Sunday, July 27, 1919

LOWDEN FIGHTS CAR STRIKE!

NEW EVIDENCE TIGHTENS NET ON FITZGERALD!

$2,500 FOR JANET!

TO RELIEVE THE SUSPENSE OF

JANET’S PARENTS AND FRIENDS,

THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE WILL PAY $2,500 FOR EXCLUSIVE INFORMATION

LEADING TO THE DISCOVERY OF JANET WILKINSON

$2,500! But Margaret steered me right away from the piles of papers, fewer stacks of them Sunday. She did not want me distracted at Mass and I did not protest, really, though I could not help but hear the newsie hollering the temperature would be the hottest all week. It got me pondering the moment I would step into the lake, him with his arms outstretched, encouraging me. Could I do it thinking little Janet might be floating in there somewhere?

“There’s only bound to be more trouble. Keep the papers out of your head, Maeve. There’s the girl and all to pray for and peace with the workers.”

She dipped her fingers in the holy water font, whispering the last, and wasn’t the church nearly full, though we stepped in a good ten minutes early. We always chose the same pew, because it was situated away from the incense made Margaret sneeze, yet also nearest the window featured St. Brigid, who’d been a girl like us, and we were not much more than girls still. For me, I hoped St. Brigid and the Virgin would be my path to forgiveness for all the lying and thieving I’d done. Yet I wondered if those two even judged me so, knowing what they must know about the lives we were fated to live, being who we were and where we’d come from. Brigid herself famous for her kindness to the poor.

We chose the nine o’clock Mass for the children’s choir, voices like cherubim made me think of our younger sisters—Nuala, had to be nine already, and little Kathleen, the baby then. Not to mention that poor child would never fully leave my thoughts but come and go for years—Janet Wilkinson. Little Janet. Margaret was smarter where feeling came into it. If she thought about our family, the thought had wings, for I noticed her examining the hats, the picture hats the ladies wore, wide all round like the edge of a plate circling the crown, and those with one side pinned up by a flower or a feather, the cloches, some of them with veils.

You could always see the latest fashions at Mass on Sunday—the hats, the summer frocks, the shoes—because the world and all met at St. Patrick’s, it being the oldest for we Irish in the city. Beautiful with the stained glass Mr. Shaughnessy made, another window or two each year, too, until the whole church filled with colored light rivaled the marvelous panels in the ceiling. You felt holy just sitting in the rays came through the shapes like a bishop’s miter, the knots, the deep emeralds and ruby reds, the fierce glare of St. Patrick, the more modest cast down eyes of Brigid, Mary of the Gael.

The church like a stove despite the stone walls. The chorus of young swallows singing the mass, Kyrie Eleison—God have mercy. And wasn’t it heartfelt, the echo in my chest, for I knew God did forgive and he would be too busy with all the more important goings on to do more than nod my way. A dip of that sacred head would absolve any sins born of the mischief in my soul. Mischief I excused, because hadn’t it sprung from need?

When the sermon came, the pastor spent it not on the labor troubles, or the plight of the poor and the soldiers just returned. Not the coloreds moving up north, nor the innocent folks died that week in the blimp crash, nor the missing girl. Instead he preached the words of Archbishop Mundelein, himself concerned with those who strayed towards temptation.

“For this disaster is usually the end and culmination of other evils, of sinful habits, of neglect of prayer and the sacraments, of cowardice in the face of hostility to one’s belief, of weakness in yielding to the wishes of kindred or friends, of social ambition and the hope of advantage in business or public career.”

There I drifted, and not the only one either. Actual whistles and snorts rose from a snoozer somewhere close. But me, I wondered if the archbishop wrote them words with special intention for the famous Catholics in our town, the businessmen starving their employees. Wouldn’t that be a sin in some category, sure?

“It is essential, in the first place, that clean living before marriage be equally obligatory on men and women. The toleration of vicious courses in one party, while the other is strictly held to the practice of virtue, may rest on convention or custom, but it is ethically false, and it is plainly at variance with the law of God, which enjoins personal purity upon each and all. Those who contemplate marriage should further make sure that their motives are upright. Where the dominant aim is selfish, where choice is controlled by ambition or greed, and where superficial qualities are preferred to character, genuine love is out of the question. Such marriages are bargains rather than unions, and their only result is discord.”

He’d have me and lose me, same as others who nodded off in the torpor. Motives? I never did know one to be absolutely pure. Sure we girls wanted to marry, and comfort came into it, yet how could it be otherwise?

We strolled slowly back to Bridey’s—Harry due to collect Margaret, but not for an hour or so—and found John on the front stoop, his face shiny with grease from whatever Bridey’d given him to eat, and all of a sudden I had to run to the lav.

“You’re not sick, Maeve?” Margaret peering at me. I can see her now, smoothing her flowered Sunday dress, fixing a curl at the side of her cheek, a bit of the young miss in her for all she wanted to be old. Harry that day taking her for a picnic with his kind, and wouldn’t she come back holding her own stomach that night on account of the trouble she had, even then, digesting all that meat.

“Just butterflies must be. We’ll plan a picnic for the four of us, next Sunday. I am excited for you, Maeve,” she said, hugging me. So sure she was then, Margaret. Then gone, leaving me time enough to give myself a good wash and let my skin dry—as much as it would dry that muggy day—before I slipped the chemise up and rolled my stockings on. Started me sweating it did in that room of ours hotter than the day outside. Up with the knickers, the petticoat—plain except for the border of lace Margaret’d stitched around the hem, for she kept her eyes out for trimmings, Margaret did. Buttoning up my shirtwaist and the skirt. I had two skirts for summer and I chose the one with the extra piece flaring out from the waist, another of my sister’s accomplishments.

The bathing costume came out from the place it nestled, small thing it was. I flapped it out our square of window where the lines strung between the buildings dangled clothes would maybe never dry at all, it being that still. They might a been flags, the white of the nappies, some garment striped, the red of a man’s shirt. Grains of sand escaping from the mohair sparkled in the fingers of sunlight and flew nearly weightless before disappearing into the alley’d often been the source of my fright.

Not that Sunday. I never saw the junk tossed out, nor the feral creatures. Never smelled whatever’d landed there and soaked into the struggling weeds. No, but held the costume up for a minute to admire it before rolling it back up and putting into my bag with a second pair of stockings and the towel I’d reminded myself to pack. I consulted the square of mirror in the lav before I left, but it only told me I was no more Dorothy Phillips than I was the Queen of Sheba, and then I was off, too, tiptoeing down the hall past the sounds of snorts and farts from Bridey’s room.

§

In the Laura Jean Libbey stories unfolded in summer, you did not find your dirty-necked, collar-loosed folks, sweat sluicing their mugs as they hung from a strap on a car shouldn’t a been packed, it being Sunday. But sure something drew us to the lake, and the open land along its edge, where—in voices just as loud as the newsies owned the street corners—peddlers hollered out the freshness of their popcorn, the coolness of their drinks.

“Ice cold lemonade!”

“Getchyer refreshin’ soda pop!”

A monkey danced at the end of the leash fixed to his bright collar, and a fellow played the tin whistle—him in a cloth cap and maybe not so long arrived in Chicago he didn’t know ’twas the custom to lay the hat on the ground.

Desmond appeared in his summer suit and the boater, rushing right up to where I’d been waiting, but not for long, and blathering words I couldn’t hear in the hubbub. Took my elbow to steer me across to the streetcar stop, us heading to the same place as before, though I’d thought we might go to a proper bathing beach. Once we reached Lincoln Park we saw children playing catch and whirling hoops on the lawn gone yellow. In the dimmer quarters beneath the tree branches, families sat on blankets laid out for their picnics, while on the paths you saw women strolling arm in arm, and old couples resting on the benches placed there, watching all go by, including Desmond and myself, racing as if we had a train to catch.

He stopped, all of a sudden, and pushed his hat back on his head. We were both panting heavy with the sprinting and the heat and I could feel my toes inside my shoes, imagined the cherry red and worse I would see when I peeled off my stockings.

“Am I torturin’ you, Maeve?”

He was smiling down onto me and my body was all airy like, so, if it was torture, it was a wonderful sort and him knowing I didn’t speak much, didn’t expect much of an answer. I piped up, though, because we’d passed a wagon on the avenue and I was perishing of thirst.

“Though I’ve always been a stout walker, I wouldn’t mind a drink.”

He strode back to where the traffic streamed to buy me a drink from the peddler closest. I waited in the shelter of one of the big trees arched over the path behind. Suspended so, as if holding my breath, which I didn’t, couldn’t do, naturally, but all of a sudden him who’d made the earth bigger—just as if he’d swept his hand across the city and said, “Presto!” and me’d expanded to the edges of it—all of a sudden that atmosphere vanished same as if a curtain’d come down. I shrank back to myself and the sweat dripping down my front, and my back, and my hurting feet, and closed my eyes for a second, hoping to recreate the spell.

When I opened them I saw a lanky woman with a loops of reddish-brown hair at her neck and heard that laugh I knew from The Chicago Magic Company, the trill had ironic depths to it, the sarcasm, and wasn’t it Eveline strolling by. Not by herself, neither, but with a man even taller, sporting a vanilla suit and a straw fedora, and didn’t the lightness of them articles of clothing just emphasize the color of his skin, same as the stone flashing from his gold ring as he waved his hand to describe some point he must a been making, then chuckled right along with Eveline, the two of them so absorbed in one another they, too, seemed in another, charmed, world.

Eveline stepped close to a tree, to lean on it while she fetched something from inside her shoe, and I heard the whistle he let loose when she exposed her leg, as she liked to do, it being long and shapely and sheathed in them lovely stockings. More attractive really than her face, which you’d a called clever more than beautiful. Then she laughed again, and said something in that particular voice made him roar, and they continued, her gait a sort of sashay dared people to confront her.

Eveline with a colored man? Him the same fancy one gave her the stockings, the jewelry, the silver compact we’d looked in? It flummoxed me, it did, me who only the day before’d decided Eveline to be made of more than the impression she gave. What to think? I followed the bob of her hat—a fluffy confection of feathers and ribbon made a nest for a tiny silk canary—until the path they strolled curved and I could no longer see them or hear their voices. She had her nerve, Eveline did. A colored man. You didn’t see that much, but I’d heard of it and seen examples of the children made from such matches, in Florida and plenty here, the lighter skin folk you found more often in jobs involved the public. Light like that one of hers, tea with a drip of milk in it.

But soon my own man was striding towards me, gripping the necks of two bottles of Dr. Pepper with one hand and, just as suddenly as it disappeared, the enchantment returned and I forgot all about Eveline.

The world and all had taken to the lake that day. As we got closer I could hear the shouts of children, maybe boys swimming naked as some of them’d do, and someone far off playing music on a trumpet or some such. Desmond moved his hand down from my elbow and took my slick hand into his.

“All right, darlin’?” He squeezed and then I did not feel hot but cold, like February slush in my shoes, my eyes swimming before I did, and then, how many minutes later I don’t know, we were there. Ten minutes, half an hour, two days? And me thinking of that old priest talked about marriage, and thinking, too, of Eveline and even though she didn’t go to church, even if I knew she went with coloreds, I did not think her a bad sort, though the priest would have thought her so.

It wasn’t done much. People said it was unnatural to mix the races, same ones thought everything should be separate—separate places in the cars, in the theaters, separate restaurants, separate neighborhoods, separate schools. He looked good enough, a gentleman in that suit of his and the hat. Later, when I got to know him, I found he was a gentleman. Still, Eveline had her nerve. Not as simple as good and bad, life and its complications, is what I came to understand.

Back then I couldn’t say what I thought, not with Desmond parting the bushes like they were the loveliest glass-beaded curtains and inviting me into that dappled copse already cleared, the weeds flat as if he’d prepared it for me. But no, there’d been others before us, you could see it in the left behinds, papers from sandwiches or some such thing stuck to the bushes. And there beyond, as before, the lake doubling all the light sent down by the blazing midday sun.

“Here we are then, darlin’, just as I promised. And isn’t it better without the crowds. Like we’re the only ones on earth, wouldn’t you say? Just like Adam and Eve?”

He peered down at me, grinning, and I rolled my lips together, wondering if he wanted to go for a kiss, and would it be right? No question it would not be right, not by what the priest said, but weren’t the voices of the priests lost in the din of romance novels and movies like the wonderful Broken Blossoms, while me, I was thinking again of how life unfolds if you let it, and could something naturally rolling out of events be wrong? Just a flicker in my mind in that standing moment before he turned.

“I’m goin’ to test the water while you put your bathin’ costume on,” said Desmond. “I bet it’s peachy warm today and better this time of day without the midges.”

Loved the swimming, he did, and my mind moved ahead to the children we’d have—as many as the Lord’d give us, but I hoped for four, two of each—and how he’d want them all to swim and what a fight there would be if I gathered them round me for safety. How he’d laugh at me, but maybe not with the affection he was after showing me that afternoon, the joking. The thought worried me as I undid what I’d done up a couple hours before—unbuttoned the shirtwaist and spread it on the bush nearest, stepped out of the skirt and put it on the same, lifted the petticoat up over my head and shook it before it, too, came to rest on that sustaining bush, its few leaves a sick green for want of water. The air met my skin for the seconds before I tugged the bathing costume up over the bloomers were part of it. I managed to get the top under the loosened chemise and then I slipped that off. Onto the bush.

There I stood decent, my drawers hid in my cloth bag with the extra stockings I’d thought to bring, though I still lacked the slippers girls wore in the photographs I saw in the Sunday supplements. It was still shoes for me, ordinary shoes I took off when I spread my towel and lay my hat on top my cloth bag. Then I could breathe and I did, eyes closed, till I heard the rustling meant he was coming back, and didn’t I bite my lip to stall the cry wanted to rise from all the wanting inside me, the dimple when he smiled, him tilting his head to the space beyond our nest.

“I’ll be just a minute, Maeve.”

Directly in front there’s only the lake lapping at the sand and the little stones, no froth on the curling waves today—it was that calm, lovely—and not far off, on either side, there were pairs and a group of children splashing. More lovely still when he dropped down beside me on a towel of his own and, as if it were not warm enough, flames licked at the small space between our two bodies. He took out his flask.

“Courage?” he asked, extending it to me.

I turned him down.

“You’re not one of them temperance types, I hope.”

That dimple again and his brow wrinkling as he squinted against the sun. I assured him no, I was not, but I’d wait a bit, for what if the drink made me senseless and I lost my footing and went under? Wasn’t courage, so much as a trap, I saw in that bottle but I never said. No, instead I got him talking about himself and the war and how he’d been ready to go but they didn’t want him because of that eye of his wandered sometime.

“Have you noticed?”

Wouldn’t a took Anna Eva or Houdini himself to read the mind of Mr. Desmond Malloy, but a body resists, tells herself stories. We were there for the swimming, like half the city spread out along the grit bordered the lake, and it was kind of him to offer to instruct me. If he thought I looked like Dorothy Phillips, well, I didn’t mind opening myself to the comparison. And if it might be his Bridgeport political connections the reason for him missing the war, as much as the eye tended to stray, couldn’t it be the good people after compensating me for Packy? Putting in my path a man whole save for that eye, and a car man about to accept an increase in pay? He was a sort of magician, Desmond, with the power he had to make me believe.

“But they’ll be plenty of time for that talk, later, darlin’. Let’s make the most of the day. Come to me.”

He stood and extended his hands, but I got myself up, trying, trying to avoid that touch, all the while him blathering about how this was the hour, and there couldn’t be a better place, and wasn’t it why he’d brought me here instead of one a them spots where the people crowded and splashed, and some you’d never want to be sharing the water with anyhow. “There aren’t but a few bits of stone on the bottom. There…that’s right…come, Maeve, come with me.”

A spout of cool water shooting up my spine, circling my neck, my shoulders, joining all them little blue streams beneath the skin, goose bumped again. Him leaving me at the edge to go deeper, standing out where the lake covered his knees, bending down and scooping up the water and laughing. Me saying, “Don’t,” and him only laughing more, and urging me.

“It’s grand, it’s grand, Maeve. I can’t give you any kind of lesson if you don’t go past your ankles.”

Me recalling the Thursday last, the little fishes not so bad, the truth being it not as deep and frightening as I’d thought. Remember, remember, said me to myself as he shook his head and dove under and came up again and there he stood, his wet costume bulging in places I was not supposed to look, just as I’d not been meant to look when first my eyes darted there and away, then back again. His hair flopping over his face, white skin luminous as the moon in my dream and the actual water not cold as what ran in my veins at all, but not as hot as the air, and me moving forward till I was in to my knees and squealing.

“Does it get any worse?”

Him laughing. “’Course it does, darlin’, if by worse you mean the deep of it. There’s enough water to float a ship big as the Titanic.”

Was it the mention of the disaster came the year after Margaret and me boarded the Mauretania and suffered our first crossing stopped me before I’d got halfway out to where Desmond stood? Or was it Janet, the thought of her maybe out there, under the water somewhere, because weren’t there invisible currents could have carried the dear child from the north of the city down here?

He scowled, impatient, like. “Suit yourself,” he said. “I’m only offerin’ an opportunity.” Aimed himself right into and under the lake so I couldn’t see him for what seemed a terrible length of time. Angry with me then? Ready to toss me over for some other girl, prettier, not only prettier but more fun, liked to swim?

Didn’t that get me moving out towards him till I felt something on my leg. I screamed, thinking it one of them eels, when it was only himself, Desmond Malloy, his hand where it should not have been on my stockinged leg, pinching me, pretending to be a big fish, then rising up dripping and gasping and putting his wet arms right around me, and me with the fright sinking into them. Oh. Then I could feel the bulge I was not supposed to feel and pulled myself away, tried to, and thought of Margaret and St. Patrick’s and Mammy and Da and the young ones we’d left and the Sisters of Perpetual Grace and the Blessed Virgin herself, who’d never known a man.

But I was in a trance like some magician’d worked, for my head turned up to Desmond’s down coming one and we were kissing and oh, I should a got away, but I didn’t and he was pressing closer in, his body arching over me, and me thinking this is not the gentleman he promised to be, but that thought, too, a sparrow you see in the verge so quickly you’re not sure you see it at all. A flock of them thoughts rose up. Me with no leisure to imagine where they would nest, and if I’d ever needed to speak up it was then, but his tongue was after sneaking through his lips right into my mouth, and then I did pull away because I was out of breath. Another tongue touching mine. His tongue! My stockings were wet all the way to my bloomers and my parts lit up like the Palmer House at Christmas holidays. For once in my life I was stopped where I stood.

His voice’d gone husky. Him frowning like he wasn’t happy, and saying, “Maeve, darlin’. You don’t have to swim if it frightens you, dear. You’ve had a splash, and you’re cooler, aren’t you? And I’ve heard the stories of them immigrant ships. It’s a wonder you’re here at all.”

“It’s not that so much but little Janet. The police want to drag this very same lake where they think he threw her body.”

“It’s that worryin’, is it?”

Nice, understanding, and maybe the music in my head would stop, a player piano speeded up like, warping the melody. I could dress and we would stroll back to the park and find a lacy tree limb to sit beneath and he’d buy us slices of watermelon and we’d listen to the fellow on the squeezebox or one of the others with their hats on the ground to collect coins. Except he was leading me back to the copse and arranging our towels side by side while me, I was thinking about the clammy feel of my wet stockings. He coaxed me down and took out his flask again and then I did take a gulp to stop the shaking came from the wet stockings, or was it my own heart beating so fierce it got me trembly.

Also, because what else was I not after doing that day? Kissing a man in the middle of Lake Michigan, drinking whiskey. Shouts occasionally rose and drifted over on the still air and he’s saying, “There, there, dear heart, don’t worry yourself about the child. She’s probably just fallen asleep somewhere in the sun.” And didn’t I want to accept that as the answer to the mystery, improbable as it was, but then he was lowering me and caressing my buds through my bathing costume and didn’t I understand then what my da meant about them blooming and I rolled away.

“No, no,” I said, getting to my knees, my feet, pushing through the bushes where my clothes awaited me. I heard him laughing, even singing, and daft as I was I realized my towel lay behind, with him. There I was standing in my wet stockings—having forgotten I’d brought dry ones—and struggling to get the chemise right over my damp skin. Did. Hurried with the petticoat, so it was only my over clothes missing when he rustled through them same shrubs and held the towel up.

“Forget somethin’, darlin’?” His voice deeper and softer so with the whiskey. Him reaching out and me falling towards him and us shuffling, would have been comical but no, not to us, nothing comical about that fierce yearning drove us back to our poor bed where he found it easier then to find my buds, and didn’t he kiss them and didn’t they blossom then into the most tender white flowers. And then his hand was moving down to where it shouldn’t and I moved it away, not opening my eyes but the once to see his face near mine, eyes half closed and the tiny red gold hairs sprouting in his beard and chafing me as he whispered, “Shh, shh, Maeve, darlin’. I’ll be gentle, I will, dearest, my own.”

This is what I mean. This is what I mean about it all being so natural, one thing leading to the next and no planning involved. But me, I wasn’t thinking so much then, only feeling slickness down there—not the same sweat’d lathered my hands minutes before when we hurried over the trampled grass to our wedding bower there. Then him fumbling with his bathing costume and climbing on top and that club—which is how I recall it, the feel of it, even though it’s dirty to even think such thoughts—oh, yes, but that, like a billy bare against my skin.

Poking, poking at my most private place, hurtful it was and I bit my lip but never hollered and him saying over and over, “Shh, shh, my own. Maeve, don’t worry,” like a lullaby and then he’s in, in me, us joined the way men and women do, and I never felt anything like it, lovely full, in the one moment I relaxed before he started moving. The two of us coupled, the emptiness filled.

In the pictures, the orchestra music swells in a wave when lovers embrace and the screen shows a sky with billowy clouds, or some grand body of water sparkling. I saw the sky above me, not a cloud, only the haze same as hung over the city most days that summer. But for the most of it, I kept my eyes closed, as if not seeing meant it didn’t happen. Was that it? Also, with my eyes closed the touches, the kisses, the parts of my body I never knew pressed deep into memory. I could feel them long after, even now.

Furious moving, chug-chug, a train forcing me into the ground beneath the weeds, caught sand maybe wounding something tender, him saying he’s sorry and it wouldn’t hurt for long and next time, next time… Odd how we are driven to it despite the pain, even him, because he cried out same as if he’d injured himself, and then he sighed and it was over. He kissed me and flopped over onto his back. “You’re a peach, darlin’.” It’s what he said and me after believing it, and caressing the stubbled cheek of him whose eyes went droopy, him being drowsy with the sun and the swimming. Nodded off.

But me? How could I sleep with all ran through my mind, and I am sorry to say it was not poor Janet anchoring my thoughts at that moment. But not sorry then, no, though I knew we’d done wrong, at least wrong as the priest saw it. It never felt wrong. Uncomfortable yes, but it would not always be so. No. We’d be in a bed soon. I smiled, thinking, dreaming and not of food, but of the future we’d have, me and Desmond. If this was the bargain, I’d kept my part and Desmond had shown up when he said he would, dependable as dependable could be when you thought of all was going on.

Margaret need not worry at all, at all, for here I had someone with a future as bright as the city itself. Even if trouble nibbled here and there, Mayor Thompson and all the big men at City Hall would make it right, not that I was pondering the mayor, not that Sunday afternoon in Chicago, with the sweet whistle of his snore coming through my ear. Growing late by then, the sun angled in across the tops of the bushes and our little hideaway truly dim, but it still hot, even hotter with his half-clothed body so near, and me considering, despite my fear, maybe I would sit in the shallow part of the lake for a spell, be just the thing.

But I must a dozed a little too before something woke us both. Laughter? Boys was it, startled us? I looked over at the man meant to be the husband Packy never got to be, face bunched, gathered, wrinkled. He sat up and shook his head.

“What a day,” said he, and I smiled—not with my teeth showing, just gentle like, understanding.

“Sorry, darlin’. Are ye all right? We should a been in a grander place, with soft pillows. Will you forgive me?”

I reached up to smooth that hair of his back from the peak and he grabbed it, my hand, and pulled me to standing next to him, and I have to say I didn’t mind at all sinking into that manly chest where I could hear his thundering heart.

“We’ve got to go. I should a been down at the barns. You better finish dressing.”

“Isn’t the big meetin’ for tomorrow night?”

He peered at me. “How would you know that? Oh, yes, you’re the one for the papers. Thing the papers don’t tell everyone is there’s a meetin’ every night.”

“But it’s your day off, sure?” I called from the tangle where my skirt hung, and the shirtwaist. I could feel the wetness around the vent in my drawers and already schemed how I’d rinse them out while Margaret slept.

“May be a string of them off if the bosses don’t give in to us. And don’t believe all you read in the papers. There’s no Bolshie tryin’ to influence us. I’d never go for that. We’re just ordinary men after a fair wage.”

It pained me a bit to follow him out onto the grass, him walking that fast, and a chafing down there, and though I’d finally remembered to put on my dry stockings, I must have rolled a pebble into them. I said nothing.

The park looked tired after such a day, yet people were lingering, some of them maybe tired, too. Others packing their baskets, resigned, and didn’t it seem God had tossed us all down on the earth like so many dice and some of us came up a six. The dream Desmond and me’d been in began to fray at the edges and spill right open as we neared the streaming streets. He let go my hand and hurried ahead as if late for an appointment, which he was so. At the car barn. There’d be no supper, not even coffee, should we want it on such a day, but he stopped for another Dr. Pepper, a soda I never drank after that week. It was not a taste I liked, but how could I refuse Desmond, parched as I was?

When we reached the Loop once again a pall of soot layered everything beneath the elevated tracks. It was there he took both my hands. Would he kiss me right there on the corner of Adams Street, with the world and all going by? I feasted on the sight of him, my Desmond Malloy—a man taller than me by half as much again, shirt open at the collar, jacket loose, too, and trousers wrinkled as they might be from any activity on a day like that one, even from sitting at the ballpark. His brown hair combed back, he’d seen to that, and his boater at a cheerful angle covering his head.

Despite the hat, his face’d gone red from the sun and the heat and the whiskey he’d been sipping, and the regret he felt for me, that my debut should be on such a hard bed. Debut, he’d said, as if he’d been after introducing me to society at a fancy dress ball. Gave me power, that, so it was me who said, “If you’ve got to get down to your barn, go ahead then. I’ll just continue on to Bridey’s. Margaret will be looking for me. And you’ve your future to think about.” Our future.

Him holding my hands still, then pursing his lips in such a way deepened that dimple. Staring into my face, the eye drifting off. But he never kissed me, no, not there at the streetcar stop where his workmates might have seen him. I could understand him not wanting to be teased and it having happened fast, him and me. Presto! But why not fast? Packy gone so sudden, and people dying here and there, unpredictably. Irene Miles, and little Janet maybe sleeping, but not in the sun, with it fallen, and maybe a sleep she’d never wake from, and all them didn’t come back from the war. I never even stopped at St. Patrick’s to beg forgiveness because, like I always said, if God didn’t want us to feel like we did, why had he given us those feelings?