Rare Objects (3 page)

She had the gift, as the Irish would say, an ear for language. Her talents were wasted as a seamstress.

“He drew you into other places. Other worlds. He made the obscure real and the unfathomable possible. He would've been a great man had he lived. There was no doubt. His brain was like a whip.” She flicked a bit of ash into the sink, pointed her cigarette at me. “You have that. You have a sharp mind.” Her words were an accusation rather than a compliment. “And his eyes. You have his eyes.”

There was just one photograph of Michael Fanning. It sat on the mantelpiece in the front room, a rather startling portrait of a handsome young man staring directly into the camera. His broad, intelligent forehead was framed by waves of dark locks, and his features were fine and even. But it was the fearless intensity of his gaze and the luminous pinpoints of light reflected in his black
pupils that drew you in. It was impossible not to imagine that he was looking straight at you, perhaps even leaning in closer, as if he'd just asked a question and was particularly interested to hear your answer. It was an honest face, without artifice or pretension, and as far as I was concerned, the most beautiful face in the world.

I'd never known him. Ma was a widow and had been all my life. But his absence was the defining force in our lives, a vacuum of loss that held us fast to our ambitions and to each other. He'd always been Michael Fanning, never father or Da. And he wasn't just a man but an era; the golden age in Ma's life, illuminated by optimism and possibility, gone before I was born. I'd grown up praying to him, begging for his guidance and mercy, imagining him always there, watching over me with those inquisitive, unblinking eyes. God the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and Michael Fanning. In my mind, the four of them sat around heaven, drinking tea, smoking cigarettes, taking turns choosing the forecast for the day.

“What time are you going to mass?”

“Six o'clock. I want to go to confession before.”

Confession.

Now there was the rub. I certainly wasn't going to confession.

“Well,” I said vaguely, “I'll see what I can do, Ma.”

My parents met in Bray, a small seaside town in county Wicklow, Ireland. Fresh from university, Michael Fanning turned his back on his family's considerable resources to teach at the local comprehensive, where Ma was a student in her final year. After a brief and clandestine courtship they married, against both their parents' wishes, when she was just seventeen. They planned to immigrate to New York, where Michael's cousin was already established. But he contracted influenza, and within three days was dead. No one from either family came to the funeral.

With what little money remained after burial costs, seventeen-year-old Nora set sail for America rather than turn to her family for help. The only ticket she could afford landed her in Boston, and so I was born six months later, in a tiny one-room apartment above a butcher's shop in the North End, with no heat, hot water, or bathroom. I was delivered by the butcher's wife, Mrs. Marcosa, who didn't speak English and had seven children of her own, most of them kneeling round the bed praying as their mother, sleeves rolled high on her thick arms, shouted at my terrified mother in Italian. When I finally appeared, they all danced, applauded, and cheered.

“It was one of the most wonderful and yet humiliating days of my life,” Ma used to say. “The Marcosa children all loved to hold you because of your red hair. They found it fascinating. The whole neighborhood did. I couldn't go half a block without someone stopping me.”

She took in seamstress work during the day, piecing together cotton blouses for Levin's garment factory nearby, and in the evenings she traveled across town to clean offices, taking me with her in a wicker laundry basket, wrapped in blankets. Setting me on the desks, she made her way through the offices, dusting, polishing, and scrubbing, singing in her low soft voice from eight until midnight before heading back across the sleeping city.

But she always hungered for more. And even when she joined the alterations department at Stearns, she'd already had her sights set on moving from the workroom to the sales floor. She enrolled in Sunday-afternoon speech classes from an impoverished spinster in Beacon Hill, taking me with her so that I could learn to enunciate without the telltale lilt of her brogue or, worse, the flat vowels of the Boston streets. I suppose that's something we have in common—the unshakable conviction we're destined for better things.

Year after year she continued to apply for a sales position, ignoring
the rejections and snubs, refusing to try elsewhere. “It's the finest department store in the city,” she maintained. “I'd rather mop floors there than anywhere else.” She could endure anything but failure.

Stubbornness is another trait we share.

She still wore the plain, slim gold band her husband had given her on her wedding ring finger, not just as a reminder but also as a safeguard against unwanted male attention.

“Your father would've been proud of you, Maeve, getting your secretarial degree.” She took a final drag from her cigarette, stubbed the end out in the sink.

I looked down. “Oh, I don't know about that.”

“Well, I do.”

All my life, she'd been a medium between this world and the next, advising on what my father would've wanted, believed in, admired.

“He had everything it took to really be someone in this world—intelligence, breeding, a good education. Everything, that is, except luck. I just hope yours is better than his.” She sighed.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. You're a clever girl. A capable girl.” Leaning in, she scrubbed the coffee stains out of the sink. “It's just a shame you lost that job in New York.”

A knot of guilt and apprehension tightened in my stomach. This was the last thing I wanted to talk about. “Let's not go into that.”

But Ma was never one to let a subject die an easy death if she could kick it around the room a few more times.

“It just doesn't make sense,” she went on, ignoring me. “Why did Mr. Halliday let you go after all that time?”

“I told you, he's traveling.”

“Yes, but why didn't he just take you with him, like he did before? Remember that? You gave me the fright of my life! I didn't get a letter from you for almost six weeks!”

It was if she knew the truth and was torturing me, the way a cat swats around a half-dead mouse. I glared at her. “Jeez, Ma! How would I know?”

“It just doesn't make sense. You've been his private secretary for almost a year, and then, out of the blue, you're suddenly out of work and back in Boston!”

“Well, at least I'm home. Aren't you glad about that?”

She gave a halfhearted shrug. “I'd rather have you make something of yourself. You were on your way in New York. Now you'll have to start all over again.” Scooping some porridge into a bowl, she set it down in front of me. “I'll hang the gray suit in your room.”

I gnawed at my thumbnail. I didn't want porridge or the suit. The only thing I wanted now was to crawl back into bed and disappear.

She gave my hand a smack. “What are you doing? You'll ruin your nails! Don't worry so much. With your training and experience, you're practically a shoo-in.”

I prodded the porridge with my spoon.

My experience.

If only my experience in New York was what she thought it was.

SOMEWHERE IN BROOKLYN, NOVEMBER 1931

I
was falling, too fast, with nothing to stop me . . . down, down, gathering speed . . .

I came to with a jolt. I was sitting on the side of a bed wearing only my slip and stockings—a wrought-iron bed in a cold, dark bedroom. Only it wasn't my bed or my room.

Suddenly the floor veered beneath me, the walls spinning, faded yellow flowers on the wallpaper melting together.
Please, God, don't let me be sick!
I pressed my eyes closed and held on to the bed frame tight.

I had to think. Where was I, and how exactly had I gotten here?

It had been a long, dull night at the Orpheum dance palace on Broadway where I worked. The joint was full of nothing but out-of-towners and hayseeds—guys with little money and lots of expectations. By the time we'd closed and I'd cashed in my ticket stubs, I was ready for some fun. Another girl, Lois, had made a “date” with a customer, and he had a friend . . . Was I game?

Why not? After all, it wasn't like I had anything to lose.

I remembered two big men, grinning like excited schoolboys, in New York for a convention and laughing the way tourists do—too easily and too hard, willing themselves to have the best night of their lives. One was reasonable-looking, and the other—well, let's just say no one was going to mistake him for Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks. But there's that old adage about beggars and choosers, and tonight I felt like a beggar for sure. The last thing I wanted was to be alone and sober at the same time. So we all piled into a cab. Hip flasks were passed round; I remembered Lois sitting on someone's lap, singing “Diggity Diggity Do.”

We drove to Harlem, to a place called Hot Feet. There was a band from New Orleans and a chorus line of smooth-skinned Negro girls dressed up with grass skirts and bone necklaces, shaking and shimmying for all they were worth. The moonshine had kicked in by then, and I was feeling a bit less rough round the edges. Lois was sure she saw Oweny Madden and the boxer Primo Carnera at the next table, and one of the guys, the ugly one, forked out for a bottle of real gin.

God, my mouth was as dry as the Sahara! What time was it now? What had happened to Lois?

I tried to stand. My head pounded, my stomach swooned. Easy does it. Not too fast.

Someone shifted in the bed next to me.

Shit. Please don't let it be the ugly one.

I tried not to look. A face you never saw was a face you never remembered. I'd learned that much in New York.

I eased myself up. My knees were sore, and there were holes in my stockings. I guess I must've fallen. Going over to the window, I pushed aside the curtain. The street was residential, narrow row houses with uneven terraces crammed together, lamps glowing eerily over abandoned lots between. I searched for something familiar on the skyline, a bridge or a building, but couldn't see anything. One thing was certain: I was definitely on the wrong side of the river.

I seemed to remember talk of going to a hotel to carry on the party—someplace like the Waldorf or the Warwick. So why was I stranded in some cheap boarding house in Queens or Yonkers with no idea where I was or how I was going to get home?

The man rolled over on to his side and began to snore. I had to get out of here, before he woke.

Where were my clothes?

I nearly stumbled over something and picked it up. But this dress wasn't mine.

Then a memory came of the day before. I'd borrowed a dress from Nancy Rae, the girl down the hall at the Nightingale boarding house, where I rented a room. It was Nancy's good-luck dress, a hunter-green serge she'd been wearing when she landed her job at Gimbles; all the girls wanted to borrow it for interviews. I'd
given her a dollar for the privilege and even gotten up early to steam the box pleats of the skirt through a towel to make them crisp and sharp without going shiny. When I finished, they fluttered open like a fan round my legs.

See that's the thing about luck—it has to be courted. You have to seduce it; reel it in slowly without arousing suspicion. It's so precious that every tiny thing matters—what you wear, which side of the road you walk on, the tune you whistle, or how many birds you see out the window. Nancy Rae's hunter-green dress had stood in fate's presence and felt its light touch. And when fate favors anything, you'd best pay attention.

I'd been working as a taxi dancer at the Orpheum for months, waltzing with strangers night after night for a dime a dance. But when I saw the advertisement in the back of the
Herald
for “a young woman of exceptional executive secretarial skills,” I knew that my luck was about to change.

So I gave Nancy the dollar, ironed the dress, and set out first thing in the morning with my notebook and résumé in hand.

But when I arrived at the address, a full hour ahead of time, there were already fifty girls ahead of me, lined up around the corner of the office building, all clutching notebooks and reference letters, all looking hungry and determined and ferociously confident. I lasted three hours waiting in the cold before the girl ahead of me, a short brunette with a frizzy permanent wave and a big run in her stocking, turned round and announced, “You know they're not going to see all of us, don't you? I've been standing in lines for months, just trying to get my foot in the door. I tell you, we're waiting here for nothing, like a bunch of saps!”

No one answered her. You can be six inches from someone's face in New York City and they can still stare straight through
you, like you're not even there. But when I looked around, I could see from the other girls' faces that what she said was true.