Read Online Mothers and Daughters by Rae Meadows - Free Book Online Page B

them rose the towering Park Row Building that, when completed, would be the tallest in the world.
    â€œHis name is Mr. Lewis, and he is a prosperous gentleman,” Lilibeth said. Her mother was dreamy, her hand on her throat as she talked about her latest boyfriend. Violet warmed to her when she was like this, felt less vexed by Lilibeth’s mercurial moods.
    â€œHe’s a loan officer at the bank,” she said, as if she had already forgotten that she was married.
    The once-neat waves of Lilibeth’s pale hair were mussed, her hairpins crookedly replaced behind her ear. Her dress was white linen and lace, muddy at its hem, and when the wind blew, the slender outlines of her arms were visible through its blousy sleeves.
    â€œHe doesn’t know about you yet,” her mother said. “I didn’t want to scare him off. You understand how it is, Vi.”
    Violet understood. There had been a string of men—pawnbrokers, philanthropists, cardsharps, politicians—since they’d arrived in New York City. Lilibeth played up her lilting accent and delicate demeanor, which Violet found confusing at first, and then annoying, and then ignorable. If city people—men especially—wanted to believe she came from a white-columned plantation house, so be it. As her mother spun tales, Violet never let on that Aberdeen—all of Barren County really—was the pits. There was nothing genteel about it: prairies, caves, and sinkholes, rife with muskrats, wild turkeys, and copperheads. Nino said it didn’t matter anyway because everyone in the city was from someplace else, and really he’d rather be from Kentucky than Calabria, so she should feel lucky.
    Violet didn’t like to think about how her mother would have an easier time without her, and she was still willing to believe Lilibeth knew that there was a chance for something more this time. Her mother could have left her in Aberdeen, Violet reminded herself, and she had not.
    As they approached City Hall, the pigeons scattered, abandoning the crumbs of an old roll, which crunched under Violet’s feet. A group of boys, their pants rolled up to the knees, played toss-penny in the adjoining park. She recognized a thief who worked up on Doyers Street, and Buck, a newsboy with two protruding front teeth. He squinted his rodent eyes at her, always peeved that Nino paid her any mind.
    The thief looked up from the game and whistled—Lilibeth usually elicited reactions—and pulled his shirt out in two points. Violet scowled at him, but her mother didn’t notice as she floated along, smiling a little at the twitter of starlings in the bushes.
    The gas lamps were being lit, and the electric lights of the bridge—a blue-white light every hundred feet that made a chain from Manhattan to Brooklyn—blazed against the veil of dusk, their reflections like dots of fire in the windows of the sooty tenements that skirted the bridge’s massive supports.
    They reached Water Street, the twilight bringing on an air of glittery possibility and sin. In an alley, a ring of wool-capped men, dockworkers, yelled and jeered at a cockfight. Violet lingered to glimpse the birds, which danced around each other, landing bloody jabs with their chipped beaks and sharpened claws.
    â€œCome on, now,” her mother said. “Stop your dawdling. You, child, need a bath.”
    Lilibeth, with the help of Mr. Lewis, had rented a new room in a building near the wharf, a dormered attic with a window and a sink. The ceiling was low but the room was surprisingly airy, and when Violet sat at just the right angle, she could see a tiny triangle of the river flashing in the city lights. She wanted this to be home.
    â€œI have a job,” Lilibeth said, her hand flitting to her hair. She turned from the pot of water on the stove and smiled at Violet, a girlish, pleased smile.
    â€œReally?”
    â€œSome ironing. For the grocer’s wife, you