Dollface

by Renée Rosen

  When Dora answered the door I apologized for being so late.

  “Don’t be silly. Hannah’s been a little angel. C’mon in.”

  I walked into the parlor and there was my daughter, dressed in a new pretty pink outfit and a pair of new shoes. There was a teddy bear next to her on the rug.

  “Well, don’t you look beautiful,” I said, reaching for Hannah and hoisting her into my arms, freckling her face with kisses. “Where’d all this come from, huh?”

  “Just a little something from her auntie Dora.” Dora stroked Hannah’s dark curls. “We girls did a little shopping today.”

  “I can see that. You shouldn’t have, Dora.”

  “It was nothing.” Dora picked up the teddy bear and held it up so Hannah could see. “She just loves her new teddy. Don’t you?”

  Dora dangled the bear and Hannah reached for it, grabbing hold of its paw, her tiny face bursting into a smile as she giggled. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her laughing like that. Seeing my daughter so happy, I should have been grateful to Dora, but instead I felt stung and somehow I twisted Dora’s generosity into a declaration of my shortcomings as a mother. I hated feeling like that. I knew I was being self-centered and selfish and now, on top of everything else, I had reason to be ashamed of myself, too.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” said Dora, still prancing the teddy bear before Hannah’s outstretched fingers. “I just put her old clothes in a bag. If you want, I can throw them out. Everything was so small on her anyway. Besides, she’s far too pretty to be dressed like a pauper.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to say thank you or even smile, because I was buckling under the weight of my failures. And at the same time, I had a premonition: Hannah as a young girl, sitting with her friends and laughing at me, making fun of me just as I’d done to my mother.

  “C’mon, honey,” I said, clutching her closer, an ache spreading across my chest. “We have to go now.”

  While I walked to the car, I pressed my lips to Hannah’s ear and whispered, “I promise you, we’re going to be okay. I’m going to take care of you. I promise. I promise.”

  After we got home and I had put Hannah to bed, I telephoned Evelyn. “Are you free tomorrow?”

  HAULING THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD

  The next day Evelyn and I went back out in search of a customer and met with a man named Simon Marvin. When we told him what we were up to, he backed off, saying, “I don’t deal in liquor anymore. Been raided one time too many.”

  I thanked him for his time, and as Evelyn and I were walking out of his office, he called to us. “But”—he came over and removed his hat—“if you’re sure you’ve got the genuine article there, straight from Canada, you should go talk to my brother, Felix.”

  Twenty minutes later we turned up on Felix Marvin’s front steps. I noticed the mezuzah nailed to the doorjamb.

  He looked at us and smiled. The first thing he said was, “Two nice Jewish girls. That’s a new twist. Come.” He motioned us inside his office. “Simon told me you were on your way.”

  He made us coffee, offered us some strudel that his wife had baked that morning. He was kind, well dressed with manicured hands and a gleaming wedding band. There was a prayer book on the corner of his desk along with a tallis bag. I took it as a sign. Something about a Jew doing business with another Jew put me more at ease.

  After I’d poured him a taste of Warren’s whiskey, he took a sip and a reflective moment later he nodded. “I have almost a dozen speakeasies out in the suburbs. Your Canadian whiskey would make for a nice addition.”

  “It’s top-shelf.”

  “This I can tell.” He raised his glass.

  “I can let you have it for thirty dollars a case.”

  “Thirty?” He rubbed his chin and nodded. “Your price is fair. You seem like a couple of nice, hamishe girls. What you’re doing in this line of work is beyond me,” he said with a shrug. “But if I can help you and you can help me, why not, eh?”

  So after a cup of coffee and a little kibitzing, Evelyn and I had our first customer. He ordered twenty cases—more than I’d been expecting—but if we had to, we could stow a couple cases in the front seat. My only stipulation was that he had to give us half the money up front.

  It was a deal, and by nightfall, Evelyn and I both had twenty-five dollars in our pockets.

  • • •

  Evelyn was nervous on that first run. But surprisingly, I wasn’t. No, I had surpassed fear months ago. Now I was determined to do whatever I had to do in order to survive. The ride up was a breeze and this time we didn’t get lost.

  When we made it to Steel’s warehouse in Milwaukee, Warren and his men were waiting for us. After questioning where our truck was and learning that we were taking only twenty cases, Warren dismissed his men in disgust.

  “It’s hardly worth the trouble,” he said as he unlocked the back gate.

  I tried to assure him there’d be many more runs in the future but he waved my words away as if they were gnats buzzing about his head.

  While Evelyn and I hefted each case of liquor in our arms and wobbled our way to the car, he leaned back and smoked his pipe. After watching us struggle for a few minutes, he finally decided to lend a hand.

  It was a tight squeeze. We had to take the bottles out of the cases just so they would fit. Twenty minutes later, all but one case made it into the backseat, slumbering under a heavy wool blanket. The last case rode up front on the floor beneath Evelyn’s feet.

  The drive back to Chicago was fortunately uneventful, despite the rattling of the bottles in the back. I was thankful not a single one broke. When we made it to Felix’s dropoff point, he was a bit miffed when we began handing over individual bottles, so I lied and said the cases had all come in broken. He accepted this and we were on our way.

  By midnight, the two of us were another twenty-five dollars richer and even Evelyn had to admit, “This is easy!”

  When I stopped by Dora’s to pick up Hannah, Dora showed me the blanket she was knitting for my daughter.

  The sight of the wooden needles stabbed me through the heart and made my mouth go dry. “It’s beautiful.” I couldn’t look at those needles. “Sweetheart,” I said, calling to Hannah, “you ready to go home?”

  Hannah looked up at me just as Knuckles came through the back way, slamming the door with a bang so loud it frightened her. Her eyes grew wide as she let out a high-pitched scream and ran to Dora.

  I felt clobbered. Dora scooped my child up in her arms and patted soothing circles on her back. “It’s okay. Uncle Knuckles didn’t mean to scare you.”

  I pasted on a smile, overcompensating for my heartache by thanking Dora with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for heroic acts while she fastened on the new coat and hat she’d purchased for Hannah.

  “Oh, wait, don’t forget your new baby doll!”

  I reached for Hannah’s free hand as she grabbed the doll from Dora. Even though Hannah was too young to know the difference, I knew I’d have to upstage that doll with a better one.

  And it didn’t stop there. I went on a shopping spree the following week. After I’d spent all but five dollars on toys and clothes for Hannah, Felix Marvin called and ordered another fifty cases.

  “Fifty cases!” Evelyn’s eyes grew wide with alarm. She’d been sitting in the living room, listening to a radio program while I’d taken the telephone call from Felix. “We can’t fit fifty cases in the car. Why did you tell him we could do it?”

  “Because I’m broke again and I need the money.”

  “What are we going to do, make two trips up and back?”

  “I thought about that, but it’ll take too long and I don’t think Warren and Felix are too crazy about our methods as it is.” I lit a cigarette and turned off the radio. “We’ve come this far. We can’t turn back now.” I smoked down half my cigarette, thinking. “What if I . . . I borrow one of my mother’s trucks?”

  “A truck!”

  “I�
�ll tell her I’m having car trouble. She won’t question it. Business is slow, so I know there’s a truck just sitting there. Besides, Buster’s already been using the other one for liquor runs.”

  The truck was my mother’s 1925 Ford Runabout, a black Model T pickup. She’d paid two hundred and eighty-one dollars for it and if my calculations were right, Evelyn and I would be making almost that much delivering liquor one day a week. If I’d thought for one minute that we would be making regular liquor runs, I would have suggested getting our own truck. But this was temporary, just something I had to do until Shep came home.

  “What if something goes wrong?” Evelyn asked when I picked her up.

  “It’s not going to.”

  “But what if it does?”

  I reached across for the glove compartment and pulled out two of Shep’s handguns.

  “Oh, Jesus, Vera!” Her eyes nearly bulged from their sockets.

  “They’re loaded, so be careful. One for you.” I handed her the six-shot. “And a Browning Hi-Power for me.”

  “I don’t know how to shoot a gun!” But even as she said this, I saw Evelyn grip that six-shooter like she’d held a dozen guns before. She angled it this way and that. “It’s so heavy,” she said, not taking her eyes off the barrel.

  “You can put it away now,” I told her.

  It took another few minutes before her fascination wore off and she was able to part with the gun and put it back in the glove compartment where it belonged.

  When we arrived at Warren Steel’s warehouse, he wasn’t waiting for us like he had before. But he must have heard the truck pull up, because it didn’t take long before we saw him standing in the doorway, arms folded across his chest. When I said we were taking fifty cases and promised him an extra ten dollars if he had his men load the truck for us, he didn’t exactly smile, but I did see his top lip curve upward ever so slightly.

  “I told you, Mr. Steel, I’m more than fair.”

  We pulled the truck up to the dock and fifteen minutes later all the whiskey was loaded on. We kept the liquor hidden beneath layers of cowhides and rigged a heavy canvas tarp over the top and fastened it down to the sides and back of the cargo box.

  It was only as we pulled away from Warren Steel’s warehouse that the realization of what we were doing began to sink in. The drive up hadn’t fazed me. I’d driven my mother’s trucks plenty of times before. That morning we’d just stepped onto the running boards, climbed into the cab and were on our way. Just two women in an empty truck. But now that the truck was loaded with liquor it was a different story. I could feel the weight of the whiskey in the cargo box. It was like I was hauling the weight of the world behind me. I sat up close to the steering wheel, my fingers gripping tight with both hands.

  Twice I thought I saw a police car and my heart all but stopped. Turned out it was only my mind playing tricks on me but it didn’t help that Evelyn kept telling me I was driving too fast.

  “You’re only drawing attention to us,” she snapped.

  “I am not! I’m going twenty-five.” I gripped the wheel tighter. “Stop making me nervous!”

  “This was such a stupid idea,” she hissed under her breath.

  “What did you just say?” I turned and glowered at her.

  “We should have stuck with smaller runs. In the car.”

  “Why are you bringing this up now? We agreed to do this, so just shut it!”

  “Don’t tell me to shut it.”

  “Shut it! Now!”

  We didn’t have much more to say to each other until we reached our dropoff point in Chicago, where two of Felix Marvin’s men were waiting for us. They unloaded the truck, sending crate after crate down the coal chute.

  As we were driving away, I turned to Evelyn. “I’m sorry I snapped at you.”

  “I’m sorry I was making you nuts.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck, feeling the tension going away. “You do that really well, you know—make me nuts!”

  “Years of experience.” She laughed. “So how much did we make today, anyway?”

  “Let’s find out.” I pulled off to the side of the road and removed an envelope from my pocketbook. “Let’s see. . . .” I counted out a stack of bills on the front seat: two hundred-dollar bills and the rest fifties and twenties. “After Warren takes his cut, we’ve got a hundred and twenty-five. Plus the first hundred and twenty-five we already got from Felix.”

  “Not bad for a day’s work.”

  And it got even better after that.

  A few weeks later, Felix increased his order to seventy-five cases, and then one hundred cases, and by the end of our second month, we were up to five hundred cases. His business was up, Warren was happy, and Evelyn and I were making money. Turned out that selling illegal liquor was easier than I thought it would be.

  One night we were driving a truckload back to the city and Evelyn and I were sharing a cigarette—the last one either of us had—passing it back and forth, me scissoring my fingers, waiting for the handoff.

  “Will you let me drive on the next run?”

  “No! What do you think I am, crazy?” I took a drag and handed her cigarette back.

  “Please?” She looked at me all wide-eyed and hopeful.

  “You barely know how to drive a car, let alone a truck.”

  “Well, it’s not like you’re such an expert driver. Remember when we first took the truck out? You wouldn’t even let go of the wheel. You were such a nervous Nellie.”

  “That’s because I didn’t want to get us killed.”

  “Yeah, and look at you now. You just slouch back in the driver’s seat. You remind me of my father when we’d drive to the lake house in Michigan. It doesn’t look so hard. C’mon. I just want to try it once. It’ll be fun.”

  “Maybe I’ll let you do a practice run one day. Maybe!” I reached up to adjust the rearview mirror and caught myself smiling. Really, it was just as Evelyn had said: This is easy!

  “So what did Felix want to talk to you about?” she asked.

  He’d pulled me aside as we were leaving earlier. “Oh, he just mentioned that he has some friends who need liquor.”

  “That’s good, right? We should do it!” She sat up, eager, her eyes dancing. “Why wouldn’t we? Warren’s got an endless supply of whiskey looking to find a good home.”

  “I know, but I don’t want to get greedy. We have a good thing going right now. It’s manageable. I’m afraid that if we take on more jobs—if we get any bigger than we are—word could get back to the boys. We can’t risk that. And besides, I’m comfortable dealing with Warren and Felix.” I glanced at Evelyn, trying to get a bead on her. I didn’t want to let her down. “I just don’t think it’s a smart idea. We’re doing great right now. I don’t see any reason to ball things up over a couple extra dollars here and there.”

  “Whatever you say. You’re the boss.” She smiled, and even if she wouldn’t admit it, I could tell she was relieved. Evelyn was no more a gangster than I was.

  That night after I’d picked up Hannah and put her to bed, I went to my room and counted my bills, separating the hundreds from the fifties. I even had two five-hundred-dollar bills from a previous run, and I put those on top of the stack.

  In exchange for the calculated risk we were taking, I had been able to make sure there was coal for the furnace and plenty of food and warm clothing for my child. I was even able to hire back my housekeeper, something that hadn’t met with Dora’s approval. She’d wanted me to save my money and let her watch Hannah, until I asked if she wanted to clean my house as well.

  “Don’t worry,” I assured her. “I only have the housekeeper three days a week. I’ll still need a babysitter from time to time.”

  In addition to the housekeeper, I also went back to my weekly hair appointments at the beauty salon and treated myself to some new outfits. I even paid a visit to the pawnshop and was able to buy back the pieces of jewelry that were still there.

  I’d restored my credit a
nd my reputation with the department stores around town, and I’d done it on my own. It was one thing to be surrounded by money, and another thing entirely to know that you generated it yourself, even if it wasn’t through the most legitimate channels. That was the one part of the equation I didn’t want to look at. I was a mother and a businesswoman. That was how I chose to see myself. I wasn’t a bootlegger, and I certainly wasn’t a gangster. But I had my own money, and I felt as powerful as any man.

  “I don’t know what you’re up to,” Basha said, eyeing my new cloche hat, “but you’d better be careful.”

  “I’m not up to anything.” I’d just arrived at Carson’s where she’d been saving me a seat for a fashion show.

  “Baloney.” She leaned in closer to whisper, “New shoes?”

  “Oh, you’ve seen these before.” It was the first time I’d ever worn them.

  “All I know is you’ve been crying the blues, saying you’re broke, and now you’re living the high life. And I know it ain’t coming from the fellas. Squeak’s even had to cut me back.”

  “My mother helped me out.”

  “Mm-hm. Sure she did. . . .” She shook her head and looked again at my shoes. “Just watch yourself; that’s all I’m saying. While Shep’s away, you’re on your own. You get yourself into trouble and you’ll have to fend for yourself. You might want to pass some of this advice on to Evelyn, too. . . .”

  Dora also had her suspicions. “Where are you and Evelyn off to this time?” she’d asked when I’d dropped Hannah off at her house.

  I’d invented a sick aunt up in Milwaukee.

  “I see. All of a sudden you and Evelyn sure do have a lot of aunts up there, don’t you. Say hello to Aunt Millie for me.”

  THE MARKED RIG

  It may have been April, but Chicago winters didn’t always coincide with the calendar. The snow started at daybreak and was already accumulating. By nine o’clock that morning there were five inches on the ground, with heavy winds producing snowdrifts peaking twice that high.