My Notorious Life (9 page)

—It’s for our own Axie, so it is, said she, and petted his head. —Oh Michael, they’ve come a long way, so they have. And sure them Aid Society people give them a dollar. Haven’t they done, Axie?

Michael Duffy’s eyes flickered as I reached in my coat pocket and brought out my two coins. It gutted me to turn my money over to that man, and it turned my stomach to see how my mother stroked Duffy’s head and cooed at him. But after enough of her coaxing, he lay down in the back room and his snores soon filled the place. We ate our bread and was left hungry still. My mother gave Charlie a place to sleep by the stove and put me in the back room opposite the shakedown mattress where Mr. Duffy snored. Mam lay down next to me and pulled a cover over us. All that night she slept with her only hand clasped around mine, and not even the beastly snorts and mutterings of my new stepfather could make me sorry I was returned to her.

When I woke the next morning, Mr. Duffy was gone. —I do not like him, I told her. —You never did neither. You said he was a louse.

—But he married me. Useless as I am.

—Where is our Aunt Nan? I asked. —Where’s her baby she was going to have?

—She died of having it. The child along with her, Mam said. Her voice was flat and her eyes turned into the distance as she rubbed her palm over the round of her stomach. —Duffy took it hard.

—He does not like Charlie, I said.

—That fella cannot stay here. I’m sorry. We Duffys’ve not got the wherewithal.

Nobody had no wherewithal it seemed. If Duffys had nothing to spare for Charlie, how would they spare anything for our Joseph and our Dutchie? There did not seem to be no plan to be a family of Muldoons. It was only me now. Was it?

—You’ve got to leave, Mam told Charlie, when he woke up. —I’m sorry for it.

—So long as I ain’t wandering the cowpaths of Rockford, Illinois, I’ll be grand, he said, with a bitter quirk to his mouth.

Mam gave Charlie bread and tea, and spoke kindly to him, and we all went down the stairs and through the alley to the street.

There Charlie tipped his hat. —Farewell to you Mrs. Duffy, and to you, Miss Chickenhearted Muldoon. I’ll be back to check on yiz before the cherries bloom on Cherry Street. He set off with his hands in his pockets,
his head flung back, watching gulls wheel in the sky. They were white chalk marks against the dark clouds.

—Don’t never marry nobody poor, my mother said, watching after him.

But who else there was besides a poor fellow to marry was not in evidence.

*  *  *

We walked along, a porridge of slush under our feet. The wind swirled leaves and rubbish in the corners of alleys, and that was the
sheehogues
dancing, Mam said, her Irish word for fairies. She stirred up a picture of pixies in flower petals despite that it was a worse cold day than ever. It was a comfort to be near my mother. The way she went ahead briskly, her head swiveling left and right, was familiar to me. Her one sleeve wagged empty in the breeze, and with her good hand she held mine as we walked, like an announcement that I belonged to her, and she to me. But as I inspected her in the daylight, I seen my mother was washed out, draggled and old. She was Mrs. Duffy now.

—Mam, I says, —when will you go and fetch our Joe and Dutch for us?

She stopped and made me look at her. —Axie, does it look like we’ve a pot to p*** in? They’re better off in the West, so they are.

—But I want them. We are the Muldoons. Daughters and sons of the Kings of Lurg, Da said Never forget it.

—And you haven’t, and so you won’t. She smiled so watery at me. —One day you’ll find them again and see they’re royalty of Lurg right out on the American prairie, the both of them. We’ll call Dutch Queenie then and we’ll call him King Joseph the Red, won’t we? with his crown all jeweled. We’ll sit around the old castle, sure we will, drinking sherry wine, and be glad we sent them off to gain a fortune.

She kissed me on the hair and said that was the plan, so what else could I do but picture it, the crown and the jewels and the castle, while we rummaged all that day through the cold, for money or scrap, whatever we could get. What we got was a door slammed in our face and a lump of coal heaved at our heads. We pocketed the coal and found nothing else till late in the afternoon, when my mother spied a torn sheet blown off somebody’s washline, and I pried a frozen stocking from a slab of ice.

—Wool, cried Mam when she saw it. —You’ll get a penny for it. She explained that the ragman would clean it and put it in a grinding mill.

—What for?

—To be woven into shoddy and mungo.

Shoddy and mungo was not a pair of minstrels but types of fabric, she said, made from such flotsam as this frozen sock, scraps and bits we might find for money. Broken down and rewoven they soon would become a soldier’s uniform, some lady’s dress.

—They get a new life, my mother said.

—I wish you and me could get a new life too. I’ll be shoddy and you’ll be mungo.

—Ah jayz, you always was a cutup, she said, and smiled at me so that if I’d have had a tail I’d have wagged it.

*  *  *

Through that winter, my mother expanded. She was heavy and silent, a cabbage under her dress. Every day I went out and scavenged for scraps of cloth and metal, rinds and crusts. The enterprise was next to worthless. The streets of all New York were picked clean as cadaver bones by a swarm of grubworms.

One morning, finding not a thread, I wandered thinking of Dutch warm and snug in her ringlets and Joe eating lemon drops while my own stomach withered with the hunger. After a while I arrived at Washington Square, amidst the grand houses, the private carriages and ladies strolling with their puny dogs on strings. The footman and the maids was in little caps adorned with folderols of bric-a-brac. Through the windows, I saw an old man served a glass of port on a silver tray held by a Negro woman. I saw two cats pawing a shade pull, a wrinkled lady arranging blossoms in a vase. I saw a wee child in front of a piano the size of a knacker’s wagon. She sat like an angel in a red dress, plinking the keys. Her miniature patent leather boots did not reach the floor but dangled kicking time to the music. The sound jangled out faint through the panes, and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star was the tune. I stared, craving the black and white keys of the instrument, the red dress, the tune plinking away like a taste in my mouth.

—Move along there, miss, said a gentleman. —Move along.

—Move along yourself, you big ox, I said, but he had a walking stick tipped with silver raised in my direction, so I scrambled away, my head furious with plans. One day I’d have such pianos and goblets, draperies and gewgaws and gated walkways with wrought iron curlicues. For now I turned into an alley and spied a row of ash barrels set out for collection. I dug through their contents no better than a dog. There was coffee grounds and eggshell and rags greasy with stove blacking. There was the bones of a roast chicken, plus the feet, all of which I wrapped in a bit of paper for soup. Then toward the bottom was treasure: whole slices of a roast joint congealed in gravy, four or six potatoes half ate in their skins, the scrapings of plates frozen in a mash of cake and sauce, cold peas and cream. A wasted miracle from the table of some ponce. I wrapped the haul in my apron, and carried it home triumphant, launching up the stairs two at a time.

When Mam seen my findings, she set about with great excitement, slicing cabbage. She was not bad with a knife even with the one arm, and together we simmered Washington Square Hoity Toity Stew, the discarded meat stretched with cabbage and one onion cooked in a sauce of ale. The smell of it tortured us as we awaited Michael Duffy, who soon came through the door from a day hauling plaster. He grabbed my mother around her thick waist and danced her about singing Whiskey in the Jar till she shrieked and laughed and swatted at him, and I saw how he nuzzled her neck and she ducked away from him, blushing and fussing with her hair.

—You’re a fine one-armed woman Mary Duffy, he said to her.

—Go on Michael, she said, her eyes bright in the firelight.

They sent me to my bed to dream of grand pianos and red shoes and someplace where my sister and brother played on ponies in fields of green, and we were the Muldoons again, only better.

In the darkness, later, I was woken by my stepfather’s voice, thick with drink.

—Mrs. Duffy. I could hear the rustle of covers as he pawed through them. —Oh Mrs. Duffy.

—Shh, my mother laughed. —She’ll wake.

—She won’t.

They commenced to heave and roll about with sighs and explorations.

I did not understand how Mam tolerated him, or just what was the rent she paid for the roof over our heads. Whatever the arrangement, she did not fight him off, and I pulled my hard pillow over my ears to shut out their noises and whisperings. We children of Cherry Street started our schooling in such matters at an early age, no different from the farmer boys and girls of Illinois, observing the livestock. If you wonder, did this vast education influence my future choice of profession? The answer is yes it did.

M
y mother’s child chose to be born on a day in February, so cold it froze the p*** of dogs, horses and men to a pale lemon color on the pavement. In the early morning when the Duffy brothers and my Aunt Bernie was out pursuing employment or swig, my mother called to me.

—Axie? she said, her voice peculiar.

When I got up from my bed she was standing in the middle of the cold front room. Steam rose off the water that broke and leaked out warm around her legs. While she mopped it she announced her baby would soon be born. She had gone downstairs to get Mrs. O’Reilly some time ago, but Mrs. O’Reilly had not shown herself. —Go down Axie now, Mam said, —and see why she hasn’t.

Downstairs Mrs. O’Reilly was asleep in her overcoat, her fire gone out and the smell of gin strong about her so that if you had lit a match the room would kindle into flames. —Missus? I shook her, but she would not budge.

—I’ll be along in a minute, she said, rasping, and opened her eyes long enough to wink one of them.

Back upstairs I gave the news to my mother, who sat heavy in her bed with her bare feet out in front of her, the heels cracked and yellow as bars of old soap.

—Well then, Mam ordered, —you’ll go in the other room and stay by the stove and wait till Mrs. O’Reilly comes or your Aunt Bernice.

Years before when our Joe was born Dutch and me passed the day and night away with our Aunt Nance Duffy same as we did when Mam lost the two others. —Little lost babies, she said, —between the three live ones. But now Nance was dead and Mam only ordered me to go by the stove. —You shouldn’t mind if I cry out, she said, her face pinched. —Never mind it.

—But I will mind.

—You mustn’t. It’s natural. It’s pain to bring a child to the world. If nobody comes you’re to cut the cord yourself.

—What will I cut?

She did not answer but sent me to the kitchen where I passed the time sewing a bunting. I was nervous, about the cord, the knife, that the child would die or worse, that my mother would, and how would her baby get out into the world? A fairy would bring it, she had once explained, but I heard otherwise amongst my wild associates on the street, and while I did not wish to believe humans are born the same as cows or dogs, I feared it was true. Why else was I not allowed to see it?

Soon enough, I heard her start her terrible noises. First they came soft, not worse than the moan of a mourning dove on the sill, but then high and stretched like something pierced her. I went to her. —Poor Mam, I said. She banished me back downstairs again to find Mrs. O’Reilly but the sot was out cold now and I could not roust her. Upstairs, Mam cried for a drink of water. I brought it. —Should I fetch someone? Mam? Should I? Anyone? The neighbors?

—No, she said. One of the Duffys would be here soon. I brought her tea. She would not drink. I covered her. She was trembling. Her brow was knit and sweated. She threw the cover off and gnashed her teeth and huffed her breath and yelled at me to Get Back AWAY from her, and despite her telling me Don’t Be Afraid, I was afraid. She blubbered her cheeks and whickered like a draft horse and tossed her black hair to and fro on the bed and clawed her one hand of fingers at the covers. Stray syllables and curses came out of her mouth like hot coal was in her blood.

—Son of a b****, my poor mother cried.

She was up, then down, pacing across the floor while I cowered in the kitchen. Her hand was pressed to the small of her back, and she asked me, would I please push against the pain there? So while she braced herself one-handed against the doorjamb I leaned the heels of my palms hard into
the bony plates of her sacrum. —There’s a good girl, Axie, said she, with sweat running off her in the cold. How sorry she was, apologizing to me. —You shouldn’t see none of this, so you shouldn’t. Her head hung down for only a moment of respite before she arched it back on the stalk of her neck and cried out. She paced and squatted and lay down again. Long sounds like the bellows of a cow came from her throat. I stood terrified and useless, watching where she lay in her dark corner.