"True adventures have never been plentiful. They who are set down in print as such have been mostly businessmen with newly invented methods. They have been out after the things they wanted - golden fleeces, holy grails, ladyloves, treasure, crowns and fame. The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet some great-unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Son - when he started back home. Half-adventurers - brave and splendid figures - have been numerous. From the Crusades to the Palisades they have enriched the arts of history and fiction and the trade of historical fiction. But each of them had a prize to win, a goal to kick, an axe to grind, a race to run, a new thrust in tierce to deliver, a name to carve, a crow to pick - so they were not followers of true adventure."
- O. Henry, The Green Door
Within the nine months Joya had officially joined the Harlem Newsgirls as Ash Villaflores, her life had changed drastically. Since the fire at her school, Mercer Conservatory, in Greenwich Village, she'd adjusted to the life as a newspaper girl fairly easily. The minimal income was actually less of a problem for the high-brow young lady and her twin brother than anyone would have expected, and she'd made friends fairly easily with some of the girls. Ash had quite a few friends down on the lower part of Manhattan, Midnight in Midtown and Rags, Sun and Dice in the Village still. She'd kept in contact with the Midtown and Greenwich newsies by visiting once a week at least, sometimes walking down with Mess in the early morning and sleeping at the Giacoma's restaurant-house on Sullivan Street. And that's where she was headed this cold January afternoon: having visited Dice and the Greenwich newsgirls, she stepped onto the sidewalk right outside of The Four Kitchens restaurant. Kicking the snow off her shoes, she pulled her dark gray cloak hood off her head and opened the door with a perfect jangle from the bell.
Looking around the well-lit, clean restaurant, she spied Papa Dante and Carmin, the eldest daughter, chatting at a table with some customers. At the register was the twenty-something Luis, who waved at her. She smiled back to him, and started towards the restricted area that served as the Giacoma's house. Mama Gina swung Kitchen Two's 'out' door open and skillfully guided the cake tray onto the countertop. "Go on in, Joya!" she called jovially to Ash. "Bel's back there! Gotta letter for you!" Immediately Mama Gina was in a conversation with a regular customer, and Ash walked on to the living quarters.
"Bel?" she called into the room, hearing Bel's cello loud and clear as an affirmative response to her presence. Ash walked down the small, familiar hall and peeked inside the room Bel and Carmin shared. The pretty girl looked up and stopped at the sight of Ash, grinning widely.
"Your brother sent you another letter!" Bel announced, standing and setting the cello carefully against the stool where she'd been sitting. The slightly younger girl greeted Ash with a great hug, and led her out to the living room, chattering about Mess, and the concert her father had taken her to the previous night. Ash smiled, enjoying Bel's happiness very much. The Italian girl went to an expansive secretary and pulled out a blue-tinted envelope from a small pigeonhole that the family reserved for Ash's mail.
Ash took it eagerly, and just as eagerly Bel sat down on the royal blue loveseat, making room for her dear friend. Yes, it was the standard, crisp, dyed stationary her brother used, and his favorite quill, perfected by years of wear, had inked it beautifully. She quickly opened it, pulling gently as to not damage the paper more than necessary, and happily waited to be told of all the news from home. Her typically bright eyes darkened after the first few sentences, and her lips stiffened before she pressed them together. Isabel watched her friend's countenance change, debating on when would be the appropriate time to ask the impending question.
She didn't have to. "Mother's ill." It was terse, disbelieving, and from the blank, gray stare in Ash's eyes, Bel knew the ailment was not a slight cold.
"What does she have?" she ventured.
"Polio."
"Oh, God!" Isabel spurted. Abruptly standing, Ash nodded a quick goodbye to Isabel and quickly left to go back to Harlem, the atrocities berating her, using thoughts as clubs against her delicate body, and more delicate mind.
He'd obliged himself into going on the ferry to Jersey to see Ash and Muse off, but Diva had to say her goodbyes at the Hudson River, because she had to be back in Long Island to sell that day. Ash didn't stick her nose in her brother's business, and she sat perfectly still as Mess kept a doting arm around her while they waited for their passage back to Jersey. Mess was talking to her, trying to keep her warm, trying not to break down in tears that matched Diva's for Muse, but she'd tuned him out from the minute he'd arrived at the Harlem girls' house to help her get her luggage into Damon's cab.
"...An' if ya need an't'in', jus' send a telegraph, I'll be down deah by yer side in no time flat, Ash," he was saying. He paused, finally feeling the distance that was already between them, and leaned over to look her in the eye. "Ya...ya knows I love ya, right, Ash?"
She finally was able to look at him, and it was then the discomfort began. She blinked, not understanding the look in his perfect eyes. It was the truest love he'd ever known, that she'd ever know, but something wasn't right. It hit her like a baby grand: She was not in love with Mess. So she nodded. "I know." But she dared not return, regardless of how appropriate it was. "I know," she repeated softly.
Forty-nine minutes later, Muse granted Mess time to say an affecting goodbye to his life's love, and Ash pushed herself to say the reciprocating things, things to comfort, things to ease. Stepping away from his kiss and towards the steamer, she turned her back and wordlessly let him go, praying to whatever god in which they mutually believed to let him know.
But their god did not, and Cupid frowned, and he set his determinations against whatever offending forces would pull them apart. Mess watched the object of his affections disappear into the gray locomotive and wiped at his eyes, standing on the platform until well after the Pennsylvania line train had pushed off for destinations far.
"As long as ya knows I love ya, Ash." he turned and faced a loneliness that would turn to a decline of a sickness he'd been battling the past half week. "I love ya."
In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing why, we look up suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our gallery of intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony and fear coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of at our familiar curb a cab-driver deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens for us and bids us to enter; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous hate, affection, and fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a sudden souse of rain - and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs drop fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs. We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam radiator."
-The Green Door, O. Henry
Her eyes had taken up affixation on the barely eaten apple flip that was meant to be her breakfast. She pulled the creamed and sugared coffee to her lips and continued to stare at light brown outer crust. Muse had turned to a game of cards with some college choirboys, and a pretentious criticism of music with these Ivy Leaguers. Muse, who never flouted anything, be it his violin bow or perfect score on a mathematics test, watched the banter with these slightly older, more educated, less intelligent Joes, and put up a more than decent argument for ragtime and band music.
A red-haired, freckle-faced fellow who wasn't too involved in the discourse kept throwing glances across the car at the deliberating Ash. When he thought she'd see him through the corner of her daunted eye, his face lit up and he smiled monstrously, but alas, she did not see him, nor would she have been too accepting if she had.
"Naw, I'm serious! Call me Mess. Ever'body does," the twins' newfound friend insisted. He was a dark, handsome boy, with eyes and a smile that could evoke joviality, and his smart navy and white Surrey Hotel uniform only heightened his appeal.
"But why?" Joya grinned. "You certainly aren't a mess!" She shifted the hatbox in front of her as James questioned him also.
"That's pr'cisely why they call me Mess. A joke," he shrugged, and if he weren't so charismatic, he'd have looked bashful. "I like t'ings ta be in good order, look nice, ya know? Bridge started callin' me 'Mess' when I was a little kid, and it jus' stuck."
Joya and James exchanged glances. "Bridge?" James furthered.
Mess nodded and smiled a bit more softly. "Yup. Old leader of the Brooklyn newsies," he said as his chest puffed up a little. "I useda be one of their boys, 'till Bridge, Red an' Fish," he tried to soften his words as well, not wanting to reveal that two of them were murdered in front of this lovely lady. "'Till they left."
Joya laughed slightly. "Bridge, Red, Fish, Mess...what other names do you have for each other?" She straightened to propriety as a lady and gentleman approached the door, which "Mess" opened for them with a deep bow, greeting them with much respect as she'd seen the other doormen at the hotels around the city do. After the couple had entered, he turned his attention to the young people.
"Lessee... There's Blue Skies Costello," he grinned, and searched for more names. "Hustler Fowler. My friend's Blind Diamond Connor - but he isn't around much no more, an' Delanie. They call 'im Sham," he smirked at this. "Shiner, Sticks, Imp... Schaefah - but they call 'er Smoke... Needle an' Spider. Rubes - 'r Ruby, if ya will - Fingers, Sketch, Pixie. An' Knuckles - 'e's the leader o' the boys up in Harlem where I'm stayin' now."
"Harlem!" Joya exclaimed. "But that's so far from the Village. And you work here every day?"
Mess nodded. "Yeah. Ain't that bad, though. Come down here an' visit 'Kenzie an' my Greenwich friends lots. An' now I got me anothah plus." He really didn't mean to only look at Joya as he defined, "You."
Stay tuned! More to come!
