Belle Cora: A Novel (41 page)

She said she liked what she was doing, and no one could get her to change her mind about it, but she missed me, so I should come and see her and try.

She insisted that I come see her
at the brothel
.

“How was she?” I asked Lewis. “What did she look like?”

“Like a princess,” he said, with a sort of gloomy admiration.

“What was the place like?”

“Like a palace.”

We had this conversation in the company of Mrs. Donovan and her daughters, as they sewed desperately in insufficient light, eyes narrowed, necks bent, and Mrs. Donovan commented, “It’ll be no easy task getting her away once she knows what it’s like to work short hours. Thank goodness, my girls are ugly, or I wouldn’t know what to tell them.” The two girls, Moira and Kathy, gave her rebuking glances—not, I think, for calling them ugly, but for suggesting they’d be tempted to do wrong. They were good girls, and proud of it. It was all they had.

XXX

AS IF TO PROVE THAT THE DEVIL
had been given complete charge of this world and procured a license to distribute its choicest properties, Mrs. Bower’s brothel, specializing in girl children, was on a good, clean, quiet street somewhat superior to the one on which I had grown up. Its trash was hauled away regularly; you could see every paving brick under your feet, there were black iron fences and polished brass door-knockers, and you would never have guessed that anything amiss was going on inside.

A skinny colored woman with a bright-red rag on her head and a white rag in her hand opened the door, and asked if I was the dressmaker.
I said no. “We expecting a dressmaker,” she said, as if it were a negotiation and if she stood her ground I might accommodate her. For a moment, I didn’t know my own name. “Looking for a place here?” she asked with a sly smile. “No!” I said hotly. She laughed.

“I’m looking for Jocelyn,” I said “Is she here?”

“What she look like?”

I described her.

“You mean Granny,” said the colored woman.

Inside, the brothel looked like a rich man’s house, which it had been once. Every window had curtains; the wallpaper and furniture were new and no more ostentatious than those to be found in the home of many a well-off New Yorker. The chairs and sofas and ottomans were well upholstered, in silk, with plenty of pillows. There were spittoons. The carpets were clean. Paintings on the walls and statues on pedestals depicted classical myths, a Roman slave market, and Truth and Charity as embodied in seminude goddesses. Maybe they weren’t very good, but I could not tell, and no doubt the house’s patrons felt that their loathsome orgies were transpiring in an atmosphere of taste and refinement. A pair of eleven- or twelve-year-old girls descended a grand staircase, holding hands. They wore silk nightgowns tailored to their boyish forms.

I knew I ought to feel that I was peering over the edge of an abyss at a scene of unspeakable horror. I did not feel that way, for Five Points was already doing its work on me. I had seen girls younger than this sleeping in wagon sheds and alleys. I had seen consumptive children, drunken children, starving children, and children beaten half to death.

I could not help observing that these two girls looked clean, healthy, and lively. They whispered to each other. As they neared the bottom of the stairs, they looked at me rudely. “Who are you?” asked one of them, and I answered, “My name is Arabella.”

“Arabella,” she repeated. “She’s pretty.”

“Yes,” said the other one. “But, fuck, she’s old.”

I told them I was looking for Jocelyn, and while one continued to inspect me, the other turned and called, “Granny! Someone’s here to see you!”

She appeared at the top of the stairs in a flannel nightshirt. “You came!” Simple pleasure spread across her face, and I guess across mine, too. She embraced me and pulled me into her room, which was furnished
like a rich woman’s bedroom, with a fireplace, a vanity table, a chest of drawers, two windows, lavender wallpaper with a pattern of vines and flowers, carpets, gilt-framed mirrors, and an oil painting that featured a pudgy pink-and-lavender infant Cupid with a bow. Then I was startled and turned away: a man with a hairy back lay prone in the bed. “Mister,” said Jocelyn. Reflecting that the sheets had covered him from the waist down, and thinking,
how can it hurt me?
I looked back. She shook his shoulder; he grunted; she shook him harder, and he turned and pushed himself up. The sheets still covered the salient parts of his nakedness. “Mister,” she repeated. He rubbed his scalp in a thorough, practiced way that bespoke many a hangover before this one, and looked at us blankly.

“Go to the kitchen,” said Jocelyn. He sat motionless for a time. When he rose abruptly to get his trousers, which lay on a chair just out of his reach, I shut my eyes with a gasp, and Jocelyn laughed. “It’s all right, he’s got his pants on now,” she told me just a few seconds later, and she told the man, “Go on. They’ll give you something for your head.”

When he was gone, she patted the spot next to her on the bed. I shook my head. She stood, put her arms around me, and held me to her, murmuring that she had missed me terribly, that the only thing she had really not liked about New York so far was the thought that she might not see me again. Then she said, “God, you stink, Arabella. I’m glad you came. I’m happy you’re here, but you need to know that you stink.”

It was true. How could it be otherwise? Every drop of water I used on my body had to be dragged up four flights. Over my objections, she opened the door and yelled for the help; when the colored woman appeared, Jocelyn demanded that buckets of hot water be brought to the room. A small room adjoining her bedroom turned out to contain a water closet and a large tin-plated tub. I didn’t want to accept anything that was offered to me in this terrible place, but the temptation was too great. I bathed, and the hot water was heaven, and then Jocelyn bathed, and we dressed and went downstairs. With my mouth watering, I nobly refused rolls and coffee, and then, when the cook prepared a meal of ham and eggs and sour cream and peach preserves and Jocelyn began blithely eating it, it seemed silly to refuse, and I took my share. I had already given
up any hope of getting her out of this place. If something bad enough happened to her here, she might leave, but no argument of mine was going to do it.

“What’s it like?” I asked her.

She knew what I meant. “Quick, usually. I know how to make it be over quick, and they don’t mind usually, because they’re drunk. Oh, sometimes a fellow will surprise me and go on too long or want it twice, but I don’t mind it, not compared with picking dirt out of cotton twelve hours a day. I’ve never minded it. I wash them before. They put up with it because they’re getting something special, being here, that they know they shouldn’t have. I’m going to have to move next year to another house, where I’ll be the youngest. Here they call me Granny.”

“How many?”

“A night?”

“Yes.”

“Five is the most I’ve done. A girl here says she has done eight.”

It was hard to grasp. You were supposed to have one man in your whole life, perhaps another if the first one died, and Jocelyn had just admitted to having five in one night; she said it as though she were telling me that she had had five sandwiches, or five cups of tea.

She continued innocently, “It’s still not that much time, because usually, like I said, it’s fast. It’s two hours of work, doing what some girls do out of charity. Some will stay till morning, like you saw, and that’s the easiest, because they think they’ll use you many times, but they never do.”

Of course, she hadn’t been there very long.

“Do you save any of your money?” I asked her.

“Yes.”

“Do you still want to become a dressmaker?”

She laughed as if the notion were absurd.

I asked her what she would do when she got old, I asked her what about the opinion of the world, I asked her about pregnancy and disease—but I asked without passion. It wasn’t an argument. I was asking because I wanted to know.

She brought me upstairs again and made me brush my teeth. Then she brushed my hair at the vanity table and put it up with combs and
pins. She sprayed me with perfume. A few minutes later, a servant came in bringing a traveling dress, secondhand but nicer and a lot cleaner than the one I was wearing, and Jocelyn offered it to me with a blithe pleasure in her ability to be generous. I sat on the bed, thinking of what occurred there, and what paid for the ham and eggs and the peaches and perfume and pretty clothes. I put my head in my hands. “I can’t, Jos. Don’t make me say why.”

I looked up to see if I had hurt her feelings. She examined the dress in her hands. She knelt and held it under my face, as if I had objected to the color or the pattern. “I could get you another. I could get ten sent up here.”

“I can’t,” I repeated. “I must go,” I said, and stood up.

I thought she hadn’t understood a thing until, at the door, she touched my arm and with a sad little smile said, “I missed you, Belle. Will I see you again?”

“Of course,” I said, not sure if it was true. Deciding to make it true, I added: “But not here. Not again.”

As we reached the foot of the stairs that led through the sitting room, I saw a plump gray-haired woman in a sober dress and a white cap, who was looking up at me expectantly, and I knew before Jocelyn said, “This is Mrs. Bower,” that it was she, the spider of this place, the madam.
I will run; I must run
, I thought, but I did not feel it. Besides, if I made a fuss, perhaps I would make trouble for Jocelyn. The woman asked me to sit in this parlor where, a few hours later, men would be drinking champagne and eating oysters in the company of little girls.

In appearance, she was a soberly dressed woman of fifty who might be taken for the widow of a rich merchant. The only sign of her profession was a certain briskness, like that of a man of affairs taking time from his busy schedule to speak briefly to a young relative visiting the city. She asked me my name and where I lived, and where I had grown up, and what I did for a living, and how I knew Jocelyn.

I told her. An inner voice castigated me for being civil to this despoiler of lives, who had grown wealthy by catering to depraved appetites. But unless you are habitually rude to everyone, it is hard to be rude to people who give an impression of wealth and power, and who have good manners and are civil to you.

She looked at me appraisingly. “You speak very well. Do you like to read?”

I said yes. She asked me what sort of things I read. I told her.

When I said I liked Byron, she inquired, “Can you recite something from Byron?”

“Yes.”

“Well, go on.”

“I can, but I don’t care to.”

“But if you did care to, if there was a reason to, you could.”

“Yes.”

“And you like that kind of thing. You do it for pleasure. Reading. Novels. Poetry. Scott. Bulwer-Lytton?”

“It passes the time. Yes.”

“Do you understand what you read?”

“There would be little point to it if I did not.”

“I agree, but people do it. They pretend to like things.” She paused briefly. “You have remarkable gifts at your disposal, if you don’t mind my saying it.” I blushed. I knew what she meant, and it was obvious that she noticed my embarrassment, but she went on anyway. “With the right attention, the right clothes, the right paint, the right corset, you could be a beauty of the first rank. You speak like a lady. You have a good carriage. And with all that reading, you could pass for a girl from a good family, a New England family, maybe Boston, ruined in the Panic, or—or you went bad and now you’re dead to them; it all came of reading Byron. You could be richer than me one day, if you’re sensible, and don’t pick up bad habits like drink or gambling, and make good investments, and don’t give it all away to some man.”

She paused, waiting for my reply. I thought of Eric Gordon, the handsome, rich man, part-owner of a five-story dry-goods store, whom I had met on the steamboat from Albany. I felt now, as then, that I ought to do something to show I wasn’t that kind of a girl.

“I’m needed at home,” I said simply, rising from the soft, clean chintz cushions of one of Mrs. Bower’s tasteful, pretty chairs.