The Eleventh Virgin

Every few months Mother Grace and the children’s father had a house party and that meant the horse-chestnut tree in the back garden would have an outcropping of nickels and dimes. They grew in the branches and were hidden among the leaves and twigs around the trunk. The boys could climb for them, but June had to burrow around the roots of the tree. She was only four then⁠ ⁠…

There was a convenient ledge all around underneath the kitchen table where the children ate supper and they hid their crusts there. Sometimes they were able to slip away unsuspected from the supper table and sometimes Mary Milady, the “girl,” went around and scooped up the crusts and made them eat them before they went out to play “run, sheepy, run.” The disadvantage of that was that the crusts got mixed up and one had to eat them indiscriminately. June being a finicky child much preferred to eat her own⁠ ⁠…

Sadie Spielberger, whose mother kept a grocery store at the end of the block, used to lure June into the little corn field at the back of the house and while the two of them hid among the sweet smelling cornstalks, told June things which were very interesting but which June felt that she ought not to know. There was an agreeable excitement in listening to Sadie, excitement akin to that stomach-aching thrill when one was going to the circus.

But Sadie died from eating an Easter egg which had served as a parlor ornament for ten years.

Once there was a terrible scene. Mother Grace picked up dishes one by one and slammed them on the floor. Mr. Henreddy got behind her and tried to hold her and kept saying, “Grace, now Grace dear.”

June and Adele were making valentines⁠—the next day they were going to get up early and distribute them to the other children around the porches⁠—and they sat with gaudy bits of paper in their hands and whimpered as the smashing continued. Dan hustled them into the bedroom and made them go down on their knees and pray. Dave wouldn’t pray. He just sat with white lips and pretended to go on reading.

Afterwards when it was over and Mother Grace was weak and shaking on the bed, Mr. Henreddy sent out for ice cream for the children, but June refused to eat hers. It was too terrible an evening to think of eating ice cream. She sat and wept. Wept for her mother, and for her father because he was so pathetic in his efforts to comfort them. And because ice cream, generally considered a treat, made the tragedy more poignant.

The next day Mother Grace made a terse remark about losing her nerve and no more was said about it. June had a hideous feeling of shame and bitterness in her heart, but she did not blame her mother for a minute. Mother Grace was brave as a general rule. She had a sweet habit of “dressing up” in the afternoon. Not that she wasn’t neat and tidy in her pleasant house dresses in the morning. But on cleaning days when the floors had to be scrubbed or after a hard morning in the common laundry in the basement of the tenement, Mother Grace was exceptionally dainty.

So leaving her heavy suitcase by the side of the desk which had been allotted to her, she set out through the East Side streets.

The Clarion office did not occupy a place of dignity on Park Row. You got off the subway, the elevated, the surface car, whichever you happened to be riding on, at Brooklyn Bridge, and walked down that dingy section of the Row given over to pawnbrokers, saloons and recruiting stations. Just before you reached Chatham Square, that gloomy crossroad where all streets lead out under shadowing elevated tracks to still gloomier regions, you turned down a little side street to the east and after passing three saloons, this was before prohibition, and two warehouses reached the Clarion offices which occupied a loft above the Meisel Printing Company.

To get to June’s room which she found that afternoon you continued east on this street. In another block it ends at Madison Street which digs straight into the East Side, running parallel with the river. It was a cheerful and lively street with horse cars which jogged every half hour through the crowds of children playing in the gutters and hiding among the ash cans. The air was full of shrill child voices, shouted admonitions from the mothers hanging over their fire-escapes which front the buildings like grim skeletons. Street organs surrounded by little girls played the latest popular tunes and every once in a while a merry-go-round set on a wagon was drawn to the curb by a lean and deafened horse.

Later on there was a woman who ran along the silence of the streets and broke it with her calls. Occasionally June heard her, darting down this side street or that and once she saw her running, stopping to get her breath, then running again. And every now and then came that long shrill cry of seeking.

When November with its flurrying snows sought to disguise the tawdry street, June made the acquaintance of two policemen who met each night for a chat under Manhattan Bridge while they ate their midnight meal of coffee and rolls. As the nights grew colder they had a glowing fire in an ash can, and June stopped to warm her hands by it. She was offered the seat of honor on a dry-goods box, and presented with a cup of hot coffee. The bulky ham sandwich she refused.

They asked her what she did so late at night and she told them, showing her newspaper police card.

Convinced that they didn’t have to waste professional curiosity on her, an easy friendship was established between them. Her office was two “beats” from home, they told her, and often one met her as she turned into Madison Street and escorted her to the ashcan fire under the bridge and from there the other took her to her door.

“We’ll watch out for you,” they assured her as if dangers lurked in every doorway. And they gave her a police whistle to blow on, if ever emergency should arise. They vied with each other in telling her long fantastic tales of tenements, haunted by crooks, catacombed with secret entrances and exits, tenements in which if a man once gained shelter, it was impossible to trace him.

He entered the room like a storm cloud, leaving the door open on the large porch outside, from which came the sounds of shuffling feet and expectant coughs.

“We wish to announce a hunger strike unless⁠—” but Miss Prindiville was allowed no further words. Morrison turned to the door and beckoned and immediately the room was filled with men, two of whom seized the elderly lady under the arms and giving her no chance to accompany them voluntarily, lifted her out of the room. As she was pulled backwards through the door, she looked like the stiff figure of a dressmaker’s dummy. Billy laughed hysterically and was immediately seized in her turn.

June made an instinctive movement to join her and was grabbed at by Morrison who stood there blazing triumphantly. As he reached his hand towards her she struck at him contemptuously and she had the satisfaction of seeing him start back and swear viciously before she found two men holding her fast by either arm. She had the feeling of being lifted, carried over the porch and along the path, before she felt her feet dragging on firm ground.

“I’m perfectly capable of walking,” she told them fiercely. But they held her the more tightly, so she vented her wrath by kicking them on the shins whenever she had the chance.

They passed many white buildings gleaming in the darkness before they entered a bare stone building smelling strongly of steam heat and dampness and antiseptic.