John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Let him reform the bankers and the coal barons as rubs elbows with him in his fancy clubs, then,” says Molly, attacking her sandwich, “and lave our byes in blue alone.”

The colored girl has only a poppyseed roll without butter.

“And where d’ye hail from, darlin?” asks Molly, who has not a mean bone in her body nor a sharp thought in her head, as she attacks her sandwich. “Somewheres in the South, is it?”

“North Carolina,” says Jessie.

“And what brung ye up here to the cold and the crowd?”

The girl thinks for a long moment before answering. “It was time to leave,” she says.

Molly accepts it for an answer. “Can ye imagine this lot here,” she sniffs, nodding her head toward the upstairs as she eats, “houses scattered all over Creation, luggin their entire mob of servin people, except poor Mrs. Coldcroft, from pillar to post every time they want a change of scenery? A dozen staff for only the two of em and a set of wee twins. There’s a photograph of em in the gentleman’s library.”

“It’s a lot to manage,” Brigid agrees.

“And d’ye have children yerself?” Molly asks the colored girl.

“I have a baby daughter,” says the girl. “Her name is Minnie.”

“Well, it’s a start,” Molly approves. “I’ve got five meself, and I believe they’ll be the death of me. They say there’s war in this Philippines — ye should see the slaughter I’ve got to face every night when I come into our rooms. A mob of heathen savages, that’s what they’ve become, with me out workin every day.”

“Who looks after them?”

“Fiona is the oldest, but she’s only ten and no match for her brothers when they join hands against her. They say she’s threatened to brain em with a sashweight.”

The girl only picks at her roll and has the good manners not to inquire about Molly’s husband, who is a lout and a tippler as likely to be sleeping in a cell in the Tombs as in her bed. The girl makes Brigid uneasy, though she has worked with colored many times before. The Irish boys and the colored boys are always fighting on the streets of her Hell’s Kitchen, of course, sometimes with their hands and sometimes with sticks and rocks or worse and their language is a scandal. But when there are no colored handy the Irish boys fight each other or go hunting for Italians. Harry is much more comfortable with them, able to engage a strange colored man on the street to ask a question or offer a comment, but he is from the South with all its twisted history, and she from a scrap of turf that rarely saw a Protestant, much less a black man.

“D’ye think,” asks Molly, peering in at the stacks of gleaming chinaware in the glass-paneled cabinet before them, “that somewhere there is a gentleman and a lady livin off the fruits of our labor? I’ve heard tell of the Rail Trust and the Coal Trust and the Steel Trust and Wheat Trust — there must be a debutante somewheres who when she passes in her carriage, lookin like a gleamin pearl on an oyster shell, they all whisper ‘Here she is now, heiress to the great Scrubwoman Fortune.’ ”

“Mr. Burke at the employment agency takes out his percentage, I know,” Brigid answers, “but he hasn’t changed that vest he wears, or washed it, in the five years I’ve worked for him.”

“The money goes further up,” says Molly. “It rises . Like smoke.”

If her father were alive and here, Brigid knows, he would be grumbling about how to burn the townhouse to the ground.

There is a gas heater in the scullery just for the deep basin used to wash dishes, where they refill their buckets. When they walk into the ballroom again Brigid can see a difference, very faint, between where they’ve scrubbed and where they haven’t.

“A pity they didn’t leave the orchestra,” says Molly, “to coax us through the afternoon.”

The trick is to keep your weight balanced between your knees and the heels of your hands. Patsy Finnegan’s father would have her brothers kneel on marbles when they were wicked, and Brigid thinks of that often when it feels like she can’t bear another moment. She only stands to refill the bucket or when the backs of her legs begin to cramp. There are venerated saints, she thinks, whose road to glory was paved by little more than what I’m doing now. But then they were rich men’s daughters, promised a life of ease but scrubbing the floors of lepers or other unfortunates without pay.

“Self-abnegation,” Sister Gonzaga always told them, waggling her finger with the huge Bride-of-Christ ring on it, “is the quickest way to Heaven.”

They have worked their way almost to the tall sliding doors when Brigid realizes the colored girl is no longer with them. Then she hears the music.

It is not religious music, exactly, but it gives her the feeling she has now and then at a High Mass, with the singing, when she thinks if God pays attention to us at all it is this he listens to. Brigid stands, wincing, and steps straight across the hall to the doorway of the music room.

Jessie sits at the piano nearly in the dark, the late-afternoon sun slanting through the skylight to spill only on her long fingers at the keys. And the music, angry then sad then romantic then brooding — who could believe it is one small person filling the air with this war of emotions? The music seems to grow larger, to possess the entire house, and Brigid imagines it entering each of the countless, empty rooms like a warm liquid, bringing a glow of life back into them. Brigid feels Molly at her elbow and for once the woman has nothing to say, only watching and listening. They stand for a long while, till Jessie ends the piece, last note hanging in the air—

The girl rests her elbows on the keys and puts her head in her hands.

Brigid and Molly walk softly back to the ballroom and kneel at their buckets.

“Would ye believe it?” says Molly, shaking her head.

The colored girl comes back then, not a word, and puts her little bit of weight into scouring away the scuff marks just inside the sliding doors. The sun deserts the floor and Brigid has to turn on the gas lamps. They are finished with the ballroom and have done the back half of the hallway when it is time to quit.

The colored girl says thank you, quietly, when she takes her pay and puts her coat on, a worn-looking item not nearly up to the weather outside, and leaves with a small nod of goodbye.

“I’ll expect you to have reached the reception room by tomorrow,” says Mrs. Coldcroft, a mite bleary-eyed, face creased on one side from where she’s slept. “Which means the fireplace will have to be dealt with. And how is the—” she nods, frowning, toward the deliveries door that Jessie has just left through. “How is she making out?”

“Oh, she’s a crackerjack, she is,” says Molly, beating Brigid to it. “Not much for conversation, but she’s a terror on the floors.”

Jessie’s legs are aching by the time she reaches the third-story landing, and she can hear little Minnie crying inside. The heat is on again, but unbearable now, either none at all or an inferno, and Minnie is wrapped tight in a blanket lying in the cradle Father made from a dresser drawer he found on the street, wailing her strange little cry that sounds as if it comes from a tiny spirit inside of her. Jessie wrestles the kitchen window open and props it with a can of beans, then unwraps her daughter and lifts her into her arms. She is overheated, which Father says is just as dangerous as her being too cold. Jessie is about to call angrily for her mother when she sees the opened envelope on the little kitchen table. It is stamped just the same as the letters that come from the Philippines, but it is not her brother’s writing on the front, the words squarish and thick and filling her with dread. Minnie has stopped crying.