Bowery Girl

by Kim Taylor

  But with Seamus, for brief moments alone and touching, she could let the weight of the city fall from her.

  Running a finger along his soft cheek, she thought, I could love him.

  “Mmmm.” He turned on his side. “Yer a beaut, Mollie Flynn.”

  “Ain’t so bad-looking yourself, Seamus Feeney. Now that your head’s healed up. Can’t believe you let a Rum Runner nail you. Had to have hurt like hell.”

  Seamus reached to the nightstand, picked up a cigarette, and lit it.

  “Didn’t hurt as much as that shit hurt when I found him.”

  “They’ll try again.”

  “Maybe.” Seamus smirked. “We paid a visit to Calhoun’s little brother—Edgie Moore?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just paid him a visit at his place of employment, that’s all. He won’t be working at the slaughterhouse for a while. Gotta take care of finding a new nose.”

  Mollie closed her eyes. “Jesus.”

  “No sirree. Handkerchief ain’t gonna help him.” Seamus sat up and shook his head. “I hate Calhoun. I hate everyone he’s ever known. And they ain’t gonna squeeze us out of Lefty’s. I’ll slit the throat of every one of the bastards before I’ll let that happen.”

  Mollie heard the words, and knew they were not his, but Tommy’s. He never questioned anything Tommy said or did. It was pathetic. Mollie wondered if he ever had a thought of his own. She remembered once that she’d asked him if he liked plum pudding. He’d looked around the room, instinctively settling on Tommy. Waiting for an answer. He didn’t get one. He just shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation to something else.

  “I gotta go,” Mollie said.

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I got to.” How could she say that she loved one side of Seamus and hated the other? The other would win. It always did.

  “Stay the night.”

  “You know me and Annabelle got a pact. You know—”

  “I know,” Seamus muttered. “Gotta come home at night.”

  “So’s we know the other’s all right.”

  Seamus sighed. He stretched out an arm and wrapped it around Mollie’s waist.

  “I gotta go.” She brushed his arm aside and turned so her feet dropped over the side of the bed. She pulled on her shoes, and in her hurry, knotted up one of the laces. She stood, took her coat from the hook in the door, and slung it on.

  “See you later.” She did not kiss him before leaving.

  The Ragpickers’ Lot was a narrow strip of empty space that ran from Roosevelt straight back to Chambers. It had not changed in the years since Annabelle had found her there. Only the faces were different. A few metal barrels of burning firewood provided the only warmth.

  The right side of the lot was a marvel of technical design: Layers of scrap wood had been nailed or balanced to create sleeping quarters four squat levels high. It was a feat of design because it rarely collapsed. When it did, the thing seemed to build itself up within a day, and all the stalls were occupied. Long and narrow feet clad in mismatched socks stuck out of one box, fourth level. One ground-floor unit boasted a guard dog, who kept one eye open and one cropped ear cocked.

  The left side of the lot held the rags—three men high and six deep—rags collected from trash bins for too many years to count. Some were washed in the nearby tub and resold.

  Mollie wondered if they held children still, as they had once held her. She knew that men and women came often from the Children’s Aid Society, that they brought broom handles to sift through the rags and find the children. Some of the ragpickers would watch, and if a child was found, they would claim to be the boy’s or girl’s guardian and ask for fees before releasing the child. Most of the kids came back within a week. Others were not heard from again. The Children’s Aid Society claimed to send the children to families in the West. But there was no one to prove that, and a lot of the kids thought they were being sold into white slavery.

  Which in a way would be true, for the Society would clean them up, teach them to read and curtsy and sew and hammer, and find them a job. The do-gooders loved to boast about finding jobs for the “destitute.” They boasted of the “honor of work,” and how they’d steered another poor soul from the “depravities of crime.” But work—in a factory, as a cash girl at a department store, as a maid in a Washington Square manse—meant only slavery in another form. Mollie’d seen the girls who stood in the window of the millinery factory on James Street, staring longingly through the plate glass while the machines rumbled and shook behind them. Mollie herself had once asked after a job sewing ladies’ gloves—only to find the wages so low one could barely afford a berth in a flophouse.

  She crossed the lot, stopping at the first ash bin. An old man warmed his fingers, keeping them so low to the flame, Mollie thought his skin would singe black. One side of his body lifted higher than the other, like a puppet on strings. The left side of his mouth was pulled in a grimace, revealing more blank space than teeth.

  “Hail Mary,” he said to Mollie in that funny voice of his, half water and half wheeze. “Hail Mary full of grace.” He set a fire-hot hand on her forehead. “Good to see you, Mary Mary Quite Contrary.”

  “Hey, Jip.”

  He removed his hand; the night seemed even colder than before. The rag mound sighed, as if the children sleeping there had let go of all their dreams at once. Mollie felt its heaviness and fear wrap around her. She knew what it was like; she understood the terror that kept them curled like dogs as far back into the rags as possible.

  “Hail Mary got a penny for a pint?”

  She reached into her breast pocket and handed Jip a handful of coins. Then she pulled out a dollar bill, rolling it tight. She set it in Jip’s palm. His skin felt like paper, like autumn leaves. “Get some food for the kids in there, all right?”

  He shoved the money in a grubby pocket. Nodded once. “Hail Mary full of grace, how does your garden grow? With silver shells and cocks and belles and Jesus’ little toes.” He held his hands over the fire again. His red-lined eyes slid toward the street and then snapped back to stare in the popping flames. “Got an admirer, Mary.”

  Mollie turned around. Tommy McCormack leaned against the broken fence, smoking. The glow of the cigarette’s tip lit the blue in his eyes. She wanted, more than anything, to keep walking, to pretend she hadn’t seen him. Just keep walking until she came to Chambers Street. From there, she had her choice of alleys or cellars to sneak through. But the worst thing you could do with Tommy was to show fear. She squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and walked over to him. As if she knew he’d been following her all along.

  “Got a penny for a pint?” He expelled smoke from his lungs, like he was on fire from within. Then he dropped the cigarette, and slowly ground it out with the bottom of his shiny shoes. “Or how about twenty dollars, which I believe you promised me last week.”

  “If I had it, I’d give it to you, wouldn’t I?”

  “I assume you’d give it to me, before you gave it to people like that.” He smiled down at her, looking to all the world like a kind brother, concerned about her health.

  “I don’t got it right now. Give me another week. It’ll be easy now that Annabelle’s back, you know, now that she’s working again. We’re just a little tight right now.”

  “Annabelle.” Tommy smiled. “Annabelle’s let me down a bit lately. A lot lately.”

  “It’s slow.”

  “She’s lazy.”

  Tommy stepped forward, then circled around Mollie until he had her pressed against the fence. He leaned into her, his cheek touching hers, and his breath blew against her ear. “Got a job for ya, Moll. You do it, we’ll call the debt even, all right?”

  “What is it?”

  “Chandler shop on Spring. You’re the only one small enough to fit through the one window that’s never shut. All you got to do is lift some keys from the watchman’s pocket and open the front door.”

  “And what if the watchman
catches me?”

  “You got a knife, don’t you?”

  “It ain’t for that.”

  “He won’t see you. I been watching him. Drinks until he sleeps. And your fingers are the lightest around.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Tommy shoved his hand under her coat, into the pocket. “What’s this?”

  Mollie winced. The money from Black Jim and a couple other takes.

  His fingers caught up the bills. He licked his index finger and counted. “Seven dollars. I’ll take it as interest.”

  “That’s rent money.”

  He tilted his head. “You’re getting slow, aren’t you? I took you for a talent at one time. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “I know you don’t care one way or the other about me. But don’t take away the rent money. I’ll pay you back, I swear to God.”

  He hesitated, then folded the money in half and placed it back in her coat. “Guess it’s twenty-seven you owe me now. I want it next week. Unless you decide to play with me. It’s just a matter of opening a door. Thought you’d like the challenge.” He lifted his derby to her and started for the street. “Oh, and tell Annabelle I miss her. I can trust you to tell her that, can’t I?”

  He swaggered away, whistling some tune as he went.

  HOW MOLLIE FLYNN CAME TO BE

  THE HAD BEEN TOLD many stories, some simple, some filled with wonder. Her favorite story began with a beautiful woman and a million stars.

  The beautiful woman was her mother; her name was Calliope. She had light hair that shined in the moonlight. Her eyes were light, too, and if anyone took the time, they’d see all her thoughts and secrets. Calliope tried to keep many secrets. But her eyes gave her away, and Mollie often damned her, for her own eyes were just the same.

  Calliope’s big secret was Mollie. Calliope was a lady, still under her father’s fine roof. She was promised to an older man with graying whiskers and ten thousand dollars in the bank. They had never so much as held hands.

  Calliope would sit in the parlor on a horsehair-and-velvet couch, listening to the tick of a rosewood clock, reading some bit of poetry. Her left hand held the book to the light. Her right hand was spread across herself, her palm feeling the tiny beat of Mollie’s heart.

  As Mollie grew bigger and bolder inside her (for Mollie was quite a courageous child—that’s what the Sister had told her), Calliope paid her maid ten dollars to sew her dresses with lace and roses and many flounces meant to hide her secret.

  On Saturdays she was handed into a shiny brougham that took her around Central Park. She threw bread to the birds.

  When it was time for Mollie to appear in the world, Calliope walked from Washington Square to the Lower East Side. The heels on her soft leather boots tore off somewhere, and soon Calliope stumbled. There were men looking her over, staring with loneliness from under the brims of their slouch caps. Others were half drunk with whiskey, half drunk with greed, who saw her silk dress and wondered if there was money clinking in a pocket or two. But then she’d walk under an oil lamp, and those men would see the blood staining the fine fabric and they’d turn away.

  She could barely breathe. The sweat that matted her hair did not come from the heavy July heat, but from Mollie, now writhing and twisting, trying to tear her mother in two.

  She finally reached the river. The tight streets and tilting wood buildings ended. In front of her, ships swayed in their moorings. She breathed to the creak of wood hulls and prayed to the tall masts, which looked much like the crosses in the church, what with their sails furled and only their vulnerable skeletons showing.

  And then Mollie came—too soon, before Calliope was ready. She had meant to drown them both in the river. Instead, her child slid from her body to the street and down the slope to the water, in an oily mess of blood that would not stop flowing.

  Calliope grabbed the cord, that lifeline between mother and child, and tore at it with her teeth. She watched Mollie slide away.

  Mollie fell into the water with a tiny splash. There were a million stars that night, wondrous stars, God’s light welcoming her to the world. Mollie knows her mother would have caught her up and held her tight, had she the strength. She knows her mother would have saved her, had she not died in the act of letting go. She does not remember the nun who found her and scooped her from the rushes. Fat, fat baby floating like a fallen star near the river’s edge.

  This was the story Sister Mary Clara told her. Mary Clara was dismissed from the charity for telling such gruesome lies to little girls. At Mary Clara’s charity, Mollie went by the name of Sarah.

  The story Mollie Flynn liked the least was probably the truth. She had been left in the basket outside the Foundling Asylum, lucky enough not to freeze during the night. She was given the name of Margaret.

  She had been called Alice and Caroline and even Pennsylvania. Charity to charity, outgrowing one, transferred to another after stealing bread, kicked out from a third for “seducing” the priest at Mass. She’d learned the skills of pickpocketing from Googs Mallory, whose bed was next to hers in the New York School for Delinquent Children. Googs was the only one who believed Mollie’s story. She was also familiar with Father Timothy’s roving hands.

  They escaped together, and Mollie became the “stall,” shifting a mark’s attention away from his wallet long enough for Googs to take it. Then one morning, Googs disappeared with money that by all rights should have been shared.

  Not much she could do after that but learn the trade better. At first, she supplemented her earnings of pennies by begging, then singing on a street corner and gasping as if she were to die of consumption any minute. She knew all the saloons with the deepest and freshest trash bins. She kept to herself—how Father Timothy had set her against trusting anyone!—and crawled into the mound of rags in the Ragpickers’ Lot for sleep. She woke and wandered and became the best pickpocket she could.

  Each morning, she emerged to find a cup of beer and some scrap of food—a half-eaten muffin, a rip of ham, an apple. As she ate, she watched a girl across the lot who wore a blonde wig and lifted her skirts in daylight. She knew this girl was the one who brought food.

  Mollie once asked Annabelle why she chose to rescue her. “Hell,” Annabelle said, “I used to sleep in that very same spot when my da and mam threw me over for the new baby. I just didn’t want no one else to take it, that’s all. Never know when I’ll need it again. Just want the space free, is all.”

  And she saw in Annabelle Lee the kindest person she’d ever known.

  March, 1883

  A FORTUNE

  “IT’S JUST A MATTER OF opening a door, Annabelle. He’s gonna take it as payment for the debt. Jesus, that sets us up right. Then what we take is our own again. If we’re lucky, we’ll have enough to move by summer.”

  Annabelle stared through the window of a secondhand shop at a tortoiseshell comb and a pair of gloves that showed only the slightest wear on the fingers. “I got a bad feeling, is all.”

  “I go through a window. I lift a set of keys. I unlock a door. I walk out.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder what it’d be like to be honest?”

  “I’m honest. And we’re honestly broke. And it’s Sunday and I don’t want to think about it.” Mollie continued down the street. She massaged her temples. She wanted to squeeze out the thoughts, the ones that came unbidden, the ones that kept her from Mass, that kept her from sleep.

  She was a thief because it paid better than a real job. It was a job, and she was of a practical nature. She knew what it took to survive—how much to steal to make rent, to buy food, to have a few odd coins for enjoyment. She had analyzed the streets of the Fourth Ward, the movement of the people, and determined the best times of day to maximize her take. She had been cautious and never greedy. And she loved the challenge—yes, she admitted it—loved the way her fingers tingled and sounds flattened out and the only things she saw were pockets and purses. But the faces of the people came to her at night, and s
he felt guilt then, like hot ashes.

  Annabelle came up beside her. She kept her hands crossed over her stomach. The baby was obvious now.

  “You’re gonna have to tell Tommy, instead of avoiding him and the dancehall,” Mollie said.

  “He’s avoiding me, too.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “I’m not gonna be able to work much longer.”

  “I know.” Mollie felt a thick pain begin in her head.

  “I’m gonna need to do something else.”

  “Then be my stall. You know how to do that.”

  “I mean after that, Moll. When we’re in Brooklyn. I want a job. I’m sick of men touching me. And I can’t do it—not with a baby.”

  “A job. That’s funny.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You been walking the streets all your life. You tell me what else you can do.”

  Annabelle stopped in her tracks. “Fuck you, Mollie Flynn.”

  Mollie knew she shouldn’t have said it, but she also knew it was true. Or had been, until the goddamn baby. Until the money on the table had started to dwindle to dimes and quarters. “I’m sorry.”

  Annabelle walked away from Mollie, then turned on the heel of her red shoe and said, “I can change. And one day I’m gonna be able to walk straight into Mass and not have one goddamn sin to confess.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Do the job for Tommy. I don’t care.”

  Mollie watched the bounce of curls as Annabelle stomped away.

  “Buy a flower or your future?”

  Mollie started. She turned to the rumpled figure in the doorway.

  A woman sat cross-legged, a spread of cards in the rags of her skirt. The crown of her head was mottled brown and pink, showing through tufts of white hair. She raised her gaze to Mollie; her eyes were milky and blind. The red paint on her lips crept into the crevices age had dug around her mouth. A basket of spring’s first wildflowers, obviously pulled from an empty lot, edged with the brown of frost and sighing over the sides, rested nearby.