So she kept to herself even more than usual, finding hidden carrels in the library to occupy, arriving at class at the last minute to avoid conversations in the hallway. Afterward she escaped as quickly as possible, often walking to the Asylum for Orphaned Hebrews, where she’d stand on the sidewalk and watch the children run about on the playground in their ever-changing cliques. She took care not to linger too long, though—more than once she’d overheard a child wondering if she was someone’s mother, come uptown to watch them at play.
Then, the subway south again, to walk quickly home past theaters and lecture-halls where women shouted their anger from the stage. They call us too weak and delicate for the vote, while our bodies burn to fuel their fortunes! Her boardinghouse had begun to feel like a prison where she waited each night for parole. To his credit, the Jinni had arrived punctually ever since the fire—but they’d never quite patched their rift, and his mood grew ever more poor and distant. She knew that his lapse in memory had been a case of terrible timing more than anything else, yet his morose silence irritated her more with each passing night.
Then, a ray of hopeful news. Anna, through good luck and better care, had been allowed to keep her leg. The hospital discharged her, the infection in retreat.
Anna arrived home to find her apartment swept and scrubbed, and the icebox crammed with food. On the kitchen table was a basket of the biggest oranges she’d ever seen, along with a sheaf of recipes for various nutritional broths and mashes. Anna hid the oranges at once, in case the neighbors should spot them and start rumors about a wealthy admirer. She’d assumed that she no longer had a job—but, to her considerable surprise, there was a letter from Morris that said she was expected at the laundry as soon as possible. Later she’d learn that, emboldened by the new talk of workers’ rights and general strikes, all the girls at Waverly had threatened to walk out if Morris so much as thought about replacing her. Within a week she was managing her charges from a rolling chair, her foot propped upon a stool. One night, the girls dragged Anna to a suffrage meeting on Canal Street, and begged her to tell the audience her story—and from then on she was a mainstay, distributing flyers and sewing banners, her limp transformed to a badge of honor. It’s something I can do, she told the Golem as they walked slowly together at Seward Park, Anna leaning on her crutch. I’m not good at much, but I can work.
“I wish I could do more to help them,” the Golem told the Jinni one morning near dawn, as they lay together on his bed.
“You always wish that, Chava.” As was often the case these days, the Jinni’s voice was tinged with impatience. “Why not be content with saving Anna’s life?”
“That’s different. I owed her a debt. I still do.”
“It seems to me that you’ve paid it.”
She shook her head. “You’re changing the subject. This isn’t about Anna, it’s about all of them. How can I add my voice to theirs when I’m afraid to go to a suffrage meeting?”
“I don’t understand why you’d want to go to one in the first place,” the Jinni said.
She turned to face him. “I beg your pardon—do you not think women should have the vote?”
He sighed, as though already weary of the conversation. “Of course they should, it’s ludicrous that they don’t. But we aren’t speaking of women, Chava. We’re speaking of you.”
The words hit her like a slap. She lay still a moment, and then said, “What, exactly, do you mean?”
“Only that you seem to forget, sometimes, that you are not one of them. There’s nothing for you to fear in a factory, or a laundry. You needn’t worry about the inheritance laws, as you’re no one’s parent and no one’s child. Yes, you must live by their rules, as I do. But to ‘add your voice to theirs,’ as you put it, would simply be meddling in their affairs.”
Her ire rose. “Are you saying I shouldn’t worry about protecting the women who work in factories and laundries because I’m not one myself? That’s more selfish than I would expect from you.”
He chuckled. He was lying on his back, one hand behind his head, gazing up at the ceiling. “Chava,” he said, “what do you think will happen when the suffragists win? Will all injustice be wiped from the land once women have the vote?”
“No, not all at once. But much of it, yes, over time.”
“And what of the wives of the businessmen who own the factories? Will they, too, vote to improve the lives of working-women?”
“They certainly ought to.”
“What they ought to do is neither here nor there. Let us concentrate on what they will do. The businessmen’s wives will vote to keep their money in their own pockets. The Temperance reformers will vote to keep their husbands sober, and the barmaids will vote to protect their jobs. The Christian women will vote to close businesses on Sundays, and the Jewish women will vote to keep them open. The Negro women, I assume, still will have no vote at all—but the rest will divide themselves, just as the men have. And you will do exactly the same. You will vote your own interests, which are the interests of those around you, and believe yourself to be a model of compassion, when in truth your motives are just as self-centered as their own.”
She lay there stunned. Had he ever talked to her like this before? Where had this tirade come from? “That’s not true!”
“Oh, it isn’t? What if, when you arrived in New York, you were rescued not by a penniless rabbi on the Lower East Side, but a Fifth Avenue millionaire? Do you think that you’d be half so
