• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1025 0

over their heads and a bit of food on the table. Then, when they were teenagers, the Depression hit. Their father’s job with the police force came and went and came and went and came and went again. He alternated between working long hours, terrified of the certain lean period to come, and being at home, unemployed, angry, and drunk. He had often spoken to them harshly, especially when he was drinking, and he had hit them as kids, Timmy and Michael always getting the worst of it. Alice remembered bruises, blood. Before they were born, there had been a baby named Declan. One night, their father fell asleep with the infant in bed beside him. At some point, he unknowingly rolled over onto the child and smothered him. He was devastated. “Never the same,” their aunt Rose had said. He blamed himself, and perhaps as a sort of penance or protection, he never bonded with another one of his children.

Alice’s parents prided themselves on being the first homeowners in their family: both sets of grandparents had immigrated to Boston from Ireland, both grandmothers died young, and the grandfathers were mostly useless. Her parents had been raised in boardinghouses and the spare rooms of charitable but not altogether kind cousins. Now they grew frightened of not being able to make the mortgage each month.

Everyone in the family had to contribute. Alice and her sister, Mary, babysat for all the neighborhood kids, making fifty cents for a full day’s work, which they then had to turn over to their mother for the Christmas club. Mary was better at it—she had infinite patience, and she actually liked children. Alice only enjoyed sitting for the Jewish ones, since their parents had money. The fathers worked all hours and the mothers just wanted to play mah-jongg in peace. So they’d send Alice and the children to the movies, always the movies. They handed out dishes at the Magnet Theater in those days. A cup on Monday, a saucer on Tuesday, a soup bowl on Wednesday, and so on, no matter that hardly anyone had the food to fill them. Between the two of them, Alice and Mary got their mother five complete sets.

Their brothers took on odd jobs after school. Timmy waited tables and Michael cleaned floors at city hall. Even their mother worked for a time—selling fruitcakes and embroidered handkerchiefs door-to-door like a proper hobo. Alice burned with embarrassment at the sight, hating her father for letting it happen. Their mother had been a schoolteacher before she married, but women were banned from teaching now, since so many men needed the work.

The four boys were made to move into one bedroom, so that the family had a spare room to let. Alice and Mary shared a tiny room already, so at first Alice was pleased to see their brothers similarly cramped together. But the lodgers who came were often frightening: Some cried and moaned over what they had lost. There were women with infants who shrieked at dawn, and men who drank and pawed at Alice and Mary on their way to the bathroom at night or scratched at their bedroom door late, whispering to them to open up and give a guy some happiness.

Mary would whisper back pleadingly from the other side of the closed door to those drunkards, telling them to get some sleep, sir, please call it a night. Alice would shoo her into bed, and then say gruffly, “Listen, you bastard, get away from here now or my father will cut you to pieces like he did the other one before you.”

Their father had done no such thing. He’d hardly care if those men came in and dragged his daughters off by their fingernails.

Mary’s eyes widened: “Gosh, you’re brave!” she would say with a sort of awe.

At eighteen, Mary was older by two years, but even so, Alice felt protective of her sister. Mary was shy and sweet and well-behaved. She waited on their parents like a maid, considering it her duty. She even did Alice’s chores sometimes. She wanted to have a dozen kids someday, and she didn’t mind caring for their bratty brothers.

Alice, on the other hand, just wanted to be left alone. She loved to paint and draw. She could escape into