The two took their ride on the same boat—the living child, whom no one wanted, to Randall’s Island, to be enlisted with its number in the army of the city’s waifs, strong and able to fight its way; the dead, for whom a mother’s heart yearns, to its place in the great ditch.
WHY IT HAPPENED
Yom Kippur being at hand, all the East Side was undergoing a scrubbing, the people included. It is part of the religious observance of the chief Jewish holiday that every worshiper presenting himself at the synagogue to be cleansed from sin must first have washed his body clean.
Hence the numerous tenement bath-houses on the East Side are run night and day in Yom Kippur week to their full capacity. There are so many more people than tubs that there is no rest for the attendants even in the small hours of the morning.
They are not palatial establishments exactly, these mikwehs (bath-houses). Most of them are in keeping with the tenements that harbor them; but they fill the bill. One, at 20 Orchard street, has even a Turkish and a Russian attachment. It is one of the most pretentious. For thirty-five cents one can be roasted by dry heat or boiled with steam. The unhappy experience of Jacob Epstein shows that it is even possible to be boiled literally and in earnest in hot water at the same price. He chose that way unwittingly, and the choice came near causing a riot.
Epstein came to the bath-house with a party of friends at 2 A. M., in quest of a Russian bath. They had been steamed, and were disporting themselves to their heart’s content when the thing befell the tailor. Epstein is a tailor. He went to get a shower-bath in a pail,—where Russian baths are got for thirty-five cents they are got partly by hand, as it were,—and in the dim, religious light of the room, the small gas-jet struggling ineffectually with the steam and darkness, he mistook the hot-water faucet for the cold. He found out his mistake when he raised the pail and poured a flood of boiling water over himself.
Then his shrieks filled the house. His companions paused in amazement, and beheld the tailor dancing on one foot and on the other by turns, yelling:
“Weh! Weh! Ich bin verbrennt!”