“Where’s your mother?”
“She had to go to the store,” I said.
“Don’t you answer the door when someone knocks?”
I shook my head.
“Where are your manners?” he asked. “Who else visits you every Saturday?” Then he laughed. “But there’ll be boys around soon enough,” he said, looking at me more closely. “Very pretty.” He reached out and touched the ruffle. “I must be paying Patsy more than I thought.”
I flinched away from him. “Mother made this for me,” I said, almost in tears. His remark spoiled my happiness. I wished I’d never put on the dress; I wished Mother would come home; I wished he was dead.
“There there now,” he said, hitching up his light summer pants and sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Who’s your pal, eh? Who brought you that Barbie doll?”
I bit my lip and didn’t answer.
He ran his finger along the ruffle again, then smoothed the front of my dress. “I don’t have a little girl of my own, you know,” he said. “Wouldn’t have been as pretty as you anyway. Your mother now, there’s a pretty woman. I met her on a visit to the Old Country. She wasn’t much older than you, and she was one of the prettiest girls in Belfast; that’s the truth.”
He took my arm although I tried to ease away. “Come sit here for a minute,” he said. His voice sounded different, soft and sort of sticky, like something Mother would say was “too sweet to be wholesome.”
“Since your mother is out.”
“You called her,” I said, frightened by sudden knowledge. “You asked her to get something for the snack shop.”
“Did I now? And me with a car and going out anyway as I always do on a Saturday evening? Would I do such a thing?”
“You called her,” I said, stubborn despite my fear.
“You’re a clever girl,” he said, settling me on his lap. “Maybe we should send you to the sisters at St. Bridget’s. Would you like that? Wear a nice little uniform, they do. Gray blazer,” he said, running his hand down my dress again, “little maroon tie, little maroon and gray kilt, little gray kneesocks. Just to here. Wouldn’t you like that? Lots of nice Irish boys and girls at St. Bridget’s.”
I stopped trying to squirm away from him. “I like my school,” I said, “but I’d like St. Bridget’s better.”
He laughed. “I just bet you would. I just bet you would. Well, it depends if you’re good.” He was stroking my knee, and I both did and did not know what he meant. I’d heard a fair bit out on the porch on those warm evenings.
“We’d have to ask my mother,” I said.
“Oh, your mother can’t afford St. Bridget’s. Never in this life! Don’t imagine your mother can afford to send you to the sisters.”
“My mother decides,” I said.
He laughed. “Does she now?” I could see the veins in the whites of his eyes; I could smell his aftershave, and something else, a raw, dangerous smell.
“I want to get down now,” I said.
“Not yet,” he said, sliding his meaty red fingers under my dress. “Not if you want to get to St. Bridget’s.”
A minute later I started to scream.
“Shhh,” said Mr. Conklin, and when I didn’t stop, he yelled, “Shut up, shut up, you little bitch!”
I wasn’t tough like my mother. The scream wasn’t under my control, it went echoing around my head and burned between my legs and poured out like blood from a wound. I couldn’t stop, not even when he slapped me. The scream was so independent, so beyond my control, that at last it even frightened Mr. Conklin, who did up his pants and hurried down the hall and out the door.
Mother came home just minutes later. I was sitting on the bed. My dress was torn, and there was blood on my legs. Mother took one look at me, and her face went white. She wrapped her arms around me, cursing and sobbing at the same time. When she stopped, she said, “I’ll fix that bastard. He’ll never hurt you again.” Taut with anger and pain, her face was almost unrecognizable, and I was nearly as frightened of her as of Mr. Conklin. “I promise,” she said. “As God is my witness.”
“No,” I said, “no!” I had an intimation of disaster, loss, some terrible punishment. Good or bad, Mr. Conklin was the chief power in our small universe.
“You’ll see,” Mother said. “I won’t bear this.” Then she sat back on her heels and looked at me. “It’s got to be a secret. God forgive me, you’ve got to keep this a secret. The police would tell Immigration. Do you understand that? We can’t tell anyone what that bastard did.”
I nodded my head. I didn’t want to tell anyone. I had no words for what had happened. “A secret,” I said.
“A deep, dark secret,” Mother said grimly.
Sometime after ten P.M. the next Friday Mr. Conklin died behind his fast food restaurant. A stab wound stopped his heart so suddenly that he was dead before he hit the pavement. The papers made much of the speed of his passing, and for years I carried an image of Mr. Conklin tumbled like a large, ungainly bird from the sky and dying in mid-fall.
That night my mother was late coming home from work. The city sounds made me nervous — the sudden shrieks and eerie lights of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances, the accelerating hot rods with their booming radios, the hoarse, quarrelsome voices of men drifting back from the bars — and I was still awake at eleven o’clock when I heard her footsteps. I ran to unlock the door.
Mother’s weary face was bloodless. “I’m sorry I’m so late, darling,” she said. “I had to wait and lock up. Mr. Conklin didn’t come back from making the night deposit.”
“I hope he never comes back,” I said.
Mother gave me a sharp look. “Be careful what you wish for,” she said, then she went into the bedroom and began to pack our cases.
Mr. Conklin looked out at us from the morning paper. His picture made him seem younger and more benevolent than he ever looked in life. The accompanying story told us about his violent end. I was thrilled and horrified by his death, by the unlooked-for fame of one of our acquaintances. These were sensational and superficial emotions, but I was genuinely sorry and frightened about leaving our apartment.
“My job’s gone,” Mother explained. “We don’t exist. There never were any papers, agreements.”
I asked about school, about the park chorus, our concerts; Mother looked me in the face and shook her head. I felt suspicion dawn in a shiver of anxiety that grew stronger when we caught the morning bus to Boston without saying goodbye to anyone, not even to Annie. Once in Boston, the MTA took us to the South End, where we started calling ourselves Malloy instead of O’Brien and quietly disappeared into the Irish community. We put down a security deposit on a shabby apartment, and a very distant relative of Mother’s found her a job in a sweatshop sewing curtains.
That fall I attended a real urban school, where I learned to smoke and swear and became outwardly tough. Inside I was frightened of a lot of things, all related to secrets and to July: men, sex, sudden death, Immigration. Underneath were even deeper fears, more terrible because unacknowledged: the fear of guilt, police, and discovery; the fear, worst of all, of being separated from Mother, whose protection, I sensed, was both sure and terrible.
It was several years before I learned that my particular horrors were not unique. Fear and loss were the common experiences of my classmates, and the art of keeping secrets was so essential to our survival that, though we could not forget old fears, we could push them down relentlessly. I put away my suspicions and learned to live with ambiguity. When I graduated from high school, I joined the army, where I became a citizen and trained as a nurse. Amid the suffering of others I at last grew really tough, tough enough to ask Mother the question that had haunted my youth.