Whiter Than Snow (16 page)

The Negro had a daughter in the school. Minder thought she shouldn’t be there, learning with white people. The girl had come home from school with Emmett once, and Minder had told her to go home, that she wasn’t welcome. When the boy asked why, Minder replied roughly, “Black people aren’t good enough to mix with us. Don’t you know that? Where’s your learning gone to?”

He thought about Emmett now and hurried on. Because of the snow, he had spent more time than usual tending the graves. He could see the vast snow-covered slope gleaming beneath the Fourth of July Mine and hear the school bell ringing. He wondered what his grandson would have to tell him about the day, and suddenly, the gloom of the cemetery left Minder, and he rushed on, to be at home when the boy arrived.

The room was cold when Essie Snowball woke up, and under the sleep-warm quilts, she stretched, arching her back and thrusting out her arms and long legs, just like the lion she’d seen once, stretching in the barred orange-and-gold railroad car in Denver. She thought about the lion sometimes, wondering if he was still caged up, but then, wasn’t everybody? Not that Essie minded. There wasn’t much wrong with being fed and pampered and admired. Better than working in a factory, much better. In fact, Essie almost enjoyed it. She had it pretty good. She stretched again, thinking how quiet and peaceful the house was, although it was already noon and some of the other girls would be awake by now. Maybe it was the cold that made them stay abed, the cold and the snow. But the snow made things seem clean and pure to Essie. She laughed at the idea of a hookhouse being clean and pure.

Essie yawned and stepped out of bed onto the cold linoleum floor, which was worn in a pattern from the door to the bed to the washbasin. She wrapped the quilt around her. It was her favorite quilt, made in a Snowball pattern. The other girls thought she was silly, piecing quilts in her off-hours, but more than one of the hookers had asked to borrow a covering when the temperature fell to twenty degrees below zero. Essie thought she might be the only hooker in Colorado, maybe the entire West, who had a sewing machine in her room, covered with a lace tablecloth, of course, for what man wanted to go to bed with a whore when a sewing machine just like his wife’s or his mother’s was sitting in plain sight?

Sewing pleasured Essie. After all, she’d been a dressmaker since she was a girl, and she felt joy in taking scraps of material and turning them into a thing of beauty. The sewing was profitable, too, since she made dresses for the other girls, shifts that were easy to put on and take off. The two dollars she charged for each dress went into the bank. She might be the only whore in Colorado who had a bank account, too. The other girls frittered away their pay on ribbons and perfume and cheap silk bedspreads that ripped when a man caught them in his dirty boots.

“You’re queer,” Miss Fanny, the madam at the Pines, told her once as she watched Essie write down a sum in her bankbook. “I never knowed a whore to be so saving. It goes against their nature.” But Essie had a reason to be saving.

She went to the window now and looked out through the frost-etched glass at the vast white. Essie had never known there could be so much snow in a place, had been awed by it when she first came to Swandyke. She’d loved it, however, the white that fell as thick as the cotton batting in her quilts, covering the old sheds and ramshackled buildings and rusted-out machinery that littered the old mining town. It wasn’t like the snow she’d grown up with, which turned black the day after it fell as it mixed with the ashes and the dirt under the wheels of freight wagons and pushcarts. Even the cold felt good, so different from the streets of the Lower East Side of New York, which in winter made you shiver with the dampness that went into your bones, and in summer steamed and smelled of rotted food and horse droppings, unwashed bodies and fetid privies.

The snow was what had given Essie the idea for her name. All the girls changed their names, some calling themselves for film stars or heroines in the romantic novels that they read in the afternoons as they smoked and nibbled on chocolate drops, waiting for the hookhouse to open. Essie considered the names Mae Marsh and Gloria Swanson, because both of those actresses had dark hair and big black eyes like Essie’s. But she didn’t like pretending to be someone else, so after consideration, she picked Essie Snowball.

“Why not just Essie Snow?” Miss Fanny had asked her. At first, Miss Fanny had called the new hooker “Frenchy.” That was because when Essie went to her for a job, Miss Fanny asked if Essie had ever worked as a crib girl. The crib girls were the lowest form of prostitutes, often diseased and addicted to opiates.
“Oy veh!”
Essie muttered, and Miss Fanny asked what language that was. “French,” Essie replied quickly, because she did not know if Miss Fanny hired Jewish girls. And so the word went about that Miss Fanny had hired a French whore.

But Essie had liked Essie Snowball. Perhaps it was because it was derived from her real name, Esther Schnable, although nobody knew that. She’d been real particular about not telling her born name, because someone might connect it with Sophie. It wouldn’t do for anyone to know that Sophie Schnable was Essie Snowball’s daughter. Only the woman who tended Sophie knew who the girl’s mother was, although now that Sophie was six, it was only a matter of time before the girl herself figured it out. That was why Essie was putting aside money. In another year, she’d have enough to open up as a dressmaker in Denver, have enough to live on until the word got out that she could make a dress better than any of the seamstresses at Daniels & Fisher, and at half the price.

Essie dreamed of that day, but until then, Sophie was well cared for by Martha Perce. Martha gave it out that Sophie was her niece, that she was raising her up until her mother, a tubercular, recovered. That Martha was bringing up Sophie was a stroke of luck. Martha had been a confidence woman in Denver, living in the same hotel as Essie, and she’d made a mint of money bilking a banker. She’d thought the man would be too ashamed to admit he’d been taken by a woman he’d tried to seduce, but to Martha’s surprise, he’d gone to the police. “I got to get out of the business, or they’ll settle my hash mighty quick,” Martha told Essie when she came to say good-bye. Martha had packed her bag and was out the door when the thought occurred to her. “Say, why’n’t you and Sophie come along? You got nothing here, either, and they won’t be on the lookout for two women and a kid.”

So as Essie had no reason to stay, no place else to go, and owed the landlord for a week, she jumped the rent and followed Martha to Swandyke, setting herself up at the Pines and making enough to pay for Sophie’s keep. “Money I pay. It’s only right,” she told Martha. The woman had grown bored after a while, with only Sophie to tend, and so she had opened a restaurant, the Dinner Bell. Sophie was big enough to help now, to put out the forks and spoons and dry the dishes. Lately, however, Martha had gotten tired of running a restaurant and fretted about staying in Swandyke. Essie knew it wouldn’t be long before Martha herself left. Then Essie and Sophie would have to move to Denver.

On Sundays, when both the hookhouse and the restaurant were closed, Essie visited her daughter, who’d been told that Essie was a friend of her mother. When it was cold, the three met in the shuttered restaurant, but when the weather was nice, they picnicked in a remote spot in the mountains. Those were Essie’s happiest times, when Sophie toddled among the wildflowers, picking off the blooms and dropping them into Essie’s lap. Essie gave cunning little dresses to her daughter, made on her own fingers, and more than one mother had wondered how Martha’s girl could be so finely dressed. In fact, the wife of the Fourth of July superintendent had asked the name of Sophie’s dressmaker.

“I wouldn’t know, lady,” Martha had replied. “Sophie’s mama sends her clothes to me by postal.” When Martha told Essie the story, the two had laughed at the stuck-up woman’s interest.

“Why’n’t you tell her to give a look at the Pines? Why’n’t you?” Essie asked, and they laughed again.

At the window, Essie stared through the willows, which were just red sticks bare of leaves, looking down the trail the children took to school. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of Sophie, who was in first grade, as the little girl trudged along with her speller. Essie knew it was a speller, because she gave the words to Sophie when they met—
cat, hat, rat.
The girl almost always got them right, because she was bright. But then, her father had been bright—not that it had taken much intelligence to lure Essie away from the life on Orchard Street.

There were no children on the trail now. The school day was only halfway over. Essie knew that because the noon whistle had awakened her.

She yawned and scratched her stomach, then pulled her hand back, because she was sore from the beating she’d taken the night before. For no reason, that man had punched her in the stomach. She’d screamed, and he’d hit her a second time, and then pulled back his arm to fist her again, but the scream had brought Miss Fanny and the other girls. They hustled him out of the hookhouse and told him never to come back. Essie ruminated over the fact that none of the johns had come to her rescue, only the women, but she wasn’t surprised. She didn’t expect much from men.

The beating had come as a shock, however, because it was rare. Essie felt safe in the whorehouse, safer than she’d been in the days she’d worked over the sewing machine in the dress factory. The man who owned the place would lean against the girls as they worked, putting his hands on their breasts, and his sons would lie in wait for the women when they went to the bathroom. More than one girl had wet herself as she sat at her machine, waiting for the men to get bored with staring at the employees and go back to their offices. Essie knew of one seamstress who gave in, and months later, a different girl was sitting at her sewing machine. It was told around the factory that the first one had fallen into the river and drowned.

The son with the hair in his nose and ears had come after Essie, all honey-mouthed, with a pomp of manner. She tried to ignore him, but he wouldn’t leave her alone. So when he slipped his fingers into her shirtwaist and tugged at her breast, she grabbed his hand, white and slippery as lard, told him to go shave the hair in his nose, and laughed at him, laughed so hard and so loud that the other girls looked up from their machines. When they saw the man, his face flushed and perspiring, trying to disentangle his hand from Essie’s blouse, they laughed, too.

“Your ears you should shave, too,” another girl called, and the man glanced around to see who had spoken, but all the seamstresses were bent over their machines.

Of course, others had been let go for less, and there were bets about how long Essie would keep her job, but it didn’t matter, because she left of her own volition not long afterward.

Essie massaged her neck, which was sore, too. She wondered what had gotten into the man who’d hit her, because most of the johns were polite. They were miners and laborers from the gold dredge, docile, well-mannered unless they were liquored up. They came for the intended purpose, but some just wanted to talk, to be with a woman for a time, pretend she was a sweetheart. They were lonely, lonelier even than the hookers. Essie talked to them about their growing-up times, their dreams, their miseries. Hooking wasn’t a bad life. In fact, it was a pretty good life. And she had a room all to herself! There’d been a time, back when she slept with eight people in a three-room tenement, that she’d never even dreamed of such a luxury.

Of course, Essie had her regulars, and they brought her presents—cigarettes and chewing gum, bracelets and silk stockings. And they were so respectful—well, most of them anyway. She liked that about the clientele at the Pines. They made you feel you were doing them a favor. And in return, Essie made them feel they were her special customers. “This hour, I have been in heaven,” she would tell them.

Dropping the curtain, Essie turned and let the quilt slip onto the floor, and then she made up the bed. The sheets were dingy, but they were almost clean. Miss Fanny didn’t like to change them more than once a week unless it was absolutely necessary. Essie folded the quilt and set it at the end of the bed. It wouldn’t do to have some impatient man stomp it in his hurry. She opened the window a little to let out the stale air, then shined up the room, dusted the chipped enamel bed, the dresser. She straightened the calendar and the picture of a bowl of fruit, and set the washbasin and pitcher and dirty towel beside the door. Just the week before, she’d taken down the ruffles that she had pinned over the door and on the cord of the single lightbulb that hung in the center of the room, washed and ironed them, and now the ruffles hung as stiff as petticoats. She wasn’t slovenly like some of the other girls. Oh no. Most men didn’t notice, but some did, and they preferred Essie for that. In fact, most men preferred her. She was the most popular girl at the Pines. “Why, you could work in any whorehouse in Colorado,” a john told her by way of compliment. And Essie had taken it for one.

Of course, the remark was no surprise to Essie, who had always appealed to men. She was something of a beauty, with her long neck and long fingers, and exotic-looking, a little like Theda Bara, who Essie thought was also Jewish. But it wasn’t just Essie’s looks. Nor was it her figure, which was still young and ripe, although she was closer to thirty than she was to twenty. No, it was the air of happiness that surrounded her. Essie’s smile could make the sun shine, and when she laughed, she made a sound like tinkling bells. Her happiness felt like good fortune, and it made a man glad to be with her. Why, if you hadn’t known better—and none of the men had—you’d have thought she’d been raised up without a care in the world. “Essie, I bet you never knowed a bad day in your life, not even one,” a john had told her.

“Why, aren’t you just right! Aren’t you!”

But he was wrong. I should live so lucky, Essie thought.

The first memory Esther Schnable had was of her mother, Emma, lying on the table moaning. The neighbor women were crowded into the kitchen, watchful, nervous, critical, as the midwife fussed and coaxed the woman. Esther’s mother wouldn’t have a doctor. It wasn’t proper for a man to see her like that, and besides, a doctor charged ten dollars. If she was lucky, the midwife would ask only two dollars, maybe one, and she’d clean up the baby and check in later to see how the mother was doing. All the women felt that way.

Emma sucked in her breath and twisted her face in pain, raising her back a little, then relaxing as the spasm passed, and the women clucked and smiled and recalled their own labors.

“With Etta, a whole day it took. Pains like you never got,” a woman bragged, pulling her old crocheted shawl around her, although it was hot in the kitchen.