by Teresa Toten
He groaned, but he gave me the pin. “Look, kid, you got to get yourself some grit, or you won’t survive out here.”
Was a con artist giving me advice?
Besides, I’d always thought of myself as being chock-full of grit. “Yes, sir. Thank you very much.”
He groaned again. “Take it from me, not everything or everyone is what it appears to be.”
I nodded politely.
“Especially if it’s pretty and shiny. You paying attention?”
“Yes, sir. Can I really have the pin?”
Sigh. “Yeah, go, get lost. You’re bad for business.”
“Thank you so much!” I headed straight for the Yorkville Public Library. What a city! Even the con artists were sweet.
“Miss Toni!” Mr. Kenyatta beamed at me as soon as I burst through the doors.
We walked back to the reference desk together. “You did it, didn’t you, Mr. Kenyatta? You’re a Canadian citizen.”
He beamed again.
“I have a little present for you.” I pulled the pin out of its miniature plastic bag. “It’s like the three official renderings of our new flag. As you know, we don’t officially pick one until the end of the year, but it’ll be from one of these three. Isn’t it great?”
“It is indeed.” He pinned it to his lapel. “I will wear it with pride every single day, Miss Toni. I am beholden to you. That was most considerate.”
“No, not really.” I shook my head. “It’s not one of my shinier qualities. But I try real hard to make up for it.”
“I have a little something for you too.” Mr. Kenyatta slid a piece of folded paper over to me. “The lady you were searching for in the Andrew Mercer, your Scarlet Sue?”
“You found her?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “Scarlet Sue’s real name is Miss Susan O’Reilly. She has been incarcerated in that unfortunate place for almost nine years. I believe I have procured the correct telephone number for you to call and request a time for visitation. As I understand it, if Miss O’Reilly is not in solitary confinement—what the prisoners call the dungeon—she will be allowed to see you if she so wishes.”
I thanked him and slipped the paper into my purse, surprised by the sense of urgency I felt.
“A word of caution, Miss Toni. Miss O’Reilly has apparently spent a great deal of time in the dungeon, for various infractions. The gentleman I spoke to took a fair measure of delight in telling me she got what she deserved for not playing along proper like.” Mr. Kenyatta paused. “He was an odious gentleman, and I fear it is an odious place. Do prepare yourself.”
Was I really going to go to a prison?
“Thank you again, Mr. Kenyatta. I’m always thanking you.”
“And it is always my pleasure, Miss Toni. But please consider this step carefully.”
“Yes, sir, I promise, really.”
I couldn’t get home fast enough. I was sure that Grady would let me use her telephone.
“Grady?” I knocked on the parlor door. “Grady, it’s me. Can I please use your phone? Grady, are you there?”
“Keep your toga on.” She opened the door and then swept back into the room. Grady was wearing one of her more glamorous ensembles. A stiff navy-blue silk dress that flared out dramatically at her tiny waist and, of course, her shiny black high heels. Her makeup was flawless, and her blond hair spritzed and teased within an inch of its life.
And she was clearly refreshed. Weeks and weeks of watching Mrs. Grady Vespucci up close had let me in on the telltale clues. Grady was swaying on the inside. This was what she described as “the sweet spot.” Thing was, she rarely stopped there.
“How about I make us a coffee and tell you about my visit to the library.”
“Coffee?” She looked crestfallen until I told her that we had tracked down Scarlet Sue and that I was going to visit her and finally get some answers.
“You’re going to the Mercer?” She sat hard on the kitchen chair while I prepared the coffee.
“Yes, ma’am. If she’ll see me. Scarlet Sue is the best I’ve got in terms of leads. Don’t worry, everybody’s been warning me about the place, and Mr. Kenyatta even said she might not be right in the head on account of spending a lot of time in solitary. They call it the dungeon.”
Grady shivered.
I placed her cup beside her on the kitchen table. “Grady?”
“At the Kingston Pen, it’s called ‘administrative segregation.’ That’s where my first husband was. The guys call it ‘the hole.’ He was put in there a lot in the early days. A lot.” I could tell she was eyeing the bottle of vodka on the counter behind me. “It changed him. He was…unrecognizable after a time.”
Did I dare?
“Grady? Is he—is that maybe why you drink so much?”
“Is that why I drink? Ha!” She rose quickly and headed for the bottle. She opened it and poured a splash into her coffee. “Is that why I drink?” She was angry now. “Hell, I wasn’t the one in the hole. And I got remarried and then remarried and remarried! I got this beautiful place and all the money I’ll ever need, right?” She waved her arm around the kitchen. I remembered what Big Bob had told me about her subsequent husbands. The last two were “meaner than snakes.”
“Honey, I drink ’cause I’m a flat-out coward.”
What? No. Grady was spectacular, and she was strong. Any fool could see that. What did Dodgy Dave say about pretty shiny things? Well, he was dead wrong, at least when it came to my landlady.
I took her by the arm and led her back to the chair. “I don’t believe it, not for a minute, Grady. You’re beautiful and kind and gentle and…really beautiful. Everybody thinks you’re like a queen or something!” Her eyes watered, but no tears broke through. Grady wasn’t a crier, not even in her various states of refreshment. She shook her head and gulped her fortified coffee.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She waved me away. “Go make your phone call, kid. Go on. You can never brace yourself for whatever’s coming. And sometimes it’s just best not to know.”
“A Hard Day’s Night”
(THE BEATLES)
IT WAS THE hottest day in August, and that was saying something. But not here. The waiting hall of the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women was cool, but not the kind of cool that was a relief from the furnace outside. The prison was the clammy cold of weeping stones and sweaty crumbling mortar. I sat waiting on a long low wooden bench with what looked to be a family—a father and three daughters. We were all shivering. This was an evil place.
Why had I come?
A guard marched in with a clipboard. “Visitor Antoinette Royce for inmate Susan O’Reilly.” It wasn’t until the family all turned to me that I realized he meant me. The name, my full and formal name, still fit like those too-big shoes I had worn when I walked away from the orphanage. Someone else’s shoes.
I followed him through a long narrow passageway. I was scared, no use pretending otherwise. I was scared of this creepy place and scared of what would meet me at the other end of the passageway. Grady was shaken by the memory of what “the hole” had done to her husband. What kind of half-human would greet me?
I was led to a small near-empty room. A table with a wooden chair on either side beckoned. The guard grunted in the vicinity of the chair and then stepped back and knocked loudly on the door opposite me.
I wanted to run. Instead, I held my breath.
The door flung open and a redheaded apparition strode in, grinning from ear to ear, arms outstretched. “Lord Almighty, give me strength! Antoinette Royce! Give your auntie Scarlet a hug, honey!”
“Oh, I…”
The guard took a menacing step toward her. “Sit down, ladies. Now!”
Scarlet Sue shrugged and plopped into the chair. “Give your butt a rest, girl. They don’t mess around in here.”
Did I sit? I must have, but it would’ve been with my mouth open. Despite wearing a bleak gray uniform, in this even bleaker room my impression of her was one of riotous color. Of
course, there was her hair, which was indeed scarlet and seemed to have a life of its own, shooting out of her head in tightly sprung coils. But it was more than that. It was like she had swallowed a rainbow.
“Hally’s baby girl! Lord oh Lord oh Lord. I haven’t seen you since you were a roly-poly toddler.” She couldn’t stop grinning. The smile revealed teeth that were crooked and one tooth that was broken, but that didn’t diminish its power a bit. “I just wish that we coulda met under better circumstances. And I regret that now, baby girl. I really do.” She shook her head. “I was only supposed to be in for four to five. If I’d only known…if I’d known that there’d be a chance, I’da smartened up for sure!”
She knew me. This was someone who knew me—or had known me. “So what happened?” I hadn’t even said hello or asked how she was or said it was nice to meet her. Mrs. Hazelton would’ve keeled over from shame.
She knew me.
Scarlet Sue did not seem to take offense at my lack of manners. “Hell’s bells, I escaped a couple times, don’t ya know. They don’t take kindly to that here, do they, Sam?”
The expressionless guard almost smiled.
“Stop shivering, girl. I’m scaring the pants off ya, ain’t I? Or is it Sam? He has that effect.” She placed her arms on the table and exhaled. “Look, I’m happy to just sit here and look at you, but since you tracked me down, I assume you want to talk turkey, and they don’t give us long. Do you got a list of questions or something? I’ll tell you anything I can.”
A list. Yes. That would have been smart. “No, ma’am, but I’ve got…” I reached into my purse, and the grim guard was at the table in an instant.
“You can’t be reaching into your purse like that, honey,” Sue said.
“But they already checked it all out before I got to the waiting hall.”
“Just tell smiling Sam what you want and he’ll have to get it for you.”
What was I doing here? “Just the three pieces of paper, please.” He reached in with his gigantic paws, placed the papers on the table and then stepped back to the wall.
Scarlet Sue examined the birth certificate, the Noronic menu and the Willa’s poster at great length. I felt vaguely ashamed, although I wasn’t sure why.
She raised her eyes from the papers to me. Hazel eyes, etched by lines and fissures but pretty eyes nonetheless. “Antoinette. Is that what they call you?”
“No, it’s Toni, ma’am.”
“Ha! That’s what I called you!” She sat back and rocked a bit. “I wiped your runny nose and taught you how to curse like a sailor.” She chuckled at some far-off memory while I wondered whether that little fact explained my so-called attitude problems at the orphanage. “So, Toni, what do you know so far?”
“Almost nothing. Until a couple of weeks ago, I thought the Noronic was a restaurant.”
Scarlet Sue stopped rocking, and all her color seemed to drain onto the stone floor. “Right. The Noronic. Okay. So your mom and dad were married in Detroit. They were Americans, which I guess makes you one too, come to think of it. Your dad came from money, big money. ’Course, your mama did not, but God she was a looker and the sweetest spirit on earth. Didn’t matter though. The Royces forbade the marriage, so your mom and dad eloped. Needless to say, the family cut them off. Your dad’s people had him real late in life and they were kind of controlling, to put it mildly. Cut-off-their-noses-to-spite-their-faces types.”
“Five minutes, ladies.”
No. There was so much…
Sue flashed Sam a look. “Your father was training to be a lawyer, join the old man’s firm, but he was a gifted musician, see? Apparently, he really had it going on with the tenor sax. Your mama encouraged his dreams even after they had you. Anyways, they drifted from club to club, barely scratching out a living in and around Detroit, and then he got a real good gig offer in Toronto at that place, Willa’s, long term, leading the house band.” Sue tapped the torn poster. “It was their big break, and the icing on the cake was that Jordon—that was your father, Jordon Royce—got hired to play on the Noronic on the way over from Detroit to Toronto.”
At the mention of the Noronic, our guard moved closer to us.
“So my father would have been like Mr. Goldman after all.” I said it more to myself than to her. “The Ramblers are the house band at the coffeehouse I work at.”
“Brooks? Hey, give him a shout for me, eh? Yeah, sure, your dad, he woulda, coulda…Well, you know about the fire, the disaster?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, so, the fire was this nightmare inferno, as Sam here could tell you. He was there.” Sam was at our table now. If there were an extra chair, I think he would’ve pulled it up and sat down. “But what came after…that’s what broke her, you know?”
“Three minutes, Sue.”
She shot him another look.
“Look, rules is rules. I’m sorry.”
“You almost drowned in the rescuing. For all I know, it was Sam that fished you out of the drink. He was part of the rescue team. Your mom made it out, half out of her head until she found you, but your dad…” She sank farther into her chair. “They couldn’t find him, see? Identifying the bloated and burned bodies was a…problem.” She looked uneasy. “Look, Toni, I don’t think I—”
“I’m not a baby anymore! I need to know!” I said that with a bit more force than I had intended. “Please, I want you to tell me.”
Sue groaned at the ceiling. “So, for days and days, your mom searched for him, body by body. They set up this disgusting staging area at the exhibition grounds. It was an unholy mess. Rows and rows of charred and water-swollen bodies. Hardened war vets and cops wept like babies. Apparently, the stench and fumes rising off of the dead was worse than at any slaughterhouse.”
“Rotting, fried, wet flesh.” Sam was shaking his head like he was there, seeing it all over again.
“Day after day, she looked for him in those putrid, pus-filled halls, with you in tow. The doctors, what did they know then? They were likely trying to help, but they gave her all sorts of pills. Miltowns, Valiums. How could she get through it otherwise?”
It felt like she was telling me a story. That was it. It was just a story. One that had almost nothing to do with me. I was far, far removed from it. Oh, I nodded sympathetically at both the guard and at Sue. It was a sad story, unbelievably tragic, but all it was, was a story until…
“Time’s up.”
Sue ignored him. “She found him on the eighth day. The only way she could identify your father was by this cheap wedding band she’d bought for him. They cut off his finger so it could be identified by his initials.”
Oh God.
Sam tapped the table. “Sorry.”
“They had to pull her off the, uh, remains, and you were just toddling around from one, uh, person to another. Hally was never the same after that.”
Was that my nightmare? Was that the fire, the shattered glass? Could I have a memory from when I was so small?
“Time’s up.” The guard went to the back of my chair.
“No, wait, please. What about after, the couple of years after…?”
“Look, they’ll have my ass in a sling,” Sam growled. “You gotta go.”
What about when she tried to kill me?
“I’ll write you, Toni. I ain’t much with a pen, but I’ll write. Where are you at?”
“I’m renting a room at 75 Hazelton, care of—”
“At Lady Grady’s? Tell her I say hello. She’s a good broad. I’ll write ya. Stay there.” Sam had her by the arm. “Stay there, okay?”
Where else would I go?
Sam knocked loudly on the far door, which opened immediately and swallowed up Scarlet Sue. Then he led me out through the corridors, the waiting hall, the front hall and outside. Free.
I was seared by the sun. Stunned, stupid and blind. My father…
“Toni? Toni, you okay?”
He never got to play at Willa’s. Never even set foot…My father was dea
d. He’d been dead all along.
“Toni!”
It was Ethan. He stepped over to me, close. “Having a hard day’s night?” He smelled of sun.
“What are you doing here, Ethan?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and spat. He spat just like Joe. “Don’t get your knickers in a knot. I didn’t want to be.”
“Oh.”
“Grady called Big Bob, and Bob got all up on my old man that you were coming down to this place and…” He shrugged.
And they made him come.
“And oh yeah, your old guy came looking for you when we opened. Rachel told him you took the day off.” He spat again. “So, you ready?”
I was simmering with a rage I could taste. No, it was the taste of soot. It filled my mouth, leaving no room for words to explain my anger and confusion. He was a musician. What my young father, full of hope, had gone through, what my mother…but no, that was the confusing part. I couldn’t, didn’t, want to feel sorry for her. But…
I wanted to hurt someone.
I took a faltering step, smacked Ethan’s chest and started to sob. What was he going to do? The poor guy had no choice but to put his arms around me.
“Louie Louie”
(THE KINGSMEN)
IT WAS EMBARRASSING for both of us. I mean, extremely. I went straight into an ugly, snot-streaming cry, and neither of us had a handkerchief or a tissue. I just slobbered on his shoulder, babbling incoherently about the Noronic and my dad and bloated bodies. When I had nothing left but hiccups, I stepped back and tried to apologize.
“Your shirt’s a mess.” Sniffle, sniffle. “Sorry.”
Ethan shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. That bad, eh?”
I shrugged back at him.
“Home?”
“Sure.” We walked to the streetcar stop in silence, rode it in silence and then walked all the way to 75 Hazelton in silence. I was grateful to him for that. I tried to tell him that he didn’t have to walk me home—it was daylight, after all, and he was already late.
