Eight

Sarah was sorry she’d taken the shortcut through the alley to Mrs. Mahoney’s tenement. It had rained during the night and the alley was full of puddles. Oblivious to their mud-caked shoes and hands, two boys, ten or eleven years old, were playing ball. She jumped away just in time to avoid being splattered with smelly black water by their bouncing ball.

She would have liked to tell them to play somewhere else, but where? A game on the sidewalk was constantly interrupted by passersby, and the streets were crowded with peddlers’ carts and horse-drawn buggies.

Some of the older boys had taken to meeting on the large flat roof of Mrs. Mahoney’s tenement where several of the women hung their clothes to dry. They played cards and, Mrs. Mahoney whispered to Sarah, told dirty jokes. Being on the roof wasn’t exactly safe either. One afternoon while Goosie was sleeping, Sarah had gone to the roof with Mrs. Mahoney to help take dry laundry off her clothesline. A sudden wind made the laundry flap wildly. The boys whooped to see their cards go flying over rooftops, but Sarah had been terrified.

She stepped gingerly over the broken plank in front of the tenement entrance and entered the narrow hallway that smelled of fish and strong soap. Goosie opened the door before she knocked. Small for his age, he looked even younger, his tightly curled red hair sprouting goose feathers that had escaped from the pillows Mrs. Mahoney sewed. Before Sarah had even crossed the threshold he thrust his hand into her coat pocket for the pencil and paper she always brought. He had begged Sarah for a pencil of his own, but pencils were carefully rationed items in the Goldman household. “I’ll give you one for Christmas,” Sarah had promised.

“I can only draw for five minutes, Goosie. I came to talk to your mama.”

“Goosie,” Mrs. Mahoney said, patting the boy’s shoulder, “go sit on your bed.” She smiled at Sarah, her lips clamped together to hide two missing teeth. She always wore a dark scarf over her head, which Sarah thought too bad because she had thick, red-gold hair. Freckles were sprinkled over the bridge of her snub nose, and her hazel eyes would have been beautiful if they had not been underlined by dark shadows.

“Mrs. Mahoney, I came to ask if I can watch Goosie every Wednesday, like I did last week, because I’m going to be taking that art class after school on Tuesdays.”

“Wednesday…is fine. No worry. And I pay you.”

“I don’t want money. I like taking care of Goosie.”

“You stay? I made fish soup. Goosie would be happy.”

“I’m sorry. Our upstairs neighbor comes to play chess tonight and Mama makes a big meal. I have to help.”

“Draw an elephant,” Goosie directed, jumping off the bed and spreading the sheet of paper on the floor.

“How am I supposed to draw without a pencil?” Sarah asked, raising her eyebrows in mock disapproval. Grinning, Goosie produced the pencil and knelt so close to her that she could smell the soap that Mrs. Mahoney used to wash his hair. The entire room smelled faintly of the soap because Mrs. Mahoney poured their used bathwater onto the floor for its weekly scrubbing.

“A big elephant with a long trunk?”

Goosie nodded, eyes fixed on the moving pencil as it outlined the big, flappy ears and wrinkled trunk.

“That’s good,” he said. “Now, draw her baby.”

Goosie could easily keep her drawing until night set in.

§

“Delicious, Rifke,” Leo Levi said, patting his stomach. He had just downed a dinner of split pea soup, beef stew, and noodle kugel. Sammy, who adored Leo, stuck his stomach out and patted it, then ran to his father and patted his, pronouncing it the fattest.

“Rifke plays the first chess game with you tonight,” Jacob said. “She stuffed your stomach so your brain will fall asleep.”

Leo laughed. He was remarkably tall and thin, with oversized hands and feet. Though no more than forty years old, he was bald as an apple and had a rubbery, expressive face with slightly protruding eyes and acrobatic black eyebrows. His regular evening with the Goldman family was the highlight of his week.

“His feet don’t touch the ground when he walks,” Rifke said. He was her favorite person outside the family.

“I have good news to tell the Goldmans.” Leo held his hands out in front of him. “These are happy hands. Why? Because soon they will be doing man’s work with wood and hammer and nails. No more fussing with needles and thread at the garment factory.” He paused. “I, Leo Levi, master carpenter, have been hired to help build exhibits for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893!”

Jacob pounded Leo on the back. “Mazeltov, Leo!”

Rifke put down a platter of rugelach and kissed him on both cheeks. “Leo, I am happy for you.”

Leo grinned like a bridegroom as Sarah and Fanny hugged him.

“The work on the Fair has been going on long…a year, maybe a year and a half, and they’re behind schedule. Fourteen great buildings and two hundred smaller ones! And Rifke, you should relax. I’m assigned to work on the Woman’s Building. I’ll make sure a good job is done.”

“When do you start?” Sarah asked.

“On Monday. The Fair is supposed to open May first.”

“Sit. We’ll have dessert now,” Rifke said. “Those happy hands need to be strong.”

Between bites of rugelach and sips of tea, Leo ran on about the Fair like a man in love who can’t stop talking about his sweetheart. “Fifty-one countries, all with fancy exhibits! Africa is bringing ten live lions. And…,” his eyebrows sprang upward and his eyes glittered, “there’s a big fuss over the Algerian exhibit because there are going to be belly dancers.”

“What’s a jelly dancer?” Sammy asked.

“Dancers who like to eat jelly,” Rifke answered quickly.

“And you know how many restaurants? Enough so seventeen hundred people can eat at one time!”

Sarah laughed. “Leo, do you stay up all night memorizing those numbers?”

“With apologies to you, Rifke, to talk about this at the table, but with so many people eating, there’ll be three thousand toilets and two thousand urinals on the fairgrounds!”

“You count them,” Rifke said, “so they don’t leave any out.”

“What does a ticket to the Fair cost?” Jacob asked.

“Fifty cents. But then you have to pay an extra twenty-five cents to do special things, like take a gondola ride or go up on the Ferris Wheel.”

“I read about the Ferris Wheel,” Jacob said. “At the top you can see Indiana.”

“Two thousand people can ride it at one time!”

“I don’t want to be one of them.” Rifke shuddered.

Fanny pulled at Jacob’s sleeve. “Papa, can we go?”

“I will have to sell a lot of pot roasts.”

“You will all go,” Leo said. “I’ll see to that. But now is the time for our story.” He moved to the couch, motioning Sammy to sit next to him. Fanny and Sarah sat on his other side, the usual configuration for Leo’s after-dinner story. “Tonight is a story about a man who ran away from his wife because she was such a terrible cook.”

“Are you sure this is a story for children?” Rifke asked.

“It’s about respectable neighborhood people.”

“It is a question whether a man who runs away from his wife is respectable,” Rifke countered.

“Tell us,” Sammy pleaded.

Leo put an arm around Sammy and drew him closer. “There was a very thin man and his very pretty, very fat wife. Now the very thin man had a very large appetite, but the very fat wife was a terrible cook. Everything she made tasted like straw. The neighbors would hear the very thin man yell at the top of his lungs, ‘I didn’t know I married a chemist! I bring you a tender chicken to cook and you turn it into rubber!’”

Sammy giggled. “Rubber, blubber.”

“One night the very thin man didn’t come home for dinner. His wife waited and waited. One day, two days, three days, no husband. The unhappy wife cried herself to sleep. She decided to tell her troubles to Miss Addams at Hull House. It just so happened that the thin man had come to Hull House that very morning to tell Miss Addams his sad story about his pretty wife who was a terrible cook.”

Leo paused. “Do you want to hear the rest?” he asked. “Maybe you heard enough.”

“Leo!” Sarah cried.

Fanny pulled his ear. “Stop teasing!”

“I just wanted to make sure. Now Miss Addams is very young, but she is already wise. She asked the thin man, ‘If your wife became a good cook, would you return home and be a faithful husband?’

‘I swear to God,’ the thin man said. ‘But it will never happen.’

‘It may take three weeks. Can you wait that long?’

‘For such a miracle, I can wait three months!’

“So Miss Addams told the fat, pretty wife about the talk she’d had with her husband. ‘If you take the cooking class at Hull House twice a week for three weeks, you can learn to be a wonderful cook. Your husband will come back and never leave again.’

“And that’s exactly what the pretty wife did. She learned to make delicious soups, sweet-and-sour cabbage rolls, tender chicken with roast potatoes, meat stew with thick gravy, and apple pies and cinnamon rolls. Miss Addams told the thin man to return home and he would see the miracle that had happened. The thin man did what she said and a week later the happy wife went to see Miss Addams again. ‘My husband eats so well now that last night he came to dinner wearing a crown he made in the wood shop.’ And he said, ‘I eat like a king so I should wear a crown.’

“So the thin man and his fat, pretty wife lived happily ever after, raising a family of four fat little girls and one very thin boy.”

Sammy, Fanny, and Sarah applauded.

“Rifke, if you turned a ten pound chicken into ten pounds of rubber,” said Jacob, “we could sell it to the tire factory and get rich.”

“Do it, Mama!” cried Sammy.

That night, Sarah dreamt that she was walking in the alley to go to take care of Goosie. When she got to the tenement, boys threw hundreds of rubber chickens down from the roof. She had to turn and run home. She woke up hearing Goosie crying because she hadn’t come to take care of him on Tuesday.