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  One of the children, disturbed his mother’s fury, turned in his sleep. He was the oldest boy, who slept in the top bunk; it creaked and swayed with his movement like a willow in the wind. Sadie steadied the top-heavy tier, affectionately brushing back the comma of hair that had fallen across her slumbering child’s forehead.

  “If you won’t throw this desecrator out for me, do it for your son,” she demanded. “He’ll be influenced by Abe’s behavior—wait and see.”

  Abe felt sick to his stomach. The other day Joseph and his eldest son had quarreled over the boy’s having skipped his Hebrew lessons in favor of playing stickball. It was not surprising. The street was filling up with immigrants of many backgrounds, and the children not having enough of their own kind to make friends with, freely mixed together, much to the displeasure of everyone’s parents. This had nothing to do with Abe, but he knew that he would suffer if Sadie succeeded in convincing her husband that his son was under a bad influence from him.

  Sadie, eyes gleaming with triumph, strutted from the kitchen into the parlor, where her parents and younger sister still snoozed.

  “She’s a balebossteh, eh?” Joseph chuckled shyly. His thick, callused thumbs drummed the tabletop.

  Abe anxiously waited for his sentence to be passed. Balebossteh was literally “praiseworthy wife,” but it implied bossiness. Abe had a sinking feeling he would be packing his cardboard suitcase by nightfall.

  Joseph took papers and tobacco from his shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette. Sadie disapproved of smoking, but concerning some things Joseph put his foot down. Accordingly, Sadie restricted herself to silently pursing her lips in displeasure whenever he lit up.

  Time passed as Joseph smoked. Occasionally he would tap the ash into the palm of his hand and then rub it onto the brown-stained green knees of his work pants. Finally he took on a look of decision. “I don’t need such aggravation in my home.” He puffed on his cigarette.

  Abe did not know how to respond. “More money?” He cringed at the thought of paying more, but rooms were hard to come by. “If a little more money might make amends—”

  Joseph shook his head. “You desecrate the Sabbath.”

  “I’ve got to work tomorrow,” Abe insisted. “The factory uses goyim as well as Jews. The Polacks and the Italians don’t mind working a Saturday—or a Sunday, for that matter. If I refuse, I’d lose the work.”

  “What’s better, to lose a shift or to lose the room?”

  “Don’t do this to me,” Abe implored, furious at the begging note he heard in his voice. That I should have to crawl on my knees to this blood-smeared dolt, he thought, but still he was careful to keep his tone and manner meek. “Three months I’ve lived here, Joseph. You already know why I work a double shift.” He smiled encouragingly.

  “To save money for a business of your own.” Joseph nodded impatiently. “Ambition is an admirable thing, but why does it have to destroy the peace in my home?”

  Abe tried to reply, but Joseph held up his hand to silence him. “Listen to me a moment, if you please. Your story I know by heart.” He looked disgusted. “I also happen to know that you are no closer to your dream than you were when you landed two years ago.”

  “I’ve saved money,” Abe replied, sullen.

  “Yes, you have, but meanwhile the real estate has grown dearer and you’ve grown older. When you landed you were thirty-two. Now you’re thirty-four.”

  “So?” Abe demanded.

  “So when are you going to take for yourself a wife? When do the children come?” He waited, smoking his cigarette.

  Abe’s eyes were downcast. “After.”

  “After what?” Joseph scowled. “Your funeral maybe.” He paused and his voice softened. “Listen to me. I’m talking to you like a friend. That sweatshop you slave in from dawn until dusk seven days a week manufactures suit coats; it manufactures pants and vests. Millionaires it doesn’t manufacture.”

  “Others have done it—”

  “In Russia you were a cobbler. You could take a nice job as a cobbler here,” Joseph argued. “Then you could get married, have children, be a mensch.”

  “Joseph, please,” Abe groaned.

  Joseph glanced toward the curtain that separated the kitchen from the parlor. Behind it his wife was undoubtedly eavesdropping. “You make it so hard for yourself, Abe. If you make trouble with Sadie, I’ve got to throw you out, right? Every night she complains to me the same thing. You come home, you eat, you go into your room and you read your newspapers until you go to sleep. You never offer to watch the baby for her and you never so much as look at her sister Leah.” He offered Abe a conspiratorial wink. “Leah is fond of you. Sadie told me so. Ask her to marry you. She’ll accept, of that I can assure you.”

  “No doubt,” Abe murmured.

  “What?” Joseph sharply demanded.

  “Oh, be reasonable,” Abe complained. “If I married now, I’d have to support a family. It would be good-bye to my store.” He leapt to his feet and dashed into his room for his overcoat. “I’m late for work. We’ll talk more about this tonight,” he called over his shoulder, heading for the door and beginning to think that he might make good his escape.

  “Joseph?” Sadie stormed into the kitchen. Her voice was high and shrill. “Joseph!”

  “Enough!” Joseph glowered at her. “Abe, tonight you will pack your bags and look for another room.”

  Abe slumped against the doorjamb. “Please,” he whispered. “Today I work a full day. Where can I find a room on Sabbath eve?”

  “All of a sudden he’s pious,” Sadie sneered.

  “Enough, I said.” Joseph turned back to his boarder. “All right, you can stay until tomorrow night.”

  Abe nodded. “Thank you.”

  “That’ll make a full week. I’ll owe you no refund.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And what about the Sabbath?” Sadie asked pointedly.

  “His last day here let him do what he wants.”

  “That’s just dandy.” Sadie frowned. “I see now that my wishes count for nothing.”

  “Tomorrow we will rent to a nice single young man, the sort who can appreciate the bride a girl like Leah would be.”

  “Talk a little louder, why don’t you,” Sadie reproached him. “Let the poor girl hear and be humiliated.” But the anger had left Sadie. The deal had been struck.

  She started as Abe let the apartment door slam shut behind him. “Good riddance,” she muttered, returning to her cooking.

  Abe stomped down the tenement’s ill-lit, narrow stairs. He was ashamed and angry. The shame came from the way he’d allowed himself to beg; the rage sprang from the way he had been refused.

  Be a cobbler, Joseph told him, a shoemaker—as if he’d journeyed to America and started a new life merely to ply the trade forced upon his family by the Russian nobleman who owned their village in the Ukraine. A sign of defeat it would be to go back to a cobbler’s bench here in America. A cobbler could never be rich. A shoemaker could hand nothing to his son but his hammer and nails.

  Despair threatened to engulf him as he stepped out onto the littered stoop and the cold predawn air bit into him. It would help if he could say the room was a sty fit only for pigs. But he knew the room was a prize, a blessing, even with Sadie’s mouth. He’d be lucky if he was able to find something half as nice.

  He buttoned his coat and turned up his collar against the cold. Abe’s breath hung in front of his face, a cloud of white vapor like the puffs of steam that rose from his pressing machine at the factory loft on Allen Street.

  The overcoat was too large. It flapped about his gaunt frame like a bathrobe. As he walked he pulled down his cuffs and shoved his hands into his coat pockets to hold it close to his body and keep the wind from whistling up his baggy sleeves.

  He headed toward East Broadway, giving wide berth to the towering stands of garbage lining both sides of Montgomery Street. Now and then a rat, made bold by the darkness, streaked across his path
.

  The cold numbed his ears as he crossed Henry Street. He’d given up wearing hats. Going hatless, like shaving, was a gesture to honor his adopted country. Although Abe would be loath to admit it, he was trying to mold himself into the image of the wealthy Jewish philanthropists he’d learned about at the settlement house: Warburg, Schiff, Lewisjohn and the fabulous Straus brothers, benefactors of the Educational Alliance, sponsors of the milk stations where hungry children and expectant mothers could find nourishment—and most important to Abe, owners of magnificent stores: R.H. Macy on Fourteenth Street near Sixth Avenue and Abraham & Straus in Brooklyn.

  “I should have mentioned the Straus brothers to Joseph,” Abe muttered to himself. “Not that he wouldn’t have laughed in my face.” He savagely booted a tin can out of his path.

  These great men were all German Jews, Yekkes to the Russian immigrants, who considered them as strange as the colored Jews who were said to live in the Orient. The Russians envied the Yekkes for their wealth and distrusted them for their Americanized ways. Abe himself often felt uneasy about how much like the Goyim the Yekkes seemed to act.

  He, of course, would not act that way. When he was rich, he would not pretend to be something he was not. He would loudly proclaim his thanks to God. The rabbi would shake his hand for donating the funds to make a proper Hebrew school in the cellar of the synagogue. His shaving and going without a hat would be waved away as the trifling offenses they were. Abe considered himself a realist; he knew that in America, as in Russia, money in a man’s pocket excused him from much obligation and condemnation.

  A harsh, cutting wind along East Broadway brought tears to his eyes and blew away his reveries. Here he joined the press of other weary, hunched, coughing men who trudged like slaves through the predawn twilight toward their sweatshop jobs.

  I am growing old, Abe thought, just like Joseph said. Two years of scrimping and saving and I am still far from my goal.

  Abe passed a synagogue and briefly thought about stopping in that evening; the shul was a good place to find out if anybody had a room to rent. He decided against it. He went to shul only on the High Holy Days. Abe’s bargain with God specified that he would use the time that might have been spent in shul working and studying to better himself. Then when he was rich, he would make it up to the Lord.

  It was a covenant communicated more in thought than in words. Still, it allowed Abe to sleep with a clear conscience. Better to keep the deal by staying away from the shul altogether than to insult God by going there for a reason other than prayer.

  Should I have agreed to court Leah? Abe wondered. Perhaps he was being too stubborn in defying them—and losing for himself such a nice room.

  Abe paused at a newspaper stand, a collection of milk crates with the periodicals held down by bricks, and bought the one Yiddish newspaper he allowed himself. He preferred to read the English papers to strengthen his grasp of the language, but every day Abe picked up a copy of the Vorwärts, the Forward. He did not pause to scan its front page but tucked the paper into his overcoat and hurried on across East Broadway onto Attorney Street.

  His thoughts returned to Leah, Sadie’s eighteen-year-old sister. She was a sweet girl, not at all like Sadie. Leah was slight of build and very docile and quiet. But maybe they were all like that before marriage. Abe mused. Who knew? He considered himself a moral man; he did not run with the tarts to be had at the red-lantern houses on Rivington Street. He knew very little about women and was by turns proud and wistful over that fact, depending on his mood. One thing he knew: a wife could help in the store—if he ever got the store, that is.

  He reached Delancey Street, where the awnings of the dark locked shops drooped like sleepy eyelids and the pushcarts chained to the lamp posts awaited their peddler owners. The wind carried the aroma of challah bread baking for the Sabbath, then the breeze changed direction and the odor of spoiled fish discarded in an alley assaulted Abe.

  Of course with a wife eventually came children. The appearance of the first-born a year after the marriage was an inevitability, else tongues in the neighborhood would start to wag. When Abe envisioned his offspring he saw a strapping boy as bright as the noon sun, a boy to make a father proud, a young man properly appreciative of the thriving business his father would one day hand over to him. Abe conceded the possibility of daughters. That was all right, for girls could bring much joy to a father, but it was the sons who counted.

  Abe’s musings about his children always began when they’d reached adolescence. He was aware that infancy and childhood were stages in a person’s life, and he could be patient for his children to pass through these stages as long as they didn’t dawdle. But let their mother play with them.

  Frivolity was not in Abe’s nature. He lived for the day when he could present his son with all that he had accomplished and see the light of admiration in his boy’s eyes. If there were daughters, they too could smile, for their father’s success would assure them of good matrimonial matches.

  By now all along Delancey the horse-drawn ash carts had appeared to haul away the previous day’s rubbish. As Abe walked toward Allen Street he carefully perused each storefront, thinking about how he would rearrange this window display of fabric or that one with its racks of suits for men and boys. Every morning on his way to work he lovingly inspected the closed shops on Delancey, Orchard and Hester Streets and coveted the better ones. It inspired him to do a good day’s work. To see why he was slaving away his last precious youth made the thought of the long day ahead endurable.

  Another year, perhaps, and it could be yours, he told himself. Something good will happen, you will see. You are working hard, and so God will see to it.

  Still, without a miracle, Abe knew, it would more likely be another two years before he had enough money saved, and that was if the work remained steady and he managed to find the strength to continue working a seven-day double shift.

  If only Leah’s parents were not poor, Abe thought, but a man in his circumstances could not expect a girl with a dowry. If Leah’s father were rich his last daughter would have been married long ago, and Sadie, for that matter, would have made a far better match than Joseph. At the very least their father could have bought doctors for his daughters by promising the price of a medical education in exchange for marriage.

  No, Abe could not hope to find a girl with money. He was too old and if the truth be known too homely to attract the notice of a wealthy girl. Even the plain ones could pick and choose a man if their fathers had money.

  Leah was not plain. She had big brown eyes, high cheekbones and a shy way of laughing, the memory of which often came back to distract Abe late at night, while he was trying to study his English.

  It did not occur to Abe to think he might be fond of Leah. Abe could not be comfortable with the thought of conjugal love. If he gave in to feelings, how could he survive the misery ahead?

  To Abe the world was God’s emporium, all transactions retail. God stood behind the counter and on the shelves were all the goods a man on earth could hope to earn. Everything had a price, and hard work, faith and sacrifice were the currency God demanded. Not marrying was part of the price Abe had to pay.

  Abe hurried up Allen Street to the factory loft behind the Greek and Arab clubs and restaurants, which were quiet now but would spring to gaudy, exotic life come evening. Tonight when Abe left work there would be wild Oriental music coming from these forbidden places, and in the upstairs windows would appear glimpses of gyrating belly dancers, half-naked savage women who had an exciting and disturbing effect on Abe.

  But that would be tonight, and tonight was many hours of piecework away. The minimum he was allowed to work was twelve hours; the most he’d ever put in at one stretch was eighteen. Tonight he would turn his head away from Allen Street’s distractions for God to see that he was not interested.

  It is a different bargain I wish to conclude with God, Abe thought as he climbed the nine steep flights of stairs to the loft. Here the h
eat of the many steam pressing machines made it seem like summer. Abe at once stripped off his overcoat, suit jacket and white shirt. Over by the toilets were rows of lockers where the men could store their clothes. For the rest of the day Abe and the other men would work in sleeveless undershirts.

  The walls were dull green. The windows had been painted black to shield the place from the notice of the factory licensing inspectors. The tin ceiling was crisscrossed with steam and water pipes and laced with electrical wiring from which dangled bare bulbs. The loft’s sagging scrap-littered wooden floor was divided into cutting, sewing and pressing areas. Puffy-eyed boys wearing knickers, their small, thin bodies still stiff with sleep, carted the cloth, linings and finished garments from area to area and finally to the freight elevator. Downstairs horses and trucks would take the merchandise uptown.

  A year ago the ILGWU, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, had found the loft and organized it. The ILGWU employed special trackers who did nothing but hunt down the sweatshops infesting New York. There was talk among the workers of a general strike to be called that summer. All of them, including Abe, were fatalistic about it, but they hoped the strike wouldn’t happen. There were stronger union shops than the one on Allen Street, the ones that employed workers of only one nationality. Here on Allen Street, where mostly Jews and Italians worked together, basic mistrust was born of different languages, different customs, even different foods. The Jews rolled their eyes at the Italians’ wine and pork. The Italians and Poles wrinkled their noses at the Jews’ herring.

  There was some communication between the different ethnic groups; Allen Street was not entirely a Tower of Babel. For that the workers could thank Abe Herodetzky.

  * * *

  The day of the breakthrough started, as usual, at six in the morning. By nine, Abe, working his presser, enveloped in a cloud of moist steam that kept him slick with sweat, found his thoughts wandering. He could easily do his job without concentrating on it. Perhaps the heat made him silly, but on that day it came to him that he and his fellow workers were lost in a maze. It was only the swearing, shouting foreman who could see the way out.