In Theda Bara's Tent (as Reviewed by Publisher's Weekly)

CHAPTER ONE

We spent the night in a room the size of a cell and ate dinner rolls that young women in the ship’s galley donated to us after Uncle Sonny flirted with them. We disembarked in Fall River and hurried to a train depot. Looking out the window at rural Massachusetts—red barns, black-and-white cows—I waited for bandits with kerchiefs over their noses to gallop close, a familiar scene at the motion-picture hall upstairs in Mr. Goldfarb’s store.
Our train stopped in a town of red-brick mills where the air smelled of leather and there was a continual hum coming from the windows of the mills. A large billboard with a picture of a woman’s high-buttoned shoe read, “Welcome to Haverhill, Slipper City of the World, population 45,000.”

I wondered what happened to the people. There weren’t enough of them. Did Cossacks on a rampage kill everyone right and left? No pushcarts overflowing with cabbages, potatoes and lemons. No mangy dogs licking the puddles found under the carts.No organ grinder whose monkey held out a black and shriveled palm. No women haranguing merchants on the sidewalk. The stores were lined up, each with its own big glass window, the goods arranged artistically: eggs in a pyramid, butter in terra cotta pots. A trolley car not bulging with people hanging off the sides clanged its bell, and the conductor waved to a woman going into a shop. She raised her hand in greeting in a slow, almost dreamy way.
We walked into a neighborhood of dirt streets and triple-decker wooden houses. Clotheslines held up shirts, women’s bloomers, diapers. Uncle Sonny opened a small gate, and I followed him into one of the identical houses.

The hall was dark and narrow, and the stairs were so steep they were almost perpendicular. The smell was cooked cabbage.Uncle Sonny and I climbed one flight, two flights, three flights to his room in the attic. A mattress on the floor was covered with a moth-eaten blanket. Books and maps were everywhere. He gave me some of our leftover rolls and said, “Stay here.” I heard him go down the steep stairs, and when I looked out the window, I saw him hurrying down the hill as men carrying lunch pails trudged up in the other direction.

His maps were crisscrossed with red pencil, routes to Alaska, Canada and California. Catalogs showed strainers used for panning gold. When he didn’t come back, I went downstairs and stood on the empty dirt street. Then I climbed back up the stairs. I went up and down all afternoon and absolutely nothing happened except the sun began to go down, then the sun went down, and the street lamps went on, and I stood by the window upstairs looking out and waiting. At last, I heard his footsteps on the stairs. The door opened and he said, “I’m done!” He picked me up, twirled me around and collapsed onto the mattress.

“I’m not a baby,” I said and brushed myself off. As far as I could see, he had not brought me anything to eat.

“You’ll thank me some day,” he said.

“For what?”

“For the fortune I’m going to heap on you.” He packed some maps in his knapsack, took off his factory uniform and stomped on it as if killing a roach.

No music came through the windows of the homes we passed, no raised female voices complained, no male voices defended, no clip-clop of tired wagon horses, no shrill police whistles.

We stopped in front of a red-brick mansion set back from the road and surrounded by trees, gnarled trunks that seemed alive with shadowy faces. The house loomed there, black at all the windows. The bell on the front door was a bronze crank. Uncle Sonny wound up the handle, and when he released it, a shrill brriiinnngg resounded inside.

A light came on at a window upstairs then the porch gaslight whooshed on. The door opened, and a woman with gray hair stood clutching her bathrobe closed and squinting out through wire-rimmed glasses. Behind the woman, sleepy children in pajamas came out to the upstairs landing. One of them said, “Is it a new boy, Lady Mother?”

Uncle Sonny knelt down so his face was directly in front of mine. For the first time, he spoke in Yiddish. “I done my time,” he said. “I signed for two years. I done two years.” He stood up, then knelt down again. My heart was racing wiith fear. “Your papa, may he rest, didn’t mean I should stand in front of that machine until I’m old. I’m going to stake a claim in Dawson City and come right back. You wait for me here. I’ll be back for you.” He stood up. “Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t look at me like that!” Then he turned and ran down the front path and away into the night.

From inside the house, a small voice asked, “How old is he?”

The woman said, “Do you speak English?” Her diction was precise. “Speak English?” She slowed the question way down. “What. Is. Your. Name.”

“Harry Sirkus.”

“Harry Sirkus, please come in.”

“No, thank you. I’ll wait here.”

The street was empty, nothing but one black dog with a feathery tail trotting by and the rhythmic vibration of crickets. I sat down on the top step with my back to her so I could figure out what to do.

“Harry,” she said. “Come inside. Please.”

When I stayed put, she closed the door but did not turn off the porch light. I sat on the step, my heart in my throat. How could my mother do this to me? My mother stirring a pot at the stove saying, “Make sure you find a wife that cooks with love. What’s love? You see how I love cooking this stuff for you? That’s cooking with love.”

The sky with filled with stars. I looked up into that New England dome of diamonds and felt like I was falling into it, a speck in the universe. The front door opened. “Come inside, Harry,” the woman said. “Come have a cookie. You can’t sleep outside. That’s for bums and Boy Scouts.”

She had a kindly face, and I was hungry. Next to the door was a bronze plaque. I read as I entered: The Elizabeth Home for Destitute Children.