by Mary Burns
Didn’t it turn out to be my lifeboat, that little craft, for all the activity out there took the minutes he might have been getting me in deeper. While he was chatting with them, inspecting their boat, sharing the flask they’d saved from the toss, seeing them off as their dripping sail filled and they headed back to where they’d come from, I saw there would be no swimming for Maeve Curragh that evening. He said it himself as he strode through the water. “There’ll be no swimmin’ for Maeve Curragh, this evenin’, not with the dark comin’ so quick. Funny how the day goes, isn’t it?”
It’s what my da’d said, about the day being long and night always coming, and it softened me to think of the connection, though I doubt my da would’ve liked imagining Desmond’s wet hand on my elbow steering me across the beach to the bushes. Same hand sliding up further, to my neck and getting tangled in my hair, for of course I’d left my hat with my clothes.
“But we’ll do it again, won’t we? And then you’ll get your bloomers wet. Look at them, like they’ve just come off the clothesline on a sunny day.”
The midges had gathered in numbers would challenge an army and they were singing around my ears as I tried to cover myself before they could feast on me. Once I’d buttoned my shirtwaist, I stepped out and let him take his turn because he was the one wet and all, though I saw he was warming himself with another sip from his flask and having a smoke, smiling as he surveyed me with my arms up, trying to pin my hair so that it’d fit beneath the hat.
“I’d like to see you again with your hair curlin’ out like that, darlin’. It’s lovely hair, and you’re a peach and if we didn’t do all I thought we’d do, you got your feet wet, didn’t you?” He laughed at himself for using an expression described what actually happened. Didn’t know my feet were still wet inside my shoes because I’d been that daft I never thought of bringing another pair of stockings, and paid the next day, blisters being the cost of stupidity.
“Hmm?” he said, stepping right close to me and tipping my chin up with his thumb, then angling in, hand on my throat. Was he going to strangle me or kiss me? Neither, only straighten the violets in danger of falling off, fasten them with the pin, breathing on me, all the while speaking. “You don’t have much to say, then, do you, Maeve? I like that in a girl. Most of them chatterin’ away so’s they don’t know what’s goin’ on around them. Still waters run deep, they say.” Another laugh, for referring to the water, must a been. Water kept coming into it.
§
Back across the park in dusk, him sure footed, pulling me by the wrist to the avenue with its traffic and noise, me believing he had a plan and I could trust him to carry me along with it. It’d gone past the usual hour for supper, sure, and a picture of fried chicken and mashed taties nudged into my head, along with visions of ice cream sodas and pies and every good thing I ever ate or imagined eating. Consumed me, those pictures, and the warmth of the man’s hand at my back, till all at once it stiffened and I felt the fingers claw in and heard laughter coming up behind us. I turned to see two boys, their white teeth big in their brown faces, two young colored fellas full of high spirits, must a been kitchen help at one of the hotels, or some of the garbage collectors got their jobs last year during the city strike.
Packy’d complained about it, how they brought the darkies in and kept some of ’em after the strike, meaning our kind never got back in. So Packy said. Desmond tensed and asked in a voice loud enough to best the din of the street, “You all right, Maeve? Are you havin’ any difficulty?” Me? Then I understood he meant the question for their benefit, as if saying, Keep away, clear out of my sight, out of town. Feelings were running hard then, harder than I remembered, unless I’d never noticed, what with all else there was to take in when we arrived.
But, now, thinking back, I see them numbers flowing north’d cemented the hard feelings. Even my own sister had come to dislike them, surprising and all considering that she, like me, held the little ones in our arms and dried their tears sparkled clear in trails down their dusky cheeks. Beautiful so, and didn’t we love them as much as those sisters we left behind, another since Nuala, Mammy wrote. Kathleen, a little sister I’d never meet. At the mission Margaret’d spent much of the day in the kitchen where she worked alongside a woman mixed of colored and Indian blood. A skinny, long-browed woman, more pious than the nuns themselves.
Then Margaret got with Harry, who told her the women might be fine—women couldn’t help what their men did—but the coloreds he took exception to were them came up north in trains and by the truckload to take the jobs of union men walked out of their places to get a decent wage for the people worked there. Same folks who thought they could eat anywhere they wanted, sit on the main floor in a theater, instead of the balcony where they’d always sat.
“Blacks are spreading through the city like a sewer overflowing,” said Harry. “Man works hard all his life to buy his own house, then some nigger agent comes in and buys up a building and the values of the whole neighborhood drop.” The papers told the same story, ’specially when there’d been an explosion or a fire meant to drive the colored out. “It isn’t fair,” Margaret complained, and though I hate to think mean of her suffered so much alongside me, I can’t deny she was a follower, my sister, except, before Harry, it used to be me she followed.
The boys stopped laughing when they saw the look on Desmond’s puss, and they shuffled back to the store window behind us, pretended to be looking at the display in there of sheet music and piano rolls and such.
Satisfied to have put them in their place, Desmond Malloy looked up and down the street and took out his car man’s watch to check it, and when we did duck into a café, he ordered us coffee and pie gone stale by that hour, and lit one of his Camel cigarettes, blew the smoke out in rings. Through the smoke I noticed that right eye of his drifting. I can’t say disappointment didn’t enter it, but he saw it right away, Desmond did, and explained that when he’d planned on supper, he’d forgot about a meeting tonight of the car men’s association, for it’s serious, this strike business, and he had to play his part, if he expected a bright future with the Chicago Surface Lines, which he no doubt did. It must have been getting onto nine by then, a queer time for a meeting, and I said as much, my empty stomach boosting the petulance.
“Queer time for a meetin’.”
“It is that, but these are queer times, and with the shift work… Well, you understand, don’t you, dear?” Dear. His collar open and a whiff of the lake from the skin of his throat, and them fingers with the shining hairs on them tapping the wood of the table, cloudy with water stains, and me wondering if he was keeping me hungry for some reason but what it could be, and if so, what could I do?
He threw his nickels down and herded me out to the street and up to the streetcar stop. “These are tryin’ days, but we’ll best them, Maeve. We’ll meet again this week and if you wait for me, I’ll save you your fare tomorrow. For tonight, take this.” He pressed a few coins into my hand, pockets must a been thick with them, and realizing I would neither have to spend the coins I had left, nor go to bed gnawing inside but stop for a bite before I climbed Bridey’s stairs, I waved out the window. He jogged along with the car for a minute before it gathered a little speed. I wouldn’t go to bed hungry, but I wouldn’t be sitting across a table like I’d sat with Packy, tapping at my lips with a linen napkin and sipping a drink dainty.
In the paper beside me, left behind, but with a story torn out at the bottom, a headline right across the front made me smile—and that was rare enough when it came to the papers.
ANIMAL PALS MOURN FOR CY
He was the zookeeper these last thirty years, fired for drunkenness or saying his mind, maybe both. The papers had the lions roaring dismally, monkeys stopping their chatter, as the news spread through the zoo. Reports, too, of lower prices near the Hull House neighborhood. Ten cents a pound for tomatoes near enough where we could pick them up, and wouldn’t
we be needing to save if Bridey turned out to be the taking advantage type, and put our rent up. Little Janet still not found, though a suspect’d been taken in. God help her, the poor child.
Friday, July 25, 1919
Margaret liked the comedians and the singers at the shows. There could never be enough Uncle Josh to satisfy her, whereas me—even before Mr. R, but more so after—it was the magicians held me. Of course, I came to know how some of them managed the tricks, and I learned how to juggle, not that juggling is magic, though the children thought it so and were always after asking me to demonstrate, bringing me oranges or rubber balls of some kind, begging me, even when I’d already got too old to hold one ball steady, let alone juggle it with another or two.
When my sister and me first arrived in Chicago all those years ago, we two girls in our borrowed dresses, we’d never seen so many theaters, let alone a show in any of them. Margaret lived-in and had but the one day off. Me, being on my own, except for the girls worked all round me in the big catalogue place would never a gone by myself. But Gladys, worked at the desk alongside me then, invited me to that first show. I pretended it would be no great event, while mimicking Gladys’s every move, and her noticing, but only laughing to think someone could reach the age of eighteen without having been to the vaudeville. Already past twenty, Gladys knew it all, yet she’d never been too high and mighty about it. Well, I’d fibbed about my age, hadn’t I, and it didn’t matter because I could do the catalogue job as well as any of them. Just sixteen still, but Gladys or nobody had to know.
From the balcony seats we could see the faces of the lovely singers and laugh at the comics, and in the play they were after putting on—about the girl pining for her fellow lost at war—dab at our tears, and later sing along to the words on the picture screen with a piano player seemed to know every song. Best of the lot, Anna Eva, small, as I have always been small, and her dazzling performance in the cabinet. I thought to myself, I’ll have to bring Margaret, seeing as how I know where to go and what to do, and no one’ll stare at us and think something mean.
On her next day off we did so, but to another theater, even fancier, for Margaret could pay her own way and we spent it on the good seats. There, towards the end of a show Margaret remembered for it being her first look at Uncle Josh, was a girl in a beautiful dress, pink as a wild rose and glistening with sequins, the scalloped neckline draped with crystal beads. The Great Sebastian so-called, a mind reader, sent her out to the audience, and that lovely girl spotted me on the aisle. When Sebastian asked for someone to offer up a personal article, my eyes were resting on him, the handsome man with the turban on his head and the mustache, but it was the pretty girl with a flower in her hair tapped me on the shoulder and asked for something.
Margaret nudged me and what did I have save a handkerchief, a clean one, though, and the girl snatched it away. Margaret grabbed onto my arm and the man in the turban said, “The object you’re holding? Why I believe…yes, it’s a handkerchief.” Not so brilliant, perhaps, but it could have been a necklace or a key or a coin, and it was not so much the right answer gave me the shivers, because they might a worked out a code—the Great Sebastian and his lovely assistant—but I wondered if in fact a line ran from him to me, something connecting us, with me supposedly possessing the famous gift came from having been born in the wee hours, as my mammy had been.
Oh, yes, the vaudeville could carry you away, and we hadn’t had much occasion for that. The evenings at St. Patrick’s, and before we left home, travelling shows’d come to Ennis. But I don’t remember them as much as the stories would be told at Uncle Thomas’s house, of the meddling wee folk, the banshees would plague my mind when I had an errand at night. I’d never take to the road alone after one of them nights at Uncle T’s, but cling to my limping da, and Mammy with the baby in a bundle on her back. The very first performance she saw began Margaret’s crush on Uncle Josh, her still laughing at the things he’d said, as she and I kissed goodbye at the Prairie Avenue stop. It made the days ahead easier for her. She wanted to go every week.
We tried the neighborhood theaters as well the downtown palaces, one grander than the next. We learned the popular songs, we even saw the famous Alexander, would bring people onto the stage and study his crystal ball and tell a person her prospects. But, after the handkerchief, I shied away, and even though Mr. R told us it was a trick, like all the others and explained how the common mentalists could convince an audience by pointing out things about an individual applied, in fact, to people in general, even Mr. R did not know all the secrets. He’d said so himself.
“You believe in magic, don’t you?” he’d asked, that slatey glare of his boring into me as it had that first day. Truth was, I did—it was all that blather about the gift, my knack for seeing things others could not, started it—and so, whenever they called for volunteers from the audience, I never budged an inch and wouldn’t let anyone volunteer me again. I didn’t want the world and all to know what dwelled in my mind. Especially Margaret, especially on the Friday morning that fated week in July when she poked me awake and asked me about the evening and what did we eat and did he like the violets.
“Was it grand then, Maeve? What picture did you see? Tell me his name again.”
In the eggshell light of the morning, the first words on my tongue, Desmond Malloy, started a flood of warmth same as the morning tea Margaret pushed at me so a wave of it sloshed near over the edge.
“We’ll have plenty occasion to talk later, tonight, but yes, it was grand. Desmond he’s called. Desmond Malloy.”
“But it can’t be tonight, unless you wait up for me, because it’s the baptism party for Harry’s nephew. I told you yesterday, but I see you are distracted. You could come along, if you like, Maeve. Harry never minds.”
All bustle she was, Margaret, pinning her hair, buttoning her sleeves, shaking the skirt free of what’d gathered on it since she took it off last night—hair, dust, soot. Me savoring the breeze she created for its reminder of the air off the lake against my bare arms, him standing there watching me clutch each arm opposite, as if chilled. Laughing at the odd possibility of someone feeling cold on an evening so warm. Laughing at something. Desmond. Didn’t the name dissolve in my mouth and sweeten it while Meggsie went on about her plans and hurried me along.
§
Desmond’d said to wait for him, but if I’d let another car pass by I would a been late for work. Hadn’t I been that daft and dreamy I forgot to ask the shift he’d be working? Wait for him, but when? The newsies sounded more like goats bleating than singers.
CAR CRISIS TODAY! STRIKE NEAR!
FITZGERALD’S WIFE ARRESTED!
JANET STILL MISSING!
Two cents for the Friday paper, a nickel for my fare, and a shame, so, me knowing somebody with a pocketful, and a soft spot for the likes of me. July 25, seventy-five degrees, cooler then, and there’s more about the little missing girl, Janet. Something draws a body to sad stories, a natural sympathy that puddles around curiosity. I prayed to the Blessed V that Janet had come to no harm while at the same time feeling certain she had. Fitzgerald still the fellow most suspect.
But them hollering about the strike of the car men yanked my thoughts away from little Janet because I saw I’d been wrong to doubt Desmond. A worry for him sure, the strike, and despite all he’d said about the Reds and the Bolshies, him no doubt voting with the others, for people had to make a stand. He’d said it himself. I pictured him doing that actually, standing up and raising his hand when the vote was called—memory of me still on his mind—his hair combed back neat so the peak pointed down, and his collar buttoned up. Gave me something to dream about as the car jolted to a stop, and started up again, rattling we passengers until we got to the Loop and all the hurrying.
Wait for me, he’d said, Desmond Malloy had, and weren’t those the words pealed through the day, me once including them as I typed out the orders, so I had
to roll that form up and out and roll another in and down, for imagine an order called “The Ideal Handkerchief wait for me Wand.” I thought of the boy had printed out the request, if it was a boy. Pictured him trying to fool his friends by passing a square of silk from one cone to another. He didn’t know, maybe, he’d have to buy his own silk. Smiling at that, me who never found too much to smile at.
“What’s on your mind, Maeve?” Eveline asked me. “It’s still only Friday and we have a day to go till we’re free to dream. Unless we make like Houdini himself and manage to dazzle Mr. R by escaping into thin air. Are you planning something? You’ve got the look of someone with a plot.”
“And what would I be after plottin’ then?” said me, but for all my experience with secrets it was the joy gave me away, the memory, the anticipation, and Eveline’d seen it before.
“A fellow. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Get on with you.”
“She can’t help it, Maeve. It’s all she ever thinks about.” This from Ruth, who seldom had the opportunity to get back at Eveline.
“It is, isn’t it?” She had the bit and she did not intend to let it go.
I rolled another order form into my machine. Eveline leaned across and pinched me. I didn’t dare look or she would a known for sure. Wait for me, wait for me.