Sex Wars

by Marge Piercy

  1869

  SEVENTEEN

  FREYDEH INSISTED SAMMY accompany her to shul. “Yes, so I don’t go often. But it’s polite since they invited us, we should both go. Maybe we’ll find out something about Shaineh. It’s like she vanished off the face of the earth.”

  “It happens,” Sammy said glumly. “It happens here.”

  “I have faith we will find her.” She tried to make her wild frizzy hair lie down nicely under a hat.

  “I won’t be with you anyhow. I’ll be with the men.”

  “So you can learn something. Besides, they let children be with the women. At your age, it’s your choice.”

  “I’ll sit with the men, okay? I’m no child.”

  Giborah and Hetty’s shul was a storefront on Orchard Street. They had made an ark for the Torah out of boards, and the women had stitched a curtain for it, a quilt of various pieces of cloth. The effect was attractive, Freydeh saw, peering out of the women’s section from behind the mehitzeh. They had a real eternal lamp burning oil, wrought of silver and decorated with fine patterning like metal lace. Someone, maybe the rabbi, had brought it from the Pale, obviously. The rabbi was young, only in his middle twenties with a full dark beard and bushy head of hair.

  Giborah poked her, pointing to a pregnant woman sitting in front of them. “That’s the rebbitzen. It’ll be their first child.”

  “When did he come over?”

  “Only last year. Around the time we did, but he’s from Minsk. We can’t find nobody from Odessa around here excepting us. It’s lonely here for us. You too?”

  “Especially since my Moishe was killed. But Sammy is company.”

  “I wonder if I’ll ever find a husband here. I need a shadchen who speaks Yiddish.”

  After the service, they had an Oneg Shabbos, with women bringing what they could to make nice—a kind of coffee cake with apples, some dried figs, as well as a loaf of fresh challah. They all tore off a piece for the bracha over the bread, then had a sip of the sweet wine. A wave of almost bitter nostalgia cut through her. Again it struck her afresh that she was an orphan with Mama and Papa dead and long buried. She could not regret that she had left, but she wished she had made money to send for them years ago so they would have taken passage, come to America and survived. If Moishe had not been killed, surely they could have sent her family money to cross the ocean.

  Finally she got to ask the rabbi and members of the little congregation whether they had ever seen Shaineh. She pulled out the drawing carefully folded in her pocket.

  Several of the men and the rebbitzen gathered around and stared solemnly at the picture. The rabbi’s wife said, “I remember her. Such a pretty thing, and so alone. She was looking for work.”

  “I remember now,” the rabbi said, plucking at his beard and frowning. “Yes. It was shortly after we began.”

  One of the men nodded. “I gave her the name of a man who hires seamstresses. She was going to apply to him.”

  “Do you remember who it was you sent her to?”

  He gave her the name and address. She thanked him fervently. This was the first solid new piece of information she had gotten in two months. Sammy was eating figs and cake with both hands. She could hardly run and find the man tonight, so she stood to one side with Hetty and let Sammy eat whatever he wanted.

  “We all need somebody,” Hetty said. “You could marry again.”

  “I got no time. I want to set up in business for myself.”

  “Every Jew wants that, no? Except Giborah. She just wants a husband.”

  “May she find as good a one as I did, and may he live a lot longer. I had a good husband, the best. I lost him way too young.” Standing at Hetty’s elbow, she looked carefully at the woman’s belly. “Hetty, are you with child?”

  “Shhh! I don’t like to say it till the quickening. You can never tell what will happen.”

  “You know it.” Everything tonight conspired to remind her of her losses—husband, parents, unborn child. But she would hold fast to her hope of finding Shaineh.

  SHE WAS STILL WORKING at the pharmacy, but Yonkelman’s wife was recovering her health. Freydeh could tell her job wasn’t going to last much longer. She wouldn’t quit on him—he’d been good to her—but when he let her go, it would be a sign that it was time for her and Sammy to get going full-time. When she thought of being on her own without a job, she was excited but scared. Suppose they could not make the condoms fast enough? Suppose no one would buy them? Well, then she would look for another job, that was how it would be. In the meantime, they worked on rubber goods in what little spare time they had and tried to make them faster and faster.

  Finally she begged off work early one Tuesday when business was slow. “I won’t pay you the hours you don’t work,” Yonkelman said, tapping his finger on the counter. He liked to act stern. A truly stern boss would not have let her take off early with Sammy.

  “I understand. But I have to try to find my sister.”

  The address was a loft where girls were stitching around tables. In September, the light was already gone by seven-thirty, but he had them working by kerosene lanterns on each table. The room was smoky and dark.

  “I’m looking for my sister. A rabbi told me she had been referred here as a seamstress.”

  “Do you see her?”

  Freydeh walked around each table while the exhausted girls squinted up at her. They were making coats of coarse wool. Their hands were bleeding from pushing the big needles through heavy fabric. She stared into each face with hope. “Is Shaineh Leibowitz here?”

  “I remember her,” one girl said. “From near Vilna, no? A pretty girl. She didn’t last. She didn’t work fast enough.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “He fired her after a month. That was in February, I think.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  “She was crying when he fired her. She said she had no place to go. She wasn’t much of a seamstress, but she was a nice girl. I hope she made out okay.”

  “Do you know where she was living?”

  The girl shook her head. “No idea. Someplace cheap.”

  The boss claimed to remember nothing. Another dead end. Freydeh’s eyes burned with tears she kept from falling. How many tears she had held behind her eyes. How many tears she had not given herself permission to shed.

  Another girl spoke up. “Give me your address. If I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”

  That night the second girl came to their door, accompanied by her brother. “I had to tell you. She was in despair, your sister. She was so helpless. One of the other girls talked to her. Told her she could make a living in a house, you know? I don’t know if she went, but I know where Lisa told her to go. That madam sometimes hires Jewish girls. You might not want to go there, or maybe you don’t want to know her anymore if that’s what happened… But she was hungry and scared and she didn’t have any idea how to survive in the city. Women get desperate, missus. You understand?”

  “I understand. And she’s still my sister even if she went to that house. So we’ll go there too. Thank you!” She embraced the girl and then her brother took her back down the tenement steps.

  “I don’t like to take you to such places,” she said to Sammy.

  “So if they don’t speak German or Yiddish or Russian, you think you can do okay? They won’t understand you and they’ll brush you off as a greenhorn. You won’t understand everything they’re saying either.” He drew himself up, trying to look stern and adult. “You think I grew up down here and I don’t know about whores and whorehouses? You think like it’s something new to me?”

  “I don’t like exposing you.”

  “Shit, like I’m going to go get myself chained up like those schlemiels at the other brothel? Give me some credit. I don’t have money for a pair of boots, I’m not going to waste it on sex when the street is full of girls who’ll do it in the alley if I feel like it.”

  She buried her face in her hands
. “Maybe it’s good I never had a baby. Trying to keep you out of trouble is a full-time job.”

  “I don’t steal no more. I don’t beat up nobody unless they attack us in the street.” Twice, they had to defend themselves on the way to the river.

  “You have a good heart, Sammy. I just want to keep you safe.”

  “Nobody’s safe around here, Freydeh. You know that.”

  “Nobody was safe in the Pale, either.” She sighed heavily. “Someday we will get out of this neighborhood and live in a house with trees around us. I swear it.”

  “Trees?” He looked puzzled.

  “They’re nice. They clean the air. But now we got to get you winter boots.”

  “So far we been spending your money trying to make protectors, not getting any back. Maybe it’s a bad idea.”

  “We’ll make money. I believe in us.”

  Two days later, Yonkelman took her aside. “My wife is ready to come back to work, Mrs. Levin. I can’t keep you on. But she can’t make up the pills and powders the way you can. If you want to come in two days a week from eight till eight, I can use you. I do the serious stuff, but I haven’t got time for what we sell so much of, the hair-raisers, the regulators, the tonics, the syrups.”

  “So when are you laying me off?”

  “Next week. She’ll be able to come in regular then.”

  It was a sign it was time to cut loose and start their business in earnest. She agreed to work for Yonkelman Sundays and Thursdays, at least through the fall and winter. Then they would have some money coming in, a trickle. Yonkelman was also letting Sammy go. They walked home in sober silence, thinking that everything they had planned and experimented with had become frighteningly real. They had been playing, but playtime was over. She felt as if she had been telling herself fairy tales. How could she, a woman and an immigrant, break into such a line of work? But she had to. It was the one thing she had thought of that might prove successful. All around them in her tenement and in the block and the neighborhood, women did piecework for so many cents a job, worked long hours like the girls in that coat factory and brought home less than they could survive on. She had to have the courage to do what she had imagined. Otherwise, how would they make it?

  Besides, she could look harder for Shaineh. Working twelve hours a day six days a week left her little time to do anything besides the necessary household tasks she shared with Sammy, bringing up water, cooking, washing up, laundry, emptying chamber pots, the minimal housecleaning they had time to do. Shopping for the essentials—candles, bread, eggs, fish, sometimes chicken parts to make soup. Carrots, turnips, potatoes, some green vegetables, a piece fruit. Honey, vinegar, oil, flour, beans. Up and down the stairs fifty times a day. In September, it was still hot. Winters were hard with the cold wind off the river blowing through the tenements as if they were made of lace. But with the heat grinding them down and making their rubber-cooking hard to endure, with the heat baking them at night so they could not sleep, waking in the morning to the filthy air laden with every kind of bad smell on sheets damp with their sweat, it was difficult not to look forward to fall with its cleaner, cooler winds.

  The day after Yonkelman let her go, they started for the brothel whose address they had been given by the young coat maker. It was across town in the Twenties, but since they were earning so little, they walked. They kept to the Bowery, then Third up to Fourteenth Street, where they stopped frequently to stare into shopwindows. The street was crowded, but not with the people they saw on the Bowery. This time of day, mostly women were about, lighting from carriages or cabs or strolling along the pavement together or with their servants just behind. The only place she saw lots of men was in carriages or in restaurants they passed—crowded, even the fancy ones. The scents that drifted onto the sidewalk made her mouth fill with saliva and her stomach growl. Roasting meat, roasting fowl, something spicy, something fried.

  The shops were like a paradise of goods—shops that sold nothing but hats, hats with whole birds on them, hats laden with silk flowers, huge velvet cartwheels, hats like lacy towers. Other shops sold only scarves and shawls. Who were all the people who bought such extravagant things, and so many of them? She saw ladies swishing out of the shops followed by servants bearing mounds of packages.

  “Now that we’re not working regular, I sure would like to go up to Central Park, you know? I never been there. You were talking about trees? They got trees up there. That’s where the rich folks live now.” Sammy pointed north.

  “We’ll go some Saturday afternoon. I want to see it too. Where I grew up, Sammy, there were fields and trees. My papa was a woodcutter. My Moishe had been a woodcutter too, but he couldn’t do that here.”

  “Not unless he went up to Central Park. I guess they don’t let you do that. My pal Grubby says they don’t let you do hardly anything unless you’re rich and you have horses and a carriage… But I’d still like to go. To see it.”

  They walked by the new dry goods stores, big as towns with women tripping in and out in bonnets and plumed hats and so many yards of material they could have rigged a ship with their skirts and underskirts. “Let’s go inside,” she said on impulse, unsure if they would let them in or not.

  Sure enough, a gentleman standing by the door in a uniform looked sideways at them and began to follow them. Freydeh didn’t care. This was like a palace. More clothes than she had ever seen, a high ceiling with a balcony, pneumatic tubes whizzing around or depositing their contents with a loud clunk. She smelled something wonderful. It came from a counter with many little bottles of colored liquor. A woman in fine white lawn and a big bustle was squirting herself with one little bottle. “No,” she said to the salesman in black who was bowing to her, “I would prefer the first. I don’t care for such a heavy perfume.”

  Freydeh had heard of perfume but never been near it. How could such a little bottle be too heavy? Then she sighed. “I’m a bad person. I’m getting distracted. Come, we’ll continue on our way.”

  “You could live in here and there’d be everything you ever needed,” Sammy said. “Did you see all those coats? Enough for everyone on our block.” Downstairs she could see carpets, piles and piles of them up to a woman’s shoulders.

  They were both silent as they plodded on. Finally Freydeh said, “In shops at home, you have onions and you have yarn and you have vodka and wine and you have buttons and needles. Only what you need. Now I understand why everybody wants to be rich in America. There’s so many things, you think you want to have them. You look and you think, Now why can’t I have one of those? And two of those?”

  “Did you really think the streets were paved with gold, like some greenhorns?”

  She pulled off his cap and ruffled his hair. “I wasn’t that ignorant. But I had no idea how crowded and filthy it would be. No one prepares you for that. But we go forward, Sammy, we go forward.”

  The brothel was an ordinary respectable-looking brownstone house in a row of them. Nothing set it off from its neighbors, no bare-breasted girls hanging out the windows, no drawings of curvaceous naked ladies. Freydeh wondered if they had the wrong address and this would be somebody’s home. They rang the bell and had a longish wait. A Black man in livery answered. He seemed rather surprised at what he saw.

  “She’s looking for our sister,” Sammy said. “We were told she might be working here. We’ve lost touch with her.”

  “Lost touch, huh? Probably threw her out.”

  “No,” Freydeh said. “No! We don’t care what she’s done. She’s our sister and we just want to see her.”

  He seemed to be making a decision. “Come into the parlor. I’ll get Mrs. Baines, and she can talk with you. If she will.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Freydeh stammered. “We won’t make no trouble. We just want to find her, to see her.” She pulled the drawing from her bag and thrust it at him. “Maybe you recognize her? Shaineh?”

  “Mrs. Baines, she’ll let you know.”

  But she had seen a fli
cker of recognition in his eyes. No matter what they said, she knew that Shaineh had been here and maybe still was.

  Mrs. Baines kept them waiting for half an hour. They sat together in the parlor on a plush sofa, gazing at the walls covered with red-striped wallpaper that looked like fabric, staring at the ceiling painted with floating half-naked nymphs. There was a whole bevy of them, blond, brunette, redhead, buxom and svelte, tall and short, all floating in draperies that bared a breast across a wishy-washy bluish sky studded with big-bosomed clouds. The effect was silly. The women looked unnatural swimming along in the sky with one tit hanging out and a good bit of leg exposed.

  Two women dressed like ladies came out together, each carrying an empty basket. One was in black silk with white lace, her black hair in loose curls. The other—in a loose red jacket and serge walking skirt looped up to show yellow-and-black-striped petticoats, striped stockings and high heeled boots—had longer red hair. They nodded at Freydeh as the Negro butler showed them out. Freydeh wondered if they worked here. Somehow she didn’t think so.

  At last a tall lean woman wearing a pince-nez marched in. “Now what’s this?”