As always, she felt vaguely guilty that she never brought the Jinni here, to the streets she’d learned in daylight. She kept meaning to suggest it—but always faltered, and changed her mind. Was it so wrong of her to keep these streets for herself? This was her territory, the one neighborhood she explored on her own. Besides, he’d only make his usual acerbic comments, about the very details she loved: the wide bay windows hung with curtains, the clean sidewalks and tidy stoops. Tedious, he’d call it—and perhaps he was right. But wasn’t tedium a rare and precious thing in this city? How many of its citizens would give everything they had for a chance at an uneventful life?
Onward she went, until she reached 136th, where Hamilton Place sprouted east at an angle from Broadway’s trunk. She glanced right as she crossed the street—and noticed for the first time the high fence of wrought iron that ran alongside a wide expanse of grass.
Curious, she turned toward it.
Bit by bit a many-gabled building appeared, surrounded by a vast lawn, and a playground where groups of children ran about. A squad of teenaged boys stood in rigid formation upon the grass, each holding a pole with a flag at its end. A whistle blew, and the boys executed a complicated set of maneuvers with the flags, waving them above their heads and sweeping them side to side.
She watched, fascinated. Was it a school? The building seemed far too large—and besides, it was a Saturday. A much smaller outbuilding sat near the fence at the middle of the block, and as the Golem approached it she felt a wave of—homesickness? Yes, from young minds full of confusion. Where is Mama? Who are these people, and why don’t they speak Yiddish? Their agitation receded as she passed. She rounded the corner at Amsterdam, where a double gate led to a long, circular drive like a mansion’s. Only then did she see the sign, mounted beside the gate: Asylum for Orphaned Hebrews.
So this was an orphanage. She placed one hand upon the fence and closed her eyes, ignoring the afternoon traffic around her. At this distance, she felt only a diffuse jumble of thoughts—the flag-wavers’ concentration, the various victories and betrayals happening upon the playground—but underpinning it all was a loneliness that seemed to saturate the very bricks. It saddened and beguiled her, and she reached out to it, wishing she could soothe them all—
A bell rang, startling her. The boys on the lawn broke their formation and ran inside, flags whipping behind them. She looked up at the sky, which was just beginning to darken. With some reluctance she walked back to Broadway and descended into the subway. Lost in her own thoughts, she rode back through the earth to the Lower East Side and emerged onto Spring Street: and only then did she feel the galvanizing shock of tragedy all around her, the grief like lightning in the air.
10.
Anna Blumberg’s brush with death occurred while the entire Lower East Side was looking elsewhere.
It began at near to closing time at the Waverly Steam Laundry on Greene Street, where Anna had now worked for eight years. The laundry took its name from nearby Waverly Place, and was meant to evoke Washington Square’s stately brownstones—though in truth the laundry sat among a mishmash of lofts and tenements, and even an ancient wood-frame stable that leaned to one side like a rotting tooth. A man named Hopkins owned the laundry; he’d bought it with the aim of installing his son Morris as the manager, a ploy to keep him out of the betting parlors.
Anna was the most senior of Morris’s hires. She was listed on the books as a washerwoman, but in reality it was Anna, not Morris, who managed the daily choreography of washers, carters, sorters, and pressers. This left Morris free to spend his work hours as he preferred, thumbing through the racing papers and nursing his various grudges. He’d hired Anna in full knowledge of her fallen condition, and was smart enough to give her small raises here and there, just enough to keep her chained to his side. Anna despised Morris, and longed to quit—but what else was there? The laundry had stolen her youth away. At thirty she looked a decade older, her face lined and florid from the constant steam. No one would take her for a salesgirl or a secretary, or even a baker. Waverly, she knew, was as good a deal as she was likely to get.
Sunday was the laundry’s day of rest, its Jewish employees notwithstanding. Morris, however, liked to begin his own personal Sabbath on Saturday afternoons, so he might fetch a good seat at his boxing club; and so Anna had been left in charge of finishing the week’s orders, as usual. She was rushing to fold a hotel’s bedsheets when Daisy, one of the sorting-girls, paused at her table to peer outside the window. “Something’s going on,” she said. “There’s a crowd of people out on the street.”
“Go see what it is,” Anna said, and went back to moving the stacks of folded sheets from table to cart, table to cart. She’d have to
