Enchanted Islands (7 page)

“All right,” I said.

She put her back to me. “No one is around today. I thought the Aid Society meeting was today, but I got the date wrong, it's on Thursday, and now I've come all the way downtown for nothing.”

I nodded, then realized she couldn't see me. “Oh.”

She untucked her blouse from her skirt and I could see the stays of the corset digging into her flesh. She had cinched it way too tight.

I undid the knot and her lungs filled with air. “This is barbaric, what we do to ourselves, but it's almost worth it for the relief you feel when it's over, isn't it? Now tie it back up, tight, but not too tight, there's a dear.”

I had never tied a corset before. In Duluth women rarely wore them. But it didn't seem too hard. Just pull on the strings and tie a knot. Knots I could do. The woman had a mole on her right shoulder, an angry brown stub.

“There you go,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. “What's your name, dear? Why aren't you at the rally?”

“Fanny—Frances.”

“I'm Mrs. Bloomfeld. Who are your people?”

I was confused by the question. Then I realized she was asking my last name. I opened my mouth and without even thinking about it, I said, “Frank,” leaving off the Polish “owski.”

“I think I know them. Bankers, right?”

“I'm not sure,” I answered. “We might be from a different part of the family.”

“All the young people have gone to the rally. Why aren't you with them?”

“I didn't know about it,” I said. I looked at our reflection in the mirror. Mrs. Bloomfeld's hair was curly around her face and long in the back where she'd gathered it into a tail. She smoothed it with her fingers.

“My cousin and I just arrived in town a few days ago,” I said. “We're orphans.”

Mrs. Bloomfeld revealed herself neither impressed nor particularly sorry for our plight. Maybe lots of “orphans” passed through the synagogue.

“Maybe if you hear of some work,” I said.

She smiled at herself in the mirror, turning her chin back and forth.

“Where are you staying?” she asked. I gave the name of the hotel.

“Oh that's terrible,” she said, but gave no further comment. “Well, nice to meet you, Frances Frank. Thanks for the help with the laces.”

When I returned to the entrance, Rosalie had indeed charmed the receptionist, who was pouring through a synagogue directory. I stood back and let them look, their heads bent together, whispering. That's how Rosalie and I must have looked, I realized, when we were studying. When Rosalie and the woman were done conferring, Rosalie kissed her on the cheek and promised to come and see her soon. I waved goodbye.

“Oh, she was nice.” Rosalie linked her arm with mine. “We are to come to the Young Ladies' Aid Society meeting on Thursday. And I think I shouldn't bother to look for any work before then.”

I was not convinced that we should give up our search, but I let myself be persuaded by Rosalie's good mood to go to Oak Street Beach, where we lay in the sun in our shirtsleeves and had an ice cream. Rosalie bunched her skirt up to her knees and took off her stockings to “get some sun on my legs,” but we were too close to the buildings to really feel we were at the beach. City rules applied, not beach lawlessness. Rosalie had always suffered from a lack of modesty. Now, in light of what I knew about her, I wondered which was her natural inclination and which a response to her circumstances. We never spoke about what had happened. I took Rosalie's lead, and it was clear she never meant to discuss it.

The next day burned hot. My clothes were instantly soaked with sweat when I took to the streets, and they had begun to smell, though I rinsed them nightly with soap. Thank God Thursday was just a day away.

We arrived in plenty of time for the meeting, and Rosalie greeted the receptionist, Lillian, warmly, introducing me as her cousin.

“That's a pretty name,” I said, which made her smile, the first sign she didn't hate me.

She led us to a room where two dozen women were assembled. They were all nicely dressed and coiffed, and some had elaborate hairdos which announced the fact that their hair was plaited by servants. They turned and stared at us, but Mrs. Bloomfeld, who was running the meeting, didn't pause. “Next piece of business,” she said.

Lillian pointed to two chairs and we sat down as quietly as we could.

“The Sukkot committee will need to be chosen by the end of the month. Please consider volunteering, either to chair the event or to work on a subcommittee. Traditionally, these have been delivering meals to the homebound, feeding poor children, and helping to plan the celebration.

“Also, it has come to my attention that the account from which we give boys their siddurim when they become bar mitzvah is sadly low. We'll need to have a fund drive to replenish it. So if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.”

Next to Mrs. Bloomfeld, another woman was taking down minutes, scribbling furiously. She obviously didn't know shorthand, and I knew that she would invariably miss some of what was said if she tried to record it word for word.

“And now we have…your name again, dear?”

“Frances Frank, Mrs. Bloomfeld,” I supplied, before Rosalie could answer, which surprised her. “Nice to see you again.”

“And you,” she said. “This is your cousin?”

“Rosalie,” I said. We had agreed that Rosalie would plead our case, as she could talk a polar bear into moving to Florida, but she was struck dumb, and I already knew Mrs. Bloomfeld.

“Ladies,” I said. “We are orphaned cousins, just arrived from…Minneapolis.” I didn't want to give our real hometown in case someone had relatives there. You never knew. “We are looking for work. And a home. And also, I don't have any clothes.” This was inelegant, I knew, but I wasn't a gifted orator like Rosalie. In fact, this might have been the largest group of adults I'd ever spoken in front of. Luckily, my ineloquence jarred Rosalie out of her stupor and she took over.

Rosalie should have been a novelist. She wove a tale so subtly sad and moving that I nearly reached into my own empty pockets to donate money to us. The story involved Mr. O'Rourke, but it was Rosalie's mother who was the victim, and all in the service of providing an education for her daughter and niece (my mother was disposed of early). Rosalie's mother died dramatically—here she borrowed liberally from
Les Misérables
, and I hoped none of the women present had read it. Several were weeping by the end, and we had the offer of a place to live (in the fancy neighborhood of Douglas, no less) in exchange for Rosalie taking care of the woman's elderly mother, a Mrs. Klein, during the day. I was to come to a specific address the following afternoon where someone's daughter had piles of clothes that should fit me. (Was she built like a roofing board as well, I wondered?)

We heard a lot of “You poor dears,” and many cakes were shoved at us, as though we were Dickensian street urchins who had never been properly fed. I had never known a day of hunger in my life, and Rosalie never knew an hour of it, but she ate greedily to keep up appearances.

We left laughing and jolly, excited at our new lives.

Mrs. Klein's home was dreary to say the least. Heavy drapes covered the front windows. When I drew them back, they opened to a shower of dust, little bits floating in the lamplight, dancing on the currents. The house was enormous, seven bedrooms with at least as many bathrooms. I went upstairs only once. Its eerie silence and stillness (I had never heard a house so quiet) spooked me.

And yet Rosalie and I were crowded into the maid's room near the kitchen. “Never mind,” Rosalie said. “We can sneak out the back stairs and we have our privacy. And our own bathroom!”

I had never shared a bathroom with just one person. Always there was someone knocking at the door, anxious to take his turn. The three families on our floor shared two communal commodes. There was one bathtub, and we had a once-a-week family rotation.

Mrs. Klein's, though, had unlimited hot water. The kitchen was a dream, with a new gas oven and a large sink that held all the dinner's dishes for washing. There was even an entire room devoted to laundry, with another basin large enough to contain a washboard, and a pulley system that held damp clothing up in the air where the warmth sped it dry. The hallway was so long you might have played basketball in it, with smooth shiny boards (that I hadn't realized I'd have to polish). The bathrooms were ornately tiled, with a border of engraved porcelain that spanned the entire length of the room. Each had a claw-foot tub, and one even had a showerhead! I dared myself to try it one day when Mrs. Klein was out.

But Mrs. Klein never went out. Apparently, until recently, she'd been very active, attending luncheons and walking in the park. She had suffered an attack, though, which left her in the hospital for several weeks. She had full-time nursing care until recently, when her disagreeableness chased the last one out. Her daughter had convinced her she was doing us a favor, and hoped that the motivation of
tzedakah
—charity—might overcome her irritability.

Our room was wallpapered with tiny fleurs-de-lis, peeling near the one window. It looked out into the alley, across which other people slept in maids' rooms and other kitchens belched cooking smells and steam into the air. There was something comforting about the proximity, everyone going about their lives the same way we were.

We were only half a mile from the lake, and I walked there daily to look at the water, which changed, like Rosalie's moods, now frothy and violent, now placid, crystalline.

Our lodging settled, I had to resume looking for a job. I spent the next day down by the piers, stopping in at shipping companies and presenting myself as an experienced secretary. I went to the smartest company first, whose offices were neat and nicely appointed. They took up the entire upper floor of the warehouse.

It was noisy at the receptionist's desk, and I kept having to repeat myself. Finally I got it across that I was looking for work. She looked me up and down. “It's very hot,” I said, by way of excuse, which must have struck a chord, for she replied, “Ya, ya, very hot it is,” her words truncated by an accent I identified as Eastern European. Her features, too, looked like they might have been created in my parents' home village. I took a chance.

“Tu bist ein Landsman?”
I whispered in Yiddish.

“Vah?”
She leaned closer.

“Landsman!”
I said, loudly. Literally, are you a countryman? Are you a fellow Jew?

“Meir zeinen gants landsman aher,”
she said, matter-of-factly. We're all landsmen here. As if that weren't notable. She said, in English, they weren't looking for any girls at the moment, but she'd be glad to inform me if they had any work in the future.

I wrote down Mrs. Klein's address. As I turned to walk out, I heard her yell,
“Vartn oyf!”

I turned.

“My sister-in-law Elsie works for a business that might be looking for someone,” she said in Yiddish. “I'll write you down the address. I'll see her tonight and let her know you're coming if you want to stop by there in the morning tomorrow.”

I was so grateful I nearly wept. “Thank you! This means so much, you have no idea…” I began to babble, but a loud buzzer rang and the woman snapped to her feet, gathering a pad and pencil at the same time. “Here,” she thrust a sheet of paper at me.

That night, I told Rosalie about my lead.

“That's great. What's the business?”

“I couldn't ask,” I said. “She was called away, but who cares?”

“What if it's a diamond-smuggling company?”

I laughed. “Or a private-investigation firm?”

“Lion-tamer training school.”

I couldn't think of anything stranger than that, so I continued to laugh. “What did you do today?”

Rosalie's face drained of color and smile. “Nothing.”

“Did something happen?” I asked.

Rosalie was like a different person. “No, nothing.” She shook her head, trying to dislodge a thought.

Something had obviously happened. I couldn't even think about what it might have been, to make her turn to stone like this. When she did this, pulled away, she seemed so remote. She was leaving me, and I hated it. There were parts of Rosalie that would forever remain unknowable to me, perhaps to anyone, maybe even herself. It made her seem older, wiser.

I took off my blouse and skirt and hung them up, standing in only my chemise and slip, as we usually did inside to save the clothing. Only then did I notice that Rosalie was wrapped in a shawl. “It's so hot,” she said, though she pulled it closer around her. “And I have a headache.”

“Lie down,” I said. “I'll get a cold cloth.”

I ran a washcloth under the tap in our room and wrung it out. She lay on the bed with her eyes closed. I placed it on her forehead. She sighed deeply, and said, “Thank you, Bear,” which is what she used to tease me with when we were children, because I wanted to add honey to everything. I kept changing the cloth until she fell asleep. I spent the evening reading quietly near the open window, hoping for a breeze.

The next morning I went as directed to see my Yiddish-speaking friend's sister-in-law, Elsie. She greeted me warmly. She had the curliest hair I'd ever seen, like a Negro's though hers was light brown, and eyes that were close set. She had rouged her cheeks, which I found tremendously chic. She spoke to me in English, and when I peppered my dialogue with Yiddish phrases, she looked at me strangely so that I understood that she knew none of the old tongue.

We sat in the lobby, on an uncomfortable bench. I had to turn awkwardly to face her. My new skirt had a tag that scratched my hip. I'd never had store-bought clothing before, and so far I was not overly impressed.