Gift House pt 3

Warning: Description of intravenous drug use and general child neglect in this part.

The house was lonely at night.  Fancy discovered this quickly.  In her room in Storyville there was always the sounds of the neighbors fucking or fighting through the walls, which she had always found annoying, but the empty boarding house felt more like a tomb.   Fancy wished for Will, and then shook the thought away.  He had never spent the night with her, and he never would.  He had to go home to his big family mansion in the north side of Old Town, and pretend he didn’t slum it with middle-aged tarts during the day.

At least the house was clean now.  Will hired a team of people to come in and go over the place from top to bottom, demolishing the ten years of dust and grime.  Fancy sat in her little sitting room, still shabby even if it was clean, and her mind ran with ideas.  White lace curtains for the downstairs, bright, happy red curtains for the resident rooms, and colorful quilts on the beds.

She hadn’t figured out how to fill those beds yet, but she was determined to make Will proud of her (a silly thing—she knew she shouldn’t care what he thought of her) and even more determined to make a proper life for herself and Liza there.

Mona was a problem. Maybe Fancy should have stayed with Liza when she told her mother she was leaving, but the girl insisted she could handle things on her own.  Liza was like Fancy—independent, strong. Not like Mona.  Fancy had tried to do her best for her little sister, but Mona had fallen into opiate abuse, and when Fancy refused to fund her addiction, she turned to hooking as well.  Nothing Fancy could do would change her, so she stopped trying. It wasn’t too late for Liza.  Liza didn’t have to live the same life as Fancy or her mother…

***

Liza ducked as the dirty chamber pot flew over her head and hit the wall by the stove with a bang and a splash.  The smell of the disturbed refuse did nothing to improve the situation.  “You are insane,” she screamed at her mother.

“You always loved her more than you loved me,” her mother said with a sob.  “I always tried to do what was best for you—”

“This is what’s best for me?” Liza demanded, waving her arm around the room.  Broken dishes littered the floor and the table they ate at (not really a kitchen table, since one room was all they had) lay on its side.  Her mother, needless to say, had not taken the news well.

“I tried,” her mother said, sitting on the floor. “Doesn’t it matter that I tried?”

“Not enough,” Liza admitted.  This was no good.  She couldn’t keep fighting with her mother all night long.  “You never tried hard enough to get clean.”  Mona didn’t answer. She only continued to cry on the floor.  Liza watched her.

Her earliest memory was her mother on the bed with a stocking tied around her arm.  One of her boyfriends had the needle, and Liza watched him jab it deep into her flesh and push the plunger.  After that she lay there on the bed with her skirts hiked up around her waist, and the boyfriend (drug dealer, john, Liza was never sure) fucked her.  Mona lay there, barely moving, staring at Liza sitting on the floor with her doll.

Liza was pretty sure she’d been three at the time, but it was hardly the only time she watched such a thing. She started leaving their room at the age of five, and she would go outside or sit with a neighbor, no matter what time of the day or night it was.  Sometimes she woke up to it happening right next to her on the bed.

“You can’t blame me,” Liza continued.  “If you were your daughter you would leave too.”

“I can’t do this myself, Eliza!” Mona begged.  “Don’t we take care of each other? You never had to beg on the streets, I never made you do anything you didn’t want to do! Isn’t that worth anything?”

“Yes.  Thank you for not selling me to your drug dealers.  At least you did that much for me.” Liza wanted to cry. Mona could have done a worse job as a mother.  But to not understand how bad it still was… “I’m gonna go out for a bit,” Liza said.  “You should clean this place up. Patty isn’t going to want to share a room that smells like piss and shit.”

She stepped over the chamber pot on the way out the door, ignoring her mother’s pleas.

There were plenty of places to go at night in Storyville. Clubs, bars, all-night cafes that claimed to sell tea but really sold any drug you could possibly imagine were on every main road.  There was one just a block from home but Liza walked a bit farther, to a dance hall called Chat Noir only a short way from Fancy’s new house. She liked it because she knew the door man and he would let her in for free.

Chat Noir’s sign was brightly painted with a giant black cat next to bright green lettering, made in the French style, though as far as Liza knew the hall’s owner was anything but French.   Bright lights lit the building inside and out, and even though sordid things happened there, Liza felt safe.  She went to the bar and ordered her own drink.  Knowing she would soon have the safety of Fancy’s new-found wealth made getting a glass of wine easy—Liza didn’t have to scheme to get a man to buy it for her.

Up on stage the dancing girls were doing a cancan, flashing bright multi-colored skirts and long legs.  The men watching were a mixed lot, from working-class Cheapside and Storyville residents to young men from the college and even a few Old Town gents. Living in Storyville was one thing, but visiting it was another.  On the outskirts of the area men looking for a good time flocked to the whores and drug dealers and game tables. And for those who had spent all of their money on the aforementioned entertainments, there were the loan sharks with their expensive suits and flashy canes.

Liza watched the crowds and wasn’t surprised when the Prince of Cats appeared.  No doubt the flashiest man in all of Storyville, he dealt in every aspect of the seedy underworld.  He wore deep purple suits, carried a gold-topped cane, and was never to be seen without his pet, a blind panther that wandered freely but only (so she had been told) attacked on command.

Manny was among the entourage that came with him, and when he went to the bar to get drinks for the group he approached her.  “I wish you would dress nicer,” he told her. “If you showed some skin and rouged up your face I could bring you over and introduce you to the Prince.  He’d like you.”

“I don’t think I want him to like me,” Liza said.

“Good things always happen to the people the Prince likes,” he said, placing his hand on her knee. She remembered earlier that day in a downtown alley, with Manny while James kept watch. On her knees, Manny’s prick in her mouth…

Liza didn’t feel uncomfortable, exactly…but she knew Manny only liked her because of what she was willing to do in exchange for his company.  She should feel lucky someone wanted to spend time with her, for whatever reason. But she was quite sure she didn’t want to have anything to do with the Prince, who sometimes supplied Mona with her drugs.

“You better hurry back then,” Liza told Manny when the bartender handed him a tray full of drinks. “You wouldn’t want the Prince to not like you anymore.”

“This is why you’re never going to get anywhere in life, Liza,” Manny said. “You think you’re so much better than everyone else, but you’re the one on your knees in exchange for a trolley ride and a sandwich.” He walked away and Liza burned with embarrassment….

She needed out of Storyville. She needed out like Fancy, and she would never look back.

***

Mona was gone when Liza came home for the last time.  All of her belonging’s fit in a cardboard box. Her other dress, one spare pair of very worn-out underclothes, and some drawing pencils and a pad of creamy white paper Fancy had gotten her for her birthday the year before.  Liza looked around the sad little room.  The other things were shared between her and Mona—the dishes, even the brush and comb on the dressing table. 

Only her postcard collection remained on the wall, and she didn’t want to leave it behind.  Each colored card was a beautiful place she had never been. Paris, New York, London. Great cathedrals, rolling country-sides and pictures of the sea.  She bought them for a nickel from a bookshop in Cheapside, or sometimes someone she knew would get one in the mail and give it to her. 

Liza carefully removed and saved every pin, and stacked them neatly in the corner of her box.   She uncovered the first card she had ever gotten, hidden by a layer of dreams that would never come true.  It was a reproduction watercolor of an English cottage on a lane covered in pink and blue flowers.  The text on the bottom of the card read “Dewdrop Inn.”

She remembered being a little girl, maybe seven.  Her mother was getting fucked in their room, and she had wandered to a magazine stand blocks and blocks away from home. She had never had the inclination to steal before, but she saw that cottage among all the other postcards and wanted to be there so badly she snatched it up and ran, her heart beating all the way.

“I remember you,” Liza said to the card.  She wanted to run away that time, and thousands of

other times.  Now she was finally getting the chance.

***

Fancy was already undressed for bed when the knock came at the door. The sudden sound frightened her because she didn’t know any of the neighbors, and no one in her life knew she was there…except Liza.

She hurried to the door without bothering to put on her dressing gown and flung it open.  Liza stood on the stairs, carrying a cardboard box tied with twine.  She held out a post card to Fancy. “I think I know what we should call the place.”

 ***

A/N:
And that's it for the first episode! Next update will begin part two.  An ebook of the first chapter will be available soon.