The Golden Cup Read online

  THE CRITICS LOVE

  BELVA PLAIN

  and THE GOLDEN CUP

  “STIRRING!” —Publishers Weekly

  “Larger-than-life leading characters whose trials and triumphs have been portrayed against a colorful historical background.” —Booklist

  “THE QUEEN OF FAMILY-SAGA WRITERS.”

  —The New York Times

  “So filled with powerful emotions and historical details, that it is impossible to put down.”

  —Rave Reviews

  “Plain doesn’t know how not to write a bestseller.”

  —Newsday

  “AN ACCOMPLISHED STORYTELLER.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Belva Plain is a talented tale-spinner with an almost Dickensian ability to keep her stories going.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “BELVA PLAIN WRITES WITH AUTHORITY AND INTEGRITY.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1986 by Bar-Nan Creations, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  ISBN: 0-440-13091-3

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5253-2

  Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press

  v3.1

  Babylon hath been a golden cup in the Lord’s hand,

  That made all the earth drunken;

  The nations have drunk of her wine,

  Therefore the nations are mad.

  Jeremiah

  It was of a famous vintage … when war and wine throve together.

  FITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part One: Hennie and Dan

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Two: Paul and Anna

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Three: Freddy and Leah

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  Hennie and Dan

  1

  All her life she would remember the somber autumn sky, how vast and high and cold it had been while the great wind raced from the East River toward Broadway. When she was very old she would still marvel, as do we all, over the randomness of things, for if she had not happened to turn just that corner, in just that hour, her whole life would have been different.

  The child whose hand she held would vaguely remember cries and lurid color, a blur of savage yellow, confusion and a terror not half understood.

  And another child, the one who came to be born because she had turned that corner, would hear a tale of heroism, as it grew to become a family legend, until he was sick of hearing it.

  The tenement burned. Over its scorched brick walls the fire scurried and flurried, tearing as with giant claws its fibers and sinews. Out of its ruined heart there rose a spiral of flame; strong and fierce, it soared into the wind, and a bitter smoke poured over the rooftops. Powerful arcs of water shot from the pumps to the blaze, but the fire had power of its own.

  And the watching crowd, packed tightly on the street among the engines and great stamping fire horses, stood waiting either for the destruction to be complete or to be told what to do and where to go. Sweatered and shawled in shabby brownish gray, it hardly moved, only changing weight from one foot to the other, shifting a baby from one shoulder to the other. With a single voice it gave out a mournful, plaintive murmur.

  Fires like this one were common enough in that part of the city, yet these people were stunned into disbelief. It was too soon for any of them to believe in the truth of what was happening or to have counted the full extent of loss, the featherbedding and pillows, the kitchen table, the change of underwear and the winter coat. That would come later. It was enough now to have gotten out alive.

  There was a terrible, anguished shriek. A young girl at the farthermost edge of the crowd, who had been passing through the street, turned back at the sound. She had a little boy by the hand and had been hurrying away because she had not wanted the child to see anything so frightful. But the cry pierced her and she stopped.

  “What is it? Is someone hurt?”

  The word was carried back in relays, neighbor to neighbor.

  “There’s someone left inside, somebody’s baby.”

  “On the top floor, too.”

  “The hoses don’t reach that far.”

  “There’s not enough pressure anyway.”

  An innocent question. “Can’t they go up through the next house and reach in?”

  A scornful reply. “Who’s going to try that, do you think?”

  Now the smoke came whipping out of the fourth floor. Soon it would reach the fifth and then the top.

  “Can’t live long in there.”

  “My God, what a way to die!”

  The girl was unable to pull herself away. She could hear her own heart beat.

  “You’re hurting my hand,” the child cried.

  “Oh, Paul, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hold you so hard.” And she bent to button up his little velvet collar against the wind. “We’ll go, we’ll go in a minute.”

  But she was fastened to the place where she stood. Her eyes were fastened to the windows behind which the most awful death was taking place, the death of a child. She felt the trembling warmth of the little boy’s hand. What if it were he? And she looked down at the clear bright eyes, the brightest blue, and the round cheeks … And thought: But it is somebody’s child, isn’t it? And could not move away.…

  Now with furious clangor of bells came the hook and ladder. Four horses clattered and charged, so that the crowd spread frantically apart to let them through, recoiling from the hooves and the snorting breath. The ladder was taken down, dragged to the building, and propped up against the wall; had no one known it could reach no higher than three floors? There sounded a great gasp and a collective sigh.

  Stupid, stupid, thought the girl.

  One of the firemen reached the top of the ladder and stood there, extending his arms in a gesture of helplessness to show that he was still a full story and a half from the top floor. Then, having shown that the task was impossible, he backed down the ladder, coughing and choking through the smoke, to join a knot of firemen gathered on the sidewalk among those onlookers who had the same opinion: There was no hope.

  “Wouldn’t you think,” a woman ventured again, “that somebody could go through the house next door?”

  “And how get across? You can see the air shaft’s too wide to step over. you think anybody will try to jump across, six floors up, with nothing but a rotting cornice to h
old you?”

  “Anyway, you couldn’t get a foothold on that ledge. It’s only a couple of inches wide.”

  “No, whoever is in there is a goner.”

  “Burned to a crisp.”

  “They say the smoke kills you first. You suffocate.”

  “That’s not always true. Once I saw a man in flames. He shrieked.… I can still hear him.”

  The fire began to roar. Perhaps it had been roaring all along, but the girl was only now conscious of its terrible voice. She closed her eyes. The roar was storm-wind and storm-water on the beach at Long Island, where they went sometimes in the summer, and had watched a man drown. It was a force to blow you before it like a leaf or a grain of sand. There was nothing you could do.

  Someone was shoving a way through the crowd. The girl, feeling the wave of displaced bodies, had a glimpse of the back of a head of black hair and a checked woolen shirt. Standing on tiptoe, she saw a young man running, moving the sidewalk groups aside, and plunging up the steps of the next tenement.

  “He’s going to try,” a woman said. “Can you imagine, he’s going to try.”

  “Try what?”

  “What do you think? To get in through the other building!”

  “I don’t believe it. It’s impossible! He’d be crazy!”

  “Then he’s crazy.”

  “My God, look there! Up there!”

  The young man was at the top-floor window, next to the burning building. Astride the sill, he swung a leg out into the air.

  “What does he—how does he think he can—” The onlookers seemed to be whispering with that single voice again.

  A foot searched for a place on the narrow cornice. It was a tin cornice; above it stood the numbers 1889. A hand went out and groped, testing the fragile scroll on the flat, fake-classic pillar, a crude bas-relief in crumbling stone. The hand drew back.

  “There’s no purchase there, nothing to grasp,” the girl said to herself. Her breath held in her throat.

  The smoke was thickening. It wreathed and curled in the scurrying wind; the fire was now making a wind of its own, which met the winds from the river, from the four corners of the earth, and fought them, swirling the smoke so that the man was almost hidden in it.

  He changed to a sitting position on the sill. For a moment he sat quite still; his legs hung down; he wore green corduroy trousers. Then, as if he had finally made his decision, he twisted off from the sill, with his back to the street, his toes on the cornice, his hands on the sill. By hand and foot he clung to the moldering stone.

  “Oh, let it hold! Let it not break off and send him smashing to the street!”

  The girl’s neck ached; tense with the strain of peering upward, she felt herself in that young man’s place. He probed now with one foot, gauging the distance between the buildings. It was too long even for the long legs of such a tall man—for, even from where she stood, she could see that he was tall. So he would need to slide to the edge of the building and then jump, which he must have known from the start, just as the fireman had known.

  “Come back … don’t try … come back.”

  In the burning house the windows had begun to melt; the shattered glass fell with a musical tinkle. Cinders and shreds of burned cloth rained gently to the street.

  Somebody spoke behind the girl. “No one can be alive in there.”

  “It’s not worth risking his life—”

  His hand must have seized some small projection. Inch by inch he slid along the stone face, past the window. Far up, through the screen of smoke, they could see him, could sense that again he was measuring distance, positioned to spring. Now he seemed to be steadying himself, assessing his balance or maybe arguing with himself as to whether it made any sense at all to try.

  You can’t do it, don’t you see you can’t?

  Silence. A horse neighed. Silence. Somebody coughed.

  The girl’s heart hammered. I will be sick if he falls. I should look away. Look away now! But she could not.

  “It won’t hold,” said the talkative woman at the girl’s back.

  I wish you would shut up, she thought in fury.

  A piece of burned paper wrapped itself like a cat or a snake around her ankle, but she did not feel it. She was feeling the fall to the street, the unspeakable seconds while the pavement rushed up.

  Her full lips fell open. “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  He leapt. The extended arm and the leg shot across the air-space. The hand grasped; one could imagine the straining muscles of the arms and the fingernails going white. One foot jammed onto the cornice of the burning building and clung until the rest of the body, curving outward into space, could follow and right itself and steady itself.

  Again the girl closed her eyes. She had a fragment of thought: No one is thinking of the child inside, even I am thinking instead of him.

  When she opened her eyes, he was standing flat on the cornice of the burning building, inching himself toward the window.

  Don’t look down. If you look you will fall.…

  “Thank God the window is open,” the girl whispered aloud.

  What would have happened had it been closed? She had not thought of that. And she wondered whether the young man had not thought of it either.

  He swung himself inside. And a babble of relief and amazement broke out.

  “My God, how brave!”

  “Who is he? Do you know?”

  “The smoke will kill him.”

  “It sears the lungs. All you need are a couple of breaths.”

  “There can’t be anyone left alive in there.”

  “Make way! Get back, get out of the way, dammit!”

  Now they were bringing up a net. A dozen men came forward to hold it.

  “Dammit, out of the way!”

  They waited.

  “Can’t survive in there. It sears the lungs.”

  And then he appeared at the window. He was holding someone: female, with a flapping skirt. She was not a baby: a grown child, then— He let go. The body hurtled through the air with a scream that tore the air, and bounced safe in the net, and bounced once more and was lifted out. A great cheer went up.

  Then the young man, flinging out his arms, jumped too, like a boy going feetfirst into the East River on a summer day. Another great cheer of relief and release went up; laughing and clapping, the crowd pushed forward toward the hero.

  But it was only an old woman whom he saved, the girl thought. No child imploring and helpless in its crib, only a very old and ugly, hairy-faced woman whimpering, with a few years left to live. Was it worth the risk of his life? And yet we are taught, she thought seriously, for she was a serious believer, that he who saves one life, saves the whole world. Still, if it had been a child’s life— Well, it is done. He did it.

  They had cornered him. Close to the smoking tenement, in front of a small wooden house out of the century past, he stood now panting and coughing, squeezed between a cigar-store Indian and a barber pole from which the gilded ball had been knocked off by the swinging fire hose. Thrilled and curious, the crowd pressed close to touch him and stare. Reporters were already there with notebook, pencil, and a hundred questions.

  Who was he? Where did he live? Why had he done it?

  “What difference does my name make? And why I did it—oh, because somebody had to. That’s as good a reason as any, isn’t it?”

  Exhausted, he still stood straight. The girl was enthralled. A king going past in a gilded coach would have been no more enthralling. From far off, between the crowding heads, she stood and saw: vivid eyes, high cheekbones, a lock of waving hair, thick as a mane, that he kept pushing back off his forehead.

  His shirt is torn and his hands are bleeding. He wants to be let alone. I would not bother you so. Go home and rest, I would say. You are the most wonderful … go home and rest, my dear.

  “Well, sonny, what did you think of that brave man?” an old fellow asked Paul as they walked away.

  “I could do
that,” Paul said gravely.

  “Well, that’s a good one! That’s the way to talk! Yessir, you’ll make your mother proud of you when you grow up! How old are you?”

  “Four,” Paul answered.

  They crossed the street and Paul whispered, “He thought you were my mother, Aunt Hennie.”

  “I know.”

  It was not unusual for people to think Paul was her child when they were out together. She wished he were. There was something between them that had nothing to do with age. She could look years and years into the future and see them caring about each other. It was not a thing she talked of; people would find it silly. But it was true, all the same.

  Who is this girl going home through the gathering afternoon? Her eyes tell of her that she is solitary and that she dreams. They are the distinguishing feature in a round, pleasant, otherwise undistinguished face. Leaf-shaped, they are the color of brown autumn and they match the curling hair that escapes under the brim of her feathered hat. She is eighteen years old and seems older.

  Because you have large bones. I don’t know how you came to be so big. There’s never been anyone with your frame in my family or in your father’s either, as far as I know.

  Her name is Henrietta De Rivera. She lives with her family in a decent apartment house east of Washington Square’s fine private brownstones, with their stoops and mounting blocks and polished railings. Her address is near enough to these things to be respectable, but too far from them to be fashionable.

  On three days a week, she walks to work as a volunteer at a settlement house downtown. She teaches English to immigrants, tries also to teach them to bathe, and tries not to mind their clothes, which are sometimes very dirty, for she understands how hard it is to find the time or place for cleanliness. Her work is called “assimilation of the immigrant into American life.”

  Some of these people do not want to be entirely assimilated into the ways of families like the De Riveras, but the De Riveras want them to because their existence as they are is an embarrassment. Hennie is naturally aware of all that, but she does not agree with it. She does not feel superior; she feels, rather, a deep kinship. Indeed, the closest friend she has—and she has not ever had many—comes not out of the group in which she has grown up, but is a pupil in one of her English classes, an immigrant sweatshop worker only a few years older than she.