Belle Cora: A Novel Page 36

  Once, when I was on Charley’s arm, I ran into Eric Gordon. I had had daydreams about this: that Gordon would snicker; Charley inveigle him into a card game and destroy him. But when the time came, Eric seemed as pleased to see me as if nothing unpleasant had happened between us, and though he must have known I could not be Mrs. Cora, he was perfectly willing to let me pretend I was. He did not wish to hurt me, and as soon as I realized this, I lost any interest in revenge.

  Besides, I had other things on my mind by then.

  One day, Cora came to our room to find me waiting for him reading the Courier, and when I looked up he knew I had something to tell him; I said that I had missed my time, and all the other signs made it very clear that I was pregnant. He said nothing. I told him that the child was his (as it had to be, though I could not prove it).

  He didn’t comment on that right away, but after more time, he sat down at a small table and asked me, “What do you mean to do?”

  “Probably I’ll get rid of it; I know how,” I said, dismayed. I stood up, telling him I had to take some air and would see him at dinner. I walked through City Hall Park, thinking. I had hoped that he would want the child. He was gentle, intelligent, and companionable. I felt safe with him. He liked children. He was always ready to spare them a joke, a card trick, a story, and he listened to their prattle. A traveling lecturer on phrenology had shown us a bump on Charley’s skull that proved him to be highly “philoprogenitive.” In the last few weeks, my eyes had often sought out that bump. But it seemed that the prospect of a little Cora did not make him wish to turn our holiday into a permanent obligation.

  Maybe, if the baby came anyway, that would change his mind: he would hold the baby, note its resemblance to him, become attached.

  Probably you’ll find in such reasoning a simple and contemptible explanation for my subsequent behavior. Perhaps I should just leave it at that. But to me it seemed that there was more to it. Abortion was immoral, wasn’t it? I did not regret murdering Matthew’s child, but this was different. I had the feeling that I would be wronging Charley by killing his child, even if he didn’t know his own mind enough to realize it. And abortion by any method was painful and dangerous. Childbirth, though also painful and dangerous, was several months away.

  Time went by. I left it for another day and another. My condition became visible. At last I had decided, without knowing when I had decided. Whatever Cora thought, he did not say. He stopped having relations with me, and the odd long hair that began to appear on his coat made it evident that he had sought the company of other women.

  ONE MORNING, HE ASKED ME TO COME down for breakfast with him; it was late, and no one else was in the dining room but one waiter and one guest, an old man smoking a cigar at a table on the other side of the room. Cora watched me eat. You would have had to know him as well as I did to know that he was tense; and though I had come to the table very hungry, I lost my appetite and I waited. At last he said quietly, “I can’t have a wife, I can’t have a mistress. I can’t be reliable. I don’t like to be reliable. I think the baby is mine. So. What should I do?” I didn’t speak. He was very still for a moment. Then he said, “You’ve brought me luck. I’m going to give you a thousand dollars.” It seemed more than fair—he had been generous already, what did he owe me?—but I said nothing, and my expression showed him nothing. “I’m going to give you two thousand dollars,” he amended, as if we had been haggling. “Do what you like with it, but—look—you like to manage things.” He raised a hand to get the waiter’s attention. “More coffee,” he said. “You should open up a house. For the girls, go to Baltimore—there are a lot of houses in Baltimore, you can find girls who are stale there but they’ll be fresh here. Get them to come with you. It has to be here.” He was thinking hard now; the prospect excited his business instincts. “In New York, you know aldermen and newspapermen and coppers, and they can help you. You know the sporting men. Rent a house in the Fifth Ward, some nice clean neighborhood where gentlemen feel safe. Furnish it out of auctions and estate sales, but make it fancy. Buy champagne, send out cards to the bachelors. They’ll tell the husbands.” His gaze fell on my belly; perhaps he was remembering the brothel in Milan, and that it was not so awful growing up there. “Men will like the idea that such a young, pretty girl is a madam, the madam the best-looking girl in the place.” He looked at me. I knew he wasn’t finished, so I didn’t answer. “You’ll have to be one of the girls, too, at least at the start. But not to just anybody. You’re the prize. Make them have the others first. Use some of the money for bribes. I could tell you to try your hand at some other business, but this is the one you know, so you begin with an edge; it’s your best chance.”

  The coffee came. He had it black, and I had it with a lot of sugar.

  “Will you help me get started?”

  “I’m leaving town. If you can’t do it yourself, you can’t do it. Write me a letter. You get in trouble, ask me for help.”

  That’s what he said. It was the opposite of sentimental, but for some reason now, maybe just because I am old, I am moved. Eight years later, his trial for murder was to make us both famous. People were impressed by the strenuousness of my efforts to save Charles Cora’s life. It has been seen, over the years, as a sort of romantic riddle. I believe I have provided several solutions. He was the father of my child; he treated me with respect and kindness; and we understood each other, which was a comfort. Just look at how many pages I am compelled to write, trying to be understood, now that he is gone.

  XXXVI

  I VISITED MRS. BOWER AT HER OWN HOME. Her housemaid brought us tea and little cakes in the sitting room. Seeing my belly, Mrs. Bower asked when my baby was due and if I knew whose it was, and if he believed me. She chided me for carelessness, but she was friendly. “Men have been asking about you.”

  “Have they? Good. Tell them to inquire at 259 Mercer.” It was not on Washington Square, but only two blocks away.

  Her face fell. She knew every parlor house in the city. The novel address, together with my smug expression, made the situation clear. She liked competition no better than anyone else in trade does. In a house of shame, as in any emporium, there are times when no customers come through the door. The girls sit around eating and drinking, but the landlord and dressmakers and maids insist on being paid. “Your own house?” she cried. “It’s a mistake. You’re too inexperienced. You’ll go bust.”

  “Then you have nothing to worry about,” I said tartly, unsure enough to be hurt by this prediction.

  She actually said, with genuine bitterness, “This is how you repay me!” And since I didn’t want her for my enemy, I insisted that I was very grateful and would never forget how she had helped me when I was at my life’s lowest ebb; that I looked upon her as my model and wouldn’t have contemplated this step without her example before me, and that that was why I had come to pay my respects and ask her advice.

  This helped to mollify her. As we drank tea from pretty china cups, we talked about doctors and midwives. Thanks to Heywood, Alderman O’Daniel, and Con Donoho, and others I had met through them, my political protection was as good as Mrs. Bower’s, and she knew it. In the ensuing months, she limited her campaign against me to intimating that my girls were in poor health and that I had fine wine labels specially printed for me and glued to bottles of cheap wine. (The second charge was true, but I had learned that trick from her.)

  Jocelyn, who had gone to New Orleans around the same time I put Lewis in touch with my grandfather, had come back at my request. She helped me not to feel lonely. I had gotten the rest of the girls in Baltimore, as Charley had suggested, and very easily: I had simply made my desires known to the proprietor of a dress shop that did much business with prostitutes. We all stayed at a ladies’ boarding house until the current tenant vacated the house on Mercer Street. When we finally moved in, Cleo, the octoroon, got first pick of the girls’ bedrooms in recompense for the indignity of posing as my servant at the boarding house. Cleo’s fee
lings were not easily hurt, but she stood up for herself as a matter of policy, being simultaneously the daughter and granddaughter of the same proud Virginian aristocrat. Monique, who had a round, rosy, dimply baby face that would not age well but was very appealing now, was simple, and cried so often that I worried about her until one day, after I had seen her cry over a blind man selling apples, a patron’s account of his impoverished childhood, and the news of the death of John Quincy Adams, I realized that she just enjoyed crying. Victoria hated herself and wanted to be dead. Through sheer luck, in that first group there happened to be no girl who made trouble just for fun, or who was envious, or thought the others were plotting against her.

  Frank, named in memory of my brother, was born without medical complications on February 24, 1848. It was exactly one month after the day gold was found at Sutter’s Mill on the American River, but New York had not heard of it yet. That year, one heard a lot about Europe. They were having the French Revolution again, this time not just in France but in many countries. As, one after another, the uprisings were crushed, my figure resumed its former shape, with improvements, and I learned what it was to hear an infant cry and to feel the tug of milk descending by way of an answer.

  I wrote to Charley often. In March, he came north and stayed for two weeks. He picked up the baby with an easy skill that suggested experience; where he might have gotten it I never learned. Sometimes Frank clamped his mouth on the flesh of his father’s arm and sucked like a leech until there was a red spot, and then I would put the baby to my breast.

  One day around this time, I was playing with Frank when Sean Donovan—whom I had started using as my messenger again as soon as I opened the house—knocked on my door and said a man with a plug hat and soap locks was here to see me.

  “Did he give his name?” I asked.

  “Jack Cutter.”

  I straightened my back and was silent for long enough to make my next words unconvincing. “My old friend Cutter!” I told Sean. “Bring him to the sitting room.”

  “He’s already there,” said Sean.

  “Is that so? Oh. Well, then, let’s go down and see him.” I put Frank down, and had Sean get the nurse while I looked at myself in the mirror. “Jack used to be a copper,” I told Sean a minute later, as we went down the turning stairs together. I glimpsed Cutter’s stained sleeve and big grimy hand on an expensive chair, and then his face, a little gaunter than when last seen. The scar noticed me before Jack did. “But he had a misunderstanding with the Corporation, and they sent him away. Hello, Jack. I’m glad you made yourself comfortable. Sean, get Rosie to bring Jack a whiskey, and wake Charley up, too. I’d like to introduce them.”

  I took a seat on a divan near his chair. “Well, well, Jack, how are you?”

  “Get your boss a whiskey, too,” Cutter told Sean, who was on his way out of the room. “Bring the bottle, and two glasses.”

  “Sure,” I said. “How are you, Jack?” I asked again. “I heard you had a raw deal.”

  He let me wait for a while and at last said, “What’d you hear?”

  “Why, that you were sent up for something every policeman in New York does.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But now you’re out, and looking up old friends.” From the expression on his face, it seemed likely that he knew I was the one who had arranged for his arrest. “What do you know, Jack?”

  He leaned forward and said quietly: “Lewis Godwin. Arabella Godwin. Solomon Godwin.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh, I see.”

  “Oh,” he said, leaving his mouth fixed for a while in a small “o.” “Oh, I see.” He held out his big hand, and then he closed it slowly into a fist, as if he were crushing a tiny Arabella Godwin.

  Rosie came with the whiskey. Charley was with her.

  I introduced them to each other. I had told Charley about Jack. “Jack tells me he knows all my names. Charley knows all about me, too,” I told Jack.

  Charley and Jack looked at each other, Charley smiling at Jack in a kindly, understanding way. At last Charley said, “Harriet. Could I talk to Mr. Cutter alone a minute?” and I left them.

  Charley knocked on my door a half-hour later. I started thanking him for scaring Cutter away, but he said, “You’re paying him. Thirty dollars a month. You send it to a P.O. box. He shows up, or asks for more, write me a letter—I’ll come.”

  IN APRIL, CHARLEY LEFT AGAIN. I hired a wet nurse and made myself available once more to a select group chosen from the gentlemen who came to 259 Mercer Street. Once more, Sean began carrying billets doux and little presents between me and my spurious beaux around the town. To reprise the role of fallen angel who had found love too late, now that I was known to be a madam, with a baby in a trundle bed right in the house, required a good deal of finesse. Daytime was easy. I could nurse the baby in the front parlor. The girls played with him, and engaged in lively discussions about swaddling and weening and the proper time to introduce solid foods; the atmosphere was quite domestic. At night, the baby lived in a part of the house the outer world never saw, separated by a pair of doors and a long hallway. I kept one room for myself there, and another, for business purposes, on the second floor of the house. To the patrons, Frank was just a rumor. I was very young. I was beautiful in the style of the time. I knew my clientele, I knew what they wanted, and the city’s rapid growth created a steady demand for the services available at my emporium. I prospered.

  Following the example of Mrs. Bower, I kept a day book and a ledger and did my own accounts, for nothing connected with business was more frightening to me than that I should not realize when I was spending more money than I was taking in. I kept the ledger in a locked drawer in my bedroom writing desk. My father, the chief clerk, the lover of the whore Frances, had kept my grandfather’s books, and sometimes he took the work home and I had watched him. I thought of that whenever I wrote in the ledger.

  XXXVII

  BY THE SPRING OF ’49, news of the gold strikes in California had reached the East, and the whole country had gone insane over it. We heard that ships in San Francisco Bay couldn’t sail, because their crews were panning for gold in the rivers; the forts were empty, because the soldiers were busy prying gold from the rocks with the tips of their bayonets. In New York, everything that could float was being rigged to take men to California. The newspapers were full of advertisements for gold-washing machines. I got a letter from Charley postmarked Panama City: “When you get this I will be in San Francisco. I’ll get my letters at the Parker House. So write me there if you want. If you ever come out this way go by the Horn, not by Panama. People are dying like flies here from the fever.”

  I had that letter in my hand when I heard a rapid knock on my door, and a shout from the sentimental Monique—“Harriet! Come quickly!”—of such urgency that I thought she must have discovered the corpse of a patron on the floor at the foot of her bed (where, several weeks earlier, just as we were about to open, she had discovered a gentleman who had been sleeping there all day).

  She took me downstairs to the parlor. Frank and his nurse sat in a chair by the window. Upon my arrival, at the bottom of the staircase, the nurse put him on his feet and said, “Go to Mama, Frankie!” He looked at me, drooling and gurgling, in his gown, and took one step, and then another. I stood still and let him come—it was a long way, and two paces short, he seemed to decide that he had done his share and stood wobbling with his arms raised and his lips pressed together. I picked him up. “Ma—” he began, and the word, his first, was like a blow to my chest, it wrung my heart with a strange mixture of joy and dismay—I wanted to hear it, but it would shake my resolution if I heard it—and so, before he could finish it, I lifted his gown, put my lips against his navel, and blew noisily, making him laugh instead. To change a fellow’s mind, to make him want something it is easier to give him, is a crucial skill in a courtesan.

  Still, there was no getting around the fact that soon he was going to be walking around and calling me Mama
, and the incident strengthened my resolve in the plan I had made soon after he was born. As a first step, I had re-established contact with my aunt. I told her that, thanks to the generosity of a dressmaker—a childless woman in her sixties—I had completed an apprenticeship in that craft; and soon afterward my benefactress had died, leaving her shop to me. The dressmaker, a devout Presbyterian, had been an active member of the New York branch of the Female Reform Society, to which I now belonged as well. I promised that hereafter I would stay in communication. I wrote in a similar vein to Anne and Melanchthon. I did not tell them that I knew where Lewis was, or that my grandfather was alive and in New York.

  Some weeks later—long enough for me to wonder if she was dead—my aunt replied with news of her own. Titus had a general store in Patavium. Matthew helped him there. He had started walking again, for short intervals, with canes, and with the Lord’s help would make a full recovery. Evangeline had married a local farmer. Agnes was teaching school in Boston, and affianced to George Sackett, who was now a minister.