The Singing Fire (38 page)

Whitechapel Road

There were twenty-seven thousand crystals in the gaslit chandelier of the Jerusalem Music Palace. Though the children were sitting in the cheapest seats high up in the gallery, they knew that these were the very best seats—why, you could practically touch the rainbow prism of crystals from this peak, this Mount Sinai where even God might take the evening off to watch the act. Gittel sat on her rolled-up coat. She’d come with Libby and her brother, Sammy, and his friend. Not that he was in the habit of going around with children but, as Libby had discovered, her brother wasn’t giving his entire wage packet to his mother, having lied about his wages, and the price for his deceit was that he must take his sister and her best friend to the music hall.

The audience was shouting, “Marie! Our Marie!” And out she skipped, the famous Marie, one of them really, the daughter of a flower
maker and a seamstress, wearing her girl’s short dress covered with a pinny, though she must be nearing thirty, and there was a burst of laughter as she put her hands together to sing the song she’d done for the Vigilant Committee, the “Ballad of Isabelle,” a song as proper as any poet laureate’s poem. However, such gestures as accompanied Marie’s rendition of “Go into the garden, Isabelle” were never seen by any morality committee, and the audience downed its pot of beer and howled for more.

From Gittel’s high seat, the hand and leg motions of “wet dripping roses” looked silly, even if Sammy was laughing so hard he was choking and his friend punched his shoulder. She had a nice voice, that Marie, but if it was a very good voice, she wouldn’t want any gestures. Still, there was an orchestra with strings and brass and a drum, and Gittel couldn’t stay away from any music even if it meant another talking-to by Mama, who would say, Tell me one thing—just one thing I’m asking—who is looking after you when you go off to the music hall? A girl alone? She’s a bone to starving dogs. An ounce of sense she doesn’t have. Better she should give herself up to the asylum for the feebleminded. Look at me, daughter mine, am I lying to you?

That would come later. For now, Gittel closed her eyes to listen to the music. Libby was going to do her hair for the concert at school. The girls’ choir was performing songs from
The Mikado
, and the teacher had asked Gittel to be Yum-Yum as her hair was perfect for the song “Braid the Raven Hair.” But Gittel was too shy to sing alone, her throat closed up, and she stayed in the chorus. Only here, high in the balcony of the Jerusalem Palace, could she dream her dreams of flowers that fell from every side as she sang on a stage like this one.

The Strand

For the opening of his new play, Jacob rented a box and invited certain of his friends, who still met regularly to assure each other that they were artists and not Jews, though these days beigels and smoked fish were finding their way back onto luncheon menus. The set was made by one of them, and every muddy cobblestone, every soot-covered brick was painted with a mixture of love and shame.

“In memory of Mr. Moses Angel, headmaster of the Jews’ Free School” was written at the top of the program. And then, “A new
drama by the creator of the famous Bow mysteries,” and below that, in an arc of bold letters,
Angel of the Ghetto
. Emilia scratched the back of her neck, listening to the curious chatter of the sculptor and his socialist brother to her right, an editor and a cartoonist behind them. A Jewish play? It won’t run more than a night. I disagree. It’s the fin de siècle, my friend. Have you seen the cigarette case made from the hanged murderer’s skin?

“It’s only expected to run for a week,” Jacob was saying to Solomon Abraham. “It was put together rather quickly. I couldn’t think how to start it, so I stole the beginning from
The Beggar of Odessa.”

“When did you see a Yiddish play?”

“Ages ago. I went with my grandfather to the old Yiddish theater. It wasn’t as bad as you might think.”

The ghost of the first wife, who loved a play in any language, stood at the front of the box, looking around at the half-full theater, the critics with their notebooks, the empty royal box, the gallery where a couple of soldiers and a handful of working men and women were eating their supper. The Adelphi was one of the theaters from a time before electric lights, and the gas lamps cast deep blue shadows across the curtains rising on a dark street, a flickering lamp, a street sign.

“It’s only one play. Even if the critics don’t like it, Jacob is still a successful author. Don’t be nervous,” Harriet whispered to Emilia.

“I’m not.” Emilia stared at the familiar street sign, Whitechapel Road, and there a shop that looked like Mr. Shmolnik’s. The last sound she’d heard in the East End was the brass balls ringing over the pawnshop door.

Onstage the lamp cast no light into the corner where a solitary figure was picking through rubbish. It seemed impossible for the Jewish actor who’d changed his name to perform Shakespeare to be this bent man, speaking as if he’d just come from a Polish
shtetl
, somewhere near Warsaw perhaps, on a riverbank where the willows dipped into the water and he studied God’s law from dawn until dusk.

A Jew actually playing a Jew; it was entirely novel. The audience clapped.

While the ragpicker dug through the rubbish heap for whatever small thing he could sell to keep his soul in this earth, daylight came and the lamplighter snuffed the flame. Then the alley filled with barrows,
and all the East End types appeared. The beggar, the cripple, the bookie, the unworldly man, the beigel lady, the costermonger, the pawnbroker, the match girl, the mother of eight, with their funny way of speaking and their quaint customs, each of them someone Emilia recognized though she shouldn’t and told herself she didn’t.

At night the ragpicker slumped into sleep in the doorway of a warehouse and a copper picked him up for vagrancy. He was thrown into the sullen grayness of the workhouse, there set to work breaking rocks. At the end of the day, his quota wasn’t filled and he was made to stay another night and given another day of breaking rocks till he should learn industriousness. At the long table of hopeless men, he prayed his foreign prayer and blessed the bread that was given him, and when darkness fell he was released into the fog of Whitechapel Road. End of Act I. The curtain fell.

The audience thundered with applause. There were shouts of “Bravo!” from the gallery. The critics were writing furiously.

“Tomorrow the house will be full,” Solomon Abraham said. He had painted the backdrop.

“A Jewish mother never lets go.” Jacob lit his pipe. “One might as well make a blessing out of it.”

Emilia smiled; she could always smile, even if her face was frozen. As Jacob turned to speak to a theater critic from
The Times
, Harriet asked what she thought of Miss Cohen’s outfit, waving her opera glasses at the Cohen sisters in the box across from theirs. And Emilia answered as if she really cared that Miss Cohen wore a low-cut gown, which would save her on the cost of it but a woman over thirty doesn’t have the neck for décolletage and Miss Cohen was no exception. Then they asked the men to get them something to drink, and Emilia wondered if her mother’s Lady’s Health Tonic had as little flavor as the greenish beverage in her glass.

In the second act, the ragpicker became an old clothes man, using a loan from the Mutual Friends’ Society to buy a barrow and pay for a route. Mist was blowing across the stage when an old woman came down from the poorest of the houses, its windows covered over with paper. Emilia recognized the house. Of course it wasn’t a real house, just a façade painted by Jacob’s friend. But he must have known it, too, the one with the ruined chimney and the peaked gable next to the washhouse in Goulston Street.

The old woman was putting her bundle of rags in the barrow, and when the old clothes man offered her a penny for it, she refused. He insisted, she refused again, running back into the house as if she was afraid. And soon the reason became clear to everyone. Something in the barrow was crying, and as the old clothes man unfolded the rags, he found a baby.

The audience sighed with satisfaction. Every good story has an orphan in it. Handkerchiefs were pulled out, eyes riveted to the stage.

This baby was a boy, and the old clothes man, whose name was Mr. Angel, made a cradle out of an orange crate, calling the child Moses, for he’d found the baby in a barrow in the fog, which was close enough to a basket floating in a river. End of Act II.

The applause was satisfactory, the critics lit up cigars. The sculptor left Jacob’s box to go backstage and look at his set, the socialist brother read the racing pages of the newspaper, the cartoonist and the editor went to eavesdrop on the gossip in other boxes.

“A Jewish penny dreadful. How clever,” Harriet said. “Everyone will love it.”

Her husband, Solomon, wore his jacket open, the paisley waistcoat rounding across his stomach. “The boy will have a good accent, if you ask me,” he said. “Every hero in a play, even if he’s born in a sewer, has a good accent and gets discovered by rich relations.”

“Just wait and see,” Jacob said, drawing on his pipe and slowly blowing out the smoke. “In the new drama there are more poor relations than rich ones.”

“Then the old man will take the baby to an orphanage?” Emilia asked, her throat very dry. “Like the Jewish asylum in Norwood.”

It was Nehama who’d told her about the orphanage. They were in Goulston Street, walking by the house with the ruined chimney and the peaked gable. Nehama carried the bundle of laundry on her head. Emilia was looking at the nest in the chimney, wondering if the birds would come back to it after their winter sojourn in Egypt. There were carolers singing, and the Salvation Army Band was marching through Whitechapel Road.

The socialist brother looked up from his racing pages. “A chimney sweep, they always want small children for that. Are you going for a social commentary at last, Jacob? Then let me shake your hand.”

Jacob laughed as he fixed the loose tobacco in his pipe, arguing with the socialist until the others returned. The editor had good news. He’d heard the manager of the Adelphi saying to the
Times
critic that the run of the play would be extended for another week.

“You should consider a novel,” the editor said. “This is new. Very new.”

“I could,” Jacob said. “I’ve got reams of notes.”

“Then you must. The only ones writing about the ghetto have been reformers. There’s nothing like this. Jews as Jews. My God, Jacob, you could spend a lifetime on the East End.”

“One day there is already a lifetime.” Emilia yawned. The ghost of the first wife was shaking her head, but it was too late. Jacob’s smile faded. He turned away, speaking in a low voice to his friends, the smoke of pipe and cigars rising like the business of factories.

She would have to order a pair of yellow gloves tomorrow and stop borrowing Harriet’s. In fact she would get half a dozen colors. That was all she’d think about and not dare to meet the first wife’s gaze while the conductor led the orchestra in the overture to Act III.

Onstage, young Moses called the old clothes man Father as he rode on top of the barrow, scrutinizing all that he surveyed. He was a born mimic and the audience laughed as he became the bookie making bets, or Mrs. Teitelbaum, who sold corsets and had a house of her own in a square, two rooms it was, one up and one down, and stairs they had, just like a squire’s, no one should cast an evil eye on their good fortune, God forbid.

Naturally the boy wanted to leave school and work with his father. But the father wished him to study. An English scholar he should be, not a Rabbi Ragpicker. The son was stubborn. The father shouted, “As it is written, ‘Hear, O my son, what I am telling you and your years will be many.’” And the son, just as angry, grabbed his father’s barrow and called out, “Ol’ proverbs. On’y a penny. Have a heart, guv. Won’t do you no ’arm to take one of my proverbs. Fresh from yesterday they are.”

That evening, Mr. Angel went to see the headmaster of the Jews’ Free School, who stroked his chin and nodded and then came out with a proposal. There was a wealthy Jewish couple without children who were looking to adopt a boy. Moses would be well educated and have his choice of going into the family business or a profession if he preferred. Mr. Angel
shook his head. This wasn’t what he came for. He wished only advice on how to make his recalcitrant son study. How could a person give up his child, his only child? But the headmaster was persuasive. He knew these streets. It would be all too easy for a clever boy to go the wrong way. Didn’t the father already see it happening? A person must wish the best for his child. What did he have? An old barrow.

Above, on the platform made by the Jewish artist to represent an attic room, a cradle rocked as if it rode in a storm-whipped river. Mr. Angel bowed his head, and the audience watched him age in an instant, his heart broken. They didn’t see the ghost of the first wife on the stage, forgetting that this was just a play, looking up at Emilia with a face full of tragedy, kneeling beside the cradle.

But Emilia saw a man that was relieved to be rid of the burden of a child. A person should never forget the true facts of the world.

The curtain fell and rose again on the next scene. The boy had become a fashionable young man, returning to the streets of his childhood with a bemused look on his face. Where he remembered a narrow passageway through a warren of alleys, there was now a model block of flats. But the Lane hadn’t changed. All the types were still there, the beggar, the bookie, the beigel lady, Mrs. Teitelbaum with her corsets hanging on a pole, measuring one of them against the back of a buyer. The Jews’ Free School stood as always, with its front to Bell Lane and its back to Frying Pan Alley, where the children were buying toffee from the stand at the corner. Moses hesitated for a moment, then ran like a boy through a door and upstairs to a forlorn attic room, where his father, alone and sick, cried out with joy to see his son again. They sat and talked, the moon rose above the stage, darkness fell, the sun came up, and the father said that he was proud. Only one thing he asked of his son. That he shouldn’t forget the children surrounded by bookies and pimps eager to teach them a trade. “Remember the first Moses,” his father said. “Remember Moses our teacher.” And he died in his son’s arms.