Brothers. Brothers. The word stuck in my head.
Then I knew where I had seen the young man before.
And he had, in fact, been attacking a woman.
I started walking. After a moment, Behan followed.
“Excuse me, where is it we’re going?”
“Home,” I told him.
10
About a year ago, I asked my uncle why I had never gone to school like other children. He answered, “You did. For one day.”
I had no memory of this day. “What happened?”
“The children called you a whore.” He began to clean his glasses. “They said you lived in a whorehouse. At the end of the day, the teacher told me it was best if you did not come back. She seemed to think it would be impossible to persuade the children they were wrong. Perhaps she agreed with them, I don’t know. She didn’t strike me as a woman who had much to teach anyone.”
And placing his glasses back on his nose, he went back to his book.
I didn’t have to ask my uncle why he hadn’t just explained to the teacher that he did not in fact run a whorehouse, but a refuge where women would be protected from former employers while they learned the less dangerous trades of sewing and secretarial work. I didn’t ask if that was why, whenever I stood on the steps, waiting for an invitation to play, other children gave me strange looks or giggled before running off.
Nonetheless, during the long summer days, the boredom of chores and the drone of adult voices drove me outside, where I would lean on the iron banister of the steps, idly swinging my foot, trying to look disinterested in company, which I understood to be the best way to get it. It was also the best way to look as if I didn’t hear what children said when they ran by.
But one day, when I was about eight, a boy had marched up to the steps and offered a greeting. I noticed several things that served as warnings: he was a boy, a little older, and there was something in his smile I didn’t like.
But maybe this was how play started, so I nodded.
In a bright voice, he asked, “How much?”
That was when I saw two other boys waiting at a distance, their eyes bright with anticipation; rather than being asked to play, I was somehow the game.
Still, wanting to be wrong, I said, “How much is what?”
The waiting boys squealed and jiggled in excitement that they had gotten me to speak.
The other boy rolled his tongue inside his cheek. “I got a nickel.”
I still didn’t understand the joke, but I knew this was not a game I was going to win. I started inside.
“Aw, come on,” he called. “It’s a whole nickel.”
“But for all three!” called one of his friends.
There is something about mockery that renders you helpless. I knew I ought to defend myself, hurt them back. But I also felt worthless and foolish for being in this situation to begin with. All I could think of was how I might have spared myself this, what I shouldn’t have done. I shouldn’t have come outside, I shouldn’t have answered their questions, shouldn’t have shown any interest.…
The boy placed his foot on the stoop. His friends crowed, fairly hugging each other in excitement. He took another step and the space between us diminished very fast, along with the chance for escape. I was horrifyingly close to tears, which somehow I dreaded more than anything else, and when he grabbed my wrist, I screamed, “Get off!”
Just then the door to the refuge slammed open and there stood Berthe Froehlich, who had come to the refuge a few months ago. A tall woman with broad shoulders, big hands, and a pugnacious face, Berthe had plied her wares at McGurk’s Suicide Hall, a saloon so violent and degraded that a number of its patrons were inspired to end their existence—the record was six in a single year, with seven unsuccessful attempts. Berthe was one of the unsuccessful ones. Having purchased carbolic acid with intent to swallow, she had bolstered her courage with several shots of gin. Unsteady on her feet, her aim poor, she ended up pouring the acid on her face. Part of her upper lip was eaten away, giving her a permanent snarl, and her chest and arms were mottled with scar tissue. From one side, she looked almost normal; the other half of her face was a purpled slab of flesh with one wild eye glaring out at the world.
The waiters at McGurk’s were trained to eject suicides onto the street before they could expire, and that was where my uncle found her. He took her to the hospital, visited while she recovered, then brought her to the refuge. The other women steered well clear of someone so desperate and unfortunate, so Berthe spent most of her time in the kitchen.
Coming out onto the stoop, she held a broomstick, which she promptly slammed into the boy’s head, knocking him backward. Then she pointed it at all three and demanded, “Anyone else want a taste? I won’t take your nickel. This, I give for free.”
She advanced down the steps, swinging. The two other boys hesitated for the briefest moment, then ran off. The one with the nickel was bleeding from the nose. Clumsily, he wiped it, smearing blood across his mouth and chin. He looked dazed, unsure what had happened. Berthe told him, “I see you around here again, I jam this up your arse.” That seemed to wake him up and he raced down the street after his friends.
Before I knew it, Berthe had pulled me back inside. Then she slapped me.
“Did that hurt?” she demanded.
My jaw and neck ached and I could taste blood. But tears were somehow beside the point. I nodded.
“Good.” She crouched down and put gentle hands on my shoulders. “You remember that hurt. The next time you want to go out there and talk to boys, you remember that pain, how fast it came, too fast for you to stop it. You remember how hard I hit you because they would have hit you even harder and it wouldn’t have been only once. You remember how unfair it felt, how mad you are. And you remember there isn’t always going to be me or somebody else behind that door.”
Confused, I stared at her until I understood.
“Can I have a broom?”
She laughed and said, “Later. Later, I get you a broom.” Some of the other women were coming down the stairs for lunch. Seeing Berthe out of the kitchen, they paused in wary surprise. “Every girl needs to know how to use a broom, right, ladies?” There was general agreement, followed by a raucous discussion—most of which went well over my head at the time. But I remember that afternoon sitting at the table surrounded by laughing women and feeling that outside was not the only place to find friendship. The following day, Berthe took me into the backyard. Setting an old bucket on a stool, she handed me a broom and said, “For practice.” I swung—tentatively at first. Then with more energy and determination, finally smacking the bucket off the chair so hard it hit the fence.
Of course, I did go outside again, but I never approached children in the street or expected an open smile. Which was fortunate, because it was not an open smile that I saw in Anna. It was rage.
The year I turned twelve, I had been pouring water over the steps of the refuge to wash away the stink of urine that in the summer months rose straight into the open windows of the front parlor. I heard a scream from a nearby alley; in an instant, the old, half-buried memory of a boy, his hand gripping my wrist, a smile that was all teeth, became immediately vivid. As did the fierce pleasure of that broom handle landing with a crack. My fingers tightened on the bucket and I ran down the steps and toward the screaming.
In the alley, I saw a skinny girl kicking her way free of two young men. I hesitated—should I rush at them, swinging the bucket, or simply hurl it at them? While I debated, she flung dirt into one’s eyes and kicked the other solidly in the guts. Beaten, the men retreated. As I watched them go, I saw one was much bigger than the other; the second man was really a boy, with large ears and a soft child’s face, wrists sticking out of a shirt that had grown too short in the arms. Aware that he was being watched, he glanced back, then continued on his shambling way.
The girl looked at me as if I were crazy when I suggested telling the police. The young men, she exp
lained, were her brothers; they didn’t want to work, but they didn’t want her to work either. At least, not in a factory.
And then she ran off.
But she came back. All that summer, she came to the refuge on her way home. I was careful to let her in the back door, so she wouldn’t be seen going into what many still saw as a house of shame, and we sat in the kitchen and talked as Berthe peeled, chopped, and cooked. Anna was the first person I had known to look Berthe in the eye and show no squeamishness.
I never took her farther inside the refuge, out of some odd notion that if the aunts who cared for her ever objected, we could say she had only been in the kitchen, as if that would shield her from corruption. But once we heard a burst of chatter as the women made their way out of a classroom, and she said curiously, “So all the women here are—”
“Were,” I said, before she chose a word we didn’t say at the refuge. Then the words I had never had a chance to say to anyone else came tumbling out. “And it’s not what they were, but what they did, and not the only things they did. Some of them were wives or mothers or even had their own business. We don’t say they were…” I trailed off, thinking this had sounded better when my uncle had explained the distinction to me.
When she left, I worried that would be the last I saw of her, that the reality of my life was too ugly, too strange. But a few days later, Anna presented herself at the door. Arms stiff at her sides, she said, “My aunts want you to come to dinner.”
I stared at her. These were words I had never heard before; she might as well have spoken in Italian.
“Tonight,” she added. “Now.”
“I should ask my uncle.”
My uncle did not say no, did not say yes. He simply said, “Do you want to?” and when I said, “Yes,” waited for me to go.
Anna’s aunts, Theresa and Maria, both lived on Bayard Street. They not only lived on the same block, they lived in the same building, albeit on separate floors. The two women hated this because meals were a shared endeavor and it meant one of the two walking up or down stairs with heavy pots and platters of hot food. There was a family story that once, Theresa’s husband had had a notion of moving three blocks north so he might be nearer his restaurant. Maria had wept. Theresa had prayed. They both shouted. The move was never mentioned again. Maria’s husband had died some years ago; she sighed, changed her clothes to black, and went on with her life.
Describing them once, Anna had said, “You know when two babies are born and they don’t separate?”
“Siamese twins,” I said.
“Theresa and Maria. Two people, but they share one heart, one brain. One dies, we’re going to the other one’s funeral the next day.”
All blocks had good buildings and bad buildings—places owned by landlords who skimped on repairs; rented to tenants who were drunken, insane, or both; and let the structure rot around the people who lived there and paid money for the privilege. Some of the buildings did not have bathrooms, only one communal sink where all the tenants got their water. Anna and her family lived in one of these buildings. The front stoop had a chunk missing, the door lock no longer worked, and the first floor smelled sour. Apprehensive, I followed her up the dark stairs.
But then I smelled the food and heard the language as women called to each other, apartment to apartment. I had never smelled anything so rich, so generous. Anna took me past an open door on the second floor. Peeking, I saw a woman busy at a skillet and macaroni drying over a cupboard door. Then up to the third floor, where Anna held her arm out to another open door.
Once we were inside, she called, “Zia Theresa, ho portato la mia amica.”
Out of the kitchen came a woman, wiping her hands on an apron. She wore dark, heavy shoes and her hair in a bun. She had a strong face, with a long, Roman nose that ran between her heavy-lidded eyes and a smiling mouth of crooked teeth. She took my face in her large hands, patting and smoothing my hair as if I had been lost for a very long time and was now, thank God, home. In a low voice, she made observations to Anna I didn’t understand. Then she pulled me into the parlor, sat me down, and returned to the kitchen.
“What did she say?” I asked Anna.
She rolled her eyes. “She’s glad you’re here, that’s all.”
Zia Maria came upstairs, shorter and rounder than her sister. Everyone was called to the table. Anna’s brothers slid in, were introduced by Anna as “Carlo and Alessandro.” I put my napkin on my lap to avoid meeting their eyes. Food was put on my plate and we ate.
And ate.
The meals at the refuge were filling, but bland, cooked quickly, and lukewarm when they came to the table. Meat, vegetables, and starch made hot and so digestible; salt and onion were the only flavor. This food had been … created. Not that the cuts of meat or the vegetables were of the best quality, but you wouldn’t know it from the tenderness and flavor. There was macaroni in a sauce of red peppers, chicken cutlet fried in bread crumbs, and a dark green leaf limp and shining with olive oil. Carlo ate his food mechanically with his head down. If he remembered me, he didn’t show it. Alessandro, whom the family called Sandro, tried to follow his brother’s example. But every once in a while, his eyes would dart my way, meet mine, and drop again. The three women spoke in Italian; the boys didn’t speak at all. I didn’t understand the words, but I felt the emotions: humor, irritation, uncertainty, enthusiasm, sharp dislike. Carlo cleared his plate and left—for work, he claimed. Not looking at him, Maria made an inquiry. I heard doubt in her voice, but Carlo ignored it, slamming the door as he left. There was a short pause, then Theresa gestured that we should all go back to eating.
At one point, Theresa caught me staring, and asked Anna something. Anna shook her head.
In explanation, Theresa said, “You.” Then she touched her ear and widened her eyes; I was being imitated.
“She asked if you speak Italian,” Anna added. “If you understand.”
I shook my head. “But I would like to learn.” Anna translated.
“Me, too,” enunciated Theresa. Then she pointed to Anna and began, “How—”
But that was as far as her English went and she said the rest in Italian.
“She wants to know how we met each other,” said Anna. Sandro looked up, eyes darting. He suddenly seemed very small to me, with his plump cheeks and anxious expression. His ears really were ridiculous.
“Some boys were bothering me,” I told Anna. “You scared them away.”
She rolled her eyes at me, but she must have repeated what I said, because her aunt smiled and patted her arm approvingly. Sandro glanced over, but it was my turn to stay focused on my plate.
When the meal was over, I wanted to help clear. But as I reached for a plate, the women looked panicked and Anna said, “Nobody touches the dishes except Maria. They’re from her mother and she loves them more than God.”
Maria didn’t understand the words but clearly knew her niece was being rude. Tutting, she pushed my hand away and gathered the plates with such care they might have been baby chicks.
I visited often after that. They never let me touch a dish. But I didn’t feel I could keep eating their food—and such food—with no contribution. So, I watched for my chance and after one meal, I quietly collected the knives and forks and brought them to Maria, who was starting her work at the buckets that served as their sink. I laid them carefully one by one on a cloth on the counter. She didn’t say anything, but from the quick raise of her eyebrows, I knew I hadn’t failed.
The next time, I was allowed to bring the cutlery and the glasses. The next, I was allowed to dry them. Finally, I was permitted to hold and dry the plates themselves, copying Maria’s gentle, unbroken circles. When I said, “Belle,” she smiled in conspiracy: we knew what beautiful things were.
Anna complained good humoredly, “You never let me near the sink.” Without turning around or breaking the rhythm of her strokes, her aunt explained why this was so. At the end, she said in English, “Jane … is … care
ful. She cares.”
I never knew if Maria and Theresa understood their niece’s politics. They had never worked outside the home and neither of their husbands had ever been involved with labor disputes, as they often hired the latest cousin or friend’s nephew to arrive in this country. When Anna had first started organizing, she had gone door-to-door in apartment buildings, knocking on doors and handing out leaflets. One time, she had come back with a blackened eye and a chipped tooth. After that, the aunts took turns accompanying her; while she spoke, an aunt stood behind her with a rolling pin.
But when I went to work for Mrs. Armslow, I saw Anna and her family less. Sometimes, when I did see her, we argued. She often talked about the one great strike that would happen when all the workers were organized. It would, she imagined, bring the city to its knees. I sometimes wondered which was more important to Anna: organization—the community and collaboration that implied—or bringing the world to its knees. Anna could be ruthless. If an effort did not contribute to the desired end, she had no interest. If it did, she pursued it with a ferocity of devotion that no lover would ever command. She seemed to have been born knowing what the world was and what it ought to be. At least until a year ago.
A year ago, Josef Pawlicec, an associate of hers, had pleaded guilty to the murder of Norrie Newsome, claiming that the young Newsome had been executed for his industrialist father’s crimes. In the months that followed, Anna had had high hopes that the American working classes would be inspired by this act to rise up. But the working classes had given no sign that they were aware of Mr. Pawlicec’s brave example, much less inspired by it.
This had led to a melancholy period of reflection; Anna was not used to doubting herself, and she liked it no better than any of us do. But she saw the necessity of it and dedicated herself to the task with her usual unflinching resolve. Over dinner one night, she confessed that perhaps she had misjudged the usefulness of violence.
“In some countries—Russia, say—when you kill a wealthy man, it means something. The people understand you have struck that blow for them, they see that the rich are not all-powerful, they can be fought. They understand that they are in a war and that there are sides. But in America, everyone—everyone, even the man who cleans garbage in the streets—thinks one day they’ll be rich. They don’t see Frick or Carnegie as the enemy, they see them as something they want to be.” She threw up her hands. “So if you attack them, they see it as an attack on their fantasies of ‘someday.’ ‘I’m poor now but someday, I’ll be an Astor.’ Insanity.”
Death of a New American--A Novel Page 11