Epitaph (4 page)

She dropped a little curtsy like a girl she saw in a penny play once. “I am very pleased to meet you, sir.”

The captain's eyes widened and warmed. A smile lifted his beard.

I did that, she thought. I made him nicer.

The two men moved off a few steps, speaking in low tones again. She craned her neck to watch the sailors up in the rigging and discovered that they were looking down at her, for little girls were rare as rubies in their world and Sadie was an arresting child: small, neat-bodied, with pale white skin and curly black hair and dark brown eyes, her new front teeth coming in nicely. She curtsied to each of the sailors, one after another, turning all around, until she staggered a little, dizzy. And the sailors didn't just smile. They clapped for her and nudged each other and cheered.

She was glad when her father took her back to the
Higgins
the next day.

“Our secret,” he reminded her. “Mutti don't gotta know. Just you and your old papa, eh?”

This time she had to hang on to the hem of his coat. He couldn't hold her hand because he was carrying big stacked trays loaded with samples. Rye, pumpernickel, and soft white bread. Yeast rolls and three kinds of muffins. Cream puffs. Almond macaroons. Crisp strudel. Seven-layer tortes.

This bounty was presented to the captain of the
Higgins
, who shared it with his officers. Grinning, their lips white with powdered sugar, they moaned their admiration for Hyman Markuse's excellence as a baker. Their eyes ate Sadie up, too.

When the trays were empty, nested and tucked under one arm, her father took her hand and they walked, bent-kneed, back down the gangplank.

“Now, what you gonna tell Mutti?” he asked.

“We took samples to a new customer.” She felt special to be trusted.

“Good girl. Gotta keep the story straight!” he declared. “Always easier when the story's true . . .”

IT WASN'T THE FIRST TIME
they'd skipped out.

Silently, Sophie Markuse bundled her three children against the January cold and hustled them down the narrow tenement stairs. Nathan was the oldest and he was used to it, but even little Hattie knew what it meant when their mother woke the children before dawn. You had to be very quiet, so as not to alert the landlord. And it wouldn't do to wake the Irish boarder, who was sleeping off a drunk on the kitchen floor. He paid for meals in advance and would want his money back.

Hy already had their bags loaded on a wagon waiting at the end of the block, where the rumble of wooden wheels and the squeal of rusty axles wouldn't give the family away. It wasn't until the driver pulled up by the wharves that Sophie realized this was no ordinary flight from overdue rent.

“Nayn, Chayim! Nayn! Ich vil nit gayen!”

“English, Sophie! We're Americans now! Don't worry, everything gonna be fine,” her husband said, mixing encouragement with urgency as he coaxed her off the wagon. “Don't make a
tzimmes
out of it. You gonna upset the children—”

“
I'm
gonna upset them? Me?
I'm
the one who's dragging them off to the end of the earth?
Nayn, Chayim! Nayn!
”

In the end, Hyman Markuse gave up arguing and simply pulled his
weeping wife toward the
Hosea Higgins.
The three children followed like ducklings, their breath forming little white clouds in the first pink light of day.

A busy crew wasmaking ready to leave port. “Mr. Marcus, take your family to your cabin!” the captain shouted. Pointing at two of the least soused sailors, he ordered, “You and you, stow their bags below!”

Looking up at his father, Nathan asked, “Mr.
Marcus
?”

“I gonna explain later,” Hy promised. “The cabin's very cozy, Sophie. You gonna see. Everything gonna be all right.”

Eyes closed, Sophie was shaking her head—
no, no, no—
but she cried out in fright when a sailor stumbled against her, dropped two valises, and apologized with the glassy-eyed solemnity of a drunk trying very hard to show how sober he is.

“You promised me, Chayim!” she wailed as her husband guided her into the bowels of the ship. “You promised! I told you I don't wanna go!”

Sadie tried to take her little sister's hand, but Hattie wouldn't let her.

“Papa musta lied,” Hattie muttered, eyes on their weeping mother's back. “Papa always lies.”

WITH HIS FAMILY ASSEMBLED
in their dark little cabin, Hyman Markuse lined the children up in front of the berth they were to share—packed head to toe, like tinned sardines—for the next 158 nights.

Nathan, eleven, was the reason Hy had offered to marry Sophie. She might have hoped to do better than a Brooklyn baker, but at twenty-seven, her chances were dwindling, and with a baby on the way, Hyman Markuse was better than no husband at all. A miscarriage was next, and a stillbirth followed: tragedy piled on irony. When Sadie finally came along, it seemed a miracle. Doll-like and beautiful, she took Hy's breath away. “You spoil her, Chayim,” his wife always said, and that was true. He could deny Sadie nothing, for she was lively and demanding, a terror when thwarted and adorable when indulged.
Hattie was next. Her mother's daughter. A dour little soul, wary and mistrustful. Glaring at him now, as if daring her father to speak the truth.

“Children,” he announced, “today we leave for to seek our fortune in the West! We gonna sail round the Horn to a new home in San Francisco, and our passage is paid, complete, 'cause I gonna be the ship's cook. From this day, our family name gonna be
Marcus.
We gonna have a new American home in a new American city, and we gonna have new American names when we get there.”

Nathan made a noise with his lips and left the cabin.

“Just like your father!” Sophie called after him. “Leave! That's the solution to everything!” Red eyes cold with judgment, Sophie declared, “You oughta be ashamed, Chay.”

“It's Henry now, and I told you, I gonna pay your brother back.”

“Teaching your own children to lie!”

“Whose business is it, we change our name a little bit? You changed your name when you married me. Was that a lie?”

“It's not just the name, Chayim! It's—”

“It's pretending, that's all,” Sadie said. “There's nothing wrong with pretending.”

SEVENTY YEARS LATER,
long after memories of Wyatt Earp and Johnny Behan had faded and died, Sadie Marcus could still recall that childhood voyage in moments of crisp clarity.

Her miserable mother dashing across the deck to vomit over the side while seabirds hovered and dove and squabbled for the results.

Her cheerful father's face shining with excitement as he told about a galley fire quickly doused with soup.

The endless Brazilian forest with its uncountable tree trunks—like the masts in Brooklyn harbor!

Whales, rising and falling in vast mounds.

Hordes of seals, sunning on rocks.

Penguins were the best of all, formally dressed for a party that
could begin only after they waddled to the edge of the rocks and tumbled into the ocean.

“You see, Sadie?” her father said, lifting a hand toward those awkward, comical birds as they flew through the gray-green water, fiercely graceful and suddenly swift. “Everything changes when you are in your proper element. That's what your
mutti
don't understand.”

Sadie stood tiptoe on a roll of canvas, resting her forearms on the rail the way her father did. She was fascinated by his hands and wrists, crisscrossed by shiny pink brands burned into his skin by baking sheets and kettles and ovens.

“Your
mutti
, she wishes we stayed in Brooklyn,” he said. “But in America? You can start over. You can change where you live. Change what you do. Change your name even! In America, you just gotta find your proper element and you will succeed.”

She was shivering beneath layers of flannel and knitting. Her lips felt thick from the cold, and her face was chapped by wind that had started its own journey in the Antarctic. It was worth mere discomfort to stand at her father's side, listening to his brave words.

“Your
mutti
gonna see. We gonna buy a nice little building on a corner. Corners is always good for a bakery. We gonna live upstairs, and we ain't gonna need no drunk Irishman to share the rent. No more boss who takes the profit! We gonna offer fine pastries and cakes, not just bread and rolls. Lotta money in San Francisco. Lotta rich people gonna want me to cater their parties . . . She'll see. Everything gonna be fine!”

And it truly was, for a while at least.

S
AN FRANCISCO.

It was newer, bigger, brasher, noisier than Brooklyn. San Francisco was willing to give anyone a second or third or fourth chance, and immigrants from around the globe were taking the town up on its offer. Chileans and Chinamen. Bengalis and Brazilians. Jews from all over Europe. Ex-convicts from Australia, ex-Confederates from Mississippi, ex-slaves from Georgia. Mohawks from New York, Cherokees from Oklahoma. Huge Hawaiian laborers, dapper Italian musicians, suave French thieves. Educated or illiterate, dirt-poor or well-capitalized, respectable or on the run—everyone in San Francisco had come for one reason only: to make a fortune in the foggy, chilly city that had mushroomed into existence on top of a boomtown's mud and dung.

When the Marcus family arrived in 1868, the bay was jammed with shipping, and the dockside warehouses were as full as the brothels. New buildings climbed up and over the hills, straining to accommodate a quarter million ambitious men and a few thousand very tired women. Swells with money swanned around town in top hats, frock coats, striped pants, and brocade vests, shoes buffed to a mirror shine twice daily by bootblacks who earned a very decent living from the filthy streets. Watching this swaggering peacock parade, the former Hyman Markuse suspected that every man in town was running from
a fuming brother-in-law, or a forlorn fiancée, or a cheated business partner somewhere back in Argentina, or Scotland, or South Africa. But what did that matter? In San Fransisco, anyone could leave a disappointing past behind and
get rich.

There were, by then, more than a hundred bakeries in town, but after two decades of sourdough, the city was ravenous for soft white bread, elaborate cakes, and fancy pastries. With his pay from the
Hosea Higgins
, Henry Marcus bought a used oven, jammed it into a tiny shack, and sent the kids out with a pushcart to sell pastries. Sophie was mortified and fretted about the children's safety, but nobody came to grief and cash began to accumulate. After six months, he was able to rent a storefront. Sales doubled.

Half a year later, he took a mortgage on a corner lot and built a fine two-story building, just as he had planned. Like Mr. and Mrs. Marcus themselves, the apartment above the bakery steadily gained bourgeois weight, its rooms filling with heavy furniture, the upholstery well-stuffed, the wood deeply carved. To Henry's immense satisfaction, Sophie's attitude toward their newest home softened along with her widening hips. She loved shopping and not for nothing was San Francisco called the Emporium of the Pacific! Henry took pleasure in his wife's pleasure, never complaining about the expense. Hattie didn't care about clothes, but Sadie! She grew more beautiful by the year, and it was a joy to see what a princess she was becoming. What did it matter if all those pretty shoes and ribbon-trimmed skirts were ruined by San Francisco's mud? The girls were growing. Sophie got plumper every year. They always needed new.

For Henry himself, success meant buying great stacks of books and magazines and newspapers, though he often fell asleep before reading very long. He had to be up well before dawn to make sure that Nathan had the ovens going because . . . Well, admittedly: Nathan was a disappointment. He didn't like working at the bakery but couldn't seem to hold a job anywhere else. He'd come home complaining that
he'd been cheated or ill-treated by his boss. After a few weeks, he'd quit in a huff and then mope around the apartment until his mother's nagging became more tedious than looking for a job.

Even so, Henry didn't worry. He was making enough to support them all and even sent money to relatives in Posen—until everything went bust in the Panic of 1873.

“GOOD TIMES NEVER LAST,
but hard times always end.” That was Henry's motto in the early days of the depression. The Marcus bakery remained solvent longer than many more impressive businesses, for there are times when man does live by bread alone. There's always a market for a baker's basics, even if his customers wait until the end of the day to save pennies on stale loaves.

“We gonna be all right?” Sophie asked whenever she heard of another local business going under.

“Sure! Everything gonna be fine!” Henry would say, and then he'd send her and Sadie out shopping, so they wouldn't worry.