“What pulls anybody here? The hope for the better. People who got it good in the old world don’t hunger for the new.”
A mist filled her eyes at memory of her native village. “How I suffered in Savel. I never had enough to eat. I never had shoes on my feet. I had to go barefoot even in the freezing winter. But still I love it. I was born there. I love the houses and the straw roofs, the mud streets, the cows, the chickens and the goats. My heart always hurts me for what is no more.”
The brilliant lights of Levy’s Café brought her back to Grand Street.
“Here is it.” He led her in and over to a corner table. “Chopped herring and onions for two,” he ordered with a flourish.
“Ain’t there some American eating on the card?” interposed Shenah Pessah.
He laughed indulgently. “If I lived in America for a hundred years I couldn’t get used to the American eating. What can make the mouth so water like the taste and the smell from herring and onions?”
“There’s something in me—I can’t help—that so quickly takes on to the American taste. It’s as if my outside skin only was Russian; the heart in me is for everything of the new world—even the eating.”
“Nu, I got nothing to complain against America. I don’t like the American eating, but I like the American dollar. Look only on me!” He expanded his chest. “I came to America a ragged nothing—and—see—” He exhibited a bank-book in four figures, gesticulating grandly, “And I learned in America how to sign my name!”
“Did it come hard to learn?” she asked under her breath.
“Hard?” His face purpled with excitement. “It would be easier for me to lift up this whole house on my shoulders than to make one little dot of a letter. When I took my pencil—Oi weh! The sweat would break out on my face! ‘I can’t, I can’t!’ I cried, but something in me jumped up. ‘You can—you yok—you must!’—Six months, night after night, I stuck to it—and I learned to twist around the little black hooks till it means—me—Sam Arkin.”
He had the rough-hewn features of the common people, but he lifted his head with the pride of a king. “Since I can write out my name, I feel I can do anything. I can sign checks, put money in the bank, or take it out without nobody to help me.”
As Shenah Pessah listened, unconsciously she compared Sam Arkin, glowing with the frank conceit of the self-made man, his neglected teeth, thick, red lips, with that of the Other One—made ever more beautiful with longings and dreams.
“But in all these black years, I was always hoping to get to the golden country,” Sam Arkin’s voice went on, but she heard it as from afar. “Before my eyes was always the shine of the high wages and the easy money and I kept pushing myself from one city to another, and saving and saving till I saved up enough for my ship-ticket to the new world. And then when I landed here, I fell into the hands of a cockroach boss.”
“A cockroach boss?” she questioned absently and reproached herself for her inattention.
“A black year on him! He was a landsman, that’s how he fooled me in. He used to come to the ship with a smiling face of welcome to all the greenhorns what had nobody to go to. And then he’d put them to work in his sweatshop and sweat them into their grave.”
“Don’t I know it?” she cried with quickened understanding. “Just like my uncle, Moisheh Rifkin.”
“The blood-sucker!” he gasped. “When I think how I slaved for him sixteen hours a day—for what? Nothing!”
She gently stroked his hand as one might a child in pain. He looked up and smiled gratefully.
“I want to forget what’s already over. I got enough money now to start for myself—maybe a tailor-shop—and soon—I—I want to marry myself—but none of those crazy chickens for me.” And he seemed to draw her unto himself by the intensity of his gaze.
Growing bolder, he exclaimed: “I got a grand idea. It’s Monday and the bank is open yet till nine o’clock. I’ll write over my bank-book on your name? Yes?”
“My name?” She fell back, dumbstruck.
“Yes—you—everything I only got—you—” he mumbled. “I’ll give you dove’s milk to drink—silks and diamonds to wear—you’ll hold all my money.”
She was shaken by this supreme proof of his devotion.
“But I—I can’t—I got to work myself up for a person. I got a head. I got ideas. I can catch on to the Americans quicker’n lightning.”
“My money can buy you everything. I’ll buy you teachers. I’ll buy you a piano. I’ll make you for a lady. Right away you can stop from work.” He leaned toward her, his eyes welling with tears of earnestness.
“Take your hard-earned money? Could I be such a beggerin?”
“God from the world! You are dearer to me than the eyes from my head! I’d give the blood from under my nails for you! I want only to work for you—to live for you—to die for you—” He was spent with the surge of his emotion.
Ach! To be loved as Sam Arkin loved! She covered her eyes, but it only pressed upon her the more. Home, husband, babies, a bread-giver for life!
And the Other—a dream—a madness that burns you up alive. “You might as well want to marry yourself to the President of America as to want him. But I can’t help it. Him and him only I want.”
She looked up again. “No—no!” she cried, cruel in the self-absorption of youth and ambition. “You can’t make me for a person. It’s not only that I got to go up higher, but I got to push myself up by myself, by my own strength—”
“Nu, nu,” he sobbed. “I’ll not bother you with me—only give you my everything. My bank-book is more than my flesh and blood—only take it, to do what you want with it.”
Her eyes deepened with humility. “I know your goodness—but there’s something like a wall around me—him in my heart.”
“Him?” The word hurled itself at him like a bomb-shell. He went white with pain. And even she, immersed in her own thoughts, lowered her head before the dumb suffering on his face. She felt she owed it to him to tell him.
“I wanted to talk myself out to you about him yet before.—He ain’t just a man. He is all that I want to be and am not yet. He is the hunger of me for the life that ain’t just eating and sleeping and slaving for bread.”
She pushed back her chair and rose abruptly. “I can’t be inside walls when I talk of him. I need the earth, the whole free sky to breathe when I think of him. Come out in the air.”
They walked for a time before either spoke. Sam Arkin followed where she led through the crooked labyrinth of streets. The sight of the young mothers with their nursing infants pressed to their bared bosoms stabbed anew his hurt.
Shenah Pessah, blind to all but the vision that obsessed her, talked on. “All that my mother and father and my mother’s mother and father ever wanted to be is in him. This fire in me, it’s not just the hunger of a woman for a man—it’s
