by Mary Burns
Oh, yes, I was all the rage, holding court at the back. The rickety assemblage Bridey called a porch, one of them landings on stairs angled down like the pleats of an opened squeeze box, like all the other stairs on that block and all the other blocks, so’s you could nail up a clothesline on a house faced one street and connect to a house faced another street altogether. We got used to the sight of the neighbors’ union suits, the dishtowels, and bed sheets decorating the alleys. Looking up, you could imagine a stage, really, like the makeshift shows they put on at the athletic clubs and at St. Patrick’s Hall.
But that night Bridey’s porch made the stage and me the star attraction, puffed up by the attention they were after paying me, the lingering fright, too. Margaret collected pennies from Lucille and Frances—girls also boarding with Bridey—and Mrs. Smith, Bridey’s elderly relative from somewhere, not Ireland, put in her share. The two fellas had rooms on the floor below climbed up from where they’d been sitting to catch some air. Bridey sent her addled son, John, down the road to fetch a pail of beer. It turned into a party with me the guest of honor describing the whoosh of air and the crash, the minute fell silent, the fire in the sky, and the great lumpy pillows of smoke smothered the sun. Only then did I remember the piece of glass’d flown out and hit me in the neck and put my hand there, irritating the new-formed scab, and didn’t fresh blood bubble up and raise a stir, everyone thrilled like they’d been there themselves.
“Did ye see any of the dead then, Maeve?”
Bridey Clancy’s the one rented the top floor of a three-flat and made her living from we handed over the weightier half of our weekly pay to sleep in one of her hall rooms—three to start, but then the one she’d managed to divide somehow so’s she could cram in another lodger and still have quarters to advertise as “private” on the sign in the parlor window. We had the smallest, Margaret and me. The two of us shared a bed no bigger than the straw pallet where we’d snuggled as children, yet it seemed smaller, Bridey’s bed, for while neither of us was big, we had grown into women. Margaret near nineteen and engaged to be married, me the year older.
“God rest their souls,” said Bridey, but her warty eyelids never fell over the staring washed-blue out of respect or nothing. Dark had mercifully taken over, and though the simpery drafts off the lake rarely reached us with any strength to speak of, we did get a whiff, at least, with its reminder of the afternoon downtown. Bridey, she lifted the bottom of her apron and mopped away whatever it was clung to that long black hair she couldn’t see to pluck out, then, in her declining years. For Bridey it would be a slow decline, though I heard tell of her death only years after the fact of it.
“Just the poor fellow they carried down. But I told you that, sure.”
“Do you know how many so? Was it hundreds?”
Bridey liked to imagine the worst, as if knowing would make her feel better about her husband got rolled into one of them machines at the steel plant. Could a been that, or something deeper in her character. If we didn’t empty our wage packets, on the Saturday she wanted our rent, she predicted a dark road ahead for us, Margaret and me. We’d be condemned to one of them houses with a shaky reputation. We would turn into the type of girl picked up soldiers and such at Dreamland, or loitered at the athletic clubhouses where the rough and fast fellas peeled their eyes for girls who didn’t know better. Yes, there were many places—and Bridey’d cited all of them—where a body could drift into a situation would start tears in her mother’s eyes. Girls!
Yet she knew we’d last seen our mother near to eight years back, her hugging us and kissing us and knotting her fingers in my tangles, pulling my head back and studying my face as she did when some notion took hold. Searching me as if I were a stranger she’d found by surprise, or the field beyond, and making me promise to look after my sister, and not to forget her or him—our mammy or our da—or Fiona, who’d died since we left, or little Nuala, or our Gran, or Uncle Thomas. All we were leaving behind. She let go my hair to reach in her apron pocket and pull out a boiled sweet for each of us. Then she turned her head and pointed her chin out as if looking off at that field again or some fascinating sight, for wasn’t it the best thing that two of her daughters had the vocation? And wouldn’t the nuns find more for us to eat than our crippled da?
Girls! After what we’d seen?
We sat outside until the singing started, Margaret and me, though the others went in before, first Bridey, for all she hated to miss anything. There was only so much to tell and I’d told it, and she needed her bed. “How in heaven’s name will I ever get any rest, with the image of them poor burning people filling my head?” she asked, accusing me like. Though hadn’t it been her wanting the gory details?
“Do you think it was burnin’ skin you smelled so?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it, then, Mrs. Clancy. That smell, like scorchin’ the hair off a pig. But we’ll learn what’s what when we see the mornin’ editions.”
“You bring one back with you and then we’ll be up to snuff and there might be pictures.”
They all knew me to be mad for the papers and hadn’t Desmond Malloy guessed it, too? Touching the inside of my elbow with that one rolled up, his teeth gleaming as he smiled big. I picked up the Daily News most evenings, first searching on the car for one left, only spending my two cents when I had no luck. If Margaret’d stepped out with her Harry, I took it to Thompson’s or one of the other neighborhood lunchrooms and had myself a good read with my supper. Still, I accepted the Trib from Desmond Malloy and not just because it was himself offering it. In our life we’d a been fools to refuse what we could get for free, even if it meant saving only a couple a pennies. I did not wonder to myself right off what it might cost me and isn’t it a marvel how we don’t know. How the time we’re in is like the narrow part in an hourglass, where sands from the past gather only to separate and land in different places in the time to come. Or so we thought until that wild-haired scientist fellow—same one stares at me now, from the picture on the wall across from where I lie, on this bed bound to be my last—while that fellow showed how the past can drift into the future and the future dribble into the past, and plenty of sand stalls right there in the middle of the hourglass, like that week in Chicago when everything happened at once.
I certainly took the paper. Why not?
The singing and the fighting combined, your fiddle and your drum, the regular orchestra along this stretch as the men stumbled back from the saloons. Common as the clackety-clack, the screeching of the last cars, the clop of horse hooves, the wailing of babies, angry words dashed out windows, and sometimes hollering, too, before the street settled. Still, we didn’t want to go in, Margaret and me, for we’d been through the world and all since sucking on those sweets our mammy gave us, and this new thing caused us to marvel at how near Death stands. That batch taken so spectacular, like the big city itself, full of noise, bluster. People from every corner of the earth, skin in every color skin can be, the rhythms of the talk, the words themselves unfamiliar as the mouths spoke them.
Too, with the rest of them gone, I could tell Margaret about the car man gave me the paper. Desmond Malloy. Desmond with that hairline arrowed down over his forehead, eyes green as the moss that furred the stones in the old friary on Mill Street, in the home place, and eyebrows shaped like the friary’s arches, that same tumbledown building where we Ennis children played, the daring most of us. Margaret didn’t recall the friary as clearly as me, though she’d tagged along and I’d helped her scramble over the stone sill to join the others in the weeds inside.
“A paper, though, Maeve, not the crown jewels. They’re terrible flirts, them car men.”
Margaret scanned the alley where some animal—could a been a rat, for the rats were big as piglets—scratched for garbage, snuffled and whimpered a little, so maybe a dog not a rat.
“It’s the land of the shillelagh and my heart goes back there daily, to the girl
I left behind me when we kissed and said…Goodbye…” If not as many Micks here as in Bridgeport and some of the other neighborhoods in the city, them that were let you know it. Yet ’twas no John McCormack crooning down there, and she drifted, Meggsie did, the beginning of a doze. Soon a bottle crashed against the house and someone yelled down for quiet. “Working people need their sleep,” said the shouter. That woke her up and she let me steer her in, and she paddled at the basin while I lay on our bed staring at the roses ghosting out from the dark wallpaper, remembering those days when the odd finger of sun fell on the mossy stones of the old Ennis friary. They appeared that soft you wanted to lay your cheek on them.
Tuesday, July 22, 1919
I had to tell her, didn’t I? Not only did the woman need to know Margaret and me could pay each week for our room, Bridey Clancy had the curiosity of someone didn’t get out much, but parsed the world through the boarders she pried open with her questions.
“The Chicago Magic Company? I won’t have no spells or nothin’ under my roof, miss.”
I wanted to turn up my lips in the way I’d seen Mr. R do when a customer stepped into the shop and, his voice gone all sandy, Mr. R revealed what he called the grand mystery of illusion—It’s all in the power to make people believe. Only to tease, sure, but Bridey kept her place clean and provided us with leftover slivers of soap and a gas plate in the room, and gave over a square of her ice box for our provisions. We’d needed a place for us both once Margaret turned in her cap and her apron, and Packy’s mother—the lady would a been my mother-in-law, Mrs. Dwyer she was—knew a good woman had a clean house on the Near West Side, didn’t charge too much. There we were then, through everything, until Bridey Clancy pointed us to the door.
“Oh no,” I said to Bridey that first day. I told her Mr. R made me swear an oath of secrecy, her not knowing about my history with vows, them promised devotion in exchange for passage. “You have to be a member of the magician’s society to learn such things, Mrs. Clancy. I’m just the girl movin’ orders along in the back.”
Still, she never stopped peering at me curiously, suspicious, imagining more to me than you’d think a small body could hold. “I knew it,” she said in the end. “Didn’t I know all along.” But not that day. When Margaret and I went out the Tuesday morning, Bridey only stood at the landing.
“Don’t forget the papers so, Maeve,” she reminded me, and I promised her that I never would. Not that day especially.
AIRSHIP AFIRE CRASHES
THROUGH LOOP BANK ROOF
BLIMP BURNS, KILLS 12
THOUSANDS SEE CREW LEAP IN PARACHUTES
MARTIAL LAW FOR RIOT IN CAPITAL?
5 DEAD, SCORES INJURED
You could stand near the stacks, read the headlines as the papers flew up into the hands of readers while the curly haired little wop newsboy—looked small to be doing the job he did, still in short pants, and with a cap above his swarthy face—while he chanted in a sing-song loud as one of them stars on stage.
MOTHER SOBS OVER MESSENGER BOY
BURNED TO A CRISP!
And the boy kitty-corner made a duet of it,
BATHIN’ BEAUTIES GET THE NOD! PITCHERS!
Today none of that was enough, and I couldn’t wait to see if I found a paper on the car. I handed my coins over to the little Italian and took the morning Trib.
The smoke came as if self impelled, driving all before it, a perpetual explosion. It was inexhaustible; one stared, waiting to see it stop, but still the great streams rolled out. They spread in vast clouds overhead, writhing, curling, then uniting in one giant river, they streamed away down the sky, stretching a black pall as far as the eye could reach.
That’s how it was, sure, the paper had it right enough, smoke writhing and curling in a giant river pushed by the wind from the lake. Those hadn’t seen the tragedy must’ve smelled it. But those had seen it turned out to be wrong in their reports of the victims, for it was not the bank president, nor Mr. Armour, nor the Paddy from Clare neither, but just ordinary souls lost in that awful wreck. Another full-inch-tall headline under the date—July 22, 1919—and the names of the dead like to spilling over a black-bordered box. Thirteen in all and two of them boys, messenger boys, one of them just fourteen.
Well, hadn’t I been younger still when I took Margaret by the hand and the two of us set off with the nuns for America? Both of us put to work you’d think more than a child ought to do. The eternal scrubbing of the pine-board floors, the soapy tubs for washing clothes and bed linen, looking after children, some the dark-skinned ones scared us so at first because we’d never seen skin stayed dark after a good scrub. We had bushels to learn. Never stopped that, the learning.
I came to love the babies, many of them grew the nappy hair, its feel of fresh-dug turf, and the eyes big and merry unless they were wailing out of loneliness or hunger, for those hadn’t been abandoned to the care of the Sisters of Perpetual Grace lived there because their mammy was sick and they had no da. Didn’t the little ones make me think of home and the sister we’d left, Nuala? Who’d just stood on her own for the first time and walked a few steps, and hadn’t she then tried to follow us out the wicket gate?
Fourteen he was, the youngest of them the airship finished. And if it wasn’t bad enough the messenger lad’d had to quit school, he’d been killed on his second week at work! What about his family sent him out for it? Now they’d be missing what he brought in, what would become of them in their sadness and misery?
I opened my pocketbook, thinking to gnaw a bit of the bread I packed with my boiled egg for lunch—food taking the place of a comforting arm around me—and there’s a candy I missed, or Margaret put there to surprise me before we said goodbye at the corner. A caramel, too, soft, as if the Blessed V’d ignored the things we’d done to get here and was smiling down, saying, Here you are, Maeve, don’t feel bad. The Holy Mother taking the place of what my own mother would a done in the same circumstance.
“Here she comes!”
As if we were, all of us waiting there, too deaf and couldn’t hear the rumbling wheels ourselves, see the front end of the car swaying like a hound’s nose sniffing right, then left. The burning eye at the front glaring through the thin milk light of the summer morning.
Car already full this close to the Loop, but I could hook my arm around a pole and hold the paper out and the greasy ink would not soil my shirtwaist.
DEATH IN HOSPITAL SWELLS BLIMP TOLL
The last to die, the thirteenth, a photographer. Herald Examiner man name of Norton, and him after asking if the equipment he’d tried to bring out with him’d suffered much from the fall. If his pictures’d survived. Well, they never did, nor him neither. Another story about how aircraft would no longer be allowed to fly through the Loop, no matter who wanted to photograph it, and how Mayor Thompson would ask the Congress and them for laws. The reporters got to use their best language, scribbling about the horror and how crowds were after jamming the bank for a look at the destruction, and the bank manager saying there’d been no money lost, as’d been rumored, and only a small fraction of the bank’s business area damaged and even that not beyond repair.
Then a big advertising space the bank’d taken to announce it’d be open for business as usual, with a promise the Goodyear company would make it right for the thirteen dead and all the injured. We never did learn what they got, the victims, if anything.
I steadied my arms best I could so’s the letters wouldn’t dance and dizzy me as I read, glancing out now and then to see the sun pink the sky way over there by the lake. It was going to be hot as blazes again, maybe hotter than yesterday. The air already boggy, no wind.
§
Cooler in our place, at least the front shop with its polished dark-oak shelves of curiosities—the satin capes, the wands, the glossy top hats, and purple wizard caps with silver stars sewed on them. Decks of cards for sale and magic
boxes with secret compartments and special coins to use for tricks, glass cases for the best illusions. Old posters showed Mr. R striking various splendid poses, and, in a frame only painted gold but appearing actual, Houdini himself, his eyebrows bent over tortured eyes, as if on this occasion he might be foiled by the handcuffs binding his crossed arms at the wrists. Every morning I turned the patterned brass knob beneath the frosted glass with its arc of letters said The Chicago Magic Company, entered the shop and greeted pretty Florence—always there before me and standing at the counter—that picture of the Great Houdini started me thinking of the fixes Margaret and me’d been in and got out of, same as the man himself.
To keep his place the biggest magic concern in the center of the country, Mr. R was always scheming, thinking. He wanted to expand the enterprise, add a bureau specially for touring magicians wanted to try out their newest tricks. It’s why he’d sent me to the bank the day before, with a letter he said would outline his vision. He no doubt wanted a loan of money to fit out the place, too, or why describe his plan to a bank? But he never said. Typical of him to be so formal when he had a telephone in the office, could have called for an appointment. But, no, he liked to keep his schemes close to his vest and do things the old-fashioned way, Mr. R, and hadn’t my errand put me right in the middle of a true historical event?
In the space behind the shop at the front, closed-in cubes housed Mr. R, and Mr. M—the Rainbow Paper Company proprietor shared our place, though we never saw him much. An opened up room had a row of desks for me, Eveline, Ruth, and the big raised table where George, our artist fella, scratched out the drawings for the catalogues, the tricks, or effects so-called, and the paper party favors Mr. M hawked in a publication of his own. George didn’t work every day, but when he did come he bent over his tilted board near the window looked out over South Dearborn Street. Then there was Billy, the stock boy, who did come every day but only for the couple of hours it took him to package up what’d been ordered and load the packages into a big bag for the postman, and to tell us the latest joke he’d picked up. Billy hoped to take to the stage himself one day and he practiced on we girls at the back whenever he had the chance.