Free Habit of Fear by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page A

glanced at May’s lawyer, making the mandated query, and with hardly a pause added: “Case dismissed.”
    May Weems could have found her way to the court clerk’s office blindfolded. Julie got a receipt for her twenty-five dollars.
    “He’d’ve wanted more if I was to pay,” May said as they waited outside the Criminal Court building, Julie trying to flag a cab. “When you ain’t got no money, that’s when it costs you.”
    “How about the favor you’re going to do for me?” Julie asked.
    “I intends to. The police say this old street person, did I know them? Did I know where they goes? I ain’t going to say till I finds out why. And then I only say I try and find out. … Julie, honey, I sure glad them wasn’t black men what attacked you.”
    A cab pulled up and discharged a passenger. Julie pushed May Weems in ahead of her. “Tell the driver where we’re going.”
    “Make him go up the West Side and let us out when I say when.”
    Julie directed the cabdriver. Then to May: “This old street person—man or woman?”
    “I swear she half and half. She not right in the head either. But I knowed she must be who the fuzz was talking about. Missy Glass. She say she try to get me in where she stay sometime, but they say, ‘No, thank you. We don’t take no ‘hoes.’”
    Julie was moved to touch the girl’s hand. May drew it away, reminding Julie of her own problem these days with touching. She said, “You’re all right, May. You’ve still got pride in people, so why don’t you have some in yourself?”
    “I ain’t people. I’s a whore.”
    Julie said nothing more. She knew as well as Judge Arbiter how very nearly hopeless it was to preach a straight gospel to May Weems.
    They were approaching Twentieth Street on Eighth Avenue when May said they could walk from there. While Julie was paying the cab fare, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, May pull down the shirt to display a naked shoulder. A reflex of the profession, for by the time Julie emerged from the cab, both shoulders were again covered. They walked along a street that if not as full of grace as it had been in the nineteenth century, wore an air of respectability. Fleetingly, Julie thought of what it might be like to restore a brownstone and furnish an apartment in it for herself.
    “This here,” May said.
    They approached a church within sight of the abandoned elevated tracks. May explained that they were going to a refuge provided by the Saint Vincent de Paul Sisters of Charity. At a side entrance to the church basement she rang the bell and gave Julie instructions: “You be the one and ask for Missy Glass.”
    “How do you know she’s here?”
    May pulled up by a couple of inches her hammered-down look. “Sometimes I takes her home when she don’t know the way.”
    A chubby red-cheeked nun in a blue uniform and wearing a large crucifix on her breast opened the door to them. Julie asked to see Miss Glass.
    “Missy’s in the back room working,” the nun said and led the way. She asked Julie if she worked for the city.
    “No. It’s a personal matter. Missy Glass may have witnessed something that happened to me.”
    “Something bad,” May added enthusiastically.
    They walked through a curtained dormitory, a dozen cots made up uniformly, and came to a recreation room—a television set and faded garden furniture, a table with a coffee urn and magazines. Only one person was present, a gaunt, stooped creature who could indeed have been taken for a man or woman. She wore men’s slacks and shoes, and she was sorting what Julie presently saw to be pieces of broken glass on an old pool table.
    “Visitors, Missy Glass,” the nun called out with a good-news air.
    The woman straightened up as far as she could, to some three-quarters of what was once her normal height. Her hair was gray and brown shag. Her smile was shy, her teeth bad, her eyes furtive.
    The nun approached the table and said of a laid-out assortment of glass