“Pardon me...”
“Good afternoon?”
“Don’t mean to intrude, but the lady you were just speaking with?”
“Yes?”
“I feel sure I know her, but I just can’t place the name...”
Charley can see the man’s hesitation, but he combines a friendly smile with a sincerely befuddled look, and the man gives in. “That’s Miss Miller, Emma Miller. She’s a clerk in the office down the hall from mine.”
Charley taps his chin and squints. “Maybe I know her parents from church.”
“Not parents. I understand her mother’s a widow. I’m not sure where they live.”
“Well, it’s a puzzlement. Maybe it’ll come to me. Much obliged to you, though.” The man touches his hat and continues on his way.
Emma. Emma Miller. What happened, Emma? Raised as a gentlewoman, but then Daddy died and the money ran out—or you found out it was never really there in the first place? And now you’re a clerk at the General Post Office. He isn’t laughing at her; he sympathizes, knowing the wellborn are so unready, so ill-equipped, when forced by circumstance to meet the realities of everyday life. And yet you handled that horse with no nonsense, no worries of dirt under your fingernails. With a will.
He waits another few days, then falls into the crowd behind her as she leaves the building. She heads north up Seventh Street and turns onto G, following the west side of the green space of the Pension Building, exactly where he’d been headed that first day. Half a block above the square, she turns onto Washington Street, one of the city’s many alleys in which low-rent housing has insinuated itself. The alleys are originally cut through to remedy the problem of how to get essential services—garbage removal, coal delivery—to the residents of Pierre L’Enfant’s fat city blocks.
And here again he is completely caught short. The row homes at the top of the alley are shabby but still neatly kept; farther down, he can see the progression into a jumble of shanties, some stacked precariously like building blocks, one on top of another. Far down the alley there is a group of colored children playing in the street, and Charley realizes that it is just beyond them, in the next alley over, that one of the city’s last remaining slave pens has only recently been torn down. Of course, in Washington City, it’s still common for the highborn and low to live cheek by jowl on the same streets, but there are clearly visible social distinctions, and there’s no mistaking who belongs in which group. This is more like the rough and tumble of his own wharf-front Georgetown neighborhood, where the various races mix like so much stew. It’s beyond him that she lives in similar circumstances.
Emma nods at a row house neighbor working on his tiny front porch, who has waved to her with his hammer. She mounts the three steps up to the adjoining porch and disappears inside. Charley stands on the other side of the neighbor’s house and rubs at the back of his neck, no longer feigning befuddlement.
“I think she’s already rented the room.”
It takes a moment for Charley to process that the handyman neighbor has stopped to stretch, noticed him looking at the house, and offered a comment.
“Beg pardon?”
“I say I think Mrs. Miller already has a renter for the room. That’s why you’re here, yah?” His German accent is thick, but his English says that he’s been in the country for some time.
“Oh, I see. Well, I thank you for keeping me from interrupting their supper for no reason.” Charley smiles and tips his cap; the neighbor again salutes with his hammer as Charley turns and starts again for home.
cd
“I tell you, Joe, I can’t make sense of it. I’d’ve bet anything that she was wellborn, but I can’t imagine a family falling that far in the space of a few years. I was thinking that they still had a big house and were just working to keep up appearances. You know how they do. But that?”
Charley and his buddy Joe are sitting on stools at their regular neighborhood bar, a half-empty glass in front of each. Joe and Charley share virtually their entire existence, since they work together in the Wetting Division at Engraving and Printing, and live in the same boarding house, sharing a room with each other and a bath with everyone.
“Well, I can’t make sense of it either. You see this girl once at the stables, and now you’re stalking behind her like an Injun hunting buffalo. And you were doing this when you thought she was rich? What exactly was your pitch going to be? You figured your natural charm and good looks would do all the heavy lifting?”
Particularly since Charley has no good looks to speak of, Joe knows perfectly well that there is nothing to recommend either of them to the fair sex. Today, as with every workday, they have changed out of their greasy coveralls into street clothes, taken a damp rag to their faces and a wet comb to their hair, and scrubbed their cuticles and fingernails with lye soap and a stiff bristle brush. Approximately twice a month, they take the work clothes home and, with their landlady’s assistance, soak the coveralls in hot water and lye and scrape the grease out of them, if for no other reason than to make themselves less combustible. Even a poor woman might take pause.
“There’s just something about her—not how she looks, but how she seems. Then when I saw her coming out of the post office, a worker! I just needed to figure it out.”
“And now?”
“Well, I’m still figuring on it.” He takes a drink. “I need to get her to notice me.”
“Holy hell, Charley. What are you fixing to do? Set your hair on fire and get her to beat it out for you?”
“Naw. I think she’d just step around me and keep on going.”
cd
She sees that he’s not outside again today, and realizes that she’s disappointed. For as much as he may imagine that he is being discreet, Emma notices him every time. At the stables, she understands that he has just happened by and is simply taking in the activity, this wiry young man with active, cheerful eyes and a big mustache. Outside of work that first time, it is the collision between the two pedestrians that catches her attention, but she would have noticed him anyway. His gaze then is intent, inquisitive. She sees him often after that, loitering at the curb, sometimes pretending to read the paper, sometimes chatting with a passerby while he continues to watch for her. Mr. Fredrickson describes him perfectly when he mentions a young man who asks after her outside of the building, with his made-up story of a church connection. And now that he has followed her home, she sees that her circumstances are below even what he is willing to accept, and he is gone. So now she feels disappointment, an old sensation that until this moment she is sure is boxed up and put away for good.
Emma has long since given up any thought that her life will ever be more than what it is: that of a spinster, living with her widowed mother who takes in boarders to fill the gaps in what Emma earns as a postal clerk, her position for the last sixteen years. By now, Emma has lived an entire second lifetime beyond what is normally considered a marriageable age. Her heart was broken once, long ago, by a boy who seemed interested in her for a time. In the end, though, his attentions were drawn away from her solid frame and unflinching demeanor by a big-eyed giggly thing with golden curls. From that point on, she’s known her time is past. So now, seeing he is not here, feeling once again that empty hole in her stomach, she struggles to put her disappointment back into its dusty box and close the lid.
cd
The Capitol Bicycle Club has set up on the Pension Building green this week, taking advantage of the lovely weather to put up a tent and some booths, and present a series of cycling demonstrations to encourage membership. Street vendors who know a business opportunity when they see one have also set up shop in the fringes, and the whole enterprise takes on the feel of a street fair. The club has an assortment of some of the very oldest bicycles alongside the latest models, and club members take turns demonstrating riding techniques and allowing