Metropolis (22 page)

“These damn things are worse than stockings to get on.”

“Would you like some help straightening those?”

“Nice try, Harris. We’ve got work to do.”

Then they were off. The very first manhole they passed, she stopped.

“Let’s go under, shall we?”

“This isn’t the right place. We’ll have to do a lot more crawling. It’ll take longer.”

“Stealth is the thing, not speed or comfort, Harris. I want to go down.”

So they went down. And he pulled the manhole cover shut on top of them. Her too-large boots were a bit of a liability, and she had to squelch a shout the first time a rat ran across her back, but she was nimble and small—two assets he didn’t share—and above all, she was game. Her stomach was strong, and she was bubbling with ideas about how the Whyos could take advantage of every small feature of the sewers. It took them a good hour to crawl their way to the grotto. She showed hesitation only once, when she realized how late it was.

“We should have gone to Twenty-third Street first, Harris. It’s more important.”

“But we’re almost there.”

A short time later, they reached the grotto. Her mood shifted again when she saw the space—or saw the black emptiness beyond the range of her headlamp, really. She began to laugh. Her laugh was high and musical, and it echoed endlessly, filling the cave, until finally Harris was infected by her mirth as well.

“It’s perfect. It’s marvelous. We could have a
meeting
down here. We could set up offices.”

“Well, keep in mind that it’s not easy to get to,” he said with an odd modesty, as if he were the author of the space rather than its discoverer, as if its flaws were his.

“Never mind that now. Show me the archway.” She reached out her hand and let him lead her forward. When they made out the ledge, he showed her the old whiskey bottle.

“Good idea. Hang on,” she said, and reached down into her left boot. A minute later, she was holding up a silver hip flask that had once belonged to a Wall Street banker. She sat down on the ledge, all sense of hurry gone, unscrewed the cap and offered the flask to him. When he passed it back to her, her fingers lingered among his for a moment. Then she took a swig. He could feel the good burn of the rye in his gullet. The water flowed and burbled past their leather-booted feet. The dark cavern glistened with moisture. They were both blinded by the other’s headlamp for a moment when they turned toward each other, but they tilted their heads and closed their eyes and leaned forward. Harris tasted the whiskey on her lips, put his hand on her waist. Then he smelled singed hair. She shouted and pulled away. A tendril had escaped from the nimbus of frizz and caught fire. It was only a momentary flare-up, but he reached down to the stream, wet his fingers and ran them across the side of her head. The burned hairs were crumbly and brittle and fell apart under his touch.

“Is it out?”

“Yeah, it’s out. Sorry—” He held out his hand, gesturing at nothing.

“How bad is it?”

“Not at all.”

But it had ended the kiss. She put the cap back on her flask, then he showed her the space beyond the arch. There was a vast cesspool that had apparently never been emptied. Instead, its overflow drained into the grotto and was swept away by the stream. In effect, it was a giant dirt-catcher. They found a hatchway from the cesspool that opened into the subbasement of the building they suspected was the post office, but they didn’t go any further. Beatrice dropped a coin on the floor outside the hatch. If the Whyo who had a day job in maintenance at the post office found it there the following day, the location would be definitively established. If not, they’d go back to their maps and reassess the situation.

They went all the way uptown to the dirt-catcher in a cab and then went over to see the dry tunnel. It was past five but still pitch-black out when they returned to the bath hall. It was nearly midwinter and the moon had set. They went back to the locker room, and Beatrice looked at herself in the small, framed mirror on the wall. She was damp and smudged, with her hair a wreck.

“I’m quite filthy, Harris,” she said. “We’re here in this bath hall. Shall we take a bath?”

By the time Harris had gotten into Mrs. Dolan’s office and thrown the main valve, he’d worked up the courage to ask if she wanted help getting out of her boots. She laughed, and her voice echoed in the bath hall just as it had in the grotto. As Harris turned on the taps of a tub near the door, he could see his hand was trembling. He was unsure what would happen when she came up beside him, knelt down, and rinsed her hands in the warm, rushing water. She was always backing away from him at moments like this. He reached his in, too, and she caught his fingers in her grip. A moment later, they were wrestling on the tiles, still booted up but struggling to loosen the buttons of each other’s shirts with their wet hands. Then there were the breeches. A couple of buttons popped free and skittered across the tiles. Their hands and mouths were all over. The crucial areas had been bared. She dove up under his shirt, and he flinched—she had his nipple in her teeth. There was simply no way they could have waited to get their boots off before doing what they did next. No, the removal of sewermen’s boots required patience, and this was frenzy. The fingers that had stolen so many watches stole his breath away. The lips that had taught him to speak smiled a smile he’d never seen before, neither impish nor ironic. He dared to think that it was real.

The bath they took afterward was as rushed as the ones Mrs. Dolan oversaw—they had suddenly become aware of the approaching dawn—but otherwise it was like no other bath that had ever been had in the sewermen’s bath hall. It was crowded, with both of them in there together, but the last thing he wanted was space. They washed each other’s legs and backs and feet. Then they dressed, tidied up and sneaked away from the building. At the corner where they’d met, Beatrice surprised him by stopping and saying good night.

“You’re not coming home?” He felt desperate at the idea of parting.

“I don’t think we should just waltz in together at dawn, Harris.”

He knew she was right. He wanted to ask her where she was going, but he knew she wouldn’t say, so he just leaned forward to kiss her good-bye—she was so beautiful.

“
Good night,
Harris,” she said, darting away, and then she was gone.

18.

RED COW

H
arris went home, flopped down on his mattress without undressing, didn’t even try to sleep. In less than an hour, it would be time to get up again.

He got reproachful looks when he did emerge from the front room, the last one up in the family, rubbing his eyes. The O’Gamhnas quite rightly assumed that odd nocturnal comings and goings were a sign of illicit, probably illegal, activity, and he had come to them on the pretense of going clean. As for Beatrice, it was clear to all of them that she was her own woman. So long as she didn’t bring gang affairs into the house, they allowed themselves to believe she was not involved anymore. Somewhere, all of them knew the truth—she brought home ten times what a regular hot-corn girl might—but they didn’t begin to imagine the extent to which she actually had brought the gang into their home, in the form of Harris himself. Still, Harris, to the O’Gamhnas, was a cause. They had undertaken to save him. They did not approve of his relapses.

“You better not lose
this
job, Harris,” carped Colleen. “I don’t know where you’d go from the sewer. There isn’t any further down.”

She was more right even than she knew, but it rolled off him. All he could think about was Beanie. Harris kept his eyes lowered, lest Colleen or Penelope see the unsuppressible grin on his face. He shaved hastily and left the flat again as quickly as possible, taking his breakfast from a coffee cart on the corner.

He met Henley on Park Row, just south of City Hall, near the vast construction site where the new
Sun
building was going up. They had excavated the pit for their first dirt-catcher around an existing sewer pipe, a four-foot, elliptical, brick-and-mortar collecting tunnel fed by numerous smaller pipes. It turned out that Henley was a specialist in blasting, which kept the work moving along, even when they encountered large boulders. They’d installed the beams that would frame the new structure. Now they had to mix the cement for the foundation. There was no need for boots and such until they opened the sewer and installed the new manhole cover, so they skipped going by the Sewer Division in the mornings. They also worked an hour later than the regular sewermen, on a schedule designed by Towle at once to shield the dirt-catcher project from common knowledge and to spare the others from contact with Frank Harris and John-Henry Henley: a bringer of ghosts and a black. That the men did not like Harris—or rather, having Harris around in McGinty’s boots—was well known to Mr. Towle, and there would surely have been trouble in the ranks about John-Henry’s use of the bathing facilities. This way, the other men were long gone and the steam on the tiles had almost completely evaporated by the time Harris and Henley showed up for their nightly tubs. Except for Mrs. Dolan, who had volunteered to stay late on their behalf, Harris and Henley had the place to themselves, and theirs was always a peaceful, soothing ten minutes—a far cry from the rushing and splashing of the regular crew.

Talking quietly over the lip of his enamel tub, Harris revealed more about his several lives to John-Henry than was known by anyone else alive. And it had barely been a week. John-Henry had told him stories of growing up in Boston in the household of abolitionists who’d helped his mother come north from Alabama. She had worked in a Waltham woolen mill, and they had a small apartment in the colored section of town till the summer John-Henry was seven, when his mother fell ill with yellow fever and died. That was when the Henleys, the abolitionists who had sponsored his mother, had taken him in. They raised him with their own children and gave him their name.

Their lives could not have been more different, and yet there was common ground between them, starting perhaps with that strange fluidity to both their names and extending to the early loss of their parents. They also told each other of their present lives, though Harris did edit himself. He kept silent about his incarceration and the warrant for his arrest, but he’d fully described his awkward relations with the sewermen and the tricks he’d learned to terrify the men. He taught the Ballad to John-Henry, and they sang it together sometimes when they worked. It was partly a joke, but it was also partly for the same reason men have always sung work songs: It made the time pass and kept the work moving at an even pace.

They got along well together. John-Henry appreciated Harris’s deftness with bricks and stones and mortar; Harris admired the precision and control with which John-Henry set and detonated his blasts, opening exactly the space they needed to do their job, no more. By turns they served as boss and crew to each other, depending on the task at hand. They trusted each other with a stone block on a pulley overhead, which meant a lot. Harris was still taken by surprise every now and then at the ease he felt working with a black man, but the difference in their races had ceased to be an issue within a few hours on the first day.

The morning after his excursion to the grotto with Beatrice, Harris was bursting to see his new friend, brimming over with what had happened. He needed to tell it. He needed advice on how he should proceed. And since they worked alone, with only occasional visits from Dr. Blacksall, they had all day to talk. But then he couldn’t figure out how to explain the circumstances, where the boundaries of the story lay. If he told him where it had happened, he would have to tell him about the gang, and he was certain that was not a good idea. It wouldn’t be a favor to John-Henry to burden him with that knowledge. So he kept quiet, quieter than usual, actually. By midmorning, it was obvious to both men that Harris wasn’t concentrating. He dropped things, did the exact reverse of what they’d just planned, didn’t listen.

“Damn it, Harris, you been acting like a fool all morning,” John-Henry finally said, and insisted that they stop early for lunch.

Harris blushed, and then, slowly, John-Henry began to laugh.

“Oh, well, I see—so it’s about a girl.”

Over bowls of Brunswick stew and glasses of beer at a stand-up restaurant, Harris told John-Henry he had met her when she helped him out of some trouble he’d been having with the law. He didn’t say exactly what trouble, nor mention the fact that he was rooming at her family’s flat. He didn’t confess he’d made love with her on the bath house floor, only to be given a curt dismissal at dawn. He didn’t have to. John-Henry looked at him.

“Harris. Don’t you know enough to keep your pants on till you’re married? Especially if you’re in love with her. It’s a real mess you got yourself in, boy.”

“I know.”

“You already made love to her. You did, didn’t you? You know they got whores for that.”

Harris nodded. He had been hoping John-Henry had some advice for him, but John-Henry just shook his head. The way he saw it, it was too late for advice. The girl had been spoiled, and Harris had proven himself a less than honorable man. “You’ve just got to let it go. It won’t ever work out with that girl, not now.”

That might be true for most people, but did such rules pertain to girls in gangs? Harris wondered, if he could have told him everything, what John-Henry would have said then. Probably nothing, he would have been too appalled.

That evening, as the two men headed back to the Sewer Division, Harris realized he was nervous on more than one front—not just about everything that had happened with Beatrice but also about Mrs. Dolan. Had she detected the invasion of her realm? Would she know it was he who had done it?

And just as he feared, the matron of the bath hall came in while Harris and Henley were soaking and stood over Harris’s tub, hands on her hips, glaring at him.

“Yes, ma’am,” he ventured, arranging his knees as modestly as he could.

“Stop in my office before you leave, McGinty,” she said.

When he knocked, there was no answer, then the door opened. But it wasn’t Mrs. Dolan; it was Mr. Towle. Harris realized he was going to be fired. He grew hot all over with shame, anxiety and above all the horror that without his job in the sewers he’d be useless to both Beatrice and the Whyos.

“Listen, Harris, I must be candid with you. It was you who did the extra work cleaning the pipes, wasn’t it? There’s no point denying it. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“I’m afraid so, sir.” Harris thought that this had all been settled at their first conference. His eyes strayed across Mrs. Dolan’s desk and he saw an ashtray with several yellow buttons in it—the breeches buttons that he’d popped last night.

“Now, why would a man do extra work in the sewers? It puzzles me. I take it you went back down below, after hours. But why?”

He thought of Beatrice and bit his lip. Maybe she didn’t really care; maybe he had spoiled it, even if she did. But he thought of that smile, of their bath, and he told himself last night had been worth it.

“That’s all right, Harris, no need to say anything. You see, I think I have an idea why. You said you’d studied science, came from a medical family, back home? What sort of education do you have, Harris?”

“Not much, really, sir.”

“High school?”

“No.”

“Too bad. But even so, I’d like to talk further about sanitary science, about what we’re doing here in the Sewer Division. Just informally, of course. Would you be willing to meet for breakfast on Sunday morning? I go to early services, so what about afterward, say, nine-thirty?” He wrote down the name and address of a coffeehouse and handed Harris the slip of paper. “I’m going to invite my niece Sarah—er, Dr. Blacksall—too, if that’s all right with you. Actually, it was her idea.”

“Yes, sir. Of course,” Harris said, still not at all sure whether he’d been found out. But apparently he wasn’t being fired. He went home and found things equally perplexing there.

Colleen and Mrs. O’Gamhna weren’t talking to him, and even Beatrice avoided eye contact. It was absolutely unbearable to be in the apartment with so many people giving him the silent treatment, and so finally he took the bucket and went to the corner well. When he returned, it was worse. As soon as he entered the kitchen, Beatrice got up and left, avoiding him like a pariah, turning away when he approached. The most he could catch was a one-quarter profile: chin and cheekbone and halo of frizzy copper. He could just make out that some of the hairs were shorter where they’d been singed. At the time they usually had their lesson, he sat down in the front room with Liam’s paper on his lap and waited, not very optimistically. To his surprise, Beatrice rose from the kitchen table, where she had been helping Colleen with the dinner, to join him.

“Oh, come now,” said Colleen. “Mr. Harris speaks well enough by now, I think. Maybe too well. Why don’t you contribute your efforts to peeling the blessed potatoes, rather than the further education of a criminal, or did you just want to make moony eyes at him?”

Harris’s heart lurched. He’d been hoping for, been looking forward to, the nearness of her thigh beneath the table all day long. He couldn’t stand to be deprived of it. It emboldened him.

“I don’t know what you mean by moony, Colleen. I think that’s quite unjust. And I’d like you to know that I wasn’t doing anything wrong last night. Just out celebrating. It’s really not so terrible. I’ve a new job now with the Sewer Division. Today I was summoned to meet with the chief of the division to discuss my promotion. I’ll be involved with, uh, sanitary science. And so you see I do need these lessons—I have a whole new set of vocabulary errors I’d better not make.”

Colleen huffed and sighed, but it worked. Beatrice sat down in the armchair across from him. He wished she’d sat on the couch, but this was better than before, at least. He smiled tentatively and started to tell her about his meeting with Towle. She listened, but she was all business, quizzing him on building terminology—no warmth. Even so, every time he heard her roll the
r
in
portland cement,
a tingle traveled through him. He inhaled deeply, searching the air for a hint of her tang, but then he recalled she’d taken a bath the night before, too—she was too clean for him to smell her from that distance. He tried to make eye contact, but she kept her eyes on the slate and managed not to show any sign whatsoever that anything unusual had happened last night.

“Listen, Harris,” she said after a while. “Why don’t you do some copying? Colleen’s right about you not really needing the lessons—you got the words and the accent pretty well under your belt by now—but your handwriting’s still much too German. You might have writing to do with this new job. Work on that.” She scribbled something on the slate. When she passed it to him, he made a point of catching his fingers in hers, and she allowed it for just a second longer than she had to. He told himself that that was enough, for now. What he read on the slate when he looked down, however, made his heart constrict:
It’s set. Sewer job Monday. J. wants you to meet the gang, go over the plan, Sunday.

He looked at her. There was nothing in her eyes: no apology, no recollection of their night together. She had gotten the information she needed about the sewers from him; she had given herself to him. It had been just a barter. Her gaze was the cold stare of a lieutenant seeing that the commands of her chief were carried out. He tried to swallow his distress, but his mind was in wild disorder. He wanted to stand up and take her shoulders in his hands and confront her.
Was
she in love with him? Was she just his handler? Was he mad not to know? Instead, he gripped his own knees and looked down. He considered wiping away her message and writing out
Marry me, Beatrice
in his best non-Gothic script, but it was too absurd to conduct such business on a chalk slate, too hopeless.
I don’t want to go through with it,
he wrote instead, and then,
Can we talk?

She sighed, wiped the slate black with the damp rag they kept on hand.

No,
she wrote.
Be there or else.

Apparently, more than the lesson was over.

She got up, and when she was safely back in the kitchen, discussing the relative virtues of small and large potatoes with Colleen, he wrote out a sentence in German, the declaration he wanted to make. Then he covered the slate with a chalk tangle and left it on the table, unwiped. She hadn’t given him a single sign of affection or recognition. Even when his fingers had brushed hers, it had been just that, without reciprocity. He wondered if it was possible he’d really just imagined it all. No, something had happened. But perhaps that was just the way her nights always went; perhaps she was a whore as well as a thief; perhaps he had entirely imagined the emotion, the excitement. They had finally consummated their flirtation, but that didn’t mean a thing. She was a Whyo.