Metropolis (37 page)

And so, while Johnny lay in bed moping, started drinking at noon and occasionally smoked sticky balls of opium that she procured for him from Wah Kee’s, Beatrice began doing the report all on her own. There were no big jobs going on at first, but people were working, and revenue was flowing in and out. Beatrice made sure people were getting the same pay or better than before, as a result of which people thought things were going on as usual, except for Johnny’s seclusion.

It was increasingly clear to Beatrice that Johnny had only ever been the nominal head of the Whyos. With his mother gone and Johnny always half drunk or stoned, that meant Beatrice was now in charge. She’d gone from pickpocket and hot-corn girl to king in under a year.
King,
that was how she thought it, not queen.

Just as Beatrice was getting used to it all, she realized something was wrong: She was ill. And late. Then more than late. There was no denying it: As sure as the sewers ran beneath the streets, she was pregnant.

It could only have happened that one morning, just before the wedding, just before the explosion. Though Johnny had been clear at the outset that he didn’t want her getting knocked up, she feared he would feel differently now. He might see it as a connection to his mother, who had clearly hoped for grandchildren. For Beatrice, though, the timing was disastrous. She had nothing left over for a baby, not if she was going to have to do Johnny’s job. And she did have to—the fate of the Why Nots was in her hands. She didn’t tell Fiona about this development, the way she would have before. She didn’t have much time to spend with Fiona now, and she felt estranged from her by the enormity of her secret power.

She knew she had spent too long not noticing, and it was close to being too late, but she took a set of powders she had on hand in some tea, hoping she could still put an end to the situation. They made her feel wretched all morning, but two days later she still hadn’t bled. She bought more and took a double dose. Nothing. She considered a visit to any of an easy dozen “hygienic advisers” and purveyors of “cures for ladies’ ailments,” but they were death shops, and there was no privacy possible there. Anyplace she went, the Why Nots would hear, and she feared the rumor would move across town so fast that Johnny would hear about it, shut-in or not, before she even got her legs up in the loops. It was going to be awful enough already; she didn’t want to have to contend with his histrionics or his rage.

And so she looked for another solution. Thinking that there must be places where ladies from other parts of town went, she took herself to the Cooper Union reading room and looked through the dailies for discreetly worded advertisements.
Ladies’ physician guarantees results to Unfortunates in just one interview.
.
.
. A necessary preventive for married women.
.
.
. For the postponement of a too rapid expansion of family.
.
.
. A mild cure for the stoppage of monthly turns.

Among the myriad, one stood out because the address was all the way uptown at Fifty-second Street, well outside the area where Whyos ranged. The following day, after the books were tallied, she made sure Johnny had some lunch and a bottle of rye available and went out without saying where or why. He didn’t greatly care about her comings or goings, so it was simple, but still she took as many back stairwells, hidden doorways and forgotten passages as possible on her way to Twenty-third Street, the outer edge of Whyo territory, just in case anyone spotted her. From there, she caught an omnibus up to Fifty-second, at which latitude the city was entirely different from the dense, low, wooden downtown. The buildings tended more toward manor houses or farmsteads and the occasional stone mansion. The house she sought was at the corner of Fifth Avenue, and it was enormous, taking up most of a block, including its walled garden.

It was nothing like the places she had known to do this type of work, and she checked the address again; it was correct. Hoping she had enough cash and wondering at the architecture, she climbed the wide stairway to the parlor-floor entrance. As she rang the bell, a group of schoolchildren ran past, shouting, “Madame La Mort!” So now she knew it was the right address. But the servant who answered waved her back downstairs, where there was a business entrance so subtly marked that she had missed it.

The offices were opulent, with dark wood and velvet, and the interview was far from what Beatrice expected. The lady told her she was mistaken. She did not extract babies for any price. Heavens, no. Did her client know the dangers, both mortal and legal, of the operation she sought? She had medicine, she said, a powder of ergot and tansy, which she offered at no more than the cost of their manufacture. Otherwise, she was there only to advise.

“I know those powders. I could have bought them downtown, too. Actually, I did buy them downtown, and they didn’t work. Surely given the size of your advertisement, you offer something stronger.”

“I seek to advise girls such as yourself, because I know the dangers of extraction. It’s easier to rupture yourself with a corset stay than you may know. Don’t let someone who knows nothing do it for you and leave you to bleed and die.”

“Madame Restell, do you offer a cure?”

The lady put an envelope heavy with powder on the desk between them and shrugged. “Five dollars.” It would have cost one downtown.

Beatrice pulled out a thick wad of cash—roughly a week’s revenue—and put it on the table. “I have a rather larger budget to work with.”

Madame Restell looked more closely at Beatrice’s dress to see if she’d misjudged her. She hadn’t, but what she saw on the table was a considerable sum. She asked herself if the girl was likely to be an agent of the government, trying to entrap her. She didn’t think so, but she was cautious. “I can, however, arrange a visit to a most healthful spa in the Catskill Mountains, where you’ll surely find yourself feeling better in no time. Five hundred for the week. But I’m afraid you’ll really need a different frock to fit in there, my dear. The company expects something a bit more . . . elegant?”

Five hundred dollars was a fortune, but Beatrice thought about the safe-deposit boxes. The problem wasn’t the price but that she couldn’t get
away.
She walked away from Madame Restell’s disappointed. She’d expected to leave in a state of agony, but not till the following day and with her problem behind her. Her belly didn’t show yet; it hadn’t quickened, but it would soon. What if she didn’t get rid of it? She’d felt very good in her limbs, in her flesh, the past weeks. She had thought it was just the power, at first, but now she understood that her body was happy about what was happening within it. If she hadn’t understood just how short-lived that happiness would be once the baby was born, she’d have drunk dark beer and eaten well and slept as late as she could, fattening herself up into a mother. It might be lovely to be a mother, the caregiver of an innocent life, if only there weren’t so much to do to keep her gang of guilty men and women alive, the girls safe—and if only the father weren’t Johnny Dolan.

She wanted more than ever to tell Fiona her trouble, and the following day she bumped into her on Astor Place. They went into a little place called the Lioness, which was almost empty, and Beatrice drank two sweet gins in quick, silent succession. Fiona was watching her closely. Finally, she asked if something was wrong. Beatrice decided on candor. After all, Fiona’s betrayal had been small compared to what she was up to now. It was she who’d grown secretive, she who was now participating in a scheme that daily defrauded the rest of the gang. She could trust Fiona.

“Goddamned Johnny,” she said. “He knocked me up. Caught me off guard. And now, with his mother gone, I’m afraid he’ll want it.”

Fiona was suitably horrified and offered to go with her to the extractionist.

“No, just think about it: There’s nowhere I can go without people finding out. He’d kill me.”

They both sat in silence for a while. Then Fiona spoke.

“There’s something I’ve heard about lately, Beanie—a Chinese needle doctor. He’s not an extractionist—he does it some Chinese way. It’s not even illegal, and no one would know a thing.” The Jimster, she explained, had heard about Dr. Zhang from a girl he used to know who’d gone and married one of the Chinamen on Mott Street.

“What, a
white
girl?”

“I think she’s English.”

They both agreed it was a very strange thing for an English girl to up and marry a Chinaman, but for Beanie’s purposes this Chinese cure sounded worth trying.

“It’s like this, he told me: You have to tell the English wife your predicament because he only talks Chinese, then you lie on a table and he sticks pins in your belly. Then you go home and drink plenty of gin for two days, and then you have your curse.”

“The pins go all the way into your belly, do they? They kill it?”

“I guess so. But how much worse can it be than the other way? I’d try it.”

Beatrice said she would think about it.

When they parted, she got on an omnibus heading downtown. She found her way to Mott Street and wandered several blocks in search of a sign with the Chinaman’s name. Finally, she stepped into a corner saloon. It was full of Chinese and whites both, but not another woman anywhere. The sweetish-sour smell of opium wafted from the rear, but she had little interest in that just then. She stepped up to the bar and asked for a sweet gin.

“A double. And by the way, can you direct me to the shop of Dr. Zhang?”

31.

SOMETHING LONG AND THIN

O
n the day of Beatrice’s visit to Madame Restell, there were 368 women in New York who were actively considering abortions; something less than half of them would go through with it; and one of every ten women who did would encounter grave complications leading to death. Usually, it was uncontrolled hemorrhage or infection that got her. As to the demographics of extraction, they matched those of the city as a whole: more poor women than rich women, more Irish than Germans, more Germans than Italians, more Italians than Chinese, more whites than blacks, and so on. But it was all quite proportional. If you looked at the denominators—and any good scientific study must account for the denominators—you’d come up with fairly consistent numbers. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that everyone was having sex, regardless of their bank accounts. Where statistics did diverge was in the survival rates: Those who could pony up to go to Madame Restell’s resort in the Catskills were far likelier to live out the year and also to bear future children to term. Only half of the enceinte were unmarried, but fully a third of those girls either didn’t know who the father was or had opted not to tell him. They were making their decisions on their own—not that they weren’t used to that. One member of that group was Beatrice, and there’s at least one other we know of: Her hair was yellow and her German accent thick and her clothes a little tawdry, so that anyone who cared to could have guessed what she was (for that was the point of such clothes).

Maria was a little further along than Beatrice. Like Beatrice, she usually used lemons, and she always bathed after a man had visited her room. There had been a time, a couple months back, when she’d known it was high time to swap out the lemon, but lemons had been astronomical at the market, and she was strapped for rent. She couldn’t see spending so very much, especially since swapping required taking a day off. You had to wait an entire day after the last time a man had been in you before you took it out. That was why a lot of girls took Sundays off. But Maria was struggling to make it as an independent operator—she’d be damned if she’d go into one of those houses where the madam took half what you made and entirely ran your life. She’d had interested customers the past two Sundays and simply hadn’t been able to refuse. When she’d finally reached up inside herself, what she found was not good. The rind had gone soft, like a custard. Her finger poked right through it. The rest came away in scraps and pieces that smelled less lemony than rank.

Her flux came, and she was relieved, but it was light, and the next one failed her entirely. She took the usual array of powders, without results. Finally, she realized she had to do something about it. If she didn’t, she’d soon be visibly pregnant and unable to attract any customers but the weirdos. But it wasn’t so easy as just deciding; the procedure was not inexpensive. So she went out noon and night to raise the money, rarely took a break between strolls, gladly charged extra for unorthodox requests. All the while she was hoping that so much activity might somehow dislodge her problem, but Maria was not that lucky. When she finally had the money, she asked a few girls she knew for a recommendation. None of them had a good story to tell. Apparently, every extractionist was a butcher. So Maria took to scanning the sheets of newspaper that were used to wrap the meat pies and cheese and vegetables she bought from the vendors at Washington Market. She would ask specially for a classified page, and there were always a few ads directed toward members of the gentler sex. At the end of a week, she had committed three addresses to memory.

It was just as Beatrice bumped into Fiona and stepped into the Lioness that day that Maria was finally gathering her dollars and steeling her nerve. She put on the rather conservative hat she wore on Sundays—no feathers at all—left off the rouge, and set out on a stroll quite unlike her usual ones. She had eyes only for the pavement. She didn’t want offers, lest she not have the mettle to refuse them. As she neared the first of the addresses, she smelled the fish market and the bitter aroma of coffee mingled with rotten brine. It was a small street just up from Coffee House Slip, one block long and narrow, and every building seemed to have a modest shop on the ground level with an apartment above. She peered into the shop windows as she went, and what she saw puzzled her. Blacks. Not that blacks were startling in themselves—she’d gotten quite used to them since she’d been here—but on this street it seemed there was nothing but blacks: black girls in front of
and
behind the counter in the little corner restaurant, blacks in the market, a black man in the window of the tobacconist’s. There were no whites at all in view. It didn’t occur to Maria that this was a respectable middle-class enclave or that she was safer in that street than anywhere in a ten-block radius of where she lived. To her, blacks seemed as beastly as their recent enslavement implied, and she certainly didn’t want some big black woman to touch her
there.
It was a line she drew in her work as well. One had to have standards, after all. She spotted the number from the ad—an apothecary shop—peered in and saw more blacks. She straightened her skirts and walked on. Thank goodness, she thought, that she’d gotten more than one address.

It was a pity. The place she passed up, the clinic of doctors Smith and Blacksall, was as clean and efficient as they got. Smith and Blacksall were generalists, not just abortionists (though they quietly and safely did that work, too). They were outspoken advocates of modern birth control and hygiene. They were also social progressives: If a patient seemed hard up, they charged nothing for their services. They absolutely didn’t want a girl like Maria to have to go on a binge to pay for this procedure. They did their best to advertise their mission by word of mouth, though abortion and birth control were both strictly illegal. The apothecary shop that housed their clinic belonged to Dr. Smith’s uncle, who was glad to have doctors in his upper story because of the trade their patients brought in. The two women generally worked together but allowed the patient’s race to determine which doctor was her physician and which assisted. They saw Negro women Mondays and Tuesdays, whites Wednesday through Friday. Not a single woman had ever died in their care.

The next address on Maria’s list was further downtown and all the way west, in the basement rooms of an old Irishwoman. M
RS. MULLIN, LISENSED PERVAYER OF CURES
was painted on the door, and not very neatly. Maria turned the knob. First, she paid a princely sum of forty dollars to her
pervayer.
Next, she was issued a small dose of laudanum mixed into a pint glass of rum. She left her stockings, pants and petticoats on a hook in a changing closet and took her place on a bench to wait her turn. Actually, it felt rather good to have just her skirt about her legs for once, nothing in between.

The Irishwoman’s implement of choice differed very little from the one Dr. Blacksall would have used. Whalebone corset stay or gynecologic probe, something long and thin and slightly flexible was what was needed. And it ought to be clean. Mrs. Mullin washed hers well with carbolic soap between customers. That afternoon was busy, however, and the rheumatism had seized her ankles again, and she just couldn’t bear to walk to the corner well with the bucket, which was dry. So the bone was rinsed in a basin of water that had already seen her breakfast dishes. A tiny clot of egg yolk clung to the long, curved, off-white spike when she lifted it from the pan. She wiped it clean on a towel before she turned to face the patient, whose ankles were splayed and raised in two rope loops that dangled from the ceiling. With Maria’s skirts up around her middle, neither woman could see the other’s face, which both preferred.

Mrs. Mullin installed the cold metal duckbill speculum without forewarning, cranked it open and proceeded with the aid of a miner’s lamp to size up Maria’s cervix: none too pretty. It was mottled and spotted, irregularly swollen and tagged, thanks to a variety of slow, pernicious diseases caused by an array of microbes yet unclassified by science. Smith and Blacksall would have had a few things to say to a woman whose insides looked like that, even an option or two for treatment. To the Irishwoman, though, it all looked pretty normal. Mrs. Mullin didn’t have to know that the small hole in the middle of the cervix was referred to by doctors, in Latin, as the
os
to traverse it with the whalebone stay. Slowly, carefully, she pushed until she hit resistance, then she went a little further. She arced her instrument up and down and back and forth, out again and in, scrambling all that lay in its path. Actually, she did her job fairly humanely—whenever Maria flinched, she paused. There was blood on the table, but that was to be expected.

When it was over, Maria gulped down another glass of rum with a black medicinal brew stirred into it, then hunkered down on an oilcloth-covered cot for an hour, till she felt she could walk. She took a cab home. Mrs. Mullin had told her she’d have to push the remains out herself and gave her a paper package of tea—mostly tansy—to bring on the contractions. She was to keep at the gin, too, and the laudanum, for pain. She lost the awful little rabbit in a flood that pretty much ruined her mattress some twelve hours later. She wouldn’t have said it didn’t hurt, because it did, but a strangely pleasant delirium settled over her late that night. She saw the walls give way to ocean swells, and oddly enough there was her mother. Her mother opened her lips and mouthed a word.

Maria had lost a fair amount of blood, but her real problem was the shivering. And the microscopic devils—those wee animalcules—that had got into her and begun to multiply where the baby had been. Her body threw a fever to fight them off.
What, Mutti, what did you say?
She saw her mother’s lips open again, and this time she made out the message: “Forgive me.” And why not? What would it cost her now, forgiveness? Maria cried as she hadn’t since the day her mother let the first mate of the
Leibnitz
drag her off, not that you could have told it from looking at her, the way the tears ran in with the sweat that rolled from every pore. She was flat on her back, barely stirring, pale as water, all her ruddiness drained and puddled in her sheets. At a certain point, it seemed to her she was flying, actually flying through the air and over the ocean and all the way home to the unheard-of town in northernmost Schleswig-Holstein, where she had been born. God, it was so much more beautiful now, in her mind’s eye, than it ever had been when she lived there as a girl. How had she never seen the loveliness of the hills, the fields?

As Maria flew, so did Beatrice. She lay on her back on another table some twenty blocks away, arms and feet splayed like a corpse, eyes closed, heart beating steady and hard. Her dress and skirts lay in the corner in a grand hump nearly as big as she was, even without her in them. She was nearly naked, in just her petticoat, and even that was partway undone, revealing her belly. For all the world, it felt like her body was tipping or being tipped right off the tabletop, first one way, then the other. First, she had seemed to be rising, and finally she felt herself soaring through space. The sensation was delightful. She forgot the dim room she was in, despite the dreadful stink from a cauldron sitting on the potbelly stove. She even forgot why she was there.

Beatrice had liked Amy Zhang as soon as she saw her. Perhaps it was just because the girl had smiled so warmly and said, “Oh, hi, come in,” just as if they knew each other and Beatrice was expected. Beatrice was curious to find out how this white girl had ended up marrying a Chinese, but they had only got as far as trading names and where they were from when the doctor came in. He was tall, with his black hair pulled back in a pigtail, like many of the Chinese one saw downtown, but he wore a western suit. Amy asked Beatrice why she was there, and then, to Beatrice’s amazement, she conveyed some version of the story to the doctor in his own language. He nodded, and Amy told Beatrice to stick out her tongue. Dr. Zhang peered at it, then took her wrists, one after the other, and prodded them with his smooth fingers. Finally, after she had lain down on the table in the center of the room, he walked around her, pressing various spots on her arms, neck, legs and feet, many of which were oddly tender, as if she had bruises in exactly those places, though as far as she knew she did not. When she flinched, he nodded and smiled. Eventually, he spoke, and Amy translated while giving Beatrice a sponge bath with a warm, damp towel.

“There are reasons for a woman not to bleed. Are you having a baby?”

Beatrice was silent. She had thought that was obvious. Perhaps it was like Madame Restell, and they wouldn’t do it for fear of the laws that forbade women from meddling with their own bodies.

“Do you
want
to have a baby?” Amy asked.

“I’m not married.”

“Yes, but are you very sure you don’t want a baby?”

“I’m sure,” Beatrice blurted, and covered her face with her hands. Amy looked away. Beatrice wondered if she’d borne her husband children yet and what they would look like—half yellow, half white, queer eyes. She couldn’t imagine.

“There are things he can do so a baby is not welcome in your body. You must lie very still. The needles don’t hurt—or maybe just a little—and they don’t go very deep at all, just beneath the skin. But they stay there for a while. You must lie still and try to sleep, and on no account get up till I come for you. Otherwise, you could hurt yourself.”

And then the doctor made a pincushion of her. By the time he was through, there were more needles sticking up from her flesh than Beatrice could count: in her ears, her arms, her shins, her feet, her head and—the only ones that had hurt—her belly. Those went slightly deeper than the others, and at first she feared Dr. Zhang really would press them in until they reached her womb. Finally, the doctor pinched little balls of clay onto the ends of a couple of the needles and set them alight with a candle. They smoked rather than burned, and she felt warmth radiate through the metal pins into her stomach. She was surrounded by a haze of incense that was nothing like what they swung on censers on Sundays in church.