Strings Attached

Twenty-five



Providence, Rhode Island

September 1938



The first time I saw Nate Benedict was after the hurricane of ‘38, which Muddie, Jamie, and I spent in the bathtub, waiting for the roof to blow off. Nobody knew the storm was coming — people went on church picnics, they went to work, the children went to school — and when the rain and wind came, it was so ferocious that it didn’t take long before everyone in Rhode Island knew they were in trouble. Some of them didn’t know it until their houses were sailing away with them inside.

The rain was bad but Delia went to work anyway, because if she missed a day, she’d miss a paycheck. She left early so she wouldn’t be late. She was trapped downtown. In a burst of surprising piety, Da told us to pray. No phones were working, we’d lost electricity, and there was no going out of doors with trees slinging by in the wind. We were sure we were going to die, and it terrified and thrilled us.

People did die in the hurricane in Rhode Island, hundreds of them, drowned in their cars, struck by trees, swept straight out to sea, but after the skies cleared, Fox Point cheered up, for the hurricane meant jobs. Anyone who could hold a shovel had immediate work if he wanted it. It was tough going, cleaning out muck and dragging downed trees, and Da came home exhausted and slept in his clothes.

I was the only one who heard the quiet knocking that night, a week after the hurricane. I was lying awake, warming my feet against Jamie’s back as he slept at the bottom of the mattress.

Was that it, was that the start of it, the change in the family, a movement of knuckles on a door?

I stuck my head out of the closet and watched as Da greeted the stranger in a murmur. Da’s hair was matted with dust and stuck up in back, and he was in a white undershirt and work pants, his feet clownish in thick wool socks. A man stepped through the door, dressed in a gray suit spotted with rain. Men in suits didn’t come to our door, and I crept out to get a closer look.

They talked about the storm, of course, because everyone was still talking about it. I heard Da chuckle as he hurriedly tucked in his shirt. He quickly ushered the guest into the kitchen, past the shabby furniture, the blanket falling off the couch, and his boots caked with dirt sitting on a newspaper by the door.

I followed the murmurs and skidded next to the wall to listen. The whiskey bottle taken down from high in the cupboard, the chime of glasses — a rare event, so the man must be important. I wanted to hear his hurricane story; maybe he’d seen a drowned body, something to tell Jamie and Muddie tomorrow to make them jealous. Jamie and Muddie could read already, but I wasn’t much for books, since letters seemed to shimmer all around on a page. Stories, though — those I could remember.

He said he was downtown, that he’d seen Delia there. How the water had risen so fast that people were swept away. It rose above the reception desk in the Biltmore Hotel. He and Delia had battled their way to an office building and he had the key to an office, he knew someone, so they climbed all the way to the top and spent the night there. Down in the street the water surged up to six feet. I wanted details, the more gruesome the better. I perked up when he described people climbing out of the trolley and sitting on the roof, then getting knocked off into the water. He saw a mink coat float by and he thought it was a bear.

I pressed closer, but the topic changed just as it was getting interesting. I thought that only happened when children were around to overhear.

Da said that Delia was out, that she worked until late at night, most nights.

“Remember her that night down at Narragansett?” the guest said. “We talked her into driving the covering car —”

“— and she drove so fast she rammed our bumper!” Da slapped his leg.

The two men chuckled softly together. It was the first time I realized that they were friends. Before then, it had just seemed odd and jerky. I yawned. It was exciting to see a stranger, but I started to think of my warm bed. Then I heard the word that made me pay attention.

Job.

The man had heard about a job. Maybe Delia would be interested? A secretary for a firm he knew downtown.

The dresses could come back, and the stockings! Delia would be pretty again. She’d turned pale and scrawny, her lips bloodless and her moods foul.

I hadn’t stirred a hair, but Da suddenly sensed me.

He said, without turning, “Go to bed back there.”

The stranger rose and peeked around the doorway. He smiled, and I saw how handsome he was. He took two steps and swung me up in his arms. “And which one are you? Muddie or Kitty?”

“I’m Kitty,” I told him, insulted to have been taken for Muddie, who was shorter than I was.

“How do you do. I’m Mr. Benedict.” He took me back to the kitchen and settled into the chair. He smelled like rain and cigarettes, a nice smell. I didn’t mind being on his lap. I swung my legs, excited to be in the kitchen with the men.

“So you’ll tell her, Jimmy?” he asked Da. “I’ll tell her, Benny.”

They started to make those noises that meant the visit was over, a cough, a decisive slap as the whiskey glass hit the table.

I trailed after the men to the door. When the man named Benny opened it, the fresh smell of rain on pavement invaded the apartment, as well as something else, the smell of dead leaves from the coming autumn.

Da stared at the door after it closed, not moving except to tell me to get back to bed.

But he didn’t seem that interested in my obeying him, so when he sat on the couch and sagged back against the cushions, I scooted up next to him. I knew he was too tired to fuss at me. It was rare that I got my father to myself, and I knew better than to pester him.

We sat in the darkness, hearing the rain against the windowpane. I could smell the faint sweet smell of whiskey on Da’s breath and feel the warmth of the stranger, see his hands on the glass, the hands of a man who did not work with dirt and grease for a living, the fingers clean, with no cracked or blackened nails. He’d brought us a job from that world, the world that my aunt had known and slipped away from. I fell asleep dreaming of a doll for Christmas.

I woke up to the door opening again, and Delia stepped in, shaking the drops from her umbrella. “What a night, fit for man nor beast.” She always said that when it rained.

She leaned her umbrella against the wall so that it would drip onto the newspaper Da had spread out, took off her coat and hung it up, told me to go right to bed, and went to the kitchen for her tea. Da still hadn’t said anything but hello. So it was me who sprang toward her, to say that a man had come, a handsome man in a suit, and that he had a job for her, that she wouldn’t have to be a cleaning lady anymore.

Delia put her hand on my shoulder and I felt the weight of it, like she was tired from work and needed support to stand. She looked across the living room at Da.

“Who was it, then, this man?”

“Mr. Benedict,” I said, proud to have remembered the name.

She said something about it being good news, but she’d sounded more excited about the rain.

I knew how Delia had prayed for things to get better. Hadn’t I seen her just last night, kneeling by her bed, her long red-gold hair braided, her white hands pressed together, her lips moving in her march of Hail Marys?

“It’s a job!” I sang. “A job, a job, a job!” As if saying it like that would get her to pay attention.

“I didn’t say I would take it,” Delia said, but she wasn’t talking to me. She was looking right at Da, and there was defensiveness in her tone and fear in her eyes.



Of course Delia took the job. She got out her gray dresses and pressed them, washed out her sweaters, brushed her hair and twisted it back in a hard knot like a two-day-old roll you had to dunk in your tea to soften. She worked for two businessmen who shared her, Mr. Loge and Mr. Rosemont, and their names were almost as sacred as Jesus in our house, for we all knew how close we’d come to the kind of poverty that meant empty bellies and no heat.

The next summer, we were on our own, because Da now had a job at the American Screw factory. He worked out a deal with our neighbor Mrs. Duffy — in return for his working in the garden on weekends, she’d feed us lunch and keep an eye on us. But Mrs. Duffy wasn’t much for keeping an eye on anyone except her husband, who was up to no good, she assured us, and had to be watched every minute.

We met Elena because we hated the Duffys and we were up to our necks in waxed paper. Da had finagled a radio ad in which we sang, “We love Howland’s because it’s three times as good!” and instead of payment, Howland sent over two cartons of waxed paper, which Da kicked across the room because that lousy chiseler had promised cash.

So when Jamie suggested we take the waxed paper and hold it across the Duffys’ back window at eight thirty a.m., the time Mr. Duffy reliably relieved himself of the pints he’d had the night before at Murphy’s Bar on Wickenden Street, Muddie and I thought it a swell idea. It was only when Duffy slowly realized that the arc that should be hitting the grass outside was instead splattering on his bare feet that we considered that we had neglected to plan our route of escape.

We ran as Duffy hit the back stairs and landed on Muddie’s jacks with his bare feet. We hooted with laughter as he screamed and chased us across the yard, though we got a little nervous when he threw Mrs. Duffy’s prized Virgin Mary statue at us as we scaled the wall in three seconds flat. Now Mrs. Duffy was screaming, too, and we were on foreign soil — the Baptiste driveway. Mrs. Duffy hated the Baptistes, too, because they were from Cape Verde and “black as the ace of spades,” she’d say, which wasn’t true — first of all, they were dark brown, and second of all, it was puzzling, because every other house in Fox Point belonged to a Portuguese family. (“That doesn’t mean I have to like it,” she said, slicing a sandwich in half with a large knife, her meanness lending the slice an extra, deadly precision.) When we told Da about this, he had sighed and said that people climbing a ladder had a tendency to piss downward.

The windows were open and we could hear the radio playing “The Dipsy Doodle.” Someone was singing along.

The window was raised higher. Elena beckoned to us with her hairbrush. We didn’t know her well, hardly enough even to say hello to, but she was called “the pretty sister” out of the three, and we all agreed with that. “What are you waiting for?” she whispered. “Get in here.”

One by one we wriggled up and in, Elena hauling us by the back of our shorts. We hit the floor and stayed there.

A moment later we heard Duffy’s puffing breath and the slap of his fat bare feet. He asked for us, and we watched, impressed, as Elena sweetly lied and sent him away down Hope Street.

She put her hands on her hips. “The famous Corrigan Three,” she said. She was mocking us and we knew it, but we didn’t care. “I think you could use some looking after.”



She came over that night, when Da was furious and still berating us with a fork raised in the air as he turned the sausages.

“Hooligans, that’s what I’m raising! What am I to do now with the lot of you?” He used the fork like a baton, orchestrating his irritation. “Who’s going to watch over you now?”

The knock didn’t stop his tirade. Glad of the diversion, the three of us tumbled toward the door. Elena breezed right past us, wearing a flowered summer dress and sandals. She went straight to the kitchen.

“Hello, Corrigan,” she said to Da. “May I come in?”

Da stood in the kitchen, astonished, as she walked in. He nodded politely at her. And waited patiently while the sausages sizzled. “Did my children do something else?” he asked. “Break a window?”

Elena laughed. “The thing is, it’s clear you need a hand with them.”

“Ah, true. They roam the neighborhood like a pack of dogs, so I’m buying them leashes tomorrow.”

“Instead,” Elena said, crossing the kitchen and taking the fork from his hand, “you should hire me. I see them outside, getting into trouble. They need a hand.”

“I don’t have much to offer in the way of payment.”

She turned the sausages. “I don’t need much, just a bit of money to help with things at home.”

We watched how easily she moved from turning the sausages to slicing bread with quick, competent strokes, then spread them with butter. She flipped the sausage out of the pan and tucked it into the bread, folding it over and handing it to Jamie without even looking at him. “If you cook these with wine and a little garlic they’d be even better,” she said. “My father makes wine. I can bring over a drop or two to cook with.”

Da looked at her as though she were speaking Japanese. “I’m a plain man, and plain cooking is enough for me.”

“Well, I won’t be cooking your dinner, will I? I’m cooking for the children.” She swiped at the stove with a rag. “You’ll have to clean this place. I don’t mind wiping up, but this is just plain dirty.”

Jamie ate the sausage, his jaw working as he watched. I saw he was already in love, but I didn’t mind, for I was, too. Elena turned and handed out sandwiches packed with sausage to me and Muddie. Da looked at the empty pan and the lack of his own dinner. We giggled. Elena rinsed and dried her hands.

“If you could come at seven in the morning and get their breakfast, too?” Da began. “One dollar for the day.”

“I’ll be here at ten of. And a dollar and a quarter.”