— 22 —

At the end of the week Moishe, Selig, and Shalva sat in the front room when Carsie and Lilia came in. Carsie unpinned her hat and set it on the stand, hung her coat on the peg, and tied on an apron. Lilia hung her coat over Carsie’s and reached for a pinafore.

Moishe snuffled. “Come in here, please, the two of you. We have something to talk about.”

Carsie glanced at her sister as they brought chairs from the table so that the five of them sat in a circle. She waited. Moishe rarely spoke—this was an event. “Yes?” she said, smiling. “What is it?” She looked from Moishe’s face to Selig’s and to Shalva’s. Shalva looked away.

“It’s your wages, is what it is,” Moishe said. “Yours and Lilia’s. You’re not giving us all of it.”

Carsie stared at Selig. He met her gaze and shook his head. “Carsie, are you keeping money for yourself?”

“Why, of course I am.”

“No, that’s not right. You give the money to Moishe, and he gives you an allowance.”

“But we must have money to buy lunch and for carfare and clothes and such. Shalva? Do you give Moishe all your pay?”

Shalva remained quiet.

“How do you expect we would get on if we didn’t have our own money?”

“That money is not yours,” Moishe said. “You have no money of your own.”

Carsie stood. “Today was payday for Lilia and her envelope is still sealed, I’m sure. I have already made a deposit at the bank, and I kept enough to give you what I have given you every week, and a little to cover carfare and my lunch.”

“A deposit at the bank?” Selig asked. “But, what are you doing with a bank account?”

She had opened the account sometime back, after she changed the hundred-ruble note for a little more than fifteen dollars. Each week she added to that sum. The account wasn’t large, but after she had lost the kopek necklace her parents had given her, having that small amount of money meant she was never broke. The account was talismanic, connecting her to Mama and Papa. “Why should I not have a bank account?”

“Because you are...” He caught himself.

“What, Selig? Because I am what?”

Shalva stood and turned away from her husband and Selig. “Because we are women, Carsie. We are not allowed to manage our own money. The bank should not have opened an account for you.”

“Uncle Moishe,” Carsie said, “how much do you put in the household account each week? Selig, how much do you contribute?”

Moishe sneered. “That’s none of your affair.”

“Selig?”

Selig said nothing.

Carsie turned to Shalva. “Do you think it’s possible they are not putting anything in the household account and the three of us and the boarders are paying the rent and the grocery tab and buying the kerosene and everything else, and these two keep everything they have made during the week for themselves?”

Shalva did not answer.

“Shalva? Do they keep all their money for themselves?”

“Shalva,” Moishe said. “Don’t answer her.”

She stared at her husband for a moment, squared her shoulders and stuck out her chin. “Yes, Carsie,” she said. “They do. They take our money so they can keep theirs for themselves.”

——

Carsie sat at the table, reading the Daily Forward. With the holidays coming on, the new novelty, teddy bears, were in short supply, and mothers all over the country were getting testy about the shortage. Russia’s harvests had failed once more, famine lay ahead. Mr. Hershey had made his chocolate bars, once a luxury, available at a price everyone could pay. Painter Paul Gauguin had died of syphilis back in May, but the news had been slow reaching the world outside French Polynesia. Israel Zangwill had a new play titled Merely Mary Ann in rehearsals up at the Garden Theatre.

Lilia looked up from her dime novel, frowning. “Carsie, what’s Norman blood?”

“What are you reading? Who’s talking ‘Norman blood’?”

“I found a new My Queen novel yesterday, The Interrupted Wedding. At the end Marion Marlowe says, ‘True hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith more than Norman blood.’ So, what does that mean?”

Carsie smiled at her sister. Lilia loved the My Queen novels—stories of the dauntless Marion Marlowe, a young farmer’s daughter who had come to New York to find her way in the world despite every hardship. The story was always the same—Marion got herself in a bind, battling the great city or traveling as a member of an opera company where she worked, or, in this case, as a maid of honor, but in the end courage and virtue triumphed. Most interesting about the books, Carsie thought, was that Marion Marlowe herself never married in the final pages.

Carsie smiled and tapped a knuckle on a review she had just read in the Forward. “There’s a new book out you should read. A book by a woman named Helen Keller...”

——

She began to do her marketing in the late afternoons at the Essex Street Market, hoping to see Arnold Rothstein again before she could forget his face. Four nights after they first met, she found him again, standing in front of Silver Dollar Smith’s. Again he tipped his hat when he spotted her. She smiled primly. After she reminded him of her name they made small talk about the weather and Enrico Caruso’s sensational debut uptown at the Opera House. She learned Rothstein sold cigars and liked to play pool but little else about him other than that he claimed to be good at math. She suggested he might contrive a budget for the Akselrod flat that would include payments from Moishe and Selig, and they both laughed. Rothstein asked how she was related to Selig, and she said Selig was her uncle. She did not mention their wedding plans.

——

The old man led Max Siegel to a room at the back of the Sheltering Society and flung open the door. “Farshtunken, yeh?”

“Yeh,” Max said, wrinkling his nose.

“You stay only until you find a job or a relative that takes you in. Farschtein?”

Max nodded. He understood.

The old man closed the door. Siegel breathed a sigh, his first moment alone in America. He sat on a cot that smelled of sweat and tobacco smoke. He lay down. He sat up. He stood on a box intended to serve as a table and looked out a window high on the wall, then tried to open it, but water and time had warped it shut. He needed air.

He grabbed his coat and stepped out into the street, his senses assaulted once more by the sounds and sights of the lower Tenth Ward—butchers tossing offal into the gutters, the smell of whiskey and cigarettes hanging at the door of a bar, men shouting over a load of rotting cabbage in a cart.

He wondered how to begin searching for Carsie. By calling out her name? By asking for her? But where? This was going to be more difficult than he’d thought. He hadn’t expected this...this chaos, this crowd. He didn’t know how he thought it would be, but he knew now it would take time. The stubs of his frostbitten fingers swelled and ached in the humidity. He had never had much luck, and he needed all he could muster. He turned back to the Sheltering Society.

The old man smiled tiredly at Siegel when he came in. “It scares people, the first time they go out by themselves. You’ll get used to it. But you’ll wish for home a thousand times a day. I did, for many years, until I realized I would never see it again.”

“I’ve come to find someone. If I find her, my home is here,” Siegel said.

The old man stepped to his book.

——

JEWS SEEK RELATIVES

FAMILIES IN RUSSIA ASK AID OF HEBREW SHELTERING SOCIETY

The Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society has received a number of appeals from Jews in Russia asking that their relatives here be notified that they are in want, or that they desire to join them in this country...

Here is the list of those sought:

CARSIE AKSELROD

Address unknown, thought to live in the Tenth Ward...

——

Selig and Moishe Akselrod sat in the doorway of Silver Dollar Smith’s saloon on Essex Street. Selig finished reading the article, folded the newspaper down and handed it back to Moishe. “Who looks for her? How do we find out?”

Those ads were nothing but trouble, Moishe thought. He had seen the ads before—it was the same as the one that brought Carsie and Lilia into his life. “I say we don’t mention it,” Moishe said. “She doesn’t need to see the paper today. Everyone goes about their business.” He glanced across the street. “You have other things to worry about.” He nodded in the direction of the Essex Street Market, where Carsie stood in front of the potato bin, talking to Arnold Rothstein.

Selig thought Rothstein stood too close to Carsie as the two of them laughed at a shared joke. Rothstein tipped his hat and walked on down Essex. He turned and waved. Selig watched from the doorway of the saloon as she lifted a gloved hand to her lips and waved back.

Selig’s eyesight blurred, his temples pounded. He felt his feet move beneath him, running across Essex. He grabbed Carsie’s arm and wrenched her to him. “Did I see you blow a kiss to Rothstein?”

“I don’t know what you saw. I like him, is all.” Yes, she thought, maybe someday I will love a man like Arnold Rothstein. “He’s a nice man. Pleasant. Not like some.”

“You and I are getting married. Rothstein is nothing to you.”

“Are we? Are you and I getting married? I thought you didn’t want to do that. I thought I was free to find someone who might be interested in marrying me. You’ve been talking about how we don’t need to marry—but the first time you see someone else who likes me, it all changes?”

“You agreed to marry me.”

She pulled her arm away and rubbed the spot where Selig had gripped. “You told me it was not necessary—that we were already related.”

“You’re planning the wedding.”

“Was planning the wedding—until recently.”

Selig’s eyes narrowed. “When you met Rothstein.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“No, as a matter of fact. You’ll marry me.”

“Then here’s the way I’ll marry you, Selig. We’ll marry only if you agree to contribute to the household fund the same as the rest of us do.”

“But Moishe doesn’t—”

“That’s not mine to say, but your portion is. And I say you give us the same amount everyone else does. And there’s one other thing.”

“What? What else can there be? Oy vey! I’m to be a married man like this?”

“That’s the only way it can happen if you want to marry me.”

“Then...what?”

“You will not argue with me. If I am happy, you’ll be happy—remember: happy wife, happy life. If I want to go somewhere or do something or want you to run an errand there is no discussion. Do you agree?”

Selig leaned against the market wall and looked at the sky, wondering how his advantage in this conversation had eroded so quickly, how Carsie had turned this marriage agreement into an unconditional surrender. He knew he had an argument ahead with Moishe. He gulped.

“Selig?” she said. “Do you agree?”