The Harlot’s Pen (2 page)

He looked up at the balcony, once again intensely scanning the entire population of the upper seats, committing their faces to memory. For a moment his eyes met mine, and it seemed he narrowed his glance at me, an eyebrow raised. But it could have been an illusion, for he then turned back to Mrs. Whitney.

At the first opening in the crowd, we finally took our advantage and fled. I turned back once more, to see Mrs. Whitney still standing proud, her hands cuffed behind her back, surrounded by men in dark suits with darker intent.

We took the next ferry back to San Francisco without any further thought of lunch. I stood on the deck of the ferry as the crisp hills of San Francisco came closer, the other two having taken refuge in the seating cabin. The wind pushed back my hair, and I put my hand up to hold my hat. The fur was soft against my fingers. I had a vision of myself flinging it into the waves.

Ravenous upon my return, I wrote feverishly in my journal, detailing the day quickly before Sam came home.

* * * *

November 14, 1919

“The women of the Y.W.C.A., the Associated Charities, and the San Francisco Center of the California Civic League, who worked so hard to relieve the distress of women thrown out of employment when the Barbary Coast was cleaned up in 1913, probably will not go into relief work in the present cleanup campaign.

“The results in 1913 were discouraging, even though Mrs. Genevieve Allen, executive secretary of the Civic League Center says her organization spent about $600 in the campaign.”
San Francisco Chronicle
, 1918

Where had all the prostitutes gone? My memory of the woman on the corner in Oakland on our way to the rally, the sneering, longing look at my hat and muff, still haunted me.

Several days after the rally, Leticia and I walked down Market Street after a grand outing of shopping at The Emporium for a warm winter coat. Hard as winter was to imagine on this typically glorious fall day, we knew that rain and darkness were only weeks away, and the best styles and colors would soon be gone. So Leticia, who so rarely bought anything, and I, using Sam’s money, took the day to stroll Market Street in search of finery and bargains.

Every day the streets seemed to grow more congested, cars and horses battling for the supremacy of the road, and we pedestrians had to be constantly on our guard. The Policettes, as the lady traffic cops were called, had been ambulance
chauffeuses
during the war, and though they did their best to keep the walkers safe and the vehicles in some sense of order, those drivers of automobiles had convinced themselves that they were the true modern kings of the road.

The sun was shining, the sky was absurdly blue, and the dust of six months without rain, kicked up by the endless parade of vehicles, wearied our eyes and made us thirsty as the desert. We turned off of Market Street to stop at a teahouse on Ellis, and that was when I asked the question: where were the dancing girls and harlots of Ellis, and of Mason, and of… all the streets of the unappetizingly-named Tenderloin?

Leticia and I settled into the teahouse, and while we waited for the waitress to bring us some seltzers and cake, I asked that very question again. For it was only eighteen months ago that the Barbary Coast and Tenderloin houses had closed for good and this fragile atmosphere of wholesomeness had been established. They’d tried before, as I remembered from the battles and skirmishes so vividly reported in the
Chronicle
, the fiery editorials by Mr. William Hearst, and the polemics by that horrible preacher against the poor women. But this time they had driven a stake in the heart of the red-light business and turned out a thousand women, at least, into the streets.

“Well,” Leticia said, in her measured, thoughtful way, “if they had been turned out into the streets, then they would be in the streets, no? They certainly aren’t being taken in by the Associated Charities or the Civic League. I’m sure they’re still out there, selling themselves for enough to keep body and soul together. Unlike that unfortunate girl in Oakland, here we simply don’t see them.”

The
Chronicle
had run an article the previous year about the Civic League’s decision not to help the displaced girls. Evidently, the last time they’d helped, back before the War, the Civic League hadn’t gotten the humble thanks they’d expected. I quoted the article to Leticia.

“Six hundred dollars!” I did not try to keep the disgust from my voice. “The Civic League’s largesse! The girls said they could make more selling soft drinks at the old Barbary Coast establishments than they could make at the paltry wages the businesses were offering.”

We sat in silence, contemplating our seltzers. In my days before Sam, before I found myself limited to the occasional society column ditty, I would have written a scathing article for the
Bulletin
on the fate of the women. But I was retired from public employment, as suited the consort, if not officially the wife, of a rising businessman, and I chafed against the limits to my pen.

“Will you write up the rally?” Leticia asked. “You should, you know. We mustn’t cower.”

I shook my head. “I can’t. You know that, Letty. After the failure of the minimum wage, I don’t dare agitate for anything that would set Sam off. But it does irk me to feel so powerless.”

She had the self-restraint not to comment. She knew that Sam was the devil incarnate when he was angry, and his newly rediscovered respectability made him sensitive to any publicity. And yet, despite his heightened social concerns, he hadn’t married me, a fact that was only known to Leticia and Jacqueline.

We went back to our seltzers, but my mind was burning. I had inherited an obsession with the minimum wage for women, and had turned my loneliness into belonging to a cause. And I knew firsthand the precarious security that a man’s money gave us. Cast into the world without funds or position, a woman was at the mercy of a disapproving society and a tight-fisted employer. It rankled me to have done so little, while the forces of reactionary politics and stultifying moralism were united in keeping women from a living wage.

Again my mind froze on the image of the weather-worn whore. Although my own moral journey had been fraught, I had been sheltered by social standing and a talented pen. But without writing I had no podium to speak from, and Sam was adamant that I stay out of the public eye. I owed my current warm coat to his benevolence, and kept it with my obedience. This could not last.

“I will do something.”

* * * *

November 15, 1919

I sent my poem, the one I had pressed into the hand of Mrs. Whitney’s aide,
The Rape of the Working Woman,
to Mr. Fremont Older. He had gone over to the
Call
, to work for William Randolph Hearst. All the Progressives were crying, saying it was the end of progressive journalism, but I still held out hope. Although I had never met him personally, I was certain that he would know my work from
Bulletin
articles of years past, and I cherished the notion that he would see the merit in the poem.

I reasoned that Sam didn’t read the
Call
. And I used a
nom de plume
so as to further disguise my identity. Sam, a young executive at Nathan-Dohrmann, had recently been appointed to its Board of Directors and was now out at meetings half the week. He rarely had the time to read anything anymore. It was strange to see the two faces of Sam Toppings: Corporate Director and former Progressive Party leader. The passionate man I had fallen in love with was fading, and the angry Corporate Director side was clearly winning.

And to think he called
me
inconstant! Truly, men were far more changeable than women. Just because they wore the same fashions year after year didn’t make them steadfast—just badly dressed.

I wondered what Mr. Older would say. I kept my fingers crossed.

* * * *

November 20, 1919

I could have held my breath. Mr. Older’s answer read, in its entirety:

“Dear Mrs. Toppings: No. Why don’t you send it to the
Argus
up in Petaluma—they’ll print anything. —- Fremont Older”

Now that was terse! Fremont Older had always been the champion of women, especially the downtrodden. He had published Alice Smith, An Outcast at the Christian Door, a serial by Ernest Hopkins (although Sophie Treadwell wrote it.) Sophie had pretended to be a prostitute and had gone from church to church to test how the San Francisco charities would treat an outcast. We knew the results of that venture—
The Civic League was so disappointed…
No other paper would have run the serial. But that was before he jumped ship, so I supposed, like Sam, he knew which side his bread was buttered on.

I hid my disappointment as best I could, but when Sam returned miraculously for dinner for the first time that week, my gloom was obvious enough to penetrate his fog of self-involvement.

“You’re looking dour, Violetta. It would please me better to come home from a long day to see a smile.”

I tried, feeling a grimace stretch my mouth. It was effective enough not to be replaced by a stinging slap. If only I could get some of my work published again, as I had before I met him, I might be independent again. Not that I would leave him—I would just feel less helpless.

I supposed I could go work someplace. But no one would hire a married woman, and right now everyone supposed me married—and it would be worse if they knew the truth.

* * * *

November 22, 1919

I took tea at Jacqueline’s with Leticia, which necessarily meant that I had given some thought to my winter wardrobe. Jacqueline told us that skirts would go shorter in the coming year, and straighter. It was truly hard to imagine how such bold trends got started, and now they seemed to be on an unstoppable trajectory. Leticia, of course, was always so sensibly dressed, but then, she was truly the most sensible of all of us. I was convinced she would wear her sable-collared jacket until the end of days. I supposed motherhood did that to one.

My own mother would have reeled in horror if she had seen what I wore, my legs bared almost to mid-calf, but then, my mother reeled in horror at me since I had left home, regardless. A woman scorned was meant to cower in her home until redeemed by another man’s hand and did not fling herself amorally into the café world, splashing her name on public newspapers with anti-domestic screeds. It really wasn’t what I wore, exactly, that bothered her so. It was what my dress seemed to mean.

* * * *

November 25, 1919

I sent the poem to the
Argus
. Despite the humiliation of having to stoop to a rural paper, I hoped that Mr. Older was right, that they would publish anything. I changed my name on it to V. Strone, sort of an approximation of Violetta Stone, so as not to use "Toppings," Sam’s name. I could not think of his reaction to seeing my name in print again, never mind
his
.

There had been a time when my name, my byline, meant something. I had not, of course, used my first name, as no paper would have published a serious article by someone named Violetta, but “By: V. Stone” had been a signature for thoughtful, incisive reports from the trenches of class warfare.

Gone now were the heady days of working shoulder to shoulder with the leaders of the Great Minimum Wage campaign. Admittedly, I had felt somewhat like a lap dog, following Miss Valeska Bary as she led us through the machinations of the Industrial Welfare Commission, hoping the raise the rate to something women could live on. But of course, as everyone knew, the bid failed. And most galling, the principal cause of the failure had been Sam’s boss’s brother, Fred Dohrmann. He had said he was only on the commission to keep it from “doing something wild.” All that work, and it had been for nothing.

Adding insult to injury, Miss Bary had been very much less than enthusiastic about my poem. “Very well written, my dear, though I don’t know much about rhymes and similes and such. But I must say, no one will publish it—which will be a mercy.”

A mercy? I was dumb-struck. But she had more. “If someone did publish it, you would be hopelessly ridiculed.”

“Well, if I am, so what?” I had fired back. “If we don’t strike a note publically, we are only smooth-talking cowards!”

I had not heard from her since Miss Bary had gone to Washington DC, where she had been appointed to the War Labor Policies Board. An exemplary woman, of course, and I missed her. And naturally, without her, the Industrial Welfare Commission didn’t stand a chance.

* * * *

November 29, 1919

No word from the
Argus
. Sam had begun talking about going to Argentina. Nathan-Dohrmann was opening a branch of the store down there or some such thing. I mentioned offhandedly that I was sure I would learn Spanish very quickly, and he gave me an odd look. Then he said, “Why would you learn Spanish?”

“To be able to make myself understood in Argentina.” He looked very uncomfortable. I didn’t dare ask him directly, but he obviously was thinking of not taking me with him.

I spent several hours ruminating on the idea of being abandoned yet again. At nearly thirty, I was no longer young. I could not spend a year or three practicing my fifteen-ball pool skills on my father’s old pool table as I had the first time I was left by a man. I was a grown woman now. A woman alone was not a secure woman, unless she either had family money or was a devoted career woman. But I knew I mustn’t pity myself, as I did have my mother’s home, perish the thought of moving back, my little fund from my father, and my pen.

* * * *

December 10, 1919

Still no word from the
Argus
. I wondered if my poem had been lost in the mail and considered sending another pamphlet, but my pride prevented me. Instead I sought news of Mrs. Whitney, and was further dismayed to learn that she languished still in the Oakland jail and had not been offered bail.