by Mary Burns
Margaret was in and snoring. If I hadn’t seen her and heard her, I would a known by the smell. Her man Harry only drove the raw meat, didn’t butcher it himself, but the stink clung to him and jumped onto Margaret same as a flea.
My bottom just fit on the sill of the window where Margaret’s shirtwaist fluttered in the shy bits of air could never seem to work themselves up into anything truly refreshing. Swim? Sure a dunking in the lake would cool a body, but the Lord only knew what lay beneath the water, them drowned there, including the hundreds tumbled off the deck of that ship, the Eastland, and it tipped over right at the dock. Mary and Joseph! Fishes and maybe water snakes like the nuns warned us about. Satan himself ready to coil around my ankles and pull me under for my bushel of sins.
I didn’t have to go. But if I did I’d need a bathing costume and fearing water, as we had ever since that ship and later the sight of the creatures crawled out of the water in Florida, we’d found better things to spend our money on. A snort, a toss, but not so reckless a toss she fell onto the space waiting for me. With her mouth slack, Margaret looked younger than her nineteen years, except for the red hands, scarred from the pricks of her trade and the needle once went clear through her thumb.
My eyes wandered down to the lane where some men shambled along home from the taverns, gassing each other about this and that, a mischievous one stopping to tug at one of the clotheslines strung from tenement to tenement. A bit of moon brightened the scene, and the odd yellow light from a building. As long as the day is, night always falls. Da said that, and also, Good luck happens same as bad. Remember, girls. The words he left us with. Remember girls, good luck can happen same as bad. You’ll find your way better if you keep your heads up. And you, Maeve, born at the hour that you were.
Of course no lights burned at Bridey’s. I had to feel my way down them creaky stairs and hope Bridey and her nosy son were asleep and the other boarders too, despite the caterwauling came from the lane, voices rising in threats. Two flights, then the door with its glass oval and the owner’s lace conceit. The sleeping ones might think it cats or rats, never thieves if they heard anything at all, because it wasn’t a house with bits and pieces worth stealing. Down the steps to the street, air soft at night, the sort of night we seldom enjoyed at home where all the stones in the land held the coolness.
In my mind I saw them hanging clothes and thought of the opportunity showed directly to me, for I might find myself a bathing costume hanging out there with the sheets and the union suits, the shirtwaists and the baby nappies. Though the night beat black as a sinner’s prospects in heaven, my eyes soon adjusted and by the time I got to the corner, it didn’t seem nearly so. Maybe it was the moon angling down on the washing pulled me sure as if the clothesline was merely a rack in a store and me coming in with a pocketbook full of dollar bills.
Between the houses I had to steer myself out to the back with the aid of a wall. A bottle rolled and something shrieked, terrifying the life near out of me, for it had to be a rat or a feral cat or some creature I hadn’t seen yet, but only heard of—like the alligators in Florida raised their open mouths from the edge of a swamp when you didn’t even know they were there. Then the moon went behind a cloud and left me stuck. I could see nothing at all, and in their confidence the crawly things came out and fair chased me down the street, and in my nightdress I tripped and fell.
When you’ve decided on a thing, there’s nothing but to be after doing it. These are my words, not Da’s, something taught me by our long way here across the terrible ocean to America, at last to the city where we’d stayed for nearly four years. Yet for a minute there, in Bridey’s lav with its smell of Jap Rose soap, which stung the scrape on my knee, I did stop long enough to drift. Never a good idea, that, to let wondering interfere, but there came a thought real as anything outside my head. If he was so keen on my company, why had Desmond Malloy not suggested the pictures, or a stroll through the park? A dance hall, a show, supper? Certainly the heat of the week came into it, but did it have to be swimming? For even if I found the proper clothing and joined him on the lip of the lake so vast it might be the ocean itself—it’s that wide you couldn’t see across to the other shore—would I have the courage to step deeper into the water when I knew there might well be a part from one of the bodies fell off the Eastland? And how many other corpses rising up from the bottom to plague us living and tempt us under?
Margaret’s arm had fallen onto my half so I had to lift it, roused her. “Go back to sleep, Peg,” said me, stroking a damp strand of hair from her face, squeezing her plump arm while pushing my foot against her arse to make a bit more room.
Wednesday, July 23, 1919
Too soon I felt her climbing over me, rattling the pot, starting the water to boil on our gas plate, then slipping out to use the lav before Bridey and the others formed a line in the hall. I stared out the window at the whiteness constituted dawn there in that big place, and sat up only when the knock of metal against metal told me the tea’d boiled. Margaret returned with a pitcher of water for a good scrub at the basin on the washstand and then it was me telling her my story, about the fella invited me to the pictures.
“To the pictures? And supper, too?”
“I’ve hit it big, Megs, I think. That’ll be me, sittin’ somewhere under one of them lazy fans, sippin’ a cool drink through a straw. Maybe it’ll be an ice cream soda and we’ll be talkin’ about the show we saw and what did we like best. You know.”
“It wouldn’t be one of them vaudevillers come into your place, would it? Or that artist fella?”
“George? Never him. It’s an office man, works in the same building.”
“Don’t let your loneliness fool you.”
Echoing what the sisters used to say. Mary Brigid, the words rolling out from between the lips of her wimple-pinched face, her voice hoarse and whispery as she described the smallness makes the throbbing space around you big and cold, so you long for a comforting touch. Pray, she advised us. Pray lest you fall into an occasion of sin. God is the only one who can relieve the shadow that darkens the spirits of girls on their own.
“Never lonely, Meggsie, jewel, not with you. And Harry soon to be my brother, and all them at home.”
I mouthed the last as we were going out the door, for Bridey’d reminded us often of the sleep needs of her addled son, John, and though Margaret would be boiling at me for telling her a fib, I’d make it right after, I would. And if I held her one minute longer when we embraced at the corner as we usually did—a habit from the beginning when we had to separate and didn’t want to and clung to each other whenever a situation forced it—she took no notice, but turned aside to go her way to the shirt factory while I went mine, down the road to the stop and the crowd of sleepy people, heads down, waiting for the car. The little newsie with the curly hair was hollering everybody awake with his Trib. Another rascal across, could be Greek, shouting louder:
CAR MEN READY TO DEAL!
CAPITAL RIOT, TWO DEAD!
WEST DRY AS DUST,
RAIN DANCIN’ EVERYWHERE!
CONGRESS OUGHTA REGULATE BLIMP SEZ MAYOR!
Their voices, one bright made you think of sun on a dime, the other husky, as if predicting the size man he’d grow into. The two calls angling against and sometimes crossing one another reminded me of what I heard spilling out the Academy of Music when they had opera singers on the bill. Trying to meddle with our curiosity, they were, the newsies, and it worked, you could tell by the gradual lowering of the stacks of papers alongside them.
ONLY DAUGHTER LOST IN BANK CRASH
the one hollered, while his competition bested him in volume,
HE’S COMING!
PRINCE GONNA VISIT CHICAGO!
With money on my mind as usual, and more so today, what with me needing a bathing costume, I daren’t waste a single coin and I could read over the shoulder of the man standing next to me
. Yet wasn’t it sad, this news. Irene Miles her name, and her small watch found in the rubbish on the floor of the bank the airship crashed into, along with $1,200. Not the $200,000 rumored, and no reports of anyone getting any of it, or what else was found, only the watch engraved on the back with the words, “Irene from Mama,” and a locket with an inscription, said the paper, IGM. “These are believed to have belonged to Miss Irene G. Miles, a stenographer and the only support of her widowed mother, one of those killed when the dirigible fell.”
More stories of the dead filled pages I could not see to read, despite my shifting and craning my neck and just as well so, for I didn’t need to be carrying sorrow in my heart. When I did get a seat I looked up to page two and there they were staring me in the face, pictures of the victims, including the smiling Irene Miles among the headlines.
FIRST BLIMP VICTIM FUNERAL HELD TODAY
BOMB IS FOUND IN GARAGE
WARTIME PROHIBITION UPHELD BY U.S. COURT
BREWERS BEGIN LEGAL FIGHT
It was the day the returned soldiers, and anyone else needing a hand, could line up for shoes and clothes and groceries at the settlement house. When I tore my eyes away from the paper to look out the window I saw a queue of them, some of them soldiers still in uniform, or parts of a uniform, there waiting for the house to open at seven thirty. You saw soldiers everywhere then, the worst of them shell shocked, begging. I heard of one fellow made it all the way through the war and shot himself only two days home. But the soldiers left my mind quickly in my preoccupation, me wondering if there might be somewhere a body could line up for beach outfits and those sweet espadrilles I’d seen in the paper ads, or shoes laced all the way up the leg.
The conductor, an old fellow, tired already in the morning—not your Desmond Malloy, but doing his job just the same—this fellow hollered “Dearborn!” I jostled out with the others and fair raced along the street, holding up my skirt with one hand and my hat down with the other, scrambled through the whirly doors of the grand Marquette right into the first elevator without noticing if the head above belonged to Hairy Bear, or Black Hawk, or Keokuk, or the Lord himself.
Although I made it to the ninth floor and the frosted glass door of 902 only minutes after I should have, Florence at the front exposed her little teeth in a way said, Me? I am never late. Or maybe it was just she’d seen the piles on my desk kept me slicing and tearing, and printing the sums neat in the ledger, typing out the orders, marking paid with stamp, stamp, stamp. Maybe those teeth were only biting back the words, Good luck to you, Maeve. She dressed more swell than the rest of us, for the front, and never passed a day without mentioning her Walter, but Florence was neither so tragic nor so high she avoided the company of us other girls, including my chum Gladys from Cosmo Buttermilk Soap on the floor above. Because that day burned just as hot as the day before, we all gathered again outside in the shade and the smoke at lunchtime and listened to Ruth read out the “True Life Love Story” you could find in the Trib. If you wrote in with your story and they took it, they’d pay you a five-dollar bill.
Ruth’s eyes, the bulgy of someone with a bad thyroid, blinked again and again because of the sun sneaking through the weave of her hat, or because of the emotion of it. She read aloud in the thrall of a couple, Mollie and Jack, met aboard a ship travelling the world on the way to Egypt. They got off the boat in Spain and went touring around and visited an old bell tower they saw. There the bell ringer persuaded them to pull the bell rope. Wasn’t till later they learned that any couple rang the bell together at the twilight hour were destined to be married someday. Sure enough, as the trip went on they fell in love and announced their engagement, and were married in London.
“Isn’t it beautiful,” Ruth mooned. Gladys pinched my arm because she thought Ruth not simple exactly, maybe innocent is the word. Poor Ruth longed so for a love story of her own, someone to talk about, to write to, other than the brother over there still, mending in some hospital in France. She lived not far from our work in a residence for women and saved money each week to buy things for her hope chest, she said. We took her at her word, but living where she did, and being who she was with her bulgy eyes and her childlike voice, what hope could there be? An unkind notion, sure, and who was I thinking I was, after just one evening with a handsome man? You had to watch it or they’d trick you, the good people. You had to watch not just what you said but your thoughts, too.
I nodded to show Ruth that, yes, it was a beautiful story, Mollie and Jack, sure, but same as The Talk of the Town, starring the very Dorothy Phillips himself said I resembled, the pictures, the stories came from a world seemed altogether different than the one where I lived. Wouldn’t I like to visit it, though. Falling in love on a ship? Had to be sailing smoother seas than the one we crossed with the Sisters of Perpetual Grace, Margaret and me, for you’d not have had the strength to raise your head, and when you did you’d be looking at someone sick as you. We heard the cries from something going on in the dark corners of the steerage where we snuggled together, trying to comfort each other with images of the lives we’d have as good nuns if we ever reached the shore we dreamed of, but it sounded more like pain than love. Still, five dollars. Weren’t we all thinking the same thought? Easy money, and didn’t we have true love stories of our own?
“I’m goin’ to write about my Walter. That was true love,” Florence said.
“But Walter’s gone. Not such a happy ending if you ask me,” Eveline reminded her, and then, just like one of the fast types in the pictures, she said, “I guess I’ve got some love stories I could tell. Question is…” and she winked here, Eveline did, because she was that kind of girl for all you couldn’t help getting a laugh from what she said. “Question is, would anyone print them?”
Florence thought Eveline aimed to mock her, but I knew it was just Eveline, a little older, though she never said how much, and maybe cockier because she’d made her own way in the city from the day she moved here young from another state, Indiana or Ohio, or some other state begins with a vowel. Why she left home so young had me puzzling. She never said much about her mam, though there were brothers, and a da—she’d refer to them now and then, never kindly, but in that same cool joking way she had. If I’d asked for more, she might have demanded my own story, to make us even, but only Margaret would ever know the truth, most of it.
The talk of the girls started me plotting. Of course the bells in my story would be the ones we heard every day, clanging as the cars snaked around the rail bends. Not romantic as a castle in Spain, and sure they’d frown on a girl who tried to nick a bathing costume to go off with a fella alone on her first date, so I’d have to change the details some. They called them true-life love stories, but who knows what Mollie and Jack got up to in that castle, or on the decks of that great ship as it sailed whatever seas never made them lose their breakfast. Yet I liked the part about the legend because didn’t it smack of the fairy stories, the mischief the good people made to steer the affairs of those mostly couldn’t see them but only feel their meddling ways. The piece of cake you saved for yourself under your pillow suddenly gone, to remind you of your selfishness, but a wandering pig miraculously found before she fell into the hands of some family hungrier than your own.
Oh, yes, I’d felt them many times, guiding me same as the Mother of God, even then, that week in Chicago. Hadn’t the airship tragedy been the occasion sparked his interest in me? Not that the good people would a caused the blimp to crash, no, I wouldn’t think so, not for that reason alone. But was it not a skein sure, everything knotted up in ways you could not divine until later, maybe not even then? And here the opportunity to record what’d already begun to develop in my mind as a story every bit as magical as the one Ruth continued to swoon about.
“Imagine,” she said again. “Like it was all planned. I’ll write about that soldier I met at Riverview, bought me chop suey, then one of them little paper umbrellas. He even held it o
ver me when it rained. What do you think?”
“Not your bell tower,” Eveline laughed, and then we had to go in.
Sears Roebuck and them promised their catalogue customers shipment, even delivery, the same day an order came in. But Sears Roebuck had hundreds of girls on the floor, whereas at our magic outfit only a few of us processed orders came in for illusions and the paper novelties offered by the Rainbow Paper Company. Of course the amusement line did not demand the same hurry you’d imagine for a new suit of clothes for a wedding, to name one thing. Still we had standards and how could we know that the “Disappearing Wand,” or the “Improved Bouquet and Card Trick,” might not be the effect would turn a parlor magician into a vaudeville star, changing his life? Meaning, most days we worked efficient as those after sending out the more ordinary things people needed.
Same as at the mission school, it came to the old question of the envelopes. I’d become the expert at opening them addressed to The Chicago Magic Company and dividing the contents—the money orders and cash to one side, the catalogue number and a description of the object on the other. Rolling in an order sheet and pressing down hard on the keys, a little thud instead of a tap as the metal key made its mark through three thicknesses—a copy to send to the customer, a copy for the stock boy, and a copy for Mr. R, who made sure the money came in equaled the cost of what we sent out.
No credit in the operation, and precious little cash either, because not many ignored the advice on the second page of the catalogue. But, today, as if I’d done good and fate was steering things my way, I found a five-dollar bill folded into an order for “The Talking Skull.” When I saw the number on the bill I left it inside its paper sleeve and shuffled it to the bottom of the pile, deliberately slowed my breath, lowered my shoulders and pressed my arms against my ribs. As much as the price for a love story! The envelope next gave me the opportunity to stall, for the customer had enclosed the catalogue entry itself and I read the trick description as if it was new to me and marvelous. The drawing and all, with the addled white birds lifting right up from that frying pan, “The Wizard’s Omelette.” The money order got clipped to the copy for Mr. R, the copy for Billy into the tray meant for him. The envelope with the shape of a bill inside smoldered at the bottom of my pile. If I took it right out, Eveline would see—our desks were that close—and if I went ahead and slipped the bill into my pocketbook I didn’t know if I’d see judgment or pleasure on her narrow face.