He would not go inside. It would be hard enough to get the words out without having to suffer Sadie’s formidable presence. He would wait right here and intercept Leah when she came out or came home. Abe decided, if Sadie ventured forth, he would hide behind the garbage cans.
He sat on a stoop that afforded him a view of Leah’s building. While he waited he desperately tried to think of a way out of his predicament. If only he could fall asleep and wake up already married, with fine sons ready to help him in business, then he would not have to go through this humiliating proposing or the other things a husband had to do to become a father.
He briefly considered returning to the matchmaker’s office and having him act as the intermediary between himself and Leah. But the broker would want to talk to Leah’s parents to assure himself that the engagement was secure, and for them to give a blessing, or even to understand what was being asked, was an impossibility. Charnov would have to turn to Sadie, and she, as usual, would be wickedly obstinate in demanding conditions and would take perverse pleasure in gossiping about Abe.
“Abe Herodetzky?” she would moan, feigning despair, as if she’d been asked to eat bacon. “I should let my precious treasure of a sister marry that little creep? Why, he lives like a convert. You should have seen how it was when he boarded with us. He shaved and he worked on the Sabbath—he still does. I hear that in his store he sells trayf food.”
In the end she would give her blessings, and gladly, but not before she had shredded his character. Not only that, but Leah’s family was poor. Joseph could afford no dowry, which meant that Abe would have to pay the broker’s fee out of his own pocket.
Then Abe had no more time to brood. Leah turned the corner onto Montgomery and hurried along the far side of the street, a big basket of sewing in her arms.
“Oh, God,” Abe murmured softly. He pushed himself up onto his feet and angled across the street to cut her off. Leah was wearing a dark cotton skirt that swirled around the tops of her black high-buttoned shoes. Her plain white blouse was buttoned to the neck, and she had a dark blue apron knotted around her slender waist. Her gleaming black hair was braided into two pigtails that hung down to the small of her back. Her dark eyes sparkled and her pouty pink lips widened into a surprised, shy smile as she spotted Abe.
Her smile faded and by the time Abe had reached her she was frowning uneasily. It did not occur to Abe that Leah might be even more timid than he, only that she was unhappy to see him.
She will never love me; she will refuse me; I am going to fail, but at least it will be over and done with.
“Hello,” he began, dismayed as Leah flinched at the sound of his voice. Years living with Sadie had turned her into a fearful creature, poised to retreat at the slightest provocation.
Abe understood none of this. It seemed to him that Leah’s behavior expressed dislike of him.
He was not blind to her pleasing looks, however. As he gazed at her flawless ivory complexion, her finely chiseled features, he was honestly amazed that he could even dream that she might accept him.
Something must have communicated his aching love, for Leah, watching him, tentatively offered up her ephemeral smile, and that smile gave Abe the courage to follow through, although the moment before he had decided to offer his greetings and slink away.
She was still holding her sewing basket. Abe chivalrously took it from her, realized that he could hardly propose with his hands full and set the basket down on the sidewalk.
“You are doing piecework?” he asked, stalling for time.
“Yeah, sure,” Leah said. Sadie allowed no language but Yiddish in her house, so Leah practiced her English as much as was possible when she went out. “I walk over to Rivington and they give it to me.”
Abe nodded. “Over there they pay okay.” He was grinning like an idiot. Compliment her on something, he coaxed himself. Say her blouse is becoming or her hair looks shiny and pretty.
A heavy steel basement door clanged open and a stream of laughing, rowdy boys ran up the steps to street level, swung around the iron railing and skipped across the sidewalk, tumbling Leah’s sewing basket in the process. Half a gross of men’s white shirts spilled across the grimy pavement.
“Oh, no,” she moaned, “they’ll get dirty. I should go in.” She bent to gather her work. “It’ll take me twice as long now, for I’ll have to wash them too.”
“Stay another minute,” Abe implored as he righted the basket and scooped up the shirts.
Leah dejectedly examined one of the shirts for grime. “If you get them dirty, they don’t pay you for the sewing,” she said.
Abe gently took the shirt from her and tossed it into the basket. “Listen to me. I want to tell you—to ask you something.”
He could feel the sweat trickling down the side of his face. His hands were so tightly clenched that his nails were drawing blood from his palms.
Leah stared at him. “What is it, Abe?” she asked, sounding frightened. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing Leah, I want to marry you,” he blurted, staring down at the basket of shirts. He heard her gasp but kept his eyes locked on the ground. “You’re not so surprised, are you? We liked each other when I was a boarder in your sister’s household, didn’t we?” Finally he glanced at her and felt his terror rise as he regarded her blank expression. I am in a nightmare, he thought.
“We’ve seen each other so often on the street,” Abe continued. “You looked at me during such meetings; I looked at you—” He shrugged. Leah was still staring, still silent, and he had nothing left to tell her. He had feelings aplenty but no words, or at least he didn’t know how to say them. He’d made a fool of himself by attempting this, though another kind of man, more confident and daring, might have reached her.
Leah seemed lost in rumination. She absently reached behind her for one of her long braids, twisted the flagged end around her fingers and brought the coil up to her lips to chew on it.
“Stop that,” Abe said mildly. “Your hair is too pretty . . .” His tongue suddenly thickened; no more words would come out of his mouth.
Leah let go of her braid, smiling at the compliment. She tentatively reached out to take his hand. She noticed that his fingers were trembling in hers.
That was when she began to understand Abe. For the first time in what was to be the pattern of her life with him, she offered Abe what he wanted and needed. “I love you,” she said.
Sadie and Joseph seemed little surprised by the announcement. “It’s about time,” Sadie grumbled. Joseph merely smiled, offering a celebratory schnapps. Arrangements were made with the rabbi to marry the couple in the Kraviches’ front parlor in one month.
It would be a modest private ceremony; Abe briefly considered inviting Stefano de Fazio to be his best man, but Sadie forbade it, vowing that no Italian would ever step foot in her home. Abe acquiesced; he didn’t want to start a commotion, and he wasn’t sure Stefano would accept.
Abe hadn’t seen much of Stefano since he left the sweatshop. A few times Stefano had stopped by the market, once to ask a favor of Abe. Elections were being held to select a board of officers to administer the locals and represent them to the national office. De Fazio was running for secretary-treasurer.
“It’s gonna be a full-time job,” said de Fazio, looking prosperous in his expensive suit and tie, polished leather briefcase under his arm.
“No more Allen Street?” Abe asked.
“Nah. An uptown office comes with the job. It’ll be up to me to record the dues paid by every member in New York.” De Fazio tried to look modest. “I’ll be the guy who disburses funds, as well.”
Abe was impressed. “I’ll bet that’ll be thousands of dollars, Stefano.”
The Italian nodded. “But first I got to get elected.” He smiled then, stroking his mustache, which had sprouted prematurely grey, matching the grey that salted his thick, black glossy curls. “I’ve a favor to ask of you, my old friend.”
Abe felt honored. “
Whatever I can do for you, Stefano, just ask.”
“Good!” De Fazio beamed, patting Abe’s shoulder. “In this election I got my own people and the Polish in my pocket. It’s the Jews I’m worried about. Some will vote for me, but there’s another guy, a Jew, who’s running against me. What I want is for you to come to the meeting next week and tell ’em how I handled that whole money thing with you—”
“You mean, talk in front of all of those people?”
“Nothing to it, my friend. Just tell ’em what happened.” Stefano gripped his hand. “I’ll be grateful, Abe.”
“Then of course I’ll be there.”
The night of the meeting came around, and with Stefano watching Abe stood on the stage, gripped the podium and did not dare to look at the audience as he stuttered out the story of how Stefano organized Allen Street, borrowed his savings to help finance the strike fund and then personally saw to it that he was paid back. Afterward Abe took a drink with some of his former union acquaintances and went home to Cherry Street, and that was that. A little while afterward he read in the paper that Stefano had won his election by a considerable margin.
That meeting was the last time he’d seen Stefano, but with such an important job it made sense, Abe reasoned, that de Fazio had no time to come around to Cherry Street or attend a modest wedding in a tenement apartment.
Chapter 14
On her wedding day Leah sat in the kitchen of the neighbors across the hall, waiting for it to be time for the ceremony. She didn’t have to watch the clock, for Joseph would come for her at the proper moment. She didn’t have to talk with anybody, for the neighbors had been invited to the ceremony in exchange for allowing the use of their apartment as the bridal chamber. Sadie, thank God, was too busy to sit with her.
Sadie had warned her that the day of her wedding would pass dreamlike, but Leah had never felt wider awake in her life. As she sat all alone in this strange apartment, stiffly upright upon a chair to avoid wrinkling her wedding dress, she could feel her pulse pounding and her nerves singing. The tan walls and chipped porcelain and enamel of the kitchen seemed to throb with vibrant color.
I’m going to be a wife, have a husband, a home of my own and a family.
She’d given up on marriage a long time ago, accepting spinsterhood as God’s will. If God had disappointed her by refusing to provide her with a husband, she could understand His side of the issue; she was, after all, rather plain. True, she had made the most of her attributes by keeping her hair clean and being pleasant at all times, but at twenty-two she had seen enough polite disinterest in the eyes of the eligible bachelors at the settlement house socials to understand that God’s hands were tied in this matter.
As late as last night, when Sadie and Joseph thought she’d fallen asleep in the parlor, she heard them whispering together in the kitchen.
“Thank God for Abe,” Joseph told his wife. “It’s lucky for us; I’d given up hope for her. She creeps around like a little mouse and she’s got hips like a boy.”
“Stop it,” Sadie scolded him. “She’s got plenty to recommend her. . . .” She trailed off.
“That’s what I thought,” Joseph knowingly chuckled after a few moments of silence. “Believe me, Sadie, that little mensch is a godsend. We’ll save a lot of money by not having to support her.”
“Well, Abe is getting a fine girl,” Sadie argued, miffed. “He’s in his middle thirties, don’t forget, and not a handsome man.”
That was true, Leah mused as she waited, nervously drumming her fingers on her neighbor’s kitchen table. Abe could never be called good-looking.
She remembered the first time she’d set eyes on him, years ago, when he came to board in Sadie and Joseph’s spare room. Just thirty years old, he was endearingly full of himself, a feisty bantam rooster homely as sin, crowing at the world.
His years in the sweatshop blunted his edge. His narrow shoulders rounded and his long face began to sag into a perpetual frown. There was a growing bald spot at the back of his dark brown head. Leah very much doubted that Abe had ever seemed especially young; already he was verging on old.
“Do you think she loves him?” Sadie whispered to her husband last night. Leah was able to hear the hand-wringing in her voice. “He won’t mistreat her, will he? Poor Leah. You’re right Joseph. She is like a little mouse.”
“Who knows from love? This much I can say: She’s made a good match. She has no dowry, she’s in her twenties already, and she’s caught for herself a fellow with his own business. You got to give Abe that much—he swore he’d have his own store and he’s done it.” Joseph’s voice softened. “But don’t worry. One thing about Abe I know. He’ll do the best he can by her, that’s for sure.”
“I hear that apartment above his store has a private toilet.” Sadie sighed wistfully.
Leah had smiled at that final exchange last night, and she was smiling now. How Sadie used to lord it over her, having a husband and children! She’d been dominated by her older sister for as long as she could remember. How wonderful to get a husband in a higher station than Joseph—not that she had any grudge against Sadie’s husband, who had always been kind to her and who often stood up for her against Sadie’s bullying.
Sadie took pleasure in bullying her, Leah knew, and had since they were little girls living with their parents in a drab Lithuanian village on the Baltic. Sadie used to take her down to the beach in winter to pin her down and sit on her belly. Sadie would sprinkle sand into her mouth as the cold wind whipped away her childish screams of outrage and chapped her cheeks beneath her streaming salty tears.
Years later Leah brought those childhood incidents up, but Sadie denied that they had ever happened. Leah was incredulous. How could Sadie have forgotten?
“You made it up,” Sadie insisted, and finally, to keep peace in the home, Leah allowed that perhaps she had.
Adulthood had not put an end to the intimidation, but merely turned it to more subtle forms. For instance, not a day went by that Sadie did not find a way to point out Leah’s second-class status in the Montgomery Street household.
“It’s not enough I’ve got our infirm mama and papa to care for,” Sadie would rant. “I also must care for you like a child. Poor Joseph works like a dog in that trayf slaughterhouse to keep a roof over all our heads. Don’t you feel ashamed, Leah? Don’t you feel grateful to me? Why don’t you do more around here, Leah? Why can’t you find a man?”
There was nothing Leah could say. She would stand silent, biting her lower lip to keep from crying, absorbing Sadie’s abuse. Through it all her parents would be coughing and groaning, lost in senility. Sadie’s youngest children would be squalling so loudly that Leah could not think, and her own hands would be raw and her head spinning from the stench of Joseph’s bloody slaughterhouse work clothes as she scrubbed them clean in the sink.
At those times Sadie’s shrewish attacks were worse than anything she’d inflicted upon her younger sister during their childhood. Leah would feel so ashamed that it would seem to be her fault her parents were senile, her fault Joseph had a disgraceful job.
Then Sadie, abruptly softening, would calm and kiss Leah affectionately, saying, “It’s nothing, dear, just me. Sometimes my feet swell up and my legs ache so much I don’t know what I’m saying. It must be because I’m so fat. God willing, a skinny thing like you will never know such agony.”
Sadie’s explanations only made it worse, for Leah could no longer assuage her misery by hating her bully of a sister.
Now all that was changed. Abe had rescued her. It was just like a prince rescuing a damsel in the storybooks she’d pored over in the settlement house reading classes. Never mind what he looked like; to her Abe was a prince.
There came a light knock on the door, and Joseph, resplendent in his finest pin-striped suit, came in.
“Ready?” he asked, looking exceedingly nervous. For the hundredth time that day he reached up to assure himself that his yarmulke was in place upon his curly mane. “
Come, Leah, they’re waiting for us.”
She nodded, straightening her white gown, and arranged her veil. Joseph looked pale. It fell to him to take her ailing father’s place in escorting her halfway across the parlor. Abe would take over at that point, leading her the rest of the way to the canopy beneath which they would make their marriage vows. Then after it was over Abe would take her to their home.
“Leah . . .” Joseph was looking down at her, his eyes full of concern above his glossy black beard. “If you ever need anything—if things don’t go right with you and Abe . . . Well, we want you to know, Sadie and I, that you are still our family. Do you understand?”
She stood on tiptoe, lifting her veil to kiss his cheek. “Thank you, sweet Joseph, for everything.”
“Sha,” he commanded gruffly. “No crying. A bride is not supposed to cry.” Then he took her arm and led her out of the kitchen and across the hallway into his own apartment.
Sadie’s kitchen was deserted. The oven was on, keeping the food warm for after the ceremony, but everyone was in the parlor. Leah caught a glimpse of their expectant faces through the partly drawn curtain that divided the apartment.
“Ready now,” Joseph breathed. “Here we go.”
At once Leah was racked with a spasm of nerves. Sadie’s kitchen with its pink floral wallpaper and worn floorboards covered by area rugs had never seemed so inviting.
It’s just that it’s all so familiar, Leah thought. It’s safe, even if it is unpleasant, but God sent Abe to me; a prayer has been answered. So what if I’m nervous; I shouldn’t be nervous on my wedding day?
Joseph gently pulled her through the curtain, and with shining eyes and God’s hand on the small of her back, she was presented to her husband.
The days after the wedding seemed like a dream to the new Mrs. Abe Herodetzky. There was the Cherry Street apartment to get used to, furnishings to purchase, and of course the store. During the first week of married life, in which Leah learned how to work the cash register, make change and keep the accounts book straight, it seemed that her new home was not upstairs but amidst the potatoes, onions and barrels of smoked meat.
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