Mrs. Carney was found at home one evening about 8 o’clock, and adjourned with her visitor to the hall outside for a confidential talk. The public passage, lighted by a flaring gas jet, was surrounded by four closed doors shutting off as many different flats and the crowded domestic life within. In the evening, when Mrs. Carney’s family was at home, it was the only spot where she could have a private word with a caller. Her final summing up of her daughter’s situation was this: “You see, if May was to go away to the hospital for two weeks, they’d all say she went away to have a baby. You see them two doors,” pointing to the forward end of the hall. “The girls in there—both of them—have just been away havin’ babies. They didn’t have nobody to take care of them, so they had to bring their babies home. Now, if May was to be gone two weeks, ye couldn’t make nobody believe she wasn’t doin’ just the same as them two.”
In view of this difficulty it was suggested that the operation might be performed at home. This seemed feasible, and the more serious question of May’s marriage was then broached. “Yes, May will be married in September,” said Mrs. Carney. “I know, she’s not seventeen yet, but it’s this way, y’ see. She’s sickly, she won’t never be no good to me,—the two or three dollars she brings home won’t hardly keep her,—and she’s always wantin’ money to spend on herself. What I say is, she’d better get married now. Daley is a good fellow and he’s workin’ steady. She mightn’t have so good a chance again.”
It would not be fair to blame Mrs. Carney very harshly for the materialism of this speech and her total lack of consideration for the “steady fellow” whom May was about to marry, and for their possible children. Mrs. Carney’s moral outlook was the result of the hard school in which she had been educated. As for her willingness to saddle a hardworking young man with her sickly daughter, this was, after all, only her duty as a “good mother.” It would have been hard to make Mrs. Carney see anything wrong in her attitude toward her daughter’s marriage. One has to admit that what we expected of her as a matter of course was from her point of view heroic conduct.
In view of the circumstances surrounding these young lives, it is useless to talk of the “fall” of these girls. Many of them have never lived on a sufficiently high moral level to “fall.” With them immorality is of a piece with the uncleanliness, physical and mental, in which they have been reared. There was, however, one important distinction which we learned to make between the forms of immorality. There was the girl who “solicited” and the girl who did not. One may have courage to grapple with mere immorality, but the girl who has been swept into the currents of commercialized vice is at once allied with secret and powerful forces which enable this trade to hold its own. Once during the year we were compelled to stand by helplessly and see a girl of sixteen slip over the brink of prostitution.
Carrie Drake, who drifted into the club one evening with Winnie Hyland, was a tall, white-faced girl, rather gawky and poorly dressed. She wore a shabby suit, a very dirty white waist of cheap embroidery, and a rackety hat which showed the effects of having been repeatedly rained upon. Carrie’s devotion to this hat was all the more noticeable because the other girls seldom wore any. We soon discovered the reason; an attack of typhoid fever had left her almost bald. Beneath the hat she wore a reddish-brown wig which was so thin that it scarcely covered her new growth of stubby hair of altogether a different shade of brown. She said she had made the wig of “some puffs,” and that it had been very good until some girl had tried to improve it by cutting it. She possessed a low voice and a courteous manner which she had kept as salvage from the wreck of her mother’s training.
Winnie Hyland, who brought her to us, was an irresistible little crippled girl whose faith in the powers of a social worker was the result of having been gently cared for all her life by representatives of one social agency or another. The tubercular hip-bone which she had developed in early childhood had saved her from the worst of the harshness and want which prevailed in her own home. Discovering her friend in search of a job she brought her over to the club to one of the “teachers.”
Carrie was not a hopeful candidate for work. She was only fifteen, still gaunt from the ravages of typhoid, grotesque in appearance. Her mother had died when she was eleven, and she had been promptly taken from school, which she hated, to do the housework. To appease the truant officer, she was sent to another school for a month. Then quietly she dropped out altogether. An attempt at work in a factory at this age was unsuccessful. “My aunt told the forelady how I was poor and hadn’t any mother. So she took pity on me and let me try.” But she was soon discharged and was kept at home to take care of her younger brother and sister, until all three were sent to an institution. Two months later the father died,—as Carrie declared and certainly believed, “of a broken heart.”
After leaving the institution at fourteen, she had lived with her aunts by spells, quarreling and breaking away from time to time. For a while she had stayed with the mother of a friend who found her sitting on the steps in the rain. She tried places at service, but she was not a trained houseworker and did not stay long at any place. Finally she had got a job in a steam laundry, but while working there she sickened with typhoid and was sent to the hospital. When she came to us she was living with an aunt in a furnished room house, a forlorn, three-story shack on one of the river blocks. The halls reeked with odors from the corner saloon. The aunt, her husband, and two children were occupying a single room when they took the girl in. There was only one bed. “I told Carrie she could squeeze in,” she explained. “I couldn’t ask her to sleep on the floor.”
It was slow business finding work for Carrie. She had to have better clothes. She had to be examined by a physician, for there were signs of a venereal disease which would have made her dangerous to fellow-workers in a factory. These things had been arranged for and consented to. But before they could be put into effect and work could be found, Carrie had taken the plunge. She disappeared without leaving a trace, but soon after one of the girls reported seeing her on Eighth Avenue, “in a real wig and a swell new suit.” Immorality was not new to Carrie, but she had found a way to make it pay. She was “on the streets.” There followed an unsuccessful search, inquiries at police headquarters, of prison officials, of probation officers. We enlisted the aid of a strong society, but the agent, though he promised to help, gave us very little encouragement, saying that such a search was pretty hopeless, as there were hundreds of girls in similar circumstances at large in New York.
Carrie slipped out of sight all the more easily because she had no one “who rightly belonged to her.” When a girl disappears from a home presided over by a determined mother, the search which follows is likely to be a desperate one. Mrs. Mullarkey’s search for her Fannie was a mixture of folly, shrewdness, and heroism. Fannie, according to her mother, was “the best girl you ever saw” till she came to live on the “Gopher block.” There she “got in” with an older girl at the factory and began to be tough. She threw up her job, as did her friend, and the two spent their time in secret ways. At first the mother knew nothing of Fannie’s being out of work because the girl left home regularly mornings and came home promptly to her dinner. But at last the fraud was discovered; there was a scene, with “hollerin’ and smashin’,” and upon the heels of it Fannie disappeared. Mrs. Mullarkey’s fears pointed to a certain house on Eleventh Avenue where a woman lived who had the reputation of harboring girls. Not daring to go there alone, she enlisted the aid of Father Langan, “a rough hollerin’ sort of a man that the children was all afraid of.” But the woman would not open even to the Father’s authoritative knock. Eventually they returned with an officer who broke down the door. But Fannie was not there after all.