Tuesday, July 22, 1919

I had to tell her, didn’t I? Not only did the woman need to know Margaret and me could pay each week for our room, Bridey Clancy had the curiosity of someone didn’t get out much, but parsed the world through the boarders she pried open with her questions.

“The Chicago Magic Company? I won’t have no spells or nothin’ under my roof, miss.”

I wanted to turn up my lips in the way I’d seen Mr. R do when a customer stepped into the shop and, his voice gone all sandy, Mr. R revealed what he called the grand mystery of illusion—It’s all in the power to make people believe. Only to tease, sure, but Bridey kept her place clean and provided us with leftover slivers of soap and a gas plate in the room, and gave over a square of her ice box for our provisions. We’d needed a place for us both once Margaret turned in her cap and her apron, and Packy’s mother—the lady would a been my mother-in-law, Mrs. Dwyer she was—knew a good woman had a clean house on the Near West Side, didn’t charge too much. There we were then, through everything, until Bridey Clancy pointed us to the door.

“Oh no,” I said to Bridey that first day. I told her Mr. R made me swear an oath of secrecy, her not knowing about my history with vows, them promised devotion in exchange for passage. “You have to be a member of the magician’s society to learn such things, Mrs. Clancy. I’m just the girl movin’ orders along in the back.”

Still, she never stopped peering at me curiously, suspicious, imagining more to me than you’d think a small body could hold. “I knew it,” she said in the end. “Didn’t I know all along.” But not that day. When Margaret and I went out the Tuesday morning, Bridey only stood at the landing.

“Don’t forget the papers so, Maeve,” she reminded me, and I promised her that I never would. Not that day especially.

AIRSHIP AFIRE CRASHES

THROUGH LOOP BANK ROOF

BLIMP BURNS, KILLS 12

THOUSANDS SEE CREW LEAP IN PARACHUTES

MARTIAL LAW FOR RIOT IN CAPITAL?

5 DEAD, SCORES INJURED

You could stand near the stacks, read the headlines as the papers flew up into the hands of readers while the curly haired little wop newsboy—looked small to be doing the job he did, still in short pants, and with a cap above his swarthy face—while he chanted in a sing-song loud as one of them stars on stage.

MOTHER SOBS OVER MESSENGER BOY

BURNED TO A CRISP!

And the boy kitty-corner made a duet of it,

BATHIN’ BEAUTIES GET THE NOD! PITCHERS!

Today none of that was enough, and I couldn’t wait to see if I found a paper on the car. I handed my coins over to the little Italian and took the morning Trib.

The smoke came as if self impelled, driving all before it, a perpetual explosion. It was inexhaustible; one stared, waiting to see it stop, but still the great streams rolled out. They spread in vast clouds overhead, writhing, curling, then uniting in one giant river, they streamed away down the sky, stretching a black pall as far as the eye could reach.

That’s how it was, sure, the paper had it right enough, smoke writhing and curling in a giant river pushed by the wind from the lake. Those hadn’t seen the tragedy must’ve smelled it. But those had seen it turned out to be wrong in their reports of the victims, for it was not the bank president, nor Mr. Armour, nor the Paddy from Clare neither, but just ordinary souls lost in that awful wreck. Another full-inch-tall headline under the date—July 22, 1919—and the names of the dead like to spilling over a black-bordered box. Thirteen in all and two of them boys, messenger boys, one of them just fourteen.

Well, hadn’t I been younger still when I took Margaret by the hand and the two of us set off with the nuns for America? Both of us put to work you’d think more than a child ought to do. The eternal scrubbing of the pine-board floors, the soapy tubs for washing clothes and bed linen, looking after children, some the dark-skinned ones scared us so at first because we’d never seen skin stayed dark after a good scrub. We had bushels to learn. Never stopped that, the learning.

I came to love the babies, many of them grew the nappy hair, its feel of fresh-dug turf, and the eyes big and merry unless they were wailing out of loneliness or hunger, for those hadn’t been abandoned to the care of the Sisters of Perpetual Grace lived there because their mammy was sick and they had no da. Didn’t the little ones make me think of home and the sister we’d left, Nuala? Who’d just stood on her own for the first time and walked a few steps, and hadn’t she then tried to follow us out the wicket gate?

Fourteen he was, the youngest of them the airship finished. And if it wasn’t bad enough the messenger lad’d had to quit school, he’d been killed on his second week at work! What about his family sent him out for it? Now they’d be missing what he brought in, what would become of them in their sadness and misery?

I opened my pocketbook, thinking to gnaw a bit of the bread I packed with my boiled egg for lunch—food taking the place of a comforting arm around me—and there’s a candy I missed, or Margaret put there to surprise me before we said goodbye at the corner. A caramel, too, soft, as if the Blessed V’d ignored the things we’d done to get here and was smiling down, saying, Here you are, Maeve, don’t feel bad. The Holy Mother taking the place of what my own mother would a done in the same circumstance.

“Here she comes!”

As if we were, all of us waiting there, too deaf and couldn’t hear the rumbling wheels ourselves, see the front end of the car swaying like a hound’s nose sniffing right, then left. The burning eye at the front glaring through the thin milk light of the summer morning.

Car already full this close to the Loop, but I could hook my arm around a pole and hold the paper out and the greasy ink would not soil my shirtwaist.

DEATH IN HOSPITAL SWELLS BLIMP TOLL

The last to die, the thirteenth, a photographer. Herald Examiner man name of Norton, and him after asking if the equipment he’d tried to bring out with him’d suffered much from the fall. If his pictures’d survived. Well, they never did, nor him neither. Another story about how aircraft would no longer be allowed to fly through the Loop, no matter who wanted to photograph it, and how Mayor Thompson would ask the Congress and them for laws. The reporters got to use their best language, scribbling about the horror and how crowds were after jamming the bank for a look at the destruction, and the bank manager saying there’d been no money lost, as’d been rumored, and only a small fraction of the bank’s business area damaged and even that not beyond repair.

Then a big advertising space the bank’d taken to announce it’d be open for business as usual, with a promise the Goodyear company would make it right for the thirteen dead and all the injured. We never did learn what they got, the victims, if anything.

I steadied my arms best I could so’s the letters wouldn’t dance and dizzy me as I read, glancing out now and then to see the sun pink the sky way over there by the lake. It was going to be hot as blazes again, maybe hotter than yesterday. The air already boggy, no wind.

§

Cooler in our place, at least the front shop with its polished dark-oak shelves of curiosities—the satin capes, the wands, the glossy top hats, and purple wizard caps with silver stars sewed on them. Decks of cards for sale and magic boxes with secret compartments and special coins to use for tricks, glass cases for the best illusions. Old posters showed Mr. R striking various splendid poses, and, in a frame only painted gold but appearing actual, Houdini himself, his eyebrows bent over tortured eyes, as if on this occasion he might be foiled by the handcuffs binding his crossed arms at the wrists. Every morning I turned the patterned brass knob beneath the frosted glass with its arc of letters said The Chicago Magic Company, entered the shop and greeted pretty Florence—always there before me and standing at the counter—that picture of the Great Houdini started me thinking of the fixes Margaret and me’d been in and got out of, same as the man himself.

To keep his place the biggest magic concern in the center of the country, Mr. R was always scheming, thinking. He wanted to expand the enterprise, add a bureau specially for touring magicians wanted to try out their newest tricks. It’s why he’d sent me to the bank the day before, with a letter he said would outline his vision. He no doubt wanted a loan of money to fit out the place, too, or why describe his plan to a bank? But he never said. Typical of him to be so formal when he had a telephone in the office, could have called for an appointment. But, no, he liked to keep his schemes close to his vest and do things the old-fashioned way, Mr. R, and hadn’t my errand put me right in the middle of a true historical event?

In the space behind the shop at the front, closed-in cubes housed Mr. R, and Mr. M—the Rainbow Paper Company proprietor shared our place, though we never saw him much. An opened up room had a row of desks for me, Eveline, Ruth, and the big raised table where George, our artist fella, scratched out the drawings for the catalogues, the tricks, or effects so-called, and the paper party favors Mr. M hawked in a publication of his own. George didn’t work every day, but when he did come he bent over his tilted board near the window looked out over South Dearborn Street. Then there was Billy, the stock boy, who did come every day but only for the couple of hours it took him to package up what’d been ordered and load the packages into a big bag for the postman, and to tell us the latest joke he’d picked up. Billy hoped to take to the stage himself one day and he practiced on we girls at the back whenever he had the chance.

’Twas a grand building to enter each morning with them Indian heads carved in bronze above the elevator doors around the foyer, the bright blue mosaic set out in pictures made of thousands of stamp-sized tiles, the story of Jolliet discovering Chicago, and Père Marquette trying to make Catholics out of the Indians. Eight months into it I liked to choose my elevator, the one under Black Hawk, or Hairy Bear, the names alone spinning my mind into wild fantasies. But the day I entered first—shy-like, the beauty of the place dwarfing me same as the tall buildings outside—I followed the gloved hand of the colored man, Clyde, waved me through the ridged marble pillars towards an open cage without even noticing which head hung over the one I stepped into. Hadn’t I felt I was getting away with something?

Yet it was Gladys told me about the job, and Gladys a girl just like me meant anybody could work there, and so I rode up to the ninth floor where Mr. R himself presided over the counter at the time. He wanted two girls, one to handle the front so as to leave him free for other business, his studying and practicing, his jawing, his cigar smoking, but he could tell right off I didn’t have the zing to chat with the parlor magicians and the vaudeville types visited the shop. As he studied my face, divining me, the heat spread over my cheeks same as lard on the bread the sisters would take out of the mission’s big oven at swallow’s cough, before the sun crawled up the sky and all the little ones woke hungry.

A sorcerer himself, Mr. R dressed natty in clean cuffs and collar each day, his black hair slicked a quarter to one side, the rest to the other, like an open book more than half-read, his mustache an even brush above lips thin as Bridey’s soap. George used Mr. R as a model for many of the drawings in the catalogue. He managed a good likeness, too, save for the eyes, the small blue-black points drilled into me that first day. Drilled but didn’t penetrate, for he said, “I take you for the trustworthy type.”

He never invited me to sit down or nothing, but said why he needed more staff was because he aimed to attract all the magicians, the conjurors, and spiritualists passing through the city. Countless numbers of them had to be because every show in all the many theaters offered an act of the kind, from the simple ones where things appeared and disappeared—some fellow in a tuxedo plucking a real rabbit, twitching and twittering with fright, out of one of them hats like displayed on the shiny dark shelves—to the most mysterious. Mr. R held forth, describing dreams that turned out to be harder to realize than rabbits. For wasn’t he after the biggest fish, even Blackstone and Thurston, and the young card man Vernon, even the Orientals. Imagined a cozy room, he did, where he’d set out a bottle and a humidor and his newest invention and, under the spell of the camaraderie he’d created, Mr. R would learn the secrets he craved and all them others could demonstrate their new acts. Sounded a grand dream to me, and didn’t my heart speed thinking maybe Anna Eva would visit, too, though she was getting on then and you didn’t find her touring to Chicago often.

I’d seen her myself, at the vaudeville, with Gladys, us sitting up top the balcony of the Majestic—but closer would have been too much then, it being my first show. There I sat in my best shirtwaist and a hat so big the man behind asked me to hold it in my lap. Anna Eva came on late, the surprise guest, when I wondered how there could be any more. Already a chimp’d circled the stage on roller skates, a girl’d danced with a chair between her teeth. There’d been a ragtime song and dance by a man in blackface. A couple of fellas wearing tall hats and sporting mustaches stretched out beyond their cheeks, with boots’d clomped across the boards, got in some kind of pretend-tussle. The audience’d stamped their feet and some’d whistled when one of the cowboys chased the other off.

When the music changed to something eerie, caused shivers, Gladys squeezed my arm. The grand velvet curtain—always red they were—lifted in gathers and there she was, Anna Eva herself, though I didn’t know her name just then. Anna Eva standing, her fair head bowed until the curtain, hoisted high as it would go, let clouds of vapor escape from even higher. Seemed like she stood in the sky. Cheers greeted her appearance and her lips curled in that sweet smile I came to dream of later. Dressed all in white she was, silk, lace-trimmed, and the man introduced her—a young man in a tuxedo and hair with the shine of patent leather, such as I was to see on Mr. R—that fellow shouted out, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am privileged to introduce the fabled woman of mystery, the very same that stumped the Great Houdini, the incomparable Anna Eva Fay who will perform her famous cabinet mystery!” Mystery he called it, not trick. We saw her tied into the cabinet, heard a banjo playing, tambourine rattling, saw them same objects fly out, then her, standing untied. A marvel, really, and it made us all laugh with amazement, most of us, them not doubters. How did she do it? we wondered, and since then I have found out. But the real magic came with the mind reading I was to see later, just the summer before that Tuesday in Chicago when Mr. R hired me to work for him at the magic company.

The trustworthy type, he said. Anna Eva herself could not have been as convincing as me that day. Makes me think I did have the gift Mammy saw in Ennis. Comes from having been born before dawn. A present from her could a been, and why her regard lingered on me the moment of our leaving. Yes, I have considered that, how I foresaw the opportunities I would discover at Mr. R’s place, even if it was only a job I wanted then. Yet, if I could truly see what others could not, it had to be a knack came and went. Or maybe ’tis a body resists what she knows because feelings drive harder than reason. The bold in me moving ahead, hadn’t it always been so? Worthy of trust? Me looking for employment and all, I only let my head tilt to the side and smiled and so came to be situated at a desk in the back, sorting the cash from the money orders, sending out the tricks, the illusions, so-called. Illusions when all we really had back there was a mess of paper.

July heat climbed through the morning as I slit open envelopes, divided a few coins and bills from the money orders and stamps customers were supposed to send and mostly did. It’s the rare bird ignored the advice at the front on the catalogue: Currency, etc. should be sent only in Registered Letters. Then time for lunch, and we three girls, plus Florence, from the front, quit the building to nibble whatever we had, in whatever shade we could find on the street. It was relief more than food we wanted, and we could have gone to the park, or down the block to State Street to shop the big store windows, but we hadn’t long and we only wanted a lake-sent breeze, really, something resembling fresh air. You’d think all the talk among us would a been about the airship crash and a load of it was so, because hadn’t I been there to see for myself and they wanted my account of it, same as the boarders at Bridey’s. I showed them the small wound on my neck and we shook our heads over them perished.

“Big loss. I saw one of them airmen myself at Grant Park on Sunday. And I can tell you girls, he was a fine lookin’ man,” Eveline said and winked, suggesting more than she wanted to let on. Typical of Eveline, that teasing. The newest of us, having started at The Chicago Magic Company less than two months before, we’d become used to her by then and for the most part liked her. Eveline was one implied more than revealed things, so for all we knew she’d slipped away with the airman for a cocktail or a dance before he set off on his fatal crash.

“If it was the pilot you saw, it doesn’t matter if he was handsome. He’s one of the few who got out alive. Didn’t you see in the papers? He landed safely on a roof and that’s not fair at all. Not when it was his fault.” This from a frowning Ruth. “I don’t see how you can feel sorry for a man who caused the death of so many innocents. Just gone to work, same as every day, then poof! Dead. They say it was a German balloon, too.”

“I hear they’ve got him under arrest,” said Florence.

Could be hard to hear out there with the motorcars firing and the newsies bawling the latest and all of a sudden a brass band coming from somewhere. Then, too, Ruth spoke in a high, almost whiny voice, childlike. Eveline talked tough and dressed better than the rest of us and not because Mr. R gave her any more in her pay packet. She came to work with nails painted and her lips swollen and rouged. My chum Gladys said Eveline got up to mischief with men, as if she was shocked by it. But maybe Gladys’d like to have been getting up to the same with Charles Francis Brown on the seventeenth floor. She laid her opinion of Eveline on how she dressed and that laugh of hers, which could feel like a slap. Gladys never liked my work mate, but she often came out with us all the same, Gladys did. Some days just the two of us strolled along State, searching for an idea to bring back for Margaret to make for us. Margaret being a crack seamstress could copy anything and Gladys was always one for the latest fashions.

That day, with the stink of the crash still in the air, Eveline held back any smart remarks might a hatched in her mind—employed a respectful tone, in my view. “It was a Goodyear balloon. Same as the tire company. You could see it on the front. Goodyear. You can’t blame the Krauts for everything.”

“Easy for you to say. But if it wasn’t for all them Germans, my Walter would have been here and I wouldn’t be spendin’ my days with all youse.” Florence blinked back the tears fountained up every time she mentioned the name. Her Walter.

The moment must’ve been specially sharp for her as the brass band passed at the corner, six or eight players in blue with gold braid across the chest leading a cluster of doughboys up Madison, them maybe just come back. The band played the song everyone knew by then, “Till We Meet Again.” Could be sad, but less sad on this occasion seeing how the marchers in brown had returned. Not Walter, though.

Even me’d lost someone. Patrick Dwyer was never a soldier, not with that weak arm of his, and despite him trying to strengthen it with exercises didn’t do much good, no guarantee it’d ever be good enough for shooting. But the flu came home with the boys and got Packy. No Germans, only the flu. His sweet ways flare in my memory even now, him going on and on about how smart I was, how brave I’d been to leave Ireland on my own—well I’d never told him about the Sisters of Perpetual Grace—how pretty I was, so’s he’d almost had me believing it. The sisters said girls must watch the sweet talkers because they knew what they were after trying to accomplish with their sugared words. Too many of them words like too many candies could make you sick, except, in the case of the sweet talkers, you might find yourself the kind of sick that lasts for the rest of your life. They liked to put the fear of God in us, the sisters did, and we guessed their meaning while also knowing it wasn’t always true. Things people told me flicker through my thoughts unexpectedly like that and with them come pictures—Sister Mary Theresa, her face squeezed into a raised round biscuit by the white wimple under her black veil, her gums pale red above small teeth when she smiled.

Despite her no doubt good intentions, she was wrong about Pat. He acted proper, not like some of the toughs held up the walls at the club dances in Hamburg and Canaryville looking for an easy girl. We’d tried those dances, Margaret and me. A lot of drinking and fights out back and priests there to oversee the goin’s-on and politicians strolling in, some of them not bothering even to take the cigars out of their mouths, but chomping down with one side of their jaw as they leaned into you and shouted over the music, “Havin’ fun, honey?” More proper, too, my Pat than them employed young Bridgets—Bridget being what housemaids were called. Rich old fellas tried to have their way with maids like Margaret in the big houses on Prairie Avenue. Despite her weekly pay, plus a room and her meals, and all the things she learned about how fine folk laid the table and groomed themselves, Margaret ran off the first time the man of the house tried to kiss her.

Yes, Packy was a gentle one. I’d seen it right away. Him sitting in the chair just beside me in the church hall, his mother on the other side of him. The youngest of a family of four and the last home, his mammy maybe hanging on to him. But he got her to invite Margaret and me out for ice cream after the show featured some of the parish children dancing. Couldn’t a been more genteel. While Mrs. Dwyer was describing her particular sort of hip stitch to Margaret, I found him staring at me, and smiled. Must have encouraged him, because next thing wasn’t he asking if he could meet me after my shift at the catalogue company the very next day. Himself he worked for the city. Already moving up in the sanitation department, thanks to his folks being good Democratic voters and him knowing what he was after.

Mere weeks we walked out together before the night he took my arm and steered me across State Street. Stood me to supper at a restaurant with white cloths on the tables and napkins big as a child’s shirt, chairs padded with velvet. Me marveling it was Maeve Curragh of old Mill Street, Ennis in the scene, for I hadn’t pictured the same, even if they often said at home I’d got the gift same as our mammy. You can see the good people in the night, Mammy’d whispered, when I’d wake, frightened. But I have rarely seen them so much as felt their presence, like a rheumatiz knowing when a storm’s about to come.

There he sat across the smooth white napery, Packy, his hair slicked back, color of rust rained on, his eyes shining as he talked about the future he saw for us. Me just going along, nodding, enjoying the gleam of the polished cutlery, the lamps hanging down over us shedding light yellow as cream clotted at the top of a pail, all the while thinking I’d be changing from the leader to the one led and how that would happen, I didn’t know. But fat sizzling along the bone of a hefty chop and taties on a platter decorated with parsley, coin-sized carrots sliding in butter. I appreciated a good meal and it felt nice with someone taking care of me. Didn’t I remember the evening fondly, too, when things changed that fast, well before Christmas. I never got the ring he promised me, but had only memories, same as I had of home.

§

Finally done for the day, slipped into the stream flowing towards the tall brass doors whirled a body from the vestibule out to the street. Knowing my choice rested between Bridey and her back stairs or our oven of a room, I got off the car at Halsted, as I often did, but instead of heading up to West Monroe I meandered along the street to enjoy a bit of the evening stench, the clouds of it blowing north from the Yards, then also garbage rotting and sweat-dripping horses, the wheezy motor cars and trucks with their billows of gas exhaust, the reek of urine along the walls outside the saloons. More open there on Halsted, brighter so. Even though a dirty sky, I could see more of it here than downtown, where buildings rose so tall they darkened the streets beneath.

I had to walk past the Academy of Music and wasn’t I tempted to duck in and see a show, for they played all day and not many days didn’t need lightening with a laugh. But I had to choose between a show or supper tonight, because we’d splurged on Sunday, Margaret and me, and it was too hot to sit indoors anyhow. The old ones sat out on stoops, crones with shawls draped around them in the scant shade of doorways. Signs tempting from above, or painted right on the window, Ice Cream Sundae, 10¢, and didn’t that one wet my mouth with longing. A storefront movie theater, had to be Italian with all the i’s in the words. The mission on the corner where a man held a placard said, “Jesus Saves.” Lunch counters and proper, if not especially fancy, restaurants, Thompson’s cafeteria further down and delicatessens where the proprietor would slice me off a smidge of cheese or meat I could eat in my hand as I walked if I wanted. Oh, yes, and I was famished and the memory of lunch dry as the bread made up that meal. I’d a liked nothing more than a cold soda or one of them lemonades you could buy at the café on the corner where Halsted met Madison.

Thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to idle here till the sky went pink again and it wasn’t so blinding out, blinding even if a layer same as the gauze strips you’d put over a bleeding wound spread over the city of Chicago where my sister Margaret and me’d come to meet our futures. I’d already spent a nickel for my fare, though I might’ve had it still if Desmond Malloy’d been collecting on my car. Yes, that one, and hadn’t he been sneaking into my dreams all day? Good chance he would a let me slip by for free, since he’d made such a fuss yesterday.

But I was left with only four nickels and where to spend them? The sizzle of sausages from one of the Hunky places, that salty cheese you could get from the Greeks if you could suffer the garlic on the vendor’s breath. Well, we’d had a grand time, my sister and me, at the show on Sunday. We’d laughed at the vaudeville and we’d cried at the picture, and even if it cost us a good portion of our weekly wages, I never saw one so beautiful. Broken Blossoms, and in a movie palace so grand made you forget your near empty pocketbook. Maybe it meant more bread than meat till the next payday. Didn’t matter. More than the gut needed satisfying.

Then a tap on my shoulder and me, startled, turning round to see the moss on the friary stones boasting its softness. The hair shooting back from that arrow point and the barest strip of scarlet around the boiled ham forehead, and his hat in his hand, but a boater instead of the conductor’s billed cap he wore on the cars.

“Fancy meetin’ you on this night of nights. The girl who saw it all, and them still countin’ the dead. What’s that I see above your collar?”

He gazed down at me, so I wondered if my hat’d gone crooked again, or my shirtwaist’d got soiled as well it might have at the end of such a day. But it’s the nick, from yesterday, he saw as he bent down, breezing me with the smell of beer.

“’Tis a souvenir of the disaster yesterday, though I don’t need remindin’. But why would this night be special, then?”

Another American holiday or some other occasion I’d missed in my ignorance? No, but the game his men lost, the White Sox, and it’s no surprise to me he should a been pinning his dreams on those fellas like most of the rest in the city. I rarely dawdled for long in the sports pages, but I’d seen pictures of the players lined up in their uniforms. They were going to win the World Series of baseball, everyone said it, though the world they talked about included only the U.S. of A., as far as I could tell. No one imagined their precious white would turn to black, all those men be shamed before the year was out.

“That’s the tragedy, then, is it? Not the airship crash, or the soldiers returned in one piece can’t find jobs to feed themselves?”

It’s like he never heard me. He was shaking his head as he was smiling, his lips pursed together. A dimple the size of a pencil eraser dented his left cheek and them eyebrows went up. Still, he did look beat and I was after thinking it had to be more than a game troubling him. But I aimed to keep my gaze hard as the glare of the sea on the rare days sun blessed our crossing, and I drifted—as I do when the past rises—and the seconds ticked along while I tried to think of what to say next, but then he spoke.

“Have you had your supper yet, darlin’? I confess your name has slipped my memory, it bein’ such a day, but I’m just off to have my own and would be pleased to have you join me.”

I lied, saying of course I’d had my supper, because it’d all of a sudden gone to mid-evening blue—I’d strolled that long—and a girl with a proper family would a been home and come back, if she was out at all.

“Well, then, sit with me while I have mine. You might enjoy a dish of ice cream or a lemonade. What do you say, dear? Cheer me up? There’s a café at Madison where they make a nice lemonade. Go down very smooth on a steamin’ evenin’ like this.”

Dear, he said, and darlin’, as if he’d known me for months, after just confessing he’d forgotten my name, not remembering I’d never mentioned it. I shrugged, as if I hadn’t been thinking of that café myself.

“Cheer you up, is it? Well, then I suppose I could, for a short spell, because I’m after meetin’ my sister soon. That’d be Margaret Curragh, while I am Maeve.”

I fibbed about Margaret to give myself an escape. Yet, as the hour whiled by, I regretted it, because he persuaded me to have a piece of pie with my drink and winked at the lady—old as Bridey could a been, but looking done-in and wearing a skirt soiled with something must a dropped on it—when she mentioned the à la mode would be extra. It was cherry inside and came lovely with cream dripping over the sugar sparkle of the brown crust. She didn’t look at me at all when she set it down, but—smiling, the years as if melted away—asked him if he’d like to take cream in his coffee.

“Thank you, dear. I will.” He took out a package of cigarettes, shook one loose and lit it, and his right eye went squinty with the smoke curling up towards the ceiling fan.

“Dickie Kerr’s the disappointment. If they wanted to use a southpaw they should a gone with Lefty Williams. He’s the man. If they’d asked me I would a said, ‘Pull Dickie,’ but no one asked and no one listened to the experts in the stands, and so we lost the series when we could a made a clean sweep of it.”

The waitress then brought his dinner on a thick white plate, heavenly fumes streaming up from the meat, slices of it drifting in a dark gravy soaked up by a hunk of bread even thicker than the plate. I should a bitten my tongue for thinking it more dainty to pretend to be full when I had enough appetite to finish his plate, my pie, and more still.

“I’ve had my supper,” I’d said, as if I’d never missed a meal. Pride’s a virtue suited better to the well fed, but there was nothing for it then but to stretch out the pie forkful by forkful, taking a bit in my mouth and savoring the difference between the soft tart filling and the crisp pastry. Listening, too, for he blathered as he stabbed and cut, pierced, chewed, swallowed. Like a man ought to eat. Despite my own hunger, it was gratifying in itself to watch Desmond Malloy campaigning his way through that meal—juice dribbling onto his bristly chin, him wiping it with the back of his hand between words that described the defeat his beloved White Sox suffered at the hands of the Yankees from New York.

That he was a man of strong feeling I could guess by the way the lights and darks shifted on his face as the story wound out. He grinned at the recollection of one thing, frowned at something else, and the melody of his voice rose and fell and occasionally paused as he gulped and the big knuckle in his throat jogged up and down in a fascinating way. I recalled the picture in yesterday’s paper of the dirigible preparing to take off from Grant Park. The ropes’d held it fast until it rose to its fate. Sitting there across from the streetcar conductor my heart lifted, not entirely off like that airship, but like a conveyance intended to soar, only tethered to the ground for the time being.

It’d gone to near night outside and the waitress had taken our plates and I’d sucked my glass dry, but Desmond Malloy showed no signs of wanting to leave. I wondered if I should get up and say goodbye to make the appointment I’d claimed to have with my sister. But he seemed to have forgotten that or didn’t care. He spooned sugar into his coffee and stirred it with a clink, clink and he’d gone from the ball game to the strike that was surely coming, he said, if the Chicago Surface Lines brass didn’t budge. A talker, he was, and that suited me because myself I was more a listener, something’d always marked me different at home. He explained why the men ought to get the eighty-five cents per hour they were asking for, and it had nothing to do with the Bolshies, like the company brass’d claimed, said Desmond Malloy, but was only on account of the needs of honest working men like himself.

If they did get it, he would be making as much in a couple of days as I made in a week at The Chicago Magic Company. I’d have to learn one of them tricks created money from wands if I wanted to keep up. Already, as far as I could figure, he earned my salary in three days instead of six, and if the car men went out for long, how would I get to my job, to make what I did make? Margaret could walk to her work at the shirt factory, but she couldn’t support the both of us, and with the garment situation being always up to the rim, about to boil over, maybe she would go out like the thousands of others in the city that summer.

As evening deepened, the odd puff of air came in, cooling. If I’d gone back to Bridey’s and had a wash before my stroll and hung my shirtwaist in the air to freshen it, or worn tomorrow’s, I’d not a been wondering if I smelled bad, or if the grime of the city’d soiled my face. But I would never a met Mr. Desmond Malloy had the weariness of a man at the end of a day, smoking his Camel cigarettes. Then, so sudden I blinked my eyes, he smiled broad—his teeth good—and dropped altogether the subject of striking car men and losing ball teams. Instead he asked, “Anyone ever tell you you’re a dead ringer for Dorothy Phillips?”

The movie star? No one had, and I admitted as much.

“The brown eyes and the curly hair though. Look closer in the mirror, darlin’. You’ll see it.”

Pouring right across the table, all that charm of his. But Dorothy Phillips was it, herself on the cover of Photoplay the very month? Then he switched subjects, asking about the home country, and had I come over with my family and how charming it sounded, my way of speaking, and how had we all made out. The past loomed like an ache, my mammy’s face, the blades of her cheekbones, the hollows deepened with each tooth lost. My da, his good nature besting the pain of walking most days, but sometimes the pain besting the good nature and him lashing out with his stick at whoever stood nearest.

The wicket gate, the friary, the whole tangled, startling lot of memories threatening to overtake me in one of them waves I fought through by looking out at the lights on Halsted Street, crowds of people, and peddlers calling still, at this hour, and tunes from a squeeze box. All so busy and joyous, easy to forget any trouble in the bustle. Nothing of the kind in Ennis, only the streets—even the nicest, like Church Street with its curve opening to a view of the cathedral—even Church Street filthy with the dropping of ponies and asses waiting in the harnesses of the traps. Streets so narrow they’d be somber on the sunniest of days.

“It’s just me and Margaret came,” I told him. “My sister. Our da chose us as the ones likely to succeed in America and we’ll be goin’ back someday for a visit anyway. We’re savin’ for it.”

But sure we were not. Whenever we put a few bills aside some need forced us to use them. We might as well a been saving for a palace as the price of our passage back to Ennis. He was staring across the table at me, intent like, yet even so the right pupil wandered off to the side of the red-veined white.

“Like us all. Never set eyes on the home country myself, but my ma can get herself weepin’ for it, though she was small when she left. Come to think of it, I must have passed you in the crowd Sunday at the flag raisin’. You’re a member, aren’t you, Maeve, you and your sister Margaret? The Ancient Order of the Hibernians?”

The right side eye joined the left as he stretched them both wide, rolling his r’s, playing the clown like he did on the cars. He laughed at his try for an accent same as mine.

“Grand, wasn’t it? The flag of the Republic of Ireland flyin’ right here in Chicago?”

“’Twas,” I nodded, without admitting our absence. Instead of joining the party in Bridgeport, Margaret and me’d been sitting in the theater dabbing at our tears as the Chinese man found the poor little girl dead in the wonderful picture show, Broken Blossoms. It was the memory of that caused the mournfulness he read on my face, though he thought it must be me missing the home country.

“Gee, it must be a simpler kind of life. And wouldn’t we all go for a life like that, considerin’ what’s happenin’ here in this stew pot. You can’t open a letter for wonderin’ if there’s a Bolshie bomb in it, and even worse than the Bolshies, them niggers just keep streamin’ north, when any jobs we have ought to be goin’ to the men fought for this country, like you were sayin’. We need some changes around here. It can get a man down. It’s a wonder I don’t just jump in the lake some days. Do you ever feel like that, Maeve?”

“The big one there? Never that. No.”

“You’re not a swimmer, then?”

“I am not.”

“You’ve not been to the ball park, and you don’t swim at the lake. You’re missin’ out on all the pleasures of the city, darlin’.” Perked up again, stars glinting in them eyes, light shining through a glass bottle greener than anything I ever saw back home, despite the picture his mammy painted for him.

I let my shoulders lift and fall and he went on talking about the fine dunks he’d had in Lake Michigan, contests and all and how his da taught all the Malloy boys—four of them—to swim when they were kids. My da so, too, out at Lahinch, if teaching is what you could call it when he limped into the wild Atlantic and threw us down the waves one after the other, like fishes too meager to make up a decent feed. Even Fiona, the youngest then, and hadn’t she caught a terrible fever after, weakened her, Mammy said, and maybe what started her fading, though when we’d left, Margaret and me, she was still in the picture. Always coughing, though. Don’t know how it must a been for our da when Fiona finally coughed her last. Don’t know because we were looking after coughing ones ourselves, Margaret and me, them children barking even though Florida and all the waters around it had to be bushels warmer than Ireland’s Atlantic. So you couldn’t blame our da. Fiona wouldn’t a liked being left on the shore as out he tossed the rest of us. It’s the way you’ll learn, he said, when we came up sputtering.

But we never got to Lahinch much and my next experience of the sea came on the Mauretania with that heaving motion. Thought of it sickened me though it was near to eight years since we’d come over. All of us too nauseated to eat the poor food we were offered, the nuns, too, but the main nun, Sister Mary Brigid, who’d made the trip more than once, assuring us that tomorrow would be better—it wouldn’t be rough for the whole crossing. Didn’t the sea prove her wrong that trip? Even when we got to St. Augustine, after riding on the train over land sure solid as any I’d walked upon, even then when I saw the sea I smelled sick. How it got in our hair. We had no place to properly wash so the sour travelled with us.

The grand Titanic, big as a city sunk down among the icebergs? The Eastland, right here in Chicago, almost as many killed as on the Titanic even? The stories I’d read of these disasters shouted in the background, nearly deafening me as he babbled on about his fine times at the lake, parties with young friends, picnics. Then my thoughts stilled, for if my ears had not played a trick on me, he was proposing to teach me to swim.

“It’s easy and the most refreshin’ thing you can do on a summer day. What do you say?”

He tapped another cigarette on the table, struck a match, sucked in the tobacco and his eyebrows went up as his lungs filled, then down again as, squinting, he blew the smoke into the space between us. Me, I must a swallowed, shivered, but I couldn’t a said even that same night what I did because as the tobacco smoke drifted up and he leaned across the table, my nose sized up the sun on his shirt, the man-sweat with its whiff of beer and the roast meat smell, the grease of it, because some of it had got onto his necktie. If I’d been one of the girls in the Laura Jean Libbey stories I’d a been swooning right then under the power of all those perfumes, the hair, too, with the oil he’d put in it, dry by then.

I never fainted, no, but I heard the rasp of a blade slicing through the ropes’d held me, though my hands were folded politely on the table and I kept my teeth on my lip. His hand was sliding across towards my wrist. A fine mitt with the long fingers like my da’s and golden hairs growing on the section above the first knuckle and nails a bit gray at the edges, but trimmed so, and hadn’t he just been out all day? And didn’t my da have thick black in the skin as well as under the nails, enough so that our mammy joked about him starting another plot of cabbage right there at his fingertips? Desmond Malloy’s hands were nothing like that, but smooth on the backs and a sweet baked bun color from the sun, just a rumor of the veins running beneath. I wanted to touch one of them. I was that trembly I thought he’d surely notice, so I shook myself. Fool, fool, I scolded.

“Whaddya say,” he repeated. “You could meet me after work. I’ve got the early shift Wednesday. Bring your bathin’ costume with you and you can change in the bathhouse.” He winked. “We’ll make an evenin’ of it. Some ice cream after? Or maybe a late supper? Tomorrow at five thirty? It’s goin’ to be another hot one, darlin’. You’ll be glad of a swim. It’ll be peachy. Whaddya say?”

I had neither a bathing costume nor the money to buy one if I wanted to, but there we sparkled like two people on the cover of True Story. Margaret, worried about me since Packy perished of the flu, wouldn’t have a care but could move along into married life with her Harry because it seemed to me that Desmond Malloy could be more than a flirt. Him warming me with that emerald fire burned directly through me, Maeve Curragh, made me think I could do anything. Even swim. I patted my mouth with my napkin like the sisters’d taught me and twirled the straw in the glass, which had been truly empty for a long spell.

“It can’t be tomorrow.”

“Then the next day. It’s goin’ to be hot all week long.”

A powerful man, yes, might have been him holding me in his arms instead of whatever else bound me. The street noise streaming in from Halsted, someone hollering at someone else and boys running past the door shrieking and the patient clop, clop of horses leading their buggies back to the barn. Somewhere a telephone with its shrill ring, ring. All of it making a platform for me to raise myself up. Me thinking, yes, yes, but staying cool, I think, keeping my face straight.

“Thursday, then, and where would you be wantin’ to meet, so?”

He laughed a big laugh, filled the café and caused people to search for the cause—like you do when you want to be in on the fun. I pretended to be interested in something going on behind the counter, where a waiter in a white apron cleared dishes and filled drinks, and pearl divers in the kitchen behind scrubbed and smacked plates against one another, for I did not want Desmond Malloy to see my own peepers flashing with excitement. I would have thought it a joke, but didn’t he reach across again and try to take my hand before I slipped it away? Oh, yes, I was in for it. I didn’t feel the heat of the evening at all or the loneliness’d been my companion as I walked along Halsted earlier, made smaller by the crowds, the buildings, the noise. No one noticing me at all.

He steered me out to the street and down to the corner stop and we waited until we heard the clacking and the bell. He tipped his hat and said goodnight and made me promise to remember our date.

“It’ll be jake, Maeve. I promise.”

As I stood in the shadows, stunned by a kind of wonderment same, better, than my first tree of oranges, a colored man sprinted to make the door of the trolley before it started off. The poor fellow tumbled over something, and fell to the cobblestones, just missing the car Desmond Malloy hopped onto, laughing as he waved to me, and the car clicked away.

§

Even then, hours after the last edition, a young newsie held to the corner singing the latest headlines.

FOLKS IN PARACHUTES FLOATED THROUGH SKY!

READ THE NAMES OF THEM KILLED

AND HURT IN DIRIGIBLE DROP!

SANDBURG SEZ, RENTS GO UP

WHEN NEGROES MOVE IN!

I had my paper from the morning but the news’d got old and I’d promised Bridey, and I never did spend my nickels on supper but made do with pie and ice cream and the breathlessness makes a body lose her appetite. I gave the young tenor his pennies, and grabbed the Daily News from him to leave fresh on Bridey’s hall table.

Margaret was in and snoring. If I hadn’t seen her and heard her, I would a known by the smell. Her man Harry only drove the raw meat, didn’t butcher it himself, but the stink clung to him and jumped onto Margaret same as a flea.

My bottom just fit on the sill of the window where Margaret’s shirtwaist fluttered in the shy bits of air could never seem to work themselves up into anything truly refreshing. Swim? Sure a dunking in the lake would cool a body, but the Lord only knew what lay beneath the water, them drowned there, including the hundreds tumbled off the deck of that ship, the Eastland, and it tipped over right at the dock. Mary and Joseph! Fishes and maybe water snakes like the nuns warned us about. Satan himself ready to coil around my ankles and pull me under for my bushel of sins.

I didn’t have to go. But if I did I’d need a bathing costume and fearing water, as we had ever since that ship and later the sight of the creatures crawled out of the water in Florida, we’d found better things to spend our money on. A snort, a toss, but not so reckless a toss she fell onto the space waiting for me. With her mouth slack, Margaret looked younger than her nineteen years, except for the red hands, scarred from the pricks of her trade and the needle once went clear through her thumb.

My eyes wandered down to the lane where some men shambled along home from the taverns, gassing each other about this and that, a mischievous one stopping to tug at one of the clotheslines strung from tenement to tenement. A bit of moon brightened the scene, and the odd yellow light from a building. As long as the day is, night always falls. Da said that, and also, Good luck happens same as bad. Remember, girls. The words he left us with. Remember girls, good luck can happen same as bad. You’ll find your way better if you keep your heads up. And you, Maeve, born at the hour that you were.

Of course no lights burned at Bridey’s. I had to feel my way down them creaky stairs and hope Bridey and her nosy son were asleep and the other boarders too, despite the caterwauling came from the lane, voices rising in threats. Two flights, then the door with its glass oval and the owner’s lace conceit. The sleeping ones might think it cats or rats, never thieves if they heard anything at all, because it wasn’t a house with bits and pieces worth stealing. Down the steps to the street, air soft at night, the sort of night we seldom enjoyed at home where all the stones in the land held the coolness.

In my mind I saw them hanging clothes and thought of the opportunity showed directly to me, for I might find myself a bathing costume hanging out there with the sheets and the union suits, the shirtwaists and the baby nappies. Though the night beat black as a sinner’s prospects in heaven, my eyes soon adjusted and by the time I got to the corner, it didn’t seem nearly so. Maybe it was the moon angling down on the washing pulled me sure as if the clothesline was merely a rack in a store and me coming in with a pocketbook full of dollar bills.

Between the houses I had to steer myself out to the back with the aid of a wall. A bottle rolled and something shrieked, terrifying the life near out of me, for it had to be a rat or a feral cat or some creature I hadn’t seen yet, but only heard of—like the alligators in Florida raised their open mouths from the edge of a swamp when you didn’t even know they were there. Then the moon went behind a cloud and left me stuck. I could see nothing at all, and in their confidence the crawly things came out and fair chased me down the street, and in my nightdress I tripped and fell.

When you’ve decided on a thing, there’s nothing but to be after doing it. These are my words, not Da’s, something taught me by our long way here across the terrible ocean to America, at last to the city where we’d stayed for nearly four years. Yet for a minute there, in Bridey’s lav with its smell of Jap Rose soap, which stung the scrape on my knee, I did stop long enough to drift. Never a good idea, that, to let wondering interfere, but there came a thought real as anything outside my head. If he was so keen on my company, why had Desmond Malloy not suggested the pictures, or a stroll through the park? A dance hall, a show, supper? Certainly the heat of the week came into it, but did it have to be swimming? For even if I found the proper clothing and joined him on the lip of the lake so vast it might be the ocean itself—it’s that wide you couldn’t see across to the other shore—would I have the courage to step deeper into the water when I knew there might well be a part from one of the bodies fell off the Eastland? And how many other corpses rising up from the bottom to plague us living and tempt us under?

Margaret’s arm had fallen onto my half so I had to lift it, roused her. “Go back to sleep, Peg,” said me, stroking a damp strand of hair from her face, squeezing her plump arm while pushing my foot against her arse to make a bit more room.