The Property of a Lady (17 page)

She had set her sights high, confident that she could get a position as an assistant to a professor of archaeology at one of the colleges: after all, she had learned firsthand about antiquities and digs. But the problem was she had no proper clothes, only the one blue skirt and a couple of simple cotton blouses, and there was no money to buy new ones or even a pair of decent shoes. Wages were low and by the time she had paid her fare on the Second Avenue el and the rent, she calculated there wouldn’t be enough left over to pay for food and new clothes. She had considered getting a job as a maid because she knew they were given their uniforms, but all the grand houses on Fifth Avenue expected their maids to live in, and anyway, the wages were barely enough to keep them alive. She had tried for a job as a salesgirl at the new department store, Macy’s, but knew instantly from the way the personnel officer looked her up and down that she was just not smart enough. It wasn’t only her clothes, she thought
despairingly, catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror. She
looked
poor. And that was the catch—
she was too poor to get a job
.

The high-summer sun beat down as she walked slowly along Delancey Street the next day, reluctant to go home and face them with the news that she had failed yet again. She stopped suddenly outside O’Hara’s Irish Alehouse. The simple words chalked on a blackboard dazzled her as if they had been inscribed in gold: “Help Wanted—Apply Within.” She had never been in a saloon in her life before, but she swung through the doors without hesitation. The fumes of whiskey, beer, and stale cigarette smoke and the smell of cabbage cooking somewhere in the back almost choked her, but lifting her chin determinedly she strode toward the burly man standing behind the counter.

Shamus O’Hara was a big, handsome forty-year-old Irishman who looked as if he had been bred from a race of giants. Everything about him was oversized, from his head with its shock of curly red hair to his hands the size of hams. He wore a collarless blue shirt straining at the buttons across his barrel chest, the rolled sleeves showing forearms braided with muscle. An old striped tie was knotted around his middle and a small cigar was clamped between his teeth. He was checking the beer pumps in between puffs on the cigar and singing snatches of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” in a pleasant baritone voice with a thick Irish accent.

He stared in surprise at the girl asking him for a job. She was too tall to be called a waif because waifs were always tiny, and yet she had the haunted look of the hungry, that telltale yellowish tinge to her skin and deep-gray shadows under her eyes. But by golly, they were beautiful violet eyes, and her brown hair shone in the sunlight streaming in through the open doors. She was neat and clean in her white blouse and blue skirt, and she had ankles pretty enough to turn any man’s glance. O’Hara thought she was a lot different from the usual rawboned,
black-haired tired Irish women he saw in the saloon or at St. Savior’s on Sunday, hidden under their shawls with a brood of ten or fourteen children flocking at their heels. With a bit of feeding up, this colleen might be a beauty. But as for giving her a job, it was hard work and she just didn’t look up to it. Besides, his customers were a rough lot and she was obviously a refined sort of girl.

“Well … I’m not sure we be needin’ anyone,” he said doubtfully. A look of despair crossed her face and he sighed and said, “The trut’ is y’don’t look strong enough t’ lift a pint of ale.”

“Oh, but I am, I am,” she cried, grabbing his arm eagerly. “I’ll clean, I’ll wash dishes, I’ll serve … anything. Just try me … please.”

Pulling herself up to her tallest, Missie tried her best to look “strong” as O’Hara looked her up and down speculatively and then said with a sigh, “Out o’ the goodness of me heart then, but just on trial, mind. The pay’s a dollar a night. Y’start at six and finish when I say the word—and not before. Understood?”

Too close to tears to reply, Missie nodded and rushed out of the saloon back to Rivington Street to tell them the good news. O’Hara followed her to the doorway, watching until she turned the corner of Orchard, wondering what her story was. Because in this part of the world, everyone had a story.

For a month O’Hara kept her busy. She swept the previous night’s filthy sawdust from the floors and scattered fresh; she washed hundreds of glasses until her hands became red, chapped lumps; she polished the counter and scrubbed vainly at the beery circles staining the tables. Trying her best to get used to the smell, she carried heavy trays laden with a dozen pints of beer without spilling them and served them, anxious and unsmiling, to the rough crowd of stevedores, bricklayers, laborers, and whores who made up O’Hara’s clientele. And at the end of
each evening, she pocketed her dollar triumphantly and dodging the drunks who tried to manhandle her, she fled back through the dark streets littered with stinking refuse from the pushcarts to the room she now called “home.”

Sofia would be waiting up for her with a glass of hot milk flavored with cinnamon, and Missie would always protest she was too tired to eat the plate of food she had brought home. “It’ll do for Azaylee’s breakfast,” she would say, slipping a scrap to Viktor, who wolfed it down as if it were a peanut. She sipped her fragrant milk gratefully before subsiding, exhausted, onto the little iron cot that served as her bed, knowing that Sofia would wait until she slept before she climbed into the sagging brass bed beside Azaylee. But she never told her that she was afraid to go to sleep, afraid of the dream that came every night when she saw Alexei’s terrified face and heard his voice begging her to help him.

Azaylee was the only one who didn’t seem to mind her new circumstances, playing happily out on the dirty streets with the neighborhood’s teeming population of children. Missie and Sofia would lean from the window watching her as, with Viktor always at her heels, she darted among the pushcarts, blond braids flying as she chased a ball or skipped rope or drew chalk hopscotch circles.

“Just look at those children,” Sofia would marvel, “a bunch of ragamuffins and my granddaughter one of the worst.” She would laugh as she said it but Missie knew it hurt.

There was one thing Missie hadn’t told Sofia about her job at O’Hara’s. The customers were a rough and ready lot, big, brawny Irishmen like O’Hara himself, though occasionally a “foreign-speaking” immigrant wandered in by mistake. Mostly O’Hara kept them in line with a mixture of Irish blarney and the threat of his fists. They were all right when they were sober but with a few whiskeys
inside them, they became different men: men with one thing on their mind.

The saloon had some female customers, a few poor women burdened with too many children whose husbands beat them and who had taken to drink to escape, and then there were the whores. Missie tried not to notice as transactions were made over the stained tables, the man handling the woman like a piece of meat before he made his purchase; and she tried not to count the brief minutes before the fellow swaggered back from the alley, often still buttoning his pants. But toward the end of the evening their drunken glances were often directed at her.

The first time it happened she just froze. She stared down at the huge hand gripping her small breast like a vise. Its black-rimmed nails cut into her flesh, but she was too shocked even to feel the pain. Then she screamed. O’Hara came running, his shillelagh swinging as he hurled curses at the drunken workman.

“You filthy bastard,” he roared, with a quick crack to the side of the man’s thick skull. “Get your wanderin’ hands off her … she’s a respectable girl—and young enough to be your own daughter. If that’s what you want you’ll be off and find it elsewhere.” Purple with anger, he hauled the surprised man across the room, blood spattering from his cracked head. “Take that!” he bellowed, planting a kick that sent the man hurtling through the swing doors onto the sidewalk. “A boot in the arse is all you’re good for. And as for you,” he said, turning to Missie, “I’ll not be turning this place into a church social. Business is business, and if you can’t handle the men by yourself, you’re out.”

Missie didn’t tell Sofia what had happened, but the old woman knew something was wrong. That night as she massaged Missie’s swollen ankles tenderly and rubbed glycerine into her raw, red hands, she said, “I cannot allow this to go on. You must leave the saloon.”

Missie threw her arms around her desperately.
“Please
let us sell the jewels,” she begged, “like we did in Constantinople. Surely we are safe now?”

Sofia shrugged and replied, as she always did, “These are not just ordinary jewels, they are heirlooms. Such grandeur is identifiable. They are as good as worthless.”

“Then what about the money in Switzerland? We could go to a lawyer, we could have him send a letter with proof of your identity. I can’t bear it, Sofia; you should be living like the princess you are instead of worse than the poorest Russian peasant.”

Sofia went to a drawer and took out a newspaper clipping dated two weeks previously. “I didn’t show you this before,” she said, “because I didn’t want to worry you.”

Missie read the brief report. It talked of the atrocities being perpetrated in Russia, of the murder of the tsar and his family and the arrests and incarceration in
gulags
of innocent people. It said that the secret police were still searching for the Ivanoffs; that to the revolutionary regime they epitomized all that was wrong and decadent about “old Russia,” that the Cheka still believed the two grandchildren had escaped with the Dowager Princess Sofia. Reliable reports from inside Russia stated that the secret police had scoured Europe for them and that the search had now spread to America. It said that if they were found, the fate of these young children was certain to be like that of the imperial family: brutal murder.

Missie finished her milk in silence. What Sofia had said was true, and there was no escape. A future struggling for each desperately needed dollar loomed in front of her, and her heart sank even lower, because she knew that somehow it was up to her to provide for them all.

O’Hara watched her with grudging admiration. She had spirit and she had guts and he liked that. She was cleaning the saloon as he lighted his first cigar of the day, and he grinned at her. “You’re the sort they needed on the covered wagons, me girl,” he told her as he watched her
scatter the fresh sawdust over the shining clean floor. “You’re pioneer stock.”

Leaning on her broom, Missie watched as he drew in the smoke luxuriously. “That cigar cost one quarter of my night’s wages,” she told him. “Don’t you think it’s about time I had a raise?”

She laughed as he choked on the cigar, his big-boned Irish face reddening as he thumped his chest with a fist the size of a football. “B’jaysus, girl, you almost sent me out o’ here feet first, saying things like that,” he cried indignantly.

“Two dollars,” she said, folding her arms belligerently, “and you know I’m worth it.”

They glared at each other across the mahogany counter like boxers sparring in the ring and his green eyes twinkled suddenly. Running his hands through his halo of curly red hair, he said, “You’ve beat me, girl. Two dollars a night it is—but only because you’re worth it.”

Missie stamped her foot angrily. “Then damn it, why didn’t you offer me it instead of making me ask?”

He leaned on the counter grinning. “Maybe it’s because I like to see you get angry. Maybe it’s because I wanted to see what the
real
Missie O’Bryan was like, instead of the tired girl who does her job and says little and never smiles. You know that today is the first time I’ve ever heard you laugh?”

“That’s because I don’t have too much to laugh about,” she replied shortly.

O’Hara drew on his cigar, watching as she picked up her broom and began to spread the sawdust evenly across the floor. “I’ve seen you on the street with the little girl,” he said, glancing at her ringless left hand, “but there’s no man around?”

“Her father is dead,” she said, not looking at him.

He nodded. “’Tis a sad thing for a child to be without a fayther, and even harder on a woman left to bring her up alone.”

Missie’s head flew up and she looked at him, startled. “Oh, but … but …” she said, and then stopped herself quickly. Of course, everyone on Rivington Street thought she was Azaylee’s mother.

That night there was two dollars in her pocket instead of one, and O’Hara himself filled a plate with boiled beef, cabbage, and potatoes and made sure she sat down for fifteen minutes to eat it. Faced with the huge plate of food, Missie suddenly lost her hunger, and she felt O’Hara’s sharp green eyes on her as she put it into a basin to take home for Sofia and Azaylee.

After that, work at the saloon seemed to get a little easier, and sometimes O’Hara asked her to help at lunch-times as well. He looked out for her, made sure the men didn’t bother her, and he made sure she ate. His broad, handsome face always broke into a smile when he saw her and he paid her promptly. There were even a few precious dollars saved now, alongside the worthless jewels in the cardboard valise under the brass bed.

A few weeks later as she was carrying a heavy tray filled with Irish whiskey to a table of brawny shirt-sleeved men, sweating like pigs from the heat and the drink, Azaylee suddenly hurtled through the swing doors with Viktor at her heels. “Missie, oh, Missie,” she screamed as everyone’s eyes focused on her. “Come quickly! Grandmother—”

After thrusting the tray at the nearest man, Missie grabbed her urgently by the shoulders. “What’s wrong? What has happened to Sofia?”

The child’s blue eyes swam with tears. “She was standing by the stove stirring the pot. Then she cried out. She fell down, Missie. I couldn’t wake her.”

The streets were crowded with people spilling from their tenements in an attempt to catch a breath of cooler evening air, but Missie pushed them ferociously out of her way, dragging the child by the hand as they ran back home, the dog at their heels.

She tore up the steep wooden stairs and hurled open the door. Sofia lay by the stove; her eyes were closed but Missie could see a pulse beating slowly at the base of her throat, and she thanked God that at least she was still alive.