City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (25 page)

She told herself she was returning now to the person she had been before work: well, and whole, and untired. There was a world of possibilities open to her. She could go to the opera house, where for twenty-five cents she could climb to the upper gallery, and see Caruso or Pavlova or Kreisler. She could go out to a philosophy lecture or one of the dancing academies or the Yiddish theatres along the Bowery, where the audience threw cabbages at the stage, and stomped their feet and shouted “Shame, shame!” if an actor lit up a cigar on the Sabbath.

Best of all, she could go to the Automatic Vaudeville, in Union Square. There she could drop her penny into one of the gilded nickelodeons in the long, marble-floored parlor, and see—
anything,
from all over the world: a love story or a pogrom. Colonel Dreyfus on Devil’s Island or Teddy Roosevelt on safari in Africa or the Czar and his court—the long files of generals and priests swaying majestically along, scattering clouds of incense, carrying their magnificent, plumed hats under their arms—

The movie she loved most of all, though, was set much closer to home. It was simply a moving picture made from the back of a truck, driving through the streets of lower Manhattan.

She never had any trouble getting that machine. It had been around for months now, and most people were bored by it, but she could never get enough. It was all there: the pushcarts and the stores, and the cops and the peddlers and the housewives, all moving in sped-up, jerky movements across the street. The trolleys and automobiles whizzing past them all like meteors. The same streets she walked every day, down past the Flatiron Building, and over to Union Square, through the crowds on Delancey, and Hester Street, and back over to Chinatown, and Little Italy. The grinning boys, chasing after the truck, and the daughters of the
maskilim,
trying to stride with utmost dignity under their parasols, and the peddlers squinting up suspiciously from their vegetable carts. Her whole world, swarming by in front of her like one gigantic play, so fast she could barely keep up with it—

Esther stretched again on the stoop—and caught sight of her own hands. They were so large now, the knuckles huge, and swollen and calloused.
Mr. Singer’s fiancée,
they liked to call it. How they grew with each year, how her skin yellowed from the shop—

She shall be brought before the king in raiment of needlework

She stared out into the crowds still pouring off the trains, wanting to look anywhere, to see anything but her own hands. It was then, amidst the blank, strange faces of the crowd, that she saw her brother.

He stood out from the rest of the crowd, as always, dressed in a snappy cutaway the color of the sky, a bowler, and a silky white four-in-hand fastened at his neck by a diamond stickpin. Where the rest of them shuffled along, he seemed to move on the balls of his feet, barely touching the ground—the way only a man who didn’t work for a living could walk at the end of the day.

When he saw Esse there he couldn’t help but walk up to her. He had thought to just nose around, see what he could, but there she was: standing on the stoop in some old
shmatte
of a dress. Looking tired and gaunt, and just as beautiful and immaculate as ever. He bared his teeth, and went up to her.

“The big
macher,”
she said, not unaffectionately, and he could tell she could barely contain her excitement at seeing him again.

“Hello, Esse,” he saluted her from the bottom of the stairs, the two Russian girls with their fairy tale book sidling away from them.

“What make you?” he asked formally—but she only continued to taunt him:

“What is it they call you now? Billy the Kid? Or something with blood?”

“Ya, ya,” he said, waving her words away. “So how are they?”

How beautiful she still was How good

“Better than you,
chachem,”
she said, noticing the bandage on the back of his head, and coming down the stairs toward him. She reached out a hand toward it, but he swatted it away.

“Just some business.”

“Nu,
how is pimping these days?”

“You shouldn’t use words like that,” he told her, really annoyed now. He hated to hear such things come out of
her
mouth, to have to think of Sadie in the same breath—

“A pimp is a pimp.”

“And a whore is a whore, all right? I never made anybody walk the streets.”

“No—and I suppose they madeyou a pimp. And the peddlers made you a horse poisoner, and the cards made you a gambler.”

“What about you? Working yourself to death. Letting them eat the head off your bones. Is that better?” he burst out—not wanting to, knowing he had let her get to him, but unable to contain himself any longer. “Look at you! You couldn’t take the place of my oldest girl, the way you look now!”

It was not true. She was still beautiful—still as immaculate as the first day he had really seen her, and he had put his hand on her hip, and she had not turned away

“Stop it!”

He expected her to slap him, and he was ready for it—the hard, flat feel of her hand on his cheek—but all she did was hold out a hand, appealing to him, until his face burned not with the slap but with shame.

“How can you talk to me like that?” she asked, her voice horribly understanding and calm.

She was still so exasperating so righteous. But he had gone up to her and she did not turn away

“I am your sister. You have blood, you know.”

“Yes,” he said, dropping his eyes. Hating her for such restraint.

She ran her hand through his deep shock of black hair, feeling carefully around his wound.

“Ah,
bulvon
—what are we ever going to do with you? When will you remember you are a person?”

She had not turned away from him, and when he had dropped his trembling hand in shame all she had said was Don’t feel bad It’s nothing bad Don’t feel bad—when in fact he knew it was evil

She was the only one he regretted.

It was back when they were still living on Forsythe Street, where the whores used to sit right out on the sidewalk, naked under their flimsy wraps. Papa raved at them when he passed, but they just laughed, and spat at his shoes, bulbuous white thighs spreading out over the pavement. They whistled at Lazar when
he
walked by, lifting up their skirts, calling to him:

Boychik, come have one on the house! Oy, that face! Softer than my tochis!

They tangled up his feet in their legs, grabbed at his crotch. He was such a sweet-faced boy then, they took him for a blushing
yeshiva bocher,
though he knew the poison was already working within him.

He walked about carefully in those days, aware of the invisible boundaries all around him. There were Poles and Ukrainians just to the east, and Italians a few blocks to the south of them, and if he wanted to venture over to the West Side docks he had to look out for the Hudson Dusters, and the Five Pointers, and the other Irish gangs.

The Irishers were just thugs, big, musclebound bruisers he could evade easily enough. The Italians he found more intriguing. They set up blazing shrines of candles at the end of their narrow alleys, and paraded with bands, and statues of saints pinned with pink roses and dollar bills. If they caught you, though, they would take your money, force you to your knees to recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary—

“Say
it, yid! We
know
you can say it!”

—all the strange, terrifying
goyishe
rituals. Spit on a crust of bread from the gutter and press it into your mouth, laughing:
This is my body. Take, eat—

“Now you’re a convert!”

He broke away, raced back home, spitting out the awful bread, their harsh laughter chasing him down the street. Gentile bread, he came to think of it, something they would really eat. Monk had been right:

Never get on your knees to a Christian

Better to let them kick and stomp you insensible. He knew what he would do the next time.

Not that he ever had much time to leave the street, the immediate neighborhood. There was his job sweeping out the pharmacy on Great Jones Street after school. Waiting to get into the public library at Seward Park, where the lines of
yiddishe
children stretched around the block. More hours reading over the Talmud with his father, listening to all the endless, arcane arguments of the older men. Droning through his lessons in the dark, smothering
bes midrash
behind the synagogue, amidst the sweet, decrepit smells of old books and candle wax, the damp and musty odor of his fellow students, sweating in their heavy coats and pants—

It bored him nearly to death. He was restless, and nervous, looking for something—anything—else. He knew he was supposed to like it, to prepare for the life of a great scholar like his father, but he thought that if he stayed in this life he would blow apart from sheer frustration.

That was when he had noticed her. Esse was always around, of course—his younger sister, working hour after hour with his mother around the kitchen table. Doing whatever they did with a needle and thread until it was time to clear it off for the scholars’ supper. They were far enough apart in age to be casual allies in the household, joking behind their backs about the old people and their
haimishe
ways, keeping each other’s little secrets. But he never really noticed her until one day—just one day for no real reason at all, when he saw how good she really was.

After that he was mesmerized. He followed her with his eyes everywhere she went around the tiny apartment—helping their mother with supper, putting the bedding away, hauling the washing up to the roof. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her, he couldn’t help from bumping into her—how could he not?—in the little space they inhabited: brushing against her, smelling her neck, her hair, watching the curve of her dress as it hung down her girlish legs. He couldn’t help noticing her, he was suffocating in the little home with her. It was wrong, he knew, but then he was evil, and the fact that it excited him only proved how bad he was.

And then, one day, their
mamaleh
had been so sick the old reb had actually been prevailed upon to take her to a doctor. Usually, when she was ill, he preferred to let her lie in bed and give her wide berth, the way he did when it was her monthlies, but this time she was too sick to be ignored, actually vomiting up green bile, and he was persuaded to at least take her to, if not a real-life doctor, at least a
baba
over on Ludlow Street.

They had been left alone in the apartment, and he had gone up to her. She was supposed to keep sewing the frilly little women’s things she was always doing with her mother, she was supposed to keep sewing but she got bored and left her post at the table to go and hop up and down the living room, turn spins and cartwheels in the shafts of sunlight. Singing to herself—absorbed in what she was doing like a little girl.

He had gone up to her then. He had gone up to her and put his hand on her hip—just one hand, light as a feather, trembling on the jut of her right hip. Just a
touch,
for she was the most beautiful, the most pure thing he had ever seen, and he was afraid to go any further.

She had turned to him. She had turned to face him, out of her game now, and she had not looked away. Her face filled with damnable compassion for him. She did not turn away but looked right at him, and he was certain he could have done anything he wanted then—that she knew just what he was about but he still could have done anything, anything at all, and she would have followed.

He turned away. Instead he turned away, full of loathing for himself, and that was when she had said it:

Don’t feel bad It’s nothing bad Don’t feel bad

—but he knew she was lying.

It was that very
Shabbos
he had left home. Not that he had meant to; it was just something, like a bad dream, that had spun out of control.

Every Friday evening his mother gave him the family
cholent
to take over to the
goyishe
baker on Delancey Street—the
Shabbos
dinner, beef and beans and barley, in a stew she made so rich and thick they would have no power to do anything for the rest of the Sabbath anyway but lie around the room in a torpor.

It took her three days to make it. She would put the dish together on Wednesday, cook it lightly, then leave it to sit in the kitchen, wending its aroma throughout their home until the Sabbath eve. Then he would lug the heavy, black pot over, along with dozens of other boys his age—a scattered parade of first sons, in caps and short pants. Mothers would smile to see them, and old men would dance on the Street corners, giddy with the holiday atmosphere:

“The
Shabbos!
The
Shabbos
bride comes!”

His mother gave him a nickel for the baker, a harried, beetle-browed man, to let the
cholent
simmer in his oven for the next twelve hours along with every other Sabbath supper in the neighborhood. The next day, after synagogue, he would retrieve it. This was a much harder haul, rushing the steaming black pot back home before it went cold, but he was always proud to do it—his stomach gurgling just at the smell of it, the faces of his family—even his father’s—radiant with joy when he carried it in.

But that particular Friday on his way to the baker, he saw the dice players. They had always been there, insolently rolling their dice right out in the open, against the brick wall of Pinsky’s Market on Attorney Street—but this Sabbath he looked at them with new eyes: a group of sharp-looking young men sitting in their center, coats turned up to their chins, kneeling around a sidewalk littered with money: pennies, nickels, even dimes and quarters.

“Come, baby, come. Be nice to papa.”