The Book Borrower Read online

  As we were welcomed into Edith’s family’s house, I was al-most sure I heard somebody in the background saying “Jewish?” Sarah didn’t notice. I was sure I was right when I saw the expression on Edith’s mother’s face, which Edith’s imitated: they were wordlessly reassuring each other, with big smiles, that nothing was wrong. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the person who’d spoken was Edith’s elderly uncle. I rather liked him anyway, maybe because of his bluntness. But I was upset, too, mostly for Sarah, who was looking with trust and pleasure at the slightly swoopy over-done dark red drapery and upholstery.

  We were looked at, meanwhile; we’d do. The uncle greeted us as nicely as anybody. Edith had brothers of all sizes. We sat down. Somebody said grace, which was new to me. The food was like food in library books. There was a vegetable I couldn’t name.

  My father was a gruff, awkward man, so I found it unsettling when Edith’s father turned out to be well spoken, with elaborate manners. “Let me help you to some more roast, Miss Lipkin. Wouldn’t you like this crisp piece?” He and the old uncle monopolized the conversation until, now and then, it would be seized by an old woman who was apparently the uncle’s wife. Gradually I realized that they were Edith’s great-aunt and great-uncle: the aunt and uncle of everyone in the room except Sarah and me. I was unfamiliar with elderly relatives, and relatives who were the heads of large families. My grandparents and great-aunts and great-uncles had been left behind in Europe and were spoken of with such foreboding and regret and guilt that I’d come to think of that generation as a crowd of helpless ghosts, nothing like this vigorous old pair, who were comfortably in charge. Everyone else liked them, too, I soon saw—except Mr. Livingston, Edith’s father. Then I began to understand that the old couple were his relatives, not his wife’s, and that he worked in a company the old man had begun. It sounded like a factory, but I couldn’t figure out what it made. The old man was called Uncle Warren and at least one of Edith’s brothers was also Warren. As the conversation became more rapid it seemed that Edith had two brothers called Warren, but even the goyim probably didn’t carry their odd customs that far. Then I realized that Mr. Livingston—Edith’s father—was Warren, and that he now ran the plant, and that his uncle didn’t think he was smart enough.

  “Of course there are Reds in the factory,“ Edith’s father said. ”There are Reds everywhere.” He sounded more like our own father now, angry. But on the other side.

  The old uncle shook his head dolefully. Edith’s brothers were becoming restless. The youngest was the one called Warren—Warrie—and he had climbed out of his chair and made friends with Sarah. She played peekaboo with him, and then took him on her lap. “And naturally they’ve infiltrated the union,” Mr. Livingston was saying. “Doesn’t surprise me. Damned Bolsheviks.”

  “Warren,” came Edith’s mother’s voice.

  “I mean it literally,” said Mr. Livingston. “If the Bolsheviks aren’t on their way to hell, I don’t know who is. Excuse me. The Underworld, boys, the Underworld.”

  “Father said ’hell,’ ” I heard the second oldest brother whisper to the oldest one, who was shushing him. “But he did, he did.”

  “Hear they’re planning a little riot for us,” said the old uncle. “Right in Boynton. If the trolley men go out. I suppose that doesn’t bother you either?”

  “Of course not,” said the father, his voice now shaky with anger. “Let them try it. We’ve got a pretty fine police force in Boynton. And there’s the National Guard, if necessary.”

  I wasn’t positive Sarah wouldn’t blurt out something about Jessie’s politics. Or maybe these men had even heard of Jessie and the anarchists. Sarah, however, was playing elaborate games with Warrie, and now they’d both left the table and tall Sarah was dodging around the furniture as if she were in her own home while the little boy shrieked with laughter. I was afraid Edith’s mother would mind, but she looked on al-most tearfully, as did, of course, Edith.

  “Would you call out soldiers for something like this?” the old uncle asked his nephew, refusing to drop the subject. “I’m just trying to ascertain what you’d do.” He sounded as if he hardly cared, and yet the father got angrier yet, and shifted abruptly in his chair, knocking his elbow into Sarah, who had come up behind him with little Warrie Livingston in her arms. He jumped up and apologized, a little impatiently I thought, but Sarah beamed at him and assured him it wasn’t his fault. “We aren’t hurt, Warrie, are we?” she said. Suddenly there was a new issue. Warrie insisted that Sarah be invited to dinner on his birthday, several weeks hence.

  “Oh, you don’t have to invite me,” said Sarah. But they did invite her—and me, too, as an afterthought. Mrs. Livingston whispered to me that they’d nearly lost the little boy to influenza. Sarah promised to return, and so did I, but Sarah was the draw for good reason. I’d sat through dinner sniffing and judging and emitting curlicues of cynicism from my place next to Edith. Sarah had joined the family and made them feel better about themselves. The old uncle kissed her when we left.

  A few days later, I locked up the millinery shop in the evening, alone. The owner’s mother was sick, and with some fanfare Miss Fredericks had explained to me what needed to be done, and, for the last few days, had trusted me to do it while she hurried home early. I swept the floor and replaced the hats we’d sold with others I took from boxes and ar-ranged on the expressionless heads, to all of which I’d secretly given names. Miss Fredericks took most of the money with her, but I liked knowing that some was left—hidden in a box only she and I knew about—and knowing that Miss Fredericks believed I wouldn’t take it. Dressing the heads was like playing with dolls, but I’d never had dolls with such elegant clothes as these hats, and when I was sure I wouldn’t be interrupted, I couldn’t keep from talking to them. It was a relief to stop sneering at everything for once.

  The hats looked stylish to me, but Boynton was a dreary place and they were probably old-fashioned before we sold them. Nonetheless, tilted over the painted faces, the hats gave the forms the calm look—I thought of it as an “American” look—that Edith’s well-dressed mother had worn as she pulled Sarah and me into her house. Of course, she wasn’t wearing a hat in her own parlor.

  The look was nothing like one my mother might affect, nor did she wear these hats. My passionate mother yanked her children closer while screaming at us to change. Neither love nor hats was dainty in our house. My mother wore hats she seemed to have brought from Europe. Jessie and I told each other that they had been handed down from remote ances-tresses who had worn them to kill chickens.

  I wasn’t above enjoying the escapes into fantasy that my job offered me, though I was often bored and annoyed in the millinery shop. Now I was engaged in the silliest of those es-capes, accepting a party invitation in a false voice while ar-ranging a black hat with a decorated veil over a head sculpted with light brown curls, which I called Louisa, when a knock at the door startled me. I hoped I hadn’t been heard. I told myself it was only a late customer. I didn’t answer, but the knock was repeated. Then I opened the door, and my sister Jessie pushed past me into the store as roughly as if she thought I might have closed the door in her face. I hadn’t seen her for a week. I screamed a little because she’d had her hair cut short since we’d last met, and it seemed for a moment as if she had indeed come to buy a hat, in order to conceal the way she looked. She acted as if she didn’t know what I was staring at, and then ran her hand through her bobbed brown hair. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You don’t like it.”

  “You look like a radical.”

  “I am a radical.” Jessie was buxom, as I’ve said, and not too tall. Her figure made her look motherly until she cut her hair. Now she looked like someone I’d be shy with. I was shy.

  Jessie walked around the store, unable to keep her hands off the merchandise. “Look at the little rosettes on this veil. How could anybody stand them in front of her eyes?”

  “Yo
u know. You’ve worn veils. You look past the little rosettes.”

  “I don’t look past things.”

  I didn’t want to ask if her hands were clean. I tried to finish my work.

  “Miriam, do you have any money?”

  “What?”

  Jessie was upset. She kept swinging her arms as she stood there, like someone on a swift hike. Then she told me about the trolley ride with William Platz. It pleased me. It made me know that my sister still lived somewhere inside this woman. “I want to make him think about me if he wakes in the night,” she said. “If you give me the money you keep here, we can help support the strikers. William knows I have no money. He’ll think I robbed a stranger in the street.”

  “She takes the money with her.” I had the box of petty cash, and after Miss Fredericks had left I’d sold one hat and collected that money, but of course the hat was gone. She’d know right away that there ought to be $3.98 in the drawer or one more hat on display. But I didn’t tell Jessie there was money in the store. Now I think my loyalty was misplaced. If I’d given it to her, maybe she’d have calmed down, sobered by some sense of responsibility toward me. Maybe she suspected that I was lying.

  Jessie left the store, shrugging. Later I learned that she went to William Platz’s house, where she found his wife alone and confessed to her that William had taken her virginity a couple of years earlier, that he had been her lover, and that now he had another lover, on Prescott Street. Jessie was guessing about the second lover, but she turned out to be right. Mrs. Platz, of course, was the wife of an anarchist, but he’d come to it late and they were legally married. She herself was not interested in political theory. Still, she told Jessie that she was unconcerned with the artificial rules of bourgeois society and William could do as he liked. Of course she was bluffing, but Jessie was silenced.

  As she was getting ready to leave, though, William came home. His wife began screaming at him, and in the end he left with Jessie. She got him back for a few days. I think he stayed at her room, where, no doubt, they made love every hour. Jessie wasn’t a bad person. She was brilliant, and we lived in such a particularly dismal town. When I read Dickens, later, the descriptions of gray, dreary mill towns re-minded me of home. Nothing we saw was beautiful or noble. If Jessie had grown up as she should have—even if my father had stayed with his idealism and thought things through— she’d have been high-minded but quieter. She’d have written forceful letters to the editor of the newspaper. Frustration turned her idealism sexual and violent.

  The strike was planned for the following week. The trolley company refused to negotiate and I don’t think the workers wanted to negotiate, either. By now it was late December. Jessie appeared at our apartment one evening. She said she’d come to collect any warm clothes she might have left behind when she moved out. Probably she also came to make my parents and me feel bad. She’d just been left, once again, by William Platz, and she needed to share her misery. My parents were predictably panic-stricken over her sheared head, which Jessie had probably forgotten entirely by then. No doubt she came to scare them with plans to shoot the presi-dent of the trolley company, and instead she had to defend her haircut. Sarah cried, and demanded to know just how it had been done and where. At an Italian barber’s, it turned out.

  “Weren’t they rude?”

  “No, they were perfectly nice.” Glancing at Jessie’s face, I knew they had been rude.

  Sarah ran her hands over her twisted braids as if to make sure she still had them. We’d been interrupted cleaning up after dinner. Jessie insisted she had already eaten, but when Sarah fixed a plate for her she didn’t refuse it. After we washed the dishes, Sarah and I followed Jessie into the bed-room. I made Jessie take a jacket of mine I insisted was too short for me. Sarah watched from the bed.

  “Goosie,” she said abruptly, watching Jessie try on the jacket and smooth her hands over her hips, “you don’t believe in free love, do you?”

  “What makes you ask that?” Of course Sarah thought Jessie was a virgin.

  “Don’t women who cut their hair believe in free love?”

  “What’s wrong with free love?” said Jessie wickedly.

  “Don’t you want to be married and have babies?” said Sarah. “Miriam’s friend Edith says free love will destroy the American family.”

  “Oh, Sarah, don’t listen to idiots,” Jessie said. She swept her hand across my dresser, as if sweeping idiots off it, and all my little bottles of scent and toilet water fell down. One broke. Jessie bent to pick up the whole bottles, putting her hand among the broken pieces of glass, while I ran for a rag.

  “You’ll cut yourself.”

  “My hide is tough,” said Jessie, “but I’m going to stink of this stuff.”

  She shook her big hands. Sarah reached to smell first one hand and then the other, laughing, and in her gesture I caught a glimpse of womanhood. She seemed indulgent, but she wouldn’t stop arguing. “Goosie, if you could meet these new friends, you’d see that you don’t have to be so angry. You don’t have to change everything American. We’re Europeans. We don’t know how they do things here.”

  “You were born here, Sarah,” Jessie said. “You can figure these things out as well as I can.”

  “I think Edith’s father knows better than you, Jessie.”

  “Edith’s father! Isn’t he the owner of Livingston Brass? Where workers lose their jobs if they relieve themselves more than once a day?”

  “Jessie!”

  “Look, Sarah, the trolley men are losing a quarter of their wages. What would happen to you if Papa’s wages were cut that much?”

  “I’d leave school and get a job,” said Sarah stalwartly.

  “That’s no answer.”

  “Well, I don’t know what I’d do,” Sarah said. She’d un-pinned her braids and was twisting them around her fingers. “But you don’t know either, Goosie. Mr. Livingston is a kind man, in a kind family. They invited us to come back for Edith’s little brother’s birthday.”

  “Let them start thinking about some other little brothers, over near the river.”

  “Goosie, Goosie.”

  “Oh, stop calling me that!” Jessie walked out of the bed-room, clutching the jacket, and Sarah, in tears, threw herself on our big sister.

  “Oh, it’s all right, Sare,” said Jessie, but she left a few minutes later, and Sarah was still crying.

  Deborah called from the hospital in the morning. They’re not letting me out until tomorrow. I’m a prisoner.

  —How come?

  —Some number. It’s minor.

  —I want to see Mary Grace! Ruben wondered if something was wrong; no.

  —So come here. I want to see you.

  —I’ll come. She had to take Squirrel along, and she was pretty sure he wouldn’t be allowed into the hospital, so she wore him in the sling and put a shirt of Harry’s on top and her coat on top of that. She’d worn that shirt when she was pregnant. I’m putting you back in, she said to Squirrel. Surprising: short, red-headed Toby Ruben deceiving the big hospital, of which she was afraid. It had given her the Squirrel and maybe it could snatch him back, an idea no less powerful because it was nonsense. You better not cry, kiddo. She walked to the bus stop, patting his rear.

  It wasn’t Ruben who broke rules. Apparently she had become Deborah, and she fluffed her hair and stretched, unhunching her shoulders, which were already tight: this baby was too big to be carried on her chest. He slept and slurped his tongue a little too noisily, and slept again—a good friend. Deborah broke rules. She thought of Deborah saying she merely read aloud to her students. If Lawful Toby tried that, Director Carlotta would whoosh in like weather to catch her and hold her up to shame. What have we here, what what WHAT have we here! White Lady thinks our Black Ladies (and white ladies) are of no account, not worth trouble, not worth squints and frowns and headaches?

  But there was no question about smuggling Squirrel into the hospital. Ruben wanted badly to visit Deborah, and see Ma
ry Grace Laidlaw, that new citizen. Peter the Squirrel had to see her too; probably he’d marry her eventually.

  At the bus stop an old woman disapproved of carrying babies on chests, and Ruben said, Oh, leave us alone! Probably the old woman, who drew herself into a seat and inserted herself in her own tote bag, grimacing, growing smaller and smaller while the tote bag grew larger and larger—quite probably the old woman cursed her. For while Ruben crossed the street in a hurry, buttoning the shirt over Squirrel and holding her coat as closed as it would get, first she remembered her dead mother, whom she didn’t like thinking about, and then Squirrel made a sound in his sleep, an ah. In the lobby of the hospital he awoke and she heard him slurp his thumb, so she left and walked around an endless block with more than four sides, onto a bridge over the highway, where she walked against the wind and her baby was socked by wind and was soon crying. Ruben started to circle the block again. This time she saw a bench. She took off her coat and Harry’s shirt and took off Squirrel, who was shrieking by now. She pulled up her own shirt and nursed him, trying to yank the coat around her. She had never been so cold. People passed and looked at her, but nobody criticized her. When the baby fell asleep, she put him back into the sling and got dressed around him. Then she re-turned to the hospital and asked for the pass to see Deborah Laidlaw. And was handed it by someone who barely looked at her.

  In the elevator, a nurse winked.

  Pass in hand, Ruben hurried down the corridor where Squirrel had been born. They’d think she was tired of him—and sometimes she was. But not bringing him back.

  In the room was her friend Deborah, bare-breasted, nursing someone not as large as her breast. Jill was leaning over her mother and Rose was lying on the bed next to Deborah, in her shoes. Jeremiah sat on the end of the bed taking his off, letting them thump to the faraway floor. The hospital had just that year decided to let the grimy sisters in.