The Singing Fire (41 page)

Jacob didn’t seem to understand the prescription. “Put down the magazine and get dressed,” he ordered. There would be no symposium or masked ball for them. They were to attend the memorial evening for the old headmaster of the Jews’ Free School. Jacob would speak; funds would be raised for the school.

“As soon as I’m finished.” Emilia picked up the Liberty’s catalog.
The wallpaper in the bedroom was too bright. It ought to be replaced with something in modern, muted colors, and she would do it if she was sure that she wasn’t going to be thrown out of the house.

Jacob glanced at his pocket watch. He was in evening dress, his fingers scrubbed clean of ink. “I have to be on the platform with the other speakers by seven-thirty.” The affair was to be held in the new wing of the school, with its entrance in Middlesex Street, where the rag market had been held since Shakespeare’s time. Hence the street had been called Petticoat Lane from that day to this. If the present queen found the word
petticoat
too indelicate, well, she had never learned how to squeeze bedbugs with a click of her fingernails.

“Oh, Jacob. No Jewish function begins sooner than half an hour after it’s called for.”

“Always late, Jews are?”

“Well”—she cut out the recipe for chocolate cake as if she’d be staying long enough to bake it—“facts are facts.”

He pulled up a chair and sat down, lighting his pipe. What could be more civilized than a brier pipe? Fine-grained and flawless, made from the root burl of a heath tree growing on a hillside in Italy. Someone had to ride up the hill on a mule to cut out the root for this pipe. “Would it nauseate you if I smoked?”

“Not at all.” She liked the smell of his tobacco. It was the smell of the third floor, where he wrote and she cut scenes out of paper. But that was then and this was now. There was always a new now. One must make accommodations. The ghost of the first wife was reading the postcard from Minsk.

“Whenever you get one of those postcards, you mope for days afterward,” Jacob said, his tone friendly enough.

“I do not.” What was he getting at, looking at her through the smoke of his pipe?

“You do. I think you miss your life there.”

“Hardly at all, Jacob.” There was a pain in the center of her chest, a blunt stabbing at the juncture of her ribs.

“By the way”—he flicked a bit of ash off his lapel—“Mr. Nussbaum told me that you canceled your appointment this week.”

So that was it. Now he could begin. The accusation, the recrimination.
Zaydeh told me that you’re not a gentile girl at all. You tricked me into marrying you.

“I’m not feeling well,” she said, just as her mother would have. “Didn’t you see the physician leaving my room?”

“You look well enough to me. Except when it comes to getting ready for this evening.”

“Well, it’s mean of you, Jacob. To ask me to go out to the East End when I’m pregnant and sensitive to odors.”

“I wonder if there isn’t another odor that’s bothering you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, let’s look at the facts together. One—you didn’t want a girl from Norwood.”

“We can’t afford it. I told your mother so.” Through the heavy curtains, she could see flashes of light and hear firecrackers explode. Dusk was passing into night.

“I’m not so sure. Would you have the same objection if it wasn’t a Jewish orphanage? Wait—I’m not finished. Second, you didn’t think much of the article I wrote about the street where I was born.”

“Jacob, what are you talking about? I never even read the article.”

“That’s just what I’m saying. Third—my new play. We’ve been married for eleven years. Do you think I don’t know what it means when you start scratching your neck?”

She picked up a plate from the tea trolley and put it on her breakfast tray. What she put on the plate didn’t matter. It was white—a slice of cake or a sandwich or even a piece of cheese, it gave her a moment to think. “I’m sorry, Jacob, but I don’t think it the best example of the new drama. Your mother didn’t like it either.”

“I wish you did like it, but that’s neither here nor there. You canceled your appointment with Mr. Nussbaum this week. My son isn’t going to have a
bris
, is he?” He crossed his legs as if to protect the snipped evidence, the crux of the matter, for if a wife doesn’t want a man’s son to look like him, then what does she think of her husband?

“No
bris?”
she repeated. So Jacob didn’t know. Zaydeh hadn’t told him that she was Jewish.

“Everything was all very well when I was an author of detective fiction and all that, but now it’s too much for you, though you won’t
come right out and say it. You might just as well, Emilia.” His face was furrowed as if he had a killing toothache.

“You think I harbor some hidden feelings toward—what?”

“Shall I spell it out? Right then. You don’t like Jews.”

“Jacob! That’s ridiculous.” It was impossible. He thought she was an anti-Semite. The ghost of the first wife looked up from the postcard as if she might try to catch Jacob’s eye, but he was gazing past them, his eyes on a painting of a white villa, a maiden, a flock of sheep.

“There’s nothing much to distinguish me from any other gentleman, is there? I’m a quasi-Jew, we’ll say.”

“And your grandfather—you can’t doubt my affection for him.” She was blinking as if there were suddenly too much light and the sun hurt her eyes.

“One little Jew, an old man at that, anyone could be fond of him. But the East End is rather more overwhelming.”

“Certainly, and it’s not a matter of race. Admit it, Jacob, the poor aren’t partial to baths.”

“If that were all, then why did you leave my play early? I saw your pained face. No, Emilia. When we come to this evening and the odor of the streets, I want to know whether you don’t mean the smell of Jews.”

“I can’t believe you’d say such a thing.” She threw off the bedcovers, magazines and letters sliding to the floor. “Just you wait and I’ll be dressed in five minutes. It’s the ideal evening for a memorial. Bonfires and lit-up tar barrels, perfect for starting a fire, as if there aren’t enough fires in the East End already and people stampeding at just the thought of it. And thieves in the crowd, I don’t know if they’re Jews or not, but no doubt ready to trip someone and bang her on the head for a wedding ring. The smell of the slaughterhouse is very nice, to be sure, and the flies …”

She stalked into the dressing room, her heart beating hard at the unraveling of her world. A button flew off her dressing gown as she yanked it off.

“Don’t bother, Emilia.” Jacob leaned against the doorframe. If this was a religious household, there would be a
mezuzah
there, and the letter
shin
would trap any demons. But as it was, the doorpost was bare and Jacob turned on his heel, calling back, “Stay in bed. I don’t care.”

She listened to his footsteps descending, the slam of the front door. It wasn’t fair. He had it all wrong, and in the end it was just as if he had it right. “Well, what do you think now?” she asked the first wife. “I told you the minute I came back from the other Charlotte Street.”

She sat down at her dressing table, head in her hands. Someone who could fit in anywhere and please everyone surely could find a way to pull herself together like a new outfit when the styles have changed. It wasn’t only her life that depended on it but her child’s. A feather in a hat, a change of overskirt.

Petticoat Lane

All through the Lane, men held torches made from sticks and sacking soaked in paraffin, waiting for the signal to set them alight. Three hundred years ago on November 5, a plot to blow up Parliament had been foiled, the traitor Guy Fawkes was caught, and the free land saved. Well, it was saved for the Protestants at any rate. This was a Catholic plot, and effigies of the pope used to be burned on Guy Fawkes Day. But that was then and this was now. Everyone celebrated, wearing masks and old clothes as if they, too, were guys about to be cast into a great fire that turned anger into revelry and sorrows into warmth and light. Here the girls were coating doorknobs with treacle, there some boys were stuffing drainpipes with paper and setting them alight. A tin can full of ashes was hung over a doorway. Windows were daubed with paint. Who could see? Who could know? The year was winding toward its end; it was the time for mischief and tricks, for burning effigies, for parades and firecrackers, for children begging pennies and shouting:

Remember, remember
The fifth of November
Is gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

On this night of fire, there was nothing so delicious as a potato baked in a tin can or a slice of sponge cake made with oatmeal and treacle, except maybe the toffee apple Gittel was biting into. The girls were standing on
either side of their guy, which was stuffed with straw and slumped against a wall, its head a painted turnip bowed like a drunk’s. The guy wore a man’s hat and the three-colored ruffled dress that Mama had made for it out of “cabbage,” the leftover pieces from tailoring work.

“A guy ought to wear trousers,” Libby said.

“Not mine.” Gittel had a plan. When the guy was burned in the bonfire, it would be a sacrifice, just like when Abel in the Bible put a sheep on the fire. Then she’d ask God for a favor. In case God didn’t speak English, He’d get the idea from the dress and He’d make Gittel’s teacher forgive her and let her back into the school concert. Then she wouldn’t have to tell her parents that she’d been cut from the choir. Did that count as two prayers? If she had only one, maybe she ought to pray for money. Mama wouldn’t let her take a job after school, not even to help out in their own workshop. She had to study, though she didn’t know what for as she’d have to turn to sewing anyway once she left school. Her first mother would let her take a job. As an opera singer if nothing else.

“The guy has no legs,” Libby complained, spreading the guy’s dress over the sides of the cart.

“What a
mitzvah
, then, to give a penny for him,” Gittel replied.

“Penny for the guy!” they called, holding out a hat.

In the Lane the torches burst into flame, one after another, like the bonfires on the hills of the Holy Land announcing the arrival of a festival. The first float was pulled by the Samsons, a dozen Jewish boxers in suspenders and open shirts. The guy rising eight feet above the float had a fat head and an ornate hat and glittering chains: he might be the pope or poor Guy Fawkes; he could be the commander of the ascending German navy or even the editor of the
East London Observer
, who believed there were altogether too many Jews in London, but certainly he was the enemy and eminently ugly. Facing him on the float, standing higher still, ten feet high, fifteen feet, as high as the black sky, was the tailor’s guy with a needle for a spear, seven-league boots, and a cigar in his mouth. Behind the float marched the tailors, swinging rattles made of spools tied together. Then came the boot makers, who sweated harder than the tailors in basement factories, shouting curses at the traitor Guy Fawkes. Behind them young women arm in arm flirted with the young men who were climbing poles, the better to see the
parade. Last the cigar makers swaggered, throwing fancy firecrackers that exploded above the crowd, threatening to alight on some roof and start another great fire, while the children ran and screamed, breathing in gunpowder and ash as they called, “Penny for a guy!”

The parade was making its way down to Whitechapel Road, where it would pass the Salvation Army Mission and turn up Brick Lane, returning to the Jews’ Free School. In the school yard the guys would be burned on a pyre, both of them: the guy of the master and the guy of the slave, and the people would shout for joy at their destruction.

“Mama’s worried,” Gittel said. She had to shout so Libby could hear her, though she didn’t like to shout. It made her feel undressed. From stalls parked on either side of the road, hawkers were calling, “Eels jellied!” “Firecrackers fresh!” “Red apples. No worms, guaranteed!”

“They all do. When I’m a mother, I’ll worry, too. Next year, I’m putting my hair up.” Libby was fourteen and working as a general hand in their workshop.

“It’s my
tatteh
she’s worried for. Because he’s in the streets at night. We need the money, and Mama doesn’t want me leaving school.”

“You won’t be thirteen till January. You’re still too young, Gittel. You can’t do nothing.” Libby stepped over some muck. Several boys pulling a red wagon shouted at the girls to move over. Their faces were cut, their noses flattened by fistfights. Libby pulled Gittel into the doorway of Shmolnik’s pawnshop. Inside, little Morrie Cohen stared at them as he waited for his mother to finish her business. He had a crush on Libby. She stuck her tongue out at him, and he waved the pair of sticks he was pretending were guns.

“I’m not too young to add up the accounts on the wall,” Gittel said. “We need
Tatteh’s
coffee money to get through the slack season, but he’s begging to get his head bashed in. He’s got only one hand to defend himself.”

The girls were silent. “It’ll be all right.” Libby took Gittel’s hand. They stood in the doorway watching firecrackers smash the sky with light.

“Mama don’t have to worry, I’ve got all my eyes about me,” Gittel said at last.

“Sure you do.” Libby held Gittel’s hand tighter as a drunk in a mask bumped against their cart.

“I heard them talking about Jinny. I heard Mama say as she sings for her supper in Dorset Street. That’s what I’ll do. And then
Tatteh
won’t have to sell coffee at night.” What did she care for school concerts? Her destiny was somewhere else. It was impossible to avoid.

“Singing in pubs is for
yokheltas
.” Gentile girls. “It’s dodgy. And you hate singing in front of people.”

“My other mother could do it,” Gittel said. “She sings in the Savoy Theatre.”

“What a lot of rubbish. You listen to me, Gittel Katzellen. You’re too big for pretending.”