The Reason for Time

by Mary Burns

  STRIKE NEARER!

  UNIONS BOLT PARLEY, CALL MASS MEETING!

  FALL KILLS JUDGE DOLAN!

  BROWNS BREAK TIE, GET LEAD IN 7TH!

  Because it was Harry at a meeting Saturday night—the situation that serious, for the teamsters, for everyone—Margaret waited for me on the stoop and a look at my face told her something had me down in the dumps.

  “He’s disappointed you. And when you were just gettin’ goin’. How much do you know about him anyway? Is he just one of the louts like them over at the Hamburg used to try to sweet talk us out the back of the club? Don’t be lettin’ your loneliness drive you to a fellow like that. Remember what the sisters told us.”

  “It’s tomorrow we’re after meeting. A stroll in the park. He’s not disappointed me, no, Meggsie. You have it wrong.” Oh, yes, wrong. Her, quoting the sisters like that. I had to hold my tongue. But she was changing, Margaret was. She’d had her waltz with adventure when we ran away from the mission, but then, imagining a comfortable life ahead, she’d swung back to where she believed she belonged. Influence of Harry was part of it. But then, too, she was going to turn twenty before I even turned twenty-one. A new decade for her to start, with a wedding planned, a house to find, children to birth, the shop they would eventually open. No magician was Margaret and, if her vision was strained by sewing, she could see a plan clear as she could see herself in a store mirror, and she often looked. I want to study the dress, she’d say, but I’d notice her turn this way and that, flirting with her reflection, squinting at it and patting her hair, drawing her shoulders back. Of course there was no mirror to speak of at Bridey’s. We didn’t get the chance much.

  I walked her down to the same café where himself had stood me to the pie and the lemonade, and the menu board at the front distracted her. I could see by the way her tongue stabbed at the corner of her mouth.

  “It’s payday and I’m goin’ to have the roast beef special. You have it, too. I’ve seen it come out and its grand, lots of gravy, and you get dessert with it, too.”

  “Does sound good.”

  “I’ll stand you to it.” For I’d promised Mammy I’d look out for her, even though it’s her peering over at me suddenly, exploring my face for a clue as to what might a befallen me. Why my new fella left me free on a Saturday night when most every other couple would be dancing somewheres. “He had a home emergency. His mother. He’s good to her, and you know what Da told us about putting our trust in such a man, for he’ll honor us same as her.” Oh, they rolled out, they did, the stories.

  But it was a long speech for me and Margaret showed she noticed by her worried blinking. We didn’t know then the degree of her short sightedness, but she’d eventually lose her job because of the handicap and have to buy herself specs.

  “Is it his mother you’re sad about then, Maeve? Because you can’t fool them that’s knowed you since we were little ones, and what we’ve been through together and all. You cannot pretend somethin’s not sittin’ on you.”

  I raised the paper. “They think she’s in the lake. They think he threw her there.”

  “Ah, the lake! No wonder, you poor t’ing. Not to mention her. Oh, that devil. But you shouldn’t be readin’ all that.”

  Margaret reached across and patted my arm and urged me to put the paper away, for wasn’t there enough sadness in our lives without inviting it in through the papers? Advice easy enough to follow as the waiter approached our table with the plates, both of them steaming and us forgetting how hot we’d been just an hour ago, and our mouths already watering and my stomach howling in anticipation.

  We saw a show after, like always on Saturday night, and this night at the Academy of Music someone almost as good as Nora Bayes performed the song we went home humming, Nora’s most popular, “Shine on, shine on harvest moo-oon up in the sky,” the hit of the show. But didn’t we laugh at the monkey in the picture, too, it dressed in clothes like a child. The magic act, a simple one of card tricks I knew all about. Wasn’t magic to me, only a trick anybody with a head on her shoulders could practice until she got good enough to do it in front of a crowd. Seemed there had to be a good dose of the unknown, a mystery that teased, before you could believe it magic. There had to be a flourish and the magician crying out, or sometimes whispering, “Presto!” You’d come to the end before you ever knew how everything happened. But I clapped all the same at the card trick, for politeness sake.

  My mood had changed so, when we passed the posters pasted to the side of the building, including one with Dorothy Phillips in Talk of the Town, I told Margaret someone had said I resembled her. Margaret laughed. “Dorothy Phillips herself, is it?” Stung it did, and Margaret saw and tried to console. “But I can see why, Maeve, with your dark hair and your brown eyes. You never think you’re pretty, but you are.”

  Some of the tenants lingered on the stoop and we stopped for a while to gab with them and Bridey about the show, herself in an easy mood and all because we’d paid our rent. Even smiling she was, Bridey, and encouraging Margaret to remind her of how that song went. Teasing, must’ve been she was, because you heard it everywhere. Even Bridey had to a heard it. But she felt that good, Margaret went along. “Shine on, shine on harvest moon up in the sky. I ain’t had no lovin’ since January, February, June, or July,” she sang, her eyes aimed up and to the side, like Nora Bayes in the shows. She didn’t go right through, but stopped at that first line, and curtsied instead of taking a bow. Bridey and the others applauded her.

  We were good for another week. Despite all the unemployed, she could count on us had the regular pay. Saturdays Bridey was happy as we ever saw her. Yet, she steered us from the show to the story of Janet quick enough, and asked if we’d seen another edition, if any more news’d come out about the awful fellow suspected. She never raised any similarities between her John and Fitzgerald, the janitor thought to be involved in the poor girl’s disappearance. Maybe there were none, but she had to wonder, she did, what her grown-up boy might be capable of doing.

  Whole minutes passed when I didn’t think of my man and the swimming lesson set up for the next day, if no one was murdered before then, or the cars stopped, or a bomb go off somewhere, a Bolshie bomb or one of them meant to scare Negroes out of white neighborhoods. Or maybe another war would start in some country we had yet to hear of.

  Sunday, July 27, 1919

  LOWDEN FIGHTS CAR STRIKE!

  NEW EVIDENCE TIGHTENS NET ON FITZGERALD!

  $2,500 FOR JANET!

  TO RELIEVE THE SUSPENSE OF

  JANET’S PARENTS AND FRIENDS,

  THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE WILL PAY $2,500 FOR EXCLUSIVE INFORMATION

  LEADING TO THE DISCOVERY OF JANET WILKINSON

  $2,500! But Margaret steered me right away from the piles of papers, fewer stacks of them Sunday. She did not want me distracted at Mass and I did not protest, really, though I could not help but hear the newsie hollering the temperature would be the hottest all week. It got me pondering the moment I would step into the lake, him with his arms outstretched, encouraging me. Could I do it thinking little Janet might be floating in there somewhere?

  “There’s only bound to be more trouble. Keep the papers out of your head, Maeve. There’s the girl and all to pray for and peace with the workers.”

  She dipped her fingers in the holy water font, whispering the last, and wasn’t the church nearly full, though we stepped in a good ten minutes early. We always chose the same pew, because it was situated away from the incense made Margaret sneeze, yet also nearest the window featured St. Brigid, who’d been a girl like us, and we were not much more than girls still. For me, I hoped St. Brigid and the Virgin would be my path to forgiveness for all the lying and thieving I’d done. Yet I wondered if those two even judged me so, knowing what they must know about the lives we were fated to live, being who we were and where we’d come from. Brigid herself famous for her kindness to th
e poor.

  We chose the nine o’clock Mass for the children’s choir, voices like cherubim made me think of our younger sisters—Nuala, had to be nine already, and little Kathleen, the baby then. Not to mention that poor child would never fully leave my thoughts but come and go for years—Janet Wilkinson. Little Janet. Margaret was smarter where feeling came into it. If she thought about our family, the thought had wings, for I noticed her examining the hats, the picture hats the ladies wore, wide all round like the edge of a plate circling the crown, and those with one side pinned up by a flower or a feather, the cloches, some of them with veils.

  You could always see the latest fashions at Mass on Sunday—the hats, the summer frocks, the shoes—because the world and all met at St. Patrick’s, it being the oldest for we Irish in the city. Beautiful with the stained glass Mr. Shaughnessy made, another window or two each year, too, until the whole church filled with colored light rivaled the marvelous panels in the ceiling. You felt holy just sitting in the rays came through the shapes like a bishop’s miter, the knots, the deep emeralds and ruby reds, the fierce glare of St. Patrick, the more modest cast down eyes of Brigid, Mary of the Gael.

  The church like a stove despite the stone walls. The chorus of young swallows singing the mass, Kyrie Eleison—God have mercy. And wasn’t it heartfelt, the echo in my chest, for I knew God did forgive and he would be too busy with all the more important goings on to do more than nod my way. A dip of that sacred head would absolve any sins born of the mischief in my soul. Mischief I excused, because hadn’t it sprung from need?

  When the sermon came, the pastor spent it not on the labor troubles, or the plight of the poor and the soldiers just returned. Not the coloreds moving up north, nor the innocent folks died that week in the blimp crash, nor the missing girl. Instead he preached the words of Archbishop Mundelein, himself concerned with those who strayed towards temptation.

  “For this disaster is usually the end and culmination of other evils, of sinful habits, of neglect of prayer and the sacraments, of cowardice in the face of hostility to one’s belief, of weakness in yielding to the wishes of kindred or friends, of social ambition and the hope of advantage in business or public career.”

  There I drifted, and not the only one either. Actual whistles and snorts rose from a snoozer somewhere close. But me, I wondered if the archbishop wrote them words with special intention for the famous Catholics in our town, the businessmen starving their employees. Wouldn’t that be a sin in some category, sure?

  “It is essential, in the first place, that clean living before marriage be equally obligatory on men and women. The toleration of vicious courses in one party, while the other is strictly held to the practice of virtue, may rest on convention or custom, but it is ethically false, and it is plainly at variance with the law of God, which enjoins personal purity upon each and all. Those who contemplate marriage should further make sure that their motives are upright. Where the dominant aim is selfish, where choice is controlled by ambition or greed, and where superficial qualities are preferred to character, genuine love is out of the question. Such marriages are bargains rather than unions, and their only result is discord.”

  He’d have me and lose me, same as others who nodded off in the torpor. Motives? I never did know one to be absolutely pure. Sure we girls wanted to marry, and comfort came into it, yet how could it be otherwise?

  We strolled slowly back to Bridey’s—Harry due to collect Margaret, but not for an hour or so—and found John on the front stoop, his face shiny with grease from whatever Bridey’d given him to eat, and all of a sudden I had to run to the lav.

  “You’re not sick, Maeve?” Margaret peering at me. I can see her now, smoothing her flowered Sunday dress, fixing a curl at the side of her cheek, a bit of the young miss in her for all she wanted to be old. Harry that day taking her for a picnic with his kind, and wouldn’t she come back holding her own stomach that night on account of the trouble she had, even then, digesting all that meat.

  “Just butterflies must be. We’ll plan a picnic for the four of us, next Sunday. I am excited for you, Maeve,” she said, hugging me. So sure she was then, Margaret. Then gone, leaving me time enough to give myself a good wash and let my skin dry—as much as it would dry that muggy day—before I slipped the chemise up and rolled my stockings on. Started me sweating it did in that room of ours hotter than the day outside. Up with the knickers, the petticoat—plain except for the border of lace Margaret’d stitched around the hem, for she kept her eyes out for trimmings, Margaret did. Buttoning up my shirtwaist and the skirt. I had two skirts for summer and I chose the one with the extra piece flaring out from the waist, another of my sister’s accomplishments.

  The bathing costume came out from the place it nestled, small thing it was. I flapped it out our square of window where the lines strung between the buildings dangled clothes would maybe never dry at all, it being that still. They might a been flags, the white of the nappies, some garment striped, the red of a man’s shirt. Grains of sand escaping from the mohair sparkled in the fingers of sunlight and flew nearly weightless before disappearing into the alley’d often been the source of my fright.

  Not that Sunday. I never saw the junk tossed out, nor the feral creatures. Never smelled whatever’d landed there and soaked into the struggling weeds. No, but held the costume up for a minute to admire it before rolling it back up and putting into my bag with a second pair of stockings and the towel I’d reminded myself to pack. I consulted the square of mirror in the lav before I left, but it only told me I was no more Dorothy Phillips than I was the Queen of Sheba, and then I was off, too, tiptoeing down the hall past the sounds of snorts and farts from Bridey’s room.

  §

  In the Laura Jean Libbey stories unfolded in summer, you did not find your dirty-necked, collar-loosed folks, sweat sluicing their mugs as they hung from a strap on a car shouldn’t a been packed, it being Sunday. But sure something drew us to the lake, and the open land along its edge, where—in voices just as loud as the newsies owned the street corners—peddlers hollered out the freshness of their popcorn, the coolness of their drinks.

  “Ice cold lemonade!”

  “Getchyer refreshin’ soda pop!”

  A monkey danced at the end of the leash fixed to his bright collar, and a fellow played the tin whistle—him in a cloth cap and maybe not so long arrived in Chicago he didn’t know ’twas the custom to lay the hat on the ground.

  Desmond appeared in his summer suit and the boater, rushing right up to where I’d been waiting, but not for long, and blathering words I couldn’t hear in the hubbub. Took my elbow to steer me across to the streetcar stop, us heading to the same place as before, though I’d thought we might go to a proper bathing beach. Once we reached Lincoln Park we saw children playing catch and whirling hoops on the lawn gone yellow. In the dimmer quarters beneath the tree branches, families sat on blankets laid out for their picnics, while on the paths you saw women strolling arm in arm, and old couples resting on the benches placed there, watching all go by, including Desmond and myself, racing as if we had a train to catch.

  He stopped, all of a sudden, and pushed his hat back on his head. We were both panting heavy with the sprinting and the heat and I could feel my toes inside my shoes, imagined the cherry red and worse I would see when I peeled off my stockings.

  “Am I torturin’ you, Maeve?”

  He was smiling down onto me and my body was all airy like, so, if it was torture, it was a wonderful sort and him knowing I didn’t speak much, didn’t expect much of an answer. I piped up, though, because we’d passed a wagon on the avenue and I was perishing of thirst.

  “Though I’ve always been a stout walker, I wouldn’t mind a drink.”

  He strode back to where the traffic streamed to buy me a drink from the peddler closest. I waited in the shelter of one of the big trees arched over the path behind. Suspended so, as if holding my bre
ath, which I didn’t, couldn’t do, naturally, but all of a sudden him who’d made the earth bigger—just as if he’d swept his hand across the city and said, “Presto!” and me’d expanded to the edges of it—all of a sudden that atmosphere vanished same as if a curtain’d come down. I shrank back to myself and the sweat dripping down my front, and my back, and my hurting feet, and closed my eyes for a second, hoping to recreate the spell.

  When I opened them I saw a lanky woman with a loops of reddish-brown hair at her neck and heard that laugh I knew from The Chicago Magic Company, the trill had ironic depths to it, the sarcasm, and wasn’t it Eveline strolling by. Not by herself, neither, but with a man even taller, sporting a vanilla suit and a straw fedora, and didn’t the lightness of them articles of clothing just emphasize the color of his skin, same as the stone flashing from his gold ring as he waved his hand to describe some point he must a been making, then chuckled right along with Eveline, the two of them so absorbed in one another they, too, seemed in another, charmed, world.

  Eveline stepped close to a tree, to lean on it while she fetched something from inside her shoe, and I heard the whistle he let loose when she exposed her leg, as she liked to do, it being long and shapely and sheathed in them lovely stockings. More attractive really than her face, which you’d a called clever more than beautiful. Then she laughed again, and said something in that particular voice made him roar, and they continued, her gait a sort of sashay dared people to confront her.