Deadly (3 page)

Or maybe I just don't feel like celebrating.

“You work too hard,” Mrs. Zanberger said. She said I shouldn't be assisting my mother in the nights like I do. Gives me black bags under the eyes, and bags make me look ugly, and ugly doesn't bring the boychiks.

Ugly is Mrs. Zanberger's favorite insult.

I raised my chin and said, “I assist Marm because it makes her job a little easier.”

She waved her heavy fingers at me. “Your mother's our best midwife. But why are you doing that work? You go to school.”

I said, “Senior girls are expected to work—I'm looking to be an afternoon typist, maybe in a doctor's office, or a hospital.”

“Typist, well, that's fine,” she said approvingly. “I'll see what I can do to help you.”

I looked into her little old eyes and felt the power behind them, the way everyone in our neighborhood honors her word, even seeks it out. Despite her fall, Her Majesty the gossip has not lost her touch.

I kissed the air beside her powdery cheek before I left.

It sinks into me, what she says about Jews being a happy people. A secret part of me longs to join them in the streets and dance in the temple and believe in an entity bigger than myself, one who has a reason for taking away my loved ones. I wish I could talk to the long-bearded Rabbi Samsfield and ask him why my brother died, why my father went away, why can't I talk to anyone, why?

Then I see how easily Mrs. Zanberger can make me weak! How she makes me question the things Marm has taught me. The independence, the dignity.

Marm doesn't talk much about her parents, chased from the old country just like Papa's, only that they worked very hard to give up their language and beliefs to become American. That's how Marm wants me to think of myself, as American, and nothing else. Hard work will bring us good things, Marm says, and not prayers and tradition.

Hard work. If only I could find some.

T
he repeating
tunes from Mr. Zito the organ grinder and Mr. Victor the hurdy-gurdy player and the clatter of horse hooves on the cobblestones create a noise so great from the street tonight, I can't sleep. I picture myself in a quiet country place, away from crowds of people, on a farm in Virginia like Anushka. I feel so awfully cramped here when I read Anushka's letters about the acres of land and the fresh air. To run barefoot through the fields of daisies and Queen Anne's lace, to smell the fragrance of tomato and dill right from your own kitchen garden! For years, her father had this idea to live close to the earth, to trade in his bookstore for farmland, and he finally
did it, moved the whole family south. I have to admire the bravery in that. And from her letters, it seems the move has made Anushka more adventurous, though she was always the braver one of us. She rides her horse to neighboring farms, hauls hay along with her brothers, works the fields with them. She does things girls wouldn't dare do in this city. I'm not so naturally adventurous; I feel nervous about the visit I have planned to her during the winter holiday. Yet I think of the flicker I saw with Marm tonight about Mr. Peary and his men, the way they explored the Arctic, the years it took to get there. A trip to Virginia hardly seems far at all.

It was Treat Night at the Automatic Vaudeville—we took two pennies from the kettle after supper and went on Mr. Moscowitz's recommendation. He said there was a very fine film about the handsome explorer who's been in all the newspapers with his adventure stories. We don't often go to Treat Nights, but Marm and I both wanted to see Mr. Peary.

The place was packed to the rafters with screaming kids eating peanuts out of paper cones and running onstage to pinch the piano player. When the mustachioed explorer came on the screen, all the girls in the audience cheered. Although Mr. Peary didn't succeed in his polar expedition,
we all felt he was a hero for trying. They filmed his schooner, which he named after President Roosevelt; Mr. Peary plans to use the same ship for what he hopes will be a successful return to the North Pole next year.

I can almost taste the arctic air, and feel the crunch of snow beneath my feet, the itch to go somewhere. I feel the push inside myself to do something astonishing with my life. If only I could find the bravery, the daring to take such an adventure, despite my being a girl. I think of Anushka down on the farm, and I remember the first day I met her—she had that sort of wildness even then. She always did.

I remember I stood alone in the corner of Mrs. Browning's first-grade room, watching all the other six-year-old girls pairing up to play a delicate game of cat's cradle. I wondered where they all came from and who they belonged to, these girls. I didn't dare approach a single one of them. Anushka strode up to me and opened her mouth in a wide smile, revealing the startling gap of a missing front tooth. She offered me half of her cradle string. I touched my own teeth—I hadn't yet lost any—and asked if it hurt, losing the one. She poked her tongue through the gap; she looked a little mad doing that. I burst into gales of laughter, and she joined me.

I feel that gap now, like a place beside me where she should be.

Two nights ago I attended the St. Xavier annual without Anushka for the first time—I'm not sure why I bothered to go. Was I hoping to meet someone? I watched all the girls dancing with the fellers, Fanny with Arthur Robertson, Josephine with Willem Stryker, all of them waltzing like grown-ups. I sat, my hands curled like two sleeping dogs in my lap. Nobody asked me to dance. I thought of all the annuals I'd attended, sitting together with my smiling Anushka while the boys made a wide circle around us, glancing at us as if we were storefront curiosities, but nothing desirable enough to engage.

This year, I had no one to smile with.

It's like opening a lock, making a new friend; the key must fit exactly right.

A
n opportunity
has finally come! I received a note sent from an office expressing interest in me as typist and general note taker. The man set next Tuesday for our meeting time—which seems like years away. Oh, I have thought and hoped so long for this chance, have imagined it so much—walking into an office or hospital in my one good maroon shirtwaist and skirt set, my black hat, my boots polished to a soft sheen. I hope I don't ruin it with my over-enthusiasm or get too flustered to type properly.

When I told Marm that it's a government job with the Department of Health and Sanitation, she held up her hand and disappeared into her room. She keeps private papers and pictures and my father's things in that room; I do not go in there.

After a bit, she returned with an old
Scribner's
magazine. “This came out the year before you were born,” she said.
“But now I think it'll be interesting for you.”

She opened to an article spread with many detailed drawings based on photographs of buildings and their insides: dirty children sleeping on wood floors, drunks in alleys, flophouses filled to the brim with raggedy men, boys in pants tied up with rope. I had seen these photographs before in Anushka's father's bookstore, in a famous book called
How the Other Half Lives.

“Jacob Riis, the journalist,” I said.

“This was his first big article,” Marm said. “Look closely at that one.” She pressed a finger to the page. I bent down, and saw it was our building! Before the improvements, before they tore down the shacks in front and installed the toilets and the running water and the airshaft.

“He came to our tenement and he began writing these reports and taking pictures,” Marm said. “The streets of the city were filled with chickens and pigs that would eat the trash people threw out the windows. There were no sweepers back then, nobody paid attention to how dirty our buildings were. Not until Jacob Riis wrote about us.”

My mind raced as I stared at the pictures with new eyes—I thought of the job.

Marm said, “I don't even think there was a Department of Health back then.” She went to the window and looked
out and said, “The streets were horrifying—with horse manure piled as high as ten feet in some places. Ten feet of manure. That's higher than our ceiling.”

I stood beside her, looking out.

“It wasn't easy, making changes,” Marm said. “Homes had to be demolished, some people disappeared, some were even arrested.”

I wonder if things are so different now. Despite the beginning chill of autumn, I can still smell the rubbish in the bins underneath our window; across the street, our fishmonger still throws the innards onto the cobblestones; our neighbors still fall ill with sicknesses they pass to each other, our girls still die in childbirth.

But ten feet of manure, we don't suffer from that. If the city has changed so much in the years since Marm was a girl, how might I help to change it further? It seems a never-ending task, keeping after the thousands of people who live in this city, making sure they have clean streets and good health and decent places to live. It seems, finally, just the sort of job I've been looking for, one that is far bigger than me.

I
had
my interview this morning. I was very nervous, and I'm not sure how well I did. The day started poorly—drizzling, the mucky streets threatening the cleanliness of my boots and skirt bottom. I had to walk halfway across town to where I could catch the crowded streetcar up to 14th Street. From there, I hurried over to Union Square, to the department's squat brick building. Just inside, people pushed past as I dabbed my wet face, trying to muster my confidence. I strode purposefully into the wide hall, though I wasn't sure where I was going. On the first door to the left, stencilled on the glass, I saw his name, my interviewer, Mr. George Soper, Sanitary Engineer. I stood for a moment, trying to gather my nerve. Across the hall, behind a windowed doorway, I could see the busy activity of men who thankfully took no notice of me.

I knocked and entered my interviewer's office. He was sitting behind his desk and looked remarkably like Mr. Robert Peary, even down to his dark mustache and the part in his hair and the very straight line of his jaw.

He indicated the coatrack; I hung my damp hat and cape. He bowed his head and said, “Please take a seat.”

To his right was a desk; on it, a brand-new Remington typing machine. I sat behind it. The size of the deep wooden desk nearly overwhelmed me—I wondered if I had what it took to fill the position. I felt as if my mouth were stuffed with rags, and my back soaked by rain showers.

“Please type these paragraphs,” he said, handing me a sheet of paper. He took out a pocket watch. He nodded, and I swallowed the nugget of fear in my throat.

My clothes felt tight and my hands weak as I performed on the stiff new keys. In one minute, he stopped me. He pulled the page out of the machine. He glanced at it, laid it on his desk, and sat down.

I stared at the strong bone of his jaw, the muscle flexing there. I looked at his smoothly oiled hair, his crisp bowtie. I wondered what sort of home he lived in, and what his wife might look like, if he had one.

Beneath his brow, he seemed to be studying me as well.

He tapped his desk slowly with his finger. “Your letter to me was a fine specimen of handwriting,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

“This work demands a good hand,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

He cleared his throat and picked up my typing test. I raked my mind for a way to ask him about the job and what it might entail—I tried to call up words, but they seemed as ephemeral as clouds.

“So, I have all of your information, name, address, and such,” he said. He stood, as if to end the meeting.

And then it came to me.

“Sir, did the Department of Health and Sanitation begin after Jacob Riis published his book
How the Other Half Lives
?”

His eyes flickered to life then, as if I had brought him out of a dull routine.