by Mary Burns
But my fingers’d learned to be smart them days I spent thinning out the donations at the mission so’s Margaret and me could make our way north to Chicago. When Billy came to pick up the orders, distracting everyone with his patter—for he never missed an opportunity—I slipped that lucky envelope into my sleeve and waited until he’d pushed through the door to the stock room before I went to the lav in the hall, taking my pocketbook, sure, and rolling my eyes at Florence as I passed, guarding the sleeve in question by placing my arm at my waist and the other hand over that, and wincing a little with the pain I wanted her to think came with my monthlies.
Must it always be this way, I thought to myself, in the hallway, the depths opening black for that one minute before me answering myself in the same thought—it must, for the time being. But Desmond Malloy could be the man to lead me out of this life and then wouldn’t I make it all good. Him after opening a window I could step through to the future where someone else managed the juggling of the daily needs.
§
Avoiding the other girls at leaving time, I hurried into the first elevator stopped, then sauntered through the marble foyer onto the street with nobody ever suspecting what I carried with me. Not so much I couldn’t save and put it back, same as I put a penny into the box for the missions whenever I went to church. Only a five, not a week’s pay. Maybe even not enough, paused me a minute. Yet it must be enough, it had to be, for just as if on a regular errand, I joined the State Street throngs and headed towards The Fair, straight to the section where the bathing costumes hung. I could have tried the heaps of clothes in the stalls on Maxwell Street and maybe found what I wanted, but with the plan being to meet my man tomorrow, I had no time to take a chance on Maxwell Street. I knew The Fair well, the dresses and the on-sale goods, the toiletries section where Gladys and me would stop and smell the creams on display while girls our age but dressed fancier, in black with shirt sleeves and collars white as a new tooth, stood behind the counter looking proud as if they owned the creams themselves.
Upstairs then, where mannequin heads modeled the loveliest straw hats for summer, and beyond them the racks of bathing costumes. Cotton jersey, wool, satin. Wouldn’t I a loved one of the satin models felt so slick under my hand, shone like a lathered bay horse, the one used to stand in Church Street and let me pet him. No horse for me, Conor Curragh’s eldest daughter. No satin bathing costume neither, not for the bill my envelope gave up. Well, the mohair would more than do, and I picked a nice navy one with white piping trimmed the square neckline. Held it up to myself and thought it would sure enough fit.
The saleslady asked, don’t you want to try it on and would you like some assistance and have you seen the bathing slippers and stockings, the charming overskirts? Her saying it with a smirk meant I have to say these words, it’s part of the job, but I know who you are. I never was trying to hide it. How could I, being who I am, small. I have always been small, but I have made my way as I had to. I only opened my pocketbook and snatched out the five rightfully belonged to someone wanted an imitation skull to tell him what to do—as if there weren’t enough empty headed ones running the show—plus one dollar of my own and put the bills on the counter. She wrapped the bathing costume in paper and dropped it into a bag. I thanked her and that was that, despite her smile told me what she thought of me and it wasn’t much.
I’d got the thing, yes I had, and the store after closing. A light-colored man in a blue uniform, a mulatto with the steel wool hair, but thin lips and a nose straight and haughty as Potter Palmer’s, stood at the door and inspected me like he could see inside my mind. I held out the bag, the sack with the name on it, The Fair. This big man would discourage anyone trying to lift goods from the store. But me, I was a shopper like everyone else dribbling out the doors, my glance told him, and why would he think otherwise? Him in the uniform, sure, but no policeman.
You saw colored at the doors, but not shopping, not at The Fair, though you did see them everywhere else, crowding streetcars, some lines. Plenty in Chicago wished these new kind of coloreds would march right back to whatever ship landed them and sail to Africa, or at the least board a train bound for where they’d come from, Mississippi, Alabama, somewhere we’d passed through, Margaret and me, riding north, and saw out the window the shacks, the stick-legged children. ’Twas the colored paper started it all, the Chicago Defender, with what they’d called “A Great Northern Drive,” trying to get colored folk to leave the South—where they’d been slaves and where they might be strung up for the slightest thing—and get themselves to Chicago for factory jobs and grand times at the hottest night clubs.
Well, they must a believed what they read in the papers because, like Desmond Malloy’d said, there was a stream coming into the city and unsettling those’d come earlier, we Micks and the Polacks like Harry, and all the rest, from every corner of the world. He was one complained about them taking all the jobs at the Yards and steering clear of the union. Made it bad for the rest, said Harry. But Harry never made room in his mind for much more than his job, his kind, and Margaret. Like I said, I got over the fear of folks with skin different than mine when we were in Florida, for it was my job to look after the babies whatever their color, them ivory, or tobacco brown, or caramel, some of them. Really all the tints nature’d mixed.
Oh, but wouldn’t I a liked that kind of life, bringing something home every day. Then I looked at the streetcar strike another way, for if the car men got their raise and Desmond Malloy got me, wouldn’t the extra money just be more to support this habit I could get into, of strolling the store aisles thinking of what I might like and what I might need and wouldn’t Desmond be happy with a new tie same as I’d seen draped on a rack above the counter near the door? Oh, yes, I’ll take that one, I’d say to the saleslady. Maybe that one as well, to match his eyes, they’re such a lovely green you know, and her smile would be altogether different than the girl who packed my bathing costume in tissue paper crackling inside the bag I carried close against me as I wrestled through the going home crowds on State Street.
It was suffering hot on the Madison car, people standing sleepy, odors of all kinds insisting. Car crawling along, sometimes you’d think you could have walked faster. Lucky ones sitting near the windows covered by grills the gritty breeze pushed through. Even though later than my usual hour, all the seats filled as it seems they always were and more of us hanging from straps. Not much talk at the end of the day and a sweltering one such as that with everyone’s feet stinging like they must be, like mine stung. Some reading the Daily News or the Examiner, or one of the papers in their own languages, or the Trib, gone old since the morning. Me trying to get a glimpse of what’d happened since I last looked.
CAR MEN OFFER WAGE COMPROMISE
WEST PARCHED, SUFFERS
GIRL MISSING IN MYSTERY
while wondering if my crime would make a story one day, one of them small ones on the back pages, headline in short skinny letters, but news all the same.
CLERK DISMISSED FOR THIEVERY
Would it be worth it in the end? And what in heaven would I ever do with a bathing costume if Desmond Malloy stood me up?
She’d be wondering what was keeping me, Margaret, and how would I explain the delay and the bag said The Fair? Yet, seeing the twin towers of St. Pat’s, I stepped off the car before my usual stop. In the street the children were glazing their bare arms with the leavings of ice from the free deliveries Mayor Thompson ordered to relieve people couldn’t get out of the city, or even out of their rooms. A horse’d folded his legs under himself right on the cobblestones and all the dogs were splayed out in the patches of shade the walls of the church threw on the sidewalk. My conscience guided me around them dogs and in.
Not novena night, but, because dim and cooler than the stoops of the tenements, people, mostly old ones, bent over in scattered pews counting their rosary beads. No priest waited in his box for confessors, not that I pla
nned to confess, not then, for I was having the old argument with Him. The nuns would say Jesus puts temptation in our way to test us, but you could also say he’s after offering an opportunity, same as, going all the way back home, he sent the mission sisters into our schoolroom, opened my mind to the possibilities this poor life offered. Same as he gave me the wit to use a typewriter. Same as he planted the idea of this city in my head and saw to it that people sent money in their envelopes to the mission school. If Margaret and me’d never gone with the nuns, if I’d stuck to scullery work, if folks’d sent their donations to the archdiocese as they were supposed to, instead of directly to the mission, if Packy hadn’t caught the flu…
The “if” chain linked back to the day my da and my mammy came together in ways they never talked about, though theirs made a true life love story if ever there was one. I would describe every bit, for there’s no shortage of paper, and I came upon the habit of writing things down after watching my da lick the end of his pencil and scribble away, raising his craggy face to think a bit, then continuing, the book of his on his knee and him bent as he had been bent since the accident on the railroad and me barely in school. Most Ennis men drank themselves away from their families. With my da it was the dreaming took him, Mammy said. “You might as well be off with the others for your nightly jar, Conor. You’re as gone as they are anyway. Praise be it doesn’t cost us anythin’ but your attention.”
Da, hearing her say that, let his pencil drop and hobbled over to where she sat on her straw-bottomed chair by the hearth, where she sits in my memory, her skin browning from the peat smoke, her eyes shining like bright blue stones on a road in the moonlight. He tugged her up, though she resisted, and took her into his arms, and steered her around the square of earthen floor in a pretend dance, though the wheezing and the sleep-whining of us all provided the only music. Then he paraded her to their bed where I heard more protesting before I pushed my face above my sister Margaret’s shoulder to see him on his bent arm, kissing her.
Drops of rain blew in under the chimney cap. I shut my eyes and nodded off to the dependable rhythm of the torrent, restless and troubled with feelings I did not recognize. After the accident he could have stayed away, joined the other men jawing away the hours at a cottage down the road behind Mill Street and playing games to gyp each other out of a drink. But he was soft, Da was, and the butt of other men’s jokes because of it.
It’s them, sure, made me who I am, the firstborn, bold as one of them irons at the front of the car pushed anything blocking the tracks out of its way. I promised to pay it back somehow, what I took. Slip some bills into an envelope and mail them to the person scribbled a return address. It was a promise came from my heart and would right the sin. The promise of money and daily prayers for the sake of the suffering, all this to the Virgin in her sapphire cloak studded with golden stars, for the Virgin seemed more understanding.
The Virgin, who kept her title though she gave birth, had to understand how it could be for a girl alone in the city, and all she needed and wouldn’t a man make it a better life and wouldn’t it be grand to see him coming in the door every night, from his work or his ball games. We’d certainly have a nicer home than the one Margaret and me shared at Bridey’s. Maybe I’d be blessed some day like them saw tears falling down the painted faces of statues. It was something I dreamed of seeing, a real sign from the Virgin knew I did my best to be good.
But nothing that evening. Only the snort of a shrunken one in the last pew, no doubt exhausted from climbing the steps and shouldering open the heavy door, all he could do to save himself from the heat took the lives of the weakest every summer since I’d been there. Terrible. Isn’t it human nature, then, to take advantage of what opportunities appear right in front of you? Wouldn’t it be as much as a slap in the face of God, or fate, or the good people, to turn your back on them?
§
Margaret sat on the front steps watching the children at their skipping games, watching something anyway as she waited, like the whole city, for a wind to blow up or the temperature to fall. It’d gone to the periwinkle hour of evening, not quite dark but promising, and neighbors perched on the steps of every house I passed, still in my work duds and clutching the bag with my pocketbook up against my chest. It was not so big, the package, that my sister would spy it right off. I wanted to slip on the costume and admire myself in a scrap of mirror, but it would have to wait. I patted the top of her head and promised to return after I used the lav, which I did, but first hid the bag with the costume in the same place I kept my writing book.
“Harry’s out tonight, then, is he?”
“He’s on with the Teamsters, them decidin’ what they’re goin’ to do if the Yards go out again this week. Your fellow stand you up, Maeve?”
“Tomorrow we’re meetin’, not tonight, and good thing for it, too, because I need to wash this shirtwaist and pray it dries overnight.”
“Or somethin’ lighter. I have a flower you could wear at your neck. Is he handsome, Maeve? Do you like his looks?”
I laughed at her curiosity, yet I’d a been the same. “He’s ordinary handsome. The nose a little big and sun burnt.” That much was true. I didn’t go on about the dimples in his cheek or sure she’d know. “Show me the flower when we’re up again.”
“Have you had your supper?”
Food filled my thoughts every minute of some days, and other days, like that one, I forgot I had a stomach. But I couldn’t tell Margaret so. Instead, I packed another fib in that ever-weightier valise I carried in my conscience and told her I hadn’t much of an appetite, because of the heat and working late and all.
“Bridey got the ice today and I left a bit of cheese in her box. Do you think we’ll ever sleep at all?”
“We will, Meggsie-pegs. When it’s cooler. I will help myself to the cheese, and then we’ll stroll over to the park and look at the people.”
The prospect of a change from Bridey’s stoop distracted her from any more questions about my date and anything else might make me squirm. But I swore that, if Desmond kept his promise and we agreed to meet again, I’d insist, I would, on inviting my sister along. And, if she asked why I’d fibbed, I wouldn’t confess it was because the sight of Mr. Desmond Malloy caused my heart or something in that vicinity to melt same as a candy in the sun, but explain it’s because I knew she feared water as much as me and didn’t think much of car men in general and probably less now they threatened to walk off the job.
Maybe she would understand, instead of scolding me about the kind of life I’d be opening myself to—me who’d come so far and worked so hard for my share of Bridey’s room, and shows as often as we could get to them, and the papers and what dime novels I could buy or borrow from the girls at work, where we soiled our fingers with ink beneath lamps that jumped and swung on account of blasting going on underground or far away, or some spell Mr. R was after casting to keep us girls alert.
When Riverview’d opened for the season earlier that summer, Harry—trying to help me fill the gap opened when Packy died—proposed we make a day of it with one of his pals from the packing plant. I screamed on the roller coaster along with the thick-fingered fellow whose words I could barely make out. Him as if talking with stuffing in his mouth, me being more a listener than a talker, yet still unable to make out much of it. Trying to avoid touching, though the coaster and later the tilt-a-whirl threw me right up against him. Mary and Joseph, the fellow stank of packer’s blood and man sweat and hadn’t he then gone and found himself some cologne to try to smother it. When I threw up the hot dog he treated us to, they all thought it was the ride made me sick.
Thursday, July 24, 1919
Still another story satisfied Margaret’s curiosity about the package I carried with my pocketbook. Wasn’t it my best skirt, then, to change into, for my date? My sleepy sister inquired no further, for even early on we were both that drained by the heat we saved any go we had
for the day ahead. But she did remember to give me the bunch of violets she promised, and pinned them at my throat.
There I was at the streetcar stop, the violets tickling my chin and the morning edition soiling my hand because, since I needn’t worry about buying my own supper that night, I had two pennies to spare. July 24, ninety-three degrees already, and there’s a child missing.
40 HOUR HUNT FAILS TO BARE CLEW TO CHILD
The same missing girl I saw mentioned in a headline I’d skipped over the night before, but this story on the front page grabbed your stomach, where fear prowls same as hunger. Only six years of age and with the sweet face and the bobbed hair of Baby Marie in the pictures. Janet Wilkinson. Gone missing on her way home from school. “Not a trace,” wept her mother. Little Janet shambling along, as children do, up to the building where she lived with her mammy and her da in an apartment on the fourth floor. Disappeared, just like that. No trace. Not a schoolbook, a shoe. No screams heard, no signs of a child’s nail marks on a doorknob she could a been clinging to. Only a box of chocolates found in the apartment of the janitor, name of Fitzgerald, lived in the same building. A moron, they called him, the papers. Could a been him, Janet’s father thought but, as it was, the whereabouts of sweet Janet were a mystery, another mournful element in the day’s hash of woe—other strikes brewing, prices going up. The troubles stretched over the city like an elastic band and me wondering what next thing would cause it to snap.
