Melting the Snow on Hester Street Page 23

  ‘I don’t want to leave Isha. I can’t leave her.’

  ‘Of course you can!’ her mother interrupted. ‘And you must. Matz is right. Isha has me to take care of her. And you will make twice the money if you go with Matz. And he needs you,’ she added.

  ‘Isha needs me.’

  ‘Isha has her grandmother,’ Matz replied. ‘And Isha needs to get away from this place as soon as she can. It’s what she needs. It’s what we all need. Only it’s taken us this to know it. Come with me, Eleana, and the sooner we can take her away from here. To a place where she can grow up to be strong, where the sun shines every day. Try to imagine it! Can you imagine it, Eleana?

  Eleana smiled. She could not.

  ‘In California they pick the oranges off the trees! And, you know, there are film companies there galore. All the film companies are going to California now. We can work on the films, why not? Why not, Eleana? The sun shines in California! And it is as far from New York as it’s possible to be. Won’t you come with me, darling? It will be a fresh beginning – I swear to it. You, me, the baby … and Batia.’

  ‘You will get into trouble again,’ Eleana said, shaking her head. ‘I know it. As long as there are suffering workers and forbidden strikes and the police—’

  ‘Never – if you come with me, I swear – I will leave it behind. All the politics – I will forget it. I will devote myself to you and to Isha – to us.’

  ‘You had better,’ said Batia.

  ‘I will take care of us. I promise you.’

  Batia nodded. But he wasn’t looking at Batia. ‘Eleana,’ he leant across the table and took her hand, ‘will you come?’

  Eleana said nothing. She began to cry.

  ‘She will come,’ said her mother confidently, taking Eleana’s other hand, and then taking Matz’s hand, so that the three were linked in a circle, hunched together at the small table. She turned to Eleana, ‘It will only be for a month or two, darling. It will be safer for Isha to stay here with me, until everything is ready. And you will both work hard … And then as soon as everything is ready and safe, and Isha is strong, I will bring her with me – and Tzivia too, if Samuel allows it. And we will come and live with you wherever you are.’ She smiled. ‘Where the oranges grow off the trees. Even if it is California.’

  Batia hesitated – it might only enrage them, she thought. God was not a part of their lives, nor ever had been. But the old ritual might comfort them perhaps: the familiarity, if not the meaning. It had comforted her when her husband died, and at home as a child, when her sister died and her father.

  Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba

  b’al’ma di v’ra chiruteih …

  But as she muttered the familiar words, Eleana and Matz gently pulled their hands away, and she fell silent.

  53

  They found the head of the line eventually. It was a long wait – nightfall by then, a full day since the fire was put out. At the end of the pier, they reached the threshold to the building where sat a kindly looking, elderly nurse, stationed to sift out all but the genuine grievers. She stopped Eleana and her mother, as she stopped every one. Had they come to this place, she enquired softly, because they were connected to the terrible event? Had they come because they were missing a loved one or … Eleana replied yes before the nurse could continue. She thought of Dora, life extinguished, and tears rolled down her cheeks once again. The nurse waited to hear more, but nothing further was offered. She said, ‘Forgive me. I am sure you are here for good reasons. But we are having problems keeping the crowds back … Ghouls and pickpockets. It’s not right.’

  ‘It’s not,’ Eleana agreed.

  ‘May I ask who you are looking for?’

  ‘My son,’ said Batia. The nurse nodded them in.

  It was a metal-framed hangar, painted a peeling, greyish yellow, cavernous and full of shadows. There were small, dark windows set high in the walls above, and river water lapping at three sides of the building, giving the impression they were walking onto an abandoned ship. High overhead, lamps cast their feeble, sulphurous light onto the open coffins below, and lined along the heads of the open caskets, held aloft by waiting police officers, there were lanterns, weak and flickering.

  Together, Eleana and Batia stepped into the space and joined the echo of the shuffling footsteps. The cry of gulls and the lapping of water, the footsteps, the occasional anguished sob – the noises filled the silence, and yet, somehow, hardly dented it. Dora’s coffin had been closed and taken away by then, her husband the cloakmaker having already seen to it. Sarah’s coffin, too, had been labelled and stowed. But the rows of unclaimed caskets seemed still to be endless. Eleana clutched at her mother’s hand. She was here for Matz, for her mother. And, for Isha, of course. So they could start afresh, all of them, together. But she would know the girls in the open boxes. She would know many of the people shuffling between them, searching for the people they loved. And here she was among them, under false pretences. She couldn’t have spoken to them if they had addressed her, and luckily she didn’t have to. From the silence, the downcast eyes, it seemed nobody wanted to talk.

  So they wandered through the rows of bodies, tagged and numbered, looking for one with almost nothing to distinguish it. It would not be hard, Batia had explained. There were plenty to choose from: scores of bodies, their features all burned to nothing.

  And when they found it, this indistinguishable body, they would stop and find something, some reason to say it was theirs.

  That was the plan. As Batia had done the night before, when she was searching for Sarah, they would ask the policeman nearest to swing his lantern closer over the coffin. And they would murmur and discuss, and they would weep, and they would agree that yes, it was Matz Beekman.

  That was the plan.

  Eleana wasn’t up to it. Within a few moments of walking through the corpses of her friends, she began to shake: so violently she had to lean on her mother, to prevent her knees from buckling. Her mother patted her, shushed her, waited. Eleana’s breathing became heavy. She began to rasp, and it rang out over the hush.

  Batia whispered, ‘Eleana, for goodness’ sake. You will draw attention …’

  Eleana nodded, but her breathing somehow grew louder, and she clasped her mother’s shoulder so tight that Batia had to pull her daughter’s fingers from her, and bite her lip to stop crying out.

  ‘Can you walk?’ Batia asked her. ‘I think you should leave. Go home. You don’t need to be here.’

  ‘I want to be here,’ Eleana whispered.

  ‘Nonsense, you are only slowing me down. Go.’ Eleana did not move.

  ‘Go home, Eleana! At once. I don’t want to stay in this place a moment longer than I need to, and you are only delaying us. Leave now. Can you walk? Of course you can. Now go.’ Batia gave her daughter a gentle push and turned away.

  Hours later, when Batia returned to the apartment, she found the four of them, Isha, Tzivia, Eleana and Matz, seated at the small table, bowls of untouched potato soup before them. It seemed even the children had lost their appetites. Batia hesitated. Seeing this family group it struck her afresh, the horror of what she had done. Too late. She had taken a decision and now there was no undoing it. There could be no question of regret.

  ‘Matz. Eleana. Leave the girls to their soup and come into the other room with me.’ It was unusual in itself, that the adults should be the ones displaced and not the children, but the adults left the table and filed dutifully into the family bedroom.

  ‘You will be angry,’ she said to her daughter, when the door was safely closed behind them. ‘But there. I made the decision. We weren’t thinking clearly before.’

  ‘What decision?’ Matz asked.

  But she continued to look at her daughter. ‘Eleana, if you had disappeared with Matz, there would have been too many questions. It would not have been safe. Not for any of us. Not for me or for Isha. Maybe not even for Tzivia. They would want to know where you had gone. Why it was
I, and not you, who identified Matz at the morgue.’ She stopped. Shuddered. ‘I have registered you too, Eleana.’

  ‘You have done what?’ Eleana said. ‘You have registered me …?’

  ‘Dead. Now you are both dead.’ A long silence.

  ‘We are both dead?’ Eleana repeated finally. After the horrors of the last few days, it seemed to have no meaning. The words rolled off her as if she were talking about the weather. ‘I am dead, too?’

  ‘I am so sorry,’ Matz said at last. ‘If I had only—’

  ‘Never mind that!’ Eleana interrupted him. ‘Never mind “if only”!’ She was angry suddenly.

  Batia said, ‘Forgive me, my darling. It was a moment’s decision, and I had to take it. I still believe—’

  ‘But I am NOT dead. Unlike all the others, I am not dead, Mama. God knows why – but I am very much alive. How dare you say I am dead!’ She was growing hysterical. Matz touched her arm.

  ‘Nobody is saying you are really dead,’ he said softly.

  ‘Well I know that.’ She glanced at his hand, touching her … They would need to find another bandage. Clean the wound … An image of his hands on the burning cable came to her, of her own arms clinging on to him, of his holding her when she seemed to slip. ‘I am sorry …’

  He squeezed her arm – as best he could. ‘Never mind that,’ he said, and smiled. Somehow, they both did. ‘I swear it, Eleana, I swear it. Everything will be better from now. It will be better when we are all in California.’

  They left on the day the city buried the unclaimed bodies: seven coffins in all, the seventh one taken not by a single corpse but by the parts of several – hands, arms, legs – unidentifiable and unknown. It was a fitting moment for Eleana Kappelman and Matz Beekman to take their leave of the city. They both thought so, quietly. Not that it had any bearing. Only it was a good day to slip away. With half a million mourners on the sodden streets, it would be easy for them to walk through the crowds unnoticed.

  The weather could not have better reflected the city’s mood that day, nor that of the broken family on Allen Street. All along the funeral procession, the rain pelted relentlessly down and, on Allen Street, as Matz and Eleana bid their daughter farewell, the cold grey sky never lifted above the rooftops.

  Matz and Eleana would take the train as far as Chicago. From there, half a country away from anyone who ever knew them, they would look for work. It was what they had planned. Leaving behind all the money that he could spare, Matz had enough for the two of them to survive a fortnight. In Chicago, there were nickelodeons and bars and, above all, there was vaudeville. Matz would play piano as soon as his hands allowed. Eleana would sing. They would find work with a touring group, the better to save every penny they made, and they would make their way west, to the orange groves and the palm trees and the Pacific Ocean. And together they would make a home for Isha.

  54

  What does a three-and-a-half year old understand of death?

  Isha’s parents discussed it at length. After they were gone, the apartment felt painfully empty. Batia, suddenly terrified by what she had done, explained the situation to Isha and Tzivia in the harshest and simplest of terms. If they let it be known that Eleana and Matz had been alive after the fire, their bubbeh would be thrown into jail. And with no one left to look after them, the two girls would have to go and live in an orphanage.

  ‘What about Tzivia’s papa?’ Isha had asked solemnly.

  ‘Indeed!’ her bubbeh had replied irritably. He’d not been seen since the morning after the fire. ‘What indeed?’

  ‘He would never leave us in the orphanage.’

  ‘Well maybe he wouldn’t. And if you want to test your high opinion of him, I suggest you do the opposite of what I advise, my young friend. Go to the market tomorrow and tell everyone you see that your mother and father are alive and well, and on their way to Chicago. And we shall see, won’t we? After I am put in jail and they have thrown away the key, we shall see if he comes for you both. Hm? Perhaps he will. And perhaps he won’t.’

  It silenced Isha. Because of course she could not be sure. She was far from sure.

  ‘I won’t say a word, bubbeh,’ Isha said solemnly. ‘And you won’t, will you, Tzivia? You will remember to tell everyone my mama and papa are dead. Just like your mama. They are all dead.’

  ‘Not really,’ Tzivia said stubbornly. ‘They are not really dead.’

  ‘Well – but they are as good as dead,’ snapped Batia, her own fear making her unkind. And both girls burst into noisy, confused tears.

  55

  But before that, on the day of the funeral of the unclaimed, Eleana and Matz shared a last moment with their daughter. Batia took Tzivia out to fetch breakfast, and the three were left alone in the apartment. They huddled together in the small parlour.

  ‘You will be good?’ Matz said to her, with brittle good cheer.

  Isha said, sulkily, without looking up at him: ‘I am always good.’

  ‘Oh I know you are,’ he said, nudging her small shoulder playfully, though there was nothing playful in the air.

  ‘Of course you are always good,’ said Eleana, crouching down so their faces were level, brushing away tears – her own, and her daughter’s. She smiled into her daughter’s green eyes. ‘You are always terribly good.’

  For once Isha did not smile back. ‘How soon will you come?’

  ‘As soon as we can.’

  ‘How long will you be dead?’

  ‘We are not dead.’

  ‘But Bubbeh said—’

  ‘You know perfectly well we are not really dead,’ Matz said to her. ‘Don’t be foolish.’

  ‘I know you are not really dead. But how long am I to pretend you are dead?’

  ‘Until we come for you.’

  ‘When will you come?’

  ‘Oh, Isha …’

  ‘Will it be a week, or a day, or a hundred years?’

  ‘Much closer to a week than a hundred years, my darling. Just a few months, that’s all. And then …’

  Isha smiled, the smile that melted the snow on Hester Street, that banished the damp grey clouds on Allen Street, that made her mother’s heart sing – and break, all at the same time. ‘And then,’ Isha recited dutifully, just as if it was a fairy tale, ‘there will be sunshine and orange groves and coconut trees. And grapes hanging from vines, and sweet smelling flowers at every corner, and besides all that, the big yellow beach and the big blue sea …’

  It was how they left it. Afterwards, Isha’s health deteriorated. Always weak, she seemed to grow weaker when her parents left. Afterwards, Eleana rehearsed those final moments again, and again, until the memory was worn thin with distortions, and all she could really remember was the smile – that brave, warm smile, and the warm green eyes, and the glow of health in her daughter’s pale cheeks which signified that on that rainy day, at least, she might have been strong enough. She might have travelled with them. They might all be together still.

  Matz and Eleana slipped out of the apartment soon after Batia and Tzivia returned. One final embrace, and they were gone, without looking back.

  Sun on San Simeon Bay

  56

  Friday 25 October 1929

  Soaking in her warm, marble tub of lily-of the-valley-infused bath water in faraway Reno, Nevada, Eleanor knew nothing of the turmoil taking place on the East Coast and cared, though her own fortunes rested on it, hardly at all. It was the morning after Black Thursday, and disaster was writ large on the front page of her newspaper. But she couldn’t have known it because her newspaper, delivered to her room that morning, still lay untouched on her breakfast tray.

  She was due in Matthew Gregory’s office at ten, and Matthew Gregory was running out of patience with her. That much was obvious. She could hardly blame him. She was running out of patience with herself. They were no closer to finding Isha Kappelman today than they were when she arrived in Reno. No closer than when she engaged Matthew’s father seven years before.r />
  Nothing had changed. She was trapped. As trapped as she had ever been. For as long as Matz Beekman could never be found, how could they ever search properly for Isha? It was impossible. And that was it: she knew it was impossible. She had always known. This morning, in her flower-scented marble bathtub, she tried to push away the single image which had ensured her discretion to this day and which, she knew, would ensure her discretion until she died. It was of Max, her faithless husband, who had saved her life and then transformed it, strapped to the electric chair for an act he committed almost twenty years earlier, his eyes through the glass of the spectator box seeking her out, looking back at her, and only at her. The image, the sound, the smell, their shared pain – it came at her in a rush, so vividly she heard herself cry out.

  And then came another picture, the one that woke her most nights: of green-eyed little Isha, waxy and feverish in that disease-infested tenement, lying beside a grandmother, slowly dying; beside her dying grandmother, slowly dying. Or Batia, already dead, and Isha crawling out onto the street in search of food, all alone, sick, frozen – calling for her mother, for her father, wondering why they had never come back to fetch her.

  Unbearable. All of it. She jerked herself up and out of the bath, unable to stay still any longer.

  She rested on the edge of the tub, eyes closed, listening to the cars on the street, the sounds of rich women’s voices – fellow guests at the hotel, she imagined, chatting and laughing together, talking loudly about alimony settlements. What was she doing here in Reno? Risking so much – for what?

  Isha is gone.

  The words came to her very clearly. She wondered if she had spoken them aloud.

  Isha is gone.

  She stood up then, aware suddenly that she was shivering. It was finished. Over. All of it. Everything. She thought she had come to Reno to find her daughter. It’s what she believed as she was packing her bags, as she stayed up all night in her first-class carriage, looking out into the darkness, and as she sat before Matthew Gregory’s garish, tight-fitting jackets, pouring out her heart. But just then, she understood. She had not come to find Isha. Isha had died, many years ago, in a cold tenement flat on Allen Street. Eleanor had come to Reno to say goodbye to her. It was time to step out of the dark.