by Kim Taylor
And new? Mollie rolled her eyes. There ain’t no one but me sitting like a fool on this bench, she wanted to say. Instead, she whistled a bit of a tune from the dancehall, until Miss DuPre looked at her over the top of her glasses.
“Add ‘No Whistling’ to the list,” she said to the matron. “Come,” she said to Mollie. She picked up her skirts and ascended the stairs. She did not turn and make sure Mollie followed; she knew Mollie followed.
They passed the second floor and the thumps and bumps of the children. The third floor appeared to be a sort of dormitory. It was all so white.
“I’ll furnish those rooms this summer. Perhaps you and Miss Lee would—”
“We got our own place, thank you.”
The stairs now narrowed sharply and grew steeper. At the top were two doors. Three locks separated the right door from whatever lay behind it. Miss DuPre turned the knob on the left door.
Tall oak cabinets lined three walls of the small, plain room. The fourth wall was mostly window, with lace curtains softening the light. A great desk with carved feet took up most of the space. Two horsehair chairs angled in front of it. The top of the desk was covered in stacks of paper, each stack held down by a book. A pipe hung from the ceiling, with two closed gas jets attached to each end. There were no paintings on the wall, no pictures on the cabinets. Only the paint that still smelled of lead and turpentine.
Emmeline DuPre perched on the corner of her desk and gestured to a seat. “Please.”
Mollie sat. The fabric, when her hands found it, was thick. It was not a chair, once settled in, that one could easily run from.
Miss DuPre moved behind the desk and sat. The springs in the chair creaked. “Can you read?”
“Yes.”
“Were the rules understandable?”
“Yes.”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen. I think.”
“I’m thirty-seven. I know. So. Classes begin at eight and let out at four. There is an hour break for lunch. Two hours a day, each student must work at a job around the facility.”
“A job?”
“A job. Painting, cleaning, watching the children on the playground. Cleaning the blackboards. This is not a charity.”
“Annabelle’s been working?”
“Miss Lee watches the children from ten to twelve. Why are you laughing?”
Mollie bit her lip. “I’m not laughing.”
“She’s learning how to care for them.”
“I hope she ain’t teaching them anything.”
“You, Miss Flynn, have no faith in your friend. And she knows it.”
“What are you talking about? I got great faith in Annabelle. Don’t tell me how I am with Annabelle.”
The Do-Gooder’s face remained clear and blank. “Why are you here?”
“I want you to fix my hands. Look at ’em.”
Emmeline DuPre leaned back in her chair and tapped a finger against her lips. “A pickpocket with bad hands. Hmm.”
“I ain’t going through this again. I wasn’t gonna steal your purse.”
“What do you want from your life?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you want to pickpocket again? Do you want to be the best thief in New York City?”
Mollie saw the watchman lying in the street, saw herself holding a sharp knife to a woman’s throat. “I just need my hands to be still. That’s all I’m asking.”
“What then?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Miss DuPre held Mollie’s gaze. “Try me.”
“You just wouldn’t, all right? You got no idea—”
“Don’t underestimate me, Miss Flynn.”
“Don’t underestimate me.”
“Which means?”
“I can be good. Whatever you think.”
“So we’ll see.” Miss DuPre opened a desk drawer. “This is the contract everyone must sign. Basically, you agree to the rules, you agree to the work, you agree to learn a trade.” She handed the paper to Mollie.
“Says near the bottom that if the rules are broken, you’re not allowed back.”
“That’s correct.”
“What if you break them on your own time?”
“That’s of no concern to me.”
“You got a pen?”
Miss DuPre handed her one. Not the kind that one dipped in ink, but a new one with its own mechanism and bladder, and scrolls of gold.
“Nice pen.” And again, Mollie Flynn signed her real name. She blew on the ink to dry it. “So what class am I taking?”
“Typewriting. It’s a new field, and there are jobs open for women.”
“How much does it pay?” Mollie asked. “When you’ve got your typewriting degree or whatever it is.”
“Three dollars a week.”
“How many hours a day?”
“Twelve hours, Sundays off.”
“Twelve hours a day.” Mollie shook her head. “That’s not bad.” Unless you’re a pickpocket who works when she wants and can make three dollars in a heartbeat. At least if the day was lucky and your hands were still.
The Do-Gooder stood; Mollie followed. They shook hands.
“That’s all, then. I’ll escort you to your class. You’re lucky. We’ve just started on the home-row letters.”
Miss DuPre opened the door. She again led the way, stopping only for Mollie to exit the office. She closed the door behind her. She did not lock it.
Mollie pointed to the three locks on the facing door. “So what’s behind there?”
The Do-Gooder was already half a flight down from her. “My home.”
“You live here?”
“Someday I’ll tell you my story. I like this neighborhood.”
“Jesus.”
“And I’d like my pen, Miss Flynn.”
asdf jkl;
THE CLATTER AND CLACK of typewriters ricocheted around the hall, sounding a lot, Mollie realized, like the pop of pistols. It took all her strength not to run. Emmeline DuPre guided her through the door; the typewriting slowed and stopped. The room was perfectly square, with dark square desks. Upon each surface sat a black metal typewriter and above each set of keys labored a set of hands. Twenty pairs of eyes moved from the great chalkboard that held the drill to be practiced. Twenty pairs of eyes examined Mollie Flynn.
The women were dressed in all they could afford, grays and browns that had been repaired many times. The men kept their coats on, and some were collarless. One woman up front looked Mollie over and gave a small, disapproving cough.
“Good morning,” Miss DuPre said to the class.
“Good morning,” they murmured in unison. Little worker-bees under the spell of a beautiful do-gooder.
The Do-Gooder stepped over to the teacher. He was a tall man, with white hair growing from his ears. His glasses, on a chain, lay against his chest. His vest and coat were black. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back. He had very large feet. He bent to hear Miss DuPre’s soft words and nodded. He pointed to an empty desk in the front row.
Not there, Mollie thought. She ignored the curious faces, and spied another seat in the back corner. That was the seat she needed. The man who’d smiled at her in the vestibule not an hour before waved from the desk right next to it.
Miss DuPre turned to Mollie, gesturing at the typewriter in the front row. “Take a seat, Miss Flynn.”
“I want to sit back there.”
“Very well. As long as you sit, so the class may continue.”
Mollie held her skirt tight to her and squeezed through the row, with everyone watching.
The long-chinned man leaned over to her. “Never mind Miss Witch up front. She only approves of herself. I’m Charlie White, by the way.”
She did not answer him, but stretched her legs under the desk and marveled at the strange machine in front of her.
Place the paper, turn the roller. Hold your hands high over the home row: ASDFJKL;. press firmly, and watch the si
lver keys in front of you tap blurry black letters on the white paper. Thumb goes to the space bar. Do not look at the keys; follow the drill on the chalkboard. Hope the teacher’s long, black-clad legs do not choose to stop in front of you. That he does not push his glasses up his nose and roll the paper out of the machine.
“A-X-C-T, H-U-J-M, L-I-N-B, D-F-G-V,” he read from her paper. “Maybe you should move closer to the board. The drill is A-S-D-F, J-K-L-semicolon. Home row. That’s all.” He folded the incorrect paper, placed it in his pocket, then rolled a blank sheet into her machine. “Again.”
She raised her hands over the keys—so many keys, all a blur under her fingers! Hit the A, it’s not that difficult. Just put your pinkie on it and press.
“Again.”
The rest of the class clattered away, their eyes fixed on the board. Bells dinged, carriages returned, and everyone else had the hang of it.
“Set your fingers on the keys, as if they were little chairs and you were only resting your hands.”
Mollie did. Her right index finger seemed to have a life of its own, though. It wanted most desperately to rest between the N and M.
The teacher stood behind her. He placed his hands on top of hers. His skin was soft and cool and when she looked down, she saw her own fingers below his were still.
“There,” he said. “Press the A.” He pushed his finger down with hers. “S.” Again, a slight pressure. “Excellent. Let’s continue.” DF. “Thumb to the space bar. Excellent.”
The first few days, Mollie went home with a headache from the sound of all the machines, from trying to concentrate for such long stretches of time. Later, the noise did not bother her, but became part of the smugly industrious background of the settlement house itself.
Lunch was taken outside, where children could meet their mothers. The “recreation area,” as it was called, was wedged in by the brick walls of factories. Yet in its oddly angled shape, grass had been planted, and the tables were clean as if they’d never once been used. The kids screamed and ran around, sometimes hugging their mothers’ knees and eating a bit from a pail brought from home, sometimes smacking sticks against the grass or having pretend sword fights. There was a small tree surrounded by a white picket fence—and oh, how the boys wanted to climb it. They circled around it, hands on their hips, chucking bits of advice to one another on which time of day would be best to sneak past the fence, which times Miss DuPre did not stand watch from her window high above.
Annabelle walked across the grass to join Mollie at a table. “Kids. I swear half of them need a good whack and the other half a bottle of gin.”
“You’re gonna be a great mother, Annabelle.”
“Think so?”
Charlie White straddled the bench across from them. He unknotted the towel that held his lunch: a sausage and a big piece of brown bread, which he immediately ripped into three pieces and shared. He pushed his bowler back on his head and smiled. “Mind if I join you?”
“Looks like you already have,” Mollie said.
He slung a hand across the table to Annabelle. “Charlie White. Seen you with the kids, just never introduced myself. What’s your friend’s name?”
“Lord, you sit right next to Charlie and don’t have the manners to introduce yourself? This here’s Mollie Flynn.”
“Mollie Flynn, Mollie Flynn. Got a good rhythm to it.” He held the sausage between his fingers, then finished it in two great bites. The piece of bread he’d kept for himself was swallowed whole. Then he wiped the rag across his mouth and stuffed it in his pocket. “Might be a song somewhere there.”
“You a composer?” Mollie asked.
“Composer, clarinetist . . . a bit of piano when I feel like it. Pretty good at it, if I do say so myself.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Right now? To have lunch with the two prettiest ladies in the crowd. Nothing more a man could want. Well, except to play in an uptown band.” He fingered his mustache, as if it was a substantial thing and he was, too. In fact, the mustache was ginger-colored and very fine. Barely worth having at all. “So, what are you doing here?” He said this to Annabelle, his gaze dropping to her stomach.
“I’m a widow.” Annabelle tilted her head and frowned.
“Gee, I’m sorry.”
“I’ve been taking in boarders, but the last one drained me of everything.”
“You couldn’t have seen it coming,” Mollie said to her, lowering her voice, as if this was a shameful thing to talk about.
“My jewelry, my wedding ring, even the cat.”
Charlie let out a low whistle. “Bad news. Did you tell the police?”
“They ain’t good for nothing,” Mollie said.
“Did you ever find the fella?”
“She did,” Mollie whispered. “This past January. Hadn’t seen him in months, then ran into him on Delancey. He was buying a hat.”
“With money that was rightly mine,” Annabelle added.
“And she was buying a hat.”
“And the hatpin got the better of me.”
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked.
“Well,” Mollie said. She leaned across the table; Charlie followed suit, until their heads were almost touching. “The hatpin launched its way into the fella’s right eye.”
Charlie drew back and glanced at the girls. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and then he forced out a laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”
“There’s more, though,” Mollie said. “You don’t mind if I tell, do you, Annabelle, since we’ve turned new leaves and repented and all?”
Annabelle sighed, and if she’d been wearing her wig; the blonde curls would have bounced ever so sadly.
Mollie pulled at her skirts and kneeled on the bench. “Here he was, a hatpin sticking out of his right eye, and stumbling around. But then he reached in his pocket, and for sure he was going to pull out a gun and shoot us dead—because, see, I was there, too. So, thinking quickly, because I’m a quick thinker, I pull the hatpin from my hair—and it’s a long one, very very sharp.”
Charlie looked at Mollie, and his eyes narrowed in disbelief.
She saw her hand there, miming the push of the pin. “Well, of course I don’t have good aim.”
“So I hold him down and she carves a letter in his cheek,” Annabelle said. “The letter A, for Annabelle.”
“The letter A for Assho—” Mollie looked slowly up from Charlie and smiled—“asking so desperately for help, didn’t I ask you for help, Miss DuPre?”
Charlie twisted around. He lifted his brown derby. “Hello.”
“Mrs. Reardon will meet you here directly after lunch, Miss Flynn. To discuss your job.”
“Already?”
“It’s been a week, Miss Flynn.” Emmeline nodded to Charlie and Annabelle. “Mr. White. Miss Lee.” She turned and moved to another quarry.
“You know,” Charlie whispered, “she’s from around here originally. Heard she was a thief once.”
“A thief? She wears glasses,” Mollie said. “I ain’t never known no thief what couldn’t see.”
“That’s what I hear.”
“Someone’s feeding you a line,” Annabelle said. “She’s got money written all over her. Listen to the way she talks. You should hear her read books. She’s reading Gulliver’s Travels to us right now and—”
Mollie watched Miss DuPre make a round of the yard, how she spoke to each person, how she took in everything, analyzing the movements and patterns of the students. Like a thief. Yes. A thief who’d managed somehow to get out. Why in God’s name had she come back?
“This whole yard? I’m cleaning this whole yard ? Look at the trash.”
Mrs. Reardon, front-desk matron, said, “The waste bin’s in the alley directly right of you. There’s a rake, there’s a bag, here’s a cloth. I’ll leave you to it.”
Mollie dragged the waste bin from the alley and opened the lid. She surveyed the “recreation and trash area.” There were bits of paper and pie
ces of bread and spills of stew on the tables. “Shit.” She pulled a match from her pocket and clamped it between her teeth.
A rap came from a window on the third floor. Mollie looked up.
Emmeline DuPre put her thumb and index finger together and made a motion of pulling a matchstick from her mouth.
Mollie played the match between her lips.
She stared up at the window. She remembered the nuns, then, and thought they might be right: One sin led to another, and the path between was littered with fool’s gold. She spit the matchstick to the grass and curtsied.
GOODNESS
THE FIRST THING SHE mastered was the heavy machine that sat in front of her. She had stumbled over the keys, and then memorized the drills scraped in chalk upon the board. This allowed her to look at the enamel letters before her and at least have half a chance of getting it right. For many days, the teacher, Mr. Dunlap, pulled her paper from her carriage, tutted over it, and folded it in his pocket. What he did with all those letters and little words, Mollie did not know. Perhaps he placed them in a file in Emmeline DuPre’s office, and the two laughed over her idiocy.
But slowly, and then with a burst of speed, Mollie learned to type. Her fingers, she found, went exactly where she wanted. She did not look at the keyboard, but watched the long metal keys hit the paper precisely and correctly. Mr. Dunlap stopped his habitual turn at her desk and moved on to others. After she was confident in her fingers’ placement, she soon grew confident of her speed. She could fill three pages in the time it took others to complete one. She liked the push and clack, and the splats of ink, and the ding of the carriage return.
Then her fingers found their way without her conscious thought, and she was able to watch the room. Some of her classmates were too tired from working all night to do much more than snore, their heads on their arms, the typewriter a pillow. Working in factories, making candles, turning a cuff, splitting hides, blowing a man in an alley—well, money still had to be made somehow.
And more to the point, she was able to watch where the girls placed their purses and satchels, how the men patted their wallets without thinking, in which drawer Mr. Dunlap chose to store his briefcase. None of them, she knew, had more than a penny or two. And it was not her desire to steal from those who needed those coins.
