Chapter 3
The next morning, Maggie woke up to summer sunlight streaming through the crack in the curtains, and the air in the room already stifling.
Last night, she’d closed the window to avoid the awful smell of the stockyards. Even though Englewood was meant to be downwind from them, Maggie had breathed in the scent of blood and animal on the air, and it had made her stomach roil.
Now she sat up in bed, brushing her dark hair from her eyes as she looked around the empty room.
The pillow and blanket Brendan had used to sleep on the floor last night had already been put away, leaving no sign that he’d been there at all.
Maggie had heard him rise a while ago, but she’d kept her eyes closed, determined not to engage with him during the intimate acts of washing and dressing, even as she was acutely conscious of the trickle and clink of the pitcher and basin, the whisper of his shirt as he pulled it on.
When he’d finally left the room with a soft click of the door, she’d breathed a small sigh of relief, her eyes still clenched shut.
Sleeping in the same room was distressingly awkward, especially after the questions they’d been peppered with over supper, all asked out of genuine friendliness, yet impossible to answer honestly.
The meal had been a surprisingly lively affair, with the other three boarders gathered around Harriet O’Malley’s dining-room table exchanging animated conversation.
Maggie had been introduced to Miss Sarah Whitman, a teacher at the Cook County Normal School just a few blocks away, where she trained young women to be schoolteachers.
In her early thirties, she wore the spectacles and drab clothes of a spinster, and yet had an attractive, appealing face, her blond hair dressed elegantly and her gray eyes twinkling behind her glasses.
The second boarder Maggie had been introduced to, Teddy Winter, sold scrub brushes door to door and was no more than twenty-one or twenty-two, tall and skinny, with an irrepressible cowlick that no manner of pomade seemed able to smooth.
With the way his chin jutted out, his scrawny neck and prominent Adam’s apple sticking out from his stiff celluloid collar, he reminded her of a turkey.
His fast way of talking, the words slipping over one another in his eagerness, was like its gobble.
He was clearly besotted with Miss Whitman, despite the fact that she was a good ten years older than him.
She took his stammering flattery with amused graciousness, which made Maggie instinctively like her, and she hoped perhaps they might be friends.
She could certainly use one in this strange city.
The third boarder was a middle-aged man named Horace Peabody.
He sported an enormous set of lambchop whiskers that quite overwhelmed his face, and he worked as a bank teller downtown.
Although quiet and seeming somewhat beleaguered, Maggie sensed he also had an affection for Miss Whitman, but with Teddy’s gobbling chatter, he was barely able to get a word in edgewise.
In any case, the conversation had been entirely centered on the new arrivals, their experiences as well as their aspirations. The questions had all been innocuous, and yet each one was met with a half-truth at best, and often an outright lie.
“Mrs. O’Malley said you were newly married?” Sarah Whitman had asked, her pretty face wreathed in a friendly smile. “When was the wedding?”
A tense pause had greeted this innocent question, and then Maggie had managed in a clipped voice, “Just last month.”
“Oh, true newlyweds!” Sarah had exclaimed, her smile widening, while Maggie wilted inside. The more lies they told, the less likely it seemed that she’d ever escape them. And how would she even remember to keep them straight?
“Fairly new,” Brendan had agreed in a jocular tone. “But we’ve known each other for some time. Where do you hail from, Miss Whitman?”
Despite his deft turn in the conversation, it had soon moved inexorably back to the far more interesting matter at hand. “I’m from Peoria,” Sarah had replied with a dismissive wave of her hand. “But tell me, at what church was your wedding? My cousins live in Brooklyn—”
“It was in Manhattan,” Brendan had said quickly. “St. Mary’s.” He’d glanced at Maggie in what she knew had to be apology. She knew he was just as uncomfortable with these lies as she was.
Things had fared no better when Danny, with a mind full of mischief, had decided to get involved. “Tell them about the wedding breakfast,” he’d urged Maggie with a cheeky grin. “What a grand affair it was!”
Maggie had attempted to discreetly glare daggers at her brother while she made up some story of a simple wedding and meal afterward, barely aware of what she was saying.
She knew Danny had no malice behind his teasing; he didn’t realize that this masquerade marriage hid deeper feelings on Brendan’s side, as well as, she acknowledged reluctantly, on hers, even if she was doing her best to ignore them… and would continue to do so.
Fortunately after that, the conversation had moved on from the wedding, but only to what their plans were in Chicago.
Once again, Brendan had prevaricated, speaking vaguely about looking for work and joining her father, although when pressed for her father’s address, Maggie had finally had to part with some honesty.
“Truth be told, we don’t know where he is,” she’d admitted. “He came to Chicago to work, but his last letter had no address and so we’re hoping to look for him here.”
“No address?” Mrs. O’Malley had repeated with a frown. Clearly it was not the version of events she’d become accustomed to.
“You know how it is,” Brendan had interjected quickly. “Lodgings can be so hard to find when one is newly arrived. We’re so grateful to have found your home, Mrs. O’Malley, truly. What a welcoming place it is! I’m sure we’ll find Maggie’s father soon enough.”
Their landlady had looked somewhat appeased by this flattery, and Brendan had valiantly attempted to turn the conversation yet again, this time to Teddy Winter’s job selling scrub brushes.
While there were no more invasive questions, Maggie had still felt exhausted by all the inquisitiveness—and all the lies.
After supper, Horace Peabody had headed to his room, while Teddy and Sarah had stayed in the front room, reading magazines and playing the piano, and Danny paid for his cot by the kitchen by fetching coal from the cellar.
Maggie had pleaded the exhaustion of travel and retired upstairs, dreading when Brendan would come up to bed, and yet at the same time finding herself unsettlingly anticipating that moment, as well.
She had spent an inordinately long time simply staring out the window at the night sky, the first stars twinkling on the horizon, and wondering what would happen when he finally opened the door.
When Brendan did come up, however, having spent several hours with their fellow boarders in the parlor, she was already asleep. She had stirred when she heard the door open and close softly but fell back asleep before Brendan so much as took off his boots, which, she knew, was really just as well.
And now it was morning, and a sweltering one at that, and the day stretched ahead of Maggie, filled with whatever was required “to see to their home life.” With a sigh, she changed out of her night dress, moving quickly in case Brendan returned, and then washed her face and arranged her hair.
In the small rectangle of mirror above the dresser, her face looked pale and pinched, her navy-blue eyes almost black.
The cleft in her chin, she comforted herself, remained just as stubborn-looking; her aunt had often said that it was a sign of a defiant will, and Maggie knew she needed a little defiance now.
She tidied her blue-black hair into a loose bun, tucking the unruly strands in as neatly as she could before giving her reflection one last appraising look and then turning to the door.
Downstairs, Mr. Peabody and Miss Whitman were sitting at the dining-room table, finishing their breakfast of eggs and bacon. Teddy Winter had already left for work, and Brendan was nowhere to be seen.
“Mrs. O’Donaghue!” Sarah Whitman exclaimed. “Good morning. I trust you slept well?”
“I did,” Maggie replied as she sat down, spreading her napkin across her lap.
“But, please, you must call me Maggie.” Because she didn’t think she could bear having to answer to Mrs. O’Donaghue every time someone spoke to her.
She ladled some scrambled eggs onto her plate while Sarah murmured that, in that case, she would be delighted if Maggie would call her Sarah.
“Mrs. O’Donaghue!” Harriet O’Malley greeted her as she came into the dining room with a fresh pot of coffee. “I hope you slept well?”
Once again, Maggie proclaimed that she had and asked her landlady to call her Maggie. “Have you seen Mr. O’Donaghue?” she asked as Harriet poured her some coffee.
“He had his breakfast over an hour ago, and has gone out to look for work,” her landlady replied.
“The grass doesn’t grow under his feet, to be sure!
And your brother has gone out as well. But Mr. O’Donaghue left you this.
” She took three silver dollars out of her apron pocket and placed them on the table by Maggie’s plate.
“He thought you might have some shopping to do. If you like, after the others have gone to work, I could show you some of Englewood’s businesses?
We have nearly everything we require right here, with little need to go into the city. ”
Her landlady looked so hopeful and eager that Maggie knew she had to accept. In truth, getting out and exploring the area was an appealing prospect, even if she’d rather be looking for work like Brendan and her brother were.
“Thank you, that sounds very pleasant,” she told Harriet, who beamed in response.
A short while later, Sarah and Mr. Peabody were readying themselves to leave, and Harriet began to clear the breakfast table, with Maggie’s help.
“As soon as we’re done here,” she told Maggie as she pumped water into the big stone sink, “we can ready ourselves to go out.”
As they washed the breakfast dishes together, it fast became clear to Maggie that her landlady was very much enjoying having a companion during the day.
Over the course of the half-hour it took to wash and dry the breakfast dishes, she learned that Harriet’s husband was a seaman on one of the lakers, or cargo ships, that traversed Lake Michigan and was away much of the time.
She’d had four children who had all died in infancy, and after breakfast she showed Maggie their locks of hair, kept in a little silver box on the mantle.
She’d started taking in boarders more for the company than the rent money, but that helped, to be sure.
Maggie felt a pity as well as affection for the older woman who was clearly lonely, the losses of her children and the absence of her husband still sorely felt.
And yet as much as Maggie sympathized with Harriet, she knew she did not want to spend her days helping with the housework and providing company for her landlady, although she already suspected that was the expectation.
“Englewood has so many businesses these days,” Harriet told her as they stepped out from the house onto the sidewalk of the wide boulevard of Sixty-Third Street.
“Years ago they were advertising for everyone to move out here to the country—fresh air and wide-open spaces! But it’s been built up quite a bit since then, as you can see, and we have nearly everything we could want. ”
Harriet kept up the cheerful chatter as they strolled down Sixty-Third Street, pointing out various stores and businesses that she frequented.
“And this is Dr. Holmes’ drugstore—all the young ladies like to go to him for their various troubles and ailments, and I’m sure it has nothing to do with his blue eyes!
” Harriet tittered, covering her mouth with her hand, as she pointed to the plate glass window of a drugstore across the street.
“Dr. Holmes, the druggist, owns the whole block, and he can’t yet be thirty.
He said he’s going to turn it into a hotel for the Exposition. ”
Maggie glanced at the building in question, which indeed took up the whole block, a strange, mismatched sort of place with various gables and towers that seemed as if they’d been placed any which way.
“Are there any department stores here?” she asked Harriet, who wrinkled her nose, frowning.
“Department stores? You mean those big places? Oh, no. You’d have to go downtown, to the Loop, for those.
But Chicago has the grandest department store in the whole country—Marshall Field and Company.
I’ve heard tell that even the commercial palaces of New York City can’t rival it.
” She spoke proudly, as if she had some part in its conception.
“Marshall Field and Company…” she repeated softly to herself. A store as big as Harriet said was sure to have a millinery department. And if they had a millinery department, then perhaps Maggie could finally find a job—and begin to recover the dreams she’d lost back in New York.
“And they’re building a new structure on State Street and Wabash Avenue, just in time for the Exposition, although it’s hard to imagine the place being any bigger!
I get lost in there as it is. Now, shall we stop at the greengrocers?
Your husband told me he was fond of peach cobbler.
I imagine you have a recipe?” She gave Maggie an expectant, mischievous smile, but Maggie barely noticed it.
All she could think about was the commercial palaces waiting for her in the Loop, and how Marshall Field and Company might provide the stepping stone to her future that she was so desperately looking for.