Beyond the Pale: A Novel (50 page)

By the following December, our dingy rooms on Essex Street were looking and feeling particularly bleak. No matter how exhausted Rose and I were from work—she had found a sewing job at Triangle Shirtwaist in the summer—we made every excuse not to get home until we dropped directly onto our bed, too tired to do more than hold each other’s hands. When Rose complained about our cheerless surroundings after Shabbes dinner one night, Aunt Bina grimaced.

“I don’t mean it as an insult to you, Mama. But weren’t we only going to live here a year or two until we could afford better? I’m working again—”

“As long as those mamzers at Triangle don’t find out you’re in the local,” I said.

“There are mamzers, as you say, everywhere. You ever been in a shop run by saints? Socialists, even?” Rose said, only to be interrupted by Harry.

“Still in the local, huh?” he asked, picking his teeth with a fish bone. He had a room next to his own factory and only came by on Friday nights.

“Don’t bait your sister, please,” Uncle Isadore shushed him. “Very nice meal, Mrs. Petrovsky, very nice. And as for you, Rose, you know how hard your mother works to fix this place up.”

“Rose does too, Uncle Isadore,” I said quietly, hoping to sound respectful.

“Yes, well, a girl should help her mother, not criticize.”

“I wasn’t criticizing, Papa.”

“Maybe you were really criticizing me, eh? But don’t worry,” he leaned over and patted her hand, “now that I’m a foreman at Stern’s, I think finally our luck is changing. I’m not going to make any premature announcements, but this year, God willing, will be the year we move. Unless of course you get married first.”

Rose gave a loud sigh. An unusual moment of silence enveloped the table. Only Harry made little smacking noises while he continued to pick his teeth.

“Rose, dear,” Bina finally said, “I was thinking how it would be nice to have a special Chanukah dinner, have everyone together.”

“Everyone?” I asked, grateful for even this change of subject.

“Yes, everyone. So we have our disagreements. We’re all still family. I don’t get the opportunity to see my new granddaughter often enough.”

“Chanukah,” Isadore said, stroking his chin in approval, “a good idea. We haven’t celebrated Chanukah in years.”

“What’s the big deal?” Harry asked, lighting a cigar.

“You’re content to come every Shabbes for a free meal, I notice,” Bina said. “Would it hurt you to come one extra night and sit with your brother, your new niece?” When she made a motion to start clearing the table I jumped up and took over the job.

“Aaron’s the family type, not me,” Harry said. “Anyway, you probably don’t even know when Chanukah is. God knows, I don’t. And you know what, Ma? I don’t care.”

“What kind of way is that to talk to your mother?”

“That’s another thing, Pop. She’s not really my mother.”

Isadore leapt up like a watch spring and hit Harry on the cheek with the back of his hand. Bina’s mouth fell open in disbelief, but whether from what Harry said or what Isadore did was hard to tell.

“Ephraim!” she managed to exclaim.

“Okay, okay. I apologize.” He put his drinking glass up to his cheek to cool it off. “That’s some wallop you got there, Pop. You should have been a fighter.”

Isadore glared at him and turned to run his fist under the brown water from the sink.

“Your father is a fighter, Harry,” Bina said softly.

“Ma, I’m apologizing, all right? All this old country holiday stuff just rubs me the wrong way.”

“You want instead to celebrate Christmas?” Rose asked, trying to joke.

“It wouldn’t be such a big crime. One of the guys I play poker with is going to get himself a regular Christmas tree.”

“A Jewish boy?”

“We’re all Americans now,” Harry said.

Isadore rubbed his knuckles and slumped back into his chair. “I never thought it would lead to this.”

“What would lead?” I asked.

“My father was shocked by me when I trimmed my beard,” he said. “I shocked myself when I stopped going to shul here. I suppose my son has to follow in my footsteps, but I didn’t think I was walking into apostasy.”

“No one’s talking about apostasy, Pop. C’mon, you gotta admit that all the lights they put up for Christmas in this town are impressive.”

“You can be bought for a string of lights?” Isadore asked.

“Listen, I’ll come for Chanukah, all right?” Harry grabbed his hat. “I gotta go put some snow on this cheek before it swells up.” He walked over to the pile of jackets Aunt Bina had been working on before dinner, trying to judge how close they were to being finished. “Ma, it’s all right between us? I’m sorry for what I said.”

Bina looked over at the jackets like a prisoner looking at bars. “Chanukah dinner, the Monday night after your Christmas, at seven o’clock.”

“Seven?”

“It wouldn’t hurt you to let your workers out a half hour early. For a Jewish holiday,” she said.

“Okay, Ma. Whatever you say. And thanks for putting the rush on these.”

Rose’s eyes almost popped out of her head at his arrogance, but Harry grabbed his hat and was down the stairs before anyone could give him more grief.

On Sunday Rose and I went to Sinsheimer’s Café at the far end of Essex Street for soda water after seeing a picture:
The Great Train Robbery
. Usually I was the one who argued for new inventions, but the moving pictures made me uncomfortable.

“A photograph makes a portrait of the soul, one moment of the soul,” Rose said, excited, “But a moving picture is a record of a soul in motion.”

“Yes,” I agreed, trying to find a way into what bothered me, “and still it stops somewhere, so it has the same effect as a photograph. It has a beginning and end in time.”

“But if I hold a photograph in my hand, what’s moving in the photograph is my own feeling. The photograph is full of secrets. It’s a ghost, a bad night or a good afternoon,” Rose said, flushed with thought. “The moving picture is public—these people we never knew are now part of our lives. They move forward and drag us with them into the future.”

“You think the moving pictures are the future?” I asked.

“Of course. The life we live is like an old photograph, it’s dirty and crumpled.” She took a long sip of her seltzer. “You think our condition can be changed by many people acting together—”

“It can be, Rose. It will be,” I said.

“Well, I hope you’re right. But think if people saw it in the nickelodeons, all over America, in little towns—”

“A moving picture about women striking?” That was a new idea. “You’re saying if we made a moving picture about women striking we would gain the sympathy of the masses?”

“More quickly than any pamphlet your socialists produce.” Rose turned and looked at the counter. “Do we have enough money for a piece of cake?”

I checked my pocket and held up a nickel. “Get me a piece of apple strudel.”

She came back with the strudel and chocolate cake. “You never get a stomach ache, do you?” I asked.

“Only when we argue,” she said, though I knew she didn’t mean it. I was trying to imagine a political picture. “I don’t know if we could get people to come to a moving picture about sweatshops. People go to these for entertainment—”

“To you everything is in a box,” Rose said, her mouth full of cake. “Entertainment is one box, politics another and our friendship something else.” She waved her fork in the air to illustrate the separate places.

I made a face about the last category but tried to let it go. I picked a little at my strudel.

“Why do people come to a speech?” Rose continued. “A speaker has to know tricks, tell jokes, or stories at least. Emma Goldman’s magazine
Mother Earth
, for instance—each month it starts with a poem. I read those poems even if I don’t read the tracts. Moving pictures draw people in. If you can tell a story the right way, it should be able to keep moving inside people after the show is over. Don’t you think that would be true?”

“You might be right, actually.” I wanted to embrace her right there. “But Mr. Carnegie isn’t going to give us the money for it. How would we ever make something like that?”

“We won’t. And that means we won’t really be part of the future,” she looked over my shoulder into the street and put her fork down.

“Oh, listen to this! When did you become a pessimist? Even if I agree with you that motion pictures are the future, and I’m not saying the future of what, even
if
—they still have no bearing on the world outside themselves. Everything has a future, its own future, lying inside it, waiting to tumble out with the days. A few inventions don’t gobble up the personal meaning of that. The automobile—”

“Yes,” Rose said, smiling again and finishing her cake, “it’s exactly like the automobile.”

I thought she was agreeing with me and I relaxed, making little balls out of the strudel crumbs, like I used to with candle wax. “Right. The automobile does not eat up the future of that horse across the street. That horse lives and has its own work and its own future.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Chava,” Rose said. “The automobile does eat up the horse, and the moving pictures are eating us—if there’s anything left after the sewing machines get us. You’re the mechanic, you ought to understand. I’ll make you a wager that in five years you’ll agree with me.”

“And what are you going to wager me?”

“Let’s see.” She looked back over at the case of kugls and salads. “A whole fancy dinner out, anywhere the winner wants to go.”

“You think you’ll be able to afford that?”

“Who knows? But I’m sure you’ll be paying.” Rose ran her tongue over her lips and laughed. “Are you going to finish that strudel or just play with it?”

“Here,” I said, pushing it across the table. I felt excited and let down all at once, and I turned to look at the horse across the street again, stamping its foot, its breath condensing into cold white clouds under the curve of the street lamp.

Melt the World

I
T CAN’T BE
5:30 already,” I groaned.

“You say this every morning, yet you’re usually the first one out of bed.”

“But Shabbes, Rose, they could at least let you sleep until six.”

“Shh, you’ll wake Papa.” Rose laid her finger on my lips and I kissed it. Then Rose moved her finger along the line of my cheekbone and over my eyes. “You can sleep today. You enjoy it, lazy girl.”

“I’m not lazy—”

“Always an argument. Next you’ll get mad, you’ll say you won’t come to meet me after work.” Rose stretched, sat up in bed.

The room was so dark. It would be nicer to have our own place. But the money, the Petrovskys. Everything was always waiting. Working and waiting.

“So who wants to go all the way over to Washington Square just to see you?” I said, giving her a little poke in the thigh.

Rose turned towards me, trying to make out my face in the bit of streetlight that filtered past the fire escape. “You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”

I tried to pull her back down and she clicked disapproval. “Oh babychins,” I whispered, “just a little—,” and Rose was back against me, the top of my head pressing into her neck, my hand kneading flesh through the nightgown. So quiet.

I remembered last month, on the Greene Street sidewalk where she worked, Rose had said, “When you touch me, I try to imagine we have a secret cave in the snow, and there’s no sound at all in there, only this fabulous warmth of you all over me. We melt the cave, we melt the world, until finally the sound comes out and there’s a place where I can say ‘I love you.’”

I laughed then because she’d said she loved me, right there on the street. We had been walking towards Washington Square Park as we usually did on Shabbes after Rose got off work. None of the other girls were near us.

“You know what I mean?” Rose had asked.

“Yes,” I said, “you mean you want to go somewhere right now where you can express your animal nature with me.” Rose banged her pocketbook against my rear.

Now in the dark Rose’s face came close and her lips were suddenly against me. I shied away. “I don’t taste good.”

“I don’t care,” Rose said and pushed my mouth back to hers, just a moment. Just a quick, thick morning kiss.

“If we lived alone,” I whispered in her ear, “I would have time to eat a peppermint first. I’d have time to buy flowers—I’d buy all the flowers in Mrs. Berger’s flower stand and fill the bed with flower petals. Then—,” I yawned, half dreaming, “I’d roll you down on them. Hmm. You’d get flower petals stuck everywhere.”

Rose stiffened, moved away, then turned back. “What makes you think we’d have more time if we lived alone?” she whispered in my ear.

“At night, anyway, at night we would.”

“Stop. We’re going to argue and that would wake everyone up. Just go back to sleep now.”

I shook my head, teasing with mouth and eyes, “No, I’m going to watch you dress, and you know it.”

“You can’t see anything in the dark, just sleep, all right?” and Rose slipped out of bed. I could make her out, changing into a white striped shirtwaist, bright, outlining her full breast, her thick arms and wide shoulders. She wound her hair in a loose braid and pinned it up.

She seemed so strong, so tender. Sometimes when I looked at Rose, the pain I felt, in my stomach, in my shoulders, disappeared. Drained out of me somehow. Look, I wanted to say, you’ve cured me, I can eat pancakes for hours just because you make me happy. That would be nice, maybe I should make pancakes for supper, for everyone, all the Petrovskys. They’d like that. Everyone would relax, Uncle Isadore would wind his watch, Aunt Bina would complain I was giving Rose too much, I was eating too little, the boarders would drip syrup on their shirts, it would be a lot of fun. They would like it. Rose would like it. She’d say she could still taste the syrup when she got into bed …

I curled up on my side. Rose, dressed, leaned over me and kissed me goodbye.

Someone was singing “Let me call you sweetheart” in an apartment on Mercer Street as I walked by later that afternoon. It was a beautiful spring day, the second Saturday after Purim. I swung my arms, humming along in English,
I’m in love with you
. Then I heard a muffled boom close by and my stomach flopped against my ribs like a fish gasping for air. When I turned the corner onto Washington Place, an old man, running wildly with his hands flailing above his head, almost knocked me over.