Belle Cora: A Novel (42 page)

“When you’ve got money, you can help the folks that matter to you,” said Mrs. Bower pensively. “You lose the respect of the parsons and the churchy women. Everyone else treats you much better.”

Neither of us spoke for a while, and then I said, “I’m sure you don’t intend me any harm. I have decided not to take this as an insult.”

Mrs. Bower nodded. “You’ve been knocked around some. Otherwise, you’d have been out the door five minutes ago.”

I did not trust myself to speak. I left.

LEWIS AND I WERE ON MULBERRY STREET
for two and a half months before he was strong enough to work. It would be winter before long, and Mrs. Donovan warned us that employment would be harder to find then. She did not say why that was so; probably she did not know why; but I was a merchant’s daughter, and with a little thought I understood that it was because New York’s commerce was highly dependent on shipping over water. Each winter, the canals froze and fewer ships crossed the Atlantic. Factories shut down, clothing manufacturers stopped giving out piecework, and young seamstresses and milliners put on their best dresses and accosted gentlemen in the streets.

Lewis, who looked older than he was, found work easily once he started looking, and had series of ill-paid jobs. Some he lost when it was found that, though strong, he tired rather quickly. He emptied trash barges into the ocean; he worked as a porter for the New York and Harlem Railroad; he worked in a Bowery boot-blacking factory.

Meanwhile, I became a maid. I left my first position, for a lawyer and his wife, after I went to my small room on the second floor of their house one evening to find the lawyer sitting on the bed, declaring his love and offering me some cheap trinkets in exchange for my caresses. I returned to the employment agency, determined to find work in a house that did not contain a man. On the third day of this quest, I was interviewed by two elderly sisters, who argued about me without bothering to lower their voices, while I struggled not to show emotion, one of them saying that they might as well try me, the other maintaining that by the time I was trained to their exacting standards I would be either married or a whore. The first sister won the argument, and so I was hired. But don’t think of her as the nice one: they were both despicable. If they had no designs on my honor, still they had a very low opinion of it, and even after I had been their maid for three months, they made a great show of locking away their jewelry, counting the silverware, and leaving out
small change to test my honesty. The elder sister had an upper lip that was wrinkled like a drawn curtain. The younger sister was in the habit of picking her nose. Though they had several unused guest rooms, they stuffed me into a drafty attic dormer with a small stove and enough coal, each week, to last four days. Once or twice a week, I stood in silence for twenty minutes while either the elder sister or the younger sister told me that in this house they had a very special way of doing things, and it was not the way I had just done it.

On my day off, sometimes I saw Jocelyn. We met in City Hall Park and at an inexpensive Bowery oyster house. She was growing taller, and she had recently graduated from Mrs. Bower’s child brothel to Mrs. Bower’s house in Washington Square. She had had to spend over a thousand dollars on new dresses and was, as a result, in debt to Mrs. Bower; but when the debt was paid off, she expected to live well. Always I searched her face for signs of corruption, and during every conversation I looked for opportunities to change her mind. I never found either of those things. Instead, I lost my horror of her actions, and she became merely Jocelyn to me again.

Whenever I went out, no matter where, whether it was to do my own business or my mistresses’, men looked at me; some of them called out to me, and sometimes they followed me until I escaped into a store; the most determined men would go right into that store and would corner me there. If I met their eyes, they took it as encouragement. Soon I hardly dared to look up when a man was near. “Where are you going, sweetheart?” they would ask. “What do you do, little angel?” and if I told them I was a maid—meaning that I had a job, I worked, I was not to be taken so lightly—they would smile and say, “A pretty girl like you, a maid? A girl like you shouldn’t have to work.”

Often, following me, they would ask this question: “Why the long face, pretty girl? Why so sad?” Of all their remarks, I hated that one most.

XXXI

WHEN THE SUBJECT OF MY FINAL DESCENT
into dishonor came up later, I had one story for patrons, and another for my intimates. I told members of the first group that a handsome man had taken advantage of my youth, and when my disgrace became known, my family cast me out. I told friends that I had entered upon this life in order to save the life of my brother Lewis. I believed this second story, although, with the passage of years, I have come to see that it does not exactly make sense by itself and cannot be the whole story. For what it’s worth, here is what I used to say. The facts are accurate, so far as they go.

On a day in January when the road was full of deep ice puddles within which leaves and oyster shells were suspended like exhibits in glass museum cases, I opened the door of my employers’ house to see a small, slender man, under five feet tall. His name was Johnny O’Faolin, he said, and he told me that my brother Lewis was in the Tombs, the prison on Centre Street. Johnny had just come back from visiting his own brother there, and Lewis had asked him to come and tell me.

It seemed that Lewis had been walking by the piano factory on Bowery when he saw, coming the other way, his former friend Tom Cross, whose real name was Jack Cutter. Cutter wore a long coat with a silver star pinned to it—it was true, what we had heard: he had become a policeman.

Lewis pushed him in the chest, told him he was a dirty, cowardly, thieving skunk, and announced to spectators, who had begun to gather immediately, that the star Cutter wore had been purchased by a bribe to an alderman, with bribe money obtained by theft from a friend and by the sale of a fourteen-year-old girl to a brothel. “See the man now paid to keep the peace,” Lewis shouted. “And there’s more I know, and more I could say.”

O’Faolin did not tell me, because Lewis hadn’t told him, that Cutter at that point said, “Watch your mouth, Lew; don’t forget what I know about you.”

Lewis told Cutter, “I’m gonna give you a mild pasting, not the mortal pasting you deserve. Then you’ll pay me the money you stole.”

Cutter swung his truncheon. Lewis evaded it and knocked it out of Cutter’s hand. They fought, Cutter getting much the worst of it, until he
broke free and ran on Bayard all the way to Mott, with Lewis behind him. New York City’s police did not wear uniforms back then, only the star, so this chase did not look as strange as it would today, but it cannot have done much for Cutter’s reputation in the Sixth Ward. Cutter was about to escape into an alley on Mott between Bayard and Pell when someone stuck a foot out and tripped him. Lewis leapt on top of Cutter and began punching him in the face.

It began to snow. People who would ordinarily have gone inside stayed in the streets, taking bets and shouting, “Get his eyes,” and “Kick his stones,” and crying foul as another man with a star on his coat began choking Lewis from behind. My brother was fortunate in the character of the second policeman. He used the truncheon on Lewis’s body only, did not use it after Lewis was subdued, and would not let Jack Cutter use it.

So now Lewis, badly bruised but not crippled, was in the strange Egyptian-looking prison a few blocks from the street where he had caught up with Officer Jack Cutter, alias Tom Cross, and with my employers’ permission I went to visit him there, bearing a basket full of apple pie, bread, cheese, sausage, candles, and newspapers.

Perhaps you have seen pictures of the famous edifice, whose appearance inspires a feeling less of the law’s might than of its mystery—a thing too bizarre to reason with. There was a broad flight of dark stone steps, and massive columns whose capitals, in the shape of palm leaves, were on that day partly obscured by icicles.

After I had gone through the entrance, I was in a large courtyard, facing a second building, which was the men’s prison, made of four galleries, one on top of another. Laborers were making repairs on the bottom floor—the prison was sinking into its soggy foundations. The light was dim, the air foul. A jailer on the third tier led me to my brother’s cell. On the way, we passed many others, one of which had the door open, so I could see a woman with a bowed head talking to the unseen inmate. Finally, the jailer opened a massive black iron door to a small, bare cell lit by a chink in the wall, with one table and two bedsteads, a sink, a chamber pot, and my brother and another prisoner, whom Lewis introduced to me as Hugh O’Faolin.

“Johnny’s brother,” I said, and Hugh smiled as if we were old friends because I knew Johnny.

While the two of them shared the food I’d brought, Lewis told me,
with a careless air, as if it made a funny story, that he was being charged with robbery, assault, resisting arrest, and half a dozen other things that slipped his mind. Cutter claimed that he had recognized Lewis as fitting the description of a man who robbed a grocery on Pell Street, that
Lewis
had run, and he, Cutter, had given chase.

When I asked how I could help, he said by not worrying. He had sent for me because he knew I would be mad if he didn’t and I found out later he’d been in jail. But if I wanted to—if it would amuse me—perhaps I could help him find a lawyer, one who would waive a fee in view of the easy victory he was bound to achieve by representing Lewis. For it was sure to be easy! Dozens of witnesses had seen that it was he, Lewis, who had followed Cutter, shouting “Stop, thief.”

My brother Lewis was an open book to me. I knew that under his bluster he was terrified. He had never seen the inside of a jail cell before, and a moment later I learned that his circumstances were in fact graver than he had yet revealed to me.

O’Faolin, who looked several years older than Lewis, said, “You left something out.”

Lewis looked at him uncomprehendingly for a moment and then shook his head.

“What?” I cried. “What is it? What? I must know everything.”

“I was there,” said his cellmate. “I was there at the police station when they brought him in, and the other coppers, when they saw Lewis, and how small he was next to Cutter, they all let go a big laugh. Because they had already heard about the chase. They heard it was Lewis chasing Cutter.”

“You see,” said my brother, “everyone knows.”

“And Cutter being so much the bigger man, that makes it funny. Your brother, he looks just half alive, but he laughs, too. And Cutter takes Lewis by the head and whispers something and gives him a knock.”

He stopped, and we both looked at Lewis, who threw another angry look at Hugh.

“What did he say to you, Lewis?”

We just listened to the sound of hammering below, until O’Faolin spoke. “He says, ‘A friend of mine is a guard in Sing Sing. You won’t last a month there.’ He says, ‘My friend’ll see to that.’ ”

I looked at Lewis, and then I looked back at his cellmate. “Mr. O’Faolin, do you think this is true? Tell me,” I implored him, because I needed expert opinion.

“It happens,” he said with a judicious air. After a little pause for recollection, he explained, “They can punish you. They say you broke this rule, and that rule, and they work you to death.” He named some men who had suffered this fate, and others who had been stabbed by fellow prisoners who had been paid to do it.

“I can take care of myself,” said Lewis, his words belied by a fat lip, and various swellings and discolorations on his face; to make his claim even less convincing, he erupted into a complex, protracted cough.

“But the court, Mr. O’Faolin—what do you say to my brother’s chances in court?”

“He needs a miracle.”

OUTSIDE THE TOMBS, THE WIND BLEW SNOW
horizontally into my face and I did not feel it—I could only think and fret and wish. My brother was the world to me. He was all the family I had, and in all creation he was the only man who had ever stood up for me, really stood up for me so it counted. He had shown me the truest, purest, most absolute loyalty there is: loyalty that had to make up for the absence of a mother, a father, and a lover; loyalty to lift my steps across the mindless drudgery of an ordinary day, or to carry me on beating wings over the sudden abyss of an emergency. He had made a cripple of his hero, just as soon as he learned that the hero had harmed me. For my sake, he had become a fugitive. And now he was killing me with his recklessness. I could not live and see my brother crushed, and he
was
being crushed, he
would
be crushed, without a miracle. Where could I get one?