Belle Cora: A Novel (36 page)

One story struck an unpleasant note: The two of them, adding details and correcting each other, told how, a few months ago, in Rome, they had wanted to get a job together as freight-boat drivers. They befriended two drivers, took them to a tavern, and stood them to many drinks. When these two fellows were corned so badly the last trump wouldn’t have woken them, Lewis and Tom showed up for work in their place. Concluding his story, Tom speared a potato with his knife and thrust it whole into his mouth.

And he thought this was something to brag about! It hurt me. I said, “I can’t help feeling sorry for those men. Some people would say that was a dirty trick.”

Tom, chewing and swallowing hurriedly, said, “Well, sure, yeah, we wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t known what those men were like. We did it after I saw the way they was treating the team—ain’t that so, Lewis?”

“Oh yeah.”

“They was killing them. They just laid on the whip. They wasn’t fed right.”

“We saved those creatures’ lives,” Lewis agreed.

Another sour note came when they were praising each other’s fighting abilities. Tom said, “Lewis looks nice, but he can do harm if he’s of a mind to. He’s a killer.”

Lewis was opposite from me at the table; I saw the smile vanish, then return as a hardened mask of itself. He flashed a look at Tom, who winked.

One girl, who knew that firefighting is an unpaid profession, asked Tom what he did for a living back in New York City. After a brief hesitation, he said he was a journeyman butcher. It was a trade that commanded a good wage, he assured us, and considerable respect in the Bowery, where much of the city’s butchering was done.

“What do you do for fun around here?” asked Tom after we had retired
to the sitting room, and he and Lewis were looking around for the first time at its grandmotherly wallpaper, rag carpets, framed samplers, big stuffed chairs and sofas.

After a silence, a girl name Rosaline asked, “Would you like to play a game of checkers, or backgammon?”

Tom laughed. “I meant in Cohoes. When you want to get out of this stuffy room. Where do you go for a glass of beer? Where do you go for fun?”

“We ain’t much for fun,” said Barbara, who had arrived in Cohoes the week after I did: they had cut her braids off because of the risk that they might be caught in the machinery. She had cried bitterly over those braids, but their sacrifice had made her into a company girl. “We’ve got to save our money.”

Barbara had more than the usual suspicion of idle amusement. But none of us were supposed to like it; we were of New England stock.

“Sure, that’s smart. But don’t the boys here take you out and spend their money on you?”

We had a pretty correct idea of what boys who spent money on girls wanted in return, and those of us who weren’t shocked felt obliged to pretend we were.

“When boys come, they visit us in the sitting room, as you are doing. There isn’t much of that, though. Mostly we read or sew.”

“Sometimes we rent a rowboat and go on the river,” volunteered Jocelyn.

Well, one could, but we never did. During the rare daylight hour not spent in the mill or at church, we packed a lunch and walked by the river. We watched the canal boats being loaded, and the men working the locks.

“You gals are wasting your lives,” said Tom.

“Would you like a game of checkers?” Rosaline repeated her offer.

“New York has spoiled me for checkers,” said Tom.

Behind me, I heard Lewis ask Jocelyn, “Would you go out on a boat with me?”

I heard her say, “Maybe.”

“Who else wants to come?” said Lewis.

“You asked
me
!” said Jocelyn.

“But you only said maybe. Say you’ll go and no mistake.”

“All right.”

“All right, what?”

“All right, I’ll go with you.”

“Good,” said Lewis, laughing in a helpless, uncontained way, like a boy. “Who else is coming?”

“You’re bad,” said Jocelyn. “I knew it. You’re no good at all.”

“You’re right,” Lewis admitted. “I spend all my pay soon as I get it. I fight and I cuss. I take all the girls on boat rides and I try to kiss them.”

“I knew it,” said Jocelyn. “I knew you was bad.”

I felt a pang of jealousy and couldn’t have told you whom or what I was jealous of—I suppose I wanted them both to love me and not each other. But I could see they made a sort of sense together; they were very alike.

“A rowboat is all right if you’re used to checkers, I guess,” said Tom, and he started to tell the mill girls of the plentiful and cheap amusements of the Bowery, already known then as the workingman’s Broadway. He spoke of firehouse balls; oyster saloons offering “all you can eat” for six cents; ice-cream saloons; pleasure gardens; plays, baseball games, dime museums. In the warm weather, there were steamboat trips in the East River and ferry rides to Long Island; picnics in New Jersey and Staten Island. If you didn’t like spending money, just watching the people promenading in their finery up and down Bowery was a thrill. They were
all
spoiled for checkers, all the Bowery Boys and Bowery Gals. Pretty girls, such as we all were, did not need to pay for anything, but if they were the independent type, why, most of them were wage earners and didn’t have to take any guff from anybody.

That’s where Lewis and Tom were headed. They were on their way to New York City, where Tom would resume his work as a butcher and Lewis would start as an apprentice. “Anyone who wants to come with us is welcome.”

Some tittered, as if he were joking. Others took offense, explaining frostily that we were girls of hard-nosed Yankee stock who labored not for a day’s amusement but for a dowry, or a home to start our married lives in, or to pay for a clever brother’s education. No doubt it was tedious of us, but we were rather inclined to worry that such shortsighted expenditures would lead a girl in time to the almshouse.

“Oh, the almshouse,” said Tom. “I don’t know about that. Not while we’re young.” With a smile of conspiracy, he looked past the prudent girls to the fools.

I suppose we all had a little more trouble sleeping that night. Certainly Jocelyn and I did, watching the slow-dying glow through the grate of the heating stove.

“Let’s go with them,” she whispered.

“You don’t know what you’re saying. We’d wind up on the streets.”

“How do you know that? You sound like Barbara. We’d find work. You heard him. Girls work in New York, and they have money to spend on oyster cellars and ferries.”

“We don’t know anything about those girls. Can’t you see that that Tom is a bad egg? You can’t trust him.”

“Your brother trusts him.”

“I wish he didn’t. I’m going to warn him about Tom, as soon as I get him alone.”

After a bit more time had passed, I thought she had gone to sleep, and I drifted off to confused dreams of Tammany parades, beach picnics, beer gardens, and dime museums. I woke abruptly to the voice of Jocelyn whispering, “I’m dying here. I hate it. I can’t stand it. The cotton fly is giving me consumption. Do you want me to die? I can’t stand the wet air, the heat, the same thing day in, day out. Maybe reading Byron and
Godey’s Lady’s Book
is your idea of a good time, but that won’t do for me.” I saw she meant to hurt me, but I kept my peace. “If we go to New York, we can work as dressmakers.”

“It takes years to become a dressmaker. You start out as an apprentice. Do you know how to make a dress?”

“I can sew.”

“Who can’t? That’s what the good widows do in the newspaper stories, the worthy old widows everyone pities, who freeze in the cellars without the shrift to buy a lump of coal for the stove. They sew shirts; they starve.”

“I won’t starve,” said Jocelyn lightly. “I know how not to starve.”

I knew what she meant. She had dropped one hint after another. The moment I first understood had passed without notice. She hadn’t lost her virginity in a careless frolic with a boy. She had given herself for
gain—not every day, just occasionally, for dollars, and for steak dinners and trips to the city. Though she had been slow to reveal it to me, she wasn’t ashamed. It was just the way she managed; she kept it a secret only because of the fuss other people would make.

It is hard to remember how strenuously I resisted the knowledge that Jocelyn had been a prostitute—or, rather, that, as I thought then, she
was
a prostitute, for certainly, once you had prostituted yourself, you were a prostitute forever, and it was the main thing you were from then on. Is the mark invisible? Invisible marks cannot be erased. You can never think the same about someone after you learn she has been a prostitute. If she stops, she is a former prostitute, just as a man who was once in prison is an ex-convict. If she reforms, which is more than stopping, a stale odor of repentance hangs over her until she goes to meet her Maker, with the final disposition of her case still in doubt.

Honest women shun prostitutes. Even if we view prostitutes as unfortunates rather than as sinners, they are unclean, and they ought to keep away from respectable women. My fondness for Jocelyn outweighed these feelings, and I could not wish we hadn’t met, but I believed that, without intending to, she had contaminated me.

Certainly I did not want her to return to that trade. “All right, then,” I said. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll be smart about it. From now on, in the evenings, we’ll practice fine sewing and dressmaking. We’ll make clothes out of
Godey’s Lady’s Book
. We’ll practice until we’re good enough to offer ourselves as dressmaker’s apprentices in New York. And in the meantime, we’ll visit now and then. We’ll try to get positions before we move. If we must, we’ll get positions as help. It would be less money, and we wouldn’t be together, but maybe it would be worth it to live in New York City.”

On Sunday, after church, Tom and Lewis took Jocelyn and me out boating on the Mohawk. The falls roared, seabirds shrieked; Tom boasted. I watched water purl around the oar, and thought: Dressmakers, why not.

We ate—the boys paid—at a tavern near the locks, got back in the boat, and rowed to the shelter of a pretty channel. A breeze combed the water; green leaves, blown off the branches, glided twirling down as their reflections rose twirling upward to meet them; tiny fish darted among the slimy rocks in the drifting shadow of the boat. Jocelyn let Lewis kiss
her. As a sort of experiment, to see how I would feel, I let Tom kiss me. His kisses were subtler than his speech, and were not unpleasant. But when his hand reached under my skirt, I pulled away with an unthinking gasp, the boat rocked, and Jocelyn cried out, having banged her head. Tom glanced at Lewis, perhaps remembering that he was my brother, and for the rest of the afternoon had the surliness of a man who has been cheated out of half the price of a boat rental, a plate of chicken and corn fixings, and a sarsaparilla.

Lewis and Tom said that they would be staying at the Cohoes Inn till Wednesday; we would have until then to decide whether we would go with them to New York.

Monday came, the factory bell woke us; we rose in the dark and walked across the gravel street to the long brick factory; I went to the weaving room and Jocelyn went to the picking room. When the seven o’clock bell rang and I crossed the street again to get my breakfast, Jocelyn wasn’t at the table. I was worried, but not worried enough. I thought she was with Tom or Lewis. Noon came; still no Jocelyn.

When I came home for supper, one of the girls handed me a message from Lewis.

ALONE ON MY HAIR-STUFFED MATTRESS
, I lay thinking and fretting, my eyes open in the darkness; in the weaving room, rushing to straighten the threads that had gotten tangled, I worried; and when I came back to the sitting room, I missed Jocelyn and was simply lonely. But what could I do? She had gone of her own free will with my devoted brother and his friend.

A week and a half later, a letter arrived.

“Nifte.” What was that? “We fawt he nifte me.” I read the sentence three times before I understood. Tom Cross had cut my brother with a
knife
, badly enough so that he could not work, and when he said he might be dying, it could be the plain truth. He was sick, maybe from the wound’s festering, and he lay in some miserable hole in a district whose
reputation I remembered from my girlhood as the gate of hell—a place no one I knew would dare to enter unaccompanied by a policeman. And Jocelyn: in a bawdy house, probably not far from where Lewis lay. I will not dwell on my feelings. I had to go to New York.

I went to the counting house to tell them that I had to be absent for a while—I knew that sometimes girls were given leave to visit parents, even to help with a harvest—but I was told that this was a busy time and it was impossible. I asked to speak to Thomas McCormick, the manager and owner; I said that I was determined to go, and hoping for sympathy I explained the circumstances. I begged him: “I must; I have no choice, Mr. McCormick.”