The Book Borrower (4 page)

I don't know why we two sisters were as angry as we were. Many people in our circumstances were at peace. Be-fore Jessie moved out, she systematically stole silverware and sheets from my parents, one piece at a time so it wouldn't be missed. Of course she believed that property was meaningless, but nonetheless. . . .

Often in life there's an obvious next step, but most adults would be shocked at the thought of taking it. We have scruples, habits, and deeply held notions: religion, morality, ideology, or custom, and when someone proposes going to bed or when a cup sits on a table at just the time we lack a cup, we consult an inner rule book. Jessie really was an anarchist. Her mind knew no government.

The anarchist cell in Boynton, Massachusetts, in 1919 and 1920 was sufficiently small and obscure—or Boynton itself was sufficiently small and obscure—that it was not a target in the infamous Palmer Raids during the “Red Scare,” when thousands of radicals and others thought to be radicals were rounded up and threatened with deportation. Anarchists in Boynton mostly contented themselves with writing manifestos and arguing. They read documents aloud to one another in our parlor or in dirty rooms around the city, rooms in which my sister acquired itches of various sorts from men as noble in mind as she. After William Platz there were others, but he was the one she loved. He had broken her heart.

We'd whisper about men on the trolley, now that Jessie had moved out. The millinery shop was near the mill where she worked, as I've said, and we'd meet and ride back and forth together. Ordinarily, on the trip home she'd alight first and I'd watch her stride thumping down the hill, her legs apart—she had a bit of a waddle—toward her rather sordid room. But on the night I'm now describing—I do remember that I began this lopsided account with Jessie and me getting on the trolley after work—she rode all the way with me, for she was coming home for dinner. I was nervous, eager to get her into a good mood so dinner at home wouldn't be spoiled by fights.

“Three hippopotamuses today, one giraffe, two lionesses,” I said while Jessie looked out the window as we rode. She was brooding and I was trying to get her attention.

“Did you sell them all hats?”

“Some of them. A lioness roared at me. Did you have ad-ventures today, Goosie?”

“What does that mean? Mr. Franklin praised my alphabetizing. Does that count?”

“I'm glad he's kind.”

“Miriam, he's kind because I wear clean clothes and speak properly,” said Jessie, “but I don't care for his sort of kindness.”

“Why on earth not?” I said. “You do wear clean clothes.”

“I'm poor. I'm no different from the men in the mill. I don't want kindnesses they don't receive. We're all just pieces of machinery to the bosses.”

I held my tongue.

“Look at him,” Jessie said then.

“At who?”

“The motorman.” He looked perfectly ordinary.

“The company wants to cut his pay by twenty-five percent,” Jessie said. “Does he look as if he deserves that?”

“What did he do? How did you know?” I said.

“Not just this man—all the motormen and conductors. There's going to be a trolley strike.”

I couldn't imagine it—the fatherly motorman braking the trolley, seizing his conductor by the arm, and departing, re-fusing to take us home. The trolley, it seemed to me, had always been there and would always be, although in fact trolleys were a relatively recent addition to the American scene, and by the time Jessie and I were young women, the trolley period was almost over. The lines had been stretched across the vast acreage of the United States at the turn of the century, and they were all over the place. I know I can't convey what it was like. All the routes intersected everywhere. The streetcar was something safe and rattly anyone could walk to the corner and jump on. We could also ride out into the country, simply, without going downtown to a big station and getting a fancy schedule and buying a ticket in advance. The interurbans hurtled through the fields; my favorite line ran along a river and within a few minutes, instead of staring at tenements and brick factory buildings, I was spotting turtles sunning themselves on rocks. The trolleys were every-where—but cars and buses were becoming prevalent. There were fewer riders all the time. The trolleys were owned by private companies, as I was soon to understand, and when the company in Boynton calmly announced that the workers were going to have to accept a twenty-five-percent pay cut, they were doing something that seems impossible now but was not uncommon at that time.

We left the motorman, that night, to his troubles, and went home to dinner. I remember, next, Jessie bending her head to laugh at something I said—something irreverent, I suppose. I try to bring back the image of my mother, at her end of the table. What was she thinking—besides, that is, worrying that there wasn't enough meat? She looks at Jessie in the gaslight, in my imagination or my memory, and what happens then? She notices that Jessie's collar looks dirty (it's interesting that I remember Jessie talking about clean clothes, because often they weren't), that Jessie's big hands are in danger of knocking over Papa's tea, that her laugh is loud. Mama doesn't understand the conversation; that would be hard on anybody. We made no effort, by this time, to speak in Yiddish or to translate. Still, I'll bestow upon my mother some fondness for Jessie, and I don't think I'm lying. Fanny Lipkin, then, saw how the light made an arc shine on her oldest daughter's head, and she had the impulse to touch the bright part, as if she thought it might feel different from the rest of Jessie's hair. There was no way to say such a thing, not in Yiddish, which Fanny was forgetting, and certainly not in English, so Fanny would have felt the wish in images, not words. Her hand tingled with the pleasure she'd feel, stroking her daughter's head—do I go too far?—and instead she reached toward the child nearer her, Sarah, and brusquely set her collar and hair to rights. She wet a finger and cleaned Sarah's cheek, and Sarah arched her back and leaned away.

“The Lake Avenue line?” Jessie was saying. For we were, in fact, talking about trolleys. I was. As transportation, not as symbols of the struggles of laborers or the injustices of the powerful. “You're not being clear.”

“The country,” I said. “She lives on a farm, with chickens.” Fanny tried to listen.

I'd made a friend. I brought my lunch and ate it on a bench on the Common, and there I'd met a girl who worked in a bookstore, and who had invited me to take the Lake Avenue trolley to visit her on Sunday, and to bring my sister Sarah. I didn't actually know whether she lived on a farm, but her family certainly kept a few chickens.

“Who is this friend?” said Papa.

Friend Fanny understood. “A Jewish girl?”

“Not Jewish,” I said.

Jessie was restless. Her nervous face, which had exaggerated, slightly bulging eyes, moved in and out of the gaslight. She began clearing plates, her skirt slapping furniture. Her big arms came down between my father and me, between me and my mother, like black lines, coming down, rising, again and again. At last, tea spilled.

“How far?” Papa asked, turning to look at Jessie though he was talking to me. I could see him tense as he watched her. Between us, Jessie and I broke his heart, but I did it more delicately.

“What difference does it make how far?” I said. “It's on the trolley line. We've passed it on the way to Lake Park.”

“The Ferris wheel?” said Sarah.

“Next thing you'll want to go to Europe,” said my father. “Sarah will ask me for carfare to Russia.”

“I'd like that,” said Sarah seriously.

“Better to stay in America,” said my father, equally seriously. “Even with this President Harding they've just elected, who is not an intelligent man, even with him, better to stay here.” He patted Sarah's arm and my mother reached out to pat her other arm.

“President Wilson, President Harding,” said my mother, leaning across the table, trying to get it. Her gray hair was untidy and she still had her apron on. I'd been attempting to teach her to read. I wanted her to become a citizen, but she didn't for many years, not until reading was no longer required. Women were about to get the vote and I'd been telling her about voting, but she had no interest.

“Ah, President Wilson,” said Papa. We'd all heard this before. “If only people had listened to President Wilson.” Woodrow Wilson was the only American politician who had been enough of an idealist to appeal to my father. Wilson understood that Europe was a real place and that people there were human. If President Wilson had prevailed, Papa was al-ways telling us, and the League of Nations had been set up to match his envisioning, we'd have had true peace, not this skittish peace that Americans celebrated with foolishness and noise, this flimsy peace full of suspicion and hate.

“And poverty. And injustice,” interrupted Jessie, also not for the first time, not that she had much faith, ever, in Presi-dent Wilson. “Your President Wilson deported Emma Goldman.”

“He's a sick man. Others did this. Wilson did not do this.” Papa had gradually stopped attending the anarchist meetings as the complexities of life in America had become more interesting to him, and now he had become afraid of radical activity, worrying that he'd be deported even though he was an American citizen. The Screamers no longer came to our house, but wherever they had gone, Jessie had followed.

Papa ignored Jessie and kept talking. I was the only one listening, not that I couldn't already recite what he was saying. My mother couldn't understand English, Sarah couldn't understand politics, and Jessie couldn't understand President Wilson, that mild compromiser who allowed people to be rounded up and imprisoned out of fear of radicalism. But I see myself looking daughterly as Papa explained that Presi-dent Wilson respected all countries, not just this one. Daily my father had exhorted Congress, from our dining room table, to ratify Wilson's treaty and support the League of Nations, but he had failed.

“If Wilson had won—”

“Oh, Papa, enough,” Jessie said, stopping on her way to the kitchen with a platter. “There are troubles in this country that President Wilson didn't know how to fix. You know there are. You yourself are a worker.”

“I see no Cossacks. I hear of no pogroms in this country.”

“But there's hatred of Jews. I feel it at the mill. And how do they treat Socialists? And what about Emma Goldman? But worst is the poverty.” Jessie carried the platter into the kitchen and I stood up to help. I could hear Jessie clattering plates. Then she came back. She could never keep from making a speech. “When they send me on an errand through the cutting rooms,” she said, a little hoarsely, her dark eyes bulging, “or the floor where the machinery is, I'm shocked at what I see—creatures so pale and wrinkled with hard work, they're scarcely human.”

“I know about hard work, my daughter.”

“And wages are being cut everywhere—”

“Your wages?” said Papa. “At the mill?”

“No, not so far, but the trolley men—”

Suddenly Father was in a rage, standing up, pounding the table. “I do not want to hear about the trolley men! I do not want to hear about my daughter screaming in the streets, throwing stones at police! They will rape you and kill you! This will be my shame for letting you hear those foolish men, when you were a baby!”

He sank to his chair and buried his face in his hands, but Jessie was shouting louder than he. “In a country where business tells the government what to do, what can workingmen do except strike? And how can decent people not support them? A strike is honorable. Helping strikers is honorable. You expect them to take a twenty-five-percent cut in wages?”

“Not my daughter!” he screamed. Sarah ran crying from the room, and I followed her, but I continued to hear their voices.

Jessie didn't stay to help finish washing up. The announcement that Sarah and I would be taking the Lake Avenue trolley out into the country on Sunday had been lost in the debate, which had given Sarah and me half a headache each, we said as we worked in the kitchen. I felt close to Sarah, for once. She was able and smart at the sink if not in school, and got the joke about half a headache, somewhat to my surprise. I felt distant from Jessie, who had gone out into the night with her crazy notions, and it made my throat tight and my stomach queasy to feel distant from Jessie.