The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  She was standing at the door, preparing to bolt.

  “Shall we ask Miss Addams to mediate for us?”

  Miss Addams, as it happened, was not happy to be consulted. “There are a good many things I know, my friends. More than is good, my doctor tells me, for my equilibrium. But I must say that while I excel at weighing human and political burdens, I have had no experience of how one comports oneself in a marriage.”

  “But the dangers?” Gregory was eager to ignore her neutrality. “Don’t you think these—these pest-houses—could be a disaster? You don’t need a spouse to appreciate that where contagious disease rages—”

  “Pest-houses! Rages!” Chaya, impatient. “Gregory! Don’t be carried away! Doesn’t that simply tell you how badly these victims need a witness?” She could feel herself quiver with vehemence.

  “No one person is so necessary that she cannot find someone else to do her work under such circumstances.”

  “Oh, thank you very much. Here I have finally found a way to be useful in the world, to be something other than a part in a machine for the profit of greedy men, and you demean it.”

  “My darling, really, you surprise me. Is this the imbalance of emotions that is said to accompany pregnancy?”

  “Please, children, please desist.” Miss Addams waved them out of her sight. “I am beginning to feel myself cast as Solomon the judge before the two women at war over one baby. Except that I cannot say which of you is the true parent.” She was faintly smiling. “Has Florence Kelley weighed in on this matter?”

  Gregory smiled as triumphantly as a poker player with a full house. “Florence Kelley is, today, in her role as Mrs. Wischnewetsky, mother of her children. She is in Winnetka this morning, visiting with them where they stay.”

  “That,” said Chaya, “has no bearing on this situation. Do you expect to impress me that she loves her children? Do you think I fail to love my”—she folded her arms protectively across her stomach—“my almost-child?” She gave Gregory exactly the smile he had given her. “Now, if you will excuse me, I am late for my work.” Again, she felt herself onstage, prettily if figuratively stamping her foot. Gregory had taken her to see Ibsen’s astonishing play A Doll’s House just last Saturday evening. She did not wish she had a door to slam, but she felt the nip of Nora’s anger. She gave Miss Addams a nod of thanks, placed a very quick kiss on Gregory’s rough cheek—he had not yet shaved, so eager had he been to catch Miss Addams at breakfast—and went to collect her coat, place her hat on her head without appearing to hurry, and, hand quivering, tuck into her purse the black notebook in which she would record the day’s atrocities.

  CHAYA WAS so furious at Gregory that she trembled as she walked. Her legs could hardly support her. Standing, leaning against a fence, she thought she must look like Hannah in the Book of Samuel when the priest thinks she is drunk, but she is only—only!—engulfed in grief.

  She arrived at her first assignment, a top-floor uniform-makers’ shop—could it be that the dark blue of the Chicago police force emerged in crates from such shameful rooms? Street level was occupied by a narrow, shabby fish store whose sawdust lay all around its door, damp and trampled, and the hall and stairs were rank with the stink of it.

  A handkerchief would seem a flag of disgust; she held her hand over her nose. Could she dare take this stench home in the folds of her dress, on the soles of her shoes? Even without her morning queasiness, this foulness would scourge her nostrils and make her gag. She had to stop and breathe in once, twice, containing herself, before she continued climbing the stairs.

  Her knock was answered by a woman, not much older than herself, so bent that her back was parallel to the floor. Chaya entered humbly. No matter what she thought of the owners, she could never bluster in, threatening and vengeful, like the Law, for fear of humiliating the victims, who were already helpless and ashamed. Nor could she tell them she had been one of them, or nearly so, as if anyone might share her good fortune; that seemed cruel by yet another degree.

  She tried to speak to the hunched woman, whose chest nearly touched her knees, but she only answered incomprehensibly in—Polish perhaps, or Bohemian. Then a man came forward, who seemed slightly demented—his eyes flew around the room, far above her head, and his fingers fluttered like insects around a light. But speech was hardly necessary; she saw what she had come to see: Nine people breathing repellent air, two bare bulbs, one of which flickered irregularly, a special torture. They worked in silence, which might be habitual, might be for her benefit. There was no owner present, no overseer, and no available English. They were like souls marooned on an island.

  Then the man who had seemed so angry startled her by careening toward her and pulling at her sleeve. “What you got, lady, we no work?” He tugged and tugged until she was sure the cloth would tear. “You say! You tell! What you got for us?” He brought his face so close to hers she could smell his breath; his eyes were the palest blue, but their whites were flooded red.

  It was the question Chaya could not answer, the awful challenge that made Mrs. K-W’s work both noble and ignoble at the same moment. If you pulled one thread in this terrible economy of souls, would the whole fabric come undone? She had arrived a savior but stumbled down the stairs and into the light a villain with no knowledge of economic laws, the cause and effect of markets. The hard facts were Gregory’s territory but that made them no more useful than her sympathy.

  GREGORY’S MOTHER and Lallie, lacking other employment, were prepared to hover over Chaya as if she were their ailing child. She was not to raise her arms, she was to submit to daily bedrest, she was to drink a quart of milk each and every day. “I shall bring you whipped cream treats,” Lallie promised, “and think of how they are going straight to the bones of the little one. And to its tiny teeth. Oh, the heaven of it!” She pretended to swoon. “Have you ever thought that everything we women do—primping and putting on our nicest costumes, and dotting our wrists with scent—all of it, in the end, is solely intended to lead us to childbed!” She nodded at her own insight. “I sometimes think this is the only thing men are good for! And we must work so hard to entice them.”

  She pouted prettily—things had not gone well for her recently in her courtship by a blond midshipman who had somehow gotten landlocked here, near a lake and a river but nothing resembling a sea. After a good deal of dancing and laughing, he had expressed a wish to return to a vessel out of New York called the Otterbein. That sounded suspiciously foreign to Lallie, and she announced that if she ever found herself beside it, she would kick it hard in its steel-and-rivets side. “What is a side called, on a ship? A flank?” She turned to Chaya petulantly. “There’s fore and aft and—you came here from Europe on a ship, didn’t you? You must know.”

  ASIDE FROM the natural tiredness she was cautioned to expect in her state, she had to acknowledge when she allowed herself an extra hour or two of sleep that she had been exhausted for years, deeply, dangerously tired. And what benefited her would certainly benefit her child. Lallie put a lilac-wreathed card into her hands that read:

  Empty your mind of every care.

  A nest of pleasant thoughts prepare.

  Your child will feed on your content,

  Nor follow where your worries went.

  Once she would have thought such a message banal, but perhaps during pregnancy the brain did soften along with the pelvic bones. She thanked Lallie, nearly overcome, and promised herself that she would obey the injunction. She had a mind in need of emptying.

  WHEN, DISCOURAGED, she came to tell Gregory she had decided to stay at home and be, for once, indulged—would try to be of help keeping Mrs. K-W’s voluminous documents in order—futile, too futile—he opened his arms and pulled her to him gently: She was to be treated with exquisite care. She was not to be upset. Henceforward she was—he did not say this because it was understood—not to be made love to, even though her radiance made her irresistible. No wonder men strayed while their wives’ bellies grew, she tho
ught but would never utter.

  One rogue idea demanded suppression, in spite of how attractive this cosseting sounded—that no one she had ever known before her marriage had had the leisure, let alone the means, to withdraw from the world to be worshipped, and look! Their children—most of them—survived. They dropped their babies in the field, they birthed them in miserable beds and barns, on pallets, in open air. Her aunt Minke was delivered of twins in a sledge, in deep snow, halfway between Slutsk and Maripolsky. Her mother had given birth to seven without a single comfort. And on the ship that brought them to America, a very young girl produced a large-headed, large-voiced baby in the dark of night, crying that she had not even known she was with child.

  But every one of them would choose her lovely bed, if only they could, would they not, and the grave attention of Faith Stillman’s doctor? Eyelet lace and two down pillows. A tall glass of pulpless orange juice, its sides beading because it was so perfectly chilled. Hanging on the armoire, now, on a padded hanger, a spring-green maternity frock, gift from Lallie, who appeared to have given herself an excuse to shop for three. Chaya was hardly in need of the voluminous dress yet but its promise gave her a kind of pleasure she had never felt before: that she was in step with all natural events, all the earth’s fulfillment. She liked to think back to her first sight of Gregory, valise in hand, all kind concern, and then envision him above her in their bed, his bare boy’s shoulders, the tendons of his neck straining with the effort it took, the thrust and release, that brought her to this moment, palms flat across her stomach, lucky woman, feeling for a first twitch of movement.

  Except, except . . . If the baby were a boy, heir to the Stillman name, could he (did she dare ask?) be circumcised? Her child, girl or boy, would be such a stranger to the world she had left behind, it would truly grow up on another continent.

  Gregory came upon her once, bent singing softly to her baby who turned, still imperceptibly, to her rhythms. She wished he had not looked at her with such perplexity but it took him a moment to realize that she was—of course, of course—singing in Yiddish.

  ASHER

  38

  “ASHER,” CHAYA called to him as he bounded up the stairs. He was chilled from his afternoon with the men at the fairgrounds, happy to tell them about Ned Stillman’s promise but rageful because as he’d made his way toward the exit, he had glanced back over his shoulder and caught sight of the poor, stilled, useless wheel against the sky—defunct, defect, defeat, words and words and empty words rattling around in his head like marbles—all these living things stripped bare, skinned. Skeletons.

  He could see that Chaya had been waiting for him. “I have something wonderful to tell you, love. Come, let’s go up to your room.” They sat on his bed and his sister took his hand, spread his fingers, traced the lines on his palm like the veins on a leaf. “You need to know, darling, we are going to be leaving Hull-House.”

  “I don’t care.” Shrugged. Took back his hand. “I never wanted to live here.”

  “Don’t you care why we are leaving? We are going to have our own house.”

  Shrugged again. Her business. “I thought you didn’t want a house. Isn’t Gregory a socialist?”

  She looked more familiar laughing. “This has only been a fine convenience, being here with all these good people for a while, so that we didn’t have to think, didn’t have to decide anything about the future. But no one says a socialist can’t live decently. Not ostentatiously, of course.” She raised her eyes to the modest room, its fine-checked curtains, its eaves. “But believing that all men deserve a fair wage doesn’t make it a sin to have what you need.”

  “Have you fallen out with Miss Addams?” Would anyone dare?

  Chaya put her hand to the front of her dress and held it there, flat. “No, dear, not at all. Only, you see, we’ll be needing more room. More privacy.” She took a deep breath. She was climbing something steep. “Gregory and I—we—are going to have a baby.”

  He stared. It was there beneath her hand. She was warming it with her palm. True, then, she had been as far away as she’d seemed, disappearing into this. He felt himself dimming in her sight, going pale and out of focus, and not his fault. Gregory’s fault. Hers.

  “This will be so lovely, Ash—the baby will be yours too. You’ll have someone you can play with, you can teach to read. You’ll be Uncle Asher!”

  Iddle kiddo.

  He wanted to ask exactly how that baby got inside, under her dress. His books assumed he knew already but he did not exactly, the mechanics of it, and there was no one to ask. Too late for that. Some of the boys and men, when he ran the alleys a long time ago, would mutter things and thrust their bodies, move and twitch, and laugh about who they “had” and who they “did,” but what were they having and what were they doing? “Will you name it after Father or Mother?” He knew that much, the son for a kaddish.

  He might have smashed her in the stomach, to judge by her face. “We don’t—I don’t believe they are dead, Asher. To use their names—they would have to be dead.” She hugged herself, the not-quite-flat front of her.

  Lost, strayed, stolen wasn’t good enough. Nothing but dead would count. She looked stricken. Struck. Sick.

  His sister was becoming one of them, girly-women who sat like birds on a fence, useless, twittering, battening—fattening—on party food and gossip. No more work, the shirker, growing that stomach sucked all her energy. Blotted the juice of her, left her dry. No more anger, that he could tell. She was too calm, quiet like something stunned, under a blanket. Her face had changed too: cheeks he wanted to poke to deflate, and a vague darkness around her mouth, not quite solid, like the smut inside a lamp. And worst, her eyes looking past him. Was it the future she was combing, that far horizon, because it would have her child in it? Searching out its destiny, making it promises?

  She seemed uninterested in his fate any more. She asked sisterly questions but without conviction. (Conviction: that was what you got for committing a crime. Commitment meant caring about something, or being sent to an asylum! Language was a trickster. Where did the rules come from?)

  She and Gregory had found a house to move to, no babies at Hell-House. There would be a room for him—“Walls made for books!” (cheerful, a chin-chuck)—and, down the hall, a nursery. Hickory, dickory, dockery, nursery, hearse-ery. Mercy, Chaya! He said it into his pillow. Didn’t know what it meant, but he knew she had failed him, who was here first: Mercy, Chaya, and be done.

  Behind his closed eyes he saw the shadow of his sister leaving him, going down to Gregory and Miss Addams and supper.

  39

  GREGORY, WITH his family’s help, found them a lovely, almost-new house in Lincoln Park, blessedly not too near his parents: It had a rounded brick corner—a “turret,” which sounded a bit too castle-like to Chaya—that would demand an equally rounded upholstered something to sit on. Every house on Deming Place had some distinguishing feature—Gregory proudly reported that there were no two façades alike. They had a stained glass window above the porch, a design of crisscrossing shoots of lavender and green; the neighbors lived beneath guardian gryphons, metallic lampstands, filigree awnings. One had a preposterous fountain that, if the wind was blowing, doused anyone who passed in a haze of water.

  Chaya was amazed at how much attention it took to choose the most trivial details for the new house. Did it—should it—really matter what her doorknobs would look like? Or, less importantly, her drawer pulls? Large or small? Pewter or brass? Carved or embossed? She remembered the drawer that had been Asher’s cradle until his arms and legs battered its sides when he turned in his sleep. There had been one shaky porcelain drawer pull against its faded wood. Did it matter one iota to the world?

  Gregory, it turned out, had very precise expectations in these matters of décor. When she shrugged, she could see him flush with disappointment. “One needs to be exacting about what may seem petty details, darling, because the whole, you know, is composed of a thousand choices that
must agree with one another or the effect will be”—he considered—“chaotic.”

  He had challenged her when she asked what difference it made whether they pulled open their drawers with glass or pewter and he had looked at her impatiently. “Necessity is a hard standard, wouldn’t you agree? Would there be any art at all if we were to use that as a yardstick? What is necessary besides food and roof and—” She would not have called it a leer but rather a look of pleasure at the gentle swell that was now visible beneath Chaya’s dress. “No music, then. No paintings. Not even the books you adore, if you are going to be so absolute.” He laughed. “My darling, I think we may have to bring Miss Addams back into the argument again. I believe she is the only one who can soothe your ascetic side.”

  She said nothing. Instead she concentrated on emptying her face of disapproval.

  “I’d have thought,” Gregory continued, and she could see the effort it took to keep his voice gentle, “I’d have thought that your first house would have excited you, Chaya.”

  So she was once again a girl raised from the cinders, ungrateful.

  He was more agitated than she had seen him. “Must you make an interest in décor into a moral judgment? A moral failure? How do you think these lovely homes you have visited lately were constituted? With care, darling. With forethought.”

  “You have the better eye, Gregory, that’s all I intend. Truly, you have had a lifetime of”—what would be the least hurtful word, and the most accurate?—“feasting on beautiful objects. You are like someone who eats delicacies and savors their taste and I am, I suppose, still merely eating to survive. I’m sorry if I fail you there.” She was afraid to look at him but kept her eyes cast down with an abjectness that burned in her throat. When that was too painful, she raised them. “So please, dear, enjoy the pleasure of indulging these great decisions for both of us. I am going up to have a nap.”