by Mary Burns
’Twas a grand building to enter each morning with them Indian heads carved in bronze above the elevator doors around the foyer, the bright blue mosaic set out in pictures made of thousands of stamp-sized tiles, the story of Jolliet discovering Chicago, and Père Marquette trying to make Catholics out of the Indians. Eight months into it I liked to choose my elevator, the one under Black Hawk, or Hairy Bear, the names alone spinning my mind into wild fantasies. But the day I entered first—shy-like, the beauty of the place dwarfing me same as the tall buildings outside—I followed the gloved hand of the colored man, Clyde, waved me through the ridged marble pillars towards an open cage without even noticing which head hung over the one I stepped into. Hadn’t I felt I was getting away with something?
Yet it was Gladys told me about the job, and Gladys a girl just like me meant anybody could work there, and so I rode up to the ninth floor where Mr. R himself presided over the counter at the time. He wanted two girls, one to handle the front so as to leave him free for other business, his studying and practicing, his jawing, his cigar smoking, but he could tell right off I didn’t have the zing to chat with the parlor magicians and the vaudeville types visited the shop. As he studied my face, divining me, the heat spread over my cheeks same as lard on the bread the sisters would take out of the mission’s big oven at swallow’s cough, before the sun crawled up the sky and all the little ones woke hungry.
A sorcerer himself, Mr. R dressed natty in clean cuffs and collar each day, his black hair slicked a quarter to one side, the rest to the other, like an open book more than half-read, his mustache an even brush above lips thin as Bridey’s soap. George used Mr. R as a model for many of the drawings in the catalogue. He managed a good likeness, too, save for the eyes, the small blue-black points drilled into me that first day. Drilled but didn’t penetrate, for he said, “I take you for the trustworthy type.”
He never invited me to sit down or nothing, but said why he needed more staff was because he aimed to attract all the magicians, the conjurors, and spiritualists passing through the city. Countless numbers of them had to be because every show in all the many theaters offered an act of the kind, from the simple ones where things appeared and disappeared—some fellow in a tuxedo plucking a real rabbit, twitching and twittering with fright, out of one of them hats like displayed on the shiny dark shelves—to the most mysterious. Mr. R held forth, describing dreams that turned out to be harder to realize than rabbits. For wasn’t he after the biggest fish, even Blackstone and Thurston, and the young card man Vernon, even the Orientals. Imagined a cozy room, he did, where he’d set out a bottle and a humidor and his newest invention and, under the spell of the camaraderie he’d created, Mr. R would learn the secrets he craved and all them others could demonstrate their new acts. Sounded a grand dream to me, and didn’t my heart speed thinking maybe Anna Eva would visit, too, though she was getting on then and you didn’t find her touring to Chicago often.
I’d seen her myself, at the vaudeville, with Gladys, us sitting up top the balcony of the Majestic—but closer would have been too much then, it being my first show. There I sat in my best shirtwaist and a hat so big the man behind asked me to hold it in my lap. Anna Eva came on late, the surprise guest, when I wondered how there could be any more. Already a chimp’d circled the stage on roller skates, a girl’d danced with a chair between her teeth. There’d been a ragtime song and dance by a man in blackface. A couple of fellas wearing tall hats and sporting mustaches stretched out beyond their cheeks, with boots’d clomped across the boards, got in some kind of pretend-tussle. The audience’d stamped their feet and some’d whistled when one of the cowboys chased the other off.
When the music changed to something eerie, caused shivers, Gladys squeezed my arm. The grand velvet curtain—always red they were—lifted in gathers and there she was, Anna Eva herself, though I didn’t know her name just then. Anna Eva standing, her fair head bowed until the curtain, hoisted high as it would go, let clouds of vapor escape from even higher. Seemed like she stood in the sky. Cheers greeted her appearance and her lips curled in that sweet smile I came to dream of later. Dressed all in white she was, silk, lace-trimmed, and the man introduced her—a young man in a tuxedo and hair with the shine of patent leather, such as I was to see on Mr. R—that fellow shouted out, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am privileged to introduce the fabled woman of mystery, the very same that stumped the Great Houdini, the incomparable Anna Eva Fay who will perform her famous cabinet mystery!” Mystery he called it, not trick. We saw her tied into the cabinet, heard a banjo playing, tambourine rattling, saw them same objects fly out, then her, standing untied. A marvel, really, and it made us all laugh with amazement, most of us, them not doubters. How did she do it? we wondered, and since then I have found out. But the real magic came with the mind reading I was to see later, just the summer before that Tuesday in Chicago when Mr. R hired me to work for him at the magic company.
The trustworthy type, he said. Anna Eva herself could not have been as convincing as me that day. Makes me think I did have the gift Mammy saw in Ennis. Comes from having been born before dawn. A present from her could a been, and why her regard lingered on me the moment of our leaving. Yes, I have considered that, how I foresaw the opportunities I would discover at Mr. R’s place, even if it was only a job I wanted then. Yet, if I could truly see what others could not, it had to be a knack came and went. Or maybe ’tis a body resists what she knows because feelings drive harder than reason. The bold in me moving ahead, hadn’t it always been so? Worthy of trust? Me looking for employment and all, I only let my head tilt to the side and smiled and so came to be situated at a desk in the back, sorting the cash from the money orders, sending out the tricks, the illusions, so-called. Illusions when all we really had back there was a mess of paper.
July heat climbed through the morning as I slit open envelopes, divided a few coins and bills from the money orders and stamps customers were supposed to send and mostly did. It’s the rare bird ignored the advice at the front on the catalogue: Currency, etc. should be sent only in Registered Letters. Then time for lunch, and we three girls, plus Florence, from the front, quit the building to nibble whatever we had, in whatever shade we could find on the street. It was relief more than food we wanted, and we could have gone to the park, or down the block to State Street to shop the big store windows, but we hadn’t long and we only wanted a lake-sent breeze, really, something resembling fresh air. You’d think all the talk among us would a been about the airship crash and a load of it was so, because hadn’t I been there to see for myself and they wanted my account of it, same as the boarders at Bridey’s. I showed them the small wound on my neck and we shook our heads over them perished.
“Big loss. I saw one of them airmen myself at Grant Park on Sunday. And I can tell you girls, he was a fine lookin’ man,” Eveline said and winked, suggesting more than she wanted to let on. Typical of Eveline, that teasing. The newest of us, having started at The Chicago Magic Company less than two months before, we’d become used to her by then and for the most part liked her. Eveline was one implied more than revealed things, so for all we knew she’d slipped away with the airman for a cocktail or a dance before he set off on his fatal crash.
“If it was the pilot you saw, it doesn’t matter if he was handsome. He’s one of the few who got out alive. Didn’t you see in the papers? He landed safely on a roof and that’s not fair at all. Not when it was his fault.” This from a frowning Ruth. “I don’t see how you can feel sorry for a man who caused the death of so many innocents. Just gone to work, same as every day, then poof! Dead. They say it was a German balloon, too.”
“I hear they’ve got him under arrest,” said Florence.
Could be hard to hear out there with the motorcars firing and the newsies bawling the latest and all of a sudden a brass band coming from somewhere. Then, too, Ruth spoke in a high, almost whiny voice, childlike. Eveline talked tough and dressed better than the rest o
f us and not because Mr. R gave her any more in her pay packet. She came to work with nails painted and her lips swollen and rouged. My chum Gladys said Eveline got up to mischief with men, as if she was shocked by it. But maybe Gladys’d like to have been getting up to the same with Charles Francis Brown on the seventeenth floor. She laid her opinion of Eveline on how she dressed and that laugh of hers, which could feel like a slap. Gladys never liked my work mate, but she often came out with us all the same, Gladys did. Some days just the two of us strolled along State, searching for an idea to bring back for Margaret to make for us. Margaret being a crack seamstress could copy anything and Gladys was always one for the latest fashions.
That day, with the stink of the crash still in the air, Eveline held back any smart remarks might a hatched in her mind—employed a respectful tone, in my view. “It was a Goodyear balloon. Same as the tire company. You could see it on the front. Goodyear. You can’t blame the Krauts for everything.”
“Easy for you to say. But if it wasn’t for all them Germans, my Walter would have been here and I wouldn’t be spendin’ my days with all youse.” Florence blinked back the tears fountained up every time she mentioned the name. Her Walter.
The moment must’ve been specially sharp for her as the brass band passed at the corner, six or eight players in blue with gold braid across the chest leading a cluster of doughboys up Madison, them maybe just come back. The band played the song everyone knew by then, “Till We Meet Again.” Could be sad, but less sad on this occasion seeing how the marchers in brown had returned. Not Walter, though.
Even me’d lost someone. Patrick Dwyer was never a soldier, not with that weak arm of his, and despite him trying to strengthen it with exercises didn’t do much good, no guarantee it’d ever be good enough for shooting. But the flu came home with the boys and got Packy. No Germans, only the flu. His sweet ways flare in my memory even now, him going on and on about how smart I was, how brave I’d been to leave Ireland on my own—well I’d never told him about the Sisters of Perpetual Grace—how pretty I was, so’s he’d almost had me believing it. The sisters said girls must watch the sweet talkers because they knew what they were after trying to accomplish with their sugared words. Too many of them words like too many candies could make you sick, except, in the case of the sweet talkers, you might find yourself the kind of sick that lasts for the rest of your life. They liked to put the fear of God in us, the sisters did, and we guessed their meaning while also knowing it wasn’t always true. Things people told me flicker through my thoughts unexpectedly like that and with them come pictures—Sister Mary Theresa, her face squeezed into a raised round biscuit by the white wimple under her black veil, her gums pale red above small teeth when she smiled.
Despite her no doubt good intentions, she was wrong about Pat. He acted proper, not like some of the toughs held up the walls at the club dances in Hamburg and Canaryville looking for an easy girl. We’d tried those dances, Margaret and me. A lot of drinking and fights out back and priests there to oversee the goin’s-on and politicians strolling in, some of them not bothering even to take the cigars out of their mouths, but chomping down with one side of their jaw as they leaned into you and shouted over the music, “Havin’ fun, honey?” More proper, too, my Pat than them employed young Bridgets—Bridget being what housemaids were called. Rich old fellas tried to have their way with maids like Margaret in the big houses on Prairie Avenue. Despite her weekly pay, plus a room and her meals, and all the things she learned about how fine folk laid the table and groomed themselves, Margaret ran off the first time the man of the house tried to kiss her.
Yes, Packy was a gentle one. I’d seen it right away. Him sitting in the chair just beside me in the church hall, his mother on the other side of him. The youngest of a family of four and the last home, his mammy maybe hanging on to him. But he got her to invite Margaret and me out for ice cream after the show featured some of the parish children dancing. Couldn’t a been more genteel. While Mrs. Dwyer was describing her particular sort of hip stitch to Margaret, I found him staring at me, and smiled. Must have encouraged him, because next thing wasn’t he asking if he could meet me after my shift at the catalogue company the very next day. Himself he worked for the city. Already moving up in the sanitation department, thanks to his folks being good Democratic voters and him knowing what he was after.
Mere weeks we walked out together before the night he took my arm and steered me across State Street. Stood me to supper at a restaurant with white cloths on the tables and napkins big as a child’s shirt, chairs padded with velvet. Me marveling it was Maeve Curragh of old Mill Street, Ennis in the scene, for I hadn’t pictured the same, even if they often said at home I’d got the gift same as our mammy. You can see the good people in the night, Mammy’d whispered, when I’d wake, frightened. But I have rarely seen them so much as felt their presence, like a rheumatiz knowing when a storm’s about to come.
There he sat across the smooth white napery, Packy, his hair slicked back, color of rust rained on, his eyes shining as he talked about the future he saw for us. Me just going along, nodding, enjoying the gleam of the polished cutlery, the lamps hanging down over us shedding light yellow as cream clotted at the top of a pail, all the while thinking I’d be changing from the leader to the one led and how that would happen, I didn’t know. But fat sizzling along the bone of a hefty chop and taties on a platter decorated with parsley, coin-sized carrots sliding in butter. I appreciated a good meal and it felt nice with someone taking care of me. Didn’t I remember the evening fondly, too, when things changed that fast, well before Christmas. I never got the ring he promised me, but had only memories, same as I had of home.
§
Finally done for the day, slipped into the stream flowing towards the tall brass doors whirled a body from the vestibule out to the street. Knowing my choice rested between Bridey and her back stairs or our oven of a room, I got off the car at Halsted, as I often did, but instead of heading up to West Monroe I meandered along the street to enjoy a bit of the evening stench, the clouds of it blowing north from the Yards, then also garbage rotting and sweat-dripping horses, the wheezy motor cars and trucks with their billows of gas exhaust, the reek of urine along the walls outside the saloons. More open there on Halsted, brighter so. Even though a dirty sky, I could see more of it here than downtown, where buildings rose so tall they darkened the streets beneath.
I had to walk past the Academy of Music and wasn’t I tempted to duck in and see a show, for they played all day and not many days didn’t need lightening with a laugh. But I had to choose between a show or supper tonight, because we’d splurged on Sunday, Margaret and me, and it was too hot to sit indoors anyhow. The old ones sat out on stoops, crones with shawls draped around them in the scant shade of doorways. Signs tempting from above, or painted right on the window, Ice Cream Sundae, 10¢, and didn’t that one wet my mouth with longing. A storefront movie theater, had to be Italian with all the i’s in the words. The mission on the corner where a man held a placard said, “Jesus Saves.” Lunch counters and proper, if not especially fancy, restaurants, Thompson’s cafeteria further down and delicatessens where the proprietor would slice me off a smidge of cheese or meat I could eat in my hand as I walked if I wanted. Oh, yes, and I was famished and the memory of lunch dry as the bread made up that meal. I’d a liked nothing more than a cold soda or one of them lemonades you could buy at the café on the corner where Halsted met Madison.
Thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to idle here till the sky went pink again and it wasn’t so blinding out, blinding even if a layer same as the gauze strips you’d put over a bleeding wound spread over the city of Chicago where my sister Margaret and me’d come to meet our futures. I’d already spent a nickel for my fare, though I might’ve had it still if Desmond Malloy’d been collecting on my car. Yes, that one, and hadn’t he been sneaking into my dreams all day? Good chance he would a let me slip by for free, since he’d made s
uch a fuss yesterday.
But I was left with only four nickels and where to spend them? The sizzle of sausages from one of the Hunky places, that salty cheese you could get from the Greeks if you could suffer the garlic on the vendor’s breath. Well, we’d had a grand time, my sister and me, at the show on Sunday. We’d laughed at the vaudeville and we’d cried at the picture, and even if it cost us a good portion of our weekly wages, I never saw one so beautiful. Broken Blossoms, and in a movie palace so grand made you forget your near empty pocketbook. Maybe it meant more bread than meat till the next payday. Didn’t matter. More than the gut needed satisfying.
Then a tap on my shoulder and me, startled, turning round to see the moss on the friary stones boasting its softness. The hair shooting back from that arrow point and the barest strip of scarlet around the boiled ham forehead, and his hat in his hand, but a boater instead of the conductor’s billed cap he wore on the cars.
“Fancy meetin’ you on this night of nights. The girl who saw it all, and them still countin’ the dead. What’s that I see above your collar?”
He gazed down at me, so I wondered if my hat’d gone crooked again, or my shirtwaist’d got soiled as well it might have at the end of such a day. But it’s the nick, from yesterday, he saw as he bent down, breezing me with the smell of beer.