Hotel Cuba, page 15
No, she decides, leave God out of this. God does not force any human being to behave as a beast or a cold snake. To be angry with God above means absolving the guilty on earth.
A short walk brings them to the synagogue, her first American synagogue. She’s unimpressed. It’s a modest white building, the same footprint as its neighbors at the foundations, but taller at the roofline. About half the size of Turya’s smallest synagogue, nicknamed Rich Man’s Shul because they had the poorest congregants.
The rabbi’s living quarters are attached to the sanctuary. He leads her into the parlor, which is cluttered with chairs, lamps with silk shades, and a box piano. Behind the parlor is a small dining room and a kitchen, where the rabbi’s wife sets down the book she’s reading to greet them with a loud yawn. She scoots upstairs, waving at Pearl to follow.
On the second floor are three bedrooms, one for the parents and one for each of their two girls. The older girl is moving in with the younger so Pearl can occupy her tiny room with its single bed, a doll-sized chair with a pink teddy bear, and a shelf shared by picture books and hairless china dolls with cold blue eyes. Pearl stands against the wall as the girls troop between the bedrooms, carrying neat piles of blankets, schoolbooks, and clothes. They appear to be used to this arrangement.
The rabbi’s wife rubs her eyes, then gives Pearl a simple white nightgown and a loose, washed-out blue cotton dress to wear in the day. It’s ugly but cooler than her raspberry crepe. No matter, Pearl thinks. I deserve to wear ugly things.
In bed, she lies awake, listening to the high-pitched whine of insects outside, while shadows from the trees shift on the ceiling. Her grandmother used to scare Pearl and her sisters by moving her knobby hands in front of the hearth to make shadows of fiendish animals dancing on the floorboards. Don’t look too long, Grandmother warned. The devil lives in shadows. He wants to get into your dreams.
Pearl never played such tricks on her little sister. If anyone tried to tease Frieda, Pearl gave them such a tongue-lashing they never attempted it again.
Pearl’s gaudy raspberry-colored dress lies in a heap on the floor. A disastrous failure of design. She wants to burn it. How foolish to think she might transform herself into a bubbly American ingénue. That’s for someone like Frieda. Pearl is a working drudge, dull and solid as a potato, with a figure to match.
In Havana, she’ll have to hope the Steinbergs will accept her again. She’ll need months to work off that advance on her salary.
A few steps more and she could have boarded that train. She’d be riding to New York this very second.
For now, she’s trapped here, until she proves her innocence. She could wire Basha in New York to vouch for her. Basha’s in America legally. But a wire costs money, and the little pocket money she had is in her suitcase, currently captive at the Customs House.
* * *
JUST PAST SEVEN in the morning, Pearl wakes to the sounds of dogs scuffling in the road, growling and kicking up dust clouds like the wild dogs who fought over scraps behind Father’s butcher shop. It takes her a moment to remember she’s in America. She gets out of bed and looks out the window, but a tree blocks her view, and in one of its branches crouches the strangest animal, something from a nightmare: a lizard the size of a cat, glowing yellow-orange among the leaves.
Pearl screams, covers her eyes, then peeks again. This thing’s head is crowned by spikes, and its toes are topped with curling claws. The sun lights up its skin as if it’s on fire. Can it fly? Does it bite, and is it poisonous? She slams the window shut.
Afraid to make the rabbi’s family wait, Pearl runs to the washroom. She makes the bed, puts on her new dress, and sits, listening to the sounds of the house.
Will someone bring food? Perhaps starvation is part of her punishment.
The rabbi’s wife knocks on the door. Her sleeveless yellow dress barely covers her knees. American women must constantly catch colds, walking around so exposed.
“You’re dressed already!” she says in Yiddish. “I thought you were sleeping. Aren’t you hungry? Come down to the kitchen.”
The rebbetzin’s name is Alma. Though her Yiddish is not as fluent as her husband’s, it is good. Pearl follows her, stepping cautiously down the creaking stairs. The kitchen faces the garden, and it’s baking in the full heat of the morning sun. With that and the heat of the stove, the room feels like a steamy bathhouse.
The two Singer girls dry their plates beside the sink. They speak no Yiddish, and as Pearl sits at the small table, the girls stare with their mouths open. Pearl finds their manners off-putting.
Alma brings coffee, sliced peaches, tomatoes, lukewarm fried cod cakes, and a grainy corn porridge called grits. Pearl avoids the tomatoes—she’s heard they’re poisonous like death cap mushrooms. There’s butter, but it’s too yellow. The sugar she stirs into her coffee tastes suspiciously sweet. Unsure of how to eat the grits, she spreads them on the cod cakes and the peaches, whose color and flavor reminds her of mangoes. The girls are giggling. Did she do it wrong?
Pearl wipes the perspiration on her forehead and her neck. However, the heat in that kitchen doesn’t affect her appetite. She quickly finishes her meal.
“Will the rabbi take his breakfast with us?” asks Pearl.
“Of course not. He’s gone already,” says Alma.
Pearl is crestfallen. With the rabbi gone, there’s no hope for her to plead her case today. “I need his help.”
Alma looks at her curiously and says, “He’ll be back. You’ll see.”
She checks the girls’ dresses, straightens a hair bow, and inspects their hands and behind their ears. Pearl thinks they look fine, but Alma reproves the younger girl for wearing dark stockings and sends her upstairs to change into white ones. Pearl admires how she manages the girls easily. It takes effort to get a girl ready for school.
Pearl finishes her meal and suppresses a burp. “The breakfast is good,” she says.
“Grace does it the night before and leaves it in the icebox,” says Alma. “I warm it in the oven. I’m not much of a cook, I’m afraid. Or a housekeeper. As a child, I wasn’t taught these things. My family expected me to marry a wealthy man.”
Pearl knits her eyebrows. “Who is Grace?”
“Grace is our maid,” says Alma.
A rabbi who wears gold and can afford a maid? He sounds plenty wealthy to Pearl. She offers to help with the dishes, but Alma insists she leave everything. “Grace will do it.” Grace seems to do everything. So what does Alma do, Pearl wonders. As if to answer her question, Alma says, “I’m going upstairs to write. Help yourself to more coffee. No, Pearl, sit back down and leave those plates where they lie. Now please excuse me.” She heads up the stairs, and soon Pearl hears the bedroom door click shut.
Pearl wonders what kind of writing Alma is doing. Maybe synagogue business. She drinks the last of her lukewarm coffee as a fan buzzes fitfully by the open window. The kitchen is small but handsome, with metal handles on the cabinets, shelves crowded with bowls, serving trays, wicker baskets. So many things for a small family. Pearl admires the large white oven. She could bake a fine loaf of bread in there, show them who she really is, not some unfortunate prisoner, but a woman of skill.
Americans are oddly trusting of strangers. Pearl could walk right out of this house, and who’d stop her? However, she’d only get lost and draw more suspicion to her case.
She leaves her plate, but washes out her cup—after all, Alma said nothing about not washing the cup—then returns to her room. Pearl opens the window; the horrible golden lizard has moved, thank God. The chair is small for a grown woman, so she sits on the edge of her neatly made bed, trying not to muss the covers.
A wire to her sisters would cost fifty, maybe sixty cents. Pearl looks for something to sell, what might not be missed. But she’s no thief, she wouldn’t really . . . unless she was desperate. She could mail her sisters a letter. No one could begrudge her the cost of a stamp.
Pearl stretches out on her bed. Perhaps Anderson will grill her further, accuse her again of being a zonah. Her fingers feel itchy, restless. She isn’t used to idleness. At least her cotton dress is comfortable. Ugly, but loose and ample. What will happen to her? Her head is aching.
At lunchtime, Alma knocks again. She’s holding a small leather notebook and a pencil. “This isn’t a jail,” she says with her hand on her hip. It’s strange for Pearl to hear such an American-looking woman speaking Yiddish. “It gets so hot up here, especially when the sun shifts to the front of the house. Why not go for a walk?”
Pearl’s confused. Isn’t she a prisoner? “Do you want me to walk?” she asks.
“What do you want to do?”
What’s the right answer? “I’ll wait for the rabbi to come home,” says Pearl.
Alma hesitates, then says, “All right. Come get lunch.”
As Alma goes to her room to prepare for a Sisterhood luncheon, Pearl is served in the kitchen by Grace, the maid, a slender woman with straw-colored hair who wears a white apron and a lacy white headpiece to match. Pearl has little hope for the meal. Someone so thin can’t be a good cook.
Grace’s voice is kind and cheerful, though she speaks in the thick accent of the region, which Pearl can’t understand. Lunch is a white-bread sandwich filled with chopped eggs mixed with mayonnaise, celery, and green onion. The sandwich is cut into triangles. Pearl inspects them for nonkosher meat and finds none. The soft bread compresses under her fingers and tastes like paper. The creamy filling oozes out, falling onto her plate in soft puddles. Unlike in Havana, no fruit is served after the meal.
While Pearl’s eating, Grace sets the dining-room table for dinner. Pearl wishes she could join in, maybe earn some money. Alma stops in the kitchen to say farewell, wearing a lovely off-the-rack dress. A shocking thought occurs to Pearl: What if Alma can’t sew? In any case, it’s a fine dress, cool and slim, and it complements her short hair. Funny how Alma looks as if at any moment she could go dancing.
Pearl asks, “Aren’t there any chores I could help with? Or sewing? I could make the breakfast in the morning, so Grace doesn’t have to do it the night before.”
“Don’t bother,” says Alma, fussing with a glove. “I waste a good part of my day kibbitzing at silly Sisterhood luncheons. That’s time when I could be writing.”
What a lot of writing Alma does, thinks Pearl.
“Now it’s too hot to stay in your room,” says Alma. “Try the porch. Grace will give you lemonade.” She sounds impatient. Pearl’s sorry she’s such trouble to her.
As instructed, Pearl goes to the front porch. There are rocking chairs, but she’s afraid to sit in them. She leans against the railing and watches the street, empty except for a crowing rooster chasing away a gray gull—and a small band of children who take turns riding the back of a goat. This idleness, the waiting, they infuriate her.
Grace brings the lemonade. Pearl has heard of this drink but never tried it before. The liquid gleams yellow in its cool glass, beaded with moisture, and is served with a chip of ice and a thin slice of lemon. The ice and lemon brush against Pearl’s lip as she takes her first sunny taste of the drink, sweet and tart, cool, crisp. She holds it up to admire the color, then takes a second, longer drink. It’s marvelous, lemonade. She laughs in her deep appreciation of it. Setting down her drink, she pulls up a rocking chair and braces it with her hands. She sits down carefully and begins to rock, slowly at first, then with vigor. It’s lovely! She grabs her lemonade, presses it to her cheek to feel its coolness, then drinks and rocks, which makes her sleepy.
Pearl goes upstairs and naps. She’s woken up by the two Singer girls, who barge in arguing over a silk bag of clicking marbles. The children seem very independent. Maybe the parents raised them to be this way. The older girl, Hannah, shows Pearl her doll collection. One of the dolls wears a diaper, and Pearl is given the task of changing it. She does it expertly, as she used to for Frieda. Hannah’s English sounds slower and clearer than what the adults speak, and Pearl can understand it better.
Rebecca, the younger girl, dark-haired and dark-eyed, sits on the floor and leans on her chubby elbows as Hannah talks. Apropos of nothing, Rebecca asks Pearl, “Where’s your mama?”
Pearl finishes changing the diaper and returns the doll to Hannah. “I have no mama,” she says slowly, thinking out each English word. “Mama is died.”
“Dead,” says Hannah, tugging out her doll’s hair. “Mama is dead, not died.”
“Dead,” Pearl repeats and feels the weight of the word. Mama is dead.
Rebecca tugs on Pearl’s wrist, and the girl’s touch feels startling, intimate. She asks, “How old are you? I’m six.”
“I have twenty-seven years,” says Pearl, though she’s actually twenty-eight.
Rebecca shrugs. “I’m six,” she repeats.
They hear the front door open downstairs. “Girls?” It’s Alma, home from her luncheon. Soon she appears in the doorway, fanning her neck and face with a rumpled pink hat. “Quit bothering our guest,” she says in English. She then switches to Yiddish for Pearl. “I’m afraid my daughters are wild as Indians. It’s their father. He indulges them.”
So in America, Indians are called wild, Pearl thinks. Where I’m from, it’s the Cossacks who are called wild.
Hannah drags her feet toward the hall, but Rebecca stays where she is on the floor and asks Pearl, “Why are you wearing Mama’s old housedress?”
“Hush, you!” says Alma. “I’m sorry,” she says in English, shakes her head, then apologizes in Yiddish.
“It’s nothing,” says Pearl.
“You’ve been here all day?” Alma asks. She pulls Rebecca into the hall. “Your choice. Supper’s promptly at six.” She pauses at the doorstep. “The last one who slept in this room, only it was a man in this case, he was also afraid at first to go out, but then he’d walk for hours. Once, we thought he drowned in the Gulf. It was a shame he had to go back. He spoke English so beautifully.”
“There have been many others here?” Pearl asked.
“Oh, yes,” says Alma. “My husband’s always bringing in strays. Thankfully, he doesn’t care for animals or we’d be overrun.”
“What happened to them? The others?”
Alma pauses. “They were sent back to Cuba. Mostly. I can’t remember all the details. Ask my husband later. But they were very nice people, all of them.”
Pearl absorbs this information, then asks, “Could I ask, is it possible . . .”
“Yes?” Alma’s eyes widen with interest. “Tell me, please.”
“May I see the shul?”
“Right now? Well, I suppose.” She switches to English again. “Girls, what did I tell you about stomping in the house? Go play in the garden or something.” Then she invites Pearl to follow her downstairs.
Pearl and Alma exit the house and walk to the front door of the sanctuary, which swings open with a screech.
The large, plain room has wooden floors and pews, as well as wood-lined walls that give way to stucco. The left side wall is slit with tall windows that face the street, letting in the glaring tropical light. Donors’ names are carved into the ark’s wooden frame, above which, an eternal light hangs, unlit.
“That bulb’s out again,” says Alma.
She sits in the front pew and Pearl sits there also. It’s a proper shul, she thinks.
“Our shul in Memphis, where we used to live, was far grander,” says Alma, her voice echoing in the empty room. “But there Ezekiel was only the junior rabbi.”
“Ezekiel?” Pearl repeats doubtfully.
“My husband. That’s his first name. Ezekiel Singer.” Alma dabs the corner of her eye with her pinky. “I miss Memphis. The girls seem happy enough, but the people here! Oh, they’re friendly, but they don’t read or know anything about the arts. I’ll bet they all voted for that dull old Warren and his ‘Return to Normalcy’ promises. In this town, I stick out like a sore thumb, Wilsonian that I am.”
Pearl hasn’t been listening too closely. “Who is Warren?”
“Only the president, my dear, of these United States. Warren Harding.”
“And you call him by his first name?” says Pearl.
“I’ve called him far worse, believe me.”
“You think if I wrote to him, he might help a girl like me?”
“That crook?” says Alma. “He’s too busy lining his own pockets.”
Though Pearl knows people here are allowed to talk this way about the government, it feels unnatural, dangerous, especially for a woman. She remembers rushing to hang the little Russian flags on their door for the tsar’s birthday. Otherwise you’d be arrested.
Now look where the tsar is, and where Pearl is. Who’s luckier?
“What does your husband think of this president?” Pearl asks.
“We share exactly the same values. Otherwise I wouldn’t have married the man.”
An interesting response. Pearl makes a note to watch the two Singers together, to see if she can observe their same values.
She and Alma sit for a while in the quiet, shady synagogue, which feels eerie without people. “Is there a service tonight?” Pearl asks in a soft voice.
“No, only on Shabbes. Try rounding up ten men to do anything in this town, even build a fence. Everyone here’s so busy looking after their own interests.”
“And what does the rabbi do when it’s not Shabbes?”
“Oh, lots of things.” Alma picks at one of her cuticles. “I wish I had an ounce of his energy. He goes around, you know, helping, giving advice. He travels to Cuba too. To lead services. Or advise on Jewish laws. And he can slaughter meat and perform a bris.”
“Could he help me?” says Pearl.
Alma looks at her as if for the first time. “Can I ask you something?” she says. “In Havana, was your life . . . I mean, it can’t be easy down there.”
“It wasn’t easy. I had to work hard to earn my living.” Then she adds, “Not the bad thing they accuse me of doing. I made hats.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” says Alma. “I wasn’t suggesting something awful.”
