Chaya had been standing beside him at the counter, leaning her elbow in the two inches or so of space allotted each of them, undoubtedly not sufficiently ladylike to qualify her for city living à la Glossop’s. She was reading her way through its lists and maps and so she neglected to notice that her brother had vanished from her side—or, rather, from the folds of her skirts. When she did cast around for a sign of his presence and failed to see him, she flung herself like a madwoman through the crowd, uncertain whether to call his name or simply to search for the top of his head. It was difficult to penetrate the density of rushing patrons. Asher, who lived at ground level, moved as quickly as a fox, and with a fox’s independence.
She was faint with terror at having lost him—half an hour in the city and her competence was already inadequate, fatally so. But when she did nerve herself up to bleat his name her voice was like some rusty hinge squeaking in a high wind. Women in daunting dress stared at her; men hardly noticed but only hurried on. She ran to the heavy doors of the station nearest to where they had consumed milk and muffin and tried to see outside. She raced back again when she saw him running, shouting who knew what, circling the information booth in pursuit of another boy around his size. Flailing their arms, they wove between skirts and pant legs, bringing down curses on their heads.
She wrenched Asher’s arm ungently, until she found a quiet pocket where she could scold him for frightening her out of her skin and putting himself, however invisibly, in danger. “You can’t simply show off like that here, this is a city, and who knows what could happen!” All this in English. They were finished with Yiddish for now, if not forever, though speaking it made her feel suspended in midair, somehow, her feet not touching solid ground.
His small, earnest face pink with exertion, Asher met her eyes levelly—he was never insolent and, though larcenous about solid objects, those many things he slipped into his grasp, he was never really devious. “Then tell me, what is this city? That wasn’t dangerous except so many people bumped into us and didn’t care.”
Chaya tried to see him as he must appear to these strangers, a slight child with a clear voice and an accent in him unidentifiable, dressed in his bedraggled small boy’s outfit, who had not yet grown into his ears or, for that matter, his dusty, ill-shod feet. He had such a pretty face, and, shining out from under his scuffed cap, such healthy dark hair for someone whose diet was unreliable at best, such a clarity about him—that was the thing about Asher, not his brilliance but his light!—that again, Chaya saw, he was like an illustration of a boy, not a real boy.
Not for the first time she was reminded that his kind of genius without experience could be a dangerous kind of idiocy.
“You have never lived in a place with thousands of people you never saw before and will never see again!” she began. Zhitomir had thoroughly faded for him. Let him be frightened; it would serve him well.
“And so?”
“And so, and so, they are not your friends!”
“That’s all right. I don’t need thousands of friends.”
Frustration washed in upon Chaya like water climbing a shore. “It is not all right! They owe you nothing. You are not an adult, Asher. You stay beside me, I don’t want you wandering off on your own again.”
He made a sour face as if to say, What do you know about what I need. This was a new defiance and it frightened her. “I thought we came here so you could be sweeter. You said.”
This was not fair. “I mean it. I’ve lived in a city, you haven’t.” Men on tall horses, spurring them to thunder down on the Jews of their quarter, who scattered like vermin. She had watched from a window, pretending to be safe, as they plunged bayonets through her neighbors and waved their rifles like flags of victory. It was not only hunger that had made them travel across half the world. “You had better trust me, little boy. I will skin you for your own sake, Asher.” She was shaking with anger. But perhaps it was not his fault: What she needed was not what he needed.
That was when Chaya felt a very gentle hand on the arm that ended with her accusing finger. “Pardon me, miss,” she heard in a male voice, carefully modulated not to alarm. She had, in fact, to look up, actually had to cant her head as she would soon do to encompass the buildings outside. “May I be of some assistance? You seem rather agitated over this little man’s stunning performance.”
Her Glossop’s had warned against accepting unsolicited proffers of generosity. The nerve of the man!—that was her first thought. But first thoughts are not always best thoughts. She looked again and registered his height—extreme; his eyes—not the blue of the sky, an expectable blue, but the darker blue of the birds that liked to eat the seeds from the fields and leave their lovely feathers like calling cards on the ground; his face, in total, that of a man of perhaps thirty or so years, with kindly lines from nose to mouth where frequent smiling tends to carve them. That inviting face seemed to be divided by the contested border between concern and amusement.
But Chaya was still caught in her moment of uncontrollable panic at having lost Asher, for she saw that if she lost control of her boy, this Chicago would casually gobble him up. She had not given so much as an ounce of thought to the risks of the city. All her dangers had been the insidious ones she knew too well at home: death by boredom, by depression, by regret.
She looked into the face of this man from behind the veil of her anxiety. “Thank you but I have no need for—” But then, by now third thought, “I could—we have no—” She was helpless with confusion, and, as brilliant as her brother must have seemed, she appeared to be feebleminded.
“I would be pleased if you were to invite me to help you.”
She had never heard a sentence so graceful. And it gave her responsibility for proceeding.
“We have no—” Which, of all their needs, should come first? “I am trying to find a place for us to go to—”
“Do you have the address?” Seeing him standing beside Asher was ludicrous, a giraffe beside a newborn chick. But she too, most probably, looked ill suited to absorb his attention, this thin girl with a weight of unruly hair (lusterless these days beneath a veil of farm dust) and a dusty jacket over a shirtwaist whose hopeful yellow had faded off-white with a hundred washings.
“No, no,” she began, and it did feel hopeless. “I mean, we have no particular place. I am just trying to find the—where—” She hesitated, frightened at the disclosure on her lips.
“Where then?” He bent down towards her and seemed to listen with something deeper than patience; he vibrated at a slower pace than most, some slow beat of the blood or the nerves.
“Where the Jewish people live.” Chaya was mortified by her bluntness. And might he tell her that in this democratic city, they were dispersed in every direction?
His constant smile did not dim. “Well—I will happily escort you there, if you will allow me. You don’t have anyone to whom you could go?”
She shook her head bitterly but—in spite of their father’s insistence that they cover their ears to circumvent the opportunistic prayers of the holidays—she knew she would have to believe that something, call it God or call it chance, would provide.
Her new friend lifted his valise and she, awkwardly, raised her absurd tan burlap bag tattooed with lettering concerning the potency and durability of the barley seed therein, whose contents poked out irregularly, as though she were hefting a sackful of unruly animals. Mercifully, he did not offer to carry it for her, since any man with functioning eyes had to understand how humiliated she would be were he to acknowledge that he had so much as seen it. He did seem to be offering his arm—at least, she believed he was, but she was pitifully uncertain of every move, and were he not offering it and she were to try to take it, she would melt into a puddle at his feet.
Outside the station, as she clutched Asher’s hand, what awaited them were squares of dark, lozenges of light. Brick, cement, macadam, glass. The setting sun seared the far edge of a hewed-stone building with fire. A cable c
ar screeched wildly at the corner, a wild jungle sound, as it lurched to a stop, but everything else moved. Everything moved. Of course she knew in theory, but it hardly seemed possible in fact, that they had lived on that prairie—nothing but slender dancing grass and scrabbled earth—while this existed. The air was thick, rich, rank, fishy, buttery, harsh with manure. And the hurrying crowds, thousands of skirts in thousands of colors sweeping the street, and more, by far, black-suited men beneath bobbing hats! They pushed forward with an energy that suggested their survival depended on gaining the next crossing. How many ways there were to live! She wished she could follow everyone home.
The man who had made himself their guide turned and watched Chaya at the door, standing so still it seemed she must be looking or listening for something in particular.
She saw him regarding her with a slight smile and was so embarrassed she had to restrain herself from fleeing, turning back in to the station. Then he made it worse. “This city’s architecture is probably its greatest gift to the nation,” he began, like a lecturer, but the rest of his comment was swamped by the shame with which she furiously quizzed herself: Architecture? Arches? Texture? What did that mean?
The Samaritan, as yet anonymous, ushered them to a hansom behind two horses who stood with their heads down respectfully, still as stone. He stepped up behind them. “Let me think now, for a moment,” he said and then, definitively, to the driver with the whip hand, “We should like to go to the Maxwell Street area, please. I will tell you more precisely when we draw near.”
“And what is there?” How could she not inquire, though why should this person know such a thing? Were the Jewish people of Chicago so notorious that a Christian should be familiar with their neighborhood?
“Some preliminaries,” he said. “My name is Gregory Stillman. I have had some traffic with your community, so it seems a fortunate circumstance that your need coincides with my experience.” He seemed quite satisfied with himself for this.
Self-consciousness had reddened her cheeks and made it difficult for her to look at him. When her lack of etiquette did not stir her to reciprocate with her own name, he quite straightforwardly asked it.
“I am,” Chaya told him, still too abashed to meet his eyes, “Chaya-Libbe Shaderowsky. This is my brother Asher.” She could hear her accent change—regress—as she spoke. It had been years since she had sounded like this!
“And you have never been in Chicago before.” Was he a masher or simply a kind man? She had never, after all, been the subject of any man’s attention, unless she counted that weak tea, Shimmie, who had winked his snake-eye at her. (If the boys of Christa had shown any interest in her, their mothers would have knocked it out of them.) She watched Gregory Stillman watching her, quite openly, really, but she had no way to read the return of her gaze, except to note that it was steady, not guileful, and that the same slow pulse and unhurried sense of well-being seemed to rise off him the way the air sometimes falls upon the skin with perfect temperateness. Those are the days when there is no shock of change between indoors and out and such sublimity tends to make one feel at peace.
“We are—” How to say it? Runaways? Wayfarers? Adventurers? She had none of the necessary language on her tongue, not yet, nor would she for many years. “We hope,” she said instead, with every small fragment of pride she could assemble, “to make our fortune here.” That phrase came directly out of one of those books she had read; she could hear it as an echo, as if someone else, a Brontë or a Dickens, were speaking from inside her mouth.
Gregory Stillman laughed as if he recognized that, somewhere between sympathy and mockery. “Oh, nothing less than your fortune!”
Irony demanded more of her than she could spare. She could not muster a smile.
“Again, please tell me where are you taking us?”
It was soon enough made clear: They had clattered on blocks of stone and wood through rows of narrow brick and wooden-sided houses, and now the shopfronts and the signs above them were a riot of Yiddish lettering, each clamoring louder than the next to be seen. Not since Zhitomir had she encountered her alphabet in any public place; her heart beat hard with relief. There were tailors; there was a matzo company and a baker of sweet rolls and butter pastries. The butchers promised economical cuts, strictly kosher. She recognized a few men walking in the deliberate way that would deliver them to the door of some synagogue. It was time for ma’ariv, evening prayers.
But her guide had already gestured to the cabman to stop before a dark-brick building that had the shape of the solemn business within. “Here,” he said to Chaya. “I am certain these people will be eager to help you and this young gentleman.” He patted the boy on his bare, scabbed knee.
Chaya began to thank the gentleman, still concerned as to his motives. With the casual ease with which she supposed those well-placed in the world could go about their pleasures, he shook off her gratitude and asked, “Will you be all right? I am certain the good people inside will help you, but beyond today—am I wrong to suppose that you might need—”
“Nothing at all,” she replied with a dignity that strained her last resources. “We will be—” She feared he was going to offer them money, which would have undone her.
“Four turns,” Asher announced. He had been so silently absorbed Chaya had almost forgotten him. “The way he just turned the carriage doesn’t count. Four real turns from the station, two railway crossings, and one bridge.”
Mr. Stillman pinched his cheek, which made him buck like a horse refusing the bit. “You are a young genius and nothing less, my friend. I think you will do very well for yourself and your sister.”
He helped them down and then, with delicacy, handed Chaya his calling card. She had never seen hands so kempt and clean on any man. “My dear Miss—Shadow?”
“Sha-der-ow-sky!” Asher said impatiently, breaking the name into emphatic syllables. “And the vuh is a w.”
She took the card, cream-colored with a soft, fuzzed edge, between her soiled fingers and wondered what to do with it. Her sack seemed an inadequate receptacle for anything so fine.
She was too flustered to try to thank him again as she should have. She had, in the course of reading to her brother from their sinfully secular books, encountered fairy godmothers, rarely fathers, but she knew that, male or female, this was not the form in which they generally appeared: that is, fairly near one’s own age, dressed in tweeds and spotless footwear, clean-shaven, even-featured, with a seductive solicitousness; the ones she remembered were gnarled little hunchbacks and warty old women with hairy chins. She bowed her head in lieu of thanks, seized her brother’s equally sullied hand, and fled inside the doors of Ner Kodesh, one of who knows how many synagogues Glossop’s had not named, and was greeted with the surprise she deserved—none at all.
But after much back-and-forthing, and a considerable number of eyes turned upon her as though to measure her virtue as well as her capacity to pay her way, she was offered the name of the widow of a recently deceased congregant who had just today, by coincidence, announced that she was yielding to the economic catastrophe brought about by his death, and wished to take in a boarder.
She was put in the hands of someone’s young son, in knickers and cap, to be shown the way, and together the three of them wound through darkening streets of depressing sordidness, loose refuse stinking against the posts that held up sagging porches, the wooden planks of the sidewalk uneven and, occasionally, punctuated by holes that they barely avoided stepping into. Chaya saw a rat, just its unmistakable ringed tail, disappearing into a yard whose privy she could smell, one among many, but she did not tell Asher.
ASHER
7
ASHER CAME to consciousness in a single blow.
It was the smokestacks, the scaffolds, the shafts—hard, all of it. Stone and iron. Wooden Wisconsin was soft and yielding, it was a pillow, a pelt. The city commanded sight, imposed hearing, and it stank. Reached up into his nostrils and raked them. Once, he had
inhaled smelling salts—tried to leap from an apple tree onto the sagging back of their horse and fell straight as a plummet onto his head when the horse moved nonchalantly off. A shriek went up, the whole farm running, and someone shoved a vial under his nose. The wild acidy insult to his membranes brought him back intact and he loved it now, helplessly. It was like scratching an endless itch, better than bread baking, better than chicken on the fire.
And here, this Chi-ca-go was something different in its particulars but just as harsh. Ugly. He breathed it in and held it, held it deeper, his eyes closed.
The Lake on Fire Page 5