My Notorious Life (2 page)

Me and my sister Dutch and my brother Joe was nearly permanent among this sorry crowd, but by the mossy skin of our teeth we got turned
from that path by a stranger who came upon us and exchanged our uncertain fate for another, equally uncertain.

The day in question I was not more than twelve years of age. Turned up nose, raggedy dress, button boots full of holes and painful in the toe, dark black hair I was vain of pulled back, but no ribbon. And my father’s eyes, the color of the Irish sea, he always said, blue as waves. I was two heads taller than a barstool. My legs was sticks, my ribs a ladder. I was not no beauty like Dutch, but I managed with what I got. And That Day we three got our whole new proposition. It walked right up and introduced itself.

Hello there, wayfarers.

We stood in the doorway of the bakery. If you stayed there long enough, you could get maybe a roll that was old, maybe the heels they would give you of the loaves. We were not particular. We would eat crumbs they swept out for the birds. We was worse than birds, we was desperate as rats. That day the smell was like a torture, of the bread baking, them cakes and the pies and them chocolate éclairs like all of your dreams coming up your nose and turning to water in your mouth. We Muldoons had not eaten since yesterday. It was February or maybe March, but no matter the date, we were frozen, no mittens, no hats, us girls without no woolies under our skirts, just britches full of moth bites. We had baby Joe warm in our arms, heavy as beer in a half keg. Dutch had my muffler I gave her, she was so cold. We wrapped it around my head and her head both, and there we stood looking like that two-headed calf I saw once in Madison Square. Two heads, four legs, one body. Two heads is better than one, but we children should’ve been smarter that day and seen what was coming.

A customer started in the door. This big fat guy with big fat neck rolls over the collar of his coat, like a meat scarf.

Dutch said, —Mister? with those blue eyes she has, such jewelry in her face, sparkling sadlike eyes.

The Meat Neck Gent said, —Go home to your Ma.

Dutch said back, —We ain’t got no Ma.

—Yeah yeah yeah, he said. —I heard that before, now beat it.

—Please mister, I said. —We ain’t. It’s the truth. (Though it wasn’t exactly.)

—Just one a them rolls or a bannock of bread.

And the guy said, —Beat it, again. He was a miserable cockroach in
fine boots, but he was not the one who ruined us, that was the kindness of strangers.

So we started to cry very quiet now, me and Dutch, because we had not had food since yesterday noon, standing there the whole morning with pain like teeth in our guts. The scarf around our head was frozen solid with our tears and snuffle.

Along at last came another customer, quite fancy. This one had the type of a beard that straps under the chin, and a clump of hair left stranded in the center of his bald dome that we saw when he removed his tall hat, like a rainbarrel on his head.

With the tears fresh in our eyes, we said, —Hey Mister.

—Why hello there, wayfarers.

Right away he got down low, peering hard at us like we were interesting, and asked in the voice of an angel, —Why you poor children! Why are you here in the cold? Don’t cry, sweet innocents. Come inside and warm yourselves.

—Nossir, I said, —we ain’t allowed. They tell us scram and kick us.

—That’s an outrage, he said. —You’ll freeze to death.

Picking baby Joe out of our arms and handling him, he marched us into the warm smell of the shop. We were hemorrhaging in the mouth practically with want. You could eat the air in the place, so thick with bread and warmth that it stang our cheeks.

—Out out out out, cried the bakery hag when she saw us. The dough of her body was trembling with fury. —Out! I told you.

—These children shall have three rolls of that white bread there, and tea with milk, said the Gentleman, and he slapped down his money bright on the counter.

The dark scowl of the miserable proprietress smoked over at us in fumes. But she swallowed her bile when she seen the Gentleman’s copper and fetched us tea. It scalded our tongues but did nothing to damage the softness of her bread or the crunch of its golden crust. It made no sense to have such a hard woman with such soft bread. We were fainting and trying not to wolf it down like beasts. The Gentleman watched us eat the same as if we were a free show.

—There now, he said, his voice a low burr in his throat, —there you are, children.

Dutch threw her arms around his neck. —Oh thank you kind Gentleman, she said. Her sweetness was like payment to him, you could see by his smile. Even with the grime on her face, Dutch was a pretty child. No one could resist her blarney and her charm, and though she was only seven years of age, she knew this well.

When we were done with the first bread, he says, —Are yiz still hungry?

Wait. Let me get his voice right. In fact, he said it all beautiful, with elocution: —Do you jolly young wayfarers still have an appetite?

And we said, —Yessir.

It was our lucky day then, for he bought us another round of penny rolls and fed us under the glare of the bakery woman’s eyes.

—Children, where are your parents? the Gentleman said.

—Please mister, our father art in heaven, said Dutch. It was the wish to be proper was why she mangled her vocabulary with a prayer. Our father was not our Father Who Art in Heaven, though he was dead. Perhaps he was in hell, what with the one sin we knew of him, which was his death two years before, from drunkenness and falling off a scaffold while carrying a hod of bricks, leaving Mam with us girls and Joe, his infant son. It was just after Joe’s arrival and our Da was celebrating with his lunch bucket and a drop, for he did like his drop, Mam said, coming home every night, so dusty and singing Toura loura loo, a stick of licorice in his pockets if we was lucky and a blast of whiskey in our faces if we wasn’t. —Fill me the growler, there’s a good girl, Axie, he says to me nightly, and I’m off like a shot for the shebeen downstairs and back in a flash without spilling. Then Da would raise the bucket in a toast and sing out, —You’re a Muldoon, dontcha forget it girls. Descended from the Kings of Lurg. The daughters and sons of Galway.

—The Kings of Lurg did not have nothing over your father, Mam said in her grief when he fell. —He was a grand hard worker, and more’s the pity for there will be no payday now he’s gone to God.

After he was gone to God we was gone ourselves, away over to Cherry Street to live with our father’s sister Aunt Nance Duffy, while Mam went out to work as a laundress to a Chinaman.

—Where is your mother then? the Gentleman asked.

—She got an injury, I says. —She can’t get out of her bed for three days.

—And where do you live? he asks us. —Have you warmth and shelter?

—Truth, says I, —it’s the food we miss.

—My name is Mr. Brace. He put out his hand, which I inspected, lacking the manners to shake it. It was clean and soft as something newborn. —Who might you be?

—Axie Muldoon. And these here is my brother Joe and sister Dutchie.

—A pleasure to make your acquaintance.

He did not look like it was a pleasure exactly, and stared like he was a police trap in brass buttons, frisking us in the face to find out our secrets. He was a big gaunt man, with pale eyes dug back in his face, an overhung forehead, jutting jaw, nose long as a vegetable, and big flanges of nostrils. There were hairs in them that I could see from down low where I was. Like any child I was disgusted by the hairs, but hoping to extend his philanthropy just a few pennies longer, I said, —Thanks mister for the bread.

—Certainly, my dear. Still you must know that man does not live for bread alone, but lives by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord.

We gazed up at him without no idea of what he was going on about.

—I should like you to have bread, said he quite gently, —yes, but more than bread. I should like you three children to come along with me.

It seemed he was going to give us cakes and ale and possibly a handful of silver, so I was all for it. He picked up our Joe and took Dutch by her hand, which she surrendered, trusting as if he was Our Lord the shepherd and she was the sheep. Not knowing we were marching off to our Fate, we all trooped out together. I was last, which was to my advantage because on the way out I gave a loud raspberry to the bakery lady. Very satisfying it was, too, and you should have seen her face, the cow. Full of her baking, we followed the Gentleman down the street.

—I would like to bring this bread to your Mother, he says. —Where do you live?

He had a parcel with the telltale shape of fat loaves under the brown paper, so despite Mam’s instructions never to truck with strangers, there was no choice but to lead him home. For bread alone, I done it.

We walked at a brisk trot around onto Catherine Street, past Henry and Madison, Monroe and Hamilton, names of our nation’s heroes and presidents, though at that time I had no knowledge of presidents nor nations. Just these streets, with their shanty wood buildings, their flashmen and
hucksters, their carts and piles of ash overflowing the bins. The horse mess was rank under your shoes and the smell of it a bad taste up your nose. We stepped over bones and oyster shells, through the tight crowds of people, across the frozen urine slush and past the women selling rags and their cold hard bread twisted in rings. We dodged a dog with a ladder of ribs like mine, only she had pups you could tell from the teats. Soon I would be old enough, Mam said, for pups of my own, but I must remain virtuous and not be grown before my time.

At last we came to Cherry Street, where no cherry bloomed in six lifetimes. Along we went to number 128, around the mess of little boys, Michael, Sean, and Francis, pitching pennies, only instead of pennies they used pebbles. They scampered back away from the Gentleman like roaches before a light, but he only smiled. —Hello boys, he said to their stony faces. We passed the hop house, where through the doorway I seen our uncle’s brother Kevin Duffy alongside Bernice his wife, drinking theirselves stupid, and then picked our way along the bone alley over the trash, with our feet mucked up past the laces in wet ooze, to the rear tenement where we had our rooms. The wash above was hung so it blotted out the dollop of sky between the buildings. Sheets and knickers flapped off the fire escapes, the lines crossing the airshaft in a piecework ceiling of laundry. The women with their red knuckles stood scrubbing it on boards and clipping it up. It had to dry before it froze.

—It is so dark, said the Gentleman when he started up our stairs. I saw the wrinkle of his toffee nose as the smells choked him in the nostrils, the cabbage cooking and the p*** in the vestibule, the sloppers emptied right off the stair. Mackerel heads and pigeon bones was all around rotting, and McGloon’s pig rootled below amongst the peels and oyster shells. The fumes mingled with the odors of us hundredsome souls cramped in there like matches in a box, on four floors, six rooms a floor. Do the arithmetic and you will see we didn’t have no space to cross ourselves. As for the smell we did not flinch, we was used to it.

—Pardon me, the Gentleman said very genteel when he banged into Missus Duggan on her way to the saloon to fill her buckets. —Pardon me.

—F*** off you, said she. —Inless youse the cops. She laughed so her dudeen pipe fell out of her mouth, and she had to feel for it on the floor and cursed us for devils. It was a danger to be there with a Gentleman like
Mr. Brace making his way through our building. Gangs of Roach Guardsmen and garroters just for the sport of it would be glad to rob him and push him down the stairs. But this Gentleman had more than bread alone for Mother, so I brung him there. I blame myself to this day.

Mrs. Gilligan’s baby coughed and coughed. You could hear the bark of it as we passed the door next to ours. It was a runt with its eye stuck shut, a crust of yellow in the corners. Already once this year, the Gilligans had the white rag fluttering off their door for the undertaker, when their old baby died of bilious fever. —Is a child ill? the Gentleman asked, concerned as if sick kids was some new scandal out of the penny papers. We did not answer, for at last we had arrived at our own rooms.

—Shush, I said to the children, —because might be Mam is sleeping. They hushed while I pushed the door open. —Mind the bottles. The floor had many empties lying about. They were dead soldiers, our Uncle Kevin Duffy always said. It was dark as the inside of a dog. I couldn’t find a lamp, but we could hear a man’s snores.

—Who’s there? asked our visitor.

—One of the Mr. Duffys, our Uncle Michael, I said. —Also our Aunt Nan is in.

—She has a baby coming, said Dutch, full of information.

—Mother says they’s all sluiced drunks and stay clear of them, I explained. Duffys was no good even though Aunt Nan Duffy was a Muldoon, my dead father’s sister. Without Nancy Mam said we’d be on the streets, but that Michael Duffy her husband was a sot and a rover. So for seven dollars the month, it was the eight of us in the two rooms together with the terlet in the hall for six apartments, and the pump downstairs for all the souls of number 128 Cherry Street. Daily we tripped over each other and Mam said when the baby Duffy came it would be worse. Perhaps it’d die like the Gilligans’ died, though it was wrong to pray for it.

Now we guided the Gentleman past the sleeping Duffys to the back room where our mother lay on her shakedown bed. Some daylight was left coming in the windowpane, so the Gentleman could see how her cheekbones was hard plums under her skin, her brow beaded with fever.

—Mam, there’s a Gentleman to see are you all right.

She stirred and opened her eyes, the gray color of smoke. —
Macushla,
she said. —It’s you Axie,
mavourneen
.

Her words fell weakly around me like dust in sunlight. I loved her like I loved no one else.

—Missus . . . ? said the Gentleman.

—Muldoon, she whispered. —Mary Muldoon.

—I am Reverend Charles Brace of the Children’s Aid Society. The whole mouthful came out in his Fifth Avenue voice. Chahles, he said. Suh-SIGH-ettee.