by Mary Burns
“’Tis a souvenir of the disaster yesterday, though I don’t need remindin’. But why would this night be special, then?”
Another American holiday or some other occasion I’d missed in my ignorance? No, but the game his men lost, the White Sox, and it’s no surprise to me he should a been pinning his dreams on those fellas like most of the rest in the city. I rarely dawdled for long in the sports pages, but I’d seen pictures of the players lined up in their uniforms. They were going to win the World Series of baseball, everyone said it, though the world they talked about included only the U.S. of A., as far as I could tell. No one imagined their precious white would turn to black, all those men be shamed before the year was out.
“That’s the tragedy, then, is it? Not the airship crash, or the soldiers returned in one piece can’t find jobs to feed themselves?”
It’s like he never heard me. He was shaking his head as he was smiling, his lips pursed together. A dimple the size of a pencil eraser dented his left cheek and them eyebrows went up. Still, he did look beat and I was after thinking it had to be more than a game troubling him. But I aimed to keep my gaze hard as the glare of the sea on the rare days sun blessed our crossing, and I drifted—as I do when the past rises—and the seconds ticked along while I tried to think of what to say next, but then he spoke.
“Have you had your supper yet, darlin’? I confess your name has slipped my memory, it bein’ such a day, but I’m just off to have my own and would be pleased to have you join me.”
I lied, saying of course I’d had my supper, because it’d all of a sudden gone to mid-evening blue—I’d strolled that long—and a girl with a proper family would a been home and come back, if she was out at all.
“Well, then, sit with me while I have mine. You might enjoy a dish of ice cream or a lemonade. What do you say, dear? Cheer me up? There’s a café at Madison where they make a nice lemonade. Go down very smooth on a steamin’ evenin’ like this.”
Dear, he said, and darlin’, as if he’d known me for months, after just confessing he’d forgotten my name, not remembering I’d never mentioned it. I shrugged, as if I hadn’t been thinking of that café myself.
“Cheer you up, is it? Well, then I suppose I could, for a short spell, because I’m after meetin’ my sister soon. That’d be Margaret Curragh, while I am Maeve.”
I fibbed about Margaret to give myself an escape. Yet, as the hour whiled by, I regretted it, because he persuaded me to have a piece of pie with my drink and winked at the lady—old as Bridey could a been, but looking done-in and wearing a skirt soiled with something must a dropped on it—when she mentioned the à la mode would be extra. It was cherry inside and came lovely with cream dripping over the sugar sparkle of the brown crust. She didn’t look at me at all when she set it down, but—smiling, the years as if melted away—asked him if he’d like to take cream in his coffee.
“Thank you, dear. I will.” He took out a package of cigarettes, shook one loose and lit it, and his right eye went squinty with the smoke curling up towards the ceiling fan.
“Dickie Kerr’s the disappointment. If they wanted to use a southpaw they should a gone with Lefty Williams. He’s the man. If they’d asked me I would a said, ‘Pull Dickie,’ but no one asked and no one listened to the experts in the stands, and so we lost the series when we could a made a clean sweep of it.”
The waitress then brought his dinner on a thick white plate, heavenly fumes streaming up from the meat, slices of it drifting in a dark gravy soaked up by a hunk of bread even thicker than the plate. I should a bitten my tongue for thinking it more dainty to pretend to be full when I had enough appetite to finish his plate, my pie, and more still.
“I’ve had my supper,” I’d said, as if I’d never missed a meal. Pride’s a virtue suited better to the well fed, but there was nothing for it then but to stretch out the pie forkful by forkful, taking a bit in my mouth and savoring the difference between the soft tart filling and the crisp pastry. Listening, too, for he blathered as he stabbed and cut, pierced, chewed, swallowed. Like a man ought to eat. Despite my own hunger, it was gratifying in itself to watch Desmond Malloy campaigning his way through that meal—juice dribbling onto his bristly chin, him wiping it with the back of his hand between words that described the defeat his beloved White Sox suffered at the hands of the Yankees from New York.
That he was a man of strong feeling I could guess by the way the lights and darks shifted on his face as the story wound out. He grinned at the recollection of one thing, frowned at something else, and the melody of his voice rose and fell and occasionally paused as he gulped and the big knuckle in his throat jogged up and down in a fascinating way. I recalled the picture in yesterday’s paper of the dirigible preparing to take off from Grant Park. The ropes’d held it fast until it rose to its fate. Sitting there across from the streetcar conductor my heart lifted, not entirely off like that airship, but like a conveyance intended to soar, only tethered to the ground for the time being.
It’d gone to near night outside and the waitress had taken our plates and I’d sucked my glass dry, but Desmond Malloy showed no signs of wanting to leave. I wondered if I should get up and say goodbye to make the appointment I’d claimed to have with my sister. But he seemed to have forgotten that or didn’t care. He spooned sugar into his coffee and stirred it with a clink, clink and he’d gone from the ball game to the strike that was surely coming, he said, if the Chicago Surface Lines brass didn’t budge. A talker, he was, and that suited me because myself I was more a listener, something’d always marked me different at home. He explained why the men ought to get the eighty-five cents per hour they were asking for, and it had nothing to do with the Bolshies, like the company brass’d claimed, said Desmond Malloy, but was only on account of the needs of honest working men like himself.
If they did get it, he would be making as much in a couple of days as I made in a week at The Chicago Magic Company. I’d have to learn one of them tricks created money from wands if I wanted to keep up. Already, as far as I could figure, he earned my salary in three days instead of six, and if the car men went out for long, how would I get to my job, to make what I did make? Margaret could walk to her work at the shirt factory, but she couldn’t support the both of us, and with the garment situation being always up to the rim, about to boil over, maybe she would go out like the thousands of others in the city that summer.
As evening deepened, the odd puff of air came in, cooling. If I’d gone back to Bridey’s and had a wash before my stroll and hung my shirtwaist in the air to freshen it, or worn tomorrow’s, I’d not a been wondering if I smelled bad, or if the grime of the city’d soiled my face. But I would never a met Mr. Desmond Malloy had the weariness of a man at the end of a day, smoking his Camel cigarettes. Then, so sudden I blinked my eyes, he smiled broad—his teeth good—and dropped altogether the subject of striking car men and losing ball teams. Instead he asked, “Anyone ever tell you you’re a dead ringer for Dorothy Phillips?”
The movie star? No one had, and I admitted as much.
“The brown eyes and the curly hair though. Look closer in the mirror, darlin’. You’ll see it.”
Pouring right across the table, all that charm of his. But Dorothy Phillips was it, herself on the cover of Photoplay the very month? Then he switched subjects, asking about the home country, and had I come over with my family and how charming it sounded, my way of speaking, and how had we all made out. The past loomed like an ache, my mammy’s face, the blades of her cheekbones, the hollows deepened with each tooth lost. My da, his good nature besting the pain of walking most days, but sometimes the pain besting the good nature and him lashing out with his stick at whoever stood nearest.
The wicket gate, the friary, the whole tangled, startling lot of memories threatening to overtake me in one of them waves I fought through by looking out at the lights on Halsted Street, crowds of people, and peddlers calling still, at this
hour, and tunes from a squeeze box. All so busy and joyous, easy to forget any trouble in the bustle. Nothing of the kind in Ennis, only the streets—even the nicest, like Church Street with its curve opening to a view of the cathedral—even Church Street filthy with the dropping of ponies and asses waiting in the harnesses of the traps. Streets so narrow they’d be somber on the sunniest of days.
“It’s just me and Margaret came,” I told him. “My sister. Our da chose us as the ones likely to succeed in America and we’ll be goin’ back someday for a visit anyway. We’re savin’ for it.”
But sure we were not. Whenever we put a few bills aside some need forced us to use them. We might as well a been saving for a palace as the price of our passage back to Ennis. He was staring across the table at me, intent like, yet even so the right pupil wandered off to the side of the red-veined white.
“Like us all. Never set eyes on the home country myself, but my ma can get herself weepin’ for it, though she was small when she left. Come to think of it, I must have passed you in the crowd Sunday at the flag raisin’. You’re a member, aren’t you, Maeve, you and your sister Margaret? The Ancient Order of the Hibernians?”
The right side eye joined the left as he stretched them both wide, rolling his r’s, playing the clown like he did on the cars. He laughed at his try for an accent same as mine.
“Grand, wasn’t it? The flag of the Republic of Ireland flyin’ right here in Chicago?”
“’Twas,” I nodded, without admitting our absence. Instead of joining the party in Bridgeport, Margaret and me’d been sitting in the theater dabbing at our tears as the Chinese man found the poor little girl dead in the wonderful picture show, Broken Blossoms. It was the memory of that caused the mournfulness he read on my face, though he thought it must be me missing the home country.
“Gee, it must be a simpler kind of life. And wouldn’t we all go for a life like that, considerin’ what’s happenin’ here in this stew pot. You can’t open a letter for wonderin’ if there’s a Bolshie bomb in it, and even worse than the Bolshies, them niggers just keep streamin’ north, when any jobs we have ought to be goin’ to the men fought for this country, like you were sayin’. We need some changes around here. It can get a man down. It’s a wonder I don’t just jump in the lake some days. Do you ever feel like that, Maeve?”
“The big one there? Never that. No.”
“You’re not a swimmer, then?”
“I am not.”
“You’ve not been to the ball park, and you don’t swim at the lake. You’re missin’ out on all the pleasures of the city, darlin’.” Perked up again, stars glinting in them eyes, light shining through a glass bottle greener than anything I ever saw back home, despite the picture his mammy painted for him.
I let my shoulders lift and fall and he went on talking about the fine dunks he’d had in Lake Michigan, contests and all and how his da taught all the Malloy boys—four of them—to swim when they were kids. My da so, too, out at Lahinch, if teaching is what you could call it when he limped into the wild Atlantic and threw us down the waves one after the other, like fishes too meager to make up a decent feed. Even Fiona, the youngest then, and hadn’t she caught a terrible fever after, weakened her, Mammy said, and maybe what started her fading, though when we’d left, Margaret and me, she was still in the picture. Always coughing, though. Don’t know how it must a been for our da when Fiona finally coughed her last. Don’t know because we were looking after coughing ones ourselves, Margaret and me, them children barking even though Florida and all the waters around it had to be bushels warmer than Ireland’s Atlantic. So you couldn’t blame our da. Fiona wouldn’t a liked being left on the shore as out he tossed the rest of us. It’s the way you’ll learn, he said, when we came up sputtering.
But we never got to Lahinch much and my next experience of the sea came on the Mauretania with that heaving motion. Thought of it sickened me though it was near to eight years since we’d come over. All of us too nauseated to eat the poor food we were offered, the nuns, too, but the main nun, Sister Mary Brigid, who’d made the trip more than once, assuring us that tomorrow would be better—it wouldn’t be rough for the whole crossing. Didn’t the sea prove her wrong that trip? Even when we got to St. Augustine, after riding on the train over land sure solid as any I’d walked upon, even then when I saw the sea I smelled sick. How it got in our hair. We had no place to properly wash so the sour travelled with us.
The grand Titanic, big as a city sunk down among the icebergs? The Eastland, right here in Chicago, almost as many killed as on the Titanic even? The stories I’d read of these disasters shouted in the background, nearly deafening me as he babbled on about his fine times at the lake, parties with young friends, picnics. Then my thoughts stilled, for if my ears had not played a trick on me, he was proposing to teach me to swim.
“It’s easy and the most refreshin’ thing you can do on a summer day. What do you say?”
He tapped another cigarette on the table, struck a match, sucked in the tobacco and his eyebrows went up as his lungs filled, then down again as, squinting, he blew the smoke into the space between us. Me, I must a swallowed, shivered, but I couldn’t a said even that same night what I did because as the tobacco smoke drifted up and he leaned across the table, my nose sized up the sun on his shirt, the man-sweat with its whiff of beer and the roast meat smell, the grease of it, because some of it had got onto his necktie. If I’d been one of the girls in the Laura Jean Libbey stories I’d a been swooning right then under the power of all those perfumes, the hair, too, with the oil he’d put in it, dry by then.
I never fainted, no, but I heard the rasp of a blade slicing through the ropes’d held me, though my hands were folded politely on the table and I kept my teeth on my lip. His hand was sliding across towards my wrist. A fine mitt with the long fingers like my da’s and golden hairs growing on the section above the first knuckle and nails a bit gray at the edges, but trimmed so, and hadn’t he just been out all day? And didn’t my da have thick black in the skin as well as under the nails, enough so that our mammy joked about him starting another plot of cabbage right there at his fingertips? Desmond Malloy’s hands were nothing like that, but smooth on the backs and a sweet baked bun color from the sun, just a rumor of the veins running beneath. I wanted to touch one of them. I was that trembly I thought he’d surely notice, so I shook myself. Fool, fool, I scolded.
“Whaddya say,” he repeated. “You could meet me after work. I’ve got the early shift Wednesday. Bring your bathin’ costume with you and you can change in the bathhouse.” He winked. “We’ll make an evenin’ of it. Some ice cream after? Or maybe a late supper? Tomorrow at five thirty? It’s goin’ to be another hot one, darlin’. You’ll be glad of a swim. It’ll be peachy. Whaddya say?”
I had neither a bathing costume nor the money to buy one if I wanted to, but there we sparkled like two people on the cover of True Story. Margaret, worried about me since Packy perished of the flu, wouldn’t have a care but could move along into married life with her Harry because it seemed to me that Desmond Malloy could be more than a flirt. Him warming me with that emerald fire burned directly through me, Maeve Curragh, made me think I could do anything. Even swim. I patted my mouth with my napkin like the sisters’d taught me and twirled the straw in the glass, which had been truly empty for a long spell.
“It can’t be tomorrow.”
“Then the next day. It’s goin’ to be hot all week long.”
A powerful man, yes, might have been him holding me in his arms instead of whatever else bound me. The street noise streaming in from Halsted, someone hollering at someone else and boys running past the door shrieking and the patient clop, clop of horses leading their buggies back to the barn. Somewhere a telephone with its shrill ring, ring. All of it making a platform for me to raise myself up. Me thinking, yes, yes, but staying cool, I think, keeping my face straight.
“Thursday,
then, and where would you be wantin’ to meet, so?”
He laughed a big laugh, filled the café and caused people to search for the cause—like you do when you want to be in on the fun. I pretended to be interested in something going on behind the counter, where a waiter in a white apron cleared dishes and filled drinks, and pearl divers in the kitchen behind scrubbed and smacked plates against one another, for I did not want Desmond Malloy to see my own peepers flashing with excitement. I would have thought it a joke, but didn’t he reach across again and try to take my hand before I slipped it away? Oh, yes, I was in for it. I didn’t feel the heat of the evening at all or the loneliness’d been my companion as I walked along Halsted earlier, made smaller by the crowds, the buildings, the noise. No one noticing me at all.
He steered me out to the street and down to the corner stop and we waited until we heard the clacking and the bell. He tipped his hat and said goodnight and made me promise to remember our date.
“It’ll be jake, Maeve. I promise.”
As I stood in the shadows, stunned by a kind of wonderment same, better, than my first tree of oranges, a colored man sprinted to make the door of the trolley before it started off. The poor fellow tumbled over something, and fell to the cobblestones, just missing the car Desmond Malloy hopped onto, laughing as he waved to me, and the car clicked away.
§
Even then, hours after the last edition, a young newsie held to the corner singing the latest headlines.
FOLKS IN PARACHUTES FLOATED THROUGH SKY!
READ THE NAMES OF THEM KILLED
AND HURT IN DIRIGIBLE DROP!
SANDBURG SEZ, RENTS GO UP
WHEN NEGROES MOVE IN!
I had my paper from the morning but the news’d got old and I’d promised Bridey, and I never did spend my nickels on supper but made do with pie and ice cream and the breathlessness makes a body lose her appetite. I gave the young tenor his pennies, and grabbed the Daily News from him to leave fresh on Bridey’s hall table.