Free Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney Page B

and his sister, Lottie, were packed off to their uncle’s farm. Their first Christmas back, they’d brought everything home with them, expecting to stay. They had crept down to the parlor to look at their mother’s daguerreotype together, many nights, with a candle, taking turns peering into its mirrored surface from every angle, seeking that elusive instant when her face melded with their own reflections, then returned to the clarity that was almost sharper than life. He was nine, his sister seven. But their father had sent them back to their uncle’s after all, and they didn’t see him for another year. There were letters, empty, benignant letters, and the following year they were invited to arrive the day
after
Christmas. On New Year’s Day their father was remarried, to a widow, a woman of noble title with children of her own. Ever after, it was the same: eleven months, including Christmas, at their uncle’s farm, New Year’s in town, a January full of hope, and then they were sent packing. Their Tante Hedwig gave them her own account of why: “He didn’t marry the kitchen help, this time, and you’d only be an embarrassment.” She didn’t have to mention the other part: that everyone knew their mother’s family had been Jewish till a generation back, making her children not quite the siblings the new wife, the baroness, imagined for her own daughters.
    His mind wandered over all of that and more as he shoveled through the night. All the while, one of them was watching him, Fiona or Beanie, sometimes both. The decision Johnny had made when Beanie tracked him down was not to pull him aside as long as Undertoe was near. They were to get him alone. So they waited. And all night long, as they sipped their flasks of gin, they wondered what on Earth he was thinking, what his schemes were, if he was wise to Undertoe or not, whether he would join the Whyos or defy them, making this a wasted night or worse.
    If only they could have known his mind. Several times just before morning, he stopped working, stopped walking, to peer into the snowy dimness up the street or at the end of an alley. He kept thinking he saw someone, some girl. He knew there were always urchins out at that hour. Urchins, the mostly nocturnal breed of boys and girls who scavenged alongside the cats and the rats and had been known to fight four-legged rivals over choicer morsels from restaurant-kitchen bins. He kept an eye on them, half worried about the safe return of the equipment, and wondered where they’d come from, what they would become. New York had so many pits for a person to fall into, more than he could fathom, though he’d dipped his own toes into the shallows. He thought of the women he’d seen at Billy’s that night, the colors they wore, slippery and bright, the jade silk shawls and scarlet-trimmed bodices that offset their hard faces. He’d read in his
Stranger’s Guide
about women who only posed as prostitutes to rob the men they lured, and also about gangs of runaway girls who sold flowers or candies, stole watches and lived communally in abandoned buildings on the edge of town. Most of them apparently packed a mean punch and carried knives. But despite these notions, he never suspected that two of the urchins he watched were older than the rest, not even when he looked one of them in the eye.
    She was leaning against a hitching post near the lighted doorway of Billy’s when he walked by again, a short while later, and he felt a prick of desire, a yearning for a woman he could press up to on such a frigid night. That’s how good she was at what she did: She could make herself an urchin one minute, then transform herself into a woman and stir up lust in a passerby, just by her posture. As for Beatrice O’Gamhna—for that was the full name of the Why Not more commonly called Beanie—she wasn’t a waif at all, nor a runaway. She was nearly a woman and fairly well off and, truth be told, she wasn’t even chilly, what with