The Property of a Lady (19 page)

He grinned at her as if his idea was the simplest thing in all the world, and she stared back at him, stunned.

“But I can’t,” she exclaimed, horrified, “I can’t just live here with you. What would people think?”

“Think?” he repeated, puzzled. “Why, they’d think nothing except that you’re me wife. I’m asking you to marry me, Missie.”

“Marry?” she repeated disbelievingly.

O’Hara shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, then he suddenly folded his giant’s body and went down on one knee. His broad handsome face blushing as red as his hair, he said, “Missie, I swear I’ve niver told this to another woman except me mother, but I’m telling you I loves you. You’re the loveliest girl I’ve ever seen and
you’ve got the kind of spirit that I like. I’m asking you properly to be me wife.”

Missie’s head swam. It was all wrong, a nightmare: She barely knew O’Hara and he certainly didn’t know her, he didn’t know the educated English girl who was Professor Marcus Aurelius Byron’s daughter; he didn’t know the same girl who loved Misha Ivanoff so passionately she could never forget him.
O’Hara didn’t know Verity Byron!
All he knew was the poor skivvy washing glasses behind his bar and eating his charity food, the “widowed” mother of a four-year-old girl, though she doubted he even believed she really was a widow. And all
she
knew was the charming, brawny Irishman who ran his alehouse with an iron hand. Still, Shamus O’Hara was a decent man and he had asked her honorably to marry him. Of course if she did, then her money problems would be solved: Azaylee would have a home and a father and she would have a man to look after her, someone to lean on. The idea was suddenly tempting. She closed her eyes and Misha’s face came to mind, proud and strong, his intelligent gray eyes looking directly into hers, and she knew it was all wrong. Azaylee could never have another “father” and she would never love another man.

O’Hara rose from his knees. “I can see by your face I’ve troubled you,” he said. “And at a time like this as well. I’ll be leaving you to think it over, Missie. Maybe afterward, you’ll feel more in the mood to heed what I’ve said. Meanwhile,” he added briskly, “are you all right for money?”

She stared at him blankly. She couldn’t ask him to lend her the money now because she would be under obligation to him. Instead she said quickly, “I just wanted to be sure you would save my job.”

“’Tis yours, Missie, whenever you’re ready to come back,” he said, pressing her hands between his big ones. He held back the velvet curtain and she slipped from the saloon and hurried along Delancey Street, her eyes on the dirty sidewalk and her mind on her problems.

There was a light in the shop window on the corner of Orchard and Rivington. She glanced inside at the shelves stocked with a hodgepodge of goods, each with a little pink ticket affixed to it, and at the shadowy figure of a man behind the brass grille.
Zev Abramski, the pawnbroker
, she remembered O’Hara telling her.
“He keeps the Lower East side going … he’ll lend twenty cents till Friday for your husband’s Sunday shirt.”

Missie peered in the window for a while, thinking, and then she turned and ran around the corner, back to the room where Sofia lay dead with a cardboard valise full of jewels under her bed.

Zev Abramski was not a solitary man by choice, but for many reasons. He was twenty-five years old, short with a slender build and a pale complexion. His thick black hair was combed straight back, he had sensitive brown eyes, a firm mouth, and the long-fingered hands of a musician. He was extremely fastidious: He went twice a week to the public baths and everyday he wore a fresh white shirt laundered free by a Chinese woman on Mott Street, who secretly used his pawnshop to finance her gambling at mah-jongg. Even on the hottest days Zev wore a sober blue tie because in his mind it established a psychological barrier between him and the ragged, shirt-sleeved populace who came to him to borrow money on their pathetic possessions.

He lived alone in two dusty rooms behind his shop, amid bits and pieces of furniture left unclaimed by their previous owners. The only thing he had ever bought was a lovely old piano that filled one room, and even that wasn’t new. It came from a secondhand shop on Grand Avenue and it had taken him four years of weekly installments to pay for it. He had taught himself to play and though he was no maestro, it pleased him. Music, and the books piled in every corner and on every chair and table, filled the emptiness of his life when at nine-thirty every
night excepting the Sabbath he turned the sign from “Open” to “Closed” and locked his shop for the night.

Zev had lived on the corner of Orchard and Rivington for thirteen of his twenty-five years, yet though he was well known in the neighborhood, where almost everyone had been his customer, he could not call any one of them his friend. He told himself it was because of the nature of his business, but he knew that wasn’t true. He was afraid of friendship.

Every night, except Friday when he went to temple, he would walk down Delancey to Ratner’s restaurant, where he would eat a bowl of mushroom and barley soup and
kasha varnishkes
, his favorite dish of bulgur wheat and noodles. Then he would walk back again, closing the door that led to his shop and to reality, and run his fingers across the ivory keys and dream. The dreams always began with his family. On the good nights they turned into the fantasies of what his life might have been, but more often than not, they simply retraced the story of his life.

The music flowed softly from his fingers as he summoned up the dim memories of his early childhood in the small
shtetl
on Russia’s northern coast. When he was a child, summers had been green and sunny and he had run free in the tall, sharp forest grass, and winters had been wild and snowy and his feet had slid from under him as he had walked with his father across the frozen river. But no matter how cold it was, he was always warm and cozy in his padded coat with the little fur
chapka
covering his ears and muffling the sounds of the horse-drawn sleighs. He remembered clutching his mother’s hand, running to keep up with her long stride as she hurried through the small town, eager to deliver her orders and get back home out of the arctic wind.

He remembered being put to bed in a wooden box near the stove and the sound of his father sighing as his sewing machine whirred through the night and seeing the finished garments hanging over the back of the chair the
next morning. He remembered the vile choking smell of the communal privy in the yard and the flat smell of chalk on the teacher’s blackboard on his first day at school; he remembered the sour smell of young bodies crowded into the small schoolroom and the sweet smell of the brown braided hair of the little girl sitting in front of him. He remembered straying from the muddy
shtetl
into the little town and the sound of his boots ringing on the wooden sidewalks and his fear as he stared at the malicious faces of boys who he knew for some reason were his enemies; and their laughter as they snatched his
yarmulke
, tossing it around like a ball while he stood stony-faced and silent, not knowing what was wrong, only that he was different. He smelled the familiar scent of his mother’s skin as she kissed him and the heavy odor of beeswax candles burning brightly in the special silver candlesticks that had belonged to her mother’s mother, and the aroma of the Friday night food, chicken soup and gefilte fish. Zev’s tiny room would fill with loud, passionate music as he recalled the sounds that had struck terror in his heart, though he had never understood why … the knocking on the door in the darkness of night, the urgent whispered conversations between his father and his uncles, the words he didn’t understand but which frightened him: “the temple burned to the ground, persecution, police, pogroms … injustice, murder. Jew!”

He was seven years old. The journey through the night, Archangel’s dark streets and his mother carrying the precious silver candlesticks wrapped in a blue cloth, the dark ship and the smell of its cargo of freshly cut wooden planks and the terrifying noise they made slipping and crashing as the fierce North Cape seas tossed the small boat around. He saw his mother’s frightened face and listened again to his father’s voice intoning a prayer …

Then a big city, a bearded uncle and a house on a cobbled street; he was not to go out in case …
“In case what?” he
had wondered with a shiver of fear as they cut
off his long side curls “for safety.” He remembered men in dark suits gathering to say the Sabbath prayers and the same Friday smells, the same food, the same frightened dark eyes and low urgent voices….

The big ship towering three storeys high had seemed like a giant whale swallowing them into its stomach along with hundreds of other immigrants. He remembered not knowing what “immigrant” meant. They were not allowed on deck, and on the journey he never once saw the sea. There was no air; it was hot, stifling. The endless sound of babies screaming, children quarreling, complaining of hunger and thirst, falling sick … the stench, the grim acceptance of degradation. And all the while the storms hurling themselves at the ship, lifting it and shaking it like a mad dog with a rabbit. The dank, rancid hold with its human cargo swelled with the sound of people praying, cursing, screaming in fear, vomiting. The sounds and smells were etched indelibly into his psyche to be triggered at any time, always releasing the same panic signals of fear, the sweating, the trembling, the lurching heart….

His father fell ill. He could see him now, lying on the faded blue cloth that had covered the candlesticks, his face grim with pain as he shook with a terrible fever—“dysentery,” the word went round the dark hold like a flame, and soon there were more pale, agonized faces, more sickness. Soon no one cared anymore about the filth and the degradation. They just wanted to die.

His mother went first, lying quietly beside his father while he watched them anxiously. Gradually her face lost its frown of pain and she seemed peaceful. Zev held her hand, happy that she was feeling better, but the hand grew colder, and then it became stiff and he screamed out,
“My mother i
s
dead.”
No one took any notice. There were plenty of other dead people, mothers, fathers, children, infants … they were too sick to care. His father died a few hours later and Zev covered them both with
the blue cloth, talking to them, pretending at first they were still alive. Then he broke down, wailing and sobbing until he was sick and his eyes were red and swollen. The next day the trapdoors above the hold were flung open and the captain ordered them onto the deck. Zev was filled with fear. He was alone and he did not know what to do, but the captain left no option. After kissing his mother and father, he put the silver candlesticks in his pocket and climbed the ladder after the others.

He smelled the salty breeze and the fresh easterly wind and saw that they were sailing up a broad river lined with tall, dark buildings. He watched to see what the others would do next. Sailors were pushing them toward the gangplank, their hands rough, their voices filled with disgust. He saw stern, official-looking men in peaked caps waiting for them, just like the police at home in Russia, and his stomach sank and his knees trembled as he waited silently for them to take him away. He listened to the questions they were asking other people, knowing he had no answers. He had no parents, nobody who knew him, no money … nothing. They would send him back to the ship, to death.

The family in front of him was large, five, six, seven children, no one could count they were running around so much, the baby screaming, the infants plucking at the tired mother’s dress. “If there are no relatives waiting you will remain on Ellis Island and await deportation,” he heard the official say. Zev held his breath, waiting for their answer. There were relatives, the man said, showing some papers. The official was impatient, eager to get rid of them and their smell; he barely looked. It was easy for Zev to tag along behind them, just another child among many….

The big hall was filled with hundreds of people, all wailing and crying and laughing at the same time, but there was no one to greet him, no one who knew him. No one even noticed the small seven-year-old boy running
from the hall, terrified they would catch him and send him back. He stopped, still as a frightened hare, staring up at the tall, dirty brick buildings, hearing new sounds, smelling new smells. Then he stared down at his feet in the new leather shoes his uncle had given him.
He was standing on America
.

Always at this point Zev would slam down the piano lid and pace his tiny room, unwilling to remember that small boy alone in a new country whose language he did not even understand, and the events that had happened next. After grabbing a book from one of the many piles, he would hurl himself into the sagging armchair with the stuffing spilling from its threadbare upholstery and immerse himself in the story of someone else’s life so he would not have to think about his own.

To his customers, Zev was a soft-spoken young Jew with an accent and a reputation for honesty in his dealings. Sure, like any other pawnbroker he offered only a minimum price on their goods, but unlike the others, he charged a reasonable rate of interest—
and
he didn’t hurry to snatch away their possessions when they begged for another few days that gradually grew into weeks, until they could find the money to repay him. Zev Abramski did not smile much, but he was fair and the entire neighborhood gave him their business.

From behind his brass cage, Zev watched the world go by his window. He knew everyone, from the pushcart vendors to the rent collectors, the housewives and the whores, Father Feeny and Rabbi Feinstein. He knew which boy out playing stickball on the street belonged to which family, which man had work and which didn’t, and which woman was cheating on her husband. He had noticed the pretty young girl with the shiny brown hair hurrying along the street. Sometimes she would be holding a blond child by the hand and a big dog would run in front as if clearing a path. She had a special quality, a
ladylike innocence that caught his attention, and his eyes would always follow her until she disappeared from view. He had noticed her again earlier that evening, when she had stopped for a long time outside his window. He wasn’t surprised therefore when the doorbell announced a customer and he glanced up to see her standing on the other side of the brass grille.