Free My Notorious Life by Kate Manning Page A

—Farewell to you Mrs. Duffy, and to you, Miss Chickenhearted Muldoon. I’ll be back to check on yiz before the cherries bloom on Cherry Street. He set off with his hands in his pockets,his head flung back, watching gulls wheel in the sky. They were white chalk marks against the dark clouds.
    —Don’t never marry nobody poor, my mother said, watching after him.
    But who else there was besides a poor fellow to marry was not in evidence.
    *  *  *
    We walked along, a porridge of slush under our feet. The wind swirled leaves and rubbish in the corners of alleys, and that was the sheehogues dancing, Mam said, her Irish word for fairies. She stirred up a picture of pixies in flower petals despite that it was a worse cold day than ever. It was a comfort to be near my mother. The way she went ahead briskly, her head swiveling left and right, was familiar to me. Her one sleeve wagged empty in the breeze, and with her good hand she held mine as we walked, like an announcement that I belonged to her, and she to me. But as I inspected her in the daylight, I seen my mother was washed out, draggled and old. She was Mrs. Duffy now.
    —Mam, I says, —when will you go and fetch our Joe and Dutch for us?
    She stopped and made me look at her. —Axie, does it look like we’ve a pot to p*** in? They’re better off in the West, so they are.
    —But I want them. We are the Muldoons. Daughters and sons of the Kings of Lurg, Da said Never forget it.
    —And you haven’t, and so you won’t. She smiled so watery at me. —One day you’ll find them again and see they’re royalty of Lurg right out on the American prairie, the both of them. We’ll call Dutch Queenie then and we’ll call him King Joseph the Red, won’t we? with his crown all jeweled. We’ll sit around the old castle, sure we will, drinking sherry wine, and be glad we sent them off to gain a fortune.
    She kissed me on the hair and said that was the plan, so what else could I do but picture it, the crown and the jewels and the castle, while we rummaged all that day through the cold, for money or scrap, whatever we could get. What we got was a door slammed in our face and a lump of coal heaved at our heads. We pocketed the coal and found nothing else till late in the afternoon, when my mother spied a torn sheet blown off somebody’s washline, and I pried a frozen stocking from a slab of ice.
    —Wool, cried Mam when she saw it. —You’ll get a penny for it. She explained that the ragman would clean it and put it in a grinding mill.
    —What for?
    —To be woven into shoddy and mungo.
    Shoddy and mungo was not a pair of minstrels but types of fabric, she said, made from such flotsam as this frozen sock, scraps and bits we might find for money. Broken down and rewoven they soon would become a soldier’s uniform, some lady’s dress.
    —They get a new life, my mother said.
    —I wish you and me could get a new life too. I’ll be shoddy and you’ll be mungo.
    —Ah jayz, you always was a cutup, she said, and smiled at me so that if I’d have had a tail I’d have wagged it.
    *  *  *
    Through that winter, my mother expanded. She was heavy and silent, a cabbage under her dress. Every day I went out and scavenged for scraps of cloth and metal, rinds and crusts. The enterprise was next to worthless. The streets of all New York were picked clean as cadaver bones by a swarm of grubworms.
    One morning, finding not a thread, I wandered thinking of Dutch warm and snug in her ringlets and Joe eating lemon drops while my own stomach withered with the hunger. After a while I arrived at Washington Square, amidst the grand houses, the private carriages and ladies strolling with their puny dogs on strings. The footman and the maids was in little caps adorned with folderols of bric-a-brac. Through the windows, I saw an old man served a glass of port on a silver tray held by a Negro woman. I saw two cats pawing a shade pull, a wrinkled lady arranging blossoms in a vase. I saw a wee