LuLu's Notes: Been a while since I've posted something.. feels good to plunge headfirst into the fandom again, though :D This is the first fic I've had the time to write in a long time (rawr, school, boo); it's also my first strictly-OFC fic (scary, isn't it?), but I thought it was about time this newsie got a girl. I like this character, and there's the possibility that I may write more about her. Also, if you know who I named her after, you get a cookie. Reviews/response are always greatly appreciated, so please leave me one when you get to the bottom ^^
Much thanks go to my beta for giving me the title and giving this the final run-through.
Simplicity
The first thing Crutchy always told them about her was that she had a pretty smile. She had many kinds of smiles, each distinct, each, in his mind, beautiful. And there was one, just one, one that was saved for him alone. It was the rarest of her smiles, but it was his favorite.
She was the kind of girl he never thought he would have been so taken with. She was the kind of girl that did not fit the cultural definition of beauty. After all, she had no time to worry about beauty. Like so many of them, she was a factory girl (though she would never call herself one; she preferred the term "industrial assistant") whose first concern was having money in her pocket and intact hands to continue her work with. But whenever she took her hair down after a long day and let out an amiable laugh, he knew that she was different from the other factory girls. The way she carried herself gave her a powerful draw. She was Willa, the girl who refused to let life (and her surroundings) get her down.
He loved her because above all else, she was simple, and she made love seem like the simplest, most comfortable emotion in the world. Every day after work she would come to see him, fighting off the affable teasing from the other boys, hoping to spend a few precious minutes with him before her boarding house's curfew. On Sundays, after each completed his or her morning activities, they would waste away the rest of the day on the front steps of the Newsboys Lodging House, talking. To them, though, the day was never wasted; though they hated to speak in absolutes, they always said every moment counted if they wanted to make it through each day.
For Willa, life was work, friends, and faith, all in ascending order of importance. She attended Catholic services every morning before the factory workday began. Along with being present without fail at Sunday rites as well, she observed all of the Holy Days, which she could tell Crutchy as if it were her own family's history, and she recited prayers with the same inherent reverence he used for headlines.
One day, she took him to Mass with her. As he watched the priest speak to the wall and observed some down on their knees, tightly grasping strange-looking necklaces(1), she translated the father's unfamiliar Latin chanting into English for him. When he asked her where she learned Latin from, she only smiled innocently and whispered that she would teach him. After Mass a plump woman with a tightly tied red scarf approached her. Willa removed her pale blue kerchief from her head and fumbled with it in her hands as the woman whispered words to her that Crutchy could not hear. When he asked her about it afterward, she only smiled secretly and told him not to worry. They walked back to the Lodging House together. It was the last day of July.
On the first day of August, he was preparing to sell, the same as usual, the same as everyone else. He awoke, washed his face, shaved, dressed, everything, the same as everyone else. Every morning was this way for everyone. It was their own sacramental ritual. But when Kloppman called to him as they headed down the stairs, he found was not the same as everyone else.
"Hey, Crutchy!" Kloppman announced as the boys headed for the door. "Your girl's here to see you."
"Willa?" he asked, incredulous. At this early in the morning, she would still be in Mass.
"Yeah, that's right."
From the window, he could see her sitting on the front steps, kicking at the invisible demons in the street. She had never come to see him before work. He saw the other boys walk past her, Cowboy and a few others sending whistles at her, all in jest because they knew whose girl she was; others, like Skittery, said simple "hellos" and "good mornings". All of them she ignored, continuing to focus on the space in front of her. However, as soon he went through the door and his crutch thumped on the wooden front porch, her head snapped up.
"Hey," she said optimistically. "Morning."
"What're you doin' here so early?" Crutchy asked, looking down at her. "No Mass?"
"No," she confirmed, biting back the hint of untruth tugging at the corners of her mouth. "Can you sit a few minutes?" Her voice turned heavier with her questions. "Or d'ya have to go sell?"
"I can wait a few. Something happen?" he asked.
"No…I've just been thinking, that's all," she answered, watching Crutchy as he tried to sink down into a sitting position. Reflexively, she held out her hands for him. He smiled and took them, understanding that affection was not the same thing as charity.
When he was at eye-level with her, he immediately said, "Something's wrong, Willa. Don't tell me I can't see it." She cast her eyes down at her feet again. "Willa?" he repeated, now concerned. "What's up?"
There was a silence between them, a moment that Crutchy thought could have lasted forever if they really wanted it to. He glanced up and saw the thick blue gray of the morning sky, the clouds blanketing their way to the horizon. It was a shell, he decided at that moment. Their world's shell, holding them together, hovering above them, keeping them safe. He reached out and draped his arm around her. She stiffened beneath his touch.
"I'm leaving, Ben." Her voice was shaky but solemn.
"You're what?" he asked, taken aback, feeling like her words alone had knocked the wind out of him. Above him, the sky cracked, and the pure blue broke through. The simplicity of it was inexplicably overwhelming.
"I'm going," she repeated. "I'm leaving this hellhole town, Ben, and all the people in it." Seeing his face fall, she immediately added, "Save you, of course."
"How can you say that stuff?" he asked. "About New York, I mean…"
"I'm just sick of it, Ben, plain and simple sick of it. I'm sick of working day for day and barely making it, having to hang around night after night with all the whores and all the liars and having nothing good to live for." She sighed. "I mean, Ben, you're the best thing that's happened to me, and it's not that I need more than you, but I need more than this." She threw her arms out in front of her, gesturing to the run-down, smoke-covered city and its dirty people as they passed by. "There's more out there. I know it."
"How do you know?" he demanded, finding the sudden ache inside him begin to grow, "Where can you find something better?"
"Boston," Willa answered instantaneously.
"What's in Boston?"
"Remember that lady from when we were at Mass? The one with the red scarf?"
"What's she got to do with anything?"
"After Mass, when she talked to me, do you remember that?"
"You're not answering my questions, Willa."
"Yes I am, please, Ben, just keep on listening." Her voice was beginning to grow frantic as she continued her story. "When she pulled me aside, she told me that she had been in Boston a couple weeks before, and she'd run into this boy a couple years older than me named Tommy--"
"What?" he interrupted. "You're leaving me to meet some boy in Boston?"
"No! Ben, listen, please!" She paused to breathe. "His name's Tommy Creighton." Crutchy stared at her blankly. "Creighton! Ben, that's my name!"
"So what? There's probably hundreds of Creightons in the country. Maybe even a thousand."
"She asked his father's name. He said it was Jay Creighton." She clasped her hands together. "What's the chance of having two Jay Creightons in the East?" she asked him rhetorically. "I mean, he's gotta be my half-brother. And if I can find family…oh God, if I can find my family…" She smiled blissfully. "After all this time, Ben. I can't even fathom it."
He said nothing. Willa understood and continued to speak.
"I'll be back, Ben," she promised. "You know I will."
"When?" he asked her. "I can't wait if I don't know when."
"Springtime," she assured. "After the snow melts."
"Springtime this year?"
"That's too soon."
"Then when?" He was almost demanding, caught by the sudden fear of her never returning.
"Anno Domini," she said to him, smiling cryptically. "In the Year of Our Lord."
"What?"
"Your first Latin lesson," she replied, smiling her hidden smile. That was the one. His favorite smile. It was everything Willa could be all at once -- confusing, capricious, carefree, contradictory -- everything. He watched her smile closely, imprinting the image in his mind. He did not even notice her body shift. She leaned in and kissed him once, quickly, her lips feather-light against his, and stood.
"I'll teach you more when I come back."
He nodded slowly from his seat on the steps. He did not need to tell her that he loved her, because the words were already a silent understanding between them.
He watched her walk away. She threw her smile over her shoulder before she turned the corner of Duane Street, out of sight but never out of mind.
She was gone. It would take time for him to understand that. But once he understood, he could wait. She would be back. Not the next day, or the coming spring, but she was coming back. Anno Domini 1900. It was her promise.
He smiled to himself and moved to stand. He would have to do it on his own for a while.
you're in my mind all of the time
i know that's not enough
if the sky can crack
there must be some way back
for love and only love
(1) For those not familiar with Catholicism, before the Second Vatican Council, Catholic priests said Mass in Latin with their backs to the people. Many people who could not understand Latin instead prayed the rosary during Mass (the "strange looking necklaces", and I should probably also say that rosaries aren't necklaces; the prose is reflecting Crutchy's ignorance of religion). Referring to the woman's scarf and Willa's kerchief, women had to have their heads covered during Mass.