“Only a few days ago Jane said I was flighty-brained and nearly useless. Of course, I had just dropped a roll of ribbon on her head.”
“Everyone makes mistakes. But you shouldn’t be too hard on Jane for these sudden bursts of exasperation. It cannot be easy living the way your friend Jane does, forced to care for that failure of a junkman brother of hers. I buy dross gold from him for fillings; I think sometimes I’m the only customer he has. I’m certain it’s your Jane who brings most of the income into that sibling household. Alas, with her plain looks and unpredictable disposition, she’s probably saddled to him and to near-impoverishment for the rest of her days.”
“Jane will find someone, Papa — someone who will deliver her from her present circumstances. You’ll see. She isn’t pretty, but there are men who won’t mind such a thing either on account of their own deficient looks or because she’s smart and would be an asset in a certain kind of marriage — one built on mutual respect.”
“You sound like a suffragette.”
Michael Osborne pinched his daughter’s nose affectionately, leaving a small dollop of white shaving lather there. As she was dabbing the spot away with her handkerchief, he toweled his face dry. “How do I look?”
“Perfectly shorn, Papa, and oh so handsome. Mrs. Barton will fall swooning into your arms, crying, ‘I do! I will! I must!’”
Osborne bellowed with laughter. He was a large man and his merriment sometimes came in Falstaffian expulsions. “Oh you think so? Say, is that Miss Maggie I see standing on the corner below? Do you think she knows?”
“Only if your heart-object has told her. I’ve kept my promise, Papa. I haven’t breathed a word about your proposal. Of course, to judge by that severe look on her face, I’m to get an earful from her all the way to Carrie’s, and I’m not sure if I can bear it. Everything expelled through those astringent lips will be against the marriage. Against your happiness—my happiness — the happiness of her very own mother. Doesn’t she know we won’t always occupy this dreary Polk Street flat? And yes, yes, yes, I know we can’t move in with the two of them because their flat is even smaller than ours. But the point I’m trying to make is that things are bound to get better. I feel a turn of fortune is due all of us — long overdue.”
Osborne smiled. He looked deeply into his daughter’s wondering eyes. “When your face lights up like this, it reminds me so much of your mother. How dearly she loved life and all its possibilities.”
“And she loved you too, Papa. I could see it in the way she looked at you. And I could hear it in those soft sweet sighs of hers when you held her close.”
Osborne sighed too. It was not, however, the same sort of sigh to which his daughter was referring; his was filled with painful, aching remorse. “Had I only been home that day.”
“A thousand times you’ve said this, Papa. I won’t allow you ever to utter that sentence again. We will never know why she did what she did, but at all events, you are not to blame. Would you have forbidden her to take that walk? Of course not. She would have gone out had you been home or had you not been home. It makes no sense for you to continue blaming yourself.”
Michael Osborne collapsed into the chair next to his bed. He dropped his face into the cradle of his palms. He took a couple of deep breaths. Molly watched as the tips of her father’s fingers pressed into his forehead. Slowly, he raised his head to look at his daughter. “It is difficult for me to believe that all things happen for a reason. For what possible reason did your mother have to die? What was the purpose behind the death of that beautiful baby? For so very long I teetered between life and death myself.”
“You say that, Papa, but I can never believe it. You wouldn’t have left me. I know you wouldn’t.”
“Of course you’re right. When I was lucid, when my thinking was unclouded, I knew that I did have something else to live for. Someone.”
Molly’s father, his eyes now filling with tears from memory and regret, looked deeply into his daughter’s equally dewy eyes — eyes the very same shade of blue as her mother’s.
“Papa, let’s not talk about this — ever again.”
Osborne nodded.
“Promise me now. Promise.”
Osborne nodded again. His expression brightened bravely. “And have we not already moved miles and miles down the road in the journey of our lives? Though Mrs. Barton would never be a perfect replacement for your mother, she’s a fine woman, given to only occasional bouts with hypochondria and dyspepsia. And she’ll make a boon companion for you and a good wife for me. And — and she makes me laugh, and isn’t that the best tonic there is for the affliction of widowerhood?”
Molly nodded. She touched her lips to her father’s forehead. Then she turned her head to glance out the window. “It appears,” she noted in an analytical tone, “that Mag has no interest in coming up the stairs to fetch me. Today she simply isn’t going to exert herself. She is looking up, though.” Molly raised the window sash. She waved. “Hello there, Mag! Top of the mornin’ to ye!” An aside to her father: “Sometimes I pretend to be an Irish charwoman. She absolutely hates it!” Molly exaggerated her smile for Maggie, so as to rain morning cheer down upon her impatient friend. “I’ll be right down!”
“Take all the time you need!” Maggie shouted back up to her. Maggie’s smile was manufactured as well, but it was frigid, almost scornful. And then in an exasperated under-breath, she said to herself, “Oh Molly Osborne! How you absolutely jar me!”
Molly closed the window. “Good-bye, Papa. I’ll be on pins and needles until this evening.”
“Hopefully there’ll be no prick at all,” said Osborne. He watched his daughter hurry from the rear rooms of the flat and then listened as the dental parlor’s front door, which opened upon the building’s third-story landing, was unlatched and then slammed shut. He promptly crossed to the window of the room where he slept and shaved himself and read his paper in the evening. (There were two other rooms, which comprised the Osbornes’ “living quarters”: a kitchen, large enough for a small dining table, and Molly’s cupboard-sized bedroom.) He looked down upon Maggie. She was shifting her weight, with obvious impatience, from leg to leg. She glanced up of a sudden and caught his gaze, then quickly turned away, the gesture constituting an undeniable cut.
“You will not win this day, you minx,” said Osborne in apostrophe. “I am to be your stepfather, whether you like it or not. I’ve heard stories of how you’ve browbeaten your mother into abject subservience, but those days, little Maggie, are over. I won’t command arbitrary allegiance from you. But I will command respect. I am a good dentist — even if I did learn my craft through itinerant apprenticeship. I am a good father — even if I’ve had to, of late, carry the burden of being mother as well. And I do not resemble your late father in any respect except that we were roughly the same age when he died. He was a drunkard all his life. I’ve been a drunkard for two years only, and only by circumstance — circumstances that are finally being put behind me. I will continue to mourn the deaths of my late wife and baby daughter until my last hour upon this earth, but I have ceased doing so from atop a saloon stool. Your mother, Miss Maggie, believes me when I say this. Perhaps in time you’ll come to believe me too, and then things cannot help but improve between us.”