“This is 1909, the first decade of the twentieth century, Bibi,” he chortled, “and we are done with all wars, forever. We will have better ships, better cars, better flying balloons, and better everything.” He was without a worry in the world. Indeed, the world was floating with joy at this September festival to honor Henry Hudson, after whom the river was named.
As evening fell, the fireworks started. Searchlights moved across the night sky like luminous fingers. A band struck up, and all around, people rolled up their picnic blankets and danced. Behind us, the city appeared jeweled with lights. All the windows, nooks, high gables and corniches of the noble buildings twinkled. We danced—Frankie and Bibi—with all the rest of the merry world.
Past midnight, we walked back arm in arm. Frankie had bought walnuts, and fed me, piece after piece, touching my tongue with his fingers.
I was melting with happiness when we reached home, hand in hand.
Frankie put little candles in the walnut shells, and they floated all about me as we lay in the tub. It was our bay, and the candles a private grove of lights. I felt him enter me as easily as a boat slips into a cove and clung to him, united, entwined, heartbeat to heartbeat, through the magical night, not knowing which part of our bodies belonged to whom.
Throughout the next ten days, I walked with Frankie all over the city, watching the astounding parade of city life. One evening, before we returned to our loaned apartment, Frankie ushered me into the small shop where he had picked up the key and told the man to make a photograph portrait of the two of us. Frankie examined the different backgrounds the man had, rolled up like curtains. Finally he made his choice, a painted scene with Roman ruins, colonnades, and distant hills.
On the last day it rained, and the lights of the streetlamps looked slick, reflected off the black streets as we went over to pick up the finished portrait. I studied it for a long time before Mr. Lepore packed it for us. I thought we looked formal and grown-up, Frankie’s arm draped over mine. Behind the cardboard of the photograph was engraved,
Torquato Lepore, Photographer
and below that, in smaller letters, the date: October 8, 1909. I had expected our names there. How would anyone know who we were, a hundred years from now; who would look at this picture and know what this time in our lives meant?
“Where are we going from here, Frankie?” I asked.
“Home?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to go back to the farm. Can we stay in the city?”
“If you married me right away!” chortled Frankie. Then, in a serious tone, he said, “I like the farm, but if you want, we can live in the city.”
“I want to live here,” I said decisively. “We can set up home here. Like Giuseppe.”
“Marry me, Bibi,” urged Frankie. “We could get married at the farm.”
“No, Frankie,” I said, digging my heels in, “let’s set up home here. I too can get some kind of job. Maybe in a store?”
“Your mother, your Grandpa Brendan, they will worry, Bibi.” Frankie sounded hesitant. “Giuseppe is coming back with his family. Where will we both stay—I have no money left—” He broke off, seeing the keenness of my disappointment. “Okay,” he said, making up his mind, “you go back, tell them at the farm, and I will stay back and find a job.”
“I just wish I could stay and help,” I suggested.
“We want everyone to be happy, Bibi.”
“Do we?” I retorted, then added reluctantly, “All right, I’ll go back to the farm, as you say, and tell them.”
“So when do we get married?” insisted Frankie.
“Only after we have a kitchen to put our own bathtub in,” I said, smiling.
We emerged from the doorway of the shop. The covered wagons trundled on the glisten of tar, like hearses in the night, as the sturdy horses drew them up and down the endless avenues.
• • •
B
UT FROM THE
very first day back on the farm, my mother and I were at war. Her weapon was her love for me, for the farm. Mine was for Frankie and the world out there. I had not known that love could be so corrosive.
As the weeks passed, my serene joy turned to bafflement. There was no news at all from Frankie, as if he had never existed. But he had touched me to the quick, leaving me swelling, navel distended, breasts changing, belly nurturing our child. I did not feel sick at all, but healthy and rosy with good health. Yet I could never keep my tears at bay after the sun set, another day in this universe without Frankie. My ma took care of me wordlessly, yet she irked me, even while I depended on her. I grew heavy and slow, until on a glorious late-May morning, I gave birth to a boy. It was an easy birth.
She cleaned the baby and gave him to me for suckle. He did so noisily, manfully, I thought, and remembered my Frankie at the same breast a lifetime ago in that candlelit room. I peered into my child’s face, ruddy with its exertions of birth, and felt that my heart would melt away.
Our boy
, I whispered as if to Frankie, and held my baby. I kissed his small face and noticed that he had a birthmark on his left cheek, like a red pea, which I had earlier taken for a drop of birthblood. I counted his toes, nuzzling his curled pale feet. His tiny fists were tight shut, like rhododendron buds. Then I saw another birthmark, like a tiny red map, on the back of his right hand. I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful.
You are mine forever,
I whispered to him again.
I gazed at my baby, the damp tendrils of his hair, his suckling mouth. I inhaled his baby smell, his small sweet breath the odour of my own first clear milk. I felt faint with love for Frankie and our child. I looked at the birthmark again. It was as if one of my father’s bees had left a drop of tawny honey on my son’s face.
Everyone who sees him would notice that sweet spot on his bonny face; it was no blemish at all.
“I’ll call him Frankie,” I said to my mother, speaking to her for the first time in months.
“You will do no such thing,” Maeve said, daring me to contradict her. “We shall call him Padraig,” she said, her eyes suddenly full of tears. “He is ours. He is home.”
“Padraig,” I said tentatively, and we held each other, mother and daughter, yet knowing that nothing was the same as before.
• • •
I
HAD MADE
up my mind. For nine months I had borne my child in my womb. I would stay for nine more months, amid my mother’s disapproval of my hope, awaiting news of Frankie. I could not bring myself to think of him as a smooth-tongued trickster. By gesture or look, by glance or touch, that poisonous knowledge would have made itself known to me; I was sure my mother was wrong.
Her father, Padraig, had fallen off the face of the earth, but my Frankie will be found,
I thought, and I waited. By the eighth month, I had managed to wean my boy. But I was also weaning myself from my old life on the farm. I squirreled away money, doing sewing and making quilts, preparing for the great flying leap that would take me to Frankie. Grudgingly I knew that I could not have done this without Mama, who loved my son with all her broken heart! He would lie ever contented and safe in her arms. I could not fend off the knowledge that once I had too. I thought of this a hundred times and sensed her thinking the same, but whatever ice stood in our way would not thaw. Unlike her, I trusted Frankie.
On a chilly Friday in early February, I set off with a small bag.
It held a few of my clothes. I had sewn my money into its seam. I wrote a note and kissed my boy, and took a train, sleeping and dozing, as it trundled its way over bridges, and finally down the great stretch along the Hudson. It was dark when the train pulled into New York.
A quiver of panic passed through me as I stood under the huge domed hall with the clock. For a wistful instant I hoped Frankie would magically appear and take my bags from me, as if this had all been planned, but I walked down the entire smooth length alone.
The shadows between the looming buildings seemed deeper now, the roads narrow and bleak. Filthy snow lay piled underfoot. The few people around were muffled against the cold, hurrying home, as if the streets needed to be emptied before some unspeakable darkness would tide into the city, drowning those left in its empty canals.
Before I knew it, I was lost. I had been certain I remembered my way to Giuseppe’s home. Surely they would take me in for the night. Or Frankie himself might open the door with a whoop of delight! But I found myself in an unfamiliar night, all the doors of the buildings around me shut.
Just then I noticed a woman ahead of me, head bent against the wintry river wind, quick steps echoing on the pavement. In the alleyway that branched off, a man lurked in the shadow. All of a sudden, the woman moved rapidly toward one of the buildings and tried the shut door. I caught sight of her face, pale and frantic, as she broke into an awkward run. The figure emerged and loped after her. He pitched her into the half shadow of a doorway. I heard the double thud of his fist hitting her, and her head against the immense door of the office building.
The woman fell to the pavement, bent double, for the man had kicked her midriff. Now he aimed a blow at her head, fist drawn back from his shoulder. I ran and hurled myself at him. There were few on the farm who did not know my strength. I toppled with him in my grip, pinning him down. With a great wrench, he got me off him, but I grabbed at him and his cap fell off, revealing the rusty hair on the fringe of his hard bald skull. The man struck my hands aside and punched me on the cheek with such force that I fell back in a swoon. What happened in the next moment or two, I am not sure, but as I sat up, I heard the lady next to me raising a shrill alarm. As I staggered up, preparing to throw myself at him again, he ran away and quickly turned the corner.
In his hand, he had my small bag with all my money.
• • •
T
HE WOMAN’S NOSE
was bleeding, her hair disheveled, and one of her shoes, its heel broken, lay a few feet away. Clutching my torn dress, I felt lightheaded with pain, my left knuckle and cheek bleeding.
“I bit him,” said the woman with satisfaction, “My name is Grunwald, Josephine.”
“He stole my bag,” I said, close to tears.
“Sometimes this happens, neh?” she said dismissively, “This is New York.”
“Sometimes?” I mumbled as the dullness of pain settled into one part of my head.
“Okay, maybe once in a long while,” conceded Josephine, “but it’s no coincidence.”
“He robbed me,” I said stubbornly, unable to understand what sense the woman was trying to make of this assault and robbery.
“I recognized him,” said Josephine Grunwald. “Malouf. A hired thug.”
“Hired?” Now I was confused. They hired thugs in this town to rob farm girls? Who were these people!
“They are paid to beat up union organizers. I’ll bet that Mr. Blanck hired Ijjybijjy Malouf.”
I could not shake him from my mind, that balding coppery head, his too-large tongue lolling in a sloppy mouthful of saliva, his predatory slink. “What a strange name. Ijjybijjy?”
“My friend Clara Lemlich at the Leisersohn’s strike pointed him out to me. Was a boxer once. Mouth full of broken teeth. They call him Ijjybijjy, for that’s how he sounds.”
“You know all this—so why don’t you go to the cops?”
Josephine laughed heartily as if I had told her a great joke. “And who else would I complain to? The President, God, Tammany Hall, Mr. Hearst?” Then she saw me holding my aching head. “You know where you are going, yes?”
“No,” I said briefly. There was not much to say. “I am lost.”
“You have the address, neh?”
I tried to explain about Giuseppe’s place and made a complete muddle. “I am looking for my . . . my . . . husband.”
“My . . . my . . . husband,” Josephine repeated after me. “Do you have children?”
Yes, I nodded. “My mother is caring for my Padraig,” I added. “I will find Frankie. I will recognize his friend’s place when I . . . find the park, the one with the white arch.”
“Washington Square Park,” said Josephine. “And how long since you saw him?”
I stood in silence.
“More than a year?”
I did not answer.
“You better come home with me.”
I nodded. My head hurt. Josephine reached out and held my hand.
“What is your name?” asked Josephine.
• • •
A
LARGE MARMALADE
cat rubbed against a tall pile of books until it fell over. Then it sat on a tome, slowly moving the tip of its tail, regular as a metronome.
“He is Gideon. He likes to knock down things,” Josephine chuckled. Two elderly men sat on chairs at each end of the table: one plump, with a green eyeshade, smoking a short pipe; the other, with a carefully tended greying moustache, holding a book only a few inches from his face. He rested his cheek on a frail bony fist, utterly unsurprised that Josephine’s face was flushed, her hair in disarray, and I a complete stranger in a torn dress with a bruised cheek.
“Shalom,” said the man with the pipe. “I’m Julius, Josephine’s father, and this is my brother Arthur.” I half nodded, half bowed, unsure how to respond. My head hurt with every move.
Books, pamphlets, and newspapers had taken over the entire household. They covered the cramped dining table, chairs, the floor, the windowsills, every surface available. They were mostly in English, but some in another alphabet which I instantly recognized from my childhood.
“These are in Hebrew!” I exclaimed.
“You read Hebrew?” asked Julius, his eyes twinkling with pleasure.
“I,” I began, unaccountably drawn by the man’s warmth,
“I . . . recognize the script. It’s Hebrew, isn’t it? My father left some books.”
“Left?” said Arthur, as Julius leaned forward.
“He died before I was born,” I said. “His name was Jakob Sztolberg.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and reached out, gently touching my hurting wrist. His frail hand, his long tapered fingers, and the pale skin with its parchment-like wrinkles filled me with tenderness.
“He was from Poland,” I said. “He went to work in Odessa.” I felt like telling them all I knew about him, what he was like, everything Papa Brendan had told me. There was not even a photograph of him. He had been slender, with pale hair, blue eyes. His village was called Jedwabne. He had a small sister, Tirzeh. She had died in something called a pogrom.