Orphan #8

by Kim van Alkemade

  “Thank you, no, she’s quiet again.” Visha looked mournfully at the broken teapot. “See what she’s done.”

  “You need a teapot to borrow?”

  Visha shook her head, gesturing to a high shelf over the sink. “I’ll use the good one from my seder dishes.”

  “I’ll come back to visit you later, yes?”

  “See you later, Maria.” Visha swept up the broken pieces of crockery and put them in the scrap bucket.

  “Look, Mama!” Rachel called from the bedroom. “Can we get a rye bread today?”

  Visha went in and glanced over the sorted coins, totaling their value. “Not today. Tomorrow when Papa brings home his pay we’ll get a fresh rye and some fish. But today there’s still the insurance man coming for his dimes, and a nickel for gas to make the soup, and another saved for tomorrow morning.” Visha dropped coins in the jar as she recited the list of obligations, then looked at what was left on the bed. “There’s enough for a yesterday’s loaf, some carrots, a meat bone. I’ve got still an onion. And some nice pickles, isn’t that right, Rachel?” On the first floor of their tenement was a shop where the pickle man tended barrels of brine and took in deliveries of cucumbers from a Long Island farmer; all the hallways of the building smelled of dill and garlic and vinegar.

  Visha pocketed the coins and lifted Rachel down from the bed. “Come, let’s get you dressed so we can do our shopping.”

  Passing through the kitchen, Rachel stopped and pointed at the wrapped bundle on the drain board. “Papa’s lunch!”

  “Ach, see what you made him forget with your crying! Now what’s he gonna eat?” Instantly, Visha regretted the sharp words. Rachel’s lip pouted and began to tremble. Soon the wailing would start up again. “I’m not angry, Rachel. Don’t cry, please. Listen, how about we take it to him at the factory?”

  Rachel clapped her mouth shut. She had never been to the factory. “Can I see where the buttons come from?” Most nights, Harry brought home an assortment of buttons twisted into a scrap of fabric, and it was Rachel’s job during the day to sit on the floor of the front room and sort them into piles by color and size.

  “Yes, and the sewing machines and everything. Now, can you dress yourself do you think?” Rachel skipped into the front room, yanked open a drawer in the dresser she and Sam shared, pulled stockings up her legs and a jumper over her head.

  Visha smiled at her plan, then hesitated. Harry had told her he didn’t want her coming to the factory. “A cutter is above the operators, Visha, you know that,” he’d explained. “I got to keep my respect. I can’t stop work just to show off my pretty wife.” But after last night, and this morning in the bedroom, wouldn’t he be happy to see her?

  “So, Rachel,” she said, buckling the girl’s shoes, “you’ll be good?”

  “Yes, Mama, I promise.”

  “All right, then, we’ll bring Papa his lunch, and we’ll do our shopping on the way home.” The factory was a good walk from their tenement—Harry took the streetcar in bad weather—but today was a fine morning that promised winter was over for good. Visha held tight to Rachel’s hand as they pushed their way through the people crowding up to the pushcarts. They turned the corner and waited for the streetcar to pass, its hook sparking and snapping along the wire above. Crossing Broad Street, Visha lifted Rachel over a pile of horse droppings, then pulled her close as a delivery truck rumbled by, its big rubber tires taller than her little girl. Eventually Visha pointed to a brick building much bigger than their tenement. “There it is.” They hurried across the street as the policeman at the intersection whistled for traffic along Broadway to stop.

  In the building’s lobby, Visha led Rachel to a wide door and stood still in front of it. “We have to take the elevator,” she explained. The door opened, sliding sideways, revealing a young man inside. Made to haul freight and workers by the dozen, the elevator car was bigger than Visha’s kitchen.

  “What floor?” he asked as they stepped in.

  “Goldman’s Shirtwaist.”

  “Factory or offices?”

  “Factory.”

  “They’re on seven.” The young man pulled the door closed and the elevator began to tremble and shake. Rachel let out a little cry.

  “First time in an elevator?” he asked. Rachel looked at Visha, who nodded for her. “Well, you did good!” The car gave a last shudder. “Goldman’s.”

  Visha led Rachel into the din of the factory. The open floor was punctuated by iron poles that reached up to the ceiling. Without walls to block the big windows, the space was bright, dust and threads floating through streaks of sunlight. Long tables stretched across the floor, one sewing machine yoked to the next, at each a woman hunched over her work. Runners were moving around the factory, delivering pieces of cloth to the operators and picking up the baskets of finished goods at their feet. In the corner, some little girls sat on the floor, the younger ones threading needles and the older ones, eleven or twelve, sewing buttons onto the gauzy blouses piled around them.

  The machines clattered and buzzed so loudly Visha had to shout in Rachel’s ear. “There’s Papa!” He was standing at the cutting table, his back to them. Above his head, pattern pieces edged in metal hung from the ceiling like peeled skin pressed flat. Rachel leaned forward, ready to dash at him, but Visha kept hold of her hand. “He’s cutting! The knives are sharp, we can’t surprise him.” Rachel shrank back; she’d already caused trouble once that morning. Together, they walked carefully past the sewing machines to the cutting table.

  Harry looked around and saw them coming. His eyes darted over Visha’s shoulder to one of the operators, a pretty girl with a lace collar buttoned up her neck. She met his gaze, hands frozen at the machine, her cheeks gone white. Seeing he’d put the knife down, Visha let go of Rachel’s hand. She ran a few steps and jumped into her father’s arms. He picked her up absently, watching the girl stand up from her machine. Moving as fast as she could down the crowded row, the girl ran across the factory floor and disappeared behind a door, the foreman chasing after her.

  Visha was now standing in front of Harry, her mouth lifted for a kiss.

  “What are you doing here?” he growled. She lowered her chin.

  “We brought your lunch, Papa. You left it at home this morning.”

  “She was so upset you left it, I thought she’d have another fit. I told her if she was good we’d bring it to you.” Visha offered the wrapped package.

  “That’s fine, Visha.” Harry shoved the lunch into his pocket, grabbed his wife’s elbow, and steered her toward the elevator, carrying Rachel. “But I told you I got a big order, I don’t have time for this.”

  Rachel’s lip began to tremble. “Aren’t you happy to see us, Papa?”

  “I’m always happy to see you, little monkey, don’t get yourself upset. I just got a lot of work to do today. I’ll see you at home later.”

  He set Rachel on her feet and left them to go back to the cutting table. When the elevator opened, it was crowded with crates full of wispy bits of cloth. “Maybe you could walk down?” the young man asked. “Scrap man’s here.”

  Visha and Rachel went over to the stairwell and pulled the door in. On the landing of the stairs, a sewing machine operator was leaning against the wall, sobbing. She was merely a girl, Visha thought, seventeen at the most, and Italian from the look of her. Visha wondered what tragedy had brought on her tears. She placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder but she threw it off with a shudder and ran back up the stairs. Visha shrugged and grabbed Rachel’s hand, guiding her down. It was dozens of steps, with a turn between each floor; by the time they reached the lobby, Rachel’s head was spinning.

  Rachel’s arm hung heavily from Visha’s hand as they did their shopping: the butcher on Broad Street for the meat bone, the bakery on the corner for a yesterday’s loaf. From a pushcart in front of their tenement, Visha haggled over a bunch of limp carrots and some potatoes with sprouting eyes. Only when they entered their building and stopped at Mr.
Rosenblum’s pickle shop did Rachel perk up.

  “Look who’s here for brightening my day.” Mr. Rosenblum’s smiling eyes crinkled his face. He spoke Yiddish with most of his customers, but with the children he practiced his English.

  “Mr. Rosenblum, we went to the waist factory!”

  “You did? Did you like the factory? You going someday to work there with your papa?”

  “No, I don’t want to work there. It’s too noisy, it makes the operators cry.”

  “Ach, pickles never make for crying. Pick a pickle, Ruchelah.” Mr. Rosenblum lifted the wooden lid from a barrel of brine, and Rachel chose a big, fat pickle.

  “Taste it,” he said. She took a bite, puckering her lips. “The more sour the pickle, the more better it’s good for you.”

  “So good, Mr. Rosenblum, thank you.”

  “And for you, Mrs. Rabinowitz?” Visha asked for half a dozen pickles. Mr. Rosenblum gave her seven. “One for the boy,” he said, winking at Rachel. “So he shouldn’t be jealous of his sister.”

  In their apartment, Visha gave Rachel a slice of the newly purchased bread. “Look here, the middle’s still soft. Take it in front and work on your buttons. I’m going to make the soup now.”

  In the quiet room, Rachel dragged the jar of buttons over by the window, where warm light stretched across the patterned linoleum. She reached into the jar and brought up a fistful of the little disks. She spread them out on the floor, then began sorting the buttons by color, dividing black from brown from white. Then she grouped them based on what they were made of: mother-of-pearl separated from ivory and bone, tortoiseshell from jet and horn. Last would be size, though Harry mostly brought home tiny shirtwaist buttons. Sometimes Rachel would find a burly coat button mixed in, so big she could spin it like a top. While she worked she recited the letters of the alphabet that Sam had taught her, all the way from A to Z.

  Visha smiled at the sound of her daughter’s chanting while she cut up the vegetables. Leaving the knife on the board, she dropped a nickel in the gas meter, struck a match, set the pot on the burner. In a smear of fat skimmed from the top of her last soup, she fried chopped onions, adding the sliced carrots and minced greens and a little salt. She put in the bone and let it heat through until she could almost smell meat, then wrapped her hands in towels to hold the pot under the tap while it filled with water. Setting it heavily back on the burner, she added the cut-up potatoes and put on the lid for the soup to simmer.

  Not much of a meal, but it was almost payday. Tomorrow, after paying his Society dues, Harry would fill up the coin jar again. Once he’d saved up enough to buy the fabrics and the patterns and hire a few piece workers, he’d get a contract for himself, deliver the finished goods for more than he’d spent on supplies and labor, reinvest the profits. He’d be a contactor of waists, and she’d be his wife, a new baby warm in her arms, its greedy mouth circling her nipple.

  Sam came clattering up the stairs and into the kitchen, startling Visha from her daydreaming. “Home already,” she said, getting his lunch. Rachel left the buttons in their little piles and climbed up on a chair beside her brother. While he ate his cold potato and pickle, Rachel told him all about going to the factory. When their mother stepped out to go down the hall, Sam said, “One of the boys, he got a real baseball. We’re gonna get in a game before afternoon school and I’m the catcher.” Sam was already on his feet when Visha came back. “Gotta go early, Mama, so I can practice my spelling.” He winked at his sister then dashed out the door.

  Rachel went back to her buttons. Soon after Sam left, it was the insurance man who came, a loose coat hanging down to his ankles despite the warm afternoon. Visha went into the bedroom and came back with the two dimes. He took a little book from his coat pocket and noted her payment.

  “Still no insurance on the little ones?” he asked, peeking in at Rachel.

  “God forbid anything should happen,” Visha said, rapping her knuckles on the wooden table. “For now all we got money for is their Papa and me.”

  “God forbid,” he agreed, shutting the little book and dropping the dimes into another pocket. They clinked against the coins he’d already collected on his trips up and down the stairs of tenements. Visha saw him out, then went back to her soup, thoughts of family stirring in her mind.

  Rachel counted out ten mother-of-pearl buttons—one for each little fingertip. They were all the same size, round and flat with two tiny holes bored through the lavender-swirled shell. Whenever she had ten the same, she wrapped them together in a bit of cloth to give to Papa. On Saturdays when he got his pay, he’d give her a penny for sorting the buttons, and Sam a penny for going every day to school, and Sam would take his sister to the sweet seller’s to spend their fortune. Rachel sorted buttons until she felt sleepy, then curled up on the couch for a nap. Visha came into the front room and sat in the light by the window to mend clothes. The afternoon would be quiet for a while now, the hush in the room made more special by the noise seeping in from the street below.

  A HARD KNOCK on the kitchen door startled Visha and woke Rachel. Voices from the hallway penetrated the apartment even before she answered. A woman, fleshy and sweating, swept into the room, pushing Visha back against the table.

  “Where is he, that bastard, that liar?”

  “What are you talking about? Who are you?” Visha thought it must have something to do with the neighbors—the woman talked like Mrs. Giovanni, but louder, meaner. Visha wasn’t upset. Not yet. Then she noticed, hanging back in the hallway, the pretty girl from the factory, the one who’d been crying in the stairwell. A sick feeling flowered in her belly.

  “Hah-ree Rah-been-o-wits, that’s what I’m talking about. You come out here, you lying bastard!” The woman took a look around the room, crossed the kitchen to the bedroom door, pulled it open, peered in, slammed it shut. “Where is he hiding?”

  “He’s at work, at the factory,” Visha said.

  “We already gone to the factory, what do you think? He got outta there quick, didn’t he, Francesca?” The woman threw her question over her shoulder at the girl lurking in the hall. “So she comes running home to her mamma, telling me Harry’s wife, his wife, she came to the factory, and with a child already. It’s true? He has a wife?”

  “I am his wife. My daughter’s here, and our son is at school.” Visha gathered her nerves, funneled them into a shout. “We have nothing to do with you, get out of my house!”

  “Your house, your daughter, but what about my girl, hey?” All the noise brought Mrs. Giovanni into the hallway. She began talking in Italian with the girl, who started crying again, tears dripping from her cheeks onto her lace collar. Their words, a foreign catechism, circled in Visha’s ears. Her cheeks lost their color. She asked the question to which she already knew the answer.

  “What does she have to do with my Harry?”

  “He promised to marry her, that’s what he has to do with her! Twice a week he comes calling for her after work, takes her out to the dance hall. Such light eyes he has, I think he’s some kind of American, not a dirty Yid coming to ruin my Francesca. Then he gets a baby in her, stupid girl, and says he’ll marry her.”

  Mrs. Giovanni had been inching closer with every word, pulling the girl with her. Now all the women were in the kitchen, Francesca so shaken that Mrs. Giovanni pulled out a chair and sat her down. She asked Francesca’s mother a question in Italian, and the whole story was told again in the language of opera.

  Visha backed into the doorway to the front room. Rachel crept closer, peeking from under her mother’s skirt at the women gesturing and talking in the kitchen. Visha absently stroked Rachel’s hair. It seemed to give her strength.

  “Stop it, all of you!” she shouted. Mrs. Giovanni came to take one of her hands. Francesca’s mother sat beside her sobbing daughter. “Harry married me, seven years ago. I have two children with him. It’s a mistake, what you say.” Visha drew in her breath, gathering the words to tell this woman Harry couldn’t have ta
ken her daughter dancing, he was busy with his Societies, saving money to be a contractor.

  Then the truth clicked into place, like the tumblers of a lock. There were no Societies. There was no savings. He’d been out with this girl, spending his money on her, and Visha left at home to make soup out of bones. Her knees folded. Mrs. Giovanni caught her around the waist and guided her to a chair.

  Visha buried her face in her hands. “Before he married me, he took me dancing, too.”

  “You know what happens to her if no one marries her?” Francesca’s mother said. “She’s damaged goods now. Ruined.”

  “I’m ruined.” Visha said it so soft and sad, Rachel ran over and threw herself in her mother’s lap.

  Francesca’s mother leaned across the table, pointing at Visha. “You tell Harry, that bastard, we need money to send Francesca upstate. There’s a convent takes girls like this. She goes away for six months, to visit a cousin is what I say. Her bastard goes to the Catholic orphanage. When she comes home, maybe people talk, but it’s just talk, si?”

  Mrs. Giovanna nodded her head. “She’s so young and pretty, some man will still have her.”

  “It’s her only chance. If Harry doesn’t pay, you tell him next time it’s not me who is coming here for him.” The woman looked at Mrs. Giovanni. “You tell him what happens when Francesca’s brothers start to see what Harry done to her. She has to get away before it shows. You tell him.”

  The woman got up, pulled her daughter into the hallway and down the stairs. Mrs. Giovanni tried to comfort her neighbor, but Visha brushed her away. “Leave me alone now, Maria, please.” After extracting from Visha the promise to send for her if she was needed, Mrs. Giovanni left. The room seemed too quiet now. The soup bubbled on the stove. Rachel shifted on her mother’s lap. “Go back to your buttons,” Visha said, pushing the child off her. “Go on with you.” Reluctantly, Rachel went into the front room. “And close that door.”

  In the kitchen, Visha fought to breathe, her chest tight around her swollen heart. She wanted to smash everything in sight, splinter the chair legs, shatter the good teapot, too, like the one that broke already that morning. Remembering the morning, she stood suddenly, grabbing a teacup. Turning on her heel, she hurled it into the sink, china shattering against cast iron. Then she leaned over the sink and vomited, sickened at the memory of Harry inside her, purging herself of the stupid excuses she’d made for her husband.