The Book Borrower Read online

  —Most of them don’t care about the test, said Carlotta. They just want the skills.

  —Polishing nails? Look, I’m white, Ruben said. Some of these students are white, some black. She quoted the Carlotta of her imagination, who would be scandalized if Ruben did what Deborah was doing. I think not teaching them anything is condescending. As if black people couldn’t learn.

  —You think your friend is not teaching them anything?

  —Well, maybe it’s not that bad, Ruben said. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem as if she is. And she hurried home, where Squirrel had screamed for an hour and a half and the sitter was in tears. Ruben paid the sitter and sent her home, nursed her frantic baby in bed until she was calmer and Squirrel fell asleep, his head on her numb arm. If she moved him to his crib, he’d wake up. If she eased her arm out and left the room, he’d roll off the bed. In tiny movements minutes apart she extricated her arm. Now he lay on his stomach, slanted across the bedspread, his bottom hunched up. The brown hair on his head swirled around its place of origin. How did it know where to begin? The Squirrel wore a blue shirt and a cloth diaper and rubber pants. Ruben felt the diaper: damp but not sopping. She curved her body around his and reached for the book on the table next to the bed. As always, her glasses were dirty, and she licked them, which really didn’t help.

  When the trolley men went out in January 1921, the city of Boynton, Massachusetts, did not immediately lose its temper. Women bundled up in the clear, cold air and walked to the shops, calling “Does you good!” to one another. Men walked to work or took out the Ford that ordinarily waited in the garage until Sunday. Since autos had become so popular, they pointed out, the trolleys didn’t matter as much. Of course that was why the fare was going up to eight cents and wages were being cut. Riders were disappearing. Still, people told one another, the trolley men had legitimate needs and concerns, and perhaps the company would find a just way to solve this problem quickly.

  The company immediately hired scabs, who, however, would come from Boston and would not arrive for several days. The newspaper called the scabs “strikebreakers,” which made them seem noble. Like the Denver Post, the Boynton Herald opposed the strike. I read the editorial aloud at our dinner table, and dug my nails into my palms. The newspaper said that as soon as the strikebreakers arrived, the trolleys would run again and everything would be fine. The strikers would learn their lesson.

  Surely, the women in the shops told one another, patting their chests and smiling after their unusual exertion, surely it would all be settled and the scabs would never come at all. Meanwhile, with everyone out except two obstinate motormen who could not act as part of a group, the trolleys were in the barn and the silence on Main Street was startling. Horses were more in evidence, but in truth, not many in Boynton still kept a buggy.

  A nephew of my father’s was one of the striking motor-men. “Uncle Saul, we must eat!” Cousin Joe had said at a family dinner on Sunday.

  “But I never saw Cousin Joe do anything except eat,” Sarah whispered to me. Joe was fat and ordinarily silent. “Maybe,” said Sarah, “he just means it’s time for dinner!” Sarah was worried about the strike, but she was excited, these days, exuberant. “One more week until Warrie’s birthday party,” she said to me as we walked home that night from our aunt and uncle’s house.

  I had to think for a minute before I remembered Warrie. Then I was shocked. “But the trolleys may not be running,” said.

  “Oh, they’ll fix the problem by then,” Sarah said.

  The first day of the strike was a Wednesday. “They’ve got to run on Sunday, they’ve got to,” Sarah said, leaving for school. My father and I got up an hour and a half earlier than usual that day and walked to work. If it hadn’t been fo my nervousness about his uncertain temper and about Jessie, it would have been a carefree adventure. We walked togethei for a mile, and then he turned and trudged down the hill to the dress factory where he labored all day. He was sturdy, but rather little—built like Jessie. He mingled quickly with the other workers. I saw him wave abruptly to a couple of friends as he marched toward the building.

  Walking to the millinery shop, I heard distant shouting an< realized it came from the trolley barn in Randolph Square. Long before I reached it, I could see people running. The trolley barn was a dilapidated wooden structure next to a small brick building where the company had its headquarters Between the buildings a yard laid with tracks ordinarily contained several of the red Boynton trolleys. Now the trolleys themselves were locked in the barn, but picketers carrying signs filled the yard. The crowd in front of the office was shouting. I made out the name “Harris”—the president of the trolley company. A stone was thrown at the strikers; I was surprised, because most of the crowd that had gathered seemed sympathetic to them. A cry went up, and some of the pickets rushed toward the crowd. Again the shout, “Harris! Harris!”

  A window opened in the building, and a man leaned out and said something.

  “Harris, Harris.”

  The man shouted unintelligibly. I was late, and I was afraid of seeing my sister. I kept walking, looking down at the paving stones and picking my way between snowy places. My shoes were thin, my feet were wet and chilled, but I reached the store at last. We didn’t sell many hats that day, but I liked being among the quiet, unargumentative heads, which looked as serene and haughty as ever. Even whiny, scared Miss Fredericks seemed soothing.

  Jessie, I learned later, was not among the picketers that day. She went to work. She needed rent money. But she had trouble pleasing the ordinarily affable Mr. Franklin, her boss. Once, months earlier, he’d said to her, “You have something between your ears,” and Jessie had made a great joke of studying her head in the mirror to see if it was true. He’d said “ears,” she added, in a funny tone, a tone suggesting they were somewhat more than ears, somehow. Now he some-times started conversations with her. She would tell him nothing about herself, but surely there were rumors at the mill. Today he was biting back fury. “What do you think of this strike, Miss Lipkin?” and “Think they can just walk away from their jobs, let the rest of us go to blazes.”

  At first Jessie was silent. Then she turned to him, a newly typed letter held against her chest as if to shield her. “I don’t agree, Mr. Franklin,” she said.

  “Don’t agree.”

  “No, ” she said. “I’m on the side of the strikers.”

  “Well, Miss Lipkin!” but that was all.

  Jessie was absent from the picket line that day, but she later became a familiar presence there. Her principles won out. Mr. Franklin fired her immediately, though she was not in the office to read his tersely worded dismissal. Jessie was at the trolley barn, shouting hoarsely, her black hat pulled down over her aforementioned ears. Some of the men were embarrassed by her and avoided her; others had heard rumors about her life and scorned her, or were afraid of her. But for many of the strikers my sister was inspiring. Her certainty that the strikers simply had to be victorious, the definiteness of the way she moved—she bustled, with her arms bent just a little so her elbows stuck out—must have given them strength, just the way her energy had speeded me up when we were children. She had screaming matches with policemen who wouldn’t hurt her because she was a woman but hated her because she took advantage.

  One morning she was hit by a rock on the side of her fore-head. She came to the millinery shop for me to wash the blood off. Luckily there were no customers—this was the third day of the strike, and walking to Main Street for a new hat no longer seemed like a delightful outing—but even so Miss Fredericks was haughty. I kissed Jessie and soothed her and loved washing the blood and soot from her face in our little back washroom. I should have locked her in the wash-room and left her there for a few days.

  When it became evident that the scabs would be coming before any settlement could possibly be reached, the trolley men and their sympathizers, including the anarchists, grew tenser and more determined. If scabs were going to run the trolleys, the strik
ers’ position would immediately become much worse. The public had to be prevented from using them. Opinion, I gather, was still divided. Some of the leaders feared a repetition of Denver and insisted that persuasion was the only legitimate method—and that it would work. On the whole, the townspeople were sympathetic, but of course their patience was not unlimited.

  Jessie and others thought that force might be necessary to keep people off the trolleys. They didn’t say they intended to hurt anyone; they’d just set up human barriers. “And what’s to keep a man from picking up a paving stone?” cried one of the strongest defenders of peace and orderliness. “Once you start pushing, people will push back.”

  “Let them,” said my sister. No, I wasn’t there. I was home washing dishes, as always. But I can hear Jessie’s hoarse voice saying it.

  Where did her clear-eyed courage come from? Jessie grew up, somehow, thinking that certain activities might well be all right, though other people were quite sure they were not all right. How did that happen? I grew up in the same house as she did. Sexually, I wasn’t far behind her. I had lovers—not then, but not much later. I never thought there was anything wrong with that, and I’m not sure how people who think sex is wrong know that it is, or where they get the idea. Maybe our parents forgot to tell us. And yet my father shrieked with rage over Jessie’s sexual looseness. I married, but it didn’t last, and I had lovers again.

  But this other, this violence. Why did Jessie think it was allowable to throw paving stones at people who wanted to use a trolley being run by an unjust company? Certainly the company was unjust; no doubt about that—although it also had its troubles. Ridership was down and yet wages had to be paid. I don’t know whether Mr. Harris or somebody else, troubles notwithstanding, was extracting an unfair profit; certainly that’s possible. The trolley company had built the amusement park. Maybe it was not a financial success and the company was trying to make the trolley men absorb the loss. I’m speculating: at the time these issues didn’t occur to me. Now I can’t find out.

  But how does violence come to seem acceptable? Jessie didn’t hit me when we were children. She wasn’t a brutal person. Maybe she wasn’t violent. Maybe she never agreed to throw things; maybe she was simply courageous enough to endure the risk that they would be thrown at her. Maybe nothing of what took place was her fault.

  By Sunday the scabs had arrived. The trolley company, in fact, had staged a little show on Saturday afternoon: one trolley, operated by scabs, traveled down Main Street, crossed by means of a curved section of track to the opposite side of the street, and ran back again. The only passenger was an old lady everybody knew was daft, who explained as she boarded the streetcar that she was the mayor’s sweetheart and he required her presence.

  Saturday night it snowed, and people awoke Sunday morning wondering whether the company would try to run the trolleys at all, just on account of the snow, but it was a sunny day, and crews of men were out shoveling early. Now crowds of strikers and sympathizers formed as quickly as the scabs appeared, and soon snowballs—some with stones in them—were in the air. Rumor had it that one thousand state troopers were on their way. Someone produced the latest antistrike editorial from the Boynton Herald, and it was jeered loudly. “It is not for nothing that these sympathizers are referred to as Bolsheviks,” it said.

  Around noon on Sunday, the first trolley of the day rolled out of the trolley barn. It was a red trolley from the Main Street line. The crowd had been waiting for hours. It surged forward. Men and women carrying hoes and rakes tried to tear down the wires. These were not ruffians; they were de-cent people who smelled of damp wool and of houses where cabbage was cooked.

  No, I still wasn’t there. I was home arguing with Sarah about, of all things, whether or not she was going to Warrie Livingston’s birthday party. What can I say? Sarah kept her promises, and she’d promised to go. Sarah wasn’t political. “I just don’t understand why not,” she said. “I’m only one girl. The trolley company isn’t going to change its mind because one girl goes to a birthday party. The company doesn’t care about me. The strikers don’t care about me. But Warrie cares.” She sat at the breakfast table long after we’d all finished, arguing with anybody who walked past her. My parents, of course, were hysterical. They were afraid of twenty things they could name and twenty more they couldn’t even imagine. They were afraid that if Sarah went, she’d be corrupted by Jessie, who, they were sure, was leading the strike. They couldn’t calm down enough to understand that if Sarah went, she’d be going against Jessie’s wishes. My father was a political man, but he wouldn’t listen now, or maybe he thought Sarah was so impressionable, she’d switch sides and become a freethinking anarchist like her sister the moment she got to Randolph Square. All he could do was shout. He forbade Sarah to leave the house, but he couldn’t say why in a way that might persuade her.

  All I can say in defense of Sarah’s position is that we didn’t have a telephone and I don’t remember whether the Livingstons did. Canceling would have been impossible. The strike was being reported in the newspaper but not, as it would be today, on radio or television. If Sarah didn’t appear, nobody would know why. Of course, I kept telling her, she could explain later. She could write a letter.

  Sarah bruised her fists on the table in a rare show of temper. Her hair was coming loose. I remember one of her tight braids slipping down so she looked lopsided. She’d been crying for so long that her eyes were red and swollen. Everybody was yelling different things at her, but everybody agreed that she had to stay home. At last, when she banged on the table one more time and a plate fell and broke, my mother walked up to Sarah and slapped her face hard—several times. Sarah ran to our bedroom, sobbing. When I looked in later she was asleep. I swept up and washed the dishes.

  At the trolley barn, a little band of would-be passengers was cheered as it boarded the first trolley—and jeered much more loudly. A man smiled confidently and waved at the crowd as if he were running for office. The troopers arrived then, marching from the railroad depot, and they in turn were cheered and jeered. Some predicted there would be no further trouble, but then the trolley was overturned, with a dreadful crash, by a crowd that moved forward like one organism, and the confident man was injured and carried off in an ambulance. Now strikers and sympathizers were throwing paving stones, bricks, stones, and lumps of coal. The soldiers filled the square and rushed to right the trolley that had been knocked over. Its windows were smashed and young boys tore off decorative metalwork from below the roof. As soon as it was righted, it was knocked on its side again. Mean-while, someone opened a fire hydrant and soon buckets of water were being poured on the tracks. The day was not bitterly cold, but it was cold enough. Everyone knew the trolleys couldn’t run on ice.

  The water was swept away, though, before it could freeze, and when the troops massed and raised their weapons, the crowd sobered. Only a few still threw rocks and lumps of coal. At last one of the red trolleys, looking innocent and ordinary, moved slowly along Main Street. And then came a green trolley: the Lake Avenue Interurban.

  Our trolley company ran crisscrossing local lines in town, and three interurban lines: The Lake Avenue line, the Prospect Avenue line, and the Hillside Road line, each of which traveled fifteen to twenty-five miles into the country, eventu-ally arriving in another town, or, in the case of Lake Avenue, at a trolley park. It’s not necessary here to repeat the familiar paean to our country’s lost interurban trolleys. As has often been said, they were a cheap, slow, charming mode of transportation by which a traveler could eventually traverse huge distances. Periodically someone would discover that you could go by interurban from Boston to Pittsburgh, or some such, changing and changing, but of course most people used them to commute to work, to get to the amusement parks the trolley companies built, or to shop or go visiting.

  The interurban cars run by the Boynton company were green, not red. They were longer than the regular cars and more elaborately decorated, with gold curlicues, if you pl
ease. It always felt like a bit of a treat to ride them. We’d ridden the Lake Avenue line to the Boynton Lake Amusement Park more than once, and of course Sarah and I had taken that line to the Livingstons’ house just two weeks earlier. Unlike the trolleys in town, the interurbans had controls at both ends and ran on a single set of tracks. The rights of way were too narrow and the tracks too expensive for two pairs of tracks to be laid. Every now and then there was a siding, so a car could leave the main track to allow one coming the opposite way to pass.

  As the interurbans began to run slowly down Main Street that Sunday, while the crowd watched restlessly and the soldiers looked bored, the day grew colder and clouds spread across the sky, which was the color of dull iron. Now I’m speaking of what I remember: I’d gone out to look for Sarah who was suddenly missing, not in her room and nowhere else in our apartment. I had hurried out to search for her, hoping she was not on her way to the birthday party.

  When I reached the square, I learned from bystanders that a second green trolley, with its gold curlicues, bearing a scab motorman and conductor plus three passengers, was making its way into the snow-covered countryside. It must have been beautiful out there. The passengers must have looked out the window at the small shabby houses, which were farther and farther apart, at dogs running in their yards, at children having snowball fights, and bare, wintry trees.

  The baby woke up. Ruben’s body was stiff and she was hungry. She would read more that night, or tomorrow. She kissed her baby’s face and carried him into the next room to change his soaked diaper. By now everything he was wearing was wet, and she brought him naked into the bathroom and gave him a bath. Squirrel liked to be bathed. He laughed, patting the water. Ruben couldn’t remember why she was ever impatient with him. The phone rang. She wrapped Squirrel in a towel, hoping he wouldn’t pee on it, and carried him into the other room. It was Deborah on the phone.