City of Promise (5 page)

The childbed fever that carried off Brigid Brannigan when Mollie was a month old had dried up her milk a few days after the child was born. It was Eileen who look the starving infant to Sadie Jones. Sadie
was the most fashionable wet nurse in the city; her tits were her fortune. She did not take them out of her dress for free. So, Sadie asked, how was a greenie like Eileen Brannigan, widowed and lumbered with a newborn not even her own, planning to pay for the use of them? “With your twat I expect,” she said before Eileen could answer. “Like most of the rest of your kind. It’s what you Irish are good at. But you’ll have to wear your cunny out if you mean it to support you and this mite both.” Dandling the baby on her knee all the while. And Mollie, as Auntie Eileen told the story, screaming with hunger but not being given a look or a nip at those famous tits.

“I will keep my legs crossed and my purse open, you can be sure of that,” Eileen reported saying. “Now give that poor child suck or I’ll tell everyone in the city you tried and failed and your day is past. Not a drop left and here’s the starving babe to prove it.”

Not just the words undid Sadie’s wrapper in Eileen’s version of the tale. “I put a solid gold five-dollar coin in her hand at the same time. And she took one of those massive pappes out of her gown and you latched on and drank as if you were perishing with hunger, as indeed you were. Poor little love.”

For years Mollie wondered where the gold coin came from, since to hear Auntie Eileen’s stories they were poor as church mice that initial year in New York when first her husband and then her sister-in-law died and Mollie was born.

The older she got the more Mollie puzzled over that small mystery, along with wondering how, by the time she was five, her aunt had been able to buy a house and go into the business that afterward supported them so well. “Tell me the Sadie Jones story, please, Auntie Eileen,” Mollie would frequently say. Her aunt always obliged, but each time the tale ended with the wet nurse capitulating and Mollie being saved from a hungry death. The gold coin was never explained, and on the few occasions Mollie tried to probe, Eileen always looked like thunder and abruptly changed the subject.

She didn’t hear the rest of the story until the winter she was twelve,
when Hatty climbed up to Mollie’s attic bedroom before dawn and shook her awake. “You come with me, Miss Mollie. Your auntie needs you.” Hatty brought a still groggy Mollie to stand beside Eileen’s bed and pulled the quilts aside. “You hop right in there, Miss Mollie. And snuggle up.”

“It’s not her concern, Hatty. There’s no cause for Mollie to—”

“Just you hush. And you hang on to that girl so you remember what you’ve done, and what’s important in this world and what is not. Now I’m going to make you both some breakfast, and I expect you to be your spit-and-damn-’em regular self when I bring it.”

At first “hang on” was all Eileen did, wrapping her arms around Mollie and pulling her close, keeping her cheek pressed to Mollie’s hair, but eventually humming a little song under her breath. And soon enough their toes were toasting near the fire Hatty had made in the sitting room, and they were eating eggs and bacon and Hatty’s cornmeal mush, rich with butter and cream, and Eileen was indeed her spit-and-damn-’em regular self.

That was such a remarkable transformation that when her aunt said, “Time to tell you about that five-dollar gold coin, Mollie my love,” Mollie wasn’t entirely surprised to find the old mystery linked to whatever had so troubled her aunt that morning.

“I was an Armagh O’Halloran before I married Brian Brannigan,” Eileen said. “And that was the start of it.”

Armagh, Mollie knew, was a place in Ireland. And O’Halloran was Auntie Eileen’s maiden name. She nibbled a piece of bacon and waited for the rest of the story.

“Armagh,” Eileen said, “is in Ulster, and it’s where St. Patrick began preaching Christianity to the heathen Irish as they were then. It’s also where the O’Hallorans developed their art. And mind you, Mollie, dipping is an art. At least the way the O’Hallorans do it.”

“Dipping?”

“Dipping,” Eileen repeated. “And it doesn’t seem possible to be raised in this house and be as much an innocent as you are. I’m not
sure I’ve done you any favors, Mollie. Well, time you learned. Dipping,” she said again, “especially if you’re an Armagh O’Halloran, is removing a person’s property without their ever knowing you’ve done it. Not a hint or a whisper. Never. Done to perfection, or not done by an O’Halloran from Armagh.”

“Picking pockets,” Mollie said, eyes wide as the reality became clear. “That’s what you mean. Like Oliver Twist in Mr. Dickens’s book.”

“Not like Oliver Twist at all,” Eileen corrected, nodding toward the shelves that housed the books and magazines that fed her niece’s imagination. “I learned the art from my parents, and they from theirs, and we didn’t live in any filthy hovel I promise you. We had a grand house in Armagh and went to Dublin or even London for a few weeks every season, and dipped enough to keep us until the next excursion. It was a fine life. But then I met your Uncle Brian, who could dip a bit as well, but never as artfully as I, and we decided to leave the old ways behind and come to New York and make our fortune here. With his little sister, of course, since Brian was Brigid’s only relative and he couldn’t leave her behind.” Eileen leaned over and poured them both another cup of tea. “And you know all that happened after that.”

“I suppose I do now,” Mollie said thoughtfully. “That’s how you got the gold coin, isn’t it? The one you gave Sadie Jones so she’d let me nurse. You dipped it.”

“I did.”

Mollie was beginning to recognize the power of the key she’d been given. “And because you’re an O’Halloran, you dipped enough to buy this house and start the business.”

Eileen nodded. “I did,” she admitted a second time. “But things are seldom as easy as they might be, Mollie. However careful one tries to be about remaining in the good graces of those who matter most.”

A certain stiffness came over Auntie Eileen then. It was the closest she ever came to tears, that way of setting her chin and her shoulders. She took an exquisitely monogrammed handkerchief—embroidered by Mollie two Christmases past—from the pocket of her woolen
wrapper and dabbed at her eyes and her cheeks. As if she had been crying, though she had not. “Never forget,” she said, repeating a rule she had pronounced numerous times before, “the authorities must be dealt with. No different in New York than in Dublin or Armagh or even London. I grew up knowing that. I have never begrudged Boss Tweed’s people their fair share, Mollie. You know that.”

She did know it. Seven hundred dollars went to Tammany Hall each month and was entered in the ledger under the heading of charity. “Auntie Eileen, are you saying Boss Tweed should have—”

Eileen raised her hand to forestall the question. “I am a realistic woman, Mollie. I believe in looking after those who can look after you. Don’t be greedy and in the normal way of things you will be permitted to go peacefully about your business.” Eileen was now furiously patting her cheeks with the embroidered handkerchief. “But Theodore Paisley,” her voice began to spiral upward though she did not, of course, shout since shouting was forbidden at Brannigan’s, “is not in the normal way of things. He’s a Protestant Ulsterman from a long line of them in Belfast. As is the horrid Mr. E. L. Godkin. Apparently Boss Tweed can control neither of them.”

The ledgers Mollie kept did not identify the clients by name, only by number, but the women tended to titter about this and that over their late morning breakfasts around the table in Hatty’s kitchen. Over the years Mollie had heard various names bandied about, but neither of those her aunt just mentioned. “Is Mr. Paisley a client, Auntie Eileen?”

“That wretch?” Something between a shout and a whisper, though not normal speech. “Never!”

“Mr. Godkin then?”

“No.” The whisper prevailed. “More’s the pity,” Eileen said. “I would have some influence if he were a client. Mr. Godkin is recently become the editor of a magazine called
The
Nation.
In which he means to advocate for what he calls the correct ordering of society.
Laissez-faire
must not be threatened. That’s French, Mollie. It means business must do as it likes with no government interference. No tariffs on goods.
No unions to make rules about how long a man may work in any day, or how many days in any week. And according to Mr. Godkin, no one should be permitted to vote except educated gentlemen who have been to college.”

Auntie Eileen frequently expressed exactly those points of view. “I thought you agreed with all that.”

“To a point, of course I do.” Eileen was once more dabbing her cheeks with the handkerchief. “How else can men become wealthy enough to indulge such luxuries as we provide here? But in a correctly ordered society, Mollie, spite would not be permitted to overrule common sense.”

“Spite of what sort, Auntie Eileen?”

“The sort that carries a grudge for years and years.” Eileen paused and drew a long breath. “The latest issue of Mr. Godkin’s magazine,” she said in a voice that sounded again as sad and as desperate as it had when Hatty first brought Mollie to her aunt’s bed, “contains an article by the wretched Theodore Paisley. In it he tells all New York about the special skills of the O’Hallorans of Armagh, and identifies me as one of them. As if that were not enough, he talks in detail about our house and says flat out it is located at number fifty-three University Place.”

Mollie started to say something, but Eileen waved her words away. “You’ll have to hear the rest of it, dear child, since it’s your future Teddy Paisley’s ruined along with mine. Every gentleman who comes to Brannigan’s, he says, should be careful to leave his valuables elsewhere, or expect ‘the light-fingered Eileen O’Halloran as was’ to relieve him of them.”

Eileen lost her battle to keep the no-shouting rule. “Light-fingered!” she wailed. “My name and address right there in print for anyone to see. Think of it, Mollie.” Her voice had once more become a hushed whisper. “Eight years work to make this the finest whorehouse in New York and raise you in a respectable manner, and for seven of them I haven’t dipped once, though God knows I’ve been tempted. Now I’m called light-fingered in a magazine read by exactly the sort of men we
cater to here at Brannigan’s. We are ruined. I shall fight back of course, but Teddy Paisley has dealt us what I fear may be a mortal wound, may his soul rot in hell.”

Not, as it turned out, quite so mortal as all that. Boss Tweed’s influence was sufficient to get a guarantee from Mr. Godkin that he would publish no further articles written by his old comrade Mr. Paisley. Friendship was one thing, having every stick of furniture in his office repeatedly busted and broken by Tammany hoodlums was quite another. As for the scandal, it slowed business at Brannigan’s for a few months, but gradually the impression faded and the clients returned.

Things to do with commerce were long since back to normal on that day when Eileen Brannigan held in her bejeweled fingers the latest proof of her eighteen-year-old niece’s skill with a needle, and announced that the gossamer swan would be framed and hung above her bed. Still, Mollie had been a bit down in the mouth since the Merkel affair, and the question of her future remained unresolved. At least from Mollie’s point of view.

Eileen had reached two conclusions.

“First,” she said, “I am raising the price of an evening at Brannigan’s to seventy dollars. The war of course. And each of the ladies will be paid twenty dollars for her night’s engagement rather than eighteen. Always be fair in business, Mollie. It’s the best way.”

Mollie nodded at the admonition she had heard numbers of times before, meanwhile doing the calculation with practiced ease. “That should be a monthly increase of forty dollars a night,” she said. “So presuming the same six-day schedule that will mean . . . an additional twelve thousand five hundred twenty dollars a year.”

“Exactly,” Eileen said, because while she couldn’t do mental arithmetic with the speed of her niece, she had already worked out the numbers using paper and pencil. “And I am going to put it all toward your dowry.”

“You’ve found someone? Perhaps a bit younger than Mr. Merkel and—”

“Not exactly. And I believe we have exhausted our resources here at Brannigan’s. But that doesn’t change the fact that since I am opposed to your being a spinster and you’re too lean and too clever to be a whore, you must be a wife.” Then, leaning forward and cupping her niece’s chin with a gentle hand, “That is still what you want, isn’t it, Mollie? I do not wish to force you into marriage.”

“It is, Auntie Eileen. I want to be a wife and mother, but—”

“Then,” Eileen said firmly, “we must find you the right sort of husband, and you have to want him, not just me. We are agreed on those basic terms, are we not?”

Mollie nodded.

“Excellent. It’s settled. I am sending you away.”

“Away?”

“Not very far. You will live in a boardinghouse for ladies on Twenty-Third Street. And I have secured employment for you. Not, however, as Mollie Brannigan. We must purge the association if we are to improve your chances. You shall be Greek.”