When she got home after a movie, reality always set in.She lived with her widowed mother in a small apartment they shared with rats and cockroaches on the near northwest side of Chicago. Edith Markey, a thin, drawn woman whose photograph on a bureau was proof she once had been beautiful, ironed shirts in a Chinese hand laundry. It was hard work for eight hours a day and worse in summer when on hot and humid days, she would get to the laundry an hour early each morning, in hopes of getting an ironing board near an open window.
What Mrs. Markey earned barely paid the rent or grocery bill. Some nights, Barbara did her homework on the kitchen table by candlelight because the electric bill hadn't been paid.
If she wasn't running off to the movies, Barbara escaped into books, first devouring fairy tales such as Cinderella, and falling asleep dreaming about Prince Charming. As she graduated to thicker books, her favorites were historical romances like Ivanhoe, and she dreamed of handsome knights riding strong white stallions. Some day, she was certain, a knight would whisk her up into his arms and ride off with her to his castle.
Her mother constantly voiced disapproval about the movies Barbara said she saw, or the books she read. "They give you ideas," is all she would say, with a frown.
She thought her mother was a woman with limited feelings, until one day she saw her cry. It was when Barbara was seven and in the second grade, making her First Holy Communion. Her mother cried all through the service, and even more when hugging her afterward. She didn't understand why her mother was crying. Didn't she look beautiful in her white dress and veil? Like a little bride? Her mother never explained why that image made her tearful.
It was in the crowd outside St. Stanislaus Catholic Church after the service that morning that she first saw the man with half a face, and even from a distance it frightened her. He had only half a nose and no ear on the right side of his face. He looked away when she saw him. She only saw him for a moment, then he vanished in the crowd, but she never got the sight of him out of her mind.
For several nights afterward, she had nightmares about him. When she would almost forget him, she would see him again somewhere in the neighborhood. But he always looked away or walked away, whenever he saw her. She did not ask her mother or any of her playmates about him, for fear she would make "No Face," as she began to call him, more real than she could stand for him to be.