by Marge Piercy
However, the Times said the election was too close to call. Henry and Elizabeth talked more during the next weeks than they had in a decade. The election was being stolen, through the three Southern states still under Reconstruction regimes. Boards were set up in Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida that disqualified thousands of ballots for Tilden and certified ballots for Hayes even when the number of ballots exceeded the number of voters in a district. Weeks turned into months and still the election was in doubt. The election finally came down to Florida and disputed votes there. The States had no president. The Democrats were protesting fraud. Finally the election was thrown into the Supreme Court, where Republicans outnumbered Democrats. The crooked election was certified along strictly partisan lines. Rutherford Hayes became the next president while Tilden retired from public life.
The personal result of the fraudulent election for Elizabeth was that she and Henry could share a meal and an apartment without fighting. They would never again be lovers, but they might be social. They had gone their own ways for so long that their mutual bitterness had eased into a benign indifference. It was interesting to get Henry’s journalistic take on political events. That was what they mainly talked about, that and their children, who were happy that their parents were on easy terms. Elizabeth still lived in Tenafly, but she was spending more time in Manhattan.
She began to feel out Susan about writing a history of the woman’s rights movement thus far. Susan thought it an excellent idea. Matilda Gage volunteered to work with them on what would be a massive project, covering several volumes. Matilda was an excellent researcher and the best writer in the movement, next to herself. As they corresponded on the subject, Elizabeth found herself growing excited. Who could write such a thing if not the three of them? She did not wish to leave history to the Boston women, with their far narrower view of issues and personalities. Susan shipped trunks of papers she had been storing in Rochester. That spring, with many interruptions for touring, they sat down in Tenafly and began. After each day’s work was done, they talked. Susan and Elizabeth would sit darning socks or mending. While she was fond of Matilda, her affection for Susan once again stood at the center of her days, along with her children. Her life’s ragged tears were slowly being rewoven, and she was heartily glad. She had missed Susan more than she had been willing to admit. She did not ever want to quarrel seriously with her dearest friend again.
FORTY-ONE
AFTER FOUR MONTHS in the Tombs, Freydeh served eight more on Blackwell’s Island in the East River. When she was brought out by boat, she was surprised at how many buildings stood on the island. It was two miles long with a smallpox hospital, a building housing typhoid and other contagious patients, a huge granite charity hospital, almshouses—one for men and one for women aged and poverty-stricken—an immense workhouse to punish the poor, a lunatic asylum and big brick buildings for children detained there and set, like everybody else who could move, to work. She had been taken past sentries to an enormous grim building of hewn stone and rubble masonry like a fort looming over her. She was checked in roughly, her clothes taken and a striped woolen uniform two sizes too big thrust at her. The floors were of cold uneven stone and all the doors and lintels were of iron. She shared a cell with three other women.
She was put to work sewing coats in a room full of women prisoners. Only one of them knew Yiddish. Most of the others spoke English, although there were two Italian women who could only communicate with each other. The women ranged in age from thirteen to sixty: prostitutes, two from panel houses where men were robbed—a panel in the wall opened while the man was occupied with the whore, and his wallet and watch stolen—thieves, pickpockets, a woman who had poisoned her lover, two women who had passed bad checks, a con woman, two abortionists, a woman who had public sex in a Bowery peep show. Several had been arrested by Comstock. The women who had been in the longest, unless they were really sad cases, bossed the others. They saw that the new prisoners and the ones they didn’t like worked the hardest. Freydeh had her food taken from her at dinner the first day. The next time that happened, she punched the woman hard in the face. She was flogged by the guard, but after that, nobody took her food.
Sammy came to see her when he could. Each time he had to go through the rigmarole of getting permission and securing a place on the boat that went out to the island. He was on the list as her son, but every time they questioned him as if they had never seen him before. He was the man of the family, because Asher was depressed. He had never lived anyplace but a little village where he knew everyone, where what was expected of him was clear and the roles each played had been set in stone for generations. Sara had adapted quickly, joining in the condom business with Debra. Kezia, Chaim and Feygeleh went to school. Sammy reported that they were all good students, although Kezia got in trouble for talking and drawing pictures.
Sammy had dropped out. Freydeh felt bad about that, but nothing could be done, with her in Blackwell’s and the family to support. Sara tried to find Shaineh but spoke English too badly to make herself understood. Sammy was convinced Kumble had moved Shaineh to a new location near the old burned-down place. But Sammy had little time to pursue Shaineh. Freydeh’s arrest and trial had strained family resources, using up all the money they had put aside. They were still paying off the lawyer.
More women kept crowding into the prison. Times were hard outside; women resorted to amateur prostitution or thievery. Women who came in now were even thinner than Sara had been. Here at least they ate, even if the food was watery stew of turnips and potatoes. There was a scarlet fever scare in the prison, but Freydeh didn’t catch it. A few prisoners were kept apart from the general population, not as punishment. They could afford individually prepared food, a comfortable bed, enough blankets, pillows, a feather quilt. The oldest woman in the prison remembered Madame Restell being locked up there twenty years before. Now in those special cells were a madam and a politician’s mistress who had stabbed a rival. She caught sight of them sometimes dolled up in silks and wearing corsets and bustles as if they were going to a party.
It was cold in the prison, then airless and hot. It always stank of urine and unwashed bodies and bad food. Freydeh lost weight, but the worst thing was lack of exercise. She saw the men being taken off to break rocks and build structures on other islands, but the women were kept cooking, sewing, cleaning. She was polite to all the women and close to none. At first she could not sleep for the noise—cursing, weeping, iron doors clanging—but over time she slept when she crawled into her bunk. Sammy brought her a comb and a better blanket. He always brought newspapers and food.
Finally the day came when she could be released. Sammy came to meet her. He was taller than ever. He had become a handsome man, she realized with a shock. He would soon be thinking about women. A young woman was waiting. It took her a moment to realize that it was Debra, now just a hair shorter than Freydeh and with a woman’s body. She was not exactly pretty, but she had a sweet face and a warm open smile. “Auntie Freydeh,” she said, “I hope you be pleased how we done with you inside.” She spoke English with an accent but she had obviously been practicing. She wore her hair up now, had a bright green skirt that looked new and a green bow on the back of her head. She would never have done that in the Pale. She even had a hat she was carrying in her hand, as if putting it on would be too much—but she had not left it behind. She was proud of it. Freydeh watched them together with a wary eye. Was something going on there? Let’s see, Debra was fourteen? And Sammy was going on sixteen now.
After they took the little boat to Manhattan, she felt like a greenhorn again as if her eyes and ears would fail, overwhelmed. She had forgotten how to move through a crowd. She was buffeted until Debra and Sammy placed her between them. She smelled hot corn, roasting oysters and chestnuts, she smelled sewage and manure and human waste, she smelled slaughterhouses and glue factories, tanneries and freshly cut sawdust. It had not been quiet in the prison, but the clang of doors slamming and women�
��s voices was silence compared to clopping hooves ringing on pavement, wheels grating and bouncing, hucksters and newsboys bellowing, harnesses jingling, street musicians scraping away on violins or playing concertinas or hurdy-gurdys, hammering, sawing, the thud of barrels being unloaded, people screaming, church bells clanging. Her head ached with it.
She had a hundred questions. “How are we doing?”
Sammy squeezed her arm. “We’ll do better now you’re back. We had some accidents and some product that wasn’t up to standard. So we lost some customers.”
“What kind of accidents?”
“A table caught fire. Sara burned herself. It was only her arm and you can’t see where unless she rolls up her sleeve.”
“It was such a bad time for that momser to arrest me.” She sighed and Debra looked sideways at her with a shrug.
“No time is a good time.” Sammy gave his cap a rakish tilt. “But we’re surviving.”
“Has he been after you?”
“We haven’t seen him. He’s after bigger fish these days. He travels all over the States. It was just rotten luck he ran in to you that day. If you ever see him again, run.”
“Believe me, I will!” Freydeh shuddered. “He cost me a year of my life.”
“And a lot of money. Money we couldn’t make.” Debra made that sign with her fingers people used for dollars.
“Plus the money you people spent on lawyers. Fat lot of good it did us,” Freydeh said. “All that money to that shyster good-for-nothing.”
“He got your sentence reduced.”
“So? It was still too much for too little.”
She felt exhausted by the time they got home. Sammy helped her up the four flights of steps to the top. “I’m…weak…from sitting.”
“But your English got better,” Sammy said. “You have less of an accent.”
“I had to speak English all the time. Only one woman spoke the mamme loshen.”
The apartment was soon crowded, for the children came home from school. The condom factory was still in the front room and Sara was tending it by herself. “So where’s Asher?” Freydeh asked, slumped in a chair with her feet up on a bucket.
“You’re so pale,” Sara said in Yiddish. “White like a sheet, white like paper. I bet you had nothing good to eat in a year.”
“Except what Sammy brought me,” Freydeh said. “You made me soup and flanken.”
“We did what we could. Times are hard,” Sammy said. “Asher got laid off three weeks ago, and he hasn’t found anything since.”
“He could peddle something. That’s what we always did when we were hard up.”
“He has trouble with that,” Sara said. “The streets confuse him. He gets attacked and his goods stolen. He was working in a lumberyard, but they cut back because construction is slow. He was working up by Central Park planting trees, but he couldn’t understand the foreman and he got fired. They’re almost all Italians.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s looking for work.”
Kezia said, “No he isn’t. He’s with some old men in the shul.”
“It’s a comfort to him,” Sara said defensively.
Freydeh had been out of jail for less than two hours and she had found out Asher was falling apart, Sara had burned herself, Debra and Sammy were already at the point of making eyes at each other or worse, they were poor again and crowded—eight people to the three-room apartment and two of the rooms the size of closets. She cursed Comstock and his meddling, cursed him body and soul, offspring and ancestors. A finster lebn af im. A dark life to him. Er zol nor anloyfen und oysgetriknt! He should dry up like a piece of clay.
She roused herself to stand. “Well, to work. Let me at my apparatus. It knows me.” She must rally her family. Fix things. That was what she was good at.
“Gladly.” Sara sank into the chair Freydeh had just vacated. “I have never worked so hard in my life.”
“That’s not true, Mamaleh,” Debra said. “You always work from dawn to well into the night.”
“We all work hard,” Freydeh said. “That’s how we get by. Time for me to pull my weight again.”
“We all know you went to prison for us, instead of us,” Sammy said.
“Well, you went into this line of work—” Sara began.
“You can always do piecework making coats or dresses. We’ll see how much you make in the same time,” Freydeh said. “If you want to do that, don’t let me stop you.”
Sara fell silent in the chair. Freydeh thought her argument had silenced her older sister, but when she turned her head to look, Sara had fallen asleep from exhaustion, her head tilted back and her mouth dropped open. They had tried to keep up in her absence. But except for Sammy, they were inexperienced and Debra was just a young maideleh still. One of the reasons orders had slacked off, she realized, was that they had been making only the simple cheaper condoms and not the tigers or the pashas or the elephants. She put the tigers right into production first thing and corrected the formula they had been using, which reduced the tensile strength of the rubber.
It was the next day before she got outside for a short walk to the kosher butcher to get a little piece meat to make a good strong cabbage borscht. The butcher greeted her. “You do my eyes good, Mrs. Levin. So what happened by you? You got stuck on Blackwell’s? It happens to the best of us. We know you just try to do for your family.”
Times were hard in the neighborhood. The street kids looked starved. Guys and a woman with her children were sleeping in the filth of the alley. Even the vegetables in the pushcarts looked the worse for wear. More men were gathered on the corners and outside the saloons, a sure sign of unemployment. The coffeehouses were jammed in midday, but most of the men were reading newspapers or playing chess or just sitting, staring into empty cups. Asher seemed to have given up looking for work. Instead he went to the shul every day to pray and study. That was all fine and good in theory, but the family needed him bringing in money. She was going to have to light a fire under him, without getting Sara riled. That and she had to find out what was going on between Debra and Sammy. She was waiting for an opportunity to corner Sammy and quiz him. Kids grew up fast on these streets.
She made soup with the beef, beets, cabbage, onions and a bit of celery root. It would feed everybody along with day-old bread. That evening she worked late into the night turning out pashas. She would get her old customers back; she would find new ones. Her exhaustion had worn off and she burned with energy, free at last, back with her family and ready to go full throttle ahead.
The untershteh—the woman in the flat underneath—was gone, killed in a labor meeting in Tompkins Square Park, when the police charged. The papers called them dangerous communists. Her skull cracked by a club, she died at home a few days later. The husband had taken the children and vanished. Now there were newly arrived Jews from the Pale living there, twelve of them, mostly men. They slept in rows on the floor and all day looked for work. Two of them had found jobs at the docks. It was wonderful to hear Yiddish in the halls and in the yard when they went to use the latrines. Sara said there were more families in the shul Asher and she attended, recent arrivals. “Things are getting so much worse there, people are going to keep coming. I just wish they knew how hard it is here. Nobody tells you.”
“Still better than there.” They were in the front room vulcanizing rubber and making tigers on the mold. Kezia was painting them as they cooled.
“At least there we knew everybody. We shared what we had. You knew if you got sick, your neighbors would come in and bring soup and take your children. You knew if you died, the burial society would wash you properly and bury you the right way.”
Asher said, “We’re starting a burial society at the shul. It will be done right.”
“Two men in the flat beneath us, they got jobs at the docks,” Freydeh said helpfully.
“They’re starkers. Big men.” Asher turned his back on her, scowling.
As long as they
were all living together, Asher was her problem as well as Sara’s. “You got to keep trying, Asher.”
Asher said nothing. Sara shook her head sadly. There was a long itchy silence in the room broken only by the neighing of a horse clopping past in the street and wagon wheels grating on the uneven stones. Someone was playing a balalaika downstairs where the men lived. Freydeh listened to the music, a song she remembered, and her fingers flew faster.
That night, she woke to voices arguing. Although the door to the tiny bedroom where Asher and Sara slept was shut, she could hear them through it. Sara was trying to get Asher to look for work. Didn’t he want a place of their own? The voices rose and then stopped abruptly as something fell over. In the morning, Sara had a fresh bruise on her cheek.
That Saturday, she took Sammy and they went in search of the man who was keeping Shaineh. For seven years she had been searching for her sister and missing her time after time. Now they were close. Alfred Benedict Kumble was still living with his mother and brothers and one of their wives in the brownstone, but Sammy, in his occasional surveillance and his chats with the stableboys, had learned that Shaineh’s keeper was engaged to be married. The wedding was to be in five weeks. The Kumbles were among the hundreds who took the ferries to Brooklyn every Sunday to hear Henry Ward Beecher orate. The stableboys had heard that Beecher was to marry Alfred Kumble to his bride, Beatrice Muriel Pike, in Plymouth Church.
Maybe if he was getting married, he would let Shaineh go. They followed his phaeton moving slowly through the crush of Saturday vehicles, horse-drawn trolleys, carriages, wagons, some streets almost closed with peddlers’ carts, people on foot jostling each other. They could, by hurrying and at times trotting, keep up with him. The dark phaeton moved sluggishly in the torrent. Finally, it turned off on Broome Street and came to a halt. Alfred got out, nodded at his footman and went up the front stairs, unlocking the door. He was greeted effusively by a portly matron in a bright blue taffeta dress who did everything but bow to him. He disappeared inside. Down the street of once-fine houses and warehouses now crowding them, they found an oyster bar serving beer, corn cakes, oysters raw or fried and an assortment of other traif. They took a table where they could watch the street and ordered corn cakes and beer. Freydeh’s heart was pounding from the pursuit through the streets and from excitement. She was still weak from prison. The corn cake was greasy but warm. It was late October; a chill sharpened the air. Sammy sat in a chair beside her, rather than across the table, where he too could watch the house. It had lace curtains on the parlor windows, so they could not see in. Two other men entered; a third man came out. Two heavily veiled women arrived separately and were ushered in.