Bowery Girl (20 page)

She tossed back the drink. The room pulsated with silence. “Doesn't no one know ‘Annabel Lee'? She used to sing it to me. Jesus, don't no one know the song? She loved that damn song.”

CHOPIN

MOLLIE FOUND HERSELF ALONE in the clean white of the settlement house vestibule. There was only the swish of her new skirt, the surprise of catching her reflection in the smooth glass. The material of the skirt was a solid, indifferent brown. The spot of lace that showed above her black coat was coarse. It was what she could afford.

The gaslights to the interior rooms had been extinguished, the shades drawn on the windows facing the yard. The hallway door that led to the classes was open; from beyond, there came one solitary note of a piano. Then another, higher. A pause. Then notes played softly, like sighs, followed by spaces of emptiness or longing. The notes played around Mollie like an embrace, pulling her toward the door.

She stepped into the hallway and spied the flush of candlelight from the library. The door was slightly ajar. She peered in at the shelves of used books, the framed picture of President Chester A. Arthur staring gallantly past his glorious side-whiskers, the vase of peach roses. She pushed against the door to see farther. Miss DuPre sat at the upright piano; she hummed quietly what her hands played.

The music coated the air; Mollie stepped into it, felt it surround her. She had heard nothing so beautiful in her life.

The notes stopped, sudden enough that Mollie was sure she could see them float, then fall like petals against the rug. The piano stool squeaked as Emmeline turned around.

“In general, doors are meant to be knocked upon.”

“It's just, the music, it was—”

“Chopin.”

“It was beautiful. Not all clangy like dancehall stuff. Not that I don't like dancehall music.”

Miss DuPre reached to the piano's top, and took down a cigarette and a match. She dragged the match across the bottom of her shoe, held the flame to the tobacco, and inhaled.

“I've come to say good-bye.”

There was a rustle of fabric as Emmeline crossed one leg over the other. Smoking, an elbow on her knee, she didn't look much different from the streetwalkers who came to rest at Lefty's. But her skin was smooth and her eyes curious, instead of halfway dead like the girls on the street. “Are you going to Brooklyn?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

“How come you ain't married?”

“Excuse me?”

“It's a little weird, ain't it, not to be married at your age? And living down here when you probably got everything in the world uptown. You don't even take a carriage, for Christ's sake. I don't see any rich people coming through here and patting people on the head like pets. That's what they used to do at the orphanage. You don't preach to us about God and repentance.”

“I don't feel there's any need to repent. I feel life is lived by looking forward. By doing one good thing each day. That's enough, isn't it?”

“Annabelle says something like that. She's got a lot of sayings.
Had
a lot of sayings.”

“Mmm.” Emmeline lifted an eyebrow. “What lures you to Brooklyn?”

“I promised Annabelle we'd go.”

“And will it be better there than here?”

“I want to be good.”

“You already are good.”

“I want to move to Brooklyn and meet nice people and not give a thought about picking their pockets. I want to walk down the street without turning my head all the time wondering if a cop's on my tail. I want someone to come pick up the dead horse that's been at the end of my block for two weeks. I want to walk into a café and not have the waiter make me prove I've got the money. I wanted that baby to have a better life than me and Annabelle had.” She put her head in her hands, then, and let the sobs shake her chest. “I don't know what to do but that. She was my friend. I loved her.” Her lungs burned, her throat was raw, and she could not stop crying. She clenched her teeth and dug her fingers into her ribcage, trying to stop crying. She knew tears brought nothing but more tears.

Emmeline did not move toward her, but finished her cigarette and slowly ground it out in the glass ashtray atop the piano.

Finally, Mollie was able to draw in one clean breath. Then another. Enough then to lift her head. “You never answered me.”

“About what?”

“Why you came back here.”

“I'm sick of the dead horse, too. And the poverty. The lack of education. The inability of people to see they are more than the Ward. That is why I came back.”

“But the horse is still there and people is still poor.”

“One small thing at a time.”

“You got a lot of money. Maybe you'd be better off giving twenty dollars to every person you meet. They'd know what to do with it, maybe better than you.”

“If I had given you twenty dollars the day before you walked into the settlement house, what would you have done with the money?”

“Paid the rent.”

“Why don't you stay here and continue your typing? I could make a room for you. It could be the first dormitory room.”

“I wanna go to Brooklyn. Me and Annabelle been dreaming of Brooklyn so long.”

“I've found that the place you live doesn't matter,” Emmeline said. “But
how
you live in that place does. Stay here. Don't squander opportunity.”

“Squander it? I'm taking it. That's the new life I been planning for. How come you can't see that?”

Emmeline sighed. “When are you going?”

“Opening day.”

“You don't need my blessing to cross that bridge, Miss Flynn.”

“Did I ask for that?”

“In your way.” Emmeline stood, and reached in her pocket. She then grasped Mollie's hand and held it tight. “Good luck to you, Mollie Flynn.”

She left twenty dollars in Mollie's palm.

OPENING DAY, MAY 24, 1883

HOW PEOPLE JOSTLED AND pushed! Ladies with parasols meant to block the sun were shouted at for blocking the view. A man in a gray morning suit had his top hat whisked from his head and crushed, just because he had stopped for a breath on the long stretch between New York and Brooklyn. Mollie felt fingers poking her ribs, urging her forward. But she grabbed the huge gray railing and clung tight.

The sun beat full on her skin. It was a fine day; a goddamn beautiful blue sky. She was here, smack in the middle of the bridge between two vast cities, between their great buildings of brick and granite. The river below reflected the reds, whites, and blues of the flags that festooned the man-o'wars and ferries and clippers. All the buildings along the East River bore flags, all the windows and rooftops and streets were full to bursting with the grays and blacks and browns of people come to see President Arthur and Governor Grover Cleveland cross the bridge to shake hands with the mayor of Brooklyn. Of course, the bridge was too vast for anyone to witness this; but many would go home and remember the day as if they
had
seen the regiment march by,
had
walked close behind the president and governor, and some might even remember receiving a smile or nod meant just for them.

Mollie Flynn cared nothing for the pomp and circumstance that began the day. What mattered to her was this moment now: crossing the bridge to Brooklyn, just as she promised Annabelle they would do. Slung across her shoulder was a small satchel; she put her hand inside to assure herself nothing had been stolen. Not that there was anything worthwhile for a pickpocket to steal. Just a broken piece of mirror, the small containers of Annabelle's paints, the trinket box that held one piece of paper:
Hapy Berthday—from m
e. Nothing else.

She had promised Annabelle they would cross the bridge together and gain new lives, and though she could not take Annabelle, she could at least take her things.

Mollie remained midway between the two cities, one hand holding a railing that still smelled of paint.

Was it true, once a person passed the rough docks and warehouses, that the sky was bluer in Brooklyn? That there was space and light and rolling hills and cows? She and Annabelle had never gone to Brooklyn to find out.

Everything the girls learned had been gathered by watching the stereoscopes in the dime museum and reading newspapers glued to the walls of home. Not once had they taken a ferry over to see.

All they thought was:
It's better than where we are.

And yet—and this is what kept Mollie Flynn's hand tethered to the railing—it was possible it would be no different than the city she came from. There would still be sailors and saloons and dancehalls, and boys like the Growlers, and the room she could afford alone might be smaller than the one she had left.

She felt the warmth of a man standing next to her. He ate a ham sandwich and dusted the crumbs from his linen jacket. He glanced down at her, taking in her cheap Bowery dress.

“Eighth Wonder of the World.” He held out his straw bowler. “Give a tip to the cities.”

“Yer half-drunk.”

“Just been toasting both towns.”

She set the hat on her head for a brief second, then tipped it to the unknown of Brooklyn. She turned then to the docks and streets she knew like the back of her hand. She doffed the hat to the buntings and flags and ships.

“Thanks.” She handed back the bowler to the doubly drunk gentleman and stepped past him.

Which way? Turn left, turn right.

Emmeline Dupre had entrusted twenty dollars to her, to do with as she pleased.

Mollie smiled.
Asked someone to pick up the horse. Put a railing on the stairs to home, so no other Annabelle Lee would die from having nothing to stop her fall
. She held her hand over the watch Annabelle had given her, feeling the regular beat of it against her chest.

She checked the time—3:45 P.M.—then stepped into the crowds and turned toward home.

THIS NOVEL BEGAN WITH the chance purchase four years ago of a single book at a dusty used-bookstore. The book,
How the Other Half Lives
, was author and photographer Jacob Riis's eye-opening study of tenement life in late nineteenth-century New York. Within its pages, Riis chronicles the poverty and despair and grit of the people who inhabited the slums. Here are the gamblers and thieves and immigrants. Here are the twenty thousand “street Arabs”—children turned out from home by families unable to afford them. Here are the tanneries and stale-beer dives, Blindman's Alley, and the notorious tenement Gotham Court.

I was awed, at first, by the sheer grimness reflected in the photos. But then I became awed by the sheer courage and tenacity of the people who tried to make their way within the narrow confines of the alleys and streets. And here began the story of the pickpocket Mollie Flynn and the prostitute Annabelle Lee, two young women who fended for themselves and had never known family or education.

Research for this novel included:
How the Other Half Lives
by Jacob Riis;
New York by Gaslight
by James D. McCabe, Jr., a wonderful 1882 tour of New York by carriage and ferry and elevated railway;
The Gangs of New York
by Herbert Asbury;
Low Life
by Luc Sante; New York:
Sunshine and Shadow
by Roger Whitehouse (with excellent photographs of all the boroughs and classes of New York between 1860 and 1915);
Old New York in Early Photographs 1853-1901
, from the Collection of the New-York Historical Society, by Mary Black;
Sins of New York
, a compilation of articles from the Police Gazette;
Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York
by Kathy Peiss;
The City in Slang
by Irving Lewis Allen;
Incredible New York
by Lloyd Morris;
The Virtues of the Vicious
by Keith Gandal; and
Tales of Gaslight New York
compiled by Frank Oppel. Settlement house history included
A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams
by Gioia Diliberto. Maps of the tenements (including stories, occupants, evidence of cholera or smallpox, and outhouses per person) came from the Peter C. Baldwin's incredible Web site:
The Fourth Ward: Life and Death in New York, 1860-1870
. More photos came from the Byron Collection at the Museum of the City of New York.

Bowery Girl
is historical fiction in the sense that the world Mollie Flynn and Annabelle Lee inhabited cannot be traced on the modern streets of Manhattan. The tenements and rear rookeries have been razed or at least improved. Castle Garden, the Rat Pit, Batavia, and Oak Street are gone. The Brooklyn Bridge is no longer commonly considered one of the great wonders of the world.

To research 1883 Manhattan is to conjure ghosts, to dig through contemporary and historical accounts that sometimes glorify and exaggerate both rich and poor, both goodness and evil. The specifics in research, beyond dates and places and streets, came from studying the photographs of the time—exploring the dimness of the gaslights, the children playing in a street and blithely unaware of the dead horse lying ten feet away, the thick layer of grease on a tenement wall, a momentary smile. Walking, for a moment, with two young women who want only a bit of sunshine and a chance for something better.

Mollie Flynn and Annabelle Lee can still be found: on the streets of Mumbai or Mexico City, down an alley in Detroit or Cleveland. Around the corner. This is not a novel about pain or poverty. It is a story of friendship and survival, and the ability to dream in the midst of insurmountable odds.