The Singing Fire (43 page)

Of friendship I have heard much talk
But you’ll find that in the end,
If you’re distressed at any time,
Then money is your friend.

At the sound of the song, the ghost of the first wife looked up, startled, ran first to the window and then out the door of the dressing room and down the stairs. Her footsteps made no noise—who would expect them to? She was gone, and Emilia was alone. That was the message.

Dorset Street

It was one thing to be reckless where Yiddish signs were visible in the torchlight, quite another to turn off Bell Lane into the forbidden street, the sky smoky and scorched above Itchy Park, where vagrants slept. Fog made the end of the street a million miles away, a sea between continents, a wall between this world and the next. There were blind streetlamps, broken glass underfoot. Figures gaunt and grotesque loomed in the fog like guys with painted turnip heads, picking cigarette butts out of the gutter. Lady guys with eyes cut out of masks wore dark dresses that turned red in the window light of a pub. If only Libby would insist that they had to go home, Gittel would, but Libby was unnaturally quiet, her red braids shivering against her back.

Humming under her breath, Gittel pulled the crate with her sacrificial guy in its three-colored dress. The wind was cold, but Gittel’s cheeks were warm, as warm as when people whispered in the dark evenings, starting a story but never finishing it, glancing at the children and leaving off in the middle of naphtha lamps exploding with paraffin vapor and the bright colors of gin palaces and hideous corners where the Ripper had lurked. And here she was, walking by the striped awning that sheltered a wax figure and the hawker advertising the wonders inside. “Wax figures! Only a penny a view. Each one figured exactly like one of them poor ladies mutilated most horribly. Move along, my dears, unless you have a penny. Don’t block the gentleman’s view.”

The fortune-teller’s house was next. “Madam Fortune,” the sign said, in case someone could read, and if not there was a picture of a crystal ball. Maybe she ought to stop there and find out just where she ought to go. Her teachers at school warned children about spiritualists and mediums and other fakery. God used to talk to people in the Bible, and when He’d had enough of people, He sent angels, but that was only because there wasn’t any science. Now there was the telephone in the post office, but it wouldn’t do you much good if the other party had no telephone. You might as well communicate with the dead.

Unless, of course, the other party was your first mother. Gittel would know her in an instant; it would be like looking at her own face in a mirror. Her other mother would be worn out, down at heel, all
hope abandoned until she heard her lost daughter sing. How she would weep to hear the voice she never knew could be so sweet, but it was all too late. Much too late. Her eyes would grow large as she saw the coins that Gittel would pile into Mama’s lap, glittering gold and silver, saving one—all right, maybe two or three—for the mother that bore her. Gittel wasn’t scared, not really—wasn’t God answering her prayer right now, the real prayer to find things out once and for all? It was just that her legs felt terribly weak and Libby was holding her hand so tight it hurt.

“Where are you going?” Libby whispered.

“Right here,” Gittel said, pointing to the first open door she saw.

One of the slumming gentlemen was talking to a pretty girl with hair cut short as if she’d just been released from the workhouse. She wore a dress almost as ruffled as the guy’s. Gittel wished for a dress like that. Very grown-up, it was. But the girl’s arms were bare, and even Gittel’s shawl was getting damp and clammy and cold against her back.

Charlotte Street

The wallpaper in Emilia’s bedroom was an old Morris paper, a trellis pattern handprinted with climbing roses that reminded her of the garden in Minsk. It was one of the things she disliked about this house. She was back in bed, making a list of the house’s flaws. So far she had fifteen items, including the shape of the roof (too pointed), the number of fireplaces (too few), and the back door (sticky). A quiet back door was indispensable. How else was a trunk to be removed without comment?

“Excuse me, missus,” the maid said. “Mr. Zalkind’s grandfather is come to see you.”

“Tell him that I’m still indisposed.” But she could hear his slow step on the stairs and the sound of his labored breath. “Zaydeh!” she said as he came in. “It’s a sin to be in a woman’s bedroom.”

“Is this a bedroom? I don’t believe it. A bedroom is where a person sleeps at night, not where she sits around all day with magazines and trays. This is a sitting room, am I right? I know I’m very old. Too old maybe to see exactly right, but this is how it looks to me.” With a slight groan, he sat down in the chair beside the bed, though keeping his eyes away from Emilia. In honor of Jacob’s speech, he wore a new wool cap.

“So what do you have to say?” Her face was defiant.

“I’m going to tell you the truth. I was very angry.” He shook his finger. So what was that? It was nothing. Just an old, knobbly finger.

“I don’t need anyone’s blessing.” In the street ragamuffins were calling, “Penny for a guy!” Emilia added another item to her list. This was no longer a good address. “I’ll take care of things myself.”

“Ah, you’re smarter than me. I asked the Holy One what I should do, but He didn’t answer. All right, I’m not Moses our teacher. Why should He talk to me? Still, an old man has to do something, even if he isn’t strong and for sure he isn’t wise. So this is what I say to myself. An old man mishears half of everything.” With his little finger, he scratched the inside of his ear. “But one thing I know. Everyone’s at the school. The whole family except you. And for a man, there’s only his wife.”

Emilia put away her list. The page was full. Her trunk would soon be packed and she was ready. “My father hated my mother like no one else,” she said.

Zaydeh didn’t look shocked. On the contrary, he was nodding as if he knew it all long. “Because she mattered the most, so you see what I mean. The wife is everything. Come with me in the carriage.”

Emilia shook her head. “Jacob hates me now, too. This isn’t your problem, Zaydeh. Have some tea and cake, please. There’s jelly roll.” She pointed to the tea trolley, and he cut himself a slice as if they were sitting in the kitchen on any other day and he never knew or cared that she was living on false papers, so to speak.

“This I like. You made it,
mine gitteh
?”

“I’m not your good one anymore,” Emilia said.

“What are you talking?”

“Everyone likes to pretend something. Even you, Zaydeh. A man of the earth—what a lot of nonsense. No one I know is as clever as you.”

“Absolutely, you’re wrong. It’s only the word I didn’t say that changed. Before, it was my good
yokhelta.”
Gentile girl. “Now it’s my good
yiddina.”
Jewish woman. “You see.
Mine gitteh…
what?” He showed her his empty hands. “It’s written that there’s one Torah in the letters of the Bible and another one in the space between the letters. So. A person can be very angry. But
nu
. What did I tell you? Until you finish
the whole book you don’t know what you’re reading. Jacob’s child will be a Jew. In a good hour, I say.”

It didn’t make her afraid. The tears in her eyes and the quickness of her breathing weren’t fear at all. She just didn’t know what her child would be. It would all depend on where she found herself. “Everyone knows Jacob’s your favorite,” she said with a little smile, certain that she had enough charm left to divert an old man for a few minutes.

“He’s my favorite because he’s not my daughter’s, she should live to be a hundred and twenty, please God. She favors Albert. He’s just like her husband. And with Jacob she was always nervous because he looks a little like me. Much finer, I should say. But something, there is. When I was young, I even argued like Jacob. All right.” He pushed aside his plate. “So you’re going to come with me.”

“I told you I’m too ill.”

“Is that right?” He put the glass teacup laced with silver back on the trolley. “I can’t force you. Of course, if you’re not there, God in heaven only knows what I might say to your Jacob. An old man. You know, his mind wanders and his tongue with it.” Now he looked at her with a straightforward gaze, letting her see the backside of his anger, the tail flicking at her. He would tell everything, and then there would be endless questions. Her mother-in-law jubilant, Jacob furious. To sell a box of jewelry, to buy train tickets, to make arrangements, a person needs to be unnoticed.

“It’s a miracle, Zaydeh. I’m feeling much better. If you go downstairs, I’ll dress. Please send Annie up to help me.”

She wouldn’t think about where she was going. She was not dizzy and she wouldn’t faint on the threshold like her mother, for she knew that tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, she would go to Shmolnik’s herself to sell her jewelry. She’d be on the train before night. A person was always on her own. Anything else was delusion.

Outside in the darkness, the carriage stood in front of the house. The horses’ breath blew at the light of streetlamps, the driver taking a nip of something in a bottle. Children were calling, “Penny for a guy,” and men carried torches. From behind the carriage, the ghost of the first wife came strolling toward the streetlamp as if she were out for a Sabbath promenade, but if she thought that Emilia would greet her with open arms, then she was mistaken. A person, even a ghost, can’t
come and go without so much as a by-your-leave. The grief at such partings becomes tiresome.

There was someone else accompanying the first wife, a woman rather older but just as dead. In the fashion of religious women fifty years ago, she wore a bib and apron, the bib embroidered in green and gold, and a turban covered her hair. She wasn’t wearing a cloak. Why should she—do the dead feel cold? Emilia drew her fur collar closer around her neck.

“Sholom aleichem,”
Zaydeh said to the first wife. “And to your friend, too.”

“Aleichem sholom,”
the other woman said, as if the dead could speak just like ordinary people. And so they can when the time is right. “Your wife is famous up there.”

“My wife? You know her.”

“Not personally. But everyone heard how she taught Deborah the prophetess to sing ‘A Woman of Valor’ in the
mama-loshen
. Come on. There isn’t much time. We have to go.”

“You’re not here to take him,” Emilia said. The carriage might soon carry her into the fog, but she was still here in front of the house. And at least on this night the house was hers and she was the possessor of its keys. “I won’t allow it.” She put her arm through Zaydeh’s as if she had no intention of forgetting him the minute she stepped on the boat. Zaydeh tried to disentangle himself, but she held on tighter. “I won’t allow it, I’m telling you. There’s no use in your even trying.”

The old woman laughed. “Don’t worry so much. I’m here for your sake, my girl. Let’s get into the carriage. I have something to say to you.” She turned to the first wife. “But, Mrs. Rosenberg, you please hurry.”

Emilia let herself be led into the carriage, bewildered by all the comings and goings in this world and the next, which she couldn’t seem to understand or govern, as the ghost of the first wife left her again, waving good-bye and walking away into the night.

Frying Pan Alley

In the front room, there was a blue vase on the mantelpiece and beside it a school picture. The dresser stood next to the table; on the dresser were the dishes and, on the top shelf, books. It had begun with two volumes
of fairy tales received in return for making a maternity dress, and now there were fifteen books, each one protected by a quilted cover that Nehama had sewn from scraps. The used-book sellers were impatient with her because she thumbed through every page to make sure they were all there. Just buy already, it’s a good price, they’d say. Are you a librarian?

In her shop, she’d let a person look from beginning to end and not stand like a copper over a vagrant. That would be if she had a shop, which she wouldn’t, for she was sure that her husband would be coshed in Dorset Street. The sages taught that the
yetzer-hara
, the instinct for survival, arises when a person is born, but the
yetzer-hatov
, the selfless impulse, develops only with maturity. If its growth was stunted, then the
yetzer-hara
grew large to compensate, and Nehama herself could testify to its success in acquiring a certain expertise.

Firecrackers were exploding just as they had on her wedding night while she crept from her bed and stood before the dark window, crying because she loved her husband and couldn’t tell whether he smelled of tobacco or sweat or anything at all. Sparks flew up above the rows of chimney pots now as then. The children were outside, enjoying the fireworks, while Minnie and Lazar, she and Nathan ate their supper, fortifying themselves for their night of work. The front room must smell of fish and onions tonight, but for Nehama there was just the sensation of grease and the taste of salt; the slippery texture of fish and onion were the same to her tongue.

“What do you think of the war?” Lazar asked, his round cheeks puffing as he chewed a good-size bit of potato and onion.

“My grandmother cut off a boy’s toes to keep him from the draft,” Nehama said. “At least he lived to have children.”

“But that was the czar. We were slaves then. Can we let the Boers shell our towns? No.” He slapped the table. “Here free men should fight.”

“Are you going to fight with your pressing iron?” Minnie laughed.

“Don’t laugh,” Nathan said. “His iron is heavy enough to clobber someone. Just don’t drop it on your foot, Lazar.”

“I got the
Daily Mail,”
he said. “They have a reporter right there. You think a sweatshop is anything? Listen to this.”

But before Lazar could read, there was a knock at the door, and
when it opened, Mrs. Cohen from down the alley stood in the doorway with her boy Morrie holding a stick of wood over his shoulder like a soldier’s rifle. She had a simple, square body covered by a coat too threadbare for even the pawnshop. Her cheeks were chapped from the fall wind, her nose wet as she wiped it with the back of her hand.