Rosie said: I remember that.
Louis said: And you liked that about me.
Rosie said: I loved that about you.
Louis said: Everybody hear that?
We all said we heard it.
Louis said: So, Mazie, you sick?
I said: No, I’m not sick. I’m pregnant.
Louis said: Mazel tov. A new member of the family. What a blessing. Now let’s let her get to bed. She’s tired.
It’s not as simple as that, though. And we all know it. I hear Rosie in the other room right now talking about how I don’t want a baby, how I’ve never wanted a baby, how there’s no mother in me. And why her and not me. And why is life this way and not the other.
And she’s right.
Louis says: Sometimes blessings are indiscriminate.
I whisper: Good night.
Mazie’s Diary, October 22, 1918
Rosie brought me lunch today at the cage, between the first and second shows. It was a bowl of beef stew. She walked it all the way from our home. Brought me a spoon and a napkin and everything. That spoon was shined up nice. And she nearly tucked that napkin right into my blouse till I slapped her hand away.
I said: What do you want?
She said: We need to talk about it.
I said: Can’t you see I’m working here?
She said: I know you don’t want it.
She doesn’t know anything. I don’t want it, it’s true. But sometimes I think about the Captain and then I do. I never wanted anything to love before. It’s all mashed up in my head. All I’m doing is crying when no one’s looking.
She said: But I do want it. I want this baby. Have this baby for me, Mazie. For me and Louis. Give us the baby. We can all live together and be one family.
How desperate was my Rosie? I was thinking about that time she took us to the gypsy, all those months she spent on the couch all clutched up in pain. Today she looked just as desperate, but now there was an extra layer of fire. She was nearly murderous.
I said: You can have it.
She was looking at me so steadily I thought she might break in two, two Rosies collapsing before me on Park Row.
She said: Are you sure?
I said that I was. She finally gasped. And then I did, too. I guess I’ve been holding it in for months and months, what was happening, what I’ve been thinking. What was I going to do, I didn’t know that whole time. But now I know. One kind of choice over another, it didn’t matter. But at least with this one I please someone else.
Mazie’s Diary, October 28, 1918
Rosie says I can wear an overcoat to work every day and no one on the streets will be able to see my tummy. Rosie says I’ll be behind a counter in the cage all day and no one will ever know and that won’t ruin my reputation and someday a nice man will still want to marry me. Rosie says I’ve got to go straight to work and home again and get plenty of rest and she’ll bring me meals every day to make sure I’m well fed. Rosie says that I’ve got to cut down on the drinking and the smoking so this baby will be born healthy and strong. Rosie says Rosie says Rosie says.
George Flicker
I remember my mother telling me, “She thinks we didn’t know? We knew.”
Mazie’s Diary, October 31, 1918
Now there’s a lot of talk in this house. New kinds of talk. There’s no room for a baby in this apartment, Rosie keeps saying. We got more room than anyone on this block, says Louis. Rosie wants a house somewhere far away in the country, but Louis says it’s impossible with all his business dealings. What about Coney Island, that’s the newest talk this morning. What about living near the ocean? Jeanie says she’d die if she lived far away from the city. Rosie tells her if she gets married she can live anywhere she likes. We sit around the kitchen table and plot. I light a cigarette, and Rosie pulls it from my fingers. This is what we are doing now, every day. Talking.
Mazie’s Diary, November 1, 1918
Twenty-one years old today. Old enough to do anything I like.
Mazie’s Diary, November 3, 1918
I know that I’m supposed to feel something alive inside of me but it feels only like a weight I have to carry with me wherever I go.
Mazie’s Diary, November 5, 1918
Rosie puts her cold hands on my warm belly at night. She says I warm her up. She says it’s like I’m her furnace. She stares at my belly. She wonders what it looks like on the other side. She holds her hands there until I tell her to stop.
Mazie’s Diary, November 7, 1918
They announced the end of the war today and the whole city cheered at once. I’ve never seen anything like it. I probably won’t again in my lifetime. The end of the war! We shut down the Venice. No one was bothering with the pictures today. I roamed the streets with Jeanie and Ethan. One parade bled into another. People kissing and hugging on the corners. Bottles of booze in the air. Children with lollies in one hand and balloons in the other. I couldn’t stop laughing for nothing, none of us could. It was one kind of relief at last. Do you see this, I whispered to myself, but I knew I was talking to my belly.
By the time we made it home though, the radio was saying it was a fake armistice. We had a party for nothing.
Mazie’s Diary, November 11, 1918
Today the war was really over. The papers said so. No more war. I can’t believe the whole city celebrated again, but they did. Any excuse. We laughed all day, but then tonight we cried. Too exhausted to be anything but grateful.
I never believed these words could come out of my mouth, but I’m ready for the party to be over.
Benjamin Hazzard, Jr.
I suppose I had this idea that I might try to seduce her, or toy with her. In my devastation from his death she seemed to be at fault for something. I was nineteen years old — that’s a good age to blame the wrong people for your problems.
I wanted to see her face. That I know. I had seen some of the others. A few women from the club, these boozy, bored wives, and there had also been this young widow down the block who was constantly breaking things in her house that only my father could fix, of course. And I am nearly certain he slept with my seventh-grade math teacher, although I’ll never be able to confirm it.
But she seemed mythic to me. The woman from New York. The famous Mazie Phillips. She’d been in the papers. He’d met all manner of politicians and war heroes, and he was an important part of the Republican Party in Connecticut. But Mazie was a real celebrity to him, and she had known him in his prime, during that war, the one he had actually fought in as opposed to watching Stateside. Everything after that war bored him, I suspect. Or maybe he really loved her. He could have loved her. I’ll never know that either.
I’ll tell you, I plumb my feelings regularly, but I can’t seem to define this moment precisely, though I can see it in my mind, everything about it. I had a bottle of whiskey at my side in the car, and the more I drank the less upset I became. My sadness began to solidify into an angry darkness. I arrived at the theater at midday. There she was in her ticket booth. I stood in line and waited my turn. She waited for me to say something and I had prepared nothing. The whole car ride there I’d just been having a conversation with my father in my head instead.
Then she said, “Step aside if you’re not buying a ticket, kid.” I was a kid then. I was nineteen years old. I said, “Are you Mazie Phillips?” She said, “Yeah, who’s asking?” I said, “I’m the son of Benjamin Hazzard.” She didn’t say anything, but she lit a cigarette. And then all I could do is blurt out that my father was dead. And then I remember this vision so specifically I can squint my eyes right now and see it: This quiver started in her hand, the one that was holding the cigarette, and the cigarette began to shake, and then this quiver sort of rolled through her body if that makes sense, all the way up to her face, and then she began to cry.