Executive Times

 

 

 

 

 

2006 Book Reviews

 

The Story of Chicago May by Nuala O’Faolain

Rating:

***

 

(Recommended)

 

 

 

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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 Ireland in 1980 and started a life of crime as a prostitute in Chicago. She went on to New York, London, Paris, in and out of love and jail, and become notorious for her part in a robbery of the American Express office in Paris. At each stage, May transforms herself to suit the situation, and finds a way to survive. Here’s an excerpt, from Chapter 5, “The Paris Heist,” pp. 114-120:

 

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 Ireland signed the register with an X. And there’d have been praying. And talking. And kneeling on the doorstep to scrape out the burnt pot with a hit of flint, her limbs wound round with rags, maybe, under a heavy worsted skirt. Unless she was ex­pecting again, and another child, to be raised for emigration, was on its way.

 

So if, in the mild Paris night, May smiled as she stood outside the American Express office—her senses tingling with alertness, her mind focused but vague—she had reason for it. She had only to smell the Parisian night and taste her own excitement and be aware at the same time of the shape—like an iceberg—of the life of brute labor that crushed the life out of a woman.

 

 

 

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 France.

 

“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. Chicago May’s peroxided head peacefully reposed on the pillow. I was busily shaving myself when she woke up, blissfully ignorant of what had been happening.”

 

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 Paris managers to headquarters. It includes this detail—remember that Dutch Gus Miller had prepared for the heist by getting to know the office staff.

 

 

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 Italy and was never caught for this robbery, though he was for others. Eddie and May simply headed for the boat train to England, though they must have known that the cops would, of course, be watching this of all trains.

 

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 Amiens, half­way to the English Channel and the boat for England. He broke away and ran, long-legged and desperate, into the station, and eventually locked himself in a toilet from which he kept calling that he wanted to see his ambassador. Nobody realized that May had been with him.

 

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 Paris, where he was kept in solitary confinement. Mean­while, the police were putting together his dossier “in which is writ­ten,” Eddie wrote, “everything that is known about you. Your past is sifted out from your childhood upwards. It is set out when, how, where and why you were horn, what you have done for a living, and what your habits are.” In London, May was being watched, too. But there was no evidence against her. Her name had never been mentioned, and she had managed to stow the stolen cash away. As much to annoy the watchers as anything else, she went about her usual life. We don’t have to rely just on May’s own account to believe this—it is one of the solid facts to emerge from the profusion of information and mis­information and supposition about the American Express robbery that survived to be filed in the Pinkerton archive.

 

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 Paris.

 

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

 

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