Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [67]
Houston Street was a poor area, with lines of washing hanging from every window, scrawny, grubby children playing in the street, a grog shop on the corner, and she often saw women trudging up the street with huge bundles of clothing on their backs that they’d sewn at home. But it was a lively, cheerful neighbourhood. On hot evenings people sat out on the front steps and chatted, the women shared child-care duties with one another, and helped the Italians and Germans with their English. Everyone she spoke to was glad they’d come to America and believed that by working hard they would achieve all their goals.
The worst thing about the tenement was that there were only two privies out the back for them all, stinking, horrible places that made Beth shudder and cover her nose when she entered. But Sam always emptied the slops pail each morning before he went to work, and their room overlooked the street, so the smell from the privies didn’t come through their windows. The apartment was also so high up that they weren’t troubled by rats, as many of those on the first and second floors were.
On days when she felt irritated by the noise and smells of cooking in the tenement, or daydreamed of the luxury of having a real bathroom with hot and cold running water like the one in Falkner Square, she reminded herself that these things weren’t really important, and how much better her life had become since she’d been in America.
It would’ve been unthinkable for her to play her fiddle in a saloon back home, where there was none of the freedom for young women like there was here. She could meet Jack alone for a couple of hours in the evening or on his day off without anyone raising an eyebrow. She had more money than she could ever have dreamed of back in England, and no one knew about how her father died either. Then there was the huge variety of food available here. She rarely cooked anything herself for it was just as cheap to buy something out. She loved the hot dogs, baked potatoes, doughnuts, pancakes and waffles. A Chinese man had a stall selling noodles which she adored, and she liked the big bowls of spaghetti with a tomato and meat sauce at the cafe´ owned by Italians. Hardly a day went by without Ira introducing her to something new: pretzels, pastrami, salt beef, fish balls or some kind of German sausage.
The only thing from England she really missed was Molly, and that was like a dull ache inside her all the time. She couldn’t walk past a mother with a plump, dark-haired little girl without stopping to speak, and in those brief moments she felt acute envy.
‘I could give you a baby of your own,’ Jack said once when they had been together and he’d watched her talk to a child. It was said light-heartedly, for every time they kissed he said he dreamed of making love to her.
Beth had laughed, for only a couple of days earlier she’d been talking to Amy and Kate, the two young women who lived in the apartment beneath her. They were a few years older than her, and appeared to have a great deal more experience with men than she did, but they were both funny and lively and Beth was very glad she had made two new friends.
The conversation that day had been about lines men used to get their way with girls. Amy recalled that her first sweetheart had said, ‘I won’t get you in the family way,’ and Kate said hers had tried to blackmail her with ‘You would if you really loved me.’
Beth thought Amy would find it very funny that Jack had turned the old line around.
But then Jack was a real treasure. He never complained about anything, not about his work, his living conditions, or her holding him at arm’s length. Always