Mabel liked how passionate Arthur was. He wasn’t the most handsome man she’d ever seen, not like Jericho. But Arthur had principles and courage. That was attractive. “I could help you spread the word about the protest.”
“Not just yet,” Arthur said, locking the blueprints in a trunk. “Let’s get you home. Wouldn’t want your parents to have another reason to hate me.”
“You don’t have to see me home,” Mabel said.
Arthur raised an eyebrow. “You said there was a fella following you.”
“Maybe I was wrong. I don’t know.” Mabel felt a bit silly now. Perhaps he’d only been walking the same direction she had.
“Well,” Arthur said, reaching for his coat, “I’m not taking any chances.”
“Extra! Extra! Two Men Drowned in Hell Gate Waters Off Ward’s Island!” a newsie called as they neared the Sixth Avenue train. “Ghosts in the Asylum, Patients Say! Haunted Hospital! Monsters in the Madhouse!” Eager readers swarmed the boy, tossing their nickels and grabbing the hot sheets.
Arthur jerked a thumb at them. “That’s what sells newspapers these days,” he said, and shook his head as they climbed the steps to the train. “Do you know why people make up ghost stories?”
There were many things Mabel could say to that, but she didn’t want Arthur to know about her work at the museum and think her foolish. She settled on, “Why?”
“Because it’s easier than believing that ordinary people can be cruel and downright evil,” Arthur said.
The minute she got home to the Bennington, Mabel knocked on Will Fitzgerald’s door.
“Mabel!” Sam said. “Say, this is a nice surprise.”
“Sam, could you steal me a movie camera?”
Sam’s eyebrows went up. “That is, without a doubt, the most interesting question I’ve been asked today. And considering the day involved talk about ghosts and the end of the world, that’s saying something.”
Jericho came up behind Sam, and Mabel caught her breath. She wished she could just stop liking him. It would be so much easier. “Why do you need a movie camera?” he asked.
“I can assure you, it’s for a good cause.”
“You wouldn’t take on a cause if it weren’t good,” Jericho said, and Mabel wasn’t entirely sure it was meant as a compliment.
“You don’t really have to steal it, but I figured you might know somebody,” Mabel said. “You always know somebody, Sam.”
Sam stroked his chin. “That’s true. Come to think of it, I do know a fella owes me a favor. If he’s not in jail or hasn’t been shot by a jealous girlfriend, I can get it for you.”
“Thanks, Sam. I owe you.” Mabel kissed Sam on the cheek, stealing a glance at Jericho as she did. Take that, Jericho.
On her way back to her apartment, Mabel reflected on Arthur’s comment about the human capacity for evil. She wasn’t naive; she’d seen plenty of bad. What Jake Marlowe and his management were doing to the workers in the name of profit was certainly cruel, if not evil. But sometimes evil was made up of small acts: cheating someone out of their due or ignoring a wrong, like during the Palmer Raids, when agents had pulled people from their homes to deport them and their neighbors had looked the other way. The longer those smaller acts of wrong went unchallenged, the more they compounded into a monster. But there had to be a counterbalance to that, and it was the human capacity for good. For kindness and self-sacrifice and justice. Toward helping your neighbor because, after all, weren’t we all in this world together? Those, too, were often small acts. Like Arthur leaving his garret to travel uptown—far out of his way—just to make sure that Mabel got home all right. That was good. That was unselfish. It made Mabel like Arthur all the more. It made her want to be an even better person. And those small acts of good carried forward with a breathtaking momentum. Over time, they could change the world for the better. Mabel believed that, perhaps more fervently than any prayer.
Before she’d even reached her apartment, Mabel could hear her father’s typewriter keys clacking away.
“Hello, Papa,” she said, breezing through the door, stopping to kiss his cheek.
Smiling, her father cupped her chin in one hand. “Shayna Punim.” Her father’s Yiddish came out when he was feeling sentimental or whenever he couldn’t quite find the words he was looking for in English.
Mabel rolled her eyes at her father’s sentimentality. “I do not have a beautiful face, Papa. I have a serviceable face.”
She didn’t say, Mama’s the beautiful one. I take after you.
“I know shayna when I see it,” her father said, as if that settled the matter. He pecked out another sentence on the typewriter using just his index fingers and returned the carriage with a cheery ting!
“Papa…” Mabel began.
“Yes, dear heart,” he said without looking up.
“Nothing.” She sat to remove her shoes, letting her toes breathe.
The typing stopped. “That’s a heavy sigh for such a nothing.”
“Have you heard anything about workers disappearing?”
Her father’s thick brows came together in concentration. “Do you mean walking off the job or being held by the police without being charged?”
“No, I mean disappearing. Being taken away by strange men. Government men. Or maybe not government men. I don’t know.” She wasn’t making sense. The whole thing seemed unreal the more she thought about it. “You heard anything about some men wearing a lapel pin—an eye with a lightning bolt?”
Her father shook his head. “Never. What’s all this about, Maideleh?”
“Nothing, Papa. Just… nothing,” she said, and he resumed his typing.
“Why don’t you like Arthur Brown?” she blurted out at last. “He seems like a very smart fellow.”
Her father’s fingers paused above the Underwood’s keys. “Smart, yes. And very… ambitious,” her father said. Ambitious wasn’t a compliment from her father. It usually meant “reckless” or “arrogant.” “So, who’s asking about Arthur Brown?”
“Oh. I ran into him on Bleecker Street the other day.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all, Papa,” Mabel said, stepping into the cramped bathroom to check her reflection.
“Good,” her father said under his breath. Mabel could hear him cranking a fresh sheet of paper around the typewriter’s cylinder and thwacking the metal bar back to hold it in place. “How is your friend, the student? Reads all the time? Jacob?”
“Jericho,” Mabel corrected. She dabbed on a bit of the lipstick Evie had given her. It didn’t look bad, but it didn’t turn her into Gloria Swanson, either. “He’s more interested in Diviners than me.”
“Ach, Diviners.”
“What do you have against Diviners?”
“Nothing, it’s only that I don’t understand why people will put their faith in soothsayers but not reformers. They will go out of their way to believe what they can’t see rather than change what’s right before their eyes!” As she came out of the bathroom, her father looked up at her, squinting. “Lipstick?”
“I like it,” Mabel said defiantly.
“You don’t need it. You’re already beautiful.”