Belle Cora: A Novel (46 page)

I had thought myself wise beyond my years. I had had an idea of how my brother’s release had been arranged, an idea that I considered sufficiently cynical, and it involved many little and big payoffs to corrupt officials. As I walked away—aimlessly at first, but then uptown and back to Mrs. Bower’s—I saw how it could have been done much more simply, with greater profit to Mrs. Donoho. Every dollar that she did not keep for herself she had given to Cutter and the other policeman who had arrested my brother.

WELL, WHY THINK ABOUT IT
? I was going to leave all that behind. I went to my room. I took out the suicide note. I took the pepper-box pistol from my bag. I had a whiskey bottle, which I had sent for earlier expressly in order to acquire the courage to kill myself. I drank until I was fearless. But then I was shameless as well. When the difference between life and death was unimportant, so was the difference between being virtuous and being a whore. Instead of shooting myself, I went to sleep.

When I awoke, I heard a series of loud, insistent knocks, which hurt as if each blow of that unseen fist were striking my head, and after I had staggered across the room to open the door, there was Mrs. Bower. I asked her the time. She said, “Past time for you to be earning, damn you.” I began shambling over to my dresser. She said, “No, you can take tonight off. Sleep it off.” I went to the water closet and vomited; then I came back and drank a little more and fell back asleep.

When I awoke a second time, I saw I had left the pistol in plain sight. I put it back in a drawer, put on a robe, and went into the hall. A diamond of light that a window at the end of the hall laid on the carpet hurt me so that I was careful not to look at the window itself. I moved slowly and
tentatively, eyes half shut, as if my head were not attached to but merely balanced on my neck, down the back stairs to the kitchen, in search of a solution for my immediate problems. Mrs. Bower sat at a small deal table—things were orderly but never fancy in the hidden rooms of the house—before a delicate china cup of coffee in a matching saucer, and two pens and two identical ink bottles, a small day book, a big ledger, and a green felt ink blotter. When I came in, she closed the day book and the ledger and bade me to sit on a chair at the other side of the table. She wore daytime attire, modest enough for the wife of a Presbyterian minister, with an ivory silk pelerine and a lace-trimmed cap. She had a double chin and puffy eyes.

“How are you feeling, Harriet?” she said, and when I didn’t answer right away, she spoke to the kitchen maid in a voice whose gentleness I had to appreciate in my condition. “Juno, Harriet’s got a hangover.” Mrs. Bower opened the day book and the ledger again. Her writing made it apparent that one bottle held red ink and the other black. “I keep track of every penny. It’s the secret of my success. I’m careful. On the other hand”—she put the pen in the bottle and looked up at me—“one can’t get rich without taking risks. I took a risk with you.” She raised a hand to signal me to silence. “I am sorry for you. This is a cruel world. We are in a cruel profession. It’s not good to be sensitive. And to be a weakling is terrible. You don’t yet know how terrible. I fear you are about to discover it.” Her voice was gentle. “Then you will wish—oh, how you will wish—you had been strong enough to take advantage of your opportunities in this house.”

At this point, quietly, Juno set down before me a tall mug of beer. She cracked an egg on the side of the mug and emptied its contents into the beer.

“Drink,” said Mrs. Bower. She watched me drink my beer and egg as though she could learn about my character from the way I drank it, and then, as if the manner of my drinking had helped her reach a decision, she said, “I’m going to try you out another week. If you don’t improve, I’ll let you work off your debt in a bawdy house run by a friend of mine. There you may stay as drunk as you like. But it will take you a year to get what you may get in a month here, and you will have to submit to many more men each night, and they’ll be men of a lower class than you meet
here, and if you don’t get sick or have a baby it will be a miracle. Is that what you want?”

I asked her to give me another chance.

“I said I would give it to you,” she said, blotting the ledger with the white cloth. She stood up, tucked the book under her arm, and—picking up her shawl, which she had draped over the chair, but leaving the ink bottles for a maid to put away—she left me to rub my brow with my fingers and to think.

See? Nothing is as easy as it looks. Even whores have a duty to “improve,” if they can, and show up to work relatively sober and on time.

For a while, I kept alive the thought of using the pistol on Jack Cutter, and perhaps Mrs. Donoho while I was at it. I tried to think of ways to get them in the same room, so that I could shoot them both before I shot myself.

Gradually, I reordered my mind, as I had to if I was not to sink into despair. I lived among people who had special ideas of right and wrong, and what deserved admiration or contempt. Their views were such as to make a whore’s life tolerable, and I accepted them as simply as I would have wrapped a blanket around me if I were cold. I became as changed a person as the possession of such opinions could make me.

THERE IS A STORY ABOUT A YOUNG PURITAN
who goes into the woods to meet the devil. He goes furtively. He hides whenever his godly neighbors pass, and more and more of them do pass. There’s an amazing amount of traffic in this part of the woods, all in one direction. He realizes that every single person in the village is on the same foul mission. They are
all
on their way to meet the devil! They are all hypocrites.

Whores of the highest type experience a similar illumination. They see society inside out; they meet the reputable pillars of the community on the occasion of their visit to the devil. We do not encounter quite every preacher, to be sure, or every crusader against vice, or every mill owner who claims that a higher wage would deny his workers the opportunity of learning thrift. Some of these folks are just what they seem. But we meet the other ones, and they are a mighty and numerous host. We meet as in the forest, in a great witches’ sabbath—fallen women, and eminent men with a name for sobriety and chastity. We drink and we fornicate; we laugh until our sides ache at all you gullible fools.

…

I BEGAN TO HAVE THE RECURRENT DREAM
I have already mentioned. I was back on my uncle Elihu’s farm. I was cleaning the cider barrel, bringing water to the mowers, brewing sassafras tea. I was innocent, I was weeping.

My aunt was there. “Arabella,” she said. “Belle, my angel, why are you crying?”

“I had a bad dream.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. Of course you can.”

“I’m too ashamed. I dreamed that I was bad, very bad. Oh, Aunt Agatha, even to dream such things, such wicked things—I’m so ashamed.”

“Don’t be sad.” She held me and patted my back. “Everyone does bad things in dreams. The Lord won’t hold us to account for what we do in dreams.”

She was so wise! “But what if I really did these things, in real life?”

“Then you would burn forever with your father,” she said with a tender smile.

I awoke in my room, my face damp with the tears I had dreamed, and I was not alone, but with Philip Heywood, who was only a year older than I, and not unattractive except for a weak chin. He was fair, with blue eyes, long lashes, and a soft, pudgy white body, never having done a day of manual labor. He was shaking me awake, very gently; he had not been so gentle the night before. “What’s wrong? Did you have a bad dream?”

“No,” I said, wiping my face and looking in true evergreen surprise at my own tears. The only time I cried was in my sleep, as if another soul, one with more tender feelings, inhabited my body in the night. “Yes. In a way. Not exactly.”

He had been with me before, but this was the first time he had spent the night. His father, Mrs. Bower had told me, was Arthur Heywood, the editor and publisher of the
New York Courier
, a penny newspaper with Democratic leanings.

“Tell me about the dream,” said Philip.

“I dreamed I was back in Boston.” It was time to tell him a version of the story I had made up at Mrs. Bower’s suggestion. “I grew up in Boston.
My father was—rather, he is, he still lives—my father is an importer, very pious and respectable. His name—I’m going to respect his wishes and not tell you his name. It wasn’t Knowles.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I had two brothers”—making a snap decision, I added—“and three sisters.” I knew the undoubted pain of this memory would account for my silence as I took thought. “My father demands a great deal of himself and his clerks. He was not much seen around the house when I was growing up. My mother is very religious, as the wives of Boston merchants tend to be. She’s a good woman, but not a good judge of character.” I looked at a picture of Lord Byron that hung on the wall nearest my side. “Or so I tell myself when I want to blame her for what happened. Anyway, a few years ago, she had come under the spell of a handsome young minister, whom she asked to help bring her daughters to the love of Jesus.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh dear.”

“You guess? So quickly? I guess it’s an old story, but it seems my mother hadn’t heard it! If my father had been more present, he might have prevented what happened. The minister—I do not feel as obliged to protect him—his name was Jeptha Childe, Childe with an ‘e.’ He preached to all the girls in the house—we attended him very eagerly.”

I stopped a long time. At last he prompted me: “What happened? If it does not hurt too much for you to speak of it.”

I laid my head down on his hairless chest and regretted it, because it was sticky. But it was too late: I stayed and endured. He put his arm around me. “He was married,” I continued. “His wife was consumptive, and they had stopped having physical relations on her doctor’s advice. When Jeptha first began talking to me of hellfire and salvation, my figure was not as well developed as it is now, but I guess I was a temptation for him all the same; he would stroke my neck as I bent down over my Bible. One day we fell into sin. It was quite mutual. I was sixteen. I had a baby, a girl. My mother is raising it. She says it is innocent of my crimes, and my father grudgingly agrees. I am not allowed to see the child.” Another pause. “There were three portraits of me in the house, one of them in oils. They have all been burned, along with the compositions I wrote at school, the diaries in which I used to pen my childish thoughts, and the pad in which I used to do my clumsy drawings. Everything of mine that could not be carried in a single portmanteau has been given to the poor.
My name may not be spoken. Even
I
do not speak it, since I use a new name now. They tell my little daughter her mother is in heaven, but they know the opposite is true. They tell each other that I was born bad, and this was always my destiny, even if, unaccountably, they did not notice it when I was small. Maybe they’re right. Who can say?”

“I can,” he said. “It’s rotten, the way they’ve treated you. It’s callous and stupid and rotten. I know you aren’t bad. Anyone should be able to see that.”

“Your tool says otherwise,” I observed, stroking him.

“Oh, that, that happens every morning,” he said, as if I were likely to be unaware of this phenomenon. “Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

“Let’s use it,” I suggested.

“What are you doing?” he inquired, for he was on his back and I was straddling him, and this was new for him. “Oh.” I pulled his hands to my bosom.

“Do you like this? Do you like it this way?” He groaned. “I think that must mean yes! So do I. It helps me to please myself.” He was one of a select group of men with whom I could take pleasure. I made lovers of them if they were young, and rich enough to have me often. With the loathsome ones I shut my eyes and pretended I was with one of the handsome ones. I never pretended that I was with Jeptha. “Maybe I wasn’t born bad, but I think I must be bad now. I think I must be very, very bad.”

“Oh. Oh my Lord. Oh Jesus. Oh. Oh. No, don’t!” I dismounted—if I could help it, I never let any of them spend their seed in my womb—and switched to other methods, learned in frank discussion with the other girls. “Oh, you’re wonderful,” he said at the end. “You’re not bad at all. You’re fine. There’s no other girl like you.”

“Do you mean it?”

“Of course.”

“And you care for me? A little?”

“Oh, very much.”

“And if things had been different? If I were not—oh, if I had never met that minister, if I were still a respectable Boston merchant’s daughter?”

“I would have asked you to marry me.”

“And Juliette Bowden?”

“What about her?”

“I saw the look you gave her last night.”

“I didn’t give her any look.”

“Would you have married her?”

“Of course not.”

“Good,” I said, and lay beside him as if very glad to know that he did not care for Juliette. Then I asked him to tell me how he spent his day. I wanted to know how he occupied himself when I wasn’t there. Where was he at this hour, where was he at that hour? Flattered, he told me (with a lot of complaints, for he didn’t like working and didn’t see why he should work, since he was rich), and later that day I sent him a long-stemmed rose, along with a note to say that I was thinking of him.

Mrs. Bower was always pushing me to earn more, but she would not mind it if, as eventually happened, most of my income derived from a relatively small group with whom I enacted a charade of love, accompanying them to restaurants and the theater and exchanging
billets doux
and presents. When I say presents, I include the ones I bought them. Where I had gotten this idea I cannot say—from a novel probably, I drew so many of my ideas from novels—but I had begun, very early, to buy certain of my gentlemen presents (accompanied by a brief note, “Thinking of you … wish I could stop thinking of you,” or “No man has shown me, never, never, what you showed me last night”). The effect of this had astonished me; it was magical; it was more persuasive than anything I had ever done in bed. Though they might with a little thought realize that the present, a silver pin or a silk cravat, was only a fraction of their own money returning to them, the recipients were at the very least flattered and sometimes virtually enslaved. With every reason to be skeptical they believed, because it was a delightful thing to believe, that while there were other men, they were exceptional; their prowess in the boudoir had taken them through brambles and over high walls into my heart.