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Jack doesn’t spend much time talking about the things he’s afraid of. A guy’s got a reputation to uphold, after all. But he’s human, and he gets scared sometimes, just like anyone else. Scared he’ll end up the same as his old man, chewed up and spat out by a city that couldn’t care less. Scared one of the fellas will get hurt on his watch, or end up in the Refuge, or worse. Scared he’s got no chance of living up to all the faith everyone seems to have in him.
When he gives Katherine the ring it’s taken him three months to save for, with a shrug and a “so...what’dya think?,” Jack isn’t scared. He’s downright terrified.
“I think...” Katherine says in measured tones, her gaze fixed on the ring. Jack swears his heart stops. “I think that is the sorriest excuse for a marriage proposal I have ever heard in my life, Jack Kelly,” she chides, but her eyes, when they meet his, are filled with tears.
Jack takes a deep breath and for once, allows himself to hope. “Yeah? Then why are you cryin’, Plumber?”
Katherine lets out a watery chuckle. “Because I’m gonna marry the guy who proposed with a ‘so, what’dya think.’ That’s tragic.”
Jack grins so wide his face feels like it could split. He’ll deny it later, but right now he’s not all together sure he’s not tearing up himself. “I ain’t never pretended to be good with words. You’re the ace reporter here.”
They beam at each other as a rumble rises from the crowd of spectators that he swears hadn’t been there a minute ago. “What’d she say, Jack? I got money on this!”
“Shut it, Romeo,” they bark in unison before Katherine launches herself at Jack, kissing him soundly.
Les wins the pool.
--
The papers run a small announcement, which is about as much as Jack can rightly expect from Joseph Pulitzer after running off with his only daughter and ruining her chance of a flashy, high society wedding. It’s short and to the point, stating only that Miss Katherine Pulitzer, of the New York Pulitzers, is lately married to Mr. Jack Kelly, art correspondent for the New York World.
Jack’s never put much stock in rabbit’s feet, throwing salt over his shoulder, or wearing the saints around his neck. He’s always figured luck was something other people were born with and guys like him had to make for themselves.
But when he sees his name next to Katherine’s on the announcements page in slightly smudged black ink, he finds himself pulling out his pocket knife and carefully cutting out the column to keep in his wallet. It’s the closest thing to a talisman he’s ever had.
--
After the wedding, they find an apartment in Brooklyn, of all places. Conlon crows about it to no end - only, of course, after having what he terms a “sit down” with Jack over whose territory is whose and Jack assuring him that he’s only selling papers in Manhattan, same as he always has. Pulitzer isn’t happy about the locale. Pulitzer’s not happy about any of it, least of all having a rabble-rousing newsie for a son-in-law, but Katherine doesn’t give him any choice in the matter, and she and Jack both agree they feel better for having the East River between them and the World.
They figure out the first week into their marriage that neither of them can cook worth a damn. Jack’s never had a proper kitchen, mostly surviving on whatever he can scrabble together from day to day, and Katherine’s been fed by Pulitzer’s staff for most of her life and hasn’t needed to fend for herself.
Jack makes the mistake of suggesting that she could learn the basics from Davey’s ma, and she turns on him with a look that could curdle milk.
“You meant to say we can learn from Mrs. Jacobs, didn’t you?”
“Oh. Uh. Yeah. Yeah, ‘course that’s what I meant.”
Davey laughs at Jack standing in his mother’s kitchen helping her peel potatoes, but it’s all worth it to see the look on Katherine’s face the first time he serves her something edible. They switch off on supper duty from then on and tag team breakfast, her making the coffee and him figuring out how to not burn bacon and eggs.
Davey has supper at their place when they have union business to discuss, and more often than not Katherine makes him kip down in their front room rather than head home after dark. Jack wakes up one morning to find Davey and Katherine talking over coffee in the kitchen, thick as thieves.
“Don’t mind me cooking now, do ya,” Jack says when he hands Davey a plate of eggs and cuffs the back of his head. Davey smiles sunnily in return.
--
Their place gets great morning light, which Jack takes advantage of on the mornings he’s not out hawking headlines, sitting out on the fire escape with his sketchpad as he watches the sun’s rays spread over the rooftops. His cartoon in the World has led to commissions from the Trib, and between that and keeping the union up and running, he’s got more work than he knows what to do with. He doesn’t really need to sell papers anymore, truth be told, but he likes being out on the street with the guys, so he sticks with it part time.
Katherine, on the other hand, works best at night. She stays up way too late, lamp burning as she hunches over her typewriter, pencil clenched between her teeth and a furrowed expression on her face.
“Hey, Miss Clackedy-clack, give it up already and come to bed.” He leans over her shoulder to peer at her work.
She sticks her pencil behind her ear. “I have a deadline,” she says, distraction in her voice.
He tugs gently on a lock of hair that’s escaped her updo. “Yeah, and I gotta go see Wiesel in six hours, we all got problems.”
Katherine rolls her eyes, kisses his cheek, and turns back to her work. “You go ahead, I’ll be in soon.”
He knows when he’s beat; more than once he’s woken up at five to find her still in her chair, typing away. If it had been one of the entertainment puff pieces the Sun still assigns her now and then, he’d hoist her out of the chair in a fireman’s carry and she’d let him, shrieking with laughter as he tickles the spot behind her knee and she pretends to pound her fist on his back. But when she catches hard news - women’s suffrage, corruption, labor rights - he respects that too much to try. Best he can do is make sure she gets fed and takes a nap the next day.
He doesn’t much mind. He’ll tell anyone who’ll listen how proud he is to be married to New York’s star reporter, and if that makes him a sucker, then he’s the luckiest sucker this side of the Atlantic.
Still, he likes it better when they wake up together. Jack still dreams of Santa Fe sometimes, his sleep filled with images of sun bleached buildings and wide open spaces, and on those nights he forgets where he is, expecting to open his eyes and see Crutchie snoring away in the next bunk over. But then he wakes up and he’s in their bed, usually with Katherine’s arm crushing his jugular, her hair in his mouth, her leg slung across his waist, or some combination of the three.
For the first time in his life, the waking up beats the dreaming by a mile.
--
They fight sometimes, sure. Not a day goes by that they’re not bickering about something or other. Marriage hasn’t changed them into entirely different people, after all, and neither one of them has ever been all that great at backing down from a fight.
About six months into the first year, they have an actual knock-down-drag-out about Katherine deliberately putting herself in danger for the sake of a scoop. After a few rounds of shouting the rafters down, Katherine storms off to bed and Jack stays up all night fuming in front of the fire. When the sun rises, he stomps off to the circulation gates with a chip on his shoulder, ready to tell the guys all about it.
If he’s expecting brotherly support, he’s sorely disappointed.
“You hear this, fellas? Oh, poor Jack, shacked up with a smart, tough, beautiful dame who sticks up for the little guy. He’s got it rough.”
He always knew there was something about Specs he didn’t like.
“Jackie...he’s got a point.”
Even Crutchie turns out to be a dirty rotten traitor.
Jack meets Katherine as she’s leaving the Sun that evening. At the first sight of her, the anger that’s coiled in his gut all day evaporates like so much smoke.
She looks warily up at him, waiting for him to make the first move. “The guys, ah-“ He pauses, scratches the back of his neck. “They like you more than me,” he huffs.
Katherine shrugs one shoulder. “Of course they do,” she replies primly, with a smirk on her lips but a kind, let’s-be-friends-again light in her eyes.
Jack laughs and gathers her into his arms, something like relief rushing through his veins. “I just need you safe, y’know?” he mumbles into her hair. “You’re all I got.”
Katherine nuzzles a bit into his neck. “Jack. You love me?” she asks quietly.
“For sure,” he says, a touch more wobble in his voice than he’d like.
“Then trust me.” Her fingers grip a little tighter on the back of his vest. “I love you, and I’m not going anywhere.” She lifts her gaze to his. “Got it?”
He exhales. “Yeah. I got it.”
She makes him buy her dinner, and he makes her promise to stop throwing things at his head when she’s angry.
--
“I ain’t goin’.”
“You most certainly are,” Katherine rebuts, tossing his one nice jacket across the bed at him so Jack either has to catch it or let it hit him in the face. “And you’re wearing that.”
“Hey, what did we say about throwing?!”
Katherine has the grace to look chagrined as she crosses to the wardrobe. “You’re right, sorry.”
He rolls his eyes. “My wife, folks, newest recruit for the Giants.” Jack glowers at the offending piece of fabric before setting it down on the bed. “I have to deal with Pulitzer wearin’ this monkey suit two days a week as it is.”
“I have to be related to the man, which means I go to at least some of his parties or he sends out the dogs,” she says, her voice muffled as she changes from her day attire into something structured and sparkly that he hadn’t even realized she owned. “And you chose to be married to me - which, let’s face it, was pretty short-sighted on your part - so you have to go with me and eat his fancy hors d’oeuvres and poke me in the side if it looks like I’m about to start yelling at his stuffed-shirt friends.”
Jack lets out a sigh of disgust, but moves to help untangle her hair from where it’s caught on the sleeve of her dress.
She shoots a look over her shoulder, and if he’d ever had a chance of winning this argument, it’s over the moment she raises an eyebrow at him and says, “For better or for worse, pal.”
He turns her in his arms and fakes a scowl. “For the record, a Saturday evening with Joe is definitely the worse.”
“Noted.” She grips his suspenders and tilts her face up to meet his. He sets about making them as fashionably late as possible.
It turns out to not be so bad, as it has two of Jack’s favorite things: free food and heckling Pulitzer and his ilk. Watching Katherine visibly restrain herself from pelting one of Pulitzer’s friends with a cream puff for calling the suffrage movement “an hysterical fit” is entertaining as hell. When they go in to dinner, Jack accidentally-on-purpose spills his glass of wine on the blowhard’s coat. The guy stalks off muttering about gutter trash under his breath, but Katherine beams at Jack like he hung the moon, so it’s worth it.
The party ends well after dark and Pulitzer sends them home in one of his carriages. Jack doesn’t argue the point, mostly because it means he can spend the entire ride to Brooklyn with Katherine more or less in his lap.
“Hey,” he says as the carriage crosses the Brooklyn Bridge. “What you said earlier, about me choosing to marry you?”
Katherine tilts her head toward his. “A thoroughly stupid decision, don’t you think?” she says, her voice teasing and light.
He squints at her in the glow from the street lamps, pretending to consider. “Nah,” he finally replies.
Katherine lifts a hand and mimes wiping sweat off her brow. “Had me worried there, Kelly.”
Jack laughs, pulling her closer. “Listen, Plumber. Marrying you?” He nudges his forehead against hers. “Best call I ever made, hands down.”
end