Belle Cora: A Novel (45 page)

If, in Mrs. Bower’s house, a bit of illusion remained, this was not to make things easier for the girls, but because it was part of our service. Before we went upstairs, there was conversation downstairs, and glasses were filled and sipped and refilled. It wasn’t the raucous carousing of a bordello, but an imitation of polite society as the men in society secretly wished it to be. There would be flirting, gallant compliments, and giggling rejoinders. We went to bed under the pretense that a forbidden romance was moving forward at an impossible speed.

How delightful it would be, for the wealthy man about town, if the pretty girl he met in her family’s drawing room could, for the right payment
to her father, be whisked upstairs and rogered on the spot! How refreshing for the young man who has to worry that a few incautious words might turn him into a husband tied to some dreary job, if he could have the girl right now, then hitch up his trousers and walk away! How pleasant if the fiftyish fellow who plays the avuncular friend of the family, and gives sage advice to his friend’s pretty daughter, could do what he really wants to do with her, instead of just imagining it on his widower’s bed a few hours later, grimacing, his furious red manhood in his fist! Well, Mrs. Bower’s parlor house was the enchanted realm where these things could happen; and I was a crucial element, for, thanks to my unusual life history and natural gifts, I did an uncanny imitation of a girl of good family. I
was
a girl of good family, to whom a series of accidents had occurred which made me available to these men.

Mrs. Bower suggested I take a new name, as most of the girls did, to cover their tracks. I did not care about that practical purpose, but I liked the drop of oblivion a false name provides, and, borrowing a Christian name from a novel and a family name from a newspaper article, I called myself Harriet Knowles.

My first, if we do not count Eric Gordon, was Colonel Jack, a state senator, small, gray, with an asymmetrical mustache and acrid breath. In my life until then I had not seen many naked bodies, and I was startled by the web of blue veins that enveloped the skin of his frail white legs and haunches as he methodically folded his clothes and placed them on a chair. His face pivoted abruptly toward me—I ought not to have been watching him—and I gave him a frightened smile. “Be gentle,” I heard myself beg him, he replied coolly, like a gentleman rebuking an untested new servant, a rebuke that is part of her education, “I’ll be what I please, as the mood takes me. Lie flat.” He was of the school that tries, using their weight, to print the girl into the bed. I could not move—he did not want me to move—and he moved only enough to generate the necessary friction, until, toward the end, he began to shudder. Meanwhile, I breathed through my mouth and returned the stare of his watery eyes, which were trapped within folds so pronounced they reminded me of hardened candle ends.

I do not remember much more from that night. I drank a good deal before we went upstairs, to improve the appeal of Colonel Jack, and again
afterward, to flush him from my consciousness, and as a result I did not make a good impression on the next man when Colonel Jack’s needs had been met; I was too drunk to behave much like a Boston merchant’s daughter. The man took me anyway, because I was beautiful and a novelty, but Mrs. Bower—who supervised right up to the bedroom door at the beginning—told me the next day, “It could be liquor is your weakness. That’s your lookout. If your plan is to wind up a used-up drunken whore in the space of a few years, I know better than to try and stop you. But you can’t do it while you’re here, because these men, so long as they aren’t blind drunk themselves, enjoy neither the company nor the caresses of women who can hardly walk for drink. Somewhere lower down the ladder you can get away with that; maybe that’s where you belong. You’ll decide. Meanwhile, though, my prices are too high for that. You’re expensive right now. You have to act expensive.”

I didn’t argue with her. What did it matter? My plans did not involve a gradual descent to the lower ranks of prostitution, accelerated by strong drink, or the opening of a millinery or a notions shop, or the acquisition of wealth through the astute management of rich men’s weaknesses. I planned to do the honorable thing and die, as soon as a few preliminaries had been cleared up.

I went that very morning to the Donoho grocery in the Five Points, gave Mrs. Donoho the five hundred, and promised her another hundred when Lewis had been released, which, according to her, should be within the week. It was part of the bargain that his case would be expedited, for I was haunted by the possibility that Cutter, who said he knew a guard at Sing Sing, might make the acquaintance of a guard in the Tombs and do away with my brother there. I gave her my new address, so that she could send a messenger to tell me the date of Lewis’s trial. Very likely she knew what that address meant, but if she had any opinion about it she gave no sign.

I decided that I could not kill myself until Lewis was free—otherwise, Mrs. Donoho might just keep my money. For the next week after that, whenever I was in the parlor, where we pretended, or upstairs, where the clothes came off and truth was supposedly revealed (but really another set of pretenses went into operation), I would always be thinking with longing and dread that this was not going to continue much longer: the
end of my life was nearing. I was eager for Lewis to be out of prison, but I was also scared. Though the decision to die had been a comfort and a sop to my vanity (I was better than these other girls, because I was going to kill myself), as the fatal hour approached I began to be afraid.

One morning, the maid knocked loudly on my door, waking me and a man whose name had slipped my mind, though I remembered that one of his testicles was shrunken and that he liked the feeling of being smothered. The maid told me disapprovingly that a rude boy from some grocery had given her a note to pass to me. The note, scrawled in pencil on a scrap of newspaper, named the location and approximate time of Lewis’s trial. It would be soon. I had to hurry; I rushed the stranger out of the room, and dressed quickly. I took along the pistol Mrs. Robinson had given me back in Cohoes; I planned to use it on Jack Cutter, in case it went wrong and it turned out that my money had been taken, and my honor lost, for nothing, and Lewis was to go to prison anyway.

I expected to see Cutter, and I hoped to see him ruined. He would be revealed as the monster who had seduced an innocent fourteen-year-old mill girl, brought her to the wicked city, and sold her into shame. Which—as I fully realized even then—would not be a perfectly accurate description of what had occurred between those two. But it was true on the general point, that he was a rotten bastard.

I thought, you see, that for Lewis to be freed, Cutter must be unmasked; at the very least, it would be made public that my brother was innocent of any robbery. But what happened instead was this: Jack Cutter and the other policeman, who would have been the only witnesses against my brother, did not show up. The state’s attorney asked that the trial be postponed; Lewis’s attorney said that justice delayed was justice denied, and his client had been shut up in the Tombs for too long already. The judge agreed and dismissed the case and ordered that my brother be set free.

I could not say I had been lied to. All Mrs. Donoho had promised was that she would use the money to free Lewis. Now he was free. However, she had known very well that I expected more. I had the feeling the poor often have, that the game is rigged.

With these complicated feelings, then, I met Lewis in the center aisle
of the courtroom and embraced him, while at the front of the room the clerk announced the next case and the judge said, “Lemuel Sanders? I know this scoundrel. Bring him up here.” My brother smelled like a sour washrag, but I hugged him close a long while, telling myself that it would be the last time we would ever embrace.

“See?” he said. “See? I told you there was nothing to worry about.”

Like so many anonymous donors, I was frustrated by the ingratitude of the beneficiary. “You’re wrong, Lewis. You’ve been lucky. You should take a lesson from this.”

He shook his head. “I knew he’d be too yellow to come to court. I wish he had, so I could have told people about him.”

I knew that most of this talk was empty show, and that he had been far more frightened than he let on. But he was going to forget that fear as fast as he could. As we walked out into the street, I repeated that he was luckier than he knew. “Lewis, I don’t care how you do it, but you’ve got to get yourself a shave and bath and clean clothes.”

“Okay, sis,” he said, in a funny voice, to show that he was being good-natured about my endless mothering of him when, after all, he was a grown man. I remembered that our mother had told me on her deathbed to look after him, and I felt a pang at the thought that I was about to relinquish that responsibility.

“Let me give you some money for the bath and a shave and clothes,” I said. He told me he could pay his own way. We went to an oyster house, had a meal, and talked about Bowling Green. I became emotional. He asked what was wrong. I said I was just happy because he was out of jail; I had been so worried. I pushed money into his hands. “If you take this, I know you’ll feel honor-bound to spend it on cleaning yourself up, and I’ll feel better. Make my mind easy, Lewis.” He rolled his eyes and took it, he said, just to make me stop talking about it. Then I said I had to get back to my job, and I walked away, my throat tight, tears flowing.

My suicide note was in my chest of drawers back at the brothel.

I had torn up four earlier versions into small pieces, not wanting my suicide made into a joke with the discovery of competing notes. Each draft had helped me survive the day on which it was written. The first had been the shortest, just a cry of anguish. The others all began “My dear Lewis.” He would know after he got the note that I was in a brothel. Mrs. Donoho would tell him why. He would realize that I had sacrificed myself for him, so, on the same day he learned I had been a whore, he would decide that I was a saint.

It was the dinner hour. Lewis had turned one way on Bowery, I had turned the other, and I had come to the rug district—rug stores for block on block; giant rugs hanging from the upper stories. I had stopped, planning to get on a horsecar, when I spotted, in the busy rush of mechanics, clerks, restaurant patrons, and paupers coming my way, one man who was not moving, and a little taller than most, and looking at me with a mixture of appetite and confidence, as if he were a boy and I an item in a store window that had been promised to him for Christmas. It was Jack Cutter. He had been following me. The copper star was still on his coat.

“Arabella!” he said. “Or—no, not Arabella, Harriet. It’s Harriet now, right?”

Just the sight of him had frightened me; it took all my self-possession not to show it, and I had not time to master my emotions before this remark threw me further off balance. My mind was clear, however, and I understood at once. He knew Mrs. Bower. It was he who had introduced Jocelyn to her. If Mrs. Bower herself had not told him about me, someone else at one of Mrs. Bower’s parlor houses must have. They need only have said that the new girl at the other house was Jocelyn’s friend from the mill.

“Do you like my new coat?” he asked me.

“How are your knees healing? I heard you fell hard on them when you were running away from my brother.”

“I’ll heal faster than he will,” said Cutter, looking very fit and pleased with himself. His handsome face had one expression, sufficiently nasty, and his little crooked scar had another. The horsecar stopped. I got on it, reaching up through the trap to pay the driver. Cutter was right behind me, getting on, too. A portly man offered me his seat. I smiled, a smile full of feminine modesty and good breeding, and shook my head. I wanted to be able to leave the car in a hurry. Cutter said, “I wanted to ask you. Do you think your brother appreciates the sacrifices you make for him?”

I thought how terrible it would be were Lewis to learn the truth from Cutter, and I could think of nothing useful to say back beyond, “You’re a pig.”

He grabbed my wrist. “Don’t call me names.”

A few of the passengers gave Cutter unfriendly glances, and a young man, who looked as if he might consider himself capable of defending a lady, said to him, “This is disgraceful.”

Cutter put a thumb on his star. “I caught this girl asking a man in a rug store if he wanted to take her to a disorderly house. That’s against the law. You look respectable. You don’t take strange girls to houses, do you?”

I had the impression that the passengers had become a jury, and the verdict was going against me. I did not think they would believe me if I said he was lying.

I had the pistol, I remembered. It was loaded. If he let go of my hand, I could get it. I would say that there was something in my bag he ought to see, and I would open the bag and shoot him before he knew what was happening. The other passengers would be frightened and duck for cover, and then I would shoot myself.

“I’m sorry I called you names,” I said. “Let’s be friends.”

“That’s better,” said Cutter, smiling, and released my wrist.

“I have something in my bag I’d like to show you,” I told Cutter.

“Let me see it,” he said.

I felt myself leaving the decision up to my hands. My hands were unwilling.

Someone tugged the cord and rang the horsecar’s bell. The horses
rested, the car stopped. I wormed my way quickly into the clutch of people disembarking. Cutter called after me. “Like my new coat?” he repeated, adding this time: “You paid for it!” I was at that moment more ashamed of being unable to kill him than I was of being a whore. It was because I was sober, I told myself. When I was drunk I would find the courage. I lifted my skirts clear of the mire of Bowery, rushed through a brief safe passage between a carriage and a horse cart, and stepped onto the curb. I heard Cutter calling through the horsecar window: “I can afford your prices now. Maybe I’ll pay you a visit.”