The Winthrop Agreement, page 10
“Maybe just a little,” Lottie said.
Eager to change the subject, Mimi asked, “How’s work? Tell me about the Winthrops.” Mimi loved hearing about life uptown.
“It’s good,” Lottie said, easily distracted.
“I love when you describe the dinners and parties. I can almost picture them. Be sure to find out what costumes everyone wears for the Winthrops’ masked ball in March. Take notes.”
Suddenly, Lottie banged both hands on the table, enough to make the glasses bounce. “Now, that would be a good piece of business for you. Why didn’t I think of it before?” She took her little book and pencil from her pocket to write a note. “You just wait and see, I’m going to send you such business. When you’re ready, that is. For next year’s Winthrop ball!” She closed the book and put it and the pencil back in her pocket before continuing. “For now, what I worry about is how you will manage on your own.”
Yes, on my own, Mimi thought. And soon there would be no hiding the fact that she was pregnant. No husband and no father for her unborn child. Did he ever return to the park? Or wonder what had become of her? If she saw him, would she find the courage to tell him she was expecting? Would he marry her?
Lottie interrupted her straying thoughts. “Don’t forget to pay the rent on time, Mimi.”
“I’m hearing that people are buying up buildings in the neighborhood and tearing them down. I can’t sleep, worrying that they might come for this one.”
“Oy!” Lottie said. “Don’t tell me you are becoming a worrier like your Mama. Let me put my arms around you. Come, meydeleh.”
Accepting Lottie’s comforting embrace, she feared she would burst into tears and admit to her condition. “Everything will be all right. I’m going to make something of myself, like you. You wait and see. For Mama!” She forced a smile and then jumped up from her box, taking Lottie’s glass. “I’ll make you more tea.”
“Sit.” Lottie took hold of her. “If I have another, I wouldn’t sleep.” She reached for Mimi’s hands. “I want you should take good care of yourself.”
“Of course, I will.” She was holding back tears.
“She asked me to watch over you. She loved you, even if she didn’t say so. Even if she didn’t show you. There were things she just couldn’t say. She had a hard life. Look at me, Mimi.” She held Mimi’s chin, forced her to meet her gaze. “You can tell me anything. I’m here for you. You’re like a daughter to me. My family.” Her gaze was unyielding. Mimi lowered her eyes. Would Lottie stand by her? She was filled with so much shame. Another day she would tell her, but not today.
5
The Moskowitz Family
JUNE
Most nights when the Moskowitz family who lived next door sat down to dinner, it was a noisy, boisterous event. They, too, had moved downstairs and were now ten, living in a room the size of hers and Mama’s but without the window that looked out onto Eldridge Street.
Since Mimi borrowed Smith’s Astronomy from the library and began teaching Szymon to read and write, his appetite for learning had flourished. He found his way to libraries, old bookstores, and peddlers’ carts in search of books about astronomy, the sciences, and history. He left his growing collection—more than forty books—at Mimi’s apartment for safekeeping, and now fourteen-year-old Szymon had come to the realization that he wasn’t stupid.
Mimi found secondhand clothes for her young friend and neighbor, mending and hemming them properly. Szymon allowed her to cut his hair—on the roof when no was around to see them. Over time he had stopped blinking and grimacing.
At Mimi’s suggestion, he had asked the shoemaker to put a thick sole on his right shoe, and so he limped less, had fewer back pains, and even stood up straight.
It had always upset Mimi to see the hatred in Szymon’s father’s eyes, to hear it in his voice when standing around the front steps with his friends, imitating how his son walked and blinked—to make the men laugh.
Szymon confided in Mimi that he’d registered for school and his teachers were helping him to catch up, and it was Mimi to whom he proudly showed his report cards.
On this steamy night in June, with the humid breath of inevitable rain—even inside the apartment, even on her skin—she could hardly imagine how there was air enough in that one windowless room next door for their family of ten to breathe. Ever since Mama had gone to the hospital and then died, Mimi wished they were her family. Hearing their voices through the wall reminded her that she was alone when she sat at the table or just stood at the stove to eat out of the pot, too exhausted to sit down after her long days at the Singer, keeping the business going, visiting Mama, and doing schoolwork.
There were the voices of the children—Nadia; Little Boris; Alina; and the twins, Igor and Anton, whom Mimi could not tell apart. She never heard Szymon’s voice. “Big Boris” Moskowitz’s bearded younger brother and his red-cheeked bride had arrived the previous year, moved in, and grown quite fat, and every step they took shook the floorboards under Mimi’s bed. Usually the children laughed and fought, and the adults spoke Russian. While Miriam didn’t understand what they said, over time she had a sense of what they were saying—a word here and there. Most nights she lay in the iron bed she had shared with Mama and tried to differentiate their voices until she fell asleep. She wondered if the Moskowitz family ever slept.
Tonight, it began with Boris—his deep, raspy, monotonous voice that seemed to come from the depth of his belly, insisting on something in what sounded like a repetition of the same sentence. His wife, Anya, shouted, “Stop!” There were several moments of silence and then he began again—a thunder of intensifying rage.
Big Boris Moskowitz was a dirty man, brawny and foul, who stank of horse dung. Miriam was sure that he never went to the baths. His broken-down boots were caked with muck, his pants were baggy at the knees and crusted with dirt or horse feed, and his shirtsleeves, rolled up above the elbows, revealed the burly arms that cleaned the city streets of manure.
Their newborn began to cry louder and Boris, impatient, hammered his fist on the table, shouting Russian curses. Anya pleaded. Chairs were knocked over. Boris’ voice grew louder. Dishes and glasses shattered on the floor as he bellowed, and a bottle crashed against the wall next to where Mimi huddled in her bed, her heart a jackhammer.
She was certain from Anya’s tone that she was pleading with her husband in an attempt to protect her children. Mimi imagined her kneeling on the floor, hair caught up in that frowsy bun, all skin and bones and in the same brown wool dress she wore every single day, its opening held together with safety pins.
She wondered if Anya had been a beautiful bride in Russia when she married Boris, like the faded photo of Mama and Jacob with his radiant smile on their wedding day. A smile, which meant nothing.
Whatever Anya Moskowitz had been like as a bride, now she walked with her shoulders pulled up to her ears, slightly stooped. Dark circles surrounded her weary eyes. Each year there was another baby on her hip, if it survived, and there was even more strain in her expression—as though she awaited the next blow. Women in the building gossiped that the reason Anya lost so many babies was because Boris kicked her when he was drunk.
Soon everyone would begin to talk about her: Mimi Milman, fifteen and pregnant, and another missing husband.
Lying alone in Mama’s bed, she recognized each voice through the wall. The uncle, who Mama had said drank as much as his brother, was shouting at Boris to stop, and soon these two came to blows and Igor’s wife, who Mama had said was meshugga, was shrieking.
And then Boris began beating the children. Nadia, four years old, blond-haired with a face pretty enough to be on a Coca-Cola calendar, shrieked like a seagull in distress. Mischievous Little Boris, seven, always hiding somewhere, was pleading, “Nyet, nyet, Papa.” Alina, ten, with only four fingers on her right hand, bleated like a sheep in static outbursts. The twelve-year-old twins, Igor and Anton, howled in unison like wolves. Above it all was the constant sound of leather hitting flesh, each blow followed by Anya’s shrill pleading.
It was Szymon’s voice that surprised Mimi. It rose from somewhere inside him like the roar of a lion and with an intensity she could not have imagined possible from the gentle boy who had taught her about the constellations. And for a moment everyone in the next room was quiet. Szymon was almost as big as his father now, and Mimi had wondered if one day he would strike back.
“Why do you stay?” she had once asked.
“My brothers and sisters need me . . . and where would I go?”
Mimi, frightened, slipped out of the iron bed she used to share with Mama, moved it away from the wall, and then slid a chair under the doorknob. She feared that Boris’ voice, his rage, the tables and chairs, the cast-iron pots in which Anya fried sausages and cooked cabbage stews, might burst through the wall that separated their apartments.
People on every floor began pounding on the walls with their fists, stamping with their feet, and banging on the floors with brooms. Some must have poked their heads into the hallways to shout.
Mimi covered her ears with her hands to muffle the sounds, folded her arms across her swelling belly, and then prayed to a God she didn’t know to protect the baby growing inside her as well as the family next door from their father’s temper.
She despised and feared Boris Moskowitz. How he looked at her, passing in the dim, narrow hallway; how his hand would brush against her; the stench of beer on his breath when he’d been drinking, and the stink of horse dung that followed him like a shadow; the murmured vibration of hunger he made whenever he saw her, his chin jutting forward, his tongue circling his lips. That smutty grin.
Mimi looked at the Big Ben clock. It was almost midnight, yet the air was no cooler. She heard Officers Thomas Doyle and Michael Callahan banging on the door with their nightsticks and shouting, “Open the door, Boris, or we’ll be havin’ to break it down. You wouldn’t want that, now, would you?” There was a scuffle and shouts of “Hold him down” and “Get the cuffs on him.” She heard them dragging Mr. Moskowitz down the hall to the street, kicking and bellowing and putting up a great fuss. She got out of bed to watch from behind the lace curtain as, shirtless, he tumbled down the front steps, landed with his legs straight up in the air, and how the two policemen, laughing, kicked him, and then beat him with their nightsticks.
When things were quiet in the Moskowitz apartment again, Mimi went back to bed, waiting for their voices to lull her to sleep.
She felt a gentle motion in her belly as the baby moved inside her for the first time.
The next evening after dinner, the intense heat brought everyone out of their sweltering apartments: into the hallways, onto the front stoop, and onto the fire escapes. Szymon Moskowitz was gone. Mimi heard it from Isaac Tannenbaum on the roof. Her heart felt broken. She decided that he must have left sometime during the early hours when everyone in 1B was finally sleeping, snoring, and dreaming of streets paved with gold, without a word or note of goodbye—without his books.
1910
1
Eviction Notice
Thursday, January 13, 1910
Haber & Troy, Attorneys-at-Law
149 Broadway, 47th Floor
New York, NY
Dear Mr. Troy,
I got your letter telling me to be out of my apartment by the end of this January. I’ve looked, but can’t find a place to live. Please give me one month.
Sincerely,
Miriam Milman
“Get her out,” Frederick Winthrop demanded as he looked out the window of his new office in the Singer Tower, with its breathtaking forty-seventh-floor views. “Any way you have to.”
“Impossible,” said Timothy Troy. “She’s a child—same age as my daughter, for God’s sake. She has no place to go.”
“And she’s got a newborn baby, Frederick,” argued Lawrence Haber. “Give her a break.”
“What do I care? Don’t give me any sob sister story. She’s the only one who hasn’t left. You gave her fair warning. Two weeks, the property’s coming down, and for all I care anyone in it.” Picking up his briefcase and bowler hat, he strode to the door.
“Out! I want her out!” he shouted as it closed. Demolition was scheduled. That was that.
When the elevator reached the lobby and he stepped out, he noticed the grandeur of the Singer Tower’s lobby. Its celestial ceiling was made up of multiple small domes with delicate plasterwork met by a forest of marble columns trimmed with bronze beading. At the top of each column was the monogram of the Singer Company, a huge needle, thread, and bobbin rendered on large bronze medallions. Three years earlier, when it had been built, it had been the tallest building in the world. His father, his family—he, for that matter—had worked and prospered with Singer, and one day soon he would build an opulent skyscraper taller than the Singer: the Winthrop Tower, his name embedded in its concrete and steel. The world and history would recognize his contribution to the city, and he would do it without his brothers, even Thomas. He would be damned if he’d ever ask for his advice. He chuckled at how angry Thomas would be to learn he had hired McKim, Mead & White.
Two weeks later he shouted over the telephone, “Well?”
“Well what?” asked Tim Troy.
“Is that girl out?”
“We won’t do it, Frederick.”
“Then I’ll get it done myself, and get a new law firm as well.”
2
Evicted
JANUARY
Matthew’s birth before the New Year had been surprisingly easy. He was the dearest baby, as though his personality were already defined and all he wanted in his life was to please. In return, Mimi loved nothing more than to kiss his fingers, toes, and cheeks and breathe in his sweet fragrance. The songs and lullabies she had learned as a child came back to her. Everyone celebrated his birth. Perhaps everyone gossiped, but no one asked her any questions.
She hadn’t wanted to trouble Lottie with her mishigas, so she had kept the eviction notice a secret, certain she would somehow manage.
The week before the building would be demolished, Lena and Max Schenkein had wept just before the wagon took them and their belongings to a small building they bought in Brooklyn, where they would live above their new bakery on Atlantic Avenue.
But between the bitter cold weather, customers’ work to complete, recuperating from giving birth, and caring for Matthew, Mimi had had no time to search for a new place to live. She had believed that the goodness in her landlord’s heart would have given her till the end of February.
On the first of February, Officer Michael Callahan, in a gray shirt and pants and leather suspenders, pounded the door with his fists and, when Mimi opened it, practically pulled her from the front room on Eldridge Street.
“I can’t believe you’re still here, Mrs. Milman. You and the baby, you’re the only ones. The buildin’s comin’ down. You ain’t got much time. Let me help you.” He picked up her Singer and Mama’s carpetbag. “Hurry!”
As she and Officer Callahan made their way down the front steps, she saw that a crowd had gathered across the street to watch the demolition. Ashamed, she pulled the collar of her coat up, covered her face with scarves, and lowered her head. Matthew was protected, close to her chest. She stumbled with the weight of all she carried.
The building fell quickly, the space it had held on Eldridge Street empty, replaced with mounds of shattered brick, the air heavy with concrete dust—and memories.
It was then that she noticed a black Pierce-Arrow and one well-dressed gentleman, heads taller than the throng. She was absolutely certain it was Frederick.
“Well, that’s done,” she heard him say to his driver, who held the automobile door open for him. Taking off his top hat, he stepped into the car. “The opera house,” he directed.
“Yes, Mr. Winthrop.”
Mimi was aghast. Winthrop! Of Lottie’s Winthrop Corporation?
With Matthew, suitcases, bundles, and her sewing machine at her feet, Mimi turned to watch him pull away. As the car vanished, she realized she had nowhere to go.
3
A Home for Mimi
Two days later, Lottie followed close behind Thomas Winthrop as he burst into his brother’s oak-paneled office at the Winthrop School.
“Frederick’s done it again, Jon!” he exclaimed. Lottie caught his coat and hat, which he practically threw into her arms. He probably would have dropped them on the floor if she hadn’t been there to catch them.
“How often must I remind you? First, a greeting.” Mr. Jonathan sat at his desk, where she could see he was working on student applications. He was fastidious about his person, his painting studio on Union Square, his school director’s office, as well as his grand Chippendale mahogany desk. Mr. Jonathan stood and nodded. “Good morning, Miss Aarons. Good morning, Tom. Dashing vest!”
Mr. Thomas laughed sheepishly, patting the red plaid vest over his broad chest. “Good morning, my dear brother.” He went around the desk and gave his brother a bear hug and then, as always, made certain his paper-white mustache was twisted properly.
Lottie hung their coats in the closet, then sat down in the chair next to Mr. Jonathan’s desk with her hands folded in her lap and her legs crossed at the ankles. She had her stenographer’s notebook and pencil on the desk, ready for dictation, should that be necessary.
“Now, sit down, Tom, and tell me what that rascal’s done. More evictions?” He pushed the school applications on his desk off to the side into a neat pile and then made certain his pen was where he preferred it to be. “Or is it women again? Sit, sit.”
Tom sat across from his brother, picked up the pen, and began tapping it nervously on the desk.
“Tom, he’s a goddamn womanizer, and foolishly feckless, too. Oh, excuse my profanity, Miss Aarons. And stop tapping my pen!” Mr. Jonathan grabbed it from his brother’s hand and placed it back where he liked it to be. “Remember when Frederick was caught climbing out of a window without his pants?”
