by M. J. Rose
Maeve went on, “And your Rory. Still such a good boy?”
Oh, that mockery. Eileen’s marriage to Rory had been talked of nearly since she had been born. He was revered by both her parents. “He’s such a good boy!” And such a handsome one, too, with his black Irish looks. Ma sometimes wondered aloud what their children would look like, given how pale Eileen was. “Bairns with some color to them! Can you imagine!”
Again Eileen felt that crush in her chest, that strangled breath. “He’s just what I want.”
“You used to want so much more.”
“I was thirteen. I didn’t know what I wanted.”
“Yes, you did,” Maeve told her, starting to walk again. “We had such plans.”
Eileen fell in beside her. “They were never going to come true, were they? We were just stupid girls. Better to just accept that.”
“They’re not accepting it.” Maeve pointed to another gaggle of suffragists emerging from a crossing street. “You didn’t even try.”
But Maeve didn’t know, did she? She couldn’t know. She hadn’t seen Ma’s worry, or Da’s anger. She hadn’t understood Eileen’s shame, or her guilt that she had let her parents down, that everything they’d given her she was throwing away, and what for? What she’d wanted was impossible. What had she thought, that one day the world would simply open up for her? That she was special? That there was something she was meant to be or do, or some fantastic fate that the world had waiting for a child of Irish immigrants whose father had been struck nearly blind from flying sparks, for a girl who’d followed the wrong person down a rabbit hole and almost lost herself?
Thank God she’d realized it in time.
But still … so many things she could not forget. The two of them huddled around that little fire, blowing on it to make it bigger. The damp cold of the old Beach Pneumatic subway tunnel. Maeve had said they were explorers, the first to discover it, though of course they hadn’t been. There had been trash there from others before them. An empty package of Camel cigarettes, a tossed Sunshine cookies wrapper, a broken smoking pipe, and a pair of drawers that had been mostly destroyed by rats that Maeve had kicked aside with an “Eeww!”
But those days, it had been their own place. Their hideout. Maeve had heard about it from some other street Arab, a rumor of the old tunnel that had served as an experimental subway for nearly three years, with a car that went one block. It had been closed down for lack of money, bricked up. The legend was that a boy had gone down there and been eaten by rats, and once Eileen and Maeve heard that, there was nothing for them to do but find it. It had taken weeks of sneaking out, exploring every alley and rusted grating, and then—oh, then! The joy of discovery and the thrill of fear and surprise as they’d ventured down the short tunnel lined with brick, the musty, underground smell, that frightening abandonment, the certainty that around any corner they might find that boy’s skeleton (“Except I heard rats’ll eat everything, even the bones!”), or even worse, an army of rats waiting to devour them, for which Maeve had brought a big stick, and Eileen “borrowed” Scully’s pocketknife, expecting any moment to see a crowd of yellow rat eyes staring at them from the darkness …
None of those things had materialized, but instead something more magical. Desolation. Silence and solitude. A sense of having been forgotten that surpassed any notion of time or place. That it had once been elegant was obvious. The brickwork had been laid with care, though it was crumbling now. They could not get to the main station; the building above had caught fire years ago and collapsed upon it, but still there remained a bit of platform here and there, as well as the old passenger car, its upholstered seats rat-bitten, with springs that creaked and squeaked. That was where they made their hideout, where they kept a small oil lamp and things to make a fire in the old rail track.
They explored every inch. There, they brought the treasures they’d found. Nothing very valuable, cheap rings that turned their skin green or watches that broke within days or hair ribbons or, more usual, pretty stones. Whatever it was, it went into a small bag that they kept tucked into a hole in the passenger seat, and each time they came, they laid the things out in a line on the platform and told their future by them.
“We’ll take a ship to Paris,” Maeve would say.
“We’ll explore the seven seas.” Eileen’s addition.
“I’ll never do piecework!”
“I’ll never make an artificial flower as long as I live!”
“We won’t be like everyone else.”
“No, we’ll never be like anyone else.”
Dreams and dreams and dreams. They’d counted their treasures greedily. Never enough. Never close to enough, but the more they spoke of such things, the more they consumed Eileen’s hours. Grubbing in that short tunnel beneath the ground, following rail tracks that went nowhere, the world became so very big that she could not hold everything she felt about it inside. Her longing threatened to explode, and only Maeve could contain it. Only Maeve knew how.
“We can’t just wait for things to happen, Eileen, we have to make them.”
Eileen had never stolen anything in her life. She’d never thought to do so. When Maeve first suggested it, Eileen had been horrified, and Maeve had scorned her horror so thoroughly that the only thing Eileen could do was prove herself, and so she had. She’d been good at it, too, better than Maeve. “You’re braver than I am,” Maeve said to her once, as they hovered around their little fire, faces lit in the dusky darkness. She’d leaned close, her lips grazing Eileen’s cheek in a way that even in memory made her shiver. “You’ll do things I wouldn’t dare.”
It wasn’t true, but Eileen had felt warm and brave and special.
Which was perhaps why, when they’d seen the coat laid so haphazardly on the bench in the square, and the man to whom it belonged talking to someone in a carriage at the edge of the park and paying no attention, she had dared what even Maeve would not have dared.
It was cold, that was what she told herself, but the truth was that the stealing had become an addiction, too. She had begun to crave the excitement. She wanted the rush of fear and the cold sweat that came after, that giggly I can’t believe it; let’s do it again, and Maeve beside her, pulling her through the grate to their subterranean hideout, falling into each other’s arms giddy with success. And that afternoon, in broad daylight, no less, oh, how heady it had been! To take that coat, to run off with it, to hear the man shouting after them as they dodged through the streets and alleys, Eileen’s footsteps pounding into her skull along with her heart, and that man not stopping, not giving up as they expected, calling for the police as he chased, and suddenly that daring had turned to fear, and Maeve had ordered, “Leave the coat!”
Eileen had thrown it aside, and the necklace had spilled out, and yes, she should have ignored it. It was obvious that was why the man was chasing so hard, and now there were policemen, too. But the blue stones glittered, and Maeve’s eyes glittered, too, and though Eileen heard “leave it,” she saw that desire in her friend’s eyes, and she heard their dreams in her head, and so she grabbed it and shoved it in her pocket.
Instead of the start of their dreams, that moment had been the end of all of them. It was only that Eileen hadn’t known it. She hadn’t known it until they were in the tunnel, safe and victorious, laughing with relief and delight as she built the fire and lit the lamp, the necklace slinking between their fingers, the answer to everything at last. “You see what I mean? We make our own dreams…”
Then the terrible sound, the rasping of the grate echoing in the tunnel, and the man calling out, and a police officer shouting, and after that … well, it was all a nightmare after that. There was no other way out but that grating, but she and Maeve knew the tunnel so much better than anyone else. Every nook and cranny. They hid in the abandoned passenger car, and while the men tried to find their way in the dark, she and Maeve dashed past. Which one of them kicked over the lamp, Eileen never knew. The two of them slithered out; Eil
een stamped the grate hard into place to slow the men down, and they ran. Two blocks, and then she remembered the necklace.
“I left it there!”
The horror on Maeve’s face made Eileen sick to her stomach. In a panic, she raced back. She thought only of the necklace, of their dreams disappearing. She barely heard Maeve’s “No! Eileen!” She heard nothing but the rush of her own breath.
The smoke coming from the grate alarmed her, but she hurried to it; it wasn’t until she was right there that she heard the men shouting. She grabbed the grate—it was so hot it seared her hands. She dropped it in confusion—how had it gotten so hot? It rattled back into place. The necklace. The necklace. She had to save it. She reached again for the grate, but now someone was grabbing her, pulling her back, Maeve.
“Eileen, no, you can’t go in there. Look!”
Eileen looked wildly about, uncomprehending. Maeve wrapped her arms around her, holding her tight, falling with her into the street. Eileen’s hands burned, the grate had imprinted itself on her palms in blisters, her skin a weird white and red. She stared at them in dumb surprise, and it was only then that she realized others were running to the opening, calling to each other, gathering for rescue. It was only then that she saw the flames and realized the men were still down there.
Maeve pulled her away; they’d melted into the gathering crowd. For days, with bandaged hands and under Ma’s watchful, worried gaze, Eileen waited for a knock on the door, for a police visit that never came. She listened to Da saying again and again, “What have you done, lass? You were with her, weren’t you? I’ve told you not to get mixed up with that one. Running around the city like a hooligan. I tell you, she’s not right,” when what he really meant to say was “Something’s not right with you when you’re with her.”
And Ma saying nothing, but looking at Eileen as if something rotten had burst in the flat, or worse, with this great sadness that gripped Eileen from the inside out.
“I’m sure they got out,” Maeve had reassured her. “But even if they didn’t, Eileen, you couldn’t have saved them yourself.”
Eileen had stared at her, disbelieving, and then felt sick all over again with mortification and fear when she realized that, for once, Maeve did not understand.
She did not understand that Eileen cared only about the necklace.
She had not seen that Eileen hadn’t considered the men at all.
It was the first time since they’d met that Eileen felt them as separate beings, and nothing would put that right.
“Don’t you ever think about it?” Eileen asked Maeve softly now.
Her old friend said, “You’ve got to put it behind you, Eileen.”
“That’s what I’ve done.”
Maeve shook her head. “You’ve never let it go. You’re punishing yourself.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Sure I do. It was the necklace. It was always the necklace. You’ve never let it go. It’s like you said, we were just thirteen and stupid. Don’t make it worse by living your whole life stupid.”
The words were a little shock. A spark through years of confusion.
They had reached Washington Square, the start of the suffrage parade. The grounds were full of white. Floats parked along the streets. Bands tuned their instruments. One played a rousing song while nearby marchers practiced their one-step. People cheered and talked. Banners luffed in the breeze and women fussed with their tangled and blowing skirts. Everywhere were white hats, yellow banners, city flags of blue and white and orange, and signs reading DENVER VOTES, WHY NOT NEW YORK? and VOTES FOR WOMEN! and people looking for their standard bearers, winding through the streets to take their places, to wait their turn to march. Whistles and the blaring horns of automobiles made a festive noise. Eileen had lived in Hell’s Kitchen all her life and she could not remember when she’d seen so many people. So many women. Had she been asked, she would have said there were not this many women in the world.
Maeve touched her hand. Again, that electricity, and Eileen was transported back to their fervent whispers, their dreams that took form in the ashy darkness of the old subway as they bounced on the old seats, the scurrying of rats and cockroaches providing background music. Such things they’d hoped for. No tenement flats with boarders sharing rooms and chipped dishes or going to the tavern in the afternoon to fill the growler with beer for a man too beaten down or injured to stir himself from a chair. No gossiping with other women on the stoop while the men gathered in the saloon and the children played in septic puddles and chased dogs and feral cats in the streets. No worry about money. No being told what to do day in and day out. No being cornered by lascivious bosses or being cajoled into dances one didn’t want to dance or marrying a man because your parents wanted it just so you could live their same life again.
Eileen took in the protesters gathered before her, the signs for the actresses, the singers, the women’s trade unionists, the clerks and the lawyers and the writers. Peddlers sold yellow paper chrysanthemums and balloons. Babies raised their little fists either in solidarity or excitement or temper tantrums.
“Look!” Maeve whispered, close now, and Eileen did not move away from the familiar warmth of Maeve’s breath against her ear, fluttering the loose wisps of her hair so they tickled, not realizing until that moment how much she had missed that feel, that voice, that lavender scent—or perhaps it was not those things, but simply Maeve’s presence, the tingle she kindled in Eileen’s blood and her fingers, the excitement and the wanting that had disappeared from her life the moment Maeve had dragged her from that burning grate. “This is what I wanted you to see. This is how we make the world, Eileen. We won’t be like anyone else. Remember?”
How often Maeve had said those words. How often Eileen had said them back. Their charm, their spell against complacence, against a world that conspired against them, that kept girls in their place.
“We did it the wrong way last time,” Maeve told her. “Now we have the chance to do it right.”
Someone in the crowd began to sing. Eileen thought of Mr. Martin. Other girls in the candy factory had wanted the day off to march. He had refused them all. “If you want to march, go ahead. But don’t expect to have a job when you come back.”
What if she marched? What if she didn’t come back on Monday? Why did she keep that stupid job; why did she bear him? There were so many jobs. Jobs that didn’t need a heavy, sticky apron, or mean that she had to breathe sugar all day until she was sick with it, or fight off a boss who wouldn’t take no for an answer. Maeve was right. She was afraid. Afraid of how much she wanted. Afraid of what she’d been willing to do to have it. Afraid that no one could understand, not even Maeve.
But Eileen had been wrong about that, hadn’t she? Maeve had understood. She had understood.
Eileen stared at the crowd and felt the excitement in the air, the palpable sense of doing something, of achievement, of knowing that whatever the outcome, they had tried. They had not simply accepted the world as it was.
Yet there were consequences for that. Eileen knew it better than most, and the reminder never faded. She looked down at her hands, at the too-white scars against her already pale skin, the outline of the grate evidenced in the blisters that had healed yet never left her.
But …
They’d nearly disappeared, she realized. Why, in the cold sunlight, she could hardly see them. When had that happened? Why had she failed to notice?
“Over there,” Maeve said, taking Eileen by the hand, curling her fingers around tightly, as if she couldn’t feel the scars at all, just as she had that day the two of them lay in the street, watching the rescuers work to save the men in the tunnel.
Maeve took them through the crowd, past a group of women trying to maneuver a banner proclaiming A VOTE FOR WOMEN IS A VOTE FOR JUSTICE. She stopped at a tall woman in a black coat standing near the sign announcing the Women’s Trade Union League. The woman wore the green-white-and-purple-striped sash of suffrage and
carried dozens of them looped over her arm, and when she saw Maeve, she smiled. “There you are, Miss Murphy! Is this your friend you’ve spoken so much about?”
“Eileen Quinn,” said Maeve, pulling Eileen forward.
“We’re so pleased to have you join us,” said the woman, putting a sash over Eileen’s head without asking permission, and then reaching behind her for a sign. She held it out to Eileen. “This one’s for you to carry.”
Eileen looked up. The sign was yellow. In big black letters, it said: STANDING TOGETHER, WE SHALL TAKE OUR LIVES INTO OUR OWN KEEPING.
“Well?” Maeve asked. “What do you think, Eileen? Shall we?”
Maeve’s expression shone with hope. The scent of lavender was everywhere.
Shall we?
Eileen pulled her hand gently away. The hope in Maeve’s face fell into disappointment. How silly, that she did not understand now, when she had understood that long-ago day, enough to return now, to show Eileen there was another way, a way she hadn’t seen at thirteen, and not until this moment. A way to change her life, to save herself. A way like this.
Eileen touched Maeve’s arm, just a slight touch, and then opened her palm, holding it out for her old friend to see. “Look,” she said wonderingly. “The scars are gone.”
Maeve’s smile returned, brighter than the blinding-white dresses reflecting the sun. “Then it will be easy to carry a sign.”