They were all leaning over their laps as they liked to do, their arms tucked under their knees, their skirts tucked up against their thighs to keep their underwear out of view. They called to me, and with the penny in my fist and no intention of going into the church alone, I joined them. There was a stirring of bare legs, socks and shoes, and raw knees as they made room. I sat on a low step, tucking my own skirt under my lap while the other girls leaned down to ask if I had heard the news. They were breathless as they spoke, and even those who said nothing, who only leaned to listen, held their mouths carefully, as if they felt the words as an ache in their teeth and their jaws.
On her wedding night, they whispered, Dora Ryan discovered that the man she had married wasn’t a man at all.
Was a woman, they said. A woman dressed up like a man.
Their astonishment was all in their mouths and their jaws. They leaned forward, their chins over their knees. Some of them had freckles, and some of them had chapped lips or pimples or sharp breath. Some were pretty, or bound to be. Someone’s teeth were chattering, as if with the cold. But there was delight in it, too. In what they were saying, a giddy shifting in their eyes, a mad pride of sorts, pride in how strange and terrible life might prove to be. They hugged their thighs against their chests. Down the street, the boys were cheering in thin voices.
I shook my head. I wished above all that Gerty were there to turn to.
“How could that be?” I said. “Who would do such a thing?”
But there wasn’t a single girl among them who was as smart as Gertrude Hanson. They shifted their feet around me. They frowned, looked to one another with shallow and delighted eyes, eyes that just skimmed over the surface of things without understanding. A mean trick was the best they could come up with: simple meanness, a mean schoolyard trick, the best explanation they could offer. A lousy mean trick to pull on poor fat Dora Ryan, a woman pretending to be a man, dressing up like a man and fooling her right through her wedding day. Standing in front of the priest like that. Kissing her on the lips. Putting her hand on Dora Ryan’s hand when they cut the wedding cake together. And then laughing, the way they figured it, laughing right in her face when they took off their clothes.
Which led to further speculation still, about the matter of a wedding night and the shedding of clothes. A matter mysterious and complicated to us all, in those days, but now with sheer meanness added to the vague and various possibilities of what went on between women and men.
While the girls were talking, a taxi pulled to the curb in front of my house. My mother got out first, then gave her hand to help my father, whose face was hidden by the brim of his hat, but whose legs, I could tell, were weak and watery. The girls watched silently, their attention drawn by the cab, the extravagance of it.
There was a ditty we said, skipping rope: A rich man takes a taxi, a poor man takes the train, a hobo walks the train tracks, but gets there just the same. One of the girls behind me began to say it now, all singsong, poking me in the back as I watched my parents climb the steps together.
“Marie’s momma must be rich,” another said.
They felt free to tease me, I knew, because Gerty wasn’t there. Because Gerty wasn’t there, I was alone among them.
I put my fist to my mouth, leaning across my lap. I could taste the bitter, metallic scent of the old penny in my hand. Had Gerty been there, the two of us, best friends, would have joined arms, tossed our heads, turned away. Instead, I merely, briefly, closed my eyes.
Dinnertime was approaching and the boys in the street began to disperse, each departure marked by the hollow, melancholy echo of a broomstick hitting the pavement. Something restless stirred among the girls, some anger, some meanness that teasing me hadn’t satisfied. With the day coming to an end, a halfhearted proposal went up among them about walking around to the Ryans’ house. Walking around to Dora Ryan’s house with the hope of maybe meeting her coming home from the subway, or seeing her at a window, with the veil of a lace curtain over her shamed face.
The older girls led the way, leaving the stoop, crossing the street. I trailed after with my penny. Two of them stopped to whisper to some of the boys just leaving the game. I heard one of the boys say, “Go on,” and knew that Dora Ryan’s catastrophe had been conveyed. Passing behind Bill Corrigan in his kitchen chair, the same two girls ran their hands over the shoulders of his suit jacket and said, “Hello there, Billy,” languidly, nearly laughing. Bill Corrigan raised his big hand, raised his chin into the air, twisting his head a bit to look at us from beneath his scarred eyelids. I could see his pale eyes searching. Then Walter Hartnett, who sat on the curb at Bill Corrigan’s feet, looked over his shoulder and said, “Get lost.” One of the girls hissed, “Gimp,” and Walter said, “Scram,” sneering, but turning away again.
We walked on to Dora Ryan’s house. We stood across the street and studied the blank windows. The air was still damp and humid, the colorless sky felt like a dome over the neighborhood. After only a few minutes, one of the girls whispered, “She’s hiding.” We paused silently, as if waiting for some affirmation of this—a hand to a stirred curtain, a shadow behind the glass. My eyes fell to the garbage cans beside the basement door. I was hoping to see, perhaps, a torn piece of bridal veil or a white stocking waving from beneath a battered lid.
I thought of Dora’s happy wedding, her satin shoes and the rice and the smiling wedding guests. I wondered if her happiness could have been preserved if the bride and groom had merely stayed in their clothes.
“So now she’ll have to try to meet someone else,” one of the older girls said solemnly.
There was a chorus of whispered, even sympathetic “Yeahs,” their cruel energies suddenly abating. I heard myself say, “My heart goes out to her,” imitating my mother. There was a brief silence, and then, reluctantly, it seemed, one by one, the girls began to agree. “Oh yeah,” someone said. “Mine, too.” “Poor thing.”
There was nothing else to do but go home. We turned away and slowly began to disperse, so that by the time I approached my own house, I was alone again. My brother was just coming down the front steps, moving quickly, his cap on and his mouth set. He threw up his hands when he saw me. On the sidewalk, he took my elbow. “Where have you been?’ he said. “I told you to come right home.”
Inside, climbing the stairs, he said, “Did you go to church?” and I wasn’t quick enough to think of a lie. “No,” I said.
He paused on the landing in front of our door. He took off his cap and ran his hand over his thick hair, our father’s gesture altogether. “Was that the truth?” he said. He said it firmly. “About the lady wanting you to go light a candle?”
“Yes,” I said.
Gabe took the penny from my palm. He put his cap back on, raising his chin as he did, looking in the dim hallway light resolved and resourceful. “What did she ask you to pray for?” he said. I shrugged. I could not call up the phrase. “Safe travels to New Jersey,” I said. “For Gerty.”
Gabe’s eyes moved in a way that reminded me of the fat woman on the stair, reading my face. “All right,” he said, reading everything there. “Go on in. If Daddy wakes up, tell him I’ll be home in a jiff.” And he turned back down the stairs.
I waited until the outside door had closed before I entered the apartment. There was immediately the faint odor of my father’s having been sick. I found my mother in the bathroom, leaning over the sink, throwing cold water on her face. Throughout her life, this was my mother’s second-best antidote—after prayer—for pain and suffering: go throw cold water on your face.
I slipped behind her, sat on the narrow edge of the bathtub. My mother was still dressed in her dark suit jacket and skirt, her going-into-the-city clothes, even when she just went in to fetch my father home whenever a message came to the house, usually from Mr. Lee at the candy store or from Mr. Fagin at the funeral parlor—the two neighborhood establishments that accepted phone calls for those of us who didn’t yet have a phone—a message that said he was under the weather.