Katie

by Michael McDowell

  The way to Cookstown took the wagon past the Varleys’. All the windows of the house were lighted for Jewel’s come-out party. Lanterns had been strung in the garden. And carriages had begun to arrive, bringing guests from all over the county, from towns as close and small as Cassville and as far away and important as Toms River. Jewel was at the open door, lighted from behind, and greeting her guests with her high and peculiar laugh.

  And at the edge of the Varleys’ garden, with the low iron fence between them, Philo saw Henry Maitland in conversation with the marshal, who had come to New Egypt to arrest her for two murders.

  The wagon rolled on, and Philo Drax, who had always held her head high, left the home of her birth cowering beneath a horsehair blanket.

  In another hour Philo had reached Cookstown again. She thanked Mrs. Libby, wept on her breast, and then sent the good woman back to her children. Half an hour later she boarded the cars, then changed at Mount Holly for a train going north. The dawn of the next morning saw her, pale and silent, at the Hoboken docks, waiting for the Christopher Street ferry to take her across the North River to New York.

  Chapter 23

  ELLA LaFAVOUR

  As she sat on the Hoboken dock, waiting for the ferry, Philo had only the wicker case she had purchased the previous afternoon in Cookstown and a small satchel with the very few items she had hastily thrown together at Mrs. Libby’s. Of her mother, she had no remembrance but the wedding ring that the undertaker’s wife had pried from Mary Drax’s finger just before she went into her coffin. In her pocket she carried an envelope with the two hundred fifty dollars she had received from Mr. Killip, and the further eight hundred from the sale of the house to Mr. MacMamus. Such a sum – over a thousand dollars – seemed vast to Philo, and she was very happy to have it. It would doubtless take her time to become established in New York. She was not afraid of work and was convinced that in time she would succeed at something. But she had no skills, and this money would get her through her apprenticeship in whatever profession she chose to take up.

  Philo was not entirely at her ease, even so far away from New Egypt as she was now. Who knew but that someone had seen her board the train at Cookstown, and the marshal pursuing her had discovered her route, and that some officer of the law was bearing down upon her even now. She would feel much safer when she was actually out of New Jersey.

  Philo had seated herself on a piling of the pier on which the ferry would dock. After ten minutes or so of cautious looking around, Philo caught the eye of a young woman – tall and slight and perhaps a few years older than herself – who stood nearby. The young woman approached with a quick gait. Her dress was fine, but to the practiced eye of the daughter of a seamstress, showed unmistakable signs of long usage and careful repair.

  “Going to stay?” cried the young woman without any other introduction, adding a shrill laugh and a jerk of her shoulders.

  “I beg your pardon?” replied Philo politely.

  “Stay in New York, I mean? You’re from the country.” She jerked her shoulders. “I know it.” She jerked her shoulders again.

  Philo smiled. “I must show unmistakable signs of verdancy,” she said, quoting something she had read somewhere.

  “Somebody dead?” shrilled Ella LaFavour, eyeing Philo’s black clothing.

  Philo nodded. “I’m in mourning for my mother and grand­father.”

  “Leave you money?”

  Philo thought this a rude question, and she replied sharply, “Your manners would lead me to believe that you were from the city.”

  The young woman took no offense at this remark. “Visiting a friend for two days in Pompton Plains. Place is dead as Sodom. Ever been there?”

  “No,” replied Philo. “I have never travelled much.”

  “Visited a friend,” the young woman said, leaning over con­fidingly, “said he was in love with me from his hatband to his boots.” She spoke in a whisper, but even her whisper was shrill. “Would you have believed him if you was me?”

  Philo didn’t know what to say and so said nothing.

  “I wouldn’t have,” the young woman went on. “And turned out he wasn’t worth the shoes he wears to the polls. Had a fiancée . . .” She spoke the word with two syllables only, “. . . in Murray Hill. Got a look at her too – ugly enough to frighten a horse. So now I’m going back to New York.” She turned and gazed at the city. She leaned on the rope, kicked a scrap of paper into the water, and sighed. “Lord! That place is a sight for men and angels!”

  The ferry was drawing close to Hoboken pier. Philo watched its approach with much interest and no little excitement. The young woman who had confided so much to Philo introduced herself as Ella LaFavour, and Philo told her name as well.

  Philo said, “I’ve never been to New York before. But I’m alone in the world now, and I thought I might as well try to live there as anywhere else.”

  Ella stared across the river at the city and nodded her approval of this plan.

  “Know anybody?” she asked.

  Philo shook her head. “Only you.”

  “I’ll help you,” said Ella. “What you need is a place to live and something to do.”

  “Yes,” agreed Philo.

  “How much can you afford a week?” said Ella.

  Philo thought a moment. “What do you pay?”

  “Four, but I share a room. If I lived on my own, I’d be paying seven.”

  “I could afford seven, I suppose, but I think I’d rather pay four. Besides, sharing the room, I’d have company.” Philo smiled sadly. “I’m not used to living alone.”

  “There’s an empty chamber where I’m staying, on Thirteenth Street. Not much I don’t think. A view of a dead tree and an old peeling wall, but the window sash goes up and down, and there’s a Morning Glory stove in the corner. You pay for your own coals, though you can store as much as you want in the cellar for free.”

  “Is it a rooming house – the place where you live?” asked Philo. She had heard of rooming houses.

  Ella nodded. “All young ladies, happy to say. Been in places where all the parlor draperies smelt of tobacco. That’s what happens when you live with young men,” she added as a fillip of instruction for Philo. “Landlady’s not much in the cooking line but she’s honest as a pulpit. You’d have the room next to hers, and I’d best warn you: Mrs. Classon snores as if all creation had the croup. She can shake down the plaster.”

  “Do you think she’ll allow me to live there?” asked Philo anxiously. It would be providential good fortune if she could find a place to live without going first to the expense of putting up at a hotel.

  “Don’t see why not!” cried Ella. “You’re a respectable-looking thing! Little dull around the edges, but get you out of that mourning . . .”

  The ferry lurched against the pier, and in another moment the ropes were unloosed. Philo was nearly knocked into the water by the horde of passengers that stormed off the boat. She drew back in alarm, but ten minutes later, pushed and prodded by her new friend, Philo was the first to board the ferry for the return journey.

  The boat was a quarter of an hour in the loading, and no longer in the crossing. Philo stood on the prow with Ella, and both young women – one returning to the city as home, the other visiting it for the first time – grew equally excited as they neared the Christopher Street pier.

  “Move along! Move along!” shrieked Ella behind her as the ropes once more were loosened. “Or we’ll be trampled!”

  All those persons who had seemed unoccupied, indolent, and careless on board the ferry turned into dynamos of movement as soon as their feet touched the boards of Manhattan and their lungs had filled with its soot.

  Philo stared about her wide-eyed. So great a concourse of people she had never seen before: not only those who had come over on the ferry with them – businessmen, farmers, ladies and their children, excursioners – but the workers at the docks, loungers, sailors, businessmen whose business was here, police­men, and more i
ll-kempt, scruffy little boys than she could have imagined existed in the entire world.

  One of these last ran up to her immediately and began tugging at the handle of her case. “Smash yer baggage, Miss?” he squealed.

  In alarm, fearing that the child meant to steal it, Philo attempted to wrest it away from him again, but Ella interfered.

  “He means he wants to carry it for you,” she said. “Let him. A dime if you’ll take it to West Thirteenth Street. No. 224,” she said to the boy. With this directive, he gave a final jerk to the bag, freed it from Philo’s grasp, and immediately disappeared into the crowd.

  Philo protested.

  “There’s thieves, all right,” said Ella. “But that’s not one.”

  And by the time they had reached the house where Ella lodged, the boy was sitting on the stoop with the case under his feet. In the doorway stood a thin lady of middle years, with a pinched nose, a pale washed-out complexion, and limp cork­screw curls.

  “She wants to share!” shrieked Ella when they were half a block away and without any other introduction of Philo to her prospective landlady.

  “Take the whole,” wheezed Mrs. Classon in a voice so breathy it could scarcely be heard by the little baggage-smasher sitting on the steps five feet below her.

  Philo by this time had reached the stoop. She took a dime from her porte-monnaie and handed it to the baggage-smasher. He took off running as if Philo had raised an axe over his head rather than paid him for a service contracted for and rendered.

  “Seven,” wheezed Mrs. Classon, and held up one hand spread wide and two fingers of her other hand. “Now.”

  “See the chamber first!” shrieked Ella behind her, and poked Philo in the ribs.

  Mrs. Classon reluctantly moved aside, and Philo entered a corridor hardly wider than the front door. She ascended a rickety staircase, so narrow she had to hold her bag in front of her. On the second floor, as on the first, she saw only a succession of closed doors, and the paper on the walls was even more dismal up here than below. Ella prodded Philo up to the third floor, where she pushed open a little narrow door into a chamber that was about twelve feet by ten. It had, as Ella had promised, a window looking out onto a peeling wall. Below was a dismal spot of ground that only in the distorted imagination of a New Yorker might be termed a garden. The Morning Glory stove in the room’s corner looked as if it had been for some years kept on a very strict rationing of coals. A hole had been roughly knocked through the paper, plaster and brick chimney, and the pipe crudely inserted, so that that entire portion of the room was black with escaped soot.

  There was a bed with a rent mattress atop it and a little pile of feathers beneath it; a chair with the legs wired together; a table so lopsided that a pencil placed on it would immediately roll onto the floor; a flawed mirror; and a pine dresser that had been painted black and then decorated with advertising cards. The walls were covered with a lozenged paper of blue roses, faded more in some places than in others.

  It was not a room to delight Philo, but she turned with a smile to Ella, who stood with her arms crossed in the doorway, now and then jerking her shoulders, as if creating periods to her silent thoughts.

  “I’ll stay,” said Philo.

  Chapter 24

  “EVER HAD A BEAU?”

  Nine other young women were resident at Mrs. Classon’s board­ing­ house, and at table that evening, Philo was introduced to them. She despaired of learning all their names. What seemed most significant about New York to her was not its size – she had seen but a few streets – but the multiplicity of all that it con­tained. Not two boys to “smash your baggage” when you got off the pier but fifty; not three rooming houses to choose from but hun­dreds; not one new friend the first day but a dozen.

  The young women all seemed tall and angular to Philo, but then she realized that what she was accounting height and angularity was merely an alertness and a sharpness of demeanor. They laughed and joked in what Philo had always imagined to be quite a masculine fashion. She blushed when they chafed her for her greenness, but Ella LaFavour cried out in her defense, “Hush, you all! When I first come to the city I was grass-green, fast color, and warranted to wash! Thought I was going to live on wedding cake and strawberries to the end of the chapter!”

  Her shrill voice had quieted them, and after that all the women promised they would assist Philo in getting a foothold in the city. Philo hoped that this promise was not lightly given.

  After supper she and Mrs. Classon and Ella sat in the front parlor, and Philo heard the rules of the house: rent paid on time or your baggage is set on the steps, no begging for the larder key after supper, no late breakfasts, no gentleman beyond the front parlor, no sitting in the windows on hot nights. Only this last precaution Philo did not understand the necessity of, since it did not interfere either with Mrs. Classon’s ease or the economy of the house, but the landlady only replied mysteriously, “Gives the place a bad air,” and nodded sagaciously. She was given a latchkey. “Street door locked at ten, but girls, I know, is sometimes out later than that. . . .”

  At this, Ella laughed convulsively. Mrs. Classon laughed her­self, as if suddenly seeing the humor of her own remark. Philo was bewildered.

  Two other young women were in the parlor, both of them waiting for gentlemen who had promised to call; this was the situation as well with Ella.

  To pass the time Philo was asked to tell of herself. However, when Philo began to speak of her mother and New Egypt, Ella cried out, “Oh, that’s old stuff! Tell us, Philo: ever had a beau?”

  Philo blushed, then smiled. “No,” she replied, “I never have.”

  The other two young women, Laura and Ida, expressed their disbelief.

  Philo blushed again. “Just once,” she admitted.

  “Was he fair?” asked Laura.

  “Was he rich?” demanded Ida.

  “He had dark hair and dark eyes,” replied Philo, “and a dark moustache, but he had no money. It’s been a long while since I thought of him.”

  “What was his name?” said Ella.

  “Wesley,” Philo replied.

  “And he married your best chum, I’ll wager!” cried Laura.

  “He went off to war,” said Philo.

  The three young women were silent a moment.

  “He fought at Savage Station, Glendale, Malvern Hills, Charles City Crossroads, Bristow Station, Second Bull Run, Chan­cel­lors­ville, Kelley’s Ford, and Wapping Heights. He was taken prisoner at Locust Grove, and he died in Andersonville.”

  There was silence for a few moments as Philo completed her melancholy recitation. The only young woman at Mrs. Classon’s who had not lost a brother, father, playmate, or sweetheart to the War was a young woman who had been orphaned since her second year.

  “Papa died in Andersonville,” said Laura after a moment.

  “And not a beau since the War?” asked Ida of Philo. “Do you keep him alive in your heart?”

  Philo shook her head with a smile. “Wesley would have married me – he asked me. I was too young to say yes then, but I would have if he had come back from the War. And after the War, after Papa died, Mother and I were very poor. For my dowry I’d have an old sewing basket and a bolt of cloth – and everybody in New Egypt knew it. Who’d come knocking at my door?”

  There was only a moment of silence, then the door knocker sounded. The four young women shook off their sudden melan­choly. Ella ran into the hallway and opened the street door. Two gentlemen were there – Philo could distinguish so many voices – but they did not enter the house. This disappointed her for she was curious to see the suitors. Ella and Laura went away, with hasty farewells.

  “Oh, lord,” sighed Ida, “I don’t think my gentleman is going to come after all. He was to be here half an hour ago.”

  “Perhaps he was unavoidably detained,” said Philo politely.

  “I could weep like a weary child,” said Ida Yearance, uncon­soled. She was a blonde, of slender figure and gr
aceful form, with blue and dreamy eyes. She was dressed in bright green and wore red boots.

  Philo was at a loss how to continue. She had, in truth, almost no experience in dealing with strangers. In New Egypt, she had always known everyone. She picked up and began leaf­ing through an occasional book of short prose, poetry, and sen­ti­mental en­gravings called The Gem for 1868. “You’re not over-occupied nei­ther,” said Ida.

  “No,” replied Philo with a smile.

  “Come out with me then. Let’s you and me go for a walk.”

  To this diversion Philo agreed readily, but then she hesit­ated a moment and asked of her new friend, “Will we be quite safe?”

  “Safe?” repeated Ida.

  “Are we likely to be set upon? Robbed in the street?”

  Ida considered a moment. Then she said, “Philo, if you have money, I’d hide it in my room somewhere, and take out with you only what you think you’ll need. Money can slip out of a pocket without you being aware.”

  “Pickpockets, you mean?”

  Ida nodded.

  Philo ran upstairs, took the envelope from her pocket, and looked all round the room for the best place to hide it. She didn’t fear for the honesty of the other girls in the house, but tales of New York made her look for a place where the envelope couldn’t be easily detected. At last she lifted one of the loose tiles on which the cold Morning Glory stove rested and slipped her thick enve­lope of bills underneath that. She stood on the opposite side of the room and peered into that corner, but could detect no more than a slight unevenness there. Satisfied, she put on her hat and gloves and came down again.

  Ida was waiting at the door, talking to Gertrude Major, the young woman of the house who seemed to Philo the quietest, soberest, and most refined. She had a plain but sweet countenance and wavy auburn hair.

  Gertrude smiled. “May I accompany you and Ida, Philo? I feel the want of air this evening.”