City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (57 page)

“You won’t eat? Fine! Then you’ll be force-fed!”

“No! We’re not on a hunger strike, we just want real food—” Clara started to protest, but she was seized and bent over the back of the chair she had been sitting in a moment earlier. The matrons grabbed Esther and Sadie next, unfastening the cuffs but dragging them forward. Pinning back their arms and stuffing thick rubber gags into their mouths before they could even protest.

Esther found herself pressed cheek down upon the warden’s desk, the tattered, green blotter reeking of ink, a collection of miniature good-luck Democratic donkeys right in front of her. One matron held her neck and head down; another one wrapped a tight rubber strap around her elbows, hooking them painfully back behind her.

“Search them! Search them thoroughly first!” the plump little warden cried excitedly.

She felt the billowy, shapeless prison dress being parted, the matron’s fingers poking roughly, cruelly up into her.

“—show them what happens to the likes of them! The whores, the whores! The insolent whores!”

Some kind of metallic tube or hose was thrust even more roughly up into her—then a spray of water that churned up her guts until she could not control them. She could not believe anything like this was happening to her. It was as if she had no control over her body any longer, the matrons shoving and opening her up where they would. They flipped her over on the desk, so that she was staring straight up at the ceiling fan now, and the long strips of flypaper hanging down from it. Began to snake another long, thick tube down her throat—

She was sure she would choke to death on the contraption. The small metal nozzle on its end scraped horribly along the roof of her mouth, but still they kept shoving it down. She began to gag, her tongue being pushed roughly back down her throat. She felt like her head would explode, and she wanted to scream at them
Stop it Stop it You are killing me
—but she couldn’t get anything out over the horrible, relentless tube.

They kept shoving it down, too hard and fast for her to do anything but try to swallow it. An even more wretched sensation hit her stomach as they pumped down the thick gruel, forcing it down into her until she thought that she would burst.

Oh God
, she thought,
how can they do something like this to a person How can they do this—

The matrons pulled the tube back so abruptly that she thought they were wrenching her throat out with it. They released her, and she staggered up from the desk, clutching at her raw throat, unable to emit so much as a sound, even with the tube gone. Across the room, Sadie lay shuddering on the floor against her chair; Clara leaned over retching dryly above hers.

There was an unbearable stench, which Esther realized came at least in part from her. She was all the more humiliated to know that the weedy little warden had been in the room the whole time. He looked red-faced and flustered, one hand tapping excitedly on a chair arm.

“Take them down to the dark rooms,” he ordered crisply now, but refusing to look them in the eye as they were drawn up before him again.

“Show them what their agitation will get them!”

They were led down more endless, stooping, mazelike corridors to three separate cells, even smaller than the one they had shared, and without any window or light of any kind. The matrons shoved Esther inside the first one, strapped her to a rough pole in the corner, sitting upright. She could hear them taking Clara and Sadie on down the hall.

They can’t be going to just leave me here They can’t be going to just leave and go away—

It was the darkest place she had ever been in, without even a hint of light coming in from under the door. There was only the scuttling sound of the vermin, the inescapable stink of herself to remind her that there was anything else in the world. She strained to hear every hint of a footstep, any movement at all outside the black, stifling box.

Once a day, it seemed, they came with food, and to empty the bucket she defecated in. Each time seemed like a revelation. The heavy steps of the guards suddenly right outside, the bolts peeling back like gunshots, the door flying open. Even the pale gray block of light from the prison corridor made her eyes hurt. The guard would walk across the floor, drop the tin plate by her side with a gloating little smile, and walk back without a word. She couldn’t bear their leaving.

“Don’t do this, don’t leave me here,” Esther broke, and pleaded with them at the last moment, though she had sworn she wouldn’t.

“You don’t have to do this; don’cha know that I’m your sister, don’cha know that our fight is the same—”

They only kissed her, still grinning, and left her in the dark room.

Her mind kept slipping, like a bad piece of cloth that caught and bunched under her hand, and she tried to force herself to concentrate on outdoor things, on the sun and air and trees. She tried to think on the summer she had spent up on the Palisades, with Clara and Gina and the rest, all of her friends, strung out along the cliff ledges like so many mountain goats. But there was no one to help her now, or Clara or Mama here, to offer her any consolation or hope. There was only the blackness.

At first she kept wishing that
he
was there, her
dybbuk.

He was right, he was right
, she thought, and all she wanted was for him to come and rescue her—to take her back to the beach at Coney.
He
would know what to do, with all his cunning little tricks and turns.
He
would always know a way out. All she wanted was to be in his arms, tucked away in their little room at the Tin Elephant, listening to the waves.

But as the hours stretched on, Coney Island seemed further away than the other side of the world and her dybbuk, her boy, just another one of her dreams. There was, instead, only the voice of her father—that father who was always with her.

The worst thing that ever happened to us was to get to reach the promised land.

What did you expect?

He would shift uncomfortably in his big, sagging leather chair, look away from her.

I don’ know. Like Poland, maybe. Only with more cows.

So in your disappointment, you make it a misery for everyone.

He would shrug at her, she was sure—a gesture both belligerent and fatalistic.

So—you don’ like it so much, why don’ch you leave?

And what would you do without me? What would you and Mama do?

She would watch him smile sardonically, underneath his dirty white beard.

You are afraid. That’s what it is. At least be true to yourself, even if you are not true to me, or to the Law. You are afraid to leave.

Her first inclination would be, as always, to shout him down. To tell herself
That’s not true!
until she could hear nothing else. But now she did not have to, because she
knew
it was not true. She was no longer afraid to leave them, she was no longer afraid of anything now that she had ended up in the worst place she could possibly imagine. She leaned back against her post, in her pitch-black cell, and he faded before her.

When they let her out of solitary, Esther could barely see. Everything seemed weirdly thin and elongated, etched with a strange burning light even in the dim, buried corridors of the Tombs. When they put her back in the cell with Clara and Sadie, none of them said a thing. They simply sat on the floor in the grimy, ludicrous dresses, trying to keep everything from spinning around them.

“Saturday! Saturday baths!”

The matrons came bustling down the hallway, thunking on the cell doors with their truncheons.

“Out to the bathing rooms!”

Someone yanked open their door, and the three of them helped pull each other up, staggering blindly against each other. They were marched out into the hall, into a long line of their fellow strikers, now all but unrecognizable in their identical, blousy dresses, hair just starting to grow raggedly back in.

They were marched in single file, back over the Bridge of Sighs again. Esther assumed they were being taken back to the rooms where they had first been hosed down and doused with insecticide, but instead they were led to a different section of the endless prison. There they were once again made to strip in the strictest silence, hanging the tent-like dresses carefully on pegs.

They were hustled on in through a low archway, to a dim, moldy room filled with several great vats of water, and decorated with the finest tilework of leaping dolphins and naiads. A room smelling of human dirt and sweat, and echoing with low groans, and grunts and shouts. Even through her blinking, distorted half-blindness, Esther thought that the lugubrious guards now seemed unusually animated and eager to move them into the baths.

When they entered the watery, echoing room she saw why. Before them was a scene of the most wanton depravity. The long troughs of water were filled with embracing women. Women languidly, voluptuously, unmistakably making love to one another as they bathed. Kissing each other right on the mouth, on breasts, on their sex. Lingering in each other’s arms, kicking water heedlessly over the sides of the tubs like strange aquatic creatures, like the naiads on the wall, as they rolled pleasurably around.

Nearly all of the lovers were the more permanent inmates of the workhouse. Most of the strikers hung warily back by the entrance—though Esther saw that the matrons were enraptured by the spectacle, standing right up by the tubs and peering in. A few of them even taking part, stripping off their blousy, institutional uniforms to become one with the women reveling in their bath.

Clara and Esther and Sadie stayed rooted with the other strikers, clutching their hands up over their breasts, gazing helplessly at the stunning spectacle—until they began to laugh. It started with Clara, giggling in short, restrained bursts to save her busted ribs, and then the rest of them caught it. They began to laugh uncontrollably, holding their hands up over their mouths—not wanting to offend the other women before them, though they were all past noticing.

They had a good, long laugh, and then they climbed into the mildly dirty, mildly warm water, letting it swirl up and around their tortured bodies. Leaning back against the troughs, their arms around each other’s shoulders, still laughing a little—at what they had seen, at the sight of the matrons out of their uniforms. At themselves, for being so shocked at what was, after all—after all the cruelty they had been through—nothing more than the sweet, sad sight of women in a prison, making love to each other on a Saturday night.

Big Tim Sullivan hurried up Broadway, and over to Washington Place. The rumor going around for days was that the women were going to march down to City Hall, and the boys liked to say his ears were so close to the ground he could hear the third rail humming. The damned thing was, he still didn’t know what he should do about it.

A block from Washington Place and the Triangle, he could already see the crowd, hear the chanting and the speeches. The street was covered with shapeless, flattened bundles of hats and other clothing, busted billy clubs and strike placards, and even a few startling red slicks of blood. A police horse lay in the gutter, where it had slipped and broken its leg on the rain-slicked street. The cop stood over it with tears in his eyes, and looked away as he lowered his pistol toward its head.

Big Tim hurried on, pushing through the crowd. Just ahead of him, lining both sides of the street, was a thin line of women pickets, already roughed up, grimly holding on to what remained of their placards. Some of the worst thugs in the City and their whores ran up and down their line, poking and grabbing at them. The cops looking on, pointing and grinning, thumping their nightsticks in the palms of their gloved hands, intervening only to arrest the factory girls if they struck back.

Even as he watched, two burly officers in their greatcoats grabbed a pretty, frail-looking striker by the arms, making her drop her placard in the street. She could not have been more than seventeen, but they held her there while a third cop stepped forward and, grimacing slightly, punched her once, twice, right in the mouth, first with his left hand and then the right, until the blood ran down the side of her mouth, and she folded up in the street.

“All right! That’s enough of that!” Sullivan shouted, but nothing could be heard over the noise of the crowd. Soon a general melee had broken out, fists and clubs flying everywhere.

Big Tim staggered away, walked blindly back the way he had come, sitting down finally on a little park bench, across from where he had seen the crying policeman shoot his horse. The horse was still there, legs jutting stiffly out. A pack of street children already dancing around it, pulling hairs from its tail to wear for finger rings.

He had always liked working with horses, himself. That had been his first job on the up-and-up. He had been in charge of changing the team on the old streetcar line up to Grand Central, back when it was still horse-drawn.

He would stand waiting with the next team, holding their halter in one hand, feeling the power of the six shuffling draft horses in his right arm. The horses waiting patiently while the change was made, steam rising in clouds off their sweating, matted coats in the frigid winter air—

There was another roar from the crowd down the street, and the sound of drums and horns. Big Tim stirred himself, peering up Washington Place.

There was a solid column of women marching down the street now, arms linked, singing as they came. The gangsters and the whores gave way, herded back by the cops. They itched to get at them, he could see, clubs still at the ready. But marching at the head of the column, and along its sides, was a phalanx of society ladies, easily distinguished by their expensive dresses and their fancy hats. Faced with this obstacle, the cops wavered, then fell back, unsure what to do. On the column came, eight across, the women singing louder with each stride they advanced unmolested, the fickle crowd cheering them now, swept along in their wake.