NOW, WHAT YOU GONNA TELL YOUR MUTTI?”
“I was helping you at the bakery.”
She was rewarded with fond eyes.
“That’s my girl!” her father declared. “I can always count on my Sadie.”
She wasn’t quite seven when they started sneaking off to the Brooklyn docks together. Her father never explained why Mutti shouldn’t know, except to say, “She got enough worries. Why give her tsuris?”
For a while, they stood with their backs against a warehouse wall, trying not to get in the way of swearing sailors and sweating stevedores. The docks were scary and exciting. There were rats and stray dogs. Hopeful new immigrants and hopeless old women with painted faces. Casks of stinking whale oil. Huge coils of rope almost as thick as her father’s arms, which were heavy with muscle that came from kneading big batches of dough.
“Why not?” her father decided. “We go take a look. No harm in that.” He scooped her into his arms, grunting, “Oy, you getting big,” and carried her out to the end of the central pier. There he turned slowly on his heel, Sadie clinging to him like an organ grinder’s monkey.
They were surrounded by ships tied up at the dock or anchored out in the harbor. More ships than she could count, though she’d recently counted all the way to fifty-three before she got bored and quit.
“Look at all them masts!” her father cried. “Like a forest, eh, Sadie?”
“What’s a forest, Papa?” She was a city child, after all.
“You seen trees, right? Well, you gotta imagine places big as Brooklyn—bigger, even—with nothing but trees and trees and trees.”
After her father explained it, she could sort of imagine a forest. Except rigging didn’t look a bit like leaves. Rigging looked like scribbles.
“You want a good heavy ship for passage around the Horn,” he told her as they started back along the pier. “Maybe you don’t want so big like the Roanoke there, but for sure you want bigger than the Germanic. Now, look at this one.” He lifted his chin toward a middle-sized ship. “She’s the Hosea Higgins. Ships is always she, even if they got a man’s name. Ja, for sure . . . The Hosea Higgins. That’s the ship you want for a voyage around the Horn.”
She thought he meant a horn that you could blow until a few days later, when he took her to a store that sold used books. The owner knew her father and asked, “How are you finding Mr. Darwin’s tale, Mr. Markuse?”
Her father talked to the shopkeeper awhile. Then he asked to use the store’s globe so he could explain to Sadie about continents and how Cape Horn was a place down at the pointy end of South America.
“Now, here is Posen, back in Europe. Who knows what country? Sometimes Poland, sometimes Prussia. That’s where your mutti and me was born. And here is Brooklyn in North America, where Nathan and you and Hattie was born.” With his finger, her father traced a line all over half the globe. “This is the voyage of the Beagle.” It sounded important, the way he said it. “But a ship like the Higgins, she ain’t gonna go so far. She gonna go from Brooklyn here . . . south across the equator. Down the coast of Brazil and Argentina . . . around the Horn, then up-up-up past Chile . . . cross the equator again . . . up some more and then you step off in San Francisco. Four months, it takes. Well, six, maybe. If the weather is bad.”
Twice more that week, they went back to watch the Higgins discharge her California cargo of wine, smoked salmon, and whale oil. When the ship began to take on westbound freight, her father scooped Sadie into his arms again. “Why not?” he said. “We just go introduce ourselves.”
The ship’s captain was bearded and gruff. “This is no place for a child, sir! State your business!”
Her father set Sadie down on the Higgins’s deck and approached the captain alone. A few minutes later, he beckoned Sadie to come closer. “Captain,” he said, “I like to introduce you my daughter, Josephine Sarah. Sadie, say hello to the captain.”
She dropped a little curtsy like a girl she saw in a penny play once. “I am very pleased to meet you, sir.”
The captain’s eyes widened and warmed. A smile lifted his beard.
I did that, she thought. I made him nicer.
The two men moved off a few steps, speaking in low tones again. She craned her neck to watch the sailors up in the rigging and discovered that they were looking down at her, for little girls were rare as rubies in their world and Sadie was an arresting child: small, neat-bodied, with pale white skin and curly black hair and dark brown eyes, her new front teeth coming in nicely. She curtsied to each of the sailors, one after another, turning all around, until she staggered a little, dizzy. And the sailors didn’t just smile. They clapped for her and nudged each other and cheered.
She was glad when her father took her back to the Higgins the next day.
“Our secret,” he reminded her. “Mutti don’t gotta know. Just you and your old papa, eh?”
This time she had to hang on to the hem of his coat. He couldn’t hold her hand because he was carrying big stacked trays loaded with samples. Rye, pumpernickel, and soft white bread. Yeast rolls and three kinds of muffins. Cream puffs. Almond macaroons. Crisp strudel. Seven-layer tortes.
This bounty was presented to the captain of the Higgins, who shared it with his officers. Grinning, their lips white with powdered sugar, they moaned their admiration for Hyman Markuse’s excellence as a baker. Their eyes ate Sadie up, too.
When the trays were empty, nested and tucked under one arm, her father took her hand and they walked, bent-kneed, back down the gangplank.
“Now, what you gonna tell Mutti?” he asked.
“We took samples to a new customer.” She felt special to be trusted.
“Good girl. Gotta keep the story straight!” he declared. “Always easier when the story’s true . . .”
IT WASN’T THE FIRST TIME they’d skipped out.
Silently, Sophie Markuse bundled her three children against the January cold and hustled them down the narrow tenement stairs. Nathan was the oldest and he was used to it, but even little Hattie knew what it meant when their mother woke the children before dawn. You had to be very quiet, so as not to alert the landlord. And it wouldn’t do to wake the Irish boarder, who was sleeping off a drunk on the kitchen floor. He paid for meals in advance and would want his money back.
Hy already had their bags loaded on a wagon waiting at the end of the block, where the rumble of wooden wheels and the squeal of rusty axles wouldn’t give the family away. It wasn’t until the driver pulled up by the wharves that Sophie realized this was no ordinary flight from overdue rent.
“Nayn, Chayim! Nayn! Ich vil nit gayen!”
“English, Sophie! We’re Americans now! Don’t worry, everything gonna be fine,” her husband said, mixing encouragement with urgency as he coaxed her off the wagon. “Don’t make a tzimmes out of it. You gonna upset the children—”
“I’m gonna upset them? Me? I’m the one who’s dragging them off to the end of the earth? Nayn, Chayim! Nayn!”
In the end, Hyman Markuse gave up arguing and simply pulled his weeping wife toward the Hosea Higgins. The three children followed like ducklings, their breath forming little white clouds in the first pink light of day.
A busy crew wasmaking ready to leave port. “Mr. Marcus, take your family to your cabin!” the captain shouted. Pointing at two of the least soused sailors, he ordered, “You and you, stow their bags below!”
Looking up at his father, Nathan asked, “Mr. Marcus?”
“I gonna explain later,” Hy promised. “The cabin’s very cozy, Sophie. You gonna see. Everything gonna be all right.”
Eyes closed, Sophie was shaking her head—no, no, no—but she cried out in fright when a sailor stumbled against her, dropped two valises, and apologized with the glassy-eyed solemnity of a drunk trying very hard to show how sober he is.
“You promised me, Chayim!” she wailed as her husband guided her into the bowels of the ship. “You promised! I told you I don’t wanna go!”
Sadie tried to take her little sister’s hand, but Hattie wouldn’t let her.
“Papa musta lied,” Hattie muttered, eyes on their weeping mother’s back. “Papa always lies.”
WITH HIS FAMILY ASSEMBLED in their dark little cabin, Hyman Markuse lined the children up in front of the berth they were to share—packed head to toe, like tinned sardines—for the next 158 nights.
Nathan, eleven, was the reason Hy had offered to marry Sophie. She might have hoped to do better than a Brooklyn baker, but at twenty-seven, her chances were dwindling, and with a baby on the way, Hyman Markuse was better than no husband at all. A miscarriage was next, and a stillbirth followed: tragedy piled on irony. When Sadie finally came along, it seemed a miracle. Doll-like and beautiful, she took Hy’s breath away. “You spoil her, Chayim,” his wife always said, and that was true. He could deny Sadie nothing, for she was lively and demanding, a terror when thwarted and adorable when indulged. Hattie was next. Her mother’s daughter. A dour little soul, wary and mistrustful. Glaring at him now, as if daring her father to speak the truth.
“Children,” he announced, “today we leave for to seek our fortune in the West! We gonna sail round the Horn to a new home in San Francisco, and our passage is paid, complete, ’cause I gonna be the ship’s cook. From this day, our family name gonna be Marcus. We gonna have a new American home in a new American city, and we gonna have new American names when we get there.”
Nathan made a noise with his lips and left the cabin.
“Just like your father!” Sophie called after him. “Leave! That’s the solution to everything!” Red eyes cold with judgment, Sophie declared, “You oughta be ashamed, Chay.”
“It’s Henry now, and I told you, I gonna pay your brother back.”
“Teaching your own children to lie!”
“Whose business is it, we change our name a little bit? You changed your name when you married me. Was that a lie?”
“It’s not just the name, Chayim! It’s—”
“It’s pretending, that’s all,” Sadie said. “There’s nothing wrong with pretending.”
SEVENTY YEARS LATER, long after memories of Wyatt Earp and Johnny Behan had faded and died, Sadie Marcus could still recall that childhood voyage in moments of crisp clarity.
Her miserable mother dashing across the deck to vomit over the side while seabirds hovered and dove and squabbled for the results.
Her cheerful father’s face shining with excitement as he told about a galley fire quickly doused with soup.
The endless Brazilian forest with its uncountable tree trunks—like the masts in Brooklyn harbor!
Whales, rising and falling in vast mounds.
Hordes of seals, sunning on rocks.
Penguins were the best of all, formally dressed for a party that could begin only after they waddled to the edge of the rocks and tumbled into the ocean.
“You see, Sadie?” her father said, lifting a hand toward those awkward, comical birds as they flew through the gray-green water, fiercely graceful and suddenly swift. “Everything changes when you are in your proper element. That’s what your mutti don’t understand.”
Sadie stood tiptoe on a roll of canvas, resting her forearms on the rail the way her father did. She was fascinated by his hands and wrists, crisscrossed by shiny pink brands burned into his skin by baking sheets and kettles and ovens.
“Your mutti, she wishes we stayed in Brooklyn,” he said. “But in America? You can start over. You can change where you live. Change what you do. Change your name even! In America, you just gotta find your proper element and you will succeed.”
She was shivering beneath layers of flannel and knitting. Her lips felt thick from the cold, and her face was chapped by wind that had started its own journey in the Antarctic. It was worth mere discomfort to stand at her father’s side, listening to his brave words.
“Your mutti gonna see. We gonna buy a nice little building on a corner. Corners is always good for a bakery. We gonna live upstairs, and we ain’t gonna need no drunk Irishman to share the rent. No more boss who takes the profit! We gonna offer fine pastries and cakes, not just bread and rolls. Lotta money in San Francisco. Lotta rich people gonna want me to cater their parties . . . She’ll see. Everything gonna be fine!”
And it truly was, for a while at least.