The Reason for Time

by Mary Burns

  “It don’t take a magician to guess what’s on your mind, my friend of few words. And if you don’t want to talk today, the time will come when you do and you know where to find me.” She shook her shoulders in a little dance and sighed, and then addressed herself to the orders on her desk, for nut cups and paper streamers. Not so remarkable as them I processed. Ruth rolled her goggly eyes at me and shook her head and soon after found an excuse to go to the front and gossip with Florence. With just us two in the back Eveline spoke again. “I mean it. If you’ve got need of anything where a man is concerned, I’m your girl. Do you catch my drift?”

  Mr. R had callers that day, Florence told us when lunch hour struck and we stepped out of the building as we liked to do. He’d closed himself in his office, Mr. R, with a couple. The woman, Could it be Anna Eva? I wondered for a minute, then accepted it couldn’t be her, because Florence said the woman was almost as big as her husband, or whoever he was in the bowler and the pin-striped suit, and so would be taller than Anna Eva. Anyhow, I’d never seen her in black, only white, flowing, so she never seemed evil, despite what the papers said later about her using trickery to make it seem she was a true seer. I never believed her to be anything but good, a body you could trust with your heart’s wishes.

  “Someone famous?” Ruth wanted to know.

  “I can’t say.” Florence squeezed her lips together, turned her head away. Pretty Florence’d given up wearing her mourning clothes. Must a been because a year had passed since her Walter’d died, or because black didn’t go in summer. Not in the kind of heat we had that week. Mr. R’d felt sorry for her or liked her looks to hire her on, near the same day as me, but she didn’t need the job as much as the rest of us. She lived across the bridge, on the north side. Close to Lincoln Park, with her mammy and da and a little brother’d been safe from the war on account of him being too young. “Thank God for that,” Florence would say when she spoke of him.

  She had the light hair my sister had, but she wore it more severe, gave her a dramatic look. The hairstyle, the violet eyes often cast down, as if she was contemplating something deep, and the lovely clothes she wore, always with a bit of lace, or a drape to the skirt. Whatever it was she wore, or did, boosted your view of her as someone wounded, and I believe Eveline thought she’d designed it all to get our sympathy. But of course Florence’d had her true tragedy in Walter. Nothing designed about that.

  She refused to say who the famous or not famous visitors were that day because Mr. R’d sworn her to secrecy, like the rest of us. But that didn’t stop curiosity from gnawing at us.

  “The thing about starting to say something, but leaving the good parts unsaid, it’s teasing,” said Eveline, before we went back in. “Is that what you used to do with your Walter?” she asked Florence, while directing a glance at me. It startled me, the notion Eveline wanted to be my friend.

  Ruth giggled, but Florence’s already pink skin burned redder with whatever sad or shaming memories Eveline’d tweaked. Me, though, I didn’t take sides, didn’t say much at all, only touched Florence’s arm to turn her and we thronged back through the whirly doors into the building, past our watchful Clyde, without saying more.

  §

  Finally, day’s end, and all we office workers on the street at once. A car pulled up, clanging. No Desmond Malloy, though if he didn’t stick his head out the opened windows, how would I a known, with the pushing crowds blocked the view. Had to be steaming in there with all those bodies, but a lovely gale swept through the canyon between the tall buildings, and it being shady, I could wait. There was even a water fountain and a trough for watering horses, but filled so with garbage. In the going-home bustle of the streets, I took refuge in the pages of the newspaper I had yet to study, though it was the early edition I’d hung onto and there’d been more news since then as the strong-throated ones hollered.

  FITZGERALD’S WIFE SAYS HE KNOWS!

  COURTS DECIDE BEER IS BEER!

  BROWNS AND SOX IN HOT FIGHT FOR SECOND!

  NEGRO CRIME TALES A LOT OF BUNK

  SEZ SANDBURG!

  Soon I was bargaining with myself as another car pulled up, people jostled on, it clacked off. If I didn’t see his mug craning out the window of the very next car I’d better step on anyway for my waistband’s loosening around my body. I’d enough paper left to feed my curiosity and entertain myself with the funnies—Mutt and Jeff, Dorothy Darnit—while I enjoyed a piece of pie and a second cup of coffee in the Halsted Thompson’s. I’d sit there with all the other single girls came to find a new life in the city and ended up under the glaring lights hung from the ceiling of the room where individual chairs—with their one arm wide enough for your plate and your cup—ensured they’d stay single.

  Not so many horses and good so, for the streets were cleaner, but here stood one, a poor creature, dirty gray, though it could have been white as a fairy horse if somebody’d given it a good scrub. Exhausted, stopped in the car tracks. Wouldn’t move, despite the driver pleading with it, then whipping it with a switch, then getting down and applying his boot directly to the horse’s rump. The nag shifted herself as far as the curb, then stopped, as if she’d reached her barn. One of them ladies looked like the speakers on the women’s voting, always sported the big hats and the spectacles, marched over and spoke to the owner, waved her finger at him, no doubt scolding.

  There were ladies took it on themselves to fix all the wrongs they saw. Women with an education and fathers rich enough they didn’t have to work, but could go round meddling in other people’s business. Or so said a letter to the editor in the Daily News. State Street soon wouldn’t allow the horses and buggies, not with the future going to motorcars. But we were in the in-between stage, had bits of what’d gone before and all that was to come. The horse planned to stay right where she’d planted herself, thankfully off the tracks, because another car came clanging up. Desmond Malloy had not forgot me. I saw his smile beaming brighter than the brass buttons on his jacket and I knew I’d be going home with an extra nickel to spend at Thompson’s.

  “There y’are darlin’.”

  He squeezed my arm, all the while grinning over at me with one eye wandering to the box, making sure no one snuck on board without depositing their fares unless he gave them a sign. Grinning at me, Maeve Curragh, and didn’t it make me forget the crowding, the stink, poor Irene Miles and Janet Wilkinson, the trouble at the car barn, coloreds and whites fighting each other right outside President Wilson’s door, and every other tragic thing, as we moved up Madison towards Halsted, him calling out the street names in his own comical way—“Clinton, Jefferson, Desplaines. Dis dem dere plains for dose of you lookin’ for it!”

  I nodded as if speaking to the woman sitting down in front of me, the one’s face’d wrinkled with a question. That’s right. This is Clinton coming up and he’s the man will tell you the next, if this is not your stop. And, if you didn’t notice, by the way, it’s me his smile is meant for. Then he’s standing next to me, talking in a voice whispery enough no one else could hear, them eyebrows of his framing a gaze trickled over me like a cool stream.

  “There’s more trouble down at the barns, Maeve, dear. I had to take another shift so’s my pal could go speak to the bosses, as he’s one of the big union men. We’ll have to make Sunday your next lesson. Whaddya say? You won’t disappoint me, will you?”

  Disappoint him? He took my wide-open eyes to mean surprise, not knowing my true thoughts concerning the situation, that anyone should think me the body with power to disappoint. Gentler then, and closer, like a blessing on my head, the smell of tobacco assuring me he’d had a break. I turned up a face displayed what? The tingle between my shoulder blades? My hopes? While in the scheming part of my mind I was thinking I’d be able to put together a better outfit. Find a proper towel, maybe line up for shoes, after all, because you never knew what’d be left from bundle day. Or go to the open market on Maxwell Str
eet, with money to spend since tomorrow’s the day Mr. R would be coming around with our pay envelopes. It wasn’t like Desmond’d stood me up. In fact he was trying to sit me down. Bulled over to a young colored man sprawling on a bench at the back, his arm slung across the rim of the bench, discouraging office workers from sitting down next to him, because his loose clothes took up as much or more room than he did on account of their ripe smell.

  “No one taught you your manners?” Desmond said, kicking right at the fellow’s scuffed boot to get his attention. “Don’t you know to offer your seat when there’s a lady nearby standin’?”

  Sleepy eyes widened in a face itself no wider than a Bible’s spine. I wouldn’t mind sitting, sure, though some ladies took it as an insult when a colored offered a seat, as if their skin were not naturally dark, but dirty and had soiled the place somehow. Letters in the papers said they didn’t know how to behave in the city, those colored farm folk hopped the train north. They didn’t know you were not supposed to wear your overalls without a shirt underneath, didn’t know you were supposed to give yourself a good scrub everyday. This is how it was done in America. For all I could say about the Sisters of Perpetual Grace, they had taught us customs our mammy wouldn’t a known to teach us. We’d never been as clean as we got to be at that mission, and since, but no one’d ever worried about it so much at home, where some sort of wash on the Saturday before church’d always been sufficient, with the whole bath saved for Christmas and Easter. The way the boy got up and hunched over to the strap nearest the back exit made my stomach shrink.

  “There you go, darlin’,” said Desmond, proud of himself. I couldn’t refuse, could I, and the seat still warm from that fella’s skinny arse, him studying the window with narrowed eyes, wouldn’t a heard if I troubled to say thank you.

  §

  There were as many papers in the evening as the morning, including your final editions, with the box scores entranced the city. On that Friday evening, every paper there on every pile at the Halsted stop had pictures of little Janet on the front page, though on the bigger papers her sweet face had moved beneath the fold. She would disappear from the news altogether if they didn’t find her soon. It’s just one child after all and, sad as it was, working people wouldn’t be able to get to their employment if the car men went out, and with the prices of everything gone up, how could you pay for anything if you couldn’t get to work? Trouble everywhere.

  JEWELrY STORE ROBBED OF $8,000!

  GUARD ATTACKED IN DAYLIGHT!

  MAYOR SEZ SEND WAR PROFITEERS TO POKEY

  The newsies like beads on a string all along Halsted, but I turned in at Thompson’s, where I chose a seat with a view to the door and watched the girls coming in. Plenty like me, the young ones. But older ones too, a man and wife had to be Bridey’s age, him steering her forward and her looking at him like he knew everything in the world. Maybe they’d been married as long as the couple whose picture I saw in the paper, fifty years, and they’re merely stopping that evening to save her fixing a meal. Or maybe there was some other story behind them.

  They left my thoughts as quickly as they entered and found their place, because a fellow in a car man’s uniform stepped in next. My heart dropped because the first sight of him made me think he was Desmond. He was that tall, but his pug face and hair that lay almost over one ear denied it, thankfully, because a chippy girl hung on his arm, curl pasted to her forehead and big spots of rouge on her cheeks, like the kewpie dolls you could win at Riverview.

  Smell of hamburger steak. Mashed potatoes gone crusty, but enough gravy would perk them up. Thanks to my man, and the carfare he’d saved me, I ate my fill and was lingering with the second cup of coffee, like I’d promised myself. Not reading the funnies as I’d planned, but basking in the memory of that sweet whisper came down through the weave of my hat. Disappoint me? I was gazing towards the food counter at the farm scene above, made out of little colored tiles, same as the discovery of Chicago in the Marquette Building’d been formed out of tiles—that being the fashion then, making whole pictures out of little pieces of various colors—when a pair of ladies entered and looked around for a place to sit.

  Ladies like the kind talked to the man with the horse. Their eyes lit on the two chairs across from me, empty as if waiting for them. I pretended to be fumbling with something in my bag, but it did no good because they’d noticed me notice them and soon they were there, and one of them, with a voice like a river, said, “Good evening, dear.” I was reminded of the nuns would talk to me that way sometime. “Dear,” not the way Desmond said it, and—knowing the nuns and what they turned out to be, some of them—I took a big gulp of my coffee and it burned my mouth and didn’t I yelp despite myself.

  “Oh, my, you must have hurt yourself, miss. Sir, sir!” She hurried up to the counter calling to the fellow there for a glass of water, which came in an instant—she had that way about her everybody listened. “Just let it sit there in your mouth for a minute.”

  They introduced themselves, Harriet and Clare, and if it’d been Margaret instead of me, she’d have chattered on about Clare being the name of the county we came from in Ireland, and telling most of our story, not all, for Margaret and I never confessed why we ran from the nuns, or how, only that we’d decided we hadn’t a vocation. These ladies, especially Clare with her river voice, were not so bad as that letter-to-the-editor writer made them out to be. They fanned themselves with one of the newspapers had sometimes called them man-haters and commented on the weather, and then didn’t they offer to buy me some ice cream to soothe my burned tongue.

  If they were not the company I wanted, they were company all the same, and ice cream was ice cream, and my mouth did burn. I knew there’s nothing in this life came absolutely free, and yet the price of dessert seemed to be nothing but information—where I came from, where I lived, where I worked. Sneaking in a way to find out my age, which was plenty old enough to be on my own, and how long have you called Chicago your home and do you have a beau?

  Not more than a sentence did it take to satisfy them I’d established myself in rooms with my sister, and the flu’d got my beau, for I didn’t know that I should mention Desmond Malloy. Even the name in my head, wanting to spill out, made me burn the same as if the coffee’d scalded me all the way down.

  “You’re one of the fortunate ones then, despite the sad loss of your intended. What are you called, dear? Here we are talking like old friends and we don’t even know your name!”

  She laughed at this, as if hours instead of minutes’d passed here among the clatter of dishes and the shouts of the cooks and the countermen. I answered her at the same time running my finger over another name in fancy script on the outside of my coffee cup, spelled Thompson.

  They were out that night, Clare and Harriet, visiting the tenements to tell people in the neighborhood about the goings-on at Hull House. “You must know it, Maeve,” they said. And who wouldn’t a known that building sprawled along Halsted? A promise you wouldn’t die of it, whatever the trouble was. Shabby, but solid, sitting there, and the odd sights you saw from the windows of the streetcar. A woman covered in flour and her carrying an empty sack and standing on the doorstep. The people lined up for whatever was being handed out on food day.

  “I guess you know that we’ve a fine apartment building for working girls, they run it themselves. Girls like you, Maeve, and your sister. Just over on Polk Street. So if you’re ever in a spot, you know, you can come over and take a look. You ask for me, should you need to.”

  When Margaret lived-in, I pondered such places. Cheaper than the women-only residences downtown, like the one where Ruth lived. When I passed the West Side YWCA, and that was often enough, it being in the neighborhood, I looked over and even stepped inside once, but didn’t it smell like charity, remind me of the mission and all we’d been made to feel there—thankful, inferior, ashamed? Charity didn’t come free, neither.

&nb
sp; This Clare then unpinned her hat and took it off and I saw her hair matched the pale wheaten color of Margaret’s and I liked her looks better without the hat. She had a wide mouth and her smile unhid a gold tooth, not far back. Added some years to her. She could a been Mammy’s age, or older even. My heart opened a bit. She was that kind I thought of telling her something would bind us, the way confidences do, but what? Never Desmond. Not the story of us hiding out in the bushes near naked. No, women like that would reel off all the dangers before grabbing my arms and sweeping me off to their Hull House or Polk Street or somewhere they could keep me safe. Weren’t there people already coming into our office building and distributing them pamphlets showed men in black fedoras waiting to nab girls from the train station?

  Yet, for all the warnings, the saddest thing’d been, nobody’d ever noticed me. Nobody’d tried to accost me or lure me. I didn’t seem to make an impression on the city at all until the evening Packy found me at the church hall. Then Desmond Malloy picked me out from among all the others on his car. I couldn’t talk about Desmond so soon, but something. My sister? How she’d settled on a man and what would I do when she went off with him? The thought sprung up as if freed, and pressed against my skin, something I never knew’d been crouching there inside.

  “I might consider it. Because Margaret will be leaving with her Harry soon. They’re going to be married at Christmas and they’ll want their own place, sure.”

  Clare reached across the space between our one-armed chairs and patted my knee, as if I needed comforting. “Why don’t you pay a visit to the Polk Street building? You’d be surprised to find girls just like you. You’d never be lonely there. They go out in the evenings together. It wouldn’t be your sister, but the next best thing.”

  Lonely was not something I planned to be ever again, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

  “Just remember where we are if you need anything, dear.”