One
New York, February 1907
One thing about New York that is never predictable is the weather. The other thing that has not always been so predictable is my life. I suppose I was destined for trouble in many ways. Never the good child who didn’t question authority. Always with big dreams. My mother used to chant with monotonous regularity that I’d come to a bad end, rolling her eyes as she said it and probably invoking a saint or two as well. Well, the bad end hadn’t happened yet, but I’d certainly come close a few times.
Now that I was no longer working as a private investigator (at least not officially), things were different. I was a New York housewife like any other, looking forward to a time of settled tranquility with my family and friends around me. Hoping for another baby, actually. The doctor had said there was nothing wrong with me so I should get on with my life and not worry. So that’s just what I was doing—taking care of my husband, my son, Liam, and Bridie, the young Irish girl we had saved from a life of servitude and had now made our ward. All was going remarkably smoothly until a snowman appeared outside my door one February afternoon.
After a mild January, just when the first snowdrops were blooming, there came a vicious arctic blast that froze any spring flower that had had the nerve to appear. It was bitterly cold and snowed for two days without stopping, making leaving the house almost impossible. Daniel had joined the other men from our little street and dug a narrow pathway to Greenwich Avenue so that he could go to work and Bridie to school. I had been forced to stay home, making do with the supplies on hand. Although I hoped our supply of coal would last, it was rapidly dwindling and everybody was rushing to buy more. We shut off the front parlor and instead huddled in the back room that was normally Daniel’s realm, or sat around the kitchen table, enjoying the warmth from the stove.
Usually my days involved a visit to my neighbors Sid and Gus. (And in case you are not familiar with my friends and think I am befriending a couple of Irish laborers, let me tell you that they are both young ladies of good family whose given names are Elena and Augusta.) But I had not seen them recently. I suspected they had been busy with their latest project. There was always something new that attracted their attention. They were true Renaissance women, dabbling in art and music and foreign cooking as well as social causes like the suffrage movement. But this wasn’t the time of year for suffrage parades. So I had been wondering if it was just the harsh weather that had kept them away when there was a knock at my front door, late one afternoon.
“Aunt Sid, Aunt Gus!” Liam shouted excitedly, pushing to the front door ahead of me. Actually it sounded more like “Aaa-Si? Aaa-Gu?” but I knew what he meant.
“Hey, young man, you stay inside.” I grabbed him by his sweater at the last minute. “It’s cold and snowy out there. And we don’t know if it is Aunt Sid and Aunt Gus.”
I swept Liam up onto my arms so that he didn’t run out into the snow, then opened the door cautiously, letting in a frigid blast. Liam had been right. It was Sid standing there, her face only just visible under a big shawl.
“My, but it’s bitter,” she said. “How are you faring, Molly?”
“We’re huddled in the kitchen. Come inside.”
“I won’t stay,” she said, “but I’ve brought you some of the Indian vegetable curry we made. We’re devoting ourselves to Indian food at the moment, having decided it’s wrong to kill and eat animals. It’s so good and it will keep you warm. I made far too much for the two of us and there was no way of halving the recipe.”
“It’s very kind of you,” I said, reaching to put the casserole down on the hall stand. “Are you sure you won’t have a cup of tea?”
She shook her head. “No, thank you. I must get back. We’ve work to do. We have a great pile of clothing to sort.”
“Clothing? Are you going through your wardrobes?” It did cross my mind that a few good cast-offs might be coming my way. They had before.
“Not ours. The Vassar Benevolent Society, of which Gus is currently president, is having a warm clothing drive. So many poor wretches freezing to death in the city. We’ve been collecting items and now our front parlor is full.”
“I could come over and help you, if you like,” I said.
“Oh, that’s kind of you, but I think we can handle it,” she said. “Besides, there isn’t space for more than two people in that room at the moment. Sometimes I can’t find Gus under all those clothes.” She smiled. “I’d better not let any more cold air into your house…” She turned to go, then paused, mouth open, and said, “What in heaven’s name?”
I followed her gaze down the alleyway and there coming toward us was a walking snowman. As it approached it revealed itself to be a person, wrapped in a big white shawl but now covered in snow. I recognized that shawl at the same time that Sid called out, “Bridie? Is that you?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” I started toward her. “What on earth were you doing? Rolling in the snow?”
Bridie staggered toward us, snow falling from her as she came. “Oh, Molly,” she said, and I could tell she was near to tears. “The boys set on me when I was crossing Washington Square. They were having a snowball fight, then they saw me coming and they all turned on me. They pelted me with snowballs. They wouldn’t stop and I couldn’t run through that snow.”
“Which boys?” I demanded. “Let me get my cape on and I’ll give them a piece of my mind. I’ll teach them to attack young girls.”
“I’ll come with you,” Sid said. “We’ll teach ’em, won’t we, Molly?”
Bridie put up a hand to stop me. “It’s no use. The constable on the corner saw them and came after them. They ran off, laughing. Besides, you’ll only make them hate me more.”
“And why would they hate you?” Sid asked.
“Because I’m Irish,” she said flatly.
“Because you’re Irish?”
She chewed on her lip, which made her look much younger than her thirteen years. “They are mostly Italian in my class. They get into fights with the Irish boys. They call us names.”
“Don’t they know they’re in America now and everyone is welcome?” Sid demanded. “You need to talk to that principal, Molly.”
“I most certainly will,” I said.
I put an arm around her shoulder. “Come inside, my darling. Let’s get you out of those wet things and have a nice hot cup of tea by the fire.” I turned back to Sid. “Thank you for the curry. I must take care of her.”
I put down Liam and he went up to Bridie, who was now shaking snow off the shawl into the alleyway. “Bwidie all wet,” he said.
Copyright © 2022 by Janet Quin-Harkin (writing as Rhys Bowen) and Clare Broyles
