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he called after me, “Whose daughter are you now?”
    “I’m Liam O’Donnell’s daughter!” I called back obediently.
    “And don’t you be forgettin’ it!”
    “I won’t.”
    But I began to forget in that instant.
    “Look out, Atlanta,” I whispered as the lock on the forbidding front door to Our Lady began to turn. “Look out, Downtown magazine . Look out, Matt Comfort. Here comes Maureen Aisling O’Donnell. And don’t you be forgetting it.”

    2
    I HAD NEVER BEEN TO NEW YORK, BUT CAROLYN REN-FROW in my class at Saint Zita’s had, to visit her older sister Deirdre. Deirdre married a Corkie boy who simply never came home after he disembarked from his Korean-war troopship, but stayed and went to work for a taxi company.
    By the time he sent for Deirdre he had his own cab, and they married and lived in Levittown, and Deirdre worked for the city in the Tax Records Division until her children began to come. But before she married Jerry Sullivan she lived briefly in the Barbizon Hotel for Women, and it was there that Carolyn visited her. I thought Carolyn’s account of Deirdre’s life there was the most magical thing I had ever heard.
    I thought Our Lady would be like that. I can’t remember why, but I did.
    In my mind I knew every inch, facet, and nuance of it before my father and I even set out for Atlanta. There would be laughing, wisecracking young women streaming out to their jobs downtown in the mornings and back in the evenings. They would be sleek and modish, 24

    25 / DOWNTOWN
    dressed in Mary Quant, their shining blunt-cut Sassoons swinging, their long legs flashing in patterned tights of white fishnet. They would be self-assured and up-to-the-minute on where to shop, dine, be seen in Atlanta, but of course they would be out-of-towners like me, too, so there would be just a touch of endearing unsureness about them; I would not stand out in their ranks in my Corkie greenness. They would welcome me as a sister; we would sit on our beds in our shortie pajamas and curlers at night, smoking and drinking Coca-Colas and trading the secrets of our hearts; we would do each other’s hair and lend each other clothes, maybe we would experiment with body paint. We would introduce each other to our boyfriends’ urbane friends, and we would go in crowds of youth and laughter and kickiness to movies and discos and restaurants and concerts. There would be a housemother, of course, a wise, eccentric older woman who saw in us her own youthful dreams and foibles, and she would shake her head, smiling, when we came in late or violated some minor house rule, and comfort us when we fetched up—briefly—between boyfriends. We would call her Muggsy or Gertie or something, and she would call us all
    “Kid.” At Christmas we would pool our resources and buy her a satin negligee, and she would crack bad jokes about it, and her eyes would shine with tears.
    One evening, across the warm, disorderly, Miss Dior-smelling parlor, our eyes would meet those of a handsome stranger come to call on someone, and would lock….
    In truth, my vision probably owed more to a recent rerun of Stage Door at the Bijou in Corkie than to Deirdre Renfrow’s tenure at the Barbizon Hotel for Women at Madison and Sixty-fourth in Manhattan. Neither one had anything at all to do with Our Lady’s

    ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 26
    Home for Catholic Girls on Fourteenth Street in Atlanta.
    Our Lady was inexorably moored in the early, Vatican-blessed fifties, and though I could not have seen it, so was I. It is incredible to me, looking back, that the woman whose fantasies that night included Stage Door and body paint was twenty-six years old. But such was the power of Corkie and the Church. The distance from Atlanta and the dock neighborhoods of Savannah was measured in far more than miles.
    Even though it was just past nine when my father dropped me off, Our Lady was largely dark. Standing on the porch waiting for the door to open to my ring I saw a dim,