“No, they wouldn’t let me in.”
“I just came from there. The firemen couldn’t get in themselves until a couple of minutes ago. Did you see Rose?”
“Rose is dead,” I heard myself say, letting my head drop back down.
“We don’t know that,” Aaron’s voice broke. “She could be in the hospital or someone could have—”
“Rose is dead, Aaron, Rose is dead. Gutke said there’s a smell—here, smell, smell it.” I shoved my palm under his nose.
He forced his arm under mine and pulled me up. “C’mon, Chava, can you walk? Good. Come with me. Here, take my arm.”
“No, I can walk myself. I’ll come.” I walked very slowly, shuffling, kicking at the dirt on the sidewalk. I felt faint but I didn’t want to admit I needed Aaron’s help.
“Look, Chava, are you going to be okay to get home?”
I nodded.
“Are you sure? I have to go down to the pier and help—”
“I gave Rose a ring,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“A little silver ring with a garnet. It’s in her hand.”
I felt Aaron shiver. “All right, I’ll look for it. You sure you can make it back to Essex Street? It’s a long walk.”
“Go ahead, Aaron, do what you have to do. I’ll be fine.” I started to cry and Aaron put his arms around me.
“Take it slow,” he said after I calmed down. “Tell Mama I’ll come by as soon as I can. Tonight.” As he ran back towards Greene Street, he kept turning his head and waving.
I picked my way along the cobbles in the street. Everything was greasy with ash. The street—I had to fight a desire to lie down and rub my hands over the paving stones.
I found myself standing in front of our building. Looking at the fire escape. Rose. Everything was so close at this minute. Rose was so close to me. Maybe she went home early, sick, maybe she quit like she always said she was going to, maybe they fired her, oh please, let them have fired her at noon, let her be there, waiting for me, crying for all the girls.
Rose floated above the fire escape, her head circled in flames. Rose beat against my chest in the street until we were both sobbing, heaving.
“Chava,” Rose cried, “you have to be brave now for my mama. Chava, please, please, don’t let me go.”
A Law of Physics
SATURDAY, MARCH 25, 1911
One body falling alone is its own weight
times distance.
Two bodies falling alone are their own but
if they hold hands
their weight is multiplied.
Here’s a for instance:
Two girls are on a ledge.
The building is burning.
There are nets below.
The girls are young and for the purpose
of this example
thin and frightened.
It is eight stories to the ground.
The net can hold 90, 120, 150 pounds
times the distance but
holding hands
they become 11,000 pounds on impact.
The net breaks.
No one knows the price
of comfort,
how much they loved each other
and expected, by jumping,
neither to live nor die
but fly
released
from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
Days went by while they identified bodies at the 26th Street Pier, where the city set up the morgue. Harry came into the bedroom and sat on the bed for awhile, running his hands around the brim of his derby. He told me there was a hailstorm the first night that smashed the glass roof at the pier. Who was angrier, the living or the dead? I noticed he was observing shive by not shaving. Aaron was in and out of the apartment for a couple days. I mostly stayed in the room. In our room. Yesterday Aunt Bina came in with the little ring clutched in her fist.
“Is this the ring you told Aaron you gave Rose?” Her eyes were red, her hair a tangle around her shoulders. She held out her arm and opened her palm. The fire had turned the silver a golden black.
I had only memorial candles for light, still I could see that someone had rubbed off the burnt skin. “Yes,” I said, “this is the one. They found it in her hand?”
“Tight in her hand,” Bina said, choking. “Aaron and Harry both looked but they couldn’t make out her face.”
“Should I go down there?”
“You don’t have to. If this is the ring, they’re sure now it must be her.”
“Do they need the ring back?”
“No. Aaron says you can keep it.”
“If you want it, Aunt Bina.” I extended the ring to her. Tears streamed down both our faces.
“No. I can’t,” she said, backing out of the room. I heard Aaron talking in the hallway, his feet thudding down the stairs.
All my life I wanted not to cry in front of anyone. Now there was no one left to watch me not cry. I sat on the edge of the bed and couldn’t stop. Rose. Mama. Papa. All those girls. The woman in Kishinev with the nails through her eyes. Rose. I clutched the ring in my hand, with the other I wiped tears off my face. I put the ring under my pillow.
Imprinted under my eyelids was the after-image of the bodies on Greene Street. I coughed the paper dust of the bindery. My face was still wet, my hands, my shirtwaist—I ripped it apart. I sucked air in and when it came out I moaned
Rose
, shaking my head back and forth, closing my eyelids, dropping my chin, shaking, sighing. Lamentation was my only relief.
My aunt sat at the kitchen table, sewing again. She watched the needle piercing the cloth, in and out: How many stitches in a life? She had only had one daughter and America swallowed her whole. She had been afraid of losing Rose bit by bit to dance halls, strangers, English. America took whatever it wanted. It didn’t ask, it didn’t even make a law, it just reached out, like an eagle in the pictures of America, on its money, reached out with its big muscles, its claws, and grabbed. Grabbed her daughter, shook her one way and then the other until she was dead.
Bina must have realized the apartment was full of my crying, a wind inside, banging on the doors to get out. She stopped the sewing machine. The boarders were at work, Uncle Isadore with the funeral committee, Harry back at his shop. Just her and me, sifting through the ashes of our grief. Did Bina think, “Like a lover, she mourns Rose”? I felt her pausing, wondering.
Everything had become so slow. Could Bina finally hear what she was saying to herself? Of course. Like a lover.
It took Bina a long time to stand up. Everything ached. It was only a few steps down the hall. So pleased they had been, to have a hallway with a closet. I sensed Bina looking in at me, curled on my side on top of the featherbed, my hands covering my face. She came around the other side of the bed and lay down next to me, embracing, holding. I turned towards her, weeping. The force of my tears made Bina cry again herself. She unbuttoned her shirt and pulled me to her, cradling me and stroking my hair.
We lay in the dark bedroom, crying and rocking, until she heard the outside door slam.
“Bina,” Uncle Isadore called. She didn’t hurry. She sat up, buttoned her shirt. She looked at me in the dusk and I returned her gaze, opening my swollen eyes as far as I could. She rubbed and patted my hand, balled up as it was into a fist.
“I’m sorry I didn’t understand,” she said, before she left the room.
G
UTKE WRITES
…
Dovida wanted to drive her auto in the memorial procession, an idea she had about showing the workers they had allies.
“The workers—and Chava—don’t care about allies right now,” I told her the evening before. “You always want to show you’re different from the rest of the world. But I’m not. The entire East Side is in mourning and I want to be another old woman, walking with the nurses of Henry Street and the poor people I came from.” Dovida ran her hands through her slicked hair and dropped her chin to her chest. Grief doesn’t always bring people together.
Still, we had been sharing life for almost twenty-seven years. And no matter how separate we were at any particular moment, her touch comforted me, brought back Golde and my mother, the old horse that pumped water for Pesah’s bathhouse. Golde, at least, was still alive. She sent me a letter with a little bit of handmade lace every Pesach.
Pesach, the feast of renewal. What a terrible thing to have to bury all those children in the spring. My hand trembles as I write. Besides Rose, I knew one other girl, Sophie, who died in the fire. She had been taking nursing courses at night and often assisted us at Henry Street on her day off. The morning of the funeral, rain woke us, hitting hard against the windows. I was glad for the rain and glad that Dovida didn’t use it as an excuse to bring up the automobile again. She handed me my black umbrella. As we left the house, she ripped her sleeve. This drew me back to her and we linked arms, joining the thousands who were walking towards Fifth Avenue through the wet streets.
Some days are long enough. Somewhere ahead of us horses pulled coffins to the Workmen’s Circle Cemetery. We walked and walked, silently, listening to a slow drum beat. Others watched from the sidewalks, mostly somber and dignified. A few miscreants worked the crowd, selling hat flowers and necklaces they said had belonged to the dead. Whether they had stolen them on the pier or made up their stories didn’t matter. People actually bought. Why? The same reason people came to Milcah and me for potions that would cure their troubles. A keepsake from the dead, a souvenir of disaster that might keep disaster away.
It was during the memorial service at the Metropolitan Opera House that I saw Chava, but I don’t think she noticed me. She was sitting with a short, freckled woman and two men, clearly a father and son, the father with a clipped, modern beard, the son beardless. They must have been Rose’s family. The mother was round-shouldered, no doubt from piecework. Or sorrow. Most of the backs in the great hall were bent with sorrow.
The talis vest that Milcah made hadn’t fit me in years, but I’d opened the seams and wore it around my shoulders, under my dress. I didn’t want to take any chances on bringing the specters of those burned girls into the memorial. Their charred and smashed bodies were vivid enough without being dragged back from the realm of the dead.
Even so, when Rose Schneiderman said, “Too much blood has been spilled,” I glanced over at Chava and was horrified to see blood covering her face, running down her chest. I must have gasped.
“What is it, dear?” Dovida whispered.
“Chava,” I said, nodding to where she sat.
When Dovida looked at Chava and back at me, puzzled, I realized I was the only one who was seeing the blood. I kept glancing at Chava during the speeches. Gradually the blood drew back from her face and the stains on her clothes dissolved. By the end of the memorial I stopped holding my breath.
It is customary not to return to a cemetery for thirty days after a burial. I had never been one for visiting graves. I did think to lay stones on my mother’s and Pesah’s graves before I left Kishinev, only once. I had to go to too many funerals as it was, since mothers expected me to attend when a baby died in childbirth. I wanted to show respect at those times, of course, but also that I wasn’t in league with Lilith and that no demons were involved in the tragedy—at least none that entered with me.
So it seemed odd to find myself taking the trolley back to Workmen’s Circle Cemetery in May. At first I attributed my desire to visit the graves to growing sentimental with age. Or perhaps I had unfinished business with the dead that only being by their side would reveal. When I saw the cloaked figure kneeling by a fresh mound, I realized it had been the living who called me.
At first I thought it was Chava but the woman was too short. I stood back some distance. Finally the woman straightened, brushing dirt off her skirt. When she turned around, I recognized her as the freckled woman sitting beside Chava the night of the memorial.
“Mrs. Petrovsky?” I asked, quietly.
She looked startled and drew her cloak around her throat.
“Do I know you?”
“No. I knew your daughter, Rose.”
“Rose?” She looked perplexed.
“From the Henry Street Settlement. I met her there with Chava Meyer.”
“Oh,” she said, relaxing. Many strangers were showing up at the doors of the families of the dead, soliciting funds for unneeded grave markers or fake charities.
“I was also your sister Miriam’s midwife in Kishinev,” I added. Her hand went up to her throat. I glanced around and motioned to a stone bench not far from where we stood.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m not usually easy to startle. I spend so much of my time with only the family at Essex Street. Mr. Petrovsky belongs to a landslayt association, of course, but I hardly ever meet someone from home.” She paused and looked at the mound where the unidentified Jewish Triangle workers lay buried together. “My daughter, my sister—.” She raised her eyebrows and stared back into my face. With her dark brown eyes and fair complexion, she looked more like her sister than her daughter. Even in the extremity of her emotion, she had a clear, strong gaze. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”