The Spirit Room (59 page)

Clara nodded.

Hannah watched her, then nodded as well. “Is it slow now? Will we have to street walk now?”

“
To be honest, it is a little slow. There are too many girls out there. They’re everywhere—dance halls, concert halls, theaters, hotels, Broadway, Bowery. It’ll pick up when the weather turns. That’s when I want you, in a couple of weeks. Spring fever comes and there are plenty of men. The girls will teach you everything you need to know. Some things work for some, and not others. You have to find your own style.” She returned the pen to its stand and leaned back into her chair. “If you get in good with the girls, they might introduce you to someone they don’t like to get you started.” She looked at Clara, her expression businesslike. “With your face and figure, you’ll have it easy, but Hannah, you’ll have to develop something interesting about you. Don’t worry, we’ll help you with that, too. It’s not always the looks they want. For instance, your virginity. I can negotiate that for you. I’ll get you the best price anyone could and you and I will share it. Your debts, unless they’re huge, will be gone the first day.” She closed the ledger. “I make them pay like it’s a bar of gold.”

Clara thought about Sam Weston at Minnie Stewart’s house in Geneva and how he had paid Papa fifty dollars, but then also gave her another dollar that Papa never knew about. Mary Johnson stood and walked around the desk.

“
Come back two weeks from today.” Mary Johnson extended her hand to both of them and led them to the front door. “Think about new names, made-up fancy names for yourselves. Girls don’t use their given names, usually.”

They went out into the cool sunny afternoon. Clara didn’t want to do the work, which she knew too well. Talking to Mary Johnson had brought Papa and Reilly and Weston back to her when she had traveled so far to escape them. But now she would be able to survive on her own. And she had her friend Hannah. Like sisters. As they headed away from the brick row house down Green Street, she took Hannah’s hand.

“
We’re wantons now,” Hannah said. “We’ll be drinking champagne and going to theater matinees and shopping at Stewart’s by next month.”

“
I suppose we will.” Clara stopped and waited for Hannah to look at her. “But what price will we pay for that, Hannah?”

“
Come on now, Clara, we’ll make the best of it. We’ll be the most desired girls in New York City.” Hannah leaned a shoulder into Clara as they resumed their walk.

At least this time she’d have someone to talk to, she thought. It wouldn’t be a secret from everyone. “Let’s walk back to Broadway and look at the spring fashions.”

They turned east onto Broome Street, into the warmth of the spring sunshine.

Forty-Two

THE FIRST NIGHT AT THE PARLOR HOUSE, Mary Johnson came to Clara’s tiny room with a short yellow silk dress with matching pantalettes and a broad white sash. She spread it out on the bed. It was a girl’s dress, not a lady’s.

“
I can’t wear that. It’s for a little girl.”

“
It’ll make you look more like a child. I need a young one right now. My last young one left me to be the mistress of one of our regular gentlemen.”

“
That’s what they want? Little girls?”

“
Some of them do, I’m afraid. I thought you’d understand from what you told me about your father and those two men.”

“
I never thought there were others who—”

“
You’ve got plenty more to learn,” Mary Johnson interrupted. “I’m afraid your eyes are about to be opened to things about men and women you could never imagine. I won’t keep you in the girl’s dresses forever.” Mary Johnson stepped toward the door, her head nearly reaching the top of the frame. “I’ve no doubt you’ll be stunning in something elegant, but once I grow you into a lady, I can’t take you back to being a girl again. You and Hannah come to the rear parlor at nine o’clock. We’ll open the doors and let the men in around nine-thirty. All you have to do is talk to them or bring them a drink if they are empty-handed until one of them picks you out and brings you up here to your room.” She started away but then hesitated. “And get the girls to explain the champagne and throne game to you and ask Abbie to show you and Hannah the douche before you go downstairs. Lettie makes up the acid solution for you girls. If it hurts you, tell her to change it, and don’t waste your hard earned money on Madame Restelle’s Female Monthly Pills. They don’t do a damn thing for you. Do you have your menses yet?”

Clara shook her head.

“
Good. Do the douche anyway. There’s no telling when you’ll start.”

When she had gone, Clara glanced down at the spread out dress. The yellow silk was pretty. A couple of years ago she would have been in love with this dress, would have put it on and twirled round and round. Now she despised it. She would sooner use it to mop the floor than wear it.

At dinner that night, Clara and Hannah met all the girls and began to learn about the house. One girl, named Adeline, was absent. She was at Madame Restelle’s down on Chambers Street getting an abortion. They expected Adeline back in a few days. Hers was the room across the hall from Clara’s. If there were no complications, Mary Johnson brought back girls who had abortions. They always went to Madame Restelle’s or sometimes Mrs. Byrnes’s or Madame Costello’s, but nowhere else. As Clara absorbed all this, she locked eyes with Hannah across the long kitchen table, silently expressing her shock and worry.

Most of the girls had come to eat dinner wearing their shimmys and pantalettes, their corsets on but open and loose, and their hair down. Some had shawls thrown over their underwear. A few had on robes. A short Negro woman with one half-closed, drooping eye and one ordinary eye brought bowl after bowl of steaming food. One of the girls explained that she was Lettie, who ran the kitchen, and was married to big James with the rambunctious hair and beard and the couple had bought their freedom from slavery and been working for Mary Johnson for ten years. If there was ever any trouble, either with the house or with the sporting men, big James and Mary Johnson usually fixed whatever it was.

Stretching across the table and grasping at whatever bowl or platter they wanted, the girls introduced themselves. They had the most splendiferous names, thought Clara. There were three Duchesses, two Princesses, and one who called herself Satin Rose. Delighted that neither Clara nor Hannah had any ideas for their new names yet, the girls set to work. First they considered Hannah. Abbie said her name should have something to do with her beautiful blond hair so they called out names like Cinderella, Princess Star, Stella White. In the end, they agreed Katrina Diamond fit the best. Hannah beamed and looked happy as a clam at high tide.

“
Katrina Diamond,” Clara said, smiling at her friend.

One of the girls, who went by Carlotta Leone and said she liked her name because it meant “lion,” somehow got it into her head that Clara should be French like the famous young ballerina, Emma Livry. “A French beauty,” she said. The girls laughed hard about this and started yelling out French sounding names, Babette, Antionette, Suzette, Juliette. They settled on Lizette.

“
Do you like the sea?” Carlotta asked.

“
I’ve never been to the sea.”

“
Never seen it?”

Clara shook her head.

“
Then we will call you Lizette LaMer with the “m” capitalized for effect on your calling card. It means “the sea” in French.”

The girls all clapped. “Katrina and Lizette,” they called out.

This was truly a strange world, eating dinner in your underwear, making up names for each other. As Clara ate her biscuits and boiled chicken, she listened to the girls fume about how the Negro servant, Phoebe Ann Holmes, at the brothel across the street, lost her bastard child in court to the father because he had an honest job as a porter for the City Express Company. She was a friend of Lettie’s and they were all irate about it.

Then she stopped listening. She put her fork down and took a deep breath. She wasn’t Clara anymore. There was no more Clara, no more Benton. No more of Papa in her name. She was Lizette—someone new, someone she didn’t even know yet. Lizette. She rolled the name over in her mind. It sounded free and saucy, like someone who could come and go as she pleased, someone who could never be owned or understood, someone beautiful, unpredictable, turbulent, like the sea. Lizette LaMer. She drew the letters lightly with the end of her fork on the table.

At nine o’clock in the evening, in the rear parlor, Clara huddled with Hannah and Abbie. She felt ridiculous in the child’s yellow dress and a flower wreath on her head. Some of the other young women were scattered about the room wearing dainty shoes and fancy low-cut dresses with big hoops. Every dress was a different brilliant color—greens, blues, reds, purples, with stripes and flounces and bows. Their faces painted with rouge and eyes drawn with dark lines, the young women were mostly pretty. There were blonds, brunettes, and redheads with jewels, flowers and ribbons decorating their hair. They were adorned with gold necklaces and bracelets and red, white, and blue glass earrings glinting in the chandelier light.

It seemed she was at the wrong party. Her party had to be elsewhere, next door perhaps, with little rich boys and girls running around throwing pillows at each other and playing tag. What was she doing here with the Duchesses and Princesses?

The room was filled with velvet sofas, divans, chairs, ottomans, lounges, small tables with marble tops, several enormous mirrors with gilt frames, oil paintings of rivers and mountains and one thundering large painting of a nude woman reclining on a sofa. There were glasses and plates, bottles of wine and liquor, fruit, plump meat pies, and small cakes sitting on a fancy lace tablecloth.

Piano music and the high quivery notes of a girl singing drifted in from the other side of the double doors.

Dreams of the radiant hills and sunlit streams,

Dreams of the bright and blue unclouded skies.

Sleep, for thy mother watches by thy side.

“
Out there is where the sporting men gather,” Abbie said. “The front parlor. They’re greeted and entertained. Four or five of the seasoned girls set the mood and look tantalizing while Mary Johnson does her business.”

Abbie turned around and took a few steps closer to the mirror that hung near them. First she rubbed at her face paint trying to even it out, then stuck her index finger in her mouth and, with her wet fingertip, smoothed out her eyebrows.

She looked at Clara and Hannah in the mirror. “Mary Johnson is making sure she knows the men. If she doesn’t, she’s getting to know them right now. Now’s when she tells them if there’s anything special going on, like you two, Lizette and Katrina.” Satisfied with her appearance, Abbie rejoined them. “Then she goes to her office and one by one the new gents—or anyone wanting a virgin—go in and she lays out her terms. After that, the men can stay as long as they like until the morning.”

Hannah’s mouth was pinched up like a little walnut. Clara knew her anguish, remembering her own first night at Minnie Stewart’s with Sam Weston.

“
Hannah, it will be over soon. There will be a tomorrow. I promise,” Clara said.

Hannah smiled but she sure wasn’t happy.

Then Abbie explained the throne game—how there was a huge, very gaudy, gilded, red-cushioned chair near the fireplace, and how it was close to the nice warm fire and seemed inviting, but none of the men wanted to sit in it. If they did they’d have to buy a round of champagne for everyone. It was the girls’ mission to get someone to sit there without them thinking about it. Then they could all have champagne and the night would go a lot better.

“
Champagne makes everyone laugh and, unless a gent offers you a drink, you can’t take one yourself unless one of us wins the game with our gent,” Abbie said.

One of the double doors opened. Carlotta Leone, dressed in red and black silk, swept in first. Clara swallowed. Cigar smoke wafted in and turned Clara’s stomach to mud. She counted the men. Twenty-two. That was more than the nineteen girls in the house at the moment. How would that work out? At least there wouldn’t be streetwalking tonight.

“
The first night is the hardest. You’ll both do all right. Don’t worry. If one of them tries to hurt you, and I don’t mean
pretend
to hurt you, I mean truly hurt you, scream like bloody hell.” Abbie spoke through the side of her mouth as she smiled radiantly at the men fanning out into the room. “Mary Johnson or James from the kitchen will come and check on you if they hear you. The most important thing, the thing that makes you popular, is you got to act like you love them. You tell them they’re your favorite gent of all the gents that come here. Here comes that sewing machine fella.”

The man approached Hannah. “Good evening. Are you Katrina?”

What the blazes did Abbie mean about the
sewing machine
fella? He was around fifty, Clara guessed. His bushy beard was grayish. His dark eyebrows swept out toward his temples like little wings.