The Book Borrower (33 page)

By the time I got home, my parents knew. For hours, we weren't alone, and it was just as well. Rabbis and prayerful old men appeared, though we didn't belong to a synagogue. Neighbors, relatives, busybodies. Food was carried in. Tea was forced on us. My mother and father sobbed, but I was silent; maybe the neighbors thought I was a co-conspirator. Later, when we were alone, my parents screamed. “She should die in the electric chair!” my father shrieked. I went into the bedroom I shared with Sarah and felt absolute terror that she was gone. And it was unthinkable. All through her life, Sarah had barely left our block except to go to school. The room seemed enormous. Never in my life had I spent a night alone in a room, without the sound of breathing nearby, the breathing of one sister or the other or both. I didn't go to bed but spent that night wringing out wet cloths and patting my mother's face with them, as Miss Fredericks had frantically patted mine. My father left the house and was gone for hours.

I thought my mother would never speak intelligibly again. The few words I made out were in Yiddish. When I remember that night, I understand why, through the years that followed, I never let myself get close enough to a man to consider bearing his child. My mother was not a particularly intelligent or strong woman. If she'd had an easy life—if there is such a thing—maybe she'd have carried it off well. But nothing much happens to anybody that's worse than what happened to my mother that night.

I don't know how much my mother understood of the American justice system, and I don't know when she made up her mind between anger at Jessie and fear for Jessie. By morning she knew which she felt, and it was anger. And for the rest of my mother's life, after that night when I bathed and kissed her over and over again, the serious quarrel between us was about pity and love for Jessie or anger at Jessie. I explained, that night and on many other nights, that it wasn't certain Jessie had done anything wrong—that she had been arrested, not convicted. To my mother, though, Jessie had done wrong when she first had left our house and taken lovers, and those actions were the cause of Sarah's death. Not that my mother hoped for Jessie's conviction. She wanted to scream at Jessie and hit her, not to have the law take an interest in her.

I don't remember much of Sarah's funeral, which took place the day after her death. I remember a small room, narrow corridors made smaller by black drapery, crowds jostling in the narrowed halls, crying and lamenting. I remember Sarah's schoolmates and their parents presenting me with their distorted faces. Crying makes people ugly, and nobody was decorously sorrowful.

A day or so later, when my mother was being tended to by relatives—she was like a sick person, mostly in bed, bargaining and stalling for hours before she'd accept morsels of food from patient cousins and sisters-in-law—I slipped out of the house, concealing my coat by crushing it against my body until I got outside. Then I put it on and walked to the city jail.

I thought I'd have to wheedle and plead, but a frightened policeman, a young, skinny Irish cop, who'd obviously never expected to have to deal with a serious crime, listened to me respectfully, nodding vigorously and too many times, as if he himself were the accused person. “You can see her in the parlor,” he said incongruously, and even in my distraught state I marveled that a jail would have a parlor.

Of course it didn't; he meant what we'd call a waiting room. He showed me into a plain, narrow room with benches along the walls and a big dusty oak desk in one corner, with nothing on it at all. He pointed to a bench and I sat down. Then he left, and in a while I heard the sound of a door, and he brought Jessie into the room.

She stood still. She looked angry. Her bobbed hair was matted and stuck out, seeming to make sharp points around her face. She was wearing her own clothes: her gray dress. She looked buxom and square, stubborn. The policeman stood beside her for an instant, then turned and moved to-ward the empty desk as if he meant to sit there, supervising our conversation. The desk had no chair. Narrow and dark in his uniform, he stood and looked at the desk a moment, and then he left the room, almost on tiptoe, walking in back of Jessie, as if she were the authority figure.

Jessie and I stayed where we were. I didn't stand and take her in my arms; she didn't step forward or cry. Her arms and legs, under the demure dress, seemed rigid, and they were spread a little, clumsily: limbs hacked off by torturers and carelessly refastened. Her face held only horror and rage. She didn't seem to see me.

I leaned to the side and began to make a sound, a shriek that I muffled with my hands because we were in a place where I could not let go. I hadn't shrieked before. I had cried, but mostly I had kept silent, bringing wet cloths. Now I was afraid I'd vomit on the floor and the jailers would be angry. At long last Jessie sat down on the bench, not close to me—as far away as someone could and still be in a conversation. “Miriam,” she finally said urgently. “Miriam.” She sounded stern. At length I stopped making sounds, passed my hands over my wet face, and sat up. I turned in her direction.

“How's Mama?”

“In bed.”

“And Papa?”

“Oh, very bad.”

“I never thought she would go,” Jessie said. “She never did anything like that.”

“I didn't think she would. I had no idea,” I said. But I was thinking that if Jessie didn't expect Sarah to take the trolley, it meant she knew there would be trouble. I was overcome with fear. It was physical. I was so afraid Jessie would die in the electric chair that I couldn't stand up, as if my bench were perched up in the sky and if I stood I'd plunge to my death. At last I moved closer to her, and put my arms around her. “Jessie, if you did it, never tell me,” I said. “Promise me you'll never tell me. Tell me you didn't do it.”

“I didn't do it,” she said.

We held each other. I wasn't close enough to feel her soft breasts. We were both pretending, as though the jailer was watching us after all. I felt that the wrong sister had died, and it was my fault because I'd always preferred Jessie's intelligence and wit to Sarah's stupid goodness. Jessie's political beliefs, her ideological beliefs, seemed, just then, like dry pedantry. She'd killed Sarah over fussy little notions. I stopped being afraid Jessie would die in the electric chair. I
wanted
her to die in that hideous manner, in humiliation and terror, being walked consciously to her death. Now I'd scared myself so badly, wanting such a thing, that I couldn't speak, but on the other hand, I was no longer afraid to move. I stood up and hurried away. The jailer, whom I found in the anteroom reading the newspaper, was surprised and embarrassed. He'd have let me stay a little longer. He pushed the paper away and later I realized he must have been reading a story about us.

Soon enough, my parents and I were left alone in what felt like a vast space. I no longer wrung out wet cloths. My mother said she wanted nothing, and hardly spoke. Neither she nor my father talked of Jessie or Sarah. Their permanent lifetime moods were selected that week. From then on, they were people of bitterness and suppressed rage. I was alone. Suddenly it seemed that I had no friends. I had thought I had friends. Edith Livingston, who'd taken so to Sarah, did not come to her funeral or make contact with me again. From the vantage point of years, I don't blame her. The newspaper didn't report where Sarah was going on that trolley—I sup-pose nobody knew but our family, and nobody asked us— but everyone knew the crash had been on the Lake Avenue line. Of course the Livingstons knew all about it; but what would have been gained if they'd blamed themselves, or sul-lied that little boy's life with a notion of responsibility, how-ever indirect, for a death? And of course they had meant no harm with their impulsive, sentimental invitation. I pride my-self on being unlike my parents, but I've never done anything impulsive or sentimental since. I've never suddenly begged a friend to come and see me; I've barely invited anybody to come and see me at all, even with advance planning. I have always blamed myself for Sarah's death, and not just for taking her to the Livingstons' in the first place, but I am not responsible for any other deaths.

One night an old friend of my father's, a member of the anarchist group he'd dropped in recent years, came to see us and talked to him solemnly in the kitchen for a long time. He was an old man, not one of the young people Jessie knew best; he'd been in prison in Russia, and was rumored to have written books. When I finally walked into the room, poured them both some schnapps, and then poured some for myself and sat down with them—knowing I was unsettling them— the old man hesitated and then seemed to decide that maybe, after all, I was a more reasonable person to speak to than my father. He told me that anti-Semitic marchers had held walks past the jail several times. They were shabby, nutty, unin-formed, and secretive, apparently members of an organization nobody knew about. Then the slogan “Kill the Little Jew” had appeared painted on a large boulder visible from the Lake Avenue trolley. Oh, yes, the trolley strike was over. It was just like Denver. The men gave up when somebody died. Even that made me angry. Were they surprised? Either you make up your mind to persist in spite of death, or you don't do what could cause a death in the first place. The old man who spoke to my father wanted us to make contact with a Jewish organization that might provide us with a lawyer. The anarchists, poor wretches, had no money, and several of their members had been accused, although only Jessie was in jail and only she was accused of murder. They would make a secret contribution to her defense, he explained, but he thought she'd be better off if her connection to them could be made to seem trivial. He thought the anti-Semitism was a good thing, because it might make one of the large Jewish groups take an interest.

My father, grief-stricken and now terrified of anti-Jewish feeling, was incapable of strategic thinking, and only shook his head, again and again, but I was glad to talk with the old man. And soon enough a lawyer appeared; I don't remember just who made the connection. A Jewish organization had taken us on. The lawyer was a plump, smooth-haired young man who held his hat on his lap, waving off my offer to take it, and repeatedly stabbed it with his finger. My mother and father faced him, watching suspiciously from their armchairs, and didn't speak. I think his name was Mr. Arthur, or Arthur somebody. He seemed to guess that they didn't know English well, because after a few minutes he switched to Yid-dish, and spoke sweetly. I was surprised. He said he was sorry, he was sorry, he was sorry for their trouble. He went back to speaking English when he began discussing the strategy of the case once more; his Yiddish was only good enough for ceremonial phraseology, I suppose.

He asked me questions that made me impatient; he didn't understand Jessie. In those days I had abrupt changes of viewpoint. Sometimes I wanted her to fry and sometimes I wanted to mount a defense that would get her acquitted at any cost. The lawyer's notion was to establish an alibi for her. He wanted to prove that she'd been with us the morning of the wreck, but she'd been arrested outside of town. We hadn't seen her all day and there was no way to prove that we had.

“Think,” he kept saying to me. “Sometimes it helps to re-member trivial things. What did you eat? Did she drop in and help cook it?” As if Jessie had ever cooked anything in her life. But he wouldn't let that topic go. I think he had the notion of proving that she cooked for the anarchists, too, that she served chicken soup with matzoh balls to hungry radicals without listening to them.

He had talked to Jessie already. “She says she was out in the country drawing pictures of barns,” he said, as if nobody would believe such a thing. “In January. That's what she was doing. Drawing barns. She said she was tired of the strike. She was angry with everybody.”

“That sounds like Jessie,” I said, and he looked up quickly, then shook his head. “I don't think your sister has confidence in me.”

“I'm sure she's grateful—” I began insincerely, but he cut me off. “She said, 'They will execute me because I'm young, female, and Jewish, or they will not execute me because I'm young, female, and Jewish.' ”

“I don't understand,” I said, but he just shook his head.

My parents and I attended the trial every day, even the selection of the jury, an impassive group of businessmen in stiff collars who all looked alike to me. My mother and father sat in the back of the courtroom, not speaking. For the trial itself the room was filled. I sat in the first row, behind Jessie, and people invariably made room for me. She crossed the room stolidly each morning, like someone on her way to clean a toilet. She wore a black dress that looked tight across her breasts. I suppose it was a uniform of some kind for prisoners. Maybe they'd had to send to Boston for it. Jessie's bulging eyes looked steadily and all but casually around the room as she walked to her place.

The District Attorney was a tall, wide man who flung his arms out and paced rapidly when he spoke. He had thick, straight white hair that fell over his big forehead and that he shook back by bending his head, as if in prayer, then flinging his chin up and out. His hair floated and slowly settled while he himself continued moving quickly. His hair was like a calm, stupefied wife moving at her own pace beside her wide-awake husband—or like a silent, sinister assistant: a hidden resource, another insidious possible form of destruction for us. By now, of course, I longed for Jessie's acquittal with all my soul. In my dreams, when Jessie was acquitted, Sarah suddenly appeared alive in the courtroom, smiling, irritatingly unmindful of all the trouble she'd caused.