Bowery Girl (13 page)

Then her fingers found their way without her conscious thought, and she was able to watch the room. Some of her classmates were too tired from working all night to do much more than snore, their heads on their arms, the typewriter a pillow. Working in factories, making candles, turning a cuff, splitting hides, blowing a man in an alley—well, money still had to be made somehow.

And more to the point, she was able to watch where the girls placed their purses and satchels, how the men patted their wallets without thinking, in which drawer Mr. Dunlap chose to store his briefcase. None of them, she knew, had more than a penny or two. And it was not her desire to steal from those who needed those coins.

But she liked to plan how she would steal the coins from the satchels and wallets and Mr. Dunlap's briefcase. A drill and a bit of practice, that was all.

She knew Susie had a picture of her fellow in her satchel, and once she'd finished her drill, she hauled the thing onto her lap and gazed at it like a moron from Barnum's old show. Mollie could walk by, stick both hands and a foot in the satchel, and Susie would still have no idea why she didn't have fare for the El.

Derrick, two seats left, carried a huge wallet in his chest pocket, but that was not where he kept his money. His money was easily heard clinking in the bottom of his lunch pail. Derrick thought this an excellent place to escape the eyes of thieves.

Charlie White had always and only a dime, which he liked to flick up and down in the air at lunch. The dime was to buy dinner for his two sisters and a handful of flowers for his mother.

As for Mr. Dunlap, he may have put his briefcase away in a drawer, but he never locked it up. Mollie could have snuck into the room during any lunch, on the pretense of having left something behind, and taken whatever she wanted. But no doubt there were only folded bits of paper in there, all filled with three- and four-letter words and much gibberish, too.

She took this way of looking into the yard with her, at lunch, and the happy asylum scene became more like the story of the Fourth Ward she lived in. She began to notice that the children played in two separate groups. Certainly both laughed, and their games were much the same. But one side of the yard had heads of red and gold and brown, and names like Ian and Maggie and Ralph. On the other side—just past the tree and far from the alley where the waste bin sat—the heads were dark. The Italians.

And just as the expanse of green grass was divided, so were the tables. For the Italians spoke and shouted in their own language, and the Irish girls and their young men jutted stubborn chins, and spit in the Wops' general direction. Mollie wondered if one of those women might even be her next-door neighbor, but who could know? The Italians all looked the same. Then again, so did the Irish. They were all drab. All rotting like the tenements around them and thinking a flowerpot and a dab of paint would somehow fix everything.

It was when lunch ended that Mollie truly liked her game; it was then she memorized the weft and weave of the settlement-house habits. She loved to rake, particularly in front of the long classroom windows. Through one, she watched the teachers take one last drag of a cigarette before trotting off to teach housekeeping or English, or whatever it was they did. There was a set of deep drawers near the hallway door, and into each, the teachers put their personal items.

Every Wednesday, at precisely 12:35, a huge rump of a man came to visit the teachers and share a few words with some of the students in the yard. He was a Tammany man, most definitely. He stood with his great legs spread wide and confident, a thumb cocked in the pocket of his Fifth Avenue suit. God help the tailor who clothed him in so many yards of satin and silk! “I'm just one of the people,” he liked to say. When he laughed, which was often, and often at nothing in particular, his stomach jiggled. His eyes, however, remained steel. After his turn with the teachers in their office and his stroll through the yard, he tilted a head toward the third-story window and gave a quick nod to Miss DuPre. Then into the building he went. The exchange upstairs was meant to be private, but Mollie saw it all from the far edge of the yard. Emmeline's hand held out for a shake, which the man then chose to kiss. Two or three words through empty smiles. An envelope proffered by Miss DuPre and duly pocketed.

The payoff. Of course Miss DuPre would go to the top. No need to pay the cops for protection when you can afford the greed of Tammany Hall itself.

There was a lot of cash floating around somewhere; Mollie guessed it to be in Miss DuPre's rooms, behind the only three locks in the building.

She shook her head.
Now, that,
she thought,
would be an easy take.

She dug the prongs of the rake deep into the grass. She looked at the lines in the brown soil. What would she do with so much money? Move to Brooklyn, yes, easily and effortlessly. Hire a nanny for Annabelle's baby. Eat chocolate cake and drink whiskey for breakfast. Buy that beautiful hat, with its shades of sunlight, and promenade anywhere she wanted.

She continued to rake, watching bent heads or recitations. The last window let light into the reading class. Emmeline DuPre taught this class herself. And this was the class where Annabelle sat, front and center, and gazed at Emmeline as if she were the lifeline that would pull her up from the depths.

Mollie expected Annabelle to be turned in her seat, wagging a red-leather boot, passing gossip with the girl behind her. She would have expected her to roll her eyes each time Miss DuPre tapped a stick against the board. But Annabelle did neither of those things. Her eyes were on her book when they were supposed to be, and she recited when everyone else did. All the while, she caressed her stomach.

Annabelle, she realized, was happy. Here, she did not have to think of how she'd feed that child inside her. Here, she did not wonder where the rent came from or if she'd have to haunt the streets again. Here, Tommy did not exist. And here, Mollie thought, Annabelle had finally determined she was good.

No—Mollie would not steal the money from behind the three locks that led to Emmeline DuPre's rooms. To take the money was the same as taking it straight out of the hands of all the people here. To take it from Annabelle.

And to steal from herself the one damn place in the entire Fourth Ward where she finally felt safe.

THE SHELL GAME

BUT THEN DUSK CAME, with real life and all its responsibilities. There was an empty food box at home: This needed filling. There was a second notice on the door regarding rent. There was a trinket box drained of anything worth selling.

Mollie began to haunt the markets late at night, in search of stale bread, half-rotten oysters, and blackened radishes. She dug through trash bins outside saloons, and was often rewarded with entire heads of cabbage and kidney pies not entirely green with mold.

One evening, she climbed the green stairs to the Elevated, looking for a good pocket or two. The path of sin might be lined with fool's gold and guilt, but it also contained the rent.

The platform was heavy with people, all jostling for the best spot, so they might be the one to grab a rare empty seat once the train arrived. Dresses, suits, a pale hand waved above the crowd, a woman's smile in response. There was a boy with blackened face dancing like a minstrel with no music save the squeal of the Elevated's wheels. There was a woman in bright yellow, laughing, a bottle in her hand.

Under a gaslight's frosted globe, Mollie caught a flash of blonde hair, the glint of an eyeglass, a dove-gray cloak. A woman stood separate and apart from the others. Emmeline DuPre waited for the train.

How strange to see her out of her element. How small she looked. She glanced neither left nor right; her face was void of expression. Or rather, Mollie thought, closed and guarded.

Where would Miss DuPre be traveling this time of night? Surely there was a lecture or reading at the settlement house. There was always something or other. Last week, a fat opera singer blared out songs so shrill and sharp, Mollie mistook the great beast in her ruby dress for a cat in full heat. Annabelle pretended to be sick and dragged Mollie from the library. “Even the baby had her hands over her ears,” she said. “If that's culture, I'd rather be deaf.”

Watches snapped shut. People leaned forward to glare down the tracks. The Elevated was late. In a far corner came a hum and singsong as familiar to Mollie as her own skin.

“Easy as sin. Just watch the shells, watch the shells. Find the penny and I'll give you a dollar.”

Three men stood around a small table that could fold quickly out of sight should the need arise. Three shells lay neatly on the wood. Behind it stood a man in a worn gray beaver top hat and red velvet collar, talking smoothly as he lifted each shell. “There. See? Take a close look. Penny's in the left one. Just watch the shell.” Around and around went the shells. “There it is center, there it is left, back again, back again, and all in a line. Easy as sin. Drop a three-center and your guess, boys—my game's the cheapest in town.”

Two of the men who watched were commuters, not gamblers. This was obvious in the way one scratched his head under his bowler, the way the other pursed his lips and tried to remember the path of the penny. But the third, timid, narrow of shoulder and hip, a clerk quite gray from spending his day in an office, pulled out a coin.

“You sure you know which one? 'Cause I ain't taking money that should be going to your wife and little ones.” The gamesman winked and readjusted his top hat. “And certainly not from some pretty thing you've got on the side.”

“I know which one, all right. It's in the left one. Sure as I'm living.”

“My friend, the only thing a person can be sure of is being dead.”

“It's in the left.”

“Coin on the table, then, and let's see if fortune smiles on thee.” Slowly, he tipped back the shell. He slid the penny out and tossed it in the air. “Seems I'm slow today. Here's your dollar, I'm an honest man.” He pulled a crumpled bill from his pocket. “Now, scram, you're bringing me bad luck.”

“Double it down.”

“Double it—no, my friend, I said scram.”

“Let him do it,” the man in the bowler said.

The gamesman rolled his eyes to heaven as if the answer could be plucked from God himself. “Well, being as I'm a charitable man, we'll take one more go. Lay out the bills, my friend, and see if fortune's still kind.”

The clerk reached deep in his trouser pocket. He smoothed a bill, matched it with the other, and laid them out. Mollie narrowed her eyes. Two bills, both damp and crumpled. Not a clerk at all. The shill. The one who egged on any sap who approached, to play and win and promise others by example that riches could be had by all.

The game was ignored by the majority, who only wanted their train and home and dinner. But then, then! A sway of a skirt and a step toward the table. Miss DuPre's gaze flicked over the players, then stopped on the shells themselves. Her foot moved forward, inadvertently, separately from any conscious wish she might have to keep it firmly in place. Her cheeks had a high flush; she raked her lower lip against her teeth.

Mollie thought,
There's the street she came from
. And the fine cut of the cloak, the soft high lace at her throat, the beads in her ears were no more than a costume, a mask, a disguise. The real Emmeline DuPre would open her purse and wager on the shells.

Would she? Would she let go and drop a three-center on the rickety table?

Miss DuPre rolled her hands into tight balls. She tore her gaze from the table and stared at the steel lattice platform beneath her feet. Her face was not blank or guarded or closed now. It roiled and struggled and weighed consequences to actions.

Mollie thought of Annabelle and of the faith she placed in this woman. Good she could not see her now, small and alone, tempted by a crooked set of shells. Crooked herself, mending her ways like any of those who traversed the steps of the settlement house. All that show of power and composure a trick of light.

Emmeline's struggle turned her pale skin even paler. White as the walls of her office. Here was a woman of money and means who could not lose the past. Who had a chance to be rid of the Lower East Side forever, but came back. For what?

Mollie felt a small jolt. She realized she would be disappointed in Miss DuPre if she succumbed to the game.

Please don't,
Mollie thought.

Emmeline DuPre jerked and turned toward Mollie. She blinked slowly, as if trying to put a name to the face she saw before her.

The metal trembled, then shook steadily as the train approached.

She drew herself up, and found her composure. Her expression closed upon itself. If she recognized Mollie, she gave no evidence. She turned to the crowd and lost herself within it.

“Would you have bet, had the train been a minute more late?” Mollie asked under her breath. “Would you?”

April 1883
THE DIME MUSEUM

“. . . REFUSED TO GIVE ME an ounce of food, they did. Goddamn ‘house of God.' A Catholic house of God, mind you.” Annabelle pulled the handle of the Love Meter. The metal ball jiggled and remained at STONE COLD. “That's what a baby does to you, Moll. You get to spend your life carrying twenty pounds of fat around for too many months to count.”

Mollie dropped a penny in the machine. She yanked the handle and watched the ball bounce and land in a bucket marked ROMANTICALLY INSANE. “I always get that. I think this damn arcade oughtta buy new machines every decade or so.”

“And the woman's sitting there with a big green sprig of grass between her teeth. She said, ‘A fallen woman is not welcome in the House of God.' And I said, ‘Well, what about that girlfriend of Jesus'? What about that virgin birth that don't seem quite innocent to me? You'd turn them away, too?' Called my child an abomination. And I said back to her, ‘You are the abomination. A-B-O-M-A-N-A-Y-S-H-E-N.'”