Sex Wars: A Novel of Gilded Age New York Read online

  “I care about my two dollars you owe. Pay up and I’ll give you the letter.”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  “Okay, come by Sunday in the evening and give me my two dollars and I’ll give you your letter.” He gripped her elbow again. “Deal?”

  She hated to give him anything, the man who had stolen her only necklace, one her mother had given her when she married, but she needed that letter. Maybe it said they were coming. Maybe they were on their way. “All right, I’ll come by after work, around eight, nine. We run late at the pharmacy. Will you be there?”

  “If I’m not, give it to Pearl. I’ll leave the letter with her. You give her the money, she gives you the letter.”

  SHE WAS NERVOUS ALL through Shabbos. She went to the shul with the Silvermans because it was easier to go than not to. Moishe and she had been freethinkers, socialists, poor as they were, among the enlightened ones. She did not believe in all that nonsense, but she kept kosher anyhow. At Wolf’s, going to shul was one thing she didn’t have to do, but the Silvermans were better people. They were honest, they were hardworking, and if they worked her hard too, she understood why. Mrs. Silverman was so skinny she could sit with her younger daughter two to the same chair. The oldest daughter was just as thin and pale as if the sun never touched her, and it scarcely did, for she worked all day and into the night with her mother and sister making those flowers to be pinned to ladies’ bosoms or stuck on their floppy hats. They all had light brown hair worn down their back in braids, all the girls and even Mrs. Silverman. When Freydeh had arrived in New York, she had been shocked how many good Jewish wives wore their own hair, but now she was used to it. After the second month, she left off her wig, letting her own hair grow out, thicker than it had been before she married, a dark reddish brown Moishe said was the color of good tea.

  She was on edge the next day at the pharmacy. Sunday was always a busy day. Lots of hangover preparations, mostly for their non-Jewish customers who knew how good a pharmacist Yonkelman was. He was better than most doctors at figuring out what ailed a sick person and what they should have—better than the cruel bleeding and poisons and purges regular doctors believed in. He sold pills too for female troubles—which meant somebody got knocked up and needed to get rid of the baby. All the pharmacies sold condoms, pessaries, womb veils, forty different douches, all to prevent conception or end it. Most pharmacists made those kinds of pills, but Yonkelman got his from Madame Restell, who sold pills and performed abortions out of a fine row house on Greenwich Street. Carriages were always pulling up to her door and veiled women in fancy clothes climbing out. Madame had a sliding scale, expensive for the elite and cheap for working women. Every so many weeks, Yonkelman would send her down to Madame or to her husband Charles Lohman, who had his office around the corner with a doctor’s plaque. He made up the pills. He was no more a doctor than Madame was, but that hardly mattered. Madame knew what she was doing, a big buxom woman with a head of beautiful dark hair, always dressed in silks as fine as any of her clients. Women preferred to go to women. Every woman in the shtetl knew there were times to have a baby and times not to. It was all part of what women did for each other at home, herbs for this and that, potions, midwifery, the lore women passed on generation to generation. When you had female troubles, you turned to a woman. Women were always running to male doctors here, but she didn’t trust them. They hadn’t saved Moishe. Besides, a male doctor wasn’t decent.

  At last they were finally closing. She rushed through the streets so fast her breath stabbed her. Fortunately, she didn’t bother with corsets and those stays American women wore. They couldn’t bend over or lie down in them or even sit comfortably. She wove her way through groups congregating around every stoop, gathered in the street, men smoking, women gossiping, kids chasing each other or looking for something to swipe. Street arabs like her friend Sammy were running errands or shooting craps or holding some toff’s horse while he visited a whore.

  Big Head’s apartment was in a rear tenement on Cherry Street, up on the top floor. He came and went across the roofs sometimes. She labored up the steep dark steps, hopping over puddles of urine and sticky stuff that looked like blood. Something was dripping at the back of the second-floor hall. The smell of cooked cabbage, rancid grease, unwashed bodies made her put her hand up to her nose, although she ought to be used to it by now. Back in the shtetl, she could always step outside and the wind would carry the evergreen scent of the woods. Here outside smelled as bad as inside. She had to walk to the river to smell something fresh, and even then, half the time it smelled like sewage or slaughterhouses or tanneries.

  Big Head wasn’t home, but his wife Pearl opened the door. She was pregnant again, wearing a loose wrapper with a stained apron over it. “Another three months to go, eh?” Freydeh eyed Pearl’s belly. She had helped deliver enough babies to know.

  “What you want, anyhow, coming around here all of a sudden after the way you moved out!” Pearl tossed her red hair and turned to plump her behind into a chair.

  “Big Head said he got a letter for me. I came for it.” She slid past Pearl into the kitchen and stood, hands on her hips.

  “He said, you pay us the three dollars you owe us and then I give you the letter.”

  “Two dollars. And he took my necklace.”

  “Three dollars. Big Head says you got to pay interest from owing it so long.”

  “Two dollars is all I got.” She took the greasy dollars from her pocket and flattened them out to show Pearl.

  “Big Head says three.”

  “Okay, well I tried. The letter is probably nothing but a series of complaints anyhow, it rained too much, the winter was too long, our cow died, I got rheumatism. To read somebody’s stale grief isn’t worth money I don’t got.”

  Freydeh gave the woman a big false smile showing all her strong teeth and then swung on her heel, marched out slowly but steadily and slammed the door. Then she stood outside it, her heart tapping its hammer on her breastbone, her clenched hands wet with sweat. She took another three steps, trying to hear if Pearl was moving behind the paper-thin wall, but there was too much noise.

  The door flung open. “Well, all right, all right. Don’t keep me standing here,” Pearl yelled. “Out of the goodness of my heart, I’m giving you the letter for the original two dollars you owe us. Now give me the money and take your dirty letter. Oh, and this is one of yours that came back. See, I saved it for you.”

  Freydeh grabbed the two letters and ran down the stairs. She did not dare stop to read the letter—it was dark already and the gas lamps that weren’t broken gave a faint illumination to the unpaved streets. Fortunately a lot of people were out. The night was mild for early April. She ran the five blocks to the Silvermans’, and not until she was in their front room did she dare take the letter and tear it open. Mrs. Silverman and the two older girls were at the table making flowers, as usual. They wouldn’t be able to stop till they fell asleep, they got so little for each piece.

  She moved near their candle and read. It wasn’t her mother’s writing. Her mother always wrote the letters. This hand was more ragged than her mother’s neat tiny writing. Her father? No, the letter was signed by Shaineh. Why Shaineh? By the light of the flickering candle, she leaned to read. Her hands were making the paper soft, she was sweating so. She smoothed out the crumpled paper. It was dated eight months ago, August 1867. In Yiddish it said,

  Dearest Sister Freydeleh,

  I have the worst news for you, forgive the messenger, but you have to know what came down on us. First our brother Eliyahu went off to the new lands where the czar is promising much land and seeds to plant, if Jews will go, so he took his wife and their little boy and he went. We have written and written to him, but we have heard nothing and we fear the worst.

  Mama and Papa got cholera in the epidemic this summer. Mama got sick first and Papa caught it from her, trying to save her and little Yakov. I was away because Mama had apprenticed me to a seamstress. B
ut I never learned nothing about sewing because she had me taking care of her twins and cooking and cleaning and treated me like a servant. So I didn’t get the cholera but everybody else did except Sara and her family, who are fine.

  Mama and Papa were going to emigrate this fall on what you sent them, but we used up some of the money burying them all so there was just enough for one. Sara said I should be the one to go. She has taken over Mama’s vodka business and her husband is working for a miller so she says she is set and I should go to America and live with you and make money and then I can send back enough for all of them to come over or else Eli and his family if they came back from that place where the czar sent them. As for Shlomo, nobody has heard of him since the czar took him for the army and maybe we never will, it’s in the hands of Hashem.

  So I have made arrangements to get out of the Pale the same way you did. I am traveling with a family from Minsk so I should be safer than if I went off alone. Papa had betrothed me to the Sibivitz middle son but he got taken by the czar too, so they called it off. So I got no ties to keep me here and I want to go and be useful and have a good life there.

  I am leaving in time to get a ship from Hamburg 20 October before the winter comes and the seas get too rough and dangerous. The ship I am supposed to go on, it’s called Die Freiheit. I think its name is a good omen. Things have been so terrible here, people ate their shoes, cooked them in water for soup and got deadly sick. We had to eat our last cow. There was no choice. We were dying of hunger. But we did that and then the cholera came, so what was the use sacrificing Daisy to survive when nobody did?

  So I expect to be in New York around the end of October to embrace you and let us blend our tears for all the troubles of our family and the loss of Mama and Papa, who worked so hard and gave us so much love.

  Your loving sister, Shaineh

  Freydeh put the letter down in shock. Her mother, her father, her little brother, all dead. All gone from her forever. It had been hard enough to leave them, knowing as every emigrant knew, that she might never see them again. But now they were truly gone and she had not been there to nurse them, to bury them properly, to mourn them. Her father had been such a force in her life, working in any weather, risking his skin to bring them enough for bread and fuel. Her mother worked from before dawn till long after dusk. Her mother was the fire in the hearth, the light of the house. Singing at her work, always singing, and the children learned those songs as early as they could mouth the words.

  Then Freydeh groaned aloud. Shaineh had presumably arrived at the end of October and there had been no one to meet her. She had probably made her way to the address she had from before, but Big Head would not have helped her. Freydeh had taken care that Big Head didn’t know where she moved, because she didn’t trust him, because she wanted nothing to do with him and his gang of thieves.

  She had sent more money in the last letter and her new address, but Shaineh must already have left. She opened her own letter carefully. It looked as if it had been rained on, dropped in the dirt and smeared with something. But her letter and the last money order were still inside. It was amazing that no one had pilfered it, torn it open, taken the order and cashed it, some Pale version of Big Head. There were enough of them. When times were hard, there were always crooks to make it still harder.

  She put her head in her hands in despair. Shaineh, her beautiful youngest sister, had come to New York alone and no one had met her. So what had happened to Shaineh? All that could go wrong swirled in Freydeh’s head. She had to find Shaineh, but how?

  All right, the first thing was to find out when the ship had come in and whether Shaineh had truly been on it. She needed to talk Yonkelman into letting her leave work to go down to Castle Garden and make inquiries. Even the prospect of dealing with the immigration people gave her a stomachache, but she must do it, and soon. If she could afford a lawyer, this would be easier, but she couldn’t, no use fussing about it. Her English was just not good enough. She had been studying and studying, sometimes even in the pharmacy during slow times. The Silverman girls helped her. They didn’t even have accents. Of course, who could hear their own accent? She would still sound like a greenhorn, she didn’t doubt it.

  She could take one of the street kids from the neighborhood with her. That kid Sammy she sometimes shared a little bread with or gave a penny for an errand, he was bright. Sammy was a good kid—as good as he could manage to be. She’d get Sammy to go down to Castle Garden with her and then she would be sure the immigration people and the people from the Hamburg line would understand her and she would understand them. It was a plan. Not much of one, but the best she could do. She had to find Shaineh, and so she had to start someplace.

  She knew that in part she was involving Sammy because she had feelings for him—barefoot in all weather, half starved, getting by on garbage and luck, filthy, ragged, scorned, invisible like thousands of others who lived on the streets of this city. They broke her heart. She wanted a child so passionately, and there were all these children just thrown away. She’d look for Sammy right now—even though it meant going down to the street. She knew where he slept—the passageway between two tenements the locals called Pig Alley. She stood up, made her explanation to the Silvermans. Mister had gone to bed with their son. The youngest girl had fallen asleep with her head on the table. Missus and the two older girls were still making flowers, their fingers bleeding as usual by day’s end. When the candle guttered out, they would finally go to bed. In the meantime, she would find Sammy and persuade him to accompany her down to the Battery on her quest for real, hard information about Shaineh. It was a weak plan, but she could not see where else to start. She had to find her sister, and she was months late looking. Anything could have happened to Shaineh, anything.

  OVER THE YEAR and five months she had been living at the Silvermans’, she had come to know Sammy. Boys grew up fast on these streets. They slept where they could. Their bodies turned up in the mornings and were hauled away and buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. Nobody said goodbye. Nobody missed them, except perhaps a younger kid whom they protected or an older kid who had protected them. There were thousands in these streets, sleeping in alleys, in filthy second basements, in halls and by fences or in sheds. Everywhere she went in the city, there they were, the unwanted, the sloughed-off kids.

  Pig Alley was a narrow unpaved slot between the six-story tenements that lined the street. Sammy had built himself a little hut against a wall, cobbled out of builders’ scraps and boxes, with a horse blanket he had probably stolen for his bed. He was huddled there, sucking on a bone he had found someplace—a bare bone but better than nothing. She approached him slowly—he was skittish—and held out a heel of bread she had saved, as she might approach a dog encountered in the street.

  “Sammy, it’s Freydeh. I brought you a little bit of bread. I need to talk with you.”

  He gobbled the bread and then listened, squinting up at her. He had brown hair a few shades lighter than hers—she thought, but it was hard to tell because of his filth. He was scrawny and tough, but he looked years younger from being so short. He wasn’t sure if he was ten or eleven.

  “Can you help me?”

  “Gimme a quarter.”

  “I’ll buy you some secondhand clothes to keep you warm, that’s what I’ll do.”

  He hesitated. He’d rather have money, of course.

  “And I’ll buy you something to eat on the way.”

  Finally he nodded approval, and she arranged to meet him in the morning. She smiled slightly as she climbed back upstairs. He had no idea what she was going to do to him. His father had died of typhus when he was little, his mother had married again and bore at least two more babies to her new husband, who beat him. Finally he ran away. They had not bothered to look for him. Nobody had ever wanted him, except for the gang of boys he hung about with in the street or somebody needing him to do something for them—mind a horse, carry a package, send a message, run to the store. He had alway
s been honest with her. She appreciated that. She knew it was silly of her to take an interest in a street arab, but she liked Sammy. Who did she have, anyhow? Until she could find Shaineh, she had no family. She thought Sammy was a cut above the little thieves of the neighborhood, and when she had a bit of extra food, she shared it with him.

  Before they started downtown, she bought him a used pair of trousers and a used jacket. He stank so they would have trouble in the offices where he was going to be her spokesman. She made him stand in the yard by the privies while she scrubbed his face and hands with a bit of cloth. Sammy cursed, enduring the cold water and her harsh scrubbing at the pump in the muddy yard between the tenement she lived in and the rear house. Then she had him put on the second- or thirdhand trousers. “Le’mir geyn, Sammy—let’s get going.” Sullenly he followed her.

  She had worked hard on her English, but she knew she still spoke with a thick accent. Most of her life was conducted in Yiddish or in German and, once in a while, Russian. Opportunities to practice English were few, for most business of the pharmacy was conducted in Yiddish or German. Sammy spoke Yiddish of course and German too, but he had been born here and spoke English like a native. He had even gone to school for a couple of years, before he went on the streets. He could read and write English, but not Yiddish, and he had not stayed in school long enough to learn to write a cursive hand. When he had to write something, he printed.

  They took the horse-drawn trolley downtown, crowded as always. Sammy kept smoothing his new clothes—new to him—and she saw him trying to catch a glimpse of himself in the reflection off the windows. She waited till they were off the trolley and then rehearsed him. “Now, you’re my little brother and you live with me at the Silvermans’. That’s the best thing to tell them. Nu, mach snell. Hurry!”

  “I could be your son.”

  “You could be.” She smiled, putting her hand on his bony shoulder. “You like that better?” She would have had to have borne him when she was sixteen if he was eleven, but such early births were not uncommon, back in the Pale or here.