Now, grace was a word Morie’s friends never hung on me. I walked fast, talked fast, scowled. I carried the stick of my parasol hard on my shoulder, with all the delicacy of a miner carting a shovel. The morning sun blasted my cheeks, and anyone fool enough to come up behind me risked getting his eye poked. We were sisters by arrangement, not blood, and though Pie was superior in most ways, I was the boss and that’s how we’d go.
As we turned from the house, our dog Rogue, a noble-hearted Rottweiler mix, ran into the alley after a bird. Rogue had been acting queerly all morning, flashing me the whites of his eyes, even when I called to him with a knob of cheese in my hand. It was as if he knew what was coming, as if he could feel the rumbling beneath his paws.
“Slow down!” Pie begged, knowing I wouldn’t heel either. I had what Morie—Pie’s mother, the widow who raised me—called willful unhearing. The welts on my legs from Morie’s most recent whacking with the boar-bristle brush proved it. With every step my skirt hit where I hurt, and with every step I went faster. I would have flown like that bird if I could.
The day was unusually mild, fogless. You’d have to be a grim widow not to feel the lark in it. We lived on bustling Francisco Street, close to the canneries and piers, where the air was always cool and briny. Ours wasn’t a fancy block, working-class. As we headed west, to our right sat the glorious bay—and beyond the bay, the Marin Headlands, green this time of year.
We were on Easter break, and free to walk the long way. Pie had arranged to meet up with her best friend, Eugenie Schmitz, at the corner of Van Ness Avenue. Pie was eager to tell Eugenie her big news. I was just glad to be out of the house.
“Make a wish,” Pie called, pumping her arms to keep up, “for your birthday.”
I glanced over my shoulder and rolled my eyes, pretending I didn’t care. “Why,” I said, “when it never comes true?”
My wish was urgent, the same every year. It made me cross to have to think it again. Instead I looked to my left, to where San Francisco rose on tiptoe. Seeing her in her morning whites always made me feel better. My city was young, bold, having burned to the ground five times and five times come back richer and more brazen. To know her was to hold in your heart the up-downness of things. Her curves and hollows, her extremes. Her windy peaks and mini-climates. Her beauty, her trembling. Her greed.
At Saint Dominic’s, the nuns taught us that we were lucky to live in San Francisco, our city being an elusive place, easy to love, hard to keep—especially for those who don’t deserve her. They taught us about the Spanish conquistadors, who sailed for years, fighting tides and hurricanes, scurvy and venereal disease in search of her; they starved themselves on hardtack, their ships battered, their tongues blistered from wind and a scarcity of water, yet still they managed to rape and pillage, and therefore, as God’s punishment, they were standing on the wrong side of the boat when they passed the fogbound Golden Gate. All that trouble, all those years, and they missed the pearl—not once but twice. “Careful of handsome fools,” warned the sisters.
“If I were a conquistador,” I said to Pie, “I wouldn’t miss what was right in front of my long Spanish nose.”
“Not everyone is as vigilant as you,” my sister observed.
The truth about Pie, and I loved her no less for this, was that she didn’t question things, and I questioned too much. “Then pox on the Spaniards too,” I said, just to hear her laugh. And because she was laughing, I considered it fair to ask, “Pie?”
“Yah?”
“I know you want to tell Eugenie, but tell me first: What happened last night with James?”
She stopped in her tracks and groaned. “You mean you heard.”
I heard. After supper, when James O’Neill knocked on the back door and asked Pie to step outside, I put my ear to the glass. When I couldn’t make out their whispers, I cracked the window. In the light of no moon, James O’Neill took Pie in his arms and promised this: in a year, if—he said if twice—if his store turned a profit, then he would ask her to marry him. The noodle went on to explain that as the sole support for his mother and sisters, he had to put them first; he’d gone into debt to open his notions shop, selling thread, tobacco, and buttons on Market Street; and, oh, he loved her. He loved Pie. He said it in that order, three things she already knew. As I knew, from the look on Pie’s face when she came inside, that James O’Neill had given her a fraction of what she’d wished for; then, to add insult, he put love at the rump. How many folks take the meagerness offered and decide it’s their due? How many girls accept a whacking with the boar-bristle brush and do nothing to stop it from ever happening again?
“I don’t understand,” I pressed. “He proposed to propose?”
“Don’t put it that way,” Pie begged. “Please, V. James may not be bold but he’s good.”
“Deadly earnest,” I agreed. “But what does it mean?”
“It means I have to wait—” Pie faltered, tears in her eyes. “Some more…”
“Oh, Pie.”
“And it means now we have no chance of paying off Morie’s debt to the Haj.”
We both sank at the thought.
Arthur Volosky was his real name, but Morie called him the Haj—Swedish for shark. The Haj ran the numbers racket
