“You don’t think they—”
“Have a future as a couple. I doubt it. Samantha is clever, but Nathan is incredibly bright. He’ll probably need someone as bright as he is to keep up with him.” Joan thought for a minute and continued, “But Nathan did tell me that Samantha should go to his school so he could make sure none of the other kids bothered her.”
A wide grin spread across her face. “We may have to burn the cabin down sooner than we planned. I’ll tell you what else, after I talked to your father yesterday, I’m certain he knew about us from early on. When we were on the train he seemed to spend a lot of time showing us things. He sent the two of us off to the dining car for a sundae, as if we were a couple. He made sure we sat next to each other at all the meals.”
“You may be right. Remember when we had that big argument? He didn’t waste time trying to see who was at fault. Instead he told us, ‘both of you should be ashamed of yourselves to let your friendship end up in an argument. Each of you owes the other one an apology and I better never hear unkind words from either of you.’”
I sipped my coffee and pondered. “Come to think of it, my dad always made sure you had enough art supplies at my house so that we could keep working on our model railroad. Oh my God...I was continually building things and you were busy decorating and painting the things I had built. Remember? He would stop us every now and then to make sure we were planning together what would come next. After a while, I wouldn’t buy anything for the model railroad unless you and I discussed it. He saw that we were good for each other and continually put us in situations where we had to learn to get along and grow together. How many other fourth and fifth graders could have done that? He must have at least suspected.”
“I agree,” Joan exclaimed. “Whenever we had a disagreement over what you should build or how I should paint something, we would ask him and he would listen to each of us and then suggest how we could resolve our differences. I didn’t realize it then, but he never made the decision for us, but taught us how to resolve it ourselves—as a couple. Remember, when your parents invited my parents over to their house to see the railroad. I was surprised my mom and dad wanted you to show them what we constructed. I’ll bet they just wanted to get to know who was making their daughter so happy.”
“I didn’t know until recently that the summer we drove to the cabin, it was my dad’s idea that we take the Corvette. My mother told him that it was dangerous to let me drive that powerful little car, but Dad told her, ‘With Joan in the car, there was no way Meyer would do anything to put her in danger.’ Of course, he was right.”
“And that brings us to Nathan and Samantha.”
“What does?” Samantha ran up the stairs and into the pilothouse.
Joan replied to her with lines from Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter. “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said. ‘To talk of other things. Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax. Of cabbages and kings. And why the sea is boiling hot. And whether pigs have wings.’”
“Sometimes you guys are strange,” Samantha told us.
“What do you think of Nathan?” Joan asked.
“He’s nice, Mom, but he’s a boy, and you know about boys.”
“Didn’t he bring a book over to show you which whales, seals, and sea otters you might see during our trip?” I said.
“Yes, and that was nice, but then we argued. Remember, Dad? You interrupted us and said that we owed each other an apology and you never wanted to hear us talking to each other with such unkind words.”
“Oh really,” Joan said. “We certainly may have to burn that cabin down sooner than we planned.”
“Good morning, all,” Esther called to us from the main deck. “I am making Rainier cherry blintzes for breakfast, if anyone wants.”
“I’ll help,” said Joan.
“Me too,” yelled Samantha and followed Joan down to the kitchen area.
After breakfast, Joan and Esther sat in the pilothouse while Samantha and I went out on deck to look for whales and seals. After a while Samantha was tired and laid down for a rest so I joined Joan and her grandmother where they were sitting and chatting.
Over the next week, in between whale, eagle, and bear sightings, Joan and I learned about Manny and Esther Weiss. The following is her story as she told it to me.
Chapter Nine
~ Esther and Manny Weiss
I was born in 1895 in the capital of Romania. I was named Esther, after my mother’s sister who died when she was young. We came across the ocean to New York City in a big ship when I was eight. My father and brothers crossed before us and sent money for my mother, sister, and me to come to the US. We didn’t come over first class believe me. We slept with my feet in my sister’s face and her feet in mine. My sister, Shifrah, and I thought it was so funny. I was sure it was awful for the adults, but we were little girls and didn’t know better.
When we arrived in New York, there were people with the letters HIAS on signs, standing for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, at the dock to greet us. None of us spoke English yet so it was a blessing to get some help. They directed us to the train station so we could ride the rails to Chicago. When we arrived, we took a second train to Iowa, and when we arrived at that train station my father was there to greet us.
“Miriam! Over here,” he yelled to us.
“Avram! Here we are,” Momma yelled back.
Momma was so excited to see him. She was so happy I don’t think her feet touched the ground for the next two weeks. We moved into the little apartment over Papa’s dry-goods store and Momma began turning it from a little apartment into a warm home for all of us.
On Friday night when Momma was blessing the candles, Papa became teary eyed and could hardly recite the blessing for the wine. He was so happy Momma and his daughters were finally living with him. Naturally we sang Shehechianu in honor of our first Sabbath together in our new home.
Papa’s brothers were there as well. You wouldn’t believe how many times they thanked my mother for inviting them. I think that was partly because that Sabbath dinner was one of the few home cooked meals they had eaten since they arrived in Iowa.
Mother organized her household duties into a routine and then began visiting the store. “Looking at it with a woman’s eye,” Papa told us later.
She noticed that, while a lot of women shopped in Papa’s store, he didn’t have the bolts of cloth and sewing materials displayed in a manner that made it enticing for women to buy. She told papa to put the bolts of cloth in the front window and she made a dress from some of the cloth and hung it there.
Soon Papa was selling quite a bit of cloth and Mama was being asked to sew dresses for some of the store’s clients. While Mama had no time to make clothing for someone else’s family, she was always the business woman. She asked Lena, a widowed Italian friend who loved to sew, to come and sew clothing for Papa’s shop. Within a couple of years, the dress shop took up so much space and made so much money, Papa and his brothers built a small store by itself. Mama named the dress store Lena and Miriam’s Frocks. The two of them became great friends and remained so all their lives.
Jews were an integral part of our little community on the Mississippi River. A Rabbi came to our little town once a month and each Sabbath, one of the families had services in their home.
As I grew, I had a never-ending curiosity that I satisfied by reading. Also, I discovered I was something of an artist and spent lots of time drawing things that I saw in nature. Papa complained that he would go broke buying me art supplies. But let me tell you, anytime his Esther needed something for drawing, my Papa would make it magically appear in my drawing supplies box.
I loved school and I adored Mrs. Goldenberg, our school teacher. As she was also the religious school’s teacher, she taught me about Judaism and how to read Hebrew. She and her husband were frequent visitors at our home on Sabbath. I was an excellent student and even entertained thoughts of college.
One day, when I was
eighteen, my sister and I were out on a walk and suddenly we were confronted by two ruffians who had decided that they wanted see how the “Jew girls” looked without their shirts on.
The boys were much bigger than we were. I was scared and my little sister started crying. I was looking for a place to run, when I noticed Manny, the blacksmith’s son, coming up behind them. He was easily a head shorter than either of the ruffians, about the same height as me. He was wide and appeared rather pudgy.
“You should leave them alone,” Manny told them in a menacing tone.
They laughed at him and told him to go away. He walked right up to them and one of the boys threw a powerful blow into Manny’s belly. It hurt me to watch, but Manny didn’t even flinch.
In the blink of an eye, he had knocked their heads together. They fell to the ground but jumped up quickly. One of them grabbed a large stick and the other was using both hands to pick up a heavy paving stone. While the first ruffian swung the stick at Manny’s face, the other was slowly coming up behind him holding the large rock over his head. While Manny caught the stick in his hand before it hit his face, I jumped at the boy with the stone and pulled on one of his arms. That caused the ruffian to lose control of the stone which then came down and hit him on the head. He tried to turn toward me, but the blow to his head made him stagger sideways and he collapsed to a sitting position on the ground.
When I looked back at Manny, he had the other boy over his head. Manny threw him onto his collapsed partner as easily as my father threw logs onto a fire. The ruffian who I hit in the head with his own rock staggered to his feet. He glared at me and yelled, “You!” He started running toward me. His forward progress was abruptly terminated by a lightening blow from Manny’s fist into his face. He screamed in pain at what was probably a broken nose and at that point the two ruffians had enough and ran away.
Manny turned toward us and modestly said to me, “It’s a good thing you helped me, or that guy could have killed me with that rock.”
“No,” I told him. “If it wasn’t for you, this would have been a disaster for us. Those guys scared us and you saved us.”
“I can walk you home if you want,” Manny offered.
“I don’t think those guys will bother us again, but maybe you should walk us home anyway,” I replied.
As we walked home, Manny started telling me about the books he was reading that he borrowed from the school teacher, Mrs. Goldenberg. He said he was learning about material science and just loved it.
I asked why he wasn’t in school and he told me that he had to help his father at the blacksmith shop. But his mother made an arrangement with his father some years before she died, that Manny would be allowed to read at least two hours a day and all day during Sabbath.
I told him that I loved art and drawing. He told me that he couldn’t draw but that his favorite artist was Meindert Hobbema.
“He was a post-Renaissance Dutch artist who,” Manny informed me, “lived in the 1600s. I particularly admire his woodland landscapes. I’ve never seen one of his paintings in person, but I saw his work in some of the books I borrowed.”
At one point I tripped on some lose gravel and fell against him. It was like tumbling into a stone wall. He put one of his powerful arms around my waist to catch me before I fell further. Then he stood me up at once, as if nothing happened and we continued walking. Although he didn’t have his arms wrapped around me and he was only touching me for a few seconds, my body was reacting as if he had both his arms wrapped solidly around me for the last hour. In my young mind, I knew this guy was going to protect me, no matter what came along.
At one point I stopped and pointed out a cloud formation that I thought would be fun to draw. I grabbed his arm to stop him so he could see it, and I felt as if I was holding onto steel—he had looked pudgy but he was solid as an anvil.
As we gazed at the cloud formation, my little sister complained that it was just a cloud and there were lots of clouds.
“Use your imagination when you look at them and you can see many things, if you try. Also look at the texture of the clouds. Some are solid and dark, while others are soft, and some are wispy,” Manny instructed my sister.
Suddenly my sister was staring intently at the clouds as if she was seeing them in a new way. She started shouting out all the things she saw in them that she’d never seen before.
And I was staring at Manny, the blacksmith’s son, because I was seeing him in a new way too. My mind was shouting out all the things I was seeing in him for the first time.
Who was this guy? I saw him at Sabbath services occasionally, but had never talked to him before. Every time he opened his mouth, something intelligent fell out, like pearls from an oyster.
My little sister had never listened to anyone, but a few words from this blacksmith’s son and she was seeing images in clouds.
And the way he smiled when he looked at me—even now, thinking about the way he smiled at me, even after all these years—I could just melt.
We started walking again and I suddenly wanted to know so much more about the blacksmith’s son. “Do you always notice clouds?” I asked him.
“Well not so often, but my mother insisted I pay attention to the natural world. She told me its beauty gives us peace of mind and reminds us to be thankful for the beauty God put in the world for us to enjoy. I know she’s right, but personally I’d rather make a tool and put it to work.”
“You had a wise mother.”
“I hear you can draw,” Manny told me. “That’s special. I can see a tool in my mind and know how to make it but I can’t draw anything.”
“I’ll make a drawing of clouds for you because you rescued us today.”
“And I’ll make a box for you to keep things in, because you prevented my head from getting dented by that rock,” he said in that gentle laughing tone of his. We arrived at my house and I said good bye.
He glanced over his shoulder as he walked away. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”
“I’ll look forward to that.”
My little sister ran in the house ahead of me to tell our mother what happened. Upon entering the house, my mother approached me asking if I was all right.
“Shifrah and I are fine because Manny rescued us,” I told my mom with a huge smile.
“Manny, the blacksmith’s son?” my mother asked astonished. “I always thought he was such a dull boy. He doesn’t go to school. He hardly says anything to anybody.”
“I’m making a drawing for him because he rescued us,” I told my mother. “And he’s making some kind of a box for me because he thinks I helped him with those ruffians.”
“You’ll be lucky to get anything beyond horse shoes from that one,” my mother declared laughingly.
“Momma, when he stood, firmly as a rock, between your two daughters and those foul ruffians, even those dullards were smart enough to know that he wouldn’t let any harm come to us. I felt so safe once he was there—and he’s smart, Momma. He was telling me about something called metallurgy and how he uses it to make stronger tools at his father’s shop.”
My mother thought for a moment and said, “Yes, I remember the school teacher said that he read nearly every book at the school and she was getting him books on metals from the University Library to read. Okay, so you’ll give him a drawing and that will be that.”
“No, Momma. That will not be that. I’m going to marry him.”
“What? No! Marry a blacksmith’s son? No,” Momma declared. “You’re educated. You’re beautiful. You don’t even know him. You will not waste yourself on the son of a lowly blacksmith.”
Remember, this was in the days of arranged marriages. I was violating lots of community mores by deciding on my own whom I would marry.
“Talk nice about him, Momma,” I dared to say. “He’s going to be the father of your grandchildren.”
Momma was horrified and raged at me. “Wait ‘til your father gets home. He’ll put a stop to this foolishness.”
My father took me aside when he arrived. “What’s this I’m hearing from your mother? Is it true?”
“Yes, Poppa, it’s true. I know it in my heart that we should be together.”
“Have you talked to him about this?”
“No but I will and—”
“Then you better hurry,” my Poppa said, “because the story around town is that he and his father, Avram, bought a saw mill and forge in some tiny town in Washington State and they’re leaving in a month. They’ll move and you’ll never hear from him. And that will be better for all concerned. Believe me.”
My heart was pounding in my chest when I heard they were planning to leave town. I started working on Manny’s drawing immediately and made plans to visit the blacksmith’s shop.
Two days later, on my way home from school, I stopped by the blacksmith’s shop with my completed drawing.
The shop was a messy place with the smell of the hot metal, charcoal, and cigar smoke permeating the air. Pieces of metal were scattered all over the floor. Manny’s dad was short too. He wore a big leather apron and heavy boots and he had a cigar clenched between his tobacco-stained teeth. He had a big infectious grin and sparkling blue eyes.
He took the cigar out of his teeth and with a huge smile said, “So, this is who my son is getting mishuga over. How do I know he’s crazy over you? For years I can’t get my son to make anything out of wood. Metal. He only wants to know about making things out of metal. Suddenly, two days ago, he’s making a beautiful chest out of oak and cherry wood, with a cedar lining, and a special spring on the hinges so it’s easy to open and close the heavy lid. He spends so much time sanding it smooth, I tell him he’s going to sand it down until there’s nothing left. And you know what else? He gave up his reading time to work on this cedar chest for you. Little lady, I’ll tell you something, he never ever gives up his reading time, but he did give up his reading time to make something for you.”
Finding a Soul Mate (Meant to be Together Book 1) Page 11