by Kim Taylor
“Seamus had to do it. The man knew what you looked like. Didn’t he?”
Mollie pushed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets until she saw only blue and silver stars.
Mollie stayed in the bed. The only time she left was to visit the outhouse. In the yard, the water rose from all the rain; bottles and cans and papers floated on the dirty skin of it. Some of the outhouses flooded, and their stench rose like a thick gas.
Seamus had come by. She had not answered the door. He had stood outside for hours, then finally given up. Sometimes it was so quiet, Mollie heard the Italians sewing buttonholes next door. Annabelle went out each day. Each night—very late—the lock would tumble, and the door would click and squeal against its hinges. Annabelle would drop coins on the table, then take off her wig and hang it on a hook. She pulled at the pins that held her hair, and let it tumble over her shoulders. She loosened her stays, letting out a great sigh.
She wandered from task to task: a bit of coal pushed around in the stove to get the last of its heat, candlewicks trimmed and lit and placed on the table, the dress removed and shaken out and hung up. She would wash herself then, scrubbing every bit of her body, shivering at the wet rag.
“Not many biting today,” she’d say. “And those who do ain’t worth the coins.”
Or “Mugs sent along some meat. I think I’ll make stew—that’ll get you up again. We ain’t had stew in ages. Course that’s because we both hate it.”
Or “Maybe you can show me how to work a pen without getting ink all over my hand. Look like I got some disease. Would you help me, Moll?”
And then, one night, when her lip was split and swollen, she yanked Mollie from the bed. “Get up. I can’t trick anymore. It hurts. All right?”
“Who gave you the lip?”
“We need money.”
“Who gave you the lip, Annabelle?”
“Tommy. Who else? I told him the baby was his. But you were right, weren’t you? He don’t give fuck-all—”
“I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch.”
“He promised me he’d settle for ten dollars.”
“Before or after he hit you?” Mollie asked.
“We need money.”
“But I did that sneak thief. He said he’d forgive the whole thing.”
Annabelle pointed to the tin box on the shelf over the bed. “There’s six dollars and thirteen cents in there. That’s all we got. I’m pregnant, Moll. I need you. And I need ya to not be dead.”
DELANCEY
MOLLIE STARED AT THE door. She took a breath. Turned the kerosene switch until the flame went blue, then snuffed black. She stood in the dark, before the door, and crossed herself.
The small window at the end of the hall thumped against the rotten frame. It was the wind, playing with the glass. Shrieks of laughter and a boy’s howl came from the yard below.
She approached the window, opening it enough to look down past the outhouse roofs. The cool air felt sharp against her skin, and she pulled her hands back, crossing her arms.
Three little boys had claimed the muddy stretch of land between the tenements and made it their kingdom. Two of the boys were at that age when legs and arms gained confidence, and each day they challenged their bodies to throw stones just a little farther, jump higher on the mountain of garbage that bulged and balanced at a threatening height. The third boy Mollie recognized as Ian, the little boy from the first floor. He trailed along behind the other two, and the stones he threw at the cans the boys had set atop the outhouses never made their mark. Still, he did not complain, even when the other two tripped him for no reason but their own amusement, or pulled his hair, or jumped from the outhouses to scare him.
The boys played ferociously on their mountain, throwing each other off, rolling down, and climbing back up. The tallest one reached the very pinnacle; he crouched down, opened the top trash bag, and rummaged around. He removed cans and bottles, stacking them on the brick window ledge of a second-story room.
“I own this mound,” he said, “and I’ll knock the head off anyone who tries to take it.”
This was of course not a warning to his friends, but an invitation readily accepted. Ian stared at the ground, as if pondering a strategy. But the other boy leaped up, his red hair like flame. The king of the pinnacle would not be removed. The redhead received quite a wallop from a can. It didn’t matter. Up he immediately climbed again, a full frontal assault. The king dug again in the bags. He threw whatever his hands found available, which meant chicken bones, a rotten cabbage, a piece of bread hard as rock.
While the boys fought, Mollie watched Ian pick his way slowly up the side of the garbage mountain. He did not look up at his quarry, nor did he make the mistake of looking down at the ground. He climbed up and up. What would happen at the top? The bigger boy would shove Ian off completely, and laugh in triumph. Might makes right.
It was the way of the Fourth Ward.
Down the stairs. A hand running along the wall from habit, from darkness, from the lack of a railing to keep one’s balance. Pass the yard, pass the boys, pass the mothers churning laundry. Slip through the narrow alley. Claim the street. Walk it like you’ve done before, Mollie.
But Lord, how the people passed so close, jarring her shoulder, darting in front of her, coming up from behind—she watched and walked. She needed a mark. One good mark. Someone who kept their money with them. Someone like Maud Riley, who had a vegetable stand and collected money all day.
Her chest was tight. What the hell was she thinking? Maud Riley knew her. Maud Riley’d tap her in a second and turn her over to the cops.
Noise tumbled around her, and she knew there was nothing for her to do but continue to walk and think. Watch out for Tommy or the boys. Take a breath: It’s only four dollars you need. Rent would be tomorrow’s problem.
Water dripped from windowsills and awnings, and pooled under the tables of vegetables at the grocer’s. Horses churned up mud from beneath the cobblestones. The air was filled with dampness that steamed from the sidewalk, from wool coats, from the stone and brick buildings. She looked up at the telegraph wires crisscrossing the sky like a spider’s web. Holding her in. Holding her to this life.
“Watch out!” Someone put a hand on her arm and moved her from the path of a huge pushcart filled with furniture.
“Don’t touch me.” She jerked her arm away. “Don’t ever touch me.”
The man who stopped her gestured to the cart. “You were going to walk right—”
“Then let me walk into it. It’s got nothing to do with you if I do or don’t.”
“Got a mouth on you, don’t you?” He ambled away, shaking his head.
At the livery stable, two horses waited in their tracings and blinders, nodding off in the steamy sun. Their whole lives, good or bad or indifferent, were entirely up to the whim of their owner. Did they ever wish for something else?
She crossed Batavia, walking along Roosevelt. The tenements all blended together, stoop after stoop, brick facades covered in black dirt, some buildings with new fire escapes—or easy entries, as the boys had pointed out. In between the flat stones of the sidewalk, Mollie saw the bright green of newly sprung grass. In a matter of days, it would all be trampled and brown. Yet, there it was, every year, just the same, beautiful and so fragile it made Mollie want to cry.
Do the only thing you know how to do, Mollie Flynn. The grass is just grass and you didn’t shoot the gun. It’s not guilt burning your gullet. It’s fear.
She wandered up and down Delancey for hours. The clouds were lumpy, heavy with bad temper, and the air, swollen and still, was tinged with a strange emerald light. Soon it would rain.
It should have been easy, finding marks on this wide, busy street, what with all the people getting off the streetcars with empty hands, then returning with arms full of packages. It should have been easy when the fire-truck bell clanged and everyone shaded their eyes to watch the horses galloping by. And then there was the emporium
with flour and salt and ready-made collars and bolts of fabric and not one eye on her. So many opportunities.
Yet, each time she stepped in closer to a fat wallet or a carelessly held purse, she could not complete the take. Where was the flattening of sound, the narrowing of focus? Mollie’s head ached—filled with all the sounds of the streets, all the back-and-forth movement of the people. And how her hands shook! She barely escaped touching the fingers of a woman who had reached in her purse for a handkerchief.
Googs Mallory had told her once: “Five seconds of thinking is three seconds too long.” And here Mollie had stood like a moron from Bellevue, letting the minutes go by.
“Goddammit,” she said out loud. She stuck a match in her mouth and trudged back to the corner where she began. She leaned against a green iron railing. The sign above advertised THE FINEST CHAIRS IN NEW YORK. THIRD FLOOR. The windows behind her contained photographs of scowling couples, and a few stills of some actress in tights and a very short skirt that barely came to her knees.
On the corner, shaded by the awning of a café entrance—a café, for God’s sake!—a policeman stood watch, his arms crossed. His mustache was well oiled. The badge on his chest gleamed. He looked at Mollie and she looked at him.
“All right already, I’m leaving.” She pushed away from the railing and sashayed by him.
She bought a hot wine from a pushcart. She dropped the change. She used both hands to keep the cup steady. Jesus Christ, she thought. What the hell am I gonna do now?
Mollie thought she might ride the streetcar, back and forth; whoever sat by her would have bad luck that day. She would have liked to rest her feet, anyway. She crossed the middle of the street, and clambered up the stairs. She stood near the door—just in case she’d need to get out fast. A plump woman in plain black squeezed next to her. The condensed moisture of everyone’s breath fogged the windows. The vehicle jolted forward. Mollie fell into the woman. This was quite a good thing, for her leg bumped something that felt very much like a bag of coins and bills.
The woman held a large knit bag on her lap, and the joints of her hands were white from holding it so tight. Another stop, another clatter and lunge. Mollie put her hand on the bench to right herself and left it there. Let the weight of it against the smooth wood seat still, for one second, the shaking. Let her fingers move slowly, feeling the fabric for the opening. Feeling for the thicker seam. There.
She felt sorry for this woman. This woman thought herself so smart, pretending to guard money in her big knit bag, thinking no one would look elsewhere. Or perhaps she had something in the bag she didn’t want to lose. Mollie thought it might be food and she might be going home to a large family of boys who would eat it all and leave her only the scraps and gristle. The woman blinked a lot, as if the diffused light that somehow made its way through the windows was too bright. She smelled of coffee and years of boiled meat and something flowery meant to hide the first two smells. Mollie hesitated. She removed her hand and instead smoothed and repinned her bun. At the next stop, the woman got off, and it was then the sound slipped to nothing but the pump of Mollie’s heart.
It should have been easy; it would have been, had the damn woman not turned on a side street, had the crowd not thinned to nothing, had the woman not spun directly around to smack Mollie in the head with her bag.
Mollie could have run away. Mollie could have called the cops.
But she shoved the woman into an alley, then to the ground, and held her sharp knife to the woman’s throat. She took the money from her pocket.
She pushed the tip of the blade into soft skin—just a bit—and the woman started to cry.
“Are you scared?” Mollie whispered.
A barge whistle blew. The river was close.
Jesus. There was a knife in her hand, held to a woman’s throat, and the woman was crying.
What have you become, Mollie Flynn?
She stepped back, dropped the knife, and ran.
CHERRY STREET SETTLEMENT HOUSE
ONE BUILDING STOOD OUT from the others. The brick was blustery red, the long windows of its three stories shimmering and bright. The awning was striped in green and white. The steps had been replaced; the columns of the portico had been stripped of plaster, and the original marble showed its veins. It looked very much like the new kid in the yard who was sure to be beaten up. Mollie felt a momentary sense of displacement. Where was she now? It should have been Cherry Street directly ahead; that building should be the baths. There should be a broken streetlamp fast by the entrance, not a new glass globe and freshly painted pole.
She squinted—yes, just faintly the word BATH could be made out on the brick. The only other sign was quite small, as if the building did not really wish to advertise itself. It was a rectangle of brass, just to the right of a door that no longer had wood planks across its bottom: CHERRY STREET SETTLEMENT HOUSE.
A group of women and men, all with the rough hands and sallow cheeks that identified them immediately as belonging to the Fourth Ward, loitered near the door or stepped inside.
Mollie glanced at Annabelle. She barely recognized her. She did not wear her blonde wig, nor any paint. She held a slim book in her hands, and her face was open and bright. Mollie suddenly remembered the moldy curled pages of Dickens. What was the first line she’d so carelessly read that day so long ago? Whether I shall be the hero of my own life . . . and something else.
It was all so far away from Mollie, though only twenty steps or so to cross the street and climb the stairs.
Annabelle took her hand. “Come on, ya daft bitch. No one bites.”
Nothing at all about the vestibule—where they had once come to sign in and bathe—looked the same, except for the stained glass of Jesus and the lambs. In place of the matron at the desk, and the pail where girls dropped their coins, stood a tall counter. Behind it, a large woman with pince-nez, a white shirt, and starched collar and tie, watched as both women and men signed in.
“Never seen a woman in a tie before,” Mollie whispered to Annabelle.
“It’s the matron from the baths, Moll. She’s still a dragon.”
Behind the counter, a large sign read:
NO SWEARING
NO RUNNING
NO GAMBLING
NO DRINKING
NO KNIVES OR GUNS
The matron set a different ledger before Mollie. “Name, address, and time checked in. You’ll wait here for an interview.”
“An interview? Why?”
“The rules are the rules.”
The gaslights hummed; they were not needed, for the room was painted so white that Mollie wanted to shade her eyes. She dipped the pen in the ink bottle, but then her hand twitched, and the ink splattered across the paper.
“I got a problem with my hands,” Mollie muttered. She felt Annabelle rub her back.
The matron cleared her throat and raised her eyebrows. She waited for Mollie’s name.
Yes, Mollie thought. I can do this. I signed my name many times before. She placed the pen against the paper.
“Your real name,” the matron said. “Your real address.”
“All right already.”
Mollie Flynn. 32 Oak Street. 510C.
The head matron plucked the pen from her hand. She read Mollie’s name, then slid the pad aside and pushed the other in place. She handed the pen to Annabelle. “Come, come, come.”
“She can’t write,” Mollie said. “I’ll sign for her.”
“No, Mollie. I can do it myself.”
And there Annabelle stood, biting her lip, signing her very own name.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Mollie said.
The matron raised a thick finger to the List of Rules. “No swearing.”
“Did I swear?” Mollie said innocently as they moved away from the counter.
Annabelle kissed her cheek. “I’m late. And I can’t run.”
“’Cause of the rules.”
“’Cause I’m suddenly big as a house.” He
r eyes flicked behind her. A man in a drab suit signed his name, then stuck his fingers back in his vest and turned to look at them. He had a long nose and chin, and his hair was oiled tight to his head and colorless as his clothes. His jacket sagged where his shoulders should have filled it out, and his pants hung as if they were made for someone else. But it was as if he thought himself as finely dressed as a Broadway gent, for he rocked back on his heels, smiled at Mollie, then sauntered down the hall.
The matron clucked, and pointed to a long bench. “You’ll wait there for Miss DuPre.”
Mollie sank down, and almost slid off the polished wood.
She grasped the edge with her fingers, as much to keep her balance as to keep them still.
The stairs that once led to the baths were filled with rolling and tumbling children. Their mothers waved to them from the main floor, and there were thrown kisses, and sullen glares from kids not wanting to go up. The matron looked at the round clock above Mollie’s head, then clapped and shushed the children up the stairs.
Shrieks and laughter came from the old bath floor. The hallway beyond the counter echoed with “good morning”s. Then a bell sounded, and quiet came. So much quiet that Mollie heard only the tick of the clock and the scratch of the matron’s pen.
Outside, carts and carriages rolled by. A woman dragged a wheeled cart filled with fabric. A prostitute and her john exited the alley directly across the street and went their separate ways.
A sharp click of heels echoed from the hallway. Emmeline DuPre held the edge of a door in each hand, and shut them to the classrooms beyond. She approached the matron. “Did Terence come?”
“No, miss. Looked for him especially.”
“Hmm.”
Miss DuPre wore an ivory dress. She pushed her thin wire-rim glasses up her nose and read through the names of those who had signed in. “Not bad. And new students?”