Authors: Lynn Austin
“I need to make some money,” Mother said. “I want to ask O’Brien if he’ll let me play the piano at his place, that’s all. I’m not planning a career as a lady legger or a floozy.”
“Aw, c’mon, Emma. I give you and Gracie food—”
“And I appreciate that, but I need to earn my own way. Where’s O’Brien’s place?”
“What’s all the whispering about out there?” Booty’s wife suddenly, hollered from the room in back where they lived.
“Nothing, Sheila . . . I’m not whispering nothing.”
It wasn’t until Mother picked me up and set me down on the counter in front of Booty like a pile of groceries to be rung up that he finally gave in and told her what she wanted to know.
“The Regency Room at the hotel downtown on Clark Street is a blind pig for O’Brien’s place. Talk to the matron in the ladies’ powder room. She lets members through into the speakeasy in back.”
“Thanks. I love you, Booty. You’re a good friend.”
That evening Mother and I took the streetcar downtown to the hotel. I had never seen a place as fancy as the Regency Room before. It looked like Cinderella’s ballroom with sparkling chandeliers and crystal and silver and white linen cloths on all the tables. The aroma of food made my mouth water, even though Mother and I had shared a can of tomato soup before leaving home. I gazed around, wide-eyed, until a sour-looking man in a black tuxedo stepped smoothly in front of us.
“May I help you, ma’am?” Judging by the way he glared at us and by the
lavish way all the other customers were dressed, I knew he didn’t want to help Mother and me at all.
“No, thank you,” Mother said, smiling. “My little girl and I would like to use the powder room.”
“Sorry, ma’am.” He didn’t look sorry, either. “Our facilities are for dining customers only.”
“Really? I thought that friends of Mr. O’Brien could use them too.”
He stepped aside without another word. Mother took my hand and we went into the ladies’ powder room, just like Booty told us to. The inside looked like every other rest room I’d seen, with a mirror over the sink, two toilets in metal stalls, and a narrow storage closet. An enormous woman with black skin sat on a stool dispensing paper towels and soap to earn tips.
“I’m a friend of Booty Higgins,” Mother told the matron. “Is O’Brien here?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Tell him it’s an old friend of his, Emma Bauer.”
The matron heaved herself off the stool and opened the storage closet door with a key. She squeezed through it, shutting it behind her. A few minutes later the door opened again and a wiry, redheaded man burst through it, sweeping Mother into his arms.
“Emma darlin’! It really is you!”
“It’s great to see. you too, O’Brien.” I was surprised to see that Mother had tears in her eyes. “And this is my daughter, Gracie.”
O’Brien crouched down to smile at me. “Has it really been this long, Emma?” he asked, shaking his head. “She was just a wee babe. . . .”
“I’ll be five years old in May,” I told him. He patted my head, then stood.
“This is no place for friends to talk. Come on back to my office and we’ll toast old times, eh, Emma?”
He led the way, stepping through the closet door, but I hesitated, afraid to follow him. It seemed like something Mother had read to me from
Alice in Wonderland
to walk into a mysterious closet. Mother took my hand and we ducked through together.
On the other side was a darkened room about one-fourth the size of the Regency Room. It was also filled with tables and chairs, but this room fairly rocked with the sound of laughter and clinking glasses. O’Brien signalled to a large, hulking man on the other side of the room, and he headed toward us. I hid behind Mother’s skirts, terrified by his size and sinister face, but Mother flew into his arms as she had O’Brien’s, and he lifted her clear off the floor.
“I’ve missed you, Black Jack,” she said when he set her down again. He had tears in his eyes too.
“Is this baby Gracie?” he asked, looking down at me. I wondered how he knew my name. “She’s as beautiful as you are, Emma.”
O’Brien herded us all into his office. The tiny room behind the bar was smaller than the ladies’ powder room and smelled like cigars. All it contained was a wooden desk, covered with papers, and a sagging black leather sofa. O’Brien sat behind the desk and pulled a bottle of amber-colored liquid from the bottom drawer.
“How about a drink, Emma?”
“No, thanks. I’m much too young to die.”
O’Brien laughed as he sloshed some of it into three tiny glasses. “This won’t kill you. It’s much better than that coffin varnish Booty used to make. Try it.”
“I need work, O’Brien. I can play any kind of piano music you need—fast, slow, dinner music, dancing music . . .” I gazed at my mother in amazement. I’d never heard her play the piano in my life. “Let me play for the dinner customers out in the restaurant.”
He drained the contents of his glass in one gulp. “Times are tough, Emma. I can’t pay you. . . .”
“I understand. Let me work for tips.”
They talked some more, and then we walked back out to the dining room. O’Brien let Mother play that very night. I sat on his lap at one of the tables and listened, fascinated, as lush melodies and toe-tapping tunes flowed from Mother’s fingers, one after the other. She seemed to sense the mood of the room and changed songs accordingly—fast, slow, happy, sad. He gave her the job.
That night I rode on a streetcar for the first time, but by the time Prohibition ended three years later I knew every stop, driver, and regular passenger on the route. I could have found my way to the Regency Room with my eyes closed. Mother and I went there every night but Sunday. O’Brien put a little bowl on top of the piano for tips, and people must have liked Mother’s music too, because we never missed a rent payment. The chef gave us free dinner every night and all the plate scrapings we could carry home. We ate like royalty.
Mother would start the evening with soft dinner music, playing songs like “Embraceable You” and “Stardust.” But as the night wore on, she picked up the tempo, playing louder, livelier tunes to drown out all the ruckus the drunks
made in the speakeasy behind the powder rooms. I went to work with her every night and fell asleep on the leather sofa in O’Brien’s office to the sound of music and laughter and clinking glasses. O’Brien drove us home in his car after the club closed at two A.M., and in the morning I wouldn’t even remember walking up the back fire stairs with Mother so that the Mulligan sisters wouldn’t know how late we’d come home. It seemed perfectly natural to fall asleep on O’Brien’s sofa and wake up in our own apartment.
The people at the club became my family. Now I had three more fathers to watch over me, besides Booty and Father O’Duggan. Booty wore a grubby white apron, and Father O’Duggan always wore black, but O’Brien, Slick Mick, and Black Jack were by far my best-dressed fathers. They wore white dinner jackets with black bow ties and cummerbunds.
O’Brien was no taller than Mother and had a wild mop of tangled hair like mine—only his was red. He had so many freckles that you could hardly see his real skin. Once, when he took off his jacket, I saw that the freckles covered his arms too. When he saw me staring he lifted his pant cuff and I saw them all over his leg. O’Brien loved to tease me. When I got the measles and had to stay home, he came to the apartment to visit me and brought me a jigsaw puzzle.
“You’re not sick at all,” he said, laughing. “You’re just catching my freckles!”
O’Brien was very smart, and though I rarely saw him in the kitchen with the chef, he was always talking on the phone about the deals he was cooking. When I was old enough
to go to
school, he helped me with my homework every night, especially my arithmetic.
“I’m pretty good at numbers,” he bragged. “Good with the ponies too.”
“Can I ride one of your ponies sometime?” I asked.
“Not them kind of ponies, Toots,” he said, laughing. “Your mother don’t want you learning nothing about them kind of ponies.” I didn’t ask O’Brien for help with my grammar assignments.
Black Jack was the club bouncer. I think he got his nickname because he had black hair and a blue-black shadow on his chin. He used to be a prizefighter in Ireland and had the lumpy nose and knotted arm muscles to prove it. He was a head taller than everyone else and very scary and tough-looking if you didn’t know him. He was as gentle as a lamb to me. Black Jack talked kind of slow and took a long time to think things through. “That’s because he’s been knocked in the head too many times,” O’Brien said.
Once, a drunk stopped me when I was on my way from the office to the
bathroom, and Black Jack lifted the man right off the floor by his shirtfront. “You ever lay another hand on that baby, and it will be the last thing you ever do!” he told him. Black Jack loved me and I loved him.
My third father down at the Regency Room, and by far the most handsome, was Slick Mick the bartender. Mick’s hair was as kinky as the powder room matron’s, only his was light brown. He had fair skin and a mournful face that made you want to do something to try and cheer him up. “Poor Slick is unlucky in love,” O’Brien told me once.
Mick came into the office to talk to me whenever he took a cigarette break, and he talked so much I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I guess it was because Mick didn’t get a chance to talk when he was tending bar—he would have to listen to all the sob stories his customers dished out. When I first met Mick, I couldn’t understand a word he said.
“We got another stash of John Barleycorn coming in tonight from some new barrel house one of the whisper sisters put me on to. The rum runner claimed it was brown plaid, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was coffin varnish. The last legger who claimed to have the real McCoy delivered soda pop moon.”
Mick had a million descriptions for people who drank too much—words like fried, boiled, canned, and crocked; pickled, pie-eyed, bleary-eyed, blotto; plastered, primed, polluted, paralyzed; stewed, soused, squiffy, and stinko. He never seemed to use the same word twice—and we saw a lot of drunks!
When it was time for me to turn out the office lights and go to sleep, Mick always came into the back and sang an Irish ballad to put me to sleep. Some of the tunes were the same as Mam O’Duggan’s ballads, but the words were very different. When I asked Mother what they meant, she said never mind if I couldn’t understand them, it was for the best.
One night when Mick got a little corked himself, he sat down on the sofa beside me. “Do you know the reason I love to sing to you, lass?” he said with a tear in his eye. “It’s because I have a wee daughter of my own somewhere, just like you. When I’m singing to you, I’m singing to her.”
“Do you ever visit your daughter?” I asked.
“She doesn’t know I’m her daddy, you see.”
I thought about my own father who I’d never seen and gave Mick a big hug. “I’ll bet she thinks about you all the time, Mick,” I said softly. “I’ll bet your little girl misses you too.” He kissed my forehead, then went back out to tend bar without another word.
Every other Thursday night O’Brien would hold a “fire drill,” and we’d
all have to practice what to do if the Feds raided the joint. Mother watched for them out front in the restaurant, and if she saw them coming she was supposed to play “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” That was the signal for everyone in the speakeasy to spring into action. Mick would dump all the glasses of hooch down the drain and stash any open bottles under my bed. Black Jack would give all the rummies the bum’s rush out the back door, and O’Brien would scurry along with them because he was on parole and wasn’t supposed to hang around where there was any juice. My job was to try not to giggle when I was pretending to be asleep, and to go into crying hysterics if the Feds came near my bed where the hooch was hidden. It was all great fun.
I loved Mick and Black Jack and O’Brien, but even so, I would sometimes peer through the windows at the other families in our neighborhood and long for a real family. I gradually realized that not only didn’t I have a father, but my mother wasn’t like the other mothers either.
For one thing, she slept all day while I was in school instead of washing and cooking and tending babies like the other mothers. I knew she worked until very late at night at the club, but I was still ashamed of the fact that she didn’t hang our laundry on the line until late in the afternoon.
She never dressed like all the other mothers either, in housedresses and aprons. Mother sewed her own clothes from things people gave her. Once she made a chemise from a parlor curtain, trimmed with lace from a tablecloth, fringe from a lampshade, and sequins from a worn-out purse. It looked like something out of a fashion magazine. When she came to my first open house at school, she arrived in a turban and long beads and one of the flapper dresses she wore to the nightclub. Her clothing embarrassed me at first, but within minutes Mother made everyone laugh out loud with her crazy stories, even the sour old principal, Mr. Dorsey. The open house became so much fun once Mother arrived that no one seemed to notice that her dress looked like something you’d wear to a dance hall.
We were different in other ways too. One Sunday morning I watched the steady stream of mothers and children coming and going to mass at St. Michael’s church around the corner, and I wished we could go with them. Mother and I had our own Sunday morning ritual of reading the funny papers together and cutting out paper dolls from old catalogues, but I still remembered how beautiful the services had been when I’d gone to church with Mam.
“Can’t we go to St. Michael’s too?” I asked my mother.
“No, dear, we don’t belong there.”
“Why not?”
“We’re not Catholic.”
“But I went to Mam’s church when you were sick.”
“I know, but that was because Mrs. O’Duggan is Catholic. Now, which shall we read first,‘Little Orphan Annie’or ‘Tom Mix’?” She waved the comics section to tempt me, but I couldn’t concentrate on the funny papers. I had another urgent question that needed to be answered.
“Mama, was I ever baptized?”
“Who wants to know, dear?”