The Girl in the Torch (2 page)

A
S
S
ARAH'S EYES SHOT
open, she was greeted by darkness. She blinked once, twice, trying to bring the inside of her house into focus, but all she could see were more shades of black.

Then her body rolled to one side as the ship sharply crested a wave and she remembered that she and her mother were at sea.

Sarah heard the whir of the engine and the muffled breathing and sleep sounds of her fellow passengers. She felt around until she located Ivan safely tucked into the inner pocket of her coat. Her mother was lying beside her, breathing heavily, hot beneath the blankets and clothes they had stacked on top of themselves to keep warm.

The ship took another sharp dip, and her mother woke with a gasp.

“Sarah?” she called into the darkness.

“Yes, Mama.”

“I need air. Come help me up.”

Sarah reached under the covers to hoist her mother to her feet.
The woman's hands were warm and clammy, the blankets moist from her sweat.

Sarah led her mother over the other sleeping bodies and up the rusted iron ladder to the upper deck of the ship. Even though she was only twelve years old, Sarah was already tall enough to be able to carefully balance her mother against her shoulder to keep her upright.

The sight of the sea and the night sky, and the cool, salty October air filling her lungs, helped banish the memory of the nightmare. Her mother immediately ran to the side of the ship, gripped the railing, and violently sent most of her meager dinner overboard. Sarah recoiled; she couldn't recall her mother ever getting sick back in their village. A knot formed in the pit of her stomach.

Alone on deck, they stood in the quiet. Finally, her mother stepped back and drew a big breath. She steadied her hands on the railing, making sure there was nothing else coming up.

“Show me the Lady,” her mother said. “That will make me feel better.”

Sarah took a worn postcard from the pocket of her coat and handed it to her mother.

On the front of the card, a full moon peeked out from behind thick, dark clouds. The Lady stood in the semidarkness, towering over the harbor like a benevolent giant, holding her torch aloft with beams of light shining out as both a warning and an invitation. Beneath the starred crown, her expression was kind and
proud all at once. Tiny trees and a flagpole surrounded her base. Sarah wondered if she could possibly be that big in real life.

She flipped over the card and read the words printed on the back, a poem that had been written about the Lady. Everyone in their village had been awed by the tantalizing message, as if it had been personally written for them.

“‘Mother of Exiles . . . ,'” Sarah read. “‘With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses. . . . / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”'”

“Let it be so,” said her mother.

Sarah wondered if there ever had been more wonderful words written. Surely America would be different from their old country, where her people were barely allowed to live, never mind be welcomed in the way that was promised in the poem.

Sarah's mother could not read or write, yet Sarah had been taught to do both by her father.

“Why bother?” one of her father's friends had asked. “Does a girl need to read to milk a cow or boil a chicken?”

“My girl's mind is as sharp as any of your sons',” her father said. “So why not?”

Sarah's parents had been planning their escape to America for two years before the attack on their village. To prepare for their new life, Sarah had been studying English with the son of the village wool merchant, who was a university student. It was Sarah who had first translated the poem on the postcard and read it to her amazed family and neighbors. The card had been sent by
her father's sister, who had moved to the United States nearly ten years earlier.

She held up the postcard against the night sky, trying to fit the image into the real horizon. She lined up the picture so it was just right, and her mother smiled and started to sing. Although she had never gone to school, her mother had a gift for melody and song. She improvised countless little tunes throughout the day—lullabies, work songs—to amuse them.

       
Have you ever seen a golden door?

       
So bright it makes your eyes feel sore.

       
Good luck spills across the floor

       
In the room behind the golden door,

       
The golden door. The golden door.

The lyrics came alive in Sarah's mind with images of golden doors and streets paved with riches. Sarah imagined them living in a perfect little house along one of those streets with plenty of food to eat and peaceful neighbors. When her mother's stomach felt settled enough, they returned belowdecks.

The next night, Sarah's mother woke her again. This time, she barely made it to the railing before vomiting over the side. But unlike the previous night, it brought no relief.

She asked Sarah to hold the postcard up to the horizon once more.

“If we do this every night, maybe the real Lady will appear
sooner,” her mother said weakly. Sarah sent up a silent prayer to make it so.

The next day, her mother's fever didn't break. She told Sarah that she was just seasick, that they weren't seafaring folk.

“I'll never get used to living in a room with floors that move beneath my feet,” she said. “That's all it is.”

Worries whirled in Sarah's mind. She had found her sea legs days earlier. But she didn't argue. She just worried to herself.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING, HER
mother wasn't even able to get up the ladder before dizziness overwhelmed her and she was forced to go back and lie down. Sarah had to fetch a bucket and empty it over the side throughout the day and night. She constantly felt her mother's forehead. Her fever grew higher and higher until her face felt like the side of a boiling teakettle.

There was a couple on board who had come from a village very near their own and were traveling with their infant son. Earlier in the trip, Sarah's mother had made conversation with them about people they knew in common and what their plans were for the New World. Now Sarah approached them.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Please, stay back,” the husband said, holding up his hand and placing his body between Sarah and his wife and child.

“Please,” Sarah said. “My mother's fever won't break. And she's not making sense when she talks.”

“Look, I really can't help you. I'm not a doctor. I can't risk my
wife or baby catching her illness. I'm sorry.”

Sarah retreated to her corner.

The next night, Sarah made another trip to the top deck to empty her mother's bucket. It was moments before dawn; the bottom of the sky was just beginning to lighten, a pale gray and yellow border on black. A group of large gulls dived after her mother's waste as Sarah poured it over the side.

Glancing up, she saw dozens of the birds as they cawed and screeched and fluttered around the ship. She looked out through the waning darkness and saw another steamship, then a long wooden sailboat with two masts, and several small fishing boats. As the sky lightened, she could see more birds and boats appearing out of the darkness around her.

And then she saw her in the far distance. Sarah had looked at the postcard so many times that she knew the Lady immediately, by just the faintest suggestion of her silhouette. The sun came creeping over the horizon and the ship moved them closer and closer. Sarah stared, transfixed, as the statue came into sharper focus.

Another passenger, a thin man with a scraggly beard, appeared behind her from below. He froze in his tracks, his eyes went wide, and he yelled, “WE'RE HERE!”

M
OST OF THE OTHER
passengers stirred and joined them on deck, excitedly pointing and cheering at the sight of the Lady.

“Thank the Lord!”

“America!”

Some broke into song. Others cried. One couple hugged each other so tightly, Sarah thought they might never let go. Some literally danced for joy.

Swept up in the moment, Sarah found herself clapping along, her legs kicking and jumping in place as if she could leap over the water to the promised land.

As the statue came closer, Sarah slipped the postcard out of her pocket. The actual Lady was far more beautiful and majestic than could ever be captured in a picture. So many new details came alive as she stared at the real thing, from the Lady's thick parted hair beneath the crown to the angular lines of her neck to the muscular firmness of her torch-bearing arm. Sarah let out a small gasp of delight as she saw the faces of several people inside the
windows in the crown. She removed Ivan from her pocket.

“Look, Ivan,” she said. “There she is.”

More people came on deck, until it seemed as if everyone on board must have been standing at the railing cheering and watching the New World come into view. She saw a young mother holding a baby swaddled in a blanket.

“It's our new home,” the woman said to her baby.

The sight of the young mother made Sarah remember her own. She shoved Ivan into her pocket, feeling guilty for having shown her toy bear the New World first. Sarah rushed back down into the hold and found her mother lying in a fevered sleep, a small lump in the middle of the otherwise deserted room.

“Mama, wake up! We're here. We're finally here!”

Her mother's skin burned, but her eyes fluttered open and she muttered, “Thank God. Thank God.”

The other passengers began to trickle back belowdecks to pack up their belongings and discuss plans for their arrival. One woman, another mother, who traveled with her husband and two children, walked up to Sarah. It was the first time in days that anyone besides her mother had talked to her.

“You must try to make your mother look well,” the woman said.

“What do you mean?” said Sarah.

“They don't let in the sick. If you don't make her look well, they won't let her in.”

Make her look well? But how?
Sarah wet a cloth and wiped her
mother's face, her neck, and under her arms, which revived her a bit. Sarah combed her hair and straightened her clothes as best she could. Eventually she was able to get her to stand and coaxed her up the ladder.

A sharp orange sun had risen into the cloudless sky, and they both had to squint as they came up onto the deck. Sarah led her to the railing.

“Look, Mama. There she is.”

Now just a few hundred yards away, the Lady's face beamed down at them, silent and strong. Sarah's mother smiled and whispered, “Thank the Lord.”

The ship sailed deeper into the harbor, until the Lady loomed over them and Sarah could see scores of people milling around at her base and up inside her torch and crown. She gasped in wonder, longing to be on the island, to explore inside the Lady and see the view from the windows of the crown and the walkway of the torch.

As they moved beyond the statue, Sarah saw New York City come into focus, the tip of Manhattan packed with buildings more tightly than she had ever thought possible, stretching into the distance as far as the eye could see. It was as if someone had stacked hundreds of villages on top of one another. Boats of all shapes and sizes moved around the island.

“Isn't it incredible, Mama?” Sarah asked.

But her mother didn't respond. Her eyes were glazed over and she seemed to be staring at nothing in particular.

The ship banked sharply to the left and docked at a small island behind the Lady. A large building that looked like a castle or fortress dominated the shoreline. The main building had four towers with rounded roofs that looked like onions.

The passengers gathered their belongings, all jostling to be the first to disembark. A line of men waited for them on the dock. They wore uniforms with stiff round blue hats and badges.

Sarah struggled to carry their few belongings and to help her mother off the ship. Once on shore, they lined up to enter the main building, and Sarah felt a pinch of disappointment as she saw that the entry door was not actually made of gold, but was wooden like any other door. She reached out and ran her finger along the dull surface. What other disappointments would she find here? Sarah wondered.

They waited outside for a half hour, and Sarah and the other passengers' excitement turned to impatience.

“It's nice to know that some things are the same as the old country,” one man joked. “I guess all governments are good at making people wait in lines.”

A few of the others laughed, but as the minutes ticked by, the tension rose and the crowd fell quiet. Her mother sat on one of their bags, holding her head in her hands. Finally, an official came out to usher them inside. Sarah hoisted her mother to her feet and they stepped into the building.

Sarah gasped and stopped short.

T
HEY ENTERED A MASSIVE
main hall filled with hundreds of people just like the passengers from her ship, waiting in several different lines that snaked through the room. The lines were separated by a series of rigid metal posts and ropes just like the rows of cattle pens in the slaughterhouse on the outskirts of her village.

The air vibrated with the sound of dozens of languages being spoken all at once. Sarah looked up and down the lines. She could hardly believe that human beings could come in so many different shapes and sizes. Short, tall, fat, skinny, ugly, beautiful, old, young, crippled, strong, brown haired, black haired, blond haired, even some redheads like her.

Some men wore beards while others were completely clean-shaven and looked more like boys than men. Some dressed in Old World clothes with baggy pants tucked into high socks, white shirts with puffy white sleeves, and strange hats shaped like large red cups. Still others wore neat modern three-piece suits and bowler hats. Some women had their hair tucked under kerchiefs
and wore long, plain, heavy black dresses. Others had their hair piled up in fancy arrangements held together by jeweled pins and wore bright dresses, with corsets pulling in their waists and pushing up their bosoms so that they indelicately spilled over the tops of their blouses.

Sarah was also transfixed by the men in uniform and the other people working in the building. Beneath their similar dress, there was an amazing array of skin tones, from the palest white to the darkest brown and everything in between. Nearly everyone at home had looked the same, with dark hair and dark eyes and similar clothes.

Sarah and the other passengers were led to the medical examination area, where groups of doctors and officials carrying clipboards and chalk made quick evaluations of the immigrants on line.

“Who are they?” a woman asked her husband.

“I think it must be the medical people. I heard they examine everyone as soon as they come ashore to make sure everyone's healthy.”

Sarah's entire body tightened with concern as she watched the exams from a distance. The doctors made very quick judgments. Most people were allowed to pass, although several were marked with a letter in chalk on their clothing and led away.

The jagged line of passengers from Sarah's ship chattered excitedly to one another. Sarah and her mother stood at the very end, a few yards away from the next-to-last person. Sarah nervously shuffled in place, measuring the distance the others were keeping
from them and worrying that the officials would notice and assume the worst.

At last it was their turn. One of the men in uniform spoke some Yiddish and Russian and asked them their names and where they came from. Her mother attempted to answer the questions as best she could, while the doctor examined Sarah.

Sarah gagged as he roughly pressed down her tongue with a dry wooden stick. He poked and prodded her body with his hands and medical instruments. Finally he took out a small metal buttonhook and reached it toward her eye. Sarah flinched and tried to turn away.

“Hold still,” he commanded as he pulled back the skin of her eye with the instrument and examined each eyeball.

“She looks fine,” he said.

As soon as the doctor turned his attention to her mother, though, his expression changed. He stared into her eyes, clearly not liking what he saw in their glassy yellow reflection. He took her mother's temperature and pulse; and then the men stepped away to confer for a moment. Sarah's mother slumped against the girl's shoulder.

Finally the Yiddish-speaking official returned and abruptly drew a large letter
P
on her mother's coat near the shoulder with a thick piece of chalk.

“What is this about?” Sarah's mother asked.

“I'm afraid you're not well. The
P
stands for physical and lungs. We think you have some sort of physical illness or infection,” the
man said. “We're going to have to take you for treatment at our hospital while your daughter proceeds to the processing center.”

“But I need to get to the United States,” her mother said.

“It's in the United States,” the man said. “It's just in another area of the facility.”

“Why can't we stay together?” her mother asked.

“Your daughter is healthy. We need to keep you quarantined so you don't get anyone else sick, including her. She'll be perfectly safe.”

The word
quarantined
sent a chill down Sarah's spine, even though she wasn't quite sure what it meant.

“I'm afraid you don't have any choice in the matter. We have a wonderful hospital, and I'm sure you will get better and be on your way in no time.”

He turned away to deal with the other passengers on line, and another official gestured for Sarah's mother to come with him.

Sarah's throat went dry.

“Mama . . .”

“We don't have a choice, little one,” she said, shaking her head.

“But I can't be alone.”

“Let's move it along,” the official said.

“One minute,” Sarah's mother told him.

Mustering her remaining strength, her mother knelt before Sarah.

“You will be fine,” she said. “We both will be. You are my brave, beautiful girl. American doctors are the best in the world.
They will make me well, and then we will enter the New World together. Promise me you'll be strong.”

Sarah just stared at her.

“Promise me,” her mother insisted.

“I promise,” Sarah finally said, wishing she believed it.

Sarah's mother kissed her on the head one final time and then was led away. She turned and waved to Sarah, barely able to find the strength to hold up her arm, then blew her a final kiss. Then she rounded a corner and was gone. Sarah was alone.

Sarah's anxiety rose as she waited for another hour until she finally made it to the front of the next line and approached a man in uniform, sitting in an elevated booth.

“How old are you?” he asked in Yiddish.

“Twelve,” she replied.

“Twelve? I would've guessed you were at least fifteen. I have a sixteen-year-old girl, and she's much younger looking than you. But I guess that's a good thing, because she can't push me around as easily.”

He chuckled. It made Sarah feel good that the official thought she was older.

“Do you know a trade?” he asked.

“My mother and I are both buttonhole makers,” Sarah said.

He nodded. “It's good to have a skill.”

Sarah's father had taught both of them the basic skills of buttonhole making, although they didn't possess anywhere near his expertise. She did have his one pair of fine professional scissors,
the most valuable possession they had carried with them from the old country. Her mother had sewn a special pocket for them inside Sarah's jacket.

“Now, we're going to have to hold you here in the dormitory while your mother gets well. That is, unless you have American relations who can come pick you up. Do you have relatives here?”

“My father's sister and her family.”

Sarah had never met her aunt, whose family had moved to Germany before settling in the United States.

“And are they in New York?” the man asked.

“They live somewhere called Brook-a-lin.”

“Brooklyn is a part of New York.” He smiled.

“I have their name and address here.” She handed the man the piece of paper that her mother had given her to hold. It said:

Cohen. Brookalin. New York. United State.

The official gave her back the piece of paper.

“There are hundreds, maybe thousands of families named Cohen in Brooklyn,” he said. “Do you have any more information?”

“My aunt's name is Rivka.”

“Okay. It's not much to go on, but we'll try to contact them.”

“May I visit my mother now?” Sarah asked hopefully.

The man's expression turned more serious.

“She has to be given a clean bill of health before she can see
anyone, but don't worry. She'll be well taken care of, and you'll be in a nice safe place until she's better.”

Sarah was led to a dormitory building and given a bed in a large room filled with other women and girls who were also being detained for one reason or another. Most of the others were groups: mothers and daughters, sets of sisters, or just friends who had made the journey together. Scanning the room, she realized she was one of the few who were alone.