GOLDA
Cousin Surah was the first friend Golda made in the new country. She confessed to Golda that when she had come to America fifteen years before, she had been, much like Golda, confused and frightened. She spoke no English, had no friends, and barely knew her husband, Yaacov, whom she had married three months before they emigrated.
“How did you manage?” Golda asked, staring at Cousin Surah’s round face as if the answer could be found written in the reassurance in her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth.
Cousin Surah sat beside Golda and took her hand. “It was difficult at first. But people spoke Yiddish. We lived with Yaacov’s aunt and uncle until Yaacov had work. The first year he sold, in a pushcart, coal in the winter and ice in the summer. And then he sold other things. Potatoes. Men’s pants. Once pots and pans.” Cousin Surah was quiet for a few minutes, as if remembering. When she spoke again, her words came faster and faster. “Then he went to work for the Free Loan Society as their bookkeeper. He used to bookkeep in the old country. Then others—businesses who came for free loans—began to hire him to do their bookkeeping. By then we got our apartment—two rooms—and I had our first child, Solomon. You’ll meet him later.” Cousin Surah patted Golda’s hand.
“I made friends who took me in hand, showed me where to buy. And my husband, Yaacov, is a good man, and he and I made a partnership. We helped each other. You manage. I learned English from my neighbors and the street. But now we have classes in schools, and there is a settlement house where they teach.” Cousin Surah smiled. “Little by little, we made a life,” she said. “You’ll see, you will too.”
Cousin Surah’s simple story gave Golda courage, even though she knew that things were never simple. The next weeks were hard—harder than Golda could have imagined. Without thinking about it, and without being asked and consenting, Golda was caring for the baby, washing his diapers, and hanging them on a clothesline out the window, where lines from every apartment crisscrossed the air, the hanging clothes waving in the wind. She boiled the baby’s bottles, then filled them with thinned evaporated milk, caring for Morton as if he were her own son.
But he was not. She tried to love him. She peered at him as he lay in her arms feeding from the bottle she had prepared, wondering what Esther would have felt for him if she were alive. She would probably have been lovesick, the way most new mothers were. She remembered how Esther had talked about the baby, thought about what she would do if she had a boy or a girl. Dreamed about holding the baby, rocking the baby. But Golda did not feel that way. She tried, but her heart was closed. She could not let him in because each time she tried, a sliver of resentment would slip in, and the tenderness would disappear.
She wanted her own life, not her sister’s, but she was stuck. Here she was in the house of a gentle and kind woman who was not her relative. There he was, Morton, a helpless baby, not hers, whom she could neither love nor leave. And there was Ben, a man who had been waiting for the bride he’d loved when he was in the old country but whose face, he confessed one day to Golda, he could barely remember.
Golda thought about Esther and how she had loved Ben, bragged about him. “Did you know he is a genius with his hands? A mechanic. He’s going to have a job when he gets to America. Abe Frankel, the man he apprenticed to in Lesko, went first and promised Ben he would have a place for him in his uncle’s business in New York.”
Golda wondered, was there any way out for her? What would she do? If she weren’t here in this house with Ben and Cousin Surah, where would she go? Each night she thought about it, remembering the young nurse on the ship. Golda wondered how you became a nurse and if she could be one. Could she earn her way? Do something for herself? As she held Morton, sang him the lullabies she had heard her mother sing to her brothers, she daydreamed about being a nurse or a shop girl or a baker in a bakery. She knew it was a dream, not something possible, but she dreamed nevertheless.
One morning, several weeks after the thirty-day mourning period was over, when she was feeding a bottle to the baby and Ben was out at work, Cousin Surah said to her, “So, has he asked you yet?”
“Asked me what?”
Cousin Surah cocked her head, smiled. “To marry?”
Golda’s mouth dropped open in shock. “No. He hasn’t.” She shook her head. Her heart beat hard. She didn’t want to marry Ben. He didn’t love her; she didn’t love him. She had never yearned to be a wife and a mother the way Esther had, but in the old country, what else was there? When she went to Przemysl, the city near her town, she saw women, young women, smartly dressed, going to school, working in offices. She wondered how they had escaped the small-town rules she was bound by. Stay home, help your mother, don’t think about school or other ways to live. But now, in this new country, she saw many women in business in the storefronts on the avenue.
She wanted to learn English so she could work like that . . . become an American. But how could she do that? Desert this tiny baby, leave him to Ben. What would he do? Cousin Surah had talked about an orphanage. How could she let her sister’s son be taken to an orphanage if she could prevent it? Her heart sank and she shivered.
“Do people really put babies in orphanages?” she whispered.
After a long wait, Cousin Surah said, “Yes. If they can’t feed them. Better an orphanage than death by starving.” Cousin Surah turned her back on Golda so she couldn’t see her face. It was probably full of disapproval, Golda thought. She felt her eyes well up with tears.
Cousin Surah turned and took Golda’s hand. “People do desperate things when they see no way out. Men run away and leave their families when they can’t feed them. They desert them. Even mothers leave. I know one whose husband died, and she left her ten-year-old son in the care of a neighbor and went west . . . where I don’t know. But the boy was ten and deserted, and he turned to crime and was eventually killed. There are more terrible stories in this building than I can talk about. You . . . your story is not so desperate. You have choices.”
Golda nodded. The walls seemed to be closing in on her. All the choices came to her, and none, except one, seemed worthy of consideration. She knew that in the village, when a man was widowed with a child, he was expected to marry his dead wife’s sister if she was not married. It was a mitzvah, a good deed, for the sister to marry him and raise her sister’s child.
“You have choices,” Cousin Surah repeated. “But not so very many.”
Golda knew what Cousin Surah was saying. She had no trade that made sense. Her embroidery was nice. A side business. All the dreams she’d had as a girl of escaping the life that was laid out before her were just that. Dreams. Make-believe. She closed her eyes, thoughts swirling in her head. What would Esther want me to do? Would she want me to marry Ben? Did she really tell me to take the baby when she lay dying on the ship?
“Is he going to ask me to marry?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he hasn’t yet. Maybe he won’t.”
“He will soon . . . and what will you say?”
Golda breathed in and out. If I say no, where will I go? Cousin Surah probably will not let me stay here. If I say yes, I will be married, and my life will no longer be my own. Will I betray my sister if I marry her husband? A deep sigh escaped her lips. If Ben asks me, I need an answer. And with all the scurrying thoughts in her head, there was only one answer that seemed to solve all the problems. And she would have to say it.
“Yes.”
They were married as soon as possible, Cousin Surah said Ben could not keep sleeping on the floor in the parlor, and as long as they were going to marry, they should do it soon.
Golda wore a dress that Cousin Surah bought for her on the avenue. They could not waste money on a white wedding dress that would never be worn again, so they settled on a pale blue dress that suited Golda and that she admitted to Surah she liked. She bought some colored thread and stayed up late before the wedding, embroidering delicate flowers along the neckline. Cousin Surah admired the beauty of the workmanship.
“You can get good work—good money—doing that,” she said.
“Where?” Golda asked.
“Dress shops. Tailors. We can go on the avenue and bring your work and show it to the tailor shops. I even know someone who works in one.”
Golda marveled that perhaps she could earn a wage with her sewing. It would help her to keep some independence.
She had not had a new dress in a very long time and kept looking at herself in the mirror before the wedding. She thought she looked pretty and wondered, if her life had not taken her down this road, whether she would ever have met a man she could truly love. Could she ever love Ben, who still was a stranger to her?
The plan was for Rabbi Levy to marry them in the little storefront shul on the next street, under a chuppah, a wedding canopy, with Cousin Surah and her husband arranging and paying for the wedding and the celebration, which Ben would eventually pay back. There were so many customs related to weddings, decisions that needed to be made, but Cousin Surah did not want to force any of them on Golda.
Did she want to go to the mikvah, the ritual bath, for purification before the wedding ceremony?
Golda thought about it and said yes, she did. So Cousin Surah accompanied her there.
Did she want to cut her hair and wear a sheitel, a wig?
Golda uttered a resounding “No!” and Cousin Surah nodded her head in agreement. After all, Esther, who had married Ben in the village, had absolutely refused to cut her hair and wear a wig, to their mother’s horror. She consented only to wear a scarf tied around her curls when she went out into the street. Golda wondered if Ben would care what she did with her hair, but she didn’t ask him. If he had a preference, he would have to tell her.
Would she wear a veil at the wedding?
Yes, she would if they could borrow one. Golda did not want to spend money unnecessarily. Cousin Surah arranged to borrow one from a neighbor whose daughter had recently married.
The wedding ceremony was not long, and Golda and Ben were married quietly. After the blessings by the rabbi, Ben stepped on the glass and broke it; there were shouts of “Mazel tov!” and the witnesses and the wedding party celebrated back at Cousin Surah’s apartment, where a few neighbors and friends had prepared a dinner for them.
Golda could not eat a bite. She clutched her marriage contract, her ketubah, in her hands and thought that a wedding was supposed to be a happy day, one of the most important days in a girl’s life. And here she was, quickly married to a man she had not selected, with a baby to take care of who was not her own. It was not lost on her that her father had wanted her to marry a widower with two small children, and she had refused. It must be her fate, she thought, to marry a widower with a child, because here she was, married to Ben, caring for Morton. It was bashert—destined.
After the wedding ceremony, after the dinner, Cousin Surah took the baby for the night and shooed the couple into the tiny bedroom that Golda had been sleeping in since she arrived. Ben followed her into the room, and they sat on opposite sides of the bed, facing away from one another. It was not a big bed. She could not imagine sleeping in it together.
Ben said, “We can wait. I don’t want to push you. I know we married for convenience.”
Golda felt her body relax. She turned and faced Ben, nodded her head. “Thank you,” she whispered.
They closed their eyes without even an embrace.