The Book Borrower (7 page)

Jessie rose to her feet. “If we decide
now,
” she shouted, “in exactly which circumstances we'll surrender—” She paused. “If we say
now
that we
could
surrender—well, we might as well give up. We might as well go home.” She was hoarse, as she often was when she made a speech: her voice wasn't naturally loud. Her eyes bulged, I imagine, and hairs escaped from her small brown bun. “
I'm
not going home. I'll do what's needed. If someone dies, I will mourn. But I will mourn then, not beforehand. If the rest of you want to go home now—well, then, it will be quiet enough in here that I can think of a plan and know what to do. I hope you reach shelter, all of you, before the snow.”

The speech became well known around town. Nobody left, of course.

This group, a combination of anarchists, Communists, Socialists, and the leaders of the trolley men's union, first planned to persuade people to boycott the trolleys during the strike. “Once the public understands what is at stake,” said William Platz, “it will demand justice in order to keep the lines running!” There was applause and shouting and happiness, but of course they were kidding themselves, and, in fact, plans were also being made to intimidate potential passengers and keep them off trolleys run by scabs.

It hadn't been my sister's first speech. She literally stood on soapboxes. Mostly people ignored her or laughed at her; some-times they got angry. Jessie knew that speeches weren't going to keep anybody off the trolleys. The Denver strike, which they'd avidly read about, had been bitterly violent. A newspaper account I've found says that at least five people were killed and thirty injured. Mobs stoned the
Denver Post
building, destroyed the business offices, and tried to demolish the presses because the paper was against the strike. A passenger was struck by a brick. Strikers and sympathizers marched on City Hall screaming “Wreck the Hall.” The response was even worse: armed volunteers joined the police, and federal troops arrived to put down the disturbances. The
New York Times
reported on August 7, 1920, that “armored tank cars mounted with Browning machine guns capable of firing five hundred shots a minute are patrolling the streets.” The
Times
continued, “Fearless men, aroused by the menace to life and property created by the riots, are armed with sawed-off shotguns and have orders to shoot to kill if necessary.” It was in this situation that the strikers gave up and the leader declared himself a changed man.

I'm as staunch an old lefty as anybody, mind you. I'm not siding with the police and the army and the reactionary press against the strikers. I just think the strikers in Denver were stupid: What did they think was going to happen? And given the example of Denver, just three months earlier, what, may I ask, did the trolley men of Boynton, Massachusetts—aided and abetted by my sister—think was going to happen to them?

“Jessie.” William Platz caught up to her as she was step-ping outside into the night. “May I walk you to your trolley stop?” Heavy irony, here. He'd seduced her three years earlier—taken her virginity. The two of them are about to try to close down the very trolley system to which he is demurely escorting her. Nonetheless comes this invitation that I'm imagining or remembering. Jessie told me about something like this. She liked his solicitude. Already, though she was so young, she had lost any claim to protection from men, and ordinarily she didn't want it. But William Platz jammed his cap on his head and pulled it off again to run his hand through his curls, which the sooty wind blew into tangles. The heavy brown cap was thrust onto his head again. Jessie hadn't tied her veil in place and the ashy breeze nicked her skin. They walked silently together. He knew where she was going—to the Crampton line. It ran into the slum where Jessie had rented a room when she and my father quarreled so badly she had to leave.

Walking up the long hill, they didn't talk. They waited together at the trolley stop and Jessie began to wonder why he didn't make his own way home. Then the trolley came and they got on. As usual, they were surrounded by tired workingmen in gray or brown coats, all of them shaking in their seats with the car's movement. William sat next to her and Jessie took in the slightly damp smell of his woolen coat. She felt a renewed awareness of his body next to her own, as if the inch of air closest to him had its own texture, mixed rough and smooth, and its own dark, pleasant smell.

He touched her, inadvertently or not, and she got the idea that he was going home with her. She thought he'd changed his mind. He'd seduced her and had been her lover for months, and then he'd told her he'd made a mistake, that de-spite the ideas of anarchism he wished to be faithful to his wife. Now Jessie's feelings were engaged—and hurt a second time. Maybe William Platz had still another lover, who happened to live on this trolley line. Whatever the reason, he jumped up, shook hands with Jessie, and disembarked three blocks before her stop. Jessie went home alone and I think—I indulge myself with thinking—that our lives were changed that night as her heart beat faster, but then more slowly and angrily, defiantly. She studied the motorman's back during those last three blocks. He was a man our father's age, with, she decided, a simple, vulnerable look to his head and shoulders. The motorman needed her. He and she were in the same army.

 

 

Ruben stopped reading and slept. But the baby woke in the night, and after she nursed him, she couldn't fall asleep again.

 

 

Lest the reader think it was always night in Boynton in 1920, with a gritty wind blowing, let me say that the Sunday after Jessie's dinner at home was sunny and clear, with cold white clouds moving swiftly across a cold sky. A light snow—the first of the season—had fallen the night before, and a scattering covered fields and roofs. Where dry reeds from the previous summer still stood in the open places, they rustled with ice. Sarah and I looked out the trolley window at the open countryside, on our way to have Sunday dinner with Edith Livingston and her family. I stared at the crisp brown grasses near the right of way until I was lulled by the rhythmic progress of the trolley and no longer saw them.

Sarah chattered about how she imagined Edith might look. “Does she have dimples? I picture her with dimples.” I felt shy, and wished I hadn't agreed to go, and to bring along my unpredictable little sister. Once, the trolley stopped because of ice on the overhead line, and the conductor climbed up on the roof and knocked it off with a pole. Sarah was excited about that, too, though she'd seen it done before. It was she who recognized Edith's house from the description I'd been given, and, sure enough, the next stop was Hale Road, where we were supposed to get off, and where Edith, who had no dimples, met us.

All I remember of the walk to the house with Edith, so many years later, is that we saw a dead sparrow on the frozen ground, and Edith, who had a volatile disposition, squatted and stroked and cooed along with Sarah, while I stood by: I was irritated at their sentimentality, and also cold. I was envious, too. My dumb but darling little sister, I thought, would soon be a closer friend of Edith's than I was. Edith was sharp and funny when she wasn't crying over something, but I watched her admire Sarah's broad pink face and easy smile. And Sarah was admirable. I see her smiling up at Edith and me, all but smiling through tears, when Edith had stopped looking at the bird and Sarah was still crouched on the ground. Sarah was smiling at her own foolishness and naturally nobody could resist that. She had on a pretty blue coat that my mother had made. She looked particularly charming in the country. We took a shortcut across a field.

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.