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Her father’s fingers paused above the Underwood’s keys. “Smart, yes. And very… ambitious,” her father said. Ambitious wasn’t a compliment from her father. It usually meant “reckless” or “arrogant.” “So, who’s asking about Arthur Brown?”
“Oh. I ran into him on Bleecker Street the other day.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all, Papa,” Mabel said, stepping into the cramped bathroom to check her reflection.
“Good,” her father said under his breath. Mabel could hear him cranking a fresh sheet of paper around the typewriter’s cylinder and thwacking the metal bar back to hold it in place. “How is your friend, the student? Reads all the time? Jacob?”
“Jericho,” Mabel corrected. She dabbed on a bit of the lipstick Evie had given her. It didn’t look bad, but it didn’t turn her into Gloria Swanson, either. “He’s more interested in Diviners than me.”
“Ach, Diviners.”
“What do you have against Diviners?”
“Nothing, it’s only that I don’t understand why people will put their faith in soothsayers but not reformers. They will go out of their way to believe what they can’t see rather than change what’s right before their eyes!” As she came out of the bathroom, her father looked up at her, squinting. “Lipstick?”
“I like it,” Mabel said defiantly.
“You don’t need it. You’re already beautiful.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re my father,” Mabel said, rolling her eyes.
“I’m saying that because it’s true,” her father said above the din of his typing, and even though the compliment had come from her father, which rendered it mostly moot, Mabel still appreciated it.
Mabel took a big bite of her father’s uneaten hamantasch. It was poppy seed, her favorite. “Wha ahr you wridding abouw?”
“A textile strike in New Jersey. A few nights ago, someone sabotaged the machinery at the factory so they couldn’t hire any more scabs.”
“Who did it? The workers?”
“No one knows. Possibly the Secret Six, that group of anarchists trying to make a name for themselves in the worst possible way. They’re causing us no end of headaches.”
Mabel swallowed the hard lump of pastry. “They would never do that.”
Her father stopped typing. “And you would know this how?”
Mabel looked down at the plate to hide her face from him. “I mean, it just doesn’t seem like something they would do. Is that all they did? Sabotage the works?”
“Yes. For now. But this sort of destruction breaks down talks and makes it hard for the rest of us trying to help the workers. And it can lead to greater violence. I’ve seen it.” Mabel’s father frowned. “You know the Secret Six was the name of the six men who subsidized the raids of John Brown, the abolitionist, just before the Civil War. These anarchists must think mighty highly of themselves to take that name.”
Mabel pretended to be very interested in the pastry. “You want the same things the Six do, though.”
“We share the same goals, yes, but violence is never the answer. An eye for an eye is supposed to be a deterrent, not a prescription, shayna. You want to help your mother and me paint picket signs tomorrow?”
Mabel sighed. That was all she was good for here. Serving coffee to socialist leaders. Handing out pamphlets. Painting signs. Boring. “I can’t. I’m meeting Evie,” she lied.
“Tell the troublemaker I said hello,” her father said, using his pet nickname for Evie.
“Maybe I’m the troublemaker,” Mabel said.
“You? My Maideleh Mabeleh? Never!” her father said, getting back to his typing.
Oh, Papa, Mabel thought. If you only knew.
After Arthur saw Mabel to the Bennington, he rode the subway back downtown and returned to his apartment. He opened the steamer trunk and examined the blueprints, making notes. Then he locked them up again. He lifted the blinds on his dormer window and peeked out. In the upstairs room of a brownstone across the way, an artist in a paint-splattered undershirt worked on a large canvas, and Arthur looked at his own, abandoned sketches with both longing and regret. Down on the noisy sidewalk, the barber, Mr. D’Agostino, stepped out of his shop to smoke. A trio of short-haired women dressed in tuxedos walked toward Macdougal Street, presumably to the famous nightclub that catered to an all-female clientele. Just another Friday night in Greenwich Village.
The man in the brown fedora was easy to miss at first. Just a man standing under a street lamp smoking a cigarette. But then he looked straight up at the bookstore’s attic, right at Arthur, and Arthur drew quickly away from the window, out of sight.
