32
Move!
My heart pounded and my hands shook. I didn’t touch the doorknob, but instead reached for the key and unlocked the door. In my nervousness, I pulled out the key and flung it under the bed. I wanted to retrieve it, but the knocks on the door grew louder and more impatient.
“Don’t open it,” C. said. “You have a right not to open your door. And you don’t want to open it.”
I glared at him to tell him to keep quiet. I opened the door, holding my nightgown closed at the neck, and peered out into the dark hallway. The landlady stood before me in a long large brown bathrobe. With eyes like daggers, she spoke words meant to draw blood. “You may no longer live in our home. Find another room.”
“Mrs.—”
“Not in my house!”
“You—”
“No shenanigans!”
“But—”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
“But—”
“Don’t put your finger in my mouth, or I’ll bite. I rented the room to one person. If you want others to stay in your room, there are plenty of other sorts of houses in New York for that!”
“How can you—”
“It’s alright,” she scoffed in English, and then continued in Yiddish. “If you can do what you do, then I can say what I have to say. It isn’t the first night that you’ve—that you’ve had a man in your room. I’ve stayed quiet up to now. But there’s a limit to everything. I have patience of iron, but even that can give way. Enough!”
“That’s what I think too!” said the husband’s voice suddenly from behind my landlady’s back. “This povedenie is not suitable for an intellectual girl in an intellectual home living among intellectual people. We can’t allow people in our home when we don’t know them or who they are. What is he, who is he, your man?”
“Why should you care who he is?” C. butted in. “The room is paid for until the first. No one has the right to change that.”
“Say, mister, who do you think you’re talking to?” said the landlord, edging closer to my door. “Who are you to tell me what my rights are? I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemies. You’re an aferist, a swindler, a white slave trader! I’ll call the police if you don’t hear me out.”
C. stared at them disgustedly. “I am her fiancé. Don’t you know that?”
“Her fiancé!” said the landlord, turning to his wife. “He should be shot. Her fiancé?”
“Her husband, alright?” C. said as though to provoke him. “We got married but haven’t been able to get an apartment yet. Until then, we’re living in this room together.”
“Her husband?” The landlord had begun to believe him, and asked, “Do you have something to prove that you’re her husband?”
C. gave him the finger.
“How dare you give me the finger!” said my landlord, temper flaring. “Let me at him!” he yelled, tearing himself from his wife’s grasp. “I’ll give him what’s coming to him! Scoundrel! Bastard! Skatina! Did you hear how he insulted me?”
“Why, that’s the limit!” shouted their daughter in English. “It’s a shame! Why, such a shame! Did you ever? Oh, my! I didn’t sleep a wink. I heard everything.”
“Daughter, you’d better stay out of this,” said her mother earnestly, prodding her daughter away. “It’s not good for you to stand here and hear such things. And as for you,” she cried, shaking her finger at me. “Move out of this house at once!”
She ushered her husband and daughter into the hall. I sat on the edge of my bed, staring dejectedly at the doorway. In my mind, the word “move” pounded like a hammer. Painfully and frantically, my heart squeezed out pity for myself and for the insult that I, of all people, had to endure. They thought of me as a fallen woman! Soon, the rumor would be all over the house, all over the street. Everyone would point their fingers at me and say, “There she is, that girl—” They would look at me with scorn and shoo me away like a pest. Why wasn’t I running away from there? Why was I still sitting there? What was I waiting for?
I tried to stand up, but my legs buckled under me and I fell back onto the edge of my untouched bed. I thought to myself that they must have looked at the made-up bed and supposed that when I hesitated to open the door I had been hastily straightening the covers. Yes, they were capable of thinking the worst of me.
“Why are you so upset and helpless?” C. asked, standing next to me and stroking my head. “What happened to make you feel like the world is ending? All that happened is that you discovered the small, ugly nature of those miserable ‘intellectuals.’ Now you know how they think about other people, whom they cannot judge any higher than their own lowdown, dirty thoughts. Don’t worry, be glad that it happened this way. Now you’ll leave this place. You’ll move. You’ll find a better room. You know what, my dear? Why don’t you move to my place? I’ll rent a pushcart and carry your things to my place, and we’ll live together. This is a great idea! At my place you’ll feel free as a bird! No one will worry about you, and you can do whatever you want! Come!”
“One insult after another,” I thought to myself. Their insulting me had bucked him up.
“Living together will be much cheaper for both of us,” he continued. “I’ll teach you how to be frugal. You’ll see how nicely we’ll manage things. And we’ll love one another like—no, I can’t describe it in words! Come—”
I felt an odd inertia preventing me from opening my mouth to answer him. His words seemed to come from somewhere far away. I strained to connect each word to the next. I felt like I was in the kind of dream where you try to move but you can’t because you’re paralyzed.
“Why are you looking at me that way?” he asked, annoyed. “Perk up! My God! Take your life into your own hands. Look at me! Look me in the eyes! Say something!”
“Leave me alone.”
“How can I leave you alone? What can I do for you? Tell me!”
I stared blankly ahead and said nothing.
“Maybe,” he said after a short pause, “we should go to city hall and get a marriage license?”
His question shook me out of my stupor. It made me think differently about him. This is how an honorable man would speak if he wanted to prevent his lover’s suffering. I would show them the license and leave their intellectual home with pride and scorn. If I wanted to, I could even take them to court for insulting me the way they had. Maybe I’d forgive them, but only after I’d taught them a lesson for the way they’d treated me. I’d refuse to move, and they’d have to call the police. And when the police came to arrest me for indecency, I’d pull out the license. The scandal would be about them and their conduct, and not about me.
All of this ran through my thoughts as quick as lightning, and I was grateful for his question. He was a much better man than he seemed. He was able to bend his principles a little to preserve the honor of the woman he loved. No man is entirely good or bad. When it comes to the critical moment when the soul is laid bare, you can see what a man is truly capable of.
“Do you want to go to city hall?” he asked again.
“Maybe. Should we?” Out of instinctual modesty, I returned the question to him.
But he didn’t answer. He just looked at me with a smirk that made all the blood rush to my head. I now understood that he’d only asked me to see what kind of reaction he would get—and it was working! I tried to control myself so he wouldn’t see the hatred his cynical smile aroused in me. I needed some time to think about how I could hurt him so that he’d know for certain that I was the cause.
“You want to go to city hall?” he asked, gesturing toward the outside. “But why? Is it because you love me so much that you want to belong to me forever?”
“Yes.”
“Is that so? And you won’t trust my love for you without it?”
“No.”
“But you know that legal marriage is against my principles.”
“I know.”
“And yet you want me to go against them.”
“That’s what I want.”
“And if we don’t get a license, then—you won’t love me?”
“I won’t.”
“Where does the love go?”
“Nowhere.”
“How can you want to bind yourself, without reason or love, to a man? Is it because he would have to support you?”
“Yes.”
“Very practical. You’re a very practical woman.”
“A girl.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon. It’s such an honor to be a girl! That’s something to be proud of! They should give you a medal! But let’s be honest. You want to get married because you are afraid. Right?”
“No.”
“Your answers are so laconic,” he responded in his guttural English. “You’re boring me to death. But, wait, should we go now and call a rabbi? He would conduct a ceremony and make us legitimate for a bargain price. We would honor our old-fashioned relatives, and laugh at them in secret. Let’s go to a rabbi! Come!”
“I don’t want a rabbi.”
“What do you want?”
“A judge.”
“So you want me to make an exception to my rule that a man shouldn’t tie himself to anything? You want me to be a slave to the law for the rest of my life?”
I didn’t say anything. When he saw that I’d fallen back into apathy and was no longer even responding laconically, he gave up and decided he’d better leave. He could see very well that I didn’t care for him. He’d be willing to assume the yoke of the law, to make a man out of himself, by getting a license, if his lover were a different kind of person. But he’s not the kind of man you can just lead around by the nose. There was nothing else to say. It’s beneath him—a lawyer and soon a doctor to boot—to stoop to begging someone to so much as say a word to him.
His self-esteem was wounded. He was looking for respect, but he didn’t get it. He’d lowered himself for my sake, hoping that I’d look up to him, but I hadn’t obliged. He even suggested that I’m in love with another man and only want to marry him so that I can do more than just love my lover. I didn’t refute him. He said that I don’t appreciate his greatness, that I think he’s out of his mind, that I don’t believe in his future. I didn’t refute that either. He said that I wanted him to leave, and I agreed.
“And you don’t want me to come back?” he asked.
“You can come.”
“Today, before nighttime, you mean? In the evening.”
“This evening.”
“And we’ll both go looking for a room today, right?”
“Yes.”
“Good! And then we’ll decide where to go from there, right?”
“Yes.”
“After all, no matter how much we argue, we have to remember our feelings for each other haven’t changed. We’ll be friends, as we were before. Right?”
“Yes.”
“I shouldn’t have said what I did. But you won’t hold that against me, right?”
“No.”
“How good, sweet, and kind you are, my dear! You are so good, you know, that you could make me your eternal slave. There may come a time when I’ll beg you to marry me and you won’t want that anymore.”
I wanted to agree with him and laugh. But if I did that, all my efforts would have been for nothing. I held myself together. I buried myself in my hidden stores of self-composure so that he wouldn’t see any sign of helplessness or sorrow.
He must have felt instinctively that I was unusually calm. He turned around at the door to see if I was watching him go.
As soon as he left I started packing my things. I worked with unnatural speed, urged along by my fear that I’d take too long and he’d come back before I had a chance to leave. Soon I was off looking for a new room, prepared to take any room, so long as I didn’t have to remain where I was.
I rented a room on a side street on a weekly basis. My landlady was a half-blind, elderly German woman. I found a man and a boy who would carry my little trunk and large satchel to my new room for a dollar. It was faster to have them do it than to take the express train.