Thursday, July 24, 1919

Still another story satisfied Margaret’s curiosity about the package I carried with my pocketbook. Wasn’t it my best skirt, then, to change into, for my date? My sleepy sister inquired no further, for even early on we were both that drained by the heat we saved any go we had for the day ahead. But she did remember to give me the bunch of violets she promised, and pinned them at my throat.

There I was at the streetcar stop, the violets tickling my chin and the morning edition soiling my hand because, since I needn’t worry about buying my own supper that night, I had two pennies to spare. July 24, ninety-three degrees already, and there’s a child missing.

40 HOUR HUNT FAILS TO BARE CLEW TO CHILD

The same missing girl I saw mentioned in a headline I’d skipped over the night before, but this story on the front page grabbed your stomach, where fear prowls same as hunger. Only six years of age and with the sweet face and the bobbed hair of Baby Marie in the pictures. Janet Wilkinson. Gone missing on her way home from school. “Not a trace,” wept her mother. Little Janet shambling along, as children do, up to the building where she lived with her mammy and her da in an apartment on the fourth floor. Disappeared, just like that. No trace. Not a schoolbook, a shoe. No screams heard, no signs of a child’s nail marks on a doorknob she could a been clinging to. Only a box of chocolates found in the apartment of the janitor, name of Fitzgerald, lived in the same building. A moron, they called him, the papers. Could a been him, Janet’s father thought but, as it was, the whereabouts of sweet Janet were a mystery, another mournful element in the day’s hash of woe—other strikes brewing, prices going up. The troubles stretched over the city like an elastic band and me wondering what next thing would cause it to snap.

In my daze, I saw a horse rear up and near dump the man driving the wagon behind. People dodged the flying hooves and, in his haste, a man in a seersucker suit slipped on some horse leavings on the tracks. Boys laughed as he fell and rose again quickly, cursing the beast just then suffering his master’s whip even as he craned his big horse head around, teeth bared, wanting to bite. Another boy there today, smaller, his father hunched behind him holding a small stack of the extra papers. The little one’s voice a tin whistle shrill, threading through the two newsies already’d claimed the corner.

FIRE CAPTAIN DIES ON DUTY!

POLACK TENEMENTS DESTROYED!

RUSSIAN TROOPS DESERT ALLIES

JOIN BOLSHEVIKI!

Mr. R was studying Janet’s story when I passed through the shop. I could see his shiny hair over the top of the front page. Did he think he could find her? Or bring in Anna Eva, whose powers made a person shiver at all that lay behind the solid world, unsettling as the good people.

Mr. R and Anna Eva could go to that apartment building and call the spirit of little Janet. I believed they could do it, for I’d seen Anna Eva’s power at work and not just by means of the cabinet trick first amazed me. Though it’d been only the summer before, when Packy and I were promised and Margaret looking lonely, seemed already years ago I took her to one of them special afternoons Anna Eva put on for women shy of letting their minds be read among men. I made Margaret sit on the aisle and when the assistant—a young man, like there were young women assistants for the men performers—when he strolled up the aisle asking for volunteers, I lifted Margaret’s hand, and she tried, but not so hard, to lower it, and didn’t they choose her!

The young man—looked a little like Mr. R with the oiled hair and the mustache, but not the wrinkles, of course; no, his face was smooth—he asked Margaret to write a question on a pad of paper, something important on her mind. He then turned to Anna Eva, dressed in white, layers of it making the skirt and the neck nice and modest and her hair done up as it had been in all the pictures I’d seen on the posters. Anna Eva guessed it immediately.

A man. Will I ever find a husband? Margaret’d written, and Anna Eva assured her that she would indeed, and she flipped her hands out as if to say, Presto! Such certainty beamed from the stage we more or less looked over our shoulders, expecting Margaret’s intended to be right there, beside or behind us. Then Anna Eva cautioned Margaret, for the man meant for her might not be who she expected. Not long after came Harry, not the Mick Margaret supposed she would marry, and just as well, for she wouldn’t have to worry about the drinking and fighting went on in some households. Not with dependable Harry liked his beer at a picnic, his schnapps—but not much—before he’d snore off, this last something she discovered later.

§

“Mornin’, Mr. R,” I said, and over the newsprint he shot them blue-black bullets could go right through you. Did he guess what I’d done? Mentioned nothing about any missing money or any missing child, or Anna Eva, or the possibility of him and her finding little Janet, but only nodded as I minced past him to the back.

In my rush to erase the sins of the day preceding, I squared the orders on my desk if they slid so much as an inch off the pile, made a show of rattling the coins that dropped out of an envelope. It was one of them rare days Mr. M made an appearance. He was a more ordinary sort of man, without the dash of Mr. R. Hair thinning already on Mr. M’s head, and clothes seemed an afterthought—generally a button missing, a stain on his shirt. A bit of a beard, more a goatee that did not suit him, actually. You wanted to tilt your head, try different angles of looking, to get him all in a piece. Or maybe it was he never showed up often, once a week, if that. Left Eveline to deal with the business of the orders came in for the paper hats and nut cups, the streamers, and the noisemakers and such he peddled in the Rainbow Paper Company catalogue, more a brochure really. He got George busy, too, that day because he needed a new edition of the brochure, with a few additional items, including a line of paper lanterns in the shapes of balls and bells and flowers. Every one of us stopped at George’s drawing table to see him work from the model Mr. M had brought in. A distracting day altogether.

I thought of telling my chum Gladys about my date, for we would go out together at lunch, and hadn’t I listened for hours to her doubts about Charles Francis Brown, her wondering if he would stop in the Cosmo to say hello, or just pass in the lobby and nod, thinking of something, or someone, obviously not her. Did the maroon shirtwaist she’d worn until spring make her sallow complexion appear yellower? Should she use a bit of rouge on her cheeks to appear younger? For while they were near the same age, she and Charles Francis, maybe he thought her older on account of her complexion. Ah. For all she dwelled on him, Charles Francis Brown never did turn out to be what she wanted. On account of her blindness in that regard, but for other reasons too, the better choice of confidant would have been wiser Eveline, her never without a man, it seemed, and she got them to buy her not only dinners and shows, but necklaces and even a hat.

Eveline. Not as pretty as fair Florence in the front, but sparky with that short upper lip left her mouth a bit open if she forgot to press her full lips closed, and hair so long she could roll it into a chestnut crown. Lanky, she wore her skirts shorter than anyone else in our place—could not get a normal skirt to cover her, she claimed—but she didn’t care how much leg showed. And why would she, with stockings too nice for an office girl? No doubt another gift, and one she drew attention to by leaning down and stroking them, as if they’d got wrinkled and needed smoothing. Not cotton or wool but real silk they were.

Not hard to imagine what Eveline might be willing to do for those stockings and the rest of it, and if the “what” some thought was true, love might not even a come into it. Not the kind of love Desmond Malloy’d seeded in me, and so I never did confide in Eveline then, which left me with Gladys. Though I toyed with the notion of spilling the beans when lunch came and we walked over towards State with the idea of looking at the Boston Store window, at a particular hat she thought Margaret could copy, we happened to get caught up in a welcome home parade of colored soldiers. Them marching in uniform, many lined along the road cheering, including children waving the flags of the men’s unit and the Stars and Stripes. Band playing some of the ragtime tunes you heard then. The opportunity to spill my secret to Gladys never came, nor did we see the hat, for we could not cross through the soldiers marching, some dancing, them had the limbs for it.

Despite the commotion Mr. M caused, and even though my mind wandered toward evening as I patted the hair springing out from my damp scalp—it was that stifling in our place, despite the fan turned lazily above—no one could fault the dutifulness of Maeve Curragh that afternoon. Slice an envelope open, roll an order form into my machine, type, type, hit the carriage return. A soothing sort of rhythm to the work. Just before leaving I went to the lav to damp my face and do my hair over and fix the violets at my throat, and they were a lovely color. But it crossed my mind Desmond Malloy could have forgotten in these almost two days passed since we sat across from one another in the café. A strike looming and his ball team winning and losing and maybe another lady hopped on his car caught his fancy. For all that—my dark Ennis eyes fair brimming with possibilities thrilling and sad—my thoughts strayed to Janet Wilkinson. Little Janet, and I whispered a prayer for her safe return.

Eveline stood near Clyde’s desk in the lobby, gassing with the doorman as he surveyed the comings and goings of all the people passed through the grand foyer. Gladys lingered nearer the door. Of course the hat, the one we couldn’t see during the lunch hour. But more than the hat, I knew my chum wanted to talk about Charles Francis and did I think he loved her and would he be faithful, and if he was truly interested—as he must’ve been to stand her to lunch that winter day—why did he insist on working most nights, so the only time they spent together he was bent over his drawing board, while she chattered from the high stool he generally waved her to. Always suffered over that man, Gladys did.

Of course I couldn’t go with her that evening to study the store windows, and though Gladys would only smile and her eyebrows would go up at the inside corners, and she would go all big on me and hug me and say, I knew it—as though she could peer into my private space and understand—I didn’t want anyone knowing about Desmond. Not yet, no. I wanted to keep him for myself. That’s what it was caused me to make up a story about having to meet my sister to look for fabric for her wedding dress.

“Then I should come right along with you. It would be perfect, Maeve. Good practice, for our turns will come soon enough. Where does she plan to start? The Fair’s always good to give you ideas, or The Boston Store. Or is she thinkin’ a specialty shop? More expensive, but if she’s goin’ to be makin’ it herself, costs nothing to look.”

“That I can’t tell, Gladys. She made me promise not to, for doesn’t she want to keep it a secret until the day itself.”

“Oh, well then.”

“Another day? Maybe even tomorrow? For the hat?”

Just then Eveline laughed that laugh of hers, unmistakable, kind of breathy and trumpety at once, and Clyde, too, snickered, though with his head lowered, I saw, for we’d both turned. Gladys blushed like they were laughing at her. Then I was sorry to have put her off because she’d been my friend for nearly as long as I’d lived in Chicago, and if she wasn’t worldly in the same way as Eveline, she’d always been kind to me, Gladys. She was one for fashion, sure, and I told her so, and complimented her on her shirtwaist, the one with a square collar like in a sailor’s suit and with navy stripes around the edges. Too, I promised to ask Margaret if she might come along next time, for Gladys could give advice if anyone could, better advice than me. She nodded as she headed for the whirly doors, and looked back and waved before she stepped into them. But her face had that pinch beneath the eyes showed her hurt. Maybe I’d convinced her, and I hoped I had, for I never aimed to trample on her feelings. Well, isn’t it true fibs are only stories after all, a matter of replacing one set of words with another?

§

Finally I was free, like Margaret and me got to be free of the mission school with the money I pinched for our dream of Chicago, the good life we’d heard of there and no snakes and no alligators. A place to make your fortune. There was nothing for it but to go ahead now I’d dug myself this far in. Wait at the corner of Clark and Van Buren, he’d said, and there’s where I stood listening to the clack-clack music of the trains on the El threw a shadow I sheltered in, for the day had not begun to cool, though a breeze snuck down, sifting soot through the air. The crowds hurrying, everybody always hurrying, and bigger crowds it seemed, with the soldiers back—some in uniform like it was the cloth itself’d made them who they were—and they’d look at me, not all, but a few, because wasn’t I standing there with my pocketbook and a bag besides and those crazy violets at my throat. I kept my lips straight and refused to catch any of the glances tossed my way.

Over all the racket, newsboys hollering what a body could read in the late editions.

NEW SUSPECT TAKEN IN LOST GIRL HUNT!

FLAT FAMINE RAISES RENTS!

ZOOKEEPER FIRED!

CAR PARLEY STUCK ON 8 HOUR DEMAND!

While I wanted to know about Janet, it’s true, my taste for stories about all transpiring in our city, and indeed the world, that day waned in anticipation of the evening. The great din of the motorcars and horns blaring and the elevated above and me waiting for my man. More motorcars here at this corner, aiming towards Michigan Avenue, a grand parade of them. With precious few rules to keep everyone where they were supposed to be, automobiles battled for road space, just as the office workers jostled for sidewalk. Some of the men after loosening their collars, taking off and carrying their jackets over their shoulders, hooked on a thumb. A man with his boater pushed back on his head, tie like a noose hanging round his neck, carrying a satchel, strode towards the avenue like there was free beer and he’s the fella wanted to drink it. Across the street a few other men gathered around one holding up a pair of pants, white pants, and Lord only knew why they’d be conducting their business there in the middle of the street, but it mesmerized me all the same to see the pants go from hand to hand, one matching them up to himself, then passing them to the next.

Girls strolled by in pairs, and I saw one of them reach around and pick her dress loose from where it must have been sticking to her arse this hot day, me thinking she might have left her bloomers at home and how daring. Thrilling to be out of my normal routine of life, more thrilling because secret, but after today, after today, if we made another date, then I’d bear Margaret’s tendency to scold, and tell her she had nothing to fear from this car man at least. For all they’re known to be flirts, we were not above a little flirting ourselves, to save the fare. A nickel was a nickel and if a girl could save one for the price of a smile, we smiled and let them think what they wanted.

It came down to me counting the bolts worked into the steel beams held up the El tracks. Counting them and noting the little cinders in the grit layered them. Must’ve been nearing six, but I had no watch. Me a girl without a watch, when just yesterday was found a watch without a girl. To Irene with love from Mama. That suffering woman, so good to her daughter, somehow gave her a watch. I could a stopped one of the passing men with chains bounced and glittered across the front of their waistcoats, but sure it could not have been as long as it felt I’d been idling there. I wouldn’t wait forever, but I’d wait until forever was on the doorsill.

My stomach grumbled despite my little sandwich and the treat of a cake Florence’d brought in to celebrate her birthday. Baked by her mother and carried from home for us all. Oh, yes, it’d been a big day—the cake, singing Happy Birthday to Florence, Mr. M and the paper lanterns. Desmond Malloy’d mentioned supper, he said we’d make an evening of it. Maybe he’d bring a picnic and I could dawdle with whatever it was he’d packed until it went too dark to venture into the water, for I wouldn’t be the fool and claim again to have eaten already, like one of them girls in the pictures, Dorothy Phillips included. So slim, life barely touched them as they spectered through it.

I tried to concentrate on the foot traffic, looking for a tall man with the peak aiming down his forehead. Terrible aching my feet were, though, standing there. What felt good for the novelty after sitting at my desk most of the day had worn with the minutes. More of them passed than ought to have and then I started thinking, praise be to Mother Mary for not having to test myself against the smooth ways of Mr. Desmond Malloy. Wasn’t this a gift from the God I’d been talking to only yesterday? Yes, it’d been long enough. The copper on the corner, the one directing traffic, had been looking my way smiling, me nodding, then drawing my eyes back out to the street to make it clear I was looking for someone. God only knew what he suspected of me. It had to be near to an hour I’d waited.

Just then a small group gathered across, a man and two women, all three in somber missionary wear, as if the word of God was serious indeed. How they must have been dripping under them clothes, but in the spaces between the trains, their voices spiraled sweet in some hymn I didn’t know, though it comforted me all the same. Whatever disappointment rose in me could not compare to the grief poor Janet’s mother had to be feeling.

The shadows shifted and if the letdown caused my feet to sting all the more, relief let me bear the suffering, for I could tell Margaret he’d stood me up—she didn’t have to know who—and, feeling sorry for me, she’d ply me with something, as our mammy used to do. Let me cook you an egg, she’d say, for we had eggs for comfort more than anything else. A nice soft-boiled egg with the skin clinging to the rounded knob at the end I’d pop in my mouth while she salted the rest, scooped it into a cup. Two mouthfuls and gone. Something so delicious coming out of that button-eyed hen clucked at the back stoop and wouldn’t lay in a proper nest, but wherever she felt like it, so some went wasted even though we thought we knew all her hidey places.

Thinking of home, more than eight years after I squeaked open the wicket gate and crossed into the single room housed us all. Even though I could buy myself eggs and eat them every day, they never tasted savory as that surprise Mammy would find for one of us. To think she might find only one, too, while there in the shops along Halsted were dozens displayed, creamy white, fawn brown, and speckled.

I crossed the street, right past the policeman winked at me as I went, must a been he’d decided me an honest woman. I tried to look up and admire the buildings and thought I might even stroll into the Palmer House a few blocks away, as once I’d done, venturing past the liveried boys, onto the marble walkway, up the stairs into the grand lobby with the ceiling painted like a cathedral, angels and cherubs and gold leaf. The same year we arrived in Chicago, me just turned sixteen, and one of them in livery thinking me there to pick up the laundry or polish the silver. The gilt, the marvelous designs in the plaster, the chandeliers with lights Bridey never would have believed, bright, yet spreading gently onto the seating area as if breathed down from the ceiling by one of them broad-winged angels. The liveried one took my arm and tried steering me over to the housekeeping department, thinking I wanted a job.

But my bold words saved me, me who doesn’t talk much, something made me different from the start at home where, if talk were money, we’d all a given Potter Palmer and his kind a run for theirs. I lifted my chin and said, “No, I am not here for work, but to meet my father.” Did he believe me, the bell captain? If not, he pretended to and escorted me to a straight chair, velvet, in my favorite blue, color of twilight. I rested from the outside bustle, imagining my da limping up them marble stairs in his cap and his black jacket going orange with age, collarless shirt, stubble on his cheek, the way he’d come through the door at home some days, smiling, smiling, like he’d a secret when he was only imagining something and how he would be reaching for his book to describe every thought.

When the bellman left, I slipped back down them marble stairs. But I’d been there and when we wrote Mammy, the first occasion we had a few dollars to send, I would tell her so, how a body could just walk in to admire the carpets, the marble, the wonderful patterns above.

§

I was after composing another letter so when he appeared, strutting along towards me, bundle under his arm.

“Maeve, darlin’,” he said, guiding me over to the curb. “Did ye think I’d forgotten you? And you lookin’ even prettier with flowers at your neck.”

The scolding words stopped in my throat, because he was a fine figure, Desmond Malloy. He had to be ten inches taller than me, requiring him to bend down to speak and I got the scent of him with its history of the day, the coffee and tobacco and the sandwich he’d chewed for lunch. Made me forget my stomach hunger, the stories I’d been making up. His hand came down on my shoulder and he turned me towards the streetcar stop, talking all the while about the ball team winning, the lateness of the hour, and did I have supper. This time I said no.

“Are you perishin’ from hunger, then?”

“Not at all.”

The truth is, suddenly, I was not. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if hunger, like magic, according to Mr. R, rested mainly in the mind? When the streetcar arrived Desmond took my arm and helped me up.

“We’ll take this up Clark Street to Lincoln Park. There’s nice bathing spots up that way.”

He winked at the conductor, a pal, and we got our ride free, and he talked all the while we rode. But with the motor cars grinding, streetcar bells clanging, the El rattling over, and “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” drifting into our window from an upstairs dance hall must a run all day, I couldn’t make real sense of what he was jawing about, only catch the odd word.

At North Avenue we hopped off and crossed over to the grass of the park from where we could see that big lake—pretty for all its frightfulness, for the sun had fallen to the level of the haze unfolded like a great blue-brown sash across the city and, nestled there, a lovely cherry color. The lake itself calm as milk. I was thinking it would be all right and anyhow his hand at my back guided me along the paths for a while, and then he was pushing me across uneven ground till we got to a copse of bushes where he stopped and smiled down at me.

“Here we are then, Maeve. Isn’t it grand?”

He threw down the bag he was carrying and lit one of his Camels.

“Here?” I said, surprised, because I’d expected a public beach with lifeguards and everything and the change rooms where you could put your clothes in a bin, and refreshments from a cart, cold drinks and the like, when all we had here were some bushes dividing the grand city and its soaring buildings from the great lake and all the secrets I feared from it. He got my drift right away.

“I know what you’re thinkin’, but the big beaches further along are too crowded with swells and most of the ones in the south are dirty with niggers. You get your fights breakin’ out regular, a lot of gamblin’ goin’ on, right on the beach. We’ll have this little spot all to ourselves, don’t you know? Better a quiet place when you’re learnin’ and I promise to be a gentleman, so you go right ahead and change, Maeve. It’ll be jake.”

I heard my sister’s voice warning me, You can’t believe a t’ing. You be careful, she’d a said, echoing the words I’d spoke to her when I’d stepped out with Packy and left her alone and worried that curiosity and loneliness might drive her to places she shouldn’t go. But this Desmond already different than what worried her, because he’d come along when he said he would, or near enough, and here we were just like he promised, and while he thought we had the spot all to ourselves I saw a pile of garments behind one of the trees, meaning others enjoyed the place, must be good. I never saw anyone else, but I did hear laughter once. Maybe all of us trying to avoid charges for the change rooms. Maybe a charge even to step into the lake, if they did charge. Me, I wouldn’t a known, not being one who frequented the bathing beaches of Chicago that week or any other week in any other city. Only those few times at Lahinch, and so long before, when it’d been all about our da and us thrashing and sputtering through the water back to him as fast as we could.

Afraid of showing hesitation, I separated the bushes and stepped through to a clear space big enough to accommodate me wrestling with my clothes, disrobing there, right outside, as if it was common for me, though whenever we undressed, Margaret and me, we never took everything off at once, and not in front of each other—not at home, not at the mission, not even in our rooms. We managed ways of leaving the top layer on while we stepped out of our bloomers and slid our nightdresses up under. There, in the bushes, with the buzzing of some insect near and the twittering of a little bird could a been snickering at me, the skirt came off first, then the shirtwaist with the violets, the corset underneath. Thrilling, the air a muggy kiss on skin never got so bare.

Hurrying, working too fast to fall, it came back to me, the scene of Margaret and me scrambling into clothes we nicked from the stacks donated to the mission. Chose ones made us look like women and not the girls we actually were, changing in the washroom of the station before the train pulled out of St. Augustine and laughing so, girls playing dress up. Margaret near tripping on the skirt too long until she’d found the means to raise the hem, for even then she knew how to use a needle. But that’d been years ago, a lifetime, and even though it’s hot as blazes still and midges were whining around my ears as I stepped into the suit I bought with money not all mine, I felt like a woman of the world. I’d have stories to match any of them I’d heard from the girls at work, if I wanted to tell them, which I might not want to, seeing as how I was not much of a talker to start.

Then up with the costume, my first time in it, and lucky it hid everything’d interest a man, but my arms showing white, so white, and only then, idjit though I was, did I remember that once I got wet I’d need a towel to dry myself. What a stupid one he would think me when there must a been a towel hanging from that line I could a yanked off the night I prowled the alley. Something for the trouble’d left my knee blemished.

“You’ll see I made a nice nest for us here, Maeve,” he called, from the other side of the bushes, and it was do or die, same as when the nuns called out for them had vocations and I raised my hand and Margaret seeing me, raised hers.

“There you are, all set, but you’ll have to take your shoes off, darlin’, or they’ll drag ye under and we wouldn’t want that. Though I’m a champ swimmer I don’t know how good I’d be at life guardin’.”

Of course I looked the fool and more with my button-up boots, and once I reached the robe he’d spread on the sand fronting the bushes, I took them off and arranged myself in a pose such as I’d seen on the cover of Dream World. Leaning back, legs nicely crossed in front of me, surveying the sky as if I could tell the weather from it or expect something to drop, a bundle of money maybe or, more likely, a surprise from one of the gulls screaming like someone’d just died.

“Just give me a minute to change myself,” he said, taking my place in the copse.

Oh, yes, I enjoyed the air that evening, it being like the petal of a wild rose—that soft, that moist. Not that roses mixed among the weeds we’d climbed through. I could hear some bird, maybe the same, mocking him, too, and wind stirring the dried leaves on the taller shrubs, the lake slopping up the shore. He sang, humming really, “Baba, daba, daba, said the monkey to the chimp.” If I didn’t have a good idea of what she’d a said if she saw me, I’d a liked Margaret to be there to take a gander at the pose, like Theda Bara herself, though without the kohl smudges around the eyes and without her glam clothes. My foot, with the imprint of my boots still on the stockings, the foot tapping in space, me humming along, but quietly with his silly tune, because wasn’t it swell sitting there, watching the tint of the sky change, the boats way out.

Unable to fully relax, what with wearing fewer clothes in public than I’d ever wore, I held myself tight and let my thoughts drift to food for a minute, wondered what he’d packed in his sack. That subject faded as soon as he appeared in his costume, legs and arms proving he’d been in the sun regularly, and muscled so, though he was not a man did hard labor. Long legs with that same sandy hair on them as on his wrists, and hair mussed from the shirt coming off, I expect. Didn’t those restless feelings force my eyes from him and direct them to the long view, the watery one. Mother of God, he was a fellow to take notice of, cocky with that smile said he knew it. Entered my mind the thought, What does he want with me, when he might have chosen Dorothy Phillips herself?

Shouts from way off, and when I squinted over I saw bobbing shapes in the waves, maybe belonging to whosever clothes lay yonder. Pretty as the card we sent home at Christmas showing the lake and the buildings behind, all of it more swell sure than Limerick. Come Easter, when Mammy sent her letter, she wrote she was glad the nuns’d settled in Chicago, for she’d never seen how we’d manage a place as foreign as Florida, with all the wild Indians and the darkies and trees she’d seen only in the magazines brought around by the missionary orders. Although I felt uneasy that Mammy should think us still with the nuns, I was not thinking of Mammy just then, but surveying Mr. Desmond Malloy, the length of him bent to fetch something out of his sack, and how it’d already come to seem natural to be lolling there together. A beautiful man standing with the lake at his back. The grin and his good straight teeth, the broad shoulders with their islets of freckles. He held a flask of something I rightly bet was whiskey.

“A little courage, Maeve. The water can be cold, but you can trust me. I’ll not letchya drown, or even get your hair wet, if you don’t want.”

I shook my head and he cocked his and raised them thick eyebrows I liked, and in the low angle of sunlight I could see red hairs and gold ones mixed with the brown of a deep bay horse, the kind I would have chosen if my da had been one of the landholders in Clare. I needed something to swallow down whatever was in my throat, but I’d hardly a taken a drop from a nearly strange man in a lonesome place, both of us half dressed. Seeing he couldn’t persuade me, he shrugged and took a long swallow himself. I smelled it when he sat down, not room for another body between us.

“Look at the lake, Maeve. Isn’t it grand? Does it remind you of the sea over there? For all I’ve never been, I feel I know it from my old people talkin’ of it when we lads were growin’ up. Especially after a night at the Hall, on one of them music evenings they have there with the tin whistle players and the fiddlers and the school girls dancin’ the jigs with their hands at their waists. Mother said it was easy for our da to miss it, when there was no chance he’d go back and risk starvin’, cuttin’ turf and liftin’ potatoes, hopin’ some farmer would take pity on him and pay him in coin instead of cabbage. Was it like that for you?”

It startled me, him wanting me to go back there, if only in my mind. The poverty worse than down along Halsted Street. “It was poor,” I said, and it didn’t matter the sparsity of the description, because he continued on, as if I’d said nothing.

“Oh, she used to be a terrible sharp-tongued one, my mother, but she’s settled quieter since her boys are grown. She’s one who’s bathed in the lake, Maeve. My old mother and my old dad. Both of them. It’s the best thing for you in summer. Are you ready?”

I wanted to ask how his da had got into the water if he had no legs—or was it just one he’d lost?—because I remembered the story the man told on the car one evening before Desmond Malloy knew I existed. Maybe they’d carried the old fella in, Desmond and his brothers. Or maybe the old one’d gone in when he still had all his parts. Could it a been something in the water caused him to lose them? Any of these questions might have stalled us there on the shore, which would a been fine with me, for wasn’t my empty stomach after knotting up like the letters on the crosses in St. Patrick’s church, and—though still plenty hot out—goose bumps stippled my flesh where it was bare because of the light breeze skimming across the water and ruffling it prettily, if also disguising the surface.

He stood without effort and held out his hand. I reached for it automatically, and as I came upright he pulled me towards himself so I nearly bumped my nose into that broad chest with the hair curling over the top of his costume. Nearly. It not being a regular public bathing beach, stones in the sand made it cobbly, with some edges sharp enough I cried out when I stepped on one, and he offered to carry me over. Wanted to get his paws on me, he did, but no. No. I pulled my hand out of his because there we were then, at the edge, and for a minute I forgot everything else but the water with its scummy foam nudging my toes, and my stomach gurgling—though the lapping noise thankfully covered it, rude lying sound that it was. It’s that makes me think hunger is not in the mind. But magic?

Did Margaret meet Harry because Anna Eva contrived it, or because it was meant to be and Anna Eva could see into the future? Could Anna Eva be as powerful as God and the Blessed V I’d been praying to, hoping for just such a man as Desmond Malloy, but never expecting him to turn up handsome so, frisky as a colt, winking as he encouraged me, on the edge of a dare, like the boys at home would dare me to jump from the highest stone step of the friary? I did jump, for I was the oldest of the Curragh girls and I had to face fear for the sake of the rest of them. To show them it could be done.

“There y’are. Just take another step. You’ll like the way the bottom squeezes through your toes, just like jam comin’ up.”

I heard his big laugh, same as I heard the words, but for all they touched me, he might a been out on one of those ships whose masts I could see, if I was seeing straight. My mind was after spooling out stories of snakes, eels, like, and how they could wrap around a body’s ankles once you were out to where you could barely stand, and if they got a good hold they’d tow you beneath. And once you were under you’d see the bones of all them’d gone before, like the folks on the Eastland. Them poor people—nearly a thousand there’d been—bought their white clothes for the holiday excursion the electrical company’d promised their employees, then hadn’t the lot of them, whole families, toppled off the listing ship into the water. Right from the dock in the river, too, hadn’t even made it to the lake, but their white clothes, like their spirits, might a drifted there.

Had to be things on the bottom’d break your heart—a child’s lost shoe, a watch same as they found in the ruins of the bank, that watch belonged to Irene Miles, whose name stayed with me, for I could only imagine what her mammy felt when she got the news of the crash. Just gone to work, typing her way through the days, like any of the other girls, Irene, then smashed and burned. How would our mammy feel when Margaret told her? She said she was going to the pictures, Margaret would wail. With a new fella. I never would have let her go swimming, and not with a car man! And Mammy maybe still believing us to be nuns.

All these thoughts strummed my brain to the beat of my jumping heart, my tossing innards, me not even aware I was clutching my upper arms and shivering, while he’d given up on me for the moment, striding down the shore till the lake reached his knees.

“Come on then,” he said, splashing and laughing, diving in and coming up all slick like a water creature. “It’s peachy, Maeve.”

Fear was fighting a fierce desire to follow him anywhere till he scooped up a big handful and splashed me with it, and instead of cooling me it burned me like a hundred tiny sparks on my skin.

“There’s nothin’ to worry about, I’ll protect you. But you’ve got to get out here where you can float, Maeve, darlin’. You’re gonna love it, come on, give it a try.”

Darlin’ was it, and him standing there in his costume wet so and outlining all his man parts, a sin to be looking there and I looked away but I’d never seen poor Packy in such a pose, and his arms—Desmond’s arms—stretched out for me to fall into, same as we used to hold out our arms for the little ones learning to toddle, Margaret and me, with Nuala the last, at home, and then when we lived at the mission in that broiling Florida. He was drawing me to him with something powerful, Desmond Malloy, and I took another step till the wet stuff reached up to my calves anyway and he cheered same as if I was the Joe Jackson everyone talked about.

“There you go, come on. A few more steps and you’ll be up to your knees. There’s a girl.”

The bottom did squish up, warm, but also slimy in a dangerous sort of way to my thinking. Yet his smile brighter than the electric along State Street lured me and sure the next step would have brought the water nearly to my bloomers, but didn’t a little boat appear, barely bigger than a plaything yet carrying two boys associated with the yacht club, must have been. Careless in the way the rich can be, for weren’t they singing and hollering just a short distance beyond, where Desmond Malloy stood with his arms stretched out towards me? The sail wrinkling, and them trying to straighten it, made me realize there was more wind than I’d thought gathering that evening, and who knew if one of them storms might whip up powerful gusts, tornadoes, hurling purple clouds pouring down with rain?

Desmond hollered at them. “Watch it, lads!”

Two of them wobbled in that wee boat, in bathing costumes and one with a sort of captain’s hat on and this one turned suddenly. His companion screamed at him not to upset the balance, but before he could turn back, didn’t it tip and them boys go over, right in front of my eyes?

“Mother of God,” I shouted to Desmond. “Save them if you can.”

He laughed as the boys came up sputtering on the other side of the boat, their wet heads, the cap gone. There was no danger to them, it being that shallow Desmond could stand with his head above water as he helped them in their struggle to right the craft. Their voices clanged against one another in argument and laughter until the mast pointed up again to the deepening blue. I hard gripped each arm with the hand opposite as I stood there and waited and waited while he nattered with them. Our connection broken, I might as well have been sitting on the shore. I stood there and listened dreamily and noticed little fish in the water lapping around my lower legs, schooling like so many grains of silver rice, and marveled to be sharing the water with the cold-blooded creatures I feared.

Didn’t it turn out to be my lifeboat, that little craft, for all the activity out there took the minutes he might have been getting me in deeper. While he was chatting with them, inspecting their boat, sharing the flask they’d saved from the toss, seeing them off as their dripping sail filled and they headed back to where they’d come from, I saw there would be no swimming for Maeve Curragh that evening. He said it himself as he strode through the water. “There’ll be no swimmin’ for Maeve Curragh, this evenin’, not with the dark comin’ so quick. Funny how the day goes, isn’t it?”

It’s what my da’d said, about the day being long and night always coming, and it softened me to think of the connection, though I doubt my da would’ve liked imagining Desmond’s wet hand on my elbow steering me across the beach to the bushes. Same hand sliding up further, to my neck and getting tangled in my hair, for of course I’d left my hat with my clothes.

“But we’ll do it again, won’t we? And then you’ll get your bloomers wet. Look at them, like they’ve just come off the clothesline on a sunny day.”

The midges had gathered in numbers would challenge an army and they were singing around my ears as I tried to cover myself before they could feast on me. Once I’d buttoned my shirtwaist, I stepped out and let him take his turn because he was the one wet and all, though I saw he was warming himself with another sip from his flask and having a smoke, smiling as he surveyed me with my arms up, trying to pin my hair so that it’d fit beneath the hat.

“I’d like to see you again with your hair curlin’ out like that, darlin’. It’s lovely hair, and you’re a peach and if we didn’t do all I thought we’d do, you got your feet wet, didn’t you?” He laughed at himself for using an expression described what actually happened. Didn’t know my feet were still wet inside my shoes because I’d been that daft I never thought of bringing another pair of stockings, and paid the next day, blisters being the cost of stupidity.

“Hmm?” he said, stepping right close to me and tipping my chin up with his thumb, then angling in, hand on my throat. Was he going to strangle me or kiss me? Neither, only straighten the violets in danger of falling off, fasten them with the pin, breathing on me, all the while speaking. “You don’t have much to say, then, do you, Maeve? I like that in a girl. Most of them chatterin’ away so’s they don’t know what’s goin’ on around them. Still waters run deep, they say.” Another laugh, for referring to the water, must a been. Water kept coming into it.

§

Back across the park in dusk, him sure footed, pulling me by the wrist to the avenue with its traffic and noise, me believing he had a plan and I could trust him to carry me along with it. It’d gone past the usual hour for supper, sure, and a picture of fried chicken and mashed taties nudged into my head, along with visions of ice cream sodas and pies and every good thing I ever ate or imagined eating. Consumed me, those pictures, and the warmth of the man’s hand at my back, till all at once it stiffened and I felt the fingers claw in and heard laughter coming up behind us. I turned to see two boys, their white teeth big in their brown faces, two young colored fellas full of high spirits, must a been kitchen help at one of the hotels, or some of the garbage collectors got their jobs last year during the city strike.

Packy’d complained about it, how they brought the darkies in and kept some of ’em after the strike, meaning our kind never got back in. So Packy said. Desmond tensed and asked in a voice loud enough to best the din of the street, “You all right, Maeve? Are you havin’ any difficulty?” Me? Then I understood he meant the question for their benefit, as if saying, Keep away, clear out of my sight, out of town. Feelings were running hard then, harder than I remembered, unless I’d never noticed, what with all else there was to take in when we arrived.

But, now, thinking back, I see them numbers flowing north’d cemented the hard feelings. Even my own sister had come to dislike them, surprising and all considering that she, like me, held the little ones in our arms and dried their tears sparkled clear in trails down their dusky cheeks. Beautiful so, and didn’t we love them as much as those sisters we left behind, another since Nuala, Mammy wrote. Kathleen, a little sister I’d never meet. At the mission Margaret’d spent much of the day in the kitchen where she worked alongside a woman mixed of colored and Indian blood. A skinny, long-browed woman, more pious than the nuns themselves.

Then Margaret got with Harry, who told her the women might be fine—women couldn’t help what their men did—but the coloreds he took exception to were them came up north in trains and by the truckload to take the jobs of union men walked out of their places to get a decent wage for the people worked there. Same folks who thought they could eat anywhere they wanted, sit on the main floor in a theater, instead of the balcony where they’d always sat.

“Blacks are spreading through the city like a sewer overflowing,” said Harry. “Man works hard all his life to buy his own house, then some nigger agent comes in and buys up a building and the values of the whole neighborhood drop.” The papers told the same story, ’specially when there’d been an explosion or a fire meant to drive the colored out. “It isn’t fair,” Margaret complained, and though I hate to think mean of her suffered so much alongside me, I can’t deny she was a follower, my sister, except, before Harry, it used to be me she followed.

The boys stopped laughing when they saw the look on Desmond’s puss, and they shuffled back to the store window behind us, pretended to be looking at the display in there of sheet music and piano rolls and such.

Satisfied to have put them in their place, Desmond Malloy looked up and down the street and took out his car man’s watch to check it, and when we did duck into a café, he ordered us coffee and pie gone stale by that hour, and lit one of his Camel cigarettes, blew the smoke out in rings. Through the smoke I noticed that right eye of his drifting. I can’t say disappointment didn’t enter it, but he saw it right away, Desmond did, and explained that when he’d planned on supper, he’d forgot about a meeting tonight of the car men’s association, for it’s serious, this strike business, and he had to play his part, if he expected a bright future with the Chicago Surface Lines, which he no doubt did. It must have been getting onto nine by then, a queer time for a meeting, and I said as much, my empty stomach boosting the petulance.

“Queer time for a meetin’.”

“It is that, but these are queer times, and with the shift work… Well, you understand, don’t you, dear?” Dear. His collar open and a whiff of the lake from the skin of his throat, and them fingers with the shining hairs on them tapping the wood of the table, cloudy with water stains, and me wondering if he was keeping me hungry for some reason but what it could be, and if so, what could I do?

He threw his nickels down and herded me out to the street and up to the streetcar stop. “These are tryin’ days, but we’ll best them, Maeve. We’ll meet again this week and if you wait for me, I’ll save you your fare tomorrow. For tonight, take this.” He pressed a few coins into my hand, pockets must a been thick with them, and realizing I would neither have to spend the coins I had left, nor go to bed gnawing inside but stop for a bite before I climbed Bridey’s stairs, I waved out the window. He jogged along with the car for a minute before it gathered a little speed. I wouldn’t go to bed hungry, but I wouldn’t be sitting across a table like I’d sat with Packy, tapping at my lips with a linen napkin and sipping a drink dainty.

In the paper beside me, left behind, but with a story torn out at the bottom, a headline right across the front made me smile—and that was rare enough when it came to the papers.

ANIMAL PALS MOURN FOR CY

He was the zookeeper these last thirty years, fired for drunkenness or saying his mind, maybe both. The papers had the lions roaring dismally, monkeys stopping their chatter, as the news spread through the zoo. Reports, too, of lower prices near the Hull House neighborhood. Ten cents a pound for tomatoes near enough where we could pick them up, and wouldn’t we be needing to save if Bridey turned out to be the taking advantage type, and put our rent up. Little Janet still not found, though a suspect’d been taken in. God help her, the poor child.