The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (13 page)

Teresa decided to marry José Luis Bonilla without ceremony, for she needed no tiara to prove her status. He was in New York, in Queens, with a good job. He cut up fish, leaving the house at 7:30
A.M
. and coming back at 9
P.M
. He was working six days a week and earned $400. Sometimes this enormous amount became even larger when people tipped him.

Her emblem of young love would be a pregnancy in San Matías that would end with the baby being born in America, which would produce citizenship for the child and free education and medical care forever. Her husband’s visit in July took care of that.

Teresa was eighteen and a half, and six months pregnant, when she left for America in January of 1998. She paid a coyote $2,200. For this she received a flight to Tijuana, assistance to cross the border, and a tourist-class ticket from Los Angeles to New York. Her husband put up the proceeds from scaling ten thousand fish. Teresa says the price was worth it, especially because she was pregnant. She defends the coyotes at each mention. She says they risk jail and, worse, having their trucks confiscated by the border guards. If she had a passport, the journey from Tijuana would consist of stepping across a line and going on to anyplace in America that she felt like seeing. Instead, for want of a piece of paper, it became hours of trudging through thorns and up a mountain, following a trail that was supposed to take them around immigration police and the Border Patrol.

She was with another pregnant woman, and they stopped frequently to rest. One rest in plain sight of Border Patrol agents was
interrupted by arrest. She wound up sitting through the night in the second-floor detention hall at the San Ysidro border control point. They took a video of her. She and about two hundred others who had been stopped watched television they couldn’t understand while children ran around and babies cried.

Early in the morning she told the immigration officer in charge of the room that she was having her baby right now! It took about fifteen minutes for them to get her through the gate and back into Mexico. “They say they would lock me up in jail if I tried again.”

She was back on the trail at nine that night. The coyote told her to follow him through a dirt tunnel that had been dug in the desert. Many of the tunnels have been built by Mexican engineers for money. One tunnel that ended just yards into America at the Tijuana border was bigger and stronger than anything they had in Vietnam, and those people won a war with theirs. Once through, she walked, walked, stopped and wiped the sand clean of her footprints, and walked on. She knew to pat the sand gently, rather than just sweep it and leave a wide, deep track to see from above.

The Border Patrol in their helicopters couldn’t see her trail. She laughs at the boys who don’t take the time to sweep carefully behind them and risk getting caught no matter how much they paid a coyote to cross them safely.

Tijuana to Queens took a week, most of it spent in a shack that was called a safe house, and her group sat in it for days until somebody came and took them by truck to the airport in Los Angeles and the flight to New York.

She and Stephanie, the first baby, flew home for Christmas in 1998. She found herself pregnant again. Right after the holiday she put her baby, a citizen of America, on the plane to New York with a woman who had papers. Then Teresa joined a group of twenty at the Tijuana Airport, this time paying $1,500. It was hard on her legs, but she was across the border and to the Los Angeles airport without stopping. Even though she was exhausted, there could be no
wall, no guard, no storm from the sky that could stop her from getting to her baby in New York.

She paid half the money to the coyote who took her over the border and the last half to one who works out of Queens and who met her at the airport. She will not discuss him, because she knows she will need him several more times.

In Queens, on the morning of July 27, 1999, she asked the landlord upstairs for a ride to the hospital. There, she had her second child, Jocelyn Hernández.

And again, the records of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation attest to baby Jocelyn’s American citizenship.

She came to this room in a basement of a house in the Queens Village neighborhood, a block off Jamaica Avenue. You walk down an alley and go through the side door and down a short light of steps to the basement. Her room is in the front of the basement. She is in a room with her children, Stephanie Hernández, one year six months old, and Jocelyn Hernández, four months old.

It is a frame house, like the others on the street, and once was the home of the Queens Irish and Germans. The room has one window high on the wall. There is a small closet. There is a bed that she puts the baby on during the day.

The older child walks around the room. There is a box of toys that she pulls things from. There is a stroller. There are two chairs and a cabinet with a television set on it. In the next low-ceilinged room, a man who rents the space is asleep on a bed against the wall. The rear of the room is a kitchen and refrigerator. On the right is a door to the bathroom. She thinks her single room is a palace.

No matter what happens, she says, I have given them American citizenship.

T
HE SONG OF
Williamsburg was played by thousands and thousands of feet on the wood planks of the walkway on the Williamsburg Bridge, one of three gray iron bridges crossing the East River from
lower Manhattan to the borough of Brooklyn. The bridges turned Brooklyn into the fourth largest city in the nation.

The Brooklyn Bridge steps out of the sidewalks and streets around City Hall in Manhattan, climbs gracefully over the East River, and descends to Borough Hall and the civic center of Brooklyn.

The bridge on the left, the Manhattan Bridge, starts only blocks away on the downtown East Side, in Chinatown, and spans the river and drops into a Brooklyn of factories that work weekends.

The Williamsburg Bridge is a few blocks farther uptown. It rises gray and is covered with stiffening trusses, steel latticework whose hundreds of strands give the bridge its industrial appearance and its strength. Out of the famous Jewish tenement streets on the Lower East Side, Eldridge and Orchard and Rivington and Ludlow, the dreary bridge breaks into the sky over the river and slopes down to crowded Williamsburg, a place where children used to go to work.

When it started, when there was no bridge, Williamsburg had about a hundred thousand people who lived and labored in the harshest turn-of-the-century conditions. Of course there were the rich Germans, Austrians, and Irish, who had a pillow wherever they sat. There were such grand people as Commodore Vanderbilt, who stole railways, Jim Fisk, and William C. Whitney.

They were in large houses on streets of expensive hotels and clubs. Along the riverfront they established Pfizer Pharmaceutical, Astral Oil (which soon became Standard Oil), and Flint Glass (which turned into Corning Glass). The rich loved to stroll past their big moneymaking plants and enjoy the sight of the river and Manhattan’s glorious Wall Street area. Even more, they loved Williamsburg because it encouraged the true American dream, cheap labor.

From the sitting rooms and porches and lawns of the great houses, it was fascinating to watch the bridge rise. Up from these tenements across the river it began its climb on November 7, 1898. Invisible at first, but soon in plain sight, were the first boatloads of
workers out on the river, with pile drivers and high stacks of steel floating on barges.

The bridge took five years to build. With two anchors 2,200 feet apart, the length of the bridge and approaches was to become 7,308 feet. The towers grew to 310 feet above high water, the center of the bridge clearing high water by 135 feet. Suspension cables were 18¾ inches thick. The bridge was completed on December 19, 1903, with the cost reaching $30 million.

It was not a handsome bridge, but the idea of bringing together a city yearning to dominate the world was thrilling at first.

And then the song of Williamsburg burst forth.

Here they came across the bridge, thousands and thousands pounding the bridge walkway planks to create a concert, these black hats and beards and anxious dark eyes swathed in babushkas, who rushed in the early-morning darkness to be first to reach the newest of the new land. Soon they would be on trolley cars running across the bridge and immediately after that on subway trains so crowded that choking was part of breathing. The bridge became known as the Jews’ Bridge. Those crossing were thrilled by the openness of the streets and the rumors of apartments that were said to be larger than the matchboxes of the East Side. Eyes bulged with astonishment when they saw actual private houses on some of the streets.

Of course they never saw the homes of the rich, but the rich heard their song.

Jews!

The song of Williamsburg came through the air with such force that Commodore Vanderbilt clapped his hands over his ears and swore. No longer would there be a way to maintain his clearing in the social rubble. These people will crush us underfoot! He reached for his walking stick and greatcoat and was out the door with butler and footman, who rushed him by coach out of Williamsburg and
home to Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where he belonged. He would not return. Immediately thereafter the others fled, Whitney and Fisk and such. Williamsburg was left to the grubby commoners in black hats and babushkas who climbed staircases and spilled and shoved into apartments that turned out to be only slightly larger than those they came from, but still allowed perhaps one more pair of shoulders, bunched like a goat’s, into the kitchen.

The Vanderbilts, who were the first to flee Williamsburg, became the last family out to buy everything in New York. They lived on Fifth Avenue in a mansion that was big enough to guard the Baltic straits. Partly because of the avalanche of the unwashed in Williamsburg, they wanted Fifth Avenue as a front lawn, and attempted to buy all the land on Fifth Avenue from Fifty-first to Fifty-seventh Streets. When there were complaints from citizens, a Vanderbilt announced, “The public be damned.” But the Vanderbilts woke up one morning to find two new hotels going up. Next was a clothing store. They moved farther uptown.

The Williamsburg neighborhood at this time was cut like a map of foreign countries. A neighborhood of Jews ran into one of Italians just off the boat. The Italians had just caused the Germans to move over to the adjacent Bushwick section. Included here was Henry Miller, who was raised for a time on Fillmore Place, off Roebling Street, in Williamsburg, and whose recollections of Ainslie Street were in his writings, which burst forth and shook and shocked the poor constricted authorities of the times. They could not see
Tropic of Cancer
becoming a book that would last forever as a world classic.

Then there were the streets of the Irish Catholics, who were sure that theirs was the only faith and blood, yet the lasting work was done by a daughter of German immigrants, Elizabeth Wehmer, who went to Williamsburg public schools for eight years and left at the age of fourteen. Thereafter, she was described as being autodidactic, which means she taught herself, and at least a generation of newspaper writers who at first thought it meant brain damage used the
word to describe her in the ton of stories about her over the many years. In 1943, using her married name, Betty Smith, she wrote
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
, a novel that pierced the sky over the neighborhood, city, and country as the finest of American letters and emotions.

About that time, there arrived in the harbor a ship with a glorious figure, a rabbi from Romania named Moseh Teitelbaum. It was he who placed the soul of Jewish survivors forever into the crowded buildings of Williamsburg. Reunited with his people, he found only twenty-five of his sect, Satmar, left from the war. They stood on the dock and waved. He stood at the rail and waved back. They waved more. He waved back. It was that way for two days. Teitelbaum made his entrance to America on the holy day of Rosh Hashanah, but under his religious laws he couldn’t leave the ship until the observance was over.

The Satmars were people who lived in Romania in the town of Satu-Mare, which means St. Mary. The Jews called the place Satmar, which means nothing except they were not going to say Saint Mary. Before the war, there were several hundred thousand living in and around Satmar, including Moseh Teitelbaum, the rabbi so famous in Eastern Europe, he was the Jew the Nazis wanted first. He disappeared into crowds of his people, and by the time he was rounded up, he was just another Jew with a number. They threw him into the Klausenberg concentration camp. When a man named Kastner bought a train and then paid ransom for Jews to fill the train and go to Switzerland, Teitelbaum, unknown to the Nazis, was one of the first to be let go for money.

When the war ended, Rebbe Teitelbaum went to Israel, saw the whole place destitute, and came to New York to raise funds. He intended to return to Israel, which he saw as a place to live but not a state. His belief was that there could be no Messiah until Israel was made up only of Jews. Any Palestinians living on these lands only delayed the appearance of the Messiah. Other Hasidic sects in Brooklyn believe that the Torah tells them there will be no state until after the Messiah arrives.

Once he could leave the ship, Rabbi Moseh Teitelbaum went first to the East Side of Manhattan and, after that, over the Williamsburg Bridge. His were the footsteps that sent the song of Williamsburg highest into the sky. The moment he arrived in Williamsburg, he was there for good. His group of twenty-five Satmars had eluded the gas ovens and survived dogs and guards’ clubs and the sound of firing squads and children’s screams. Hundreds of thousands of their sect had died; they lived. After that, handfuls more came from Europe on old freighters, these people who had somehow survived, and now were drawn to the leader whose name was a flame through all the nights in all the concentration camps.

Hasidic groups in Williamsburg now included the first of survivors from Hungary and Romania and Poland, members of the Lubavitch, Bobov, Stolin, Ger, Belz, and Puppa orders. Even at its zenith, with every day starting with the incomprehensible fact of freedom, life in Williamsburg was still trying. They first worked in knitting factories for 25¢ an hour and crowded into the sparse apartments for $3 a month.