A scream pierced her thoughts.
She turned in surprise and stumbled into the cart, her leg colliding painfully with its sharp edge. Daisy had returned, and was speaking to another laundry girl, who stood horrified, her hand over her mouth. Without a word the girl ran out the door.
“What is it?” said Anna, walking over. “What’s wrong with Ellie?”
Daisy was white-faced. “There’s a fire at the factory where her sister works. Girls are jumping out the windows.”
“Oh, my God,” Anna murmured.
“Which factory?” another girl demanded.
“Triangle Shirtwaist, in the Asch Building.”
“My friend Ida works at Triangle,” someone said, a quaver in her voice.
The girls all began edging worriedly toward the door. Anna looked around at the work that still had to be done: the sheets rolled halfway through the mangle, the washers full of boiling water. “Go,” she told them. “I’ll finish up.” They threw her grateful looks, and in a moment the laundry had emptied.
Something warm and wet was trickling onto Anna’s foot. She looked down—and saw the gash. It was inches long, and carved deep into her calf. The edges of the skin were pressed inward, along with the torn stocking. Bloody footprints traced her path back to the cart.
She shuddered, suddenly dizzy. Don’t look, she thought. Just take care of it.
She found a towel, tied it tight around the now-aching wound, and mopped the blood from the floor. Then she gritted her teeth and dragged the steaming sheets from the washers. Slop-water drenched her leg; the cut burned as though she’d soaked it in vinegar. She ignored the pain, loaded and spun the extractors, fed the sheets into the mangle one by one.
At last the deliveries were all tagged and sorted. She peeled away the now-sodden towel. The skin around the wound was swollen and grayish, but the bleeding had stopped, at least. It would heal. Others were no doubt hurting worse tonight. She drew the ruined stocking over her calf, then switched off the lights, locked the front door, and limped toward home.
The streets seemed quieter than usual, though more than once she heard crying. Her head throbbed in time with her leg; she remembered the empty icebox, but couldn’t bear the idea of stopping at the butcher’s. She’d send Toby out for something.
She climbed the tenement stairs slowly, gripping the railing tight. By the time she reached their floor, the hallway lamps had turned gray and distant, as though receding down a tunnel. With shaking fingers she fished the key from her bag.
“Mama?” Toby stood in the doorway, dressed in his new Western Union uniform. He was so proud of it that he rarely took it off.
“Hello, boychik.” She smiled, hoping that it looked natural. “I’m sorry I’m late. Are you hungry?” She dropped her bag next to the couch, sat down heavily. Had he said something in reply? She wasn’t sure. He, too, was vanishing down that tunnel, watching her from far away. I’m all right, she told him, I just need a little sleep . . .
The tunnel dimmed entirely, and Toby disappeared into the dark.
* * *
The news arrived at the Asylum at supper-time, and sped through the dining hall.
A fire, at a factory.
Frum’s mother was there.
Who?
Max Frum, in Dormitory 1.
All craned their heads toward the table where the youngest boys ate in pale-faced silence, their eyes avoiding the empty chair in their midst.
Poor kid.
He’s a true orphan now, I guess.
At her own table, Kreindel Altschul heard the whispered words—fire, true orphan. She shivered, and put down her fork.
Yossele, she thought. Tonight. I’ll come to you tonight.
The storage room at the end of the basement’s southern wing was known as the large-item repository, and it was the most neglected and disorderly spot in the entire Asylum. Once, it had been used exclusively for surplus furniture and old pageant props—but that had been in the building’s early days, before the Asylum’s population had grown so large that a second boiler had been deemed necessary. With nowhere else to put it, the workmen had carved a boiler closet from the large-item repository itself: a room within a room, accessible only from the hallway, like a slice taken from the side of a cake. Now, as one traveled deeper into the storage room, it constricted to a narrow corridor and then expanded again at the very back, creating an alcove that was nearly impossible to see from the door.
In the years following the room’s alteration, its contents had become a hopeless jumble. Boxes of concert programs, dusty yearbooks, and other ancient ephemera stacked the walls, shading the feeble light from the window-wells. No one knew exactly when the lock on the door had broken—but no one wanted to replace it, either, in case the act should somehow make them responsible for the room and its contents. Few of the Asylum’s current staff even knew about the alcove in the back, and none of them had seen it for themselves.
In the darkest corner of this hidden lair, shaded by a dusty length of burlap painted with palm trees from a long-ago Biblical play, Yossele the golem sat waiting for his master.
It wasn’t a difficult life, there in the storage room. Instead of the dockyard tarpaulin, he wore an old theater curtain of moth-eaten velvet that Kreindel had unearthed from a box and draped around him. He might’ve grown stiff and uncomfortable in winter were it not for the gigantic boiler on the other side of the wall, sending out its heat day and night. He had no wish to be anywhere else, unless it was closer to Kreindel; and he had no need for visitors, for Kreindel’s mind was his constant companion.
He watched, now, as she lay awake and impatient, waiting for the Asylum to grow still. More children than usual were crying in
