“They won’t change their minds. It’s all signed and sealed. I have a job waiting for me.”
“Well, good. That’s good.”
Mary understood what was eating him, but there was no possible way to say it. After he’d pinned her for not asking him any personal questions, she’d made sure to pose a few, now and again, in light conversation, and over the months she’d learned that he had no wife, no children, and lived on East Ninety-Eighth Street with his younger brother, who was bigger and stronger than John, but who was not right in his mind, and could not hold a job because he was prone to fits so violent that he’d once bitten clear through his own tongue. This brother tried to care for John like a wife, doing the cleaning, the shopping, the cooking, but he was not a wife, not nearly a wife, and Mary also understood without ever needing to ask the question that what John wanted his whole life long was a real wife, and he had not given up.
“I want to tell you something,” John said, and Mary cursed herself for letting it come to this. “I want to tell you that I don’t think things are so bad here on North Brother. I think it’s a pretty spot and your bungalow is sound, if a little on the damp side, but show me a building that isn’t. And I think you have to admit you’ve had pretty good company when you’ve sought it. You’ve had someone to talk to, is what I mean. Would you agree?”
“I agree completely.”
“But you still want to leave.”
“Yes.”
“Well, then I want to tell you something else. That Alfred who came here that time. Your man. Yes, I know you said he’s not your man anymore, and yes I know you didn’t put it like that, but I can put two and two together, and what I want to say is that Alfred is not a good character. I don’t mean because of what the papers said about the way you lived, or any of that. I just mean man to man, I can tell a good one from a bad one, and I don’t trust that one to stay away from you once you’re over there again. Remember I said that, and remember that he didn’t have the patience to wait for you while you were here, like any other man would. Like a few other men I can think of would have done without a doubt. And now look where his impatience got him. Don’t forget that, Mary, once he comes around.”
“I won’t forget,” Mary promised, and all the humor she’d felt a moment earlier, all the warmth toward her friend, disappeared, and instead she felt her stomach tighten, her head fill up with electric sparks.
“Well, I had to say it,” John said, and now, his burden lifted, he seemed like the old John, at home with himself and with the door frame of Mary’s bungalow. “And maybe we can visit sometime, over there, and I can tell you the news of North Brother. We can go for a walk or something.”
“John.” She stepped forward and hugged him, and felt where the top of his head met with her ear. She couldn’t help it, she felt it was like hugging a child, a solid, muscular child, but still a child, a child’s narrow shoulders, a child’s way of clinging to her when he wants comfort, and she couldn’t muster up a single morsel of attraction toward him. “Let’s do that.”
FOURTEEN
When Mary was seventeen but passing herself off as twenty-five or twenty-six, turning from the sidewalk and pushing the heavy wrought-iron gate that led to the front door of a house like the Warrens had rented in Oyster Bay, or the Bowens had on Park Avenue, would have made her body a hard knot of dread. It was worse when the woman of the house was young, newly married, maybe only eighteen or twenty herself. Girls of twenty know by instinct who is at least their own age and who is younger, and Mary would compensate by marching into the kitchen with authority, maybe even a little disdain. She’d thicken her accent like a gravy on the stove and hope that would explain to them why she seemed so young. A cultural difference, Mary could see the young mistress thinking. This is the way Irish are, I suppose. Once, when she arrived to cook for the Hill family on Riverside Drive, the mistress had taken one look at her and told her outright that she didn’t believe Mary’s age or experience. Mary had just turned eighteen, and had slowly been getting jobs the agency didn’t know about. Aunt Kate would hear about something from a friend, or Mary would answer an ad in the newspaper. In addition to a home so large that it could have housed a dozen families, the Hills had three carriages, six horses, and a pair of Shetland ponies for the children, who were not yet old enough to ride them. Mrs. Hill told Mary to be on her way.
“I only look young,” Mary insisted, feeling as she said it exactly what she was: a skinny child who hadn’t eaten a proper meal since her last employment. “You’ll get no one else out here today. I might as well make dinner before I go.”
Mrs. Hill hesitated. “I am hungry,” she admitted, and patted her considerable belly. “Only porridge this morning.”
After showing Mary to the kitchen, Mrs. Hill left her alone to create something wonderful out of the bland bits and pieces that had been left behind by the previous cook and the pale chicken carcass the porter had been sent out to fetch that morning. Mary found flour, butter, eggs, raisins, rosemary, three old apples she knocked on and then tested for juice with her front teeth. An hour later she brought Mr. and Mrs. Hill, along with their two children, plates of walnut and raisin chicken salad, with fresh bread and baked apples on the side. She stayed at the Hills’ until her true age was exposed by a porter who’d overlapped with her at a job in Brooklyn Heights. For the next few months Mary had to go back to washing and ironing, giving her the feeling that life was just one long, narrow road, with no turns, no peaks or valleys.
“I can’t take it,” she used to say to Aunt Kate when she’d go home.
“You’ll take it,” Aunt Kate assured her. “You’ll take it like everyone else.”
• • •
She’d been repeating the words to herself since stepping onto the ferry: You are no longer a cook. You are a laundress. You signed the papers. Better to be a laundress in New York City than a cook trapped in a bungalow on an island of death.
The boardinghouse where she’d slept since Friday night served decent-enough food, to Mary’s surprise, but she didn’t like the company. Men slept on a different floor than the women, but they all took their meals together, and there was too much eyeing and gawking for Mary to be able to enjoy her plate. To the one wall-eyed man who kept breathing in her direction, and then whispered that he liked the look of her, she’d stated plainly that she’d make him sorry if he ever came near her. He’d laughed, the food he’d just eaten a pulp on his exposed tongue, but she’d stared at him without changing her expression. He snapped his mouth closed and turned back to his beef and barley.
When Mary walked into the laundry on that Monday morning in February 1910, she felt flat, tired, and hungry, as if all those years between hurrying after Paddy Brown in Castle Garden and that moment, pushing open the door to a Chinese laundry, were no more than a matter of weeks, and she was no older now than she’d been then. The laundry was on Washington Place and Greene Street, directly next to the taller Asch Building, and on Mary’s first day the entrance was blocked by a lake of icy slush so deep she had to hitch up her skirt to stride through it. It was a busy street, full of students from New York University and women working at the factories up and down the block.
The laundry was open to customers every day except for Sundays, and the washers, too, had the day off. But those who ironed and hung had to show up for at least four or five hours on Sundays in order to press and fold or hang what had been washed the day before. It was a small operation — a front room to welcome customers; a middle room where Chu, the owner, slept; and a back room where all the washing and pressing took place alongside a little kitchen and sitting area that they were allowed to use for thirty minutes out of every day. Chu did not speak to Mary, but directed all his instructions to another Chinese man named Li, and Li translated all Chu’s instructions for Mary. Here is where you stand, he told her. Here is how you wring. Here is how you shake out, how you hang, how you feel for dampness. In certain fabrics it was preferable to iron before completely dry; in others the garment must absolutely be bone-dry before touching with a hot iron or else the iron would stick, and the garment would burn, and Mary would be out of a day’s wages. The irons must be kept hot, but not so hot that they would scorch, and they must be kept clean. Mary would find, Li warned, that by the end of the day the irons would feel heavier, and Mary would be slower to move them, and so she should be on guard for this always. Everyone was to take turns up front if Chu was not available, or if he couldn’t make himself understood, or if the customer did not want to speak to a Chinese.