∞∞∞
“Aryl saw Jonathan’s blue eye on the other side of the peephole and smiled. He put his own eye to the door to stare back at Jonathan, who pulled his head away, laughing.
“Here, I brought you these,” Aryl said, smiling when Jonathan opened the door.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“I told you that when Caleb and I got some information together, I’d bring it to you to look at. You can let us know if this is feasible.”
“Right, right. The flour idea.” Jonathan shook his head, looking at his friend with pessimistic eyes, but relented. “I’ll look at it,” he said, tucking the papers in his pocket.
“Listen, did Claire mention anything to you about a calendar tonight?” he asked in a hushed tone with one eyebrow raised. Aryl nodded slowly with a grim expression. He looked back in the apartment as he stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind him. “Ava just told me about that over dinner.” He looked at Aryl, appalled, waiting for him to provide a solution. Both men stood staring at each other for a moment. “What are we supposed to do?” Jonathan finally asked.
“Apparently nothing,” Aryl said and laughed, even though he didn’t think it was funny at all.
“Well, this just gets better and better, doesn’t it?” Jonathan grumbled.
“We’ll figure something out. Maybe we can trade a bottle of rum or something,” Aryl suggested. Jonathan pointed at him.
“That’s a good idea!” he exclaimed. “We should start asking around.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said and grinned, turning toward the stairs. “See you tomorrow, Jon.”
∞∞∞
On the way up to his apartment, he passed the open door of the family across the hall from him. He unintentionally looked in as he passed and saw a baby positioned by the fireplace that was starting to fuss in a makeshift crib made of a large fruit crate. Several well-worn and stained cloth diapers hung on a line across the room to dry. The faint smell of urine met Aryl’s nose. A tired mother crossed the room speaking soothingly to her baby in Italian. Aryl quickly turned his head away. He preferred his idyllic vision to the depressing reality of having a baby in the tenement. The sight reinforced his resignation that a baby could never happen here.
Inside the apartment, Claire was taking down the five or six pieces of clothes that hung on a rope in front of the fireplace. She found that if she did the previous day’s laundry each morning, it wouldn’t grow to an unmanageable pile that caused her to spend the entire day scrubbing and wringing. She lit candles on the mantel and table, turned off the overhead light, and tuned the radio to a mystery program. She had extra firewood on the hearth and a blanket on the couch, now moved closer to the fireplace, which filled the room with flickering, radiant light. They snuggled under the blanket as they listened to the program and watched the fire dance.
Afterward, they ran across the cold floor on tiptoes to the bedroom, jumped under the covers and, after much struggling, chose to conserve certain precious resources.
Well after midnight, Aryl woke up shivering fiercely, fully covered with Claire curled close to him. She jumped when her leg moved to a freezing cold section of the sheet. Aryl turned on the light, and he could see his breath.
“Heat must have gone out in the whole building,” he assumed and immediately thought of the baby across the hall. He pulled on an extra set of day clothes over his nightclothes. Claire followed suit, shivering as she piled on two sweaters and a pair of Aryl’s wool socks.
He went out to the living room and saw that there were still some embers left from the fire. He stoked them a bit, so they could breathe and come back to life. He added more wood and crouched by the hearth, blowing warm breath into his hands until it caught.
“We’re not g-going to g-get any h-h-heat in the b-bedroom, Aryl.” Claire shook in the doorway with her arms wrapped around herself.
“We’re not going to sleep in the bedroom,” he said as he walked by her, pulled the blankets off the bed and drug the ragged mattress into the living room. Claire pushed the couch against the wall of the living room, and he laid the old mattress in front of the hearth. She picked up the blankets from the bedroom floor and spread them out while Aryl brought the pillows. They hopped under the covers, and Aryl placed the poker on the floor next to him, so he could stoke the fire when needed. They burrowed as close to each other as they could, shivering and waiting for the fire to fully roll and start putting out some appreciable heat.
After fifteen minutes or so, Aryl crawled out from underneath the covers. “This isn’t working,” he complained. He pushed the couch up to the foot of the mattress and dragged the two dining chairs to the sides of the mattress. “Do we have an extra blanket?” he asked. She nodded, too cold to speak, and went to the small closet to pull out a bedspread.
He tucked the bedspread under the cushions of the couch and then draped it over the backs of the chairs. He arranged the edge on the mantel, piling books on top to hold it there. He lifted a corner, crawled under his tent creation and Claire followed. Within minutes, they began to warm as the tent directed the heat into their cove.
“This was a good idea, Aryl.” Claire snuggled close to him and resented the layers of clothing between them.
“It’s like camping,” he said and smiled, kissing her forehead.
November 7th 1929
Victor stood outside the gate of the shipping dock early in the morning, watching the stream of men that filed in. He surveyed each one, and when he found one that he thought would do, he stopped him and introduced himself. The scruffy worker looked Victor up and down warily. After a quick moment of casual conversation, Victor got to the point. He stepped closer to the man, whose small eyes were as black as his own.
“Do you know a worker here named Jonathan Garrett?” Victor asked. The worker nodded. “He’s one of them rich boys. His friend, the one with the red hair, he’s an okay guy. But Garrett’s got a chip on his shoulder. Not real liked ‘round here.” He bobbed his head in synch with his accent, a combination of old-Italian and new-New Yorker. Victor smiled and held out a twenty-dollar bill. The man’s eyes bulged.
“What’s your name?” Victor asked.
“Tony.”
“You want to make some money, Tony?” Victor said and smiled cunningly. The man nodded, eyes still wary.
“Mess with him,” Victor said and handed him the money. The man looked from the bill to Victor and returned the devious smile, nodding his agreement. Victor simply turned and walked away, leaving the details to Tony's imagination. Tony watched him walk away then tucked the twenty in his pocket, looking all around him to make sure no one was watching. He was happy to start earning every cent. He raced to clock in and find out where Jonathan would be working for the day.
Close to lunchtime, one of the yard leads called Jonathan over. While he was distracted, Tony walked by, pulled out his pocketknife, and knifed the bottom layer of a couple of flour sacks. Jonathan had laid his gloves on the bumper of the truck, and Tony stole them. He had more in mind, but made off in haste when he saw Jonathan turning back toward the pallet. He strolled past with a grin. Jonathan reached behind him for his gloves, but felt only metal. He turned and cursed under his breath when he saw that they were gone. He lifted a sack of flour by opposite corners and swung it around. Just as it cleared the pallet, the bag burst and flour spilled onto the ground, piling on his shoes and covering his shirt and face in a white dusting. Before he could even begin cursing, one of the yard supervisors appeared near him, yelling and cursing at the top of his lungs.
“What in the hell did you do, Garrett?” The heavyset, lead supervisor waddled over, a lit cigar hanging out of his mouth.
“I don’t know. It just busted,” Jonathan said with indifference, brushing flour off his coat and face.
“Don’t let it happen again,” he barked at Jonathan. Jonathan grabbed a second bag while glowering at the supervisor, and it happened again, creating a massive pile
of flour on the ground at his feet. The supervisor turned when he heard the bag rip and began yelling and cursing again. He ended his tirade with, “Those two bags are coming out of your pay, Garrett!” Jonathan threw the torn bag on the ground and took off his coat to shake it out while glaring at the supervisor’s back. He laid it on the pallet and started smacking flour from his pants and bent to clean his shoes with a piece of torn bag. When he stood, his coat was gone. He looked in all directions, but there was no one around. It seemed to have disappeared into thin air. He couldn’t see Tony, who was hiding on the other side of the truck, slinking his way to the front bumper and then running off.
At the lunch whistle, Jonathan ran to the room where many workers kept their lunches in wooden compartments. The honor system was used as there were no doors or locks to the cubby-type, square openings. It was warmer in this room, and he was starving. He reached into his compartment to find his lunch missing. He looked around the room and found it smashed in a corner by the garbage can.
“You have got to be kidding me,” he fumed. Others filed in for lunch, not saying a word to Jonathan but talking heartily to Caleb. He noticed Jonathan’s expression as being one of a man on the edge and pulled him aside.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded. Jonathan recounted the events of the morning. Caleb shook his head, irritated, and grabbed his lunch, splitting it with Jonathan. “Some of these guys can be real assholes,” he commented, ripping his sandwich in half and handing it to Jonathan. He would still be hungry eating only half but knew what to expect at home, so he planned to buy dinner from the deli anyway. Caleb had on several layers and peeled off one of his wool shirts for him. It was small, but it helped a little.
After lunch, Aryl asked around to try to find out who was messing with Jonathan, but no one seemed to know anything. He put the word out anyway that when he found out who it was, he would settle it with them personally. The rest of the afternoon went without incident.
∞∞∞
Ava tiptoed out, careful not to alert the beady-eyed one and knocked softly on Shannon’s door. She heard a child squeal on the other side of the door. Shannon opened it, half-holding the baby as it nursed, covered by a cloth sling.
“I’m so glad ye came,” she said. “Please sit down. I’ll be done with the baby in a moment.”
Ava looked about the room as she sat. It was the same sized apartment, but much more crowded with the additional necessities for two children. The sofa set close to the fireplace with a square table on one side. A full-size bed was crammed in one corner behind the door. There was an older bureau on the right of the bed, a small radio on top, and the square dining table tucked into another corner. Under the table was a large travel trunk, presumably for storage. Glancing in the only bedroom, she could see the foot of a small bed and a cradle in the corner. The kitchen was the same size as hers, but she noticed hanging shelves in the middle of the kitchen ceiling.
“Those are interesting,” Ava commented, walking over to take a closer look. Shannon was working at the sink, the nursing baby still nestled in the sling that was tied in a large knot in the center of her back.
“Patrick made those for me. We got tired of the rats gettin' to the food and either stealin’ it or makin’ us sick to our stomachs.”
“Rats?” Ava asked uneasily.
“Aye. Haven’t ye seen them at your place? We catch a few a week in the traps, but they’re all throughout the building, can’t get rid of ‘em. Patrick made these hanging shelves, so I can put my bread or fresh food on them, and the rats have a heck of a time reaching it. It works well. Ye just have to mind not to bump yer head.” Ava studied the simple contraptions consisting of a square piece of wood with thick twine nailed to the bottom of each corner. The twine was knotted about two feet above and nailed directly into the middle of the ceiling. There were three of them hung exactly at Shannon’s eye level.
“You were getting sick?” Ava asked curiously. During the brief time she and Jonathan had lived there, they had had intermittent nausea and diarrhea.
“Aye. Get the runs something awful.”
Ava thought for a moment that she would be sick making the link between their intestinal ailments to dirty rats, which had most likely crawled on and nibbled at their food. She would have Jonathan make her some of these shelves as soon as possible.
Shannon went to lay the baby in the cradle and returned to the cramped living room, closing the bedroom door softly behind her.
“Aislin is already down for her nap. We might get a few moments peace,” she said, smiling and pulling a plate of shortbread cookies from one of the hanging shelves. She poured tea and balanced two cups and the plate back to the couch. “It’s so nice to have neighbors I can actually talk to. The ones that were there before you dint speak English. Seemed nice enough but couldn’t do more than wave or nod. Patrick’s a firm believer in knowing yer neighbors. Looking out fer them and they fer you. Back in Ireland, we knew everyone for miles and could call on them for anything at any time. And they us. It’s not like that here.” She paused in obvious homesickness. “When I told Patrick about you and your husband, he was so excited. You look nice and clean and, well, normal. He wanted me to invite you over for dinner, would you come?”
“Oh, that would be nice. I’m sure Jonathan would like that,” she said and smiled, as she looked around, wondering just how they would all fit to have dinner together. “Just let me know when.”
“How about Saturday?”
“Sure. We’ll be here, but only if you make that delicious bread again.” Shannon looked pleased.
“Better yet, how about I teach ye how to make it?”
“That would be wonderful. Maybe I could bring my friends, so they could learn, too?”
“Aye, the more, the merrier.” Shannon poured more tea. “Where does your husband work?” she asked.
“At the shipping yard. He, Caleb and Aryl all work there together.”
“It’s good that you and yer friends could stick together,” Shannon said.
“I’m glad,” Ava said sincerely. “Only now there seems to be so little to do beyond the same monotonous chores, and the whole day just stares me down. There’s nothing to really look forward to, and every morning it seems like I'm only going through the motions to get to bedtime, so I can go to sleep and not worry for a bit. It’s all very depressing. Claire, Ahna and I have spent a lot of time together the last two weeks. I guess we’ve been feeling a bit smothered by each other.”
“Aye. T’was that way with some neighbors we had in our old building. I made a couple of friends right off, and we had a wonderful time together. The first week or so it was wonderful, but if ye spend day after day together, ye run out of things to talk about eventually. Boredom makes you begin to notice the uglier side of folks. You begin to pick them apart and get very annoyed with them.” Ava nodded in complete agreement.
“Exactly!” she exclaimed. “I love my friends, but Ahna’s whining is starting to bother me, along with the fact that she doesn’t do anything all day.”
“How can someone just not do anything all day?” Shannon asked, amazed.
“I don’t know. But Jon told me that Caleb told him that he buys dinner every night and has taken to doing the laundry, too.” Shannon stared at her.
“How’d she get her husband to do that?” she asked in awe.
“It’s not a matter of getting him to do it. He has to do it if he wants clean clothes. If he doesn’t have time, he pays a neighbor to do it. Arianna claims she doesn’t know how to wash on a washboard. Well, I didn’t either, but I figured it out. It’s really not that hard.” Ava suddenly realized that she was gossiping, something she detested.
“And yer other gal, Claire, was it? How is she?”
“Oh, Claire is struggling so much. Her husband doesn’t know it, but she cries almost every day. She hides it when he comes home, and he does a great job of helping her see things the way he does. It’s enough to keep her from falling apart
, I think.”
“He sounds like a good man,” Shannon said admiringly. Ava nodded, secretly envious that Aryl was strong enough to keep him and Claire going when Jon seemed barely able to get up in the morning and not just because of the new, comfortable mattress. He was getting worse, angrier and more distant. She’d had enough of gossip and touching on subjects that made her eyes sting.
“Where does Patrick work?” Ava asked, helping herself to another shortbread cookie.
“At the dry docks. He rivets on new ships and repairs the old ones. Aye, he does a variety of things. When we came to America, he took so many jobs. He learned to rivet, some carpentry, metalworking, plumbing and painting. He never stayed at any one job longer than to learn the skill, and then he moved on.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ava said sympathetically. She had heard of job jumpers and the hardships their families had to endure.
“Oh, no, dear, that was the point. He learned as many trades as fast as he could to increase his chances of gettin’ a long-term job. And he did. And if this job falls through, he can try to get one as a painter or carpenter or plumber. Puts the odds more in his favor of stayin’ employed, ye see.” Ava nodded.
“That’s a really good idea,” she said, impressed.
“I was gonna get on at the cannery or at Mr. Finklestein's sewin’ factory, but then I found out I was to have Roan, so it had to wait. I guess we better pay more attention to the calendar, so I can get to work.” They both laughed and Ava glanced over at the calendar by the bedside. Most all the days were marked with a line in black, save seven or eight days.
∞∞∞
Jonathan came through the door, a few minutes earlier than usual, shaking violently with cold. The sun had set, the temperature had dropped markedly, and the two wool shirts did not provide enough protection from the bitter-cold wind.
1929 Page 13