The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [53]
She wished she could close the window and shut it all out, but then they would surely suffocate as the temperature soared into the hundreds. The cramped tenement room that had seemed like a haven the night they found it seemed to have shrunk, trapping them in its four walls. Sofia lay in the sagging brass bed, looking pale and ill though she claimed she was only resting, and Azaylee was sitting on the rickety iron fire escape, her thin arms clasped round her knees, watching the endless activity in the street four storeys below. Viktor’s tongue lolled in the heat and Missie could see his ribs sticking out under their thin covering of fur and flesh. She knew that if she looked in a mirror she would see her own ribs sticking out just like Viktor’s, but it no longer upset her. The desperate hunger of youth clawed perpetually at her stomach; lying in bed at night with only a bowl of thin soup and a piece of stale black bread inside her, she thought she would go crazy with her dreams of food: eggs, chicken, good bread, and sweet fresh butter. But she knew it was only because of Sofia’s resourcefulness that they managed to eat at all.
She asked herself time and time again how a woman like Sofia, who had never even thought about food except to instruct her chef what to serve for lunch or dinner, knew how to shop and bargain among Rivington Street’s pushcarts. But Sofia always came home in the late afternoon with a bag of vegetables bought for a few cents because they were bruised and shriveled, and by tomorrow would have gone bad. She would have a newspaper parcel with a bone “for the dog” on which the sympathetic butcher had left enough meat to flavor their meager soup, and occasionally she would buy cheap offal, liver, kidneys, even brains, to add to their diet. She had told Missie that she had often seen the villagers at Varishnya cooking such things, and now she learned how to make tasty meals from them herself. So with Sofia’s ingenuity they ate, and meanwhile Missie looked for a job.
She had set her sights high, confident that she could get a position as an assistant to a professor of archaeology at one of the colleges: after all, she had learned firsthand about antiquities and digs. But the problem was she had no proper clothes, only the one blue skirt and a couple of simple cotton blouses, and there was no money to buy new ones or even a pair of decent shoes. Wages were low and by the time she had paid her fare on the Second Avenue el and the rent, she calculated there wouldn’t be enough left over to pay for food and new clothes. She had considered getting a job as a maid because she knew they were given their uniforms, but all the grand houses on Fifth Avenue expected their maids to live in, and anyway, the wages were barely enough to keep them alive. She had tried for a job as a salesgirl at the new department store, Macy’s, but knew instantly from the way the personnel officer looked her up and down that she was just not smart enough. It wasn’t only her clothes, she thought despairingly, catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror. She looked poor. And that was the catch—she was too poor to get a job.
The high-summer sun beat down as she walked slowly along Delancey Street the next day, reluctant to go home and face them with the news that she had failed yet again. She stopped suddenly outside O’Hara’s Irish Alehouse. The simple words chalked on a blackboard dazzled her as if they had been inscribed in gold: “Help Wanted—Apply Within.” She had never been in a saloon in her life before, but she swung through the doors without hesitation. The fumes of whiskey, beer, and stale cigarette smoke and the smell of cabbage cooking somewhere in the back almost choked her, but lifting her chin determinedly she strode toward the burly man standing behind the counter.
Shamus O’Hara was a big, handsome forty-year-old Irishman who looked as if he had been bred from a race of giants. Everything about him was oversized, from his head with its shock of curly red hair to his hands the size of hams. He wore a collarless blue