman? Nobody’s ever mistaken me for her before—you must not know her. I’m Sherna, Sherna Block.”

We introduced ourselves. “I’ve always missed Pauline at the League offices, but Rose Schneiderman said to make sure to find her.”

“You’re League members?”

“I am—”

“I’m just a hanger-on,” Rose said.

“No one has to join the League, or even a union, to belong here,” Sherna said. “The camp feels like a utopia.”

“A utopia! This I have to see,” I answered.

“Just look around. It’s not the Ritz but everyone shares what they have and looks out for each other.”

“And when it’s not summer anymore?” I didn’t want to seem sour, so I kept my voice light, hoping she would understand.

“Then we’ll figure out what to do next—together,” Sherna said, pointing to a space between tents and trees. “You can set up your things there. The kitchen is just through these tents and down that path, you can’t miss it. Bring anything to eat?”

“Of course,” Rose said. I could tell she was insulted that anyone would mistake us for spongers.

“It’ll be welcome,” Sherna said, oblivious to Rose’s tone. “If you’re still looking for Pauline, she’s the one with short hair over there.” She pointed to the edge of the singing circle, where a few girls stood to the side, talking.

For our tent we had two old sheets. We tied a line between trees and folded one sheet over, anchoring it with large stones. The other we used to cover the ground. It was an illusion of floor but at least insects would have to cross over to get to us. We each had a bedroll with our featherbeds and another sheet. We rolled them out on our new floor and looked at each other. We’d left as much room between them as possible.

“Do you think we could move them closer?” I asked.

Rose shook her head, sighing. Was she thinking of all the ways we hid, until it seemed the real people we were hiding from were each other? Then she nodded her head, up and down, wise, warm and welcoming. Stooped, we pulled the featherbeds until they overlapped. Our heads bumped and we fell, laughing, in a heap. We quickly untangled when we heard footsteps.

“Hello!” a voice called, “are you decent?”

“We’re trying not to be,” Rose called back.

I shot her an amazed look as I brushed off my skirt and crawled out towards the voice. Pauline was standing in front of our tent, her hands on her hips, wearing a cap like a workman’s, a black skirt and a plain, pleated white shirtwaist, the shirtsleeves rolled as high as they’d go. As I straightened up, I saw she was my height.

“Are you Chava?” I nodded and she extended her hand. “I heard you were looking for me. You’re a friend of Rose Schneiderman?”

“Not a friend exactly, but I know her from the Women’s Trade Union League.”

“I’ve been thinking about joining them,” Pauline said, “but I go to all the meetings of the Socialist Party already. How many nights are there?” She shrugged and a strand of brown hair fell over her ear.

Pauline couldn’t have been older than sixteen but she seemed to have the easy self-confidence of a grown union organizer. I looked directly into her eyes to show I wasn’t intimidated, to show I was a comrade. “I’m drawn to the socialists but sometimes I’m confused about what, exactly, their program is, and if there’s really a place for women to work in it,” I said.

“Tell me about it!” She threw an arm around my shoulder, leading me towards the group Rose and I had noticed earlier. “Come, I’ll introduce you to some socialists who organize women.”

I turned around and saw Rose on her hands and knees in our tent door, peering up at me. I brought my shoulder up to my ear, as if to ask, you don’t mind, do you?

“Go ahead,” she yelled after me, standing, shaking the dust off her clothes. “I’ll take a walk and look around.”

Pauline observed our exchange and didn’t miss a step as she led me forward.

R
OSE WANDERED THROUGH
the camp on a path that led towards the cliffs. Usually she talked with everyone, anyone, but a rush of quiet filled her. She wanted to think. All the girls appeared to be Jews, since the only languages she heard were Yiddish and Yiddish- English, mostly Russian accents, but also Polish, Croatian, even some German and French. She noticed at least a dozen blond girls talking Yiddish, which reminded her of old childhood whisperings that her grandfather must have been a Cossack, on account of her blue eyes.

How many hidden Cossacks were there in Jews? And what difference did it make, she wondered. Her blue eyes didn’t change who she was. What Jews are—was it inside or outside? The path went around a rocky outcropping. Near the edge was a stone face that looked easy to climb: a toehold and you could swing a leg up, pull your whole weight after you and sit on a ledge on one of the dark columns of the Palisades. It took Rose two tries; she was glad no one was near, watching. The last group of tents was just visible through the trees and boulders, though the sound of girls’ voices was close and stirred her.

Out of her pocket she pulled the rock she’d picked up at the Dyckman landing. The stone was flecked with soft, shiny bits that peeled off in small wafers. She compared it to the rock where she sat. They were so unlike, no bright bits on the reddish brown stone of the Palisades. She pried a wafer from the rock in her hand carefully, with her longest nail, and held up the miniature sheet to the light. The sun was beginning to set behind her, the horizon edged with pink, as if someone had woven ribbon through the hem of a tablecloth, laying it out over the sky, edges swaying over the city. The soft wafer pane could be a window in a miniature house. She pulled its layers apart slowly, letting it crumble by her side.

Songs drifted by as she sat, hugging her knees. Directly across, a river cut through a rounded hill. Far to her right, below the fields, New York City looked like a castle: a vast, low, rambling castle estate, its fingers pointing to the sky as if to challenge any idea that came from above instead of below, where so many toiled to make the castle rich.

Rose looked at the river, the rocks, the tents that from this distance appeared like flags from a fairy tale. Her heart had so many pieces that seemed uncomplicated at first, yet didn’t quite fit together. She had a momentary sensation of longing for herself. The rock had been there longer than her life, and yet her childhood seemed like a wearisome dream she’d had, taking care of Papa’s sons. They had been important—their ambitions, their ideas—important, in a way she never was, though Mama made her feel loved. There was a difference between being loved and being important, she realized. Her life had always been hard and soft at the same time. She favored smooth things: clean tablecloths with a little lace at the edge, carefully made-up featherbeds, smooth gravies and strudel with cream, clean starched shirts, fine woolen shawls. Her own skin, she always liked her own skin, even before Chava. Touching it made her catch her breath—on the inside of her elbows, for instance, where the soft flesh was always warm, or her earlobe, a little sack at the side of her face made for fingering, like shells she remembered from the portside stores of Odessa.

She never complained about the work she had to do because Mama always tried to make it fun. “Imagine the mop is your dance partner,” Mama said, “see how much of the floor you can cover, dancing.” Mama taught her how to waltz, letting Rose stand on her feet. She knew girls with more brothers, whose mamas scolded them no matter how hard they worked. They’d get used to married life that way, their mamas said. Her Mama said she didn’t want that kind of marriage for Rose.