The Auerbach Will by Stephen; Birmingham

most had, her mother pointed out, reminding her again of her good fortune. Most girls were at work by age fourteen, and the time had come for Essie to begin to make some financial contribution to the household. If nothing else, she could help Minna in the store. The time was also approaching when Essie should begin thinking about finding a husband. Minna herself had been fifteen when she was married, and seventeen when Essie was born. These matters, however, would be left in the hands of Essie’s father, who would find her a match in the customary way.
    At P.H.S. Eleven, knowing that this was her last year, Essie was not studying very hard, nor was her mind really on the complicated business of what lay ahead for her. Most of the courses she was taking—Home Economics, Civics, Botany—were designed to teach a Jewish girl to be a practical housekeeper, to cook and to sew and to press flowers under glass, and she found them too easy to get high marks in. But that was the year she had discovered books—not the books that were the texts for her courses, but the books on the shelves of the branch of the Public Library on East Broadway near Chatham Square. All that was needed was her name and address on a little card, and all these books were hers to take home for free. There were newspapers and magazines at the library, too—magazines on art and travel and science and history—and all at once she found herself lifted up, transported, out of the constricted and quarrelsome little world of the Tageblatt , into the Casbah of Marakesh and onto the landscape of the moon.
    She read ravenously, everything she could get her hands on, from Shakespeare’s plays to the latest novel by Joseph Conrad, called The Secret Agent , and the more daring modern novels by Bertha M. Clay, the poems of Ethel Lynn Beers and Rose Terry Cooke. Vicariously, she rose in the ranks of the French bourgeoisie with Emma Bovary, was titillated by the erotic Kate Chopin, and suffered the humiliation of Hester Prynne. “Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart,” she read, and sighed.
    Her father complained about it. “Look at her,” he would cry, “her nose in a book again!”
    â€œBut you’re always reading, Papa.”
    â€œNot the trash you read—novels, picture magazines.”
    â€œYou wanted me to memorize Shakespeare. Remember?”
    â€œBut that was for your school,” he argued. “No husband will want a wife who spends all her time with a book.”
    â€œYour papa’s right,” her mother said. “Men don’t like bookish women. If a man ever finds out you’re bookish, he’ll want nothing to do with you.”
    Still, she continued her journey to the center of the earth with Jules Verne.
    At school, meanwhile, there was one weekly lecture which she had begun to look forward to. It took place on Fridays, and the tall young man who conducted it was one of the Do-Gooders from Uptown who worked as a volunteer in the school system. The course he taught was called Living With Our City, and the topics he chose were almost uniformly boring—How Our Fire Department Does Its Job, A Day in the Life of a Sanitation Inspector, Our Mayor and His Councilmen, Why the Policeman is Our Friend, and so on—nor was his manner of delivery particularly inspiring, as he droned on about the sewer system and abjured against young people’s practice of opening fire hydrants on hot days. And so, instead of listening to what this tall young man had to say, Essie had taken to making sketches of him in her notebook, because Essie thought him simply the handsomest young man she had ever seen.
    He must have been in his early twenties, with the darkest, curliest hair, the bluest eyes, the strongest chin, the straightest nose. He was also beautifully dressed, and one of her classmates had told her why—his family was