Sex Wars (47 page)

C
ORLEARS HOOK WAS
an old part of the city, more dangerous than their neighborhood—dirtier, just as crowded, streets muddy with sewage and offal, dead cats, rats, pigs, dogs and horses stinking and rotting as people simply walked around them. The gangs here were notorious. Just last week, the American papers that Sammy read told of a double murder, victims’ throats slit. Freydeh was nervous and Sammy kept fingering the knife in his belt. After querying neighbors and handing out more little bribes than they could afford, they found the house. The slattern who was keeping Reba, along with three other children farmed out by prostitutes, lived in a crooked old wooden house in a yard behind a tenement. The smell in the yard was intense, for not only was the privy overflowing right next to the well, but someone was keeping pigs there as well as chickens and a goat. Freydeh gagged as they waited for the woman to answer the door.

“So you say you’re her aunt and her mom is dead. Why should I believe you? Little girls like her go for a pretty price.”

“You will not sell her to any pimp or madam, or I’ll kill you.” Freydeh seized the woman’s shoulder and squeezed. She was all bones. “What do you want for her?”

“Twenty dollars.”

“Fifteen,” Freydeh said. “We’ll take her off your hands. You’ll never hear from that bastard Kumble again, believe me. He’s gone.”

“Eighteen.”

Freydeh didn’t have the stomach for more haggling. “We’ll come back with it.”

“If she isn’t here, your life will be forfeit,” Sammy said. Where did he get language like that? Probably from those yellow adventure books he loved.

“Where are we going to get eighteen dollars?” he said to her once they were in the street again. “I know you saved up five, maybe six.”

“You brought that pillowcase full of Shaineh’s things?”

“Yeah, I didn’t know what else to do with it. I thought maybe we’d bury her in something from it.”

“They’re washing the body right now. They won’t bury her in any of that whorish stuff. She’ll be buried in a plain white shroud.” Freydeh walked on, thinking of Shaineh’s poor body with the burial society women preparing her. “We’ll go to a couple of madams and see if they want Shaineh’s clothing, her lingerie, her wrappers. You take the jewelry he gave her and try to pawn it. We might get a few dollars. I thought I saw gold in there.”

By late afternoon, they had disposed of what they could sell, and it was time to rush to the little cemetery, across the river in Brooklyn. The whole family went on the ferry with Shaineh’s body, along with horses, a cow, a wagon heaped with bricks, two empty produce wagons and a wedding party. Asher said, “I never told them she was a
cuervah.
I told them a man was trying to rape her and she got pushed down the steps of a boardinghouse. Don’t tell them different. It’s a true shame on the family.”

“She did what she had to, to survive.” Freydeh sighed, wiping her eyes. “It was as much my fault as hers.”

“We can’t let him get away with this…this defilement and murder.”

“It was an accident,” Sammy said. “They were struggling at the head of the steps. She was trying to get away from him and they fought.”

“He defiled her. He soiled our family,” Asher said.

Freydeh decided to ignore him. To find Shaineh and immediately to lose her, it was more than she could endure. The only thing keeping her going was that they must save the little girl. She had thought that Sara and Asher would adopt her, but listening to Asher, she didn’t want to give the girl into his care. He would take out on the daughter what he viewed as the shame cast upon him. What was one more child? A gift. Kezia could help care for Reba. If she could never have her baby sister back, she could have her sister’s baby. Her child to raise, like Kezia and Sammy.

When they each threw a handful of dirt on the cheap pine coffin, the tears came. Had she tried hard enough? Was she too often distracted? She leaned on Sammy, taller now by several more inches, and wept. A waste. That was what she felt. Her baby sister was spent and wasted for nothing. The casual pleasure of a well-to-do man who cared for her only as one
might for a fast horse or a beautiful spaniel. Who took her child from her and lodged that child in a squalid, falling-down house in a courtyard with pigs. She hated him but at least none of them need ever see his face again.

The simple ceremony was over, the grave marked by a wooden number. In a year, she hoped they would have money for a stone. Now she and Sammy must go and get the child. Sara and she hugged, returning on the ferry. The wind on the East River cut into her bones. I’m getting older, she thought, and because of that
momser
Comstock, I’m starting all over again trying to get to a warm secure place for my family. Asher was withdrawn into himself. He stood at the rail muttering, davening. The other passengers pulled away from him as if he carried plague. Shaineh was not even his sister, and he was sullen and working himself into a state. It was not so much that he grieved as that he felt sullied.

So much was different here in the New World,
goldeneh medina
that wasn’t at all golden, the hard strange life that made him feel lost. She could understand that. But you had to struggle. You had to be willing to change and change more and change until you felt as if you were on a rack with your arms and legs pulled from their sockets and your head was yanked until you thought your neck would just snap like rubber pulled too far. You had to fiddle with your sense of right and wrong. But you survived. If you pushed yourself hard enough and made the right choices, you might prosper. If luck was with you and
momsers
like Comstock didn’t break you. Freydeh sighed, hugging her sister and then Sammy, with Kezia clinging to her skirt as if she were afraid she might blow away into the river. Ever since she had come out of Blackwell’s, Kezia had clung to her, even in sleep. She sighed, ruffling Kezia’s thick black curls. “We’re going to bring you a sister, Kezia.”

“Will you still love me?”

“Always and forever. And she’ll love you too.”

When they were all back in the flat, Sammy said, “We can’t go there tonight. It’s after dark. We’d never get out alive.”

“But if we leave her there, that bitch might sell her.”

“You can’t go,” Asher said. “We must sit shivah for her.”

Sara had already covered the mirrors. Asher had made friends in his shul and the wives of his minyan brought food to them, what they could afford.

Freydeh said nothing. She would simply walk out in the morning with Sammy and fetch the little girl. Asher was not her husband, and she had
been on her own for so long she did not know if she could bring herself to obey any man. She had become something other than a wife. Sara obeyed Asher, but Freydeh wouldn’t. He was not the head of her household, whether he realized that or not. She gave Sammy a look that said, It’s okay.

In the kitchen setting out dishes for everyone, mismatched, a few cracked, but dishes enough, she murmured to him, “We have the eighteen, right?”

He nodded.

“We don’t fight with Asher. In the morning, I go downstairs to the privy. Five minutes later, you follow. Just quiet and casual like.”

Sammy nodded. “We get her tomorrow. We don’t put it off.”

“You’re the true son of my heart. You know that, don’t you?”

“If I was your real son, I couldn’t marry Debra.”

“No talk about marrying.”

He made a sign of zipping his lip, but she knew that was not the end of this. They were old enough to marry. He was sixteen; Debra was fourteen. The age of consent in New York was ten. She must discuss this with him and with Sara before something bad happened. Children, death, marriage, it all came tumbling down at once. She could imagine a quiet life, but she had never known one. Imagine a day without a crisis. Shalom, shalom, shalom, Jews prayed all the time and where was it? In the clouds. In dreams the color of lavender and the pink cotton candy the goyim ate on the Bowery. Peace like the scent of pine needles on a June morning early. In their heads, peace, shalom, there and only there.

In the morning they left as planned. Asher was davening, lost in blissful mumbling, facing the east windows in the front room. It did not occur to him that they would disobey. They hurried through the early streets, crowded already with carts, one picking up dead animals in the street and the occasional corpse, one delivering empty barrels to a brewery, one carrying in potatoes from Long Island to the greengrocers along his route. A peddler was selling turnips, leeks, onions and carrots. There was a skim of ice on the mud of the street, but it melted quickly. The day was going to be warmer than yesterday, she could feel it. They dodged a cascade of slops from a chamber pot and headed downtown past Delancey, then east to the river. The only reasonable way to get there was to walk, and they did, at a fast pace through the mud and over the cobblestones and wooden planks. It wasn’t that far, just a different world: no Jews, tougher gangs, more filth. The Patsy Conroys, the Daybreak Boys who preyed on the
docks, the River Pirates all found their homes in this old, old slum along the East River where Irish and Yankees below poverty shared the rotting buildings and narrow streets deep in mud.

The old woman in her torn gray gown that had once been red, with a dirty kerchief tied around her head and her arm in a sling, answered the door again. She stared as if seeing them for the first time. “You got the money?”

“Show us the girl.”

“Reba! Get your ass down here.”

A dirty little barefoot girl, her long brown hair hanging in greasy hanks, came slowly, reluctantly toward the door, blinking at the light. She edged past the woman, gingerly.

“I’m your Aunt Freydeh. Did your mama ever mention me? Did she tell you my name?”

The girl shrugged, filthy thumb in mouth.

“You were lost. I’ve come to get you.”

“Where’s my mama?”

Freydeh did not want to start off by lying, but she could hardly tell the girl her mother was dead and she must go with them. The little girl squinted at Sammy suspiciously. She had already learned to mistrust men. Freydeh began, “Later on—”

“Your mother’s dead,” the slattern interrupted. “They take you or I’ll throw you out in the street or worse. Now give me the twenty dollars for her.”

“We agreed on eighteen.” Freydeh held out the money but kept a grip on it.

Sammy let his coat fall open so that his knife was visible. “We’ll take her now.”

The woman looked indecisive. “I said twenty.”

“Then you agreed to eighteen. You take it or leave it. Either way we’re going home with our niece.” Sammy stepped forward as if to threaten her.

The woman took the money and tucked it into a woven purse she wore under her skirts with a flash of her gray flabby legs. Freydeh picked up the child, who began to cry and tried to duck behind the woman. For a girl of five, she was severely underweight. She stank of urine and worse. The child beat feebly on her, crying and shrieking. Freydeh half expected the windows to open and people to run down as they would on her block, but nobody even looked. With Sammy in the lead, they headed for home. Freydeh gave the girl a dried apple ring to suck on, and she quieted.
Halfway there, Sammy took her. Reba began to cry again. Freydeh soothed her with more of the dried apple rings from her pocket and they marched on. At one point, the little girl said, “My mama has yellow hair. Is she coming to get me?”

Sammy looked at her and she looked back at him. Nothing to do but tell the truth. “No. But we promised her we’d take care of you for her.”

“Miz Canary, she say my mama dead?”

“I’m your auntie and this is your cousin. We’re going to take you home with us.”

“You won’t throw me in the river?”

“Why would we do that? You’re our little girl now.”

“Miz Canary say she throw me in the river.”

“We’re going to take you home and feed you and put you in clean clothes. You’re going to your real family, to another little girl Kezia and your Aunt Sara and your Uncle Asher and your cousins Debra and Feygeleh, who’s just your age, and Chaim. You’ll have children to play with and a home to live in.”

S
HE NOTICED THOSE
next days as Reba was cleaned up and dressed and fed, her hair cut off to get rid of the lice, the scabs on her arms and legs treated with ointment, that Asher did not look at the little girl. Sara took Reba on her lap along with her own Feygeleh. Chaim considered himself too big to sit on his mother’s lap now. Sometimes on Saturdays, Asher took him to shul, and sometimes on weekday mornings for prayers before school. Chaim was still obedient and took his father’s wishes as law, but she knew, from her years in the neighborhood, that would change. Kezia played with Reba like a doll. Sammy was tender with her. Debra hung back at first, but then the maternal feelings that were uncommonly developed in her took over and she began to mother Reba.

Reba would cringe if Asher or Sammy or Sara moved suddenly or lifted an arm. She did not have that reaction with Freydeh. After she had been with them for a month, she began to call Freydeh “Mama.” She knew who she belonged to now.

Asher went out to look for work but seldom found it. Freydeh suspected he wanted it to find him. He was one of those men, unlike her own father, who paid little attention to his daughters and a great deal to his son. Her father had loved them all out of his overflowing generosity of spirit. She had been lucky in her parents, even though she fought with her
mother. Her mother thought she had too much spirit for a girl and that would prove dangerous. She still thought her mother was wrong. A girl needed all the strength and spirit she could muster. Her mother had obviously preferred Sara and Shaineh, and she had doted on her sons. Her father had encouraged Freydeh to learn, to walk with him in the woods and listen as he told her about the different trees and birds and animals who lived there, the foxes, the wolves, the weasels, the hares, the rabbits and the deer. He showed her cocoons of moths and hornets’ nests and the hives of wild bees in hollows of trees. She could never have a chance to pass on that kind of lore to her sweet adopted children, because there were no trees, no rabbits unless someone kept them in a hutch behind a building. Someday she would get them out of this slum. Comstock had cost her four years of work, but she would save, get them to a better spot. She would.