Chapter 2
The woman who answered the door after Brendan had pressed the bell was middle-aged and harried, her graying hair scraped back into a bun, and her narrowed pale blue eyes moving up and down their travel-weary forms.
“You want a room, then?” she asked in a voice that held the guttural trace of a German accent, and not much warmth.
“Yes, if there are some available,” Brendan replied in his most pleasant manner. “My name is Brendan O’Donaghue, and this is my sister Margaret and my—our brother Danny.” He stumbled slightly over the falsehood, but then smiled charmingly.
The woman only sniffed in response, unimpressed. “Your sister, eh?” she remarked skeptically. “Well, I never.” She folded her arms in a way that felt foreboding.
“You have rooms available?” Brendan continued as genially as he could.
“Not for a brother and sister,” she replied, ladening the words with obvious, incredulous derision. “If you want to get up to no good, you can do it elsewhere.” And without another word, she slammed the door in their faces.
“Well, I never,” Danny replied, sounding both outraged and amused before he gave them a quick, laughing smile. “I reckon you two don’t look very like each other. Not the way Maggie and I do. You might not pass for brother and sister, no matter what you say.”
There was certainly some truth in that, Maggie acknowledged with a suppressed sigh. Her dark hair and navy eyes bore little resemblance to Brendan’s light brown hair and hazel eyes, his round face so unlike hers with its strong cheekbones, and the unfeminine cleft in her chin.
“There will be other places,” Brendan replied, sounding less than convinced, and Maggie could not suppress a needling of guilt.
Was she being too demanding, asking they enact this other charade, for her own benefit?
And if doing so necessitated an extra room that Brendan would have to pay for himself…
“I know this is difficult,” she said stiffly as she laced her hands tightly in front of her, the wedding ring biting into her finger. “And I appreciate how much you have spent on our behalf already—”
“Do you?” Brendan interjected, sounding weary rather than annoyed, and without waiting for a reply, he turned from the door.
Maggie stayed silent, stung by this seeming criticism.
Had she not been appropriately grateful for all Brendan had done?
He’d lost everything too, for her and Danny’s sakes, and hadn’t complained about it once.
He’d paid for everything, as well—their passage here, the clothes on their backs, the rooms they were hoping to rent.
She owed everything to him. How could she ever show her gratitude, especially when she resented the situation she found herself in, through no real fault of her own?
Silently, Maggie followed Brendan down the street as he inquired at four other boarding houses along Sixty-Third Street.
No matter the availability of rooms, the good housewives and landladies of Englewood were clearly and frustratingly discerning.
By the fourth scathing rejection of their brother-and-sister pretense, Maggie knew Brendan was right.
No one believed they were siblings, and no one wanted to bring their boarding house into ill repute by renting to a man and woman of marriageable age who were pretending to be something they were not.
It was ridiculous, she fumed silently, for she and Brendan might not be brother and sister, but neither were they husband and wife!
And yet with no more than a ring on her finger, bought for a dollar at a cheap jewelers on Maiden Lane back in New York, it seemed a narrow-eyed landlady would happily believe them to be so.
“If we must pretend to be wed in order to obtain lodgings,” Maggie told Brendan after the fourth rejection, her heart heavy as she accepted the strictures of their circumstances, “then so be it.”
“You look as if you are headed straight to the gallows,” he replied with an attempt at wryness that he did not quite manage. His mouth twisted, his gaze narrowed. “I assure you, Miss O’Halloran, I will end this pretense as soon as it is possible to do so.”
Maggie couldn’t tell from his tone if he’d been trying to be amusing.
If he had, his irritation and hurt had both bled through the awkward attempt at levity.
Brendan had confessed his tender feelings toward her on more than one occasion, and while Maggie had been seriously tempted to return them, her vision of her future did not include cooking and cleaning for a man she would have to call master, as well as taking care of half a dozen of his babies besides, which was the undoubted fate of any women bound in matrimony, no matter what Brendan might say about the matter.
She’d seen it back in Ireland, and in New York, as well. The lot of a wife was always drudgery and often destitution, and she was determined to choose something different for herself and her own life.
But for now… married she would be—or at least seem so, for the sake of a room and two meals a day in a boarding house.
At the next house, the door was thrown open by a smiling woman in her late forties, her sandy, graying hair falling in wisps about her broad face.
She had a distinct Irish brogue and, within minutes it was discovered, had cousins in County Cork, where Brendan hailed from, and so they were family, or as good as.
“And you’re newly married?” she surmised as she settled them in the front parlor, a shabby but neat room, with cups of tea. “I can tell by the twinkle in your eye,” she added with a laughing nod to Brendan, while Maggie tried not to grit her teeth. The twinkle in his eye, indeed!
“Yes, we’ve come to join my father-in-law, who has found work here in Chicago,” Brendan explained, and their likely landlady, who had introduced herself as Harriet O’Malley, gave a smiling nod.
“And where has he found work? In the stockyards?”
“Yes, exactly,” Brendan replied after a second’s pause, clearly unsure whether to admit they didn’t actually know where her father was.
The only reason they had to believe he was in Chicago at all was a letter he’d written several months ago, with a Chicago postmark.
He’d offered no forwarding address and, truth be told, they had no idea where he was now.
He might have left Chicago entirely, just as he’d escaped New York.
Brendan ran his hand over his hair, clearly a sign of his discomfort at this extended deception. His conscience came into play when lying about her father, but not about their presumed marital bliss, Maggie couldn’t help but notice, with some bitterness.
“And will you find work yourselves?” Mrs. O’Malley asked, and Brendan nodded.
“I ran a small grocery back in New York. I hope eventually to do something similar here, although for now I’ll seek work, managing a store, perhaps.”
“That seems sensible,” Mrs. O’ Malley replied. “And you, lad?” she asked Danny with an encouraging smile. “You look too old for school.”
“I’ll find work, too,” Danny said, shooting Maggie an uncertain look. They had not discussed what he would do in Chicago, what any of them would do.
“Maybe working on the construction for the Columbian Exposition?” Brendan inserted. “It’s not too far from here, is it, and I imagine they need some strong young lads.”
“It’s being built out in Jackson Park,” Mrs. O’Malley confirmed.
“The whole thing was a desolate swamp before they came in, half the oak trees there as good as dead, but now they’re building all sorts of grand buildings.
Some of them look like marble palaces.” She glanced at Danny, smiling but skeptical.
“I imagine they need good workers. You’re small, but you might be strong… ?”
“I am strong,” Danny affirmed indignantly while Brendan looked benevolently on.
Brendan was, Maggie thought, arranging their lives like pieces of a puzzle when only he knew the whole. So Danny was going to work at the fair, and Brendan was going to manage a store. And what, she wondered, did he intend for her to do?
“I shall be looking for work myself,” Maggie told their landlady, who looked surprised and, she feared, somewhat disapproving.
“I suppose you could take in some sewing,” Mrs. O’Malley remarked dubiously, as if that were the only employment suitable for a married woman, and perhaps in her mind it was.
“I’m not sure yet what I shall turn my hand to,” Maggie demurred, although she already knew she would not be taking in any sewing.
That was how she’d started life back on the Lower East Side when they had first arrived in America—sewing trousers for twelve cents a pair, working her fingers to blisters and bone and straining her eyes besides, bent over her sewing machine by the gloomy light of a smoking kerosene lamp.
She had no wish or intention to repeat the dispiriting experience.
“Hmm.” Mrs. O’Malley looked skeptical, and Maggie hoped her ambitions would not derail their domestic arrangements—but if they did, she thought with a sudden spurt of savagery, then so be it! She would not be boxed into a corner simply because it was easier for everyone else.
“I’m sure my wife will take some time to see to our home life,” Brendan remarked placatingly, and then dared to drape an arm over her shoulders, giving them a quick squeeze before removing it again.
“And that is as it should be,” Mrs. O’Malley replied promptly, her face splitting into a smile of approval, while Maggie bit her lips to keep from saying something she suspected Brendan would regret, even if she knew she would not.
They made desultory chitchat for a few more minutes before Mrs. O’Malley finally heaved herself up from the sofa.
“Well, let me show you the room,” she said, “and then you can see what you think.”