City of Hope (30 page)

Bridie drew a cross on the dead man's face, closed his ghoulish, staring eyes, then put her hand out for me to help her up. She groaned as her knees creaked.

“What are we going to do with him?” she asked as she stretched her body upright again.

I took off my coat and laid it over him, then the three of us stood over the corpse all thinking the same, dreadful thing. For all Bridie's prayers and my propriety, Dingus' dead body was no more to any of us than a rather messy pile of garbage that we had to dispose of. I spoke before Sheila had the chance to say as much in front of Bridie.

“We should bury him. Jake and Matt dug up the last of the potatoes last week before the frost came. We can put him in there.”

“Oh yes—the spuds will do very well next year!”

“Sheila, that's enough!” I said.

“You are such a hypocrite, Ellie,” she retorted, then nodded at Bridie, “and you—you old baggage! I kill a savage—save that little slut's life—and you're still looking down your nose at me. Well, screw you—the pair of you!”

“How dare—” I was about to reprimand her again when Bridie took my arm and held me back.

“Leave her,” she said. “She just killed a man, she needs some time.”

Maureen had put Nancy to bed in her room with the baby and given her enough whiskey to calm her down and let her sleep for the afternoon. Jake had come out when he heard the clap of the gunshot, so we had little choice but to enlist his help.

Not yet fifteen, yet as tall and almost as broad as a man, he dug out a deep hole and measured it the length and breadth of the body, then went across to the sheds at the back of Mario's house to fetch the workers' wheelbarrow, and hoisted the covered body onto it with only a little help from me and Maureen. His face was full of a fake sternness, covering the fact that he was enjoying this responsibility, being the only man helping out the women in this terrible misadventure. Maureen was heartbroken to see her son playing out such a role, as was I. Disposing of a body was the worst type of criminal activity, and one that both his mother and I had hoped this new life would protect him from.

Jake wheeled the barrow with the body to the edge of the hole, then Bridie insisted that I take the boy inside.

“You take Jake in, Ellie. Maureen and I will finish off here.”

She made it sound like laundry. I wanted to insist that I stay, and let Maureen take her son inside, but Maureen said, “I'll help Bridie, Ellie—you take Jake in and make some tea. We'll be in shortly.”

At that point Jake lost any semblance of adult decorum and started to complain like a child.

“Let me stay. I'll tip him in—the dirty pig—let me finish the job.”

“Come on,” I said, “you've been a great help, but come inside with me now and we'll have some cookies.”

He looked pleadingly at his mother, whose face was shot through with such disappointment and pain that I felt this was truly the greatest tragedy of the morning. Nancy and her baby had been spared, but Jake had not. The rest of us were adults and must deal with whatever life threw at us, with God's good grace, and put it down to experience—to learn from, or not, in whatever way we could.

By lunchtime we were sitting around the kitchen, eating as if nothing had happened. Anna had missed the whole incident—having the day off meant that she had spent the morning cleaning her own house and had come over just after midday, having prepared us a spaghetti dish, which she carried in a large pan.

“Where is Nancy?” she asked.

“Upstairs,” Maureen said, “she's feeling a little under the weather.”

“But she loves my spaghetti!”

“She'll be down later,” Bridie reassured her.

Bridie, Maureen and I looked at each other. Anna sensed the awkward atmosphere and knew she was missing something, but assumed that, as usual, it was probably something to do with Sheila having acted out of turn. Sheila had not come downstairs since storming off, but Anna didn't push for our anecdote, knowing that we'd tell her in our own good time.

The truth was that none of us who were involved could find words to put on what had happened that morning. Immediately after Maureen and Bridie came back into the house (having done what they had done), they both bathed and changed their clothes. We then all sat in the kitchen and drank tea in an exhausted silence. There was nothing to be said. Sheila was upstairs, Nancy asleep. There was no reason for us not to discuss what had happened, except that the words—gun, dead, body, corpse, shot, blood, gangster—felt unseemly somehow. What we had done was classified as a crime, even though it was self-defense. Had we acted like criminals in dumping the body? Should we have called the cops?

These questions were too complicated, too crass to put into words. What had happened was ugly—and none of us wanted to repeat the experience by talking about it. In any case, there was little to be said. We were all safe (bar the dead man) and there was nothing more that needed to be done. So an unspoken agreement to keep silent immediately developed among us. If Jake talked—to his school friends, the men of the house—it was unlikely anyone would believe him. After all, the whole thing felt like an illusion, the wild boastings of a schoolboy fantasy. Before he was cold in the ground, Dingus had disappeared from my conscience like a rat down a sewer pipe.

After lunch Maureen went with Anna to meet the children from school, and Bridie went down the basement to do some laundry. I went upstairs to check on Nancy and Sheila. Nancy was fast asleep, with Tom stirring quietly in the cot beside her. I left them both.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
FOUR

The snow came and took over our lives.

Some of the houses were centrally heated, the radiators being fed from coal-fired furnaces in the basements, but coal was expensive and problems in the systems only emerged when they were put under the pressure of constant use. Water and air banged through the pipes as if some mad percussionist was living behind our walls. Plus fuel was expensive, so most of us chose to burn cheaper wood in whatever open fireplaces we had, and that had to be hulked about on roads too icy to walk or drive on. Some of the chimneys started to crumble when they were cleaned, and two chimney fires were caused by overenthusiastic lightings in the first week after the snow came.

The children had to be bought boots and heavy coats, and it was a challenge to get many of them to go to school at all, instead of playing out in the snow. One of the younger boys broke his arm falling off a sled, so that our first hospital bill had to be paid, and three other children caught bad chills and had to be nursed at home by Maureen. The weather seemed to be causing us to lurch from one drama to the next.

Water pipes in the house and the shop would freeze and have to be coaxed back to life with kettles and warm towels. The path in front of the shop had to be cleared of snow and ice to make it reachable, then fires had to be lit and grates cleared of the ashes twice and sometimes three times a day. All this work meant that just getting out of bed in the morning and getting ourselves to work was a challenge.

At this time the homeless began to emerge from the corners of the city. They had survived in small shacks like the one where I had found Maureen, hiding and coping—but the severe snow had driven in not just the desperate, but those too proud to look for help. They came to the shop in their droves, begging for warmth and comfort. Bridie's small soup kitchen could barely feed the hordes who were turning up there each day. We were all despairing as to what we could do, when Maureen was approached by a group of our wealthy customers to ask if they could help in any way. It seemed they were anxious to volunteer, but the charity rosters at their churches were already full up. The freezing temperatures had not only brought the needy into sharp view, but had pinched the good hearts and consciences of the affluent, too.

“They're bored!” Bridie had puffed cynically when Maureen told us. “Sure, those spoiled biddies would be no use to anybody.”

“Their money would be useful enough,” Maureen added.

“Don't be so unkind,” I said, although in truth I was thinking the same thing. The last thing I needed was to be appeasing a group of rich ladies—finding something for them to “do” might only create more work for myself, and make the women in the shop feel uncomfortable.

I need not have worried because shortly afterward I was approached in the shop by Lavinia French, the wife of a property prospector (and one of our landlords). She was a tall, slim woman with an angular, intelligent face, and a demeanor more suited to the army than the nursery. I had served her in the shop a few times and always found her rather aloof and snooty. She told me that she intended to open up one of her husband's empty buildings that very day as an emergency hostel, and could we supply enough soup and bread to feed up to one hundred people? She would pay us, of course. On no account was there any need to pay us, I assured her. It would be our pleasure to
continue
to help feeding the poor of the village. I lifted my chin to let her know that I was every bit as capable of giving charity as she was, and had plenty of means by which to do so. I was mad that I was wearing my apron, no makeup and had my hair tied back like a scullery maid. As she shook my hand and bustled her beautiful cream wool coat out the door, Sheila emerged from the back, where she had been listening.

“You'd better get your halo polished,” she said, sucking on a sweet that she had stolen from the counter jar. “I'd say there'll be a bit of competition with that one, Ellie.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” I snapped. Although I knew exactly what she was talking about, I was not about to admit it to her or to myself. “And I've told you before not to steal that candy.”

Lavinia enlisted the help of the middle-class women of Yonkers to run her soup kitchen, which took over from our service, and a badly needed men's hostel. We prepared all the food for her, and I swallowed my pride and gave way to good sense by allowing her to source and provide ingredients donated by wholesalers as old stock that they could not sell. The same woman canvassed for money from local businessmen, gathering clothes and blankets from all around the neighborhood. Every night they put down mattresses on the linoleum floor of the now-empty offices on the first floor of the building and opened the hostel. Heartbreaking numbers of homeless men would line up for a place. The next day they would be given a blanket to take away, and a hot cup of tea with a slice of yesterday's bread, before they wandered back out into the cold, to look for enough work to keep a home for their families in some softer, smaller American town.

It being an unsuitable environment for a woman at night, the homeless men policed and ran the night hostel themselves as volunteers on a rotation, making sure that there was no drink and no trouble, and that everyone left the building in the morning, clearing away their bedding and emptying and swilling out their chamber pots. There were street vagrants as well as respectable family men fallen on hard times, but there was seldom any trouble. It was too cold, and their relationship with survival too tenuous to accommodate petty fights or unreasonable emotions.

“It's a slick operation,” Matt told us after he volunteered to stay there one night. “I was impressed.”

“She's some flier,” Sheila said from behind her book. We were all sitting around the fire, reading and relaxing.

Matt added, “Lavinia? She's some woman all right.”

I smarted. Sheila was setting me up and, as usual, it was working.

“She surely is,” Bridie added. “I'll take my words back, but she's a good person—a better one than I gave her credit for, I'll say that. I'm not too proud to admit when I'm wrong.”

“A heart of gold, and not afraid of hard work, either,” added Maureen, looking up from her knitting. “I saw her there at ten o'clock the other night, bringing in food.”

Sheila shielded her face with her paperback, but I could see from her eyes that she was laughing.

“I admired her silk scarf the other day, and she took it clean off and gave it to me, there and then!” Nancy said.

I flew at the girl.

“Don't go taking charity off those women,” I said. “Do you hear me, Nancy? You're well cared for here! You've no need of it.”

“There's no crime in wanting to look well,” the young girl snapped, “you should try it sometime!”

Nancy ran from the room.

“I don't know what's wrong with that girl,” I said, “ever since . . .”

Although I stopped myself saying it out loud, I knew that the incident with Dingus must have had a traumatic effect on her, for Nancy had become petulant lately. She had been tardy and lazy at work and, more worrying, seemed to have lost interest in her baby, Tom. For the first three months of his life she had treated him like a precious doll, wary of other people even holding him. Recently, however, she appeared less enthralled by him. She left him for hours sitting in his cot, and often it would take us to tell her that he was crying upstairs. On one occasion she left him in the house without telling us, and closed the door to his room so that we could not hear his cries. I was passing her room on the way to my own before I heard him. I opened the door and found the poor mite purple with bawling from hunger. Immediately I felt sick, realizing that he had been there on his own, crying for somebody to come for him. I picked him up and he clung to my neck, his tiny hands grabbing gratefully at the loose strings of hair around my face as his cries gradually reduced to relieved, breathy sobs. He had been sitting in his own dirt for a long time, so I carried him downstairs and called for Maureen to help me clean up the sore, sorry mess of him, as I mashed potatoes and butter into some warm milk.

He was still too small to sit up unaided, so I put him on my lap, balancing the bowl on the edge of the table. His mouth stretched opened comically as he strained forward for the spoon. I laughed, and just as Bridie, Maureen and I were all gathered around him, Nancy walked in.