“What is it you want?”
“Mrs. McCallum.”
“The chief kitchen maid, is it?”
“I think so,” Florence said.
The young boy looked at Jean. “Jesus, you’ll hate it.”
“Hate what?” Jean said.
“Hate here.”
He was gone and a husky woman with red cheeks and auburn hair, her wide midsection covered with an apron, appeared. Florence Morrison immediately began to sell Jean’s ability to work speedily, to pay attention, and to show humility at all times. The chief kitchen maid was quite interested. At this time in New York, it was common to hire a ten-year-old girl for kitchen work, for factory work, or for any work that paid almost nothing and could be done by someone who did not have a powerful body.
Ten-year-old boys often went to work at their fathers’ jobs. It was common to see a father and son shoveling concrete into a wheelbarrow, or for a father and son to be unloading bananas from a freighter. Sometimes, the boys stumbled a bit under the loads, but as they grew older, to be twelve and thirteen, and their shoulder widths increased, they were able to work with less strain.
Now, in the kitchen of this Fifth Avenue mansion, the chief maid, Mrs. McCallum, said that, yes, she thought the household could use this promising girl worker. Jean Morrison, clutching her doll, was given a paper bag full of underwear and nightclothes by her aunt, and then a kiss and the aunt was gone. Jean was astonished at the size of the stoves and number of brown wooden iceboxes in the large, gloomy kitchen. The maid walked Jean to a windowless room that was so narrow only a child could fit between the bed and the wall. She pulled a long string to light a small bulb high up on a ceiling that was dark with smoke. “Don’t you like it?” Mrs. McCallum said. She was a fat Scotswoman.
“When is my auntie comin’ to fetch me?” Jean said.
“First, you’ll put your dolly on the bed and you’ll come with me,” the maid said.
She led Jean to a large wooden icebox, one of three in a pantry. “First off, ye’ll take everything out of the icebox. Then ye’ll get yourself a brush and pail of water and soap and ye’ll scrub the box till ye can hold yer dolly’s face to the insides and see how she looks.”
“Will me auntie be here by then?”
“Be off with your auntie. Ye’ll start earnin’ yer keep now.”
The fat Scotswoman handed Jean a pail and brush and left. It was two in the afternoon. The girl opened the icebox and emptied the milk and beer bottles, butter, boxes of strawberries, vegetables, huge steaks wrapped in butcher’s paper, and a large turkey. She placed them all on the floor. At the top of the icebox there was a large cake of ice.
“Ye’ll take that out, too,” the chief maid said. Jean tugged at the ice, found the piece was too heavy, and then looked at a young man, who was almost fourteen, who had on a neat white linen jacket for serving. “Help me lift the ice out?” Jean said.
“He’ll do no such thing,” the chief maid said. “He’s dressed for servin’ in the parlor.”
“I can’t lift it out,” Jean said.
“Then ye’ll wait till it melts.”
Jean sat on the floor and waited while the block of ice diminished in the muggy kitchen air. She never looked down, where the drip pan under the icebox became full and the cold water slopped over the sides, until suddenly Jean found all her food on the floor, the vegetables and steaks, sopping with ice water.
The chief maid let out a shriek. “Ye’ve ruined the food! That’ll come out of yer pay.”
Jean was scrubbing the icebox and the floor around it until six o’clock at night. At which time she was summoned to a wooden table in one corner of the kitchen and given a piece of bread and an egg mixed with turnips. When she finished, she stood up.
“Thank you,” she said. “Is me auntie comin’ now?”
“No. But the dishes’ll be comin’ soon. Set ye down and wait for them.”
That night Jean stood on her tiptoes at a large sink and scrubbed pots. Once, walking a pot over to the stove, she brushed against a tray of crystal glasses, causing one of them to drop to the floor and break.
“The Waterford!” Mrs. McCallum yelled.
Her hand spread and she hit Jean on top of the head and caused the little girl to black out for a moment. Later, the chief maid walked Jean to the narrow bedroom, opened the door, and said, “In you go.”
Jean fell asleep with her doll in the crook of her arm. She was awakened at six-thirty in the morning and was given the job of slicing oranges and squeezing juice.
On the following Thursday, at noon, her aunt arrived and Jean yelped in joy. The aunt held a finger to her lips to indicate silence and then went in and spoke to Mrs. McCallum, who was inspecting the food shelves. The aunt then came back and took Jean by the hand and led her out of the house.
“Why did you leave me?” Jean said.
“Oh, I didn’t leave you, child. That’s where you stay from now on. That’s yer job. I have to tell you, you can’t afford to break any more glasses. They’re paying you sixty cents a day, but the glass cost three dollar twenty. They charged ye fer it, and the food you ruined, too. So ye got no pay.”
Jean was at home with her mother, Annie, from one in the afternoon until five in the evening. When her brother, Kevin, returned from school, Jean was elated to see him and they ate dinner together and were talking about going out to play when their aunt arrived and said it was time for Jean to get back to the Bigelow mansion. Jean screamed and tried to cling to her mother, and then reached for her brother, but Florence yanked her away and led her, bawling, out of the rooms on Catherine Street and back up to the mansion, where the Scotswoman greeted her with a smile. “Yer in time for the last of the dishes. Shooo.”
She was to remain in the mansion for five years and become part of the children’s asylums in the shadowy kitchens of nearly every great mansion in the city. The rich acclaimed the style of their butlers, and were proud of their number of maids, but they never spoke of the kitchen children, illiterate, faces without color, spirits splintered by the drudgery of the days.
Once, she poked one swinging door in the kitchen and when it swung open, she found herself in a short passageway, which she stepped along silently and then found herself in a long room with burning lamps in the corners and a long dining table, covered with crisp linen. Maids in new uniforms were setting places under the direction of the butler, a short, chunky man with black curly hair. When the butler noticed Jean, he was instantly offended.
“Will someone please remove this child?”
As Jean retreated from the burning lights, she heard the butler snap, “Next you shall allow the hairdresser to pass through the front of the house.”
In her years of servitude, this was the closest Jean came to being in the presence of the masters of the house, the Bigelow family, or the elegance in which they lived. They were unknown gods, unthinkable that she would ever see them, and with the only reminders of them in the kitchen being the silverware and Waterford crystal.
As Annie Morrison grew weaker with an illness nobody could determine—and as a result she worked only sporadically—the aunt, Florence, assumed more control. One day when Kevin, the son, was almost ten years old, she took him out of school at lunch and brought him to a lumberyard on Water Street, where he was hired for $1.40 a week. He had a sister in a kitchen and he was in a lumberyard, thus making the Morrisons a family of American workers. ·
There were no child labor laws at this time; nothing really effective was passed until 1938. There was only the spirit of Horatio Alger, which was advanced as the national answer to sorrow. The great Horatio Alger story formula told of young men like Ben the Bootblack, who glanced up from shining shoes to spot a runaway horse that was about to trample to horrible death the beautiful young daughter of a multimillionaire banker. Ben the Bootblack dropped his shoeshine rag and rushed gallantly into the street, risking his meaningless life in order to save the banker’s daughter. Of course, Ben the B
ootblack then kept his eyes down in the daughter’s presence, rather than taking the opportunity to molest the banker’s daughter, as he certainly had the right to do. As a reward for all this, the multimillionaire banker praised Ben the Bootblack, ordered him to throw away his shoeshine rag and report to the bank, where he worked happily ever after as one of a hundred thankful clerks who put in fifty hours a week at desks in dusty air and for a rate of pay that was never mentioned, as the numbers looked too small in print.
In the lumberyard, Kevin Morrison struggled each day with long pieces of wood; sweeping was his only relaxation. He found it difficult to understand that the big men, some of them as old as thirty, working in the lumberyard did not much like it when Kevin threw wood chips around to have fun. A couple of clouts across the legs with a heavy stick taught him to tend to business, just as a whip smacking a racehorse between the ears is supposed to make him concentrate on running. Kevin walked home at night, his hair white with sawdust.
One night in her fifteenth year, one of the kitchen boys, an eighteen-year-old, slipped into Jean Morrison’s bedroom at the mansion, fell atop her, and pushed her legs apart. The act was unknown to her and the pain and the boy were gone quickly. On another night, after a huge party in the mansion, the job of polishing silver and putting away Waterford vases lasted until two A.M. Jean was sweaty and exhausted and a man in a tuxedo opened the bedroom door and, preceded by the smell of wine, walked in and removed his pants and got into bed with her. He reached for her, then fell asleep with his hand on her stomach. Jean was afraid to hurt the man’s feelings and remained still. Sometime before dawn, the man awoke, eyes red and watery, and seemed appalled to find himself where he was. He immediately resumed pawing her. He got on her, had intercourse, and then stood up to dress. “Thank you, dear.”
That Thursday, when she went home, she wailed upon entering the rooms on Catherine Street. Her mother, who was, as usual, in bed sick, asked her what was the matter, but got only tears as an answer. Then her aunt Florence came over and the two women talked to the girl and finally Jean wailed out something that caused the two women to gasp. Kevin Morrison, trying to listen, couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then his aunt stepped out of the bedroom, and told him, “Don’t you worry about it. This has nothing to do with you. Some evil people up there touched her, that’s all. I’ll have something to say to them.”
Kevin went into the bedroom and said to his sister, “Somebody hit you?”
She nodded. He ran out of the Catherine Street building with change in his pocket and took a horse-drawn trolley toward the suburban section of the city, to the corner of 69th and Fifth.
Where, at the noon hour, he rang the front doorbell of the Bigelow mansion, not understanding there was a rear door, and when a footman opened it, Kevin slipped past him, ran into the house, was momentarily stunned by the furniture and rugs and chandeliers, and then raced about, looking for the kitchen, while the shouting footman chased. Kevin went through the dining room and a short passage to the swinging door, which he exploded through, looking for someone obviously evil enough to hit his sister. There was one scullery maid and a young boy of fourteen or so. Now the footman entered the kitchen and Kevin grabbed a large knife from a carving block and swung around.
“What is it?” the footman said.
“One of ye hit me sister.”
A smirk came on the footman’s long face. He walked up to Kevin Morrison, ignored the knife, and slapped Kevin on the left side of his head. Slapped hard. The footman intended the next slap to be even harder. Kevin stabbed the hand before it got to him. He tried to push the knife right through the hand and the footman started a long scream.
In the noise, Kevin went out the back door and was soon racing down streets he never had seen. He did not get to Catherine Street until late evening. His sister was still there, and the aunt was trying to get her to return to the mansion.
“I stabbed the fooker that hit her,” Kevin announced.
At this point, the aunt realized that there was no way to take Jean back. She left her on Catherine Street. Where, outside on the street, ten days later, she met a young man named Willie. As she had nothing to do, and neither did he, they strolled down to the docks and after quitting time for the men, at four-thirty, the two went onto Pier 44, East River, and had sex in the late afternoon sun on the coffee sacks.
It didn’t take Jean very long to become pregnant by somebody, and four months later, she was living at Catherine Street with a bulging stomach, a mother who by now was completely bedridden with her mysterious ailment, and a brother, Kevin, who was still doing boy’s work in the lumberyard. Florence Morrison, summoned to the house, took one look at Jean’s midsection and clapped a hand to her mouth.
“I guess the lot of us is grandparents,” she said, sighing.
She then took Kevin Morrison to the office of the Board of Water Supply, whose clerks listened as she told of the family heritage in the city’s water supply, omitting the news that her brother, Johnny, had worked only long enough to incinerate, or certainly singe, the night clerk at Beacon. They hired Kevin for a job at the Croton site. Two days later, he walked through the pale light of Grand Central Station, as had his father, Johnny. Kevin looked at the shirts worn by the men who rushed through the crowded station. Spotless and stiff. They make thousands and don’t even get the shirt dirty. He wondered how many shirts men such as these owned. Probably no more than two. Look at this one fellow here. He can make it through a week with what he has on; doesn’t even move enough during the day to get the armpits moist.
He took the train to the Croton Reservoir, which was fifteen miles into Westchester County, and became one of hundreds of laborers building a gravity dam with cyclopean masonry. Plans called for the dam to go down one hundred fifty feet into soundrock, widening at the base. The top of the dam was to climb one hundred forty feet up from the water it held back, twenty million gallons of rainwater that ran to the reservoir on the magic land that dropped one foot in each ten thousand as it sloped toward the city.
He lived in a work camp, and on the first payday he went with a crowd down to Willis Avenue, in the South Bronx. There was a line of bars, and the streets were crowded with Irish. He was instantly at home, and he never made it below 138th Street and Willis Avenue again, except for the funeral of his mother. It was held in Chelsea and his aunt Florence and her husband, O’Gara, the grocer, were in charge. Jean was there with her baby. She had been tending the grocery store counter while Florence cared for the baby. After the funeral, he went back to his job in Croton and his life on Willis Avenue. He was eighteen when he met Kathy Gallagher, who lived in a brownstone on Willis Avenue that was inhabited by tunnel workers, who called themselves sandhogs, and unmarried schoolteachers of some age. One of them, Rose O’Neill, who lived in the apartment next to the Gallagher family, taught their prospective son-in-law, Kevin Morrison, the forgotten art of reading. Working at the kitchen table at night, she noted the speed with which Kevin stepped from being able to pick out the words “can’t do it” to realizing immediately that “can’t” meant that whatever it was they were talking about could not be done. He could be suited for more, she said, but then she looked over at him. He was rubbing against Kathy Gallagher, plainly yearning to get on top of her right at the table. When he talked he concentrated on the money he could make as a sandhog. Sufficient that he can read and write, the old schoolteacher decided.
When Kevin Morrison married Kathy Gallagher a year later, they moved into a rooming house whose owner, in need of a superintendent, offered the job to Kevin, who refused, since shaking down a furnace at night and putting out ashes was in direct conflict with his nightly occupation of being a paying customer at the Keeper Hill Lounge, number 412 Willis Avenue. When at work one day, deep in the tunnel under the dam, Morrison’s friend, Jerry Barry, who was here three months from Donegal, turned off his acetylene torch at the tip but left the tank open. Lit up like he deserved a good smoke for himself. Lit up in a
tight chamber far under a reservoir. Barry blew straight up through the roof and into the water. Later, standing on the gravel shore, somebody spotted Barry out in the reservoir. The head was bobbing along, the face looking up, with sometimes no water covering the face at all, looking up at the sky as the water swept it toward the gate in the dam that led to the tunnel to the city. Somebody handed Morrison a pole with a small net on it and said, “Well, this is about all you’ll need to fish Barry out of the water.” It was. When Morrison picked it up in the net, the man rowing the boat looked at the head in the net and said, “I guess he sure left a sour taste in the drinking water.”
That night, Morrison carried out the ashes from the rooming house for the first time. He felt that if anything happened to him on his regular job, his wife of six months could take over as janitor and have a place to live. He may have thought about her at other times during their years together, but he had an extraordinary ability to mask such things.
Kevin Morrison had auburn hair and blue eyes, and was of average size for an Irishman, five foot five. At this time one could always tell an Irish saloon, for the ceiling lamps hung dangerously low, yet only by leaping upward could any customer ever hit his head. Kevin Morrison became famous on Willis Avenue for his tactic of remaining docile at the bar, no matter what words were hurled at him, and if fists were thrown, he always slipped the punches and walked away, and then at six the next morning, auburn hair neatly brushed, he would knock on the offending party’s door and, depending on how he felt, might or might not say something before throwing a punch at the man with a hangover who answered the door. Kevin Morrison also carried the water bucket for and worked in the corner of the most famous person in the neighborhood, Frankie McCann, a bantamweight fighter who, seeking aid from those places far beyond the sky, took the name of his parish church, St. Immaculata, as his ring name. Fighting as Frankie Immaculata, and weighing 116 pounds, he was thrown in over his head with a man named Jack McAuliffe, from Cork city. When Immaculata came back to the corner at the end of the ninth round, during which he had absorbed a frightening number of punches, Kevin Morrison jumped up the steps and swung into the ring and held the bottle of water to Immaculata’s mouth. Immaculata had trouble finding the neck of the bottle with his mouth. Kevin Morrison then held out a tin pail so Immaculata could spit out the water. Immaculata bent toward the bucket, but then spit the water into the canvas several inches to the side of the bucket.
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