Family Secrets Read Online Free PDF Page B

minute; she threw herself on top of her mother and buried her face in her neck, the way she used to when she was a baby. “I love you, Mama.”
    “I love you, too, shaina maidel. Oooh, what’s this, such a big hug? You have to be careful now, Lavinia, my big girl. I’m going to have another baby.”
    “A boy?”
    “Maybe.”
    “That’s why we have the Polish girl to help out?”
    “You saw her?”
    “Yes,” Lavinia lied.
    “You can help teach her English,” Mama said. “Now that you’re such a good student.”
    “All right. And look, I lost a tooth. I saved it for you.” She held out the tooth proudly.
    “Thank you.”
    She noticed how tired her mama sounded, as if it were hard for her to breathe. Her face was flushed but her hands seemed damp and cold. It must be hard to have babies.
    “Are you having the baby now, Mama?”
    “No, no, not until the spring. I want to rest now a little. You go in the kitchen and see the Polish girl makes the baby’s food right.”
    “Yes, Mama.”
    She went to the kitchen to help out. She would be good, she would help, she would be smart in school, and she would never tell either Mama or Papa anything bad that ever happened to her, ever again. Then they would think she was perfect, and even if she really was an orphan they wouldn’t want to give her away. She would be the best one of all their children.

FOUR
    The immigrants were coming in torrents. The ships disgorged them from steerage, tired, seasick, frightened, hopeful, excited. Some had come to join family, some for an arranged marriage, some just because it had been unbearable where they had been and America had to be better. Some of them had nobody to meet them. But those who were related to Adam Saffron, no matter how distantly, always had a scrap of paper with an address on it clutched in their hands and knew when they got there they would have a place to stay.
    “Another greenhorn is coming,” Adam would say to Lucy, and then she would find someplace for the foreigner to sleep, even if it was the floor. Adam would find a job in a factory for the greenhorn, and at night there were classes in English at night school, so that although the apartment was always filled with strangers babbling in strange tongues and wearing odd-looking clothes, they were really hardly ever there, and so it did not disturb the pattern of family life very much. Although there was another mouth to feed there were also two new capable hands to help out, to wash dishes, to cook some special dish remembered from home with nostalgia, to hold a cranky baby.
    When Adam had any extra money he sent it home to his family in Russia, for he knew Jews were having a hard time there and he believed America was to be his family’s salvation. His family in Russia saved too, and they came one by one, in order of age. First Isaac, his oldest brother, thirty-eight years old and set in his ways, who hated America with all its strangeness and went back to Russia as soon as he could save the passage money. A waste, the ingrate, everyone said; but then he was so old, and it was hard for a middle-aged man to learn new ways.
    Next came his brother Solomon Saffron, with his wife, a cousin. They had been intelligentsia in Russia, spending long hours talking of intellectual things with their friends, respected. Now they were not respected, for they could no longer express their thoughts in this new tongue, and even when they spoke in the old one no one had time to listen. Solomon refused to work in a factory, so Adam set him up with a small candy store. Solomon felt humiliated.
    Adam had better luck with his placid older sister Hepzibah, whom he brought over with her husband and their two children. They stayed, grateful and content, moving into a small apartment in Mudville. Hepzibah’s husband was a tailor, and did well enough.
    Zipporah came over soon afterward, so close in age and temperament to her sister Hepzibah that they might have been twins. The two