Hannah, Divided

by Adele Griffin

  “She’s no sweetheart. This is only Hannah,” said Joe. “You know I got a girl already. Ole Hannah’s helping me collect aluminum.”

  “Saw some lucky bird haul a whole radiator to Mr. Lee this Thursday last,” Marshal told them. “Got nine dollars for it, special patriot’s rate, what with Armistice Day ’round the corner. She’ll be eating caviar and blinis for a month.”

  Joe scoffed. “We’ll earn double that, the rate we’re going. See ya later, boys.”

  It wasn’t until they were on their way again, the boys gone from sight, that Hannah had to ask, “Who is your girl, Joe? I never met her.”

  “’Cause I don’t really have one is why. But a fella’s gotta say what he’s gotta say, and your lips aren’t smoochable enough to be any million-dollar doll face of mine.”

  “Joe Elway, you don’t even know from smoochable!” Hannah retorted.

  “Takes one to smooch one,” he called over his shoulder.

  They combed the city all morning, peeling their treasures from discarded cigarette packs and wheeling into some better luck with an empty tin of Bon Ami and two Campbell’s soup cans that had been dropped in plain sight off the South Street wharf. Toward noon, it was Joe who spied their best prize, a muffin pan abandoned in an alleyway on Panama Street.

  “That gives us five pounds, easy,” said Joe, parking the skato and then dropping to sit on the curb. “We’ll go around to see Lee after lunch.” He pulled a squashed, waxed-paper package from his jacket and unwrapped it to reveal a lumpy sandwich. “I’ll split. Cheese and mustard.”

  Hannah dropped down next to him. She was tired and surprised to hear her stomach gurgle. Back home, she’d always been hungry before every meal, but at Delancey Place, the food arrived before the appetite. She took the offered half of sandwich gladly.

  “Say, Joe, are those boys, Francis and those fellows, are they friends of yours from school?”

  Joe snorted. “I only wish! They go to Our Lady of Lourdes, where I’d wanna be, too, but it doesn’t give out scholarships. My school’s full of fellows so lousy with money they can’t even tell what it’s worth. Meantime, back home, my brothers sleep head to foot, two to a cot, and live underground fifteen hours a day.”

  “Underground? How’s that?”

  “I mean coal mines. Elways are coal men. How we all live and die, till me.”

  “Then how did Mrs. Sweet find you, if you were underground?” Hannah asked.

  Joe rolled his eyes. “My sister Sally’s to blame. She said it wasn’t natural to remember things like I do, word for word, like church sermons from years ago. She thought I might have a blessing or a curse on me. I was like a joke that she couldn’t decide was funny or not. This past April, Sally blew her last nickel to send me to Pittsburgh to be looked at by Monsignor Carroll. I met him all right. Recited the entire Advent, from First Kings, ‘The Miraculous Rain,’ Chapter Eighteen, verses one through forty, through ‘The Birth of John the Baptist,’ Luke One, fifty-six through eighty. And all the psalms in between.”

  He smiled. “Monsignor said the only thing unnatural was to allow my mind to go to waste. He fixed me up with some academic big shots. Which is how I came to meet Sweet. Sally’s got different plans for me now. Wants me to invent something useful, like a flying car. A get-rich-quick-scheme, so she can drive a Ford coupe and serve oxtail consommé out of a gold tureen.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  Joe pondered it. “Sure I’d like to help out my family, after all this educating. But I’m no money-grubber. And so far as I see, the only people who should have boatloads of cash are bank robbers. Those’re the ones risking their necks. Betting on their lives. Of course, Hoover and all his men zotzed the bravest ones. Bonnie and Clyde both took their hits this past spring. John Dillinger got picked off in July, standing right outside the cinema. Heard they sold scraps of his bloody shirt as souvenirs. And Pretty Boy Floyd!” Joe sliced his hands together, brushing off bread crumbs. “He got the lead pump only last Monday, while he was holed up in Wellsville. Wellsville! Poor guy died under an apple tree. Guess you didn’t read about it. And so now,” Joe concluded unhappily, “all there is left is Baby Face Nelson. But Mr. Special Agent Hoover’s never gonna put his cubs on him.”

  “Baby who? I never heard about a crook named Baby Face.” Hannah had not heard of some of those others, either. She wondered if Joe was only teasing.

  Joe turned on her, indignant. “Whaddaya talkin’ about, you never heard of Baby Face Nelson? Don’t you read the papers? Don’t you hear the song? ‘Baby Face! You got the cutest little Baby Face.’ I’ve cut out all his clippings for my scrapbook. Coppers and gumshoes need eyes in the back of their heads to catch Baby Face.”

  “I heard the song, but I don’t read the papers,” Hannah admitted. “Can’t, that is.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Can’t read. I mean, I can a little. But not a lot. Not a newspaper’s amount.”

  “Can’t read? Ha!” Joe laughed. “For Pete’s sake, if that’s not the dopiest thing I ever heard.”

  “It hardly bothered me back home,” Hannah confessed. “But the Ottley Friends girls aren’t as … charitable as my real friends in Chadds Ford. Most days I’m more concerned that Helene Lyon is spying at me through the keyhole while I’m having my tutorials in Miss Jordan’s office.”

  “I guess Ottley Friends isn’t so friendly to milkmaids,” said Joe. “Anyhow, you’ll never get my scholarship if you can’t read!.” He laughed, slapping his knees. “Here I’ve been in a horse sweat over the competition! Aw, get a look at that sourpuss face on you. Cripes, I’m mostly ribbing. I know I’ll get a scholarship. I’m so sure on that, I’ll teach you to read myself. First you gotta figure what you want to read. Then it’s easy as fish stew.” He snapped his fingers.

  Hannah shrugged as if it didn’t matter to her. She could never tell if Joe was being earnest. He seemed awfully confident about being able to teach her. If it was only in jest, though, she did not want to appear eager.

  “Boy, oh, boy, I’d like to see you try,” she said in a Mae West-ish, careless way, but she tapped a hopeful pattern on each knee before she could stop herself.

  21. RITTENHOUSE WILLOW

  SHADOWS HAD GROWN LONGER than their objects by the time they wheeled all the way to Forty-sixth and King Street, where Mr. Lee kept his cart parked out front of the Coal, Coke & Wood Warehouse. In exchange for their scrap metal, Mr. Lee gave Hannah and Joe twenty-three cents apiece. Hannah held the two silver dimes and three copper pennies tight in her palm.

  “This is the first cash money I ever earned,” she admitted. She didn’t know why she was so happy about it. After all, Mrs. Sweet had tossed her fifty cents’ allowance just last week! Yet Mrs. Sweet’s money had made her feel guilty, and she’d spent it in a hurry. This money was different, Hannah decided. It was more important. It was hers.

  She buttoned the coins into the inside breast pocket of her coat.

  “We ought to get home.” She lifted her face to the darkening skyline. “Chestnut would be quickest.” It had not taken long for the grid of the city to unfold smooth as a map in her mind’s eye. Its patterns were clear, even math-minded, now that she’d spent the whole day navigating. She was glad Joe had followed her suggestions when she told him the quickest way to get from here to there. Joe was not one to pretend he knew more than he did.

  “Chestnut,” Joe agreed. “Only first lemme show you something. Hold on.”

  Hannah held on and pushed off with a leg that was aching sore from the strain of use. Joe sped them downtown on Chestnut Street. When they turned onto Walnut Street, Hannah saw they were on their way to Rittenhouse Park.

  The park was a wide square of ground, inlaid with flower beds and footpaths and belted on four sides by wrought iron gating that resembled asparagus. The recent cold snap had stripped its trees of their leaves and discolored its grass, but it was still impressive. The dinner hour had reduced its usual hubbub of fashionable pe
ople to only a uniformed nanny pushing a baby carriage and an elderly couple who sat on a bench surrounded by bobbing pigeons.

  “Watch me!” said Joe, as he parked the skato by the open front gate. He peeled off his shoes and socks and tore across the lawn. “Don’t be a chicken! C’mon!”

  Hannah glanced around. Nobody seemed to care what Joe was doing. Nor was anyone watching to see if Hannah would copy him. Discreetly, she unlaced and pulled off a shoe and stocking. Then their mates. It had been over a month, she realized, since she had been barefoot outdoors. She shrieked to feel the cold grass scratch the bottoms of her feet.

  Joe shot the length of the park and was steering toward one of its largest willow trees. She saw him grip its lowest branch expertly, twisting himself up the trunk, then hauling his body still higher. Up and up. Was he allowed? She doubted it.

  “Betcha can’t climb a tree anymore, milkmaid!” Joe shouted.

  She was already to the willow’s base. “Betcha you’re wrong!”

  This tree was not as thick as Bloom, but its branches were lower and more plentiful. Hannah gripped and pulled herself until she was a full head higher than Joe. No, she had not forgotten a thing about trees.

  Settled, she swung her feet, enjoying the bite of October cold on her toetips.

  “Go careful,” Joe warned, looking up at her. “This tree is trickier that it looks. I fell out of it a few months back. Bruise on my keister looked like I’d skid across a patch of motor oil.”

  “I’m safe,” she assured him.

  They stared across the cityscape. At the edge of the park’s gate, the lamplighter propped his ladder, and soon the first light of a city evening sparked to a glow.

  Hannah leaned back and threw her arms wide and up so that they brushed the feathery fringed tips of what few leaves remained. “This was a best day,” she declared. “Thanks, Joe.”

  “Yeah, yeah, it was nothing.”

  “It was better than nothing.”

  “One thing about a city, there’s always enough to do to push you out of a sulk,” said Joe. “Even without me to show the way. And don’t forget, when it comes to the competition, it’s still you against me.”

  “You against me!” Hannah agreed.

  22. BABY FACE NELSON

  SUNDAY, JOE IGNORED HANNAH. He galloped upstairs after she came home from church in the morning. He sneaked out of the house without her in the afternoon.

  Perhaps he hadn’t had any fun yesterday? Hannah slumped in the parlor’s front window seat. Perhaps he preferred to be left alone?

  A noise in the doorway startled her. She turned. Joe must have come inside through the kitchen. A worn brown notebook was tucked under his arm.

  “Here’s the thing,” he said. “If you don’t know all there is to know about Baby Face Nelson, I don’t see how we’re gonna be buddies. You might say I’m off my head, but I feel like he’s a personal acquaintance of mine. You got anyone like that?”

  “Madame Curie and Pythagoras and Mae West,” Hannah answered.

  “There you have it! And look here. Francis’s ma bakes on Sundays. Reading and eating, see, they go together.” Joe jumped up onto the window seat beside her, removed his cap, and pulled a handkerchief-wrapped slice of butter cake from his pocket. “We’ll split.”

  Hannah broke the cake in half as Joe opened his scrapbook across their laps. She stared at the newsprint, a sly jumble of words set alongside grainy photographs of storefronts or automobiles or a close-up image of a man whose boneless face appeared to have taken a few punches. “Mushy Face Nelson, they ought to call him,” she pronounced. “Oh, boy, the newsprint is too small!”

  “Don’t sulk. Reading’s a cinch if you’re on to the right story,” Joe answered. In one crocodile bite, he dropped a piece of cake into his mouth. Crumbs flew everywhere. “We’ll begin at the beginning, how ‘bout? First, I’ll take you through the history on the official FBI report. You watch my finger hit the words.” He brushed the crumbs off the page, cleared his throat, and began to speak in his “Ulysses” voice. “‘Baby Face Nelson was born Lester M. Gillis in December 1908, in Chicago. He spent his youth roaming the city streets with his gang of juvenile hoodlums, committing petty crimes. By the age of fourteen, Baby Face was an accomplished car thief.’”

  Hannah watched the words under Joe’s finger as she listened to a story that was as good—if not better—than any radio program she’d ever heard. Baby Face was just a few years older than Hepp, and what a life he’d led! All that shoplifting, car stealing, street fighting, liquor smuggling, and bank robbing!

  Joe had arranged the articles in sequence so that Baby Face’s records read like a mystery thriller. He broke apart the harder words into chewable pieces.

  Tom-my-gun. Fed-er-al in-ves-ti-gation. Plain-clothes-men.

  The light thinned as they wound their way through Baby Face’s grisly history.

  “Gosh, Joe,” Hannah said, closing the book with a contented sigh after they had finished. “I do believe that is the best story I ever read.”

  “Toldja!” Joe grinned. Then he explained that with John Dillinger dead, Baby Face was now the FBI’s Most Wanted. “Armed and dangerous!” Joe wriggled his eyebrows.

  “How do you know Baby Face won’t come to Philadelphia next?” squeaked Hannah.

  “Uh-uh, he won’t come here. Too many men in blue.”

  “But what about the banks?” Hannah insisted. “There’s loads of banks in Philadelphia.”

  “Naw, see, you don’t understand Baby Face. He’s best in the heartland, where he can lay low from prying—”

  “Aha! Joe and Hannah!” Neither of them had heard Mrs. Sweet enter the house. Startled, Hannah looked up to see her leaning slantways into the room. Her features were unpleasantly bunched, as if tied and held to the middle of her face by invisible string. “I’m looking for Beverly. Where is she?” She glanced at the empty piano bench as if Beverly ought to be there.

  “She’s out,” said Joe. That Beverly spent her Sunday evenings with her regular beau, Charlie, was a secret from Mrs. Sweet.

  “When she gets in, tell her that I want a word,” said Mrs. Sweet. “No matter the time. Hear me? Tell her to knock on my door.”

  Hannah and Joe nodded. Mrs. Sweet turned and huffed upstairs.

  “She didn’t even say good night. D’you think something’s wrong?” Hannah asked nervously.

  “I don’t know from wrong, but something’s on the cooker,” Joe answered.

  23. ABANDONED

  “YOU’RE GETTING THE BOOT?” Joe’s voice was incredulous.

  Beverly nodded. “I’ve got two weeks’ notice. Sweet tells me the new crop of students entering the Academy is too young and talented for me to compete. Classically trained,” she whispered. She dabbed at her eyes. “Even if I passed the exams, I might not be guaranteed placement, and she doesn’t want to chance it.”

  Hannah counted the chimes as the grandfather clock in the foyer struck midnight. An hour earlier, on Beverly’s knock, both she and Joe had sneaked downstairs, where Beverly had heated a pan of milk and poured it into mugs sweetened with sugar. Now Beverly raised her mug as if in a toast. “Truth is, Sweet wants a real, sensible maid.” She took a long sip. “Someone who actually remembers to dust.”

  “Christmas!” Joe sputtered. “It was never about the dust! Who ever heard of a maid with fingers too soft to scrub a floor or press a sheet? You’re the worst dratted maid in all of Philadelphia, Bev. But you’re a fine musician.”

  Under the table, Hannah’s fingers tapped an anxious rhythm. Her stomach felt pulled as taffy. What else could Beverly do, if she couldn’t play music?

  “Sweet told me a house of young people had been amusing at first, but we were starting to crowd her,” said Beverly. “‘It’s true I’ve been lonely now that both my boys have left me,’ she says. ‘But what if I want to see in Paris in the springtime?’ she says. ‘Why’s it left to me to mind you three, to serve your every need? I’ve bit off more tha
n I chew.’” Beverly shook her head in disbelief. “Boarding us kids—it’s been nothing but a rich folks’ fad, if you ask me. Same as those puffy goose-down jackets ladies took to wearing last year.”

  “I’ll wager there’s plenty other families who’d take you in.” Joe thudded a fist into his palm. “A beezillion people living a stone’s throw from the Academy who are nuts for music, and who’ve got a spare room, and who aren’t blasted dopes.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  “There’s no such number as beezillion,” said Hannah. She knew it was the wrong thing to blurt out, but no one remarked on it.

  “My luck’s burnt down to the wire,” said Beverly tiredly. “Charlie teaches piano, so he’s always in the big fancy houses, and he says the newest trend is to bring poor students over from Europe to teach arts on the cheap.”

  “If Charlie teaches piano, maybe you could, too,” Hannah suggested.

  “Oh, sure I could, but that’s no way to make a living.” Beverly sighed. “Charlie’s real paycheck comes from working down at the wharf. Piano’s his hobby. Hannah, please quit drumming your fingers under the table. It’s driving me bats.” Beverly stood and pushed in her chair. “I don’t have money to live on my own and work and study. I’ll be eighteen next month. Too old for dreams.”

  “It’s not fair,” said Hannah. “It’s not fair for Mrs. Sweet to close a door on you all of a sudden like that!”

  Beverly shrugged, but her smile was sad. “Perhaps things’ll look smoother by morning. I’ll go to sleep and see. Good night, you two.” She leaned over and dropped a kiss on each of their heads before slipping off through the kitchen door to her bedroom.

  “Poor Bev,” Hannah murmured. “Poor us, too. What if Mrs. Sweet wants to chuck us all out? What if it’s true, Joe, that we’re nothing but a fad?”

  “Time will tell. But without Beverly around pretending to take care of things, this joint is gonna get pretty empty.” Joe’s voice was matter-of-fact to disguise the hurt in his face. More than once Joe had mentioned to Hannah that Beverly was the same age as his sister, Sally. In the short time they’d lived here, Beverly had become a big sister to them both. The house wouldn’t be the same without Beverly and her music, thought Hannah miserably.