City of Orphans

by Avi

  “Got any money?”

  “A little from my last pay.” She lowers her voice. “People try to steal it. Tell Mama I really need to see her.”

  “I’ll bring her. I promise. And you won’t be here long,” Maks says without knowing it to be true.

  Emma grips his hands again, pressing and kissing them. She wants to hear family news, everything, even ’bout Monsieur Zulot.

  Maks tells her what he can: Ryker being given an American name, Ronald. She smiles at that. Tells her ’bout Willa. “Her parents died. She was living in some alley. She helped me, and Mama told me she should move in with us.”

  “Bless Mama!”

  “But I don’t know if Willa’s gonna do it.”

  It’s hard for Maks to leave, but he promises he’ll come back soon. Emma can’t let go of him. She keeps holding on to him, saying she loves him.

  The guard leads him out. “Can’t my sister get a better cell?” he asks.

  “Kid, The Tombs got six decent cells. You want ’em, you grease palms. You’re old enough to know that. What’s in charge is money.”

  Maks goes back through the building. It’s busier than when he first came, full of people looking either important or miserable. He wants to go up to one of the important ones and tell ’em Emma is innocent. But he knows no one’s gonna listen to a kid.

  At the entrance a policeman asks for his ticket. For a moment Maks forgets where he put it. Thinking it’s lost, he panics, only to find it inside a pocket. When he finally gives it over, it’s all creased and wrinkled.

  When he’s told he can go, he all but runs.

  Except, when he gets outside The Tombs, Willa ain’t there.

  27

  Okay. What happened to Willa?

  She’s on the steps of The Tombs when Maks heads up them toward the entryway. When she sees him go in, she stares at the big building, trying to make up her mind what to do. Then she turns round and starts walking.

  She goes quickly, only to stop and then go on again, slower. Tense and uncomfortable, she speeds up. See, during the past few months, working by the East River on garbage barges, or under the docks picking out usable rags, people avoided her. She was alone most of the time. Became used to it. Didn’t care what she looked like.

  Now she’s uneasy that Plug Uglies might be watching her, that she’s in danger. She don’t like having to walk crowded streets on guard, holding her stick so if that gang sees her, they’ll know she’ll hit back. That time in the alley with Maks wasn’t the first time she’d used her stick, but it was the worst. That fight frightened her, made her feel unsafe—not that she was going to tell Maks.

  And she knows she’s dirty.

  Willa reaches Birmingham Street, and when she gets to Maks’s tenement, she stands on the stoop, scanning the street. No Plug Uglies. But two little girls on the street run up, and one of them calls, “Hey, lady, you live here now?”

  “I . . . don’t know.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Willa.”

  “Mine’s Miriam.”

  “Mine’s Selena.”

  Giggling, they run off.

  Willa goes slowly up the murky stairs, not sure what she’s going to do. She pauses on the third floor, considers going down. But keeps going up. Then, just as she’s ’bout to open the flat door, she halts. Realizing she’ll be alone with Maks’s mother.

  And more . . .

  Senses that by going in, she’ll be staying with this family. That this will be her home. That these people will become her family. That she’ll return here always.

  Those thoughts bring memories.

  Willa remembers her mother as warm and close, someone who liked to smile. She had a quiet voice with a German accent, which Willa noticed only when they went marketing and her mother talked to people.

  Those times with her mother were calm and steady. Though her father wasn’t around much, it didn’t seem to matter. Then her mother got ill—coughing more and more, talking less and less. Ate less. Became very thin. Weak. As she grew sicker, her eyes seemed to get larger, darker. She hardly smiled. Spat blood. A lot. The day came when she took to bed and stayed there.

  Willa took care of her, was her constant companion. She cooked for her. Cleaned the rooms where they lived. The only time Willa went out was to the market. She had no friends.

  Their rooms were like those where Maks lived. But Willa’s building wasn’t as old, the kind of tenement called a “dumbbell,” with an open central shaft that allows for light and air. Electricity and running water. Each floor, its own toilet. The house smelled cleaner too.

  Willa’s mother often asked her to sit by her side. Not that they talked much. Each day Willa combed her mother’s hair. She thought it very beautiful.

  For long hours Willa just held her mother’s hand. As her mother’s hands grew thinner, her wedding ring kept slipping off. One day she gave the ring to Willa and told her she must take good care of it. “Use it for your own family,” she said with a sad smile.

  There were moments when Willa thought she’d caused her mother’s illness. No reason to think so, ’cept that being well, she felt guilty. Fact, sometimes she wished she’d get sick, so she could be the same as her mother.

  Most days and nights her father was gone. As Willa understood it, he was working, but she didn’t know what he did. She asked her mother, but her mother never said, not exactly. Something ’bout collecting money for an important person. Willa sensed that what her father did wasn’t a good thing. That it worried her mother, made her ashamed. But Willa felt it’d be better not to ask.

  When her father and mother spoke to each other, it was mostly in German, so Willa didn’t understand what they were saying. But they usually sounded angry.

  Sometimes, after her parents talked, her mother cried. When Willa asked her why, her mother only said, “Promise me that you’ll never lie.”

  Willa promised.

  Those times when her father came home, he would give Willa some money to buy food and pay the rent to Mrs. Barsis, the landlady who lived on the first floor.

  He didn’t give much attention to Willa. Mostly, he read a newspaper. Willa tried to please him by being quiet, not asking for anything.

  Her mother grew weaker. Sicker.

  The day Willa’s mother died, Willa’s father wasn’t home. Terrified, not knowing what to do, Willa waited for him to return. When, after many hours, he still didn’t come, she went to Mrs. Barsis and told her what had happened. Mrs. Barsis came right to the rooms. She covered the body with a sheet and told Willa to go find a policeman, tell him what had happened. Then the woman fled to her own rooms.

  Frantic, sobbing, Willa ran through the streets looking for a policeman. It took an hour.

  When the body was taken away, a city medical officer told Willa her mother died of wasting disease.

  “Are you alone?” he asked Willa.

  “My father will come,” she said.

  That night Willa stayed in the apartment alone, struggling to keep from crying. Next day, when her father did return, she told him what happened.

  “Where did they take her?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t you ask?”

  Willa shook her head.

  He said, “What kind of a daughter are you?”

  Willa wept.

  That evening her father sat in his chair. He was very cross. When Willa tried to talk to him, he said she needed to leave him alone. When she made supper for him, he wouldn’t eat.

  In the days that followed, Willa stayed home, tried to keep up the rooms for her father and herself. Never knowing when he might return home, she remained inside, ’fraid if she went out, she’d miss him. When he did come, he barely talked.

  Two weeks later Willa waited three days for him to return. She sat in their rooms or on the front stoop by the sidewalk. He didn’t show up.

  On the fourth day she wandered though the city looking for him. She searched fo
r a week, spending days on the streets, nights at home, looking and waiting. For food, she ate what was left in the pantry.

  He did not return.

  On the eighth day of her searching, she came home to find people living in their rooms. She didn’t know who they were. They spoke a language she didn’t understand. She got Mrs. Barsis to go with her into the apartment, where she took a doll and a tin box.

  “Where are you going to live?” Mrs. Barsis asked.

  “I have to find my father.”

  “He’s not a good man,” said the woman.

  “Why do you say that?”

  When the woman wouldn’t answer, Willa didn’t want to have anything more to do with her.

  From then on, Willa lived on the streets.

  Always clinging to her doll and box, she went and sat on the front stoop of the house where she used to live, hoping her father would return. Or maybe he’d leave word where he went.

  He never did.

  After a while Willa stopped going back to the house, but she stayed on the streets. One day a street peddler noticed her sitting on a curb, begging. He told her she might find work in the garbage dumps by the East River.

  She worked there picking rags—sometimes finding food—earning ten cents a week. And—as another girl working there told her—if she stood on line after midnight at St. Peter’s Church near Fulton Street, she might get a loaf of old bread.

  When Willa could, she searched for a safe place to sleep. It took weeks to find the walled-in place in the alley. She’d been living there for five months when Maks found her, too tired to climb back into her hole.

  Now, as Willa stands outside the door of Maks’s family’s flat, she tells herself again that this is her new home. That it’s a good thing. That she likes Maks. That he’s a good friend. That his family is kind.

  This is my new home, she tells herself, pushing down the sadness she keeps feeling. It’s good.

  Willa opens the door and steps inside.

  Mama is sitting at the table. Startled, she looks up.

  “Willa! Is something the matter?”

  “Can . . . can I have a bath?”

  28

  Back to Maks.

  When he comes out of The Tombs, all he can do is sit on the steps. He’s exhausted, upset, scared, his chest hurting as though he were breathing fire.

  He keeps thinking how awful it is for Emma to be locked up like some animal. To be told she stole something when she didn’t do nothing.

  Find the watch, he’s thinking. Sure, might as well find a way to keep Agnes from coughing. Or keep the shoe factory open. Or find a million bucks on the street.

  He reminds himself he needs to buy the day’s papers, start selling. They’re gonna need every penny. Maks even thinks ’bout getting a job selling a morning paper—maybe The Times. He’d have to get up by four in the morning. Peddle The World in the afternoon. He could do it.

  Though Maks knows he needs to get to Papa and then Mama to tell ’em what Emma said, he keeps sitting there.

  He’s worried what’s gonna happen when he tells his parents how bad it is for Emma. He knows how scared they are. Even if they get a lawyer, how are they gonna pay him? What’s a lawyer supposed to do, anyway? Talk ’bout sending Emma back to Denmark is terrible. And now she needs money for food. And they need a doc for Agnes. Nobody’s saying it, but the money Emma made at the hotel was big. It’s gone.

  What are his parents gonna do?

  And Willa. Where’d she go? Maks wonders if he’ll ever see her again. The thought comes to him that maybe the Plug Uglies got her. Naw, she knows how to fight back. Glad somebody does.

  But Willa never said she’d move in with the family. He thinks ’bout how mad she was when he told her what Mama said. Don’t understand why.

  He remembers Willa’s alley. It’s the only place he knows where she might have gone. Could look for her there. But he don’t have the time. Has to get to Papa.

  Forcing himself up, Maks walks the twenty blocks to Stanton Street, to the shoe factory where Papa and Agnes work. Dreading talking to Papa, he goes slowly, stopping to watch men dig in the streets, as they always seem to be doing.

  As he looks on, he thinks ’bout that joke how in America it’s easy to find gold in the streets. With all the digging they do round town, Maks sometimes thinks they’re looking for it under the streets.

  Well, good luck!

  29

  The factory where Papa works is a three-floor wooden building. On the first floor they make chairs and tables. The second floor, suits and coats. It’s on the top floor that they make the shoes.

  Maks goes up the wide steps, which are on the outside of the building. As he climbs, he hears hammers and saws on the first floor; steam and clacking scissors on the second.

  The third floor is big, open, crowded, murky. Just a few skylights, mostly coated with soot and ash. Most light comes from dangling, flickering electric lamps. People work half in light, half in shadow, over large tables. It all stinks of leather, dye, horse glue, and people. Tobacco smoke floats through the air like layers of cake.

  There’s constant noise: the steady slicing of knives and scissors, the ripping of leather, the tat-tat-tat of shoe nail hammers. The wizzy-wizzy of stitching machines. Always gives Maks a headache.

  The foremen—there are a few of ’em walking ’bout the floor—bark at workers, praising ’em or pointing out mistakes, urging everyone to work faster, reminding ’em that they make their money by the number of shoes they turn out each day.

  In one corner there’s a big, whining electric motor that runs the leather drive belts—belts that go up to the ceiling and then down, running the cutting and stitching machines on the floor. The wide belts and machines scare Maks. People have lost fingers. Someone lost a hand. Agnes once told him the factory joke: “What do you get if you lose a hand? A free, one-way carriage ride to the hospital.”

  Well, good luck, again!

  It’s always hot—even in winter—with maybe fifty guys working in sweaty undershirts, hairy chests open. Every time Maks visits, he’s reminded of the goblin shoemakers from the bedtime stories Mama used to tell.

  What Papa does is cut thin leather for ladies’ shoes. Works twelve hours a day with large scissors—thank goodness—not a machine. The pay? Dollar twenty cents each day, depending on how many leather pieces he cuts.

  Naturally, if you get sick, you don’t get paid.

  As for Agnes, she puts laces into finished shoes. Her wage: twenty-five cents the day.

  Papa once told Maks he got his job because his hands were big, but Agnes got her job because her fingers were small. “Best thing ’bout America,” Papa once said, “she uses all kinds.”

  It takes Maks a while to spot Papa. He’s at the far end of the floor bending over a large table cutting red leather from a pattern. Every time he cuts a piece, he sets it in a pile, then marks a little book. That way the foreman can’t cheat on his wages, which Maks knows they sometimes do.

  Papa is so hunched over his work that even when Maks is standing right next to him, he don’t notice.

  “Papa?” Maks shouts. “Papa!”

  With a start, Papa looks round. Seeing Maks, he drops his scissors and leans toward him, big hands gripping Maks’s shoulders, sweaty face close. “Did you see her?”

  Maks nods.

  “Is it . . . bad?”

  “Yeah.”

  Papa groans.

  Agnes appears from somewhere, listening, staring at Maks with her big eyes. She says, “What did she say?”

  Quick as he can, Maks repeats his conversation with Emma. As he speaks, he keeps looking away from Papa ’cause his father’s eyes are full of misery. It upsets Maks. Mostly, he talks to Agnes.

  Agnes gazes at him, hardly blinking, listening intently, now and again clearing her throat or stifling a cough.

  “And,” says Maks, “she’s going on trial.”

  “On trial!” cries Papa, stepping back, like a boxe
r getting hit by a really hard punch.

  “She can’t get free,” says Maks, “till we find the watch.”

  “What watch?”

  “The one they say she stole. And, Papa, she needs money for food.”

  “Don’t they feed her?”

  “Geless!” a voice booms over Maks’s head. “Why ain’t you working?”

  Maks looks up. It’s the foreman, a man he knows as Mr. Purnham. Tall, with curly black hair, Mr. Purnham always wears a straw hat cocked at an angle. “You’re losing money, Gelesses. The both of you! Who’s the kid?”

  “He’s my son,” says Papa, fingering his mustache.

  “You find a lawyer?” Maks whispers.

  Papa says, “Agnes is trying. Expensive, probably.”

  With a worried look at Purnham, Papa steps away from Maks, picks up his scissors, and bends over his table, starting his clipping again.

  Agnes heads back to her work, calling, “Maks! Go tell Mama!”

  “Go to school, kid!” Purnham yells. “Learn to make money. Take care of your pa in his old age! Ha-ha!”

  Papa darts a look at Maks. “Go tell your mother. We’ll talk later.”

  In the dim light Maks sees Papa’s eyes are brimming with tears. The sight fills Maks with pain.

  “Bye,” he mumbles, and walks away till he reaches the outside steps. He stops, looks back. Papa is making a mark in his book. Agnes is somewhere else. The thing is, the factory don’t seem no different than when he got there: loud, with everyone slaving. All Maks can see is that all these bad things are happening, but people just keep working. Makes him angry. But the next moment—like a punctured balloon—he’s telling himself, What else people gonna do?

  30

  When Maks gets out of the factory, it’s lunch hour, so the streets are packed. People are alone, in twos, threes. Some talking, some laughing. Staring straight ahead. Going, always going. He wonders where. Wonders if it even matters.

  Maks, standing at the bottom of the factory steps, only sees crowds of people who don’t care. He’s full of heartache, but no one is seeing it. No one even looks at him.

  For a moment he thinks of going to Willa’s alley. No time.