In the Midst of Wolves

By P. L. Novak

It's 1896. New York City is hardly the ideal place for a child whose father has disappeared and whose mother has fled from reality to the comfort of her piano. Eight-year-old Leigh Blackwell, determined to care for her mother and make ends meet, leaves school and takes a job in the garment district. Just as lifes challenges threaten to overwhelm her, she finds nine-year-old Tom Paterson, a streetwise pickpocket, on her front steps.

Tom and Leighs lives soon intertwine as he appoints himself her protector and shares part of his meager earnings with her. After her love of horse racing eventually leads Leigh to a job at a thoroughbred stable, she finally attains independence and slowly pulls away from the one who has quietly fallen in love with her. But when Leigh leaves New York and becomes entangled with a bitter, angry man, her desire to help him nearly costs Tom his lifeand their chance at ever finding happiness together.

In the Midst of Wolves recounts the unconventional coming-of-age journey of a homeless pickpocket and an enterprising orphan as they grow into adulthood in the early twentieth century despite many obstacles, including some that are of their own making.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abbott Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781458209894

P. L. Novak

P. L. Novak was raised in upstate New York and earned BA and MA degrees in English literature. After a twenty-five-year career as a technical editor and manager in Washington State, she returned to New York, where she now resides. This is her first published novel.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 P. L. Novak.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Abbott Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

Abbott Press

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.abbottpress.com

Phone: [phone]

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4582-0991-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4582-0990-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4582-0989-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013909952

Abbott Press rev. date: 6/6/2013

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

For my earliest readers and supporters: Jeri, Barbara, Mona, Patrick, and Sarah. For Ted, Michaela, and Lisa, whose knowledge of and love for racehorses is, I hope, reflected in these pages. And for Al, especially.

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

Matthew 10:16

King James Bible

Prologue

39676.jpg

A PERSON SELDOM realizes that he is living in momentous times; when times are momentous, a person is generally too preoccupied with just living. I have been privileged to watch the nineteenth century yield to the twentieth, and because I was already established in my profession by then I had the luxury of recognizing the huge and rapid changes taking place. The sense of forward momentum, of the future rushing toward us, was invigorating but often disorienting, even frightening. During those years, however, I became a minor (though, I trust, not unimportant) character in the lives of a young woman and a young man who were so absorbed by the complex and quite perilous business of just living that they didn’t realize they were riding the wave of history. Their story is all the more fascinating for their assumption that life had always been this tumultuous and always would be.

They grew up in New York City, a place that has demanded much of its citizens in every age. But in the early 1900s, perhaps even more so. New York in those days seemed to me to have established itself as the setting for an immense stage production, the like of which the world had never seen. Though no one knew of the existence of any script or the identity of the director, people poured into the city from all over the country and all over the world, hoping to secure some role in the drama. The city absorbed these multitudes somehow, although in my opinion the stage production benefited at the expense of the cast. Many who had dreamed of playing leading men or women ended up as extras or stage hands; yet even these were the lucky ones, in comparison to the thousands who were simply extraneous but had nowhere else to go or no will to go elsewhere. The great drama that unfolded in New York during those years, as it turned out, was composed of countless small dramas—rarely grand, often heart-breaking, sometimes pointless, occasionally inspiring. If all these stories could be collected and told, they would (I am convinced) stand as the story of humankind in all places and all ages, for all time. Perhaps other cities can make such a boast; I rather doubt it. In the eyes of the world, New York City is The City; that is the best and worst that can be said of it.

The young people whose small story is told here are noteworthy because they refused to let the city make them extraneous, though it tried. Essentially without family, they made their living as children in a city with no child labor laws and virtually no child protections of any kind. They were all too familiar with loss, disease, hunger, cruelty, pestilence, homelessness. Meanwhile, their world was being continually transformed by revolutionary advances in communication and transportation technology. Around them swirled the rip-tides of street gangs and sweatshops as well as the undercurrents of corrupt politics, workers unions, woman suffrage. They reached adulthood only to greet the war that was supposed to end all wars. But in their own minds all they really did was to take each day as it came. They were truly out in the midst of wolves. Their resources were God and each other, and they believed (most of the time) those were more than enough.

This is a love story, as you’ll see. I’ll let you decide for yourself whether or not it ends happily. After all, I’m merely a lawyer, not a romantic.

39636.jpg

Leigh Blackwell

MY MOTHER WAS born Lydia Bernice Rhodes and was raised to be pampered. She was lovely. Her hair was long like mine, but blonde instead of dark, and her eyes were a gentle blue. I’m named for her, by the way; my name is actually Lydia Leigh. (I’m glad she didn’t saddle me with Bernice.) She was trained in classical piano and took to it naturally. I gather that she could have played in concert halls. But instead she married my father, Philip Blackwell. It’s from him that I get my dark eyes and hair and who knows what else. I have no idea how they met or what he did for a living; all I know is that her family in Pittsburgh was so displeased with her choice that they severed all ties with her and my father. They probably never even knew that I exist. My parents and I lived in an apartment on the second floor of a nondescript building between 6th and 7th Avenues, near what New Yorkers call the Garment District. Not the best neighborhood but safe, I guess, compared to many. When I was eight years old, my father packed up and left. I came home from school to find my mother sobbing. I have to say I don’t remember much about him, and at this point my memories of him are probably based more on their wedding picture than anything else.

Once I realized that my father was never coming back (I think I understood this before my mother did), I figured I’d better get a job. My mother hadn’t been raised with the idea of working and she just couldn’t accept what had happened. We had no friends or family in New York, and I felt responsible for the two of us. Now don’t suppose that I resented this responsibility; I accepted my mother’s role as a lady and wanted more than anything to let her stay that way. What was disturbing, though, was how she started to slip away from the present as the fact of my father’s permanent absence became inescapable. She spent her days at the piano. I not only needed a job; I had to prepare meals and do whatever household chores were required.

My first job was piecework for some of the garment shops a few blocks south. The woman in the apartment across the hall helped get me started. I sewed artificial flowers—violets, forget-me-nots, and other small varieties—for women’s hats. Child labor was still legal then, but just to be safe I told the shop owners that my mother was unable to leave the apartment because of her health (which technically wasn’t a lie) and that I was just picking up the work and dropping it off for her. I got paid a little extra for delivering the finished goods from the seamstresses in our building; usually the shops hired boys to do that. At two cents a bunch, you have to sew a lot of flowers to make any money at all, so I gave up school. Thankfully, there were no visits from truant officers. I met Tommy on my front steps a few months after I started working (he tells that story better than I do), and later he even helped a little with the sewing. He wouldn’t be proud to have you know that, but it’s true and I was grateful for his help. My fingers got pretty sore, doing that all day. No matter; I became skilled enough that I was promoted from flowers to ladies’ gloves, which paid a little better. I did this, all told, for almost three years, though I had to fill in with odd jobs, like cleaning up after the horse-drawn trolleys. All of this probably wouldn’t have sustained us for even that long, except that Tommy, who was working as a newsboy by then, generously shared his earnings with me, and that my father at least had had the heart to leave some money behind. Or maybe he’d forgotten it was there.

Expert at running the numbers even then, Tommy figured out that the sewing wouldn’t make enough to pay bills and feed my mother and me, even if I were able to do it twenty-four hours a day. I had to find another job. I had a good friend from the neighborhood, Karen, who had recently been more or less forced into prostitution by her parents; she was pretty and they were poor, and such things weren’t all that uncommon, I’m sorry to say. I would still see her occasionally and she tried to persuade me that her new life wasn’t so bad, but I couldn’t imagine that God would use that as the way to take care of me. There weren’t many options, though. An idea finally occurred to me. Once in a while on a Saturday, Tommy and I would take the train down to Coney Island and (while he made some extra money picking pockets, as if I didn’t know) I’d sneak into the horse races at the Sheepshead Bay track. I loved watching those magnificent animals—a different species, almost, from the spiritless creatures that pulled carts, wagons, trolleys all across the city. I wondered if perhaps I could get a job at the stables. The name I remembered seeing most often at the track was McLaren. I bought an old but serviceable bicycle, found myself a pair of trousers at a church rummage sale, and set out for the McLaren stables in Brooklyn. You won’t get if you don’t ask, I reasoned; but you’d better believe I prayed about it, too.

I know that God made it possible for me to get that job. Of all the people I could have first spoken to when I showed up at McLaren’s Thoroughbreds, old Sam McFee, the stable foreman, was the only one who wouldn’t have shut the door on me. Years later he told me I reminded him of his granddaughter. Good thing! Anyway, he told me that working in the stables was very hard. I told him I was willing to work as hard as he needed me to. He said that I would have to work as hard as the boys, and that my work would be judged more critically because I was a girl. I told him I understood, and I would be grateful if he gave me a chance. In the end, he took me on.

Who would have guessed that I would love being there? Mucking out stalls and hauling hay, feed, and water is truly demanding, but being with the horses was worth the labor. I loved their big brown eyes, the smooth gloss of their coats after I’d brushed them, their varied personalities, even their earthy smell (somehow it was hard to connect it with the unpleasant, often acrid odors I’d always known on our streets). I hadn’t been there long when Mr. McLaren got wind of it. My first impression of him was pretty terrifying. Rorey McLaren was known as the Roaring Scotsman because he always yelled first and (maybe) listened afterward. And he was just furious that Sam had hired me. I’ll nae be ha’in’ girlie-girls in m’ stables! he thundered as I did my best not to cower. Sam interceded, assuring Mr. McLaren that I was proving to be an excellent stable hand, even better than some of the boys. Still, I think that if Mr. McLaren hadn’t had a lot of respect for Sam, I’d have been out of a job. He let me stay on, provided I didn’t turn out to be a girlie-girl after all. And so I was a lowly stable boy for quite a few years; eventually I was entrusted with the added responsibilities of grooming and saddling the horses. Sam even had me exercising them and walking them to cool down after a hard run. I mended tack as a regular duty, of course, but I was grateful that Sam didn’t have me do more than my share of that task.

Most employers paid female employees less than males, supposedly based on the premise that males were permanent members of the workforce and primary breadwinners to boot. It’s too bad that landlords and coal merchants didn’t honor this premise by charging women one-third less. Unfair or not, that’s just how it was. So you can see why I felt especially blessed to work for Sam; as soon as he saw that I worked as hard and as diligently as the boys, he paid me the same wages. A dollar a day! It wasn’t enough to get rich on, but compared to what I’d been making as a seamstress it felt like a windfall. I never took it for granted.

Tommy, on the other hand, wasn’t thrilled with my new occupation, though he admitted that it did pay considerably better than flowers and gloves. He was concerned that I’d forget I was going to grow up to be a woman, not a man. He made me promise that I would leave my hair long and never cut it. I learned how to plait it in one thick braid down my back. That’s the way I still wear it when I’m working with the horses.

And I should tell you that, although it won me many shocked and disapproving looks, especially as I got older, I definitely learned to like wearing trousers. I felt so much more capable in them. Skirts make me feel very confined and vulnerable. Who could win a horse race sitting side-saddle?

Tom Paterson

After my mother and siblings had all died, I lived alone with my father in two small rooms on the third floor of a four-story tenement on the lower West Side. Being a kid, I didn’t know any different, but looking back on it I have to say it was the kind of place where people hole up just to keep from slipping over the edge entirely. If I tell you that tenement life prepared me in some important ways for being homeless altogether, you’ll maybe get the idea. The building, like all the others on the block, was almost grand-looking on the outside, with its ornamental cornices and scrolled iron fretwork, as if trying overly hard to hide the ugly truths inside. Our home had a window, which might have been considered a luxury in that part of town except that it only looked across the air shaft to the tenement immediately behind. Not enough light or air got through to make much difference. I remember sleeping on the ornate but not-so-sturdy fire escape on hot summer nights, along with a lot of other people. It’s a wonder the thing didn’t collapse. Our furniture consisted of the bed, made of scrap lumber on crates, on which my father slept, and a pile of rags in the corner that served as my bed. In my mother’s time we had several chairs and a little table, but my father sold those to pay for his nights at the saloon on the first floor.

The whole building was served by two outhouses that were so filthy and so prone to overflowing when it rained that most of us didn’t use them. You may have read that some tenement dwellers used the stairwells, hallways, or even their own rooms when nature called. I can vouch for the truth of that claim, as disgusting as it sounds. The stench was nauseating and suffocating and made my eyes and throat burn; maybe the adults were less affected because their heads were further from the ground but I doubt it. More likely they kept themselves too drunk to notice. You had to watch your step or you’d slip in something vile and land in something viler. It was especially horrible on windy winter days when no one wanted to lose what little warmth they’d been able to create by their own breathing and shivering. There wasn’t much other heat indoors and the place wasn’t built with any notion of keeping out drafts. It was about the most squalid existence known to the civilized world. I made a few pennies sweeping horse manure out of the street and into the gutter along our block so it was easier for the sanitation crews to haul away, and it did seem ironic to me (kids do understand irony, by the way) that our street was more wholesome than the inside of our building.

To be fair, some families did everything they could to keep their rooms tidy and clean—take into account that soot and dirt found their way through a hundred gaps, and that laundry on the clotheslines strung between the buildings was arguably not much cleaner than it had been before it was washed. I think that maybe if my mother had lived, my father and I might not have ended up living like feral dogs.

Life can completely change in a day, though, even for a dog. When I was nine, my dad beat the daylights out of me one morning before he left for work. If there was a reason I never did know it. No different from all the other times, but I’d had my fill of it. Once my head cleared I ran away, and my intention was to be done with living. I was feeling pretty despondent, no lie. I pictured myself stopping halfway over a bridge, over the deepest part of the river, and jumping off. Or throwing myself under the Death Avenue train that lumbered down the middle of 11th. Good riddance to life. What purpose had it had so far? What hope that there’d ever be a purpose for it?

I kept running until I found myself in an unfamiliar part of town, and I was just going to sit on some steps awhile and catch my breath, you know. But I began to sense that someone was there, sitting next to me. The eye on that side of my face was swollen shut, thanks to my dear daddy, and I had to turn my head to see. I don’t know who I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting a girl. Why would a little girl sit next to me? I didn’t look friendly or even safe, I’m sure. Not that she had much to lose. Scrawny little thing; a dress and shoes she had pretty much outgrown, and a jumble of long, dark hair. But her brown eyes were so deep and innocent. I’d seen many things in people’s eyes during my short life, but I’d never seen innocence before. I was almost scared, to tell the truth.

Being the tough kid I was, I just told her, Your hair is a mess.

She got up and went into the building and I thought I’d chased her off. But no, back she came with a silver-backed hairbrush in her little hands. I noticed how red and sore her fingers looked. And then she handed me the brush and sat back down beside me.

You want me to brush your hair? I knew even at the time this was an imbecilic thing to say, because the answer was obvious, but she just looked at me with a shy little smile and sat there.

Now, I was a boy. I didn’t know beans about brushing hair, especially hair that was so long and thick and tangled. I don’t know why I even considered doing it, but once I started, there didn’t seem to be any rational way to quit. It took at least an hour, because I didn’t want to yank on the knots and hurt her. By the time I finished, I was amazed (and to be honest, enthralled) by how soft and lovely her hair was, how it slipped through my fingers, and how it fell like a dark, heavy curtain around her face and down her back, all the way to the step behind her. I was completely in awe. But I couldn’t have her knowing that. I asked her what her name was and she told me; I told her my name was Tom. But as we kept talking, I noticed that she always called me Tommy. You know it’s not like Leigh to do that, to give someone a nickname they didn’t ask for. I somehow understood that it was her way of claiming me for herself. It made me feel differently about the killing myself idea. Maybe Tom Paterson could jump off a bridge and no one in the world would care, but Tommy could never do that to this little girl. And so the rest is what it is. I’ve been her Tommy ever since, and she’s been my Little Girl. I’ve always called her that. At first it bothered her, but I think she came to understand why I did it. A tough and angry nine-year-old boy, after all, can’t handle such a sudden, overpowering feeling of being needed and of wanting to take care of someone. Sometimes when I look at her I still can’t handle it.

Leigh

While Tommy couldn’t really argue about the better pay offered by my new job at the stables, he hated the idea of my riding my bicycle that far alone every day. For such a young person, he seemed to know a lot about the evils of the city.

What’s so terrible about it? I said. I’m a good enough cyclist to make it to the stables.

You don’t got any idea, do you? This place is crawling with low-lifes, you need to understand that. It’s not just the kids in the gangs, Little Girl. There’s lots of other people you don’t wanna meet.

I can take care of myself.

No you can’t. You don’t know what you’re sayin’. If you take the straightest path to the Brooklyn Bridge, you know what neighborhood you’ll be goin’ right through?

No. I haven’t been very many places except with you.

And I’m careful where I takes you and how we gets there, believe me. But you gotta be at McLaren’s so early, it’ll still be dark. There’s a part of town you’d be ridin’ through, ya know, that’s nothin’ but saloons and brothels.

What’s a brothel?

Ordinarily, I think, he’d have blushed, but he was already too worked up for that. A house of…. A place where they…. Aw, heck. A whorehouse.

I blew out a sigh of exasperation. Why didn’t you say so? So what.

I don’t want you goin’ anywhere near there.

Oh, come on. It’ll be during the daytime. You think I’m going to get sucked in through the door or something?

You’re gonna be hard to look after, ya know that? Guess I have to explain it to ya. There are people who would see you and figure you’d make a nice little whore, and they’d—

Come on, Tommy, how can they make me do something I don’t want to do?

You scare me, you’re so ignorant. You don’t wanna know what they can make ya do.

That was all the detail he was willing to provide, but he was clearly upset so I didn’t push him. He borrowed my bike and figured out the route he thought would be safest. He warned me not to stop along the way, no matter what. He made me promise. (I had to become very adept at dodging pedestrians, trolleys, and pushcarts to keep that promise, I’ll have you know.) Just in case of trouble, he taught me how to defend myself, where to kick a man so it really hurts. It sounded absurd.

But I actually used those lessons once. I had to slow down for a trolley on the way home one evening, and suddenly a large man with an unfriendly sneer stepped in front of me, straddling the bike’s front tire and grabbing my hands on the handlebars. I don’t think he expected me to be very strong; how could he know I hefted forty-pound bales of hay every day? I picked up the front of the bike as hard as I could; the tire got him right between the legs. He yelped and immediately lost interest in me and pretty much everything else, and I wasted no time getting away from there. I didn’t dare tell Tommy (until many years later) or he’d never have let me go back to the stables. I realize now that I was awfully naive, and I must have worried Tommy half to death. After that day, though, I decided I could afford to retire my bicycle and take the train instead.

Of course, there were challenges in the stables, too. It didn’t take me long to realize that the racehorse business was fanatically serious for everyone involved. Mistakes were costly and were not tolerated. Violating someone’s preferences counted as a mistake. I was allowed to haul hay and feed, but under no circumstances was I to feed any of the horses. Their diet, in both quantity and composition, was rigidly controlled, and varied according to whether a particular horse was scheduled to race or had come back from a race, or was going to be bred soon, or was being prepared for sale at auction. I observed and listened and followed instructions.

I was allowed, even encouraged, to spend time with the horses as I mucked out their stalls. The object was for me to become familiar with each horse’s ways so that I’d notice right off if something were amiss. I was far from being the only person who made these sorts of observations, but every pair of eyes helped. This part of the job is what gets a person hooked on horses. Some of the horses were friendly and seemed almost serene, but most of them were nervous to varying degrees, and I learned to move slowly and talk in a soothing way, making sure they saw me and what I was doing (and staying out of the way of their kicks). Don’t ever think that I became foolishly sentimental about the horses in our stables, either. They were high-strung and perfectly willing to hurt or even kill any of us if they took a mind to do it.

Their ears told me a lot about what they were thinking, and I learned particularly to heed the signs of boredom. It’s not at all pleasant to be bitten by a horse whose natural inclinations are constantly thwarted; such bites are meant to make you yell (that’s considered