Divide the Dawn- Fight

by Eamon Loingsigh

  Throughout her childhood it was prophesied by the augurs in the oldest section of Irishtown that she would grow to be Queen of the Brooklyn Waterfront, Queen of Irishtown, her beauty unrivaled, her ancestry royal, in a gravelly New York kind of way.

  How could they have ever thought that? Anna wonders. We Lonergans are infamous as the lowest of the low in Brooklyn.

  But to the survivors of the Great Hunger, the original settlers of Irishtown, Anna Lonergan was always greeted with a bow and named a princess when seen on the street with a snot-nosed grimace, balled fists and thick hair flailing in the waterfront wind behind her like a crimson cloak. In their telling, Princess Lonergan’s bloodline included an uncle on her mother’s side named Jimmy Brady. Better known as Yakey Yake, Brady was a vicious Lower East Side gang leader that fought off the Swamp Angels, Monk Eastman’s Gang and even the renowned Five Points Gang to saunter up and down Catherine Street and adjoining alleys where the Yakey Yake Gang virulently ruled. Anna’s father, John Lonergan was Yake Brady’s muscle and enforcer. A bareknuckle prize fighter of some renown in the 1890s, he is no more than a drunken foot soldier for Bill now.

  I don’t want for any of that. I’ve done all I could to tear down their expectations. Now look at me. I’m nothing, nobody.

  Pain shoots into the back of her head and she leans on the sink, dizziness overtaking her.

  Anna had never been in a proper bathroom before. She grew amidst the rattle of the Manhattan Bridge in the slums of Johnson Street; the southern edge of Irishtown. In the Lonergan tenement there are only shared water closets and privies outside of their room. Twenty times a day she would march her siblings outside while her mother scrubbed floors in the mansions of the old Anglo-Saxon and Dutch ascendency, her father nursing a bottle of whiskey somewhere, anywhere but home.

  I became a mother before ever having sex, and a slattern without ever selling my body, she laughs in the mirror.

  A proper bathroom is strangely enticing since it is within the flat. It would have been a great convenience growing up with a proper bathroom having fourteen siblings.

  There is even a window in the bathroom that overlooks Green-Wood Cemetery to the south and east. Outside a sigh of wind sends the cluttering leaves of a thousand trees into a gentle sway over the walkways that wend down the rolling bends and embankments. The grass on the steep-sloped hills, the weeping willows and the wildflowers move in the currents too. But the leaning tombstones and copper crypts that have turned green with rust just sit there motionless.

  Trundling up the hill of Twenty-Fourth Street a black horse with a crimson bridle pulls a casket coach toward the Yale & Stabile undertaker downstairs. Its forelocks of jet black hair partially cover its eyes while it bobs its head to haul the weight along the inclining street that is hemmed in by rows of black wrought iron fencing and obelisk posts.

  Anna’s mother had buried two children in that cemetery, which caused Mary to regress into a mixture religion, mysticism and macabre folklore.

  More to hide from.

  At the burial of Anna’s little sister in January, Mourning Mother Mary had entered a state of reverie. She told Anna that cemeteries are like icebergs and, “underneath Green-Wood is a portal to the Otherworld. Below, it’s five thousand times as large as what the eye can see above, bigger even! All those people await Him. Await the Messiah’s comin’.”

  In this state of reverie over her daughter’s grave, Anna’s mother raised her arms to the sky, “When the mist descends an’ the veil between the livin’ an’ the dead is thinnest, the chosen souls will writhe in their graves. An’ when storm comes an’ unearths the burial mounds, they will rise an’ set out among the livin’!”

  Over the hole, a terror had come across her mother’s face. Men with soiled jumpsuits and paper cigarettes that dangled from cursing lips began shoveling dirt callously into the grave. And Mourning Mother Mary fell as if struck by a bolt of lightning.

  “The blood!” She screamed and held her wrists, then reached for her ankles.

  The gravediggers stopped their work, Father Larkin halted his sermon, Anna’s siblings reared back in horror as their mother rolled on the frozen ground.

  “The Messiah! The Messiah has granted me the ecstasy o’ his sufferin’!”

  Her mother’s black dress had cinched up to her waist as she flailed in the fresh dirt and goose droppings. If it hadn’t been for Richie grabbing hold of her by the feet, Mary might have fallen into the grave with her daughter.

  “Ma, what’s wrong wit’ ya?” Anna slapped her. “What’s wrong?”

  “Look,” her mother bore her wrists in plain sight. “The blood! The pain o’ the Messiah is gifted me. See the blood?”

  “I don’t see no blood, Ma.”

  “They come from the Otherworld, they do,” Mary screamed at them. “The storm! An’. . . an’ a hero will arrive like the risin’ o’ the moon. Five an’ t’ree will come to make seven. It is prewritten, their wet souls will writhe, relived. A great an’ horrific spectacle is comin’!”

  For close on two weeks Mourning Mother Mary was inconsolable and spouting incoherent stories. Anna never did fully understand what it was that drove her mother mad. But then came the storm in February, just as she’d foreseen in her reverie.

  And little did Anna know, the storm would bring yet more calamity to herself even; the greatest tragedy Anna Lonergan would ever know. Worse even than losing her siblings, she had lost Neesha, her love.

  In the bathroom Anna looks in the mirror.

  I will not cry. You cannot cry if you have no love.

  But the thought of leaving her young siblings in the care of her psychopathic mother and drunken father makes her bite at her cuticles again.

  I’m being selfish by hiding here, aren’t I?

  Out of the corner of her eye Anna sees something move in the cemetery. She goes up on her tiptoes to see out the window, beyond the black wrought iron fence.

  In the distance she can see the back of the towering gothic-style castle gate entrance, but someone is walking shoeless down a steep knoll as if in a trance. It is a red-headed, emaciated woman, though her hair is curly and unkempt, her dress torn and ratty. Anna squints to get a better look when the woman wanders behind a tree. When she reemerges, the woman stops and stares back.

  There’s no way she can see me through the window, across the street. No way.

  Yet the red-haired woman is fixated as if she has found what she had been looking for all along.

  Is that me? In the future?

  Anna pants and loses her breath as she comes down to the heels of her feet away from the window. Quickly she goes back onto the balls of her feet for another look, but the red-haired woman is gone.

  That didn’t happen, Anna convinces herself. I just imagined it. I’m still drunk, that’s all.

  Anna takes a deep breath and sprinkles water over her face.

  Or was it Neesha that sent her to draw me out of my hiding? To show me what will happen to me if I refuse to surrender to my love?

  Anna turns the water pressure up as high as it will go and rinses handfuls of water over her face now.

  I am going mad in here. There’s too much peace. Too much time to think.

  Out in the parlor the door opens and men’s voices come to Anna’s ear. Quickly she picks up her wet dress and steps into the tiny closet, but she can’t close it all the way.

  Kit’s protesting voice comes to her, “What, ya can’t knock?”

  “Silenzio, puttana,” is the response.

  An Italian man, Anna mouths in the cramped closet.

  Sixto Stabile, who owns the Adonis Social Club and half of the undertaker business downstairs rarely speaks Italian to the girls, so it must be Frankie Yale. But then she hears the voice of three men. The third must be the man named Lucy, the one who comes to pick up Grace and Kit every morning at eleven A.M. and drives them to the Adonis.

  Naked, Anna holds the wet dress against her body. But the smell of it change
s her mind. Quietly, she opens the closet and drops it into the tub.

  Then the bathroom door opens.

  Anna bites on the cuticles of her hand as the sound of a man pissing into the toilet fills the room. If he sees me, my hair will give me away as the sister of Richie Lonergan, a lieutenant for Bill Lovett.

  Word has it that Pulcinella, as they call Bill, has a target on his back. A big, young fellow was hired to take back Red Hook and kill the Irish leadership there.

  But if they find me now, they will kidnap and ransom me. That’s what they do, they’re Black Hand.

  The sound of the man’s zipper makes Anna’s eyes bulge. The closet door can’t close all the way with her in it, so if he tries pushing it, she will be found. Footsteps inside the bathroom make her shiver as she covers up her breasts with one arm and her private area with her other hand.

  The man growls and sniffs into the air.

  “Puzza de piscio qui,” the man calls out in a deep voice to the others in the parlor.

  Around the edge of the door she can see the man’s profile and knows it is Lucy by the big bend in his nose. Again Lucy sniffs over the tub where her dress lies crumpled and wet with piss.

  He must be telling them that it smells of piss. He’s going to find me. What am I doing here naked and hiding? I am putting Richie and Bill at risk. I’ve lost my way.

  “Sangue, sangue,” Anna hears Grace and Kit yell in unison outside as Lucy growls again in the small space of the bathroom.

  Inside the closet Anna shivers. Her lungs long to be filled with a scream, so she takes her hands off her breasts to cover her mouth. Without washing his hands Lucy opens the door and promptly steps out.

  Anna takes a deep breath, then listens to the five of them speak out in the parlor. Anna had learned that the only time Lucy could be turned away is if Grace and Kit sang those magic words in Italian, “Blood, blood.”

  Sometimes, even when they had their blood, Lucy would come back to explain in broken English that a man wished to feed on her blood.

  “All men have different appetites,” Grace had explained to her last month when their moon had last come.

  Then Kit said, “I’ve played the virgin victim an’ the domineerin’ dame, but nothin’s ravin’ mad like a man wit’ a red mustache.”

  “Madness,” Grace had agreed. “What are ya supposed to say after a man asks ya to dress up like his mother an’ take advantage o’ his innocence?”

  Kit answered with a shrug, “It was business doin’ pleasure wit’ ya?”

  Anna had heard stories as a girl about how Italians eat their own children in a blood sauce. It was her father who said it mostly, but her mother did not trouble to correct him. She had been told that Irish-American men are wholesome and healthy, strong and just. But both Grace and Kit disagreed. And if the stories she heard about McGowan’s wake were true, Dinny Meehan drank the blood of his dead righthander in front of one and all.

  Men are beasts, Anna shakes her head in the mirror. I should have been one.

  The door opens and Grace passes a dress through while Anna exchanges it with her wet dress. “It’s Kit’s. She’s more ya size than I am.”

  “They’re gone?”

  “They’re gone,” Grace assures. “Ya know ya prolly shouldn’t—”

  “I know,” Anna stops her. “I shouldn’t be here.”

  “We need to talk, Anna,” Grace slowly closes the door. “A real talk.”

  Anna holds the dress up to inspect it. It is fringed with a shiny gold lamé round the sleeves and at the hemline, but is made mostly from linen and low quality cotton. The stitching along the waist meanders and there are stains that had been rubbed out with some crude soap and a brush.

  I don’t want to think about where the stains come from.

  The shoulders puff out and the neckline is too low for her taste. Grace had once told Anna that her breasts are a small man’s handful and her hips were not the kind most Italian men prefer. She also told Anna that although she is extraordinarily beautiful, she could never be a whore because she couldn’t act demure. Not enough for most men’s taste, at least.

  Anna slips into the dress and enters the parlor room where Kit sits on a sill blowing cigarette smoke out an open window.

  Grace turns from the washboard and walks through the parlor with Anna’s soiled dress in her hands and clothespins in her mouth mumbling of how the dress will take hours to dry. She leans out the window where Kit smokes and attaches it to the line that stretches fifteen feet across to the neighboring building to the south. Outside Anna sees the piss-stained rug slung over the wire as well.

  “I. . . I’m sorry about—”

  “Oh stop,” Grace turns from the window with her hands on her hips. The two of them take deep breathes in unison and stare at Anna. Grace then takes the cigarette from Kit and draws from it, then hands it back. “Anna?”

  “Don’t.”

  “Anna ya worry me.”

  “Is that right?” Anna stares back at the two and raises an eyebrow.

  “Anna last night after ya passed out, ya were talkin’ in ya sleep about this Neesha person again. Callin’ out his name an’ whatnot. Who is Neesha? Ya asked about him when Bill hurt ya that day after the storm. Then last night ya were so drunk down at the saloon Kit an’ I had to tell all the men that ya couldn’t be bought. One man tried to carry ya off, ya know. Ya passed out on the toilet an’ he walked in an’ scooped ya up wit’ ya under clothes around ya ankles.”

  “Everywhere I go I have to tell men I ain’t no slattern, so what? Everywhere men take bets on who rode me. Now I even dress like a slattern. I don’ fookin’ care what anybody thinks, understand me? I don’ fookin’ care. I ain’t beholden to that shit.”

  “Anna,” Grace walks in front of her and puts two hands on her shoulders.

  “Don’ touch me,” Anna’s eyes flash with blue fire.

  “She’s gonna cut ya wit’ that sharp tongue,” Kit advises.

  But Grace shushes her, “Uhright, uhright. It’s just I love ya, Anna. We both do, see? Why do ya put ya’self through so much? What’s wrong? What’s on ya mind?”

  Anna looks away stubbornly. “I know ya love me,” her voice cracks and her eyes glass over with water. “But I can’t talk about—”

  Grace pulls her close for a hug, but Anna’s arms remain limp at her side.

  “Ya’re touchin’ me again,” Anna growls.

  “Say, if I tell ya a secret that. . . that hurts so bad. . . that I don’ ever wanna talk about. Oh never mind,” Grace changes her mind.

  “What?” Anna perks up and pulls away. “What kinda secret do ya have?”

  Grace bites her lip as Kit tosses the cigarette out the window, “Can we sit down at least?”

  Anna sits on the floor in the whore’s dress cross-legged. Grace and Kit follow suit, the three of them sitting in a circle, holding hands.

  Grace takes a deep breath. “I lied in court. To a judge.”

  “When?”

  “Well the trial was in 1913, but the murder I witnessed was in 1912. Actually, the murder Kit an’ I both witnessed.”

  “I didn’t see nothin’,” Kit shakes her head.

  Grace turns her head to Kit and rolls her eyes, “Ya saw what I saw, but ya just said ya didn’t see nothin’.”

  “Yeah, ‘cause I know it’s better to let sleepin’ dogs lie, but you?” Kit lowers her eyes. “Ya even told them ya real name.”

  Anna turns to Kit, “What did ya tell them ya name was then?”

  “Peggy Kelly,” Kit holds her hand two feet above the ground. “Ever since I’m this high I been told never to tell the tunics my real name. The boys say Patrick Kelly, but my Ma always said, ‘them tunics ask ya name? tell them we’re all Peggy Kelly, because Peggy Kelly means shut ya fookin’ mouth.’” Kit thumbs at Grace. “This one didn’ learn her lessons.”

  Grace rolls her eyes again, “Kit, ya’re a ol’ biddy already. I never even see ya laugh.”

  �
�I am what I am. A whore should never laugh unless she wants a soft cock an’ a hard fist.”

  Anna laughs, until Grace turns on her, “If I tell ya this story, ya gotta tell me yours.”

  Anna’s eyes flick back and forth between Grace and Kit, “Maybe.”

  Grace sighs through her nose.

  “What did ya lie about, in court?” Anna prods.

  “Well, Dinny an’ McGowan were already in Jacob’s Saloon.”

  “Don’ say that name,” Kit warns.

  “No one’s here to hear me,” Grace snaps. “Anyway, Dinny an’ McGowan were already in Jacob’s Saloon, which was between the bridges, it’s burned down now—”

  “I know it’s burned down. Everyone knows that.”

  “Uhright, let me talk.”

  “G’on.”

  “So Dinny an’ McGowan were frisked before they came in. They were facing the front window while Kit was dancin’ wit’ Christie Maroney an’ I was singin’ a song. I have a beautyful singin’ voice, ya know. Everyone says I do.”

  “And?” Anna had only heard rumors of the story about how the White Hand came to power in Brooklyn when she was eleven years old.

  “The sun was startin’ to come up. We’d been blowin’ dust all night an’ drinkin’ too. Christie’s hand was up Kit’s dress while she blew dust from his pinky nail.”

  “I was what? Fifteen?” Kit strikes a match against the floor and lights a handrolled cigarette. “But older than most already.”

  “Anyhow, my singin’ caused Dinny to start cryin’.”

  “Cryin’?” Anna sits back.

  “I swear he was cryin’ when I was singin’ Dear Ol’ Skibberreen. Then we hear some shoutin’ outside o’ the women’s entrance. It was Pickles Leighton. All night long Christie had been talkin’ about makin’ the newcomer Bill Lovett’s gang fight against Dinny’s to make sure that he could keep power to hisself. So Christie was confused when he heard Pickles challenge him to come outside. But as soon as he did, bang. Shot between the eyes. I watched the whole thing. I even saw’r blood shoot out from the back o’ his head. The thing is, Pickles hadn’t killt him.”