I had succeeded.
* * *
Shayna had to almost drag me back to the cart. I was sick, she said, so sick that it looked like I might not wake up. Mama and Shayna told me that my fever burned so hot that when they dunked me in ice water to bring it down, the water turned warm as blood. Mama longed for her mother to come and put together one of her brews, but Bubbe was gone and all Mama knew how to do was boil up a chicken and try to make me eat. They said that I fought her, that I said she was trying to drown me. And then, as suddenly as I got sick, I got better. I woke up one morning and asked Mama for something to eat. By the next day, I’d had enough of lying in bed. But Mama didn’t want to let us out. Something had happened while I was sick. The skin around her eyes was taut and she had chewed her lips so hard that they bled.
“The chief of police is dead,” she told me. “Dead and gone. And there’s bad feeling in the air.”
“I don’t feel anything,” I said. I suppose I was still sick, to have said something so stupid.
She clipped me around the ear. “Not your kind of feeling, child! The chief didn’t up and die of a chill, idiot! Someone killed him. And the army says it was the Jews.”
Shayna broke in. “Everybody knows that the chief was a friend to us! Didn’t he say—”
“Yes. Yes, he did,” said our mama. “And now he’s dead and the chief prosecutor is no friend of ours. The self-defense league has been patrolling every hour of the day and weapons are appearing on the streets outside of the quarter, and for all it’s a bright June day, there’s a dark fog lying over the city. I don’t want you two going out.”
“Mama,” I said. “You can’t keep us in forever. How long must we wait until this fog lifts? I haven’t been outside for so long. This is the gentile Holy Week and things will only get worse. Better now than Easter Sunday.”
Mama looked like she might slap me again. “Headstrong girl! I should have sent you both to America already, for here you have the survival skills of an infant!”
To hear such a thing after what I had done! That she wished me far from her side, that she did not trust me to take care of myself even after she had depended on me for charms and amulets. An infant, she called me! Me, who had fought off a demon and destroyed its hold over our family! Still, I kept my temper in check, as I had learned.
“Mama, if times are so bad, it’s all the more reason for me to go out. With the protections I put on the family, my supplies are low. Let me get what I need to protect us, and when I come back, you’ll have no more worries.”
And Mama relented, I think as much out of a desire to see roses in my cheeks again as anything else. I took Shayna with me to help carry my supplies, and as we stepped over the threshold, I looked back at Yeshua. But I shook myself. He was safe now; if Mama was to be believed, taking him with me would only be putting him in more danger. So Shayna and I left together, and Yeshkele stayed with Mama while Papa worked in his shop next door.
After I got the herbs I needed, Shayna and I walked over to Yetta’s sweetshop, so I could make sure she was all right. It was a long walk for me; I was weak, and the colors didn’t look quite real—everything was thin and watery. The sun hurt my eyes.
At the sweetshop I fell into conversation with Yetta, who was minding the shop while her parents were out. Shayna eyed the candies. We could hear the sounds of some kind of parade from far off, but Yetta was catching me up on the gossip I had missed during my weeks of illness, and I was enthralled in the story of her other sister’s betrothed’s time at gymnasium. I didn’t even notice the sound of a gunshot, which I later learned had been the signal for the processions to turn on the Jewish Quarter. We didn’t hear the shouts; it wasn’t until Yetta smelled smoke and looked out the door to see a mob yelling and throwing stones that she grabbed me and Shayna and pulled us into the stone cellar. I helped pull the rug over the trapdoor in the back room as we went down and wrestled the bar into place.
We heard glass smashing, and then sounds of violence were right overhead. We could hear barrels being smashed, the counter splitting. My mind was still weak from the fever, or I think I would remember more clearly. But I do remember knowing as strongly as I had ever known anything that Yeshkele needed me, only me, and he needed me to come quickly, to run to him. I remember the sound of flames crackling, my hands on the barred trap door, Yetta grabbing my arms from behind and yanking me back down the stairs. We stayed there a long time. We ate the sweets and dried fruits that were being stored and used an old barrel to relieve ourselves. We slept and woke and still the sounds of the mob carried down to the cellar.
Finally there was quiet.
Shayna crept upstairs and put her head out the trapdoor while Yetta made sure I stayed still.
“Everything’s burnt,” Shayna said. Her whisper cracked.
Yetta and I followed her upstairs.
The shop looked like—nothing. Everything burnt or smashed or both. We picked our way across the floor, silent and reverent as Adam and Eve on the first day of the world, but it felt like the last.
The streets were empty, but fires were still burning down the block.
We didn’t speak. Other people were just as silent. I remember one man watching a building burn. Tears dripped steadily from his eyes but he didn’t make a sound. Some wandered aimlessly; nowhere left to go, I guess. I saw two women meet each other in the middle of a block, saw their eyes widen in shock and relief, and then they threw their arms around each other. Without a word. I never heard a silence like that before.
I don’t remember saying good-bye to Yetta. She went to look for her family, I think, and Shayna and I needed to find ours. I didn’t see Yetta again. I don’t know what happened to her. My best friend, and I never saw her again.
I don’t remember walking home, either, but I must have. Not all the streets were destroyed. We found out later that in some places the self-defense league had managed to fight off the attackers: civilians, police, an army with bombs and guns. And some streets that held places like butchers’ shops, places where men and women brought out the long knives, they made it through all right, too. I do remember that Shayna insisted that we would find Mama and Papa safe at home, Mama with her dressmaker’s shears and Papa with his awl, but I knew different.
* * *
Our street was always quiet, mostly private homes.
Shayna said she had to lead me home every step, because if she let go my arm I’d just stand in the middle of the street like a lamppost. I allowed her to pull me along, but I paid no attention to my path, stumbling once into a pile of broken glass. I did not feel the fall, though the cuts hurt sharp enough as they healed. Shayna spent almost an hour picking glass out of my flesh that night. When we reached home, my arms were coated red with my own blood.
Mama and Papa and Yeshua, they were dead. Shayna closed Mama’s eyes before I went to see her. I couldn’t bear to stand before those eyes. I remember holding Yeshua’s little body against my breast and crying, trying to wake him up. But I could not wake him, and all my embraces did was stain him with my blood.
The day after we buried Mama, Papa, and our brother, I went into the back garden and dug up our savings. It was enough for two of us.
* * *
That is how Shayna and I came to America. In America, Mama had said, they don’t let you burn, and I repeated it to Shayna every night on the boat.
We had enough when we got here to rent a room and buy some new clothing so we didn’t give ourselves away as a couple of greenhorns before we even opened our mouths, but not enough to last for long. A business like mine needs word of mouth, needs local knowledge, so it’s not like I could just set up shop. Our landsleit group got us work at one of the tiny sweatshops in the neighborhood, no more than six people crowded into the boss’s front room, his wife cooking dinner on the same stove he used to heat the irons. But it was such a little shop—you couldn’t live on what they paid. The boss sweated every penny out of you and the shop was no good for rebuilding my own trade, bec
ause there were so few of us working there. I had no intention of living out my life like that, and I would not allow Shayna to do so either. I saw what had happened to women who had been sewing their whole lives—hacking coughs from the cotton dust, eyes bleary and half-blind from peering at seams and threads all day, fingertips like leather from stabbing themselves with needles.
Those small sweatshops were the past, they were the Old Country, like we’d never left. America, everybody knew, was in the modern factories, where dozens of girls sat together and earned a respectable wage, not subcontracted out to tiny shops that took their profit out of your skin.
Not that the factories were any picnic—women there could still end up blind, coughing, and sick, but it was more congenial, friendlier, and most important for me, had lots of girls together in one place. We needed to get out of the small shops, and Shayna was the one with the skills to get us hired. Lots of these factories broke down the work so that you didn’t need much skill, but nonetheless, it was useful to sew more beautifully than a machine.
When we walked into Shlomo Cohen’s, they barely gave us a second glance.
“Mister,” I said to the foreman, “we’re looking for jobs.”
“And you can keep looking,” he said to me, but when Shayna pulled out a blouse she had stitched and embroidered on the ship coming to America he sang a different tune.
“This is something special,” he said, addressing Shayna this time. “We can use someone like you, and you could go far here, maybe be stitching samples in a little time.”
“And my sister,” said Shayna firmly.
He shrugged. “And your sister.” We were put to work on the spot.
So, we worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, at Cohen’s shop, one of the smaller factories, only about fifty girls, and we got by. There was always work. You could hear sewing machines on the Lower East Side every hour of the day and night, every day of the week, Sabbath or no Sabbath. The Italian girls worked Saturdays and the Jewish girls worked Sundays and most of us didn’t observe so much and we worked any day we could. That was the way of the New World—even the most pious would eat ham sandwiches in the New World. And be glad to get them, too.
Shayna’s talent shone through. She was made a tucker on the ladies’ skirts, a high-paying job, with the possibility of becoming a sample-maker, where she could follow a garment from fabric to its final form, doing almost the same kind of detailed craftwork she had done with our mother.
On one side of me was Ruthie, another girl like me who could run up a seam but not much else. Ruthie had bright blue eyes and she laughed like the shop was a party. Something about her black brows and brown braid reminded me of Yetta and I started spending less time with Shayna. Shayna would stay late, so eager she was to become a sample-maker, and I would walk home with Ruthie instead. We would eat dinner together, talk. She was like me, no interest in the young men, but she was friendly enough to me. She said my eyes were like awls. And she said this like it was a good thing.
Ruthie was a firebrand, had been at gymnasium back in Riga and had become a Bundist, a revolutionary. Like many of her comrades, she was also a freethinker.
“No gods, no masters!” she would tell me passionately, before stabbing her finger with the machine’s needle. “These others,” she’d say, swinging her arm around to take in every girl in the shop, “these others are only interested in catching a rich man, but I have bigger dreams! Look here, here is opportunity for a world not bounded by fears of superstitious whispers! Here we can cast off such foolishness, do away with rich men and cruel gods together! We can throw away fears of demons and see evil’s true face, the faces of depraved men!”
I was so captivated by her speech that despite what I knew she had me half-ready to forswear any belief in God or devils as well. I had never been very political, but in the company of someone like Ruthie, I found myself stirred by visions of justice, by a world aflame with possibility, the blossoming of a new era in the New World.
Ruthie always told me that she became a Bundist after learning of the misery suffered by the poorer members of her father’s shul. Back in the old country, her father was a rebbe and a Zionist, a man who believed that safety and justice for Jews would be found only in our return to our ancient land. I half think Ruthie became a Bundist in part to anger him. Ruthie had Shayna’s sense of excitement along with some real order to her thoughts. She’d had to leave Riga when the police found out that she’d been the author of certain pamphlets.
After work Ruthie would let me practice my English on her, or we’d go to the movies or wander the streets, arm in arm. Never was the Lower East Side so wondrously beautiful as on those nights, especially after it had rained and washed away some of the smell.
On my other side in the factory was Rose, who had been abandoned by her nogoodnik husband and left with four children. One day she came in with more lines in her face than usual. Her youngest, Fanny, had been up all night with what Rose claimed was the croup.
“The croup is bad,” I said, “but not terrible. You can paint her throat with iodine.”
Rose nodded, but she didn’t look less worried. I almost put it down to a mother’s heart, but still I kept pushing. “I can come over after work and help you.”
“No!” she cried fearfully, and then subsided. “No, I can do it myself.”
“Rose,” I said. “It’s not the croup, is it?”
“How can you know?” she asked.
I was pleased—close observation can take the place of any more mysterious power when necessary. “I know,” I said.
She looked around furtively and edged closer to me. “You mustn’t tell anyone,” she whispered. “I can’t afford to stay home in quarantine.”
I knew then what the next words out of her mouth would be.
“Scarlet fever,” she whispered.
“Rose,” I said. “I can help with that.”
“How?” she asked, a little suspicious. “I can’t pay.”
“So who said anything about payment? I’m offering to help.”
I put all I could of myself into the broth I made that night, and I had faith in it, even though the ingredients I got here were not quite the same as those I would have used back home; vinegar and red pepper were easy enough to find, but I searched hours in the markets for myrrh gum. For double measure I made up an amulet for the baby as well, and added into it something new that I found in the markets: powdered foxglove. When Rose saw the amulet her face lit up.
“Now,” I said, handing over the amulet and the medicine. “You must be sure to give Fanny hot baths—she needs to sweat out the illness.”
I prayed every night that the child would recover. I had done everything I could, but there is no knowing with scarlet fever. It can recede only to come back worse than ever. But Fanny did recover, and Rose believed it was my doing.
She came back to me when her sister was in trouble. Her younger sister, she told me, had started walking out with a worthless boy, and wouldn’t take anybody’s words of warning, even their father’s. Rose was worried the girl would fall pregnant, and then what would become of her?
“I can help with that,” I said.
“I will pay you,” she said.
So I made up pessaries for Rose’s sister. “It’s good you had the brains to come to me early on,” I told her. “It’s easier now than later.”
Little by little I built up a group of women who knew me—Rose’s sister had a friend with female troubles, that friend had an aunt with a sick child, the aunt had a friend with a child coming after two miscarriages who wanted every amulet and charm I could provide for her. After a few months I was able to stop working at the shop, and that week, Ruthie came to live with Shayna and me. The family she boarded with had decided to move to Boston, and it seemed only natural for her to come stay with us. In fact, it was no trouble at all, because Shayna was home less and less. When I asked her where she was going, she would just tell me that she was spending time w
ith some of the better seamstresses from the shop, that they were giving her tips on becoming a sample-maker. As I was so busy lately, I was just grateful that Shayna had made some friends. Between my work and Ruthie, I barely got to see Shayna some weeks. Ruthie and I often had the room to ourselves. I was grateful that Shayna understood.
About a month after moving in with us, Ruthie left the shop as well, putting her troublesome writing to good use. On the Lower East Side, there were so many newspapers! She was hired as a writer by Der Schturkez, a socialist paper put out by immigrants who had come to America after the failed 1905 rebellion. They made even Ruthie look mild.
I’d hoped the three of us could celebrate together, but when I went to Shlomo Cohen’s to pick up Ruthie and Shayna, only my friend was there. I couldn’t find my sister with any of the other girls, but I wouldn’t let it ruin the evening. Ruthie and I went uptown and waited for standing room tickets at the opera, even treating ourselves to a glass of wine each at the intermission. At the bar, I leaned over and saw my sister on the arm of Johnny Fein.
Johnny Fein had a handsome face and he dressed well, but he was a dangerous man to know. He ran numbers, drugs, women. His girls came to me for help all the time. But he never had any trouble getting a pretty girl on his arm. He wouldn’t have had much trouble even if he’d been a tailor, I think, because of his sharp features and lantern jawline, but it didn’t hurt that he always had a lot of money to flash around, and he was flashing it that night, treating Shayna to a bottle of champagne. I hadn’t seen them in the standing room section, that was for sure. And Shayna didn’t see me now, as I turned away and went to find Ruthie.
We missed the final act of the opera, as I was staging my own melodrama outside with Ruthie as audience.
“How long—how long do you think she has been walking out with him? With a criminal?”
“Calm down,” said Ruthie. “You’re doing nobody any good tearing your hair out like this, least of all me. This is supposed to be a happy occasion, remember?”
“Happy? I should be happy with my sister, my baby sister whom I’m supposed to protect even now, sipping from the cup of iniquity? Willingly chaining herself with fine gold and silver filigree to a man of evil? How could I not know?”
Burning Girls Page 3