Flesh and Blood (26 page)

“And you were inspired by Hannah?” Frank said, returning him gently to the subject.

“Yes,” Stern said firmly. “Very much. And I wasn't the only one either. You must have seen that picture, the one of her giving that speech in Union Square.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Those faces, looking up at her. Didn't they look inspired?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there you have it then.”

“Were you at that rally?”

“Of course,” Stern said. “You don't cover the world in an office, you know.” Something seemed to strike his mind. “You said you were looking for a relative?”

“That's right.”

“Well, she had two sisters,” Stern told him. “She was sort of their guardian, you might say. The father was dead.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Gilda was beautiful in her face,” Stern added. “But Hannah, she was beautiful in her mind, her heart, what she thought about and wanted. These things were beautiful in her.” He shook his head wonderingly. “It's hard to imagine it.”

“When did you meet her?”

“While the strike was going on,” Stern said. He shivered slightly. “It was a bad winter. There was so much snow.” His eyes drifted over to the large reservoir which faced him from across the street, its surface rippling lightly in the cold winter breeze. “The wind off the East River was like a sheet of ice, and I can remember how Hannah stood in it hour after hour with that little sign she'd painted. Justice, it said. That's all. Just one word. In red. Justice.”

Frank wrote it down. “This was in Union Square?”

“Orchard Street,” Stern told him. “In front of her shop.”

“The one Sol Feig owned.”

Stern nodded silently. “Sol Feig, yes,” he said finally.

“Hannah was the leader of that shop, wasn't she?”

“She was the leader,” Stern said. “Absolutely. And she was a damned good leader, let me tell you. She had a gift, a wonderful gift. She could make you believe in something as powerfully as she believed in it herself.” His eyes flashed suddenly, with a kind of odd, liquid fire. “Do you have any idea what a great gift that is?”

Frank said nothing.

“In a leader,” Stern added, “it is the greatest possible power.” He lifted one of his hands from its covering sleeve and drew it into a tight fist. “It's the gift of inspiration,” he said fiercely. “It's the power to inspire people to do more, suffer more, than it seems possible for them to do.”

In his mind, Frank suddenly saw and heard Hannah Kovatnik in all her brief and glowing splendor, saw her eyes staring wildly into the cheering crowds, her body drawn taut in the freezing air, her voice ringing through the bare, leafless trees, blistering, furious, overwhelming.

“I had never seen anything like her,” Stern said, his own voice suddenly high, tremulous, but not breaking. “She made everything seem possible. More than that. She made a
great thing
seem possible.”

“Justice,” Frank said.

“Yes.”

Frank could feel a strangely ancient sorrow suddenly move through him, a deep, silent mourning for everything that goes wrong.

“What happened?” he asked quietly.

Stern shifted his shoulders slightly. “What do you mean?”

“With Hannah.”

For a moment, Stern seemed to move away from him, sinking back into an impenetrable solitude. Then he suddenly straightened himself slightly. “She won,” he said darkly.

“Won what?”

“The strike,” Stern said. “Her shop won.”

For a time, Frank allowed the silence to lengthen between them. Then, abruptly, he broke it.

“But that's not the end of it, is it?” he said.

“For most people it was.”

“But not for Hannah.”

Stern shook his head. “No, not for Hannah.”

“She was expelled from the union not long after the strike,” he said.

Stern's eyes swept back to the gently shifting waters of the reservoir. He did not speak.

“There was a hearing of some kind,” Frank added, as he continued to watch the old man closely.

Stern's eyes closed slowly, and his hand crawled back beneath the sleeve.

“A charge was made against her,” Frank continued.

Stern's eyes tightened.

“You brought that charge.”

The old man's eyes opened slowly, still staring straight ahead. “How do you know that?”

“There's a paper in the union archives,” Frank went on. “But it leaves a lot out.”

A thin smile rose on Stern's face. “Of course it does,” he said with an edge of bitterness.

“What do you mean?”

Stern looked at Frank pointedly. “Do you think it was easy to make a union in those days?” he asked fiercely. “Do you think it was something you did with your hands in a pair of white gloves?”

“No,” Frank answered immediately.

Stern laughed coldly. “You should have been there in the winter of 1935. You should have seen what the papers wrote about us. You should have seen the police charging us on horseback. Like cossacks. Like in Poland.” He shook his head wearily. “Then you would have some idea of what Hannah felt.”

“About what?”

“About what she did,” Stern said, his voice still hard, yet strangely weary. “And why she did it.” He turned away, as if to regain control of himself. “But still,” he added after a moment. “But still, there are limits. There have to be limits.”

“On what?”

“On us,” Stern told him. “On what we're willing to do.”

Frank pressed the tip of his pen against the notebook. “And Hannah went beyond them, the limits?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

The old man stared at Frank hesitantly. “What does it matter? What are you looking for?”

“The truth.”

“About what?”

“About Hannah.”

Stern turned away again, a single hand grabbing at the red scarf, plucking at it nervously.

Frank leaned toward him slightly. “What did she do?”

“She broke a commandment,” Stern said simply, crisply, as if he would say nothing more.

“Which one?”

Slowly the old man turned back toward Frank and stared squarely into his eyes. “The ninth commandment,” he said.

Instantly Frank remembered his Bible-thumping father, how he'd raged from the pulpit, going through the commandments one by one until the dusty congregation had been all but pressed to death by their agonizing weight. It was then that he had learned them, one by one, as they seemed to fall like great black stones from the rocky ledge of Sinai.

“Thou shalt not bear false witness,” he said.

Stern's face suddenly took on an oddly muted anguish. “Yes.”

“She lied about someone?” Frank asked immediately.

“Yes.”

“Who was it?”

“Sol Feig,” Stern answered immediately, as if the last of his old resistance had given way, and the past was now sweeping back over him, thundering like a wave.

“The man she worked for,” Frank said.

“Yes.”

Frank could see Feig as he now lived, locked in his room on Orchard Street, crumpled in his chair, his watery eyes glaring toward the squat red tenements that faced him from the window.

“Sol Feig was a greedy man,” Stern began. “And he ran a greedy shop. It was also very profitable, and a few people hoped that the strike would break him, cause him to sell at a loss.” He stopped, and his eyes drifted out toward the water once again. “One of them was a man named Abe Bornstein.”

In his mind, Frank could hear Bornstein's voice as he leered at Hannah from his bench in the park:
She's the rabbi's daughter. She don't open up her legs for nobody.

“Bornstein wanted to take over Feig's operation,” Stern went on, his voice now fully controlled. “He wanted to break him, and he wanted to use the strike to do it. That's why he came to Hannah.”

“Why Hannah?”

“The strike had been going on for a long time by then,” Stern explained. “People were beginning to break. They couldn't buy food or coal. You have to understand what it was like in the winter of 1935.” He shook his head. “Hannah was working desperately to keep everybody going, but even a woman like her, even a person with that kind of force, can't do everything. She couldn't keep her people warm at night. She couldn't keep food in their stomachs. And without things like that, the fire goes out.” He shivered slightly as a lean wind blew around them, sweeping a line of rust-colored leaves over their feet. “The fire was going out,” he repeated. “Hannah could see it. And so could Abe Bornstein. That's when he came to her.”

Frank could see them in the park together, just as Riviera had described them, huddled beside a slender wooden bench, while in the distance, a knot of unemployed men fed wooden slats into a flaming drum.

“Bornstein had a plan,” Stern went on matter-of-factly. “He had an actress who was willing to claim that Feig had tried to rape her. He knew that a charge like that would put some steel back in the strike. Hannah's job was to broadcast it throughout the union, let it loose in the neighborhood. The Lower East Side was like a little village in those days. Feig would be ruined. The strike would win. Bornstein would buy Feig out, and once in control, he'd deal with the union in a better way.”

“Is that what happened?” Frank asked quickly.

“More or less,” Stern said. “But things got badly out of hand. The rumor finally got to Feig's daughter.” He stopped. “Feig had nothing but his daughter. Except for the shop, she was his whole life.”

Frank could feel a terrible tension growing in his body, pressing outward, as if trying to explode.

“Her name was Marta,” Stern said. “She was only fifteen.” His eyes returned to Frank. “She worshipped Feig. And after this came out—on Christmas day, as a matter of fact, 1935—she hanged herself in her bedroom closet.”

Frank's eyes swept out toward the looming towers which rose on the other side of the reservoir.

Stern watched him closely. “Can you imagine what that did to Feig?” he asked. “The suicide of his only daughter?”

Frank kept his eyes on the twin gray towers. “Yes.”

For a time, they sat in silence, then Stern shifted slightly in his seat, massaging his knees rhythmically. “Circulation problems,” he explained.

Frank turned toward him. “How did you find out about what Hannah and Bornstein did?” he asked.

“The oldest way in the world.”

“What way is that?”

“Someone told me.”

“Why?”

“Because this person thought that Hannah had gone too far, that she'd compromised the struggle, that if it was ever discovered that some union-planted lie, some vicious slander, had ended up causing a young girl to kill herself—that if that ever became known, it would be the end of the union.”

“So he told you about it?”

“Yes.”

“So that you could bring the charge.”

“That's right.”

“Why didn't he bring it himself?”

“He couldn't.”

“Why not?”

“Because blood is thicker than water, Mr. Clemons,” Stern said bluntly. “It's thicker than almost anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hannah had only one real friend in the world,” Stern said. “One person she could tell everything to.”

Frank waited, his pen bearing down on the pad.

“Her sister,” Stern said finally. “Naomi.”

“And Naomi told you?” Frank asked immediately.

“No,” Stern answered quickly. “Naomi's husband. He'd overheard it all.”

“This husband, what was his name?”

“Fischelson. Joseph Fischelson.”

Suddenly, Frank saw the name as it appeared on the request for death benefits for Gilda, little amber letters on a dead black screen.

“So it was Fischelson who came to you?”

“Yes,” Stern said, “because he couldn't bring the charge himself. He gave me all the information I needed to pursue it. I started with the actress. She was a rummy. She broke fast. Then Bornstein tumbled. I had all the facts. And so I brought the charge.”

“And that's when they had the hearing?”

“Yes.”

“Did Hannah defend herself?”

“Not really,” Stern said. “She sat at the end of the table. She was staring straight ahead. She looked different, like something had been drained away from her, some kind of moisture. She looked hard. She looked like she'd never care about anything again.”

“Where was this hearing?”

“A small room in the back of the union meeting hall,” Stern said. “It was off Delancey Street. It's all been knocked down for high-rises.”

“Who was there?”

Stern thought for a moment. “Beidelbaum was there. Sidney Beidelbaum, the head of the local. I was there, with all my information. Karl Fisk. Norman Vladeck.” He shook his head. “They're all dead.”

“When it was over, what happened?”

“They swore her to secrecy,” Stern said. “Then they told her to withdraw from all union activity.”

“And she agreed to do that?”

“With a little nod,” Stern said.

“Did she say anything?”

“Not until it was over,” Stern said. “Then she stood up. She'd been sitting at the end of the table. It was a real inquisition type of setup. Hannah alone at one end of the table, all these bearded men at the other end.” He frowned harshly. “It was an awful thing. Even the way it looked was awful.”

“But when it was over, she said something.”

“Yeah,” Stern said. “She stood up. Very stiff. Full of pride. She stood up and she said the old words they use when they issue the final divorce decree in Orthodox Jewish marriages. She stood up and she said—and this was in Hebrew—she said, ‘I cast you out. I cast you out. I cast you out.' Three times, just like that. According to the rules of Jewish law.”