City of Promise (4 page)

“Two. Nine and eleven. With their auntie they live. In Boston. For some years now. When my wife became ill her sister took them. They are settled. I am not right away thinking of bringing them home. A new wife first is necessary.”

Well, no bones made about that. Not that she minded. As long as
she could have babies of her own she’d be happy enough to mother two others. It wasn’t, after all, unlike what Auntie Eileen had done for her, though she suspected not getting stepchildren in their infancy would make things more difficult. “Yes,” she said, “of course.”

Mollie was in her aunt’s usual place, sitting in an armchair upholstered in crewelwork Mollie had done some years earlier, apples and pears and lots of green leaves. Merkel was on the green-and-white-striped sofa near the fireplace. He patted the place beside him. “Come, Mollie. Sit next to me. Let us get to know each other a little better.”

It was a reasonable request. Mollie got up and sat beside him, though she positioned herself at the opposite end of the sofa and hung on to the arm, rather as if she thought he might try to yank her closer. Merkel chose an entirely different maneuver. He scrambled across the cushions and came to rest with his thick thigh a scant inch away from the voluminous skirt of the dark red frock she had chosen for the occasion.

Max Merkel smelled of beer, but not as strongly as she had feared. She could get used to it, she told herself. And when he leaned over and kissed her cheek she determined she could learn to tolerate the scratchiness of his beard and his mutton-chop sideburns.

The kiss was over very quickly. “You are blushing,” he said when he drew back. “So, in a place like this you grow up and you can still blush. That is good.”

“As you say, Mr. Merkel, I grew up here. I do not work here.”

Merkel roared with laughter. “Spunk,” he said. “I like that in a woman. So, Mollie, shall we be engaged?”

She wasn’t entirely ready. However much she wanted to be. “I am prepared to consider it, Mr. Merkel. That’s all I can say at this time.”

Mollie spent the next two days thinking not of Max Merkel but of wedding finery. White had become fashionable for brides since Queen Victoria chose white satin when she married Prince Albert in 1840.
But white, Mollie thought, did not flatter her. Blush pink perhaps, or even a slightly darker shade. And she could embroider the skirt with roses and pick out their edges in tiny seed pearls. Not real of course, such extravagance was the prerogative of the daughters of millionaires being married from Fifth Avenue mansions.

As for what might happen after the wedding—not in the bedroom, she could hardly avoid knowing all there was to know about that—but in the day-by-day life as the wife of a Brooklyn brewer more than twice her age . . . Mollie could not imagine that it would be anything but rather dull and boring. Never mind that, she told herself. Concentrate on the babies. There were sure to be babies. Because, in the normal way of things, it took considerable effort to prevent them.

She had heard her aunt’s instructions on numerous occasions. They involved inserting various herbal potions before and flushing with warm water after. There were screened areas in each bedroom, and behind the screens basins and pitchers of water and a small tub to squat over while one performed the ablutions. “I’ve made it as easy as I can,” Eileen informed her ladies. “Now it’s up to you to take advantage.” Each woman knew that if she was not scrupulously careful it was the end of working at Brannigan’s.

Mollie was never home when one of them was screaming herself clean of a bastard. On the days such events were scheduled Auntie Eileen inevitably sent Mollie off to shop or do whatever else might amuse her. Though afterward Mollie would know which it had been, because a week later the woman would be gone. “I don’t put one of mine on the street because she was stupid enough or unlucky enough to get in the family way,” Eileen Brannigan always said. “And I will pay to have her done with it, if that’s what she wants. But after that, she no longer shines. She has lost the special something, the quality. And it’s the quality makes a man of stature put down sixty dollars for an evening’s pleasure. I know quality. That’s why they come to me. The women and the men alike.”

The women came as well because Eileen’s rules concerning pregnancy
were, for all their strictness, a protection of sorts. These days, with every abortionist in the city hounded by such things as Mr. Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, it was not a simple matter to arrange the procedure. But Eileen Brannigan always managed. And the abortionists she brought in were competent. Mostly women exercising a skill that had been passed down through generations. Other medical needs were the province of men, proper doctors. Eileen had tamed a few of those to her needs as well.

It went without saying that the women at Mrs. Brannigan’s would not give a man the French disease. “A bath once every three days,” Eileen insisted. “And in the morning when your client leaves, you must wash between your legs with carbolic soap. And do the same every evening before the gentlemen arrive.” But just to be sure, Eileen had a doctor come once a month and inspect each and every employee for signs of infection.

Mollie wasn’t entirely sure what the doctor did because she had never been in the room when he did it; but the physician’s visits to the house had been a regular part of Mollie’s life for as long as she could remember. She was, however, surprised when three days after Max Merkel’s visit her aunt interrupted her reverie about seed pearls and embroidered roses to say that Dr. Steinfeldt would be arriving shortly.

“Is someone ill?” Dr. Steinfeldt lived some ways to the east, in the neighborhood below Fourteenth Street known as Kleindeutschland, and his regular visits to University Place were scheduled for Thursday afternoons, not Wednesday.

“No. He is coming to see you.”

“Me? Heavens, why? I’m perfectly healthy.” Mollie reached up to pinch her cheeks, thinking perhaps the winter cold had drained them of color. “Really, Auntie Eileen, I feel quite well.”

“I know.”

“Then why—”

“Mr. Merkel has requested it.”

Mollie’s mouth opened, but it took a few moments before she said,
“He wants me checked over. Like . . . Like a man buying a horse. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

“No,” Eileen spoke so softly it was hard for Mollie to hear her words. “Not exactly. Mr. Merkel wishes to be assured that you are . . .”

The very fact that she couldn’t say the words told Mollie what they were. She had heard the phrase
virgo intacta
from one of the women who, before coming to work for Eileen Brannigan, had been a student at the Female Medical College in Philadelphia. The woman had decided she could not bear the aromas of that profession, and wished for reasons of her own not to return to her parental home, so she had knocked one afternoon on the door of the house on University Place and assured Auntie Eileen she need have no qualms about employing her. “I’m not
virgo intacta,
” she had said. “My virtue is already compromised. You need have no qualms about that.”

Mr. Merkel apparently did have qualms. “He thinks,” Mollie said, “that I’m . . . compromised.”

“Only that you might be,” Eileen said, adding quickly, “It’s not entirely surprising, Mollie. I mean given all this.” She waved a hand to indicate their entire small and exceptional world.

“But I told him. I said I lived here but I didn’t work here.”

“I told him as well. Of course I did, but he—”

“Mr. Merkel does not believe us,” Mollie said. “That’s what it comes down to. He wants to be my husband, entrust me with the care of his children, but he believes both you and me to be flat-out liars.”

“Yes,” Eileen agreed, knowing from the look on her niece’s face that Merkel’s suit had been decided, and not in his favor. “I suppose that’s not putting too fine a point on it.”

“Tell him,” Mollie said, “not to trouble himself. The matter is no longer his concern.” Then, reaching for a piece of her aunt’s thick-as-cream Tiffany stationery, “Never mind, I shall tell him myself.”

It was one of those moments when Eileen Brannigan was most proud of herself for having mustered the influence required to enroll the girl in Miss Lucy Green’s fashionable Fifth Avenue school, despite the objections of the headmistress to having among her students a
child living in a whorehouse. Miss Green’s had not simply taught Mollie to read and write; the school had put the final polish on her. Mollie was a lady.

Eileen wanted a husband for her niece; her plan had never been to offer the girl as an unpaid housekeeper and captive whore. And Mollie was right: Max Merkel had shown himself nowhere near good enough.

Eileen had small plump hands, and a love for jewelry that made her wear a ring on six of her ten fingers, and five of them fair-size diamonds (which like her writing paper always came from Tiffany’s). A month after what Mollie had come to think of as “the Merkel affair,” she was watching her aunt’s bejeweled fingers smooth a square of gossamer on which Mollie had embroidered—freehand, making it up as she went along—a swan riding the crest of a wave. As usual, though the fabric was exceedingly sheer, there was nowhere a pucker or a stitch out of line. “It’s exquisite, Mollie,” Eileen said. “But what’s it for?”

“I’m not sure. Can Mrs. Mullaney make a wrapper around it?”

Mrs. Mullaney was the new dressmaker. She came once a week to Brannigan’s since Rosie O’Toole, who was Auntie Eileen’s good friend, went off to become manageress of the new fitting and alterations department at Macy’s dry goods store at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street.

Eileen had no difficulty finding a replacement to come once a week with finished gowns for some of the ladies, and bolts of fabric to drape around others in a revolving chain of lucrative custom. The women sometimes complained at the expense, but Eileen would brook no other arrangement. She had the final say on each and every frock, and no interest in the current trend toward ready-to-wear. Why should she when her way of doing things was a source of additional profit?

Rosie O’Toole had paid Eileen Brannigan ten cents on every dollar the Brannigan’s ladies paid her. When she hired Mrs. Mullaney, Eileen set her commission at twelve. “An essential change,” Eileen had told her niece. “The war,” she’d added with a sigh.

Mollie wasn’t sure how the cost of keeping the South in the Union added to her aunt’s expenses and justified raised rates. Indeed, exactly the opposite seemed to be the case. A thing Mollie knew because she always read the newspapers the gentlemen left behind. Hatty Ellis, who had been Brannigan’s cook from the day the house opened, never threw them on the kitchen fire until after Mollie looked at them. She therefore understood that though New York had come reluctant to the battle—not good for the economy, the men of the city said—once war was handed to her, the city made the most of it.

New York business was booming, and it was inevitable that good business among the wealthiest and most influential men of the city meant better business at Brannigan’s. Now, more than ever, Eileen ruled all things beneath her roof and no detail was too small to escape her notice.

The women were allowed only certain scents—Hungary Water and Jameson’s Attar of Roses were approved, but not Trezise’s Tincture of Devon Violets—and cabbage was banished from the kitchen because the odor lingered after it was cooked. Gowns must never be black—too mournful or too sophisticated depending on the cut—and jewelry kept to a minimum since the men were to think they had come to their own home, not a salon, when they visited Mrs. Brannigan’s. Never a bonnet for the same reason, though a fancy comb was sometimes permitted. No professional musicians ever, though on occasion one of the women might play a piano selection. With such attention to minutiae, no question but what Eileen’s writ ran to the destiny of each piece of needlework done by her niece.

“Not a wrapper, no,” Eileen pronounced, setting aside the gossamer swan. “I shall have a frame made and hang it in my room. Above my bed, with all the other most prized examples of your artistry.”

Mollie did not object. Eileen had long since proven herself devoted to her niece’s well-being.