Page 63 of If Looks Could Kill
I looked up to see her watching me. Her words rang in the silence between us.I made my choice. Nobody but me.
Butwhyhad she made it? Why Freyda, the one who herself had warned us about the dangers of entering a brothel? She, who had lived in the city for ages and knew better. Why?
As if reading my mind, she spoke. “I did want to help your Cora,” she said slowly. “That’s how the idea first took root. But…”
“What idea?”
“I thought I could do one better than Nellie Bly,” she said miserably. “I thought, if she can enter Blackwell’s Island and pretend to be insaneand sell half a million newspapers, I could enter a notorious madam’s lair and pretend to be ‘fallen.’?” She laughed bitterly. “And me, such a nice little Jewish girl.”
Freyda was many wonderful things—brilliant, brave, with a biting wit, not to mention loyal and committed—but “nice” wasn’t quite what I’d have called my hard-talking, almost-trouser-wearing anarchist friend.
“Your family must be worried sick,” I said. “Should I get a message to them?”
She was silent for a while. “I don’t know how to go to them with this.”
I leaned back and looked into her eyes. “How long were you in there, Freyda?”
She kicked at the faded carpet. “Six days.”
Six days. No turkey dinner. No menorah. No latkes.
“After six days, won’t your family fear you’re dead?”
She couldn’t speak.
“Tell me,” I said softly, “who waits for you at home?”
She gulped. “My mother and father. My younger brother and my younger sister. And my baba.” Her breath caught in her throat.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Your… baba?”
“Babushka,” she explained. “My grandmother.”
The mention of her baba seemed to unlock something. Her face contorted with sorrow.
“Tell me about them,” I said.
She took a shuddering breath. “They’re very… observant,” she said. “Devout.”
I nodded.
“They already think I’m a scandal. That America has corrupted my morals.”
“You’ve done nothing wrong,” I pointed out.
“That’s not how they’ll see it,” she said. “They won’t see muchdifference between entering a brothel to free a trapped girl and expose an illegal operation in a newspaper article and entering such a ‘den of sin’ for immoral purposes.” She imitated someone, perhaps her mother: “?‘What nice Jewish boy will have you now?’?”
“Freyda,” I said, “don’t you think they’ve been pining for you ever since you left?”
She couldn’t look at me.
“Won’t they be overjoyed to know you’realive?”
Her breath caught in her throat.
“I think,” I said, “you should let them speak for themselves.”
She turned toward me hesitantly.
