Threads and Flames (40 page)

His eyelids flickered at the sound of his name, but that was all.

Raisa covered her face with her hands.
“Gavrel!”
His name was a long, desolate, animal cry, a pain that burned its way out of her soul.

Strong hands seized her shoulders from behind and gently brought her to her feet. “Dear God, you poor girl. Let me help you.” A sweet voice spoke to her in lightly accented English. Raisa turned, lowering her hands, eyes half blinded by tears.

Before she saw the woman's face, before she was fully aware of the sparkle of gold and pearls pinned to the woman's crisp white collar, she saw the empty space in the circle, the tiny hollow where a single pearl no bigger than a sesame seed had once been. She looked a little higher and recognized the woman who had fainted among the open coffins on Misery Lane, the woman whose fine clothes, healthy looks, and grand name made it impossible, unthinkable for her to be—

“Henda?”

They stared at one another for a heartbeat, for two, and then—

“Raisa? Is it really you?” The Yiddish words barely left the woman's lips before she crushed Raisa to her chest. “It is! It can't be, but thank God, it is! It is!”

Raisa couldn't speak. She was drowning where she stood, new tears of amazed thanksgiving flowing into the tears she'd shed for Gavrel. All she could do was sob and press her face so close to Henda that she could feel their mother's brooch marking her cheek with its broken circle of pearls.

“Don't cry!” Henda exclaimed. “I'm scared that you'll make
me
cry, and then how ungrateful would we look for such a miracle? To find you alive when I thought you were gone forever—Raisa,
please
stop crying!”

“I—I want to.” Raisa choked out the words. She heard the sound of approaching footsteps from the hall. “I don't—I don't want Gavrel's parents to find me like this. They'll think the worst, even though—oh, Henda, I'm so happy, but I don't know
how
to stop crying like a fool!”

“To stop crying, my Raisa . . . laugh.” A hoarse, familiar voice made her catch her breath sharply. A warm hand curved around her own in a perfect fit. His face was pale and too thin, but when she looked into Gavrel's eyes, Raisa rejoiced to see that they were alive again, and lit by the smile she knew so well.

Before she could respond, the Kamenskys came in. Gavrel's room became a storm of hugs, kisses, more tears, and soon enough, arguments. Brina tried to swarm onto Gavrel's lap, only to have Mr. Kamensky hold her back, warning her that she might hurt him. That made Brina yowl, which in turn made Mrs. Kamensky scold her husband only a breath before she ordered Fruma not to touch her brother until she had taken off her overcoat.

“It's carrying cold air from outside. Do you want him to catch pneumonia, God forbid?”

“Mama, you can't catch pneumonia from a cold coat!”

“Since when are you a doctor?” Mrs. Kamensky turned to Henda, whose plain blue dress worn under a spotless white bib apron gave her an official look. “Young woman, you're a nurse;
you
tell her I'm right.”

“I'm sure you are, ma'am,” Henda replied. “But not about me. I'm not a nurse.” She put her arm around Raisa's shoulders. “I'm only her sister.”

 

 

While Raisa pushed Gavrel's wheelchair, Henda led everyone into an improvised parlor down the hall. She explained that it had once been the cottage library, until the owner of the property had turned the house into a refuge for those people whose minds and spirits had been scarred. As everyone settled down into the comfortably upholstered sofa and chairs, Henda tugged at the bell pull hanging on the wall beside the unlit fire-place. When a young girl in a dusting cap and apron answered her summons, Henda said, “Molly, will you please ask Mrs. Voss to send up tea and a luncheon for eight—” Her eyes fell on Brina. “I mean, for nine guests. Have Joshua help you, and let him bring in some of the small tables from downstairs.”

“Yes, Mrs. Taylor.” The girl dropped a curtsy before hurrying away.

Henda turned to her guests. “There will be food and drink for you shortly. Meanwhile, would you all mind if I took a short walk with my sister?”

“Short, long, whatever you like!” Mr. Kamensky exclaimed, grinning. “We won't be lonely.” He and his wife had moved their chairs to either side of Gavrel, with Fruma hovering behind him. It looked as though they were afraid he would grow wings and take flight if they didn't hem him in.

Henda got a coat and led Raisa out of the cottage, into the sleeping garden. They walked the winding path in silence, until Henda paused beside an empty birdbath caught in a tangle of dead ivy. Here she removed the brooch pinned to her collar and held it out to her sister. “When I woke from my faint, that day at the pier, I thought I'd lost my mind . . . again.”

“Again?” Raisa echoed as the circlet of gold and pearls was placed in the palm of her hand.

Henda's face distorted with painful memories. “The letter—
that
letter—it shattered me, Raisaleh. It tore away the world.” She closed Raisa's fingers over their mother's pin and cupped her sister's hand with both of her own. “It was a dark time for me. Even after I was well, sometimes I still doubted myself, wondering if I could tell reality from dreams. That awful day, in the midst of so much horror, how could I be seeing
your
face leaning over me, when that cursed letter said that you were—?” She shivered. “God forbid. But I
wanted
to believe my eyes, and when I grabbed your shawl just as you were being dragged away, and I found Mama's brooch left behind in my hand, I knew you were real. It gave me hope. From that moment on I was certain I would find you again.”

“Henda ...” Raisa ran the fingertips of her free hand over the rough stone rim of the abandoned birdbath. “How hard did you look?”

“I know what you're saying,” Henda said sadly. “If
I
had looked for you myself, it wouldn't have taken nine months and a miracle for us to be standing here.” She squeezed Raisa's hand that held the brooch. “As soon as my husband brought me out of the pier, into the fresh air, I told him that I'd seen you and I had to go back inside at once. He refused, insisting that I needed to go home and rest. I can't blame him for that—I was frantic, almost hysterical, clinging to his coat like a mad-woman. I promised to go home at once if he'd stay behind and try to catch you when you came out—I described you to him exactly—but again he refused.”

“Why?” Raisa's fingers tightened on the cold stone.

“You sound ready to condemn him,” Henda said softly. “But hear me out, please. He knew what I'd suffered when I received that accursed letter. He had no reason to believe you were alive and every reason to think that what I'd seen at the pier had overwhelmed me. When I calmed myself enough to show him the brooch and tell him what it meant, he went back immediately. But by that time it was too late.

“He hired a private detective at once. Poor man, he felt so guilty for not having believed me earlier! He was afraid to let me risk my health by undertaking the search, and persuaded me that a professional would find you faster.” Her mouth twisted. “He didn't know that the man was a bumbler, a cheat, and a drunkard, eating up our time and money, filling our ears with false hopes, and doing nothing to find you. My husband finally fired him last week, after hiring a second detective to observe and report on his ‘work.'” She sighed. “All that time, wasted. How could we have been such fools for so long?”

“I was foolish, too,” Raisa said. “When your friend told me that I'd just helped Mrs. Harrison Taylor, that name was enough to convince me that you
couldn't
be my sister. I heard that your young man was a German Jew, not some Yankee.”

“I always call my husband by the name he was born with: Hillel Schneider,” Henda said. “A few years ago, his father decided that the family would have a better chance of mingling with the
right
people—whatever that means—if they had
American
names.”

“Whatever
that
means,” Raisa muttered.

“And on my wedding day, Hillel's father tried persuading me to change
my
name to Johanna,” Henda said. “I almost said yes.”

“Why would you even
think
of agreeing to such a thing?”

“Because I was so grateful to that man,” Henda replied. “I loved his son almost from the day he first spoke to me. Hillel was so kind, so caring. He treated me, a poor sewing machine girl, with as much courtesy and respect as if I were a princess. If he hadn't been a rich man's son, I would never have kept him at arm's length for as long as I did, but I was afraid that if we became sweethearts, it would make trouble between him and his parents. Why would they want a penniless nobody for a daughter-in-law?”

“But if he loved you—” Raisa began.

“He loved his parents, too. And I loved him enough so that I never wanted him to have to choose between us. All of that changed on the day I got Reb Laski's letter. Oh, Raisa, even now I can't remember anything that happened from the time that I read those awful words until the moment I found myself in a strange room, a strange bed, with a beautifully dressed lady keeping watch over me. That was how I first met my Hillel's mother. Hillel saved me, Raisa, he and his parents together. When I was insane with grief, he brought me into their home and they took me in, healed me, comforted me, found doctors who brought me back among the living. The healing took a long, long time. When I was stronger, they took me upstate for a rest cure near Saratoga Springs. While we were there, my Hillel would take me for walks in the countryside, and one day that was where he told me he wanted to marry me.”

“What did you tell him?” Raisa asked.

“The truth. That I loved him, too, but that I would sooner vanish back into the streets than repay his parents' kindness by stealing their son.”

“Yet here you are, Mrs. Harrison Taylor!” Raisa smiled at her sister.

“Yes, I am, because that night, his father came to me and said that he and his wife knew how Hillel and I felt about one another, and that they would be happy to welcome me into their hearts just as they'd welcomed me into their home.” A sudden wind came up, biting cold. Henda dug her chin into her coat collar in just the way Raisa remembered her doing in the winter months back in the shtetl. “We should go back.”

As they returned to the house, Raisa asked, “Henda, have you written to Glukel since—?”

“No. Not to her, not to Reb Laski, to no one. At first it was because I couldn't. I was too ill. And when I was better, even though we had only a small, private wedding, the preparations left me too exhausted to do more than live from day to day. After that ...” She took a deep breath. “After that, I was afraid to write.”

“Afraid?”

“Afraid that if I did send word after such a long silence, I'd be blamed for not having done so sooner. How stupid, I know. Because the longer I hesitated, the more silence grew between me and Glukel. If I broke it, what would she say? That I was a selfish, ungrateful girl to leave her? That I was worse than that for pretending she didn't exist for so long? And the worst thing is, she'd be right.” She looked down sharply. “I'm so ashamed.”

“You couldn't help it, Henda.”

“I should have
tried,
” Henda said fiercely. “I did write to her, Raisa—to her through Reb Laski—but I never could make myself finish the letters. I should have been stronger! I should have done—”

Raisa held her close. “You did what you could when you could. You were as strong as you were able to be. We'll write to Glukel together, today, and to Reb Laski, too. I promise you, when they read what we have to tell them, they'll understand and they'll rejoice.”

Henda smiled. “Thank you, Raisaleh.”

The sisters walked on, their arms around each other's waists. They were almost to the door of the house when Raisa murmured, “You were so sick for so long, under so much strain, and yet—why were you at the pier that day, Henda?”

“I had to be there,” Henda answered quietly. “The people I was with—new friends I've made through my husband—felt the same way. They knew they had to witness the full, ugly truth of what had happened. We had to see the faces of the tragedy, even when the faces themselves were gone. And for me, those faces were a part of my life. I worked with girls like those who lay in coffined rows on that pier. I walked with the dread that my next step might bring me to the foot of a wooden box holding someone I'd once known, a friend.

“You know, Raisa, when you have enough money to live a life of ease, it can warp your sight. It lulls you into looking at disasters as if they were only stories, stage shows, moving pictures. You close the book, you put down the newspaper, you leave the theater, and you're free of it. You can go back to your comfortable life and pretend nothing happened because it didn't happen to you. My friends and I don't want that to happen to us. We felt that we had to remember that each of the one hundred and forty-six who died, even the nameless ones, was a
person,
not a number. Numbers burn too easily, and they're too easily forgotten. What happened once can happen again if all that we remember are the numbers.”

She gestured at the cottage. “This house was the gift my friend Dorothea received on her wedding day from her husband.”

“Luciana mentioned him,” Raisa said. “I didn't know that a doctor could be so wealthy.”

“He was born to wealth, to a prominent New York society family,” Henda said. “But he refused to settle for a life of empty pleasures. He wanted to make a difference in the lives of those who needed help, to heal them so that someday they might help others. Dorothea felt the same way, and used her own money to transform, maintain, and run this place as a rest home. After the fire, she opened its doors even wider, to make it a refuge for anyone whose mind was affected by the fire—anyone, not just Triangle workers but their friends, their families, even the people who stood as witnesses when the bodies fell.