Dedication
To the memory of my grandfather Victor Berger,
“the ever-efficient boy of the Home”
Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Acknowledgments
References
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . . * About the author
About the book
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
FROM HER BED OF BUNDLED NEWSPAPERS UNDER THE kitchen table, Rachel Rabinowitz watched her mother’s bare feet shuffle to the sink. She heard water filling the kettle, then saw her mother’s heels lift as she stretched up to drop a nickel in the gas meter. There was the sizzle of a struck match, the hiss of the burner, the whoosh of catching flame. As her mother passed the table Rachel reached out to catch the hem of her nightdress.
“Awake already, little monkey?” Visha peered down, her dark hair hanging in loose curls. Rachel nodded, open eyes eager. “You’ll stay put until the boarders leave for work, yes? You know it makes me nervous when there’s too many people crowding in the kitchen.”
Rachel stuck out her bottom lip. Visha tensed, still afraid of sparking one of her daughter’s tantrums, even though months had gone by since the last one. Then Rachel smiled. “Yes, Mama, I will.”
Visha let out her breath. “That’s a good girl.” She stood and knocked on the front room door, two sharp raps. After hearing the boarders’ muffled voices assure her they were awake, she crossed the kitchen and let herself out of the apartment. Going down the tenement’s hallway to use the toilet, she allowed herself to think their trouble with Rachel was really over.
It had started with the colic, but she couldn’t blame the baby for that, though Harry seemed to. For months, it wailed at all hours of the night. Only if she held it in her arms and paced the kitchen did the cries settle into sobs that at least the neighbors could sleep through. They hadn’t been able to keep boarders then—who would pay to sleep next to that racket?—and Harry started working late to make up the income. To avoid the baby, he took to spending more nights at his Society meetings. Sundays, too, he’d managed to escape, taking Sam up to the Central Park or down to the piers to watch the ships. Visha might have gone crazy, boxed up in those three rooms with an infant who seemed to hate her. It was only Mrs. Giovanni coming by every day, for a visit so Visha could talk like a person, or to take the baby for an hour so she could rest, that got her through those long months.
Back in the kitchen, Visha poured boiling water into the teapot and also into a basin in the bottom of the sink before filling the kettle again and setting it back on the flame. She tempered the water in the basin with a splash of cold and set out a hard square of soap and a threadbare towel. She put the teapot, two cups, a jar of jelly, a spoon, and the slices of yesterday’s bread on the table. In the front room, furniture scraped across the floor, then the door opened, and the boarders, Joe and Abe, emerged. The young men were bare chested, suspenders drooping from the waists of rumpled trousers, their untied laces slithering as they walked. Visha settled two damp shirts on the backs of the kitchen chairs. She’d washed them out late the night before, and at least they were clean if anyone complained. Abe went down the hall while Joe leaned over the sink to wash up. Visha edged past him into her bedroom and shut the door.
She lifted off her nightdress and hung it from a nail in the wall, then buttoned up a white shirtwaist over her shift and stepped into a long skirt. Her husband yawned when Visha sat on the bed to pull up her stockings. Harry’s arm still stretched across her pillow from last night, when he’d stroked her shoulder and whispered in her ear: “Soon, my Visha, soon, when I’m a contractor with my own business, we’ll move out of this tenement and up to Harlem, maybe even the Bronx. The children will have their own bedroom, we won’t have to take in boarders, and you can sit all afternoon with your feet up like a queen, my queen.” As he spoke, Visha pictured herself in the quiet bedroom of a new apartment building, windows open to the cool outside air. She imagined filling a tub in a tiled bathroom with hot water just waiting for her to turn the tap.
Visha had turned to Harry then, inviting. He moved over her quietly, the way she liked, not like Mr. Giovanni next door, whose grunts echoed in the stinking airshaft. She kept him inside her to the end, her heels pressed into the backs of his knees, the prospect of his success stirring her desire for another baby. Rachel was four years old already, the sleepless nights a long-ago memory, the tantrums apparently over. After Harry rolled off of her, Visha dreamed of the feathery weight of a newborn in her arms.
Rachel was getting restless as the boarders sat in the kitchen, stirring jelly into their tea and soaking their bread to soften it. From under the table, she reached out and tangled Joe’s shoelaces.
“What is this now happening? Is there rats chewing on my boot strings?”
Rachel laughed. She nudged her brother beside her to wake up. “Tie them in knots, Sam, so he falls down,” she whispered. “I can’t tie knots yet.”
Joe heard her. “What for you want me to fall over, to break my neck maybe? Be careful I don’t pull you from under there and make trouble with your mother.”
Sam wrapped his arms around his sister. “Don’t start now, Rachel. Be good and quiet and I’ll teach you what number comes after one hundred.”
Rachel let go of the laces. “There’s more numbers after one hundred?”
“Do you promise to be still until Mama says we can come out?”
Rachel nodded vigorously. Sam whispered in her ear.
“Say it again.” He did. Rachel laughed like when she tasted something sweet.
“One hundred and one hundred and one hundred.” Sam put his head down on the newspapers and listened, satisfied, to his sister’s chanting.
Back in September when he started first grade, Rachel had gotten it into her head that she would be going to school with Sam. When he walked out the door without her, she had thrown a fit that was still going on when he came home for lunch. Rachel’s screaming had driven even Mrs. Giovanni away and Visha was beside herself. “See what you can do with her!” she said to Sam, then shut herself up in the bedroom.
Sam had managed to calm his sister by teaching her the first five letters of the alphabet. Before he went back to school for the afternoon, his stomach rolling with hunger, he’d struck their bargain. For quiet and goodness, Sam paid Rachel with letters and numbers. It was April now, and already she knew as much as he’d been taught. That first day, Visha made up for his missed lunch by preparing for Sam his favorite dinner, pasta with tomato gravy just like Mrs. Giovanni’s. “You saved my life today,” she’d told her son, kissing the top of his head.
Visha, dressed, came in from the bedroom to make the boarders their lunches, wrapping cold baked potatoes and fat pickles in newspaper. Chair legs scraped and cups rattled as Joe and Abe got up from the table. Hoisting suspenders over damp shirts and grabbing jackets, they tucked the food into their pockets and stomped out the door.
“Come out from there now, you little monkeys,” Visha said. The blanke
t flew back and Rachel scrambled up, followed by Sam. Visha gave them each a kiss on the head, then Sam grabbed his sister’s hand and pulled her out of the kitchen and down the hall. While they took their turns at the toilet, Visha made a second pot of tea, refilled the kettle, rinsed the teacups, and put them back on the table.
When the children raced into the kitchen, Visha caught Rachel and lifted the girl onto her lap while Sam stood on his toes to reach the washbasin in the sink. He was tall already for a boy of six and seemed to Visha a small version of the man he’d one day become. His light brown hair was Harry’s for sure, as were the pale gray eyes that made Visha’s father doubt Harry was really a Jew. But where Harry was smooth and sweet-talking, Sam was sharp and quick, already getting in fights at school and tearing his pants playing stickball in the street.
Rachel put her hands on Visha’s cheeks to get her mother’s attention. Visha gazed at her reflection in her daughter’s dark eyes, so brown they were nearly black. When Sam was finished, Visha dragged her chair to the sink so Rachel could stand on it to wash herself. After both children were at the table sipping tea and soaking bread, Visha dropped a whole egg into the kettle to boil and went in to wake her husband.
His breath still thick from sleep, Harry murmured in Visha’s ear, “So, did we make a baby last night do you think?” Visha whispered back, “If we did, he’ll need a papa who’s a contractor, so get yourself out of bed already.” Visha came into the kitchen with a shy smile on her face, Harry following her.
“Papa!” Rachel and Sam chorused. Their father dropped his hands onto their shoulders and pulled them close so he could kiss both of their cheeks at once.
“You give him a minute of peace,” Visha clucked. She lifted the lid of the kettle to check on the bobbing egg while Harry went down the hall. It was a luxury this, every morning a whole egg just for Harry, but he said he needed his strength. If Visha had to get a bone with less meat for their soup or buy their bread already a day old to afford the eggs, well, it would all be better once Harry made good.
When he got back, Harry lifted Rachel onto his knee and took her seat. Visha put a cup of tea in front of him and some more bread, then fished out the egg with a fork and set it on Harry’s plate to cool. She leaned against the sink, her hand absently resting on her belly, watching her husband with their children.
“So, Sammy, what did you learn from school yesterday?” Harry hadn’t seen the children since breakfast the day before. He’d worked late, then gone directly to his Society meeting, coming home after even the boarders were asleep to whisper in Visha’s ear. She used to resent these Societies of his, the dues so hard on their pockets, until Harry convinced her the Society would back him when he went into business for himself.
Sam squinted. “B-R-E-D,” he said. “T-E.”
“And what’s this?” Harry asked, looking at Visha with sparkling eyes.
“That spells bread and tea, Papa! We learned the whole alphabet already, and now every day we learn spelling for new words. C-A-T. That spells cat, Papa!”
“Already such a genius,” Harry said, rolling his egg on the plate to shed it of its shell. Sometimes he saved a bite for Rachel, pushing the rounded egg white between her lips with his finger, but this morning he popped it whole into his mouth.
“What are you cutting today, Harry?” Visha asked. Rachel echoed her mother. “Yes, Papa, what are you cutting?”
“Well,” he said, addressing himself to his daughter, “we got patterns for the new shirtwaists yesterday, and I had to figure how to lay them out. The contractor, he likes my cutting because I don’t leave much scrap, but the material for the new waists has a little stitching running through the weave, and I had to lay out the pattern so the little stitch matched up at all the seams. It took me some time, that’s why I missed supper last night.” He glanced at Visha. “But I got it all figured out, so today I do the cutting.”
“Can I be a cutter, too, when I grow up?” Rachel asked.
“What for you want to work in a factory? That’s why I work so hard, so you don’t have such a life. Besides, girls aren’t cutters. The knives are too big for their little hands.” Harry put Rachel’s fingers in his mouth and pretended to chew on them until she laughed.
Harry turned to Sam. “You’d better get going now, little genius, or you’ll be late for school.”
Sam jumped up from his chair and dashed into the front room to dress. When he returned, Visha handed him his jacket. “And don’t waste the whole lunch hour playing in the street, come straight home to eat!” she called as he banged out the door and clattered down the two flights of stairs.
Visha went into the front room to open the windows. The April morning was clear and fresh. Leaning out, she saw a policeman still wearing his influenza mask, but Visha felt they were safe, now the winter was over. She knocked on wood as the grateful thought passed through her mind. Then she saw Sam burst from the front of the tenement, dodging vendors’ carts and motorcars and the milk truck’s old horse. It amazed her that such a small boy could charge so headlong into the world.
Turning away from the window, she sighed. The boarders had left the room a mess, blankets tossed over couches, dirty clothes on the floor, their trunk gaping in the corner. She spent a few minutes setting the room to rights before coming into the kitchen. Harry had gone in to dress. Rachel was at the table, dropping pieces of stale bread into her cooling cup of tea and lifting them out with a fork. She pressed the dripping chunks of bread against the roof of her mouth with her tongue, squeezing out the tea and savoring the bread’s softness.
Visha was wrapping Harry’s lunch when he called to her from the bedroom. “Come in here a minute, would you?”
“You stay there now, Rachel,” Visha said, leaving the wrapped potato and pickle on the drain board. “I’ll be right back.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Close the door, Visha,” Harry said. She did. He caught her before she could fully turn around, his hands sliding down her hips.
“Harry, no, I’m already dressed.” He grabbed a fistful of fabric in each hand and lifted her skirt to her waist. “You’ll make yourself late.” He steered her toward the bed, bending her over, pulling at her bloomers. “Rachel will hear!” Holding her down with one heavy hand, he guided himself into her with the other. It was Visha now who had to stifle a grunt. She turned her face into the mattress as Harry moved behind her. “You want another baby, don’t you?” The mattress swallowed her answer of yes, yes.
In the kitchen, Rachel finished her cup of tea, but there was still a piece of bread on the table. The teapot was empty. There was the kettle on the stove, the chair still pulled up to the sink. She looked at the bedroom door, knowing she should wait for her mother, but she wanted the tea now. She took the teapot from the table and, standing on the chair, set it on the drain board, lifted its lid, and put in a pinch of tea from the tin. Then, with two hands, she picked up the kettle like she’d seen her mother do a thousand times.
The kettle was heavier than she expected. When she tilted it, the spout hit the teapot and knocked it over. Her two hands still clutching the kettle, Rachel watched, helpless, as the teapot fell and shattered. Dropping the kettle back onto the burner, the water spit and sizzled in the flame. Startled, Rachel lost her balance. The chair teetered over, toppling her to the floor. For a second she felt like she couldn’t breathe. Then she gulped in some air and out came a scream like falling cats.
In the bedroom, Visha tensed at the sounds of breaking and falling. She pushed up against the bed to stand, but Harry, not finished, held her down. Their daughter’s high wail carried over the transom. “Harry, enough, she’s hurt!” With a shudder, he pushed into her even deeper. When he finally pulled back, Visha stumbled to her feet, tugging her clothes into place over her slippery thighs.
Visha found Rachel on the floor, the chair on top of her. “Harry, come in here!”
Harry followed, buttoning his pants. He lifted up his screaming daughter an
d kicked aside the fallen chair. “What happened here? Is anything broken?”
Visha ran her hands over Rachel’s legs, bending knees and ankles, then lifted each of her arms, checking elbows and wrists. Rachel kept up a constant scream that never wavered in pitch as Visha examined her joints. “I don’t think so, Harry, she fell down is all.” Visha saw the shards strewn across the floor. “And look at my teapot! What did I tell you, to stay in your chair!”
Harry stroked his daughter’s hair, but now that she was in one of her fits nothing seemed to calm her. He handed her to Visha. “I got no time for this, already I’m gonna be late,” he shouted over Rachel’s screams.
“As if it’s not your own fault!”
Harry scowled as he yanked his jacket from its nail and shoved his fedora on his head. Visha, sorry for the harsh words, lifted her cheek to be kissed, but he turned away and headed into the hall.
“When you coming home?” Visha called after him.
“You know I got to finish all the cutting.” He paused in the doorway. “You just take care of this here. I’ll be home when I’m home.”
RACHEL WAS GROWING heavy in her mother’s arms, her screams unnerving. Visha carried her daughter into the bedroom and sat her in the middle of the bed. “You calm yourself now.” She looked around for something that might distract Rachel, thinking of how Sam managed to settle her. Visha reached for the money jar on the dresser.
“Rachel, can you count these out for Mama? Then you can come do the shopping with me. I’m not angry about the teapot, I promise. Please?”
Miraculously, Rachel seemed willing to calm down. Stifling her sobs, she took the jar and dumped it on the blanket. Rusted pennies, dull nickels, sleek dimes, even a few quarters. She began to make little piles, matching like to like.
Visha backed cautiously into the kitchen. She sat down and took a few minutes to settle her nerves. Mrs. Giovanni peeked her head in from the hallway, a flowered kerchief tied over her hair.
“Can I help you, Visha?” she offered.
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