Margie used to think she’d like to have him to take to bed with her like a doll. She said that and Agnes and Fred laughed and laughed at her so that she felt awful ashamed.
But what she liked best at Holland’s Beach was the vaudeville theater. They’d go in there and the crowds and laughs and racket would die away as the big padded doors closed behind them. There’d be a movingpicture going on when they went in. She didn’t like that much, but what she liked best in all the world were the illustrated songs that came next, the pictures of lovely ladies and gentlemen in colors like tinted flowers and such lovely dresses and big hats and the words with pansies and forgetmenots around them and the lady or gentleman singing them to the dark theater. There were always boats on ripply streams and ladies in lovely dresses being helped out of them, but not like at Broad Channel where it was so glary and there was nothing but mudflats and the slimysmelly piles and the boatlanding lying on the ooze when the tide went out, but lovely blue ripply rivers with lovely green banks and weepingwillowtrees hanging over them. After that it was vaudeville. There were acrobats and trained seals and men in straw hats who told funny jokes and ladies that danced. The Merry Widow Girls it was once, in their big black hats tipped up so wonderfully on one side and their sheathdresses and trains in blue and green and purple and yellow and orange and red, and a handsome young man in a cutaway coat waltzing with each in turn.
The trouble with going to Holland’s Beach was that Fred would meet friends there and keep going in through swinging doors and coming back with his eyes bright and a smell of whiskey and pickled onions on his breath, and halfway through the good time, Margie would see that worried meek look coming over Agnes’s face, and then she’d know that there would be no more fun that day. The last time they all went over together to the beach they lost Fred although they looked everywhere for him, and had to go home without him. Agnes sobbed so loud that everybody stared at her on the train and Ed Otis the conductor who was a friend of Fred’s came over and tried to tell her not to take on so, but that only made Agnes sob the worse. Margie was so ashamed she decided to run away or kill herself as soon as she got home so that she wouldn’t have to face the people on the train ever again.
That time Fred didn’t turn up the next day the way he usually did. Joe Hines came in to say that a guy had told him he’d seen Fred on a bat over in Brooklyn and that he didn’t think he’d come home for a while. Agnes made Margie go to bed and she could hear her voice and Joe Hines’s in the kitchen talking low for hours. Margie woke up with a start to find Agnes in her nightgown getting into bed with her. Her cheeks were fiery hot and she kept saying, “Imagine his nerve and him a miserable trackwalker… Margie… We can’t stand this life any more, can we, little girl?”
“I bet he’d come here fussing, the dreadful old thing,” said Margie.
“Something like that… Oh, it’s too awful, I can’t stand it any more. God knows I’ve worked my fingers to the bone.”
Margie suddenly came out with, “Well, when the cat’s away the mice will play,” and was surprised at how long Agnes laughed though she was crying too.
In September just when Agnes was fixing up Margie’s dresses for the opening of school, the rentman came round for the quarter’s rent. All they’d heard from Fred was a letter with a fivedollar bill in it. He said he’d gotten into a fight and gotten arrested and spent two weeks in jail but that he had a job now and would be home as soon as he’d straightened things out a little. But Margie knew they owed the five dollars and twelve dollars more for groceries. When Agnes came back into the kitchen from talking to the rentman with her face streaky and horrid with crying, she told Margie that they were going into the city to live. “I always told Fred Dowling the day would come when I couldn’t stand it any more. Now he can make his own home after this.”
It was a dreadful day when they got their two bags and the awful old dampeaten trunk up to the station with the help of Joe Hines, who was always doing odd jobs for Agnes when Fred was away, and got on the train that took them into Brooklyn. They went to Agnes’s father’s and mother’s, who lived in the back of a small paperhanger’s store on Fulton Street under the el. Old Mr. Fisher was a paperhanger and plasterer and the whole house smelt of paste and turpentine and plaster. He was a small little grey man and Mrs. Fisher was just like him except that he had drooping grey mustaches and she didn’t. They fixed up a cot for Margie in the parlor but she could see that they thought she was a nuisance. She didn’t like them either and hated it in Brooklyn.
It was a relief when Agnes said one evening when she came home before supper looking quite stylish, Margie thought, in her city clothes, that she’d taken a position as cook with a family on Brooklyn Heights and that she was going to send Margie to the Sisters’ this winter.
Margie was a little scared all the time she was at the convent, from the minute she went in the door of the greystone vestibule with a whitemarble figure standing up in the middle of it. Margie hadn’t ever had much religion, and the Sisters were scary in their dripping black with their faces and hands looking so pale always edged with white starched stuff, and the big dark church full of candles and the catechismclass and confession, and the way the little bell rang at mass for everybody to close their eyes when the Saviour came down among angels and doves in a glare of amber light onto the altar. It was funny, after the way Agnes had let her run round the house without any clothes on, that when she took her bath once a week the Sister made her wear a sheet right in the tub and even soap herself under it.
The winter was a long slow climb to Christmas, and after all the girls had talked about what they’d do at Christmas so much Margie’s Christmas was awful, a late gloomy dinner with Agnes and the old people and only one or two presents. Agnes looked pale, she was deadtired from getting the Christmas dinner for the people she worked for. She did bring a net stocking full of candy and a pretty goldenhaired dolly with eyes that opened and closed, but Margie felt like crying. Not even a tree. Already sitting at the table she was busy making up things to tell the other girls anyway.
Agnes was just kissing her goodnight and getting ready putting on her little worn furpiece to go back to Brooklyn Heights when Fred came in very much under the influence and wanted to take them all out on a party. Of course they wouldn’t go and he went away mad and Agnes went away crying, and Margie lay awake half the night on the cot made up for her in the old people’s parlor thinking how awful it was to be poor and have a father like that.
It was dreary, too, hanging round the old people’s house while the vacation lasted. There was no place to play and they scolded her for the least little thing. It was bully to get back to the convent where there was a gym and she could play basketball and giggle with the other girls at recess. The winter term began to speed up towards Easter. Just before, she took her first communion. Agnes made the white dress for her and all the Sisters rolled up their eyes and said how pretty and pure she looked with her golden curls and blue eyes like an angel, and Minette Hardy, an older girl with a snubnose, got a crush on her and used to pass her chocolatepeppermints in the playground wrapped in bits of paper with little messages scrawled on them: To Goldilocks with love from her darling Minette, and things like that.
She hated it when commencement came, and there was nothing about summer plans she could tell the other girls. She grew fast that summer and got gawky and her breasts began to show. The stuffy gritty hot weather dragged on endlessly at the Fishers’. It was awful there cooped up with the old people. Old Mrs. Fisher never let her forget that she wasn’t really Agnes’s little girl and that she thought it was silly of her daughter to support the child of a noaccount like Fred. They tried to get her to do enough housework to pay for her keep and every day there were scoldings and tears and tantrums.