Sex Wars (34 page)

“So you are for divorce reform?”

“Of course. I’m a divorced woman. Someone must have told you that already.”

Susan nodded. “The Boston ladies have been writing me missives.”

Elizabeth waited until Amelia had cleared the course and was about to bring in the pie, fruit and cheese. “Mrs. Woodhull, what do you need from us?”

Woodhull cocked her head to the side on her swanlike neck. “I need your advice and wisdom. I need to find a reliable biographer, not a scandalmonger, to write up a biography of me for my campaign. Perhaps it can replace all those wild rumors floating about.”

Susan and Elizabeth conferred. Finally Elizabeth said, “I believe Theodore Tilton could do it. He writes vividly and swiftly. For years, he wrote Henry Ward Beecher’s essays and articles for the
Independent.
Beecher is famous for missing deadlines.”

“If you approach him, it would be better not to mention my name,” Susan said. “He threw me out of his house recently, when I attempted to see his wife, Lib. I was worried about her.”

“Threw you out of his house? What occasioned such violence?”

Elizabeth told the story of their night in Brooklyn with Laura Bullard, Theo and Lib Tilton. Woodhull listened, fascinated. “That explains what rumors I heard about Beecher in Washington. But if his affairs are known, are they accepted by the members of his church?”

“It is ‘known’ as a rumor,” Susan said primly, “but such a rumor that anyone who needs to dismiss it can. He’s the most popular preacher in the States. His sermons are printed in the papers. He mints money by lecturing. A whole publishing house depends on him. He’s the engine behind the God is Love movement in Protestant churches, the liberalizing of Calvinist dogma—”

“He has no theology or philosophy,” Elizabeth said, “Only sentimentality.
But he’s all the more popular for that. His congregation numbers three thousand and includes the most powerful and influential men in politics and commerce in Brooklyn and even in Manhattan.”

“Perhaps we are all doomed to be gossiped about on this plane of existence. In any event, you both agree that Theodore Tilton would be the first author to speak to about my biography?”

Elizabeth nodded. “I no longer completely trust him, but he’s a fast and competent writer and won’t be shocked by whatever you tell him.”

“Good,” Woodhull said. “I’ve heard about him. I’m eager to meet him. He sounds quite…interesting.”

F
REYDEH FELT GUILTY
keeping Sammy out of school, but if they did not follow up on their lead quickly, it would vanish as all the others had. She would make it up to Sammy, she would see he got back in school when they had found Shaineh and her little girl. She could not go on sacrificing Sammy to Shaineh.

He was making his way from stable to stable, slowly. She had to keep buying him cigarettes all the lads were smoking so he could offer them to the stableboys to befriend them. Sometimes beer was necessary. She did not have to worry about Sammy getting drunk, as he despised drunkards—men who had often beaten him in his street urchin days. She worried more about his being tempted to join one of the gangs that preyed lucratively on neighborhoods. They offered a step up to boys from the streets and the blocks—a social network, an identity, a means of making money, a way of advancing. As they grew, they might move into firefighting and then into politics. Many of the Tweed men had started in local gangs. If she had not taken him in and he had survived those vulnerable years, he would probably have joined a gang and would now be a full member of the Sheeny mob or the Whyos or the River Pirates. His hero would be a bank robber, locally famous and much admired.

“Do you envy those stableboys?” she asked him at supper, after a day he had spent in five different stables, hanging around the guys who worked there.

“Being around horses and horse shit all day and all night? Nah. I don’t like horses…they’re too big. I don’t want to climb up on one, and I sure don’t want one of them stepping on me. They can cripple you for life.”

Lacking Sammy’s help, she was up early and up late fulfilling orders. She pressed Kezia into service with the packing. At night she was almost too exhausted to sleep. There were a hundred stables to check out in their target area, more if it turned out that they were wrong about the probable location. Every family who could afford it kept a horse. Every time Sammy appeared at the end of a day of plying stableboys with cigarettes or beer, she greeted him with the same question, “Did you learn anything?” and every day she got the same answer as he stumbled in, worn out, reeking of tobacco and sometimes of beer.

The sketch of Shaineh had grown worn and greasy and was tearing along its folds, so Kezia copied it and made new pictures for each of them to carry, with lighter hair. When she was working with Kezia, Freydeh taught her songs she had heard her own mother sing—Yiddish songs, songs from services in the shul, an occasional Russian or Polish ditty that had passed into shtetl culture. Kezia had a reedy voice but singing made her happy as they worked together by candlelight. How many years it had been since Freydeh sang as she worked. Her mother sang constantly. Frey-deh’s father teased her mother, saying she was half finch and he would get some seeds to feed her instead of human food.

She told Kezia stories about her mother and father, her sisters and brothers, telling Kezia that they were her kin now. When she introduced a new name to Kezia, Kezia always asked the same thing, “Would they like me?” Always Freydeh assured the girl that they would indeed love her.

She was sending money to Sara so that soon her sister and brother-in-law and their three children could come over. Sara’s husband Asher wanted to bring his father too, but she told him he would have to earn that money here and send it back. They had changed their minds about emigrating, for they wrote that things were getting worse. They were afraid. The money orders Freydeh sent when she could were their lifeline, Sara wrote. She had stopped berating Freydeh for having lost Shaineh and now mostly wrote how she wanted to come to the
goldeneh medina.
Freydeh replied it wasn’t so golden over here, believe her, but that if everyone in the family worked, they could get ahead. The letters took so long that often
they crossed in the mails. She always read Sara’s letters to Sammy and to Kezia.

“What do they do in the Pale?” Sammy asked.

“Sara took over my mother’s vodka business. Her husband Asher works for a miller. Here they’ll have to do whatever they can.”

“Is Sara strong like you or tiny like Shaineh?”

“She’s a good-sized woman. She’s not as strong as me—I got Papa’s strength—but she’s no fragile flower. I scarcely know Asher or their children. The oldest was just four when Moishe and I left. She had a kid crawling around who died. The two others weren’t even in her belly yet.”

Sunday afternoon she was working on the vulcanization and Kezia was sitting singing monotonously to herself a song she had learned in school about a farmer—a Yankee song that Kezia did not understand. When Freydeh, always trying to improve her English, asked Kezia what a “dell” was, Kezia had no idea. She said it maybe was a cottage? Maybe where the family lived?

When Sammy burst in, Freydeh turned from her molding. “Is something wrong?”

“I think I found that toff.” Sammy threw himself down in a chair. He must have run for blocks. She brought him a glass of water from the pitcherful she had boiled. The water had been making people sick lately. A man from Hungary who had been a doctor told her to boil it before drinking it. She could not see what good that would do, but she obeyed, and none of them had gotten sick.

“Where is he? Tell me everything! Had they ever seen Shaineh?”

“They don’t know where the family lives, but it has to be nearby. The stables are behind a row of houses on Twenty-ninth Street, between Broadway and Sixth—not far from that toff restaurant Delmonico’s. There are at least three men who use the phaeton. Their last name is Kum-ble. The stableboys say they’re rolling in money.”

“What does their money come from?”

“They don’t know.”

“At last we have a name. Alfred or Albert Kumble. But how can we find him?”

“Easy. We go to Billyboy Hanrahan and look at a city directory. Just bring him a donation and he’ll let you look up Kumble.”

She kissed Sammy on the brow. “You are a good, good boy. Now you go back to school.”

“No! Once we have his address, I watch his house. None of them ever
seen Shaineh, so I doubt he keeps her there. If we want to find her, we have to follow him. He must have her in a room in a boardinghouse or a brothel.”

She set out with Sammy for the ward boss, who held open house Sunday afternoons when he wasn’t putting on a picnic or a dance. She had never met him, but of course she knew him on sight. The Twelfth Ward boss was an Irish fellow married to a German woman, thus combining the two biggest blocks of voters in the ward. Billyboy Hanrahan was a bald man with enormous hands and broad shoulders and a lopsided nose, a remnant of days when he had led turf battles in the streets. He was a shrewd, jovial man with a reputation for being a good family type, faithful to his wife and loving to his eight surviving children. His attitude in the ward was paternal but tough. He laid down the law and he expected to be obeyed, but he also discharged largesse in the form of putting pressure on landlords now and then to prevent evictions, getting some money to widows and their children, feeding the hungry in hard times, keeping the criminal element within accepted bounds. He expected the vote to be delivered unanimously for Tammany, and he paid for extra votes. Generally if people had not been on the wrong side of his temper, they liked him. When the city outlawed pigs, he helped distribute lumber so people could pen them in their privy yards instead of letting them run loose in the streets to eat offal and garbage, as had been the rule for decades. He knew people needed their pigs, so he helped them keep them under cover. The police weren’t about to chase pigs unless they were in the street, in which case there would be a big police barbeque, but the poor family would lose their pork.

She was nervous going to him, even with Sammy at her side. She wore her good dress—the least mended and bedraggled—and pinned her hair up and put on her only hat. They took him a present of five dollars.

He was holding forth in a saloon named the Belching Cow, at a table at the back with henchmen in attendance and his son at his side, a boy of sixteen or seventeen, a smaller version of his father except for an enormous shock of dark brown hair. They stood in the line waiting for his attention, as mothers described daughters in trouble, sons needing work, as workmen who hadn’t been paid complained, as a dispute between a laundress and a client over a torn shirt was settled.

The henchman to his left took the offerings of money or occasionally meat, a chicken, a pair of shoes, a gold chain. The gold chain was left by a tough who simply laid it down and left. Then at last it was their turn. She
let Sammy do the talking. The boss was glad to let them look at the directory, and wished them luck in finding the lost sister. “These filthy rich toffs, they come and take our women and use them like rags. I hope you deal with him when you find her.” He made a quick motion across his throat. “Do it careful-like and nobody the wiser.”

Sammy nodded. They looked into the directory and there he was, Alfred Benedict Kumble, merchant. He was listed with a Josiah Francis Kumble, also a merchant, Benjamin Augustus Kumble and Abigail Fielding Kumble, widow. His mother? Sammy wrote the address on an old numbers tab he found on the floor. Somebody had played the numbers, lost and tossed away his receipt.

They had Kumble’s address, but Freydeh could not let Sammy spend his days and nights watching the house. She insisted he return to school. They did not yet even know which of the young men who came and went was Alfred. There were three brothers, Josiah, Benjamin and Alfred. Twice they saw an old lady venture out, probably Abigail. A much younger woman also appeared with one of the young men—the bearded one—and once with the old lady. A nurse appeared with a perambulator with a baby inside and they saw a little boy looking out a window.

They discussed whether to dismiss the man who had appeared with the presumed mother of the baby and the young boy.

“That he’s married don’t mean he can’t have a mistress,” Sammy argued.

“Who could afford two households?”

“He’s probably only keeping Shaineh in one room. And there’s at least three incomes going into that house, right? Plus maybe the dead father left them well fixed. I say there’s money there. I’ve counted four servants besides the nurse with the baby. There may be more.”

“They have the whole house to themselves, that’s true.” Freydeh rubbed her hands together. “I feel like we’re getting close.”

They took turns occasionally following the men. Two of them—the heavyset one and the one with chin whiskers—went off to an establishment on the East River waterfront, a Federal-style building of brick four stories high. Sammy found a sign: Upham and Kumble, merchants. Apparently they dealt with imports or exports, although of what Freydeh had no idea. The third young man, the tallest of the brothers, was a broker who operated out of a small office near Gold Street. He spent much of his time on the street talking intently with one or another man, and some of it eating or drinking with other men in the establishments that clustered
around the Exchange. He was a snappier dresser than the other two, but they were obviously brothers and the brief description the baker had given could fit any of them.

Sammy got excited the first evening he saw the spider phaeton go out from the stable, and he trotted quickly to follow it as best he could through the crowded streets. However, it turned out to contain the mother of the young children and one of the export-import brothers. They stopped at a private club where some gala was being held. Obviously the phaeton was shared by all the brothers. They also had a runabout used for family outings.

Sometimes Freydeh imagined confronting the brothers, one at a time, and demanding she be taken to her sister. But they were Yankees and she was a Jew, they were rich and she was barely out of poverty, they were native-born and she was an immigrant with an accent as thick as a slice of liverwurst. She would only get into trouble, and whichever brother had Shaineh locked up would simply move her. They attempted to keep their surveillance unobtrusive. Indeed, there were always loiterers on the street, men out of work, servants stealing a little time off, couples making an assignation, boys delivering meat or milk or bread. Once a telegram was delivered and the brother who was a broker went rushing off in a cab to his little office.

They argued about which brother was the likely one and came to the conclusion that it was the broker, since he was the least conservative dresser of the brothers. Then one evening Freydeh was lurking outside when she saw the married couple arguing upstairs, exchanging heated words until the husband—the bearded brother—stormed out of the room and then out of the house. She followed him at a discreet distance until he went into a brothel two blocks down. Could Shaineh be there?

It was a couple of days before Freydeh could approach the madam, presumably to offer her a sample of their condoms to try. The woman had no one in the house who resembled Shaineh. She said taking in someone who wasn’t willing was more trouble than she needed. She waved her hand heavy with rings. “I have girls trying to get into my house every week. They know it’s safe and lucrative here and I take care of my girls. I pity the poor streetwalkers with no one to look out for their health or safety, any man’s prey, and the ones with a pimp are worse off than those without. I’ll try your product. I don’t want disease spread in my house. Word gets around and then you lose the carriage trade.”

After that they took the married brother off their list. If he went to a brothel, he wasn’t keeping Shaineh. They concentrated on the other two.
If only one of them would call the other by name in the street, they would be settled. The boys in the stable only knew the men as Kumbles.

Then Sammy had an idea. They got him into the most respectable clothes they could find and he waited outside the export-import office, then strolled up to the fat one. “Why, aren’t you Alfred Kumble?”

The man swung around to stare at him. “You’ve mistaken me for my younger brother. Do you know him?”

“Surely I do,” Sammy said. “Sorry. I’m a bit weak-eyed and you look so much like him.”