Strings Attached (2 page)

I shrugged. “Everybody wants something.”

“That doesn’t mean they can’t get it.”

“You know this isn’t right.”

“No,” he said, anger in his voice now. “This
is
right. It just doesn’t
look
right. So don’t tell anybody, and nobody has to know.”

“Not even Billy?”

“Especially not him.”

“So you want me to keep a secret from him.”

“I think you can. If it helps him.” He eyed me. “You have before.”

“What about you?” I looked at him, gripping my gloves inside my pockets. “Don’t you ever give anything up?”

“I gave up my
son
!” Nate slammed out the words, and I saw a flash of what he would be like if he let out that rage full on. I saw Billy in him, the way you could never tell when he was simmering until he blew the pot lid off.

“So I can trust you,” I said. “That’s what you’re telling me.”

“You know you can,” he said. “For God’s sake, Kit, you’ve come to me before. You know I’m looking out for Billy, and that means looking out for you.”

“You weren’t so happy with me or my brother a couple of months ago.”

“I wasn’t so happy with Billy, either.”

“Yeah. Me, too. But I didn’t go blaming anybody for it.” I held his gaze, and he was the first one to drop his eyes. He knew I was talking about Jamie.

“Let’s forget about that day. We were all upset. You can tell Billy that you got a job, that you have a place to live, a nice place. He’ll have a furlough before he ships out, so he can see you here.” He took a step toward me, and in that quick eager step, I saw Billy in him again, and this time tears suddenly were behind my eyes and I shook my head, hoping that would clear them.

He thought I was shaking it at him and he said, “After a while, you’ll forget about our deal. I’ll never knock on your door.” He held up his hands, like he was surrendering.

I thought of telling him that Billy and I had argued that night. That the fight had been so bitter and terrible that I couldn’t remember words so much as broken glass and a heart so twisted in pain and fear that I threw up in the bushes. If Nate could see a future, all I could see was a past that blocked it out.

He walked closer and slipped the key in my pocket, looking at me while he did it. I felt his hand brush mine and could smell his soap. I had to fight not to step back.

“I can’t afford this place,” I said.

“What, you think I’m going to hand you a bill?”

“You might. What if things don’t work out the way you want?”

“I’m giving it to you, you got that? Till Billy comes back. The rent is nothing. I own the building — it’s an investment. I won’t call. I won’t bother you. You have someplace to stay, pursue your dream and whatnot. Who knows — maybe you’ll be a star, after all.”

I didn’t know anymore if I had enough for that. It was one thing to dream of something and another to come and test it.

He could always read faces. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

“I’m not,” I said. “But what’s good in Providence isn’t so special in New York City.”

“Don’t ever think that, Kitty,” he told me. “You were something else when you were twelve, and you’re something else today.”

Even for a girl who was used to compliments, there were some that delivered the goods. I didn’t want him to see the pleasure on my face so I turned and pretended to look around. I wished I could stop thinking of our apartment in Providence, crammed with beds and tables and pillows and shoes, or Shirley’s lumpy couch and the smell of Vicks
that I couldn’t get out of my nose. I wished I could stop thinking of how swell it would be to pack my suitcase and tell Shirley I’d found my own place. “So what do you say?”

I held out the key to him and shook my head.

“You know the favor I did your family,” Nate said. “I didn’t want to have to mention it.”

“That’s funny, because you just did.”

“I told you back then, even when you were a little girl, you’d owe me a favor. And you shook on it.”

“You’re calling in a promise I made when I was
twelve
?”

Did I owe him this much?

I owed him this much.

“C’mon, I promised you dinner. How about a steak? There’s a place around the corner that’s good.”

I wanted the steak. My mouth watered for it. The steak, and this place, and the radiator blasting heat, and the radio, and the pillows. I could see myself here, and I could see Billy knocking at the door in his uniform and me opening the door in a dress and heels and lipstick, welcoming him home.

Maybe I’d been dead wrong about Billy. Maybe the decision to stop seeing him was the latest in the long line of bad Corrigan luck. Wasn’t it true that I was still crazy for him, that I had to stop myself from writing him every single night? That there were plenty of nights I left the theater, hoping he’d be at the stage door in his uniform, with that hungry look in his eyes before he lifted me into his arms? How many times had I played that scene in my head — how I’d shake my head at him, telling him it was still over? Didn’t it always end in a kiss?

There was too much going on in my head, and I was afraid some of it would spill out in front of Nate Benedict.

“I never eat after a show,” I told him.

When we walked out, the wind hit us, cold and damp from off the river, and leaves crunched under our feet as we walked to First Avenue.

“I’ll put you in a cab,” he said.

He raised his arm and directed his next remark to the street. “You said a lot, but you never said you didn’t love him.”

The cab pulled over, and he handed in some bills to the driver. He cupped my elbow, helping me over the curb. Our heads were close together when he murmured, “You and me, we want the same thing. His happiness.”

I slid a bit in my heels and almost fell into the cab. He closed the door. I crashed back against the seat, looking through the window at him. He stood on the corner, bareheaded in the wind, hands in his pockets. It was like we’d made some kind of bargain. Another one, like the ones we’d made before.

In my pocket, my fingers closed around the key.

Two

 

New York City
October 1950

I hadn’t expected it to be easy to come to New York, but I hadn’t expected it to be so hard, either. Donuts and peanuts for a diet, rooming houses so far north in the Bronx that it took me an hour on the subway to Times Square. The green stain in the sink, the toilet that wouldn’t flush. The sounds from the other rooms — the fights, the crying, the rhythmic thumping that made me put my pillow over my head and hum “Skylark.” The discovery of bedbugs. I’d bounced from one bad rooming house to another.

Then I got smart, and lucky. I found out where all the actors ate lunch, at Walgreens in Times Square, and I squeezed out my dimes and ate lunch there every day, just a bowl of soup I could eat real slow. One day a blonde in a tight red sweater started talking to her friend about a girl leaving a show. In the chorus and had quit right there and then, saying she had appendix trouble. The blonde had snickered, said in a high squeaky voice, “That’s four months’ worth of a swollen appendix if you ask me.” I slapped down my coins and left.

I went straight to the theater and my luck was still holding, because the man at the door was Irish, and he actually remembered the Corrigan Three, the performing triplets
from Rhode Island. He waved me through the door and said the director and choreographer were both onstage, right then.

I picked up routines fast. You could show me once and I could do it, straight from the top. And I was strong. That was training. Then there was luck. This time I had the right height and the director didn’t need a blonde. I guess he knew the show was a dog and would be closing soon, and he didn’t really care. I think he patted himself on the back for giving a kid her first break.

I was in a Broadway show. Lights and glory. But it wasn’t much different from summer stock. It was a bunch of girls razzing each other and helping each other, and there was always a mean girl, too. It was “Would you lookit that, I got a run and I just bought these at Woolworth’s yestaday” and “My feet are gonna fall off my legs one day, I swear to ya” and “Christ, I’m getting married as soon as somebody asks, as God is my goddamn witness” and making lewd comments about the state of the lead actor’s trousers when he looked us over. Pin curls underneath their rayon scarves when they got to the theater, and after the show half of the girls going out with dates, the other half home to their mothers.

Luck doesn’t last,
I knew that much. Sometimes over my cup of coffee I’d think about the Corrigans — a long line of lunkheads going straight back to County Galway. One dumb choice after another. The family had sailed to America in 1883 and they were still greenhorns. Always looking at their feet, never up at the sky. We went down in ships, we died in childbirth, we drank or worked ourselves to death, we disappeared without a trace. What chance did I have to break that chain of misfortune?

Where did the bad luck start? Maybe you could trace it
back to the night in ’23 when sixteen-year-old Jimmy Mac Corrigan offered to help unload some whiskey on a boat from Canada. Or a Sunday morning in ‘32 when, after three days of rain, Jimmy convinced Maggie Corrigan to skip church because he had a better idea of how to pass the time. Who knew that would result, nine months later, in twenty-year-old Maggie’s last breath as three babies came into the world?

“All those falls from grace,” Aunt Delia would have said in that thin-lipped Irish way. Lust, liquor, and legs — that’s where I came from. That’s who I was.

 

For a minute when I woke up, I thought I was back in Providence. Maybe it was the sound of the whistle on the teakettle. By the time I’d fallen asleep, the light had been just coming up. I glanced at the clock on the mantel, an ugly big brass number that looked like the first thing you’d grab to bean a burglar.

It was after ten. Four hours’ sleep would have to do. I could hear Shirley and her mother in the kitchen, talking in loud whispers so that they could claim they were trying to be quiet. I didn’t know if I could get up the oomph to be polite this morning. I didn’t know if I could face Mrs. Krapansky flipping through the newspaper with her furrowed dark red nails, the shape of her toes showing through the worn leather of her slippers. Each time she turned a page she’d lick her dry finger. Turn, lick. Turn, lick.

And today, Shirley would have told her mother that I almost messed up the line last night. Not to mention the crack about her age. Shirley was twenty-six and thought
she was over the hill. No confidence, no brains. All she had was a mother with her hands at her back, pushing.

I sat up. Hell to pay. No question about it.

“She acts all high and mighty and sneaks around behind her boyfriend’s back. And him in the service and everything! I swear to you, it
lit-rally
makes me sick.”

I felt bored already; I knew every step of what was going to happen next, how I’d have to go into that kitchen and pretend I hadn’t heard, maybe hum on my way to make tea, ignore it when Mrs. Krapansky complained about the cost of sugar. And then the remarks would begin, little pellets of contempt, putting me in my place.

I got up and stretched, a dancer’s stretch. I could feel Shirley watching from the kitchen so I held it, knowing I was pulling my nightgown up my legs, almost posing now, because my figure was better than Shirley’s, and Shirley knew it, too.

“You’d better get that bedding straightened up quick today. I’ve got guests coming later this morning,” Mrs. Krapansky said.

Guests. Please. That meant Mrs. Maloney from next door. I yawned as I made my way to the bathroom and brushed my teeth and hair, then packed away the brushes and my things in the little pouch I’d bought at the five-and-dime. Shirley had given me one drawer in her dresser and a tiny space in the closet. I packed quickly and pulled my best cardigan on, along with my navy skirt, the most becoming one I had. I wriggled into high heels.

Then I walked out and laid the key and ten dollars on the kitchen table.

“If you think you can just walk out of here —” Mrs. Krapansky said, her potato nose glowing red. “Good riddance to bad rubbish!”

It was easy enough to keep going, right out the door and down the stairs. It was when I hit the sidewalk that I lost my nerve. I looked down at my cheap suitcase with its broken latch. Everything I owned was in it, and it wasn’t much. The chill wind twined around my ankles, and my legs already felt cold in my nylon stockings.

I only had one place to go. But maybe that made it harder to take the first step toward it.

 

I woke up alone the next day in fresh, flowered sheets. I sat down at the kitchen table with the yellow legs. The sun pooled on the tabletop, just the way I’d known it would. In one of those dramatic changes of weather that seemed to happen all the time in Manhattan, the October day felt like spring. The wind had blown the gray clouds out to sea, and when I threw open a window I was sure I could smell the river. It reminded me of home, but that was all right today. I was the product of rivers —you couldn’t walk a half mile in Providence without bumping into one.

Steam rising from my teacup. Buttered toast on a plate. The sweetness of being alone. The radio on, softly. Everything would be perfect if I could just stop thinking. Nate had given me Billy’s address when he’d given me the key. I’d tried three letters, one after the other, and they were sitting in front of me.

Dear Billy,
I guess you’ll be surprised to get this. I never thought
I’d be

Dear Billy,
How is everyth

Dear Billy,
You’ll never guess where I am!

 

I put down the pen. I’d never lied to Billy — even when I’d told him I never wanted to see him again, I had genuinely never wanted to see him again.

And now … I’d made a promise to his father. But I hadn’t promised
when
I’d write to him, had I? I didn’t have to write the day I moved in. I could wait a few days to find the right words. I’d find a way to fill the letter with so much truth that one little lie wouldn’t matter.

A pair of sneakers appeared on the fire escape stairs outside the window. The ladder came shuddering down with a clang. I flinched, spilling the tea across the letters I’d tried to write.

A boy, tall and lanky, jumped down the last two steps. A thick book was tucked underneath his arm and he held an apple in his teeth. His gaze slid past the kitchen and then stopped. His mouth dropped open, the apple fell out, and I burst out laughing.

I walked over, tying my robe tighter, and leaned out. I looked down at the ground, where the apple had fallen into the dirt of the scraggly yard.

“I think I owe you lunch,” I told the boy.

“I didn’t know the apartment was rented — it’s been empty for years.” He stammered out the words, blushing up to the tips of his ears.

I recognized the blush. I saw it on teenage boys all the time.

“I’m Hank,” he said.

“I’m Kit. I just moved in yesterday,” I told him.

The book was a textbook,
American Prose.
I’d left textbooks behind when I’d left home, and even though I’d hated every day of school, the book made me feel hollow, like I was missing out.

“I study outside sometimes,” Hank said. “For the privacy.” His hair was light brown and matched his eyes perfectly.

“Lots of brothers and sisters?” I asked. “No. Just parents.” He shrugged. “That’s enough, sometimes.”

“So who’s the piano player?” I’d heard the music that morning, through the ceiling over my head.

He blushed again. “Me, I guess. Is it too loud? I can —”

“No, it’s nice.”

There was a pause. I began to feel stupid, standing there in my nightgown and robe. “I go to Stuy. You?”

It sounded like another language at first —
igotastyu?

“Stuyvesant High?” he said. “I’m a senior.”

I was used to people thinking I was older than I was. But my face was scrubbed clean, and I must’ve looked my age. A girl in high school. I was suddenly annoyed at him, at his earnestness, his sneakers, his book.

“I just moved,” I said. “From Rhode Island. I’m not in high school; I work. And I’ve got things to do, so …”

“Sure.” Embarrassed, he started back up the ladder, then paused. “With the move and all … do you and your parents … I mean, do you need help with anything?”

“I don’t need any help,” I said, then shut the window.

Empty for years,
he’d said. I found myself wondering: If
Nate had bought the building as an investment, why hadn’t he rented it out?

 

He called that night about five minutes after I got home. Almost as if he’d timed how long it would take me to get back from the theater.

“Did you send the letter?” he asked.

“You said you wouldn’t call.”

“Did you send the letter?”

“You said you wouldn’t call.”

“We had an agreement.”

“Exactly. You said you wouldn’t call.”

The standoff. I leaned against the wall, the receiver against my ear. I couldn’t believe I was talking to an adult like this. I’d only been here a month, but New York had sure taught me not to waste time being polite.