My Notorious Life (18 page)

—Nothing.

—Nothing, nothing, says the maiden, Charlie whispered, —but yet something makes her hide her face. What are you thinking?

—Shut it, please, I says, shy and miserable under my apron.

He was quiet. I heard him sigh and suck air in a chirp through the crack between his teeth, and he said so softly, —You think of your Mam and your pretty sister and your little red-hair brother. Don’t you now?

I wept then, through the cramp in my throat. He had known me so long, since way back then, and knew Joe and Dutch and Mam. As for himself, he had no Mam or sister and brother of his own to think of, and it was all this that made me cry.

—Here, then. He put his arm around my shoulder. —Go on and sob away if you want to.

I shook my head and stayed stiff so you could not whittle the apron off my face with a pocketknife. He pulled at it careful as a surgeon, till it was peeled down to reveal my wretched expression. Charlie allowed me to cry into his neck. The collar of his shirt chafed against the socket of my left eye. The bone of his cheek rested against my hair.

—There now. That’s a good girl.

He poured me a cup of cider and held it to my lips. I dried my tears on my sleeve.

—We’ll find those two, your sister and brother, he said. —One of these days we will. Mark my words.

I marked them. I put them in my pocket and kept them there for years.

Now Charlie leaned in, toward my face, the kindness of his eyes so trustworthy or so dangerous, which? How could I know? His head tipped over my sorry mouth, looming near, so it seemed he would _____, and I was panicked so flustered as he reached his hand toward my hair, when just at that moment I heard the front bell ring, a fast knocking. I jumped away. A light came on inside, and I heard the feeble mew of Mrs. Evans calling. A patient was at the door, and I had to go.

—Well, Student, Charlie said, —I’ll be off. He slipped his braces over his shoulders, put his arms through his jacket sleeves. He stood, looking
down at the puddle of my sorry self, and striped my nose with the tip of his forefinger, the way you would do a puppy. —Too bad you wouldn’t come out with me. Perhaps another time.

*  *  *

But for weeks there was no other time. He did not come again. He did not sit on the step nor bring me no more oysters or a lesson in proper English or let me cry again into his warm neck. What did he want with me anyway? He was a jagger and a dangler like Greta said. Was he? I did not know and had no way to know. Once before he said he would be back before the cherries bloomed and then looked for me too late. He had touched my hair, his eyes so soft, then had pat me on the nose like the stray mutt I was. The month of June wore away and there was no other occasion to borrow a petticoat or gaze at a chandelier. Greta met Mr. Schaeffer on the corner now and strolled out with him bold as brass. Several times I jealously saw them, arms linked, Greta laughing and saying, —
Oh mein Gott,
so loud that surely the populace would peer down from their windows and see her go off with him into the night. She had another new hat and a pretty necklace with a charm on it. The spring was hurtling on toward summer and it seemed Charlie was not my suitor, but only an empty pair of braces with tricks up his sleeve. He had showed up and then disappeared and while he was there I liked him but when he was gone I hated him. It would take me years to see it was a pattern.

*  *  *

But then one evening at last, Charlie arrived scuffing the dirt outside in the yard with the toe of his boot. —Axie Muldoon! he cried, rapping at the open door. Mrs. Browder got there before me, brandished her ladle at him.

—And who wants her?

—Charles G. Jones. He bowed like Lord Muck. —At your service.

—Does she know you?

—She does, I said. —I do.

Mrs. Browder turned to inspect me with suspicion. —How?

—I known him from my childhood, I said. —He met my Mam.

Mrs. Browder always liked when I talked about my Mam. —Is that so? Her face was softer now.

—It is, he said. —Her Mam fed me a lovely dinner one night when I was a youngster.

—Charlie is a printer at the
Herald,
I told her.

—Is he? Hmmp. I read the
Police Gazette,
myself. She dried her hands, pushed the door half-to, and pulled me into the kitchen. —And how did this man discover you here in Chatham Square?

—By coincidence at Hegemann’s the chemist’s, I lied.

She held my chin in her floury fingers and fixed me with a stern look. —You’ll be back before the sun sets, is that clear?

—Yes ma’am.

—And keep your eyes forward and your hands folded in front of you or in back.

—Yes ma’am.

—And look out he doesn’t finagle you.

—Finagle me?

—You know exactly what I’m talking about. And take your apron off. And brush your hair.

She watched me as I took out the pins and brushed my hair and twisted it up again. —It’s about time you went out. She pinched my cheeks till they were pink. —Very pretty, she said, and shooed me toward the door.

*  *  *

It was my right to treat Charles Jones with frost and ginger after his neglect of me, and yet it was himself who stomped along in a dark mood. He did not wink. He did not whistle. He did not boast or correct my ain’ts, or find a penny behind my ear, or ask for my thoughts or feed me any kind of oyster. For several blocks he scowled and strode along so fast that my short legs could not keep up, and I felt small, like I was to blame, and did not muster the wherewithal to ask where had he been for the month of June?

—Student, he said at last, scowling, chewing his lip. —There’s a war on.

—You don’t say, Professor. Has been one on these past years.

—The point is this: them Republicans have a Conscription Act now and they’re about to draft every cove with two legs to go fight, UNLESS we can pay THREE HUNDRED dollars for a substitute to take our place on the battle lines. It’s a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight and that’s a SCANDAL.

—Three hundred dollars?

—Who can pay it? If you’re a three hundred dollar man, you’re a swell or a squire. Not a working cove like myself, right? And so I’m doomed to go to war against my will.

—Mrs. Browder’s Archie had his arm cut off at Bull Run, I offered.

—There you have it. Poor Archie the slub. Meanwhile the rich boys buy their way out or pay a substitute. The blackies get a cakewalk. It’s true! No Negro is required to fight and yet the Federals have gone and given ME a number in the draft lottery. It ain’t fair and I won’t go. The boys in the composing room won’t neither, draft lottery or no draft lottery. Why should I lose one of my arms? One of my two legs? How would I tie my bootlaces? Tell me that. How would I dance?

—You can’t dance now, Charles Jones, so what would be the difference?

With that he stopped short. —You think I can’t dance? Is that what you think? It seemed he was furious till he grinned all of a sudden and grabbed me around the waist and whirled me once in a jig right at the corner of Duane Street, so I was confused whether he liked me or not at all and had to beat him with my little drawstring purse and push him away for decorum’s sake, all the while laughing despite how the passersby stared and clucked. —Mr. Jones!

—At your service.

—Where’d you get that name, anyway?

—Off a street sign. Great Jones Street. There’s a block with that name, near here, by Cooper Square. Great Jones! It’s a name like P. T. Barnum would have up on a balloon. But I don’t use the Great.

—Why not? Charles G. Jones. Sounds right.

—So you think I AM great then? I’ll be greater still one of these days, you’ll see.

—And not too proud of it, I said.

—Am I bigheaded?

—Like a watermelon’s under your hat.

—I’ll be writing for the paper soon. Starting with ads, and straight on to the articles with a headline here and a byline there. He flourished his hands like he was setting his name in type in the air. —By Charles G. Jones. You watch. Watch now.

He adjusted his cuffs, then reached slowly toward me like a mesmerist
and pulled a handkerchief from behind my ear. —Behold, a Gentleman’s pocket square. Chinese silk, spun personally by the Emperor’s silkworms in the gardens of Shanghai, with a hand-rolled edge, and the bluest of indigo dye from the fabled lands of Araby. Available only from behind the delicate ear of Miss Chickenheart Muldoon.

He snapped it in the air, and I snatched it, tucked it in the bodice of my dress.

—It’s mine.

—It’s not yours. He eyed the nest where it was stowed.

—It is now.

—Well I won’t argue with you.

—You better not, I said. —I’d win.

He was suddenly quiet. Not smiling. I was wary of him again. His beetled brow and his narrow eyes. —I would win, I repeated, shy.

—You won already, he said. —You won me.

—What? I did not hear him correctly.

We were stopped in the shadows of the St. Andrews Roman Catholic Church on the corner of Duane and Broadway. It was quiet, with just the clack of somebody’s boot nails on the cobbles, and fiddle music drifting out of a saloon. On the sidewalk we stood rooted with the air thick and strange between us. I did not know where to look. The muscles of my arms and legs were shot through with dropsy.

—You won me, he said again. —Some poor prize, right? About to be packed off to the war to be fodder for the enemy. You’ll pray for my mortal soul, won’t you? Say you will, Axie.

—Everything I pray for the reverse happens. You’ll wish you never’ve asked.

—Not true. He pulled me through a gate, into the dark recess of the empty churchyard, where the shadows were deep and holy. We were hidden by the hedge along the spiked iron fences but God watched through the windows as Charlie turned to me.

—You’re my girl, he said softly. —Are ya?

All I gave him for an answer was just the lift of my chin, and he took it in his hand and pulled my mouth to him like my face was an apple he would eat. He kissed me then and my heart flew up into my throat so he took that too and swallowed it down.

—Axie you’re a snap of a girl, he murmured. —You know it.

He held me in his arms and kissed me again, so my legs faltered and turned to aspic and his whiskers were a soft good burr against the skin of my face. I was water down a drain. We stayed still and pressed together. Far away I heard the sounds of wheels out on the pavement and men singing in the shebeen. Only the hush of our breath was loud and near, the thump of his blood wild as my own careening in the cages of our bones. —Sweet, he whispered. The heat off his neck smelled of tobacco and ink. His hand stalled on the curve of my back. We rested standing so quiet in the churchyard and my limbs trembled like it was cold out, when it wasn’t. —You’re my girl, he said, kissing me again, and he was smooth and professional in the way he went about it, so it was plain he knew his way around a kiss, and even as I was afraid of him and his dangerous knowledge, the flicker of his tongue started a jolt of molten liquid straight down my center so nothing was ever the same again. —Kiss me, he said, and I did, sick with kisses, and time went away till at last he took my arm and led me out of the shadows. We strolled, altered now and shy through the gaslit streets. The uproar in my very linings was surely visible.

At the back door of 100 Chatham Street Charlie took his hat in hand. —I’ll be needing that handkerchief back.

—Then you should not have lost it behind my ear.

—I’ll come fetch it soon. I’ll go looking right where you stowed it.

—How will I know you are not a liar? The cockles of my heart already had begun to form their hard shell of suspicion. —Who’s to say you won’t disappear again, only to come and . . . take a girl to the churchyard?

—Did I not say you were my girl? he asked.

—No, you ASKED was I yours?

—And you ARE, ya suspicious cat. Then he blew me a kiss off two fingers and went backwards away down the lane grinning. You’d think he won a raffle. When he was out of sight I closed the door behind him and leaned against it in a faint.

*  *  *

—Are you sick? Mrs. Browder asked the next morning.

—No, I said.

But I was. I spilled the tea. I stared at motes of dust.

—Are you in love? she asked.

—I’m not.

—I have only one thing to say to you. And I’ll say it again.

—What’s that?

—Don’t go out nowheres with him after dark. If I catch you I’ll welt you till you’re sorry you ever heard the name Browder. You won’t go out.

*  *  *

So I didn’t. The next night when Charlie came late to the kitchen door and whispered my name, I heeded her advice and invited him to come in. We did not stroll outside but soon found ourselves sitting on the hard bench at the kitchen table with cups of cider and something else between us: last evening in the churchyard. While Charlie blathered on about the d***ed Conscription Act, it sat there like a red apple on a white plate.

—Two boys in the composing room got called up for the draft lottery next week, Charlie said. —I’ll be next.

—I hope you’re wrong.

—It’s not that I’m afraid to die.

—Don’t talk that way.

—If you’re drafted in this war, it’s as good as a ticket to the grave.

—You can’t die, I told him, quiet so he looked hard at me. —You mustn’t die. These three words caused just the smallest of reactions in him, a swallow.

—Do you mind, he asked, with his brown velvet gaze, —if I kiss you again?

My mind had nothing to do with it, I discovered, so it was not long before we found ourselves down entangled desperate on the floor where slips of onion skin were fallen in the cracks along with a dropped raisin from a pudding, a hairpin, the peel of a potato. It was hard wood planks beneath us and the rafters above. It was private. It was available. It was dark. It was somebody’s arms around us. With our eyes closed we were carried away, away on top of a fast train. We were orphans murmuring and grappling and where we went was the only place that belonged to us. And then his fingers found the buttons at the neck of my dress.