Ragtime (10 page)

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nd what of Tateh and his little girl? After that meeting the old artist sat one night and one A day in his flat and he did not eat or say anything, brooding, as he smoked endlessly his Sobrany cigarettes, on the brutal luck of his life. Every once in a while he would look at his child, and seeing the sure destruction of her incredible beauty in his continuing victimization he would clutch her to him and tears would fill his eyes. The little girl quietly prepared their simple meals in ways so reminiscent of the movements of his wife that finally he could bear the situation no longer. Throwing their few clothes in a musty suitcase whose strap had long since rotted away, he tied a piece of clothesline around the suitcase, took the girl by the hand and left the two-room flat on Hester Street forever. They walked to the corner and boarded the No. 12 streetcar for Union Square. At Union Square they transferred to the No. 8 and rode north up Broadway. The early evening was warm and all the windows of the trolley were lowered. The streets were crowded with cabs and cars and their horns blew at one another. Trolleys went along in clusters, their bells ringing, the flashes of electricity from their pantographs crackling
along the overhead wires in minute intensifications of the heat lightning that flattened the sky over the darkening, sultry city. Tateh had no idea where he was going. The little girl held his hand tightly. Her dark eyes stared solemnly at the parades of people strolling along Broadway, the men in boaters and blue blazers and white ducks, the women in white summer frocks. The electric light bulbs of each vaudeville house rippled in a particular pattern. A ring of light spun around the rims of her pupils. Three hours later they were on a streetcar moving north along Webster Avenue in the Bronx. The moon was out, the temperature had dropped, and the trolley clipped along the broad reaches of this wide boulevard with only occasional stops. They passed grassy lots interspersed with blocks of row houses still under construction. Finally the lights disappeared entirely and the little girl realized they were traveling along the edges of a great hillside cemetery. The stones and vaults standing against the cold night sky suggested to her the fate of her mother. For the first time she asked her Tateh where they were going. He pulled the window shut against the cold wind whistling now through the ratcheting, rocking trolley. They were the only passengers. Sha, he said to her. Close your eyes. Distributed in his pockets and in his shoes were his life savings, some thirty dollars. He had decided to leave New York, the city that had ruined his life. There was in these days of our history a highly developed system of interurban street railway lines. One could travel great distances on hard rush seats or wooden benches by taking each line to its
terminus and transferring to the next. Tateh did not know anything about the routes. He only planned to keep on going as far as each streetcar would take him.

In the early hours of the first morning of their trip they crossed the city line into Mount Vernon, New York, and there learned that the next service would not begin till daylight. They found a small park and slept in the band shell. In the morning they washed and refreshed themselves in a public facility. As the sun came up they boarded a bright red and yellow streetcar, and the conductor greeted them cheerfully. Tateh paid a nickel for himself, two cents for the child. On the wooden floor of the car, at the rear, were stacked crates filled with wet and glistening quart bottles of milk. Tateh offered to buy one. The conductor looked at him and then at the little girl and told him to take one out but did not wait to be paid for it. He pulled a cord, the trolley bell rang, and the car lurched into motion. The conductor sang. He was a robust big-bellied man with a tenor voice. He had a change-making machine strapped to his belt. A while later the streetcar entered the city of New Rochelle, New York, and slowly made its way up Main Street. Traffic was heavier now, the sun was up, and the small city was abustle. It was explained to Tateh that if he wanted to ride through he had to transfer to the Post Road Shore Line at the corner of North Avenue. This was done by paying another penny for each transfer. Tateh and the little girl got off at the corner of Main Street and North Avenue and waited for the connecting trolley. A boy and his mother passed by. The little girl looked at the boy. He was tow-headed.
He wore a sailor blouse, dark blue knickers, white socks and polished white shoes. His hand was in his mother’s hand and as he passed the little girl standing with her ancient father, the boy’s eyes looked into hers. At this moment the Post Road streetcar appeared and Tateh holding the little girl firmly by the wrist walked into the street and stepped aboard. As the car moved off, the little girl watched the boy pass backward in her sight. She stood on the rear platform of the trolley car and watched him until she could no longer see him. His eyes had been blue and yellow and dark green, like a school globe. The streetcar went up the Post Road, along the Long Island Sound shoreline to the Connecticut border. In Greenwich, Connecticut, they transferred to another car. This took them up through the cities of Stamford, Norwalk and then to Bridgeport, the burial place of Tom Thumb. By now they knew how to tell when the end of the line was approaching. The conductor would walk back through the car and reverse the empty seats, going along the aisle and yanking the handles attached to the seat backs without breaking stride. At Bridgeport they transferred again. The tracks turned inland. They stopped for the night in New Haven, Connecticut. They slept in a rooming house and had breakfast in the landlady’s dining room. Tateh furiously brushed his trousers and jacket and soft cap before going downstairs. He tied a bow tie around his frayed collar. He made sure the little girl wore her clean pinafore. It was a rooming house for university students and some of them were at the table. They wore gold spectacles and
turtleneck sweaters. After breakfast the old artist and his daughter walked to the streetcar tracks and resumed their journey. A car of the Springfield Traction Company took them to New Britain and then to the city of Hartford. The car slowly swung through the narrow streets of Hartford, the clapboard houses of the city seemingly close enough to reach out and touch. Then they were on the outskirts and racing along north to Springfield, Massachusetts. The great wooden car swayed from side to side. The wind flew in their faces. They sped along the edges of open fields from which birds started and settled as they passed. The little girl saw herds of grazing cows. She saw brown horses loping in the sun. A thin layer of chalk dust settled on her face, like a mask, whitening her complexion, bringing out her large moist eyes, the redness of her mouth, and Tateh was momentarily shocked by a vision of her maturity. The car barreled along its tracks down the side of the road, and whenever it approached an intersection its air horn blew. Once it stopped and took on a load of produce. Riders crowded the aisle. The little girl could not wait for the speed to be up. Tateh realized she was happy. She loved the trip. Holding the suitcase on his lap with just one arm Tateh put the other around his child. He found himself smiling. The wind blew in his face and filled his mouth. The car threatened to jump off the tracks. It banged from side to side and everyone laughed. Tateh laughed. He saw the village of his youth going by now, some versts beyond the meadow. There was a church steeple seen above a hill. As a child he loved wagons, he loved the rides on the
big tumbrils in summer moonlight, the bodies of children falling over one another in the hard bumping wagons. He looked around at the riders on the trolley and for the first time since coming to America he thought it might be possible to live here. In Springfield they bought bread and cheese and boarded a modern dark green car of the Worcester Electric Street Railway. Tateh realized now that he was going at least as far as Boston. He computed the cost of all the fares. It would come to two dollars and forty cents for him, just over a dollar for the child. The trolley hummed along the dirt roads, the sun behind it now going down in the Berkshires. Stands of fir trees threw long shadows. They passed a single oarsman in a scull on a very quiet broad stream. They saw a great dripping millwheel turning slowly over a creek. The shadows deepened. The little girl fell asleep. Tateh clutched the suitcase on his lap and kept his eyes on the tracks ahead, shining now in the single beam of the powerful electric headlamp on the front of the car.

T
racks! Tracks! It seemed to the visionaries who wrote for the popular magazines that the future lay at the end of parallel rails. There were longdistance locomotive railroads and interurban electric railroads and street railways and elevated railroads, all laying their steel stripes on the land, crisscrossing like the texture of an indefatigable civilization. And in Boston and New York there were even railroads under the streets, new rapid-transit subway systems transporting thousands of people every day. In New York, in fact, the success of the Manhattan subway had created a demand for a line to Brooklyn. Accordingly an engineering miracle was taking place, the construction of a tunnel under the East River from Brooklyn to the Battery. Sandhogs working behind a hydraulic shield excavated riverbed silt inch by inch and installed linking sections of cast-iron tubes as they went. The digging chamber was filled with compressed air pumped in from the surface. The work was dangerous. The men who did the work, the sandhogs, were considered heroes. Working under the river they were subject to horrible destinies. One typical hazard was the blowout, a situation in which the compressed air found a weakness
in the roof of the tunnel and escaped with a violent rush. One day there was a blowout so explosive that it sucked four workmen out of the tunnel and blew them through twenty feet of river silt and shot them up through the river itself forty feet into the air on the crest of a geyser. Only one of the men survived. The freak accident made headlines in all the papers, and when Harry Houdini read the accounts over his morning coffee he hurriedly dressed and rushed downtown to Bellevue Hospital where it was said the surviving worker had been taken. I’m Harry Houdini, he told the admissions desk, and I’ve got to see that sandhog. Two nurses conferred behind the desk and while they did he stole a glance at the charts and ran up the stairs. You can’t come up here, a flinty nurse told him as he strode down a ward filled with sick and dying men. Chutes of cheerful morning sun leaned like buttresses from the high dirty windows of the ward. Clustered about the bed of the heroic sandhog was his family—a wife, an old mother in a babushka, two strapping sons. A doctor was in attendance. The man in the bed was swathed in bandages from his head to his feet. His arms, in casts, were supported in traction as was one encased leg. Every few moments there would issue from his head bandages a weak or perhaps only decorous groan. Houdini cleared his throat. I’m Harry Houdini, he said to the family, I escape for a living, that’s my profession, I’m an escapologist. But let me tell you I’ve never done an escape that can touch this one. He pointed to the bed. The family looked at him without expression on their stolid Slavic faces. The grandmother
without taking her eyes off Houdini said something in a foreign language—a question it was, because one of the sons answered in kind and said Houdini’s name. They continued to look at him. I came to offer my respects, Houdini said. They all had flat faces, broad brows, eyes set widely apart. They did not return his smile. How did you get in here, the doctor said. I’ll only be a minute, Houdini said, I just want to ask him something. I think you better leave, the doctor said. Houdini turned to the family. I want to know how it felt. I want to know what he did to get to the surface. He was the only one to make it. He must have done something. I would like to know, it means a lot to me to know. He took out his wallet, removed some bills. I think you could probably use this. Go ahead, take it, I would like to help. The family continued to gaze at him. A sound came from the figure on the bed. One of the sons leaned over and put his ear down. He listened a moment and nodded. He went to the other son and said something to him. They were big fellows, over six feet, with chests like barrels. No rough stuff, the doctor said. Houdini found himself lifted by the arms and walked down the aisle of the ward with his feet just failing to touch the floor. He made a decision not to resist. He knew the tricks of self-defense, there were ways he could best these oafs; but this was a hospital after all.