The Lake on Fire

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The Lake on Fire Page 9

by Rosellen Brown


  Asher, at the least, was still coming home at night. He told her nothing of where he had spent his days, how he had not—in short pants which ought to have been long, with a jacket nearly transparent, and a cap that did not cover his ears—succumbed to the weather. But he appeared to be healthy, he neither coughed nor shivered. For this, she relied on Mrs. Gottlieb’s judgment; she only saw him asleep.

  She tried to imagine, as her fingers lived their independent life and her vision blurred behind a scrim of weariness, what her brother was doing running free all day, competently making his way home each night. She had begun to hear about the wiles of the boys who wandered the disorganized streets around theirs, Maxwell, DeKoven, Twelfth. It seemed they stole anything that was not tightly secured: milk, coal, candy (it went without saying), kerosene, wood. They pried back the doors of boxcars and sampled their contents. They pilfered boxes of every kind of merchandise from stands and carts, from stores, and the worst of them—in training, she supposed, not for petty vandalism but for genuine careers in crime—from any house they could enter without much ado. And some were truly without shame. Sara, Chaya’s teacher at Winkler’s, for example, had a freckly faced younger brother, “sweet-faced as Jesus in a painting,” she assured Chaya, who was constantly being hauled off to court for a talking-to that did not seem to redeem him or even notably slow him down. He had amassed collections of miscellany he must have appropriated for the challenge alone, since much of it was useless to him: parts for talking machines, fishing reels without the requisite rod, bifocals, and most recently, she confided, a silver-plated tea set in four pieces which he had hoped to present to his mother but was afraid to produce for fear she would know instantly how it was obtained.

  Was Asher among them? Was he going bad, like the fleet-footed, lightning-fingered, uncurfewed, ungrammatical, unrepentant older fellows in their tweed knickers and caps, he, following, rushing to keep up, in short pants, knees chapped, lips blue with cold? Would they deign to take him along? Would they goad him? Did they work the streets together, organized like adult thieves, and thus find themselves in need of a decoy or a lookout or a mite to crawl into tight spaces? Were they bringing home their cargo to their mothers and actually being thanked—perhaps Sara had it wrong—because their families were starving like the rest? Had hunger overwhelmed shame? It might have. It might have.

  All Chaya knew was that he did not catch cold, his clothes were not torn by splintery fences, his pockets did not sag, distorted by the drag of booty. Which of them would end up on the wrong side of the law, Asher and his possible friends, his theoretical gang, or she for abandoning a child, genius or not, to his own unreliable discretion.

  “ASHER,” SHE said to him one time. She had just lumbered up the stairs after her double shift. It was midnight, there was fresh snow on her shoulders when she woke him; it was so cold in that apartment, the crystals would cling to the wool like frost on grass until the wan sun came up. “I want to talk to you now.” Wrenched from sleep and not yet in full control he might, she thought, confide in her.

  “Sleeping,” he muttered and turned his head away.

  “Would you like me to take you home again to the farm? To Mama and Papa?” She wondered, even as she asked, if the question was for Asher or for herself.

  He shook his head so firmly she imagined that she heard the swivel.

  “You like it here.”

  He nodded earnestly and yawned. The inside of his mouth sparkled in the low light.

  “But I can’t let you run loose like this, Asher. That is impossible.”

  He stared at her without expression. She was kneeling on the floor beside him, at his level, the level of a cat.

  “You are a brilliant boy,” she whispered to him, “but you have to understand, and if you don’t want to be concerned for yourself, you have to”—she dared to hope this might break through the terrible neutrality of his gaze—“you have to have some sympathy for me. We will starve if I have to give up one of my places to keep you in my sight and guard you from danger. Have you no feeling for the one person who cares about you?” She tried a smile so that he wouldn’t feel assaulted.

  “Take me with you there.”

  “I can’t, Asher. You are too stubborn by half and you only hear what you want to hear. You could never be found near me, so where would you stay? What would you do? You cannot even imagine what it is like in those places.”

  “I would hide. Read. Get me a book.”

  “I think the police who protect the factory will discover you if you skulk around like that in the shadows. Do you want to be picked up and taken away? Is that what you are hoping for? Do you want to be separated from me?”

  He slumped back against the chair legs. “Oh, Chaya, I only want to sleep!”

  “First tell me where you are going every day, and then I’ll leave you.”

  Asher sighed, finally, resigned. “I don’t do bad things. I don’t, I don’t go with the boys, they would never have me. I just—walk around seeing everything. I look. I am visiting Chicago everywhere. I have to be looking at new things all the time or it—you know how it is. I don’t feel good.”

  She heard in his voice that querulous hunger that she knew so well. He was a strange threshing machine that needed to be fed new fodder or it would rust. But she breathed out the breath she had not realized she was holding. “Does anyone bother you?”

  He shook his head. “I only like to walk around and look in shop windows, and when it’s too cold, I go inside and get warm. Sometimes I have to talk to them to get them to let me stay—I have to make them like me.” He shrugged. Apparently that was not difficult to do.

  “Now, will you promise me that you won’t ever—” Out of the corner of her eye, then, she saw a book she had never seen before, and she reached out to pick it up. Old Sailors’ Tales it was, and on its frontispiece a furious Ahab of a man stood shaking his fist at the heavens while his meager lifeboat was being upended by furious whitecaps. So much water surrounded him that he seemed to be standing inside a cave. “And you got this where?”

  He didn’t answer. Tears, so rare for Asher, spilled down his cheeks and fell as quick as rain on his hands.

  Chaya pulled him to her and she held him fast—she who had secreted Glossop’s Guide in her bag long before desperation had set in—and wept with him.

  12

  WHEN HER eyesight made her work at home too difficult, Mrs. Gottlieb found herself an opening in a sweat just a few doors down Liberty Street, third floor, front, inspecting coats and jackets. She did not sew, herself, but, quite miraculously, she was able to feel where a seam had deviated and left a tiny rent, to feel where the placement of a button was off by a shade or a hem was not secure. She sat before a window where the light, in spite of ineradicable grime, was good enough that she could hold up close to her failing eyes the garment to be scrutinized, and, better yet, use her experienced touch to discover the flaws with her fingertips.

  Sweat, breath, and sour steam that rose off half-singed cloth—the room was foul, and except for her perch, it stayed too dark for exacting work. All day, with an insolent hiss, the mangle expelled gusts of moist fog, gray as smoke. She suspected a frail, sallow-faced woman named Mollie of hiding consumption, and though no bloodied handkerchiefs surfaced, Mrs. Gottlieb was certain her hideous cough hung beads of contagion all around her. A mysterious residue that came off the fabrics sometimes closed her throat and teared her eyes. She and Chaya compared miasmas, laughing (for what else could they do?) about the competition between cigar-murk and wool-fog.

  In two small rooms, nine people, most of them related to the owner—wife, daughters, cousins (one male, the presser), nieces—worked with hardly a minute free, to produce overcoats too heavy for some of the machines, too burdensome, when she was very tired, for Mrs. Gottlieb to heft without unbearable exertion. The effort it took to keep the machines moving, by foot or by knee, had hobbled a woman named Bella, who looked strong enough to be a lumberjack but wh
ose legs hurt so badly that she limped like a cripple, and a very young girl (about Chaya’s age when she’d made the crossing and so it was painful to hear Mrs. Gottlieb speak about her), who cried piteously for the last hour of every day because her muscles were so strained. But she could not be let go and most likely she did not want to be, for the sake of her paycheck: She was the niece of the owner, which bound her in servitude alongside his own unlucky daughters.

  Chaya visited Mrs. Gottlieb there only once, and seeing their awful circumstances, reluctantly she congratulated herself for having had the instinct to choose as she had, grateful that she needed only her eyes and hands to earn her keep. But she was tired of being harangued about speed, speed, and more speed, and threatened for every torn leaf or imperfect seal. Sometimes the leaves she was given were so dry they ripped when she so much as looked at them; sometimes her paste cup crusted over because its cover had mysteriously disappeared. Still, her limbs were her own and that freedom was apparently not to be taken for granted.

  She easily picked out of the small group of workers the girl whom her landlady so pitied. She was a thin, pretty thing in a faded pink smock, her pale, hair tugged back in a ragged bow, one strand of which escaped to tickle her brow and cause her to swat at it regularly, without noticing, as if it were a pesky fly. She watched the girl laboring to drag a navy-blue cloak of immense weight, to pull it up under her needle. Her whole body had to move, below the waist, to work the treadle, though this was far from a dance. Then the needle must have broken. She raised the silvery foot and the vast garment slipped to the floor. The foreman shouted; the girl allowed herself but half a minute to close her eyes—in prayer or exhaustion—and then she opened them, wet with tears of pain and frustration and, hand over hand, hauled up the many pounds of winter wool yet again as if it were a net bursting with fish. She was attempting to attach the collar to the coat, and so the whole body of the garment hung down, an enormous weight pulling hard; she readjusted her lap to catch some of its drag, and the thing, a recalcitrant beast with a will of its own, slithered yet again into a dark heap on the floor, littered with scraps and pins and threads, and they adhered to it like iron shavings to a magnet. Chaya could not watch. But when the owner called her a terrible name which Chaya tried not to listen to, her weeping began, and, between hissed interruptions from the presser’s corner, there was no choice but to hear.

  Still, Mrs. Gottlieb was relatively content with her employment, which allowed her to walk to her work in a minute and a half, and once there, to sit in the light. Even her age, she said, seemed to be respected rather than derided. Perhaps that was because the owner and foreman, Mr. Kraswitz (who, Mrs. Gottlieb speculated, might have taken his lessons in gruffness and whip-cracking from a previous employer but executed with forced conviction, alternating kindness with brutality), had a mother far more ancient than she, who sat at the other window. All Mr. Kraswitz’s patience puddled up where, sentient as a barnacle, she clung to consciousness, vacantly staring through the glass where her reflection overlaid the horizon of tenements across the street. He was tender to this husk of a woman, speaking to her in a voice far more gentle than he used with his employees, bringing her tea, Russian style, in a glass supported by a chased silver holder, which she sipped through a sugar cube. Mrs. Gottlieb would look up sometimes to see old Mrs. Kraswitz dribbling her tea or asleep with the tipping glass about to fall from her hands, and would put down the cape or coat she was scrutinizing and pat the chin or remove the glass or straighten the sagging babushka in her chair.

  One afternoon, just after Mrs. Gottlieb had returned from the bowl of soup she ate hurriedly in her own rooms, a clamor arose on the stairs and the door burst open without so much as a knock of warning. Mr. Kraswitz, who always wore a vest and a tie so that he looked entrepreneurial even when he was rolling out the rubbish cans, rushed to confront two men with unforgiving faces who stood in the doorway. He huddled with them, gesturing, Mrs. Gottlieb could see, with growing anxiety and cast an arm wildly in the direction of his operators, who had boldly stopped their machines to stare.

  The buzz of speculation began, passing with the speed of a needle in cloth from chair to chair: Thieves? Criminals, there to rob the sweatshop of its goods, its payroll? The Law, ready to rescue the youngest workers from their indentured labor now that new rules were astir that threatened to protect the young and force them to school? They did have the menacing neutrality of Government about them, something not so much individual as bureaucratic, dressed exactly alike as they were, with no particularity to their faces except the desire to intimidate. Ready to accuse, the operators turned to the girl whose weeping distressed them daily, as though she might somehow be guilty of attracting these intruders.

  But it was worse. One of the men, clearly under orders to appear as inhumanely grim as possible, moved to the bin where the finished overcoats were piled once they had passed through Mrs. Gottlieb’s hands, nudged it with a foot as if it might be dangerous, then bent and, his head turned away—“Gotenyu!” Mrs. Gottlieb said—he held to his nose a massive handkerchief or perhaps a scarf, something white and voluminous, and with a gloved hand pulled two coats from the pile, one from the bottom, the other from the top. These he wrapped in a sort of carpet, or some such heavy material, and dropped into a cask the size of a steamer trunk that the other brought to him. Then, having closed and locked the receptacle, he began to stalk the little room, peering into the faces of the operators, who sat stunned and wordless. As they passed her, Mollie, the presumed consumptive, began to cough—fear will do that to the fragile—and the man leaped back, bathing her in a glance both contemptuous and fearful. The old Mrs. Kraswitz let out a chilling wail, as if she could feel disaster in the air.

  Then the man came and stood beside a seat unoccupied that afternoon and vacant for a few preceding days. “And where is this operator?” he asked, and Mr. Kraswitz, in a voice hardly recognizable, replied that she was at home attending her sick child. And this was the moment that struck alarm into Mrs. Gottlieb. Something about the long unwavering look Mr. Kraswitz received as a result of his reply, and worse—her clear memory that Esther, the woman whose place was so portentously empty, had no child. “I know she lives way over west,” she told Chaya, who was hearing the story with numb terror, “with her bachelor brother. Or did, except he died last week.”

  The man stepped toward Mr. Kraswitz. “And would you happen to know what illness her child might be suffering?”

  “Oh,” their boss shrugged, “I wouldn’t know a thing like—”

  “Croup, I think,” said the girl who wept. “She told me her little girl has terrible croup.”

  The man, who had a single caterpillar of an eyebrow that Mrs. Gottlieb knew symbolized stubbornness and immovability and promised exceedingly bad luck, retired to the door at this point. Mr. Kraswitz, who seemed to have lost both height and weight during this encounter, skittered over to speak with them still more, gesturing like a man bargaining for his life. Then, one of them lugging the chest and its overcoats across the threshold, they were gone.

  “What?” the younger Mrs. Kraswitz demanded in her most threatening voice. “What was that?” She was a woman one did not ignore.

  But her husband threw a hand at her, dismissing her. Instead he turned to command his operators back to work. “They are interested in placing a very large order,” he told them with a shrug, “and so we must bear with their intrusion. They have the right to inquire into our operation, after all.” He wiped his brow with his sleeve. “Please do not give it a thought. Let’s just return to our work and”—here he smiled, most unconvincingly—“if this order works out, there will be bonuses, I promise you, in every pay envelope. Chanukah gelt!”

  At that, Mrs. Gottlieb was convinced that some doom had befallen the shop, because Harold Kraswitz, attempting to be unapproachable, had never before spoken with such regard for the concerns of his workers, had never promised them a penny beyond the few that he owed them (though he wa
s strictly honest and never cheated them), and surely never dared ignore the demands of his wife. And because, she added, on the word promise his voice had broken like a boy’s chanting his bar mitzvah portion.

  So it was no great surprise—though it was no less grievous—that Mrs. Gottlieb, when Chaya returned from her buckeye the next night, told her that she had gone to her work that morning a trifle cautiously, still wondering what might be afoot, and found the rooms empty. Totally abandoned. All that remained to identify the sweatshop were the smell of effort and vagrant threads and remnants and the little glinting pins that littered the floor. The sewing machines were gone, and the steam mangle, though each table had left a modest footprint on the linoleum. The bins were absent, the shelves bare, dust around the places where piles and boxes had been removed, and—could it really be?—the furniture of the family was missing as well, give or take a few items too paltry to be moved: two cracked dishes and a mug, a collapsing wooden chair with someone’s family crest on its back. And all she confronted on the dark staircase were the two workers, not counting the missing Esther, who were not Kraswitz relatives.

 

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