Had you chanced to be in Grand Street on that starry February night,
it would scarcely have occurred to you that the Ghetto was groaning
under the culmination of a long season of enforced idleness and
distress. The air was exhilaratingly crisp, and the glare of the cafés
and millinery shops flooded it with contentment and kindly good will.
The sidewalks were alive with shoppers and promenaders, and lined with
peddlers.
Yet the dazzling, deafening chaos had many a tale of woe to tell. The
greater part of the surging crowd was out on an errand of
self-torture. Straying forlornly by inexorable window displays, men
and women would pause here and there to indulge in a hypothetical
selection, to feast a hungry eye upon the object of an imaginary
purchase, only forthwith to pay for the momentary joy with all the
pangs of awakening to an empty purse.
Many of the peddlers, too, bore piteous testimony to the calamity
which was then preying upon the quarter. Some of them performed their
task of yelling and gesticulating with the desperation of imminent
ruin; others implored the passers-by for custom with the abject effect
of begging alms; while in still others this feverish urgency was
disguised by an air of martyrdom or of shamefaced unwontedness, as if
peddling were beneath the dignity of their habitual occupations, and
they had been driven to it by sheer famine,--by the hopeless dearth of
employment at their own trades.
One of these was a thick-set fellow of twenty-five or twenty-six, with
honest, clever blue eyes. It might be due to the genial, inviting
quality of his face that the Passover dishes whose praises he was
sounding had greater attraction for some of the women with an
"effectual demand" than those of his competitors. Still, his
comparative success had not as yet reconciled him to his new calling.
He was constantly gazing about for a possible passer-by of his
acquaintance, and when one came in sight he would seek refuge from
identification in closer communion with the crockery on his
push-cart.
"Buy nice dishes for the holidays! Cheap and strong! Buy dishes for
Passover!" When business was brisk, he sang with a bashful relish;
when the interval between a customer and her successor was growing too
long, his sing-song would acquire a mournful ring that was suggestive
of the psalm-chanting at an orthodox Jewish funeral.
He was a cap-blocker, and in the busy season his earnings ranged from
ten to fifteen dollars a week. But he had not worked full time for
over two years, and during the last three months he had not been able
to procure a single day's employment.
Goldy, his sweetheart, too, who was employed in making knee-breeches,
had hardly work enough to pay her humble board and rent. Nathan, after
much hesitation, was ultimately compelled to take to peddling; and the
longed-for day of their wedding was put off from month to month.
They had become engaged nearly two years before; the wedding ceremony
having been originally fixed for a date some three months later. Their
joint savings then amounted to one hundred and twenty dollars,--a sum
quite adequate, in Nathan's judgment, for a modest, quiet celebration
and the humble beginnings of a household establishment. Goldy,
however, summarily and indignantly overruled him.
"One does not marry every day," she argued, "and when I have at last
lived to stand under the bridal canopy with my predestined one, I will
not do so like a beggar-maid. Give me a respectable wedding, or none
at all, Nathan, do you hear?"
It is to be noted that a "respectable wedding" was not merely a casual
expression with Goldy. Like its antithesis, a "slipshod wedding," it
played in her vocabulary the part of something like a well-established
scientific term, with a meaning as clearly defined as that of
"centrifugal force" or "geometrical progression." Now, a slipshod
wedding was anything short of a gown of white satin and slippers to
match; two carriages to bring the bride and the bridegroom to the
ceremony, and one to take them to their bridal apartments; a wedding
bard and a band of at least five musicians; a spacious ballroom
crowded with dancers, and a feast of a hundred and fifty covers. As to
furniture, she refused to consider any which did not include a
pier-glass and a Brussels carpet.
Nathan contended that the items upon which she insisted would cost a
sum far beyond their joint accumulations. This she met by the
declaration that he had all along been bent upon making her the target
of universal ridicule, and that she would rather descend into an
untimely grave than be married in a slipshod manner. Here she burst
out crying; and whether her tears referred to the untimely grave or to
the slipshod wedding, they certainly seemed to strengthen the cogency
of her argument; for Nathan at once proceeded to signify his surrender
by a kiss, and when ignominiously repulsed he protested his
determination to earn the necessary money to bring things to the
standard which she held up so uncompromisingly.
Hard times set in. Nathan and Goldy pinched and scrimped; but all
their heroic economies were powerless to keep their capital from
dribbling down to less than one hundred dollars. The wedding was
postponed again and again. Finally the curse of utter idleness fell
upon Nathan's careworn head. Their savings dwindled apace. In dismay
they beheld the foundation of their happiness melt gradually away.
Both were tired of boarding. Both longed for the bliss and economy of
married life. They grew more impatient and restless every day, and
Goldy made concession after concession. First the wedding supper was
sacrificed; then the pier-mirror and the bard were stricken from the
programme; and these were eventually succeeded by the hired hall and
the Brussels carpet.
After Nathan went into peddling, a few days before we first find him
hawking chinaware on Grand Street, matters began to look brighter, and
the spirits of our betrothed couple rose. Their capital, which had
sunk to forty dollars, was increasing again, and Goldy advised waiting
long enough for it to reach the sum necessary for a slipshod wedding
and establishment.
* * * * *
It was nearly ten o'clock. Nathan was absently drawling his "Buy nice
dishes for the holidays!" His mind was engrossed with the question of
making peddling his permanent occupation.
Presently he was startled by a merry soprano mocking him: "Buy nice
di-i-shes! Mind that you don't fall asleep murmuring like this. A big
lot you can make!"
Nathan turned a smile of affectionate surprise upon a compact little
figure, small to drollness, but sweet in the amusing grace of its
diminutive outlines,--an epitome of exquisite femininity. Her tiny
face was as comically lovely as her form: her apple-like cheeks were
firm as marble, and her inadequate nose protruded between them like
the result of a hasty tweak; a pair of large, round black eyes and a
thick-lipped little mouth inundating it all with passion and restless,
good-natured shrewdness.
"Goldy! What brings _you_ here?" Nathan demanded, with a fond look
which instantly gave way to an air of discomfort. "You know I hate you
to see me peddling."
"Are you really angry? Bite the feather bed, then. Where is the
disgrace? As if you were the only peddler in America! I wish you were.
Wouldn't you make heaps of money then! But you had better hear what
_does_ bring me here. Nathan, darling-dearest little heart, dearest
little crown that you are, guess what a plan I have hit upon!" she
exploded all at once. "Well, if you hear me out, and you don't say
that Goldy has the head of a cabinet minister, then--well, then you
will be a big hog, and nothing else."
And without giving him time to put in as much as an interjection, she
rattled on, puffing for breath and smacking her lips for ecstasy. Was
it not stupid of them to be racking their brains about the wedding
while there was such a plain way of having both a "respectable"
celebration and fine furniture--Brussels carpet, pier-glass, and
all--with the money they now had on hand?
"Come, out with it, then," he said morosely.
But his disguised curiosity only whetted her appetite for tormenting
him, and she declared her determination not to disclose her great
scheme before they had reached her lodgings.
"You have been yelling long enough to-day, anyhow," she said, with
abrupt sympathy. "Do you suppose it does not go to my very heart to
think of the way you stand out in the cold screaming yourself hoarse?"
Half an hour later, when they were alone in Mrs. Volpiansky's parlor,
which was also Goldy's bedroom, she set about emptying his pockets of
the gross results of the day's business, and counting the money. This
she did with a preoccupied, matter-of-fact air, Nathan submitting to
the operation with fond and amused willingness; and the sum being
satisfactory, she went on to unfold her plan.
"You see," she began, almost in a whisper, and with the mien of a
careworn, experience-laden old matron, "in a week or two we shall have
about seventy-five dollars, shan't we? Well, what is seventy-five
dollars? Nothing! We could just have the plainest furniture, and no
wedding worth speaking of. Now, if we have no wedding, we shall get no
presents, shall we?"
Nathan shook his head thoughtfully.
"Well, why shouldn't we be up to snuff and do this way? Let us spend
all our money on a grand, respectable wedding, and send out a big lot
of invitations, and then--well, won't uncle Leiser send us a carpet or
a parlor set? And aunt Beile, and cousin Shapiro, and Charley, and
Meyerke, and Wolfke, and Bennie, and Sore-Gitke,--won't each present
something or other, as is the custom among respectable people? May God
give us a lump of good luck as big as the wedding present each of them
is sure to send us! Why, did not Beilke get a fine carpet from uncle
when she got married? And am I not a nearer relative than she?"
She paused to search his face for a sign of approval, and, fondly
smoothing a tuft of his dark hair into place, she went on to enumerate
the friends to be invited and the gifts to be expected from them.
"So you see," she pursued, "we will have both a respectable wedding
that we shan't have to be ashamed of in after years and the nicest
things we could get if we spent two hundred dollars. What do you say?"
"What _shall_ I say?" he returned dubiously.
The project appeared reasonable enough, but the investment struck him
as rather hazardous. He pleaded for caution, for delay; but as he had
no tangible argument to produce, while she stood her ground with the
firmness of conviction, her victory was an easy one.
"It will all come right, depend upon it," she said coaxingly. "You
just leave everything to me. Don't be uneasy, Nathan," she added. "You
and I are orphans, and you know the Uppermost does not forsake a bride
and bridegroom who have nobody to take care of them. If my father were
alive, it would be different," she concluded, with a disconsolate
gesture.
There was a pathetic pause. Tears glistened in Goldy's eyes.
"May your father rest in a bright paradise," Nathan said feelingly.
"But what is the use of crying? Can you bring him back to life? I will
be a father to you."
"If God be pleased," she assented. "Would that mamma, at least,--may
she be healthy a hundred and twenty years,--would that she, at least,
were here to attend our wedding! Poor mother! it will break her heart
to think that she has not been foreordained by the Uppermost to lead
me under the canopy."
There was another desolate pause, but it was presently broken by
Goldy, who exclaimed with unexpected buoyancy, "By the way, Nathan,
guess what I did! I am afraid you will call me braggart and make fun
of me, but I don't care," she pursued, with a playful pout, as she
produced a strip of carpet from her pocket-book. "I went into a
furniture store, and they gave me a sample three times as big as this.
I explained in my letter to mother that this is the kind of stuff that
will cover my floor when I am married. Then I enclosed the sample in
the letter, and sent it all to Russia."
Nathan clapped his hands and burst out laughing. "But how do you know
that is just the kind of carpet you will get for your wedding
present?" he demanded, amazed as much as amused.
"How do I know? As if it mattered what sort of carpet! I can just see
mamma going the rounds of the neighbors, and showing off the 'costly
tablecloth' her daughter will trample upon. Won't she be happy!"
* * * * *
Over a hundred invitations, printed in as luxurious a black-and-gold
as ever came out of an Essex Street band-press, were sent out for an
early date in April. Goldy and Nathan paid a month's rent in advance
for three rooms on the second floor of a Cherry Street tenement-house.
Goldy regarded the rent as unusually low, and the apartments as the
finest on the East Side.
"Oh, haven't I got lovely rooms!" she would ejaculate, beaming with
the consciousness of the pronoun. Or, "You ought to see _my_ rooms!
How much do you pay for yours?" Or again, "I have made up my mind to
have my parlor in the rear room. It is as light as the front one,
anyhow, and I want that for a kitchen, you know. What do you say?" For
hours together she would go on talking nothing but rooms, rent, and
furniture; every married couple who had recently moved into new
quarters, or were about to do so, seemed bound to her by the ties of a
common cause; in her imagination, humanity was divided into those who
were interested in the question of rooms, rent and furniture and those
who were not,--the former, of whom she was one, constituting the
superior category; and whenever her eye fell upon a bill announcing
rooms to let, she would experience something akin to the feeling with
which an artist, in passing, views some accessory of his art.
It is customary to send the bulkier wedding presents to a young
couple's apartments a few days before they become man and wife, the
closer relatives and friends of the betrothed usually settling among
themselves what piece of furniture each is to contribute. Accordingly,
Goldy gave up her work a week in advance of the day set for the great
event, in order that she might be on hand to receive the things when
they arrived.
She went to the empty little rooms, with her lunch, early in the
morning, and kept anxious watch till after nightfall, when Nathan came
to take her home.
A day passed, another, and a third, but no expressman called out her
name. She sat waiting and listening for the rough voice, but in vain.
"Oh, it is too early, anyhow. I am a fool to be expecting anything so
soon at all," she tried to console herself. And she waited another
hour, and still another; but no wedding gift made its appearance.
"Well, there is plenty of time, after all; wedding presents do come a
day or two before the ceremony," she argued; and again she waited, and
again strained her ears, and again her heart rose in her throat.
The vacuity of the rooms, freshly cleaned, scrubbed, and smelling of
whitewash, began to frighten her. Her over-wrought mind was filled
with sounds which her overstrained ears did not hear. Yet there she
sat on the window-sill, listening and listening for an expressman's
voice.
"Hush, hush-sh, hush-sh-sh!" whispered the walls; the corners muttered
awful threats; her heart was ever and anon contracted with fear; she
often thought herself on the brink of insanity; yet she stayed on,
waiting, waiting, waiting.
At the slightest noise in the hall she would spring to her feet, her
heart beating wildly, only presently to sink in her bosom at finding
it to be some neighbor or a peddler; and so frequent were these
violent throbbings that Goldy grew to imagine herself a prey to heart
disease. Nevertheless the fifth day came, and she was again at her
post, waiting, waiting, waiting for her wedding gifts. And what is
more, when Nathan came from business, and his countenance fell as he
surveyed the undisturbed emptiness of the rooms, she set a merry face
against his rueful inquiries, and took to bantering him as a woman
quick to lose heart, and to painting their prospects in roseate hues,
until she argued herself, if not him, into a more cheerful view of the
situation.
On the sixth day an expressman did pull up in front of the Cherry
Street tenement-house, but he had only a cheap huge rocking-chair for
Goldy and Nathan; and as it proved to be the gift of a family who had
been set down for nothing less than a carpet or a parlor set, the joy
and hope which its advent had called forth turned to dire
disappointment and despair. For nearly an hour Goldy sat mournfully
rocking and striving to picture how delightful it would have been if
all her anticipations had come true.
Presently there arrived a flimsy plush-covered little corner table. It
could not have cost more than a dollar. Yet it was the gift of a near
friend, who had been relied upon for a pier-glass or a bedroom set. A
little later a cheap alarm-clock and an ice-box were brought in. That
was all.
Occasionally Goldy went to the door to take in the entire effect; but
the more she tried to view the parlor as half furnished, the more
cruelly did the few lonely and mismated things emphasize the remaining
emptiness of the apartments: whereupon she would sink into her rocker
and sit motionless, with a drooping head, and then desperately fall to
swaying to and fro, as though bent upon swinging herself out of her
woebegone, wretched self.
Still, when Nathan came, there was a triumphant twinkle in her eye, as
she said, pointing to the gifts, "Well, mister, who was right? It is
not very bad for a start, is it? You know most people do send their
wedding presents after the ceremony,--why, of course!" she added, in a
sort of confidential way. "Well, we have invited a big crowd, and all
people of no mean sort, thank God; and who ever heard of a lady or a
gentleman attending a respectable wedding and having a grand wedding
supper, and then cheating the bride and the bridegroom out of their
present?"
* * * * *
The evening was well advanced; yet there were only a score of people
in a hall that was used to hundreds.
Everybody felt ill at ease, and ever and anon looked about for the
possible arrival of more guests. At ten o'clock the dancing
preliminary to the ceremony had not yet ceased, although the few
waltzers looked as if they were scared by the ringing echoes of their
own footsteps amid the austere solemnity of the surrounding void and
the depressing sheen of the dim expanse of floor.
The two fiddles, the cornet, and the clarinet were shrieking as though
for pain, and the malicious superabundance of gaslight was fiendishly
sneering at their tortures. Weddings and entertainments being scarce
in the Ghetto, its musicians caught the contagion of misery: hence
the greedy, desperate gusto with which the band plied their
instruments.
At last it became evident that the assemblage was not destined to be
larger than it was, and that it was no use delaying the ceremony. It
was, in fact, an open secret among those present that by far the
greater number of the invited friends were kept away by lack of
employment: some having their presentable clothes in the pawn shop;
others avoiding the expense of a wedding present, or simply being too
cruelly borne down by their cares to have a mind for the excitement of
a wedding; indeed, some even thought it wrong of Nathan to have the
celebration during such a period of hard times, when everybody was out
of work.
It was a little after ten when the bard--a tall, gaunt man, with a
grizzly beard and a melancholy face--donned his skull-cap, and,
advancing toward the dancers, called out in a synagogue intonation,
"Come, ladies, let us veil the bride!"
An odd dozen of daughters of Israel followed him and the musicians
into a little side-room where Goldy was seated between her two
brideswomen (the wives of two men who were to attend upon the groom).
According to the orthodox custom she had fasted the whole day, and as
a result of this and of her gnawing grief, added to the awe-inspiring
scene she had been awaiting, she was pale as death; the effect being
heightened by the wreath and white gown she wore. As the procession
came filing in, she sat blinking her round dark eyes in dismay, as if
the bard were an executioner come to lead her to the scaffold.
The song or address to the bride usually partakes of the qualities of
prayer and harangue, and includes a melancholy meditation upon life
and death; lamenting the deceased members of the young woman's family,
bemoaning her own woes, and exhorting her to discharge her sacred
duties as a wife, mother, and servant of God. Composed in verse and
declaimed in a solemn, plaintive recitative, often broken by the
band's mournful refrain, it is sure to fulfill its mission of
eliciting tears even when hearts are brimful of glee. Imagine, then,
the funereal effect which it produced at Goldy's wedding ceremony.
The bard, half starved himself, sang the anguish of his own heart; the
violins wept, the clarinet moaned, the cornet and the double-bass
groaned, each reciting the sad tale of its poverty-stricken master. He
began:--
"Silence, good women, give heed to my verses!
To-night, bride, thou dost stand before the Uppermost.
Pray to him to bless thy union,
To let thee and thy mate live a hundred and twenty peaceful years,
To give you your daily bread,
To keep hunger from your door."
Several women, including Goldy, burst into tears, the others sadly
lowering their gaze. The band sounded a wailing chord, and the whole
audience broke into loud, heartrending weeping.