by Noah Gordon
The first day Rachel was back in school, she was subdued. That afternoon, when the children were gone, she came back from the outhouse shivering and crying.
Shaman came and put his arms around her. She made no protest, just stood between him and the stove with her eyes closed. “I loathe Peoria,” she said quietly. “Hateful, meeting so many people. My mother and father … they placed me on display.”
It seemed reasonable to him that they were proud of her. Besides, she wouldn’t have to go to Peoria again for a whole year. He said nothing. He didn’t even dream of kissing her, happy just to stand in contact with her softness, certain that nothing a man and a woman did together could be better than this. In the briefest of moments she pulled back and considered him gravely through wet eyes. “My steadfast friend.”
“Yes,” he said.
Two incidents brought revelation to Rob J. On a sharp November morning, Shaman stopped his father on the way to the barn.
“I visited Miss Burnham—that is, Mrs. Cowan—yesterday. She asked me to give you and Mother her best regards.”
Rob J. smiled. “Oh? That’s fine. I suppose she’s becoming accustomed to life on the Cowan farm?”
“Yes. The little girls seem to like her. Of course, there’s a lot of work, only the two of them.” He glanced at his father. “Pa? Are there lots of marriages like theirs? That is, with the woman older than the man?”
“Why, Shaman, it’s usually the other way around, but not always. I suppose there are a good many.” He waited for the conversation to go somewhere, but his son merely nodded and wandered off to the academy, and he went in and saddled his horse.
A few days later he and the boy were working together in the house. Sarah had seen some floor coverings in several homes in Rock Island, and she had begged Rob J. until he agreed she could have three floor coverings of her own. They were made by sizing canvas cloth with resin and then applying five coats of paint. The result was mudproof, waterproof, and decorative. She had employed Alex and Alden to apply the resin and the first four layers of paint, but had drafted her husband to supply the finish.
Rob J. had mixed the paint for all five coats, using buttermilk, store-bought oil, and finely ground brown eggshells to make a good paint that was the color of new wheat. He and Shaman had applied the final surface together, and now, on a sunny Sunday morning, they were painstakingly adding a thin black border around the outside edges of each floor covering, trying to finish the job before Sarah came home from church.
Shaman was being patient. Rob J. knew that Rachel waited for him in their kitchen, but he saw that the boy didn’t try to hurry their work as they applied the decorative border to the last of their three projects. “Pa?” Shaman said. “Does it take a lot of money to be married?”
“Hmm. Considerable.” He wiped his small paintbrush on a rag. “Well, it varies, of course. Some couples live with her family, or his, until they can make it on their own.” He had made a stencil of thin wood in order to make his work easier, and now Shaman moved it along the painted surface and he applied the black paint, bringing their work to an end.
They cleaned up the brushes, put things away in the barn. Before he turned back to the house, Shaman nodded. “I can see that it would vary.”
“What would vary?” Rob J. asked absently, his mind already dwelling on exactly how he was going to drain the fluid from Harold Hayse’s grossly swollen knee.
“The money you would need to get married. It would depend on how much you made from your work, how soon a baby would come, things like that.”
“Exactly,” Rob J. said. He was mystified, puzzled by a feeling that he’d missed a vital part of their conversation.
But a few minutes later Shaman and Rachel Geiger walked past the barn toward the house road. Shaman’s eyes were on Rachel so he could see what she was saying, but watching his son’s face, Rob J. understood at once what it revealed.
As certain things fell into place, he grimaced.
Before he tended to Harold Hayse’s knee, he rode to the Geiger farm. His friend was in his toolshed, sharpening a pair of scythes, and smiled a welcome without stopping the sweeping rasp of the stone against the blade.
“Rob J.”
“Jason.”
There was another whetstone and Rob J. picked it up and began to work on the second scythe.
“I have to talk with you about a problem,” he said.
40
GROWING UP
Winter’s last diehard layer of snow still dominated the fields like a thin frosting when Rob J. set into motion the spring activities on the sheep farm, and Shaman was startled but pleased to be included in the work plans for the first time. Always before, he’d done only occasional chores and had been left to pursue his studies and his voice therapy. “This year we sorely need your help,” his father told him. “Alden and Alex won’t admit it, but no three men can do the work Comes Singing used to do all by himself.” Besides, he said, every year the flock grew and they enclosed more pasture. “I’ve talked with both Dorothy Cowan and Rachel. They both feel you’ve learned everything you can at the academy. They tell me you don’t need the voice exercises anymore, either, and”—he grinned at Shaman—“I must say I agree with them. You sound fine to me!”
Rob J. was careful to tell Shaman the arrangement wouldn’t be permanent. “I know you don’t want to farm. But you help us out now, and we can be thinking about what you want to do next.”
Alden and Alex took care of the slaughtering of lambs. Shaman was set to work planting brush borders as soon as the ground could be penetrated. Split-rail fences were no good when you had sheep, because the animals had little trouble escaping between the rails, which also admitted predators. To mark off a new pasture, Shaman plowed a single strip around the perimeter, then he planted Osage orange close enough to form a thick barrier. He sowed carefully, because the seed cost five dollars a pound. The orange trees grew strong and brushy, with long wicked thorns that combined to keep sheep in and coyotes and wolves out. It took three years for Osage orange to make a hedge that would protect a field, but Rob J. had been growing thorn barriers from the start of the farm, and when Shaman had finished planting new hedges, he spent days on a ladder, cutting back established ones. When the trimming was done, there were field stones to be coaxed from the ground, firewood to be worked up, posts to be made, stumps to be worried from the earth at the edge of the woods.
His hands and arms were scratched by the thorns, his palms became callused, his muscles ached and then toughened. His body was undergoing developmental changes, his voice deepening. At night he had sexual dreams. Sometimes he couldn’t recollect the dreams or identify the women in them, but several times he had clear memories of Rachel. At least once, he knew the woman had been Makwa, which confused and frightened him. He did his futile best to remove the evidence before his bedsheet was added to the laundry for boiling.
For years he’d seen Rachel every day, and now he seldom saw her. On a Sunday afternoon he walked to her house and her mother answered his knock. “Rachel is occupied and can’t see you now. I shall give her your best, Rob J.,” Lillian said, not unkindly. On an occasional Saturday evening, when their families joined for music and fellowship, he managed to sit with Rachel and talk about the school. He missed teaching the children arithmetic, and asked her about them, and helped her plan future lessons. But she seemed strangely ill-at-ease. Something he loved about her, a kind of warmth and light, had been dampened, like a fire with too much wood. When he suggested they go for a walk, it was as if the adults in the room waited for her reply and didn’t relax until she said no, she didn’t care to walk right now, but thank you, Shaman.
Her mother and her father had explained the situation to Rachel, speaking understandingly about a young boy’s infatuation and stating plainly that it was her responsibility to guard against showing him any kind of encouragement. It was very hard. Shaman was her friend and she missed his company. She worried about his future, but she
was poised over a personal abyss, and trying to see into its murky depths claimed most of her anxiety and fear.
She should have realized that Shaman’s infatuation would be the precipitating force for change, but so strong was her denial of her future that when Johann C. Regensberg came to spend the weekend at her parents’ home, she accepted him at once as a friend of her father’s. He was an affable, slightly plump man in his late thirties, who respectfully referred to his host as Mr. Geiger but asked Jason to call him Joe. Of medium height, he had lively, slightly squinting blue eyes that peered thoughtfully at the world from behind metal-framed spectacles. His pleasant face was balanced nicely between a short beard and a head of shrinking brown hair that rode atop his scalp. Later, Lillian would describe him to friends as having “a high forehead.”
Joe Regensberg appeared at the farm on a Friday, well in time for the Shabbat dinner. That evening and the next day he spent in leisure with the Geiger family. On Saturday morning he and Jason read the Scriptures and studied the Book of Leviticus. After a cold lunch he inspected the barn and the apothecary shop and then, bundled against an overcast day, walked along the road with them to see the fields that would be planted in the spring.
The Geigers ended the Sabbath with a supper of cholent, a dish containing beans, meat, pearl barley, and prunes, that had been cooking slowly in hot coals since the previous afternoon, because Jews were enjoined from kindling a fire during the Shabbat. Afterward there was music, with Jason playing part of a Beethoven violin sonata and then deferring to Rachel, who enjoyed finishing it while the stranger watched with evident pleasure. At the end of the evening Joe Regensberg went to his huge tapestry suitcase and drew presents from it, a nest of bread pans for Lillian, made in the tinware factory he owned in Chicago; a bottle of fine aged brandy for Jay; and for Rachel, a book, The Pickwick Papers.
She observed that there were no gifts for her brothers. At once she knew the significance of his visit and was overtaken by terror and confusion. Through lips that felt stiff and numb she thanked him, telling him she liked the writing of Mr. Dickens but thus far had read only Nicholas Nickleby.
“The Pickwick Papers is a particular favorite of mine,” he said. “We must discuss it after you read it.”
He could not be described as handsome by anyone honest, but he had an intelligent face. A book, she thought hopefully, was a first gift an exceptional man would give a woman in these circumstances.
“I thought it a suitable gift for a teacher,” he said, as if he could read her mind. His clothes fit better than the clothes of the men she knew; probably his were better made. When he smiled, there were humor wrinkles in the corners of his eyes.
Jason had written to Benjamin Schoenberg, the shadchen in Peoria, and for insurance had sent another letter to a marriage broker named Solomon Rosen in Chicago, where there was a growing Jewish population. Schoenberg had replied with a flowery letter, stating he had a number of young men who would make wonderful bridegrooms, and the Geigers could meet them when the family came to Peoria for the High Holidays. But Solomon Rosen had acted. One of his best potential grooms was Johann Regensberg. When Regensberg mentioned he was about to travel to western Illinois to call upon outlets that carried his tinware, including several stores in Rock Island and Davenport, Solomon Rosen arranged the introduction.
Several weeks after the visit, another letter arrived from Mr. Rosen. Johann Regensberg had been very favorably impressed by Rachel. Mr. Rosen informed them that the Regensberg family had yiches, the true family distinction that comes from many generations of community service. The letter said that among Mr. Regensberg’s ancestors were teachers and biblical scholars, back to the fourteenth century.
But as Jay continued to read, his face darkened with insult. Johann’s parents, Leon and Golda Regensberg, were dead. They were represented in this matter by Mrs. Harriet Ferber, sister of the late Leon Regensberg. In an attempt to follow the tradition of her family, Mrs. Ferber had requested that testimony or other proofs be furnished regarding the virginity of the prospective bride.
“This is not Europe. And they are not buying a cow,” Jason said thinly.
His cool note of refusal was answered at once by a conciliatory letter from Mr. Rosen, withdrawing the request and asking instead if Johann’s aunt could be invited to visit the Geigers. So a few weeks later Mrs. Ferber came to Holden’s Crossing, a small, erect woman with gleaming white hair pulled back against her skull and woven into a knot. Accompanied by a hamper containing candied fruits, brandied cakes, and a dozen bottles of kosher wines, she, too, arrived in time for the Shabbat. She took pleasure in Lillian’s cooking and in the musical accomplishment of the family, but it was Rachel she watched, and conversed with about education and children, and obviously doted upon from the start.
She was not nearly as forbidding as they had feared. Late in the evening, while Rachel cleared the kitchen, Mrs. Ferber sat with Jay and Lillian, and they acquainted one another with their respective families.
Lillian’s ancestors were Spanish Jews who had fled the Inquisition, first to Holland, then to England. In America they had a political heritage. On her father’s side she was related to Francis Salvador, who had been elected by his Christian neighbors to the Provincial Congress of South Carolina, and who, while serving with patriot militia only a few weeks after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, became the first Jew to die for the United States, ambushed and scalped by Tories and Indians. On her mother’s side she was a Mendes, cousin to Judah Benjamin, the United States senator from Louisiana. Jason’s family, established pharmaceutical manufacturers in Germany, had come to Charleston in 1819, fleeing the riots in which crowds had coursed the streets looking for Jews and shouting “Hep! Hep! Hep!”, a cry that went back to the Crusaders, formed by the initials of Hierosolyma est perdita, Jerusalem is lost.
The Regensbergs had left Germany a decade before the Hep riots, Mrs. Ferber disclosed. They had had vineyards in the Rhineland. They didn’t have great wealth but enjoyed financial comfort, and Joe Regensberg’s tinware business was prosperous. He was a member of the tribe of Kohane, the blood of high priests in Solomon’s Temple flowed in his veins. If there was a marriage, she indicated delicately to Lillian and Jay, their grandchildren would be descended from two chief rabbis of Jerusalem. The three of them sat and contemplated one another with pleasure, drinking a good English tea that had come out of Mrs. Ferber’s opulent hamper. “My mother’s sister was named Harriet,” Lillian said. “We called her Hattie.” No one called her anything but Harriet, Mrs. Ferber said, but with such warm good humor that they found it easy to accept when she invited them to Chicago.
A few weeks later, on a Wednesday, all six members of the Geiger family boarded a locomotive coach at Rock Island for a direct five-hour rail trip, without changing trains. Chicago was large, sprawling, dirty, crowded, shabby, noisy, and, to Rachel, very exciting. Her family had rooms on the fourth floor of Palmer’s Illinois House Hotel. On Thursday and Friday, during two dinners at Harriet’s home on South Wabash Avenue, they met other relatives, and on Saturday morning they attended worship services at the Regensbergs’ family synagogue, Congregation Kehilath Anshe Maarib, where Jason was honored to be called to the Torah to chant a blessing. That evening they went to a hall where a touring opera company was presenting Der Freischütz, by Carl Maria von Weber. Rachel had never before attended an opera, and the soaring, romantic arias transported her. At the first interval between acts, Joe Regensberg led her outside and asked her to be his wife, and she accepted him. It was accomplished with little trauma, because the real proposal and acceptance had been accomplished by their elders. From his pocket he took a ring that had been his mother’s. The diamond, the first Rachel had ever seen, was modest but was set beautifully. The ring was a bit large, and she kept her fist clenched so it wouldn’t fall off her finger and be lost. When they slipped back into their seats the opera was resuming. Sitting in the dark next to Lillian, Rachel took her mother’s
hand and placed it on the ring, and smiled broadly at the instantaneous gasp. As she allowed the music to carry her gloriously back into the German forest, she realized that the event she had feared for so long might actually be a door to freedom and a very pleasant kind of power.
The hot May morning she came to the sheep farm, Shaman had worked up a heavy sweat mowing with a scythe for several hours and then had begun to rake, so he was covered with dust and chaff. Rachel wore a familiar old gray dress with dark heat moisture already beginning to show under her arms, a wide gray bonnet he hadn’t seen before, and white cotton gloves. When she asked if he could walk her home, he dropped the rake gladly.
For a while they talked of the academy, but almost at once she began to tell him of herself, of what was happening in her life.
Smiling at him, Rachel took off the left glove and showed him the ring, and he understood she was to marry.
“You’ll move away from here, then?”
She took his hand. Years later, thinking of the scene again and again, Shaman was ashamed he hadn’t talked to her. Wished her a good life, said what she had meant to him, thanked her.
Said good-bye.
But he couldn’t look at her, so he didn’t know what she was saying. He became like a stone, and her words rolled off like rain.
When they reached her lane and he turned away and started back, his hand ached because she’d held it so tightly.