was wide awake. Sleep. Sleep? ‘I – I don’t know where,’ she stammered. ‘I hadn’t thought that far ahead.’ So they stood and fried up those doughnuts and talked about what to do. Clare was adamant. ‘I’m not going back home to Montana,’ she said. ‘I want to help. I want to help here. Every day. But I’ve no place to live, no job, no money.’ She chewed her lip.
Mavis chuckled. ‘You sound just like a bum!’
‘What you need is a flophouse,’ Sally giggled.
The young man, Major Mitchell he was called, materialised in the doorway. ‘There’s a room upstairs – high up, in the attic,’ he said. ‘It’s just a cot, mind, but we’ll be able to find a blanket, and there’s an old tin stove in there you can use for heating.
‘Very basic,’ he stressed, looking at her fine wool dress under the starched apron. ‘And you’d have to eat as the men do. There’s nothing else here.’
‘I’d be mighty grateful, sir,’ Clare said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘The Lord brought you to us. It’s us who are grateful.’
They sent Harvey with her to collect her luggage from the Barbizon. Harvey, a real bum, who also wanted to help. ‘Idle hands do the Devil’s work,’ he told. ‘I seen what some o’ them boys gets up to with all their darned wasted hours – I’d rather be a Salvos gofer any day.’
Harvey also accompanied her with a kettle to street corners in the months which followed. They rang the bell. They banged the tambourine. They accepted every coin with genuine grace. Panhandlers always moved on when they set up. ‘It’s like a gentleman’s agreement,’ he told. ‘They don’t want to compete – they know the good works that come from Salvos donations, that they’re just as likely to score a meal as the next bum.’
He smiled toothlessly at a little girl who dropped a dime into the kettle with one hand while holding firm to her mother with the other. ‘People ain’t got so much money now,’ he explained. ‘But they ain’t got so much resistance to giving neither. What I sees is people got more compassion in hard times. A lot o’ them know that there but for the grace of God ... You can read it in their faces, by golly.’
Harvey told he’d always been a bum. It was the reason he never got low. ‘It’s the only life I evers known,’ he said. ‘I got no need for money, I’ve never had any. Never had nothing, so don’t want nothing – see? I’m used to eating slim, sleeping rough.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s the new poor I’m sorry for. The ones who’ve fallen furthest – you can tell,’ he said. ‘You can tell by the eyes – it’s not just a body craving a decent feed, but in here too,’ pressing hard to his chest, ‘where there’s a heart craving decent hope.’
He started to sing:
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
One day Clare sat and wrote a letter to her parents. She sat at a big long bench in the dining hall, a cup of coffee at her elbow, an old serge housecoat covering her increasingly threadbare wool jersey dress. Sat and wrote about what she felt, what she had learnt, what had been, what might become. Had gone and put the savings she’d never touched into a money order which now lay in the envelope awaiting her letter’s companionship on a long overland journey home to Montana. Yes, she was certain of her conviction, her choice – she was at peace in the place where hope lives.
It was hard to remember the feelings of before, of when she had faced this transition from the then of normalcy, through the despondency of failure, to the finding of her way. She sat and thought about it in the few precious moments of silence before her next work would be needed. No – it wasn’t there. She couldn’t conjure the memory, or emotions, any better than a rabbit could be pulled from a hat. The only thing which had stayed with her from that time, accompanying her every act, was Mrs Molly Brown’s squeeze of the hand and heart-centred words of wisdom. Yes, she had indeed done as advised.
Just then, Major Mitchell – John – came in to stand quiet behind her while she finished her letter, placed it in the envelope and sealed its contents with a kiss. At last, she looked up, around and into his eyes. And he reached down to squeeze her hand.
One Day, the Singing Bird
(inspired by Hopper’s Room in Brooklyn, 1932, in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
‘I’ll be going now,’ he called from the door. ‘Back before dark.’
She could hear his fidget with the handle, knew he was watching for some reaction. Knew he cared, knew he hesitated before leaving her alone with this sadness. But she had no energy to muster a reaction, one at least which would put him at ease. Her hair hung neat, flat, head turned a mite toward the streetscape below – shoeshine boy at the corner, grocer putting out apples, chalk scratching a price on the front of a crate.
She knew he still watched the nape of her neck. His deep breath, a slow and deliberating intake of air, filled the space between them. He walked back toward her, heavy boots scuffing the linoleum, hat crushed in his big fist, came up and placed a hand on the back of her rocker to slow its perpetual movement.
‘You’ll be OK?’ he questioned of no one in particular. Then – ‘I’m trying, Maddy, I’m trying real hard … let’s see if there’s something going on down at the naval yards today, hmmm?’ Walked away, back to the door, closing it with a finality which meant that this time he hadn’t looked back.
Now she was free. To sigh. To let out all that stale air – how long had it been trapped inside, tightening her throat? A pity to replace with more stale air. The acrid air of this city, this place.
She resumed her gentle rocking, a comfort in the face of all things foreign. When she rocked, the dirty chimney tops opposite began to sway like a breeze-rustled tree. Back and forth, to and fro. Well, only if you blurred your seeing. And pretended just a little. The rocker’s rhythmic squeak blocked the street sounds below. That itself was enough. For now.
The sun, low but bright in this early morning sky, slowly began to warm the room. Yet still too chill to take off her robe. No, let’s be honest. She mostly didn’t take it off, instead staying snug-wrapped, cocooned from the cold of this foreign town, cocooned with her baby quietly growing inside.
She looked over to the vase of flowers standing there on the little side table Papa had made. A wedding gift, when there’d been no money for anything more than make-do. But where did he say he’d gotten those flowers from? In he’d come yester evening, all smelling of moonshine. That’s right – the flowers had come from an old lady over by Driggs Avenue. Here he was, coming home from a blind pig, a few coins still jingling in his pocket (surprise, her first reaction to this news) and an old lady having stopped him. Hand held up, flowers held out, imploring: ‘Please sir, good sir, kind sir, spare a thought for the babes your coins will help feed. Take a few blooms home to your own good family. Your few coins will bring good into more than one life.’
He wept as he relayed the tale. The grog talking, she couldn’t help but note, even as her own heart bled for that self-same hardship wrought on the shoulders of innocents. ‘There’s always someone worse off, Maddy, from what I see. And we’ve seen a lot already in this town, ain’t we. So when she spoke of babes, and I thought of ours soon to come …’ Spare a thought, indeed.
She had to admit it was nice to have flowers. Something pretty, just this once, to soften the sparseness of the room. Yes, only this room. It, and a tiny side room just big enough for a bed and their trunk. A makeshift kitchen ran against one wall, shared
bathroom down the hall. And the baby? Where would their child fit into this nothing space? Maybe she could tidy out the trunk as its little bed? To be frank, she hadn’t given it much thought as yet. Thought needed energy and she had none to spare. All gone in the rocking and the looking, the sighing and the sitting. All gone. All gone.
Hard to think back to a life before this, a life before everything was all gone, all used up and snuffed out here in a Brooklyn shoebox, with a view onto identical brownstone shoeboxes, a sea of grubby chimney pots above, litter and melancholy below. Where was the green? Where was anything green hereabouts? She had to think hard to remember, to re-remember green, shut her eyes tight to the starkness of those brown building blocks across the way, set against a blue-blue sky, too blue for so much brown. The rocker squeaked back and forth, to and fro, harder, faster. She was trying to enter that other space where life had been, had been before now …
Ah yes. Now she saw – a sunny day. Back and forth she went on the old swing Papa had tied to the strongest straightest bough of the apple tree, there in the midst of an orchard of apples. An apple tree planted when she was born, no less. ‘Keep a green tree in your heart, Maddy, and the singing bird will come,’ he ever-counselled when she low. Learnt by heart from his Gran-mamy’s American Presbyterian