These Shallow Graves

by Jennifer Donnelly

  Jo, giggling, got off the bench upon which she’d been sitting, in a viewing area built on the Manhattan-side tower, and lumbered around like a bear. No one paid her any attention. She and Fay were two of only a handful of people there, most of whom were looking at the Statue of Liberty.

  “Very good,” Fay said. She started to circle Jo. Her eyes became predatory and her movements catlike. “You’ve a cigar in one hand and your coat in the other. Your cummerbund’s too tight, you’re drunk from too much brandy, and you’re sore because the chorus girl you took to Rector’s barely let you cop a feel.”

  “Fay!” Jo said, scandalized.

  “Stay in character!” Fay scolded. “Now, here I come. Dressed to blend in. I don’t do anything, say anything, or wear anything that makes me stand out.” As she spoke, she bumped into Jo and dropped her purse. Jo picked it up and held it out to her.

  “Time for the three Fs of the female pickpocket,” Fay said. “First F: Flirtation.” She smiled demurely, batted her eyelashes, and thanked Jo. “Second F: Flattery.” She placed a dainty hand on Jo’s arm. “Oh, how gallant you are, sir, to retrieve my purse for me!” she cooed in honeyed tones. “And finally, our third F: Finesse.” Fay stepped back, holding Jo’s pocket watch.

  “I didn’t even feel that!” Jo exclaimed, clapping. “Show me how!”

  Fay grinned, pleased at Jo’s praise. “Lifting watches is hard. We’ll start you off with something easier. I have a coin purse in my skirt pocket. Try to take it,” she instructed, turning her back to Jo.

  Jo tiptoed up to Fay, then pounced, thrusting a hand deep into her right pocket.

  Fay turned around. She shook her head. “Are you trying to pick my pocket or rip my skirt off?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” Jo said sheepishly.

  “Try again. Use your pointer and middle finger only, not your whole hand. You need to be light and quick.”

  Jo tried several more times, aiming for Fay’s right pocket, but Fay was walking in a slow circle, and Jo kept missing. Finally, her hand sank into the folds of Fay’s skirt and her fingers scissored closed on something. “Ha!” she crowed, grinning, but her triumph was short-lived.

  “My goodness!” she cried, as she realized she was holding a small silver revolver instead of a purse.

  “Whoops. Wrong pocket,” said Fay.

  “I’ll say!”

  “Give it back and try again,” Fay said.

  “I’m afraid to. What else do you have in there? A machete?” Jo asked reproachfully.

  “Don’t be so silly.”

  Jo tried one more time and found something soft. That must be it, she thought, but when she pulled it out, it wasn’t a purse, either. It was a small, ragged cloth doll.

  The doll wore a frayed calico dress. Its hair was made of yarn that had once been yellow but was now browned with grime. Its smile was stitched in red thread, and its eyes were tiny blue buttons. It was a small child’s toy, and Jo thought it an odd thing for a girl like Fay to be carrying.

  “That’s my good-luck charm,” Fay said. She sat down on a bench. “I need a rest. I’m winded. Thirsty, too. Teaching the likes of you is hard work.”

  Ever since they’d reached the viewing area, about an hour ago, Fay had been showing Jo self-defense moves as well as giving her pickpocketing lessons. Jo had learned how to jab a man in the Adam’s apple, and how to knee him in the groin if he was standing, or in the face if he was bending over.

  Fay pulled a small silver flask and matching cigarette case from the folds of her skirt. She handed the flask to Jo, who looked at it questioningly.

  “Go on, it’s only gin.”

  Jo sat down beside her, took a swig, and coughed. “That’s almost as bad as Eddie’s whiskey,” she said, wiping her mouth.

  “The more you drink, the better it tastes,” Fay said, motioning for her to take another swallow.

  Jo did so. And then another. And then she handed the flask back to Fay. The alcohol warmed her chest. Its heat spread through her body, making her feel languid and loose-limbed. She found she liked the feeling.

  Fay tongued the razor blade out of her mouth and carefully laid it on the arm of the bench. She drank from the flask, capped it, and lit a cigarette. After taking a few deep drags, she handed that to Jo, too. Jo took a puff and found herself racked by a fit of coughing.

  “Is this supposed to be enjoyable?” she rasped when her coughs subsided.

  “It’s tolerable once you get used to it,” Fay replied. “Most things are.”

  Jo realized she was still holding Fay’s doll. “This isn’t much of a good-luck charm, considering you were caught by the police a couple of days ago,” she said, handing it back.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Fay said, pocketing it. “The Tailor said he made it for me when I was little. To shut me up. He says I wouldn’t stop crying when he first took me in.”

  Jo remembered the Tailor’s story, how he found Fay in a stairwell, abandoned. “Do you remember your life before the Tailor?” she asked, curious.

  “I can’t remember a thing. Not a face or a voice. Not the place I was found in. Nothing. I can’t even remember my own name. My real one, I mean. Can’t remember anything but the Tailor. He’s a shit, but I owe him everything. He’s fed me all these years. Clothed me. Kept a roof over my head. That’s more than many kids in the Bend have. It’s more than Eddie and Tommy and Eileen had.”

  Jo couldn’t imagine having it worse than living with the Tailor. “Eddie told me a bit about his life,” she said. “It sounds like he had a hard upbringing.”

  Fay nodded, her eyes steely now. “The hardest,” she said. “His mother used to beg scraps from restaurant kitchens—bones, corncobs, potato peelings—and boil them for broth. Sometimes a cup or two of that was all they’d have to eat for the day.”

  Jo’s heart hurt at the thought of Eddie’s mother having to beg in order to feed her children, and of Eddie and his siblings being hungry. “What was he like when he was little?” she asked.

  Fay laughed. “A damn good thief. Tough. Ruthless. Like all the rest of us. You have to be to survive the Bend. And the Tailor.” Fay took another drag on her cigarette and said, “He likes you something wicked. I can tell. You like him, too, don’t you?”

  Jo blushed. Fay elbowed her. Her shrewd eyes locked on Jo’s, and Jo found herself powerless to evade them. Or her question.

  “Yes,” she finally admitted. “I do.”

  “That’s tough,” Fay said. “Can’t really see it happening. Him being him and you being you.”

  “Nor can I,” Jo said sadly.

  “The social pages all say Bram Aldrich is your best beau.”

  “You read the social pages?” Jo had trouble imagining Fay in the Tailor’s lair, perusing news of balls, operas, and plays.

  “Of course I do. I steal from the rich, don’t I? I have to know where they are,” said Fay matter-of-factly. “Anyway, is it true? Are you Bram’s sweetheart?”

  Jo shook her head. “I don’t think so. Not anymore,” she said. “I have some stiff competition, and I believe she’s winning.”

  “You could always elope with Eddie,” Fay suggested. She leaned back as she spoke, stretched her legs out and crossed one ankle over the other. Staring straight ahead now at the waters of New York Harbor, she took a puff of her cigarette.

  Jo leaned back and stretched her legs, too. She felt unguarded and open, not at all like herself. It’s the gin, she thought. She reached for Fay’s cigarette, took a drag, and slowly exhaled.

  “The truth is, Fay, sometimes I wish I could marry him—more than anything—and other times I wish I’d never met him,” she said wistfully, looking up at the sky. “I wish I’d never gone to the Standard and never overheard him talking. That’s how I found out about my father, you know. Ever since that day, I’ve been doing things I never thou
ght I’d do. And most of them aren’t good. I keep stepping out of my world, going farther away from everything and everyone I know. I’m scared, Fay. Scared I’ll go too far one day and I won’t be able to find my way back.”

  Fay was silent. Jo turned and looked at the side of her face. “Now’s when you tell me it’ll be fine. I’ll be all right. Everything will work out,” she said.

  Fay smirked. “That only happens in stories,” she said. She motioned for her cigarette, took a few puffs, and said, “Who would you have if they both asked you to marry them, right at the same time, and you had to choose?”

  “But that’s the thing, I can’t choose,” Jo said despondently.

  “But if you could.”

  Jo didn’t want to answer the question. Fay was digging deep. Too deep.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Jo finally said, trying to sound nonchalant. “You tell me. Whom should I choose? What’s better—security or love?”

  Fay didn’t reply right away. Instead she looked out over the East River for a bit; then, in a voice raw with longing, said, “This is the best thing, Jo. The city stretched out before you, glittering like a sack of diamonds. Yours for the taking. A drink and a smoke and no one to please but yourself. Freedom. That’s my answer. The freedom to be your own best thing.”

  Without any warning, tears came to Jo’s eyes. Neither of them could choose their future, it was true—but Jo knew that the life she would have as Bram’s wife, or the wife of any of a number of the city’s golden boys, would be paradise compared to the one Fay was facing.

  She reached for Fay’s hand. “You’re not going to Madam Esther’s. I won’t let you. I won’t.”

  “It won’t be so bad,” Fay said bravely. “At least I’ll be off the streets at Esther’s. And her heavies don’t allow shenanigans. Anyone causes a ruckus and he’s out.”

  “You speak well. Can you read and write, too?” asked Jo.

  “Yes. The Tailor taught me.”

  “You could get a proper job, then,” Jo said hopefully. “As a typist or a shopgirl.”

  “The Tailor said if I ever tried to leave him and go straight, he’d tell my employer about my past. I’d be fired immediately.”

  Fury rose in Jo. “He doesn’t own you,” she said. “You’re not his slave.”

  Fay inhaled another lungful of smoke and blew it out again. “What’s done is done.”

  “There must be some way around this,” Jo insisted. “We just have to figure it out.”

  Fay stood up and stretched. “You know, you never even told me what you were doing in Brooklyn all by yourself.”

  “Don’t change the subject. This is serious. There are diseases. You could get sick.”

  “Does it have anything to do with that man you’re after? Kinch? I’m still trying to find him for you,” Fay said. She dropped her cigarette and ground it out with her toe.

  “Fay, listen to me—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Fay said, angrily. “So don’t make me, all right? I don’t have a way out of it. We can’t all marry an Aldrich, you know.”

  Jo winced at that.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Fay said, softening. “It’s nice that you care. Thank you.” She hesitated, as if working up her courage, then said, “You’re a friend, Jo. The only friend I’ve got. The only real one. And I know you mean well, but there’s nothing you can do.”

  There was resignation in Fay’s voice but fear in her eyes. Jo saw it and knew it would be unkind to keep pressing her. “All right,” she said. “I’ll stop.”

  “Good.”

  “For now.”

  Fay shook her head, smiling. As she did, they heard church bells on both sides of the river ring out the hour.

  “Three? That can’t be the time. I have to get back. My driver’s supposed to pick me up at the Astor Library at four,” Jo said. She felt like a slave to the clock, always having to make sure she wasn’t gone too long, for fear of making her mother suspicious.

  “I’ll get you there. We’ll make it. You can flag a cab when we get to the other side,” Fay said. She grabbed her razor blade and hooked her arm through Jo’s, and together they hurried off. Ten minutes later, they were standing on Pearl Street. Jo saw hackney cabs moving up and down it, and knew she’d make it back to the library in time.

  “This is goodbye,” Fay said, “but listen, Jo, I meant what I said about Kinch. I’ll keep looking. Somebody somewhere in this city must’ve seen him.”

  “Thank you,” Jo said. “And thanks for the drink and the smoke and the pickpocketing lessons, too.”

  Fay laughed. She gave Jo a little wave, and then she was walking away. Jo watched her go, worried for her—this slight, brave, rough girl who’d endured so much and would endure much worse if the Tailor and Madam Esther had their way.

  Fay passed a woman digging in a rubbish bin and gave her a coin. It was Mad Mary. She kissed Fay. Fay patted her shoulder and walked on.

  Jo’s own words echoed in her head. I keep stepping out of my world, going farther away from everything and everyone I know.

  She thought about that world now and the people in it. They were good people, decent and upright. She thought of her friends—Addie, Jennie, Trudy, and Caro. None of them even knew who Madam Esther was, never mind what she did. They didn’t know about people like Fay, Tumbler, or the Tailor.

  They don’t know me, either. Not really, Jo thought. They don’t know what’s going on in my life and they’d be horrified if they did. They’d never offer to teach me how to pick pockets, or track down a dangerous man with tattoos on his face and darkness in his heart.

  “Fay!” she called. Too loudly. But she didn’t care.

  Fay, who was a good twenty yards down the sidewalk now, turned around. She gave Jo a questioning look.

  Jo started walking toward her, then broke into a run. “You’re the only friend I have, too,” she said, catching up to her. “The only real one.”

  The two girls—one from Gramercy Square, the other from Mulberry Bend—hugged each other tightly, then went their separate ways.

  Braid the raven hair,

  Weave the supple tress,

  Deck the maiden fair

  In her loveliness. …

  Jo stepped out of her bath and pulled the plug. As she toweled herself off, she continued to sing “Braid the Raven Hair,” a song from The Mikado, an operetta her mother found unrefined but Jo loved.

  Paint the pretty face,

  Dye the coral lip,

  Emphasize the grace

  Of her ladyship!

  She took her lacy white nightgown from its hook on the back of the bathroom door and put it on. Her own raven tresses were piled high on her head to keep them out of the bathwater. She let them down and brushed them, then opened the bathroom door and stepped into her bedroom, singing the last couplet of the song.

  Art and nature, thus allied,

  Go to make a pretty bride!

  “Don’t scream,” a man’s voice said.

  Jo screamed.

  “Now you’ve done it.” It was Eddie. He was sitting on her bed.

  Jo didn’t have her dressing gown on. Her hair was loose. Her feet were bare. She was mortified.

  “I’ve done it?” she said angrily, trembling from the fright he’d given her. “What are you doing in my bedroom?”

  Before he could respond, they both heard footsteps coming down the hallway.

  “Where’s my dressing gown?” Jo said, panicking. And then she spotted it—Eddie was sitting on it. “Give it to me!” she said, tugging it out from under him.

  She shrugged into it, conscious of Eddie’s eyes on her. Just as she was knotting the sash, she heard a pounding on the door.

  “Miss Josephine! Are you all right?”

  “Miss Jo, what’s wrong?”

&nb
sp; “It’s Theakston and Katie,” Jo whispered. “You can’t be here!” She looked around her room frantically, then said, “Get under the bed. Hurry!”

  The door opened just as Eddie pulled his feet in under the dust ruffle. Her mother strode into the room, followed by the butler and maid.

  “Josephine, what is going on?” she demanded. “Why did you scream?”

  Jo pressed a hand to her chest. “I’m so sorry, Mama It was a mouse,” she fibbed. “A big one. It ran across my foot as I got out of the bath. I shouldn’t have carried on so, but it frightened the wits out of me.”

  Her mother looked relieved. “Poor dear. How awful.” She felt Jo’s forehead. “You’re warm and flushed. It must’ve startled you terribly.” She turned to Theakston and said, “Go make sure the wretched thing is gone.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Montfort,” Theakston said, hurrying to the bathroom. He came back out again almost immediately and said, “It’s gone. I have no idea how it got in. Perhaps it followed water pipes up from the basement.”

  “Get an exterminator here first thing in the morning, Theakston,” Jo’s mother said, turning to leave. “Good night, Josephine. Do get some rest.”

  “I will, Mama,” Jo said. “Good night.”

  Theakston and Katie followed her mother out of the room. Jo quickly shut the door behind them and leaned against it, trying to slow the pounding of her heart. She waited until the footsteps had all receded, then said, “Come out of there!”

  Eddie peeked out from the dust ruffle. “Good story,” he said. “Quick thinking,”

  “Never mind that! How did you get in here?” Jo asked.

  She was glad to see that his eye was no longer swollen and the bruises on his face had faded a little but was too angry to tell him so.

  “I was outside your house,” he said, pulling himself out from under the bed, “trying to figure out how to get a note to you, when your maid came out to dump some ashes. I asked her to give you the note, but she said no. So I hid on the other side of your stoop and waited. When she came out with more ashes, I snuck inside. I made my way down the hall and up the back stairs, hoping I’d find your room before someone found me. Then I heard you singing and I knew which room was yours. You have a very nice voice.”