Page 151 of If Looks Could Kill
Your servant,
Maud Ballington Booth
I copied it out longhand and sent the original to Pearl.
And each night, when I looked down that long corridor of my future, I wondered if, perhaps, a door was beginning to glimmer in the distance.
Then, just a few days after Christmas, a letter came back from Pearl.
Slum Sisters,she wrote.Let’s do it.
The Bowery, Lower East Side, ManhattanTabitha—Irish Stew(Tuesday, January 15, 1889)
January midday skies were dark and rainy when I knocked on the door of Ben Feldman’s tenement flat and shivered under my umbrella. He opened the door and blinked at me.
“I’m Freyda’s friend,” I told him. “The Salvation Army girl.”
“Miss Tabitha,” he remembered. “Freyda’s not here. She and Cora returned to Freyda’s family.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “Cora decided to stay in the city, then?”
Ben’s expression fell. “You haven’t heard,” he said. “Her parents said don’t come back.”
Oh.
I tried to imagine a world where my own father didn’t welcome me back.
Then again, I hadn’t told my dad what nearly happened to me in a Greenwich Village brothel. Was I afraid of a fate like Cora’s?
Ben interrupted my thoughts.
“Freyda’s writing more for the paper,” he told me, “and both of them are working at her home, in Freyda’s parents’ business, sewing shirts.”
Ben gave me Freyda’s family’s address, and I went straight there.
I’d gotten off the train an hour before, dropped my suitcase at Pearl’s and my new tenement, and gone looking for Freyda and Cora. Pearl wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow.
“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Gorbady said, peering through her spectacles. “The girls aren’t here.”
She looked exactly as I imagined Freyda would look after giving birth to three children, raising them, and supporting them by squinting at stitches.
Behind her, I saw children and adults hunched over sewing, piecing shirts together at a furious pace. It was afternoon, but the dark outside forced them to work by candlelight.
“They went to meet with a newspaperman,” she told me.
Bravo to them! I couldn’t wait to hear more. I thanked Mrs. Gorbady and took my leave.
I reached the tavern and pushed through the door.
O’Flynn’s was mostly empty. A few old men sat in the back, lost in a card game, but otherwise, the place felt askew. As if, without people, it had forgotten its purpose.
Mike’s uncle stood behind the bar, totting up figures on a piece of paper, frowning, and comparing his columns to a pile of receipts. He only noticed me as I approached the bar. He peered over his spectacles at me, then took them off and folded them into his shirt pocket.
“Miss Tabitha.” He had a quiet sort of smile. “It’s good to see you back.”
The door behind the bar swung open and Mike backed through, toting a wooden crate full of clinking bottles. My heart sprang toward him like a cuckoo in a clock.
“Uncle, I think they shorted us a case of—”
