City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (39 page)

“I don’t know—but I think it’s someone else,” Clara said confidentially. “I don’t trust that Miss Havisham!”

“Really?”

She leaned in closer to Esther.

“Guess what? I’m a walking delegate if there’s a strike. And if that goes well—maybe even a traveling delegate.”

“Really?”

Such ajob—

It meant organizing all the other women out there, spreading the Cause to their sisters in all the other factories, out in the intriguing vastness of the country. It meant going from city to strange new city by train. Racing along the rails through the night, sitting up in the parlor car while it hurtled across whole new lands. It was far beyond anything she thought she could do herself, but Esther ached to go with her.

“Keep it under your hat.”

Clara winked, and hugged her tight. Pauline and Miss Dreier and Mrs. Perkins stood waiting, a little ways off, to walk home with her and talk over the strike some more, and it only reminded Esther of how little she was, even in the union. She couldn’t help but look down, filled with envy—wanting to tell Clara everything about Coney Island and her
dybbuk
there, just to have something to cut through her good news.

Clara noticed her expression, peering in at her closely—filled with such obvious concern that Esther felt ashamed.

“Everything all right,
mamaleh?”

“Yes, yes, it’s nothing. Just a little tired.” She smiled weakly.

“Well, see you get some rest then. Even if it don’ mean reading tonight.”

“Sure.”

“All right then. Sleep tight, dear heart!”

“All right, dear heart.”

They each kissed their knuckles and pressed them together, in one of the secret, affectionate little signs the girls at the factories all had, and she watched Clara walk away with her new friends.

Esther turned and walked back toward Orchard Street, following the course of a garbage wagon home—the iron ash cans ringing and sparking along the sidewalk in the dark as the garbagemen wrestled them up and over, into the cart.

She had thought about the society women many times since she had started coming to the union office. Where she was too shy to say hello to them, Clara had been invited on vacations to a cottage Miss Dreier had at Gravesend, and to a house Mrs. Perkins’s family owned in the Berkshires.

“They’re just like anybody else,” Clara had laughed at her when she asked what it was like, but she did not believe it.

Like most of the others, Esther tiptoed around the society ladies and the social workers in the office. She didn’t quite trust them. She could not figure out why they were there, and she feared that if
she
had been a wealthy woman, living in Brooklyn or Massachusetts, she would never have come out to the union hall at all.

A sudden gust of wind broke the still August night, and there was a terrible fluttering sound above her. Esther started, and jumped into a shop door—but it was only a dentist’s shingle, a huge, gold tooth, swung loose and flapping like a demented angel over her head.

I’m scared of a cat and I’m scared of a mouse

She hurried on home past vacant lots strewn with dilapidated baby carriages and broken suitcases, old shirts and worn-out shoes. Up on the fifth floor, she nearly stepped on a cat and its litter, lying right out on the landing. The mother’s slit green eyes peered up weakly, her kittens prodding her body for what little it could provide. The cats were everywhere; they yowled all night in the summer with their lovemaking and in the winter they clutched at the door whenever you opened it, desperate to be in someplace warm. Sometimes she would find whole litters frozen to death together in the corners, their eyes not yet open.

She crept on into the apartment, where everyone else was asleep, her pallet lying already prepared for her in the kitchen. She did not lie down, though, but pulled out her battered copy of the Dickens—bought secondhand from a pushcart peddler for ten cents—and tried to read for at least a little while by the oily glow of the kerosene lamp.

She was dead tired, but she always tried to do something—anything—before she went to bed. Something every night, so that it would not be one more day with nothing accomplished, nothing earned except for someone else.

There were some Sundays when she never got to the Talkers’ Cafe. Some Sundays when the weight of the world lay unbearably upon her, and it seemed pointless to go out at all. She hid from the
roomerkehs
in her parents’ room while the old man walked around the neighborhood, eagerly peering into each new storefront synagogue and scoffing at its impertinence.

Those afternoons she would sit and stare out into the desolate back courtyard. The yard was her constant star. In the summer, it was littered with broken flags and fish heads, gutted mattresses and dead cats—whatever anybody from the tenements might throw down. There was a sign reading
ALL BOYS CAUGHT IN THIS YARD WILL BE DELT WIT ACCORDEN TO LAW
—though she knew in the winter it would be thick with boys, and girls, and older street bums, trying to soak up the heat from the building furnace.

Sometimes, through all the junk, she could make out the old slate stones the yard was paved with, scavenged from one of the city’s countless uprooted cemeteries: winged death’s-heads and crossbones, above a mysterious antique lettering, slowly eroding away.
What kind of people would put such things on their gravestones?
she wondered. Nothing like the simple Jewish stones, with a name, a date, to mark where a person lay.

She would sit and stare at the strange winged skulls, and think about how little she knew, and how little she was likely to do in her life. A feeling of gnawing, inexplicable dread enveloped her, until she was close to weeping. Sometimes she actually did cry—hot, bitter tears that she knew were silly. Over nothing, really—nothing but the fear of being afraid, and the future, and what would become of her. But that just made her cry all the harder, ashamed all over again of her fear, and her hopelessness.

And then for a few hours only, at the right times of the year, direct sunlight flowed into the courtyard. On those afternoons, she might pry open the old, encrusted windows and bask in the sun, with her eyes closed. On those Sundays, she might dry her tears, and decide that maybe she felt well enough to go out for a walk after all. Maybe even to the cafes.

She had only wished that her father could see her in such places. He would never deign to set foot in them himself, of course, but she had hoped one of his old congregation would tell him, out of spite.

Why do you insist on pouring ashes on my head? You have come to love talk more than you love the Almighty.

And how should I love Him? What have you ever taught me of Him? All I know is a needle and a thread.

Can you fathom the sea? Then neither can you fathom the depths of Talmud.

She would kneel before him, put her hands in his and look up seriously into his face.

Then teach me.

I cannot. You are not my son.

Who is your son? Your son is not your son.

All right, I have no son. I have a son in Talmud. That is my fruit, my offspring—my learning.

Arrogance! And me? And me?

You are not my son.

The Dickens swam and wavered before her, in the tiny kitchen. In such moments, such bleak flashes of truth just before sleep, she was not sure that he wasn’t right. Looking deep into her heart, she didn’t know that she even wanted a strike, or that she would be content to hide here forever, dreaming of new hats and secret benefactors. But that didn’t make her feel any better.

“Look out, you idiot!”

The big yellow touring car wheeled around the corner too fast, and just managed to avoid the little boy standing in the crowded street. Looking back, clutching onto his hat, Freud saw a slab-faced man in a straw boater, clutching the boy’s hand and shaking his fist after them. He shuddered to think what might have happened had they hit him.

“Slow down! You’re driving like the characters in those idiotic movies.”

“Ja,
it just takes a little getting used to,” Ferenczi muttered nervously, trying to work the gearshift. “You have to swim with the current.”

“We will lie with the worms if you aren’t more careful!”

Instead, Ferenczi accelerated, and Freud felt his stomach turn over. It was not just the speed of the car. Everything was proceeding much too rapidly, too haphazardly.

He didn’t know where they would be without Brill, their old colleague, so insistent on giving them his grand tour of the city that he still had not taken them up to his clinic at Columbia. At first, Freud had thought this was from nerves, but he had become convinced that the man really did believe they would be impressed by New York.

“Wait—just wait until you see this!” had become his constant refrain.

They had just come from a restaurant in the Chinese section of the city, where they sold live crabs and carp on the sidewalk, and where Jung had eaten the most incredible dish of chopped meat smothered in what seemed to be earthworms. So far—besides the earthworms—they had been dragged to see an opera company, a symphony, and a recital at a new, orange-brick concert hall—all very credible, though distinctly inferior to their equivalents in Vienna, or Berlin. There had been a tour of a new art museum, just off the vast, wooded Central Park, which Freud had liked a good deal more, the museum’s wealthy, American patrons having bought up an impressive quantity of first-rate pictures—though again, it really couldn’t stand up to the great European capitals.

“How could they? After all, they don’t have two thousand years of culture behind them,” he remarked with what he thought was good-humored condescension to Jung.

“But look at what they’ve accomplished already! What is the republic—barely a century old?” Jung pointed out. “They are a fresh, young people, with a young psychology. In another hundred years, I predict, they will surpass anything in Europe!”

“Yes, I suppose their rich men will be able to buy up everything by that time,” he answered bitterly, wondering if Jung was deliberately trying to be perverse.

He found the thought of such a philistine victory infinitely depressing. New York’s greatest triumph, he thought, lay in something Abe Brill didn’t try to show off. That was its raw power—from its busy harbor and its dangerous streets to the ugly, overgrown skyscrapers sprouting out of the sidewalk. New York—and America—was all about
size,
overwhelming, indomitable size. The city was dark, and grim, and furious, like some enormous, inscrutable god-machine, and no one was at the controls.

He wondered if it was the city itself that was wrecking his digestion and his sleep, filling his head with nightmares—

In the dream the woman patient who had sent the orchids to his stateroom stood before him in her dressing gown. She was as beautiful as the flowers—much more beautiful than he remembered.

She undid the dressing gown, and let it slide to the floor. Then she climbed up on the bed, and smiled back at him reassuringly—even wantonly. She got on her hands and knees and began to lift up her underwear, revealing her lovely bottom and her sex—bright red as the officers’ uniforms.

He eagerly took out his cock, preparing to enter her, when she looked back at him again. Only now her face was the mask, the totem he had held up in front of his father as a disguise. But no—he looked closer and saw that it was transformed, somehow, into the face of the tanned man, from the Bleikeller, still perfectly preserved. The gaping, silently screaming face, inconceivably ancient—

Then the scene changed, and they were in the Aula again, the great ceremonial hall before all the assembled minds of science, with his penis hanging limply out of his fly. Trying to hide behind the lectern, hoping they wouldn’t see it—

They careened on down through the jammed streets, working their way around trucks, and wagon teams, and pushcarts laden with all kinds of goods—a sort of gigantic, endless maze, designed to test nothing but one’s reflexes and survival instincts. They were making their way through a largely Jewish neighborhood now, the shop signs in Hebrew and Yiddish as often as English—though he noticed that on many streets the Jews seemed to live cheek by jowl with everyone else, Italians next to Bohemians next to Irish next to Germans.

From the street level of the open touring car Freud could look right into the faces of the men and women shuffling along beside them. He caught the eye of one young man without even a pushcart—hauling a huge pile of cloth on his back and head, holding the bundled lawn in place with one hand, using the other to sweep out a space for himself in the never-ending river of people.