The Little Bride (15 page)

“Stop moving,” she kept saying. And though Minna was certain that she had not moved—where would she imagine herself going with a sack over her head?—she did not protest. Ruth was the sort of well-mannered woman who longed for an excuse to argue; Minna had seen her overzealous blinking the instant she rolled up with her husband and children on a wagon nearly as tall as the hill. They’d caught Minna off guard, making bread, her hands covered in a floury paste. Ruth and Leo Friedman, they said, from five miles north. Their horses were fast, they added, as if Minna had protested their efforts; it was barely a morning’s journey. Leo chewed on a pipe that looked better than corncob. Ruth wore a bonnet. The sky hurt Minna’s eyes, but she resisted raising a sticky hand to shade them. Even the children looked clean, despite their journey, and suddenly the grime that had been gathering, no matter Minna’s best efforts at the creek, took on a weight against her skin: behind her ears, at her nape, between her breasts, she felt as if covered in fur. Leo smiled at her in a remote, teacherly way. He’d known Max when they were children, he explained, back in Kotelnia. He was the one who’d convinced Max to marry again; he’d even found the man in Mitchell who knew the men in NewYork who ran the agency which had sent away for Minna. Well, he said—half yawning—it was fine to finally meet her. Then he climbed down to go find Max. The children followed, but Ruth stayed sitting, blinking down at Minna as a dressmaker might: head to toe, unapologetic. Which suited Minna, who was tired of being treated delicately. When Ruth frowned, Minna stood straighter. A confidence overtook her: the particular nerve she’d felt as a girl only when she’d done something wrong. She released her hands from hiding. They reminded her, filmed in the gelatinous paste, of the egg sacks of kitchen moths. She held them up, and smiled.

What Ruth thought was difficult to tell. She was attractive in a handsome, permanent way, with the type of robust features that made it difficult to imagine her ever having been a girl. When she stood, her waist was thick in the uneven way of early pregnancy. She held a basket in one hand and a scissors in the other and announced that it would be her honor to cut Minna’s veil. Then she jumped down from the wagon, entered the house only to exit a minute later, calling it airless and foul and what had Minna been
doing
with herself since she’d arrived over a month ago? Ach. Ruth would show her how to make a proper whitewash, but first—she beamed grimly—there was a bride to be made. She marched Minna around back, carrying a crate chair in one hand, the basket and scissors and sack in the other, a damp rag between her teeth. The rag she used to wipe down Minna’s hands—“Spread your fingers, dear.
Wider
.”—then she slipped the sack over Minna’s head.

In a civilized place, Minna thought, she would be permitted to question these people, the Friedmans, before allowing them on her property, into her house. She would have the right to tell Max that he should warn her the next time company was coming. Yet what good would it do here? They lived without locks or fences or any semblance of privacy. For privacy, Minna would have to crawl down between the banks of the creek, or lie in a patch of soil she’d cleared, like an animal.

So she’d let the Friedmans roll in and now here she was in her own yard with her head in her own flour sack. She’d sneezed at first, but now she was used to the thin, powdery air and only sweated, lightly, from her scalp. As of this morning, Max still hadn’t made any mention of a wedding, let alone one whose preparations were under way, but this was what Minna had been waiting for. Wasn’t it? And there was something restful about being inside the sack, unable to see except for the soft white light, required to do nothing but sit still. Ruth’s scissors rasped softly through the cloth. Minna could sleep like this. If not for the insistent jab of Ruth’s voice.

“You’ll like it here.”

“Mm.”

“It’s a wonderful life.”

Minna nodded.

“Stop moving! It’s wonderful. Once you have children.”

A light breeze puffed the sack away from Minna’s ear.
Children.
She felt under sail—as if she might lean slightly and be carried off the crate. Ruth’s voice, if she let it drift, could sound like a fiddle, being plucked and massaged.

“Children of your own. You’ll see. We’ll have a time of it then. Sit still! That cow needs grass.”

“Mm.”

“It won’t produce without grass.”

“No.”

“It needs to pasture.”

“I’ll tell Max.”

“You’ll tell Max.”

“Mm.”

“You do know, dear, you’re not marrying much of a farmer.”

Minna knew what Ruth saw as she said this: the failed field, most of it still draped in crushed wheat. The shack they called the “barn,” lying in ruins from a cyclone last spring. The fields they were still clearing, though the planting season was over. She wanted to say,
I know, I know! He couldn’t hammer a nail to fix a fence—if we even had a fence!
But another voice warned her off—she didn’t trust Ruth not to report her disloyalty. She barely trusted her to cut her veil. Besides, who was Minna to criticize Max’s uselessness? Beneath the bed was what she’d been doing for the past month: a pile of braided grass that would bewilder Ruth. Minna had gotten fast with the braids. They were a small, absurd accomplishment, but she liked to peek at them, count them, see their mass grow.

“He gets by,” she said.

“No,” said Ruth. “The sons get him by.”

Minna’s gauzy state was gone now. This was another test, perhaps.
Are you loyal, or are you smart?
She smelled the rust in the room in the basement in the municipal building.
Do you remove your clothes because you’re obedient, or depraved? Are you humble, or desperate?
A girl had to choose. Ruth’s scissors bit, insistent: would Minna defend Max, or did she realize that he wouldn’t, couldn’t, provide for her? Or maybe Ruth was asking about a more particular aspect of Minna’s loyalty—maybe what she really wanted was to goad Minna into talking about “the sons.”

“Sit still!”

Minna stiffened.

“I’ve upset you,” Ruth said, loosening the string around the sack. “There, there. It’s not easy, I know, coming all this way not knowing who you’ll marry. Of course, I came by way of an aunt who knew a girl who’d married one of Leo’s cousins. I had some idea of what I was getting into. And I didn’t come straight to Sodokota. We were years in Milwaukee first.” Her thumbs pressed above Minna’s ears. “But it’s not so bad,” she added. “It could be worse. Apparently, he’s leaning toward letting you keep your hair.”

Minna grabbed the sack with both hands. She hadn’t thought to hope against baldness. She’d been worried about hunger and cyclones, and, when she couldn’t help it, about whether Max’s pale, furtive fingers on her skin would only be irritating, or unbearable. But to be shorn, like a sheep, like the women she’d always felt ashamed for? To wear a
sheytl
on her head? The wigs reminded her of stuffed rabbits, or squirrels.

She lifted the cloth until she could see her boots. “How do you know that he won’t make me cut it?”

“I don’t
know
. Let go of the sack, dear. Who ever knows what a man will do?The first wife wore a
sheytl
, black as ink. But Leo says Max says the boys are trying to convince him.”

“Which way?”

“To let you keep it. Of course. Let go.”

Minna let the sack fall. She wondered which of the boys had said what about her hair. Since his braiding lesson, Samuel had looked at her more directly than usual, which was the opposite of what she’d expected—as if to challenge, or further confuse, her memory of his breath.

(Which she was not supposed to be thinking about.)

“Their mother, you know—she was a very beautiful woman.”

Minna straightened on the crate.

“I mean beautiful in the way no one disputes.”

“Oh.”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this. Perhaps you’d rather not know?”

Minna waited.

“She had money,” Ruth said. “Timber money. Lina Rozenberg was her name, as in Rozenberg Timber.”

Wood,
Jacob had said.
Our mother sold wood.

“You wouldn’t know it where you’re from but Rozenberg’s was something else. Everyone knew Rozenberg. Enough money she could have married any boy she wanted. So she chose the one destined to become a great rabbi.”

“I don’t understand,” Minna said.

“Max, dear. That was Max. His father and grandfather and great-grandfather, they were all rabbis.”

Minna started to turn around, but Ruth grabbed her shoulders and set her back in place. “I’m still working. Of course you want to know, of course you would, why Max himself didn’t succeed. I’m afraid I’ve aroused your curiosity—though really it isn’t my place. I don’t have all the answers, though I do know certain things, by way of Leo. Who wouldn’t like my telling you, I’m sure. But he won’t have to know, will he, dear?”

Minna shook her head as slightly as she could.

“Good,” Ruth said. “Now sit still. I should say, before I tell you, that Leo was younger than Max, and lived outside town—his family were farmers—so it’s not as if he knows the story intimately. He knows what everyone knew—which was quite enough, as far as I’m concerned, given that people came from all over to watch the beautiful Lina Rozenberg’s wedding parade, and eat from her father’s feast, and dance at his dance—Lina and Max were lifted in chairs made from his trees!! Of course, that’s not the point, dear. The point is what happened after. It was nothing evil, not at first—only Max, it turned out, wasn’t like his father or his grandfather, he was missing some
klugshaft
or
heylikayt
, however you want to call it. Lina realized this. Everyone saw her realize it. They saw her,
bislekhvayz
, turn from him. She bore him two sons, then stopped. She was cold to his parents.

Then Max was passed over for rabbi in favor of his cousin and he fell into despair. Lina would barely look at him now. She looked at Samuel instead, she sent Samuel to
yeshiva
, said Samuel would be the next
Baal Shem Tov.
For years they lived like this. Imagine. Then the town was attacked. Leo was there, even Leo will admit he was terrified, every house emptied onto the street, chairs and mirrors and windows and cradles, everything smashed, and then the
shul
was raided, too, the Torah scrolls carried out like heads, Leo says, and the Russians herded the most pious men together and raised their crowbars and gave the men a choice, their bodies or the scrolls. And man after man chose themselves. Their knees were broken, or their arms. One was blinded. Both eyes. Then the Russians got to Max and he stood there in front of the whole town, in front of his wife and his sons and his own father, who’d already been beaten, and he chose the scroll.”

Ruth paused, her scissors still. “You can tell now, can’t you, how he never forgave himself.”

Minna nodded. And now Ruth didn’t scold her for moving and in the absence of Ruth’s scolding Minna didn’t know what to do or say. The whole story was awful. Minna was the only one who’d take him. She was ugly next to Lina, and poor, and desperate herself, in her own ways. Which made her, perhaps, a perfect match for Max—which made the whole business more shameful.

“Are you done?” she asked.

“Almost.” Ruth tugged on the veil. “So you see when they got here, it wasn’t the sod hut that ran Lina off. It wasn’t the work, as the boys would have you think. And
that
is why I tell you this little story, my dear! Yes. Not as gossip, but encouragement! You shouldn’t let a little hardship put you off.”

The scissors made a final snap. “There. All done. I’ll hem it but there.”

Minna felt a breeze at the back of her head.

“Now you can see your lovely hair.”

Lovvvvily
, was how Ruth said it, savoring the word, and Minna understood. Ruth herself was shorn. Of course. It shouldn’t surprise her, yet did: that the braided bun she’d glimpsed under Ruth’s white, American bonnet was made of another woman’s hair. An Indian’s, maybe—or maybe it had been ordered from Sioux Falls, wherever that was, where the meat was supposed to come from, or from Milwaukee, or Chicago. Or perhaps it was a Gypsy’s hair—maybe Ruth had carried it across the ocean wrapped in a shawl, like a little dog, on her own journey from Odessa, or Kiev, or Vilna, or some town Minna had never heard of. Lina Rozenberg must have had one, too, but apparently she would have worn hers beautifully. Whereas Ruth’s embarrassed her; she tied it back, kept it concealed; she must have hated Lina. Ruth’s scalp must be rough and gray, closer to the surface of a man’s chin than a woman’s head. Minna felt a rush of sorrow for her, and wondered if this was how friendship began. Then she heard again the way Ruth had said
lovvvvily
, and thought of the pleasure she’d taken in telling Minna about Max, and knew that Ruth’s jealousy was the sort so minutely aimed, it was an insult: apart from her hair—which was not in fact lovely but a tangled mess, for Minna hadn’t seen the point of using her comb since she’d arrived—she coveted nothing of Minna’s life. She was like the noblewoman who used to roll through Beltsy on a carriage with rubber springs, who as she passed the little porches with the little people living their little lives, doled out flattery of the most condescending kind:
What a lovvvvily flower! I’ve never seen such a fat baby! How lucky you are to have such fine lace curtains!

“You might have left the sack a sack,” Minna heard herself say. “It will look like one anyway.”

Ruth had begun raising the cloth—now she was a still, dark spot behind it. “You would rather I hadn’t come?”

“I didn’t say—”

“You need no company?”

Minna lifted the cloth from her face. She squinted up. Ruth’s smile did not involve her eyes.

“I only meant—just—everyone will know it’s a sack—”

“Everyone.” Ruth laughed. “Who is this everyone you imagine attending your wedding?”