Edwardian Candlelight Omnibus (20 page)

And as for Molly, she wished they were all back in the cosy comfort of her father’s shop in Brooklyn, when things were safe and normal before that momentous evening a year ago when she and Mary had unwittingly founded the Maguire fortunes.

She closed her eyes tightly to shut out the motion of the ship and remembered how it had all begun….

It had been a close, humid Brooklyn evening in Jane Street, a narrow alley running off Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn. The gas lamps had been lit, the other, bigger stores—Namm’s, Frederick Loeser’s, Waldorf Shoes—had all put up their shutters long ago. But the Maguire’s General Store stayed open, sometimes around the clock, in order to lure stray customers to their doors. They sold everything and anything from hairpins to coffee beans. Mr. Joseph Maguire and his wife, Nadia, had retired to bed leaving their daughters, Molly and Mary, to cope with any late-night shoppers.

The large flyblown mirror over the unused fireplace, advertising Bigg’s Tobacco in curly glass letters, reflected their tired faces; a beautiful combination of vivid blue eyes and black curly hair from their Irish father and the high Slav cheekbones of their Polish mother. The girls often took turns sleeping on a mattress under the counter. If anyone had told them that their life was hard, they would have been very surprised indeed. Both were dutiful, lively, and merry. They passed the long night hours weaving romantic fantasies. The shop bell would clang and who should be standing on the threshold but the Prince of Ruritania himself. He would fall in love with one of them, of course. Molly said it would be Mary and Mary swore loyally it would be Molly.

But usually it was only one of the local lads with his sheepish smile and thick boots, giggling and asking for “two ounces of baccy.”

The neighbors were apt to censure the Maguire parents for exposing their daughters to the dangers of nighttime Brooklyn. But Molly kept a shotgun under the counter, which her father had taught her to use, and Officer Brady made as many calls as he could to stand and drink coffee in the warmth of the little shop and admire the famous beauty of the girls.

On the fateful evening that was to change their lives, Molly had just celebrated her seventeenth birthday. Mary was nearly sixteen. The hour was eleven in the evening and the shop no longer shook with the rumble of the trains on the King’s County Elevated Railroad that ran above Fulton Street.

Molly was not feeling her usual happy-go-lucky self. Jimmy Heimlich, whose father owned the greengrocers two doors away, had asked her to walk out with him, but she had refused. And her mother had been very angry. Jimmy was a well-set-up young man and Mrs. Maguire had looked forward to a merging of the two businesses. Jimmy’s father was failing, everyone knew that. It was only a matter of time. But her infuriating daughter had said no and had refused to give a reason.

Molly could not really work out in her mind
why
she had refused Jimmy. At last she had said slowly that it was because she was not in love with Jimmy, and her angry mother had confiscated her small store of romances, saying she could not have her books back until she came to her senses.

The theater crowd from Colonel William F. Simm’s Park Theater had cheered the Spooner Stock Company to the last curtain call and had gone home without any of them calling in at the Maguires’ store. It looked as if it were going to be a quiet night.

Mary was asleep under the counter because she had school in the morning. Molly, who had finished school, had elected to stay awake.

But her eyes felt heavy and she leaned her elbows on the counter, enduring the familiar feeling of fatigue and sore feet. Her eyelids drooped lower and lower and the temptation to crawl under the counter beside Mary was nearly irresistible.

The sudden clanging of the doorbell brought her eyes open with a jerk, and then she blinked. For surely the lady standing on the threshold must have come from one of her dreams.

Despite the close humidity of the night, she was dressed from head to foot in white ermine. She had a thin, white, autocratic face with weak, pale eyes. On her scarlet hair was perched a sequined cap ornamented with long black cock’s feathers that hung down to her shoulder. She raised a hand to her forehead and her furred cuff fell back to reveal a heavy diamond bracelet circling a wrist so fragile and thin that you would have thought it would have snapped under the weight of the jewels.

Behind her stood a tall elderly gentleman with a white mustache and a florid face. Little beads of moisture clung to his tall silk hat and to the fur collar of his coat.

And behind the couple a huge Lozier automobile crouched beside the curb, with a uniformed chauffeur standing at attention.

It must be a dream!

But the lady was moving forward languidly to the counter. She opened her thin, painted mouth and said, “Hev youse got anything for dis cough? It’s a-makin’ me sick to my stummick, ain’t it, Joey?”

“Yaas,” said the elderly gentleman vaguely, and then, “What’s thet?”

“Thet” was Mary’s round eyes peering over the counter. Mary got to her feet and smoothed out the creases on her starched pinafore and both Maguire sisters stared at their customers in awe.

“Come along, gels,” said the gentleman called Joey. “Meh Dolores hes got the cough something awful, she has.”

And in answer Dolores let out a series of stentorian barks. “Theh you ah!” said Joey triumphantly. The gentleman appeared to be English, to judge from the strangulated accents coming from him. But his fair lady had undoubtedly sprung from Brooklyn soil. Molly looked feverishly around the shop. No cough medicine.

She stood irresolute. She did not want to send these grand customers away empty-handed. Then Molly remembered her grandmother’s old receipt book in the back shop. Surely there would be something in that.

“We have just the thing, if you will wait a few minutes,” said Molly, nipping deftly around the counter and placing a chair for Dolores next to the shelves of canned goods. And hustling the wide-eyed Mary in front of her, she bustled into the back shop.

“What are you
doing?
” demanded Mary.

“We ain’t got no cough syrup.”

“Haven’t got any,” corrected Molly automatically. “But there’s bound to be something in Gran’s book. Here it is! Now, let me see—
cough, cough, cough
—ah, got it! Find an empty bottle, Mary, and draw a label—you’re good at that—and call it…oh, something fancy.”

While Mary seized her ever ready paints and paper, Molly got to work. In a small bowl she mixed fennel, cinnamon, anise, and lemon and added two spoonfuls of honey. It needed more. It needed something to bring these fabulous people back to the Maguire store. Alcohol! That was it! Coming as she did from a Polish-Irish background, Molly was convinced that adults were fueled solely by alcohol. Her mother’s bottle of 140 proof Polish vodka stood over by the sink. She added a great slug to the mixture and turned to see how Mary was getting on.

Mary had cut one of her small drawings out of her pad. It showed a rather evil-looking leprechaun sitting on a rock, leering up at several fairies who were dancing through a rainbow overhead. Mary had quickly added the words
MAGUIRES’ LEPRECHAUN DEW
in bold black gothic lettering.

“Oh, that’s very good. But it’s awful, too,” laughed Molly. “They’ll know we’re taking the Mickey.”

“Come along, gels,” trumpeted the voice of Joey. “Meh Dolores is waiting.”

“It’ll have to do,” hissed Molly, pasting the label on the bottle. “Here goes!”

“This is our own recipe,” said Molly sweetly, handing Dolores the bottle. Dolores looked suspiciously at the leprechaun who seemed to look suspiciously back, but Joey was already pulling out a purse and demanding the price. Molly thought quickly. She did not want to charge too little. She did not want to charge too much. She took a deep breath. “Fifty cents, please,” she said. “It’s a very old recipe and we don’t give it to many customers.”

“It had better work or youse’ll hear from me,” said Dolores nastily. Joey was looking at the Maguire sisters in a way Molly did not like.

When the door had crashed shut behind the customers, Molly and Mary remained standing primly behind the counter until they could hear the car no longer. Then they both burst out into peals of laughter, hanging on to each other. “Leprechaun Dew, indeed,” howled Mary. Then she sobered. “But why are you always after me to talk proper, Molly? She
don’t
. I mean she talked like a regular Brooklyner.”

Molly hesitated. And then, lowering her voice, she said, “I think Dolores was that man’s
mistress
.”

“Ooooh!” screamed Mary in gleeful dismay. Then her face fell. “It’s a pity if she is. Thought she was one of them East Siders who’d take a fancy to us and introduce us to society, where we would meet a prince.”

Molly gave her an affectionate hug. “Let’s forget about the whole thing. Wouldn’t Ma be mad if she knew what we’d done!”

Perhaps Mrs. Maguire would never have heard of their visitors had they been sold something other than cough medicine. Dolores moved on the fringes of the best circles, where she was only barely tolerated because of her protector’s great wealth. No lady was going to listen to Miss Dolores’s views on anything. Anything, that is, but the common cold, that most democratic of minor illnesses.

The stunned Maguire parents found themselves being besieged during the following week for Maguires’ Leprechaun Dew. The secret was out and the custom was in as Molly mixed and filled and Mary drew and painted and the limousines and carriages blocked the narrow lane outside.

By the following week the Maguires were closing up shop very early indeed so that they could cope with the flood of orders. Neither parents had any proper business sense and the whole thing might have fizzled out for lack of supplies, but Fate decided to take a further hand in the presence of Mr. Bernard Abrahams who ran the tailoring shop next door.

Mr. Abrahams was in his thirties and had recently and gloomily inherited the business from his father and was reputed to make the worst suits in the whole of Brooklyn. But Bernie had also recently discovered a talent for turning money into more money by gambling shrewdly on Wall Street. He elected himself advisor to the bewildered Maguires. With his beaky nose and brightly colored waistcoats, he darted around the Maguires’ small living room above the shop like some strange bird of paradise. Soon a small factory in Red Hook was turning out the precious bottles of cough mixture, and the huge bull-like figure of Mr. Maguire twisted and turned to follow Bernie’s mad gyrations and his large cauliflower ears strained to take in a flood of talk about stocks and shares and distributors and international markets.

Now that the factory was in operation, Molly and Mary felt somewhat at a loss. The work and bustle had gone now that bottles of Maguires’ Leprechaun Dew were now appearing in all the major pharmacies.

One evening after she had put up the heavy wooden shutters, Molly climbed the stairs to their small dark living room to find Bernie, as usual, holding the floor. Her mother had been darning a sock but it lay limply in her hand as she turned her large, dazed white face to Bernie’s small animated one. “Millionaires!” she was saying faintly.

“Ain’t it the truth,” said Bernie, hooking his thumbs in his waistcoat and then peering down to admire the gleaming white of his new spats. “So you’ve gotta move in with the nobs, now…see. Can’t go on living in a rat hole like this.”

Mrs. Nadia Maguire looked dazedly around the dark living room. “But what will we do? What will happen to the girls?”

“They’ll become ladies, that’s what,” said Bernie. “As for you, Ma, don’t you want to travel? See the Riviera and places like that? I’ll find a companion for the girls. One of their schoolteachers’ll do the trick.”

And that, reflected Molly, had been the beginning of the end. They had moved to a great dark brownstone in Brooklyn Heights with Miss Simms, their former English teacher, as companion while their parents went off on a world tour.

Miss Simms was a brisk, ferrety woman who hid a penchant for gin under an energetic exterior. Her way of introducing the girls to Brooklyn Heights society was to inform them that their neighbors were “common” and to take them for long, dreary walks on the Promenade. They still wore their plaid school dresses and white starched aprons and had their uncomfortable boots bought for them for two dollars and fifty cents a pair at the Waldorf Shoe Company in Fulton Street. They could do little else about it for Miss Simms held the purse strings. Bernie would occasionally relieve the monotony of their existence by taking them to Dreamland, the great pleasure park at Surf Avenue and West Eighth Street, where they could do their own world tour through four simulated corners of the globe. But mostly he was absorbed in his business affairs.

Then at last the Maguire parents returned, much changed. Mrs. Maguire seemed to think it fashionable to appear chronically ill. Her fat figure had dwindled to angular lines and she perpetually held a long, trailing handkerchief in one hand and a bottle of smelling salts in the other. Pa Maguire had adopted what he fondly believed to be an English accent and rivaled Bernie in the brightness of his waistcoats and the whiteness of his spats. But the homecoming welcomes were hardly over when the last blow fell. The Maguire parents had arranged for Molly and Mary to travel to England.

They were to stay with a certain Lady Fanny Holden at a fashionable English resort called Hadsea. There they would be polished and molded and prepared for a London Season. They would both marry lords and live happily ever after.

Mary began to cry. Everything had been taken away. Her school, the cosy shop, the work, their home, and now their parents. Molly stood protectively over her, prepared to do battle. But the arrival of Bernie knocked the wind out of her sails. For Bernie, noisy, garrulous Bernie, whom she had looked upon as an uncle, was equally enraged. He, Bernie, had planned to marry Molly. Caught between Scylla and Charybdis, Molly found she had nothing to say.

She would look on the bright side of things. Perhaps when they sailed to England there would be other young people on board the liner. There might even be a prince, she told Mary.