Water Street

  Thomas wondered how he could slide out of the kitchen without anyone noticing, but Annie put her hand on his shoulder and shook her head.

  Bird was taking down the plates and spreading them around the table. He saw that her hands were trembling, and Mrs. Mallon, who was bringing food to the table, had tears in her eyes.

  “Bad enough to have to pay for a window—” Mr. Mallon said as they sat.

  “I'll pay for it,” Hughie broke in. “Don't worry about that. I don't need you to give me money.”

  “But the disgrace of going down to the station house to bring you home.”

  “You didn't have to come for me,” Hughie said. “They'd have let me out sooner or later.”

  “Yes,” Annie said with bitterness. “You should have left him there to think about things.”

  Hughie glanced up at her. “You get harder every day, Annie.”

  “How can you talk to your sister like that?” Mr. Mallon raised his hand and then dropped it on the table.

  “I won't talk to anyone.” Hughie stood up and his chair went over.

  “If you think you're going out this night, you're wrong.” Mr. Mallon stepped back to stand against the door. “You won't get past me.”

  Thomas looked down at the plate Annie had put in his hand. He could feel his heart thumping. What was Hughie going to do? He was younger and stronger than Mr. Mallon and they all knew it.

  “I'm not going out tonight,” Hughie said. “I just want some peace myself—nowhere to go but this bed in the kitchen and the bit of space in the cellar. I hate it, all of it.”

  Mr. Mallon stood aside and Thomas listened as Hughie went down the steps. Thomas ate, feeling as if everyone's eyes were on him, as if everyone was wondering what he was doing there. No one seemed to notice him, though.

  Mr. Mallon barely touched his dinner. Finally he stood up and put on his cap and jacket. “I'm going for a walk, Nory,” he said. “Do you mind?”

  “Go.” She reached out and touched his arm. “We've been through worse. We'll get through this, you'll see.”

  Thomas waited until Mr. Mallon was gone; then he put his plate on the counter and slipped out. “Thank you,” he said, not looking at any of them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  {THOMAS}

  Thomas had never been in the cellar before. It smelled damp, and as he passed the coal bin, he could smell the dust of it. He went slowly, not sure if Hughie would mind. Hadn't he acted as if he wanted to get away from everybody?

  But Thomas thought about being alone. Sometimes that was worse than anything.

  He heard Hughie punching at the bag in the small room in back, and then there was silence. He passed the storage rooms, and saw the crack of light at the end of the dark passageway. He didn't want to call out, but still he wanted Hughie to know he was there, so he made sure to bang into the cans that held the ashes from the furnace.

  “Is that you, Thomas?” Hughie called, and shoved the door open with his foot.

  “How did you know?”

  “I thought you'd be along somehow.”

  A bench stood along the wall, with cracked leather on top, and Thomas slid onto it. Now that he was there he almost felt foolish. There was nothing he could say. But maybe he wouldn't have to. Maybe he could just sit there for a few minutes.

  Hughie gave the bag one last punch, then banged it against the wall with his elbow and sank down on the mat on the floor. “Why do I do it? Is that what you want to ask?”

  Thomas shook his head. “No, I never thought about that.”

  “I've thought about it forever. If I were on a farm somewhere, working in a field, I wouldn't care how hard I'd have to work.” Hughie put his head back against the wall. “Do you know what it was like working in that caisson under the river? Closed in, knowing the water was just inches away, deep underneath.” He shuddered. “But I thought if I had the money—”

  Thomas swallowed, thinking of what it would be like to write about that, almost suffocating in that place, afraid of the water coming in, but trying to hold on for one more hour, one more day.

  “The disease finished me,” Hughie said. “I couldn't go back. I knew I might die of it.” He spread his large hands. “A coward.”

  “I couldn't do it either,” Thomas said. “Never.”

  “I think you could,” Hughie said. “I think you could do anything you had to do.”

  No one had ever said anything like that to him. Was this what it would have been like if he'd had a brother? He'd write those words down: “I think you could do anything you had to do.”

  He'd remember it when Pop didn't come in for half the night, for when he had to go looking for him.

  “Now listen, Thomasy. Isn't that what your father calls you? I'm going to fight until someone stops me, or bashes in my head. I'm going to fight until I get the money for a farm.”

  “Your mother wants a farm,” Thomas said.

  “Ma doesn't want a farm, not really. She wants to stay here and do exactly what she's doing.”

  Thomas nodded. Maybe that was true.

  Hughie stood up and punched the bag. “Come on, I'll show you how to do this.”

  Thomas stood up and tried, surprised at how hard it was. He kept working at it, though.

  “Just don't tell my little sister you're doing this,” Hughie said. “What a fierce one she is.”

  Thomas looked over his shoulder. “Do you think I don't know that?”

  They both laughed, and after a while Thomas felt the rhythm of it, one fist and then the other, the bag moving back and forth between them, back and forth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  {BIRD}

  Bird was sitting at the kitchen table reading Sister Raymond's book when Annie came out of the bedroom. “Look what I found in the bottom drawer.”

  It was the cure book. Bird had shoved it in the bottom dresser drawer weeks ago. But Annie was waiting to see how pleased she'd be.

  Annie would never be pretty, but standing in the doorway smiling, with the blue shawl she'd just knitted thrown around her shoulders, she must have looked like Aunt Celia had when she was young, and sometimes Aunt Celia was beautiful.

  “Thank you,” Bird said, as if she'd been wondering where the book was all this time, but that didn't seem enough. “I didn't remember where I put it.”

  She could feel Mama's eyes on her as she riffled through it: dill weed, foxglove, garlic and honey for a cough. And on one page she'd written two Irish cures: coal from a turf fire held under the nose stopped sneezing, and praying ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys healed shingles, a painful skin ailment.

  She read it aloud to Annie, and Mama laughed. “Having the wee folk on your side is supposed to be good for any disease, especially the impossible ones.”

  Bird could feel the color come into her face: impossible.

  Mama waited until Annie was down the stairs on her way to do the shopping. Then she pulled out a chair and sat next to her at the table.

  “We could do another one,” Mama said. “Just in case you change your mind.”

  It was the closest Mama had come to saying anything to her about nursing in all this time.

  She looked up quickly, but Mama went on. “How about onion for bee sting?”

  Head down, Bird wrote as Mama told her how it was used: cut the onion until it oozed, and it was the ooze rubbed on the spot that took the sting out.

  “The bee probably dies of the smell if he stays around,” Bird said, trying to make Mama laugh.

  But what good did it do her to know how to take the pain out of a bee sting? What good was it to know that a warm flannel placed on the neck helped the pain of a sore throat?

  It wasn't enough. None of it was enough.

  Mama's hand was on her wrist.

  She felt the tears on her cheeks, and kept staring down at the book, until it seemed as if they'd been sitting there forever.

  “I wanted …,” she began at last, spreading her hands out.

&nbsp
; “Don't you think I know what's in your head?” Mama leaned forward. “We all have doubts. Always.”

  Bird gave a shake of her head. “I can't.”

  “What can I say to you, child?” Mama said. “If this isn't what you want, there are so many other things you can do. It's a big world out there; nothing's impossible. It's not like the Old Country, where we spent our days searching for food, when that was the only thing on our minds from the time we awoke in the morning until the sun went down in the sea.”

  Bird closed her eyes. She had a quick picture in her mind of Mama walking through the streets, the medicine bag over her arm. “I'll never know enough.”

  Mama sighed. “None of us will ever know enough, and some problems can't be cured. We just have to do the best we can—”

  There was a quick rap on the door.

  Mama didn't let go of her hand. “I will tell you this, Bird. I will never be disappointed in what you do. But I think you have a wonderful way with patients. I think—”

  The knock came again.

  “Thomas,” they said together. Bird had completely forgotten she had promised to walk to the bridge with him this afternoon.

  Worse, it had been her own idea.

  She reached back to turn the knob, then went for her coat. As she stood in the kitchen doorway pulling on her hat, Thomas leaned over Mama's plants. “This one's growing strong.”

  “Geranium,” Mama said.

  Bird pulled on her coat, feeling sadness deep in her chest, remembering the day the baby had been born. She'd never have that again.

  Thomas was still talking to Mama. He would have stood there talking to her for a half hour and Mama wouldn't have minded one bit.

  Bird took a good look at him. His shoes were scuffed much worse than hers. Had he even combed his hair today? Two buttons were missing from his coat, and he held the whole thing together with one arm crossed over the other.

  It didn't take much to use a needle and thread. But then she smiled at herself for being such a know-it-all. Last night she'd tried crocheting a collar, and Annie'd had to rip out the first three rows of the lace because she had made so many mistakes.

  She sighed. “Just let me get the button jar. I'll sew on those buttons.”

  “Never mind,” he said, embarrassed, but she made a face. She told herself she was going to die of the heat in her own coat as she rummaged in the jar for two of Hughie's old buttons and sewed them on. Where was his mother? Where was that Lillie, taking herself through Europe with her pearls and her buffed nails while her son was such a mess?

  She handed the jacket back to Thomas.

  “Thanks, Eldrida,” he said as they went down the stairs.

  She raised her hand. “Never mind.”

  Outside, they walked along Water Street toward the bridge. “Does your mother write to you?” she blurted out.

  He was running a stick over the wroughtiron railings. The clatter of it was irritating, but everything seemed too quiet when he stopped.

  At first he didn't answer. That gave her time to feel sorry for asking.

  “She—” He began to run the stick over the railings again. “She's very busy, but—”

  They crossed the street to get closer to the bridge, and perched there on the end of a pile of wood. Mounds of debris rose around them, chunks of granite, bent nails as wide as her thumbs, and dusty rocks. They watched the barges going up the river, the froth of their wakes white and cold, and then shaded their eyes to look at the towers, one on the Brooklyn side, the other on the Manhattan side, and in between them men in their small swings, working on the cables that would hold the roadbed up.

  A woman in a garnet skirt and black shawl went past, and Bird nudged Thomas. “That's the woman who's finishing the bridge. Her name is Emily, Mrs. Roebling.”

  Thomas nodded. He pulled his book out of his pocket and began to write. Bird tried to look over his shoulder, but a pale sun was in her eyes. All she could see was that most of the page was filled with his scrawl, and that her name was at the top.

  She leaned closer, but he reached out and held her wrist the way Mama had a little while ago. “I'll show it to you someday,” he said. “But not now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  {BIRD}

  For lunch Saturday they'd had boiled potatoes with snips of chives from Thomas's plant, and butter dripping onto the plate. Annie was working a half day at the factory, and Mama had left to take the trolley to visit Aunt Celia. Bird didn't know where Hughie was, but for once she wasn't going to worry about him. She had a whole scoop of time free to read.

  But first she stood at the kitchen window angling her head to look at the top of the bridge tower. Even though she couldn't see it very well, she knew that the top was crowded with men—maybe seventy or eighty of them, Da said. “It's cold up there, Birdie. And the wind! It roars across that great height.”

  Mrs. Daley had had something to say about that wind, her arms crossed over her chest. “Men have been killed that way. A shame and a waste for a bridge that will never work.”

  Bird went over to the table. She was halfway through Sister Raymond's book. It was about the terrible famine in Ireland thirty years earlier. It was Mama's famine, she realized, Da's famine. She thought of Da saying, “Ah, Bird, you'll never really know what it was like. How far we've come.”

  The downstairs door opened. Bird put her finger between the pages of the book, listening to the footsteps: too heavy for Thomas's, too light for Annie's, too steady for Mr. Neary's.

  The knock came on their door, more a scratch than a knock. Bird pulled it open, startling the girl waiting there. She wasn't much older than Annie, but already there was the beginning of a line between her eyebrows. She had the Viking color of the people from the west of Ireland, and Bird could hear Mama's brogue in her voice. “Are you the healer?”

  Bird shook her head. “I'm sorry, she's not here.”

  “You go with her sometimes, don't you?” the girl said. “I saw you last summer in the street, carrying her bag.” She leaned forward. “I know you do.”

  Bird swallowed. “No, I can't.” From the doorway, she could see Thomas on the stairs looking down at them.

  “I'll pay you.” The line between the girl's eyebrows deepened. “Just what we've always paid your mother. Really, I will.” The girl gripped Bird's arm so hard she felt the pain of it. “You have to come.”

  “No. I can't help.” Bird raised her shoulders helplessly, her hands out. “You'll have to get the doctor.” But as she said it she could see Thomas on the landing now, shaking his head, reminding her that they had seen the doctor driving his horses hard a few hours ago. He'd never be back in his office yet.

  “They will die then.” The girl's mouth was chapped, tight and pinched, her skin dry. Mama would say she looked woebegone, but as Bird looked at her eyes, the word she thought of was desperate.

  “Bird,” Thomas said.

  For a moment she looked up at him; then she asked, “Who is it that's sick?”

  “Just come,” the girl said. “My baby sister—”

  “But your mother … Isn't your mother there?”

  “She's sick. Please.”

  Bird still might not have gone, but she thought of Mary Bridget that summer day, the happiest day she could remember. And Thomas was still standing there, and she knew he wanted her to go. “Wait,” she said. “Just—”

  She went to the coat stand and leaned her head against the wooden bar. She couldn't do this. She knew she couldn't. But then with her heart pounding hard enough so she felt it in her throat, she reached for her coat, her hat, and pulled open the kitchen drawer for the cure book, spilling out knives and spoons. It wasn't there.

  She hurried into her room to search under the bed, and to push back the closet curtain to see if she had left it on the floor. Always missing, that book, but she told herself she knew every line of it by heart. She decided to go without it.

  Thomas was at the doorway now. “I'll go with you,
and wait outside.”

  Thomas. Always there.

  Downstairs there was a line at the bakery door. Sullivan had fresh bread, and there was a tray of Annie's cookies in the window. Bird threaded her way around the women.

  It was an easy walk: three blocks down, one over, and the girl began to talk as they crossed the street. “I don't know what's the matter,” she said. “My mother is sick, my sister, my brother.”

  “Three of them?” Bird's voice didn't sound like her own. “How sick?”

  The girl didn't answer.

  How was she going to do that, take care of three of them? She cut off the thought as the girl went on. “They have fever. They're burning up, I've covered them, kept them warm, but their faces—” She waved a chapped hand in front of her own face. “And myself—”

  Bird took a quick look at her, but she seemed healthy, her cheeks rosy, her eyes clear. Stay healthy, she told the girl in her head.

  The family lived on the first floor. As they went up the steps in front, Bird caught a glimpse of someone in a bed near the window.

  “I'll be right here, Bird,” Thomas said, sitting on the stoop and pulling out his writing book.

  The apartment inside could have been the Mallons' except there was only one bedroom. The little boy and his mother were in the bed together, the boy's arms flung out, one of them across his mother's body, blotches of red across his face.

  A flat rash, red. Scarlet fever. She knew it right away. She remembered Mama at the kitchen table talking about rashes: chicken pox, smallpox, measles, ringworm.

  Scarlet fever.

  The mother and the boy didn't seem to know Bird and the girl were there, and even when the girl said, “I've brought help,” they didn't open their eyes.

  Help. What help could she be?

  She stared down at them. Anyone could see how sick they were. “Where is the baby?”