Authors: Kim van Alkemade
Visha smiled at the sound of her daughter’s chanting while she cut up the vegetables. Leaving the knife on the board, she dropped a nickel in the gas meter, struck a match, set the pot on the burner. In a smear of fat skimmed from the top of her last soup, she fried chopped onions, adding the sliced carrots and minced greens and a little salt. She put in the bone and let it heat through until she could almost smell meat, then wrapped her hands in towels to hold the pot under the tap while it filled with water. Setting it heavily back on the burner, she added the cut-up potatoes and put on the lid for the soup to simmer.
Not much of a meal, but it was almost payday. Tomorrow, after paying his Society dues, Harry would fill up the coin jar again.
Once he’d saved up enough to buy the fabrics and the patterns and hire a few piece workers, he’d get a contract for himself, deliver the finished goods for more than he’d spent on supplies and labor, reinvest the profits. He’d be a contactor of waists, and she’d be his wife, a new baby warm in her arms, its greedy mouth circling her nipple.
Sam came clattering up the stairs and into the kitchen, startling Visha from her daydreaming. “Home already,” she said, getting his lunch. Rachel left the buttons in their little piles and climbed up on a chair beside her brother. While he ate his cold potato and pickle, Rachel told him all about going to the factory. When their mother stepped out to go down the hall, Sam said, “One of the boys, he got a real baseball. We’re gonna get in a game before afternoon school and I’m the catcher.” Sam was already on his feet when Visha came back. “Gotta go early, Mama, so I can practice my spelling.” He winked at his sister then dashed out the door.
Rachel went back to her buttons. Soon after Sam left, it was the insurance man who came, a loose coat hanging down to his ankles despite the warm afternoon. Visha went into the bedroom and came back with the two dimes. He took a little book from his coat pocket and noted her payment.
“Still no insurance on the little ones?” he asked, peeking in at Rachel.
“God forbid anything should happen,” Visha said, rapping her knuckles on the wooden table. “For now all we got money for is their Papa and me.”
“God forbid,” he agreed, shutting the little book and dropping the dimes into another pocket. They clinked against the coins he’d
already collected on his trips up and down the stairs of tenements. Visha saw him out, then went back to her soup, thoughts of family stirring in her mind.
Rachel counted out ten mother-of-pearl buttons—one for each little fingertip. They were all the same size, round and flat with two tiny holes bored through the lavender-swirled shell. Whenever she had ten the same, she wrapped them together in a bit of cloth to give to Papa. On Saturdays when he got his pay, he’d give her a penny for sorting the buttons, and Sam a penny for going every day to school, and Sam would take his sister to the sweet seller’s to spend their fortune. Rachel sorted buttons until she felt sleepy, then curled up on the couch for a nap. Visha came into the front room and sat in the light by the window to mend clothes. The afternoon would be quiet for a while now, the hush in the room made more special by the noise seeping in from the street below.
A
HARD KNOCK
on the kitchen door startled Visha and woke Rachel. Voices from the hallway penetrated the apartment even before she answered. A woman, fleshy and sweating, swept into the room, pushing Visha back against the table.
“Where is he, that bastard, that liar?”
“What are you talking about? Who are you?” Visha thought it must have something to do with the neighbors—the woman talked like Mrs. Giovanni, but louder, meaner. Visha wasn’t upset. Not yet. Then she noticed, hanging back in the hallway, the pretty girl from the factory, the one who’d been crying in the stairwell. A sick feeling flowered in her belly.
“Hah-ree Rah-been-o-wits, that’s what I’m talking about. You come out here, you lying bastard!” The woman took a look around the room, crossed the kitchen to the bedroom door, pulled it open, peered in, slammed it shut. “Where is he hiding?”
“He’s at work, at the factory,” Visha said.
“We already gone to the factory, what do you think? He got outta there quick, didn’t he, Francesca?” The woman threw her question over her shoulder at the girl lurking in the hall. “So she comes running home to her mamma, telling me Harry’s wife, his
wife
, she came to the factory, and with a child already. It’s true? He has a wife?”
“I am his wife. My daughter’s here, and our son is at school.” Visha gathered her nerves, funneled them into a shout. “We have nothing to do with you, get out of my house!”
“
Your
house,
your
daughter, but what about
my
girl, hey?” All the noise brought Mrs. Giovanni into the hallway. She began talking in Italian with the girl, who started crying again, tears dripping from her cheeks onto her lace collar. Their words, a foreign catechism, circled in Visha’s ears. Her cheeks lost their color. She asked the question to which she already knew the answer.
“What does she have to do with my Harry?”
“He promised to marry her, that’s what he has to do with her! Twice a week he comes calling for her after work, takes her out to the dance hall. Such light eyes he has, I think he’s some kind of American, not a dirty Yid coming to ruin my Francesca. Then he gets a baby in her, stupid girl, and says he’ll marry her.”
Mrs. Giovanni had been inching closer with every word, pulling the girl with her. Now all the women were in the kitchen,
Francesca so shaken that Mrs. Giovanni pulled out a chair and sat her down. She asked Francesca’s mother a question in Italian, and the whole story was told again in the language of opera.
Visha backed into the doorway to the front room. Rachel crept closer, peeking from under her mother’s skirt at the women gesturing and talking in the kitchen. Visha absently stroked Rachel’s hair. It seemed to give her strength.
“Stop it, all of you!” she shouted. Mrs. Giovanni came to take one of her hands. Francesca’s mother sat beside her sobbing daughter. “Harry married me, seven years ago. I have two children with him. It’s a mistake, what you say.” Visha drew in her breath, gathering the words to tell this woman Harry couldn’t have taken her daughter dancing, he was busy with his Societies, saving money to be a contractor.
Then the truth clicked into place, like the tumblers of a lock. There were no Societies. There was no savings. He’d been out with this girl, spending his money on her, and Visha left at home to make soup out of bones. Her knees folded. Mrs. Giovanni caught her around the waist and guided her to a chair.
Visha buried her face in her hands. “Before he married me, he took me dancing, too.”
“You know what happens to her if no one marries her?” Francesca’s mother said. “She’s damaged goods now. Ruined.”
“I’m ruined.” Visha said it so soft and sad, Rachel ran over and threw herself in her mother’s lap.
Francesca’s mother leaned across the table, pointing at Visha. “You tell Harry, that bastard, we need money to send Francesca upstate. There’s a convent takes girls like this. She goes away for six months, to visit a cousin is what I say. Her bastard goes to the
Catholic orphanage. When she comes home, maybe people talk, but it’s just talk,
si
?”
Mrs. Giovanna nodded her head. “She’s so young and pretty, some man will still have her.”
“It’s her only chance. If Harry doesn’t pay, you tell him next time it’s not me who is coming here for him.” The woman looked at Mrs. Giovanni. “You tell him what happens when Francesca’s brothers start to see what Harry done to her. She has to get away before it shows. You tell him.”
The woman got up, pulled her daughter into the hallway and down the stairs. Mrs. Giovanni tried to comfort her neighbor, but Visha brushed her away. “Leave me alone now, Maria, please.” After extracting from Visha the promise to send for her if she was needed, Mrs. Giovanni left. The room seemed too quiet now. The soup bubbled on the stove. Rachel shifted on her mother’s lap. “Go back to your buttons,” Visha said, pushing the child off her. “Go on with you.” Reluctantly, Rachel went into the front room. “And close that door.”
In the kitchen, Visha fought to breathe, her chest tight around her swollen heart. She wanted to smash everything in sight, splinter the chair legs, shatter the good teapot, too, like the one that broke already that morning. Remembering the morning, she stood suddenly, grabbing a teacup. Turning on her heel, she hurled it into the sink, china shattering against cast iron. Then she leaned over the sink and vomited, sickened at the memory of Harry inside her, purging herself of the stupid excuses she’d made for her husband.
Rachel was trying to count buttons, but the sound of breaking startled her. Her lip pouted and trembled, but something kept her from letting out the upsetness inside her. Pillowing her head on
her arm, she curled up on the floor and tucked her thumb in her mouth, piles of buttons surrounding her like cairns.
Visha collapsed onto a kitchen chair and stared at the wall, black eyes blank. She felt frozen now, her limbs numb. If Rachel had thrown a fit, if Mrs. Giovanni had come calling, Visha might have broken down like a crazy woman. Instead she sat still as a ghost, sounds from the hallway and stairwell and out in the street muffled by the surf in her ears.
Visha had no sense of how much time had passed before the apartment door creaked open and Harry slunk into the kitchen. Placing his warm palm on her cheek, he murmured, “Visha, my Visha, what’s wrong?”
From the place where his hand touched her, a trembling started and spread over Visha’s skin and through her muscles until her hands were quaking. As if released from a spell, Visha jumped out of the chair, backing away from her husband.
“What’s wrong? You have the nerve to ask me what’s wrong? I know everything! She was here, in my own kitchen, that Italian whore! All your promises, they were lies. All lies!” Behind her she felt the cold rim of the sink. She reached back and down, her hand closing on the knife, the blade slimed with vomit. Clutching the handle in her fist, she stepped closer to Harry. Her hand jutted forward. The knife caught his arm, splitting skin. A streak of red blossomed under his sleeve.
Harry grabbed her wrist, raising her arm and the knife away from him. “You crazy bitch!”
“You bastard, you liar!”
Rachel, hearing her parents scream and struggle, came running into the room. In her haste, she kicked a pile of buttons. The
tiny disks skittered across the kitchen floor. She saw the blood on her father’s arm, the knife in her mother’s raised hand. Her lip trembled and a wail erupted from her throat. Now Mrs. Giovanni, drawn by the yelling, appeared in the doorway. She couldn’t see the knife, knew only that Harry and Visha were fighting—and no wonder, after what that man had done. She came into the kitchen to grab Rachel’s hand and pull her toward the hallway, thinking at least the little girl shouldn’t see her parents like this. Suddenly, Sam burst into the crowded room, panting from playing in the street. He froze for a second, confused by the commotion. Harry twisted around to see what was happening. Sam saw the flash of a knife, his mother’s distorted face. He lunged forward, hanging on his father’s arm. Rachel twisted away from Mrs. Giovanni and ran to her mother, grabbing at her skirt. Visha lost her balance, pitched forward. Harry yanked his arm away from Sam.
The arm, relieved of Sam’s weight, shot upward. The knife, clutched by both husband and wife, swung through the space between them. The blade nicked the side of Visha’s neck under her ear. It seemed a scratch, nothing more. Then a fountain of blood pulsed against the kitchen wall. Harry, stunned, stepped back. The knife clattered to the floor. Visha sank to her knees, swallowing Rachel in her skirt. Sam beat his fists against his father’s chest until Harry swatted him away, his grown man’s strength landing the boy hard against a wall.
“Murder! Police!” Mrs. Giovanni screamed. She ran from the room, her words echoing down the stairwell.
Harry looked around wildly. He dashed into the bedroom, grabbed a box from under the bed and began shoving things into it. Sam crawled across the kitchen. Snatching the dishtowel, he
pressed it to his mother’s neck. It was soaked and dripping moments later when his father came back, the box under his arm.
“Papa!” Sam called. “Help us!”
Harry sized up his wife, his children, the pattern of blood on the wall. He wasted no scrap on sentiment. “Take care of your sister, Sam. You’re the man here now.”
Harry turned and flew down the stairs, running into the street and ducking into an alley before the policeman came from around the corner, whistle blowing.
Visha tilted over onto the kitchen floor, head turned to the side. The spreading pool of blood lifted the scattered buttons. They bobbed like tiny white boats.
Rachel swallowed her screams with gasping breaths. She put her hands on her mother’s white cheeks. Their eyes met. Visha spoke, but the words were a burble. Rachel tried to read the shape of her mother’s mouth. Then the mouth stopped moving and her face went still, the eyes black buttons on the far shore of a terrible sea.
I
T LOOKED LIKE THE RADIO WEATHERMAN GOT IT RIGHT FOR
once—it was going to be another scorcher. Even at six-thirty in the morning, the humidity was as stifling as a wool coat out of season. I’d only walked three blocks from the subway and already sweat was beading up behind my ears and dripping down my neck. I dreaded to think how bad it would get as the day wore on.
Finally, the Old Hebrews Home rose up ahead of me. As I waited to cross the street to work, I contemplated the building, so out of place among the modern apartment blocks that had gone up all around it, as if some medieval European citadel had been dropped on Manhattan. I wondered, not for the first time, if it had shared an architect with my other Homes. Whose idea had it been to construct these castles for the keeping of orphaned and geriatric Jews? Perhaps they were showing off, those prosperous bankers and department store magnates who sat on the building committees and boards of directors. For them, the peaked roofs and rounded turrets must have seemed monuments to their magnanimous charity. Or maybe they were feeling besieged, the rich
Jews of New York, unwelcome at the yacht clubs and racetracks no matter how flush their pockets, their wives excluded from the society pages, their sons turned away from the Ivy League. I supposed they thought they were doing us a favor by surrounding us with fortress walls. Growing up, though, those walls felt designed to pen us in, not keep us safe.