Matty tilts his head as if to say that doesn’t matter, “Ya Ma says ya’re the Mary Magdelene.”
“Mary Magdelene?” Anna tries to remember her childhood listening to the homilies of Father Larkin at St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church.
“Yeah, the prostitute in the bible.”
Kit grumbles through cigarette smoke, “Laugh Anna, it’s a comedy o’ miscues we have here. Pure slapstick, Mary Magdelene was not a—”
But Matty speaks over her, “Yeah Anna, but ya Ma says ya been victimized by some sort o’ devilish possession an’ she wants ya come to her so ya can be saved by penitence. Then at least ya will be known as a penitent prostitute.”
Kit chuckles, which turns into a wet cough.
“Penitent fookin’ prostitute,” Anna balls up her fists and walks toward the window in thought.
My own mother believes me a whore. All I want to do is hide from their slavery, but they yank my chain as soon as I flee. Can’t I mourn the loss of my love in peace?
Outside the wind breathes and the heaving trees wade in swirls above the old headstones and sloped walkways as Grace, Kit and Matty await her response.
Anna now completely turns her back on everyone in the room and walks to the window. From behind a tomb in the cemetery the emaciated red-headed woman appears again, shoeless. She stares back at Anna with a mop of hair in the shape of the surrounding willow trees. A tear comes to Anna’s eye, but she balls her fists tight until it dries up.
That is me. If I stay here. If I ignore the love in my heart, that is who I will become; an old woman wandering among cemetery stones. Now I understand that I must surrender to the love in my heart, not to Neesha. Neesha doesn’t exist. Neesha is just a dream, a story, a symbol of my love. The love I must surrender to. My true love, in real life, is my family. That’s what Neesha was saying. Surrender to my love. That’s it. Now I understand. I have to go home to my family.
“Anna, what are ya gonna do?” Grace asks.
She quickly turns on her heel, “I need to change outta this. What else do ya have Kit?”
“Other than dresses for the Adonis? I dunno, a white peasant blouse an’ maybe a skirt. A long plaid skirt.”
“Let me have that instead.”
“Ya can’t wear that outfit outside, Anna,” Grace gawks. “Ya don’ wanna look like a gypsy immigrant.”
“What do I care?”
Kit takes a drag and talks through the exhale, “Ya don’ have to dress up to be pretty in a man’s eyes, just make ya’self look half stupit. That’s twice as much as he needs.”
Grace has loss in her eyes and cries out, “But I don’ want ya to go nowhere, Anna. Where ya gonna sleep now?”
“Home. I’m goin’ home. Should I let my own mother think I sold myself? Nah, I gotta set her straight, an’ everyone else.”
Grace looks back to Anna with innocent eyes, “But I thought ya said that don’ matter? That people believe what they want, not what’s true or factual, an’ that ya not a slave to their idears?”
Kit chuckles at that, “A woman is a many-colored creature who camouflages desire to blind her predators.”
“Anna, what about what ya was talkin’ about,” Grace bulges her eyes, not wanting to say the words in front of Matty. “What we was talkin’ about, ya know?”
Protection. She is talking about who I can get to help protect her when she testifies in the trial so she can tell the truth about who really killed Christie Maroney.
“I’ll get back to ya on that, I promise.”
“Oh please, please do,” Grace says.
“Until then,” Anna grabs at Grace’s wrist. “Peggy Kelly, uhright?”
“I understand.”
Anna then turns to Kit and holds both her hands in her own, “Thanks for all ya advice, Kit.”
“Advice? Ya want advice? Never kiss a frog ‘cause he ain’t but just another dirty dog.”
“There are no princes, are there?”
“Princes,” Kit scowls at the notion. “Get outta here wit’ that. Princes are for dreams, right?”
“What are yaz talkin’ about?” Matty’s mouth goes sideways in wonder.
“Girls have secrets, Matty. Ya don’ know that by now?” Grace scolds.
“Secrets are dangerous. Girl secrets are the mostest of all.”
Outside, with Matty behind her, Anna storms down the long slope on Twenty-Fourth Street as her shadow rushes ahead. Down the hill’s steep distance a church spire stretches into the sky while Red Hook’s grain elevators and sugar refineries bend over the waterfront. And even further still, the Statue of Liberty reaches up and out of the water to protect the flame. The cornices and rooftops descend like giant’s steps on both sides of the street, framing the New York Harbor beyond. Over her shoulders Anna’s fox-colored mane whips behind her. Unfurling down her back and snapping like a flag in the gales as she strides downhill toward the Fifth Avenue Elevated Train.
“What’s not Richie’s fault?” Matty calls up ahead. “I heard ya yellin’ that somethin’ wasn’t Richie’s fault. What were yaz talkin’ about?”
“Shaddup,” Anna hurls back.
Matty had loved her since they were but moppets on the Irishtown sidewalks. She thinks of the time when he first told her while playing stoopball on Johnson Street.
“I love ya,” he said and showed her his hairless cock. That had no effect on her since she had many younger brothers with the same bald wiggle-worm as Matty. Before that she was unaware love had anything to do with private parts. A month later he asked her to play stink finger when they were in her basement with all her siblings. Instinctively she refused. But the more she ignored his advances, the more he desired her.
Now, walking down 24th Street she could feel his eyes watching her from behind. That only made her want to walk like a man, but no matter what she did it always only seemed to arouse him.
How am I going to set fools like him straight?
But Matty had proved to be a good source of information. He had told her about how Bill Lovett was going to the Dock Loaders’ Club to recruit Dinny’s men. A war veteran always has the right of things amongst the working class. But a decorated war veteran has their hearts in his palm.
On Fifth Avenue they ascend the train station stairs, Matty running up behind her. When Anna sees the train is about to leave, she runs in before the doors close. But Matty thrusts his hand through the doorway and looks down to the conductor. He then pulls the door open and enters as Anna rolls her eyes.
Suddenly Matty grabs her arm, “We could leave together. Go to, I dunno, what city ya ever wanted to see? We could go somewhere an’ forget all this. Have a fam’ly. Think about makin’ payments on a house so we can pass it down. Our kids’d say they were born in the house they had kids in, ya know? We could start somethin’. Build somethin’. We could ponder the future, Anna. Out in the new suburbs they do a lot o’ ponderin’ an’—”
“There is no future. There’s just now,” Anna mumbles.
“Bill said he don’ want ya around no more,” Matty has spite in his tone now. “Or them slatterns ya hang out wit’ either.”
As the train slows for their stop, Matty sits closer to her.
“We’re almost there, ya can go away now,” Anna finally responds to him.
“It’s just dangerous for a girl to walk around wit’out a escort,” Matty said.
So he thinks I’m a whore but he wants to escort and run away with me anyhow.
Anna flutters her butterfly eyes and looks at him demurely, “Do ya think I really did what they say?”
Matty is stumped, “I dunno.”
“Can I admit somethin’ to ya?”
“Sure sure.”
“I’m still pure.”
“Then how did—”
“Matty.”
“Wha?”
“Whatever ya heard, it’s not true. I may have gotten money to feed my fam’ly, an’ I may have friends that work at the Adonis, but never, ever did I sle
ep wit’ nobody. I’m surprised at ya, Matty. Ya’ve known me ya whole life.”
Matty looks down at his shoes and sticks his tongue in his cheek, then looks back up to her, “Ya’re pure?”
She shakes her head at him, “Just don’ tell nobody, promise? Can I trust ya?”
“Uhright.”
You’re a puppet and I got hold of your strings, Anna smiles. Tell them what they want to hear, that’s how you set fools straight. Blind them with their own fanciful desires, not your own.
“But ya can’t walk around wit’ them fookin’ slatterns no more, Grace an’ Kit. They’re whores, Anna.”
Anna stops, “An’ in ya world, where am I?”
“What do ya mean?”
“Answer me. Where am I? Are ya above me?”
“Ya’re a girl.”
“So is that a yes? Ya’re above me then? Ya’re better than me?”
“I—”
“Ya don’ wanna admit that I am, but ya believe it,” She walks out of the train at the Sands Street Station along the sloped abutment of the Brooklyn Bridge toward the stairwell.
“C’mon Anna, I mean—”
“Ya’re just a thick Brooklyn yob at the bottom o’ a teenage gang—”
“I’m not at the bottom—”
“My mother’s brother was Yakey Yake Brady an’ my father was his enforcer. My brother Richie is the leader o’ the gang ya’re in, but I’m still below ya?”
“Everyone thinks ya whore’d ya’self, so that makes
ya—”
“But ya know it’s not true.”
“I mean ya told me it’s not true but—”
“An’ if ya believe it, if ya truly love me, ya’d be a man an’ stand up for me.”
“Well yeah.”
“Good then,” she says as Matty tries to catch up to her down the hill on Bridge Street, getting closer and closer to the water now.
“But it don’ change the fact that ya’re a girl.”
“I’m a woman,” Anna says without looking back. “I’m eighteen.”
“Ya ain’t a real woman ‘til ya have children.”
“I have thirteen children,” Anna spits back.
“Those are ya siblin’s. An’ ya don’ even pay much attention to them no more.”
“I got thirteen god’amn children, but that don’ even make me a women? I’ll tell ya what makes a woman. A woman makes up her own mind. Which means there ain’t hardly a woman anywhere in this world.”
“Yet ya call ya’self one?”
“I do,” She spins on her heel. “An’ if Bill doesn’t want anythin’ to do wit’ me, then why does he have ya escort me around?”
“He don’t,” Matty responds. “Richie does.”
Richie. My sweet, wordless big brother. He knows me. But does he believe I slept with men for money as Bill told him?
Richie Lonergan may report to Bill Lovett, but Anna knows that he loves her. The best sort of love there is; boundless, unending love. The subtle kindnesses he offered her throughout their childhood had always touched her. Somewhere Richie wants to help, but can’t.
He can’t even speak on account of all the horrors he’s experienced.
The Lonergan fury is in Richie, just as much as it is in her. That much they share. She had seen her big brother brawl many times on the street. When he lets his fists fly, no one can stop him. When Richie was caught cutpursing by three men at the Sands Street Station, he had broken one man’s collar bone, another man’s jaw and threw the last down a flight of stairs from the third to second floor. Then he slid down the handrail and picked the man up over his head and heaved him down to the sidewalks.
Having one leg meant nothing to Richie Lonergan. When he fought Red Donnelly behind the Dock Loaders’ Club, Anna was there. She saw it all. Red threw one punch and missed. Then Richie’s eyes lit up and he attacked like a rabid wolf with the scent of blood in its mouth. Richie beat Red Donnelly to sleep right there on the Belgian bricks.
Richie, she nods her head in silence. Richie could be my most diligent, loyal ally.
On the sidewalk outside of the Lonergan bicycle shop on Bridge Street between York and Front streets, the barefoot girls play potsy with a small puck, while the boys hold rocks and paving stones, awaiting a rat to peak its head out of the sewer. The boys with suspenders that hold up their big trousers had laid soggy bread on the grate as bait.
Anna’s stomach turns when a sense of deja vu washes over her like waves. Then she looks up above the Lonergan bicycle shop to the three-story pre-Civil War clapboard tenement where many families reside in one-window, musty rooms. Just then, an unkindness of ravens dart across the leaden sky amidst the rooftops.
Neesha, now I remember.
In dream, Neesha had told her something that she had heard before, but couldn’t remember from where.
You have the will of a prophetess and the future is yours to shape, he told her. But it was Mrs. O’Flaherty who said it first.
Last month Mrs. O’Flaherty from the second floor died. She came to Brooklyn from County Galway way back in 1850. Dinny Meehan had her waked upstairs and paraded her casket through the cobblestoned streets to bury her in a proper grave down in Green-Wood Cemetery. A proper grave was the only thing Mrs. O’Flaherty requested, since three of her siblings and her father had all died on roadsides back in Ireland during the hunger times.
When Anna was younger she would often run “tae” up to Mrs. O’Flaherty, who sometimes spoke in the old language, but always had strange things to say.
Once the old woman touched her hand and looked at her with windswept, bright blue eyes.
“Child,” she croaked. “Ye’re more than a princess. Ye’re a prophetess, ye know it? The Ghost God has touched ye an’ will come to ye one day, so he will.”
Anna stood with her mouth open in her sack dress with a torn sleeve and old beaten boots.
“It’s true,” the pitch of the old woman’s voice went high. “A child o’ a lost tribe who will grow very old, like me. But!” Mrs. O’Flaherty’s finger went in the air to procure attention. “Ye may foretell the future, t’is true, t’is true. Because the future is yers to shape.”
Now two people have told me the same thing, Anna realizes while still she stares above the Lonergan bicycle shop. Though one of them was dead and in my dreams.
Anna looks down and turns her hand so the light can gleam on the gold surface of her wreath-of-vine ring.
She thinks of the stories she heard as a child in the old part of Irishtown, closer to the water. There was “Dierdre of the Sorrows” of course, who foresaw the man she would marry when a raven landed in the snow with its bloody prey. But Dierdre’s story ended badly and she killed herself when she was taken as wife of the old king.
Will my story end badly too? Anna wonders.
Then there was the willful and ruthless Gráinne who also had an older man as a suitor. But Gráinne’s powers were much more appealing, she had the geis, the curse-gift that she put on the younger man Diarmuid to make him fall in love with her. He was a skilled fighter and a beloved member of the ancient Fenian warriors, but he eventually died too. Anna bows her head when she realizes that there is nothing in the old stories for her to learn from.
Or is there? I’ll just have to make my own story, she thinks, though mine already has its share of sorrow and death.
A swirling, unsettled breeze comes up the Bridge Street hill from the water, carrying with it the brine of the East River. Dead fish and locomotive grease mingle in Anna’s nose as she grits her teeth again and flexes her fists at the end of both arms.
Lowering her eyes to the entrance of the bicycle shop, she stomps by her brood of siblings and the scabby-kneed jackanapes of Bridge Street. Without noticing her, the boys suddenly screech in unison and heave their paving stones at a pink nose that had sniffed at the bread from below the sewer grate while the girls stop playing potsy to see about the commotion. With hoarse laughs the children run to look down the grate
and see if they hit the mark when a babe of no more than three years belatedly throws his rock, hitting another child in the ear. A flood of angry tears come in response.
Anna pushes through the children to see who is crying, but when it is a dark-haired boy who does not own the surname Lonergan, she pushes back through the slew of street urchins toward the bicycle shop’s glass door, leaving the kid to his tears.
“Anna, ya’re back!” Her little sisters Sarah and Catherine yell up to her.
“Yay!” Little James and Patrick hug at her thigh through the plaid skirt.
“My little ones,” Anna runs her fingers through their windblown, dirty blonde heads. “My children. Yes I’m back. Back for ya. An’ I’ll never leave yaz again.”
“Promise it,” Julia screams.
“I promise,” Anna smiles until she sees two teen sentries that guard the entrance to the Lonergan Bicycle shop.
They are members of Richie’s gang that had been enveloped by Bill’s boys when he returned from the war. Short and stout Petey Behan stands with his arms crossed and a smirk on his square head. Timothy Quilty stares at Anna with hands dangling round his thighs and his gob open to show his big buck teeth.
“Ya ma’s inside,” Matty comes to her ear.
Anna takes a deep breath, “An’ so it begins.”
A Dire Choice
Sadie Meehan could not sleep all night. When the darkness turned to light outside the hotel window, her trepidation piqued. Flashes of unsettling worries plague her now and waves of tingles rush up and down her spine. The hotelier will be up in room 310 soon. Waiting for her. Waiting with her ring.
Two letters had arrived for Sadie at the hotel on Long Island. Though she had sent out many more, only two people responded.
Liam Garrity’s letter has twice the amount of money he normally sends. The letter inside simply says, “He’s back. Come home. The extra is for passage.”
Sweet Liam. Naive Liam. He does not know that my decision is made. I am never going back to Brooklyn.
A choice had been thrust upon her. A simple choice. A horrifying choice. A choice between her husband and her son. And although she questions most of the decisions she has made recently as she sits in the dark on the small chair by the hotel window overlooking the car park, at least this she is certain.
Divide the Dawn- Fight Page 28
