Chapter 34

Putting anything that Jack would have spent on her birthday towards the house fund had seemed like a really good idea at the time. It truly, genuinely had. But the reality? Well, that's rather more difficult.

The first birthday that Katherine remembers, properly remembers, she was five. Her mother had organised a party for her, and Lucy, aged seven at the time, had thrown a fit ten minutes before it started because it wasn't fair that Katherine got all of these presents when she didn't get anything. The fact that her own birthday would occur just a few months later was entirely irrelevant to a child to whom a few months was an interminable amount of time. Still, the second guests began to arrive, Lucy was, once again, the perfect hostess. Katherine can recall a game of musical chairs and a cake covered in pastel blue icing. Her mother gave her her presents after all the guests had left and Lucy had sat by, sulking, until Katherine had given her one to open and they had been friends again after that. Kate, as always, prompted a thank you, and Katherine gave one, a thank you, Mother. Nobody had acknowledged that the gifts were from both of her parents. Her father was at the office. He was always at the office.

And now Katherine's nineteen. She's older than Lucy will ever be. Her Father is still at the office.

What a celebration, indeed, it all is, when she gets to spend her birthday chewing through her own tongue as Miss Morton lectures her on appropriate wedding music over afternoon tea. Personally, at this exact moment, Katherine feels like Chopin's second sonata in b-flat minor might be her music of choice.

Jack, of course, had offered to take the afternoon off work to spend with her, but honestly, both of them knew it wasn't worth it. They will have to start looking for a house soon and they need every extra dollar they can scrape together. Besides, Katherine isn't too sure that Miss Morton wouldn't flat-out refuse to let Jack back in the building after the events of last time.

She is altogether resigned to an hour of discussing whether Pachelbel or Bach is preferable for exiting the church, when Susan, the mousy little maid whose spirit, Katherine is sure, has been broken through a decade of service to Miss Morton, announces the entrance of two men. One is a Mr. David Jacobs. The other, and even Susan can hardly suppress a smile as she says it, is a Mr. Racetrack Higgins.

David looks as well put-together as usual. Race, however, is wearing too-big clothes (Katherine is quite certain she's seen Davey wearing that shirt before) and his normally pale skin is red like it's been scrubbed raw. Race, despite his look of abject discomfort, pauses in re-adjusting the belt on his trousers to wave at her. Katherine stifles a laugh, rising from the table with Miss Morton and triumphantly dragging her former seat across the carpeted floor to make a table of three at an empty table, gesturing for them to follow her. She can hear whispering amongst the other girls, can imagine their comments of how many men does she have on the go? She can't quite bring herself to care.

"What you doing here?" She hisses, holding in the laugh that's bubbling in her throat as the three of them sit down.

Davey offers her a wide, bright smile. "Jack said he had to work on your birthday, so we thought we'd come and cheer you up."

"An' 'pparently, Princess, cheerin' you up involves me havin' to take a bath an' put on Dave's stuffy clothes." Race grumbles, tugging at the lopsided tie until it's loose and half out from under his shirt collar.

Katherine stifles a laugh. "You look very handsome, Race."

"D'ya hear that, Davey? I's handsome." Race says, smugly sinking a little further into his chair and reaching out for one of the cakes on the cake stand which Susan has set in front of them. He looks positively gleeful. "Wait 'til I tell Jack his girl called me handsome!"

"I think this was a mistake." David says, shooting Katherine a long-suffering look. Rolling his eyes, he reaches into his satchel and pulls out a parcel wrapped in brown paper. "Here, Mom bought you bed linens for when you move into your house with Jack."

Katherine has been given a lot of gifts in her life. As a child, every birthday had the promise of thirty or more. As a teenager, new jewellery or dresses were a regular occurrence. As an adult, Jack, despite his lack of funds, finds ways to give her little gifts on an almost weekly basis; sketches in her pigeonhole at work, the latest dime-novel she's been hankering after, impromptu picnic lunches in parks. But this? From a woman that she hardly knows, who clearly doesn't have the money to be throwing around? She doesn't quite know what to say.

"Oh my – oh, David, do thank her for me. These are such a lovely gift."

There's a silence, in which Katherine tries valiantly not to cry, and then Race breaks it. "I ain't brought you no present. I jus' brought my presence."

"He's been planning that line all the way here." Davey deadpans, and then she's laughing, properly laughing, not the little giggles that are politely placed in the corners of the parlour by the other girls at afternoon tea, but properly belly laughing.

Race shoots her a gap-toothed grin and pulls a cigar out of the inside pocket of his jacket, fitting it between his lips and making to get the matches from his other pocket. Before he has chance to light it, however, it is snatched right out of his mouth by a wrinkled hand. Jack may have withered under Miss Morton's gaze, but Race certainly doesn't.

"Hey, that's my cigar!" He cries, looking up into Miss Morton's stony face.

"Smoking is not permitted in the parlour." She turns on her heel and marches off, shooting Katherine a look that very clearly expresses that she is going to get it in the neck later on.

"I'll buy you another." Katherine offers, wincing.

"That ain't the point," Race huffs, "the point is that that old cow," he raises his voice pointedly, "stole my cigar."

Katherine doesn't dare look over to where Miss Morton is sitting – the old cow in question may be seventy-two, but she has the hearing of a bat. David, however, doesn't have such foresight, kicking Race under the table and turning his head to see the reception of the other boy's comment, hoping against hope that it might have escaped her hearing. No dice. Miss Morton looks as if she's about to pop a blood vessel.

"Aren't you two selling papes today?" Katherine asks, trying, in vain, to stop Race from shooting death glares at her elderly landlady.

"Got finished early." Race grins. "I's rivallin' Jackie-boy now."

Davey rolls his eyes. "Jack doesn't sell papes anymore."

"Shuddup." Race shoves Davey, almost sending him toppling right off his chair and onto the carpet.

Katherine trusts Davey not to start an all-out brawl in the middle of the afternoon tea, but she still feels obligated to (hopefully) prevent any more scandals, as amusing as Miss Morton's expression is when she causes them. Therefore, she tries again. "Good headline?"

"The best!" Race turns back to her. "The kuh-zar wants to stop the Boer war an' he's gettin' real pissy wi' the Brits." Miss Morton's mouth drops open at the blatant cursing. Davey drops his head into his hands.

"The who?" Katherine asks, stifling a laugh. She has no idea what Race is on about but, if the 'erster' incident is anything to go by, it should be good.

"The kuh-zar." Race says again, then, at her blank expression, continues. "Y'know, the king o' Russia."

"It's the Czar, Race." Davey sighs, his voice muffled by his face still being pressed into his hands. "Czar."

Maybe, Katherine thinks, it's better that her father is at the office for her birthdays.

The following day, Jack lets Katherine drag him to church with her. Apparently, according to her, at least, attending the services shows willing in a way that just turning up to these counselling sessions, which are organised for straight after, doesn't. If him going to church with her is what she wants for her birthday though, then who is he to say no? So, he gets up early on the one day each week that he actually gets to sleep past six am and makes sure his suit is clean and pressed and puts on a tie (even though there is categorically no excuse for wearing a tie on the weekends) and goes to pick her up from the boarding house.

Jack already knows that he doesn't like church. You don't grow up in a lodging house run by nuns and feel indifferent towards church. The thing is, it isn't churches that he hates. He loves churches. He could sit all day in a church, if you'd let him, not to mention the many nights he's picked a lock and slept on a pew during the hard winters. They're pretty, the colours and the stained glass and the draperies. They're all in straight lines, too, symmetrical and neat, the kind of thing that would be easy to draw, easy to copy out in thick graphite lines. It's church services that he doesn't like.

He doesn't like the long sermons on righteous behaviour given by some priest who's never faced the choice between a righteous life and no life at all. He doesn't like the people who look at him with narrowed eyes as if he doesn't deserve to be there. And he certainly doesn't like sitting still for that long on a cold, hard wooden pew. It's alright for these people who eat well enough to have a bit of fat on them to cushion themselves, but for kids who eat a decent meal once in a blue moon, it gets uncomfortable real fast.

People give him funny looks and whisper behind their hands when they walk in, Katherine's arm hooked tightly into his. Jack wonders whether it's to prevent him for turning around and walking straight back out of the door. It's as if Katherine doesn't even notice though, leading him to a pew and sitting them down with her head held high. She's wearing a hat with a ridiculous feather that tickles Jack's nose and makes him want to sneeze, but he got a beating from one of the nuns at the lodgehouse once for sneezing in church, so he swallows it down. Admittedly, he had been sneezing on purpose back then, trying to make the other boys laugh every time the priest (who had a very unfortunate stutter) managed to wrap his lips around an 'ah' vowel sound. Still, he isn't taking any chances.

The service is long and boring and the church is dark and warm. That's how you know it's a rich people church, Jack thinks, when it's warm. Katherine elbows him every time his head starts to dip with tiredness, but luckily she doesn't seem annoyed. At least, not yet. Jack doesn't really know whether you're allowed to be annoyed while in a church. When the next hymn begins to play and she drags him, half-asleep, to his feet, he mouths a sorry at her. Katherine looks at him with such pity in her eyes he can hardly stand it, and he knows with perfect clarity that she's under no delusions as to the reason that he's falling asleep. Somehow, that's worse than her being mad with him, her knowing just how hard he's having to work to give her the life that she deserves.

After the service, they don't go outside like everybody else, but wait, solemn and tight-lipped, in the pew. Katherine has her head bowed and hands together, gloved fingers interlinked in her lap, and Jack can't tell if she's praying or not, or if he's allowed to speak or interrupt, so he just settles for reaching over and taking her hand. She squeezes it, even with her head bowed, so he's guessing that means that they're okay.

Eventually, Reverend Bates reappears in the church and guides them through into a small room behind the altar. Jack figures this must be where he puts that dress thing on before the service, but it's a pretty good setup, honestly, with a little stove and kettle and a neat table with four chairs set around it. The reverend pours them each a cup of tea, then squashes his bulk into one of the chairs. He's the kind of man, Jack can tell, who has never skipped a meal in his life. He knows that Katherine is just the same, that she's never known what it is to be hungry, but it seems different somehow in a way that makes him feel validated in despising the Reverend.

"So, Mr. Kelly," Reverend Bates sets his tea down, speaking through reddened, puffed-up lips, "Miss Pulitzer tells me you don't have a background in the church?"

"I knows bits an' pieces." Jack nods, a little too quickly. He feels desperate and anxious to please in a way that he knows is stupid. It's not like he cares what think man thinks of him. It's not like his opinion matters. "Lodgehouse I lived in for a while was run by nuns, so's I knows the basics."

"And your parents, are they religious?" The reverend asks, staring at Jack a little too intensely, impenetrable and unblinking. His face reminds Jack a little bit of a frog he and the boys once found in a park pond, all swollen and slimy with sweat, bulging eyes and lips.

"Nah, not my old man." He tilts his head to the side, thinking back to the winter when he was five or six. Jack can't remember exactly which, as the winters before his father died were all much the same, cold and hungry and painful, a blur of snow and socks with holes in. "We went to church on Christmas Eve, one year, but he was drunk so they wouldn't let us in."

Reverend Bates looks slightly taken aback by Jack's bluntness and shoots Katherine a look that seems to ask what she's thinking. Jack, luckily, doesn't notice, but Katherine does and she stares the reverend right back down. "And your mother?"

"Never met 'er." Jack shrugs. "She was a whore, though, so I shouldn't think so."

Beside him, Katherine chokes on her tea. The reverend looks at him like he's just admitted to sodomising a golden calf. (Jack's like ninety percent sure that there was something in the Old Testament about that, way, way back when he could still be persuaded into Sunday school by the promise of a glass of milk and a stale biscuit. The nuns had said something along those lines, right? Oh well. He's said something wrong, as usual.)

And then the reverend looks like he wants to hit him. Jack doesn't know exactly what he's said wrong, but he sure as hell knows what a man who wants to hit him looks like. Reverend Bates is about the same height as him, he knows, having sized him up when they walked in, an old habit from the streets. Jack's fitter, but Bates has considerably more weight to throw around. Bates also has the advantage of being a minister. Jack isn't any kind of expert on the law, or sin, for that matter, but he's pretty sure that punching a minister, even in self-defence, is worse than punching a normal person.

His eyes light on the reverend's hands, clenched into fists on the table, and feels sweat start to gather under his arms and at his shirt collar. It's okay, he's been hit before. He can take it. Let the minister get a few good punches in, don't hit him back, and maybe, just maybe, he might still be able to marry Katherine.

A hand on his knee under the table. Jack flinches, knee jerking up into the underside of the table, rattling the china and narrowly missing crushing the hand on it. Droplets of tea sail through the air and land on the tablecloth. Those stains will be hell to get out, Jack thinks, distantly. Then he realises that the hand is just Katherine's, and he wants to crawl under the table and never come out.

"What Jack means to say," Katherine says, using that soothing tone she has when one of the little newsies has scraped up their knee real bad, "is that his mother was a prostitute. He's not being vulgar, Reverend."

She doesn't look at him. Prostitute. Oh. Well. Maybe whore wasn't the right word to use after all. Katherine's mad, she must be mad, she must be. The reverend, at least, looks pacified, his fists unclenched.

"Well, I-" the man swallows down whatever comment he'd clearly been intending on making, the folds of fat at his throat jiggling, and his tone turns caustic, "I would thank you not to use such language in the house of God again, Mr. Kelly."

Jack wonders where God is, if this is supposed to be his house. He wonders if God has been on vacation for a while. He wonders if he'll ever come back.

When they leave the church, Katherine steers them away from the path back toward both Jack's apartment and the boarding house, and instead toward a nearby park. Jack doesn't speak the entire journey. It's almost as if he hasn't registered that they're going the wrong way. Katherine isn't stupid, she knows something is wrong, she just doesn't know what it is. But with the way that Jack's jaw is clenched, teeth bitten tightly together as if to dam a flow of curses, she reckons it's going to take quite a bit of coaxing.

He remains silent when Katherine sits him down on a bench and goes over to a little stand selling sandwiches. It's only when she sits down next to him and presses a ham sandwich into his hand that he actually looks at her.

"Talk to me." She says, unwrapping the paper from around her own sandwich and taking a bite.

"'S stupid." Jack finally responds, in a voice that sounds like he hasn't spoken for days, the toe of his boot drawing patterns in the dusty earth.

"You couldn't be stupid if you tried. Spill."

"I jus'-" Jack sighs, running a hand over his face in exhaustion, "-how can you sit there, an' jus'… listen to him, like he's tellin' the truth?" When Katherine doesn't respond, he looks over to her and meets with a thoroughly confused expression. He sighs, the sandwich she bought, still wrapped in yesterday's newspaper, heavy as lead in his lap. "Like, God loves you an all that?"

Katherine frowns, swallowing the bite of her sandwich heavily. "God does."

"Psh. You, maybe." Jack scoffs, returning his gaze to the picture he's drawn in the dirt. Soil has coated the toe of his boot and the picture doesn't look anything at all like the dog it was supposed to be. "'F God was real, the Refuge would never have existed. My old man wouldn't have beaten the stuffin' outta me. An' if God's sat up on some cloud playin' favourites, then I don't want nothin' to do with him."

Katherine's expression hardens and she stiffens. She looks like she's been carved from granite. "You shouldn't speak about your Creator like that."

"Creator?" Jack casts her a disbelieving look. "The only person as created me was a dockyard worker who knocked up some whore."

"Jack." Katherine hisses, turning around to look back at the path, praying that she won't see any scandalised young families eavesdropping on their conversation.

"Oh, my apologies," he bites out, standing up from his seat and yanking his cap off to run a hand through his hair, "I means a prostitute, I ain't tryna be vulgar."

The sandwich, still wrapped in its newspaper, flies off his lap and onto the ground. Katherine focuses in on that, reaching down to pick it up, keeping her voice as low and level as she can. "Jack."

She will not start crying. He's just hurt, hurt and angry, blowing off steam, and her words were ill-chosen. Her words always seem to be ill-chosen these days. Perhaps she's losing her touch. Wouldn't that be a fine thing, to peak at nineteen.

"It's all well an' good to sit in a church an' pray, but it don't fix nothin' for the little guy." He snarls, as if he hasn't heard her at all – and maybe he hasn't, maybe he's so far gone he's stopped listening altogether, like he does sometimes, the times that she just has to wait it out and let him come and bury his face in her shoulder in his own time.

His hands have been thrown up in the air. People are starting to look over. The sensation of being watched makes her skin prickle and blood rush to her cheeks. Still, she's trying. "Those things, Jack, they're human. It's human evil. Not God's."

Jack rubs his hands over his face, pressing balled fists into his eye sockets until colours explode behind his eyelids. "But 'f he loves me so much as you say he does, then why's my back covered in scars? Huh?"

Katherine knows that he's got a point. She'll have to ask Reverend Bates about how to explain theodicy, because faith isn't as simple as Jack is making it out to be. But she knows where he's coming from, where he's at in his head right now, and it's the only thing keeping her from yelling at him for blasphemy, so she holds tight to it with both hands and faces his questions head-on.

"Because people have free will. God isn't going to take that away. People have to be able to choose good or bad."

"But why?"

And there goes all of her sympathy. He's acting like a three-year-old. "If we didn't have free will, Jack, I'd have obeyed my father and been the good little girl and followed the life set out for me. Somehow, I don't think that'd be a better world." Her tone is snappish, and he looks like she's just slapped him. Okay, Katherine. Don't push him away. Softer: "Not my life without you."

He frowns at that, forehead creasing. "I don't-"

Katherine closes her eyes and interrupts him. "I understand that you don't feel very loved by God, right now. But I love you and my faith is important to me." Opening them, Jack is just looking at her (finally), completely unreadable. She judges that it's safe to carry on. "I expect you to come to church with me, when we're married. And we're going to have our children christened, and they're going to go to church every week too. They're going to grow up knowing that God loves them, even if they take after their father and hate the clergy."

She holds out his sandwich to him, but he doesn't take it from her hand, just looks at her. Katherine's heart drops down through her stomach and right out of her, landing, still beating, on the path between them. And then Jack comes, slow and stiff, but he does, and sits back down next to her on the bench. That's enough to put her heart back in her chest where it belongs.

"Okay." He nods. Takes the sandwich. Unwraps it, breathing heavy, not meeting her eyes. "I ain't… I ain't on board wi' this. This God loves you thing. But 'f it's that important to you, then, okay."

He bites into it, doesn't say a word. Katherine waits a moment, then leans into him, a gentle shoulder barge like the one he'd given her the first night she kissed him, all those months ago, in his penthouse, looking out across New York. "Thank you."

"Thank you." Jack says, quiet, around a mouthful of sandwich. Katherine frowns at him, too confused, even, to correct his godawful table manners. Seeing her expression, he clarifies, swallowing it down. "For lovin' me anyways."

And he is thankful. Because he's difficult and stubborn and angry at the world and he knows it. And still, she's chosen him. That's the ring that he bought, on her finger. Why, he'll never know. This absolute angel, and she's chosen him. If there's anybody who can make him believe in God, it's Katherine.

Author's note: The third movement of the Chopin piece that Katherine references is what basically everybody knows as the funeral march. My jokes are actually hilarious if you have extensive knowledge of classical music. Also, the headline is a real one from the New York World on the date that this is set – I had great fun trawling through the old newspaper archives. More importantly, as a devout Christian, this chapter was really difficult for me to write. However, both I (in the past) and many others have been hurt greatly by poor theology/church teachings and I think it's important to acknowledge that, alongside how faith can also be something wonderful and life-changing. I hope that I've handled the subject matter sensitively and would appreciate any constructive criticism. Hope you're all having a lovely day!