The Family Overhead

By Joseph William Meagher

When Con and Margaret Mary Skilly, an elderly couple
who have always longed for children, begin finding abandoned children left and
right, they never question their good luck but simply raise the three
foundlings with love and devotion.

Too soon the three kids are left on their own
again. It's the Depression, with more
feet than shoes, more appetites than dinners, when rumrunners wear diamonds big
as knuckles, even the cops have favorite speakeasies, and the thrills of radio
and the talkies hold the nation spellbound.

Only Birdy's Regina wants the kids.style="mso-spacerun: yes"> A diffident, self-effacing young woman, she
has always been cowed by her mother, bullied by her absurd husband, and
intimidated by her own infant. But she
turns out to have the heart of a lioness, and is determined to keep the
foundlings free of the State's clutches.
Along the way she finds a strong and completely unexpected ally.

Joseph William Meagher brings to teeming life this
Brooklyn neighborhood and the people in it who struggle for food and rent, love
and fun, and everything that keeps life going.
If characters caring deeply for one another are unfashionable, then this
is an unfashionable novel.

But such an enjoyable one!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 5, 2004
• ISBN: 9781410789624

Joseph William Meagher

Joseph William Meagher was born in Brooklyn in 1917.  Stricken with polio at the age of four, he spent much of his childhood in hospitals.  There he began an intensive reading of history and ultimately the great literature which were the seeds of his fascination with the past and his acknowledged fine craftsmanship as a writer.  "An author," Joseph Meagher has said, "must enchant to win, never forgetting that dullness is a fifth cousin of death."  Critics have praised him as a genuine storyteller and compared him to a kind of modern Dickens.  His previous novels, published here and abroad, include THROUGH MIDNIGHT STREETS, TIPPY LOCKLIN and THE TENEMENT OF DREAMS, followed by his recently published memoir, BROKEN YESTERDAYS.

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© 2004, 2012 Joseph William Meagher. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means

without the written permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4107-8962-4 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4107-8963-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4107-8964-8 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2003096343

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web

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publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

1stBooks-rev. 11/26/12

By Joseph William Meagher

THROUGH MIDNIGHT STREETS

THE TENEMENT OF DREAMS

TIPPY LOCKLIN

BROKEN YESTERDAYS: A Memoir

THE FAMILY OVERHEAD

TO LEE

BECAUSE I LOVE HER

CONTENTS

PART ONE THE RADIO STAIRS

1-LARRY AND PEGGY AND BRENDAN

2-CON AND MARGARET MARY

3-MARGARET MARY TALLY

4-CON SKILLY

5-NEIGHBORS AND BUSYBODIES

6-LARRY AND THE WORKADAY WORLD

7-NEIGHBORS AND STRANGERS

8-NEIGHBORS AND SUPPER GUESTS

9-BIRDY AND NEDDIE

10-JIGGSY AND COLLEAGUES

11-NEDDIEDEALY

PART TWO BIRDY’S REGINA

1-LARRY AND THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE

2-REGINA AND COMPANY

3-REGINA AND THE PAYING GUEST

4-BIRDY AND REGINA

5-REGINA

PART ONE

THE RADIO STAIRS

1-LARRY AND PEGGY AND BRENDAN

Across the river from Manhattan early one October evening in 1931, a kid named Larry jumped down from the back of a Smith Street trolley. He had been hitching rides ever since school let out in late afternoon. Although he liked the sensation of travel at no cost, Larry was trying to avoid a kid named Conklin who was said to be looking for him with a baseball bat. They had fought earlier in the schoolyard at recess, with Larry barely the winner. Although only ten, he had already learned that if you do happen to win one fight you’re almost sure to lose the next.

The electric light bulbs at Sanders Theater just opposite Prospect Park were flashing in sequence along the marquee borders. They called to him and so did the sidewalk posters and the tinted movie stills in the display cases. But first he had to wait for traffic to ease up. A blue Hupmobile with a broken fender went by. Clipped to its bumper was a stamped tin sign:

REPEAL THE 18TH AMENDMENT

Once across, Larry studied the movie advertisements, particularly a blowup of Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson trying to outstare one another. Larry rarely passed the theater without looking over its display posters. He’d never been inside the place. It was mainly a matter of not being able to afford to.

There wasn’t very much money in that neighborhood. Times were tight. The entire country had just settled into the early stages of the Great Depression. There were more workers than jobs, more appetites than dinners, more feet than shoes.

Having looked his fill, Larry pulled his jacket tight about him and headed down a sloping street. The buildings became shabbier the farther they were from the park. When he came to the house where he lived-a five-story limestone tenement of no particular distinction-he stopped short.

Trouble.

It wasn’t Conklin and his baseball bat. On the top step of the front stoop stood the two Nelson brothers-sons of the drunken pipefitter on the first floor left. The older one was holding a chair leg. Both kids were waiting for somebody their size or possibly smaller to try to get past them. Larry would do.

They smiled down at him twin smiles of bruised ruin. The younger brother swung a broken bedspring which hummed as it cut through the air. Come on up, he said.

All Larry wanted was his supper. The only thing he could do right now was wait around, hoping the situation would change. One brother he could handle but not two.

He waited. So did the Nelsons.

Try your luck, said the older one.

Larry, said the younger, when’s your birthday? When’s the big party?

Larry marked them both for death at this because he didn’t know when he’d been born and didn’t know who his parents were. Larry was an orphan-worse than that, a foundling. He lived on the top floor left with two others like him, a girl of eleven and a boy of six. They were being raised by a very old man who many thought wasn’t quite up to the job.

Waiting by the lamppost, Larry heard a tapping noise from an upper window. He raised his eyes and saw Peggy motioning him impatiently to come up. In her other hand she held a lighted candle. What was that all about, he wondered. Since he couldn’t get upstairs just then to find out, Larry looked away.

Reinforcement arrived when Brendan, the youngest orphan, came down the block striking a rolled-up magazine against his leg. I seen a junkman’s horse having a fit, he said, going straight over to Larry. A cop had to hold his head.

It was Brendan’s good fortune to come across sights and spectacles beyond the usual everyday happenings. He never lied-there was no one he wanted to impress.

Look what I found in a garbage pail, he said, flicking a potato peel from an Argosy magazine with a cover of Zorro, masked on horseback, riding down a villainous alcalde. Read me that story later, maybe? he asked. Brendan knew all twenty-six capital letters of the alphabet by sight but that was about as far as he went with them.

Larry, putting on bravery as one would a coat, nodded yes. There are some kinds of courage which need an audience and that was his kind. Brendan provided that audience. Somehow he had the idea that Larry was both philosopher and daredevil and looked to him for wisdom and muscle.

We’ll have to get past ‘em somehow, said Larry, pointing to the Nelson brothers.

Now? asked Brendan, rolling up his magazine. That was the trouble. He was the braver of the two but didn’t know it.

Na, said Larry. We’ll wait until somebody from the building goes in and we’ll sneak in behind ‘em.

Okay, said Brendan.

They waited. So did the Nelsons. Happy birthday, said the one with the broken bedspring.

The first tenant to come along was Tod Clench, second floor right, who pulled up before the building in his COAL & HAULAGE truck. He parked it there every night at the same time and nobody else ever tried to take this spot-not that very many people on the block owned automobiles. It was more that Tod Clench was a bad man to tangle with.

Climbing down from his truck, he began unloading a heap of boxes, dumping them on the sidewalk. Something in his manner kept people at a distance. He had the aloofness of the hardbitten and rarely raised his voice because he never had to.

In addition to selling egg and nut coal when not doing short-haul jobs, Tod Clench was a thief. More precisely, a receiver of stolen goods. A spattering of coal dust began rising from this latest swag he was unloading as it hit the sidewalk.

Although he took a bath almost every day, he never looked clean. Coal dust grayed his complexion, pitted the pores of his nose and ridged his hairline with soot. His corduroy cap and trousers were dark with it and so was his leather vest.

Larry was drawn to sealed boxes and wrapped parcels and came nearer to watch the unloading, Brendan trailing after him. Tod Clench had just finished. He unslipped a broom from the side of his truck and began sweeping the boxes clear of grit.

Larry got a bit too close and Tod Clench leveled the broom at his head. Beat it, he said. Blow.

Both kids drew off to one side but continued to watch while they waited.

Tod Clench was so vigorous in getting the coal dust off his boxes that it brought the janitor, Mrs. Himmelfleisch, up from the basement. Out she bounced, broom in hand, wearing a dead man’s cardigan which came nearly to her knees. The cuffs were turned back three times and held with pins.

She launched into a sweeping-up which had overtones of hysteria. The coal dust on the sidewalk maddened her. Her sidewalk was her home. But she had no home. The German lady lived in the limestone tenement, occupying two cellar rooms without air vents or windows.

Just like Larry, Mrs. Himmelfleisch came too near Tod Clench’s crates. He aimed his broomhandle at her. Where do you want your ass shipped? he said. Uptown or downtown?

The janitor, like everyone else afraid of him, at once withdrew and calmed herself by sweeping down the cellar entranceway for the fourth time that morning.

The next person to turn up was Birdy’s Regina. She didn’t live in the building but her mother, Birdy Dealy-third floor right-did and the daughter’s frequent visits there made her seem like a tenant. That was enough for Larry, who belonged to the any-port-in-a-storm school. Brendan was first to spot her coming down the street.

There’s Regina, he said, tugging at the older boy’s sleeve.

Where? asked Larry, glancing around. Where?

Birdy’s Regina was an almost handsome young woman with hazel eyes and cocoa-brown hair cut short. She was having trouble with the baby in her arms because it battled her just then with great kick-outs of its plump arms and plumper legs. In an attempt to soothe the infant, she shifted it from one hip to the other but at each change of position the baby made fists of its fingers and pummeled her. Although this was her own child, she behaved as if it outranked her.

Baby Junior! Please! she said, near tears as Larry and Brendan came rushing up to her.

Hello, Regina, said Larry, his eyes on the Nelson brothers. How are you?

Larry! Brendan! said Regina, her face brightening as she stooped to include them in a one-arm hug. How are you? And how is Peggy?

Peggy’s okay, said Larry.

And your father?

We don’t know, said Brendan. He ain’t got up yet.

I hope he’s all right, said Birdy’s Regina, as both boys fell in behind her. Working all them long hours like he does.

She started up the front stoop of the limestone tenement, Larry and Brendan sticking close to her. When she reached the top step, the Nelson brothers let her go by but then struck suddenly as Larry and Brendan tried to crowd into the vestibule after her. Regina, trying to calm her still-struggling baby while pressing the buzzer of her mother’s apartment, had no inkling of the wordlessly fierce battle going on in back of her.

Larry and Brendan were getting the worst of it but, as the upstairs buzzer replied to Regina’s ring, the vestibule door opened and they squeezed into the entrance hall behind her. At the same moment, Larry kneed the older Nelson and Brendan stuck his rolled-up magazine into the younger brother’s eye. Both Nelsons, after falling back with an ouch! and an ow!, leaped again to the attack but Larry shut the vestibule door in their faces.

What was that? asked Regina, half-trying to look around. She couldn’t because Baby Junior was keeping her more than busy.

Nothing, said Larry, cutting past her on the stairs with Brendan following. Just some kids.

They started up the stairs but paused when they saw what a hard time Regina was having. Baby Junior had managed to turn himself upside down and, head hanging, was kicking at his mother with the heels of his shoes. There wasn’t anything Larry or Brendan could do. Babies weren’t in their line.

So long, Regina, said Larry. See you later.

Yeah, goodbye, said Brendan.

Goodbye, said Regina, working to turn her son right side up. Say hello to Peggy for me.

Nodding, both kids raced up the stairs but stopped at the third landing when they saw a thin exclamation mark of a woman staring at them. The mere sight of Birdy Dealy made them slow down to a complete stop. She had scrutiny eyes that tested the world and forever found it wanting.

No running and jumping on the stairs, she told them. There’s people like your father trying to sleep.

But her gaze was on her daughter as Regina came into view, the baby still getting the better of her. Birdy’s lips were thin lines of disapproval at sight of the hapless way the baby’s mother was trying to right her dangle-down infant. Birdy waited until her daughter had reached the head of the stairs.

Hello, Mama, said Regina, dipping with her free hand into a net bag suspended from her shoulder. I brought you some walnuts. Only six cents a pound-

Birdy Dealy wasted no time on hellos. With a quick forward step she plucked Baby Junior from his mother and shook him once but firmly. The kick-outs stopped and so did the making of fists. Cowed, he allowed his grandmother to turn him right side up.

You can’t stop this child of yours from doing anything it wants to do, can you? asked Birdy, pushing her face close to Regina who, cowed also, drew back. When will you learn?

I was only- said Regina. I was just-I mean, I was trying to-

Come inside, said her mother. Don’t stand out in the hall telling everyone your business.

This was meant for Larry and Brendan, who were leaning over the banister above, looking down. They watched as both women went into Birdy’s flat and then the two kids, without comment, continued on their way.

Halfway up the last flight of stairs, Larry suddenly stopped short. Jeepers, he said.

What? asked Brendan, also pausing.

Now I know why Peggy was holding that candle-And why she was waving me to come up. We ain’t got no electricity. It’s been turned off.

Brendan studied the older boy’s face for clues. That’s because we ain’t got no money to pay the bill, ain’t it?

Yup, said Larry.

And it’s because we’re poor, right?

I guess so-but does everybody have to know about it? asked Larry, who didn’t like the world peering behind the scenes. Turning, he darted up to the top floor.

Peggy was waiting in the doorway, candle in hand. Behind her the flat was in darkness. Her face was printed with worry. Although somewhat plain, she had eyes that were brilliant but soft. What took you so long? she asked, as they trooped inside. I been waiting and waiting and waiting.

We couldn’t get in, said Larry, as he took the candle from her. Because of them rotten Nelson kids-

She noticed a bruise on his face where one of the Nelsons had touched him up with the chair leg. "What happened?" she asked, remembering to keep her voice low, disturbed as she was.

I asked him to hit me in the eye and he done it, said Larry. As a favor to me.

Peggy always wanted to pinch him hard whenever he talked like that. Although not related, they’d fallen into a brother-sister relationship based on differing viewpoints. While often disagreeing, they rarely quarreled outright. One didn’t with Peggy. Any kind of controversy brought out the flinches in her.

Larry went into the front parlor, the others at his heels. The candle helped push back some of the darkness. The whole place was pitch dark when I come home, said Peggy, whispering.

Maybe you blew a fuse, said Larry, after pulling a light cord in vain.

I did not. I never touched nothing.

They were back in the long hall on which the other rooms opened. Going into each in turn, they tested the lights. They tiptoed past the one door that was shut. From within came heavy breathing sounds. Only when reaching the kitchen did they speak. Even so, Peggy closed the door to shut off any sound they might make.

Larry placed the flickering candle in a saucer on the table. He’s going to be mad when he wakes up and finds out, he said.

It ain’t our fault, said Peggy.

He must have forgot to pay the bill or else he ain’t got no more money left.

Standing on a backless chair, Larry rummaged about in a cupboard until he found some extra candles. Peggy placed them lighted in saucers and the kitchen came more firmly into view around them.

Larry, opening the dumbwaiter door, began hauling at the rope.

What are you doing? asked Peggy, well aware what he had in mind.

I’m going down to the basement and take a look at the fuse box, said Larry, not certain what he’d do once he saw it.

You’re not supposed to ride the dumbwaiter, said Peggy. A kid got killed from that once.

Larry knew that he should use the stairs to the cellar but a free ride was a free ride. When the dumbwaiter lumbered up to their floor he climbed into it. The wooden box opened on both sides for the loading-on of rubbish. There was barely room enough for Larry and he had to sit with knees drawn up to his chin and head down.

Ready, he said.

Brendan-and Peggy, despite her misgivings-pulled on the braided rope as the dumbwaiter dropped from view. They yanked at it until their arms were sticks of ache.

Larry was being lowered in absolute darkness. The only sounds were the bumping of the dumbwaiter against the walls of the shaft and the creak of the rope-and-pulley device above him. His journey ended with a jarring stop on the basement floor. Crawling out and brushing bits of lettuce leaf from his clothes, Larry picked his way through a slag-ridden area, past lumber, old tubing, baited rat traps, rusting boilers, loose lump coal, a broken bicycle pump and two snow shovels.

He moved cautiously around the storage bins and iron furnace because this was Mrs. Himmelfleisch’s territory and the lady janitor didn’t like kids riding the dumbwaiter. Although servile to the tenants she was hell on wheels to anyone under fifteen years of age.

She was sitting on a camp chair near the two rooms where she lived. Except when she turned on the electricity, it was always night in there with no trace of sky nor any touch of weather.

The Himmelfleischs had left Germany in 1923 during the bad inflation and come to America to mine the gold in the streets. They found none, someone else having beaten them to it. The husband got work as a curbstone setter but lost his job after the Wall Street crash. His wife and he moved into the limestone tenement in 1930 as superintendents, living rent-free at a salary of twenty dollars a month.

Eleven weeks of this basement existence was enough for Mr. Himmelfleisch, who slipped away one night and stowed himself aboard a North German Lloyd liner to return to Düsseldorf. His wife never heard from him again. She continued to stay on, tending the furnace and keeping the place clean. Her wages were cut but still she remained, managing somehow by getting part of her food, most of her clothing and all her reading matter from the dumbwaiter. She ransacked it as soon as tenants loaded it up with whatever they didn’t want, along with their refuse. It angered Mrs. Himmelfleisch when other people in the building helped themselves to things on the dumbwaiter which she felt were rightly hers before she had a chance to haul it down to the basement.

The cardigan she wore belonged to an old bachelor on the third floor left who had died a few months before. His heirs had dumped all his clothing on the dumbwaiter, load after load, with Mrs. Himmelfleisch down in the basement pulling in everything. She wore the dead man’s shoes, socks, shirts and underwear.

The lady janitor kept the building flawlessly clean but was mechanically inept and made herself scarce when anything in the building had to be fixed. If routed out, she would report with her best broom, as if hoping to sweep away the difficulty. Matters usually ended with the tenants doing the repairs themselves.

As he approached, Larry saw she was working on her ball of tinfoil, adding to it that day’s dumbwaiter gleanings. Mrs. Himmelfleisch believed that her accumulating lump of silver paper would be worth money some day. There was no use reasoning with her on this because she had all the confidence of ignorance. Eventually it might help pay her passage home.

The moment the janitor saw Larry she hid her ball of foil. What iss? she asked, in a man’s deep voice-You come down by the dumbwaiter, yess?

Not me, said Larry. Cellar stairs."

Mrs. Himmelfleisch grumbled that peoples was always by the dumbwaiter riding. Her English was heavily Teutonized. She reversed her U’s and W’s, her S’s were buzzes and in her R’s there was the sound of a dull surf rolling on an inferior shore.

Larry told her that something was wrong with the fuse in their flat and they had no electricity. Mrs. Himmelfleisch’s response was a laugh which made her rock back and forth clutching her elbows in glee.

You don’t have no fuse broke! You got no lights because the bill you don’t pay-

To prove it she took him over to the area where the building’s gas and light meters were. The janitor lady pointed out the one for the top floor left. "Aber, look! she said, pointing to the seal which had been newly applied. You see? You see?" Larry saw. The man from the Edison company had been there while Peggy, Brendan and he were at school and the old man upstairs was sleeping. The current had been turned off and they were all in the soup again.

Peggy and Larry were at the table doing homework by means of flittering candles. The kitchen door was kept shut because the old man was still asleep. Peggy made several trips over to the gas range where a pot of lima beans was simmering. It would be their supper. Although not yet twelve, she did most of the cooking for the house. Easy things in the main. Nothing adventurous. She was good at soups.

Larry, an indifferent student, was having trouble working out a problem in latitude and longitude. Halfway through he stopped, annoyed that the world had been divided up into squares and rectangles as if it were a ball in a net.

Brendan lay flat on the floor, heels swinging, turning the pages of the March, 1930 issue of Popular Mechanics. Every night he spent an hour over its line drawings. The magazine was his personal property and, like most of the reading matter in the house, had come from that traveling horn-of-plenty, the building dumbwaiter. He was looking through its pages with the aid of an inch-high candle burning in a cracked dish beside him.

Don’t step on my light, he said to Peggy, whenever she went over to the stove to see how her soup was doing.

Brendan, having just begun the first grade at school, wasn’t yet able to read. He had no difficulty figuring out diagrams and crosscut sketches but the capital letters of the alphabet gave him trouble because he saw each in a special way. A was a pyramided house, B two buns piled one atop the other, C a hook, D half an orange slice, E a bookshelf seen in profile, F the same shelves with the bottom one missing, G a hook with a doorstep, H the start of a ladder, I a pole, J a hook with a roof, K a collapsed double shelf, L half a box, M a house with a dented roof, N the start of a broken ladder, O a nothing, P a bun on a stick, Q a nothing with a tail, R a bun on a stick with a tail, S a badly bent hook, T a pole with a roof, U a nothing with the top bitten off, V a sinking arrow, W two sinking arrows, X a crooked cross, Y a slingshot handle and Z a comic-strip snore.

More minutes passed while Larry scratched away at his problem, Peggy stirred the bean soup and Brendan examined a diagram of a horizontal-return tubular boiler. The candle flames dipped and danced as night continued charcoaling the kitchen window.

Having finished their homework, the three kids were amusing themselves. That wasn’t difficult for they possessed youth’s immediate access to joy. What they also had was an underlying fear, knowing as they did that they were strays in a pigeonholed world.

Brendan, having joined them at the table, was drawing pictures in a composition book with marbled black covers. The World War had recently come to his attention and he was doing a battle on a double page, filling it with flying bullets and dead soldiers in bundles.

Larry took to holding the saucered candle under his chin and rolling his eyes at Peggy, hoping to scare her. The light gave his face a spectral, underlit glow. She caught up her candle and did the same thing right back at him. Brendan stopped penciling in military carnage and followed suit. All three were making ghost faces at one another when they heard the rusty buzz of the alarm clock in the closed bedroom and exchanged uncertain glances.

He’s awake, said Peggy.

With Larry leading the way, they carried their candles down the long inner hall whose worn linoleum could be cool underfoot even in summer. Stopping before the shut door, they listened to the sounds of somebody moving about inside and heard a growl of exasperation as a heavy object fell over.

Larry pushed the door open. Their arrival brought the unsteady light of candles into the dark bedroom. As they entered, their shadows kept them company-bobbing and pitching on the wall. A gaunt old man in winter underwear stood swinging at an electric light cord above him. He kept missing it every time. Beside him lay an overturned chair.

When he turned and said something they couldn’t make it out because his teeth weren’t in. Realizing this, Cornelius Skilly-or Con, as everyone called him-plucked a pair of dental plates from a water glass on his bed table. Larry averted his eyes as the old man crammed the uppers and lowers into his mouth with one shove.

Blow out them blamed candles! said Con, his voice thick with the phlegms of age. My light don’t seem to be working. He pointed a finger at Larry. Go take the bulb from the parlor lamp.

There ain’t no electricity, Pop, said Larry. The man from the Edison company come this afternoon and turned it off.

What? said Con. What’s that? He sank to a sitting position on the rumpled bed, his jaw dropping down at the news. His look of astonishment gave way to one of bewilderment. Con’s tangled white hair and tufted eyebrows made him resemble a Mark Twain of the working class.

He seemed to be staring at the three kids as they stood by with guttering candles but they saw that his eyes were on nothing. The gap between the old man and the young kids seemed almost unbridgeable.

And yet it wasn’t. Like them, he too was an orphan.

2-CON AND MARGARET MARY

It happened when Con, only five years old, was crossing a downtown street with his parents. He was walking between them, his hand in theirs. By the time he got to the other side he was an orphan. His father and mother remained in the middle of the road. People stood around to shield him from the sight. From then on there would be no other hands for him to reach up and hold.

It was 1866, the time of the Broadway omnibuses, wooden sidewalks, hoop skirts, Whittier’s Snowbound, the raids into Canada and the Black Crook extravaganza.

Con was the only child of a Presbyterian couple. Working class people of spare habits, their gaslit flat was an atoll of Protestantism in the sea of Irish Catholicism surging around them. Religion and the night had taken his parents away from him. Con forgave the night but never became a friend of God and the angels.

Come along, child, come along, his mother had said as she hurried him through the evening streets. They were wearing stiff, churchgoing clothes. It wasn’t possible to dress comfortably in that century.

Night having fallen, shopkeepers were nailing up their shutters, the ragpickers were bringing in their last loads, lamplighters were making their rounds and the streets were swarming with an afterwork bustle.

Mother and son were hurrying to the cordage loft near the Atlantic Dock where his father worked as a ropemaker. Con remembered the elder Skilly coming out of the place with his wages and stooping to kiss him. It was Saturday night and as a treat they went to a cookshop and had boiled beef, India tea and seedcake.

Then they started for church and the mid-Lenten service. As they walked Con became aware of this faint drumming sound growing louder and louder. He was to hear it in his head, off and on, for the next six decades.

Lighting was poor in the 1860s, with dull bluish-white lamps illuminating only the street corners while leaving dim the rest of the cobbled roadbed.

Suddenly there were horses rearing high over the heads of Con and his parents. As they were crossing the half-lit street a team of maddened runaways had come churning out of the darkness, their forelegs stroking the air fantastically. The drunken farmhand at the reins of the Studebaker wagon tumbled from the driver’s seat and rolled about the paving stones, whip still in hand.

The Skillys had no chance to escape. It was too late to be saved. They had just time enough to die.

Con was scooped up by his father and thrown through the air, away from the nickering death, to land unhurt in a gutter of water and slops. His father was shielding his mother-too paralyzed to move-and the whinnying horses rose up to drum them down into a stillness marked by a final few twitches.

I have here a new prospect for you, said the pastor of the church where Con’s parents had worshipped. Master Cornelius Skilly, by name. A child of God-fearing parents.

The minister was speaking to the director of the orphan asylum where Con had been consigned by the elders of his church. The Skillys had no other relatives in America and there wasn’t anyone else to look after the five-year-old boy.

He’s a biddable lad, said the pastor, who was partial to his side whiskers. He kept fluffing them up and smoothing them down affectionately, as if they were haired darlings he knew he’d never part with.

The minister bent over Con. Biddable, he repeated. But you’ll find he never has too much to say for himself. He gave Con a cinnamon candy wrapped in a tract. Goodbye, young Cornelius, he said, preening his whiskers as he turned away. Seek to know the Lord and follow His way in all things.

The director of the home, who hadn’t spoken a word of greeting to Con, pulled a handkerchief out of his waistcoat pocket and blew his nose with severity. Then he opened a desk drawer and from it gave Con a New Testament in cheap covers, its pages crowded with tiny print. After that, he knelt with the boy on the hard floor and prayed with him until Con’s knees lost all feeling.

The orphanage was maintained by the Presbyterian Assembly and it was there that Con began his long spin away from God. The asylum was of brown brick and faced a tannery across the way. It had enscrolled double doors and cryptlike rooms. The halls were pools of lightlessness. Con wore the uniform of dependency: striped wool shirt, short knee pants, ribbed black stockings, cloglike shoes.

He stayed for thirteen years, turning ever more inward as religion was washed over him in a daily dousing. The prayers seemed never to stop and the Old and New Testaments were cranked out hourly in chapter, verse and commentary.

The practical world wasn’t forgotten for, amid all this zealotry, Con was being taught the joiner’s trade so he could earn his living in later years.

While there was great solicitude for the state of his soul, there was no affection of any kind. Scrupulous as the overseers were in that era of frock coats and ferules, they lacked a saving warmth because they were so busy setting nets to trap the souls of their charges. There was a blight in the deadened passageways and desolation in the creaking of the common stairs.

Something of this worked its way into Con’s temperament. His natural taciturnity increased, rooted as it was in a need to keep hidden his true feelings about religion in view of the pressures surrounding him. This in time made him seem flintier than he really was.

When Con turned eighteen he left the orphanage with a certificate of woodworking schooling. He was given a new suit and four silver dollars sewn into a handkerchief. And when he left the home it was with the promise of a job.

A man named John Calvin Briety, a recent arrival from Nova Scotia, had started a dockbuilding business. He came one day to the orphanage maintained by his co-religionists to select an apprentice to be taught that trade. He wanted a youth of upright character and Christian morals who would serve seven years at scratch wages, acquiring in return a craft that would earn him a livelihood.

As the best woodworking student there, Con was chosen. He went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Briety and began his new life. Dockbuilding was a good trade to learn in a city poised on the lip of the Atlantic Ocean. It was also an exacting one which involved the hewing and setting of heavy timbers in place and driving creosoted pilings deep into estuarial waters.

John Calvin Briety was master dockbuilder six days a week and meddlesome Christian on the seventh. That became apparent when he learned his apprentice preferred lying late in bed on the Lord’s day rather than attending church. Several times he saw Con entering an open-air beer garden on a Sunday afternoon to sit with friends and drink lager while listening to the German band.

In 1879 many employers believed it was their duty to oversee the private lives of their workers and when John Calvin Briety tried to do just that, Con-inclined to be stiffnecked even then-objected strongly. That night he moved his things to a boardinghouse nearby.

He took with him the chest of tools to which he’d been adding, week after week: cold chisel, adze, spirit level, maul, peenball hammer, T-square and so on. The box came padlocked and had triple clamps. He used a jackknife to carve his initials on it.

His employer made a number of attempts to bring his apprentice back to his house and to God but Con was adamant. John Calvin Briety kept him on the payroll anyway because saving a soul was all very well but holding on to a good hand was even more important. They never discussed religion again after that but confined themselves to things like underpinnings, bracings, footings and anchor bolts.

When Con became nineteen, he decided it was time to marry. He set about looking for someone.

His knowledge of women was confined solely to a Mrs. Spindle-wright, an alleged widow who dressed always in black twill. In summer she lightened her mourning by wearing white streamers in her flared straw hat and net gloves through which peeped fingers as glossy as pink sausages.

Mrs. Spindlewright was a woman of formidable eyebrows who kept herself tightly laced, believing that it would add to the high color already obtained from her rouge pot. She passed herself off as a specialty needleworker. A card in her window said as much though none of the neighborhood women ever brought her any work to do.

But men came in reasonable numbers, usually after dark. The widow never got up until three in the afternoon for she believed that daylight faded her eyes. Con became one of her callers and visited there every other Saturday night and never stayed longer than twenty minutes. Mrs. Spindlewright practiced her profession with the gloomy air of a prisoner of war. Sex in the last half of the nineteenth century was equated with a kind of muscle spasm.

Frequently she mixed up her appointments and the overbooked customers had to wait in her smothering parlor with its wicker seats, Turkish pillows, plush hangings and étageres clogged with knickknacks of spun glass. The waiting men never spoke to one another but sat hat in hand, eyes cast down. When Con›s turn came-a maid in black kept order and, in between, read Lydia Sigourney-he entered a room nearly dark because Mrs. Spindlewright never let her clients see her in the buff. Her rented passion was filled with cave-of-the-wind sighs and a small groan of disarray when the thing was done.

Con really didn›t care for his Spindlewright habit but sensed it was necessary for reasons of health. He felt that there must be more to women than this, for the groaning widow seemed to be nothing but a supine flesh bank in which he made regular deposits. Con didn›t know any other women. His loveless orphanage years made it difficult for him to cast out lines to others-particularly females. And he wouldn›t have known about Mrs. Spindlewright if a friend of his, a roughwork carpenter, hadn›t given him one of the embossed cards she passed out to preferred customers-those who paid beforehand and didn›t smash the furniture.

Con›s boardinghouse was on Sackett Street, a few blocks up from Buttermilk Channel where sailing ships and occasional paddle-wheelers rustled by. It was operated by Mr. and Mrs. Van Barkeloo, who allowed no larking on the stairs and kept a sharp watch on their boarders when they gathered for supper in the dining room each night.

The Van Barkeloo clients were an unobtrusive lot: ribbon clerks, cobblers, hand sewers, coopers, hatters and telegraph operators. Con had little to do with any of them.

In fine weather, whenever he went out in back to wash up at the pump for supper, there was always a young woman who sat peeling potatoes. They never spoke. Con couldn›t see her face clearly because she rarely looked up from her work. Despite this, he got an impression of rosiness, plumpness and sadness. After a time the young woman was promoted to setting the tables, bringing in plates and pewter jugs, putting out bonehandled knives and forks, slicing loaves of home-baked bread and filling pitchers with milk. She didn›t eat with the boarders but helped with the serving and stayed to wash dishes and scrub pots. All Con knew of her was that she worked part-time for the Van Barkeloos and her name was Margaret Mary Tally.

One day she came permanently to the boardinghouse to live and rented the smallest room there-a place just under the eaves. She no longer waited on tables, having obtained full-time work elsewhere. From one of the women boarders Con learned that Margaret Mary had been taking care of her mother who had died of galloping consumption. She was now all alone.

Like Con, Margaret Mary did without the comforts of religion. In the early 1880s everyone professed some kind of faith-even the poorest claimed church membership. God was close to everybody then-perhaps no more than a fingertip away, as in the Michelangelo painting. One was either Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian or-least favored of all-Roman Catholic.

Margaret Mary›s mother was a Catholic and her father Protestant. The wars between them were unending. Every Sunday Margaret Mary›s mother would take her to hear Mass. Her father, a Long Island Rail Road brakeman working erratic hours, would meet them when church was letting out and, twitching with fury, hurry the girl over to his own place of worship to wipe out the Popish stain inflicted on her. Margaret Mary, having two separate beliefs dinned into her, ended up with no religion at all-more to keep peace than anything else.

God, as she saw it, caused racking disputes at the supper table, evoking rages that lasted well into the night and sometimes terminating when her father slammed his way out of the house en route to a saloon. One time, returning home drunk, he went straight to his wife›s bureau and swept it clean with a thrust of his arm. Then, picking up the fallen statues and holy pictures, he tossed them out into the street.

The wild tears of her mother as she rushed outside to retrieve them made Margaret Mary resolve to join the Catholic religion. But somehow she didn›t, perhaps because she loved her father also and grieved at the battling which kept her parents apart. They were all she had in the world, the families on both sides having disowned her father and mother for marrying outside their religion.

The Catholic-Protestant wars gained intensity. Her father drank, her mother grew sick but neither gave way. All strife ended when her father died under a freight car backing up in the Jamaica yards and what was left of him came home in a basket. Her mother took to bed for good and, in time, died.

Margaret Mary got a job at a cigar factory and moved into the boardinghouse. She was poor, free and without God but had all the other decencies. Con saw this in her face whenever their eyes met at supper. Hers were always the first to slide away.

Margaret Mary Tally wasn›t beautiful but she had freshness, serenity and the patient expectancy of the unsummoned. In a series of stiff and tentative gestures, Con Skilly began courting her.

Con and Margaret Mary worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, Monday through Saturday, but so did everyone else around them. There seemed almost no opportunity for young people of that era to find time to seek one another out and yet they managed. And there was all of Sunday for social visits and excursions, including the few hours set aside for church attendance.

Con usually worked late on piers and wharves around the city making emergency repairs, sometimes returning to find the dining room closed and the boarders in bed. Even so, he saw Margaret Mary once or twice a week at supper. Although not at her table, he sat where he could see her directly. Con›s approaches were at first confined to occasional glances her way. Margaret Mary had been aware from the first of his interest because it›s a woman›s business to know such things. Their eyes were conversing long before they themselves were. Con›s glances set up small flutters within her. She thought him a tall and quiet person but wondered why he always seemed so stern.

Their free Sunday mornings brought them together. Most of the boarders either slept late or were at church. Con and Margaret Mary-early risers by inclination and having no religious duties to fulfill-found themselves alone in the dining room, Sunday morning after Sunday morning, while the Van Barkeloos were attending the Dutch Reformed church and there was only the hired girl moving about stacking dishes and shaking toast crumbs from the tablecloths.

By and by they began having breakfast together. The next step was long strolls in good weather while church bells were tolling. Margaret Mary had never before walked with anybody who had so little to say about himself. All the young man beside her seemed able to talk of was wood and its grain, how difficult some timbers were to cut and how they fought the adze and dulled the crosscut saw. Margaret Mary in turn explained that cigars had to be packed just so, the labels resting face up with the brand name showing.

From the generalities of their jobs they passed to the particulars of their lives. Margaret Mary talked easily, as women can, and before long Con knew about her parents› religious strife, her father›s death in the freight yard and how her mother coughed her life away in a matter of weeks. Con said little in return and she became aware that he was keeping a large lump of himself to himself. She began to fear he had something to hide.

Con bought her gifts. A box of maple sugar. A silk souvenir fan. A fringed pillow. A pyrography set for burning mottoes in wood. And orange ices as the weather grew warmer.

They spent the Fourth of July at Coney Island, arriving there on the Culver Line railroad. It was a day dizzy with sunshine, so bright that clouds, sea and sky seemed enameled. Con let Margaret Mary do most of the talking as they made their way past the fun booths, the pony riders, the young girls selling ears of hot corn and the chowder pot men. He took her to see the Wooden Elephant Hotel which overlooked the curling surf. They walked several times around it, glancing up at the windows in its flanks and at the stairs in the forelegs and hindlegs.

Later on they sat in an open air pavilion near the beach. The breeze from the ocean blew briskly about them. Clog dancers were performing on a raised platform.

Con bought a glass of lemon squash for Margaret Mary and a pitcher of ale for himself. The dancers were followed by a team of tumblers and then by a short-skirted woman with a violet feather boa who sang «Never Take the Horseshoe from the Door.»

Con was beginning at last to talk in brief, indistinct sentences. Margaret Mary, unsure at first of what he was getting at, responded to the emotion welling out of him and listened carefully.

«On Christmas Eve we would get half an apple. Oh, sliced very neat but cut in half-a half on each plate. That was our Christmas present. And they kept calling us by our last names only. Stand up, Skilly, they›d say to me. Sit down, Skilly. Recite the names of the Twelve Apostles, Skilly. When I first come there I used to bite my pillow at night to keep from crying. They didn›t allow crying. They come and prayed over you if you cried because you was a sinner not to appreciate all that they was doing for you-»

And so in fits and starts Con told of his orphanage days and of the bleakness stamped into him. Margaret Mary, now in possession of the last undeclared block of his inner self, laid her hand on his arm.

Standing up, Con wiped the warmth of the day from his face with a polka-dotted bandana and then bending, kissed her under the short curving brim of her summer straw hat. The clog dancers had returned and in that airy bright moment aflash with sunshine, Con and Margaret Mary engaged themselves to marry.

He continued to see Mrs. Spindlewright twice monthly. On Con›s last visit to her murky bedroom, after he›d completed his spasm and she had simulated hers, he told her that he was to be married and would no longer be calling around. «Which one are you?» asked the widow. She turned up the crystal night lamp kept behind a stone jug of Florida water on her night table. When she saw who it was she nodded. Con, in turn, observed a massive lady in an orange silk wrapper with black ruching. Catching a glimpse of her formidable thighs, he glanced away.

But Mrs. Spindlewright was a woman, first and foremost, and she gave him a hug before again turning the bed lamp low. She wished him happiness and, as a wedding present, returned him half the price.

Con and Margaret Mary were married at Borough Hall in September, 1880 and their honeymoon was a two-day excursion to Providence, Rhode Island on the Fall River Line.

He was twenty and she eighteen when they began their married life in rooms over a ship chandler›s shop on Baltic Street. They were as happy as only the solitary who have stumbled into love can be.

Patiently they waited for children to come. Women in those days had strings of them, confinement following confinement. So many babies died within weeks of their arrival on earth that a woman who gave birth to eight or nine might see only two or three survive.

Con and Margaret Mary never did have any children. Each one tried to take the blame for it. Margaret Mary didn›t even have a false pregnancy. She visited midwives and herb doctors who dosed her with fetid potions-things like bark tea tinctured with iodine. Nothing came of all this.

Cheerful and bustling by nature, Margaret Mary hid the slow-spreading dismay her childlessness caused her by a continual busyness, cooking Con enormous meals and putting up each autumn jars of pepper relish and mustard pickle.

Con, his apprenticeship ended, was now a dockbuilder, first class. John Calvin Briety was finding it necessary to spend more and more time behind a desk running his business. Con was his best worker and had his salary increased-modestly. Nobody but John Calvin Briety ever got rich working for John Calvin Briety.

Despite not having any kids, Margaret Mary and Con were a well-matched couple. He was a bottled-up person who would probably always be that way but that›s sometimes the sort of man who comes closest to sensing the depths in a woman-most of whom have more feelings than any one lifetime can use up.

Con and Margaret Mary, growing old together, were slower coming and going on the stairs. The dockbuilder lost none of his ranginess because his hammering and bending work in the open air kept him fit but Margaret Mary grew heavier. By now they›d lived in a number of places because laboring class women need change, finding it one way of working off a certain restlessness which overtakes them. Unlike their wealthier sisters, they couldn›t pick up and head for Penobscot when the winds of boredom began blowing through them.

Margaret Mary hoped that a change of scenery might be good for her but every flat they moved to left her as childless as ever. The day came when she finally gave up all hope of motherhood. The question of adoption was never seriously considered by them. By the time they did think of it, both felt it was too late.

Con and Margaret Mary were nearing their mid-fifties when they moved into the top floor left of the limestone tenement in the Park Slope section. Margaret Mary tried making friends with her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Knobbey, whom she often met on the stairs clinging to her husband›s arm. Clarinda Knobbey would respond to her advances with stiff little nods although her husband was always more genial. The two women never got on speaking terms and Margaret Mary in time stopped trying.

Con and she became friends with the Dealys on the third floor right, who were Catholics. They visited each other›s kitchens regularly on alternating Saturday nights. What especially drew Margaret Mary to Birdy Dealy was her neighbor›s newborn baby, Regina, still in swaddling clothes. Mrs. Dealy, an intense little woman, wore her hair in an implacable bun. Her husband, a tunnelworker, was as small and wiry as his wife.

Occasionally Birdy would hand over her infant daughter to Margaret Mary to hold. It was a moment of deep emotion whenever the childless woman took baby Regina in her arms. She could have been a pauper fingering a five-dollar gold piece. Returning the child to her mother, her regret was almost pain.

Con and Margaret Mary’s flat was silent, with no youthful voices and no quick steps running from room to room. There was only the squeak of the Morris chair as Con sat down to spell his way through the newspaper while Margaret Mary, across from him in her rocker, did hand embroidery.

The loudest noise was the bonging of the wall clock as it announced hours and half-hours until enough had sounded for Con to snap open his repeater watch, wind it with a key and prepare for bed.

The top floor flat was a house of whispers, of unpeopled afternoons and eventless nights. The days of the graying couple were as alike as red beans on a white dish until Peggy was found in a box on the street.

The box was cardboard, the kind used to ship apples east from Washington State under the name Skookum Chick. Its trademark was a round-cheeked Indian child.

But before that happened, there’d been a change in Con’s life. In 1917 the United States joined the war against the Kaiser. That caused a shipping boom-which meant that existing piers and stringpieces had to be restored and strengthened. New ones were built. John Calvin Briety had so much work that he expanded his firm, placing Con in charge of night operations. This he did because he knew that his former apprentice was the only one he could trust while he, John Calvin Briety, was asleep. Con and his gang worked all through the war, seven nights a week, beneath sputtering torches or double-celled hand lanterns, building jetties or adding to breakwaters. When the fighting ended in 1918, the night gang-much reduced-stayed on