The Reason for Time

by Mary Burns

  When the bellman left, I slipped back down them marble stairs. But I’d been there and when we wrote Mammy, the first occasion we had a few dollars to send, I would tell her so, how a body could just walk in to admire the carpets, the marble, the wonderful patterns above.

  §

  I was after composing another letter so when he appeared, strutting along towards me, bundle under his arm.

  “Maeve, darlin’,” he said, guiding me over to the curb. “Did ye think I’d forgotten you? And you lookin’ even prettier with flowers at your neck.”

  The scolding words stopped in my throat, because he was a fine figure, Desmond Malloy. He had to be ten inches taller than me, requiring him to bend down to speak and I got the scent of him with its history of the day, the coffee and tobacco and the sandwich he’d chewed for lunch. Made me forget my stomach hunger, the stories I’d been making up. His hand came down on my shoulder and he turned me towards the streetcar stop, talking all the while about the ball team winning, the lateness of the hour, and did I have supper. This time I said no.

  “Are you perishin’ from hunger, then?”

  “Not at all.”

  The truth is, suddenly, I was not. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if hunger, like magic, according to Mr. R, rested mainly in the mind? When the streetcar arrived Desmond took my arm and helped me up.

  “We’ll take this up Clark Street to Lincoln Park. There’s nice bathing spots up that way.”

  He winked at the conductor, a pal, and we got our ride free, and he talked all the while we rode. But with the motor cars grinding, streetcar bells clanging, the El rattling over, and “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” drifting into our window from an upstairs dance hall must a run all day, I couldn’t make real sense of what he was jawing about, only catch the odd word.

  At North Avenue we hopped off and crossed over to the grass of the park from where we could see that big lake—pretty for all its frightfulness, for the sun had fallen to the level of the haze unfolded like a great blue-brown sash across the city and, nestled there, a lovely cherry color. The lake itself calm as milk. I was thinking it would be all right and anyhow his hand at my back guided me along the paths for a while, and then he was pushing me across uneven ground till we got to a copse of bushes where he stopped and smiled down at me.

  “Here we are then, Maeve. Isn’t it grand?”

  He threw down the bag he was carrying and lit one of his Camels.

  “Here?” I said, surprised, because I’d expected a public beach with lifeguards and everything and the change rooms where you could put your clothes in a bin, and refreshments from a cart, cold drinks and the like, when all we had here were some bushes dividing the grand city and its soaring buildings from the great lake and all the secrets I feared from it. He got my drift right away.

  “I know what you’re thinkin’, but the big beaches further along are too crowded with swells and most of the ones in the south are dirty with niggers. You get your fights breakin’ out regular, a lot of gamblin’ goin’ on, right on the beach. We’ll have this little spot all to ourselves, don’t you know? Better a quiet place when you’re learnin’ and I promise to be a gentleman, so you go right ahead and change, Maeve. It’ll be jake.”

  I heard my sister’s voice warning me, You can’t believe a t’ing. You be careful, she’d a said, echoing the words I’d spoke to her when I’d stepped out with Packy and left her alone and worried that curiosity and loneliness might drive her to places she shouldn’t go. But this Desmond already different than what worried her, because he’d come along when he said he would, or near enough, and here we were just like he promised, and while he thought we had the spot all to ourselves I saw a pile of garments behind one of the trees, meaning others enjoyed the place, must be good. I never saw anyone else, but I did hear laughter once. Maybe all of us trying to avoid charges for the change rooms. Maybe a charge even to step into the lake, if they did charge. Me, I wouldn’t a known, not being one who frequented the bathing beaches of Chicago that week or any other week in any other city. Only those few times at Lahinch, and so long before, when it’d been all about our da and us thrashing and sputtering through the water back to him as fast as we could.

  Afraid of showing hesitation, I separated the bushes and stepped through to a clear space big enough to accommodate me wrestling with my clothes, disrobing there, right outside, as if it was common for me, though whenever we undressed, Margaret and me, we never took everything off at once, and not in front of each other—not at home, not at the mission, not even in our rooms. We managed ways of leaving the top layer on while we stepped out of our bloomers and slid our nightdresses up under. There, in the bushes, with the buzzing of some insect near and the twittering of a little bird could a been snickering at me, the skirt came off first, then the shirtwaist with the violets, the corset underneath. Thrilling, the air a muggy kiss on skin never got so bare.

  Hurrying, working too fast to fall, it came back to me, the scene of Margaret and me scrambling into clothes we nicked from the stacks donated to the mission. Chose ones made us look like women and not the girls we actually were, changing in the washroom of the station before the train pulled out of St. Augustine and laughing so, girls playing dress up. Margaret near tripping on the skirt too long until she’d found the means to raise the hem, for even then she knew how to use a needle. But that’d been years ago, a lifetime, and even though it’s hot as blazes still and midges were whining around my ears as I stepped into the suit I bought with money not all mine, I felt like a woman of the world. I’d have stories to match any of them I’d heard from the girls at work, if I wanted to tell them, which I might not want to, seeing as how I was not much of a talker to start.

  Then up with the costume, my first time in it, and lucky it hid everything’d interest a man, but my arms showing white, so white, and only then, idjit though I was, did I remember that once I got wet I’d need a towel to dry myself. What a stupid one he would think me when there must a been a towel hanging from that line I could a yanked off the night I prowled the alley. Something for the trouble’d left my knee blemished.

  “You’ll see I made a nice nest for us here, Maeve,” he called, from the other side of the bushes, and it was do or die, same as when the nuns called out for them had vocations and I raised my hand and Margaret seeing me, raised hers.

  “There you are, all set, but you’ll have to take your shoes off, darlin’, or they’ll drag ye under and we wouldn’t want that. Though I’m a champ swimmer I don’t know how good I’d be at life guardin’.”

  Of course I looked the fool and more with my button-up boots, and once I reached the robe he’d spread on the sand fronting the bushes, I took them off and arranged myself in a pose such as I’d seen on the cover of Dream World. Leaning back, legs nicely crossed in front of me, surveying the sky as if I could tell the weather from it or expect something to drop, a bundle of money maybe or, more likely, a surprise from one of the gulls screaming like someone’d just died.

  “Just give me a minute to change myself,” he said, taking my place in the copse.

  Oh, yes, I enjoyed the air that evening, it being like the petal of a wild rose—that soft, that moist. Not that roses mixed among the weeds we’d climbed through. I could hear some bird, maybe the same, mocking him, too, and wind stirring the dried leaves on the taller shrubs, the lake slopping up the shore. He sang, humming really, “Baba, daba, daba, said the monkey to the chimp.” If I didn’t have a good idea of what she’d a said if she saw me, I’d a liked Margaret to be there to take a gander at the pose, like Theda Bara herself, though without the kohl smudges around the eyes and without her glam clothes. My foot, with the imprint of my boots still on the stockings, the foot tapping in space, me humming along, but quietly with his silly tune, because wasn’t it swell sitting there, watching the tint of the sky change, the boats way out.

  Unable to fully relax, what with wearin
g fewer clothes in public than I’d ever wore, I held myself tight and let my thoughts drift to food for a minute, wondered what he’d packed in his sack. That subject faded as soon as he appeared in his costume, legs and arms proving he’d been in the sun regularly, and muscled so, though he was not a man did hard labor. Long legs with that same sandy hair on them as on his wrists, and hair mussed from the shirt coming off, I expect. Didn’t those restless feelings force my eyes from him and direct them to the long view, the watery one. Mother of God, he was a fellow to take notice of, cocky with that smile said he knew it. Entered my mind the thought, What does he want with me, when he might have chosen Dorothy Phillips herself?

  Shouts from way off, and when I squinted over I saw bobbing shapes in the waves, maybe belonging to whosever clothes lay yonder. Pretty as the card we sent home at Christmas showing the lake and the buildings behind, all of it more swell sure than Limerick. Come Easter, when Mammy sent her letter, she wrote she was glad the nuns’d settled in Chicago, for she’d never seen how we’d manage a place as foreign as Florida, with all the wild Indians and the darkies and trees she’d seen only in the magazines brought around by the missionary orders. Although I felt uneasy that Mammy should think us still with the nuns, I was not thinking of Mammy just then, but surveying Mr. Desmond Malloy, the length of him bent to fetch something out of his sack, and how it’d already come to seem natural to be lolling there together. A beautiful man standing with the lake at his back. The grin and his good straight teeth, the broad shoulders with their islets of freckles. He held a flask of something I rightly bet was whiskey.

  “A little courage, Maeve. The water can be cold, but you can trust me. I’ll not letchya drown, or even get your hair wet, if you don’t want.”

  I shook my head and he cocked his and raised them thick eyebrows I liked, and in the low angle of sunlight I could see red hairs and gold ones mixed with the brown of a deep bay horse, the kind I would have chosen if my da had been one of the landholders in Clare. I needed something to swallow down whatever was in my throat, but I’d hardly a taken a drop from a nearly strange man in a lonesome place, both of us half dressed. Seeing he couldn’t persuade me, he shrugged and took a long swallow himself. I smelled it when he sat down, not room for another body between us.

  “Look at the lake, Maeve. Isn’t it grand? Does it remind you of the sea over there? For all I’ve never been, I feel I know it from my old people talkin’ of it when we lads were growin’ up. Especially after a night at the Hall, on one of them music evenings they have there with the tin whistle players and the fiddlers and the school girls dancin’ the jigs with their hands at their waists. Mother said it was easy for our da to miss it, when there was no chance he’d go back and risk starvin’, cuttin’ turf and liftin’ potatoes, hopin’ some farmer would take pity on him and pay him in coin instead of cabbage. Was it like that for you?”

  It startled me, him wanting me to go back there, if only in my mind. The poverty worse than down along Halsted Street. “It was poor,” I said, and it didn’t matter the sparsity of the description, because he continued on, as if I’d said nothing.

  “Oh, she used to be a terrible sharp-tongued one, my mother, but she’s settled quieter since her boys are grown. She’s one who’s bathed in the lake, Maeve. My old mother and my old dad. Both of them. It’s the best thing for you in summer. Are you ready?”

  I wanted to ask how his da had got into the water if he had no legs—or was it just one he’d lost?—because I remembered the story the man told on the car one evening before Desmond Malloy knew I existed. Maybe they’d carried the old fella in, Desmond and his brothers. Or maybe the old one’d gone in when he still had all his parts. Could it a been something in the water caused him to lose them? Any of these questions might have stalled us there on the shore, which would a been fine with me, for wasn’t my empty stomach after knotting up like the letters on the crosses in St. Patrick’s church, and—though still plenty hot out—goose bumps stippled my flesh where it was bare because of the light breeze skimming across the water and ruffling it prettily, if also disguising the surface.

  He stood without effort and held out his hand. I reached for it automatically, and as I came upright he pulled me towards himself so I nearly bumped my nose into that broad chest with the hair curling over the top of his costume. Nearly. It not being a regular public bathing beach, stones in the sand made it cobbly, with some edges sharp enough I cried out when I stepped on one, and he offered to carry me over. Wanted to get his paws on me, he did, but no. No. I pulled my hand out of his because there we were then, at the edge, and for a minute I forgot everything else but the water with its scummy foam nudging my toes, and my stomach gurgling—though the lapping noise thankfully covered it, rude lying sound that it was. It’s that makes me think hunger is not in the mind. But magic?

  Did Margaret meet Harry because Anna Eva contrived it, or because it was meant to be and Anna Eva could see into the future? Could Anna Eva be as powerful as God and the Blessed V I’d been praying to, hoping for just such a man as Desmond Malloy, but never expecting him to turn up handsome so, frisky as a colt, winking as he encouraged me, on the edge of a dare, like the boys at home would dare me to jump from the highest stone step of the friary? I did jump, for I was the oldest of the Curragh girls and I had to face fear for the sake of the rest of them. To show them it could be done.

  “There y’are. Just take another step. You’ll like the way the bottom squeezes through your toes, just like jam comin’ up.”

  I heard his big laugh, same as I heard the words, but for all they touched me, he might a been out on one of those ships whose masts I could see, if I was seeing straight. My mind was after spooling out stories of snakes, eels, like, and how they could wrap around a body’s ankles once you were out to where you could barely stand, and if they got a good hold they’d tow you beneath. And once you were under you’d see the bones of all them’d gone before, like the folks on the Eastland. Them poor people—nearly a thousand there’d been—bought their white clothes for the holiday excursion the electrical company’d promised their employees, then hadn’t the lot of them, whole families, toppled off the listing ship into the water. Right from the dock in the river, too, hadn’t even made it to the lake, but their white clothes, like their spirits, might a drifted there.

  Had to be things on the bottom’d break your heart—a child’s lost shoe, a watch same as they found in the ruins of the bank, that watch belonged to Irene Miles, whose name stayed with me, for I could only imagine what her mammy felt when she got the news of the crash. Just gone to work, typing her way through the days, like any of the other girls, Irene, then smashed and burned. How would our mammy feel when Margaret told her? She said she was going to the pictures, Margaret would wail. With a new fella. I never would have let her go swimming, and not with a car man! And Mammy maybe still believing us to be nuns.

  All these thoughts strummed my brain to the beat of my jumping heart, my tossing innards, me not even aware I was clutching my upper arms and shivering, while he’d given up on me for the moment, striding down the shore till the lake reached his knees.

  “Come on then,” he said, splashing and laughing, diving in and coming up all slick like a water creature. “It’s peachy, Maeve.”

  Fear was fighting a fierce desire to follow him anywhere till he scooped up a big handful and splashed me with it, and instead of cooling me it burned me like a hundred tiny sparks on my skin.

  “There’s nothin’ to worry about, I’ll protect you. But you’ve got to get out here where you can float, Maeve, darlin’. You’re gonna love it, come on, give it a try.”

  Darlin’ was it, and him standing there in his costume wet so and outlining all his man parts, a sin to be looking there and I looked away but I’d never seen poor Packy in such a pose, and his arms—Desmond’s arms—stretched out for me to fall into, same as we used to hold out our arms for the little ones learning to
toddle, Margaret and me, with Nuala the last, at home, and then when we lived at the mission in that broiling Florida. He was drawing me to him with something powerful, Desmond Malloy, and I took another step till the wet stuff reached up to my calves anyway and he cheered same as if I was the Joe Jackson everyone talked about.

  “There you go, come on. A few more steps and you’ll be up to your knees. There’s a girl.”

  The bottom did squish up, warm, but also slimy in a dangerous sort of way to my thinking. Yet his smile brighter than the electric along State Street lured me and sure the next step would have brought the water nearly to my bloomers, but didn’t a little boat appear, barely bigger than a plaything yet carrying two boys associated with the yacht club, must have been. Careless in the way the rich can be, for weren’t they singing and hollering just a short distance beyond, where Desmond Malloy stood with his arms stretched out towards me? The sail wrinkling, and them trying to straighten it, made me realize there was more wind than I’d thought gathering that evening, and who knew if one of them storms might whip up powerful gusts, tornadoes, hurling purple clouds pouring down with rain?

  Desmond hollered at them. “Watch it, lads!”

  Two of them wobbled in that wee boat, in bathing costumes and one with a sort of captain’s hat on and this one turned suddenly. His companion screamed at him not to upset the balance, but before he could turn back, didn’t it tip and them boys go over, right in front of my eyes?

  “Mother of God,” I shouted to Desmond. “Save them if you can.”

  He laughed as the boys came up sputtering on the other side of the boat, their wet heads, the cap gone. There was no danger to them, it being that shallow Desmond could stand with his head above water as he helped them in their struggle to right the craft. Their voices clanged against one another in argument and laughter until the mast pointed up again to the deepening blue. I hard gripped each arm with the hand opposite as I stood there and waited and waited while he nattered with them. Our connection broken, I might as well have been sitting on the shore. I stood there and listened dreamily and noticed little fish in the water lapping around my lower legs, schooling like so many grains of silver rice, and marveled to be sharing the water with the cold-blooded creatures I feared.