The Reason for Time

by Mary Burns

  Their suppers were getting cold and they set about eating and we all fell silent for a spell until I saw there was nothing for it but to leave.

  §

  Margaret got in with her talk of the baptism party and Harry’s fear the Union Stock Yards would go out again and the teamsters support them, how she would have to work for the both of them and it would be okay because the garment manufacturers foresaw an increase in work with the demand for winter coats. A cold winter predicted, and the prediction came true, sure, but all we expected then was somebody’d be working and maybe they wouldn’t have to put off their wedding after all.

  As if she’d read my mind same as the Great Alexander or them, she asked, “What about you, Maeve? Do you think this new man, this Desmond, might be the one?”

  “Don’t be after frettin’ about me,” I huffed, for hadn’t I already lived on my own, me in the great city of Chicago while she slept high on Prairie Avenue? Me just sixteen kept my arms close to my body and my head down and lied straight out, said I was eighteen, a trained stenographer, not a full lie because the nuns’d showed me how to type and had begun to teach me shorthand. So I got the job for the big catalogue company, riding the cars back to a room smaller than Bridey’s, taking my meals in silence, afraid a what’d spill out of my mouth if I opened it. Maybe I’d a stayed in that situation if it hadn’t been for Packy and then me catching enough of the flu myself to have to miss weeks of work and lose my place. Margaret gone by then from Prairie Avenue and hiring out for piecework barely covered the room rent, much less food for us.

  My sister fell to sleep smooth faced, her big problem solved, despite the little problems remaining. But me, I couldn’t sleep, not at all, not with the heat and the thoughts in my mind running like the creatures rustled at night looking for opportunities in the alleyways of Chicago.

  Back to the sill of the window, dreaming, when the good people gathered as dark shapes among the piles of cast-off bricks and metal and whatever else’d cluttered the dirty ground between the buildings. Maybe only someone strolling home from the tavern, or a couple snuggling, or even dogs, I thought at first, but no sound drifted up, meaning it must a been the good people wrestling, one against the other, as in the long ago hill battles in Munster. Fierce, as if they’re out to slaughter one another or some common enemy I couldn’t see with the few lamps sputtered out as stars behind swift-moving clouds. I could see no faces, only whirling outlines made it more fearful so’s my heart jumped up to my shoulder and beat there madly. Them being out of our usual time and from some world not altogether ours kept the cause of the struggle a mystery. It couldn’t a been me, yet why had they showed themselves?

  Dizzy, faint even, I tried to raise Margaret, tell her I was sick. But wasn’t she that used to my prodding and jostling, the two of us thrashing away like the forms outside, she only turned and mumbled and the tapioca pudding feel of her shoulder recalled the cafeteria over on Halsted and the vision of a little cherry sitting in the middle of the gluey stuff and the kindness of that lady, Clare.

  I nodded off to my sister’s moaning, and soon entered dreams of a big full moon, the lake gleamy as the fine chalice the priest raises at the Mass and not watery at all, the lake, but solid, so when Desmond led me towards it we walked on top. I trusted it, as I trusted him, and lifted my face to his mouth, which I wanted to kiss the way I never wanted to kiss Packy, nor in the rough way that man on the ship tried to kiss me, nor in the way my da and mammy kissed me, with all the love in the world while a kind of resignation stuck to my face so they never knew my thoughts at all.

  Wasn’t it lucky I got to be the expert? Started young to hide what went on inside my head?

  Such a dream. Me waking from it with a troubling feeling, had to be sin. I never slept much at all, nor did many people in the city. It was that hot, the weather and all what else boiling. And my tongue still sore from the coffee’d scalded it, despite the ice cream. Margaret, mumbling as she tossed, about rashers and being careful to wash your hands so worms didn’t get into them.

  I fixed the sheet over her and went back to the sill, lifted my arms to dry the slickness under them and fancied myself flying over the buildings like that doomed Wingfoot Express, seeing everything down there and making sense of it, maybe learning whatever happened to the Wilkinson girl, God help her, and knowing where himself’d gone, for he’d been shy of telling me too much. Lived over in Bridgeport still, he said, helping out his mammy and his da, who had finished with working. No wonder he’d finished if he’d lost his legs, but Desmond had not explained how yet and I’d forgotten to ask him, what with our meetings being so rushed. But the opportunity would come. Sounded like a big family—hadn’t the man on the car said four boys? Were there sisters, too? I wondered when he’d want to introduce me and if they’d take to me.

  That hour vermin owned the town, displacing even them battling shapes sent me to the side of my sister. I heard rat tails sliding, imagined their pointy noses poking into the meager leavings made it to the trash, and then I spied a shadow. Someone roaming the lanes like I’d done, and before the cloud rolled back over the moon I saw a shadow enter the tenement across. Wasn’t I hoping he belonged there, because I’d hate to a been called as a witness to testify against some murdering fellow who snuck into a house at night. Then a candle flamed in a black square across the way. There wouldn’t be anyone snatched like young Janet, not in this neighborhood had only the writhings of people couldn’t rest, the faeries battling it out for causes only they knew, and the whiskered critters came out in the night.

  Saturday, July 26, 1919

  JANET’S PHOTO FAILS TO BRING CONFESSION

  PLEADING EYES OF LOST GIRL

  DO NOT MOVE FITZGERALD

  CAR PARLEY BRINGS HOPE

  FRENCH PROTEST AMERICAN

  SOLDIER ACTS TO COLORED

  I scanned the damp ink as I waited, but I never bought a copy from the curly-haired fella with the dago lilt to his words, nor from the ruffian on the other side of the street trying to disguise his station with a necktie he must’ve lifted from somewheres. Not that day, it being payday, and me, after my feast at Thompson’s, with just enough to get downtown.

  Came through the mail, the pieces of a fortune-telling ball, and the customer after pestering us for a refund. The ball didn’t work, not as advertised, not as Mr. Howard Thurston made it work, and the customer in question’d embarrassed himself, having been the butt of laughter from the group he set himself up to entrance. Instead of moving up and down its rod, as expected, to answer the common questions—How many children will I have? Will I be rich? When will my beau propose to me?—the ball’d dropped to the bottom of the base and never budged. The performer shamed, his audience wanting their money back.

  He should a known the ball couldn’t answer without the magician contriving a spell. Magic was no matter of mechanics alone, as Mr. R had well taught us. Not to give anything away, Mr. R would start, in one of the moods’d come over him, appearing without warning in the back, dressed in his usual neat business suit, but as if wearing a cape or something conferred on him a theatrical, sort of swashbuckling air. He would pick up a trick—an illusion we were to call them—“The Ideal Handkerchief Wand,” or a deck of cards. He’d practice for the lot of us at the back, and while flipping the cards from hand to hand and fanning them out, then sweeping them back into his hand, he would ruminate, as he did less with us than with his cronies who visited.

  “The real magic, girls, comes from the magician. Watch closely. You see it is not so much what I do with the apparatus, but that you want to believe. Yes, you do, don’t try to deny it. The audience has to be willing to believe, and it is the magician who opens the door for them to that opportunity. No illusion that. Are you ready, girls?”

  He would cause a broach, for example, to move from Ruth’s shirtwaist to his pocket. Even we who knew it a trick were fooled. But hadn’t I guessed thi
s all along, operated as such? It is the magician creates the magic, and before you can convince anyone else of your unearthly powers, you have to convince yourself. Sad to say, no such advice appeared in the catalogue distributed by The Chicago Magic Company, and so the unfortunate customer who’d bought the fortune-telling ball’d failed, perhaps was bound to fail.

  With Mr. R gone on his usual Saturday lunch, not to return till the hour came to hand out the pay packets, I tried to put the ball together, see if it would work for me, answer my questions and all. For the tube of that hourglass marked time as sand trickled through, that space between the past and future’d magnified so the present seemed everything—the what-to-come far off as the roof of the building looked like a palace, the Art Institute, with its big lions, and the past so far behind I could barely remember the music of my family’s voices and the squeak of the wicket gate. There in the middle was me, stretched out between that distant future and the just as distant past, waiting, waiting.

  “Do you think that’ll really work, Maeve?” Eveline, laughing, a flake of lipstick on her front tooth, though I didn’t tell her, not with her thinking me the fool.

  “I’m tryin’ to see if the customer was right.”

  “And then what? We’re not supposed to send any refunds.”

  She waited for a reply never came, but another laugh neither. Hard Eveline softened a little. “I think you really believe in that stuff. Who would a thought? It’s a shill game, Maeve. There’s always some trick to it.”

  “I know it. It’s just the trick makes me curious is all.”

  She winked, she did, as if we shared more than I imagined. A bit of a seer herself, Eveline, and though I’d never been much against her from the start—not as much as Ruth and Gladys—I’d begun to open to her more, because we don’t know all there is to know about a person, do we? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Who was that said about, then, was it Mary Magdalene?

  Normally we sent damaged goods back with Billy, who kept them behind the swinging door in the storeroom. Mr. R would sometimes be able to fix a problem so’s we could mail out the article again. Yet he seldom got up to that task and a pile of broken things gathered dust on a shelf near the floor. Nobody’d miss the ball is why I thought of smuggling it home, but hadn’t I already done worse and, with all the strikes, I couldn’t risk losing the job. I put the pieces in a drawer in my desk and there they remained. Then it was just waiting for Mr. R to come in with our pay. He always made a bit of a show of it, too, holding the envelopes up while a little thrill’d go through us all, even Eveline. I knew it, because I’d seen her shoulders rising same as mine, the oft-stained teeth biting on her red lips.

  The girls lived at home might be planning a shopping trip, if they could make it to the stores before early closing. Gladys surely would want to go somewheres and I’d seen her at our front, lunchtime, talking to fair Florence. Didn’t say a word to me, only smiled when I passed. Maybe she’d given up on me as a confidant on account of me snubbing her on the Thursday. Maybe the two of them would go off together, and wouldn’t I like so, too, but we without relatives to put us up had to satisfy their rent first. With Thompson’s asking more for meals, and Bridey, on account of some missing butter, threatening to cut off our kitchen “privliges,” as she called them. I saw my pay shrinking—price of bacon doubled since we could afford to buy it, tea gone up by a full dime per pound.

  Yes, Florence might make a better companion for Gladys, them better matched on account of her living with her aunt and Florence still at home, so naturally having more to spend than the rest of us. Even if Gladys had to pay something for her room, it wasn’t much, and her aunt wouldn’t throw her out if she was short. That left Eveline, Ruth, and me as the independents. Eveline seemed to not care what went on with anyone. She’d be out the door as soon as the long hand on the clock moved up to the top. She’d already spent ten minutes buffing her nails and smoothing her stockings, using a little silver compact with a mirror to powder her nose. I’d a liked one of those and maybe I’d get one when I was promised to Desmond. He’d favor all the newest styles and I imagined he’d want his wife to look her best. Eveline noticed me watching.

  “Want to try some?”

  “Oh, don’t,” Ruth warned. “It’s cheap.”

  Eveline laughed, but not in a mean way. “You try it, too, Ruthie. It washes off, you know.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be much traffic in the party business if you have the opportunity to do all that.”

  “Come on, try it. You first.”

  She held out the silver case to Ruth, who—though she looked at it suspicious like, as if there was a spider and not powder inside—took it and held it in her hands, opened it and touched the powder with her finger.

  “It does smell good.”

  We’d divided, we three in the back and Florence up front with my pal Gladys who’d never even worked at The Chicago Magic Company.

  “You’re not going to try it?”

  Ruth blinked and sucked in a breath and handed the compact to me. “Not today. I’m perfectly happy with myself as I am, thank you.”

  It felt lovely, the shiny silver smudged a bit from going around from hand to hand, but cool against my skin. It snapped open and in the little round mirror I saw the middle of my face, without the hair, without the neck of my shirtwaist. Dorothy Phillips was it? Well, I’d do it then. I patted the puff into the pressed powder and daubed it on myself, my cheeks, my nose, under my eyes. Ruth couldn’t help watching for all she might a disapproved.

  “It does smell good, you’re right about that. How does it look?”

  I didn’t like it that Ruth stuck out so. Awkward. Might a been me. Was me, before Desmond. But I had someone, and Eveline too, had to be, while Ruth had only the company she found in the building where she lived with the other women who worked downtown. For all the ladies in the big hats, Clare and her friend, had praised them buildings where girls could live together, couldn’t a been their first choice.

  “Not so bad,” she admitted.

  “Brings out your eyes,” said Eveline, then laughed, because if this is what it did, then for sure it was better Ruth’d declined. Maybe she’d missed Eveline’s meaning. I know she didn’t like our mate’s brazen way, but she was fascinated with her same as me.

  “But I wouldn’t want to get in the makeup habit. I’ve got better things to save for.”

  “Better? Like what, Ruthie?”

  She chewed on the inside of her cheek, maybe considering whether or not she wanted to say, then decided to go ahead. “The Normal College. I’ll be starting after Christmas. My brother is sure to be settled home by then.”

  “An educated woman you’re going to be.”

  Ruth frowned as if injured. “A teacher. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “I never said there was, Ruthie. I think it’s swell.”

  If I couldn’t go out with Florence, and nowadays Gladys alongside her, I could dream of the fine displays at The Fair, the mannequins in simple afternoon dresses patterned with flowers and looking so cool, the creams and perfumes, the gold necklaces shining in the glass cases. And my mind drifted to Desmond Malloy, the raise the car men would get to stay on the job, and what a life would be possible with money like that. We didn’t know for certain there would not be a surprise in the pay envelope. Mr. R’d given them all an extra dollar at Christmas, according to Ruth, and sure we could use a bit more, Christmas or not.

  It’s that hope anyway caused me to use the letter opener, and nudge the blade along the seal, slow, like combing tangles out of Margaret’s fine hair, in place of ripping the paper, and not reaching in and grabbing, but opening just enough to see the pay packet’s no fatter after all. A glance around told me the others’d got the same, not that any of us’d expected a windfall. But it was the hope for one we hadn’t lost yet, the some of us had it to begin with.
/>   §

  It was leaving time and that sweltering again I might not a hung my shirt to dry at all. I could feel it sticking to my back and twisted my spine around to release the cloth from there and the cleft between my buds. That’s what Mammy called them, buds, and Da said buds turn into beautiful flowers and Mammy said to keep his poetry out of the ears of his own daughters so. Da only laughed at her. A gentle fellow he was, him taking what he earned and bringing it home, more than some did, as Mam’s letters reminded us. “A good man still abides by the Christian spirit despite everything, you girls will be happy to learn.” Of course, Mammy never knew right off when we quit the convent and the mission and, save for Sunday Mass, most things holy.

  Was it the thought of Mammy stopped me, or the dread I felt about facing the woman in the bathing costume department, the one’d looked at me like she did? I should a forgot it. Her thinking if she’d been the one choosing people ought to be in this world, she would a left me out. Me, who was barely in. Didn’t want to meet that one again, no. So there I was standing on the street corner, dreaming about The Fair—the bonnet would complete my outfit, or at least a proper pair of bathing stockings—wondering where my famous boldness hid, in the moments I cowered undecided. Then up came a boy with the Daily News Home edition changed my fantasies of shopping altogether. ’Twas an Extra reporting on the little girl.

  POLICE ORDER LAKE DRAGGED TO FIND GIRL

  TELEPHONE CALLS INQUIRE

  WHETHER REPORTS ARE TRUE THAT

  BODY OF LOST CHILD HAS BEEN FOUND

  IN BASEMENT OF VIRGINIA HOTEL

  A cinder blown into one of my eyes started them both watering. Either the cinder or the laced air threaded through with murder and anger and cruelty. Janet Wilkinson maybe already tossed into that lake held all I feared, and me—daft with love—forgetting the terrors, enjoying instead the little fish like grains of silver rising round me the evening I lingered with Desmond. Them same fish could be pooling around Janet’s sweet pale face. Hah! Saturday night supposed to be cheerful, a full day off looming and me with a date for tomorrow. There was no advantage in standing around reading sad tales of murdered children and watching the man on the corner beat a horse almost dead to begin with, for on the other side of the road boys chased after pigeons flew up before them as if happiness existed still. Sparks from the wires made a pretty light and a breeze stirred the poisonous haze over Chicago, a promise, if it kept up, we’d sleep tonight.