Taking a Chance

by Deborah Burrows

  ‘You going to behave yourself, Evie?’ asked Smith, giving her a sour look in return.

  Evie’s expression was defiant. ‘Boney knows I’d run away if she sent me to the receiving depot. I ran away last time.’

  He ignored that and turned to me. ‘She’s got an appointment with Special Magistrate Schroeder at ten on Monday. Make sure she’s there, or there’ll be hell to pay.’

  My stomach clenched. I couldn’t guarantee anything. But I smiled and said that she’d be there on Monday. Evie looked mutinous.

  ‘Evie,’ said McKittrick, ‘Miss Fitzgerald is really putting herself out for you. I hope that you don’t muck up on her.’

  Evie frowned. ‘Can we go now?’

  My misgivings increased.

  ‘Sure we can, kiddo,’ said Johnny. ‘We’ll take a cab. It’s pouring down out there.’

  Evie’s frown was replaced with a broad smile, there was that sudden shift in perception and she looked like a child. ‘A taxi? Really? That’d be bonzer.’

  Alma let me into the kitchen to telephone Aunty May. When Uncle Pat died, my cousins put in together to arrange for a telephone to be installed. It was the first private tele­phone in the street, but Aunty hated using it. She tended to shout into the receiver and forget to listen. Within a month of us getting it, Mr Stafford at number 15 had put one in his house as well. Dan said it was because Mr Stafford was horrified at the thought of the Protestants in the street needing to use a Popish telephone in an emergency. Dan was a joker.

  I managed to let Aunty May know that there would be two extra for tea and a girl would be staying the night. I told her a little about the circumstances, emphasised that Evie would need a bath, and asked her to light the woodchip heater in the bathroom.

  When I returned, Evie was flirting with Johnny and Sergeant Smith, fluttering her eyelashes and pouting. Johnny wore his look of perennial amusement and Smith looked irritated. It seemed likely that Shirley, McKittrick and Smith were each correct in their assessment of Evie: she was a tease, a sweet girl and a holy terror.

  The smell of wet asphalt was almost overpowering as we left the cafe and dashed through the rain for the taxi that was waiting across the street. Sergeant Smith was holding it for us, or it would have been taken by one of the crowd, because taxis were in very short supply these days. Johnny got into the back and Evie followed, plonking herself down on his lap. I got in beside Evie and pulled her roughly onto the seat next to me. She managed to keep one slim arm firmly around Johnny’s neck while the other played with the buttons of his tan gabardine jacket.

  ‘Evie, you are too old to sit on Johnny’s lap. Johnny, why don’t you sit in the front?’

  He moved very fast. The door was open and despite his ‘bung ankle’ he was out and into the front passenger seat before I could draw breath. He twisted around to speak to us.

  ‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Twenty-seven Violet Grove, Shenton Park. It’s off Onslow Road.’

  Evie’s pout disappeared and there was a wondering smile. ‘What a pretty name. Are there really violets?’

  ‘No,’ I replied shortly. ‘It’s just an ordinary street, in an ordinary suburb.’ It was a tiny weatherboard house in a working-class suburb. I rarely took anyone home. Johnny was really getting what he would call the ‘lowdown’ on Nell Fitzgerald.

  I called out a ‘thank you’ to Sergeant Smith, who waved us off as the taxi started to move. The sound of rain was like a waterfall on the roof and the wheels splashed through puddles on the road. It was still light but the afternoon was quickly fading into night. No lights were coming on in the street around us, however. Ever since the Japanese had entered the war, the blackout regulations had been strictly enforced. They were due to be relaxed in just a few days, on account of the improvement in the war situation. But for now the taxi’s headlights were taped over, illuminating only a tiny circle on the road in front of the car.

  We pulled into busy St Georges Terrace. Many people were sheltering from the heavy rain under awnings, while others scurried along under umbrellas or were holding raincoats close. I assumed that most of them were workers heading home, but many would be on their way to the cabarets and dance halls that had sprung up when the Americans arrived last year.

  Evie was giving me a considering look. ‘Are you and Johnny going out together?’

  I blushed. ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘My boyfriend is in the army. Johnny is just a friend. Actually, we met today. At the Mitrovic trial.’

  ‘I bet you dump the other bloke and end up with Johnny. He likes you. I can tell.’

  My blush deepened. ‘No I won’t. And no he doesn’t.’

  Johnny looked around from the front seat. ‘Of course I like her. She’s gorgeous. But apparently her fellow is rich, handsome and a war hero. He’s a much better catch than an impecunious, crippled journalist.’

  ‘You’re a hero,’ Evie said, eyes shining. ‘You saved me. Do you think that they’ll hang Lena Mitrovic?’ she added. ‘My friend says she knew her. Do you think she’s pretty? Do you think she did it? My friend says that Lena was really nice but Rick Henzell could be a bossy old thing.’

  ‘Maybe your friend needed bossing,’ I muttered. If she was like Evie then she was probably a handful.

  Evie seemed confused at this, and I felt the blush begin again.

  I said, embarrassed, ‘I just mean that sometimes people boss a person because they care about them. I have six older cousins and they boss me a lot, but it’s because they want to look after me. Because they love me.’

  To my horror, Evie’s eyes filled with tears. I remembered that she was an orphan, or as good as, and I felt like a fool. A bit clumsily, I put an arm around her and pulled her close. She was very stiff to start with, but after a few seconds she let her head rest on my shoulder, just as she had in the cafe, and she started to cry.

  ‘I’m only blubbing because I’m tired and hungry,’ she said, sniffing.

  ‘Of course,’ I replied.

  In a minute or two the tears stopped and she pushed away from me. She spent the rest of the taxi ride asking Johnny about himself and America. Johnny was sweet with her, behaving with old-fashioned courtesy and managing, on the whole, to keep a straight face.

  ‘Is America like in the pictures?’ she asked.

  ‘In some ways it is, but not in others.’

  ‘That’s a funny name, Horvath.’

  ‘It’s a Yugoslav name, Croatian; my father was from Dubrovnik.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Chicago.’

  ‘There are gangsters in Chicago, aren’t there?’ Evie was leaning forward, watching his face.

  ‘Sure are. I expect I rubbed elbows with dozens every day, but I don’t know any personally.’

  ‘What’s Chicago like?’

  ‘It’s on the shore of a lake – Lake Michigan – that seems as big as the ocean, because you can’t see the other side at all. And there are lots of skyscrapers.’

  ‘How tall?’ asked Evie, entranced.

  ‘Well, they seem to touch the sky.’

  Evie grinned. ‘Hah. I bet they’re taller than the CML building – that’s the biggest here in Perth. How many storeys are there in the CML building, Nell?’

  ‘Eleven,’ I said. ‘Plus a basement.’ We had reached the foot of Mount Eliza now and in front of us was the Swan River, slate grey and dimpled with the rain. My mind was full of images of Chicago and skyscrapers and a lake that seemed as big as the ocean.

  Johnny gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Oh yeah. Our skyscrapers are bigger than that.’

  The taxi was travelling along Mounts Bay Road now, splashing noisily through puddles. It was just light enough to make out a couple of Catalina seaplanes moored in Matilda Bay near the university. They were flown by the men of the US Patrol Wing 10, who were quartered nearby. The rain was very heavy now, and I knew that the planes couldn’t take off in this sort of weather.

  ‘The
weather’s different, too,’ Johnny went on. ‘We have real winters, with deep snow and ice. In winter we go ice-skating. Here, it’ll pour with rain one day and be sunny and warm the next. This is like a cool summer in Chicago.’

  It didn’t seem like summer to me. Or to Evie, who was shivering. She turned her blue eyes on me.

  ‘What’s your aunt like? Will she like me?’ She sounded unsure, and burrowed against me again. I wrapped an arm around her and felt goose bumps on her bare arm under the short bolero sleeve. I rubbed at her arm briskly and smiled.

  ‘I think so, Evie. But it’s a two-way street. If you are polite to Aunty May then I’m sure she’ll like you.’

  It was quite dark by the time the taxi pulled up outside my front gate, and it was almost impossible to make out the houses in my street. Daylight would reveal a short, narrow street of weatherboard bungalows with corrugated-tin roofs, sitting on tiny blocks.

  A waist-high chain link fence separated the front yard from the footpath and the street. Before the war there had been a tiny square of lawn, surrounded by garden beds filled with roses, hydrangeas and lavender. Since 1940 we had followed the government’s admonition to ‘grow food for victory’ and the garden had been all given over to vegetables; Aunty May was a champion gardener. A narrow path at the side led to the front porch. It was a modest little house, but comfortable.

  Now that it was just me and Aunty May, it never ceased to amaze me that at one stage there were eight of us living there. When I arrived I had Biddie’s old room, a small partitioned area on the back verandah, because Biddie had been married three months earlier. Aunty May and Uncle Pat had the main bedroom, Mick and Frank shared the second bedroom, and Charlie, Gerry, and Dan were in three beds on the remaining part of the back verandah. I now had the entire second bedroom to myself, which was luxury indeed.

  Johnny paid the taxi driver and we dashed through the rain to the front door. Once inside the hallway, Evie looked around her with interest.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty ordinary.’

  Sitting on the hall table was a letter addressed to me. It was from Rob. I had a flash of irritation that I had to wait to read it because Evie and Johnny were there, but I recollected my duties as hostess and introduced them both to Aunty May.

  My aunt was a small, slightly built woman, a bustling bundle of energy with a no-nonsense manner that belied her kind disposition.

  ‘Thank you for letting me stay,’ said Evie in a soft voice, hanging onto my arm and peeping out at her from behind my shoulder. Her shyness surprised me; she seemed overwhelmed by my little aunt.

  ‘It’s a pleasure,’ said Aunty May. ‘Now, come on, let me look at you.’

  I pushed Evie forward to be examined and she stared fixedly at the floor as my aunt ran a critical eye over her.

  ‘Food, bath, bed,’ said Aunty May. ‘You look done in, poor lamb.’ Her voice was kind, and Evie finally looked up at her. There were tears in the girl’s eyes. Aunty May smiled and gestured down the hallway. ‘The bathroom’s in a lean-to at the rear of the house, past the kitchen door, through the back verandah and to the left. Just wash your face and hands for now and wait until after tea for your bath.’ Evie hesitated and Aunty May took her arm, giving her a little push. ‘We’ve got boiled mutton for tea, and treacle pudding for afters.’

  Evie left us with a quick backward glance at me. I smiled encouragingly. ‘It’s fine, Evie,’ I said, as she walked slowly down the hall.

  ‘I’ll give her some whiskey and butter before bed and she’ll be right as rain in the morning,’ said Aunty May. It was her cure-all for every ill.

  She turned to Johnny and gave him her most charming smile, the one that still held a shadow of the beauty she’d been in her youth. Aunty May always liked to see a good-looking man.

  ‘So you’re a journalist, just like our Nellie,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely to meet you, Mr Horvath. Now, you wait in here and make yourself comfortable while Nellie and I get the meal ready.’

  As she showed Johnny into the lounge room, I got ‘the look’, which meant I should join her in the kitchen immediately. Explaining it all was even more difficult than I had anticipated.

  ‘So, this Evie has no home or family?’ Aunty May was carving up the boiled mutton. If Johnny and Evie hadn’t turned up, it would have lasted us for three meals.

  ‘Yes, poor girl. She’s got nowhere to go.’ I laid out plates on the kitchen table. We always ate in the kitchen – there was no fancy dining room in the Dillon house.

  ‘She’s not in any trouble, is she? Some of these young girls are real tearaways, just like that awful Francine McGonagall. I don’t want a girl like that one in my house, Nell.’

  Francine lived near us in Derby Road. Her parents were stalwarts of St Aloysius, but seventeen-year-old Francine had taken the arrival of the Americans as a personal invitation to ‘sup with Satan’, as Father Tierney put it in his homily after she’d been found in a carnal embrace with a submariner under a weeping willow tree near Dyson’s Swamp. She had been dragged off to the Children’s Court, declared an ‘uncontrollable child’ and put on probation for two years.

  ‘It’s nothing like Francine,’ I said, mentally crossing my fingers at the white lie. ‘She had nowhere to go and fell in with a couple of young married women and American sailors. She was obviously too young to be out with them, and Johnny and I were worried about her, so we called the anti-vice squad.’

  ‘But, Nell, to offer to put her up here until Monday – it’s a risk, isn’t it? What if she runs off?’ My aunt put meat onto each plate, along with boiled carrots and turnips. ‘That one’s for

  Mr Horvath,’ she said, indicating the one with the most mutton.

  ‘I couldn’t leave her, Aunty. Not to be taken to the government receiving depot, like a criminal. She’s just a child, really. She’s not even fifteen.’

  I poured caper sauce over the meat on the plates, then placed a spoonful of boiled green beans and mashed potato on each one.

  ‘Hmm. Well, she’s your responsibility, Nell. I’m too old to cope with a young tearaway.’

  But Aunty’s face was softening, and so I played my trump card.

  ‘Her mother died last year,’ I said. ‘There’s no one to look after her and she was sent to St Joseph’s Orphanage.’

  ‘Oh, the poor little lamb,’ said Aunty May. There was another shrewd look at me. ‘Ran away, did she?’

  I nodded. Aunty May knew how much I’d hated the orphanage in Dublin.

  ‘You did the right thing in bringing her here, Nell. That poor child,’ she said.

  I collected Johnny and Evie and we all sat down to eat. When Aunty May said grace, I was interested to see that both Johnny and Evie crossed themselves like good Catholics. Aunty May beamed at them both.

  unty May liked Johnny very much. That was embarrassingly obvious. Still, I appreciated the way he kept telling her what an act of charity it was to put up Evie for the weekend. Aunty was lapping it up. Evie frowned, although on the whole she was too busy wolfing down the food to pay much attention to the conversation.

  ‘And are you a married man, Mr Horvath?’ My aunt’s voice was deceptively light.

  There was a quick grin and he flashed me a look. ‘No, ma’am. No wife, not even a girlfriend at present. Up until now I’ve not had the good fortune to meet the girl of my dreams.’

  I was uncertain what he meant by that. But if he didn’t have a girlfriend at present, I was sure that he’d had plenty in the past. He was a heartbreaker. You could tell.

  Aunty May smiled. ‘I knew, the moment I met Patrick Dillon, that he was the one for me,’ she said. ‘My mother said to me, “How can you be so sure when you’ve just laid eyes on him? And he’s such a paddy – straight off the boat from Ireland.” Pat felt the same as I did, but they made us wait for six months, so we’d be sure. I knew, though, the moment I met him.’ A dreamy expression came into her eyes. ‘Pat was such a fine-looking man, and oh, he made me
laugh.’

  ‘Mr Horvath likes Nell, I can tell,’ said Evie, in a rare break between mouthfuls.

  I felt the blood rushing into my cheeks. This was getting well past a joke. I wished that Evie and Aunty May would both just shut up about me and John Horvath. Of course I liked him – why wouldn’t I? He was good company, intelligent and attractive. He was also a dreadful flirt, and I suspected that he was entirely untrustworthy when it came to women. Anyway, Aunty May knew, and I had told Evie – I was with Rob.

  Johnny was obviously amused by Evie’s comment.

  ‘Miss Fitzgerald is charming, Evie. Of course I like her. It’s very kind of her and Mrs Dillon to invite me to supper like this. Although you Australians have been extraordinarily hospitable to us Americans ever since we arrived last year.’

  Aunty May smiled. ‘It’s no bother,’ she said. ‘We know how much we owe you all. It was so terrifying to think of facing the Japanese Empire alone – England’s no good to us, because it’s fighting its own war. I was very glad to hear

  Mr Curtin say that we looked to America now.’

  ‘And even more pleased when America answered,’ I said with a laugh.

  ‘We’ve had American boys around for Sunday roast dinner a few times,’ continued Aunty May. ‘Father Tierney arranges a roster for the parish. The boys go to Mass and then to lunch with a local family. We’ve had Catalina boys and submariners from Fremantle, haven’t we, Nell? They always bring presents when they come and oodles of food. We really appreciate it, although we never ask them to. Every one of them has been a delight. They especially love to spend time with Nellie.’

  ‘I’m sure they do,’ murmured Johnny.

  ‘She’s always got such stories to tell about her escapades on the newspaper.’

  Johnny raised an eyebrow. ‘Does she now? I’d love to hear about them.’

  I broke in, ‘No, really, we’d much rather hear about you. Johnny’s from Chicago, Aunty. Why don’t you tell Aunty May about Chicago?’

  But, somehow, he got us talking about the family. Aunty May told stories about my cousins’ exploits that made him roar with laughter.