Chpter 5- The Big House

“The lady I live with wont like this!” Cried Mildred from behind the jail bars. Anne patted Mildred’s shoulder, “We’ll be out by dinnertime once they process our bail.” “Said the rich girl! That was a week’s wages for me, no dinner tonight.” The girl with the fat bottom sneered. Anne straightened, “Come now! This is the stuff that change is made of.” “Change! Sure, change of apartment for her and a new job for me. I should have been at my shift an hour ago.” The fat bottomed girl started pacing. A lazy officer on the other side of the bars leaned back in his chair and pretended to read a magazine. The fat bottomed girl hissed, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself locking three girls up for no reason.” “Ashamed? You came in wearing nothing but bathing suits!” He raised his eyebrows at the memory of it. “The female form is nothing to hide!” Fired Anne. The officer stood, leaning against the bars, looking Anne up and down “Why don’t you take off your coat and prove it!” “How dare you!” Stomped Anne. “Come on now! You girls like to dress like that, I like to see it. We agree, now let’s have another look.” He snickered and stuck his Billy club into the cell lifting Anne’s coat. A door opened from behind the officer, a familiar voice. “Anne! Good heavens!” A young man a bit older than Anne rushed over to the bars. He wore a bowtie suit, and his hair was parted down the middle. He was tall and lanky wore wire glasses. He was handsome but didn’t seem interested in showing it. Anne looked relieved to see him at that moment, “James? What on earth are you doing here?” “What am I doing here? I’d ask you the same thing.” A clerk walks in and hands the officer some papers. The officer stands flipping through them, walking over to the cell he fumbles with his keys. “Well looks like you girls are free to go if you like.” The fat bottom girl bats her eyelashes, “If we like? What are we going to do stay here with you?” She cackles at Mildred links her their arms and they trot out of the jail cell together without waiting for Anne. She calls after them, as if to keep up, “Remember girls, next week in the park!” “So long as you’re posting bail rich girl! C’mon, walk me to work, I bet I can make it…” They take off out of the building out into the city streets. Anne starts to chase after them, James takes her arm, looks at her sincerely, “Your father has been trying to get ahold of you. Sending letters for weeks!” Anne is unmoved. She continues walking down the street. He catches up to her. Anne walks next to James, her face forward, “So that’s what this is about. You’ve come on his behalf. Shame on you James.” James stops, takes both of her arms, and looks at her squarely. “He’s sick. Pneumonia. That on top of his condition, the doctor says it’s serious.” “Serious.” She chuckles to herself “John Hibbert always gets his way.” She trails off in memory for a moment. Then, all at once she is decided. “No, I have a life here people depend on me.” She motions ahead of her as if toward the girls who have just left. She turns back to James, she rolls her eyes slightly, she can feel him imploring her to come with him back to her father’s house. She crosses her arms, “No! Stop looking at me like that! I’m Absolutly not going James!”

Family meeting-Study "Chptr 4"

The rage was building inside Joseph Lavery. He looked into the warehouse from the window of his office. Everything was as it should be. The moving truck was tidy and in working order. Padding blankets and crates were stacked and folded for the next day’s job. Their two employees had been sent home with pay to feed their families. The Lavery Brothers Moving company was booked solid for the next month. - And now this. He looked at his brother Daniel, still seated at the desk, having the nerve to look smug after what he just did. Joseph would have socked him if he wasn’t a praying man. Suddenly, Joseph blurted out, “The Gatt Brothers? What were you thinking?” “I was thinking about making money, Joe!” Daniel expected Joseph to respond this way. He had his argument prepared. “We’re already selling the stuff.” “Sure, but to friends and neighbors and occasionally over to Sully’s but that’s it! This is different, this is crime!” Said Joseph with conviction. He wasn’t wrong. Distilling and transporting high volume spirits for resale and distribution was a federal offence. Selling to a place like Gatt’s was instant incrimination. The small booze operation the Lavery’s had been running was a hobby, a community service of protest to the eighteenth amendment of the prohibition of alcohol. The Laverys believed an honest day’s labor deserved a strong drink. What a man put in his body was his own business. Distilling on a small scale came with some risk but getting caught with a bottle or two never came with incarceration. It could but didn’t. The Cops and The Dry Squad didn’t go for small infractions. Too much paperwork. Bottles got dumped out or, in most cases officers just pocketed the loot for their own personal drink. Selling to a place like Gatt’s where they were taking five jugs a week was a new kind of game. The kind that the dry Squad was keen to. One that Joseph wanted no part of. This had been a source of contention between the brothers from the beginning. Daniel wanted to grow, distill as much as possible, make money. It pained him to constantly turn customers down, and they were! They had a reputation for having the best Moonshine in the region and he was ready to cash in. “Four hundred dollars a month Joe! Four hundred! What’s a few more jugs a week?” “It’s another cask! It’s two more truckloads of rye and sugar a month from the pier and double the water from the city. We can’t hide that! Tell me this, how are we gonna get it to them? How do we know the squads not watching their building and seeing our truck with our family name on it? Our name! How can I be sure they won’t be watching Sully’s, bringing a heap of trouble on that poor old man and his boys. Four hundred dollars a month? That doesn’t seem enough for what you’ve just enlisted us to!” “Enlisted us to?” Daniel was indignant. “What have you enlisted us to, old man? A life of servitude to the well to dos? Hauling their shite all over this town?” “It’s an honest day’s work.” Joseph waved him off. Daniel fired back, “That’s just something poor folks say to face another day!” Joseph, scowling “It was good enough for father…” Daniel snaped his fingers as if his proved his point, “We couldn’t afford a headstone for that poor fool when he died…” “Don’t you dare call him a fool!” “Well, he was! Pushed that damn plow all his life only to die without a proper burial. He brewed the best Poitin in Donegal and practically gave the stuff away. Jesus, even the Priest came to Dad every week, but he just couldn’t muster the savvy to make a gain from it.” “It was a hobby…” “It was a missed opportunity! I’m not going to die someone else’s man like he did.” “No, you won’t die like he did, not at this rate. You’ll die young rich and fat in a bed of your own money with no wife or child.” Daniel laughed cruelly, “No wife and child, I guess that aint far from how you’re gonna die at this rate!” In an instant Daniel received a fisted blow to the face. He fell to the floor in a heap while Joseph stood over him. “Don’t you ever mention that again you snake!” Joseph was on the verge of tears or rage. His body is tense. Daniel knew to stay put where her is on the floor, motionless.

Suffergist -Study "Chptr 3"

PART 1 One month earlier: October 2nd 1929 In Anne Hibbert’s small San Francisco apartment there is a framed copy of the 19th Amendment hung in the center of the mirror vanity in the place where a woman would normally fix her face. A sash that reads: “The vote is not enough” is draped next to it. “Singing in the rain” by Cliff Edwards plays on the phonograph. It’s pouring outside. The mail chute flaps open, and a letter falls to the ground. Anne picks it up, rolls her eyes and tosses next to the door into a basket already filled with several unopened letters written in the same hand. A small olive tree next to the vanity and a blooming gardenia in front of the mirror. Other various succulents and philodendrons are scattered about. Anne is cinched in a full length peacoat and heels. She takes the sash from the mirror and drapes it over herself and pins a Cloche hat on her head. She peeks at the mirror sneakily around the 19th amendment. She plucks the gardenia flower and places it in the hat. She looks at herself and rolls her eyes, throwing the flower back on the vanity. It lands next to a framed picture of a well to do man in the rainforest holding a baby standing next to a solemn faced woman. Instead, Anne plucks a prudent spring of olive and tucks it behind her ear and walks out the door.

PART 2 “Come on Mildred! We’re already late!” Anne practically runs. “What if someone sees us?” Asked Mildred nervously almost out of breath. “Well, that’s entirely the point, isn’t it?” Anne’s eyes are fixed ahead. Mildred, practically whining. “The woman at my boarding house is very sure we ought to conduct ourselves as ladies. I can’t lose my place. You sure were not going to catch any trouble for this? No man’s going to marry a girl who’s up to trouble…” Anne stops walking, takes Mildred’s shoulder, “Oh dear…you’re missing the point entirely aren’t you.” Mildred looks back at Anne vacantly. Anne exhales, drawing up her patience. “Speaking your mind is not making trouble, Mildred, remember that. Any house that believes that is not worth living in! And any man who holds you to that is not worth loving. Do you understand? We must be absolute in our cause or change will never come! Now come on, we can’t let all the others down. All for one girl! Onward!” Anne links arms with Mildred, practically dragging her.

PART 3 A white linen restraunt on the pier. Waiters formally dressed. Windows all around provide a panoramic view to city and sea. A lady and gentleman sit in silence while they eat, fork and knife slicing modest bites. CRASH! The lady drops her silverware from her hands it rattles the plate. Holding her hand to her mouth, “Oh dear!” Her gentleman partner wipes his face, averting his eyes from the front window with his napkin, “Oh my God!” Out front three women stood in the rain wearing reduced bathing suits; the controversial style that revealed their bulges and creases, like the hanky panky magazines men liked to look at in secret. The women were glistening and wet from the rain. Still wearing high heels, their hair was disheveled and their eyes were dark with smeared mascara. One of the women wore a sash and had an olive branch tucked behind her ear. Another one was short and plump with a bottom so large that the underside of it hung out of her suit, undulating as she paced back and forth chanting. She had a short haircut so that it looked like a wet swimming cap. The last woman was tiny and mousy looking. She looked freezing cold and covered her breasts with one hand and held a sign with the other, fighting back tears as she chanted. The manager was going by the tables apologizing. The waiters fumbled with the drapes at the windows, closing them slowly, catching one more peak at all the delightful quivers and curves of the angry wet ladies, licking their cops and snickering to one another. Two of the waiters stood by the window, close enough for the dinning couple to hear. “Which one would you have?” Said one. “I’d take the big one. Look at all that…she is all riled up” Smacking his knee the other one added “The big one? She looks like a mountain climber!” raising his eyebrows, “Well, I got a mountain for her to climb!” The lady started fanning herself, it was all she could take. “Oh my, Jesus Lord!” CREEEEK! Her gentleman lurched his chair out from the table abruptly and threw his napkin on the table in disgust. He grabed the nasty mouthed waiter by the arm. “We will not exit this building with those Suffragists outside! Call the police now!” The waiter noded sheepishly. He started to walk away as the gentleman added “…and get back in the kitchen and away from my wife!” the

The Genesis of Anne-Study "Chptr 2"

It was unfortunate for Anne that things had come to this. She had never wanted to be the Conservatory’s Curator. She despised the position in fact. She had avoided the place entirely for years, wanted it gone even. But now, this Monday am, donned in apron and glove hauling the wheeled watering cart she doled out fertilizer to the Livistona chinensis in the great Palm room. Her late father had been the Previous Curator. The great Joh Hibbert. He was a well-known botanist and collector who had spent his life traveling, collecting rare specimens to cultivate and display, ironically in pursuit of conservation. The hypocrisies of conservationism were Anne’s primary repulsion of Conservatory culture. Botanists the world over harvested the rarities of nature and displayed them for the public in the name of conservation. But it was the displays that created the lust for the market in the first place. Foolery! It was a shameless public black market. Led by egotistical scholars like her father who sought their names in history books and ecology magazines hoping to be remembered like Darwin, Roosevelt, and Muir Anne’s second repulsion was that the Conservatory attracted wealthy patrons who had adopted exclusive rights to it. That’s not to say that it wasn’t open to the public, but funding members had decided on hours of operation which did not include convenient times for the working class. Weekends and evenings were reserved for events and scheduled parties. Docent led tours could be scheduled for a fee, which none could afford. Anne had grown up in the Conservatory and knew everyone of its glass panes and curved spires. The light shown through the stained glass around the entryway and colored the mornings depending on the time of year. She knew its hiding places and loose bricks where she stowed away sweets for safe keeping. One summer was spent reading The Secret Garden behind the rock waterfall. The majesties of the story were all around her. She pondered how a fern could unfurl from its dormancy slow enough to be undetected and yet all at once as if to have appeared suddenly. How could a carnivorous plant know how to flex and reflex itself without having a mind for sensation? Could a plant actually feel? Once her father brought a boat small enough to go in the pond of the main room so she could practice writing poetry by candlelight, on evenings when he had to work late. It wasn’t the Conservatory she hated but rather what it fostered, pretension, division, scandal and sometimes shame. All good things in life were like that. Since Eden really. Like the garden itself, God’s gift to man; beautiful and perfect yet stained by the perversions of secrets and personal gain. It could be said that she missed the Conservatory for what it used to mean to her. But she could never go back. Not after what she had seen. For what her father had done that summer night when he thought she had gone home. The night that everything changed, and she learned about the lies people tell and the secrets that they keep in places sworn to be sacred. That fathers play a certain kind of make believe to their wives, and another kind of make believe to the women that they love. She had gone away and sworn she would never come back but it could not be avoided. And though she was made to be there, this time, she promised to be on her guard; not to fall for anything fleeting and wild. Never to lose herself to poetry and romance; and certainly, never to trust anything so tremulous and tender as love again.

Speakeasy/Gatt Brothers study "Chptr 1"

If Booze was the remedy, they were the Pharmacists. The Gatt brothers, Frank and Leo were raking in the cash this Friday night in their packed club. Girls danced with Guys they had only just met. Smoke rose all around from tables of folks who were drinking to get drunk in a time where the stuff was illegal. Prohibition turned a healthy profit and the Gatt brothers sat at their reserved table watching their wallets get fat. Leaning back in his chair Frank sucked on the butt end of his cigarette, extinguishing it and looking at his watch. “He’s late” Leo’s eyes were fixated on a figure across the room, “No, he’s right on time.” A dark bearded man wearing a chapeau and dark tweed coat carried a medium burlap sack under his arm, surveying the room. The Gatt brother rose in unison. Frank wasted no time and waved the man over. “Dan Lavery, I assume?” Daniel rolled his eyes looking at the burlap sack, “What gave it away?” “Please” Frank motioned to a chair. They all sat together. Daniel placed the burlap sack in the center of the table. “This here is our Poitin. ‘Swat you Americans call Moonshine. Farmer’s whiskey where I’m from, strongest we distill.” Frank turned over three stemmed glasses, Daniel whistles, “Never seen shine served in a stemmed glass before! Is this how your people do it?” Daniel filled the glasses with Poitin. Frank looked over at Leo, “I’ve never seen Liquor served from a burlap sack, is this how your people do it?” Daniel grinned at the return. All raised their glasses. “To the Micks, and their Poitin!” Laughed Leo. “To the Jews and their glasses!” said Daniel. All three heaved back a shot. Leaving both Gatt brothers wheezing. Lavery Poitin was stronger than any American Moonshine and went down hard. “Shit!” Coughed Frank. “That’ll make a pair drop, dear God!” Added Leo. “Want another?” Asked Daniel “Nah. We’ll see how one settles. We’ll know by the end of this song." The lights grew dim. A woman wearing a red dress and a matching headband appeared on stage. Her eyes were smokey and her cheekbones high and angular. Her frame was soft and full against her dress and the lights from the stage reflected boudoir shadows underneath her clothes that drew attention from the men and most of the women in the room. The music started and she began to sing. Her voice was lower than the pretty tones of the women who sang on the radio. There was something slow in her tempo, like taking her time drawing the audience into her body and breath radiating herself against the stillness of the open room. She closed her eyes and sent her voice against the back wall, heaving air into her belly and chest as she let the tassels of her curls fall carelessly out of place around her cheeks, cupping the microphone gently as she breathed into it. By the end of the song Daniel had leaned in toward her, staring. Frank let out a chuckle. Daniel remembered himself, sitting up abruptly. “Her name is Angela” Frank whispered. Daniel exhaled “Nice voice” “Ha-ha. We know.” Leo nods to Frank. Applause roared throughout the audience. Daniels eyes followed Angela as she walked down the stage into the audience up the aisle toward them. "Back to business! It's a good buzz I think Daniel. How much for Jug?”Leo crossed his arms ready to negotiate. “Twenty” Daniel looked at him squarely. “Twenty? Jesus, would you take fifteen?” Pleaded Frank. “It’s worth Twenty!” Daniel watched Angela as she moved closer to them. Thinking of coming to the club often on deliveries he has a sudden change of heart. “Though…I suppose we could work something out.” “Like…” Prompted Leo “…Like, You place a standing order. Every week. The more I come the better deal I give you. I make money in volume; you reap the benefits in profit.” Daniel could feel Angela getting closer, he sensed her move from the corner of his eyes but kept them forward on the Gatt brothers, on business. He was steel and calm with an unwavering countenance. “You got yourself a deal!” Leo thrust his hand toward Daniel. Daniel took his hand and shook it. A moment later, Angela showed up at the table fluttered an unlit cigarette between her red lips. “Leo, Frank….anybody got a light?” Her eyes fix on Daniel as he reaches into his lapel pocket as his eyes met hers.