I sat in an unfamiliar parlor on East Thirteenth Street. The room was close, and there were rollaway cots that had been covered with white sheets, the beds where R’s sisters had slept. A sheet also covered the mirror on the wall, as was always the case during mourning periods. R was nineteen and had been burned on her arms and legs. The skin was red and mottled now, coated with a healing gel of aloe and fish oil. She had been a pretty girl, but now she seemed ravaged, not just by the effects of the fire on her body but by the memory of all she had seen. She told me she had no wish to be awake. There were days when she slept for eighteen hours or more, doing her best to bypass time completely.
“Did I deserve this?” R asked me. Her voice was so young and plaintive I felt only a fool would dare to respond. Who was I to remark upon her life? All the same I made a comment I thought might ease our conversation. I told her no, she did not deserve her fate, and if there was a God, something I myself doubted, then he had made a terrible mistake.
She laughed hoarsely and said, “God has nothing to do with this. It’s men’s greed that made this happen.”
Her mother was watching from the hallway, to ensure I didn’t tire R or upset her by dredging up memories of March 25. I recounted what I had so far learned of Hannah Weiss. R’s eyes were lowered as I spoke. When I finished she lifted her gaze to meet mine.
“They didn’t know her completely,” R said. “I was her closest friend.”
I signaled to the mother then, and asked if she would bring us tea. She had been suspicious of me from the start and had insisted I leave my camera in the front hall. Now she looked at R with an uneasy expression, but R merely said, “I’ll be fine with him. We could use the tea for our parched throats.”
When her mother went down the corridor, I asked R what she meant.
“Hannah went to labor meetings and didn’t tell her father. Mr. Weiss was strict. She knew he would fear for her safety. He would have never allowed her to risk going to prison. I saw her once with several strikers outside another factory on Great Jones Street. She ran after me and made me promise not to tell. So I gave her my promise. She hugged me to thank me. She said, I’ll remember this.”
“Even if her father wouldn’t approve, there’s nothing so unusual in any of that,” I countered.
“She wasn’t alone. She was with a man. She started going to union meetings with him. I think she was in love with him.”
I leaned forward, interested. “And you knew this because?”
R laughed at me. I think she definitely took me for a fool. “From the look on her face.”
That was all R could tell me—she did not know the man’s name or address—but it was enough to make me wonder if the image of Hannah I’d been carrying had been distorted by the tide of her father’s love. Perhaps I hadn’t been able find a map of who she was because I’d been misled. She was more independent than I’d thought. More willing to take a risk.
I walked for a long time after leaving R. Without thinking, I found myself outside the building where the Weisses lived. I went upstairs and knocked on the door. I went by nearly every day, though I had little to report. It had become a ritual I felt I needed to complete, even on those occasions when I stayed only a few moments, embarrassed by how little I’d discovered. And yet Weiss never faulted me. He was still hopeful.
“Did you find anything?” he asked after he’d let me in. “The gold necklace? Her shoes? Anyone who saw her?”
I said no. I couldn’t tell Weiss that his daughter had loved some man he’d never heard of or met and that she’d had a rebel’s soul.
“You’ll find her,” he said, sure of himself, sure of me, perhaps desperate to be so.
I stayed for dinner, reciting the evening prayers along with him out of respect. I still remembered them. Hannah’s sister made us a meal of barley soup, stuffed cabbage, then a roast chicken, along with bread, butter, and pavel, a plumlike butter. For dessert there was an apple strudel with sugar sprinkled on top. To me, it was a feast. I was reminded of my mother’s cooking, the way she sang to herself as she went about her chores, her use of herbs to make the meal more appealing. I thanked Ella and said, in return for including me in their dinner, I would help her clean up. The truth was, I wanted to stand beside her out of the old man’s hearing, so we might have some privacy.
“Your sister was in love?” I said.
Ella shot me a look. “What difference does it make?”
“Maybe nothing, maybe everything.”
“If so, she didn’t tell me.”
“She told you everything,” I reminded her.
“He was just a boy. Nothing serious. She’d only just met him. That’s all she said. All I know is that his name was Samuel. She said I would meet him, but that day didn’t come.”
The plates were chipped and the dishwater was tepid. I didn’t blame Ella for leading me astray by not mentioning this Samuel, nor did I berate her for the time I’d wasted searching for a vision that was untrue. I would now have to begin all over again, and think of Hannah as a different sort of person. I was about to let the topic drop when Ella surprised me by gripping my hand.
“I dreamt again that Hannah was in water. She was whirling in a circle, dressed in blue. When I woke up I heard her voice. She told me she couldn’t come back to me. That she’d tried, but it was no longer possible.”
She grasped my hand tightly, and I comforted her as Hochman might have, assuring her this wasn’t an unusual reaction to great loss. I hoped I didn’t sound as pompous as he always had. “It’s normal to have such dreams.”
I didn’t tell Ella that I sometimes heard my own mother’s voice after all these years, when I could barely remember her face and couldn’t bring myself to say her name. Nor did I mention that I often dreamed of my father. Though he was alive, he was lost to me as well. In my dreams, he stood in silence, knee deep in the grass.
“You’re saying this is normal? That I see her clear as day?”
“It is when you love someone,” I said. I didn’t know what I was talking about, but I’d heard Hochman express similar sentiments and I parroted his words. My next statement, however, I knew to be true. “You imagine what you wish for.”
“My pillow was wet,” Ella insisted. “She was there.”
I shook my head. “You wept. It was you.”
On the way home, I stopped across the street from my father’s home. I had to pass nearby. It was dark, and the night was unusually warm. I wondered how it was that we could have slept side by side in the forest at one time in our lives and be complete strangers to each other now. Would he know me if he passed me by on the street, without my black hat and coat, my hair shorn close to my head, or would I just be another citizen of New York? I thought of my younger self, the child who did not understand how a person could be on earth one instant and gone the next. How was it possible that my mother, who had been so alive, had become nothing more than ashes? Surely she must be somewhere. I became a finder because I needed an answer to this question. So perhaps this was my gift.
I did not know Hannah Weiss and, if her sister was correct, I never would, but that didn’t matter.
I could not let her go.