I didn’t see my parents die when I was nine but I saw the way they died. I saw others leaping from the flames landing with a thud on the sidewalk. Young girls once vibrant were now a pile of clothes. Thud. Then the next one. Thud. It’s that sound that remains with me and the chaos of the scene—the cops linking arms to form a barricade to keep us back, firemen hosing water up the eight stories of the textile factory where my mother worked. The crowds shoved and screamed and knocked over pushcarts, but for one strange moment, I was detached and took a scientific view. Water came from somewhere and went into those hoses. The water came from somewhere outside of my Delancey Street neighborhood, and for a split second, I saw the wide world, saw how everything was really much bigger than I’d imagined. That was a comforting insight. Then someone shoved me, and I shouted for my father, and Oats told me he’d gone in to rescue my mother.
Afterward, neighbors were whispering and looking at me as if something was lurking behind me. One of the women was cooking at my mother’s stove. The men who used to grab and tickle me avoided my eye. It was Oats who drove me to the docks in Mr. Goldfarb’s wagon. This could not happen unless there was some emergency because Mr. Goldfarb never let anyone drive his dry-goods wagon, especially not Oats, whose racket was protection. If you paid Oats, he wouldn’t poison your horse. Now here he was sitting in the wagon outside my building waiting for me to come downstairs with those coins in my pocket and some of my clothes bundled in a shawl. It never entered my head as we clip-clopped along the streets of the Lower East Side that I was going away.
I’d never been to the piers before, and I was excited to see all those gigantic ships, sailing schooners, freight ships and a gaudy three-story side-wheeler like the kind in picture books about the Mississippi River. The pier was dense with activity, families carrying luggage, tractors heaped with cargo, sailors loading freight. It was a madhouse with seagulls overhead screeching, sheee, yuk, yuk, sheee, yuk, yuk. A sudden ship-horn blast made Mr. Goldfarb’s horse bolt. People rushed to avoid him, and Oats had to stand in the wagon to rein him in saying, “Whoa, Stevie, whoa, big fella,” and he said this with a kind of compassion that seemed at odds with his profession. When the horse was again standing in his usual exhausted way, Oats said, “That one,” and pointed to the side-wheeler. “You go find him. I can’t leave the horse.” I assumed he meant my father come back alive somehow.
Passengers were coming down a gangplank to the dock. When I caught sight of my father—tall, shoulders back, head high—I charged through the crowd. What a relief! No more lying in bed at night wondering who was going to take care of me. I threw my arms around his waist, but the hands that loosened my grip were not my father’s. Startled, I stepped back and looked up into the face of a young man who said, “You got money for the ticket?” He had my father’s face but not the face I knew. He had my father’s young face, the one in the photo from Lithuania before my father came to America, the one Mr. Goldfarb tucked into my bundle as I was walking out the door. I held my coins in an open palm as if feeding a horse, and the young man picked out what he needed. His hands were calloused, with black under the nails.
I had made one of the most humiliating mistakes of childhood. I hugged the wrong person. I tried to recover my dignity by saying, “Oats is here,” which I thought would show that I had things under control. But Oats had vanished. Now I heard some of the words that had circulated in whispers around me that week: “Who says nineteen isn’t old enough?” and “New England? Where’s that?”
“Are you Uncle Sonny?” I said. “You’re the one’s supposed to take care of me.”
He looked down at me with grave eyes. “Don’t you think I know that?” A whistle blasted. “Come on!” Uncle Sonny shouted and I ran after him out to the deck where the wind blew my hat off. I watched it sail out over the water, dip, sail more, then land on the waves.
He didn’t care about my hat. “Hey! See that?” he shouted. “It’s the Statue of Liberty!” I said, “Think it will sink?” He considered this, then realized I was teasing. He pulled his hand back pretending he was going to cuff me, and I ducked, and our eyes met with a quick hug. I had always wanted an older brother. So this was the Uncle Sonny my father was always looking forward to seeing again.
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.