Family Secrets
A Novel
ONE
In March of 1902 the rains never seemed to stop; there were floods all over the eastern part of the United States, and the part of Brooklyn the immigrants called Mudville was a sea of mud. The fixers, the peddlers, the people who worked out of doors, were driven inside, not only to keep from being drenched to the skin but because there was no business outside. Only a fool or a starving man would stand in such a rain. The coffee houses were full. Not only the men who sat there all day talking their business deals were there, but also those for whom the coffee house was ordinarily only an after-work luxury. It was better than the crowded rooms in which they lived, filled with the shouts and gabble of women and children and the smells of cooking and bodies and poverty and everyday life.
Adam Saffron had been sitting in the coffee house for nearly two weeks now. He was a fixer: a mender of chairs mostly, although his fingers were blessed and he could fix almost anything you gave him to repair, quickly and neatly. It was not his wish to be a chair mender, and certainly not his life’s ambition, but it was the first job he had fallen into when he stepped off the boat, and it fed him and his wife, Polly, and the baby, Leah Vania, who was almost two and walked and talked already. He was twenty-four years old, he could speak English, and he had a small apartment with an indoor toilet for himself and his family. But he was not meant to remain a fixer for the rest of his life and he knew it, and so he sat in the coffee house and listened to the men who made business. These men bought and sold land without even setting foot on it. They knew where each lot was and what could be built on it, and so they bought and sold and never got their hands dirty. That was a job for an intelligent man, a clever man. It seemed to Adam, as he sat there nursing his cup of tea, that the only thing a man needed to do such business was a persuasive tongue and money. But if a man had no money, as he had none, then an intelligent man needed a persuasive tongue and a stupid partner who had money but no charm, no brains, and no gift of talk—in other words a man who needed someone to make deals for him with his money. Adam had considered several such possibilities, but the best one seemed to be Yussel, a big loksch who wanted to be liked and always made stupid deals that lost money. If anyone was to buy a piece of land that was impossible to sell, it was Yussel, and that was a feat, for they were buying everything, buying in the morning and selling that night. A man could make three hundred dollars in a single day.
Adam bit into the piece of sugar and holding it in his teeth sipped the tea through it, as he had done as a boy in Russia and would probably always do, although the Americans preferred to stir the sugar into the tea. That was what a rich man would do, not afraid to waste sugar; an American, who did not have to spend his life scheming of ways to make every little good thing last longer. There was Yussel in the corner with friends, his broad flat face beaming, slurping his tea from the saucer like a cat. A Hungarian, a peasant, but rich in this rich land, and so he could do as he pleased. There were those who drank their tea from a glass, and those who drank from a cup, and those who slurped from saucers, and there were those who drank coffee, and each showed his national origins and his wish to assimilate or to remain apart by this simple, natural act. Adam knew that what he saw everyone else also saw, and so he had begun to drink his tea from a cup instead of a glass, thus remaining somewhere in the middle, a man who could adjust but a man no one would really know.
He kept his eyes on Yussel, knowing that after a while the other men would drift away to join other groups, and then he could make his move. Yussel already liked him; Yussel liked everybody. And Adam had been listening to and learning the business talk around him until he knew exactly how to buy and sell a piece of land. But he had done one thing more, because he was new at this and had much to learn—he had left the coffee house every evening before supper and walked through Mudville, getting drenched and dirty and cold but hardly feeling it, walking and looking and imagining what could be done with such a place. It was a dreadful-looking place, even uglier in the rain. But a clever man could build cheap houses there, rent them to immigrants who would live anywhere as long as the rooms were big enough to house their large families and there was an indoor toilet. The houses could be ugly, they could be built all in a row and attached, which would be much cheaper than building separate buildings, and the immigrants would rent there because the apartments would be clean and new and the idea of being close to their own landsmen made them feel safe. These businessmen in the coffee house were clever, but they lacked imagination. To them Mudville was not real; it was a piece of paper, a handful of money, a deal, an abstract. But Adam saw it teeming with life, with sidewalks, with children running along those sidewalks and horse-drawn carts filled with produce being hawked along those streets. He saw the immigrant women coming out of their row houses, drying their reddened hands on their aprons and haggling with the peddlers for their family’s dinner. He could hear them shrieking at their children to come in because dinner was ready, and he could see the immigrant husbands coming home from the factories, tired, sweaty, looking forward to a bath in their own kitchens.
This was his vision, but he would tell nobody, not because they would laugh at him but because it was none of their business. He would do it, step by step, and then when it was done they would wonder why they had not thought of it themselves. When he came home every night, soaked and muddy, Polly was upset because she thought he had been out trying to find chairs to mend, and she worried for his health. She filled the bathtub with hot water for him and dried and pressed his suit, cleaning it as best she could. She sighed over his ruined shoes, stuffing them with old newspapers as they dried to keep them from warping out of shape, cleaning and polishing them when they were dry, shaking her head sadly over her good man and watching him go out into the day to ruin his shoes all over again and not come back with a penny.
“Must you go out today?” she would ask softly. “We have enough saved to last until the rain stops. There’s enough to eat, Adam. Stay. You’ll be sick.”
He would silence her with a look and pick up the baby, squeezing it hard in a hug until it screamed. Then the baby would wave at him from the doorway, one fat hand in her mother’s thin one, the other waving at him. “Papa, Papa, Papa,” the little voice would pipe, and Polly would smile.
It was Polly who had been taken sick, not he, and now she had been in bed for a week, burning with fever and coughing. It was the influenza. Everyone had it; it spread from house to house in the rain and the damp. She was a good woman, intelligent, tall but not strong, and she was his first cousin. His family often married cousins; they met each other at family occasions, were attracted, fell in love. If you married a cousin you knew the family, you were not likely to end up with bad blood. It was safer than marrying a stranger. Her family had come to America about the same time as his, and because he had known them back in the old country it was natural to become close with them here in the new one. Polly was as talented with her hands as he was with his. She sewed and embroidered ladies’ clothes at home, and so helped him make a living. She always wore clothes she had made, and they were a living advertisement in the neighborhood when they went for a walk. Now that she was sick in bed it was lucky they had the family; there was always a cousin or an aunt in the apartment, tending to Polly, feeding and dressing the baby. He never had to worry about them, and that was good, for a man’s work was in the world and he should not have to spend his time worrying about what was going on in his home. If he could make his first business with Yussel today he would have something good to tell Polly at last, and although perhaps she might not understand it, it would make her happy because she would know it was good. If he had some money in his pocket he would bring the doctor. Even though the cousins and the old aunts had all their home remedies from the old country, this was the new country, and maybe the doctor knew something they didn’t know.
He saw the men who had been sitting with Yussel say their goodbyes, and Adam stood slowly and walked over to Yussel’s table. “So nu, Yussel? Vas machst du? May I sit a minute?”
Yussel beamed. He was happy to see anybody who would be nice to him, and he was not a snob. A fixer was as good as a businessman because a fixer was needed too. How would life go on without those who worked with their hands? His father was a wealthy merchant of yard goods, and as Yussel saw it, how could he sell those yard goods if someone else hadn’t first made them? It was the only clever thing Yussel had ever thought of all by himself, and so he liked to repeat it to anyone who would listen, hoping they would think he was a philosopher.
“Please sit,” Yussel said. “Will you have tea?”
“Why not?”
Yussel laughed. “Why not? Yes, why not? There’s nothing else to do today but drink tea until a man floats away.”
“I have an idea for you and me to do a little business,” Adam said.
And so the first part of his plan happened. He persuaded Yussel to put up the money to buy a lot, and then Adam sold the lot at a profit to one of the dealers in the coffee house, and by the end of the day Adam and Yussel were three hundred dollars richer, half of it for each of them, and not one of them had gotten their hands dirty, not one of them had set a foot out of doors into the mud. Yussel was as delighted and proud as if he had done it all himself.
“We make good partners, you and I,” he said.
“We do,” Adam said.
“You have the gift of gab. When I talk, I put my foot in my mouth. With you talking and me being the financial power, we could do very well together.”
“That’s true,” Adam said. “But we could do more than trade one lot. What is a lot?”
Yussel looked blank. “What’s a lot? Everybody knows what a lot is.”
“I mean,” Adam said patiently, “what is it for?”
“It’s for … for trading.”
“But why do we trade it?”
Yussel brightened. “To make money!”
“But why, besides making money?”
“I don’t like it when you talk in circles,” Yussel said.
“We trade it,” Adam said, “because it is a piece of land that someone, some day, will build houses on. Now, we have been trading land that everybody wants, and it’s easy to sell a piece of land to a man who already has another piece of land next to it, because when he has enough land he wants to build on it and then he really makes money. So, my plan is this. Why don’t we buy some land that nobody wants, get it very cheap, and then we build on it?”
“Why do we want something nobody wants?”
“Because we have imagination. We see what it could be.”
“But who would build there, on this land nobody wants but us?”
“We would,” Adam said.
“I thought you said that,” Yussel said. “But would somebody want it after we built on it?”
“Of course. The people who would rent apartments from us.”
“You mean we would be landlords?”
“We would be landowners and builders and landlords.”
Yussel breathed a heavy sigh. “Oy, that takes a lot of money. Where could we get it?”
“From the bank.”
“What would we use as collateral?”
“The land.”
“What land?” Yussel said. “What is this magic land that nobody sees is wonderful but us, that we will get cheap and that will make us rich men?”
“Mudville.”
Yussel’s excited face turned glum. “You’ve been making fun of me.”
“I’m serious,” Adam said. “We buy a big piece of Mudville. You with all your bad luck, and me, a fixer with no brains, how could anyone do anything but laugh at us? They will sell us as much land in Mudville as we want and think good riddance. And the bank will give us money, not as much as we would like, because they will think we’re fools too, but enough. We won’t be building palaces, you know. We’ll be building good, cheap houses for people who have no homes to live in.”
“If you say it can be done I believe you,” Yussel said. “I’m willing to put up the money if you do the rest. But I wouldn’t tell anybody. I’d be too embarrassed.”
“They’ll find out soon enough,” Adam said.
With a hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket and wet feet Adam got off the streetcar and walked the two blocks to his apartment house. What a story he had to tell Polly tonight! First the story, then the doctor. No, first the doctor, then the story. He walked up the steps to his front door and suddenly there were women all around him—wailing women in babushkas and sheitels, crazy women, strangers, neighbors, all of them weeping and babbling like lunatics. He tried to push his way through them but hands grabbed at his sleeves. He recognized one of them at least, Tanta Yettel, his ancient aunt.
“Oh, my Adam,” she said, and burst into tears. Her eyes were red as if she had already been crying for hours.
“What is it?” he said, and the first thought that popped into his mind was that something had happened to his mother.
“Polly is dead.”
TWO
The day of the funeral the rain stopped, and Adam thought that life was strange because it was the rain that had started him on his great plan to become a success in life and it was that same rain that had taken his wife away. Afterward the small apartment was filled with friends and relatives. The women brought cakes and pies they had baked, platters of noodle pudding, chicken, beef, potato pancakes, cookies, bread. They sat and stared at each other and tried to think of things to say, and sometimes one or another of the women cried. They had every intention of sitting shiva for the entire prescribed time, and as far as Adam was concerned it was a waste of part of his life. Dead was dead. The dead lived on in the minds and hearts of the living. God had not made heaven and hell, the goyim had, and if they wanted to believe in such things and frighten themselves to death it was their pleasure, not his. Heaven or hell were here, on earth; he had seen plenty of evidence of both. He had seen plenty of devils who were human, without worrying about one with horns and a tail.
He left the apartment, and the women were sympathetic, thinking he needed to be alone with his grief. He went to the coffee house to find Yussel, and told him what had happened. Yussel was full of sympathy.
“I’m a bachelor myself, but I feel for your sorrow.”
“Ya, ya.” Adam nodded solemnly. “Now, you remember that we are still going to buy that land. Next week, on Monday, I’ll be here to meet you and we’ll start to work.”
Yussel nodded and clasped Adam’s hand. “Work is good medicine for grief. My mother used to say that, may she rest in peace.”
“Your mother was a smart woman.”
It was not so bad in the apartment in the evenings, for then the men came back from work and Adam had someone to talk to. He could never talk to women. He looked around at the faces of the people he had known for years, so many of them married to relatives, so many of the faces alike, all of them looking for security in a hard world and a strange land. A man should be married. A man should not live alone like a dog.
The baby screamed in her bed in the night. Polly’s younger sister, Lucy, rose immediately and went into the dark room to comfort her. She came out carrying the baby, soothing her with soft words and little kisses. Adam watched them. Lucy was so young and small, only twenty. She almost never spoke, which he liked, and when she did her voice was gentle and she never said anything stupid. She was small, but she was not frail looking. Polly’s height had been deceptive; she was thin and she had not been strong and she had died of an illness that took old people and babies. Looks could fool you. He followed Lucy into the kitchen.
“I’m making tea, Adam. Would you like some? Or would you prefer coffee?” She was speaking to him in Yiddish.
“You don’t speak English?” he asked.
Lucy blushed. “Oh, yes,” she said in English. “I studied at night school. But sometimes, with the family, I feel more comfortable when I speak Yiddish …” She smiled shyly and buried her face in the baby’s soft hair. She still had the child cradled in one arm, the child half-asleep now, her face cuddled in Lucy’s neck, drooling on her clean white shirtwaist. With the other hand Lucy kept on measuring the spoonfuls of tea. It was a small, square, capable hand.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Adam said.
“I’ll put her back to bed soon,” Lucy said. “She had a bad dream. She misses her mother and she doesn’t understand what happened.”
“She needs a mother.”
Lucy nodded and hoisted the baby higher on her hip.
“She’s too heavy for you,” Adam said.
“No, it’s all right.”
“I’ll take her. You make the tea.” He took Leah Vania from Lucy’s arm and realized how heavy the child must have been for her. He liked a woman who loved children. The baby recognized him in her sleep and put her fat arms around his neck. Lucy smiled at them.
“What a pretty picture that makes,” she said.
“A sad picture,” Adam said. “A young man alone, twenty-four years old, and an orphan child. I suppose they’ll put her in an orphanage now.”
Lucy paled. “Oy, no! We would never let them do that!” She put her fingers delicately to her lips and made a soft puffing sound into them: her way of spitting on the floor to keep away evil, her gentle New World version of the coarse Old World custom she still believed in.
“I have to work hard all day to make a living,” Adam said, “Who would take care of the child?”
“We will! All of us. I promise you, Adam, they would have to kill me first before I would let them take away your child.” The color had returned to Lucy’s face and she was having trouble catching her breath. He hoped she wouldn’t cry. He hated women who cried. She didn’t cry: she turned to the kettle in which the water had begun to boil and deftly wrapped a dish towel around the handle, then poured the freshly boiling water over the tea leaves and put the cover on the teapot so the tea could steep. Then she looked at him again. She was breathing normally.
“I think I would rather have coffee,” Adam said.
“Yes? All right,” she said calmly, and took the tin of coffee from the shelf.
“No, don’t bother,” he said. He put his hand on her hand. He was glad that she didn’t recoil. Her hand was very cool.
“If you want coffee, of course you shall have it,” Lucy said matter-of-factly. He saw how quick and neat she was, without a wasted motion. She was shy, but she was not uncomfortable with him; she was, after all, his first cousin as well as his sister-in-law. She respected him and was fond of him, but Adam sensed that she was not afraid of him, and he liked that too. A shy, quiet woman was good; a frightened, silly one was a trial for life.
“So, nu?” he said pleasantly. “What are you going to do with your life?”
“Do?” She looked at him in open amazement. What else was there for a woman to do but hope to have a good husband and healthy children? Her look searched him to see if he was teasing her, and then she seemed satisfied that he was not. “I don’t know how to talk philosophy,” she said.
“I wouldn’t want you to.”
“Good.” She smiled almost mischievously. “See, the coffee is boiling already. Would you like a piece of cake with it? There is some which is fresh today and I put it aside for you.”
“Did you make it?”
“No.”
“But is it good then?”
“Yes.”
“Tomorrow is the last day we all sit shiva,” Adam said. “It will be lonely here.”
“I know,” she said softly. He liked the way her moods shifted along with his, as if she were his own shadow; instantly, instinctively sympathetic, following the lights and darks of his spirit. “Please will you come spend Shabbas with us?” she said. “Both Friday night and Saturday.”
“That is not what I want,” he said. “I will not live in other people’s houses.”
“We’re not ‘other people’—we’re family.”
“No.”
“Then no,” she said.
“Will you marry me?” Adam said.
She looked at him for a long moment and he noticed that her eyes were green. “Yes,” she said. “But on one condition.”
“A condition you’re giving me?”
“Yes. I know that in time, please God, we’ll have children, and I want them all to be equal. I want Leah Vania to be my child. She’s so young, soon she won’t remember her mother. I want all our children to be true brothers and sisters. I don’t want anyone to tell them.”
Adam felt a great wave of contentment wash over him. He had chosen well. “I promise,” he said.
Lucy held out her arms. “Now give me my daughter,” she said, “It’s time I put her back in her bed.”
When Adam married Lucy in six weeks, everyone felt it was a good move; it was the old, respected way for a man or a woman who was widowed to marry quickly, and preferably marry the next of kin, for it held the family together even more tightly, and the family was safety. In the meantime, Adam had begun to buy land in Mudville, using Yussel’s money, and there were very few in the coffee house who were loyal enough friends to come forward and tell them what fools they were. This pleased Adam, for he knew people were talking about him and Yussel behind their backs, laughing at them, and the more they laughed the easier the land in Mudville became to buy. Soon they owned enough to start a small community. Then he went to the bank, where the people told him it was a risky venture but seemed impressed by his confidence in himself. He knew which men were the best builders; they had to be fast and cheap, but their houses had to be safe. He would not build houses that fell down or burned down and killed people. A man did not have to be a killer to make money.
In August, when the land was dry and hard from the summer sun, the builders began to build on what had once been a sea of mud and now was nothing worse than a barren and ugly foundation which could be quite serviceable. The fact that there was nothing around it did not bother Adam. He would also build some suitable stores and perhaps even plant some trees. He would take out a few ads in the Yiddish language newspapers, and between that and word of mouth, the apartments would be rented in no time.
Lucy was pregnant, and remembering his promise to her, Adam moved their little family to a new neighborhood. No neighbor women remembered Polly in her stylish dresses walking down the street with Leah Vania, nor the funeral, nor his remarriage. Lucy was his wife, Leah Vania was their child, and he noticed with approval that the little girl was going to look exactly like him. She had his clever little eyes and his clear, intelligent forehead. She remembered everything she heard, like a little monkey, both English and Yiddish, and babbled and prattled away in both interchangeably.
There was only one problem with the child, which Lucy told him about sadly. Polly had been fond of wearing a long purple cape, which she had sewn herself, and during the spring which had passed after her death it had become stylish for many women to wear such a long purple cape—and so when Lucy took Leah Vania out for a walk often the child would see a tall woman in a purple cape from the back and run after her, screaming: “Mama! Mama!”
“I am your Mama,” Lucy would say, and the child would look at her with those clever little eyes filled with confusion.
“When will she forget?” Lucy would ask him.
“Nu, she’ll forget. An adult forgets, so a child can forget.”
“She screams at night, Adam. You sleep, you don’t hear her.”
“All children scream. That’s why I snore, so I can’t hear them scream.”
He would take the child on his lap and bounce her up and down. “Nu, nu, nu, my little monkey. You will be good to your Mama? You will obey your Papa?”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Then give me a kiss.”
“Nooo …”
“Why no?”
“Moustache!” the child would shriek, putting her hand gingerly on its bristly surface, and then she would put her arms tightly around his neck as if she was determined never to let him go. He would have to pull those little arms open, comfort her screams, and hand her to Lucy, thinking how glad he was to be a man and so not have to take care of children.
When Lucy’s child was born and it was another girl he was not too disappointed. It was good for two sisters to be close in age; then they could be friends. The baby was beautiful, with giant clear eyes as green as grass, much prettier even than her mother’s. Her nose seemed to turn up, and her hair was golden. A regular goy, he thought, amused. Now he hoped the next one would be a boy.
But the next child was a girl also, plain-looking but placid. Leah Vania was six, ready for school in the fall, and they had moved to a larger apartment in the same building. Lucy’s mother was living with them now, the son she had been living with having died and no one else in the family financially able to care for her. She was an Orthodox old woman who wore a sheitel and kept strictly kosher, poking around the pots and pans to make sure she was not being poisoned by tref, speaking only Yiddish and making a general pest of herself. But family was family, and it was good that she was there to watch over the two older girls while Lucy was busy with the new baby.
Adam’s dream of Mudville had come true. The row houses were filled with immigrant families, the streets were filled with children playing and peddlers hawking their wares, and the stores were rented too, one a kosher butcher, one a store for yard goods and things for making clothes, and one a grocery. Adam was pleased with his new tenants. He went by there every day to check on things, to make sure a toilet had not broken or a naughty boy had not smashed a window playing ball in the street. He was making money, and he was respected. Even Yussel was respected.
Yussel would have been happy to spend the rest of his days in the coffee house, telling and retelling the story of how he and Adam Saffron had been great visionaries who had foreseen all this when other men had not. But Adam was ready to buy more land and build again. This time his credit was good, he was known, and he had his choice of men who wished to invest with him and a loan from the bank. He decided to stay with Yussel, but in the back of his mind he was not sure how long it would last. Yussel was of small mentality, he was content with what they had now and although he was excited at the prospect of something new he was also afraid it would all be taken away from them. Because he did not understand business or finance, Yussel regarded it all as a sort of magic. They had magically been lucky, and he could hardly understand that, so they could magically be unlucky, and although he could not understand that either, at least it was something he was used to.
Adam decided to build more houses with Yussel, and in the meantime look around to choose other men with more money and more vision. He already had a vision of his own. The next building he built would be tall, maybe even ten stories, with an elevator in it, such as very rich people had in their homes, and it would be used only for business. Doctors and lawyers could have offices there, companies could do business—not dirty business like a factory but clean business with paper work and figuring and clean girls in starched white shirtwaists typing business letters on typewriters. Men in suits and hats would have appointments, and there would be serious conferences in quiet rooms with desks that shone of good wood and carpets on the floors so not a footstep could be heard. That was beyond Yussel’s imagining, and also his purse, so Adam did not speak of it to him. He concentrated on the new family dwellings he was building and bided his time. He hired a young man he liked and trusted to take his place as watcher in Mudville, to go there every day as he had done and see that everything was all right. The people liked knowing that their landlord cared about them, and having the young man there was the only way Adam could be sure they would be good tenants and not turn the place into a pigsty. He hoped that it would not be a long time before his wife started having sons. By the time they grew up there would be a great deal for them to do.
THREE
It was fall, and it was Leah Vania’s first day at school. School! How long she had dreamed of it, wishing to be old enough. Now she could learn to read. She had seen the grownups with their books, studying English, squinting over the pages, and she had longed to be able to read a book. She could speak English already, so it could not be too hard for her to learn how to read words. Her heart was pounding with happiness as she skipped along the street with her hand in her Mama’s. She was all dressed up in the dress her Mama had made for her first day at school, and her Mama was all dressed up too because it was the first time a child in the family, born in America, an American child, was going to an American school. Leah Vania knew she had been born in Brooklyn, New York, United States of America, and was a citizen.
They approached the large red building and suddenly Leah Vania was afraid she was going to cry. She choked back the tears and looked at her Mama, who was smiling proudly.
“Will you come for me at three o’clock, Mama?”
“Yes, of course, mein kind.”
“You won’t forget me?”
“I’ll think about you all day and be happy.”
“You promise you’ll come?”
“I promise. I’ll wait outside here until you are in. You go in this door here with the girls. Go. They look like nice girls. You’ll meet friends. Go, and be good and do everything your teacher tells you.”
Her home room was cool and smelled of dust and chalk and feet. There were boys and girls both in the class, all the same size and age, the ones who had been noisy in the street quiet and frightened now, all of them awed by their first day in the first grade. They had to line up and walk to the teacher single file. She was a tall, stern-looking woman with a huge bun, red. Leah Vania had never seen red hair before and she stared at it. It sat on the top of her head like a big tomato, and under it her face was long and white like a radish, the kind you made horseradish from. Her name was Miss White. She sat behind her huge desk with papers and pencils on it.
“Name?” she said.
“Leah Vania Saffron.”
The teacher shook her head as if she were trying to get a fly out of her bun. “No, no, your American name.”
“It is my American name. Leah Vania.”
“Yes, well, from now on your name is Lavinia. We don’t have foreign names here. Go sit in that row with the S’s.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Leah Vania now Lavinia murmured, and went to the row where she was supposed to sit. The teacher had already forgotten her and was changing the next girl’s name. Lavinia, Lavinia … it was pretty. It sounded like a flower of some kind, a scent. It sounded like lavender, that’s what it sounded like. Mama kept lavender sachet in the dresser drawer with her secret things. Lavinia … it was so American!
Lavinia sat at her desk. Her old name sounded foreign now. She wanted to be like everybody else here and to be liked. She had been named after old dead relatives back in Russia, but this was Brooklyn, and Lavinia Saffron was the most beautiful name she had ever heard.
Miss White was standing now, talking to the class. “Keep your hands on top of your desk at all times. If I don’t see your hands at all times I will hit them with this ruler.” She waved the ruler menacingly. “No talking. You will answer questions when I call your name. If any of you has to go to the bathroom you will raise your hand and wait until I call on you, then you will ask permission.” She pointed with her long, wooden ruler at the American flag hanging limply from a tall pole in the corner near where she stood. “Now, children, we will learn the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.”
At three o’clock when the bell rang Lavinia raced out of doors with the other children, bursting with the need to shout, to giggle, to run, to move her aching legs and arms and back. She had never sat so long, so stiffly, in one place in her life. It had been horribly embarrassing to raise her hand to ask to go to the bathroom in front of the boys, but worse to think of what would happen if she wet her bloomers. She had been so afraid someone might whisper to her and make her get hit by that big hard ruler that she had kept her eyes looking straight ahead at Miss White every minute, never even glancing at any of the other girls, and so she had not made any friends but she had not gotten hit either.
But it was all worth it even so, because finally, after learning that long boring pledge that they would have to recite every day, they had been given their first glimpse of the mystery of life: Miss White had written the alphabet on the blackboard. Lavinia had a notebook and some pencils which her Mama had bought her, and she had copied the letters into the notebook to study and learn. Soon they would be put together into words, and then she would be able to learn everything in the world.
“I love school!” she said to her Mama.
“I’m so glad. You must tell Papa. He’ll be proud of you.”
That night while he ate supper she told him. “I love school, Papa. We got the alphabet and we learned to pledge allegiance to the flag, and my teacher’s name is Miss White.”
He was obviously pleased with her. “Good, good. It’s good that you should learn. I want you to be good and listen to your teacher.”
“I do. And Papa, my name is Lavinia now. That’s what Miss White said. It’s my American name.”
“Nu? American name?” he seemed amused.
“So please, Papa, could everybody in this house please call me Lavinia from now on?”
“You like it better than Monkey?”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Very hoity-toity.” His eyes twinkled and he pounded his fist on the table. “From now on everyone in this house will call Leah Vania Lavinia!”
“Vus? Vus?” her grandmother, the old witch, grumbled from her seat at the end of the table. She couldn’t stand it when they spoke English.
“The child is telling us about school,” Papa spoke in Yiddish.
“She talks too much,” the old lady said.
For once Lavinia couldn’t care less what the old witch said, because she was so happy that her Papa was pleased with her.
But such happiness had to end, and afterward she wondered how she could have been so dumb and innocent. School was a place where the teachers were always watching for ways to be cruel to the children, and the children always had to be on guard not to get hit or slapped or made fun of.
One day Lavinia knew her tooth was going to fall out. She moved it with her tongue, back and forth, trying to tell how long it would be before it came out altogether. She liked losing teeth because it meant she was growing up. This one was nearly ready to pop. If she just gave it a little nudge with her finger … she did, and it came out white and tiny in her hand. The hole filled with blood, which did not disgust her at all because she was used to it, and she swallowed it so it wouldn’t mess her dress. But of course some did get on her dress, it always did.
“Ooh,” the girl sitting next to her whispered, “you’re all bloody!”
“Lavinia Saffron!” Miss White shrieked triumphantly, striding down the aisle between the desks, waving her famous wooden ruler. “You were talking!”
“No, ma’am,” Lavinia said. “I didn’t say a word.” She held up the tooth. “I lost my tooth.”
“You pulled out your tooth—in class—and then you had to tell your friend, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t tell her, she saw it.”
“Liar! Liar!” Miss White grabbed Lavinia’s arm and pulled her up out of the seat. “I hate a liar.”
“I’m not a liar.”
She was dragging her now, almost pulling her arm out of its socket, the ruler smacking her on the bottom, on the shoulder, on the backs of her legs, wildly. “I’ll show you what I do with liars, Miss Liar.”
The school room was completely silent. Miss White dragged Lavinia out into the hall, down the hall, and then opened a door and shoved her into a dark closet.
“In you go, Miss Liar,” Miss White said, and slammed the door shut.
It took a few seconds for Lavinia’s heart to stop pounding, and then she realized that her eyes were never going to get used to the dark in the completely dark closet. She couldn’t tell which was front and which was back. Fuzzy shapes brushed the top of her head and she screamed and jumped away, hitting her shoulder on one wall. They were only coats, not bats. They smelled. There was no air in there, none at all. She was going to smother. She tried hard to breathe, but her terror and the closed-in darkness choked her and she knew she was going to die. It was so unfair! She began to cry, great gulping sobs, and felt the blood from the empty tooth socket running down her chin. She still had the little tooth clutched in her hand. Her tooth, a part of her, part of her life, her growing up. Now she would never grow up, she would die at six years old, and nobody would save her ever. Papa and Mama thought she loved school, they thought she was good, they didn’t know that she was going to be murdered by Miss White. It would be a slow death, by suffocation. She lay on the floor and it felt fuzzy with dust. Maybe there were bugs there, maybe rats or spiders. She sprang to her feet in fear and felt the fuzz stuck to her chin, her face. She wiped her face with the skirt of her clean dress and tried to breathe, but the harder she tried the more she couldn’t. She began to feel dizzy, and knew she was going to fall down.
And just before she fainted on the floor of the dark coat closet Lavinia knew one terrible last thing: she had wet her bloomers.
At three o’clock Miss White opened the door and pulled her out and told her to go home. Lavinia went to the girls’ bathroom first and vomited into the toilet. Then she washed out her mouth and washed her face, drying it with the awful towels they gave you. She tried to wipe off as much of the dust and dirt and blood from her dress as she could. She smoothed her hair and then hurried downstairs and out of the building. She went home alone now, because she knew the way and Mama was busy with the other children.
She was relieved that no one she saw along the way paid her the slightest attention. They all seemed used to the sight of a little girl in a terrible mess and assumed she had been playing.
In the front of the apartment building where they lived there was a small yard—not much, just enough for some grass and a few flowers which the ladies like Mama planted to make the place look nice. There was Grandma, the old witch, in her black dress and her black wig which was always crooked, revealing some wisps of white hair, and her black kerchief tied over it, kneeling down in the front yard mumbling angrily to herself and burying something.
“Vas machst du, Grandma?” Lavinia called.
“Tref,” the old woman snarled, “Tref, tref.”
She was burying the silverware in the front yard, in front of the whole world to see!
“Grandma, why are you putting the silverware in the ground?” Lavinia asked her in Yiddish.
“The milk forks she used for meat, I saw her, and the spoons too. All of it, poisoned.”
“Mama?” Lavinia said, surprised.
“No, the girl, stupid. They have a girl now, to help, a Polish, a goy. She tried to poison us all.”
“But if you bury them we won’t have anything to eat from.”
“I’ll take them out tomorrow, stupid. Then they’ll be clean again.”
“How can they be clean from being in the dirt?”
The old woman looked at her for the first time. “Dirt? You talk about shmutz, you, queen of shmutz, shmutz-face? How did you get so dirty? Your poor mama doesn’t have enough to do without washing your dirty dresses too, and you’re not even her daughter?”
“I am so her daughter, you old witch,” Lavinia said, being careful to say ‘old witch’ in English so the old witch wouldn’t understand her.
“You’re not her daughter. You’re an orphan. Orphan. Orphan.”
“Oh, you’re crazy,” Lavinia said in English.
“Speak Yiddish!” the old witch said, furious at missing something.
“Why do you call me an orphan?” Lavinia said in Yiddish.
“Because your real mother is dead and your Mama is not your mama, she is only the mama of your sisters. You have no mama. I know, because I am the mother of both of them!” she finished triumphantly.
Lavinia felt a terrible fear. She couldn’t remember, but somehow she knew that what the old witch said was true. She remembered the dreams she sometimes had at night of a woman without a face, tall, in a dark cloak, running away from her, and of herself running after this faceless woman, not knowing who she was but somehow feeling herself choking with pain and knowing that she needed this stranger. The woman in her dream must have been her dead mother, but she could not remember her and she knew only her own Mama, whom she adored, and who loved her. If her Mama wasn’t her mama, why did she act as if she was? Maybe she didn’t know either. Maybe only the old woman knew. If Lavinia didn’t tell her then she would never know. Did Papa know? She was tired from her horrible day and it was all too much to figure out. She went into the house.
By the time anyone noticed her she had put the soiled dress and stockings and bloomers into the wash hamper for the new girl to launder and had washed her face and hands very well with good soap and dried them with her own clean towel. She brushed the top of her hair—luckily not much could happen to braids—and put on clean bloomers and stockings and her play dress. Mama was in her room, lying on the bed.
“So, mein kind? How did it go today?”
“Good, Mama.”
“Did you learn well?”
“Yes, Mama.” She could not bear to wait another minute; she threw herself on top of her mother and buried her face in her neck, the way she used to when she was a baby. “I love you, Mama.”
“I love you, too, shaina maidel. Oooh, what’s this, such a big hug? You have to be careful now, Lavinia, my big girl. I’m going to have another baby.”
“A boy?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s why we have the Polish girl to help out?”
“You saw her?”
“Yes,” Lavinia lied.
“You can help teach her English,” Mama said. “Now that you’re such a good student.”
“All right. And look, I lost a tooth. I saved it for you.” She held out the tooth proudly.
“Thank you.”
She noticed how tired her mama sounded, as if it were hard for her to breathe. Her face was flushed but her hands seemed damp and cold. It must be hard to have babies.
“Are you having the baby now, Mama?”
“No, no, not until the spring. I want to rest now a little. You go in the kitchen and see the Polish girl makes the baby’s food right.”
“Yes, Mama.”
She went to the kitchen to help out. She would be good, she would help, she would be smart in school, and she would never tell either Mama or Papa anything bad that ever happened to her, ever again. Then they would think she was perfect, and even if she really was an orphan they wouldn’t want to give her away. She would be the best one of all their children.
FOUR
The immigrants were coming in torrents. The ships disgorged them from steerage, tired, seasick, frightened, hopeful, excited. Some had come to join family, some for an arranged marriage, some just because it had been unbearable where they had been and America had to be better. Some of them had nobody to meet them. But those who were related to Adam Saffron, no matter how distantly, always had a scrap of paper with an address on it clutched in their hands and knew when they got there they would have a place to stay.
“Another greenhorn is coming,” Adam would say to Lucy, and then she would find someplace for the foreigner to sleep, even if it was the floor. Adam would find a job in a factory for the greenhorn, and at night there were classes in English at night school, so that although the apartment was always filled with strangers babbling in strange tongues and wearing odd-looking clothes, they were really hardly ever there, and so it did not disturb the pattern of family life very much. Although there was another mouth to feed there were also two new capable hands to help out, to wash dishes, to cook some special dish remembered from home with nostalgia, to hold a cranky baby.
When Adam had any extra money he sent it home to his family in Russia, for he knew Jews were having a hard time there and he believed America was to be his family’s salvation. His family in Russia saved too, and they came one by one, in order of age. First Isaac, his oldest brother, thirty-eight years old and set in his ways, who hated America with all its strangeness and went back to Russia as soon as he could save the passage money. A waste, the ingrate, everyone said; but then he was so old, and it was hard for a middle-aged man to learn new ways.
Next came his brother Solomon Saffron, with his wife, a cousin. They had been intelligentsia in Russia, spending long hours talking of intellectual things with their friends, respected. Now they were not respected, for they could no longer express their thoughts in this new tongue, and even when they spoke in the old one no one had time to listen. Solomon refused to work in a factory, so Adam set him up with a small candy store. Solomon felt humiliated.
Adam had better luck with his placid older sister Hepzibah, whom he brought over with her husband and their two children. They stayed, grateful and content, moving into a small apartment in Mudville. Hepzibah’s husband was a tailor, and did well enough.
Zipporah came over soon afterward, so close in age and temperament to her sister Hepzibah that they might have been twins. The two sisters were overjoyed to be together again, and Zipporah and her husband moved into an apartment right next door to Hepzibah’s.
Now there were only two more whose turn was to come: first it would be Bena, and finally, when the money was saved, the youngest sister, Rebecca. Adam had already spoken to a cousin about Bena, how good she was, how capable, how pretty. This cousin had a good job as a foreman in a factory, and he seemed interested in an arranged marriage, although he insisted on meeting the bride first. That didn’t bother Adam. It was better that two people should be compatible. He wrote to his mother, explaining his plans for Bena, and enclosed the ticket for the boat. It would be good timing, for it was spring, and Lucy had finally given him his first son, a fine lively boy.
Lucy seemed to have more and more trouble breathing. At first she had thought it was from carrying the child, who was a large one, but after the birth she was no better. One doctor said it was her lungs, another her heart. Neither seemed sure, but both agreed she should have rest and not have to care for her children until she was stronger. Bena could help with the baby, and in this family setting she could meet the young man who was intended for her, and he would be sure to be pleased. There was nothing like the sight of a pretty young woman with a child in her arms to inspire a man who was thinking of marrying; Adam knew that as well as anyone. He hadn’t seen Bena for a long time, but his mother wrote that she had grown up to be the prettiest girl in the family, and his mother was a wise and critical woman whom Adam trusted.
FIVE
It was not a very long journey from their town to where the ships would leave, but long enough so that Papa couldn’t go with them because he would miss four days of work. Rebecca helped her Mama pack Bena’s things, while Bena hurried to finish the tiny stitches on the fine new woolen dress she would wear on the ship. It would do for the cool days at sea, and would not be too hot for the nights below in steerage, for the girls had heard frightening stories of how crowded it was.
“Is it true people bring their goats with them?” Bena asked. She was not happy, and had not eaten anything for two days. She was nervous about the adventure. Becky envied her; if it were she who was going she would be singing with happiness.
“Goats?” her Mama said. “Of course not. Who would bring a goat on the ship with people?”
“Well, that’s what Fanny told me,” Bena said, looking near tears. “She said her brother wrote her that there were goats and chickens on the ship and it wasn’t fit for pigs.”
“And how would Fanny’s brother know about a pig?” Mama said. That was her way, to talk sideways, always to get out of things. She often said that it was her brains that had made Adam become such a success in America.
“You could bring your cat then!” Becky said. “Couldn’t she, Mama? It would be company for her and she wouldn’t get homesick.”
“She will bring no cat,” Mama said.