The Gilded Cage

by Susannah Bamford

  Perhaps that longing for spring was what made her press Bell a little too hard. But why hadn’t Bell laughed, or teased? It wasn’t like her to be so cold. Bell was a private person, but she had never been cold. Columbine had always thought that love made people happy. But Bell didn’t seem happy; her face often looked strained. She didn’t moon out the window or appear flushed and happy when she came in the house late at night. Maybe Bell was afraid of being too happy in front of her. Columbine’s mouth twisted, and she sighed. Bell was all too aware that Elijah Reed was not exactly sweeping Columbine off her feet.

  Columbine was used to being pursued. She was used to wooing. She was used to flowers, and lingering glances, and compliments on her beauty. She was used to the soft sound of approving laughter at her wit. She was used to a certain amount of maneuvering at parties, when men stalked her or hovered by her side or smiled at her across bobbing heads. Granted, she was no longer a young, fresh beauty. But she’d be damned, Columbine thought, her hands tightening into fists, if she gave up those things. She still had her vanity, damnit. She still had her romantic heart.

  She had known since the dusky evening in the house on West 10th Street that she was in love with Elijah. She’d thought it would be easy, that night, to set in motion that delicious train of events that led to a love affair. She thought something in her voice, in her eyes, would have told Elijah how she felt. She’d believed that night that he did know, that the knowledge had leaped from her to him at the same instant. But as days passed and he did not do all the things she assumed he would do, she’d doubted her belief.

  Was the man blind? Was he a stick? Did he care? He seemed to like her. He called at least three times a week and usually more. He discussed his series in the Century, “City of Souls,” with her. He joined in all the problems and frustrations of the move to Safe Passage House. But the only time he touched her was when, in a gesture which spoke purely of gentlemanly politeness, no more, he took her arm.

  “The man is a stick,” Columbine muttered, and to put an exclamation point on her statement, she threw her pencil across the room. She felt ruffled and angry and childish and very much in love.

  Lunch without Edwin was unappetizing, and Toby was busy that afternoon, so Marguerite sat and brooded. What was the good of having a wonderful life if she had no one to show it off to?

  “Oh, hell,” she said out loud. Toby always slapped her hand when she cursed, but she was alone, as usual, and she could do whatever she liked.

  Rising, Marguerite looked at herself in the full length mirror of her bedroom. She loved her gown of faille and velvet in deep lavender. It had a trimming of Valenciennes lace and the scalloped skirt was drawn up by deep purple ribbons. Marguerite thought of her mother, who loved clothes, and sighed.

  “Why not?” she asked the mirror. Pressing her lips together, she impulsively searched for her plainest black three-quarter length coat. Within ten minutes, she was heading toward Broadway and signaling for a hansom cab.

  With her heart thumping against her chest, she called to the driver, “Broadway and Broome.” She fell back against the seat and tried not to think as the cab trotted its way inexorably downtown. When it reached Broome Street, Marguerite got out and paid the driver. Without looking around, she headed east.

  She was glad she’d chosen her black coat, but she mourned for her new boots when she started down the street. How could she have forgotten the muck? The further east she walked, the more crowded the street became. Children dressed in rags, some carrying bolts of heavy cloth as tall as they were, darted or trudged around her, and the sidewalks were jammed with people, carrying huge baskets full of food or clothing.

  Marguerite turned the corner and walked down to Hester Street. Pushcarts were everywhere, each peddler crying his own tune. Some cried their wares in mournful shrieks that still grated on her nerves as they had four years before. The crush and stench were overpowering. Women weaved expertly through the crowd with their market baskets, or called over the din as they haggled about the price of fish or potatoes. Marguerite walked quickly, ignoring the men who stared after her. She wished she’d had the foresight to wear a different dress. Even the six inches hanging below her coat was of such rich purple velvet that it marked her as an outsider. She didn’t fit in here any longer.

  That was what she wanted, she told herself firmly, that was what she dreamed of. She’d come down here to prove to herself how much she didn’t fit in, how right she’d been to leave. She lifted her chin defiantly as her expensive boots skirted the running water, the garbage, and the rotting vegetable matter on the sidewalk.

  She reached the corner of Hester and Ludlow Street, the site of the Pig’s Market. Pushcarts and peddlers crowded even more densely into the space, selling everything but pigs. Potatoes, onions, old coats, pickles, eyeglasses, chickens, cabbages, shoes. Marguerite pushed her way south down Ludlow Street and the pandemoniom lessened a bit.

  Everything seemed to turn gray on this street. The smoky sky seemed to droop over the brindled tenements, and she could see only gray, the gray of coal and ash. The very air seemed full of tears as a light mist began to fall. No color here, no gay, bright hats, no glimpse of a green square blocks ahead, no canary-yellow carriages rumbling by. Poverty came in monochrome, she thought wearily. She turned into a dumbell tenement that looked like every other on the street. No filthier, no cleaner, no sunnier, no less dismal than any other dismal building on this dismal block.

  She pushed open the front door and reeled back. She could never prepare herself for the smell. She took a deep breath of cold air and went in. She would get used to it; she wouldn’t resort to a perfumed handkerchief to her mouth, like a silly countess. There was one sink per floor, one sink that was often backed up from the refuse thrown down it. Waste was either thrown out into the airshaft or dumped in the basement. City services were not exactly up to Fifth Avenue standards down here. She heard the hum of machinery—probably a sweatshop on this floor—and the sound of coughing. Coughing was the constant noise of the poor in the cold months. When she thought of Ludlow Street—and she tried never to think of Ludlow Street—she thought of phlegm.

  She mounted the stairs quickly. On the third-floor landing, a head poked out of a doorway. “What do you want?” the woman called out in Yiddish. Her tone was half-nasty, half-authoritative.

  “It’s me, Mrs. Schneiderman,” Marguerite answered in Yiddish.

  The woman opened the door wider. She pushed a lock of gray hair off her forehead. “Marguerite Blum! Come to see your mama? That’s good.”

  “Is she well?”

  The woman shrugged. “Living in this hellhole, as well as can be expected, eh? But your father has the cough. They lost their boarder, that makher, he was no good. But I found them another, Mr. Ablowitz, he’s a tailor.”

  “That was kind of you, Mrs. Schneiderman. How is your family?” Marguerite asked politely. She knew she’d hear it from her mother if she didn’t inquire about the health of their neighbor’s family.

  “What you’d expect. Colds, chilblains, but the weather is getting warmer, at least. Spring gives us hope still, God knows why.”

  She seemed inclined to say more, but Marguerite said quickly, “I’ll go up now, then.”

  Mrs. Schneiderman seemed to notice Marguerite’s clothes for the first time. She looked her up and down, and her eyes widened. There was no subtlety on the East Side. Any moment now she would ask Marguerite where she’d obtained such fine clothes—and how. On the East Side, your business was everybody’s business.

  “Goodbye, Mrs. Schneiderman,” Marguerite said quickly, and turned to go.

  “Tell your mother I’ll be up later with some cabbage soup,” the woman called after her. She held the door open and watched until Marguerite was out of sight, craning her neck to see her.

  Marguerite pounded out her irritation on each step. She remembered afresh the reason she left. Poverty, yes, she’d hated everything about it. She hated the smell, the look
, the feel of it, scratchy clothes against her skin, cabbage, human waste, cold water. And she hated her father, of course. But how she hated this feeling, the penned-in feeling, the difficulty breathing because of the close air, the smells, and the goddamn neighbors who know everything, down to how often Mr. and Mrs. Gelb on the sixth floor make love, or how bad Mr. Goldman’s cough is, or how long Marguerite Blum had talked to Avi Cohen on the fire escape the night before.

  She knocked on her parents’ door, heard slow footsteps heading across the kitchen. Her mother opened it and peered at her in the dim light. “Marguerite?” she asked, as if she didn’t recognize her at all.

  “Hello, maman.” Marguerite stepped forward into the kitchen and hugged her mother. She still got a shock, every time. Her mother who had once smelled so light and flowery, whose skin had been so soft, whose body had been so round. Now her mother was as thin and crackly as paper, so transparent that Marguerite almost expected her to crumble into dust when she moved.

  “Ma petite.” Tears were in her mother’s blue eyes. “You look very pretty. Come in. Your father is here today,” she added in a whisper.

  Marguerite hesitated. “He’s home?” she asked in an undertone.

  “His chest is bad. He couldn’t carry the pack. He’s helping me with the sewing today. Come in, he’s too sick to fuss at you.” Her mother tugged on Marguerite’s hand. “Come in, come in. I want to see you.”

  She followed her mother uneasily down the short, dark hall, inching around a pile of sewing. Her mother took in whatever she could get. It was a good job, better than a sweatshop, but not steady. Sometimes her mother made paper flowers if she could not get piece work. But the bundles of cloth made the apartment look like the sweatshop she prided herself on avoiding. There was no room to move, and the dust from the cloth, carried through the streets, made everyone sneeze. It was piled everywhere, even on the kitchen table.

  The light in the main room was not much better. Pants and coats were bundled up and stacked against the walls. An old sewing machine, a precious item, was pushed up against the one window, a cheap pair of knee pants trailing off one end. Next to the machine, a mattress was pushed up against the wall. The boarder would place it on the floor when he returned home that evening, Marguerite knew. She remembered during one bad time that her father had unhinged the doors and used them for beds for more boarders, laying them across the few chairs they had. Marguerite would have to pick her way through the men, in their dirty underwear lying underneath thin blankets, snoring, their beards wet with saliva from their open mouths. One of them used to grab at her legs, try to get underneath her skirts as she passed. She never told her mother.

  Her father sat sewing in one corner, his long beard trailing in his lap. Marguerite could see how bad his stitches were. Her mother would probably rip them out and do all his work over again, at night, when he was asleep. It was the unwritten rule of the Blum family that Jacob Blum never be confronted with his many failures, no matter how large or small. Forget to pay the rent, father, so we’re thrown out in the street with our embarrassing bundle of belongings? Let the street boys cheat you out of items from your peddler’s pack for two weeks in a row? Forget your daughter’s birthday? Strike your wife for no reason? No one will mention a word of reproach.

  “Look, Jacob,” her mother said.

  Her father looked up. Marguerite hadn’t seen him in three years. “I see, Sophie.” He bent down over his work again. She saw the needle shake in his thick fingers.

  Sophie crossed the room with rapid steps. She bent over her husband. “Aren’t you going to greet your daughter? Aren’t you going to say something?” she hissed.

  Marguerite sighed. It had been this way since she could remember. Her father ignored her existence and her mother begged him to acknowledge her. It had never been easy. He had struck her only once, at the age of fifteen. She had been ten minutes late coming home from school. After that, she just ceased to exist for him. He would not talk to her, answer her questions, notice her in any way. She had begged him on her knees to talk to her, but he had merely looked past her shoulder and asked Sophie if there was any tea.

  He would not go as far as to sit shiva on her, though. That puzzled her, though perhaps it was because he could point to nothing that she’d actually done wrong. She had been dutiful, as far as it went, and she’d gotten a good job uptown, room and board in respectable houses.

  Their antagonism had always been silent. She’d left for good at sixteen, returning only for occasional visits when she knew he would not be home. She never knew what she had done to make her father hate her so. She didn’t care any longer.

  She loosened her coat and leaned against the doorframe. The room was so terrible in its familiarity. Sophie tried to keep the place looking as nice as possible. She’d refused to sell not only her fine tablecloth, only used on the Sabbath, but also the bright pieces of fabric she’d brought from France. So a yellow fringed cloth was draped over the dilapidated sofa, and a red cushion sat in a lonely fashion on a chair with a broken spindle on its back. Marguerite’s eyes roamed around the room and finally returned to her father. To her surprise, he was looking at her.

  “Sophie, look at her dress,” he said.

  Marguerite’s hands fluttered to her coat. She pulled it closed.

  “Good material, I can see from here,” he said. “Silk. Fine lace. Velvet. And her boots. Look at her boots. Fur-lined.”

  “Jacob—”

  Marguerite rearranged her skirts hastily, but she could not disguise her boots completely. She met her father’s gaze, held trapped in its fiery blackness, suspended, in a dream. She was sixteen, she was fifteen again, still feeling that bewildering rush of shame.

  Suddenly, he leaped to his feet, the boy’s trousers falling to the floor. “Whore!” he shouted. He took two steps toward her while Sophie grabbed ineffectually at his sleeve. “Did you come here from Allen Street?”

  Marguerite stared at him. She kept her face a mask, for she knew it infuriated him more. Tears gave him great satisfaction.

  Sophie had begun to cry. “Please,” she sobbed. “Please. I just want to visit with her. We’ll go to the kitchen. Sit, Jacob. Please.”

  “Is that why you left your father’s house?” Jacob thundered. “And who is your cadet, that Benny Gold? The bum who peddles flesh instead of fish? He has the girls you can get for cheap, I hear.”

  “Is that what you hear, Papa?” she asked deliberately. “Or is that what you paid? You always were a shnorer.”

  “Marguerite! Please.” Sophie’s sobs were wrenching.

  Marguerite glanced at her mother. “I’m going, Mama.” She turned and went back into the kitchen. Her hands were shaking as she buttoned her coat. Why had she returned? To tell her mother, who loved music, that she had a voice, a real voice? Or to show off her pretty dress? What did she expect?

  Furious at her own stupidity, Marguerite banged out of the apartment and hurried down the steep, narrow stairs. She could hardly wait to get outside, where she could breathe again. As she passed the third landing, she heard Mrs. Schneiderman open her door. “Don’t worry, I’m leaving!” she called furiously as she ran down the stairs.

  She burst through the front door and took a deep breath of the chill air. She leaned weakly against the railing for an instant. She had to move, had to get off this street, but she felt paralyzed. Suppose she saw someone she knew? She’d kept to herself for the short time she’d lived here, but still, there were those who might recognize her as the scrawny teenager who’d run away and broken her parents’ hearts. Marguerite had thought she’d wanted that, wanted someone from her past to see her fine clothes. But they would all think the same thing, that she was a whore. Because she was pretty and because she had a fine dress, she was a whore. Marguerite walked down the steps.

  Behind her, the door opened, and Sophie ran out, pulling on her shabby coat. “Marguerite, wait,” she said, hurrying down the steps after her.

  Marguerite t
urned a stony face to her mother. She waited for the explanation, the excuses. Your father, he doesn’t mean it. He’s been sick with the cough. He’s never gotten over the shame of being a peddler, Jacob Blum, the richest Jew in Odessa. Can’t you see what that would do to a man?

  Instead, Sophie gazed at her with calm, beautiful blue eyes, looking very practical, and very French. She shrugged. “I have to put up with him. You don’t. Next time, I’ll meet you somewhere.”

  Sometimes Marguerite was able to catch a glimpse of the woman she’d once known, and this was one of those times. Instantly, she softened. “Oh, Maman.” She hugged her mother and tears sprang to her eyes.

  “My baby.” Sophie tucked a dark curl into Marguerite’s hat. “Come, let’s walk, little raven.”

  “Don’t call me that, please, Maman,” Marguerite said in a calm voice.

  Sophie peered at her worriedly. “Of course.”

  They walked, arm in arm, toward Canal Street. There was no place to walk to, no park, no square with trees or grass. Sophie probably hadn’t seen a blade of grass since she and Marguerite had left France nearly five years ago, Marguerite reflected.

  Marguerite had grown up in Odessa, that most beautiful of seaports on the Black Sea, one of the few Russian cities with a European accent. Her father dealt in Ukranian wheat, and he was rich. He’d come penniless from France as a boy, and he’d worked his way up in the grain business. It took him until he was thirty to open his own office, but he did it, starting small, sleeping in the small office next to his files. The business flourished and grew, and Jacob saved his money. When he felt he had more than enough, he bought a house and looked for a wife to run it. He’d wanted someone mature, someone his own age, thirty-nine. But on the street one day he’d seen nineteen-year-old Sophie Marcel, who had come for a visit with her father from France, blond, blue-eyed, with the face of an angel. Jacob had fallen instantly in love. He courted her, and Sophie had been dazzled by the handsome, wealthy man who looked at her so adoringly, who touched her hand so respectfully, so thrillingly. They were engaged within a month.