Crescent City (2 page)

They were staring at him, waiting for a fuller explanation of his presence, as if they were hostile to it. He must seem a stranger—was a stranger now. And Dinah had her own special bitterness: She’d been an old
maid already when he’d married her younger sister, gentle Hannah, so dark and dear, when Dinah had been dried up. Dryer than ever now, gone pasty yellow, forty years old, with a disgusting stain on her Sabbath skirt and nothing to wait for, nothing but the old man’s death, which would, by the look of him, be coming soon enough. On his cot Opa was coughing and shaking while he pulled the shawl around his gaunt neck. To grow old, to die, in this gloom! And Ferdinand was soft with pity.

Miriam’s was the only face in the room that answered to his, that gave what he wanted to receive. She had her mother’s opal eyes, tipping upward at the corners, with a kind of gaiety about them even when their owner was in a serious mood, as she was now. Like her mother’s, too, was the short upper lip, channeled between nose and mouth by two delicate ridges, while the upper lip barely closed upon the lower. It was a tender mouth, too tender, he thought penitently, for this house, for the poor querulous old man and the spinster, who must, he suspected, have her own forms of petty tyranny. So he was painfully moved by the discovery of this little daughter, by the elegance of her narrow feet, crossed at the ankles, and the grace of her thin fingers, now stroking the small, silky dog on her lap.

“I’ve got some nice things for you, Miriam,” he said. Tears gathered at the back of his throat, and he swallowed. He wanted so much to give, to give out of love and sorrow over the irretrievable lost years. “I bought things in Paris and left them there to be shipped home.”

And he thought of the marvelous things which were already on their way to New Orleans: a Pleyel piano, boxes of gold and blue Sèvres porcelain, yards of Alencon lace, embroidered shawls, ruffled parasols, painted
fans, and fine leather-bound books for the boy. Then it flashed through his mind that to speak of these things here on the Judengasse would be a cruelty. There would be time enough to show what he could do for his children when he had them home.

So he said only, “I’ve bought you a doll with golden hair. It’s in my portmanteau at the inn, and I’ll give it to you in the morning.” Then a moment later he could not help adding, “Also a suit for you, David, and a traveling dress for you, Miriam. They’re in this box. You must wear them tomorrow so you’ll look nice on the journey.”

“And now you are going to take my children away.” The grandfather spoke reproachfully, accusingly.

“Opa, I know how it must be for you, I know. But I’ll take you, too, if you’ll come. And you also, Dinah.” Instantly Ferdinand was dubious about his offer: What if they were to accept? Well, then, he would just have to take them!

“I have a wife, a good woman, Emma. A widow with a family. Two daughters. One was married last winter. Pelagie, a lovely girl. And I’ve a fine large house, as grand as anything you’ve ever seen in Wurzburg.”

“Naturally. Gold lies about on the streets in America. We all know that,” Dinah said.

Sarcastic as of old, she had to let him know that she was impressed neither by his magnificence nor his munificence.

The Sharp tongue of the unmarried woman, the un-chosen, he thought, pitying her, too. For her condition, one had to admit, was only in part her fault. Young Jewish men were either penniless or leaving for America. In addition, there was the heartless
matrikel
to be reckoned with—the state permit granted only to a few at best. No, not altogether her fault.

He answered quietly. “I didn’t find mine lying in the streets. I had to work very hard for it.”

The old man coughed violently, painfully, spitting blood. David brought a cup of water; with gentle patience he held his grandfather’s hands steady on the cup.

Suddenly, almost forcefully, as though he had with strong effort willed himself to break his own silence, the boy addressed Ferdinand. “Tell us about America. Tell us what happened after you left here.”

Although he must have told this story a hundred times or more, it pleased Ferdinand to tell it again now.

“Well, after your mother died—I had been thinking for a long time about America—I made up my mind. As you know, I didn’t own very much, so I just took what I had, wrapped it up in a linen bag, and tramped westward. Before I reached the Rhine, I had worn out my shoes, so I traded two days’ work picking apples for a pair of old boots. Luckily they fit. Then I journeyed part of the way on a Rhine boat. In Strasbourg I had some distant cousins who let me rest for a few days and gave me some good meals.”

They were all listening in that attitude of motionless attention which encourages a tale. The boy was rapt. He can’t wait to go, too, Ferdinand thought. And he went on.

“I got a ride on an empty cotton wagon as far as Paris .…”

Paris then and Paris now. Revolting, smelly alleys. Flowering chestnut and long, wide avenues. Two different cities, depending on the money you have or have not got in your purse.

“I reached Le Havre at last and sailed from there. It
took two months and cost me seventy American dollars, all I had in the world .… The sea is like mountains crashing toward you. You can’t imagine it. I was at the bottom of the ship where the immigrants go. I was so sick. Some people even died of seasickness.” He looked up, a smile spreading again across his face. “Don’t worry, it won’t be like that for you. You’ll have nice cabins, high up, with plenty of fresh salt air. You should see the cabins! Teakwood and polished brass. Fine quilts and linens. Well, anyway, I crossed the ocean, got to Baltimore, and went to work. It was very hard. Sometimes I wonder how I did it, how anyone ever does it. But they do, and I did. Got to New Orleans in the end, too.”

“Is it very far,” David asked, “to New Orleans from that place, Baltimore?”

“Oh, far! Miles and years between the two. Although, to tell you the truth, in my case the years have been surprisingly few. I began on a farm in Maryland. I’d never farmed before, as you know, but when you have your health and a strong will, you can learn to do anything. I learned English fast. I’ve an ear for languages. It wasn’t bad there. They were decent people, a fat man and his fat wife, silent, hardworking folk. They’d sit at meals and there wouldn’t be a sound but chewing and forks clattering. They fed me well, I will say that, yet they were stingy with pay. When the time came for my wages, he only gave me half of what he’d promised. Said he’d had a bad year, which wasn’t true, because the crops were good. We’d had the best weather, enough sun and enough rain, and I’d gone with him to market and seen him sell his corn. It was just that his big fist didn’t want to let the coins go loose. Well, I said to myself, I’d promised to stay two years and he’d promised to pay, but he’d broken his promise, so I had no qualms about breaking mine. I
just got up very early one morning and slipped away out of the barn where I slept.”

Fall Fall of the leaves. Such golden, rosy leaves! Sour-sweet apples lay rotted on the grass. Dawn was cold; in a few hours the sun would be hot and the warmed air humming with bee buzz in the apples. By that time I would be far down the road, any road, as long as it was going west.

“This time I had a plan. I’d met a peddler who came by every few months with knickknacks for the farmwives: cotton cloth and thread, needles and toothbrushes. I saw he could do pretty well for himself. So that’s what I did. Got a pack full of stuff with the money the farmer had paid me, and I worked along the road from farm to farm all the way to the Ohio River. And this wasn’t a bad life, either, walking through the country with the coins jingling, growing heavier in your pocket. Or riding the riverboat, turning and curving, wondering what’s around the next curve .…”

After a hundred hills and valleys, remember the debarkation at the spot where the Ohio rode into the Mississippi; the green shimmer of just-beginning spring the smell of grass and all the vast space, the vast silence. Remember how one threw one’s hat off and alone there, unobserved, flung oneself into a crazy dance just for the joy of freedom, of answering to no man, of being young enough to feel one’s own strength and no longer being afraid of anything not having to be afraid of anything anymore.

“After a while I was able to buy a horse. It was such a poor thing, all worn out and sick with saddle sores! I could have afforded a better creature, but I felt sorry for it. So I let it rest awhile and get its strength. We made friends, he and I, and went on together. In and out, back and forth, inland and back to the river. At
the wholesalers’ in the towns I replenished my sacks. Sometimes I’d get back onto the riverboat for ten or fifteen miles to the next landing.”

Ferdinand, in the telling, was living it all again, telling as much now to himself as to the others.

“I saw great plantations on the riverfront, grand columned houses, hundreds of black slaves, miles and miles of cotton fields. I saw poor settlements, three or four log houses in the woods. There are no forests like those in Europe, no …” He thought for words. “You can’t imagine the distances, the wildness of those forests. Sometimes it startles you to think how seldom a human foot has been there before you. Often it is hours between settlements. You will see a cluster of men in deerskins, women and children in ragged woolen. You wonder what brought them, what keeps them in this primitive, hard life.”

Forest and swamp and trail Darkness falls under the pines and the thorny underbrush, pressing across the path, whips at your face so that you must protect it with your hand. Your footsteps crackle. Then comes the fright, the old terror out of childhood, everyone’s childhood; something is following at one’s back. In another instant it will spring forward, it will grasp. And you force yourself to steady your mind toward common sense. You will yourself not to turn around and look behind.

“Lonely, empty—”

“And Indians?” David had gone tense with interest. With finger to forehead he twined loose strands of curly hair.

“Oh, yes, Indians! The Choctaw tribes. And wolves. It was because of the wolves, though, not the Indians, that I got a rifle. The Indians never bothered me.”

“A rifle,” the boy repeated. What was left of the child in him was enthralled, Ferdinand saw. Three-quarters
man, or maybe more, he was; the rest was the remnant of the child. And with these adventures the father was reaching that child.

He nodded to his son. “Yes, but fortunately, I never had to use it on anything except a rabbit. After a while I was able to afford a wagon for the horse. I remember my first wagonload. Ten trunks, I had, stuffed with every kind of cloth from bombazine to madras. I had brass clocks and gold watches, lisle stockings, paisley shawls, kid gloves, and gimcrack jewelry, everything for master and servant both. Once I had the wagon, I had to stay on traveled roads.” He laughed. “Traveled! Why, you could go a whole day there, too, without meeting another human being! Sometimes I’d come upon another peddler, another European Jew, most likely. After a while I began to feel the loneliness of the life. Still, you know, if you’ve an idea in your head, a thought that goes along with your steps, you’re not entirely alone. I wanted to settle down in one place and open a store, that was my thought. After all, I knew how trading is done; my father bought grain for Napoleon’s army. Well, after two years or so I had saved enough to set up a trading post. Wasn’t much more than a big square shed with shelves all around. But the location was right, on the way to the Chihuahua Trail, supplying caravans on the way to Mexico. Everyone who passed that way, from planters to Indians, came to me. And things moved fast. They moved fast in America.”

The candles were almost burned down. Dinah got up and kindled another. To burn candles so late into the night was still a luxury, an extravagance, Ferdinand knew, as it had always been and as it would always be. Here in these European villages, nothing moved.

“So—where was I? Oh, yes. I prospered, you see,
because a community sprang up around me in no time at all. The next year I sold my plot of land for three times what I had paid for it and made my way downriver. What a river! One of the greatest in the world. So wide that in some places you can’t see the opposite shore. With bustling cities all the way: Memphis, the big inland cotton market, Baton Rouge, going south, always south into the heat. New Orleans was what I’d had my eye on from the beginning. The Queen City, or sometimes they call it the Crescent City, at the mouth of the river.”

Ah, New Orleans! The jewel in the river’s crescent, the slow green bayou water, the slumbering afternoons, the glittering nights—

“I fell in love with it as one”—he was about to say, “as one falls in love with a woman,” but a man does not say such things in front of his daughter—“as one would expect to fall in love with such a place. Almost at once I struck up a friendship with a very fine man. His name was Michael Myers. He was a Jew from the northern part of the country near New York. His father had served under George Washington in the American Revolution. Do you know anything about that, David?”

“I’ve heard about it. It was a fight for freedom from England.”

“Exactly. You’ve done some reading, I see. So, now. This Michael Myers had been in New Orleans for twenty years and had built up a thriving import-export business. But he wasn’t young, and he’d been looking for a partner, someone younger and stronger who understood the business or who at least could be taught and trusted. It happened that he found that man in me. He never had any reason to regret his choice, I can say that with confidence. I not only caught on fast, but I was able to add a few touches of my own. For
instance, I made friends—I make friends easily—with some of the ship captains you meet in the cafés. And through such contacts alone, I was able to get hold of a profitable line of goods appealing to the ladies—jewelry, shoes, linens, and such. Luxuries, delicacies. I always had a good eye for delicacies. Yes, my partner never had reason to regret his choice in the short time we were together.”