Belle Cora: A Novel (6 page)

Once, Edward and I were walking down Broadway, and Lewis was running ahead of us. A big sow coming out from a side street knocked him down. He was sitting in the road, not yet sure if he ought to cry about this, when the sow turned and charged him again; it would, for all I know, have eaten him had I not been there. I picked up a brickbat and with a lucky shot hit the sow in the snout, whereupon it turned on me. A small barrel, thrown from a nearby wagon by a quick-thinking teamster, hit the sow on its back. The cask bounced off the animal and went rolling down the street. Carts changed course to avoid it, and the sow darted between the tall wheels of a coach and ran off “to mend its ways,” said Edward, who had been laughing, like most of the onlookers.

When we got home, the story was that Lewis had almost been eaten by a pig, and that I had risked my life to save his. “Lewis has two mothers,” said my father, adding that I was certainly the most courageous girl he had ever met; my mother said I was a blessing and a boon. “What would I do without you?” It was a prominent part of our family conversation for weeks. For a long time afterward, Lewis was afraid of pigs—not only of pigs in the street, but of any and all pigs, and he would not eat pork, for fear of angering the pigs. He ate ham, thinking it came from some other animal, and we would all be amused, and my father would offer him second helpings, saying, “More ham for our young Mussulman?”

Were we happy? I want to tell the truth in these pages, and so I am wary of making any period of my life appear better than it was. Everyone has troubles. When disaster strikes, it finds us in the midst of everyday cares and sorrows. But I do not want to go too far in the other direction and imply that it was all grimness, growing up in the shadow of consumption. We all thought that we belonged together, in our house in Bowling Green, with our family stories and our foolish jokes, and each of us was indispensable. My mother’s illness gave me responsibilities. By the
time I was five, I had given up playing with dolls. Lewis was my doll, and when I was not minding him, I was running and fetching and carrying messages and being praised for my usefulness. I considered myself wise beyond my years and braver than the common run of girls, and I honestly believed that the household would fall apart without me. “What a boon you are to me,” said my mother, “I could never get along without you,” and I took her at her word. Under her eye, or watched by the hired girl—the “help,” as we called servants in those days—by the time I was seven I could put wood in the kitchen fireplace, bake biscuits in a Dutch oven, and make buckwheat cakes and scrambled eggs in a cast-iron skillet that I had to lift with two hands. I mended holes in stockings. I conveyed my mother’s wishes to the help, and when my mother was too ill to say what she wanted done, I told them what my mother’s wishes would have been.

I notice that I have not mentioned her special advice to me, in the letters I was to read after her death. What does the voice from the beyond say? She praises me for my diligence. She warns me against vanity. She tells me to be gentle, to keep my criticisms of others to myself and show the better way, if necessary, by example rather than by harsh words, and to be virtuous. I reread these letters recently, and how that felt I do not have the art to tell you. Mother, I’m sorry.

AFTER I BECAME RICH, I MADE A POINT
of acquiring the surviving evidence of my life long ago in Bowling Green, as a pathetic substitute for my lost childhood there, which ended abruptly when I was nine. I have the letters my mother wrote to us, and also her diaries, which came to me under circumstances I may as well describe here, though it requires me to break away from strict chronology.

In 1884, my brother Edward died alone without heirs, with a wooden leg that he had not used in a long time, his stump being ulcerous, in a room full of empty whiskey bottles, heaps of clothes cured with pus and urine, and some old family furniture that he had given long black scars by letting cigarettes burn out on them. The police broke down the door of his apartment on Great Jones Street in New York City after a neighbor complained of the smell coming from his rooms. Handkerchiefs before their faces, they marched in to find my brother’s corpse on its back, clutching a wooden leg. A window was opened, a breeze came in, a slip of paper on his dresser drew attention to itself by fluttering, and it
turned out to be a bank draft from Mrs. Frances Andersen of San Francisco. Eventually, someone thought of writing to the rich woman who seemed to be supporting him and might be persuaded to pay his debts, and that is how, a few months later, I happened to receive a parcel containing the diaries: the cracked red leather covers permanently indented where for so long they had been tightly wrapped in twine, the good rag paper, the straps, which Edward had slit, neatly, because the keys were lost (probably they still exist somewhere; they are all around us, in boxes, drawers, drains, and riverbeds, these brass widowers, these useless keys to destroyed locks).

I laid my hands upon them for a while. When at last I permitted myself to open the first volume, I was a straight-backed, corseted old lady outwardly but, inside, a child desperate to be with her mother. And look how much she wrote! Alas, the length turned out to be deceptive; the details of her illness occupied half of each diary. Over and over: her lungs, her sputum, her cough, her food, how often she has bled herself. On first perusal, these passages were not without a power to awaken memory, but gradually I began to be dismayed, as I am when she copies out a hymn or lines from some dreadful book of spiritual guidance that comforted her in its time.

In the diary, which she expected to be destroyed, she discusses her children in a less guarded way than in the letters, and it is bracing to read years later if you are one of us. Ink that once sat in a bottle on her bedroom desk records her worries about Edward—blurred ink on warped pages swollen from being drenched some years ago with whiskey. (Whiskey and tears on the very pages devoted to him, while cigarettes expired on the heirloom furniture—what a maudlin debauch that must have been.)

Some entries made when I was four record the family’s flight from New York City’s 1832 cholera epidemic. We stayed with my aunt and uncle in their Massachusetts farmhouse, a year before they moved to western New York State. I had known about this visit but had no memory of it. When I read this part, I rose to my feet and paced the floor. Suddenly they were all present, younger than my earliest memories of them—aunt, uncle, cousins—and I couldn’t do a thing about it. There my mother was, forever, playing finger games with my cousin Matthew.

When they were growing up, after the early death of their own mother,
my aunt Agatha and my mother had been together sometimes, and other times apart. Both had spent their childhoods in the homes of betteroff relations, bouncing from one to another. Both had tiny dowries. The great difference was that Aunt Agatha was plain, and she had not married well. I believe my mother was shocked by the fate that had befallen her sister, but she wouldn’t let herself think of it. In the diary, she does not remark on the poverty, narrow-mindedness, and ignorance of Elihu, my aunt’s husband. Instead, she praises them both for their hard work. They lived the old, virtuous country way, buying nothing, making everything, which kept them very busy all the time.

II

WE ALWAYS HAD A SERVANT
—just one at any time, usually a German girl. Before I was born, my mother had formed a special prejudice against Irish help when she overheard one of them telling Robert that a medal she wore on a chain represented Saint Benedict, proof against consumption. Friends reminded her that not all the Irish were Catholics, and that, in any case, by insisting on Protestant help she was denying these girls the opportunity to benefit by our example. My mother replied that she had to take special care since, owing to her illness, her children were often in the company of the help. Native-born white American girls were considered too demanding and “ungrateful.” This left Germans and colored girls. There was one colored girl, Louise, who worked for us when I was two and then went to work for my grandfather. The rest were mostly Germans, and thanks to them my brothers and I learned the names of several German towns and principalities and went around the house repeating little German phrases of shock and exasperation like “
Scheiße!
” and “
Verdammt
” and “
Verflucht nochmal!
,” which the girl had uttered during kitchen mishaps.

They would be with us six months or a year or two. Then, because they found better work or a husband, or for some other reason, they’d leave,
and their time became the basis of our household’s private calendar—my mother would date a past event by saying “when we had Frieda,” or “when we had Bertha,” and my father, adopting her practice and gently mocking it, would say, “That was back in the reign of Gretchen.”

The departures were usually tearful, with the help weeping as much as the children did. If a girl left without a big tragic goodbye, it was a betrayal; my love would sour temporarily into hatred. My mother became attached to them, too, but she worried about their influence on us. She was shocked when, instead of saving for their dowries or to keep their little brothers and sisters off the streets, they spent their money on pretty bows and hats and dresses, and used their little scraps of leisure to walk up Broadway or Bowery or to go to dance halls or theaters. She wondered if they were subtly imparting to us (maybe just by the way they put their weight more on one leg than the other, or arched their backs and flung out their arms to stretch their young bones) some invisible taint of immorality carried from the squalid districts where their families lived.

One of them left when her belly grew, amid rebukes from my mother (“You were like a daughter to us!”), tears and defiance from the girl, and conversations that stopped when I came into the room. My mother said that Anna had found work in a house with more help uptown (which was plausible: the help were always saying that we ought to ease their labor by hiring another girl, and forever recommending friends who would work cheaply), but my father said that Anna had taken a boat back to Hesse. My brother Robert said, “Anna had a weak character. She fell.” I asked how and where. He said, “She fell
morally
.” He refused to add to his explanation.

After Anna, my parents made an exception and hired Sally, an American. Sally did not fuss over me like the German girls, nor was she as pretty, but she had a careless, absentminded, amoral manner I found relaxing. When we played, she played to win. She never used anything as the occasion for a lesson. She took Lewis and me with her when she did the marketing, and one day I noticed a departure from my mother’s instructions. Sally wasn’t asking for the best cut of beef, but for something cheaper. When I corrected her, I saw a look pass between her and the butcher.

My mother had told me to watch the help to make sure they weren’t
stealing, and had warned me of the methods they might use. Though I liked Sally, my loyalty was to my mother. I told her what I had seen, and she rose from her sickbed to interview the storekeepers and the peddlers, thereby uncovering Sally’s corrupt practices, identical with those implemented on a larger scale, later in the century, by the great names in army provisioning, streetcar manufacturing, and municipal office construction. My father was tenderhearted and wanted merely to give Sally a scolding, but my mother, who took everything these girls did very personally, said that Sally had taken a low advantage of the illness in the house. So Sally was fired without notice, and my father acted the part that our ideas of the world demanded by telling her he hoped it would be a lesson to her.

I went into her room while she was packing. She had thrown her week’s allotment of wood into the stove as a final gesture of defiance, and the heat was stifling. She crouched on the floor, jamming clothes into an old leather trunk that had broken straps. “You’re just a dumb little girl, you didn’t know any better,” she said, bidding me to stand on the trunk while she secured it with rope and tugged as if she meant to strangle it. “There’s things I could say. Like why I’m grudged a few coppers saved by good management, that’s all it was, while doing three girls’ work. Why a New York Yankee merchant’s son, with a house in Bowling Green, has got to live poor as Job’s turkey with one help and no carriage. Does he gamble? Has he got a gal on the side? I could say all that, but I won’t. I’ll put my capital into a nasty dress and go on the town.”