Sirens

by Janet Fox

  What was he thinking? Marriage? I talked back, made bold by the warm temperature and the worry. “I can help the family by getting a job once I graduate from college.”

  “Job.” Pops paced the floor, spouting, my back talk unleashing his anger, all his pent-up arguments. “First they get the vote, and now women think they can go around taking jobs from men. Worse thing that ever happened to this country was when women got the vote. Dumb politicians.”

  I’d heard it all before—Pops’s raving about the suffrage—but this time was different. This time it was about me.

  He turned on me. “There’s no job except where you ought to be—at home, taking care of your family. Like your ma, who takes care of things around this house. You don’t hear her complaining, do you?” Behind me, Ma shifted, a soft murmur in her throat. Pa’s voice rose, quick. “You’re going, and you’ll find a husband. And no nonsense about cutting your hair. Women who cut their hair short are floozies.”

  My voice trembled. “I’m not ready to get married. I want to finish out the school year. I have plans. And my plans don’t include becoming a floozy.”

  Pops narrowed his eyes. “I’m your father. You’ll do as I tell you. You’re to go to New York, to stay with your aunt and uncle.”

  My throat grew tight, and I heard Ma behind me, felt her rest her hand on my shoulder. “Of course she will. Won’t you, Jo?”

  Pops’s eyes slipped between Ma’s and mine, and he turned on his heel and left us in the kitchen, the air weighing damp with the clean clothes that smelled of Ma’s lavender soap.

  I turned. “Ma.” Now the tears welled. “This is all wrong.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t. Don’t, Jo. It’ll do no good.”

  “But why? Why can’t I stay here?” Even as I said it I could see it in her eyes: she and Pops both wanted me out of the house, to disappear behind a curtain. Something was surely wrong. Frustration edged in again behind my fear. “He sells spirits illegally and I can do his books, but I can’t finish school and get an honest job?” I folded my arms over my chest, tucking myself in. “If he’s worried about floozies, he should take a look at the places that sell his liquor.”

  “Josephine.” Ma’s voice was hard now. “You will not talk about your father that way in this house.” She took a breath. “Especially not when he’s only thinking about you.”

  I dropped my head.

  She went on, “You know, Mary landed on her feet with Bertram. My sister was clever that way. He’s done well. They’ve got a big beautiful place on Park Avenue now. They tell me it’s all the rage, living in a Park Avenue apartment. Plenty of privacy there, and lots of protection. They even have a doorman to keep you safe.”

  Safe. The word stuck in the air like a dab of glue on paper.

  “Aunt Mary and Uncle Bert hardly know me. Why would they want to take me in?”

  “They’re family. We’re family.” Ma didn’t lie well. Safe hung there, thick. Protection. Pops’s anger was out of bounds. Ma pressed the shirt through the wringer, squeezing the life out of it.

  “Mary said you don’t need to bring anything but underclothes. Your cousin Melody has dresses she’s dying to give you.”

  “Ma? What’s really going on?” I reached for the shirt, hung it for her while she picked out the next.

  She shrugged. “I don’t ask for details. I don’t question your father.” She worked the wringer with a vengeance, snapped the next shirt hard, then handed it to me to hang it over the drying rack. She said as she turned away, in a voice so calm it was chilling, “We just couldn’t bear to lose you, too.”

  The argument went out of me as I heard the tremor in her voice. Lose me, too. Like they lost Teddy.

  She moved back to me then, placed one hand on my shoulder, lifting the hair away from my face with the other. “You’re a smart girl. I know you can take care of yourself in New York. Your aunt and uncle aren’t unkind. They live high, but they won’t treat you poorly. Please. Do this for your father. For me.”

  “All right, Ma. When should I be ready?”

  “Your father said over the weekend.”

  “This weekend?”

  “Best not to finish out the school week and have the other students knowing where you’re off to.”

  I rubbed my eyes with my fingers. Not finish out the week. And not finish out the year. “Do you need my help here?” I asked from behind my knuckles.

  “No. You go do what you need to.” Her voice was soft.

  I turned away fast so Ma couldn’t see my face.

  I left the kitchen, back to the dining table where I dropped into the chair, my eyes stinging. Pops’s books were done. My story wouldn’t be finished tonight; I was in no mood for it. Besides, now without school and Miss Draper, there’d be no one to read it.

  Pops had never mentioned marrying me off before. I thought again about that conversation in the alley I’d overheard the night before, the one between Pops and Danny Connor’s men. There was a threat hanging over this house, and he wanted me out. Fumbling for answers, I went over in my mind what I’d heard of the argument in the dark alley outside my bedroom window.

  Close to midnight the noises had started. I’d gotten so used to noises like those that usually I slept through. But not last night. Behind the clatter of bottles and from the depths of sleep I heard Teddy’s name.

  And then, “…something Mr. Connor’s been looking for. You know anything?”

  “No.” Pops’s voice was sharp.

  “You wouldn’t be lying now, would you?” The voice was a low growl. “’Cause Mr. Connor, he wants us to tell you he’s got reason to believe there might be something Teddy…” Here the clanking of bottles drowned the next words.

  After a few minutes, Pops said, “We’re done.”

  “Done for now, Billy-boy, but if Mr. Connor suspects you’re hiding—”

  “Nothing. I’m hiding nothing,” Pops interrupted. “My son has been dead and gone these past eleven months, and we have nothing.” They might not hear it, but I could: Pops’s voice shook.

  “Mr. Connor says to tell you he’s paying you a visit in the near future. If he thinks you know something, our next pickup might not be the usual.”

  “Yeah,” said another voice. “Liftin’ boxes is tough when your knees don’t work.”

  Car doors slammed; a car motor started; the sound moved off. The back door shut with a thump and the lock clicked. Murmurings issued from my parents’ bedroom, and I lay there listening until I couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer.

  Now as I reflected on that conversation it still made little sense. New York gangster Danny Connor was looking for something of Teddy’s, here in this house. Pops was sending me away as fast as he could, and had Ma talking about losing me. I didn’t know the specifics, but this was something so dangerous or so important that the threat to Pops, to Ma, and even to me was serious. And then there was Teddy’s Houdini-like disappearance. He left us—he left me—for a reason.

  I could see now that Pops wanted to get me out of the house for my own good.

  If Teddy’s troubles were wrapped up with Connor, Pops’s line of work had put all of us in a devilish spot. Pops had been wrong to swallow his grief by working with the likes of Danny Connor.

  I would never blame Teddy for this turn of events. No, I would not.

  CHAPTER 3

  Lou

  So who knows right from wrong straightaway, anyhow?

  I adjust my posture, folding my hands in my lap.

  Look, Detective, I know what you’re trying here, but it ain’t working. That light is glaring straight into my baby blues, so would you mind? That’s better. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah. Me and Danny Connor. And right and wrong.

  I never pretended to be sure about what was right. I never pretended to know anything but this: I did what I did to survive. Me, Louise O’Keefe, as tough as nails on the outside, but all I truly wanted was some guy to take care of me.

  So sure, it was all
about keeping us safe, at least at first. It was about me not having any more dough and us being down on our luck and Danny being in the right place at the right time. That he was from the old country? That was extra. I was pretty sure a boyo like him would have a soft spot for the likes of me since we were both only a step away from home.

  I hear the clack of the steno from behind my back as I talk.

  I met Danny Connor back in 1921. When I saw him that day on the street, I was just about on my last dime. There he stood: handsomest guy I’d ever seen and oh so swanky in that three-piece and those spats, a cane with what I thought was a polished brass knob—I later learned it was solid gold. And his eyes, gray like a spring storm. Sure, he was the best-looking swell I’d ever seen. But that wasn’t what took me there. It was that other thing, that smell. Expensive aftershave, the kind you can buy only uptown in a shop where they know you by name. He reeked of it. That, and dough. Because money has a smell, too, you know?

  And he was doling out the goods to the neighborhood: food, booze, money. Gave special attention to the elders and the littlest. I liked that.

  I asked one of the boys, some jerk standing there, who the guy was and what he was about, and I learned he was a palooka who’d fought his way to the top. That he took care of his own around town. Every week he’d truck in stuff for the community. He was the biggest benefactor the Irish community had ever seen. Daniel Connor.

  “So he’s decent,” I said, watching Danny work the crowd. I figured that he wasn’t born rich, and that he was trucking in liquid goods most of the time so as to make his dough, but by that time everyone and his mother was a rumrunner. “That’s pretty swell.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s swell,” the jerk answered. Then he tried to put the squeeze on me, but I’d already set my sights higher, right straight to the top, to Danny, and I slugged that jerk smack on the kisser.

  Detective Smith laughs out loud, and I smile. Back those four-plus years ago I was an eighteen-year-old with moxie. Enough moxie that I turned right around to Danny and stuck out my hand.

  So I says to Danny, “Heyo. I’m Louise O’Keefe. My parents came from County Cork, but they’re now both dead and gone, and I’m looking for a job.”

  Yeah, Danny laughed at first, but I could see it in his eyes when he looked me up and down. I might be short, but I’ve got curves in all the right places, or so I’ve been told.

  “What did you have in mind?” Danny asked.

  I stiffened my shoulders, folded my arms. “I can cook, clean, wash, iron. I can do it all.”

  He looked me up and down again. This wasn’t anything new, but I was hopeful. Because one true guy was better than what I thought I was gonna have to put up with, being clean broke like I was.

  “A girl like you doesn’t need to be ruining her pretty hands with that kind of work. Can you read and write?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you learn to speak properly, and manage a household?”

  I had no idea what he meant by that, but I said, “I’m willing to manage anything.”

  When he smiled this time, he showed all his pearly whites.

  A few weeks later he told me I was his dame, and that he’d take care of me. I took him at his word.

  I watch that detective smirk now as I think again about right and wrong. That’s the only kind of right I knew back then, the kind I got from Danny. That he’d treat me right, yes, sir. As right as rain.

  CHAPTER 4

  MAY 18–19, 1925

  Moll: noun, informal (also, “gun moll”): a gangster’s female companion.

  —Oxford Dictionary of the English Language

  Jo

  The dream of fire, of flames, of heat—my recurring nightmare—that’s what woke me, that terrible consuming desire of fire reaching for me that woke me this night or that out of a sound sleep so that I lay panting in the dark. Fire and being trapped in the fire in that small playhouse and the smother of smoke and snap of the wood around me: those were the memories that fed the nightmare that woke me. And made the scar on my back tingle with remembered pain.

  And then any number of other things would keep me lying there, awake, in the dark.

  This night, after the nightmare, what kept me awake was the obvious lie about sending me to New York City to find a suitable husband, and what was going on that had Pops and Ma so worried about me being safe.

  I got up and turned on the light. Sleep had left me; I might as well put my time in these wee hours to some use. I had to pack for New York. For Pops’s magic trick: making me disappear.

  I’d likely never return to White Plains High. Not say good-bye to Moira, even if we had so little in common anymore with her eyeing the senior boys all the time, looking for a catch. No one else would miss me; within a couple of months kids would be scratching their heads trying to remember the name of the girl who read and wrote every spare minute, that quiet girl who disappeared like the mist that made up her dreams. Only my teacher, Miss Draper, who encouraged my writing, would worry over my absence.

  Since from what Ma had said I didn’t need many clothes, I filled my suitcase with books. All my novels—the old ones by Austen, the newer ones by Eleanor Porter and Zane Grey, and the latest by Forster and Fitzgerald—they’d come with me. And I slipped in as many as I could of those masterful stories about clever Mr. Holmes, the ones Teddy’d given me. I’d carry the suitcase myself, even if it weighed a ton.

  “It isn’t fair,” I whispered to the air in my room. “You were the hero, but I have to obey his orders.”

  Life isn’t fair, Josie, I would’ve heard Teddy say. You’ve got to make what you make for yourself. Watch yourself, Josie-girl, because life can be downright dangerous.

  As I looked at the last bundle to add to my suitcase, I wondered if Ma would notice that the things that had sat on Teddy’s dresser for the past year had gone missing.

  I doubted it. Ma suffered in silence. She was too knotted up with her ongoing grief over Teddy to want to spend time in his room. I was the one who’d set up and maintained the little shrine, who’d spent nights in the dark, staring at the boxes, at the medals, those shiny, shiny medals, that reflected what little light came in from the streetlights, the moon, the stars.

  I lay the contents of that little shrine on top of the silk scarf, the one with the red poppies, the heavy silk square spread out flat. I rubbed the silk between my thumb and forefinger.

  Teddy had brought that scarf for me when he came home from the war.

  Like he’d promised before he left, that day in the early summer of ’17. He already had his uniform. His hair was still curling over his ears, blond and thick like sheep’s wool. He still flashed that beautiful smile, the one that made all the girls melt and made Ma and Pops proud—and made me proud, too, because I knew Teddy had a smile just for me.

  “I’m gonna bring you something back from France, Josie-girl,” Teddy said. “Something real special that a body can’t find except only in Paris.”

  “What?” I asked, excited, bouncing a little, not understanding what it meant for him to go to Paris then. “What, Teddy?”

  “Oh, it’ll be a big surprise,” Teddy had said, and winked.

  And when he came back only half a year later and handed me the fancy box with the scarf, I still didn’t understand. His hair had become short and stiff, and his back and his eyes had turned stiff, too.

  “Like I promised” was all Teddy said as I opened the box and unfolded the scarf and draped it over my shoulders.

  I stroked it and thanked Teddy, but he turned away and disappeared into his room before I could tell him how happy I was that he was home, how much I had missed him, how many new secrets I had to share with him, how many new words I’d written during that half year he was gone….

  I never really got Teddy back from that war. Not really. And all I had now was this scarf and the precious things that lay atop it.

  I touched them one by one. The medals in their hinged boxes. One, two,
three of them, those medals, all points and hard edges and high-sounding words.

  “Keep these for me, Josie-girl,” Teddy’d said when he left almost a year ago. “I’ve got to go away for a while. Got to lay low.”

  Then he’d asked me to cover for him. That business that still gave me a chill.

  “It should only be for a time,” he’d said. “Then I’ll be back.”

  “Why wouldn’t you be back?” I’d asked. “You will, won’t you?”

  Teddy had chewed his lip, not looking at me. “This is a secret you’ve got to keep. Not tell Ma, not tell Pops. It’s life and death.”

  I began to tremble. “How can I keep this from Ma and Pops?”

  He took both my hands. “You can’t let on to anybody. Not anybody. Especially not Ma and Pops. You’ve got to pretend. Swear it, Jo.”

  I tasted a bitter tang; the misery we would put our parents through was gall. But I swore, and now it was almost a year, and I had to believe that any day now Teddy would come back and everything would be all right again.

  I put the medals back on the scarf and folded it over them and tied the corners into a tight knot and tucked the bundle deep in my suitcase under the books so that even the red poppies disappeared beneath the weight of leather and parchment.

  Yes, Teddy was right. Life can be downright dangerous.

  Pops came into the kitchen while I was eating breakfast. Worry worked at his mouth. “I got a telephone call. It’s best if Jo stays up in her room until I can get her to the train.”

  Ma and I exchanged a quick look. She nodded at me, and I rested my fork on my plate.

  I rose and started to my room, but a slight cough by the front door stopped me. The door was open to let in the spring air, the screen door keeping out the flies. A man stood on the other side of the screen.

  Our eyes met, and he held mine like he was a hypnotist. I’d seen him in the flesh only once before, but I knew who he was. His picture was in the paper often enough. Mr. Daniel Connor. Boss man of the East Side, heir to the throne left vacant when Big Al Capone went to Chicago. Boss of my pops now, too.