Melting the Snow on Hester Street

Thick snow had settled above the city grime on Hester Street. During the day, the two had mingled under a million tired feet, and this evening the resulting soup had frozen over once again. Eleana’s boots had been restitched so often there was barely anything left to hold them together. They had sucked in the filthy, icy mire, numbed her feet as she stood on Greene Street – and now, in the steaming warmth of the picture house, they were itching and aching as they thawed. It didn’t matter. Not really. It was such a relief to be inside – somewhere warm and cheerful at last – and with Matz at the piano, smiling at her through the crowd. There was neat gin running warm through Eleana’s veins, and hot potato soup in her belly, and the new movie, Frankenstein, playing on a loop on the screen above her head. Her feet could have detached themselves completely and she might not have complained.

Maybe ‘picture house’ was too grand a name for the place. It was a five-cent Lower East Side nickelodeon, a dirty little store front, nothing more, and nothing like the big, fancy theatres opening further uptown. There was a screen at one end, a hand-turned projector at the other, and not enough benches for the boisterous audience between the two. It was packed, as it was every night, even now, with the garment strike – and thick with the smells of tobacco and sweat, and hot, unwashed bodies.

The projection screen was too small, or the film was too large. Something wasn’t right. As always, at the nickelodeon on Hester Street, the top half of the image was bouncing lopsided off the ceiling. But nobody complained. In the normal run of things, such a detail wouldn’t stop the audience from screaming with merry terror: it was Matz Beekman, up to his tricks at the piano keyboard, who was so blithely sabotaging the mood.

Matz was employed five evenings a week (at seventy-five cents a night) to provide musical accompaniment to whatever film was showing. Tonight he had cast aside the official score, as he did from time to time, and was improvising a comic soundtrack of his own – turning what was meant to be a horror show into a ludicrous romp – and the crowd was loving it. Their bellows of laughter could be heard outside on the frozen street, bursting from the room, beckoning more people to join the hot, boisterous crush. Looking at them all, as Eleana did just then, it would have been hard to guess just what and whom they were up against. The garment workers’ general strike, into its third week now, was more widespread – and more successful – than anyone had expected it would be, including the strike organizers. And now the city authorities were turning savage. In cahoots with the factory owners, they were letting their thugs loose on the picket lines, and for the mass of the Lower East Side, garment-manufacturing centre of the world, life had become not merely a struggle to stay warm and to find enough to eat, but a battle – bloody, violent, lawless. To the hunger and the grind, the anonymity and the squalor, there had been added a tang of actual, mortal fear.

Eleana turned her mind from it, from all of it. Everything to do with the strike, and everything connected with it. She concentrated instead on the here and now: the nickelodeon on Hester Street. And Matz at his piano. And Frankenstein and his monster, bouncing off the ceiling.

The film was only sixteen minutes long and Matz knew every frame. He watched movies differently from other people – with the same concentration and passion that he did everything, but with a filmmaker’s instinct, too; though he couldn’t know it yet. It meant he only needed to watch something once, and he could break it down, scene by scene, shot by shot.

No matter what the film was showing, in just a handful of notes, and simply to keep himself amused, Matz could take possession of it, transform the mood. He could send the audience lurching from horror to tears and then to laughter, and carry every soul in the room with him. It was magical. Matz was magical. Eleana loved him most when he was at the piano, hitting the keys, playing the audience – happy and free. He was a different man from the one who stood on stage at the Union halls and called on his fellow workers to strike, or to keep striking, or to keep up the fighting. She loved him then, too – of course. She loved and admired him in the halls. But she loved and desired him at the piano. He would look up suddenly, in the middle of it all, his audience weeping or laughing at his musical command – he would glance up through the crowd, with that look of ferocious concentration, search out Eleana, catch her eye, and his face would break into a wild grin. Often, more and more often, he would beckon her over, forget the film entirely, and instead start hammering out one of the popular songs, in the hope that she might sing along …

Give My Regards to Broadway …, Take Me Out to the Ball Game … , Keep on the Sunny Side …

The crowd never objected. The regulars would holler for her until she came forward to stand beside him.

She didn’t do much. A song and dance. A little routine. The usual schtick. The sort of acts pretty young girls were running through in cheap bars and crowded nickelodeons all over the city. Except, when it came to it, Eleana was anything but usual. Her dark features were too large to be conventionally pretty, and there was a wildness about her, as if she were permanently searching, in hope and fear – and, above all, in vain – for an exit from whatever situation she was in. She was rough hewn, yet: still only a teenager. But she was beautiful. Matz saw it. The crowd saw it, when she sang. In years to come, the camera would see it. She was as magical as Matz up there, standing by that piano: a born performer. Her rich voice, her expressive face, her timing, her intensity, her humour, her lightness of touch – something and everything about her cast a spell. Matz told her so, endlessly. He knew she was a star, all along. He used to say so. And she must have believed it, just a little, or she wouldn’t have continued to stand up there, night after night. She wouldn’t have followed him to the ends of the earth … And she must have heard the applause, felt the warmth. She loved it back then, in the beginning. It made her feel alive.

Tonight, after she sang, they would be passing a hat for the strike fund. And when Matz stopped playing for the evening, when she’d done her song and dance, and the customers were heading home, she might pull him into the cupboard behind that beaten-up piano. Or he might pull her, probably: either way. It was where the proprietor, Mr Listig, stored any reels of film overnight. Not such a big cupboard then: no space to lie down. But big enough. At the end of the evening they always helped to put the reels away, and then – what the hell? Mr Lustig pretended not to notice. He didn’t care (so long as the reels weren’t ruined). Seventy-five cents an evening wasn’t much, after all, and Eleana didn’t even get that. She received nothing, except a wave-through at the door. A little bit of privacy at the end of the night wasn’t much, but it was a luxury not many young couples enjoyed back then, not on the Lower East Side. The use of his cupboard was a perk of the job.

13

She and Matz had been together for three years by then, since Eleana was fifteen. And Matz was eighteen, perhaps. Or seventeen. Nineteen … Matz always travelled light on such details. Until he met Eleana, he seemed to travel entirely alone. He came to America – he said – ten years earlier, alone with his mother, who had died since, to be reunited with his father, who never appeared at the dock to claim him. It was a daily tragedy in New York back then, when so many thousands of immigrants were pouring in every day.

And, to Matz, it was a mystery still. His father had sent the money home, enough for their passage to join him. It had taken him four years to collect enough together: four long, hungry years, saving, scrimping, living no better than a dog in the Lower East slums.

But when wife and son disembarked at last, the Statue of Liberty behind them, and a free life in the New World in front, he wasn’t at the pier to greet them, and though they waited for three days, returned every morning and every afternoon for many more, he never did come. Matz and Matz’s mother never laid eyes on him again.

So that was Matz.

He couldn’t remember his father, anyway. Couldn’t remember his home country, not really. But he remembered this and that: a grandmother, plenty of cousins, and a great crowd – the whole shtetl, his mother said, turning out to wave them off on their journey. He remembered the ship, and the long days at sea: the cramped, stale air on the lower deck, the seasickness – and the lice inspectors at Ellis Island, who had dragged him off, yanked him, screaming, from his mother’s arms. He remembered the wild, overwhelming relief when he was allowed to fall back into her arms again. He would never forget that.

And then … nothing much. The shock of the Lower East Side. The tenement flats, six storeys high, one after the other to the horizon end, blocking the sun, hiding the sky – and the teeming streets, the dirt, the smell of rotting garbage and horse manure, the roar of metal wheels on cobbled roads, the soot that rained from the elevated trains, the endless noise … And his mother finding work, and then working, and working, and never stopping … Someone used to bring vast bundles of materials to the apartment where they boarded, and then she – and the lady who took the rent, and her three daughters and an old man and someone else, and sometimes Matz, too – would sit in silence, too tired to talk, constructing silken flowers for ladies’ hats, by the hundreds, by the thousands, night after night … Someone took the bundles away when the work was completed, and brought back more bundles: a never-ending stream of bundles, squatting in the space, piled high, stealing the daylight …

What he remembers most is that airless August, when she lay dying.

They were boarding with a family on Essex Street, and the family was kind. There was tuberculosis rampant through the block that summer. With so many bodies existing so close together, when the sickness visited a building, as it did from time to time, it took with it whole families, it swept away whole floors of human life. But on this occasion, in Matz’s small apartment, only Matz’s mother fell prey – and the family they boarded with took pity. They let her stay on the only bed, they moved it to the room with the only window, and for those last few weeks, and even for a week or so afterwards, they wouldn’t take any rent from him, and they fed Matz free of charge.

After that – after that – Matz had survived. That was the main thing. He stole food from the carts on Hester Street, collected coal fallen from the back of the coal carts and sold it, or exchanged it, piece by piece. He constructed silk flowers, carried bundles, took work where he could; did whatever he had to do. And in fact he did far better than simply survive. Somehow, between the struggle to earn enough to eat, the struggle to find a place to sleep, Matz achieved what his parents had brought him to the New World to achieve: there was a charitable night school on East Broadway, founded to help little immigrant boys just like him. Without it, who knows what might have happened?

Matz learned English. He learned to read and write. Learned the piano. Discovered Karl Marx. Learned, above all, that life didn’t have to be this way; that it wasn’t this way for everyone.

When he first came to live at Eleana’s tenement flat on Allen Street – his fifth move in a year – he was a member of the Socialist Party of America, and a vocal and active member of the Garment Workers’ Union. He worked ten hours a day as a cutter at the Triangle Waist Company, already one of the largest and most productive garment factories in the city – where, because his job required skill as well as masculine brawn, he earned $12 a week; three times what the young female machinists were paid, working the same hours. He kept only what he needed to survive, and divided the rest between the Party, the Union, and the little boys on the Lower East Side who roamed the streets just as he had, whose fathers never came to meet them at the dock, whose mothers died of consumption by a small window in a filthy street, in a crowded tenement a world away from home.

That was Matz.

By comparison, Eleana had enjoyed an easy life. Who hadn’t? She was born a few crowded streets away, on Orchard Street, five years after her parents arrived off the ship. By the time she was born, her parents were fully Americanized, and took care to speak to Eleana, almost always, in English. Her sister, two years her elder, died of tuberculosis when Eleana was one. Her father, Jethro, shared a lease on a six-by-four feet pickled food store, in the hallway of a neighbouring tenement block. He died of pneumonia, aged thirty-nine, in the winter of 1905, a year or so before she and Matz met. But Eleana often remembered her father: learned, affectionate and kind, always with the smell of pickled herring hanging over him, and – like everyone she knew – always working.

After he died, life grew much tougher. The shop, such that it was, was quickly appropriated by the other lessee, leaving Jethro’s widow and daughter to fend for themselves: Eleana abandoned her education and set to work making up the family income. Easier than Matz’s life, perhaps. But never easy. Before Jethro died, their tiny apartment had been shared only with one uncle and two cousins. Afterwards, innumerable more were crammed in. The apartment, like so many of their neighbours’, became home and sweatshop both, and a flop house for an ever-changing roster of boarders and fellow workers. They sewed buttons onto feathers, or feathers onto ribbons or ribbons onto hats … Whatever piecework was going, they took it in, and sewed – too tired to talk – and sewed – too poorly paid to stop – and sewed, and only paused to sleep.

It was how Matz first encountered her. Old for her years, and with the roster of boarders always passing through, no longer quite the untarnished maiden of good romantic fiction, a toughened daughter of the Lower East Side, but with a bloom that nothing and no one could dim.

There was a heat between them from the moment they met. No doubt about it. She was fifteen. He was eighteen. Maybe. He came back from the Triangle factory that first night. He sat down at the small kitchen table, where the boarders had to eat in shifts. Her mother passed Eleana a plate of schmaltz – chicken fat – and cornbread, which Eleana set before him without a word. He looked up at her – she looked back at him. If it wasn’t love, it was desire at first sight: hot, thick, rich. They gazed at each other, and felt a rush of something wonderful flow through them. They gazed at each other, in no hurry to look away; allowed their eyes to roam each other’s faces as if they were quite alone in the room, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. After a minute, when the current between them seemed to stifle everything else – and there seemed to be no question where it would lead, Eleana’s mother leaned across from the stove and smacked her soup ladle against Matz’s bowl. That was all. She said nothing. Nobody said anything. And, for the instant at least, the spell was partially broken.

There were eight bodies sleeping in that small and crumbling ‘old law’ Allen Street apartment then. Lower East Side was still filled with them – tenements with conditions so foul, with so little light and space, that they were no longer legal. Slowly, they were being replaced. But too slowly. In this small apartment, there lived five family members, loosely connected – not everyone could say quite how – and three boarders, connected only by the fact of the rent. At the end of each day, ten dog-tired bodies returned from their workplaces to be fed by their landlady: pickled herring and cornbread, pickled herring or cornbread, schmaltz, potatoes … mostly potatoes … Eleven bodies squeezed into the four small rooms: a parlour, a windowless kitchen, two windowless bedrooms. Directly outside ran the track for the Second Avenue elevated railroad, which meant a constant thunder and rumble of passing trains, and cinders from the engines floating through the only window, coating the parlour and everything inside it with dust. There was a water faucet in the hallway and a couple of toilets, which serviced all six floors, all seventeen apartments, each one as crammed as the one above, and the one below, and opposite, and on either side …

They slept sardine-like, side by side on wooden pallets – no room for niceties here; no single-sex wards. On the sixth night, the two of them lay together in the same hot, slumbering room, separated only by a few unwanted bodies, a few feet of space. Neither could have stood it much longer: the proximity and the distance. But Eleana waited, her mind and body restless with longing. She knew he would come to her, and so he did.

Matz clambered over the two sleeping figures between them – Eleana’s young cousin was one, and the other was somebody else. Matz squeezed in beside her. And she regarded him in the semi-darkness. A long time it was they lay like that: a minute or two, or more. And in the beautiful hush, when the noisy world receded, he touched her face – and she touched his, and they saw in each other all that they needed to see, at least for the moment: more than they ever knew it was possible to see in another human being – acceptance, trust, curiosity, desire … Finally, he whispered:

‘You – this moment – no, you, Eleana. This is all I have been able to think of …’

She nodded, curved him a slow, warm smile: ‘I was hoping so,’ she murmured, ‘but my goodness you took your time!’

He laughed – they both did, a whispered laugh – and they made love to each other – they fucked each other – just there and then. Quietly. So quietly. Beside them, the sleeping man – the one who wasn’t the cousin – grunted in his sleep, a half-conscious protest at his small space being disturbed; and shunted up as best he could. But he didn’t wake.

It was a stolen moment: a moment of enchantment and fierce perfection, shared by two people for whom life had only ever offered struggle. It was a moment which amazed them both.

‘Kishefdik!’ Matz whispered. ‘I am a lucky man.’

And she giggled. ‘Kishefdik! Magical. Yes, yes. It was. You are. Let’s do it again.’

He gazed at her, through the tenement gloom. There was a small light shining from the parlour, where a few of them were still at work, attaching mother-of-pearl buttons to a heap of child-sized pantaloons, sixty little buttons an hour, ninety child-sized pantaloons a night, fourteen hours a day. Three dollars more a week. ‘Sheyn maydl, Eleana,’ he whispered, over the hum of the sweatshop sewing machines, the hum which never stopped; over the snores and grunts of his fellow boarders. ‘You’re beautiful … The most beautiful girl I ever saw.’ And she was. He believed she was. Cat’s eyes, green as emeralds, warm as a summer moon; and that soft, smiling mouth, that long slim neck, and those eyes …

‘Your eyes …’ he whispered. ‘All week, all I see are those eyes …’

She didn’t giggle. She looked at him, looking at her, through the tenement gloom. ‘I am not really beautiful,’ she said simply. ‘But you make me feel as though I were.’

That was how it began. And now, three years on, Matz still worked at the Triangle Waist Company factory during the day and, five nights a week, he worked (though it hardly counted as work) at the Hester Street nickelodeon. During the strike, of course, he and Eleana earned nothing from the factory. But thanks to the nickelodeon, they were better off than many. They had moved to another apartment on the same street, no less cramped or dark or crumbling, and even smaller than the last, but without the elevated railway right outside the window, at least, and with fewer roommates. They lived with Eleana’s mother, Batia Kappelman, and Eleana’s pregnant cousin, Sarah Kessler, and Sarah’s brown-eyed baby Tzivia, and (sometimes) with Sarah’s husband Samuel Kessler, who came and went. There was also, temporarily, a greenhorn boarder living with them, a cousin of Sarah’s, fresh from the old country and still finding his feet.

And best of all, of course, there was a daughter, Isha. Two years old – eighteen months older than her cousin Tzivia. The girls were as alike as two peas in a pod, so their grandmother always said. But of course they weren’t. In any case, Matz and Eleana quietly, confidently noted, Isha was not like anyone, not really. She was their golden child. She could walk and talk already, and she had a smile that could melt all the snow on Hester Street, and eyes as wild and green as her mother’s. Her parents wanted nothing less than the world for her: but a different world – one that was kinder and fairer, and which didn’t smell of pickled herring and horse manure and rotting vegetables. And where food was plentiful and the air was clean, and where their baby girl didn’t have to fight for every soot-filled little breath, and wheeze through every airless night, but where she could sleep comfortably, breathe easily, and know that she was safe.

Isha was never strong – not from the first day. But she had bright green eyes, like her mother, and thick dark curly hair, like her father. And laughter that was so easy, so warm, so infectious, it lightened the burden of all and any who were lucky enough to hear it.

So. They were blessed. They had a roof over their heads and enough food on the table – always enough for Isha, and enough, just about, for them. Unlike his fellow strikers, Matz still brought money home from his work at the nickelodeon and there was just enough, after he had given half of it away, to pay the rent. Better than that, in the apartment they shared with only five others, it had been agreed that when the strike was over, and the greenhorn had found his feet, Eleana, Matz and Isha would have a room of their own.

14

Last night, as she had been making her way home from the Greene Street picket line, Eleana had been approached – ambushed, rather – by Mr Blumenkranz, one of the supervisors at Triangle and someone who, when she wasn’t striking, she was forced to deal with on a daily basis. He was a small man, no taller than Eleana, in his late forties, with an unhappy wife at home. Mr Blumenkranz was standing in wait for her, hiding behind a stationary coal cart, because he sensed, quite rightly, that if Eleana had seen him she would have quickly turned and walked the other way. He fell into step as she bustled by, causing her to jump, and offering her no choice but to acknowledge his presence. She glanced about her, unhappy that anyone should spot her fraternizing with the management, and tried to walk on by. But he was quite determined.

‘Eleana!’ he said, panting slightly to keep pace, struggling for a foothold on the ice.

‘Good evening Mr Blumenkranz,’ she replied, cool but polite, not glancing at him, walking faster. Since when, she wondered, had he thought to call her Eleana?

He rarely bothered to learn the machinists’ names – not first names or second names. Most came and went so fast, why would he bother? But there was generally one girl who caught his eye, whose name he always remembered. Eleana was the one. Everybody noticed it. All the girls. And Matz, too. Mr Blumenkranz’s crushes were a long-running joke at Triangle. Sometimes the girl he fixated upon simply left. Couldn’t cope with it. Sometimes, when they wouldn’t submit to his advances, he fired them. Sometimes they accepted his little gifts, his offers of money and stayed for a little while. Until they were fired. Sometimes, rumours circulated about a girl getting herself in trouble. One way or another, nothing good ever seemed to come of his crushes. To their recipients, it was generally deemed, they were less of a blessing than a curse.

But Eleana was clever, in her quiet way. And somehow she had survived Blumenkranz’s cloying attention for longer than the rest, while still keeping him at bay. Her pleasant refusal to engage with him, her ability to slip so innocuously through his fingers, only left him panting for more. Mr Blumenkranz had taken to standing behind her as she bent over her sewing machine, which whirred from the same motor under the same floorboards and at the same speed as the machine beside her, and the machine beside that, and all two hundred machines on the factory’s eighth floor …