Her swollen feet and ankles resisted the restrictions of her boots. Alice found the nearest bench in the crowded station. Not ladylike, she thought as she leaned forward and worked to loosen the laces on her boots. But who would pay any attention to her or what she was doing? She must have arrived at a busy time for the trains. Now the question was how to even begin to find her way or make a plan to locate this woman, ostensibly the mother of her phantom husband. She had little to go on. Not even a name. Only a vague street reference: at the corner of Fourth and Beale. Howard had described his mother as living in an area of fine old homes there.
At the edge of the station, she spied an information desk, occupied by a thin elderly woman in large horn-rimmed glasses. She seemed oblivious to the scurrying crowds, totally occupied in a book. Alice could just make out the title and smiled to see Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
“Excuse me. I’m sorry to interrupt such a fine reading experience.”
“No, no. Quite all right, my dear. I tend to have a lot of time for my reading. I’m not even sure why they maintain this desk at all. Very few seem to need my services, so you are a welcome interruption. How may I help you?”
“I’m looking for someone. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t actually have a name or an exact address. However, it’s important that I locate her. I have some serious news for her.” Alice hesitated. “Both good and bad.”
“Well, my dear, what do you have that we might begin with?”
“Only a fine old home near the corner of Fourth and Beale. Are you familiar with that area of town?”
The look Alice received from this woman shot through her in a flash of alarm. What had she said to elicit such a response?
“Are you sure of that information?”
“It’s all I have.”
“I wish I could offer you a seat, my dear. This may be disturbing to you.”
“I have come all the way from Chicago,” Alice said.
“Oh, dear. Well, let me be quick about this. There were, indeed, a number of fine homes at one end of Beale Street at one time. However, an epidemic of yellow fever wiped out almost the entire community there quite a number of years ago. Now in the particular area you have given and for several blocks in each direction, there are nothing but saloons, gambling, some rather loose women, and a good deal of crime. I could never recommend you go there, no matter who you need to find.”
Alice felt the blow of this information. Nothing in her experience with this man, this father of the child she carried, had been true. Ever since he came so decorously into her life, nothing had been real. She steadied herself on the edge of the desk.
“Are you faint, my dear?”
Alice shook her head. “No. I am just waking myself to reality.” She waved her fingers back and forth, a gesture at once of both acceptance and disbelief. “I will be all right. Yes. I will be.” She raised her head and picked up her unwieldy bag. “Thank you.”
*
Though the information had hit quickly, realization was slow to clarify itself. The weight of her life seemed unbearable to her. She had prayed to leave it behind with this trip. But she had placed her hope in Memphis on a phantom. A man who did not exist. Why would she believe him to be in Memphis at the cotton exchange, any more than in Chicago in an office at the Board of Trade? Why would she believe that the mother he had never taken her to see actually lived in Memphis, let alone even existed?
What now? Alice took a deep breath and stood in line at the ticket booth.
“I’ve made a mistake, sir,” she said to the man behind the glass.
He smiled at her with a slightly quizzical look. And a warm smile. “At your service, ma’am.”
“I accidentally purchased a Memphis ticket, when my destination is actually New Orleans. Could you help me to remedy that, sir?”
He gave her a puzzled, almost defeated look, then brightened. “Do you still have your original ticket, ma’am?”
“Yes, in my little handbag.” She fished out the crumpled ticket.
“Another, separate ticket would cost a fair bit more,” he said. “But if I add this on as a full one-way, it will be less. Now, there you go, ma’am.” He handed the ticket under the window as she pushed the fare he had quoted back. “You have a nice trip now, ma’am.”
In all this nightmare of lies and pain and uncertainty, there was still kindness.
And a way forward. In New Orleans she would find a safe rooming house. She would find work. She would provide a life for herself and her child.
Alice settled into her seat. With the first step toward hope.
CHAPTER 17
Alice shivered as she raised the heavy knocker on the big front door and let it fall. At least it was a shiver only from the evening chill and not from inches of snow on the ground. She stood wondering if she should knock again, when she heard footsteps approaching. With the click of an interior latch lifting, the door opened on the ruddy face of a breathless woman of uncertain age.
“Yes.” That was all she said.
Alice shifted the cumbersome bag to the opposite hand and took a deep breath. “I’ve just arrived from Chicago, ma’am, and the clerk at the station offered me this address as a safe rooming house for women only.”
“Oh, yes. Well, come right in, then. You’re in luck, as fate would have it. I was just done cleaning the only room I have. If you had arrived yesterday, you’d have been clean out of luck. Vacated only this morning, yes. And now tidied up, as if awaiting your arrival. If you’d’ve tried to reserve it, you’d’ve been out of luck entirely. But here you are. Now, set your things down there, and we’ll see about getting you fixed up. Right there, right there by the stairs. You’ll have to carry it up, now, when we’re done. It’s on the upper floor. It used to be an attic, but we’ve done it up good. There’s not plumbing up there, so you’ll have to come down one floor for your private needs. You’re not the frail type, are you?”
“No, no. I’m fully accustomed to walking up three floors. I’ll take it till I find work.” Alice pulled at the fingertips of her glove and slipped it into her left hand, ready to sign whatever was put before her. At least for the night. The long train ride had worn thin, and she was exhausted.
The room was, indeed, on the third floor. And Mrs. McLaren had spoken truly: the room was clean and orderly. It was also spacious for a third floor, though with the strangely tilted and erratic ceilings characteristic of attic space. Alice had just enough to pay the room and board for a good week and was able to negotiate a small reduction in exchange for helping in the kitchen while she searched for work.
Alice had a fair collection of copper pennies. She would need them for newspapers to search the help-wanted postings. The afternoon newspaper, the New Orleans Item, cost pennies. The Picayune, the same. She considered buying only one, but she dared not miss a possible opportunity. Her solution was to buy each one on alternate days, one the first day, the other the second. She operated on the assumption, which soon proved true, that most of the want ads would run for several days. She hoped her method would not put her at risk of losing out on the very one she needed.
The first day passed without result. There were openings for waitresses, but only in small, ill-paying cafés. Openings for help at laundries, for maids at hotels, and one for sewing alterations at a neighborhood dress shop. That was promising perhaps, though she had no concept of the various quarters of New Orleans. For two days, Alice made the rounds, only to find the position filled or to know she could not work in such a place. One turned out to be sewing for women at a house of legalized prostitution in what was known as Storyville. She had entered the house and was speaking with a woman in charge before she realized the extent of her mistake.
“You are here in reference to the advertisement for a seamstress?”
Alice nodded, aghast at the florid elegance of the woman’s dress, then shocked beyond speech to see in her peripheral vision a laughing girl in bloomers and camisole tugging a well-dressed gentleman up the stairs.
“Perhaps you would be interested in a better-paying kind of work,” the woman said, laying her hand over Alice’s. “You have the face and body for it, you know?”
Alice fled. At the end of the block, breathless, she stopped. She would not give up; she made an oath to herself that she would not despair. Despair had brought her here. She would not allow it to bury her.
*