‘Do you know him very well?’ Rosie asked. ‘Mr Slowik?’
Anna smiled — to Rosie it looked like it had a bitter edge. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He is a friend of mine. An old friend. Indeed he is. And a friend of women like you, as well.’
‘Anyway, I finally got here,’ Rosie finished. ‘I don’t know what comes next, but at least I got this far.’
A ghost of a smile touched the corners of Anna Stevenson’s mouth. ‘Yes. And made a good job of it, too.’
Gathering all her remaining courage — the last thirty-six hours had taken a great deal of it
— Rosie asked if she could spend the night at Daughters and Sisters.
‘Quite a bit longer than that, if you need to,’ Anna replied. ‘Technically speaking, this is a shelter — a privately endowed halfway house. You can stay up to eight weeks, and even that is an arbitrary number. We are quite flexible here at Daughters and Sisters.’ She preened slightly (and probably unconsciously) as she said this, and Rosie found herself remembering something she had learned about a thousand years ago, in French II: L’ état, c’est moi. Then the thought was swept away by amazement as she really realized what the woman was saying.
‘Eight . . . eight . . . ‘
She thought of the pale young man who had been sitting outside the entrance to the Portside terminal, the one with the sign in his lap reading HOMELESS & HAVE AIDS, and suddenly knew how he would feel if a passing stranger for some reason dropped a hundred-dollar bill into his cigar-box.
‘Pardon me, did you say up to eight weeks’?’
Dig out your ears, little lady, Anna Stevenson would say briskly. Days, I said— eight days.
Do you think we’d let the likes of you stay here for eight weeks? Let’s be sensible, shall we?
Instead, Anna nodded. ‘Although very few of the women who come to us end up having to stay so long. That’s a point of pride with us. And you’ll eventually pay for your room and board, although we like to think the prices here are very reasonable.’ She smiled that brief, preening smile again. ‘You should be aware that the accommodations are a long way from fancy. Most of the second floor has been turned into a dormitory. There are thirty beds —
well, camp-beds — and one of them just happens to be vacant, which is why we are able to take you in. The room you slept in today belongs to one of the live-in counsellors. We have three.’
‘Don’t you have to ask someone?’ Rosie whispered. ‘Put my name up before a committee, or something?’
‘ I’m the committee,’ Anna replied, and Rosie later thought that it had probably been years since the woman had heard the faint arrogance in her own voice. ‘Daughters and Sisters was set up by my parents, who were well-to-do. There’s a very helpful endowed trust. I choose who’s invited to stay, and who isn’t invited to stay . . . although the reactions of the other women to potential D and S candidates are important. Crucial, maybe. Their reaction to you was favorable.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ Rosie asked faintly.
‘Yes indeed.’ Anna rummaged on her desk, moved documents, and finally found what she wanted behind the Power-Book computer sitting to her left. She flapped a sheet of paper with a blue Daughters and Sisters letterhead at Rosie. ‘Here. Read this and sign it. Basically it says that you agree to pay sixteen dollars a night, room and board, payment to be deferred if necessary. It’s not even really legal; just « promise. We like it if you can pay half as you go, at least for awhile.’
‘I can,’ Rosie said. ‘I still have some money. I don’t know how to thank you for this, Mrs Stevenson.’
‘It’s Ms to my business associates and Anna to you,’ she said, watching Rosie scribble her name on the bottom of the sheet. ‘And you don’t need to thank me, or Peter Slowik, either. It was Providence that brought you here — Providence with a capital P, just like in a Charles Dickens novel. I really believe that. I’ve seen too many women crawl in here broken and walk out whole not to believe it. Peter is one of two dozen people in the city who refer women to me, but the force that brought you to him, Rose . . . that was Providence.’
‘With a capital P.’
‘Correct.’ Anna glanced at Rosie’s signature, then placed the paper on a shelf to her right, where, Rosie felt sure, it would disappear into the general clutter before another twenty-four
hours had passed.
‘Now,’ Anna said, speaking with the air of someone who has finished with the boring formalities and may now get down to what she really likes. ‘What can you do?’
‘Do?’ Rosie echoed. She suddenly felt faint again. She knew what was coming.
‘Yes, do, what can you do? Any shorthand skills, for instance?’
‘I . . . ‘ She swallowed. She had taken Shorthand I and II back at Aubreyville High, and she had gotten A’s in both, but these days she wouldn’t know a pothook from a boathook. She shook her head. ‘No. No shorthand. Once, but no more.’
‘Any other secretarial skills?’
She shook her head. Warm prickles stung at her eyes. She blinked them back savagely. The knuckles of her interlocked hands were gleaming white again.
‘Clerical skills? Typing, maybe?’
‘No.’
‘Math? Accounting? Banking?’
‘No!’
Anna Stevenson happened on a pencil amid the heaps of paper, extracted it, and tapped the eraser end against her clean white teeth. ‘Can you waitress?’
Rosie desperately wanted to say yes, but she thought about the large trays waitresses had to balance all day long . . . and then she thought about her back and her kidneys.
‘No,’ she whispered. She was losing her battle with the te ars; the little room and the woman on the other side of the desk began to blur and soften. ‘Not yet, anyway. Maybe in a month or two. My back . . . right now it’s not strong.’ And oh, it sounded like a lie. It was the kind of thing that, when he heard someone say it on TV, made Norman laugh cynically and talk about welfare Cadillacs and foodstamp millionaires.
Anna Stevenson did not seem particularly perturbed, however. ‘What skills do you have, Rose? Any at all?’
‘Yes!’ she said, appalled by the harsh, angry edge she heard in her voice but unable to make it go away or even mute it. ‘Yes indeed! I can dust, I can wash dishes, I can make beds, I can vacuum the floor, I can cook meals for two, I can sleep with my husband once a week. And I can take a punch. That’s another skill I have. Do you suppose any of the local gyms have openings for sparring partners?’
Then she did burst into tears. She wept into her cupped hands as she had so often during the years since she had married him, wept and waited for Anna to tell her to get out, that they could fill that empty cot upstairs with someone who wasn’t a smartass.
Something bumped the back of her left hand. She lowered it and saw a box of Kleenex.
Anna Stevenson was holding it out to her. And, incredibly, Anna Stevenson was smiling.
‘I don’t think you’ll have to be anyone’s sparring partner,’ she said. ‘Things are going to work out for you, I think — they almost always do. Here, dry your eyes.’
And, as Rosie dried them, Anna explained about the Whitestone Hotel, with which Daughters and Sisters had had a long and useful relationship. The Whitestone was owned by a corporation on whose board Anna’s well-to-do father had once sat, and a great many women had relearned the satisfactions of working for pay there. Anna told Rosie that she would have to work only as hard as her back allowed her to work, and that if her overall physical condition didn’t begin to improve in twenty-one days, she would be hauled off the job and taken to a hospital for tests.
‘Also, you’ll be paired with a woman who knows the ropes. A sort of counsellor who lives here full time. She’ll teach you, and she’ll be responsible for you. If you steal something, it’ll be her who gets in trouble, not you . . . but you’re not a thief, are you?’
Rosie shook her head. ‘Just my husband’s bank card, that’s all, and I only used it once. To make sure I could get away.’
‘You’ll work at the Whitestone until you find something that suits you better, as you almost certainly will — Providence, remember.’
‘With a capital P.’
‘Yes. While you’re at the Whitestone, we ask only that you do your best — in order to protect the jobs of all the women who’ll come after you, if for no other reason. Do you follow me?’