Rich Man, Poor Man
Characters from both sides of the tracks mingle in a tale of early 20th-century New York.
HIDDEN
A Novel
  (From "Hidden") |
By Victoria Lustbader
Forge. 463 pp. $24.95
Victoria Lustbader is great at casting. Her first novel has a whole roster of convincing characters: an aging mogul, a weak heir, a brilliant outsider, a dying child, a cold mother and an abused wife. We've met most of them often, but she brings them skillfully to life in Hidden .
A veteran fiction editor with an extensive background in publishing, married to novelist Eric Van Lustbader of The Ninja fame, Lustbader more than lives up to her pedigree. She has written a novel that is hefty but always fun to read. World War I has already begun when first we meet the Gates family, firmly ensconced in upper-crust New York society. Joseph Gates, the aging founder, is a man of steel with enough businesses to rival a contemporary conglomerate. His family resides in Waspish elegance in a 16-room apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park with multiple servants and icy codes of correct behavior.
Jed, the grandson and heir apparent to the empire, feels entrapped by lineage and expectations. Suddenly, in an unprecedented act of rebellion, he secretly decides to join the army bound for Europe "on the very day in April that war had been declared. It had come to him with the undeniability of a sign from God." Despite his family's vigorous attempts to keep him away from actual fighting, Jed pours all his energies into becoming a crack officer and ends up in the bloody battle of the Marne.
At the lower end of Manhattan Island, scraping along in abject poverty, is the Warshinsky clan. Like his uptown contemporary, son David is also desperate to escape, but his constraints are very different. He feels suffocated by his traditional Jewish family crammed into the tiny rooms of a Lower East Side tenement. He is willing to do anything to get away from their narrow and fearful lives. So, acting in secret, he too joins the army. "Every day he reminded himself that he was moving farther and father away from home. To be doing that was worth even going to war."
David and Jed, having met only once in a chance encounter at a Manhattan automat, find each other on the way to war. They become comrades in arms and devoted friends. Both men are wounded but survive. On their return to the States, David turns his back completely on his past and his family. Jed insists that his status-conscious family accept David into their inner circle. So the Gateses take him in, and he joins the business. Now he is known as David Shaw, his presence explained away as that of a rediscovered distant cousin.
The scene is set. From the moment they return to New York, both men are living lies: Jed refusing to recognize his homosexuality and David hiding the fact that he is Jewish, with the Warshinsky family still living only miles away in a world unimaginable to the affluent Gateses.
Lustbader's portraits of life in the sweatshop society are full of the voices, smells and broken spirits of immigrants searching in vain for the prosperous new lives they thought America would offer. After David walks out on his family, his 14-year-old sister Sarah is forced to support the family by working as a seamstress in a dark and stuffy loft for $6 a week. The rules are so inflexible and brutal that "she understood that if she didn't sew the lining on these sleeves perfectly and quickly, Pankin [the boss] would throw her out."
There is a touch of stereotype in the portraits of the women: Jed's mother is the rigid, dominating matron; his sister, Lucy, is the rebel who flouts all the rules, goes to college and works in Margaret Sanger's clinic offering birth control to ever-expanding families like the Warshinskys; Jed himself acquires a saintly and patient wife. But any good story needs setbacks as well as saints: Monty, a snarky villain, stages a deadly riding accident; the Spanish flu carries off a granddaughter; the Triangle Fire inflicts horrors downtown; and, finally, one of our heroes meets a tragic end.
Lustbader's skill in making us genuinely interested in these characters does make her tendency to bump them off when they get in the way of the plot sometimes aggravating. Both families seem very prone to fatal illness and accident, but then those were more fragile times.
In the end, Hidden delivers robustly on its promise to take readers into another era. Lustbader gracefully avoids some of the perils of past masters of the genre, most notably James Michener, who dropped increasingly undigested lumps of history onto the page as his novels got longer. Her characters eat, drink, read, socialize and suffer in ways that feel authentic. In this remarkable and accomplished debut, she takes us as near as most of us would care to get to the conditions and backbreaking toil of the immigrant garment workers on the Lower East Side and also lets us sit at the candlelit dining tables of the rich and famous. ?
Brigitte Weeks is a former editor of Book World.
