Mrs. Engels

by Gavin McCrea

  That night Frederick doesn’t stay the night, for he can’t be seen walking to the mill from this direction in the morning. I hear him leave around midnight. Mary comes straight into me.

  “I’m tired,” I says. “And we’re up early.”

  She pays me no heed. Gets into the bed beside me. “I’ve told him,” she says.

  “Told him what?” I says, though I know well what.

  “About my circumstances.”

  “Oh, for Christ sake. Good night, Mary.”

  “If I’m not pregnant now, Lizzie, I will be before long. It’s not a real lie.”

  I shake my head in the dark. “And is he happy about your circumstances?”

  “That’s the thing. He’s over the moon.”

  “Suffering Jesus.”

  “He’s going to stick by us.”

  “Is he now.”

  “He’s going to put us in a bigger place, maybe even farther into the country, for the fresh air, and as soon as I start to show, he’s going to tell everybody and move in with us himself.”

  “Us? Who’s this us?”

  “You, me, and the babby. And him.”

  I laugh. “Have you lost your senses?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You think I’m going to stick round here and take on the burden of your mistakes? Sit up for your dirty issue? Clean the crap out of his nappies?”

  “You’re twisting my meaning.”

  “You’re the one that’s twisting, Mary. Twisting the good out of everything.”

  “You’re my family, Lizzie, and you’ll soon be Frederick’s too. He vowed to look after you.”

  “Look after me?”

  Out of naught a vision of Moss comes: nuddy as Our Savior on the cross. “Better to marry me,” he says, “than to burn in this hell.”

  The next day, after the bells ring, I go looking for him. He’s not hard to find. I take the seat beside him.

  “Two more of those,” I says to the tapstress.

  “What do you want?” he says.

  “I’m sorry for yesterday, Moss.”

  He shakes his head. “Arrah, you don’t have to be sorry, Lizzie Burns. You’re a good woman. I’m not worth you.”

  I touch his hand. “Enough of that, Moss. You’re worth more than most I know.”

  He looks at me then, and through his blinking eyes, I can see his urges.

  “I’m getting you out of here,” I says.

  And he follows. You don’t understand the power you have till you test it.

  We can’t go to his house, for he shares with other men, and I’ll not bring him to ours, not with Mary there to fling the dirt, so I lead him up the passages. We start a couple of times, but we’re not left alone for long.

  “I know a place,” Moss says. “But it costs.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I says.

  He brings me down Great Ancoats and into a neighborhood I can’t name. The room is bright enough and tidy. The lass who shows us up is younger and has a plainer, cleaner face than you’d suppose.

  “Thanks,” I says when I hand her the coins.

  “You have till the morning,” she says. “Nine on the clock. If you leave before, you don’t get it back.”

  His bit is a thick log that sobers me and gives me second thoughts.

  “You ought know something, Moss,” I says.

  “What?” he says, lifting his head out of my mammies.

  “I know my way around a man, but I’ve never let one inside.”

  His eyes go wide and his brow creases, and I can’t tell if he’s more surprised by my frankness or by my maidenhead.

  Once it’s in, there’s little in the act that surprises me. I lie under and he goes over, and I search in it for the pleasure, though it’s over before I catch more than a spark.

  Afterwards he stretches out beside me, puts an arm across my belly.

  “If I’m up the pole,” I says, “will you run off like you did in the park?”

  “I’m sorry about that, only I didn’t feel right. I was riled up, and when I’m like that my manners are not of the best. I hope you can forgive me.”

  “I suppose.” I put my arm to rest over his.

  We’re like this till I’m almost asleep. But then he chooses to say, “I was engaged to be married, you know. In Ireland.”

  “I don’t need to know about that, Moss.”

  “She was a fine girl and I loved her, but I had to leave. It was the only way.”

  “Please, Moss, that’s all none of my business.”

  He sits up on his elbow. Looks down at me. “I hope you’ll make me your business now.”

  “Let’s see what happens.”

  What happens is not a babby but ulcers on my fingers and about my cunny.

  “You filthy bastard,” I says to him when he comes to see me at the lock hospital, “you big dirty filthy bastard, you’ve given me the Old Joe,” and if I’d strength enough to mete him out a lashing I’d do it, in front of the nurses and all.

  “I didn’t know, Lizzie,” he says, holding out another posy of his picked flowers. “Please believe me, I didn’t know.”

  I wave the weeds away. “Well, you don’t have to worry anyhows. Frederick is paying for the mercury.”

  “Lizzie, please forgive me.”

  “You’ll have to take the same yourself before you get another lass into this mess.”

  “Oh, Lizzie—”

  “I can talk to Frederick for you, if you want. About covering the costs.”

  He falls into the chair by the bed, white as death. Around us, the women cough and moan.

  “Lizzie, let me marry you,” he says after looking at me for a long while.

  “Proposals, Moss? This is not the time.”

  “I’ve naught only what I stand upright in, but I love you and want to look after you.”

  “Are you talking out of shame, or do you mean it?”

  He doesn’t have to reply. I can tell by the way he takes grip of the bedsheets that he means it, violent.

  It’s men are at the bottom of every plague in this world. We come to the lock with this frontmost in our minds, and as we lie here stewing in our cures and wondering if we’ll be next to go cripple, or walk off into fits, or turn so childish we’ve to be washed in bath chairs and given to drink with a spoon in a teacup, our knowledge turns to action: sometimes screams or fists but most often somber vows of chastity breathed out into the late-night miasmas. “Dear Lord,” we says. “Dear Lord God Our Father, if You find the grace to spare me, I’ll never go near another one again.” And we’re dead earnest. We believe ourselves new-made saints. And we make the same vow the next night and every night after, till we’re told by some twist-whiskered pup that we’re saved and can likely leave in the morning. And now we’re so grateful—so effin’ overglad—our holy promises are dropped and we forgive the dirty drakes everything. More than that, when we see them biding by the door to take us home, it’s Lucky me! we think. Lucky me to have such a morsel worrying after me!

  Moss goes for my elbow and I let him have it, but when he uses it to slow my walk, I take it back from him and says, “I don’t need a crutch, I can get around grand.” And farther on, when he lays hold of my hip to help me cross a road: “Don’t handle me like I’ve lost the use of myself. I’m well and not changed.”

  We stop for a pause at Ducie Bridge. Shoulder-to-shoulder, we lean over the parapet where the bricks have fallen away. The weather being dry, the river is shrunk to a string of pools. Caught in the weirs, the slime sits out to dry and rot. The stink is enough to make you dizzy, but we close our noses to it and stay.

  “Look,” I says, pointing to the sky above the tanneries.

  “What?” he says, searching in vain. “What is it?”

  “Arrah, you’re too slow. It’s gone behind. It was a seagull.”

  We come away. My knees are sore after the weeks of lying slack, and by the time we reach Salford, I’m in a mighty sweat. We bu
y ass’s milk and brandy balls from a coster outside Weaste station, and eat and drink sitting on an overturned cart.

  “Moss, you need to know something.”

  He stops chewing and looks at me in a tone of “Ah, Lizzie, what’s this? Do I really need to know anything?”

  “If you don’t like what I say,” I says, “you can walk. I’m giving you license to turn on your heel and go. I won’t hold it against you.”

  He looks at me, afraid.

  I throw what’s left of my sweet to the mice and rub my fingers on my skirt. “I can no longer have children. That part of me has been taken.”

  He drops his face down to his boots. “So we’ll do without and we’ll live better for it.”

  His answer comes too fast and I don’t trust it. “Look at me, Moss.”

  He lifts up, his eyes ashiver from too much talk.

  “Don’t you want a family? A homestead of your own? Without the hope of little ones, would there be any sense to us?”

  “I’d go on happy with just the two of us.”

  “You says that now.”

  “I says that now and I mean it. The most I can give in this life is my word.”

  And what more, for brutal truth, could I ask?

  Sat on the cart, we stay, and watch the bodies come out of the station. The swells and sailors coming from Liverpool. The Manchester men climbing into their gigs.

  “Did you make friends at least?” he says.

  “In the lock?” I says.

  He nods.

  I smile and poke him in the side. “All I’ll miss from that place is the laudanum.”

  We get up and walk the rest of the way. At the end of my road we kiss.

  “Leave me here, Moss.”

  “I want to go in with you.”

  “Nay, I’ll do this alone.”

  “I’ll bide here.”

  “Go home and I’ll call on you tomorrow.”

  “Don’t change your mind, Lizzie. Don’t let them talk you against me.”

  “Don’t be fretting and git.”

  He doesn’t move till I peel him off and push.

  “Go on, skedaddle.”

  I don’t have the key, so I have to knock.

  “Here she is, back,” says Mary, opening. She kisses me on the side of the head above the ear.

  Frederick is here. “Look at you,” he says, taking me from her and planting on my cheeks. “More ravishing than ever.”

  She’s cooked a fish, I can smell it.

  “I hope you’ve not gone to any trouble. I’m not terrible hungry. It’s more tired is what I am.”

  “You’re out of breath,” Mary says. “Have you been walking?”

  “Just a little.”

  “Why didn’t you get a cab back? The money I gave you yesterday, didn’t you use it to get a cab?”

  “It’s not the walking. I’m just tired out after all the time on my back.”

  “Well, come on, you’ll sit and have something.”

  “Just a drink, Mary, please. That’s all I want.”

  From the armchair I listen to them eat. The whiskey softens the noise of them, their scrape and swallow. It softens Mary’s ire, too, when final she decides to release it.

  “Oh, but she’s some willful one,” she says, the same as if I’m not sitting here two paces away, “insisting on going into the lock like a pauper when she’d have been cared for best here at home.”

  “Leave it be, Mary,” says Frederick.

  I don’t look over. I keep fixed on the window and the day that’s darkening on the other side.

  “Well, she’s cured,” she says. “I suppose that’s the main thing.”

  When they’re finished, they bring their glasses over to the sofa.

  “Aren’t you going to give her the gift?” says Mary to Frederick after he’s sat.

  “Ah, ya,” he says, getting up again and going off to the bedroom.

  When he’s good and gone, she leans in. “Aren’t you the lucky one.”

  “Aren’t I the what?”

  “Getting away with only your womb lost?”

  “Only?”

  “Well,” she says, “it could’ve been your hair. Or your teeth.”

  He comes back and hands me a basket of soaps.

  “That’s awful kind of you, Frederick.”

  “With these you can take lots of hot baths and rebuild your forces.”

  I smell them. Lavender. And rose. “They’re lovely.”

  “Lots of baths and fresh air and rest, that is what I prescribe. And I forbid you to go back to the mill.”

  “I’m not intending to go back, Frederick, not till next week at least.”

  “Not next week, not ever. Mary has left for good and so should you.”

  I look over at her. She sips from her glass, then holds it out to the side, dangles it between two fingers as if threatening to drop it on the carpet, as if such a spill wouldn’t be her mess to fettle. “What’re you looking at me like that for, Lizzie? It was only a question of time. It’s not right for me to be there anymore.”

  “Not right?”

  “The rumors were putting Frederick into too many awkward corners. The Ermens were asking questions, only dying for the excuse to smoke him out of the business. And the Club, he couldn’t even pass it without jokes and whisperings coming out at him. And the Communists up in London, well they are—”

  “They’re not rumors if they’re true.”

  Frederick coughs. He has to sew his mouth to keep the lush from showering. Mary doesn’t flicker a lid. Slugs the end out of her glass and puts it down. “Lizzie, you wouldn’t believe how jealous those bitches got, what a misery they were making of it for me.”

  It’s bitches they are now. Once upon a time, they were careful and kind. Once on a time, they were the salt of her earth.

  “At first I laughed along, put on like I thought it was funny, but then the slighting speak began, and the games in the yard crafted only to make me suffer, and I realized I’d crack before they’d ever stop, that’s how cruel they’d turned. It’s best I got out before”—she rubs her belly like a trencher woman brewing a belch—“before, you know.”

  I know, I know. It’s enough to see her changed out of her bodice and into her loose shimmy. Fraught. In foal. Brought to bed. On the straw.

  Sighing, I hold my glass out. “Where did you put that bottle?”

  Frederick jumps up and goes for it. Tilts me more in. Puts it on the floor beside my chair.

  “So what’s all this got to do with me?” I says when I have it downed. “Why ought I leave my situation on account of your troubles?”

  Mary darts Frederick a fearful look. He clears his throat. Crosses his legs. Looks about to speech off, but I hold up to halt him. I don’t need to hear it. I can suspect for myself. The rumors have my name in them. They say it’s the two of us he keeps for his pleasure. One Burns one night, the other Burns the next, the two Burnses together on feast days and strikes. They say it’s him who put me in the lock.

  “Are you discharging me, Frederick?”

  “Nein, nein, of course not.”

  “Am I to lose my earnings to keep you safe in your circumstances?”

  “Christ, Lizzie,” says Mary, “we thought you’d be happy to leave the place.”

  “Happy? What’d I do instead? Can you tell me that? What’d I do?”

  “That’s what we want to talk to you about.”

  “I couldn’t go out to service. No respectable house would have me after so long in the mills.” And I’ll not sit here all day stitching and learning the melodies, going soft on a foreign man’s mint.

  “Lizzie, would you listen a minute? It’s been arranged. We’ve it all drawn out.”

  And now she lays it out visible, the picture of us. In the middle is herself, of course, glowing under her own halo. And around her, sitting and standing and draped over, are her stout, German-faced children. And around them, circling with velvet arms and a grinful of pe
rfect teeth, is Frederick. And behind him, the faint color of wallpapering, is myself, the starve-acred relative without a sprig of her own to tend except her breakdowns abloom. And around us all, built solid and flush and clean, is a house on Burlington Street: two floors, two gardens, three bedrooms, an inside bathroom, and an attic for lodgers to cover the extra expense of me.

  “Nay.” I nigh on snap an ankle in my rush to get upstanding in my boots. “Nay, nay, nay.” I’m wag-wag-wagging my finger in their faces. “Nay, nay, nay, nay, you can rub me right out. I’m not going any place with you two, not to Burlington nor any other street. I’m staying in my job and earning my wages as usual. And I’m going to live with Moss O’Malley.”

  Now Mary bats. “You’re going to what?”

  “You heard me. It’s all been settled.”

  “Settled? When?”

  “Today. Over the past weeks. He’s been coming to see me. I paid off the nurses to let him in.”

  “Mary Mother of Jesus. With our money, too.” She gets up, takes the glasses out of our hands, and brings them to the kitchen.

  “I wasn’t over with that,” I says on her way out. We hear her putting the kettle on for the dishing up. A pause while she gathers herself.

  “What’re you playing at, Lizzie?” she says when she comes back.

  “I could ask the same of you, Mary.”

  “Ladies, please!” says Frederick from way below on the couch. “Sit down and let us talk this out like civilized human beings.”

  “He’s no good for you,” she says.

  “He wants me no harm.”

  “Harmless, aye, that’s the right word for him. Wet and harmless. A big man gone damp.”

  “You’re one to talk, a prime tippler yourself.”

  “And his intimates? All the same. Jamie, Kit, Dan, Mick, Joseph, the whole crowd of them. Naught doing but passing their time in swilling ale and smoking like the beasts that perish.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “Arrah, he’s a tosspot. They all are. Talking for the good of Ireland when they’re the worst of its examples.”

  Furious, I point down at her shame. “Well, he’d never do something like this by me.”

  “And how could he, even if he wanted to, with your insides taken?”

  I clasp my mouth and teeter back. That’s the end of it. No gain to be got in keeping on. She has her mind and she can keep it.