Belle Cora: A Novel (35 page)

She did not strike me as stupid, but she could barely read, and in conversation it developed that she didn’t know that rivers empty into the oceans, or that the earth was round, or that there were more foreigners in it than Americans; she had never heard of Julius Caesar or William Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson. Since she was careless, when I was around her I felt wise and prudent. I felt responsible for her.

Jocelyn said that her father had been a teamster in Pennsylvania, regularly carrying beer to Philadelphia, and he used to take her along. Then he died in a terrible accident. The horses, frightened by the cracking of a walnut board while he was loading baggage, ran wild, and he was crushed by the wheels and caught by his belt and dragged along the highway for half a mile. His fellow teamsters helped her mother open a little store, where she sold candy, bread, kindling wood, and so on. The family lived in a back room. They took in washing and sewing and made straw hats, and still they had nothing. One day, a neighbor showed them an advertisement for millworkers. Jocelyn and her mother both applied, but her mother was rejected because she was blind in one eye.

This was the story she told me first. A few weeks later, she admitted that her father was alive. He’d gotten better work in New Jersey, where he remarried without bothering to obtain a divorce. He had never taken
Jocelyn to Philadelphia. But someone had, it seemed to me. She was well informed about the city’s amusements.

She had come to me, this foolish pet, this empty-headed friend, about two weeks after I had received a terrible letter about Jeptha. It came from Anne, and it began with an apology for the pain she was about to inflict on me. Jeptha had married Grace, the minister’s pretty, unspoiled daughter in New Jersey. I remember holding this letter in my hand in the sitting room, and then finding myself upstairs, facedown on the hair mattress, crying my heart out, as though I had dematerialized in one place and reappeared in another.

As much as I had grieved before, I had never thought I’d seen the last of Jeptha. And as you will learn, I had not. I write it here out of kindness, so you need not despair with me. But you must remember that I didn’t know this. I acted in the belief that we were separated forever, and I would never be accountable to him for my actions. Had I known the truth, I would have behaved with more discretion.

A WEEK AFTER THAT, I RECEIVED
a letter in Lewis’s hand, addressed to me in the care of the Harmony Manufacturing Company. It was posted from Rome, a town on the Erie Canal, about a hundred miles west of Cohoes.

Where had he picked up such a fancy closing—“devoted brother”? Maybe he had gotten someone’s help. I loved those words: “devoted brother”—
devoted
. There had been two more letters since, both promising visits, both vague about the nature of his occupations. They were sacred to me.

BEFORE DAWN A FACTORY BELL WOKE
us. Most of us had grown up on farms and were used to working before breakfast. But this part was new: emerging from our boarding house under dimming stars to join other streams of half-dreaming girls summoned as if by an enchantment to the several doors of the long high brick factory building across the street. By five a.m. we had assumed our various duties in the picking room, the carding room, the spinning room, the weaving room, the cloth room. At seven the bells rang again; we ran back to our various boarding houses for breakfast. Mine was served under the supervision of Mrs. Robinson, a big, fleshy, red-faced woman, almost six feet tall, a widow, and a generous cook, whatever other complaints we had, we did not starve. We had to be back by seven thirty-five. Dinner—with its own bell—was from noon to twelve-thirty, also at the boarding house. Mrs. Robinson made hard-boiled eggs that we could carry with us if we had not had time to fill our stomachs.

As it had been discovered that dry air causes threads to snap, the windows of the weaving room were never opened and steam was pumped in through pipes, and it was always warm and damp. Cotton fibers flew into our throats and lungs. Despite these discomforts, the thing that made the strongest impression on me was the amazing regularity of the place. The one room ran the whole length of the building. We saw the long rows of pillars, the farthest diminishing in apparent size as perfectly as in books that teach drawing. A rotating shaft over each identical loom helped turn a barrel-like cylinder. A black band around each cylinder ran
to the loom, somehow causing it to open and close, open and close, while the shuttle flew between the threads, and we mill girls, dressed alike the better to illustrate rules of linear perspective, watched the perfect manufacture of our identical seconds, minutes, and hours. When the falls ran dry, causing the machines to stop, and we left the mill to stroll through the impressive natural scenery of the Mohawk Valley, it was like being woken from dreams too strange for the waking mind to grasp.

At the seven o’clock, evening bell, we went back to the company-owned boarding house, had supper, and did as we pleased until ten, when, by company law, we had to be in bed. We were permitted to go out, but Cohoes was not a lively town, so we spent our few hours of leisure in a large room furnished to resemble the sitting room in a home more prosperous than those from which any of us had come. We played games, drew, made clothes, wrote in diaries. Unbelievably, some girls knitted. I read to Jocelyn from
Godey’s Lady’s Book
and memorized passages from a cheap one-volume copy of Byron’s works, with tiny type in two columns per page.

We were expected to go to church. Jocelyn and I chose the Cohoes Presbyterian Church. It had the most comfortable pews for the price, good heating and ventilation. On Saturday afternoons, young Reverend Adams gave lectures on the terrible vice of self-abuse, an epidemic of which was filling America’s insane asylums with madmen, its hospitals with consumptives, and its brothels with girls exactly like us.

XXVII

ONE DAY, WHEN I WAS IN THE WEAVING ROOM
, minding my three looms, I became aware of a stir, an additional alertness among the other operatives. A stern-looking senior clerk was walking in my direction. “Arabella Moody?” he inquired.

“Yes,” I said.

“A man is asking for you. He says he’s your brother.”

An overseer took charge of my machines, and I was allowed to take a half-hour off. I went to the counting house, which was where I went once a week to collect my wages; and there, to my joy, I found Lewis waiting for me. He had a cigar butt in his mouth, which he removed and tossed with careless accuracy into a distant spittoon. We embraced hungrily. Then we stood holding each other at arm’s length, to give our eyes the pleasure. In the six months since I had last seen him, he had grown taller and leaner, and he was dressed and groomed in a way that would set him apart from any man in Livy or Cohoes; he had a plug hat, under which his hair was cut very short behind, but long and greasy and puffed out at the sides. These side locks were made to curl forward, in front of the ears, with the help of soap. He wore black broadcloth trousers, which vanished into high-heeled boots; an open tailcoat; a woolen shirt with a bright-orange silk cravat.

I introduced him to the clerks in the counting house, “This is my brother Lewis,” I told them proudly. The clerks nodded with wary expressions, and I could tell that they disliked him, resenting the clothes, the hair, even the posture. As I came to understand later, it was the outfit of the New York City “Bowery Boy.” That Lewis should be so dressed and groomed was especially odd: since as our conversation progressed I learned that he had not been to New York City during our separation.

We went down the dark, winding stairs and out of the factory. I made him stand on the side of me nearest the street and walk arm in arm with me. “Well, what have you been doing, Lewis? How have you been surviving?”

“One thing and another. I been traveling with somebody.”

I have not troubled myself with exact reproduction of people’s speech in this memoir; but what Lewis said was really more like this: “One t’ing ’n’ anudda,” and “I been travelin’ wit’ sumbuddy.” He spoke in the dialect now considered the accent of New York’s lower strata, and then as the specific accent of the Bowery.

“Oh? Who?”

“Tom Cross. We met up in Lockport”—he said “Lockpawt”—“and we’ve been doing this and doing that and getting jobs on the canal and the farms around here. He’s a grand fella, Tom is. He’s done a thousand things—you’ll get a kick out of him. He’s from York. We’re staying at the Cohoes Inn. He’s dying to meet you.”

He waited outside while I went into the boarding house. Mrs. Robinson was on her fat white knees, washing the stairs with her great hanging arms and a bucket, her hair pasted to her neck and brow from sweat; from her two talkative grown daughters, who helped in the boarding house and slept in our room, I had learned that she was the widow of a housepainter, who had succumbed to an illness she called “painter’s colic” after lingering a year in bed. Her strange manner and physical appearance had frightened me when I first arrived: I did not know what to make of her big, shapeless, sweaty, sour-smelling body, and her bulging eyes, always startled and distracted, as if staring at some horror she alone could see—maybe her husband’s illness and the financial ruin it caused. She had nine children in all, some living with relatives, some others, boys and girls, working at the mill.

I asked her if my brother and a friend could visit us for supper. “So long as they act like gentlemen,” she replied, and as usual the thoughts behind her bulging eyes were unreadable. I wanted her to think well of me. It was foolish, but there it was.

TOM WAS A LITTLE LARGER THAN LEWIS
, and ten years older, blue-eyed, with brown hair and a prominent Adam’s apple, which, when he drained a glass of water, the mill girls watched as if it were a circus acrobat. His overall good looks were marred by a crooked little scar that ran from his temple to his right eye. The real Tom resided in that scar. He was dressed in an outfit much like the one Lewis wore. Under his coat, which he kept on at supper, he wore the tight-fitting red woolen shirt of the volunteer fire department. As a member of Engine Company 9, he had put out many fires; until almost a year ago he was led north by the love of adventure and the opportunity of helping a pal (Tom’s stories were liberally punctuated with offhand references to unnamed pals). He had been kicking around here, doing manly work on the canal, ever since.

He was voluble, though not always believable, on other subjects: lives and property he had saved, brawls with other fire companies, times he and his pals had defended the honest working women of New York against insulting advances from aristocratic dandies.

He reminded me of Matthew; a more cosmopolitan Matthew from New York. I wondered if Lewis had ever noted the resemblance.

I suppose it was pleasant for a sturdy young fellow to sit down to supper at a long table surrounded by man-starved young mill girls. Lewis’s and Tom’s plates were heaped high. The girls listened raptly to their stories of life on the big freight boats, and of all the “scraps” they had gotten in between Albany and Buffalo. Whenever the boys’ big gestures threatened to overturn pitchers or candlesticks, a girl sitting nearby would uncomplainingly rescue these items.