Belle Cora: A Novel (37 page)

McCormick, who had seemed awkward but kindly in our one or two brief previous conversations, was a different man that day. He wished me to know that, whatever I might think, mill owners were not defenseless against unreliable girls like me. They had a list, which they circulated among themselves; if I left now, I would go on that list and never be hired at a knitting mill or a weaving mill again.

I begged, argued, and wept, to no avail. I stood numbly beside him while he instructed the clerks to give me the forty-three dollars I had managed to save after the money deducted from room and board and the money sent home to Agatha and Elihu, plus the nine dollars owed to me from this month’s salary less room and board.

When I returned back to the boarding house to pack, Mrs. Robinson was there with her daughter Amanda. So that we might be alone, she sent her daughter to go clean one of the downstairs rooms. Then she asked me if I had been crying; I told her yes, and why.

“Oh, the bastard,” she said. “It was nothing to him and everything to you. Oh, damnit. The rotten bastard.”

I had always wondered what she thought of me, and her ready sympathy for my predicament, her certainty that I had done nothing to deserve it, surprised and touched me. After an instant of hesitation, I embraced her shapeless, overworked body. She patted my head, and murmured soothingly for some seconds. When we separated, she asked, “What will you do now?”

“I still have to go on the same errand as I had before, and I guess then I’ll look for a job. Maybe at another mill.”

She nodded. “You can try, but I should tell you, what he said was true:
when a girl is dismissed for cause, the mill agents put her on a list that circulates to all the cloth mills. You’d better find work in a factory in New York, or as a housemaid there. It’s not so bad being a servant when you’re young, if you have a good employer. Do you have anyone to go with you down the river?”

“No, Mrs. Robinson. It’s been too short notice.”

“I wish you didn’t have to go alone. A young girl traveling by herself, it gives people the wrong idea. Men: there are men who would try to take advantage of that. But since you must go alone, I have something for you. You won’t be coming back, so I’ve got to sell it to you.” She left the room and returned a few minutes later with a leather pouch, from which she removed an object that had been wrapped in several layers of cloth and newspaper and twine. After a full minute of suspenseful unwrapping, it was revealed to be a pocket pistol.

“It was my husband’s,” she said. “He won it in a card game. He never used it except once or twice, to test it, and I’m sure I’ll never use it myself. I can’t give it to you: it’s like money to me, I’ve pawned it three times already. But I think you had better buy it, since you’re going to York and, at that, to Five Points, where you’ll be cheek to jowl with niggers and Irishmen and God only knows what other thieving, murdering scum that sleep in their own filth and kill each other for a dollar.”

I didn’t want a gun. I could not imagine using it. But I responded to her concern for my welfare, and I didn’t want to say no to her. “Thank you, Mrs. Robinson.”

“Don’t thank me. I’m selling it.”

“Thank you anyway. How much?”

“Look at it first,” she said irritably. Hiding my reluctance, I took her little killing machine into my hands. It was an English-made pistol of the type known as a “pepper-box revolver” because of the rotating barrel, which was on the front. When you pulled the trigger, the barrel turned and the gun cocked itself. “It’s not accurate,” Mrs. Robinson warned me. “But it didn’t take poor Joe’s hand off, and I guess it won’t take yours. You ought to keep it loaded, so you can scare them off with a shot.”

After making sure the barrels were empty, she encouraged me to pull the trigger, and she showed me how to load it. Again I asked her the price.

“Ten dollars.”

I took it on trust that the price was fair, and I supposed I could sell
the gun when I was sure that I would never need it. And perhaps, if someone tried to hurt me, I would point it at them and the threat would be enough. I counted out the coins, but when I reached for the gun, she stopped me—“Wait!”—and gave me back half the money. “You were supposed to Jew me down. What a baby you are. Oh, and here’s another box of bullets.”

Later, as an afterthought, she warned me against men who would try to help me; I should be careful. They might seem merely kind at first, then, later, demand a recompense that no honest girl could give. I must not take money from them. I must not be alone with them. I was very pretty, she observed, and that added to the danger, but some men even took advantage of young girls who were not pretty. She knew.

XXVIII

SO ONCE MORE I WAS ON THE HUDSON
, this time heading south, to the city of my birth. I was worried about my brother and my friend and my future, and I had no real plan, yet I felt strangely equal to the situation, for no other reason than that I was young and strong, and I was thriftily determined to enjoy this little trip, which I had paid for with my own money, earned with the work of my own hands.

The steamboat, the
Israel Putnam
, was like a floating hotel, with more people on it than inhabited the town of Livy. Since the word “saloon” in those days still conveyed a sense of luxury and gentility, there was a “gentlemen’s saloon,” a “ladies’ saloon,” a “dining saloon,” and, for the men, a “shaving saloon” as well as a barroom; there were flying pennants, and two great smokestacks, and people of varying stations in life, most of them friendly and talkative, happy to be of the race of travelers now, whatever they were at other times. All were eager to explain themselves, like actors in some simply written drama. “I’m a merchant on a buying trip,” a man would say, as a bearded child in a school play might brandish a trident and announce, “I’m Neptune, King of the Deep.”

I made three male acquaintances and had every meal at the same table with them, the first time by accident, the other times by design. We sat by the window, to my left the boats and birds and mountains, and to my right a taciturn, gray-headed Yankee corn-dealer, stiff and straight, who spoke very little but sat with us every time.

The other two men, facing me, evidently knew each other, but it was not clear how far back their acquaintance went. Both were well dressed and, as their conversation soon established, rich. I judged them to be in their thirties. Their names were Eric Gordon and Charles Cora. Eric Gordon was handsome, with straight black hair, smooth white skin, and a big chin. He said he was the manager and part-owner of a celebrated New York City dry-goods store, and was on his way back from a business trip to Rochester and Utica and other canal cities. His home was in Brooklyn, but he kept a separate residence at the Astor House, where his business required that he stay for a few days each week—had I ever heard of the Astor House? I allowed that I had. Had I ever been there? I told him no. Oh, Eric Gordon said, I
must
go there. It was a grand place! I must dine there as his guest one evening soon after we arrived in New York.

I knew that many mill girls—Barbara, for example—would have taken great offense at the suggestion that they should let a strange man buy them a dinner costing more than a mill girl’s monthly wage, and they would have made it known in some well-bred way; and I wished I could think of one. I wondered whether the stiff-looking matrons a few tables away had overheard, and, if so, what they thought of me now.

He didn’t pursue the subject, but perhaps by not speaking I had given him a tacit permission to continue. When the menu was passed around and oysters were on it, he said he would not have them, for soon he would be dining in the Park Row Oyster Palace, on oysters the size of a dessert plate—had I ever eaten oysters like that? And when I said no, he said it was a crime that I hadn’t, I must have them, and he would see to it that I got them. I said I would probably be too busy. That was wrong, he said. While we were young, we must make time for enjoyment. And he listed a series of New York’s temptations, some already named by Tom Cross. How well the women of New York dressed. How well those styles would suit me. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Cora?”

Every so often, with words like these, he would ask his companion to back him up on some point. Mr. Cora—I will call him Cora now, though
he became Charley to me later—was a few years older, and not as handsome; he was slim, with curly black hair, dark eyes, and an Italian accent. He was ordinary-looking, except for a certain watchful self-possession that one noticed in him after a while. He had the table manners of a farmer, conveying food to his mouth with his knife, but all his movements had such economy and precision that they seemed civilized in their own way. When Eric Gordon solicited his opinion, Cora would say that he had to agree, I would look good in the fashions of the day. When Eric Gordon mentioned a restaurant where some wonderful dish was to be had, sometimes Cora would chime in with a comment drawn from his own experiences of the city’s delights. But he seemed simply to be making conversation, whereas when Eric Gordon spoke I knew that a practiced fisherman was at work, and I was dining on bait, as pretty girls often do, and I had to keep my wits about me.

At last I said that, though it was entertaining to hear of these places, they did not sound practical for one in my station of life. Eric said, “Station? Station? What a word. Are we in England? We have no fixed stations here. Besides, there is an aristocracy of beauty, and indisputably you belong to it. Don’t you agree, Mr. Cora?”

“I ain’t blind,” said Cora, with a smile more friendly than seductive.

Eric Gordon looked as though he had considered, and decided against, asking the opinion of the Yankee corn-dealer who sat to my right, most of the time as stiff as a wax-museum representation of his type.

To change the subject, I asked Cora what kind of work
he
did.

“Work?” He repeated the word as though it were unfamiliar. “I don’t work.” He said it not so much as if he were a gentleman but more as if he were a boy.

“How do you live?”

“I play.” He said this soberly as a statement of fact.

“Mr. Cora’s games are poker, faro, and blackjack,” said Eric Gordon. I saw that he wanted me to admire him for knowing someone like Cora, but he also wanted me to know he was Cora’s superior.

Cora regarded him without expression. “I like to play these games with sporting gentlemen.”

At dinner, I told them that I worked in the weaving room of the Harmony Manufacturing Company’s textile mill. I did not tell them I had lost the job. At supper, I told them of my errand on behalf of Lewis and
Jocelyn. When I said that my brother was staying on Anthony Street in Five Points, Eric Gordon became alert.

“Tell her, Mr. Cora,” he said, “what she’s doing isn’t safe.” But Cora didn’t answer. “Let me help,” said Eric Gordon, putting his hand over mine. “A girl as lovely as you shouldn’t have to do a thing like this alone.”

His concern for my welfare seemed genuine. For my part, I would have loved to have someone’s help, but I had seen the white shadow of a wedding ring on his finger, and when he had known I was a mill girl he had proposed to take me to dine at the Astor House, which, considering the social gulf between us, was very little different from asking me to climb into his bed. Eric Gordon’s help, I was sure, came at a price; he was one of the men Mrs. Robinson had warned me about. So I thanked him but said that it was a family matter, and I had better handle it alone. At this, his attitude changed rather surprisingly: he looked unhappy, and almost angry. “Is this true, that you’ve got a sick brother on Anthony Street?”

“Of course it’s true. Do you assume as a matter of course that people you meet as strangers are lying?”

“And you’re going there alone? A girl like you?”

“I don’t see how I can go as any other girl; I guess it will have to be as me.”

“I wouldn’t go there without a policeman.”

“Maybe I will ask one, then.”

“They won’t help you unless you give them money.”

“Thank you. I will.”

“Do you mean it?”

“Your manners are getting worse and worse.”