Belle Cora: A Novel (43 page)

I have always been a quick study. I had been five months in New York City, and I knew where miracles were sold. I went to the grocery store of Con Donoho, the mighty Sixth Ward street inspector, and asked Mrs. Donoho to speak with me alone. Without a word, she took me down to a musty-smelling basement full of sacks and barrels and broken furniture. She lit another candle to improve the light, and said to me, “This would be about your brother Lewis?” I nodded, not very surprised—glad of it, since her omniscience suggested power, and I needed power—and
she went to a barrel and drained a mug of beer from it and handed it to me. “Tell me what you think of this variety,” she said. My two elderly employers had a secret fondness for beer and sometimes sent me out to get it for them, so I knew a little about it. I sniffed the mug and guessed that it was stale beer from the lees. A cup of it gave one a killing headache, but it was a cheap way to get drunk, and—so a flirtatious bartender had told me—the Five Points was full of dank cellars in which men determinedly obliterated themselves with this stuff. Supposing that the cup had been put before me to test my good sense, I ignored it. Trying to sound businesslike and not too worried, I began repeating what I had learned while visiting my brother in the Tombs—my brother’s words, O’Faolin’s words—and after repeatedly nodding, as if she knew all this, Mrs. Donoho said impatiently, “And Cutter has threatened to have your brother killed in prison.”

Here I suppose my brave front dropped. “How do you know this?”

“Oh, word gets around.”

I was at a loss for a few seconds. At last I asked her, “And is it empty talk?”

She shrugged. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Tell me what I need to do to fix it. I’ll do anything.”

She blinked at me. “Anything? Is that so? Or is that just a figure of speech?” I didn’t answer. She took away the mug of lees without comment, got up, and brought me another mug. “Try this and see if you like it better.”

I smelled it and took a sip; it tasted exactly like the drink I had once stolen from the two elderly sisters in an impulsive act of vengeance.

“What makes you think Constantine can fix this?” she asked.

“I guess he’ll know who can, and what they’ll want in return.”

“I’ll ask him, and he’ll ask around. But if you forced me to guess, I’d say they’d want five hundred dollars. And you a housemaid. Where are you going to get money like that, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I don’t mind your asking, but where I get it is my lookout.”

“I guess so. Well, you’re loyal to that brother of yours. I hope he appreciates it.”

I had to get back to the elderly sisters, so I walked fast, and a young fellow in a stovepipe hat noticed me. “Hello! Where are you going in such a hurry?”

I was in that state when one schemes to quell panic and make the next minute bearable. If necessary, you think, I will do this unpleasant thing, and give up that dear thing, and you feel better because at least these ugly choices are your own. I decided that I would really need six hundred dollars, not just five hundred. That way, I could promise Mrs. Donoho an extra hundred when my brother was actually freed. I know now that five hundred alone would have been enough: her cut had been figured into it.

Six hundred dollars was twice my yearly salary. My rich grandfather was dead. I had not heard from my older brothers since I was twelve, or any other relative of mine save my aunt and uncle, who hated Lewis. Distasteful as it might be to ask Jocelyn to loan me the money she had earned by selling her flesh, I would have asked her, but I knew she didn’t have it. She owed money to Mrs. Bower.

So my mind turned to my steamboat companion Eric Gordon. He must be very rich, to have one home in Brooklyn and another just a ferry ride away, at the most expensive hotel in New York, so that he could amuse himself with light women while his wife enjoyed a house with trees, a garden, and servants. Such a man could solve carelessly, almost absentmindedly, problems that meant life or death to me and to Lewis.

There was never any doubt in my mind what I would have to give Mr. Gordon in exchange for such a large sum. Shivering in my bed in my cold attic room that night, in the house of the two sisters who had predicted that I would eventually do just what I was about to do, I went through many phases of decision and indecision. What if Cutter had been merely lying or boasting when he said that he would have my brother killed in prison? In that case, the trade was this—either Lewis, thanks to his own folly, would go to prison for a certain time, or I would dishonor myself forever. And after that, what? What would I be?
Who
would I be? Was it a fair exchange?

Perhaps I would not be able to find Eric Gordon. Maybe he was out of town. Whereas before I had calmed myself with the idea of action, now I took refuge in the thought that the final outcome was up to chance and fate, and at last I was able to sleep.

IN A FUR-COLLARED COAT
, a pretty blue dress, an India-muslin pelerine, and white kid gloves, all just purchased secondhand with my entire savings, I crossed the street, which was full of dirty snow, big-wheeled,
boatlike omnibuses, gigs, hacks, and carriages, and I approached the world-famous Astor House. The great hotel looked majestic from a distance, but at ground level it resembled a bazaar, gripped by a disorderly collection of canvas awnings that put the sidewalk in shadow, by street hawkers, and by hanging placards and bills that advertised restaurants, patent medicines, and theatrical productions in those tall letters that remind one of men on stilts. I passed between a pair of Roman columns, and up a flight of steps into a tall, wide, gaslit lobby. The marble floor was strewn with luggage. Guests handed coats and capes and silk hats to a fellow in a room to the side. In another alcove, a man stood still while a hotel employee brushed his coat.

An imposing, double-chinned desk clerk stood before a great book and near a mysterious glass case full of sickle-shaped pieces of brass. After he had assisted a few of the customers in line before me, I handed him a letter for Mr. Gordon; he gave no sign of whether he knew who Eric Gordon was, or had any opinions about the kind of girl who might leave a letter for him. He turned and put the letter into a pigeonhole in the wall behind him.

The letter told of my brother’s trouble and asked for Eric Gordon’s help, not saying what I might give in return, or the amount of money that would be needed. I said that I would come back to the hotel desk at the same time next week, on my day off.

As I was leaving the hotel, I saw him. He looked richer to me now than he had before, and nearly as handsome as I remembered. He gave me the glance a man of his type gives a pretty girl, and then his face lit up. “Miss Moody! From the
Israel Putnam
!” He pressed my right hand between his hands. “Look at you. Don’t you look lovely. Do you know someone at the hotel?”

“Only you,” I said, frightened—it was happening too quickly. “I left a letter for you.”

“When?”

“Just now. Only just now.”

“I see. Is there someplace you must be right now? Or do you have time to speak to me in person?”

“I have time.”

“Then you must dine with me,” he said, as though it were a matter of course and he said that he was planning to dine here—would I mind
that terribly?—and when I said no, he hooked his arm in mine, took my letter from the clerk, who did not look at me, and led me through the Astor House, which became to me at that point a labyrinth. I suppose if Eric had left me there I would have been able to find my way out, but it did not feel like that as we walked through doorways and down halls; I decided that twice the combined population of Livy and Patavium were contained within these walls and most of them were strangers to each other. The thought was comforting. No one knew or cared what I did.

There were children in the corridors, rich men’s children, running and screaming. What an easy life they had!

At last Eric led me into an opulently furnished, gaslit room, with heavy drapes and rich carpets and chandeliers, and a few round tables with lacy white tablecloths. There were women and children as well as men in the chamber. When we came in Eric nodded to a few of the other patrons, evidently casual acquaintances of his—and who, I was sure, must know I was not his wife. Though he had not introduced me, the men, and also a few women in the proximity of children probably their own, returned his speechless greeting in a way that seemed to acknowledge and welcome me into their company, and afterward ignored us, and I felt that I had learned something about the morals and manners appropriate to a fashionable hotel dining room. A well-dressed waiter filled our glasses with clear, sweet Croton water and some chunks of ice, handed us a printed bill of fare, and retreated to a corner. “The
table d’hôte
here is considered one of the best in the city,” Eric said. “I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”

“I’m sure I won’t. I have very little basis for comparison.”

He looked at me. “I remember that about you. That you talk that way.”

It was not clear quite what he meant, but I liked his saying it. It made me feel that he had noticed me for something other than my proportions, and I found a bit of courage in that, enough to mask my nerves.

“Why don’t you order for me?” I said. “And then you can read the letter, and we’ll have something to talk about.”

“You’re here in the flesh. Why don’t you just tell me what’s in it?”

“I labored over its composition. I don’t want it to go to waste.”

“All right. Do you like veal?”

“I’m happy to try it,” I said.

“Wine?”

“Yes, and quickly.”

He laughed. I was amusing him already. He ordered with the expected fluency. When I drank the wine I felt its power immediately, as abstemious people do, and was less nervous about the future. What would be would be. The rich man would decide.

He read my letter without a change of expression and put it into his waistcoat. He took a sip from his glass as the waiter came forward to refill mine.

“The Sixth Ward is certainly badly governed. I did not know it was governed out of a grocery, but I can believe it.” My letter had mentioned Con Donoho and his wife. “How did you come to meet that woman?”

Sipping more slowly on my second glass of wine, I told him of my experiences in New York, starting with my encounter with the bad man with the poet’s hair and the cane, and how, while escaping him, I had come to my old house; and Mrs. Shea, who had given me the name of Mrs. Donoho. “Will you be able to help me?”

“I’m sure I can do something,” he said. “What a life of adventure you lead.”

The waiter was bringing the dishes now.

“It only seems that way when I tell it quickly. It has been mostly drudgery.”

“I hope you’ll let me change that.”

If that was a question, I was not ready to answer it, so I just smiled at him.

“Do you like the theater?” he asked me.

“Probably.”

“We could go to the theater tonight, you and I. Of course I’ll help your brother. You can rest easy, knowing that, and in the meantime, we can enjoy ourselves.”

“All right,” I said, smiling at him.

I thought I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen tonight, and if I must take this fearful step, I preferred to do it in an atmosphere of music and wine and oysters and such amusements as he had described to me on the
Israel Putnam
. Luxury was supposed to be the
thing that tempted weak-willed girls from the path of virtue, and it was a terrible mistake and a bad bargain; I had always heard that, and I believed it. But if I had to be bad, I might as well have the pleasant things that came along with it, and I welcomed distraction as someone undergoing a surgical operation would welcome ether.

The food came to us. Together, Eric Gordon and I discovered that I did like veal, that I had a great talent for liking viands well cooked in the French mode, and that my mouth looked pretty when I was attempting to pronounce their names.

Since it was early for the theater, we first walked arm in arm to the fountain at City Hall, and from there to a great gaudy five-story building with flags on the roof, oval paintings of its attractions between the windows, and the name
BARNUM
’
S AMERICAN MUSEUM
running under the fourth-story windows along Anne Street. In the company of visitors from the world over, we went from floor to floor, looking at dioramas, panoramas, models of Dublin, Paris, Niagara Falls (with flowing water); mechanical figures, industrious fleas, educated dogs, jugglers, automatons, ventriloquists, living statues; American Indians doing rain dances in full ceremonial dress, the very club with which Captain Cook was killed in the Sandwich Islands.

We then walked to the Park Theatre, which burned down a few years later. It was evening. Lamps were on. The streets were full of hacks and carriages and elegantly dressed strollers. Men tipped their hats to me. It was a worldly throng, friendly and at ease with each other; the preachers and the deep thinkers were at home, eating their dinners and rebuking their children, and we were safe from their disapproval.

The Park was small by today’s standards, but beautiful, with gaslight chandeliers, well-upholstered chairs, and attendants; and Eric had a subscription to a box. We saw a musical number, with a singer, followed by a play featuring Edwin Forrest, Bridget’s favorite actor. The play was
Spartacus
, which allowed Forrest—whose figure was much admired, though he struck me as too stout—to stand half naked, waving a sword, while lecturing ancient Romans on modern American notions. The mechanics, who adored Forrest, sat in the pit, eating peanuts and sandwiches, insulting the actors they disliked, and whooping and whistling at each entrance of their hero. In those days, clergymen considered theaters to be cesspools
of immorality, and they knew whereof they spoke: one could see the men in the lower tiers leaving their boxes to visit the prostitutes in the third tier, a section reserved for such people back then, as even I who had never been in a theater before knew. After
Spartacus
there was a minstrel show.