Beyond the Pale: A Novel (54 page)

“Aunt Bina?” This change of subject confused me. It took me a minute to remember our apartment. “She’s been saving money all these years, penny by penny. With that and the death benefit—.” I clenched. How much were those girls worth? Less than a sewing machine.

“Go on.”

“Uncle Iz has the opportunity to buy a small jewelry store in Yonkers now. The man who had it, a landsman, is retiring. His sons didn’t want to be in the business. Aunt Bina says it’s a relief to be able to leave Essex Street, too much there reminds her. So they, we—”

“You were planning to move to Yonkers with them?”

“I guess I wasn’t planning anything.” I pulled out the thread I’d been worrying and wound it around my finger.

“So maybe you’ll come by us until you know what you want to do next?”

“Live here?”

“Why not? There’s an extra room where we put our guests. You wouldn’t be a guest, exactly, but you could stay there.”

“Dovida—.” I heard Dovida clear her throat in the doorway.

“I wouldn’t mind if you stayed with us for awhile, if that’s what you were about to ask,” she said, stepping into the room. “It’s better you should be in New York than in Yonkers. More opportunities.”

“Opportunities?” What did I care about opportunities?

“She doesn’t mean in business, dear,” Gutke said. “Through Henry Street or the League—”

“The League?” I hadn’t gone to the League since the fire. I meant to, but every day when I got home from work I was too tired.

“You have to repeat everything we say? You remember the League, surely,” Gutke said.

“I was talking to Paul, Pauline Newman just a few weeks ago when I was in Chicago,” Dovida said, sitting down in the easy chair across from us. “She said after the fire she couldn’t do anything for weeks. Couldn’t read, write, give speeches. Schneiderman and Reznikoff persuaded her to keep going and she went on to Cleveland, organized the cloakmakers there. She keeps resigning, but the garment workers keep asking her to come back. She’s their only woman organizer, you know.” She tapped the case of her pocket watch. “But she keeps on, and her life’s not an easy one.”

“She didn’t lose—, “ I started.

“You can’t say that, dear. Pauline worked at Triangle for years. You don’t know who she might have lost.” Gutke raised an eyebrow at me.

“You’re right, I don’t know.” I remembered Pauline on the Palisades, the knowing look she gave Rose and me. “Still, what’s that got to do with me?”

“Everything,” Dovida said, “don’t you see? These women need you—Pauline, Lena, Rose Schneiderman, Lillian Wald—”

“Stop, Dovida,” Gutke said, “you’re overwhelming her.”

“No, it’s all right. It’s—.” I got up and went over to the window. Across the street children were playing, people were strolling, arguing, gesturing, even though it must have been nearly freezing. “What can I do? All
I
know is gluing and machines.”

Dovida snorted. “All these years of lectures, debates, marches, strikes, and all you know is gluing and machines?”

I turned around to face her, angry. She was smiling at me.

“Come,” she said, “let’s go look at your room. You’ll tell me if there’s anything you need. Then we’ll go with you over to your aunt’s, so she’ll see you’re moving in with a respectable bourgeois couple.”

“She’ll have trouble believing I know any bourgeoisie.”

“Don’t worry,” Gutke said. “I already met your aunt, a very good woman. She’ll be glad to know you’re staying by us. I was your mother’s midwife, after all, so to her it will be the same as family.”

Dovida and I looked at Gutke in surprise, but she wouldn’t say anything more.

Living with Dovida and Gutke was harder than I imagined. Everything in their home was either clean and new or old and valuable. It was easier to be a guest for tea. Going to the bindery, then coming back to an impeccably kept house every night was unnerving. I started going over to the League offices in the evenings again. Not many of the allies were around at night, just working girls.

But things weren’t going so well at the League, either. The allies, and even some of the American-born working women, thought Rose Schneiderman was spending too much time organizing the Jewish working girls.

“Too much time!” she said to me. “Maybe if I’d spent more time—”

“They don’t remember your speech after the fire? That was the most moving speech I ever heard.” Rose Schneiderman could always find something for a volunteer to do. I was filing papers for her.

“Thank you,” she said, without smiling. “But speeches don’t seem to change much. You don’t know what I have to swallow to work with these American-born. Now they’ve hired an organizer who supports immigration restrictions, as if immigrants cause all of America’s labor problems.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Everyone wants someone to blame. Organizers know that the easiest way to get group solidarity is to find a common enemy.” She handed me a fresh stack of paper. “Only I thought we had agreed our enemies were capitalists, not poor people escaping pogroms.”

“I agree.” I had to keep repeating the English alphabet to myself under my breath while she talked.

“Yes, but you’re not even on the executive committee anymore, are you?”

“What? Oh, no. When I stopped going last year, they replaced me.”

“With an American girl?”

“Yes, now that you mention it.”

She sighed, starting to sort a new stack. “Our secretary said, at the last meeting, ‘The Russian Jew has little sense of administration. We have been used to ascribing their failures to their depending solely on their emotions and not on constructive work.’”

I turned around and looked at her in disbelief. “She said that? After everything you’ve done, all the work Pauline and Lena have put in, all the Jewish girls?”

“It’s plain anti-Semitism,” she said, getting up and pacing. The room must have been as familiar to her as Essex Street was to me. Desks, telephone, American flag, photographs of the League presidents in other cities. “I have to resign. I can’t let them think this kind of slander is acceptable, can I?”

“No,” I said fiercely.

“The suffragists have been asking me to go to Ohio to stump for the referendum there.” She sat behind her desk, picked up an eraser and started bouncing it nervously.

What must it be like to work for women’s unions, and if that didn’t work out, to work for the vote? Everyone wanted Rose Schneiderman because she was such a wonderful speaker. Even when she couldn’t give you the answer, she could lay the problem out as quick and clean as you’d gut a fish.

“So what do you think?” she asked.

“About going to Ohio?”

She caught the eraser in her fist. “Probably it will do me good to get out of New York for awhile. And there’s no doubt we need the vote. I think I was born a suffragist but if I wasn’t, the conditions of working girls in New York would have made me one.”

“You’re already working on your speech,” I said, turning back to the filing cabinet.

She laughed. “I’m sorry, I’m used to soap boxes. But the more I try to organize women, the more I believe we need the power of the vote.”

“Last week I heard a speaker over by Delancey Street say that suffrage is a sidetrack, we can’t depend on the state for solutions.” I had listened to his whole speech. Nobody was waiting for me at home.

“That sounds like the Wobblies. They’ve done some wonderful things, but you saw what happened after 1909, how the momentum dissipated,” Rose said with authority. “We have to be able to influence legislation, to make laws to protect women and children, or we’ll never be safe at work. I know there are contradictions but we have to take the world where it is. If we start, maybe the next generation will be strong enough to fix our mistakes.”

She fell silent, bouncing the eraser. Was it better to make practical compromises or hold out for the ideal? If you could agree on what the ideal was—my finger slipped among the papers and I had to start over again: A, B, C …

“Rose Schneiderman is going to Ohio for the vote, is she?” Dovida folded her napkin carefully, tucked it into her shirt for a bib. Gutke had made chicken fricassee for dinner, with baby carrots. “She’s some firebrand.”

I looked at Dovida to see if she’d heard herself, but she was busy sucking a neck bone. Gutke was aware, though. Rose Schneiderman’s red hair, her anger, did make her seem like a torch, sometimes. Roses going up in flames. Except Rose Schneiderman didn’t get consumed.

“Eat, darling, you’ve hardly touched your dinner. It doesn’t taste good to you?”

“It’s delicious, Gutke. Everything you make is better than the last.”

“She’s something, isn’t she?” Dovida beamed at Gutke.

Suddenly I felt that I had witnessed too many of their private moments, that I couldn’t stay with them anymore than I could still live with Aunt Bina and Uncle Isadore. “Maybe I should go with her,” I said on impulse.

“To the kitchen?”

“She means with Rose, to Ohio, Dovida,” Gutke said.

“I knew that.” Dovida took another bite of chicken. “That’s not a bad idea.”

“You’re ready to get rid of me?”

“Not at all, not at all. But it’s good to have a change of scene. And working for an idea you believe in, that’s the best kind of work there is.” Dovida said.

“Nobody’s offered me a job to do this.”

“No?” Dovida sucked her teeth for a second. “Maybe I should hire you.”

“You? I couldn’t accept that. You’ve been too generous already.”

“You know many of the working girls at the League, in the Socialist Party, get their wages paid by patrons who believe in what they’re doing.”

“Some people would say you buy the leadership now, so you won’t have to worry later,” I said, looking at the gravy on my plate.

Dovida screwed up her mouth, bobbed her head. “Good argument. I’ll remember that. But we’re not so worried about later, are we, Gutke?”

“Later takes care of itself, I’ve found out,” Gutke said. “I don’t think Dovida’s offer comes from bad motivation, Chava.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry. You should always ask what someone expects in return when they give you something.” Dovida paused, chewing. “And I do want something in return.”

“Which is?”

“I want you to keep working until the cause is won.”

Both Gutke and I laughed. “Which cause do you mean?” I asked.

“The vote, to start. And then everything else you believe in—”

“But that would take my whole life,” I protested.

“Exactly,” Dovida said. She turned to Gutke. “Did you have time to bake today?”

Gutke raised her eyebrows. “Really, Dovida. I was working with the nurses from six o’clock this morning. You’re lucky you got this.”

“You didn’t happen to bake, did you, Chava?”

I stared at her. For a second I remembered making challah with Mama. It had never occurred to me to bake anything in America.

“Just making sure.” She whipped her napkin off, went into the front hallway and came back with a pink baker’s box tied up with string. “I picked this up for my working girls,” she said, pulling out the most beautiful pie I’d ever seen. “If I can remember how to turn the oven on, I’ll heat this up and we can have it with tea while we discuss your trip to Ohio.”

The pie, cherry, was so good we each ate two pieces.

“I hope you won’t be disappointed if the food isn’t so good out West,” Dovida said. I realized we were taking it for granted that I was going. I cracked my knuckles.

“That’s not the most ladylike habit, dear. I don’t mean to criticize, but traveling with suffragists won’t be the same as being a mechanic at the New World Bindery,” Gutke said.

“You know—.” Dovida poked her finger into the air, stopped, looked at me. “You don’t have to travel as a woman, you know.”

“Dovida,” Gutke warned.

I knew exactly what Dovida meant. “I always wanted to know how you pull it off.”

Gutke cleared her throat and started to remove the plates. “This is not the world’s best idea.”

“I just want to know how it can be done, that’s all,” I said.

“She should have every option, don’t you think, Gutke? Or am I still such a freak to you?”

Gutke dropped a dish. “Never—Dovida!”

“Let me clean that up,” I said, while they were untangling each other’s meanings with looks and gestures. I found the broom and started sweeping.

“Dovida.” Gutke pulled a chair next to her, took her hand. “You can’t believe I ever thought of you like that.”

“Then why are you so against it?”

“Because it’s dangerous. I was thinking of Chava, not you. You’ve been doing this for years and you’re a banker. Remember what happened to Oscar Wilde.”

“That was different. Oscar Wilde went out of his way to provoke censure and thought no one would ever take him up on it. We know how the mob thinks and we know how to avoid giving them reason to think it. I’m not suggesting Chava do anything that she feels uncomfortable with.”

“Think what would happen to her if anyone found out.”

“She should have a good teacher, then, to make sure she doesn’t get found out—
if
she decides to do it. What do you think, Chava?”

I leaned the broom against the wall. “I’m not sure. How do you think Rose Schneiderman would feel if I suddenly turned up as a man?”

“A very good question. What do you think, Gutke?”

“I think she would blink and then go on with whatever speech she was making. Rose Schneiderman is the last person I’m worried about. But something about this bothers me. For Chava,” Gutke emphasized.

“Chava?” Dovida cocked her head to the side, looking me up and down.

I took a deep breath. “It would be easier to get a job as a mechanic.”

“It will always be easier for men to get jobs as mechanics,” Gutke said. “But you got one already as a woman.”

“Yes, I did,” I said, thinking about leaving the bindery, leaving New York, saying goodbye to Aunt Bina a second time. “Well, you could show me how and I can still decide later, can’t I?”

“Absolutely,” Dovida said. “Come upstairs with me.”

There must be a road away from death. I came across seas to find it, leaving my mother’s wig in the dust of Kishinev. The boat stank, the shops were filthy. We thought in America it would be different but only America’s manners are different, and its clothes. Underneath all countries lies the same greed. Let me call it what it is—I’m not ashamed. How can I be ashamed anymore after I saw Rose in the fire?