Marching to Zion (17 page)

I said I’d bring the child sweeties, and there they are, he said. His voice was hoarse and wavered. His eyes had in them a beggar’s despair, as if the man before him were the last soul on earth who might offer him bread.

I’ve seen Minnie, he said. We are reunited, but I cannot fathom zackly what’s happened to her. I knew it was bad, but it’s worse than ever I thought. When I’m in her presence, I find one of my feet is in heaven and the other stuck in the tar pits of hell. Surely it was more than misfortune and a broken heart that changed her. She was smarter than that. What happened to her? What happened to our Minnie?

America happens to her, Fishbein said.

I don’t understand.

This is a country where a person can toss out his past like yesterday’s garbage. For a Jew, once the past is gone, there is nothing left. But America gives you plenty to fill the void. In America, you can takes your pick of all the apples in the tree. I think that’s what Minerva does. When her heart is too sore for her to bear, she needs get rid of it. She grabs too much America, too many apples.

Fishbein shrugged and clapped his hands together in a gesture of finality as Magnus Bailey stared off into nothingness, considering his words. The America that Fishbein described was certainly not his America. If the colored man in America could cast off his past like that, why, he’d do it without so much as a backward glance. But the hard, ugly truth of the Negro’s past in America kept him locked eternally in a trap of deprivation and anger he never planned or desired but simply had to learn to manage as stealthily as he could. Last time Bailey looked, there were no apples dangling in the air above his head, ripe for the taking. Every apple he ever bit into, he’d paid a high price for.

And that’s it, the old man finished
. Nu?

The telephone rang. Fishbein shuffled to the foyer, where his telephone sat on a small mahogany table. Bailey could hear his conversation from the kitchen.

Yes,
mine kind,
yes, I told him. I know. I know. But,
mine kind,
it is Bailey! Magnus Bailey, I tell. Not some
shmendrick
from the street.

He was silent for what felt a very long time, a period where even from the kitchen Bailey could hear the static screech of a feminine voice haranguing him at a furious pitch. This went on and on until at last, the old man interrupted.

Oy,
enough already, Fishbein said.
Nu
, I am sorry,
mine kind
. I am very sorry. But now the cat is loose from the bag. It is not a terrible thing, believe me.

When he returned to the kitchen, he shook his head and rolled his eyes upward to beseech his inscrutable God. Some things, he said, never change.

He offered Bailey schnapps and was accepted. The two men repaired to the living room, where they sat in the same chairs they’d sat in before. Fishbein poured the liquor into shot glasses and downed his own in one swallow. Is good, no? he asked Bailey, who sipped his then smiled in spite of himself.

Yes, Fishbein said, smiling also. I confess it’s the kind I like—peppermint! The taste of our little Goldele is all in the family!

The child, he told him, was not there. She was his only from Thursday night to Sunday night. The rest of the time she lived upriver at the farm of that good woman who also taught her lessons, as Minerva was afraid to have her in a public school. On Sundays, she had Hebrew lessons and Torah lessons from her zaydee
.
She could
bench licht
and knew her Shabbos prayers. On Friday nights and the holidays, Minerva came and stayed with them. Golde believed that her mother was a nurse with many urgent responsibilities at a hospital and that she spent as much time with her as humanly possible. I don’t know, Fishbein said, how long she will keep to believe that.

Bailey promised again to rescue them all. Without mentioning Europe, he promised he would get the child and her mother, and Fishbein, too, to another, safer world before Golde had a chance to learn the truth. He promised with such fervor, Fishbein was gentle with him.

And the money to finance this great escape, my friend? Where it comes from?

Bailey reached for the bottle and poured them both more schnapps. This time it was he who downed the drink in a single swallow. I’ll get it, he said. Don’t you worry. I’ll get it.

Okey-dokey, you’ll get it.

One more shot and Bailey felt the room enclose him in a warm embrace of hope and enthusiasm for the future. In the strangest way, he felt as if this very room was where he belonged more than any other place on earth. The Lord works in mysterious ways, he heard the voice of his long-dead mama say, and her tone prompted him to scriptural thoughts.

I’ll work for her, he told Fishbein. I’ll work for her as hard as Jacob worked for Rachel.

Fishbein held up a finger and wagged it at him playfully.

But will there be a Leah in between? he asked.

Aurora Mae was erased from his mind as easily as chalk on a blackboard.

No! Bailey laughed.

So then we are talkings seven years? Fishbein said, playing along.

Seven years is too long! It’ll be less! Far less! Bailey swore.

He left Fishbein’s that day a bit drunk. He hadn’t wanted to leave. He lingered as long as he could at the paternal home of his beloved, the home where all things felt possible, where images of his own youth as well as Minnie’s surrounded him like friendly ghosts. But duty called through the dam of peppermint schnapps, and he walked into the night to make his way home.

Aurora Mae informed him that the whore Pearl would be staying on awhile. She was going to take lessons from Dr. Willie. When she’d taken enough, she’d be baptized and renamed Sister Pearl to become, if everything went alright, a handmaiden of the Miracle Church of God’s People over to Pendleton Street.

I know you don’t like Dr. Willie, Aurora Mae said.

You’d be right about that.

And I know too it’ll irritate you when he’s around. But whatever else he is, he surely knows how to talk to a gal. Pearl came here sufferin’ and wantin’ just to live. Now she wants to be reborn too. She wants to be washed clean in the livin’ stream of Jesus’ love. Lord knows, she got plenty of muck on that soul of hers after workin’ so long at Minerva Fishbein’s, which by the way, is where she told me today she come from. Can you beat that? You don’t mind we keep her awhile, do you?

Magnus Bailey, feeling softhearted as drunk, guilt-ridden deceivers are wont to do, was touched that Aurora Mae thought he had a vote in the matter. Of course I don’t, he said, thinking the more distractions Aurora Mae piled up around herself, the easier he’d have it visiting Minnie and working for their future. He felt a twinge of guilt for the deceptions he’d committed already and for those he planned for the morrow. He reminded himself that he’d never made a vow of fidelity to Aurora Mae, nor she to him. They’d only ever sworn loving friendship, not eternal love, and that knowledge comforted his conscience. If old Willie kept her company for a time, he’d just have to live with it. Maybe having the preacher hanging around was a good thing. If he was going to leave Aurora Mae someday, she’d need a new man to fill in the gap. She’d do better than Willie anon, he judged, but he’d be serviceable for a while. He laughed at himself. Funny how his opinion of Dr. Willie had softened now that he needed him.

Bailey considered how lucky he was that Pearl landed on their doorstep before he’d ever been inside L’il Red’s, or she’d know him by now and his particular jig would be up and fried for breakfast. As he laid his weary head down on the pillow to the left of Aurora Mae Stanton’s, his last thought was, Wouldn’t it be a wonder if bringing Minerva Fishbein to Jesus would erase the hardness from her soul the way it was about to do for the whore Pearl? Now, wouldn’t it? Then the room began to swim about, and he thought no more.

1934–1936

It was a pleasant
Saturday morning in March. Fishbein walked to shul with his head down, his mind full of worries, unaware of his surroundings. Sweet notes of spring buoyed the air if not his thoughts. Now and again winter’s last gasp came up off the river in a bracing draft that shot up the sleeves of his coat and threatened to sweep the hat off his head. He barely noticed.

When he’d left the house, Golde was asleep. Magnus climbed the steps by the back door and Minerva bustled about the kitchen putting out plates of food from the ice chest and the bread box. She had a burnish about her, that glow of happy domesticity women in love acquire. She seemed younger, innocent even, an impossibility that caused her father a shudder of alarm. Where could all this lead but into a world of danger and pain? Magnus spoke of golden exile, but Fishbein knew better. There was no such thing. Exile was a ripping up, a tearing away, a flight from one set of evils to another. The new place might feel benign, but that was always a lie, or at best a misapprehension. Evil in a different tongue, while incomprehensible at first, disguised in layers of superficial impression, was still unequivocally evil. Look what had happened to him and Minerva in America, once their wonderland of tolerance compared to Europe. Look what happened every day to Magnus Bailey’s people whose chains of iron had been loosed but never removed. The human heart is a comedian, he thought, making fools of every man who nurtures hope there like a disease no therapy can excise.

Did any life escape pain and loss? Inconceivable, he thought. Yet, without fear of contradiction, such was the constant object of his prayers.
Mine Gott, mine Gott,
he muttered in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the night while tears sprung forth unbidden. Grant our Golde a little miracle! Grant our darling girl a life of joy!

Hope for Golde was the only reason Fishbein could find in his poor fool’s heart for encouraging the insanity of Minerva and Magnus. For two years now they hurtled along a primrose path strewn with brambles sharp as arrow tips, studded with insurmountable boulders, crisscrossed by poison streams. Those two lived with switches inside their brains, he decided. Switches that with a single flick could erase the past and blur the present so that neither of them had to admit the truth of how they lived when they were apart. Flick! they were together. Flick! the hour would come when they’d bid good-bye and return to their outside lives. Flick! they would commit their duties in that other sphere with efficiency and aplomb, their shadow selves in perfect repose, a daydream or two their only sustenance until the next assignation. How many times, he wondered, did they approach each other after a spell apart full of doubt, shame, regret, even a resolve to end this madness when, flick! The first glance, the slightest touch dissolved all but their hours together and that idiotic notion of the future they nurtured between themselves. It was the worst nonsense. There could be no happy resolution. But Minerva and Magnus were adults, free to enhance or ruin their lives as they saw fit.

Golde was another story. The child grew older every day. Fishbein was tormented by concern for her welfare. Although she was a good child, an obedient child, her lack of a proper home ate at her more with each passing year. How often she complained to him out of Minerva’s earshot that she longed desperately for a life where her mother and grandfather—Bailey, too, and oh! if God were kind, two or three brothers or sisters—lived with her under one harmonious roof. I’m so lonely, she’d cry with her big green eyes brimming. He bought her a bird in a cage, a cat, even a turtle to keep her company, but while she loved and cared for them, she whined to him, I want a family! And if I can’t have that, a real friend! A playmate! Only this too her mother forbade even in the country, lest some thoughtless child reveal the truth of Golde’s origins. Minerva’s web of rules and subterfuge had protected the child so far, but it was futile to try to contain her body or her mind much longer. It was only a matter of time before she rebelled.

Fishbein’s deepest fear was that she discover her mother’s business at the worst possible moment, when she was at puberty, and this event fast approached. For the moment, she was a good child, and what’s more, a good Jewish child, Fishbein’s hopeful response to the Divine who had severely challenged her mother from the time she was three when she arrived, naked and bathed in blood, in a stranger’s doorway. However corrupt Minerva had become, Fishbein forgave her on account of that moment thirty years before. With such a beginning, how could even Ha-Shem expect her to turn out any differently? But Golde. Golde was another story. Of fragile health from the start, beautiful, delicate, quick, and bright, the child filled his heart daily with a melting affection and terror both.

On days when fear for her innocence consumed him, the fool Fishbein found himself longing for the fulfillment of Magnus Bailey’s promises. Yet for all that man chased after every dime he could squirrel away, the times were mean, and after these two years his purse was not half large enough. It was likely Minerva didn’t care. Fishbein suspected that her support of her lover’s efforts was whimsical. It seemed to him that in her heart she did not believe Bailey would ever have enough of a stake to carry out his plans. He certainly didn’t see any signs that she would soon give up her livelihood in favor of dependence on him. Like every human before her engaged in a disaster about to happen, Minerva deluded herself, thinking she could protect Golde from the truth forever.

That Friday night while her mother put the child to bed, Bailey and Fishbein drank a digestif and mused together.

I can puts up this house, wreck though it is, Fishbein said. Maybe that will get us sooner to the promised land.

It would help, Bailey said. As he looked up at his friend, his eyes softened in gratitude.

Fishbein pounced upon his sentiment.

You know, I am thinking even so that Paree is exactly the wrong place to go. Maybe you have heard of this German Bund? It is a harbinger, I tell you. Things are not so good for Jews wherever the Bund blinks its eyes. I know, I know, they are German not French, but, my friend, you cannots know how Europe is, how an idea spreads from one place to another like a fire that comes wild to a dry forest.

Minerva came down the stairs just then. With his head turned toward her in delirious devotion, Bailey ceased to listen to him.

Nu,
thought Fishbein as he kissed the mezuzah of the Baron Hirsch Synagogue, if we are doomed, we are doomed. It is the way our people have always been, living with hatred outside the door, in the backyard, down the street, but
, baruch Ha-Shem,
living, and so we get used to things the way they are. What was it Minerva said to him the last time he tried to talk her away from Europe? When he warned her of the animus he feared would rise up there and also here, in America?

Papa, she said, so people hate Jews. This is new?

She laughed in a sad but resolute manner, and then she shrugged.

Oy, oy, oy,
he repeated, shaking his head. I have never been able to affect her behavior. Why do I think I can now?

He pulled open the heavy door of the synagogue and commended himself not into the hands of Minerva and Magnus Bailey but into the hands of God.

As always, he was early, arriving before the beginning of services. To his surprise, the shul was bustling. The patriarchs Loeb and Goldsmith were on the bimah, pacing to the wings and back, carrying papers of some importance it would seem for the way they cradled them tenderly as Torahs in their arms. The leaders of the congregation milled about in an excited cluster just beyond them. Their voices were steady and rushed, like an ocean tide, rising, crashing, receding, rising yet again. Behind them lesser lights pushed and shoved to be closest to whatever it was that animated them. Anshel, the gabbai
,
rushed by. Fishbein touched his elbow and asked, What is goings on? To which Anshel, a plain man not given to detailed response, said, We have a guest speaker.

Hoo-hee, thought Fishbein, must be some special guest. He stood on his tiptoes to look above the crowd, but he could not see through the throng to someone new. He might have done better had he joined them, but he determined that if the guest was as honored as it appeared, either that rich or that learned or that holy, the father of the most infamous member of the Jewish community of Memphis, Tennessee, was the last person anyone wanted him to meet. Fishbein was a pitiable pariah of sorts at Baron Hirsch Synagogue. Though once a respected newcomer at the shul, feted and celebrated as a pious man as well as a man of means, when Minerva fell from grace, so did he in the eyes of his fellow congregants. Why he did not disown her, rip his sleeve, declare her as one dead confounded them. In their view, Fishbein was weak, culpable, enslaved by love for his daughter, and so, unable to rebuke her. He forgave them their harsh judgment. They’d never known the bloody child who’d cried out, terrified at his door, her yawning need for order, the way she’d perched, since childhood, like a trembling bird on a high wire, her balance ever precarious, fighting for a slim chance at happiness, and in the end undone by a gale of wind that took the name of Magnus Bailey.

Taking his usual spot in the back of the synagogue, Fishbein uttered the blessing before putting on a talis,
swung the garment over his shoulders, its fringes fluttering, and steeped himself in prayer and meditation. As always, the more he prayed, the sadder he became, thinking of his long lost ones: his mother, his father, his beloved wife, and the child she’d carried, the entire Jewish quarter of his city in the old country, Minerva, of course, who was as lost as any of them, no matter what Magnus Bailey planned, and George McCallum, too. As he davened, he sighed and moaned. When the congregational service began, he was unaware at first, too busy with his sways and dips, with repeating the phrases of Kaddish over and over. No one looked at him, wondering who had died of his people. Everyone knew this was his habit and vow, to perpetually pray for his dead both during
yarhzeit
and every day that was not
yarhzeit
besides.

The
parsha
that day was Ki-Tisa, which makes mention of God’s instructions to Moses on taking a census of the people with him in the desert. It relates also the story of the Golden Calf and the destruction of the first tablets of the law. Fishbein closely followed the reader as he recited the text. Not only was the
parsha
the cornerstone of every service, a sacred obligation to fulfill, but the honored guest was surely a speaker coming to exhort the congregation for some purpose or other and would just as surely use the
parsha
as an inspiration for his talk.

After the service, Anshel announced in his large, plain voice that everyone should stay to listen to their guest, who had important news. As always after the prayer that more or less concluded every service, the final Kaddish, the mourner’s Kaddish,
Fishbein was immersed in sorrow, and it took some time for him to come back to himself. He did not catch the speaker’s name or where he was from, but up on the bimah was a big, broad-shouldered man with a black beard and blacker eyes, ruddy cheeks, and skin darker than Golde’s. He opened his mouth and boomed in a voice that was enormous even in comparison to Anshel’s. It was like thunderclaps resounding between mountaintops, and the census of the
parsha
was the focus of his words.

Shema-Yisroel!
he boomed in the accents of the East. You citizens of Memphis, recall that other Memphis where your fathers were enslaved! Once again, the Lord God commands an accounting of your numbers and a tax that will mean atonement of your sins!

They were close to Pesach
.
Fishbein assumed they would listen to a jeremiad about bondage to the world of the flesh and redemption from it, which was freedom, freedom to choose another bondage, a better bondage, one to a book of Law and priestly obligation in return for which Ha-Shem would embrace them. It was a pleasant theme, one of renewal. The open windows of the synagogue filled the air with the fresh, budding world outside. For the first time that day, Fishbein inhaled the scent of regeneration and was nearly consoled. Then the orator took a turn he did not expect.

Far from here, the man said, far from this fat land with its pretty snares and stealthy traps that enslave the righteous, lies a world struggling to be reborn! It is Eretz Israel, the land of your fathers, and she calls to you, she calls to you in the morning, she calls to you in the afternoon, she calls to you in the night! You must make ready your souls to receive her! She will save you and hold you at her bosom, for nowhere else in the world will you be safe, and nowhere else in the world will you be free!

Look to Germany, he said, where Leviathan licks his lips and sharpens his teeth! How long shall the children of Moses recline there, sleek and satisfied upon their couches before they find them full of nails and sharpest knives? Look to your own New York, where Germany’s handmaidens gather to set the stage for your condemnation! And here! Even here! Where you are used to riding your river in comfort, holding the hands of gentiles, who pretend not to despise you as you drift along, without purpose, without the guidance of the Lord! Here in the mountains to your east, is the devil William Dudley Pelley and his forgeries, the Benjamin Franklin Prophecy. Ah! You do not know him? He is a brother of the heart to the German Chancellor Hitler and in the mountains of North Carolina, he gathers his army, his Silver Shirts, who long for your blood and, failing that, your expulsion! There he gathers his people around him to teach them the vilest lies and pretend they have come from the mouth of your Franklin. Not since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has such filth been received so lovingly by our neighbors! Hear the alarm, O Israel, hear it!