The Singing Fire (44 page)

“Good evening, good evening,” she said.
“Sholom aleichem
. Don’t get up, Mrs. Katzellen. I’m just here for a minute. No, please. Not even a cup of tea.”

“Do you want me to turn over your coat?” Nehama asked. Last year she’d made over a
Shobbos
dress for Mrs. Cohen, creating a waist for her with darts and tucks. “I’m too busy, now. But in the slack season…”

“I need to tell you something,” Mrs. Cohen said. “I was at Shmolnik’s …”

Right away Nehama knew that something was wrong. It had to be if it involved Shmolnik. “What does he want from me?” Nehama said.

“Him? Nothing. It’s nothing to do with Shmolnik.”

“Then what?”

“I’m trying to tell you. Morrie was waiting for me and looking outside at the parade.”

“And?” Minnie asked. She went to the stove, her wooden spoon dripping melted chicken fat as she put another serving of potatoes onto her plate.

“He heard your girls talking. Tell them, Morrie.”

The boy looked down at his scuffed boots. His face was dirty, his ears stuck out under his cap. Everyone knew that the glazier paid him a penny to break windows when the trade was slack. “They said as they was going to Dorset Street.”

“What?” Nehama asked. She couldn’t have heard right. A person’s nightmare doesn’t suddenly turn into a supper of fried fish and the snotty-nosed neighbor boy, who has a crush on Libby, speaking of doom in the half-Yiddish, half-Cockney English of the alley.

“Something about singing like Jinny what used to live with her grandma next door,” the boy said. “Does Jinny sing? That’s not what I heard.”

“Shh.” His mother cuffed his ear.

“That’s ridiculous,” Minnie snapped, pouring fresh tea into Nehama’s
cup and pushing it into her hands. “I shouldn’t say it, but everyone knows your Morrie makes up stories.”

“Is it true, Morrie?” his mother asked him. “If you’re lying, tell me now and I won’t say anything. Otherwise I’ll use that good stick for your backside, don’t think I won’t.”

“I heard what I heard,” he muttered, his face so sullen that no one could think he was lying.

“The girls went to the Jews’ Free School,” Minnie said, taking her shawl. “They said they’d be burning the guy on the bonfire there. I’ll run out and fetch them.”

Lazar was still holding the
Daily Mail
, opened to the photograph of ruined houses in Ladysmith. “I’m sure the girls are fine,” he said uncertainly.

“Stay here in case they come home,” Nehama said, hardly seeing as Mrs. Cohen and her son left. How could she see when she was dreaming the worst of dreams? “I’m going to look for them in Dorset Street.”

“You think Gittel is really singing in some public house?” Nathan asked, already standing up and shrugging on his jacket. “Our Gittel what’s so shy?”

“It’s my fault. Don’t you remember? I said that Jinny sings for her supper. I shouldn’t have mentioned her name. Not even in a roundabout way. A girl that does what she does.” Nehama threw her shawl over her head.

“So maybe Gittel misunderstood and it gave her an idea. Then the important thing is to find her.”

“Where are you going?” she asked him.

“If she’s in Dorset Street, God forbid, I’ll bring her home. I’ll be all right, Nehameleh. People there know me.”

And she knew them. God forbid he should see it and realize what she’d been. “In the damp, you’ll catch your death. Do I need to nurse you back to health in the middle of the busy season?”

“Don’t look so scared. You think I can’t do it? You think I can’t take care of my daughter and my wife?” His voice was sharp, the bitterness returning.

“Of course not. But shouldn’t I think about your health? All right, if you don’t care, then I won’t say anything. Come on. Let’s go. Better the last mile together. Am I right?”

Her mind was running on ahead of her, down the alley, past the school, up Bell Lane, where there was a small wooden sign in Yiddish between the kosher butcher and the German blacksmith’s. When she came to the sign, she would turn back into what she’d been. She must—so that everything she knew could guide her. Nathan would only have to take one look and he would hate her, but all that mattered was that she get her daughter out of a room as bright as a gold tooth biting down. Then she would atone for being the selfish mother in the court of King Solomon and she would offer her own heart to pay off her outstanding debts.

CHAPTER 9

The Song

NOVEMBER 5, 1899

The Horn and Plenty

The door was open, the gas jets making a cave warm and light, only five steps down. Gittel stood at the bottom of the stairs, cold air at her back, Libby’s fingers gripping her arm. The smell of beer and sausages made her stomach peculiar, and she suddenly didn’t want to know which of the slack-jawed women standing at the bar might be her mother. But it didn’t matter what she wanted, only where she belonged. The pub was bright with lion glass lamps, colored posters of music hall singers winked in the gas jets, and on the wall was a bill for the new melodrama at the Victorian, set in India. Women stood at the counter, talking and dipping a finger into glasses of gin for their babies to suck on.

“An’ is she no better?”

“Nor won’t be till she’s gone.”

“A great expense the burying is. Our Davey lay dead on the table six days till we found the money for him.”

“It wants doing respectable. With mutes and plumes and that.”

Gittel listened to the accordion, the hiss of taps, the click of conversation, the clang of a metal ring tied to a rope and flung against a hook on the back wall. Ringing the Bull, the game was called. In Roman times the hook had been a horn. On one side of the pub was a map of London 1807, at the far end a door marked in black paint,
PRIVAT
.
If only she could just take one step inside, she’d be all right. She’d sing and bring the money home so her
tatteh
wouldn’t have to sell coffee and be coshed and rolled in the street even if she had to come back here to stand with her first mother somewhere at the bar. But her feet wouldn’t move, and Libby was whispering that she wasn’t going to catch it on Gittel’s account and she’d go herself in a minute. Help me, Gittel prayed, and her prayer was answered in the way that prayers can be in the days of science, with the voice of a neighbor rather than an angel, for there are immigration laws to prevent the sudden arrival of strangers sent by God incognito to a dusty tent.

“Over here.” It was Mrs. Dawes from next door standing there at the counter, the frills of her cap rising like petals, and beside her was Jinny, with her yellow hair and a lacy bodice not quite covering her chest. Gittel made her way to Mrs. Dawes, trying not to be dazzled by the green walls and the three-tone posters, the stripes of Jinny’s dress and the peacock feather eyeing her from a glass behind the barman, who kept order with a butcher’s mallet.

Mrs. Dawes had two living grandchildren, one that lodged with her and Jinny, who rented a bed by the night in Dorset Street. Jinny’s nickname was Star to rhyme with
car
. Her dress was striped like a streetcar, and men rode her, people said. Gittel wasn’t certain what was meant, though it made her skin hot, as if her teacher were telling her to get the yardstick and hold her hands out for discipline while the whole class looked at her.

“Hello, Libby. Hello, Gittel. Are you sleeping on your feet, then?”

Gittel blinked. “Hello, Star,” she said, putting her hands in her pockets.

“A rum guy, that is,” Mrs. Dawes said. “Looks more of a dolly-mop than our Guy Fawkes.”

“It were her mother made the guy’s dress,” Libby said in an angry voice. “And we ought to go now, Gittel, and throw it in the fire. Remember?”

“Right. Off with you girls,” Mrs. Dawes said. “Your mother don’t want a pot of beer, and there’s nothing for you two in the Horn and Plenty.”

Gittel put her hand on the old woman’s arm. “I want to earn some money. Can you tell me who I ought to talk to so I can sing like Star?”
She hated the sound of her nervous, squeaky voice. No pennies could come from that.

“A good girl, that is,” Mrs. Dawes said. “Thinking on your mum. That’s as it ought to be. But our Jinny don’t sing, she—well, she sews trousers. Don’t you, Jinny?”

“Oh, yes. Trousers. You can take a quid out of a good pair of trousers, you can.”

“I could do that. Mama taught me to sew,” Gittel said quickly. Not one of the women looking at her curiously was familiar. Her other mother wasn’t here, and she couldn’t go to the next pub and the next. Her legs wouldn’t hold her up. Maybe God meant her to wait, after all, and appear on the stage with a bouquet of flowers and help out now by sewing so that she could rip out any mistakes. “Could you get me some trousers, Star?”

“You see the Squire over there, Gittel. Him as is sitting at the little table near the back door.” Gittel nodded. She’d noticed the watch fob on his vest, and how he was knitting like a sailor. “The Squire gets me any number of trousers, he does,” Star said. “For a little girl like you, he’d have a good price. Ten quid, I’d say.”

Six months’ rent—a fortune. But Mrs. Dawes was shaking her head, the frills on her cap fluttering like Mr. Wordsworth’s daffodils. “I don’t hold with little girls having any truck with trousers. You’d best wait till you’re thirteen, like our Jinny did.” She reached down and ran her fingers along Gittel’s face as if she could steal away some of the softness for her own. “But you can sing a little song for the Squire and I believe as he’ll give you a few pennies to take home to your mum, and enough left over to stand us one.”

Dorset Street

Nehama was forty-one years old now, and the street didn’t look much different from when she was seventeen. Smoke from the bonfires crept up to the roofs and hung among the chimney pots, listening to what went on behind the gaping doorways. Shadows moved in holes where doors had been stolen off hinges. There still wasn’t more than a single streetlamp. Over there the waxworks was new and the fortune-teller’s sign, though the Horn and Plenty was where it had always been.

She couldn’t remember much about the first time a man lay on her
for money. She knew that she didn’t want to understand what was expected of her, but that was no impediment. She was led behind a door marked
PRIVAT
in black paint. The room had a tiny window, the man a vague shape, as if the fog were as much inside as outside. The Squire came to the room afterward and laughed at her for trying to cover herself while he picked up the money. But England was a free country, he said, and as soon as she’d paid off her debts she could go on her way.

She didn’t remember where she slept or if she slept, only that she came out of a stupor after some days, stiff and sore as she stood at the counter in the Horn and Plenty with a pencil and a Christian tract. On the back she added up her debts, glancing now and then at the map of London. Someone beside her was eating winkles with loud lip smackings, and Nehama believed that she herself would never eat again. Always it came back to the dress.

You couldn’t profitably go on the game—or the turf as they called it then—without a dress that caught the eye. The Squire had provided the fancy dress, and his niece followed Nehama wherever she went to make sure that she didn’t sell or pawn it. Her earnings, even with what she could pick from a man’s pocket, were never enough to buy herself out.

The first time she ran away, it had been raining. She made her way to the train station through alleys and passageways only she knew, certain that she’d lost Lizzie, the Squire’s niece. At the station, the dress got drenched while she bought a ticket for Brighton and stood waiting for the train. There they found her. The Squire looked like a country gentleman in his vest and watch fob, and no one stopped him when she called for help.

After the beating, she couldn’t stand for a week, and the lost earnings were added to her debt.

Later she would say to Minnie that there are two kinds of criminals: those that lie and those that steal. She would be sitting on Minnie’s bed at the time, wearing a borrowed brown dress, in her hand a needle and thread as she fixed the badly mended shawl. Minnie sat at the table, basting hems. Forgers and fences and pimps are liars; thieves and prostitutes steal. She had already proven what kind she was when she snuck into her sister’s room, taking her earrings to sell for a boat ticket, and in her opinion, liars were smarter.

She always remembered that when the Squire knocked her off her feet with his walking stick, she felt gravel digging into her cheek as she watched Lizzie standing under the station clock, her head turned away and water dripping from her hat, so wasn’t it strange that she could never remember exactly how the dress itself looked? She’d dream it was red and then that it was green, that the sleeves were wide or narrow, that the skirt had five flounces or that it was plain in front with a short train hanging from the bustle.

After Gittel asked for a dress for the guy, Nehama looked at what she’d made and was sure that it was a copy of the very one she couldn’t remember before, and Heaven would forgive her as soon as it was burned on the fire. Only now it seemed that the gown was a sign that her sin was to be passed on to her daughter.

Nehama would, like the woman that came before King Solomon the Wise, gladly have given up her daughter rather than see her split in two on Dorset Street.

Under a striped awning, someone called, “Wax figures! See the Ripper’s victims! Only a penny! Come in, guv. You never seen nothing so fine in the British Museum.” A gentleman was inspecting the wax woman laid out on a plank under the awning, her internal organs artfully shaped and colored, a pamphlet (only tuppence) with diagrams of the mutilations proving the accuracy of the model, and further wonders just inside the door. Across the road, someone was waiting under a sign swinging precariously from one bolt.

Of course Nehama knew it was a ghost. Anyone who used her eyes could see that. A cow isn’t the same as meat on the table, nor a ghost a human being. A kosher cow—there was no question of that face, but why should it be standing in Dorset Street staring at her?