Belle Cora: A Novel (38 page)

When the argument had gone on a minute longer, I blurted out that I had a gun: it would keep me safe. As soon as I said it, I felt I had said something childish. To cover my embarrassment, I told them the story of how I had gotten it.

“Can we see it?” Eric Gordon inquired.

I reached under the table, into my carpetbag, and came up holding the gun as if I did not know which end of it the bullets came out of. Each in turn, the men at the table examined the pistol. Cora held it as if estimating its weight. “It’s a good weapon,” he concluded. “Probably you don’t need it. Try not to need it.”

At breakfast the next day, an hour before we were to arrive in New York, Eric Gordon again reminded me that he was staying at the Astor, and he gave me a card with his name on it; if I wanted to see him, I should leave a message with the clerk there. He was often in town, and I should get in touch with him if I was in any kind of trouble.

Then Cora came to sit down with us, and Gordon said, “You look pleased with yourself,” though in fact the gambler looked just as he usually did: composed, tranquil, and watchful. Gordon told me that Cora last night had hosted a midnight supper of oysters, canvasback ducks, and champagne, for the sporting men on the boat, and there had been a friendly card game. “I see one of your sports now,” he said. At the far end of the dining saloon, a big man in a stained gray waistcoat was glaring at Cora. “Maybe you had better leave, Miss Moody,” said Eric Gordon.

“No, stay,” said Cora. “Let him come. It’s okay.”

“I think she ought to leave,” Gordon insisted.

Whereupon the Yankee corn-dealer got up, strenuously swallowing his last bite, and bade us a good trip. “You should come, too, Miss Moody,” he added. “These fellers are an education, but don’t get tangled with them. Either of them.”

I was about to take his advice when Charles Cora inquired, “Miss Moody, would you show us your pocket pistol again?”

I found the situation exciting, and something about Cora—his composure, maybe—gave me confidence. I knew he was a sharper, and that tricking people was a part of his profession, but I was sure, I don’t know how, that he would never think of tricking
me
, and so from the very first I trusted him. I took out the pocket pistol and put it on the table. The man in the stained waistcoat walked to our table, and said he’d been thinking about what had happened last night. He’d been turning it over in his mind.

“Yes?” asked Cora.

The man’s eyes found the pistol, and he looked startled. “What’s that?”

“Bacon,” replied Cora blandly; there was bacon not far from the gun.

The man’s face reddened, and for a moment I thought that Cora was going to have to use my pistol, but evidently Cora did not think so, and the man walked on and out of the dining saloon. Then Cora did something
that endeared him to me: he picked up his napkin and patted his brow with it.

“You’re a coward,” said Eric Gordon. “Hiding behind a woman’s skirts.”

“He could have called me out,” said Cora mildly.

“What would you have done if he had?” asked Eric Gordon.

“Swim.”

I could not tell if he was joking.

“I’ve half a mind to call you out myself. How’d you like that?”

“Please don’t do that,” said Cora. “It’s been such a nice trip.”

Despite Eric Gordon’s great concern for me, he did not offer to help me with my luggage or to get me a hack uptown. I assumed that this was because someone was waiting to meet him when he left the boat, maybe a wife, or a relative, or a business associate more reputable and less broad-minded than Charles Cora.

IN THE SUMMER LIGHT, EVERY DETAIL
of the waterfront sparkled. Each dirty face, scuffed sign, crate, dog, and puddle looked its best, ready to have its picture taken, when I stepped from the mere tumult of the emptying steamboat to the churning chaos of the docks. I walked, disoriented, past bewildered immigrants dragging chests and searching the crowd for their husbands or their brothers; past children running, men holding placards with the names of hotels; past heaps of sacks, pyramids of barrels, streams of spilled rum and oil. Two boys fought on the bricks of the street while boys around them shouted advice. A cabman called out, “Come to the cheapest house in all the world!”

All that in the first paltry seconds, as if New York were saying: “Last Judgment? We have it for breakfast here. This is the Big Town.” Waterfront buildings loomed over me, formidably businesslike, warehouses with wide awnings and wooden overhangs projecting from the second story. The names of firms and their trades were blazoned in giant painted letters interrupted by windows. Everything up there was fine and majestic. Everything down here was grimy and chaotic and twice my eyes recoiled from the corpse of some unlucky rat that had been flattened and embossed many times by wagon wheels. Since I had last been here, New York had grown out of human scale. Though it crossed my mind
that I might have stood right on this spot with Horace and Lewis in 1837, really I had only a dim idea of where I was, other than smack in the middle of everything. I remembered a few streets from my childhood, and I knew that the infamous Five Points lay in a sort of fat triangle bounded by Broadway, Bowery, and Walker. I reasoned that if I walked east from the North River I would come first to Broadway. Walker would lie either north or south; if necessary, I would take an omnibus. Then I would ask directions to Anthony Street.

It was easy for a newcomer to get lost in the New York of those days. Though the eye found printed words everywhere—on rooftops and awnings, etched into flagstones in front of the stores, on the sides of wagons (and, the oddest sight, on sandwich boards slung over the shoulders of ragged men who trudged up and down the street)—simple street signs were hard to find. They existed, but they were on the lampposts, and small; and since I did not know that, my only clue as to which street I was on was the occasional store sign that included the full address. I walked away from the river and came presently to cleaner, better-smelling purlieus, with fewer stores, and many impressive buildings of brick and limestone, or white marble. I reached a big park surrounded by rails and trees, and at one end of it stood a giant fountain, at the other a white palace with flags and a cupola. During all my years in Livy I had been the girl from New York, and I had taken the characterization very seriously. I had expected that within a few minutes of my return it would all come back to me; and instead I was lost within sight of a prominent landmark.

I approached two well-dressed women, one young, the older one walking with the young one’s help. “Excuse me, could you tell me the name of that big white building with the two flags?” I asked. The younger one told me it was City Hall. I thanked her and asked, “How would I find 160 Anthony Street from here?” At this they looked at each other, made a decision about me, and walked on. Several of the men who passed by looked at me and a couple of them attempted to catch my eye. I preferred not to ask directions of them. I kept asking women, who kept pretending they didn’t know. At last I put my inquiry to a gentleman. He was walking slowly, smoking a slim cigar, and tapping his cane on the black railing. He was about thirty, with soft, longish, poet’s hair, parted in the middle, and dewy, sympathetic brown eyes, and he asked me with an expression of concern if I was certain that I had the right address. I
said that I was sure I did. If it was not too bold of him to ask, why was I going there? I hesitated and then told him that my brother was living in a rooming house at that address, which I knew to be a bad one, and that he was sick, and I had come to help him.

“Well, let me think,” he said. “You know, it’s really not that far. It’s—I’m not very good at giving directions. It’s no use; I’ll have to take you there. No, I don’t mind. Don’t be silly. Come on.” He flicked away the cigar and took my portmanteau in one hand. I was grateful to be relieved of the burden. He hooked his free arm through mine, and we walked on, while he asked me about my trip and talked about New York, how interesting I would find it, and how, even though it was quite a large city, the bad places and the good places were only a short distance from each other. I must be careful.

We turned into a neat, clean, quiet street, where there were only a few carts and people. He said, “I promised my sister I would look in on her. If you don’t mind, I need to stop here for a few minutes. You can come up with me.”

“All right,” I said, beginning to be suspicious, “but if you don’t mind, I’ll wait for you out here.”

“Don’t be absurd. It’s right inside. You can rest your feet. You must be tired.”

I was sure it would be a mistake to go inside with him. I wondered whether I should demand my luggage. Would he keep it? Perhaps he would, making a joke of it, in the hope that I would follow him. I wondered if I should take out the pocket pistol. I wondered if I was being foolish and worrying about nothing.

“All right,” I said, and I held onto his arm firmly, while he reached for the key to the door. He had to put down the portmanteau in order to reach into his pocket. I grabbed the bag and ran.

“Wait!” I heard him call after me. “Wait! You don’t understand! I’d have made it worth your while!”

Eventually, I slowed to a brisk walk, passed a child who must have been playing hide-and-seek, because he stood with his back flat against a wall and put his index finger to his lips when he saw me; and passed a maid carrying a basket, and a young man helping an old woman out of a carriage. I turned and saw no one pursuing me.

In my panic, I hadn’t paid attention to where I was going, but, calmer
now, I recognized the street I had fled to: It was Bowling Green. I looked up. Rows of gray chimneys tugged with lethal precision at those mystic chords of memory that have been said to link hearts to hearths, and perhaps I sighed, or perhaps I just stood there with my mouth agape.

I had come to my old house, where a hot meal cooked by Anna or Sally or Christina used to be waiting for me after I had spent a Saturday playing in the snow, where my mother coughed into a bowl and looked at the color and wrote letters her children were meant to read when she was dead, and where she took mercury and paregoric and made mustard plasters and said I was a joy and a boon to her.

I rapped the brass knocker, imagining—I could not help it—that they would all be there, my father, my mother, my brothers as children; my little self, nine years old. And she would say: Who are you? I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. Go away.

After a minute the door opened, and there appeared in it a short, fat, blousy, red-faced, brown-haired, blue-eyed woman whose features were crowded into the center of her blotchy countenance, like certain old-fashioned representations of the sun and the moon when they have faces. She was only a little over thirty, as I learned a bit later, but I took her for a woman in her middle years. She wore a dress and an apron. Her left hand held a rag. I asked her who lived here. Glancing at my bag, she said it was a boarding house mostly for young clerks, only men. She had an Irish brogue. I said I had been born in this house and lived here until I was nine years old.

At this her manner changed. “Go on! You lived here?” she said, and she invited me in. “Tell me how it was in the old days. Come, I don’t bite.”

After a little hesitation, I followed her. She introduced herself as Mrs. Shea; it was her place—that is, she rented it and ran it. With misgivings, because the Irish of New York were known to dislike my family, I told her that my name was Arabella Godwin. She did not respond to the name, except that she called me by my first name often in the first few minutes after I told it to her (“Come this way, Arabella”), as if to help herself learn it. She led me on a tour of my childhood home. I recognized a few pieces of furniture that must not have been thought worth the trouble of carting out and selling, and most of the wallpaper was the same; in two rooms it had been painted over. Everything was drabber and more worn,
with nicks in the wainscoting and patched sections in the plaster. There were wooden numbers nailed to the doors. The one Lewis and I had slept in was number 4.

When we made our way back downstairs, she sat me down at a long table, in a room smelling of stale tobacco, and I noticed a Turkey carpet, whose complicated pattern of big orange squares and impossible blue flower petals had mesmerized me as a child. It was badly frayed and stained now, as changed, I thought, as I was. Mrs. Shea served me reheated coffee, bread, and jam. She asked me for my story, and I told it, leaving out the most shameful details but including my parents’ deaths (I found out by her remarks then that she knew my father had committed suicide, and that she knew the previous owner of the house had been Solomon Godwin). I told her about Livy and Cohoes, and I told her, in a general way, of my purpose in New York. I said that my friend had disappeared and, I feared, had fallen into bad company, and that my brother was sick in a Five Points lodging house.

When I told her about William Miller and Adventism, she said, “It was an honest mistake. There were many here in New York that made it.” She added, “There are those in Ireland now who could wish that Jesus would return and bring the world’s end, and a stern judgment, while He’s about it.” I often thought, in later years, that she must have been thinking of the potato famine, which had not been going on long enough to cause much notice in the United States, except among the Irish.

It had felt strange at first, to be here in my childhood home telling my story to this stranger, but after a while I began to enjoy myself.

When I told her about running away from the man with poet’s hair shortly before I stumbled into Bowling Green, I placed great emphasis on his outward respectability, how well-dressed and gentlemanly he was, how improbable it had seemed that such a man could have bad intentions. I said these things because I did not want Mrs. Shea to have a bad opinion of me, but also because I was genuinely shocked. I told her that I was still not sure what the well-spoken stranger had meant to do.

She shook her head. “No honest man would ask you to come alone with him into a strange place when you didn’t know him. You showed good sense when you ran.”