Metropolis (12 page)

And that was how Will got an alias that stuck and soon thereafter a job that was legit, and on a building crew, too. He saved himself, and he slipped through the fingers of Luther Undertoe, from whose sights he seemed simply to vanish (precipitating a serious downturn in Undertoe’s fortunes, which were closely linked to satisfying Sergeant Jones). He did it by indenturing himself to a gang of murderers. They would be calling on his services to do some ill deed before long, he knew. But for now, it seemed like the best of his options. Weirdly lucky, even.

That very night, he was thrust into the middle of a family whose members lived on top of one another in a three-room tenement apartment: There was Beatrice, there was her Aunt Penelope, and then there were her cousin Liam, his wife, Colleen, and their children. It didn’t take long for Harris to see how much he’d missed being a part of a family all these years. For though the O’Gamhnas weren’t his family, they took him in as if they were. They ate up the story Beanie told them, of a man determined to redeem himself, and they pledged to help.

It was every bit as crowded at the O’Gamhnas’ as it had been at the flop on Mott Street. They dragged out the mattresses and blankets from the so-called bedroom at night and spread them over every inch of the front room’s floor—only old Aunt Penelope actually slept in the tiny bedroom, on a real bed—but in all other ways it was different from Wah Kee’s. It was clean, for example. And strangely enough, given that he’d just joined up with a gang of thieves, he was now considerably less likely to be stabbed, robbed or poisoned as he slept.

Frank Harris’s first task was to learn to speak the O’Gamhnas’ brand of Irish-American English. Amidst all the lies, Beatrice told her family some truths: that he was German and in trouble with both a gang and the law and that their scheme was to have him masquerade as an Irishman to get a clean start. Harris told some truths, too: that he’d apprenticed as a stoneworker on a cathedral and that what he really wanted was to go back to working on buildings. Liam immediately promised to find him a post as soon as he was ready to face the world as an Irishman. “It’s not a cathedral, but it’s construction, and it’s a start.” Harris could have wept—either for gratitude or for remorse at the way he was deceiving these good people—but he just smiled and said he couldn’t wait, which was true.

Every member of the family was eager to help him speed along toward that day by coaching him on his English. Even the baby of the family, a four-year-old boy, felt free to quiz him, criticize him and correct him at any time of day. Since he never left the apartment except in the dark of night to use the privy, the O’Gamhnas were his only human contact, and though it was exhausting, he made faster progress than he would have imagined. Colleen and Mrs. O’Gamhna sat home all day by the window at their sewing—they did shirtsleeves for Bloomingdale’s—chatting with him, yelling at the children and policing his grammar. In the evenings, when he came home from work, Liam was concerned with teaching Harris the vocabulary of the building trades so he wouldn’t falter when he started work. Beatrice, whom the family thought was making her pennies with her hot corn alone, was particularly obsessed with eradicating his accent.

As for Dandy Johnny, Piker Ryan and the other Whyos, Harris didn’t see or hear from them, and Beatrice never mentioned them nor said anything about teaching him the queer Whyo language. English was his subject. He helped with the household chores when the women would let him, but mostly he just studied and dreamt of the job on the paving crew, of chiseling out mortise joints or shallow-grooved rain gutters in bluestone sidewalk slabs. At night, he read aloud from the newspapers Beanie brought home, practicing elocution and picking up vocabulary.

Afterwards, he sat with her and she had him write out vocabulary words on the boys’ slate, which had obviously been hers, since
BEANIE O’G.
had been crudely carved into its wooden frame. His handwriting was a sore spot. It was so obviously German, she chided, and badgered him to change it. He knew from his experience at the hiring office that she was right, but he didn’t want to give it up and rarely practiced the cursive forms she told him to. In a way, though, it wasn’t so much his connection to his past he wanted to keep, it was her attention. Something strange was happening to him during their lessons. He found he wanted her to put her hand over his and force his hand to make the letters curve and slide across the slate. He could feel the warmth of her body, smell the oils of her hair and the salts of her skin. They laughed at the abominable handwriting that resulted from their joint efforts, him fighting her guidance, and time and again he promised he would try harder, do his homework, learn.

It wasn’t long before he understood what it was that was happening when she drilled and quizzed him, and that it wasn’t so strange. The strange part was that the girl he couldn’t stop thinking about was a secret gangster, that their first meeting had begun with a blow to his head and that he knew one day soon she would stop being a girl who curled her fingers over his and drew
F
after
F
after
H—
for she was adamant that at least his signature must look appropriate to an Irishman. One day soon, she would give him his orders from Johnny, and he would not have the choice to say no. They were not destined to be sweethearts but murderers. But all that seemed awfully implausible, awfully far off, and each evening he strove to please and impress her as he read and conjugated and displayed his growing knowledge of everything from idioms to prepositions. He was gratified beyond words when he managed to make her laugh. As his beard filled in, prickly at first, then gradually thickening and lengthening, he began to imagine he might never have to fulfill the commitment he’d made, might get away scot-free.

The first violence in his new life came quite unexpectedly one Sunday afternoon, some five weeks into his tenure at the tenement, when everyone else was out enjoying the unseasonably warm spring air—even Aunt Penelope, for once. Harris had been gazing out the window, seriously considering a violation of his house arrest, when someone began pounding on the door. As a rule, he didn’t answer the door. He was in hiding, after all. The clamor continued for some minutes, then suddenly stopped. He heard a quiet rattle that for all the world sounded like someone was sliding the key into its hole. But who on Earth would have made such a racket if possessed of a key? The lock turned over with a
click thunk.
He was imagining Undertoe, the police, Piker Ryan, even Dandy Johnny when he picked up the chair, positioned himself behind the door, and prepared to strike. Luckily or not, depending on who you were, the chair’s leg was loose, the adjacent rung popped free under the pressure of the man’s skull, and the leg clattered to the floor. The intruder fell with it, but not for long. The blow had been glancing, no more.

The first thing Leon O’Gamhna saw of the man his family called Frank Harris was the throbbing blue halo around him. He rose up and launched himself at Harris, but none too lethally. He was already half in the bag, thanks to his morning cup of a clear liquid that surely wasn’t water and wasn’t quite rum but something harsher and meaner. It was his thirst that had gotten him kicked out of the family apartment years before, but he came back from time to time, when he was hungry or broke. The drunkard’s left hook met the shut-in’s right eye. Harris was to develop a plum of a shiner by the afternoon, but being bigger, younger and entirely sober, he managed to return the favor twofold. He imagined he was fighting for his life, though his assailant had struck neither first nor very hard. He was attempting to do away with Beatrice’s uncle for once and for all when she came in.

“Jesus Christus, what’s going on? Harris? Harris! Quit punching him. That’s my Uncle Leon. He may be a drunk, but I’d really rather you let him live.”

“This is your uncle?”

“Hello, Uncle Leon, you old dipsomaniac. You need something?”

“Dipso
-what
?” said Harris.

Leon was sitting on the floor looking confused.

“
Dipsomaniac.
That’s
d-i-p-s-o-m-a-n-i-a-c,
meaning drunk, alcoholic or enemy of the Ladies Temperance League. Aunt Penny won’t let him in the house anymore, but I never begrudge him a pork chop or a couple dollars. After all, he’s my blood, not hers. What happened anyway, did he sock you?”

As Beanie talked, Leon O’Gamhna had gotten himself back on his feet. Now he reeled back and clobbered Frank Harris with the chair leg, and Harris launched into him again. Beatrice pushed the men apart and gave her uncle a handful of money and half a loaf of bread, at which point he scuttled off, cursing and wiping a trickle of blood from under his nose.

Leon hadn’t remotely resembled a Whyo, a cop or Undertoe, and he hadn’t done anything more threatening than unlock the door, but Harris had attacked him. He was ashamed of it, but he had felt a thrill when his fist met the old man’s nose. The question thus arose in Harris’s mind whether he, Harris, really was a thug, whether perhaps he genuinely belonged in a gang, rather than, say, in a nice home with a family and a proper job. Maybe he had found his level. After all, no one is born a killer, and even a bloodthirsty hit man like Johnny’s henchman Piker Ryan had probably once been just a bully. He imagined a frustrated, reckless, down-and-out Irish kid who happened to learn a certain lesson along the way: Might pays. Was he any different or better? Apparently not. He’d made his pact with the Whyos to save his own skin. He’d been willing to strike first and find out later why. Soon, he’d be working for the gang, and he knew they would ask him to kill. Was he capable of it? For the first time, he realized he might be. Wordlessly, reeling with horror at himself, he turned his back on Beatrice, the broken chair, the disarray that he had caused, and left the apartment.

“Harris,” she called, “stop right there,” but he didn’t. When he reached the ground level, there were only two ways to go: out into the courtyard to the privies or out the front door. He hadn’t been outside since the day of the meeting, and he wanted nothing more than to escape into the wide world. At that moment, he didn’t particularly care that to do so would certainly lead to his arrest and eventual hanging, if not some quicker fate at the hands of an angry gang member. The manhunt was still on, and Beanie showed him articles from the paper every few days, lest he forget it. From time to time, they even reprinted his likeness. He thought of Beatrice—his jailer, but also increasingly his friend. He wanted to escape, but he didn’t want to escape
her,
not exactly. Not seeing her would be a disaster, he realized. He had been running above all from himself, from the beating he’d just given her uncle, and that was simply futile. No, what he needed now was to explain himself.

He was just about to turn and go back upstairs when footsteps approached from the staircase above. He ducked into a reeking privy to hide himself—the family had kept his presence in their apartment a secret, after all—but the footsteps he’d heard had been Beatrice. She could imagine his frustration, being cooped up so long, and wanted to talk with him. Above all, she wanted to make sure he didn’t do something foolish. When she found the hall empty, she shouted toward the privies, “Are you in there?”

He wanted to talk to her, desperately, but he couldn’t bring himself to call back to her from the humiliating vantage of the privy. When he failed to respond, she cursed and ran out into the street.

Harris returned to the apartment to find the chair still in pieces on the floor. He dug Liam’s wide canvas bag of tools out from the closet and selected the equipment he would need to make the necessary repairs. He mixed a paste of powdered glue and water, dabbed it on the ends of the rungs and gently pounded them into place. Then he strapped the legs and the seat together with a length of rope and left it upside down to dry under compression. It was satisfying to repair a thing, he thought, even if it was his own temper that had broken it. It would be stronger than before, once it had set. He would apologize to Beatrice and the others. He told himself it was possible to make a wrong thing right. As he worked, he felt the same pleasure he always did when he was building something, whether great or small, and he began to think about the job that Liam had arranged for him.

That evening, when Beatrice returned from whatever crimes were her day’s work, he avoided meeting her eye, but she wouldn’t let him avoid what had happened.

“You didn’t go out onto the street, did you?” she asked.

“No, I was down in the privy.” She frowned and then filled the family in on the afternoon’s events. Amazingly, no one seemed to think ill of him at all for attacking old Leon; in fact, they found it funny that Harris might think Leon a threat. Colleen even said she was grateful to Harris for preventing Leon from raiding the pantry.

“You’ve been pent up too long, Harris,” said Beatrice. “Maybe it’s time to introduce your new self to the world.”

“They’re hiring laborers on my crew, nothing better at the moment, but there’s a job,” said Liam.

Frank Harris nodded. He was eager to get outside and on with life, but he was also nervous. What if he wasn’t convincing as an Irishman? What would people think? What were the chances that someone would peg him as the suspect in the Barnum’s case? It was unsettling.

That night, late, Beatrice quietly led Harris out of the building for the first time in well over a month. He imagined taking her hand and telling her they must both run away, they must never go back to that apartment or the Whyos, they could make it on their own, but the world seemed wide and overwhelming, and he was nervous about who he was. He didn’t do it. Instead, he let her take him to a dark corner bar where she reached under a bench and found a cheap suitcase that Fiona had deposited there earlier in the day. They had a silent pint and then made their way back to the building, this time making plenty of noise and idle conversation.

“And what about Granny Shea?” she asked, and he went along with it: He said she had died the year before but that the funeral was lovely. By the time they’d made it to the O’Gamhnas’ landing, she’d also mentioned loudly that Liam would probably be able to get him a job.