Then he went for the mother lode.
I know about Golde, he said. I visited your daddy a bit ago, and there she was. Oh, she’s a fine child, Minnie. But she needs to grow up out of Jim Crow’s arms. Here’s my plan. We’ll take your daddy and daughter with us. Then, my dear, we will all be happy evermore.
Before he was finished, everything unraveled. At the very mention of Golde, she turned her head from him, got up. She paced to the window and back, scowling. He could feel the heat of her anxiety from several feet away. He hadn’t expected such a reaction. He knew it was a surprise to her that he’d met the girl, but why would the mere mention of Golde derail her so? He held his breath, waiting for explanation while a hope that maternity had kept even the tiniest corner of her soul uncorrupted rose, burning bright, from his chest into his throat.
No one knows about her, she said at last in a hoarse whisper, and she can never know about me.
She raised her arms and made wide circles to indicate the whole of their surrounds, upstairs and downstairs both.
About this.
Of course not, Minnie.
She had the need to explain how Golde came to be then, giving him the reasons her father had divulged along with details he could have lived his whole life without ever having to hear. But he listened. He owed her that. There were unexpected tears and hot embraces. He told her he didn’t care about Golde’s daddy. He would love and protect the child as if she were his own flesh.
She told him Fishbein would never go back to Europe, and how could she leave him? She might not be much in the way of a dutiful daughter, but she’d disappointed him quite enough already. Abandonment would be the final blow. If they took Golde away from him, it would kill him.
Let me talk to him, Bailey said. I always had my ways to get to him.
She agreed to let him try.
They ate the dainties and drank Champagne, made love again, and darkness fell. Their talk fell to the blissful chatter of lovers about the charms of each other’s bodies and other nonsense. The piano man downstairs ran through scales, warming up, while slippered feet ran up and down the stairs outside Minnie’s door as the girls got ready for the night’s business. Spats broke out. The brute named John was heard calming things down with a word or a slap. Magnus Bailey could no longer suspend his knowledge of where he was and his lover’s role as boss over the sordid mess that was L’il Red’s. He told Minnie he had to leave and would be back, same time, next day.
There a woman somewhere you need to go home to? she asked.
I got a livin’ to make, he replied, evading that conversation until another time.
She raised her chin, gave him a prideful smile.
I got enough for us both, she said.
He took her by the shoulders and squared her up to him so that she’d listen hard.
I know you don’t believe me yet, he said. But someday soon, you’re going to give all this up, and we’re going to go far, far away and on my dime. We’re going to start out fresh and pretty as a day in spring and leave all the past behind. That includes your money. It’s the only way.
Her lips moved playfully as if she were choking back a great joke, but she raised up on her toes and kissed him. Well, you’re the man here, aren’t you?
Yes, I am.
He hugged her close, kissed her head, and made to leave.
Wait.
He stopped with his hand on the doorknob and twisted around. She stood strong, insolent, with her arms crossed, a hip jutted out to the side. An unlit cigarette dangled from her lip. The look in her narrowed eyes made a little worm of fear squirm inside him.
There’s somethin’ on my mind you made me forget.
What’s that?
Why did you come here yesternight lookin’ for that Pearl? Who’s she to you? What you got to do with a piece of work like that?
He tried to come as close to the truth as he dared so that he’d sound honest and sincere.
A friend of mine found her near dead in the street and asked me to check around, he said. His voice cracked on ‘around.’ He hoped she didn’t notice.
Alright, she said. Her face was impassive, sizing him up.
I can go now?
Yes.
He blew her a kiss and whistled his way down the stairs to give her the impression he was unaware she had her doubts about his veracity, but his feet had not left the landing when he heard her tell herself, On his dime! and break into a brittle laughter.
That slowed him down and hushed him up. He moved more deliberately, head low, while he contemplated whether she’d meant for him to hear her derision. When he reached the door, he near rammed into one of Minnie’s gals, who stood in his way. She was big and black as night like him. Her hair was bobbed, tamed, and rolled under. A scent of mineral oil and beeswax wafted through it. She had long fingernails painted the color of blood run cold and her eyelids were smudged with a silver grease. Her dress was short, thin, boldly cut, and she wore nothing to speak of underneath.
What’s a bull of a man like you doin’ with our skinny L’il Red? she asked him. You need more ’n that bag of pale bones to keep you warm, I am surely sure. Why don’t you come by me sometime? I got a whole lot of fire.
Before he could think up what to say, a sniggering erupted behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a clutch of whores made up and attired similarly to the one blocking his way to freedom. They leaned against the walls and one another, whispering, tittering, gawking at his discomfort and finding great sport in it. He filled his chest with air, flashed them every one of his square white teeth along with the gold one, and said, Ladies, I am certain you have much more profitable activities in store for you tonight and so I leave you to them. He pushed his way past the whore and escaped.
He stopped at a five and dime for peppermints and went double-speed to Fishbein’s house straight after. When the old man answered his back door, Bailey just about fell into the house, he was that tired and distraught. Fishbein helped him to a chair at the kitchen table and fetched him water. Bailey drank it down and asked for more and drank that, too, while his lungs burned. Fishbein hovered over him, silent, his red eyes full of concern, his lips tight, their corners turned south in a mournful arc. Gasping, Magnus Bailey plunked down his bag of candy on the table.
I said I’d bring the child sweeties, and there they are, he said. His voice was hoarse and wavered. His eyes had in them a beggar’s despair, as if the man before him were the last soul on earth who might offer him bread.
I’ve seen Minnie, he said. We are reunited, but I cannot fathom zackly what’s happened to her. I knew it was bad, but it’s worse than ever I thought. When I’m in her presence, I find one of my feet is in heaven and the other stuck in the tar pits of hell. Surely it was more than misfortune and a broken heart that changed her. She was smarter than that. What happened to her? What happened to our Minnie?
America happens to her, Fishbein said.
I don’t understand.
This is a country where a person can toss out his past like yesterday’s garbage. For a Jew, once the past is gone, there is nothing left. But America gives you plenty to fill the void. In America, you can takes your pick of all the apples in the tree. I think that’s what Minerva does. When her heart is too sore for her to bear, she needs get rid of it. She grabs too much America, too many apples.
Fishbein shrugged and clapped his hands together in a gesture of finality as Magnus Bailey stared off into nothingness, considering his words. The America that Fishbein described was certainly not his America. If the colored man in America could cast off his past like that, why, he’d do it without so much as a backward glance. But the hard, ugly truth of the Negro’s past in America kept him locked eternally in a trap of deprivation and anger he never planned or desired but simply had to learn to manage as stealthily as he could. Last time Bailey looked, there wer
e no apples dangling in the air above his head, ripe for the taking. Every apple he ever bit into, he’d paid a high price for.
And that’s it, the old man finished. Nu?
The telephone rang. Fishbein shuffled to the foyer, where his telephone sat on a small mahogany table. Bailey could hear his conversation from the kitchen.
Yes, mine kind, yes, I told him. I know. I know. But, mine kind, it is Bailey! Magnus Bailey, I tell. Not some shmendrick from the street.
He was silent for what felt a very long time, a period where even from the kitchen Bailey could hear the static screech of a feminine voice haranguing him at a furious pitch. This went on and on until at last, the old man interrupted.
Oy, enough already, Fishbein said. Nu, I am sorry, mine kind. I am very sorry. But now the cat is loose from the bag. It is not a terrible thing, believe me.
When he returned to the kitchen, he shook his head and rolled his eyes upward to beseech his inscrutable God. Some things, he said, never change.
He offered Bailey schnapps and was accepted. The two men repaired to the living room, where they sat in the same chairs they’d sat in before. Fishbein poured the liquor into shot glasses and downed his own in one swallow. Is good, no? he asked Bailey, who sipped his then smiled in spite of himself.
Yes, Fishbein said, smiling also. I confess it’s the kind I like—peppermint! The taste of our little Goldele is all in the family!
The child, he told him, was not there. She was his only from Thursday night to Sunday night. The rest of the time she lived upriver at the farm of that good woman who also taught her lessons, as Minerva was afraid to have her in a public school. On Sundays, she had Hebrew lessons and Torah lessons from her zaydee. She could bench licht and knew her Shabbos prayers. On Friday nights and the holidays, Minerva came and stayed with them. Golde believed that her mother was a nurse with many urgent responsibilities at a hospital and that she spent as much time with her as humanly possible. I don’t know, Fishbein said, how long she will keep to believe that.
Bailey promised again to rescue them all. Without mentioning Europe, he promised he would get the child and her mother, and Fishbein, too, to another, safer world before Golde had a chance to learn the truth. He promised with such fervor, Fishbein was gentle with him.
And the money to finance this great escape, my friend? Where it comes from?
Bailey reached for the bottle and poured them both more schnapps. This time it was he who downed the drink in a single swallow. I’ll get it, he said. Don’t you worry. I’ll get it.
Okey-dokey, you’ll get it.
One more shot and Bailey felt the room enclose him in a warm embrace of hope and enthusiasm for the future. In the strangest way, he felt as if this very room was where he belonged more than any other place on earth. The Lord works in mysterious ways, he heard the voice of his long-dead mama say, and her tone prompted him to scriptural thoughts.
I’ll work for her, he told Fishbein. I’ll work for her as hard as Jacob worked for Rachel.
Fishbein held up a finger and wagged it at him playfully.
But will there be a Leah in between? he asked.
Aurora Mae was erased from his mind as easily as chalk on a blackboard.
No! Bailey laughed.
So then we are talkings seven years? Fishbein said, playing along.
Seven years is too long! It’ll be less! Far less! Bailey swore.
He left Fishbein’s that day a bit drunk. He hadn’t wanted to leave. He lingered as long as he could at the paternal home of his beloved, the home where all things felt possible, where images of his own youth as well as Minnie’s surrounded him like friendly ghosts. But duty called through the dam of peppermint schnapps, and he walked into the night to make his way home.
Aurora Mae informed him that the whore Pearl would be staying on awhile. She was going to take lessons from Dr. Willie. When she’d taken enough, she’d be baptized and renamed Sister Pearl to become, if everything went alright, a handmaiden of the Miracle Church of God’s People over to Pendleton Street.
I know you don’t like Dr. Willie, Aurora Mae said.
You’d be right about that.
And I know too it’ll irritate you when he’s around. But whatever else he is, he surely knows how to talk to a gal. Pearl came here sufferin’ and wantin’ just to live. Now she wants to be reborn too. She wants to be washed clean in the livin’ stream of Jesus’ love. Lord knows, she got plenty of muck on that soul of hers after workin’ so long at Minerva Fishbein’s, which by the way, is where she told me today she come from. Can you beat that? You don’t mind we keep her awhile, do you?
Magnus Bailey, feeling softhearted as drunk, guilt-ridden deceivers are wont to do, was touched that Aurora Mae thought he had a vote in the matter. Of course I don’t, he said, thinking the more distractions Aurora Mae piled up around herself, the easier he’d have it visiting Minnie and working for their future. He felt a twinge of guilt for the deceptions he’d committed already and for those he planned for the morrow. He reminded himself that he’d never made a vow of fidelity to Aurora Mae, nor she to him. They’d only ever sworn loving friendship, not eternal love, and that knowledge comforted his conscience. If old Willie kept her company for a time, he’d just have to live with it. Maybe having the preacher hanging around was a good thing. If he was going to leave Aurora Mae someday, she’d need a new man to fill in the gap. She’d do better than Willie anon, he judged, but he’d be serviceable for a while. He laughed at himself. Funny how his opinion of Dr. Willie had softened now that he needed him.
Bailey considered how lucky he was that Pearl landed on their doorstep before he’d ever been inside L’il Red’s, or she’d know him by now and his particular jig would be up and fried for breakfast. As he laid his weary head down on the pillow to the left of Aurora Mae Stanton’s, his last thought was, Wouldn’t it be a wonder if bringing Minerva Fishbein to Jesus would erase the hardness from her soul the way it was about to do for the whore Pearl? Now, wouldn’t it? Then the room began to swim about, and he thought no more.
FAIRER WORLDS ON HIGH
1934–1936
XV
It was a pleasant Saturday morning in March. Fishbein walked to shul with his head down, his mind full of worries, unaware of his surroundings. Sweet notes of spring buoyed the air if not his thoughts. Now and again winter’s last gasp came up off the river in a bracing draft that shot up the sleeves of his coat and threatened to sweep the hat off his head. He barely noticed.
When he’d left the house, Golde was asleep. Magnus climbed the steps by the back door and Minerva bustled about the kitchen putting out plates of food from the ice chest and the bread box. She had a burnish about her, that glow of happy domesticity women in love acquire. She seemed younger, innocent even, an impossibility that caused her father a shudder of alarm. Where could all this lead but into a world of danger and pain? Magnus spoke of golden exile, but Fishbein knew better. There was no such thing. Exile was a ripping up, a tearing away, a flight from one set of evils to another. The new place might feel benign, but that was always a lie, or at best a misapprehension. Evil in a different tongue, while incomprehensible at first, disguised in layers of superficial impression, was still unequivocally evil. Look what had happened to him and Minerva in America, once their wonderland of tolerance compared to Europe. Look what happened every day to Magnus Bailey’s people whose chains of iron had been loosed but never removed. The human heart is a comedian, he thought, making fools of every man who nurtures hope there like a disease no therapy can excise.
Did any life escape pain and loss? Inconceivable, he thought. Yet, without fear of contradiction, such was the constant object of his prayers. Mine Gott, mine Gott, he muttered in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the night while tears sprung forth unbidden. Grant our Golde a little miracle! Grant our darling girl a life of joy!
Hope for Golde was
the only reason Fishbein could find in his poor fool’s heart for encouraging the insanity of Minerva and Magnus. For two years now they hurtled along a primrose path strewn with brambles sharp as arrow tips, studded with insurmountable boulders, crisscrossed by poison streams. Those two lived with switches inside their brains, he decided. Switches that with a single flick could erase the past and blur the present so that neither of them had to admit the truth of how they lived when they were apart. Flick! they were together. Flick! the hour would come when they’d bid good-bye and return to their outside lives. Flick! they would commit their duties in that other sphere with efficiency and aplomb, their shadow selves in perfect repose, a daydream or two their only sustenance until the next assignation. How many times, he wondered, did they approach each other after a spell apart full of doubt, shame, regret, even a resolve to end this madness when, flick! The first glance, the slightest touch dissolved all but their hours together and that idiotic notion of the future they nurtured between themselves. It was the worst nonsense. There could be no happy resolution. But Minerva and Magnus were adults, free to enhance or ruin their lives as they saw fit.
Golde was another story. The child grew older every day. Fishbein was tormented by concern for her welfare. Although she was a good child, an obedient child, her lack of a proper home ate at her more with each passing year. How often she complained to him out of Minerva’s earshot that she longed desperately for a life where her mother and grandfather—Bailey, too, and oh! if God were kind, two or three brothers or sisters—lived with her under one harmonious roof. I’m so lonely, she’d cry with her big green eyes brimming. He bought her a bird in a cage, a cat, even a turtle to keep her company, but while she loved and cared for them, she whined to him, I want a family! And if I can’t have that, a real friend! A playmate! Only this too her mother forbade even in the country, lest some thoughtless child reveal the truth of Golde’s origins. Minerva’s web of rules and subterfuge had protected the child so far, but it was futile to try to contain her body or her mind much longer. It was only a matter of time before she rebelled.
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