Belle Cora: A Novel (50 page)

NOT LONG AFTER THIS, MY ATTENTION
was drawn to the one watchful-looking gentleman in a rowdy group that had just entered the house. He was dressed quietly for a man of his profession, but extravagantly for most men, in a soft black hat, a black suit, black boots, a white shirt, and a silk vest, with gold rings on his fingers and a small diamond pin on the shirt. When he spoke to Mrs. Bower, I heard the Italian accent: it was Charles Cora, the gambler whom I had met in the company of Eric Gordon on the
Israel Putnam
between Cohoes and New York. It had been a year and a half. Mrs. Bower introduced him to Juliette, but he turned to me. “You,” he said. He snapped his fingers and was about to speak but stopped, noticing my alarm.

“This is Harriet,” said Mrs. Bower, who had also noticed; she noticed everything.

“The boat,” said Cora.

I nodded tightly, and he took the hint and didn’t mention it, and then I made sure that he was the one who took me upstairs.

Later, I asked him if he was surprised to see me here. We were both on our backs. It had been easy and in no way unusual, except for the delicacy of his long fingers, and he said, “Yes, a little.”
A little
was a funny way to put it. He added, “I knew I’d see you again. I didn’t think here.”

“You have presentiments? They come true?”

“The strong ones.”

“That must be useful in your profession.”

There was more skepticism in that remark than I had intended. He said simply, “All gamblers believe in fortune.”

I had been ready to bribe him to keep my secret, but there was no need: he wouldn’t think of harming me. He had a comradely regard for women of my type. In this he was an unusual example of his own kind. Most sporting men, though they may admire a fine whore and thank God that some women are bad, are contemptuous as well; to feel otherwise would be to insult their wives and mothers and sisters. In Italy, where Charles Cora was born, an even sharper distinction is made between good and bad women, but he had different ideas, because his mother was a prostitute, and he had been raised in a brothel in Milan.

Though he was—and I liked this about him—as thoroughly a creature of the present as any grown man I have ever known, and not much interested in his own past, now and then during our time together a scrap of it rose to the surface of his talk. With your permission, I will tell it all now, everything I learned in all the years I knew him. He thought that his father might have been a French officer, since he was born in the time of Napoleon, when there were many Frenchmen in Italy. Or maybe his father was the amiable landowner’s son who spent as many hours playing with him as dallying with the girls, and gave him his first deck of cards. He did not know who arranged for him to be sent to the school from which he had run away to live on the streets of Bologna when he was fourteen.

He had lived in Brazil and Cuba. He had called himself Fabrizzio
Bologna and Bernardino Blanco. “Charles” was from St. Charles Street in New Orleans, and “Cora” was really his ignorant misspelling of
cuore
, Italian for the suit of the card that was in his hand when he decided it was time for a new last name.

He was a very gifted gambler, with a brain that was wonderful for remembering the play and calculating odds; and hands uncanny for their skill in conjuring the wide, irregular, or slightly nicked card, so swiftly and eyelessly that it was all over before his victims knew it. He could imbibe quarts of liquor without visible effect, and he always knew exactly when to leave town.

He told me that where men were honest he was honest, but America, if he could say so without hurting my feelings, was a very dishonest country; here he had to cheat in self-defense. This was nonsense. Cheating is the whole art of professional card dealing; it had been his study since he was a half-wild boy in Lombardy.

He lost everything he had—it happened all the time—and to watch the methodical, uncomplaining, and perfectly confident way he began again from nothing was an inspiring sight. He was always generous, because money was unreal to him.

CORA CAME BACK ALMOST EVERY DAY
for a few weeks. There was something between us, though I couldn’t put a name to it; perhaps we were friends. At any rate, I felt comfortable with him; he was comfortable in a brothel and would stay almost for the whole next day, having breakfast with the whores, telling them stale jokes, of which he had an encyclopedic knowledge, playing absentmindedly with a deck of cards (in my room, he would go even further and sit at my desk trimming them and nicking them).

Since his appetite for lovemaking was no greater than average, for a while I wondered if he might be jealous and trying to monopolize me, but if so he was going about it very carelessly: he often went out, and I was with other men; sometimes, when he was busy trimming cards, I was writing love letters, and it didn’t seem to bother him. He usually came back in time to be the last man and to spend the night.

I will not say that I fell in love with him, but I looked forward to his visits, and I wondered what he was doing when he was not with me.
When, on occasion, he did not show up as expected, I was disappointed, and when he returned again, I found myself taking him to task for it, as if the absence of obligation were not the whole point of him and me. He had an easygoing, self-possessed manner that was very agreeable—instant intimacy of a low order; I could speak freely, he was never angry or hurt—but which would be frustrating to anyone trying to make the acquaintance of the inner man. Then I’d say something sharp to get under his skin, but he would just smile. I envied Charley his composure, and after a while I learned to take his mood as my own, and to glide lightly and swiftly over the surface of life, as he did.

Once, he was gone for over a month, and I decided that when he returned I would tell him not to come anymore, because I was becoming too attached to him. But when he showed up he was in a good mood, and it seemed foolish to spoil the moment. “Let’s go out,” he said. “Show, restaurant, dance, hotel.”

He had just been to New Orleans, where he had run a faro game in a little storefront, and also played poker in rich men’s houses, and he had prospered, and he told me how it all was done.

“I’d like to see New Orleans,” I said, and he promised to take me next time.

He suggested later that we go to his hotel room, which, it turned out, was on the second floor of the Astor House. My back stiffened when I learned this, and I told him how I had embarrassed myself with Eric Gordon who often stayed at that hotel. “Let’s go somewhere else, then,” said Charley. I thought about it and said no, I didn’t want to be weak, and he nodded. That was something he understood.

At the Astor House, we registered as Mr. and Mrs. Cora. The next morning, in the bed, with his arms crossed behind his head, watching me dress, he said: “Why not stay?”

“I have to answer to Mrs. Bower,” I reminded him.

“That’s what I mean,” he said. “Where do you stand with her?” He knew how American parlor houses worked. He offered to settle my debts.

I told him that I was paid up, and that I liked him, but I had to be realistic. What was he offering me? Was he offering to keep me permanently?

“No, just while I’m in town.”

“And when you go?”

He shrugged. “You won’t be any worse off.”

He was right, I realized. I had already stayed with Mrs. Bower as long as the average girl did. I was still popular, and she wanted to keep me, but she had nothing to complain of if I left. In a month or a year, I would still be marketable. I sat down at the desk and, with an Astor House pen on Astor House stationery, wrote a letter to Mrs. Bower; I tipped a boy to take it. And so, for a time, I lived in the best hotel in New York City as Mrs. Charles Cora. We lived a life of idle pleasure, going to see races and prizefights out on Long Island, learning to ride horses, taking cruises in schooners and steamboats around the bay and up the Hudson, attending concerts, plays, picnics, and circuses, drinking champagne, and eating saddles of veal and oysters as big as dessert plates. When I was bored with all that, I would sit in the hotel common room, read
The Tribune
and
The Penny Magazine
, and strike up conversations with people from far-off places, people who had uprooted themselves, if only for a few weeks: here they were in New York; and where was I from, they would ask me, what was my story?

Once, when I was on Charley’s arm, I ran into Eric Gordon. I had had daydreams about this: that Gordon would snicker; Charley inveigle him into a card game and destroy him. But when the time came, Eric seemed as pleased to see me as if nothing unpleasant had happened between us, and though he must have known I could not be Mrs. Cora, he was perfectly willing to let me pretend I was. He did not wish to hurt me, and as soon as I realized this, I lost any interest in revenge.

Besides, I had other things on my mind by then.

One day, Cora came to our room to find me waiting for him reading the
Courier
, and when I looked up he knew I had something to tell him; I said that I had missed my time, and all the other signs made it very clear that I was pregnant. He said nothing. I told him that the child was his (as it had to be, though I could not prove it).

He didn’t comment on that right away, but after more time, he sat down at a small table and asked me, “What do you mean to do?”

“Probably I’ll get rid of it; I know how,” I said, dismayed. I stood up, telling him I had to take some air and would see him at dinner. I walked through City Hall Park, thinking. I had hoped that he would want the child. He was gentle, intelligent, and companionable. I felt safe with him.
He liked children. He was always ready to spare them a joke, a card trick, a story, and he listened to their prattle. A traveling lecturer on phrenology had shown us a bump on Charley’s skull that proved him to be highly “philoprogenitive.” In the last few weeks, my eyes had often sought out that bump. But it seemed that the prospect of a little Cora did not make him wish to turn our holiday into a permanent obligation.

Maybe, if the baby came anyway, that would change his mind: he would hold the baby, note its resemblance to him, become attached.

Probably you’ll find in such reasoning a simple and contemptible explanation for my subsequent behavior. Perhaps I should just leave it at that. But to me it seemed that there was more to it. Abortion was immoral, wasn’t it? I did not regret murdering Matthew’s child, but this was different. I had the feeling that I would be wronging Charley by killing his child, even if he didn’t know his own mind enough to realize it. And abortion by any method was painful and dangerous. Childbirth, though also painful and dangerous, was several months away.

Time went by. I left it for another day and another. My condition became visible. At last I had decided, without knowing when I had decided. Whatever Cora thought, he did not say. He stopped having relations with me, and the odd long hair that began to appear on his coat made it evident that he had sought the company of other women.

ONE MORNING, HE ASKED ME TO COME
down for breakfast with him; it was late, and no one else was in the dining room but one waiter and one guest, an old man smoking a cigar at a table on the other side of the room. Cora watched me eat. You would have had to know him as well as I did to know that he was tense; and though I had come to the table very hungry, I lost my appetite and I waited. At last he said quietly, “I can’t have a wife, I can’t have a mistress. I can’t be reliable. I don’t like to be reliable. I think the baby is mine. So. What should I do?” I didn’t speak. He was very still for a moment. Then he said, “You’ve brought me luck. I’m going to give you a thousand dollars.” It seemed more than fair—he had been generous already, what did he owe me?—but I said nothing, and my expression showed him nothing. “I’m going to give you two thousand dollars,” he amended, as if we had been haggling. “Do what you like with it, but—look—you like to manage things.” He raised a hand to get the
waiter’s attention. “More coffee,” he said. “You should open up a house. For the girls, go to Baltimore—there are a lot of houses in Baltimore, you can find girls who are stale there but they’ll be fresh here. Get them to come with you. It has to be here.” He was thinking hard now; the prospect excited his business instincts. “In New York, you know aldermen and newspapermen and coppers, and they can help you. You know the sporting men. Rent a house in the Fifth Ward, some nice clean neighborhood where gentlemen feel safe. Furnish it out of auctions and estate sales, but make it fancy. Buy champagne, send out cards to the bachelors. They’ll tell the husbands.” His gaze fell on my belly; perhaps he was remembering the brothel in Milan, and that it was not so awful growing up there. “Men will like the idea that such a young, pretty girl is a madam, the madam the best-looking girl in the place.” He looked at me. I knew he wasn’t finished, so I didn’t answer. “You’ll have to be one of the girls, too, at least at the start. But not to just anybody. You’re the prize. Make them have the others first. Use some of the money for bribes. I could tell you to try your hand at some other business, but this is the one you know, so you begin with an edge; it’s your best chance.”

The coffee came. He had it black, and I had it with a lot of sugar.

“Will you help me get started?”

“I’m leaving town. If you can’t do it yourself, you can’t do it. Write me a letter. You get in trouble, ask me for help.”

That’s what he said. It was the opposite of sentimental, but for some reason now, maybe just because I am old, I am moved. Eight years later, his trial for murder was to make us both famous. People were impressed by the strenuousness of my efforts to save Charles Cora’s life. It has been seen, over the years, as a sort of romantic riddle. I believe I have provided several solutions. He was the father of my child; he treated me with respect and kindness; and we understood each other, which was a comfort. Just look at how many pages I am compelled to write, trying to be understood, now that he is gone.

XXXVI