My Notorious Life (17 page)

—Miss Muldoon, he said again loudly. Yes it was him. There was the slight underbite of his jaw, the darting minnows of his eyes.

—Charlie! I said. —It’s you.

—It ain’t Abe Lincoln.

—Come along now, miss, said the little rooster of a porter.

—Apologies, mister, Charlie said, and bowed very proper, even as he took my arm. —My sister here ain’t quite right in the head. She suffers from fainting fits and dementia. Also she has a weakness in the blood which makes her simple. She has spells, you know.

I adopted a vague glassy look.

—She had a hold of the merchandise, the porter sniffed. —Without intention to buy.

—She doesn’t mean any harm, Charlie said. —It’s the shiny stuff she likes, the poor thing, you can’t blame her. You know how the female is susceptible. They can’t help it. I will take my sister off your hands and set her straight.

I smiled sweetly at the paltry little guard, and away he went to cavil and snitch. Charlie and me made our way through the throng till we stood outside in the night air where Charlie stared at me like I was something a cat had dropped at his feet.

—So, I said, —your sister, am I?

—There is a resemblance, he said, grinning. —You could be.

—In your dreams.

—You’ve not changed, I see, Axie Muldoon.

—I have. I’m a baroness.

He laughed. —Oh Your Highness, you should’ve seen your royal face when that cove grabbed you. Red as roses.

—You shoulda seen yours. You obviously was lying through your teeth.

—For a good cause I’d lie on Sundays. I’d lie on the Bible, but I don’t have to since I have a crib now over at Sixth Avenue where Mrs. Sheehan keeps a boardinghouse. How’s that for circumstances?

—Not bad for an orphan off the train. Where’ve you been all this time? I asked.

—I been down the Nile. I been to Staten Island. I seen Paris in the springtime. Yourself?

—Not on Cherry Street.

—I know that already. I came looking for you once. A year ago or more.

So he had showed up, despite we had no cherry blossoms.

—That Duffy told me about your Mam, Charlie said, quiet. He leaned toward me and put his hand on my wrist then so my blood turned spiky at the touch of his fingers, which I seen were cracked and stained dark around the nails. —Sorry to hear it.

—Thank you, I said.

We stood awkward on the sidewalk like stones in a stream, with the
crowd of walkers eddying past, the light of the bright windows in a pool around us.

—You’ve blossomed into a red, red rose, Miss Axie Muldoon. Haven’t you? With those scarlet cheeks?

He stood with the left side of his mouth cocked up, squinting in appraisal, seeming to mock me and my furious blush.

—I’m called Ann now, I said, haughty as possible.

—Aha. Now he started to sing the Annie Laurie song, his cap over his heart and a look in his eye that was half a leer. —Her brow is like the snowdrift, Her neck is like the swan, Her face it is the fairest, That ’er the sun shone on . . .

I rolled my eyes at him uneasy and moved along the sidewalk.

—I must confess, Charlie said, —that just now I watched that mug grab you, and I didn’t recognize it was you, and then on second glance, I seen you were none other than that chickenhearted orphan train rider who wouldn’t stand up on the roof with me back in days of yore.

—Only an idiot such as yourself would stand on the roof of a train.

—Time has not made a lady outta you, I see.

—It hasn’t made a lady outta you either.

—It’s made me a gentleman.

—Has it then?

—I’m a typesetter at the
Herald
. He spread his inky hands for my inspection. —All the letters of the alphabet at my fingertips. All the stories of the world. I can set five lines in a minute, hundreds of lines an hour.

—Well ain’t you grand?

—I ain’t no shoeshine boy.

A wicked flash was in his eye when he said it, so that when he looked me over, I felt it like a hand on my skin.

—And yourself, Miss Muldoon of Gotham? Are you the queen?

—I am an assistant to a doctor in Chatham Square.

—You’re a bonded girl then?

—I am not. I am an assistant.

—Assistant. What’s that then? Do you hold a poor cove down on the floor while the sawbones cuts off his leg?

—Of course, I says, —I keep ’em quiet with a hot poker.

—Just as I suspected, you’ve no heart at all, Axie. Have you ever stitched a man shut? Ever seen a tooth pulled? Ever lanced an abscess?

—What I seen is what I seen, I said, not about to tell him the details.

—Assistant. He regarded me with frank respect. —Who’d have thought it? Such a long way from Illinois.

—Don’t talk to me of Illinois.

—I’m talking about how you and me escaped.

—I wish everybody did.

He closed his mouth, and by his look of honest sorrow I knew he saw what was in my mind, my waxy heart.
Joe and Dutchie.
He smiled then and reached behind my ear to withdraw a penny. —For your thoughts, he said, and handed it to me.

—How’d you do that?

—Magic. Observe.

He showed me his palms, empty, yet he found a pencil between the strands of my hair with just the sleight of his hand, and balanced it on the end of his nose. I was nearly fallen out on the pavement with astonishment. The passersby turned their heads to stare. Among them was Greta, wearing a new hat but without Mr. Schaeffer.

—Annie,
mein Gott
! Greta said, noticing me there at last. —Where’ve you been? I’ve been up and down the place looking.

—What? Charlie said, looking back and forth between us. —Is this young lady that sister of yours then, all grown up?

—This is my friend Greta. She’s a German, God forgive her, but don’t you mind about that, I said, to razz on her, —she don’t even like sauerkraut.

Greta gave me a pinch and sized him up with her saucepot eyes.

—Charles G. Jones, he said, bowing. —Pleased to meet you.

Jones, I thought when I heard it. So he wasn’t plain Charlie anymore, he’d got a last name somewheres along the way.

Greta tugged my arm. —We have to go, Annie,
mein Gott.
It’s late!

—I’ll walk you, ladies, said Charlie, —so’s you don’t have to travel alone.

He took my arm on one side and Greta’s on the other, and we jumped the streetcar. He rode with us in the back, squeezed up against the rail, and whispered in my ear so the hairs rose along the back of my neck and down along my arm. —Point me out which one’s your doctor’s place, he said.

—Number one hundred Chatham, there, I said, when it came into view.

—Ah, he said in my ear, —you’ve a nice pair.

I startled, for his meaning seemed wicked. —A nice pair of lanterns out front, he continued with a smolder in his eye. —I won’t forget them.

—Won’t you? I said, some upset taking root now in my system.

—I’ll call on you then. He waved his hat as we hopped off and ran home, my borrowed birthday petticoat swishing around my legs.

—He’s a dodgy fella, Greta said, running.

—No he ain’t, I said, not sure.

—He’s one of those danglers and he’ll dangle you, miss.

—I known him from way back.

—Still, she said, —you gott to be careful.

—You’re the one with the new hat, I says. —Where’d you get it?

—Nothing wrong mit a new hat. Be careful is all I’m saying.

—Right, I said. —Be careful yourself.

T
wo nights later came a knock on the back door. There was Charlie Jones, holding a penny paper of fried oysters.

—Hungry? he asked, chewing. He threw an oyster in the air and caught it in his mouth. —Come along out with me.

—Shhh, I says. —I can’t.

—Why not? Chicken?

I looked behind me. Inside was the dark kitchen and the remnants of supper to clear. Mrs. Browder had gone home to Archie for the night. At present no ladies was in confinement upstairs in the spare rooms and the Evanses’ lights was out. I had found no evidence of murdered infants on the premises and decided that Greta was full of b. and s. But I was on my guard and did not wish to invite trouble. —You can’t come in.

—You’re scared, he says.

—Hardly.

—Mind if I sit?

I shrugged.

He sat in the open doorway surveying the bare dirt yard and mentioned how oysters will make a man thirsty. —Have you got any cider? I went inside and brought out a jug of it with two cups. He patted the spot next to him and I sat there. He offered me an oyster and I bit down on it. It was chewy as rawhide but salty.

—Where’s your employer the doctor, then?

—Asleep.

—Tired from bleeding the populace? Does old Sawbones lance boils all day and treat the piles and cauterize the suppurating wounds of accident victims?

—It’s Mrs. Evans I assist, with her patients.

—Is she short-tempered then? he said, pleased at his joke. —PATIENCE, get it?

—Very funny, says I. And he was, though I barely gave him the satisfaction of a smile, only brushed at my hair with my fingers, nervous.

—So you’re assistant to a midwife? You must’ve seen . . . things. And he wagged his eyebrows suggesting what I seen was dirty.

—It ain’t a man’s business.

—ISn’t, not AIN’T. Listen to me, Student, speak like the upper crust.

—I’ll speak how I want.

—Here, now, Student, eat this.

He held another oyster in front of my mouth. My jaws opened automatically and he fed me like I was a baby starling. I tried not to bust out laughing but was not successful. His boyish manner and his charm worked under my skin. The grease off the oysters made his lips shiny.

—Open. He fed me another bit, then another. He licked his fingers. He said, Oysters is an Aphrodisiac and I said, What’s that? and he said it was a Liver Invigorator. He thrust another one in my mouth.

In this manner, Charlie wooed me on the back step. He fed me and trained me to talk proper. Isn’t not ain’t. Doesn’t not don’t. Saw not seen. Brought not brung. I done my best to learn, but it was DID my best, he reminded me, so that I was flustered and embarrassed and flattered, with his rewards of oysters, and how he called me Student. With his braces loose off the shoulder, he was a man, a stranger, though I had knew—had KNOWN—him, four years. While we sat there, the long train West and back again snaked under and around us carrying all our d***ed past with its sorrow and shame, my lost brother and sister left behind, the scars of a farmer’s whip on his back. And flashing like a light on the last train car was Mrs. Dix’s warning to me, how I must not succumb to the influence of wild unruly boys such as orphan Charlie, fathered in sin and mothered by the streets. No good will come of it, she had said. No good. And yet the night
wore on in the dank yard with me and him laughing and the garbage pit still smoking and the laundry lines crossing to the trunk of a haggard half dead sycamore that grew there. The stars came out overhead, needle pricks stitching the dark. Charlie bragged of his job at the
Herald
where he started as a lowdown newsboy fresh back from the prairie. He told how he hawked papers in the wind and snow and worked his way up to the composing room, where he made a point to read everything he set in type and thus learned to speak like a schoolmaster.

—What do you mean, set in type?

—It’s like this, Student. We use cast metal sorts, and compose them into formes until each page is set. You gotta be fast and precise and accurate and have your type and your leading all sorted in your tray. He folded his left hand palm up and stroked the thumb in quick movements, counting off. —Thumb thumb thumb, each one in order on the jobstick.

—Speak English, I said. —Not this jobstick and whatnot like a foreign language.

—Listen, Student, you gotta go top speed yet never bung it up, because the foreman’ll come after you for every flip.

He stared at me, grinning.

—Flip?

—Flip, he said, very slow, and locked my eyes in the tongs of his gaze. —You have to think about the typeface, he said, quiet now, —and the shank, the point size, the shoulder, the nick and the groove.

—I don’t have to think of that, not at all, so I don’t.

—What do you think about, then, Miss Axie? he inquired with a crooked mouth.

What did I think about. The night around us was loud with peepers and soft wind, the scuttling of rats in the alley. A cat mewed and hissed. Charlie waited for me to speak and while he waited he leaned back on his hands, his face turned upward to the rooftops. He stretched his legs long in front of us, and his flank brushed against mine as he shifted so I shuddered at the touch. Behind my hunched shoulders his gaze burned me. When I turned to look at him his eyes was on my face, devoted and intent on listening for what pearl or ruby of secret thought I would confess.

—What worries trouble your little head, eh? he said.

I ran the hem of my apron back and forth, between my thumb and
forefinger, until finally I brought the cloth to my face and pressed it against my eyes.

—What? Hello, now, Chickenheart, what’s the matter?