Whiter Than Snow (17 page)

“Such luck you have. My Isaac weighed twelve pounds, maybe thirteen. Tore up like a newspaper, that’s me,” a second woman said.

The others shushed them, but it did not matter, because the woman on the table cried out and didn’t hear them.

Outside, Esther’s father sat on the stoop with a handful of men, smoking, coughing, because Abraham Schnable, working in the dank basement of a factory, had begun to develop small lesions on his lungs, the mark of what was called the “tailor’s disease.” Over the calls of vegetable vendors and pushcart hawkers, the shrill voices of women bargaining over the price of fish and the sellers pleading poverty, he heard his wife’s last scream and reacted with a combination of pride and pity—pride because of Emma’s fecundity, which was really a sign of his own maleness, and pity because he loved her and was sorry for the pain he’d caused.

“Maybe you get a boy this time, eh, Abe?” One of the men poked Esther’s father in the side with his elbow.

“One that’s goinna live,” someone added. Of the six children Emma had already borne—all girls—only Esther and her sister Rachel, nearly three years older, were alive.

Now the two little girls sat forgotten in a corner of the front room. Rachel shivered and cried softly, and it was the younger girl who was the strength for both of them. “What if something happens to Mama?” Rachel whispered.

“It won’t,” Esther replied. She didn’t know of the two babies before her who were born dead or recall the two others born after who’d lived such a short time, didn’t understand death the way Rachel did. Besides, even at that age, Esther was an optimist, with a sunny disposition that charmed both family and neighbors. She lowered her voice, as if Rachel didn’t know what was happening, and confided, “Mama’s going to bring us a baby. It’s going to be a brother.”

“Oh, so now you’re a prophet,” Rachel said.

But Esther was right. More screams, more moans, and they heard the midwife announce, “A boy, Mrs. Schnable! Such a boy!” And the neighbor women cooed and laughed in their relief, and one went downstairs to tell Abe.

The father burst through the door of the dingy apartment and looked at the boy, examined the raw little thing with his eyes pinched shut and his hands and feet stretching in all directions and said, “My Jakob. My boy.” Then he went to his wife and patted her hand and told her she’d given him a son, as if she hadn’t known. He called the two little girls then and said, “Your brother. Come. Him you greet.”

Esther rushed to look at the little bundle, but Rachel held back and muttered, “A boy. Now he won’t want us. We aren’t his
kindela
no more.”

In 1906, at age thirteen, Esther got a job in the dress factory. Rachel had gone to work at the same age, when the father announced, “Learning for a girl, who cares? We got to buy glasses for Jakob, got to buy him clothes so the kids don’t make fun of him.”

“Nobody makes fun of him, Papa,” Rachel said.

“Mind your business,” the father replied, and coughed. The consumption had taken hold now.

“Money we need,” Emma, her mother, confided, and Rachel had nodded, resigned, for, like others in the neighborhood, the Schnables scrambled to make a living. Abe could work only a little now, and he spent most of his time in a chair in the front room or, in nice weather, sitting on the stoop, gossiping and reading the newspaper. Emma did custom sewing at home, and without Rachel’s income, she could not have made the weekly payments on the precious sewing machine. Emma also kept the apartment clean and did the laundry and cooking for three boarders. She, Abe, and Jakob slept in the bedroom, the girls in the kitchen, the boarders in the front room.

So Rachel went off to the factory, and in a few years, Esther followed. Esther didn’t mind quitting school as much as Rachel had, because this younger sister was not much for books and learning. She liked the idea of earning money and didn’t brood over her life the way Rachel did. Esther believed there were good things in store for her, although she couldn’t have said why. If she’d thought about it, she would have understood that a Jewish girl born to immigrant parents on the Lower East Side of New York City didn’t have many opportunities. But part of Esther’s optimism was that she was caught up more in dreams than in reality.

Once, she and Rachel walked uptown, walked up Fifth Avenue all the way to Central Park. It was the first time either of them had left the neighborhood, and they were awestruck at the sights. They went into a department store and watched as shoppers stepped onto a staircase that actually moved, carrying them to the floor above. They stared for a long time before Esther dared Rachel to ride it.

“We go up. How do we go down?”

“There’s got to be a down way. And if there isn’t”—she shrugged—“we’ll stay in the store forever. Us. That’s something, eh?”

So they stepped gingerly onto the escalator, which swept them to the second floor, and there they found a second escalator and went on up to another floor. But a man caught them, took in their shabby clothes, asked what they were doing in the place, and told them to go back where they’d come from. Rachel was mortified, but Esther only vowed to make herself a fine dress, a black skirt with a white waist, and return.

Farther up Fifth Avenue, they stopped to gawk at a stone mansion where a family was gathered around a great table in the dining room, sitting under a chandelier that glittered like a starry night. “We should only live so good!” Esther exclaimed.

“Oh, and why should we? We’re poor Jews from Orchard Street. Us, we’ll never be anything,” her sister replied.

Rachel went home morose, bitter about their state, but Esther viewed poverty only as a temporary condition. She saw no reason why she, too, shouldn’t live in a stone house with electricity and servants. She did not know how she would manage these things, only trusted that they would happen.

At work, she told the other girls about the houses and carriages she had seen on Fifth Avenue and the people, dressed in rich silks and heavy velvets and furs, even the children. “A fur coat she had, all white like snow falling, and her not any older than Jakob,” she said, and the others shook their heads in amazement. “Me, I’m going to have a white fur coat, and it’s not going to be rabbit, either. And a chandelier like stars. I’ll live in a house with a chandelier.”

The others laughed at such a preposterous idea, and Rachel, listening, turned red with shame, for what hope did Esther have of leaving Orchard Street, or Lewis, or Hester? “You make a fool of us all,” she said. But then, thinking it over, Rachel told Esther that maybe she was on to something. “If we ever get out of here, it’ll be you. Papa isn’t going to amount to anything, and Jakob, what does he care about us? He can be a doctor, and you and me he’d let live in the tenement.” And so the older sister pinned her hopes on the younger one. The only way out of the Lower East Side that she could think of was for a girl to marry well, Rachel told her sister, and why shouldn’t Esther make a good match? After all, she was a beauty, with her dark hair and smoldering eyes, long neck and long fingers.

Rachel herself wasn’t likely to marry well. She was short and broad, with a face as plain as a loaf of bread, and indeed, her parents had already picked out her husband. This happened when Rachel was nineteen, and she was excited. She hadn’t met the man yet, although she’d seen him, a squat fellow with close-set eyes and hair covering the backs of his hands. Benjamin was a butcher, the son of a butcher, a good catch. “You’ll never go hungry,” the marriage broker said, and the parents laughed, but nonetheless, they found that a compelling argument. Of course, Rachel had no feelings for the man yet, but what girl did when she married? Love came later, after the wedding, after the children. That was the way it was. Marrying for love was a sure sign of trouble ahead.

Esther thought Rachel’s intended was nice enough but dull, but then, so was her sister, which made them a good match. Benjamin visited Rachel, although the two were never left alone, because the girls were kept strict. The father and mother sat in the room with the young couple, Abe reading the newspaper and Emma sewing, Rachel shy, and the butcher tongue-tied and embarrassed.

“Eh, you see here the newspaper tells us they found the man what robbed the shoe store over on Columbia Street?” Abe remarked. “What you think of that?”

Benjamin only flushed and made darting gestures with his arms, and Rachel came to his rescue. “God should strike him dead for stealing from a poor man,” she said, and Benjamin nodded emphatically.

The three women made Rachel’s wedding dress from white silk, with a bit of lace around the neck. Emma, who collected her daughters’ unopened pay envelopes every week, handing over only a dollar to each for expenses, was extravagant, giving Rachel enough to buy a pearl necklace, and for Esther, pearl earrings. “Where do we buy such fine pearls?” Rachel asked. She had never purchased a piece of jewelry, never owned so much as a paste brooch, in fact.

“Not from a pushcart,” Esther replied. “We go to a jewelry store. They got different, better.” And so the two girls, neither knowing a pearl from a quartz pebble, went into a store, where they bargained the clerk down from ten dollars to eight for the necklace, and he threw in the earrings. “A bargain. Do I know a pearl when I see it?” Esther asked, but in fact, they could have bought the pearls from a pushcart for half that, and as for being real pearls, it was best that Esther really didn’t know a pearl when she saw it.

The wedding was held in the tenement, which was filled with relatives and neighbors, and after the ceremony, the guests ate cake and drank wine while a photographer took a picture of the newlyweds, standing stiff and solemn, a little apart from each other. Rachel looked scared, and indeed she was, for neither girl knew what would happen to the bride on her wedding night. Still, Rachel was happy, because she was anxious to leave the crowded tenement for her own home. And it was the first time since Jakob was born that Rachel was the center of attention. But she would miss Esther, her sister knew as she passed the cake, pressing it on the guests, for it would be unthinkable that any would be left. As Esther neared Rachel, her sister took her hand and whispered, “Tonight…” but she could not say more.

“You’ll be all right. Have little fear.”

Rachel nodded. “I will tell you. I will tell you everything then. You should not be an ignorant bride like me.”

“Everything?” Esther giggled, and her sister turned crimson.

After the party was over, the wine drunk, the cake eaten, the presents opened and admired, Rachel and Benjamin left. The men gave each other knowing winks, but the women held back. “He’s a kind man, her Benjamin,” one whispered to Emma, who nodded and replied, “Esther, I hope she is so lucky.”

In fact, Rachel did not tell Esther everything. When Esther pressed her, Rachel grew red, and her hands perspired, and she turned away, mumbling, “It is not such a big deal. Nothing to fear. Not such a big deal at all. One day you will know.”

Although Rachel was married and lived a few streets away, life for her was not so different from the way it had been before her marriage. She had the care of her own tenement apartment, and she went to work in the dress factory every day, sitting beside her sister. At noon, she gossiped with the other girls, as she always had. And at night, when her husband was working or out smoking and drinking with his friends, Rachel and Esther went out themselves, to the candy store or the picture show or sometimes just to walk the crowded streets. When there was a cost to their outing, Rachel paid for the two of them, for, like any wife, she had charge of her own family’s funds.

Sometimes the sisters walked past a dance hall, stopping to listen to the ragtime music. They peered in at the couples holding each other close. “Benjamin should take you dancing,” Esther said once.

“Benny dance? I should live so long!” Rachel replied, and sighed, for while she had never danced, she loved the music.

“Then let’s go inside by ourselves, you and me,” Esther said, and, struck with the idea, grinned. “Let’s do it right now.”

“I couldn’t. What if Benny finds out?”

“What? Benny doesn’t have a good time when he wants to? All we’ll do is pay a dime to listen to the music. It will do the heart good.”

“No, I couldn’t,” Rachel repeated.

“Then stay. I’m going in.”

“By yourself?”

“Unless I find somebody to pay my way.”

“Esther!”

“It isn’t my fault if my sister won’t come along to be my chaperone.”

Well, if Esther put it that way, Rachel replied, and she took two coins from her pocketbook, and the sisters went inside.

The place was dingy, and it smelled of cigar smoke, which turned the air a bluish gray. The room was close and stank of sweating bodies, too. But to the two sisters, who had never been inside such an establishment, the dance hall was exotic, a bit wicked. They clutched each other and stood at the rear of the hall, watching the dancers as they leaned toward each other. Rachel looked shocked, but Esther only smiled, and before long, a man came up and bowed a little and asked if she would like to dance.

“No,” Rachel told him. “You I didn’t ask,” the man said, and held out his hand to Esther. “I don’t know how,” Esther admitted.

“I’ll teach you.”

Esther looked at her sister, who frowned and shook her head, then looked resigned and waved her off. “Dance. Dance. Who’s to stop you?” And so Esther took the man’s arm and the two moved onto the dance floor.

She had not danced before, true, but Esther was light on her feet, and before the music ended, she had picked up the steps. And when she returned to her place beside Rachel, she was invited to dance by another man. And so the evening went. Even Rachel was asked out onto the dance floor, but each time, she replied that she was a married woman. The men did not understand that, for what did marriage have to do with a spin around the room? But Rachel stayed where she was, watching Esther, a chaperone.

When they made ready to leave—Esther was expected home at a certain hour, and Benjamin would be anxious if he returned to the tenement and found his wife was away—a man invited them to go to a saloon for a glass of beer, which horrified both of the woman.