Belle Cora: A Novel (51 page)

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 feelings 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.

Our correspondence had continued from there. Now I wrote as follows: