Leah's Journey (11 page)

Thinking now of the Moskowitz children, dispersed among relatives, Leah reached the corner of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street and pushed open the door of the Cafe Royale.

The sounds of the mournful violinist floated above the bubbles of conversation that sparkled upward from every table. Scraps of Yiddish tumbled over arguments in French and collided with stern pronouncements in Russian. A tall blond man stood up and read from a tattered copy of Eugene Onegin. The two blonde women with him, both dressed in pale blue suits, clapped in unison and their gloved hands created a wondrously soft, sweet sound. A young man, wearing a suit and a vest from which a pocket watch dangled, waved across the room to a pretty girl in a high-waisted red dress. She joined him at the table he shared with three men dressed in work clothes, glasses of tea standing before them. They continued their argument without looking at the girl, who slid quietly into an empty chair and touched the young man’s hand with her own.

At a small table a one-eyed artist sat, sketching the café’s patrons. They drifted across his pad in gray pencil lines and Leah, glancing automatically at the artist’s work, saw the figures of the bent newspaper readers, the arguing clusters of men, the groups of pale girls who sat together and watched the clock that would eventually drive them back to their barren bedrooms at the end of dimly lit boarding-house corridors. The waiters drifted from table to table, uneasily balancing glasses of tea and coffee and chunks of cake on the scarred aluminum disks that served as trays.

Cigarette smoke wreathed the warm room in a gray cloud that made Leah’s eyes smart. Suddenly her name was called and she felt Eli Feinstein’s hand on her shoulder, guiding her to an empty chair at a table where two glasses of tea had already been set down, next to two clumsy pieces of honey cake on which bright golden nuts nestled unevenly.

“I hope the tea isn’t cold,” he said. “You were so late I thought you weren’t coming.”

“I was delayed. Something at the factory.”

“Oh?”

“Nothing very important,” she said and was stung by the memory of Bonnie’s cheeks reddening in shame and despair. Suddenly, without meaning to, she was telling Eli Feinstein the story.

“It’s not so unusual,” he said when she had finished. “The girl is very young and very poor. A sick father. A sick brother. What can she do?”

“Yes. Still, it is not right to steal.”

“Nor to be stolen from. Her youth is stolen for poor wages. Her dignity is stolen. In a way this is why I wanted to see you, to talk to you. Think of how it would be if there were a fund at the factory for girls like Bonnie, a fund they could borrow from if there is such sickness in the family or they need help for other reasons. It’s been done in other factories where the workers have been organized.”

“You’re talking about a union,” Leah said. “Please. Do not play word games with me. You must say what you mean.”

She sipped her tea. Eli Feinstein had sweetened it himself and she was surprised that he knew she took two sugars. Smiling, taking another drink, she looked at him.

“Once on the street I saw you buy a tea from a peddler. I saw that you take two sugars. I noticed.”

“Then you have noticed that I am a forelady. Foreladies are not good people to talk to about organizing unions.”

“I thought perhaps a forelady with eyes such as yours might be different,” he said. “A forelady who hates the examination of workers, who thinks of ways to protect them, who worries about a little finisher with a sick brother. Such a forelady, I thought, might be induced to care even more. Maybe she would organize her caring so that it means something. Was I wrong, Mrs. Goldfeder, was I wrong to think that you cared about your comrades?” His voice was gentle but certain, playing against her feelings knowingly and expertly, a skilled fiddler wielding his bow against a recalcitrant instrument.

Leah looked up at him, fending off his words. The café violinist, who had wandered from table to table, cradling the café sitters in the cocoon of his mournful tunes, had gone to sit with the one-eyed artist and count the coins he had collected in the cup which dangled from his waist. It was the music that had unnerved her, she thought, the music and the use of the word “comrade.” The music had swept her back to her wedding to Yaakov in Odessa and she remembered how they had sat in a circle then, the bridegroom and bride clasping the hands of their assembled friends while the violins played and they sang of bright tomorrows, of days of peace when comrades would stride forth together. There had been no tomorrows for Yaakov and the violins had been stilled; the comrades and the promises vanished, when the streets rang with agony and were littered with bloodied bodies.

“I care, Mr. Feinstein. I care about my husband and my children. I do not like words like comrade. You see, I was in Odessa in 1919,” she said. Again, she was telling this man something she had not meant to reveal, thrusting out secrets of her past in defense against a future she did not want.

“I too am from Odessa. My wife was killed in that pogrom,” Eli Feinstein replied. “I was away that day. In Karkov. Karkov.” He offered the name of the town as though only that gave reality to all that had happened. Leah remembered now Moshe and Henia’s neighbors, whose three children had been murdered when a mob raided the apartment while their mother was out shopping.

“I went down for flour and brown sugar. I needed a kilo of brown sugar,” the woman had said over and over again, clinging to the memory of that sugar in its mesh sack as though it represented her sanity, her grasp on reality. Leah, remembering the terror of a distant summer day, often thought of the dress she had been wearing. It had been of yellow cotton, dotted with sprigs of tiny red roses. Karkov. Brown sugar. Yellow cotton with tiny red roses. Small weights of facts to anchor them lest they drown in the whirlpools of horror.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

“No matter.” Eli Feinstein stared at his tea. “I do not talk of communism and brave new worlds. I talk only of Rosenblatts and girls like young Bonnie. You know that Rosenblatts is one of the few larger factories that is still not unionized.”

“Yes. I know that.”

“It is because Rosenblatt frightens off those workers who try to organize and buys off others. You, I have the feeling, he can neither frighten nor buy. And there are others like you. Am I right to have such a feeling about you, Mrs. Goldfeder?”

Leah sipped again at the tea, cold now, and allowed her eyes to rise from the scarred linoleum-topped table and meet Feinstein’s searching gaze.

“You must understand something, Mr. Feinstein,” she said. “I am working to support my family. My husband is studying for entrance into medical school and we have two small children. Only my salary buys our food and clothing, pays the rent. I do not think I can risk my husband’s future and my children’s needs.”

“But you wouldn’t have to.” He leaned forward eagerly and continued. “Look, there are a few important workers who make it possible for Rosenblatt to run that factory and keep his good-for-nothing brother traveling around Europe, his father in an old age home, his wife on Park Avenue, and his mistress on Fifth Avenue. Without them he’d have to close down.”

“So he would close down for a week, two weeks even. Until he found new workers and then it would be the same thing all over again. Only you and I and the others who joined with us would not have jobs.”

“But that’s not true,” Eli Feinstein protested. “The organizers for the United Hebrew Trade Unions have found out a few things. Like, for instance, Mr. Rosenblatt has a lot of creditors who watch what’s going on with him very carefully. If he closed down, even for a day, they’d all be demanding their money and that would finish him.”

Eli Feinstein fumbled in his pocket and found a folded sheet of paper which he spread out in front of Leah. It was a list of company names; some of them she recognized as the names of fabric companies whose cartons she frequently handled, and others as names of leading dealers in trimming and threads. Many of the names were unfamiliar to her but the figures next to them were staggering. Arnold Rosenblatt owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. The paunchy little man in expensive dark suits, whose chauffeured car waited for him each evening, who clipped his cigars with a small gold scissors, was in debt in every part of New York. His survival, she supposed, on a much grander scale, was not unlike that of her brother-in-law Shimon, who had established his own small business which existed largely on credit.

“How can you owe everyone so much money?” Malcha had asked worriedly, but her husband had winked and laughed.

“The man who sells me threads doesn’t know that Label Katz from the trimming store also gives me credit. Blumberg, from the fabrics, I pay absolutely on time, and he tells Weinstein from the machines what a good customer I am, so Weinstein I can let ride for two, three months. Like in a circle, Malcha, I juggle,” Shimon had replied with relish, and Leah had wondered if he would enjoy being in business so much if it were not such a game.

“In a circus, sometimes a ball gets dropped,” David had observed dryly, looking up from a textbook.

“Just so long as it’s only one ball, I’m okay,” Shimon had replied.

But if Rosenblatt were unable to maintain the business for even a day, all the manufacturers with whom he dealt would become aware of his precarious situation and his delicate balancing act would be over, Leah realized, scanning Eli Feinstein’s list again.

“These important workers you talk about—all of them are in agreement with you?” Leah asked.

“Some are less sure than others,” he answered honestly. “But they are all willing to sit down and talk about it together, to see if it’s possible. And you, are you willing?”

“I don’t know. So much depends on this job. My husband’s studies. My family. My parents are still in Europe and I want to make enough money to bring them over. The news from there is not good.” She arrayed her objections like a merchant loading a scale and then, her voice still low, she balanced the other weight. “But I know it is wrong for people to work like that. It is dangerous for the girls in the building. I worry about the doors. If we ever had to leave the factory in a hurry, in a case of a pipe busting or a fire, we could never get out safely. And I know that the girls are underpaid. Six days a week—ten hours a day—no holidays. It’s not right.”

“But will you come to the meeting?” Eli Feinstein asked urgently, seizing a moment when her voice trembled against the uneasy balance of pros and cons.

The violinist had begun to play again, a mazurka she had often danced to with Yaakov’s fine-boned hands resting lightly on her waist, the movements of his booted feet matching her light, slippered steps. Beneath the table, Eli Feinstein’s feet twitched with remembered rhythms and his eyes grew clouded with the film of memories.

“Yes, I’ll come to the meeting,” she said. “Give me the address and the time.”

Briskly he jerked himself free of the spell of the music and scribbled the information on a piece of paper.

She groped in her purse for change to pay for the tea and cake but impatiently he refused the outstretched coins.

“You are my guest. I invited you,” he said and rising to his feet, he took her hand in his and his lips brushed her upturned palm.

“Well, thank you. And good night.”

She hurried from the café, passing the table where the group of girls still sat, smoking cigarettes now, their pale faces veiled in smoke and their eyes roving to a corner booth where a group of young men argued over steaming glasses of coffee. Near the exit, a bearded poet read his Yiddish verses to listeners who marked his rhythms with bent teaspoons. Softly, as though fearful of snapping the delicate thread of their attention, Leah closed the café door behind her.

It was late when she reached home and from the street below she saw Aaron at his post in the window, anxiously watching the street. But, as always, he slid into the room when he saw her in the doorway. She waited a moment before entering the apartment, then lifted her hand and allowed her fingers to lightly touch the spot where Eli Feinstein’s dry lips had met her skin.

*

Two weeks passed before the meeting which Eli Feinstein was organizing took place. The cool air of early spring melted into a sudden warmth and small shoots of young grass appeared beneath the cracks in the pavements. Through the factory window, where a lone ailanthus tree grew in a barren courtyard, Leah watched the lacy leaves sprout forth, their texture so delicate that the sun filtered through them and dappled shadows fell on the concrete pavement where, once again, small gray sparrows and starlings fluttered.

Several times, during those two weeks, Eli Feinstein stopped at Leah’s worktable. Once he left a Yiddish newspaper folded to a particular page, and when she opened it, she found a story describing a fire in a factory similar to Rosenblatts. Four girls had been burned to death in that fire, and one survivor, a sixteen-year-old, would never walk again. A few days later he left a small pamphlet published by the United Hebrew Trades Association describing the need for organized labor and stressing the fact that organized factories, union shops, resulted in greater profits for the owners.

“What did you think of the pamphlet?” Feinstein asked Leah a few days later, when they met at the cart of a vendor who peddled cold drinks to the factory workers during the lunch break. They were in the courtyard and the bright sunlight danced across the cutter’s face, sparking golden tones in his green eyes.

Leah leaned against the ailanthus tree and sipped her cold coffee.

“It makes it all sound so simple. Too simple,” she said. “If everything were as described in the union pamphlet we could just go up to Rosenblatt and tell him that if we had a union he’d make more money.”

Eli Feinstein laughed.

“You’re a smart woman, Leah Goldfeder. Look, isn’t that the girl you told me about??”

Leah followed his eyes to a corner of the courtyard where Bonnie Eckstein sat with a group of girls. Her face was flushed and she wore her pale blonde hair in the newly popular pageboy fashion. She was singing, a gentle song about a calf with mournful eyes, and the others were following the melody, singing with increased confidence so that soon their voices rose in a sweet chorus that vied with the harsh gong of the factory bell that summoned them back to their machines. Still singing, they gathered their things together and drifted back to work. Some of the tardier ones cast nervous glances at Leah. She and Eli Feinstein remained standing for a moment in the deserted courtyard, listening to the whir of the machines that had so swiftly replaced the sweetness of the singing.