by Mary Burns
“Can I help you, miss?”
“I came to see my…” What to call him stopped me, for husband had not yet become legally true. “The man I am promised to. I read it in the papers.”
“You know this is a Negro hospital.”
A fellow younger than me, though taller, like most, and a very narrow face, tanned, and teeth could use some fixing, but not so harsh voiced he frightened me.
“I do, but he was hurt near here, the paper said it, and I checked.”
I didn’t say what I checked, but all the same, with my oft-practiced skills, I convinced the fellow and he stepped aside to let me enter that place smelled of sick and rubbing alcohol, that rusty blood odor I knew from my monthlies, and the accidents I’d seen on the street involved more horse blood than human, but it smells the same, blood. Fans above, spreading out those perfumes to any of us dared enter, as if warning us, and women, various hues of colored women in their long dresses and their long white aprons atop and their white caps striped with black.
Right away one of them came up to me, Maeve Curragh, whose best shirtwaist was near-ruined from the great circles of perspiration her elbows aimed to hide, her face flushed, her big hat tilted maybe crazily, and she said to me, “Do you have permission to be here? Can I help you?”
Behind her the bustling of people in their hospital uniforms, and someone rolling past on a stretcher, a blanket pulled over the face, had to be dead, sure, and I could only swallow and then the tears came, and though it was Margaret who was the crier, not me, they poured as if from an overturned jug and I couldn’t stop, for what if it was Desmond lying under that sheet and rolling down the corridor barely lit? What if I was too late? I couldn’t help thinking the worst even though the arm outside the blanket was brown.
“Are you hurt, ma’am?”
Her voice kinder then, her hand at my back steering me to a bench where people waited, one boy whose bleeding forehead his mammy blotted carefully with a towel. Another, older, near my age, with his leg stretched out and misery on his face, and he moaned from time to time while I was there, which was not long. Still, long enough to register people standing, sitting, some children with their mothers, others young men—one of them scowling in the instant my eye met his—some blood dropping right onto the floor. It was no place for a white woman and a prevaricating one at that.
“It’s not me,” I started to explain, but the kind nurse only offered me a cloth, more nappy-size than a handkerchief, same as the mother was using on her injured son, and just as useful for wiping my face.
Before she hurried into the room across from the bench she said, “It’s all right. The doctor will see you when it’s your turn. Could be some time.”
For those few minutes I waited, I entertained the notion something had gone wrong with me and ’twas only myself couldn’t see it, being the fool I was. If I’d continued to wait, maybe the tall doctor I’d spied when the door across opened—his white coat stained, his specs slipped down his nose, sprigs of ivory through tufts of hair sprung from a scalp dark as any of the patients here, save for me—maybe that man would examine me and find a cause for everything and come up with a cure to rid me of it all. So coursed my wild hope, half-acknowledged, for at the same time I had no intention, really, of sitting there waiting for anyone, not in this company, people who must’ve hated or at least resented me. Not in any other company neither. I’d yet to accomplish my mission.
When the double entrance doors opened wide and a couple a policeman carried in someone on a pallet, someone stabbed—a tailor they said, near death—the doctor bustled out of his examining room and listened to the man’s heart, and shooed away anyone in the path leading to the operating theater down the hall. With everyone’s attention focused there, ’twas my chance to leave the bench for the stairway in the center of the building. More humble those steps than the ones where I’d perched with Ruth at the Marquette—felt like a year before, though it’d been only a day. Wood for this banister, and it well worn above the iron railings supported it. No marble, no, but the portal leading to the second floor worth more to me than any marble or brass or beautiful mosaic pictures.
Where I would find him, I did not know. I would have to put on my most assured manner, aim to be casual. Be someone who not only belonged here, but was accustomed to the place despite her appearance, this small white-skinned woman with a hobble in her step and a hat hid her true looks. I would search every room until I found him. I never thought I would not find him. It would be only a matter of method, peering into a room, all more or less like the first, walls painted white, ceiling fans turning high up, iron bedsteads, men resting, some groaning, some old, the stink of their uncontrolled bowels. No Desmond there. Nor in the room across, more beds, these for women, must a been. A long-aproned nurse, back turned to me, tending to a very large lady, bulk almost too great for that narrow iron bed. I slipped in and slipped out.
Unless I was mistaken, there’d been a light face on one of them pillows, the face of a white woman. The clock on the wall said one o’clock.
The image of that clock returns as if it is ticking right here in front of my eyes as I lay on this bed and stare at the fellow in the picture framed on the wall across. Professor Einstein himself, but with his wild hair and the drooping mustache colored a bright turquoise blue against a field of yellow, and words in the same screaming blue as his hair: “The only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once.”
They could a put a holy card there, or a calendar or something, but they left the room as it was when the oldest ran off, them maybe thinking she’d return soon, or I wouldn’t be here for long. No doubt they are right, at least about me. I know what stands near, big, quiet, waiting for me. When does not matter. With me here living a week transpired half a century ago, it more alive than the sounds from down below, I can’t help but consider what my companion on the picture across from me says, the man everyone called a genius. Yet despite all the clocks, the calendars, the day and the month and the year printed at the top of each edition of all the many papers so’s everyone could keep track of what went on when, everything did happen at once that week in Chicago, and the sorting out has taken a lifetime.
I was torn between continuing along them hospital corridors until I found Desmond, or finding a place to tidy myself first, for with the crying, and the sweating, and the exhaustion, I had to look a fright. Some cold water on my face would help, and a minute to smooth my hair and adjust my hat smelled of my dear sister, the oil came from her hair, and didn’t she seem that far away.
I found cleaning closets, cabinets for storing medicines, another room with a glass window for patients with infectious diseases, a sign above the window forbidding entry. As I continued down the hall I never nodded to any who passed, but carried on as if I knew exactly where I was going and what I planned to do when I reached my destination.
That confidence, or the good people, or St. Brigid, or magic, or just dumb luck, ensured I did see a lav. I slipped in, and while it was only a toilet with a small sink, mirror above, it gave me a chance to breathe and cool my face and flap my arms like the addled birds rising up from the frying pan in George’s drawing of “The Wizard’s Omelette.” This I did in an effort to dry the ponds beneath. Of course, I could not wait there long enough for any kind of breeze to spring up, no, and so only let myself drift a second as if I’d actually sprouted wings and I could raise him, like we saw in the books at the mission when angels gathered someone up to heaven, but this time it would be a heaven of our own making, us together, and my love for him would speed his healing. He would walk again, and work the cars, and we would have our four children who would not only swim but also play the piano. If you believe something, it has to be so, just on the power of conviction. Mr. R’d said it and the books said it, too. I closed my eyes, and if something slipped inside my heart, like grains of soil at the edge of a ditch, could it a meant my faith
was wanting? Was it me, then, the one at fault?
At the end of the hallway, another stairway, and the first room at the top of it small, and sad so, for instead of the usual iron beds were cribs made of the same stuff, children, babies in them, like the little ones I cared for in Florida and came to love. Like the little sisters we’d left behind in Ennis, the youngest, Kathleen, whose face we’d never see. One of the children was standing, his head afire with a full head of frizzy hair, like a halo created by the light behind it, and bawling in a heartbreaking way, but futilely, with no one to comfort. Between his wails, he caught sight of me and he cried even harder, maybe hoping I’d pick him up and didn’t I long to, but from there in the corner, fussing over another, came the shh-shh of someone too busy to do all there was to do. While the child continued to mourn his unhappy state, his face wet with tears glistened on his clear brown skin, and two thick trails of white snot escaping his nose, I moved along before the busy one could see me.
Still, it stayed with me, that scene, and it caused me to wonder what satisfaction I might find in nursing. This was later, when it came up again, that wanting to help feeling led me to the job took me out of the city. At that moment, though, it was not nursing I aimed for, not a profession, no, but marriage, and a family, and a life in Chicago maybe not as swell as the folks at the north end of Prairie Avenue, but comfortable all the same. A man with a steady job and a house somewhere in the city, further west on Monroe maybe, or one of the nicer neighborhoods across the river.
Yes, chaos in the ward for children, but no less outside on the ground where bells clanged and loud shouts pierced the open windows three floors up. I could hear feet tramping and hollering. Later it came out that most of them, five hundred or so, injured in the riot’d been colored people. Many injured would a been taken to Provident and could a been dying right around me, suffering anyway, but there had to be one white man here, if the papers were right, and sometimes they were not, I knew, because you saw a box regular, on page two, for corrections. When the governor put out his report about the riot, turned out the papers’d had most of it wrong really, most of them days. Wouldn’t you know they downplayed that part, seeing how it was their news being criticized. Just because it’d been there for us all to read, plain as day in black and white, didn’t mean it’d been true, those stories. Seems a good part’d come from the imagination of reporters as frightened as the rest of us.
I heard another child also wailing in another small room across the hall, but another ward for children? Could there be so many little ones sick? The door was half shut, but I opened it a bit and stared in and saw the source of the misery, another baby perhaps not sick, but upset for a reason only he knew. Flaxen-haired and cradled by a woman with hair the same, her standing and jiggling and blocking from my sight the person lying in the bed.
Maybe this was the room saved for white folks needed it, so my heart sped again and I licked my lips, and blinked my eyes clear, for if he should be conscious I wanted him to take pleasure from looking at me, and didn’t I wish I’d stopped at one of the candy stores downtown and brought a box of fudge to treat him, or something comforting, or a cold drink. But I could run down after I’d stayed awhile, run down to the street when it was safe and find something with the bit of money in the pocketbook I’d clutched tightly through all the city.
It was him. Though a white cotton bandage swathed his head, though his bruised lids covered that memorable green, and his long leg was lifted in a device for holding it steady till it healed, and the bottom of the big foot exposed, though he was not the same charming car man with a grin could liven your day and a patter could boost a smile to a laugh, it was him. The nose a little big, those hands with the long fingers beautiful so, even then, lying on the white sheet, and I was about to rush forward to pick up one of them hands and hold it to my lips when the mother of the crying child turned and saw me.
“Thank goodness,” said she. “I thought he was the only one. Why they didn’t just take him to Mercy I don’t know. It’s dangerous. I didn’t even feel safe getting here—had to take a cab—let alone walking in. I heard talk of holding some whites hostage, but I couldn’t keep away. Where is your husband? Is there a special room for us?”
She moved close to the bed then and took the hand I meant to kiss, and patted it, and said there, there, or some such, and in my ears a tornado was howling, funneling right into my bowels. She’s talking about how he got mixed up with a group of thugs on the cars, late on Sunday. Sunday! Didn’t do a thing himself, wouldn’t, she said, even if he had no great love for all the Negroes moving into all the white neighborhoods and taking over the city. Attacked. Right in his own neighborhood, not six blocks from Wentworth Avenue. Attacked!
“Are you all right?”
“Me?” I whispered it.
“Is he bad, then? Your husband? Are they operating?”
I wanted to tell her he’s the same one lying there, still handsome, if powerless, unconscious. But it was never her put him up to his flirting, never her who made him choose me. The child of theirs quiet, curious about the small woman in the big hat like a trembling statue at the foot of his father’s bed. Something cold, the deepest violet inside pushing to burst out of me. The tornado that’d tunneled in my ears passed through quickly enough but, instead of clear sky, bruised clouds and a ringing like the after-chime of a struck bell.
“He’s gone,” I said. And my eyes flooded like they’d done downstairs when I came in so exhausted and someone said a kind word. For sure, he was gone, just as certain as if he died of his wounds, which he did not. I looked in the list of the thirty-eight dead published later in the week and saw no Desmond Malloy. While all the air went out of my hopes there in Provident Hospital, as I stood at the end of the bed where he lay, unconscious still, or perhaps only sleeping to avoid the trouble could rise should he recognize me, people were breathing their last in some other part of the building, and in the other hospitals, too, most at the biggest, Cook County Hospital, which I had not stepped foot in yet, but would, and not for dying.
Epilogue
I never more saw the man I’d thought my own on the Madison line when the cars started up again, not on that first Saturday, not any other day. Nor on Halsted where I continued to wander that summer after work, sometimes going into a show by myself, rather than back to Bridey’s room and Margaret’s talk. She did not pester me long, Margaret. I told her I’d had news about him being hurt in the riot and I didn’t know if I’d see him again. When I said the same to Eveline, she assured me I’d find another. “Plenty of fish in the sea,” she added, not knowing it would take an act of Congress to get me anywhere near water again, which fear I passed on to my daughter. Sadly. For all she ended up near to his height, with that peak pointed down her lovely forehead, Irene Janet never took to swimming.
I am a small woman, I was always small, and maybe my size made it obvious sooner. Come Thanksgiving I could no longer disguise my condition. I wished Mr. R could wave his wand and reverse time, so instead of the unfortunate woman who apologized with words and the whole beat down position of her body and told him she would be leaving at the end of the week, so instead of that wretched creature it would be the earlier version of Maeve Curragh there standing before him, trembling at the prospect of working in such a grand building where she expected to see all the famous magicians she knew from the vaudeville stages.
Even before that moment Eveline guessed and said to me, not unkindly, “I wish you would a talked to me, like I said. You can do things to stop babies coming. You bog trotters. You never have enough of them. Criminy!”
Mr. R’d seen it all before, and Florence, and Ruth maybe, too. Florence never said much and Ruth only cried and hugged me. Not too close, though, not so she came in contact with my rounding middle. “And you thought he was the one! Poor Maeve.” Torn she was between scolding and comforting, because I told them all he’d died—same as I told Margaret, and
my Irene, who later told the same to her children. In the eyes of my workmates, that news took the edge off my sin or my recklessness, whatever it was they called it in their minds. Foolish, no matter how you looked at it.
Oh, but I’d wanted him so!
My last day at The Chicago Magic Company, as I got off the car that already dark November evening, knowing the next hurdle to face was going to be Bridey, the newsies were hollering the way that they did.
LIGHTS ALL ASKEW IN THE HEAVENS!
And didn’t I look up to see if my predicament’d affected even the stars, but no. It was the first I heard of that Professor Einstein was to become so famous on account of twisting our sense of time. The same Professor Einstein now stares at me from the wall across as I stew here in the juices of the past bubbled up, about to dissolve me.
I was a marked woman. Gladys did not give me up entirely, but I never saw her much. Sure she was busy with Florence, the two of them out looking for clothes, and maybe attending them parties at the aunt’s house. Gladys’s aunt. I wouldn’t a had the outfit for those parties myself, so it was just as well I never went. I didn’t blame Gladys for anything, nor Margaret when Harry made her choose between me and him. She pleaded with me to understand. They’d found the flat they wanted and would be married before my child came into the world. So far along I was by then, there’d be no way to disguise my condition. Harry’s family would think bad of her, Margaret said, to be the sister of someone did what she was supposed to wait to be married to do. Of course I understood, it being me in the wrong, and all. We suspected Harry would come round after making his stand.
And so it was Eveline saved me. When my time came ’twas Eveline and Mr. Jordan took me to Cook County Hospital and went and fetched Margaret who eventually found Gladys and they were all there to greet us with flowers and a cake, me and little Irene Janet—who was born at midday and better for her, so, because the good people might not meddle with her. When Cook County let me go with her, my daughter, back to my room, Mr. Jordan brought me more of the typing supported us that first year, Irene’s first.