Sex Wars (48 page)
Authors: Marge Piercy
Asher was brooding about Shaineh and the shame she had brought on the family—as if anyone here knew her. If he didn’t tell the story, no one would know, so what was the problem, Sara said repeatedly. He did not listen. Occasionally he would lose his temper and pound on the table in fury if she did not shut up. Nobody cared where Reba came from. So many families ended up taking in children of relatives who died, no one thought twice about it. Reba wasn’t about to go shouting in the hallway that her mother had been a whore. So forget about it, maybe go and see if they’re hiring at the tin factory where one of the men downstairs got a job.
Asher did not forget. He twisted thin and bitter stories about the facts of Shaineh’s life and death. He ignored Reba. In three tiny rooms, that was difficult, but he was so often at the shul he could withdraw. Several times Freydeh tried to speak to him about his situation. His gaze glassed over. He did not bother to reply, simply waiting for her voice to cease as if it were an annoying noise from the street. A dog in agony. A horse or a woman being beaten. The third time she spoke to him he glared and raised his fist as if to hit her. She caught his arm and held it as they each tested their strength against the other. She was the stronger. He turned away. He was cold to all of them except his little son. She felt as if he did not know who to blame for what had happened to Shaineh. His shame gnawed away inside him like an ulcer. She tried to talk with Sara about Asher, but Sara was fiercely loyal to her husband and perhaps afraid.
Time seemed to do little to ease his bitterness. Once or twice he found work briefly but it never lasted. In the meantime, Freydeh finally confronted Sara about the attachment between Sammy and Debra. Freydeh had sent them on an errand to buy some supplies she needed. She took advantage
of the privacy with the two of them gone, the younger four children in school—she had enrolled Reba, whose short hair caused her to be teased, as everyone could guess the reason for it—and Asher off at shul. “Do you think anything has happened between them?” Sara asked, wringing her hands.
“I don’t think so. Sammy is a good boy. Debra’s a good girl. I think holding hands and a stolen kiss is as far as it’s gone.”
“We should move out.”
“If you can find a place cheap.” She was taking only four dollars for all of them.
“I don’t know what to do!”
“Will you speak to Asher?”
“He’ll just start screaming. He’s so destroyed by what happened to Shaineh,
zikronah
l’
brakhah,
may her name be blessed.”
“So we’ll keep this to ourselves. Even if you move out, I suspect they’ll see each other. Should we think about marriage?”
“She’s so young… They both are.” Sara was wringing her hands again. “Who needs more trouble?”
“Maybe if we betroth them, then they can marry when we think they’re ready.”
“Freydeh, has Sammy been bar mitzvahed?”
Freydeh sat down hard in a chair. “I took him off the streets. I never thought of it. We’ve been so busy trying to survive.”
“We got to bar mitzvah him right away. We won’t say why, just that it never happened… He’s circumcised, right?”
“Of course.”
“So we get him bar mitzvahed. Without that, Asher will never agree.”
She broke the news to Sammy, pulling him into the hall. “You got to get bar mitzvahed, Sara says.”
“What for? I’m a Jew. That costs money we don’t got.”
“Because you and Debra are making cow eyes at each other. Because there’s no chance for you with her if you don’t do this. Better late than not. Asher will forbid it otherwise.”
“We want to get married. Not right away. But soon.”
“So then you got to do this. It means learning a bunch of Hebrew, but you’re quick with languages.”
“If I got to do it for her, I’ll do it.”
It was explained to Asher that without a man in the family, it had never happened. That seemed sufficient explanation for him and he
arranged for Sammy to start studying with one of the men in his minyan. Sammy would not take the regular Hebrew classes; since he was so much older and bigger than the boys in them, he would be ashamed. The rabbi agreed that his preparation would be accelerated. Everyone accepted that he had missed his time because his father was dead and because there had been so few Jews from the Pale living in the neighborhood then. Now a couple more came every week. The shul had moved upstairs and taken over the apartment above the store.
Sammy liked learning the language, but he resented going through all what he called the rigmarole. She didn’t push him about it. He understood the situation and he would do what he must, but he wasn’t going to be religious like Asher. He would be something of a freethinker, like Moishe had been, like herself. Debra was a closed book to her. A good girl, hardworking, willing to do whatever she had to for her family, but showing little of what she truly thought. She was picking up English quickly, even though she couldn’t go to school. When Freydeh saw her with Sammy in the street or the hallway or with one of the girls she had made friends with in the neighborhood, she was far more animated. She laughed openly, she waved her hands around and spun on her heel and leaned close to her friend to argue. She was a different girl away from her parents. Was that the girl Sammy had fallen for? Freydeh was intrigued, but would not interfere. Then she caught them in the hall together kissing against the wall with Sammy’s hand under Debra’s blouse. She warned them to be careful. “Enough trouble in the family already!”
Asher went out often in the evenings. They assumed he was at the shul, but one evening when Sammy was working with his Hebrew tutor, he came back and said that Asher was not there. “So where is he?” Freydeh asked Sara.
“I don’t know! He doesn’t smell of liquor or beer when he comes home. Could he have another woman?” Sara looked as if she might weep.
“I can’t imagine that. Maybe he’s so distraught he’s walking and thinking…”
When Asher came home that night, they were waiting for him. “Where have you been?” Sara asked, her hands on her hips. “We know you weren’t at shul. Do you have a woman on the side?”
“Wife, I am going to wash away the shame on our family.”
“There is no shame, but what you think is shame,” Freydeh said. “Shaineh had no choice. She had a little girl to feed. He locked her up. He kept her locked up.”
“Then he is a criminal and the shame should be on him.” Asher turned his back on them and strode to the window to stare out at the street.
“You can’t prosecute him in a court of law. Lawyers cost a lot of money. He has money. We don’t.”
“Keep out of my family business. You didn’t protect her when she came. It’s your fault, what happened to her.” Every night now he went out. Sometimes he came back in an hour. Sometimes he was gone until after midnight.
“Do you think I should follow him?” Sammy asked.
Freydeh shook her head. “He’s a grown man. Let him find his way.”
Then one night Asher came back at ten. He was dirty and disheveled as he sat down at the table and announced, “I have dealt with it.”
“Dealt with what?” Sara asked him. “You got a job?”
“I was waiting for him when he left the house of his
cuervah.
Such a man always has such a woman. I caught him and I struck him across both knees with a lead pipe. Then I left him there in the alley… He will survive, but he will be lame.”
“Asher, mine husband!” Sara shook him by the shoulders. “How could you do such a thing? The police will come and take you away. We’ll never see you again.”
“He doesn’t know who I am. He never saw my face in the dark alley. No one will come after me. I thought of killing him, but I did not want to commit such an act. What I did is sufficient. I am done with him.”
Freydeh was astonished. The New World had changed him too. He would never have dared seek revenge in the Pale. She was worried that somehow he could be found, but she couldn’t imagine how.
He rose and walked to where Reba was sleeping on a pallet. “I spoke with the rabbi. There’s a Children of Israel orphanage—”
Freydeh lunged to her feet. “She’s no orphan. She has us. She has me.”
“She’s a child of shame.”
“She’s a sweet little girl who’s had a hard time of it. Now she’s mine.” She stood glaring back at him, in his face.
“I won’t live under the same roof with her.”
“Then find another roof.” She doubted he would. For that, he would have to get a job. At least perhaps he would begin to act like a mensch. She stood before him without wavering, and after a few minutes he turned from her, muttering. She did not regret what Asher had done, so long as no consequences landed on her and her children. She had three of them
now, and soon Debra would join her family. She smiled when she thought of that. A barren woman she had been, and now she was the mother of three. The street had killed Moishe, but it had given her beautiful children. All the lines of condoms were in manufacture now; she had won back some of her lost customers and found new ones. All her effort could go into taking care of her family. Asher could carry on as he pleased, but she was the one everyone turned to when there was trouble, when something was needed, she was the one.
1902
E
LIZABETH HAD GROWN WEAK
and short of breath and quite blind. She had extracted a promise from her doctor Livonia that when she became too feeble to continue, when the pain became too much for her to work, Livonia would help her to slip out of life easily in a way that would not alarm her children or give cause for scandal. It should appear to be natural. In her recent will, she had recorded her objection to an autopsy. She requested that there should be a simple, commonsense ceremony conducted by women and then she should be buried in Woodlawn Cemetery rapidly without fuss or ostentation. She hated the ceremony of mourning that had weighed so heavily on women all through the previous century, the heavy black gowns, the weeping and wailing, the enforced withdrawal from work and society.
This was to be her last day, she decided. She had her hair dressed carefully in the morning. Snow white, it was still abundant and curly. Should she leave a note for Susan? No, that might tip her hand. They had last seen each other in the spring, when Susan visited her in the New York apartment
where she had moved when Tenafly grew too much for her. She lived with her son Robert, a lawyer, and her daughter Margaret, a widow and professor of physical education at Columbia Teachers College. Susan was still passionately involved with suffrage agitation and the younger women she had brought into the movement, besides cooperating with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union on their suffrage work. Elizabeth was mistrustful of them and of their leader Frances Willard, although she did not doubt the woman’s energy or organizational skills. But her dislike of organized religion had not diminished in the seven years since she published
The Woman’s Bible
and shocked half her allies into distancing themselves. She was not a Christian. Several conventions of suffragists passed resolutions against her because of
The Woman’s Bible,
but she would rather women did not vote than see the government at the mercy of bigots and religious zealots. The founding fathers had seen the danger of the joining of church and state and tried to secure equal rights for all citizens, Quaker, Baptist, Jew, Catholic, Protestant, infidel, agnostic: every one equal. Now organized religion was encroaching on the movement for woman’s rights, eroding its edge, sapping its wild energy. Respectable women wanted to be “good.” Until women ceased worrying about respectability, they would never seize their freedom—Tennie Claflin had written that in their
Weekly
decades ago, before it was suppressed.
Even now, toward what she chose should be the end, she had not been idle. Two weeks before, she had written a new essay on divorce. Until women could leave a bad relationship without forfeiting their children, they would be imprisoned. The only other woman she thought right on the mark on divorce was Victoria, who continued to write about it. They corresponded regularly. She had visited Victoria and her husband John Martin at their sumptuous Hyde Park Gate residence in London the last time she sailed to Europe. There was a woman who had retreated from scandal but never abandoned her belief in woman’s rights. They enjoyed a good visit, lots of intelligent talk of politics and social issues.
Recently she had written an open letter to President Theodore Roosevelt and privately to his wife urging support for woman suffrage. She did not expect him to act, but putting a little pressure on never hurt. He was too much of a believer in woman as breeder and little else to give assistance to their cause. He was always going on about “race suicide” as if more rich white children was what the nation most needed. Still, if his wife took notice, something might be accomplished.
Her mind worked as well as ever, but her hand was cramped and her
writing crabbed. She was forced to dictate. She would have liked one of those new writing machines, but her vision got in the way. Victoria had one, as well as a motorcar. Victoria was passionate about driving. Elizabeth found motorcars noisy and dusty.
Death did not frighten her. She had lived a good long time and accomplished some of what she had hoped to do. She had written essays she was proud of. She had reveled in some sweet friendships over the years. She had six living children whom she loved and who loved her back. She had darling grandchildren. Every single one of her seven children had received a college education—not easily accomplished, but she brought that off with the help of her older sister. Her daughter Harriot would carry on her work. Harriot was her truest heir.
So many of her dear friends were dead—Matilda, Lucretia, Pearlo. Henry was gone. Her eldest son Neil had died eleven years before. If she had been more superstitious, no doubt she would have been cheered by the notion of rejoining them in some eternal Sunday afternoon, an infinite vista of singing hymns and sitting around a heavenly parlor bored silly and stifling yawns. She did not believe in an afterlife. She would become one with the universe, yes, as trees gave back to the forest, as flowers wilted and dried up. A matter of chemicals. Many spiritualists who believed firmly in other levels of existence after death had lent their energy to woman’s rights, and she appreciated their efforts. She also thought them fools. For a long time, she had been polite about their beliefs, but she was too old for twaddle. At least they gave women a decent role in the here and now. Victoria had been one of those believers. Elizabeth had the impression Victoria had gradually dropped those wishful theories. Once she said the spirits abandoned her after her failed run for president; another time, she said perhaps she had abandoned them.