Bowery Girl

Table of Contents

 

 

Side Dish

Cissy Funk

Bowery Girl

VIKING
Published by Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in 2006 by Viking, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group

 

Copyright © Kim Taylor, 2006

All rights reserved

 

Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available.

eISBN : 978-1-440-67835-6

 

 

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There are thousands more or less connected with criminal enterprises; and still other tens of thousands, poor, hard-pressed, and depending for daily bread on the day's earnings, swarming in tenement-houses, who behold the gilded rewards of toil all about them, but are never permitted to touch them.

Let but Law lift its hand from them for a season, or let the civilizing influences of American life fail to reach them, and, if the opportunity offered, we should see an explosion from this class which might leave this city in ashes and blood.

—Charles Loring Brace,
The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Among Them
, 1872

A
more gorgeous creature could not be found. Her jaunty bonnet, set rakishly on one side of her head, bloomed in all the colors of the rainbow; her short skirts showed the neatest-turned ankle and the trimmest little foot, with a perfectly marvelous stocking. And then her air—as, with parasol poised in one hand, the other arm swinging to the motion of her body, her dainty nose pointing upward, she passed at a quick gait peculiar to herself along the Bowery, or through Chatham Square—it was the perfection of East Side poetry. No wonder the “Bowery Boy” bowed down before her, and worshipped. She was irresistible.

—
New York by Gaslight
, James D. McCabe, 1882

RELEASE

DOWN THE STREET STRODE a young woman, who could have been anywhere between thirteen and twenty. She didn't know her own age, so she had decided on sixteen. She was not pretty, nor was she plain. Her hair was brown, not dirty and not clean, and she kept it in a loose bun. Her eyebrows were dark and full, and from beneath them, her winter-gray eyes missed nothing. A matchstick hung from the corner of her mouth, and every so often she shifted it to the other side, then back again to its original spot. She had been told by several do-gooders at several charity houses that this was a reprehensible habit, which was why she never stopped doing it.

Her dress was neither this year's fashion nor the last; it was patched in places, and frayed along the bottom. The material was coarse brown cotton, solid and indifferent. With each step, the young woman, whose name was Mollie Flynn, admired the black sheen of her new boots. Mollie was quite proud of them. She'd pinched them a week earlier from Fried-rich's Secondhand Shop on Chambers Street. They were bright as black could be, and she polished them every night to keep them so.

An Elevated train rattled above, drowning out the
rat-a-tat
from the shooting gallery, the shouts of drivers as they jockeyed their carts and horses for a bit of space, the competing songs of violins and out-of-tune pianos floating from saloon doorways.

She walked by an old woman in an alcove, selling buttons she'd probably picked out of trash bins. Another woman trundled slowly past, a huge pile of fabric balanced on her head. Two boys played hoops and sticks, laughing and shouting to each other. The boys' laughter, the woman's determined footfall, the call to buy buttons, the wheedling song of pullers-in trying to tempt passersby into the billiard room, the dancehall, the used-jewelry store, the pawnshop—the rhythm made Mollie dizzy.

At Maud Riley's vegetable stand, a tall man bargained over a rather measly cabbage. He nodded, a deal struck, then fumbled in the inside pocket of his coat for his wallet. Maud wrapped two cabbages and a few potatoes in newspaper and pulled a bit of twine tight.

Mollie sucked a bit on her matchstick and narrowed her eyes. She wasn't looking at Maud Riley's slaughter of a poor cabbage. She was watching the man's wallet, which flapped open, hung about, and generally looked like it was going to jump right out of his incompetent fingers.

Now that,
Mollie thought,
would be the easiest wallet to pinch in the world. It would only take a second.
Her fingers tingled with possibility.

But she was late already. And she had a pocket full of coins, enough at least for a good meal of oysters and beer. For it was time—finally and after so many months!—to collect Annabelle Lee from the steps of the criminal courts, which everyone in New York City called “The Tombs.” The sky above Mollie was blue and heavenly, so sharp and new with the beginning of spring that she thought she could single out each crystal that made it.

Mollie bought a hot wine and a bag of chestnuts from a pushcart on the corner of Centre and Worth. “What time ya got?” she asked the cart's owner.

“One.”

“One?” She gulped down the wine and set the cup on the pushcart. She peered into the shadows of the thick, dark granite columns of the prison. There were so many people going in and out, so much shouting. Here was a fellow coming out and hugging his wife. And there was a drunk being dragged by a copper up the steps.

A milk cart rolled by, and then a delivery van, and damn if the trolley didn't block her! She'd best cross over, so Annabelle could find her. She darted across the street, careful to hop over the tracks that coursed the middle of Centre Street—no need to bring bad luck on such a day.

She passed the wrought-iron fence that guarded two scrawny winter-dead trees and a narrow patch of soil and stopped directly at the bottom of the gray steps.

In November, Annabelle Lee had been caught with her hand in a detective's pocket. Though he was quite happy with the service she had provided him, he was not happy to then be robbed. She had been sent to Blackwell's Island, and it was noted by the fat judge that she was “incurably saucy and a menace to society.”

Mollie missed Annabelle Lee. It was Annabelle Lee who had held out her hand, had pulled Mollie from the rags she had crawled under to warm herself. Annabelle had walked the streets even then, a twelve-year-old porcelain doll-child. She worked the corner next to the Ragpickers' Lot. Annabelle left her bread and beer, like you'd leave scraps and fish bones for a feral cat you wanted to tame. It was Annabelle Lee who had given her the name Mollie Flynn.

They had lived together in a cellar that ran underneath Batavia between Roosevelt and Chambers, just around the corner from where they lived now, close by the brewery, where men gave them free drinks just for a chance to grab at Annabelle's girlish breasts. Annabelle never let them grab at Mollie's.

Mollie missed the strolls in the streets during the dead times, those times between the lunch crowd and the evening drunk crowd. Annabelle used to laugh for no reason—they both laughed for no reason. Sometimes they'd sneak into the Thalia Theatre and watch rehearsals. Other times, they'd walk the East River docks, wondering where each ship was headed—Bombay, Barcelona, Cape Town, Buenos Aires. Annabelle said her father's father had been a deckhand on a slave ship, and he had shown her the shackles once to prove it.

On Sundays, when good Irish Catholics went to Mass, Annabelle and Mollie would visit the psychic who lodged on the first floor of a Batavia Street tenement. Annabelle dressed plainly in gray, though insisted on wearing her wig, for she loved the way the blonde curls bounced around her face as she walked.

The psychic's name was Hermione Montreal. She was old; the paint she put on her lips bled into the lines all around her mouth. She always told them, in a croaky voice, that they were destined for greatness and would marry well. Each Sunday they came back and told her that neither event had happened and they wanted their money back. But she served them whiskey and cookies and told them the stars never lied.

Now, in front of the Tombs, Mollie thought she might spot Annabelle from her blonde curls, but then realized that the wig hung on the wall at home; Annabelle's own hair was dark as half the throng.

And then she laughed out loud, for of course it would be easy to find Annabelle Lee! Why, there she was, parading down the hard steps, red leather shoes peeping and teasing from under her skirts.

“You're here.” Annabelle smiled.

“And I'm early, so what ya got to say about that?”

Annabelle put a hand on her hip and pretended to fluff her hair with the other. “Do you like the outfit? Courtesy of the good Ladies of Charity. Gave me a Bible, too, but it somehow got lost. Tried to take my shoes, but I said I'd claw their eyes out and bite their ears.”

Mollie took her in. She wasn't at all the Annabelle who'd gone to Blackwell's Island four months ago. Her skin was pale, almost purple around her brown eyes. And Lord, the clothes she wore were of the roughest material, like sacks, not even the hint of a bustle or corseted waist.