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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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The Story
of Chicago May by Nuala O’Faolain |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Transformations Nuala O’Faolain’s
biography of May Duignan, The Story
of Chicago May, blends facts with imagination to produce an engaging
story of a remarkable life of a smart and scrappy survivor. At age 19, May
left May mentions in her
autobiography that a cop she was once trying to avoid came up behind her and
said, “No use hiding your pretty face, May—I’d know that straight back
anywhere.” So I see her stand in the Rue Scribe in the upright way of her
countrywomen, who were well able to brace their shoulders to two buckets of
water. I see her watching the street as at ease on her feet as if she were
standing at her own gate, watching the road for her children coming from
school. On this night, if she weighs
herself against what she might have been if she’d stayed at home, she must
surely believe that she has made the better choice. In Edenmore,
at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was an even chance that her
husband, if she had had one, would have been at least ten years her senior. A
woman with the dowry she’d have brought him would have had the minding of
whatever number of children “God sent,” and of three or four cows, ten young
cattle, fifty or sixty hens and cockerels, half a dozen ducks and a drake, a
gander and maybe two geese and their goslings—geese do a lot of foraging and
cattle won’t come where they’ve been, but in Edenmore,
the rough ground at the edge of the bog is ideal for geese. There’d have been
the horse that drew the cart, and a pony, if they had a pony, and trap as
well. And twice a year she and her husband would have killed one of the two
fat pigs. Her dark kitchen with its dirt floor would have had flitches of bacon hung to smoke from its rafters. She
would have labored day and night at bringing in water, planting and digging
up potatoes, milking the cows, feeding calves, preparing feed for the pigs,
for the hens, for the family, for the baby~ for the mother-in-law above in
the room. The dog, at least, would have looked after itself. There was also washing,
scrubbing, smoothing, peeling, blowing ashy turf fires into flame, mashing,
dividing, putting the bowls on the table, taking the infant by the hand to
the table and showing him the spoon and the bread-and-milk and how to use his
fat little hand to eat. And helping the children with their schoolwork, as
not all mothers could—in 1901, in spite of compulsory primary education, ten percent of brides in So if, in the mild Every single account
of the robbery gives a different figure for how much they stole. Whatever the
sum was, a large part of it was in the form of drafts and checks that would
be very difficult for the gang to turn into cash. An article about Eddie in
the Chicago Tribune some years
later, which is accurate in other respects, says that their haul was six
thousand dollars, the equivalent of six hundred thousand dollars today.
Whatever it was, the men divided it into three equal parts. Then they slipped
away from the building to make their separate ways out of “When I got back to my
hotel near the Madeleine in the early hours of the morning,” Eddie wrote, “I
had a fortune in my pockets. I doubt that. What she says is that
soon after the sound of the explosion, I
went home to bed. Little sleeping was done by me, the balance of that night.
I got up early, so as to be at the door when the maid came with coffee. This
was to prevent her from noticing that my “husband,” Eddie, was not in bed as
usual. That’s possible. But about what
happened next I am confident. There was a hotel room
and May was waiting in it—they agree on that. Eddie had just pulled off a really
high-class burglary under the noses of the French police he hated, and he was
free, now, to tell her about it and to show her the money. Of course, when he
came in, he threw his coat with its heavy pockets onto the chair and in
electric silence looked down on her bright face. They were in their prime,
the pair of them, and they hadn’t known each other long enough for the first
attraction to wear off and they had to do something to express their relief
after the suspense of the night. Of course their celebration was a thing
that heaved and licked and sucked and slapped skin against skin. They had what Proust could not have: no thought, just life. There’s a contemporary
internal American Express report on the robbery in the Pinkerton file, sent
from one of the On the
day after the robbery many of our young men at 11 Rue Scribe were on duty
straightening up matters in connection therewith and four of them adjourned
to a restaurant for luncheon at about one o’clock on Sunday afternoon. Mr Dodsworth, Asst Cashier, was
the last to hang up his coat and proceed towards the table when in passing a
table midway the man Miller rose up, extended his hand and made some jocular
remark in regard to the fact that the office had been robbed. The woman with
Miller quickly asked, “Who is this?” and Miller in a nonchalant way said, “Oh
one of the boys from the American Express Company’s office.” The woman then
relapsed into silence. This same woman was seen at the train. What was the little crew
of Americans doing? Why were they back, like daring children, at the scene of
the crime? Was Dutch Gus showing off to May? Were they all showing off to
each other, heedless of the risk they took? Over and over I’m
checked by what seems to me the strangeness of the crooks of May’s time. In her Manhattan days,
May’s grifter pals put all their energy into the
setting up of a scam and were relatively indifferent as to whether the scam
worked, in the sense of yielding a profit. They were so careless about
covering their tracks that they seemed not to care, at heart, whether they
were caught or not. Was the passivity a kind of despair? Were crooks, then,
not so much antisocial as unsocialized or socially
incompetent? I always took it for granted that they couldn’t feel for other
people. But the story of how the American Express gang was caught makes me
wonder whether they also couldn’t feel for themselves. Only Kid McManus took
any pains to get away—he headed for As the cops were. They
recognized Dutch Gus when he turned up at the Gare du Nord. They took him in for
questioning, and when they opened his suitcase, they found some of the stolen
dollars there and—even more unbelievably—some of the rope. And yet Gus had put
sustained work into setting up the robbery; from the technical point of view,
it had been brilliantly done. May and Eddie did at least
catch the train. She was carrying his share of the loot when it pulled
out—their two accounts agree on that. Everything might have gone well, May wrote, if it had not been for Eddie’s infernal
conceit. He was very proud of his ability at slinging French. The French
dicks happened to ask him, in broken English, where they could find the
dining-car. We had been posing as English travelers, but what does the chump
do but answer the detectives in French that would do justice to an educated
native. At that, the sans culottes did not know who
they had in their clutches. They thought he was a French criminal they were
on the lookout for. Once they had him, the fat was in the fire. It took
half-a-dozen men to overpower him. I went on alone, not appearing to know the
man who had been arrested. Whether or not it had to
do with his speaking French, we know, from a report in the Pinkerton archive,
that there was nothing heroic about the scene when Eddie was hustled off the
train at I imagine the train
beginning to pull slowly out along the sun-washed backs of old houses that
had weeds growing between the slates of their uneven roofs. She says she
threw most of the drafts away. Perhaps she did it this way—as the train
rolled out from under the canopy of glass and iron and everyone ran to the
right-hand windows to crane back at the station, May, at a left-hand window,
tipped an envelope stuffed with checks and drafts into the oily water of the
deep, littered hay between tracks. Perhaps, of course, she did nothing of the
kind. Five or six weeks went
by, and they moved Eddie to La Sante prison in For the first time, we
hear her in her own contemporaneous words. She wrote to Eddie,
and the police intercepted the letter, and it was read out, translated into
French, at Eddie’s trial. Translated back into English, it says, Dear Eddie, What can I do for your defense? I’ve run around
all day. And you must defend yourself! We’ll do all we can—tell us what we
must do. Write me a letter. Say what you want me to do about your underwear.
Why don’t you prove your alibi? You know that you didn’t go out that night.
Do you want me to go to the hotel in the Rue Vignon?
Say yes or no. These aren’t private
words, of course—she’s trying to prompt him to say that she was with him in
the hotel all night. She’s offering her help. She is, in fact,
offering to go back to O’Faolain used May’s autobiography as a starting
point, and her style is to interpret May, as shown in the expert. What the
interpretation is based on may be unclear, but is certainly entertaining. The Story
of Chicago May is an unusual one, but one that’s engaging and memorable. Steve Hopkins,
December 22, 2005 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the January 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Story of Chicago May.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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