Belle Cora: A Novel (39 page)

I showed her the miniature of my mother. “How dear!” exclaimed
Mrs. Shea. “A window on lost times. Oh, I wish I had a likeness of my mother. I know that room. Mr. Holland stays there now.”

She told me about her life, a few years of it spent in Ireland and the rest in New York. Her family had been poor, and her story was full of untimely deaths from illnesses and work accidents. Her surviving brothers and sisters were all good honest working people. She told me a little about what life was like in the house now. The young boarders were good sorts who spent most of their evenings around this table, joking or singing songs, and holidays were celebrated here in a splendid, warm, familylike way.

Perhaps an hour had gone by with all of this, and I decided I must return to business. I asked her if she knew the way to 160 Anthony Street.

“Of course, your brother is sick—you’ll be wanting to go to him. Let me think,” she said. “You can walk it if you’re not too tired, and if you get lost, well, if you get lost, ask any man you see wearing a leather apron”—suddenly her fair wide face, with its features strangely positioned near its center, became pink with emotion—“or a man holding a broom or a trowel or a shovel; he may or may not be able to tell you, but he won’t try to take a mean advantage of you, like a man whose only tool is a black cane with a brass grip will, if you ask me, who knows something about it. Ask the hot-corn girl or the woman who sells apples; she’ll tell you, and she won’t want anything for it other than maybe for you to buy an apple, and sure you’ll be no worse off for that.” Her voice shook. She was angry, but I guessed not at me—or only a little at me, for my divided loyalties and misplaced suspicions. “Better to ask the apple woman than some man who thinks himself the lord of creation because his mother never had to sell apples, and looks on a poor girl’s worry and confusion as another gift to him from the gods.”

And she gave me the directions. I thanked her and got up to leave.

“Wait,” she said. “I know that place where your brother is. It’s a bad house on a bad street. I wouldn’t let my brother stay there. Get him out. If you must stay in New York for any time, I can tell you where to find cheap board and lodgings.”

She left to fetch a pencil and some paper. Then, reciting addresses slowly, she gave me the name of a house where six girls who sewed hats in a factory lived, and another where a widow took in lodgers.

If I had any clothes to sell or to buy, or if I needed to borrow money or to pawn something, I should go to her uncle’s secondhand shop on Orange Street, just below Walker—she gave me the address—but I must stay clear of the secondhand stores farther down on Orange: they were all run by Jews. What’s more, and this was very important, I must introduce myself to Con Donoho and his wife, Mrs. Donoho, whom I would find at their grocery, also on Orange Street. Donoho was the Sixth Ward street inspector, and might find my brother a job when he recovered; in any case, he was a good man to pay one’s respects to, and I could endear myself to him by using her name—I should introduce myself to the wife first, and make it clear that I was a factory girl. “And it’s all right that you’re a Protestant, if you’re civil. But don’t say your name is Godwin, for the love of heaven. Not to hurt your feelings, but in the Points, only niggers remember that name fondly.”

Since she had brought up the Godwin name, I thought I might as well ask her: “Do you know what happened to them—my grandfather—his wife—my brothers?”

The hard look in her eyes melted. “I heard he was ruined in the Panic and died of a broken heart. That’s all I know.”

I WALKED, FOLLOWING MRS. SHEA
’
S DIRECTIONS
. Step by step the streets were more crowded with people and incidents, with fewer carriages, more cheap goods being lifted for skeptical examination by short stout women, more children selling things. I came to Chatham Square, a middling neighborhood frequented by rich and poor, with a circus-midway atmosphere created by garish advertising placards and by the presence of men who stood in front of stores praising the goods within.

Another turn, another block, and I did not have to ask, I knew I was in Five Points. Children carrying scraps of wood in their arms, dandified young hooligans, Jews in skullcaps, Negroes pushing carts, staggering drunkards, dispirited men with heavy burdens strapped to their backs, women holding wicker baskets against their hips, men with patches on their trousers, people arguing at the top of their voices in the street—such folk had made up a fraction of the population wherever I had been in New York until now: here the proportions were reversed: here they lived in all their multitudes; this was the source; this was their home. They rushed
toward me, they passed me from behind (sometimes tarrying to cast a curious, hostile, or lascivious glance my way), going in and out of places that stenciled wooden signs identified as dime-a-night lodging houses, cheap restaurants, saloons, groceries, old-clothes stores, coal yards and horse sheds. Patches of color, paint from another century, clung to the gray clapboards of which most of the buildings to my left and right were made. In every tenth window broken glass had been replaced with a plank or canvas or newspaper. A long ridge of trash ran along the middle of the street, and the mire on either side was imprinted with crisscrossing wheel ruts.

THOUGH THE CROWD WAS SO DENSE
that sometimes I could not see from one side of the street to the other, there were no friendly apple women in sight. Two women stood near a doorway and I decided to ask them where 160 Anthony was. I noticed after I had changed course to walk toward them that they were sharing a bottle, and were only half dressed, and by the time I was close enough to speak to them I had no doubt they were prostitutes. They were both quite young, about my own age, and homely: one thin, missing a front tooth, the other fat with curly blond hair and fair skin but the features of a colored woman. Only my fear of insulting them kept me from turning and walking away. I asked my question. The skinny one said this was 160 Anthony—we were all standing in front of it! I asked if there was a lodging house for men here, and said I was looking for my brother. They asked me his name. When I answered, the thin one, whose missing tooth gave her a juicy lisp, said, “Lewish!” She passed the bottle to the fat one and grabbed my hand. Her grip was tight. She pulled me to a flight of stairs and started down it. “Come on,” she said, when I resisted.

“What do you mean? Where are we going? Where are you taking me?”

“To yer brother! Lewis! You’ll be wanting to see yer brother, won’t ya?” Under the lisp, she had a brogue as heavy as Mrs. Shea’s.

She took me down the staircase, which had one turn in it, into a basement with a low ceiling and many beds: some on legs; more in shelflike tiers, one atop another, set in the walls, canvas hammocks strung between two wooden rails. There were also straw mattresses on the floor. I could imagine how crowded this place would be when night came, and
how dear unconsciousness would be then. The air stank, like all the air of the neighborhood, but with mildew, vomit, and drink added to the usual aromas of sewage and rot. On the walls near the floor were wavy stains of varying hues, the geological record of yesteryear’s floods.

There were only a handful of men in the wretched room now, most of them pickling in liquor, yet still the girl had to point my brother out before I saw him. He was like everything else here, a chaos of muddy hues. Then his name was torn from my chest—“Lewis! Lewis!” I spoke it not so much to alert him to my presence as to conjure him into continued being, and I ran to him, still crying his name. I saw when I stood over him that I had been right to come. He had been cut badly in at least two places, with bandages around a wound at his waist and others around his right arm, and he was sick, very sick, from the festering of his wounds, and this was no place for him to recover. But I could see that someone was taking care of him. The bandages, though less clean than we like bandages to be today, had been changed recently, and the bedclothes were clean and dry. “Belle,” he said wonderingly, when he saw me, and then he told the skinny prostitute that I was his sister. A few seconds passed, and he added, “That’s Bridget, Belle.”

“Lewis,” I said. “Lewis, I was at our old house.” Quite unexpectedly I began to weep. “I was in Bowling Green today, Lewis. I was there
just now
. In Bowling Green.”

XXIX

I WAS GLAD THAT SOMEONE HAD HELPED
my brother, grateful—but I was also dismayed, more than I can express, more than I can really remember now, to find myself under an obligation to a gap-toothed prostitute. She had changed his clothes, bedding, and bandages, and brought him clean water, and broth that she had paid for with her own money, earned through the degradation of her body. Perhaps she had saved his
life. I realized all that, and yet I felt invisibly damaged just by being in her presence. People would think differently of me if they learned that I had been here and had touched her hand.

We sat on the edge of an empty bed and talked through the snoring of men who looked as pale as if they had their drink delivered here and the sun’s direct rays never touched them. In the most offhand way, she told me things no decent woman should know; and, fearing that no woman could remain entirely decent once she knew them, I listened. She said she had a room to herself in the brothel that occupied the second and third floors of the house, and she took care of my brother when she could. She had wanted to take him into her room—most of her clients wouldn’t have cared—but Mrs. Mulrooney would not allow it; she did not want someone dying in the house.

I didn’t know where to look, every view was so disgusting. At last, for lack of an alternative, I chose Bridget’s homely face. “I must get him out of here. I’m scared to walk around this neighborhood alone.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said cheerfully.

While we were together, she told me more about herself. She told me what she liked and didn’t like. She liked whiskey, rum, chocolate, hot buttered corn, the theater, Shakespeare, and the actor Edwin Forrest. She liked dancing. She liked New Jersey—it was beautiful. She liked Yankee Sullivan, the prizefighter. She liked the policeman Tim O’Hara, who had helped her and asked for nothing in return. She did not like Pell Street, where something bad had happened to her that she decided not to talk about. She didn’t like what men and women did in bed. Did anyone really like it? She didn’t believe even the men really liked it. They just thought they had to do it because they were men.

She told me how she had become a prostitute. She had been born in County Waterford. Her parents died. With the help of her landlord, who wanted to get rid of his indigent tenants, she came to America, and she sought out her aunt Liz, a widow. Aunt Liz was living in a small apartment with three young women who took turns taking men to the one bedroom in the apartment; they paid Aunt Liz for the use of the room. Sometimes the girls served two or three men in the room at once. Soon after Bridget arrived, her aunt kicked out the three girls, to Bridget’s relief, but then started bringing men to Bridget, saying that she had to
earn her keep and she wouldn’t be sorry, it was a good life. “You’re sitting on your fortune,” her aunt said. Bridget wept and resisted. Her aunt threatened to kick her out to roam the streets, where, Aunt Liz said, she would certainly become a whore anyway; finally, Bridget gave in.

A year later, when she was fifteen, she had left her aunt so that she could keep more of her earnings. By now she was used to the life. It was all she knew, and not so bad. She had all her meals out. A maid did all the cleaning and washing for the girls. Bridget spent far more time standing and waiting than she did in the performance of her duties, and she had money for oyster saloons and ferryboats and theater tickets, and for a drop of whiskey now and then. Even so, sometimes she felt blue, because this was not the life she had planned; of course, it was different for someone like me (I learned gradually from such parenthetical remarks that she thought I was a whore, too, but a fine one, far above the likes of her). She planned to quit any day now. I didn’t ask, but she told me that her price was a dollar. She thought that was fair, since she was, she admitted, “no Cleopatra.” It could go lower if there was haggling.