The Property of a Lady (29 page)

New York, 1919

O’Hara threw open the saloon doors, letting the cold morning air in and the fog of smoke and booze out. He stood for a few minutes, his hands behind his back, the first cigar of the day at the corner of his mouth, inspecting his domain. He had lived on Delancey Street for twenty years and was one of its oldest residents, and sometimes he felt like he owned it. He knew everybody, the men were his customers, in work or out, for he always allowed them to run a tab until work came along. He knew their wives and knew how some were struggling to help their men while others were resentful, feeling life had cheated them. He knew their kids and their grandparents and aunts and uncles and lovers and the ins and outs of their lives because everybody’s problems were hashed out over his mahogany counter, helped down with a few beers. And there had been many a quiet handout of a few dollars to the desperate, no repayment asked or expected. He liked Delancey. It was good-humored, there was no violence—only the occasional man cuffing his wife around or noisy family fight. He would be sorry to leave it.

He walked back inside and began to clean his pumps, restocking his shelves with whiskey and gin, tobacco, cigarette papers, and cheap cigars. In a few weeks all this would be gone, banned by the Prohibition Act; he would
be out of business and out of Delancey Street. But he had got it beat. He had made his plans a long time ago.

When he first came to America he had been a raw lad of eighteen, fresh from Ireland’s shores, big, brawny, and ready for what a new world had to offer. His brief schooling had ended at ten, but he could read and write and do arithmetic, and he had worked as a laborer in the fields. He wanted no more of the old country; he wanted “Life with a Capital L,” and he knew he wasn’t going to find it in the poor shebeen his ailing father had run in the bleak, windswept countryside overlooking Liscannor Bay. His father, Mick O’Hara, had been a weasly little man with a cough that dragged itself up from his oversized boots. He was rarely to be seen without a thin, ragged hand-rolled cigarette between his lips; it was there when he drew ale from the keg, it stayed there when he talked and even when he coughed. The only time Shamus had ever seen it removed was when his father ate, but that was over in a matter of minutes and it was back to rolling the next one. And to the next tot of whiskey, “to keep out the cold.”

Mary Kathleen O’Hara knew her husband was killing himself but there was nothing she could do about it. She had long ago accepted the fact that one day he would drop dead and she would be left to fend for herself, and she had made her plans accordingly. But time went on and the tough old weasel still defeated death, coughing his way through yet another night. Mary Kathleen was a big, strapping woman herself, with the red hair Shamus had inherited, a high color to her cheeks, and flashing green eyes. She had been considered a looker in her day and she was still a fine woman at forty, but her life had been a rough one. When she was a young girl, the potato famine had devastated Ireland and millions had starved to death, including most of her family. When she met Mick O’Hara he was twenty years older than she; he fancied her and she knew that no matter how poor, men would always find the few coppers for a drink at his she-been.
Although he was small and sour and argumentative, Mick O’Hara offered a roof over her head and food in her belly. It was security of a kind, and she settled for it and tried to be a good wife to him.

Their only child was Shamus and at the time she had thanked God because more would have only meant more mouths to feed, but when she had realized that she was likely to become a young widow, she had wished she’d had more sons to look after her when her husband was gone.

In his typical cussed fashion Mick O’Hara took his time about dying, and Shamus was already seventeen when he finally went. After the funeral Mary Kathleen had walked with her son to the top of the Liscannor cliffs and they had stood there arm in arm, letting the fierce Atlantic winds sweep over them. It had felt like a cleansing to her, blowing away the tedious years when she had been confined to the three dark, mean rooms behind the bar with the constant sound of coughing and the smell of ale and death.

“Son,” she had said, gripping his arm tightly, “across that ocean is a new world, a place where a man can make a fortune. I’m selling up the alehouse and giving you the money. I want you to go to America and make a new life for us, and when you are ready you will send for me.”

Shamus still remembered looking down at her face, so proud and serene and sure; she had trusted him to take all she had in the world and multiply it, certain he would take care of her. He had vowed not to let her down.

When he first came to America, he traveled the country from coast to coast; he was big and muscular, and it was easy for him to get a job as a laborer, carrying bricks in Chicago, hauling crates on the docks in San Francisco and stoking furnaces at the steel plants in Pittsburgh, but he knew it was not going to make him a fortune. A year passed and though he still had the money his mother had
given him, he was no closer to bringing her over and looking after her than he was before. He thought of her back home, waiting uncomplainingly for him to do what was right, and he knew he would have to find something.

He drifted back to New York, wandering the streets aimlessly, staring at the mansions on Gramercy Park and Washington Square and Fifth Avenue, wondering bitterly how people had made enough money to build such places, and he told himself that one day he would own one just like that. Meanwhile, he took a room over a saloon on Delancey Street and worked by day as a bricklayer on a construction site. He liked the building trade and he would have liked to learn more about it, maybe make his way up to foreman or even a manager, but there was not time; he always carried the dread in back of his mind that his mother would die before he was successful and he would be too late to keep his promise.

He enjoyed living over the saloon. The smell of whiskey and beer and the nightly noise were familiar and reminded him of home, and he offered to give the proprietor a hand of an evening, pulling pints of ale and slinging mounds of corned beef hash. He was a sociable young man who liked the masculine camaraderie of the saloon, and after six months, when the proprietor told him he was thinking of selling up and going back to St. Paul, Minnesota, on an impulse Shamus offered to buy it. Within two weeks the transaction was completed and he wrote his mother, enclosing her fare and telling her to come as soon as possible. It was only afterward that he reflected on the irony of the fact that he was bringing her to the brave new world to live exactly the way she had before, in three rooms behind an alehouse.

Nevertheless, Mary Kathleen had considered it a great step up in the world; she arrived from Liscannor with all her bits and pieces of furniture, and soon the rooms on Delancey Street looked exactly like the ones back home in Ireland. Mary Kathleen cooked up great batches of
proper Irish stew as well as hash and boiled beef and cabbage and potato bread, and she served heaping portions at cheap prices. It didn’t take too long for the word to get around the neighborhood that O’Hara’s had the best and cheapest food around, and the ale was good too. They were on their way.

Mary Kathleen enjoyed her new role. Before, her husband had been the boss; now she herself was there every lunchtime and every evening, chatting to the customers and graciously accepting their rough compliments as she pocketed their money. Within a year they had money in the bank and in a few years they were prosperous. She kept telling Shamus that it was time he looked for a nice Irish girl to marry; he should settle down and give her a few grandchildren to indulge in her old age. After all, she said, he could afford it now.

Shamus knew he could afford it, but a wife and children demanded a man’s time, and who would run the saloon if he wasn’t there every night? No, marriage would have to wait. Five years later there was a fair amount of money in the bank as well as one or two little property investments Shamus had made up in the hills of New Jersey. Then Kathleen Mary died suddenly of a heart attack, still without her grandchildren and still living in three rooms behind the saloon.

As he buried her Shamus wept tears of anger and shame that he had never bought her a little house of her own where she could have passed her final years peacefully, and he told himself that when he finally did marry, no wife of his would ever live in three rooms behind a bar.

He reminded himself of that now as Missie swung through the doors, flinging him a brief smile as she hung up her coat and began briskly to sweep the sawdust and litter from the floor.

O’Hara watched her longingly. It had been three months since he had asked her to marry him, and he still
didn’t have an answer. In fact she had never mentioned it since the funeral, and he had held back, waiting patiently for her to recover from the blow of Sofia’s death. But time was moving on: He was a man with important matters on his mind, a man who wanted answers—now.

His heart melted as he looked at her, working busily as though if she did her work in half the time she could escape earlier … but she could not. He paid her by the day and she was his as long as he needed her. It was his way of guaranteeing she would always be there. Except now he knew he needed her for a lifetime.

She felt his eyes on her and glanced up. He smiled beguilingly and said, “Missie, it occurs to me that you and I have never been alone together. Now you know I’m a busy man. The saloon opens every day and every night and that niver leaves a man a minute to himself, let alone for a woman. But tomorrow I intend on closing it—on one condition.”

She stared at him, surprised. “What condition?”

“I’ll close, if you will do me the honor of taking lunch with me.”

She stared at him again, hardly believing her ears, and then she laughed. He felt the color rising in his face as she said, “You want to take
me
out to lunch? But why, O’Hara? We see each other every day except Sunday! And we eat lunch together here at this very counter every day too. So, why?”

He took a cigar from the box on the mirrored shelves behind the bar, lighting it busily. “I meant it as a surprise,” he said sadly. “Dammit, Missie, I thought it would please you.”

He ran his hand through his mop of red curls, looking pleadingly at her as she walked to the counter. She leaned her elbows on it, staring at him doubtfully. “O’Hara,” she said, “maybe this is a mistake. I’m not the girl you think I am. You don’t even know the real me.”

“That’s exactly why I want to take you out, so we can
get to know each other better,” he said, his old jaunty grin returning. “Away from here we can both be ourselves. Besides,” he said, placing his large hand over hers, “I’ve something to show you. Something special.” He could see she was intrigued and he added, “And I’ve something important to tell you.”

After sliding her hand from under his, she began to polish the counter. “In that case I’d better say yes,” she said calmly, “but remember, I will have Azaylee with me.”

“Of course,” he said, beaming, “of course Azaylee will be with you.” He didn’t care if she brought a whole troop of kids. She had agreed to come.

Missie hurried back to Rivington Street with her morning’s earnings, a single dollar, in her pocket. She stopped at Zabar’s pushcart and bought a spray of fabric roses and a length of yellow ribbon for fifteen cents, and blushing at daring to spend so much money on herself, she hurried up the stairs to Rosa Perelman’s apartment.

Rosa’s place could be called an apartment because it had two rooms, and with three children she needed them. Her husband, Meyer Perelman, was twenty-five years older; he was from Poland and spoke only Polish and Yiddish. Rosa was only twenty-five herself, and had been born right here on the Lower East Side, of Estonian immigrant parents. She spoke English and Yiddish, as well as a smattering of Russian, but very little Polish, so communications between them were limited. For two dollars a week she had added Azaylee to her own brood, and she fed and looked after her as if she were her own while Missie was at work. And over the weeks since Sofia died, she had become her friend. She smiled as Missie tapped on the door and walked in.

“Nu, shane
, there you are,” Rosa said, pleased. “You’re just in time, I was fixing a glass of tea. And a little treat I saved for us.”

She handed Missie a tall steaming glass and a plate with a few small biscuits. “From Gertel’s bakeshop on Hester,” she said, “and just like my own mother used to make.” Her face lighted up as she took a bite. “Better,
even. Don’t worry,” she added, noticing Missie’s restless glance, “the children are out in the street, under my eldest, Sonia’s, eye. And she knows she’ll catch it from me if she takes that eye off them for one minute. Anyway,” she added with a giggle, “it gives you and me a bit of peace to catch up on ourselves, doesn’t it?”

Missie laughed. She liked Rosa. She was small and round with beautiful black shiny hair, dark brown eyes, and soft features, and even though matters were difficult between her and her husband, she always managed a smile and a joke. Nothing would get Rosa down for long. It just wasn’t in her nature to brood on her misfortunes, the worst of which, Missie thought, was having been “sold” to her husband by her unscrupulous father.