by Kalyan Ray
When my neck hurt, I would close my eyes momentarily, clench my tired palms, and think intently of our new home: Josephine had helped me find a tiny apartment with a kitchen—and a bathtub in it!—close to Water Slip off the East River. It would be available in a week or so. In that same building lived Hepzibah Schiffman, a plump smiling widow whom Josephine knew well. She would look after my boy while I worked. That is why I did not mind how much Anna Gullo the sour-faced supervisor scowled, sticking her head through lines of hanging patterns that hung like paper ghosts.
I did not want to acknowledge it even to myself, but I thought often of the sweet life on the farm. I longed for Grandpa Brendan and his simple affection. Most of all, I longed for Frankie’s arms around me, but what I missed most keenly was his zest for life. It fed mine. I yearned for my little boy, how he smelt, his minute perfect fingers, his chortles when I would pretend to hide behind my palms and then go peek-a-boo. He never did tire of that game. I felt our lives, Frankie’s, Padraig’s, and mine, were a grim version of that hide-and-seek game, where we were each trying to come find each other. Had my baby forgotten me, did he miss me? I thought with anguish if now he loved Mama more than me.
Not daring to ask for a couple of days off to go to the farm, I wrote to Mama with the news of my job and asked her to bring my son the next weekend, adding the news about Frankie and his quest in Naples.
I had so wanted to prove to my mother that I could manage on my own, but felt no great triumph now. A month ago I had felt the need to stand squarely before her and ask why she had not given my letter, my letter by rights, from Frankie. But the sharp edge of my anger had blunted. I thought of my little boy safe with her and missed the uncrowded rhythms of the farm. Oh, I knew that she loved me too; it was its insistence and grip that galled me. Yet the days away from her had taken away its sharp vinegar. My heart was torn over my proud, obdurate mother who was silent about too many things, while I need to talk.
Why do I always need to set my will against hers, Grandpapa Brendan? I thought, Will Mama see things my way now, stand by me, and say, “No need for Mrs. Schiffman, for I am right here for you”?
• • •
JOSEPHINE HAD GOT up early this particular Saturday morning. It was the first time in years that she had taken a day off work, for Uncle Arthur was turning sixty years old. Shy as a schoolboy, he beamed about all the fuss Josephine made. He too had taken the day off. But I would be paid today and hand over much of that money to my landlord. I would be given the key to my own place right away, or a day later, if the landlord did not want to work on his Sabbath. I would miss Josephine, and the two old men, but felt a deep pleasure that I would have a home of my own.
I expected my mother to arrive either today or on Sunday at Josephine’s, but I was certain she would come this weekend. Josephine insisted that it would be no problem for all of us to share her room for the day or so until I had my apartment ready.
Josephine appeared happy, joyous as a child on her own birthday. She made Uncle Arthur his favorite breakfast, then went about the apartment busily arranging for the birthday dinner and also the probable arrival of my mother and son. Before I left, she said, “I thought of something else, Bibi. I met Nino Tancredi at a union meeting, and he said that he was working with Italian immigrant groups from Naples and the church there. I just thought to send word through him for news of Lucia and Frankie.”
I felt my tears gathering. “But I wrote dozens of those letters,” I began.
“Hush,” she said, touching my arm, “this is different. You know how the mails are. Nino is going himself next week. He is such a close friend, a good union man. He will do this personally for me. He promised. I wanted to wait until I had some news, but today I thought you should have some joy too.” I smiled, my heart aching to gain faith.
I left reluctantly, for the apartment was full of cheer. I stood at the door, watching Uncle Arthur and Uncle Julius shake hands, chuckling as they sat down for a leisurely cup of coffee and quiet smoke, while Josephine bustled behind them.
When I stepped out into the street, I felt amazed by the beautiful day. Twenty-fifth of March, and already glorious weather, the sky a deep blue lake. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of that receding figure: the shy young man with the fair hair, vivid blue eyes, yarmulke on his head, crossing the street away from me. For a moment I thought I’d call out after the stranger, “Jakob Sztolberg, oh stop for me, Jakob. It’s me, Bibi. Don’t you know me, Papa?” But he had gone from my life again. I looked up at the sky and saw the glide of a pale hawk as it soared above the sparkling city and watched until it disappeared from sight.
“I am happy,” I told myself. “Someday I will meet my papa, I know, in no country where time exists. Won’t that be something!”
• • •
MY BACK HURT by late afternoon as I labored on, absorbed in the frenzy of the closing work week. The operators worked their stuttering machines, and the runners scampered up and down with fabric lengths, putting them into wicker baskets by our side, and picking up the finished pieces: sleeves and tucked collars and such. Everything around me screamed hurry, hurry! The machines were clicking at a gallop. The foremen bellowed the number of pieces needed, checking various piles, in a complicated race. I wondered if I could ever fit back into the farm again.
I raised my head briefly to ease my aching shoulders, staring into the distance, not really focusing on anything. With a jolt, I recognized the receding coppery head of Ijjybijjy Malouf. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He walked through the busy room, pushing his way with his muscular shoulders, looking neither left nor right. He slipped into Mr. Blanck’s glassed-in office and kicked the door shut behind him. The green glow of the banker’s lamp on Mr. Blanck’s desk made them look submerged and mossy. I watched, fascinated, hands on my lap—the only person on the work floor not caught up just now in the frenetic pace of the closing hour.
“Nine more sleeves, double quick!” bellowed Mr. Bernstein to one of the runners.
Just beyond Mr. Abramowitz at his cutter’s table, I could still see Malouf and Mr. Blanck but could not hear a thing. They seemed to be quarreling. Mr. Blanck’s mouth opened and closed, his face livid, and he kept pointing his index finger, whether to make a point or to show Malouf the door, I was not sure. I watched Ijjybijjy clenching his jaw, smoke curling up from the cigarette in his mouth. Suddenly he pushed Mr. Blanck with his open palm, making him stagger against his desk. Malouf turned around, as if on a mechanical device, and slid out.
He flicked something into Mr. Abramowitz’s bin of scrap cuttings of cotton and lawn before he slunk off toward the main door. There Ijjybijjy swiveled around to stare at the room, as if he were a curious passerby. A small smile played on his lips. Mr. Blanck seemed relieved to be rid of the man and bent down to make a phone call.
By the time I glanced back, Ijjybijjy Malouf had gone.
Ten more minutes to closing time, so I settled down to work, although I longed to go to one of the tall windows and look upon the greening heads of the trees. I wondered where my boy was, and found myself wishing my mother had an easy trip down to this unfamiliar city. I felt a sharp twinge that I had made an adversary of her. In the last year, her face often looked tired, her back a little stooped. When I was a child, she would bring johnnie-cakes and cookies made from mulled oats and honey out to us—Grandpapa Brendan and me—with glasses of milk at this time of day. The simple memory comforted me.
A dancing light played just beyond my range of vision as I leaned down to finish the last of the needlework. An odor of burning leaves and their crinkling sound as they curled in the fire?
In a trice, something jolted me upright. I saw the sudden palms of fire, vivid and ochre, reaching out from the bin by Mr. Abramowitz’s table. The fire danced in reflection on Mr. Blanck’s glass office, where he stood screaming soundlessly. The tables that lay side by side, the tissue and lawn, the heaped layers of cotton ignited. Dangling from the netw
ork of wires overhead, the paper patterns in translucent tissue fluttered aflame. A whoosh of smoke gamboled and rolled toward the windows like a gray wave. The window beams crackled and the sound of breaking glass tinkled in the air. A tongue of fire licked along the wall and out a tall window, seeking the balmy air outside. The smoke lowered in the ululating room.
The door on the far side was locked. Rebecca Feibisch and Sarah Sabasowitz were among those hurling themselves against it, and in a terrible pantomime of bewilderment, crumpling down, clothes afire, on the smoking floor. I whirled around and saw the inseparable Ida Kenowitz and Sarah Kupla standing against the flaming wall, wide-eyed in terror, holding hands, their skirts swirling about them.
The smoke unfurled itself lower and lower, making it impossible to breathe. People were now running into and over each other, with a dreadful creaking underfoot as if the floor were splitting. Cinders clattered in clumps from the roof. Wisps of cotton and lengths of lawn caught fire, rising like crazy magic carpets into the smoke. I heard the wailing of Julia Rosen, the piercing shrieks of Vincenza, while all about me flickered light, but not of a kind I had ever seen before. And beyond them, I could see the slow pirouette of Annie Starr, her eyes shut as if she had heard some dread music. In front of me I saw the pale, silent face of little Bessie Viviano.
I stood as still as ever I stood on this earth, before I knew what I had to do.
Maeve
New York City
March 25, 1911
I had that dream again.
In the first months after my Jakob died, I had a recurrent nightmare: My grief had turned into a box with a complicated latch I was too weak to shut. It was so densely packed that, once opened, sunlight and air had swollen the contents, making it impossible to grapple the lid down to close it. I struggled with the box until I would heave awake, choking, in a night thick as smoke.
Bibi had written from New York; she knows about the letters. I needed to speak to Papa Brendan urgently, stranded as I was on my island of woe, the black waters rising. When he came into the kitchen that morning, still sleepy, I spoke directly.
“I want to die, Papa Brendan. I wish it were all over. I want to walk into that lake with rocks in my fists and never come out.”
He looked gravely at me, his eyebrows white, his cheeks like pink fabric wrinkled.
“Is that so, my girl?” he said, as if I were a wee child who had taken a bad fall.
My withholding the letters was past explaining now. I handed him Frankie’s letters, which he read, saying nothing, while I sat as if it were the dead end of time.
“You did wrong, Maeve,” he said simply. His eyes were keen, watching my face, aware of my plight. “But you can turn it about, you know?” I sat looking back at him, entirely confused by his manner.
“Come, dear,” he urged, “come away from this dim kitchen, for ’tis a grand morning outside.” He led me, my palm in his, to the wooden bench under the horse chestnut.
“You can bring all the happiness back into your world, and your girl’s love to boot. Do you know that?”
“And how am I to do that, Papa Brendan?” I retorted.
“Take a ship to Italy,” he said. “Take Bibi and the child. Help them find Frankie.”
“What?” I was completely dumbfounded. “Papa Brendan . . .” I wavered.
“You need to right the wrong you did Bibi.” He was looking sternly at me now. I hung my head. “Nay, nay, Maeve,” he said, “look up, look at me. Think who you are: Padraig’s daughter, dauntless Maire Aherne’s blood. Take that ship to Naples. You can take on the Atlantic. You did once.”
I took a deep breath. “And you, Papa Brendan?”
“Ach,” he said, blinking in the growing light, “I need to hold the fort here. Besides, I have to do the ledgers each month, don’t I? You’ll be back before you know it. And don’t you worry about the money. We have enough and more, saved over all these years, eh, my tightfisted girl?” He was grinning at me.
“Will you be all right by yourself in that while?” A great weight was lifting off me.
“Aye, certainly,” he said, “although, I must say, girleen, I will have to fend off Mrs. Gabrielsen’s endless baking!”
“She likes you,” I teased him, amazed to find myself in a jocular mood so easily.
“Nay, nay,” he chortled, “the widow has made eyes at all the men here, young and old. The lady cannot help herself any more than a sneeze in pollen time.”
• • •
I HAVE GIRDED myself, for my hapless love has outweighed the sum of all my fears. I ask nothing in return but my daughter’s trust back. Aye, I am the wanderer’s daughter, but I know why I am setting out. Yes, oh yes! With Bibi under my wing, I shall sail that dread Atlantic again.
That is the first thing I will tell Bibi when I see her.
I woke with a jolt on the hard railway bench, holding my sleeping grandson. The gum of uneasy sleep was still on my eyes as the train grated into the station. Standing within the doorway of a looming building, like the mouth of a cave, I reread the sheet on which Bibi had sent her address.
It was almost noon by the time I found it, reluctant to ask help from strangers. Bibi had already left for work. The apartment felt cramped, its sepia light burdened with the smell of tobacco and old paper, the wallpaper close and constricting, and the family’s oddly pronounced English unfamiliar. I did not know what to say to the two elderly men and the busy young woman, Josephine. Both men spoke with an old-fashioned courtesy. Papa Brendan would have thoroughly enjoyed their company, but I retreated into silence.
How is it that Jakob never felt alien to me? These Grunwalds are from that part of the world, but I felt ill at ease. They kept talking of my daughter as if Bibi was theirs. Then the two men continued talking about people they thought I would know about. But these names, McClellan, Hearst, and Charles Murphy meant nothing to me. They discussed Tammany Hall. Was that a person or a place?
Josephine Grunwald was solicitous to me and made baby Padraig comfortable and served us lunch. The food was strange, the shape of the bread unfamiliar. I did recognize the seeds of rye and thought the taste not unpleasant. The soup had bits of bread and meat in it, and I made myself eat a small portion out of politeness. Little Padraig had woken up and tried to haul himself unsteadily up by the chair, but flopped down on the carpeted floor. The old man with the pink bald head seemed delighted with the child and had him stand again. Padraig, without a trace of unease, firmly held the man’s thumbs, propelling himself a few steps before the old man planted him on his lap and offered him a piece of bread. The child gummed it with gusto, while a large cat watched gravely from a corner.
Josephine was preparing quantities of food for the evening, dishes I did not know. Nonetheless I went into the crammed kitchen to help with the chopping and cutting. I could see plainly that Josephine cooked with speed and efficiency, but no talent. I did notice that Josephine’s kitchen had some oranges, sugar, butter, flour—ingredients for Irish Burnt Orange Cake. When the young woman had quite finished and was about to untie her apron, I asked her, “Could I use your kitchen, please?” Josephine seemed surprised, thinking in confusion that I was intending to cook my own meal. She held out her hands and said, “But I cooked everything for all of us. You will eat, of course, with us, neh?”
“Thank you for that,” I told her. “I will bake for your family.”
“Of course, yes, please use anything you like,” said Josephine. “Bibi tells me what wonders you can cook, but only if you want to make something. The kitchen is yours.” Then she earnestly added, “This home too, as long as you wish.”
So I baked. I felt calmer now.
The aroma of my cake soon made the two gentlemen sit up in anticipation. When I returned to the kitchen to take it out of the oven, Josephine followed me.
“Bibi will be so glad to see you,” said Josephine.
I could not help a shadow passing over my face in spite of myself.
“She mu
st miss your cooking,” Josephine said, trying to put me at ease. I was silent, for I could never bring myself to speak of my heart’s ache to a stranger, kind to Bibi as she was. All the troubles that I have had with Bibi made me slow to answer.
“For certain she loves you,” added Josephine. “The letters are no matter.”
I stood stricken. The words had been so unexpected, it was as if the young woman had taken a plate and smashed it. So Bibi has told this stranger what I have done, I thought, bitterness curdling within me. What could this woman from no country I knew, from a strange city, begin to know of our safe garden where I wanted to protect my willful daughter? My heart was a slab of stone. Yes, heavy misery it was made of—and guilt—and also my helpless love.
I barely managed to speak. “Write me down, kindly, the address where my Bibi works,” I said as evenly as I could manage. “I have a mind to take the child there and meet my daughter when she is done for the day.”
“You will?” said Josephine, breaking into a smile. She wrote down the address and began to explain how to get there. “It is not far.”
What does this young woman know how far I have traveled, and how could she even begin to comprehend how turbulent the world could be for the likes of us, torn and uprooted as we had been from our Ireland, leaving us lost on some sea or on some unsure ice beneath us, until we found our own piece of earth?