My Notorious Life (19 page)

—No, I said, and swatted him.

—Annie, Axie, oh Annie.

—No.

—Will you take your shirt off then?

—No!

—Just let me see them.

—No.

—Just a look. The rosy nibs.

—Stop. But he would not. My face was on fire by his questions, all my parts.

—Just a look, he said. —Lord have mercy just a wee look. I’m aching for it. How bothered and stirred was I by his wicked talk.
The rosy nibs.
And so passed that night till I shooed him away and another night, another assault on my buttons till at last one time shaking, I said, just a look and allowed him. How he gasped and trembled. Such Beauties he said in a holy voice while I cried, clutching the sides of the corset closed in the dim light. It was wrong I knew but it didn’t feel wrong, it was ______. Please may I kiss them? he pleaded so charming and coaxed at me. I held him away. I was a girl of sixteen, torn every which way, by the warnings of Adelaide and Frances, and by the lurid texts and dangerous diseases of Dr. Gunning’s book, and then tormented a different way altogether by the running of a printer’s hands along the skin of my leg.

*  *  *

In the weeks after Greta started up her rumor of bloody murder at the Evanses, I observed my employers with suspicious eyes and listened outside doorways. I examined the waste bin and looked in corners for evidence or weapons. But while I found no sign that either of the Evans was a killer and argued against Greta, she would not leave off twitting me, saying, —You are Hausmaid to der Murderer.
Der verrückte Abtreiber.

—Does Mrs. Evans murder babies? I asked Mrs. Browder one warm day, while she prepared a haunch of beef.

—Who told you that? She swung around to me with a cleaver in her hand, her eyes fierce.

—Next door Greta says it’s all hoors here and Missus fixes them if they’re you-know.

—Listen to me, young filly. Your Mrs. Evans has the kindest hand in the city and you will never brook a word against her, hear me? She’d no
more murder a child than you or me. Tell your fine Greta to stop listening to Mrs. Pfeiffer who is nothing but a bitter old catamaran. People like her never stood in the shoes of a desperate girl or a mother facing her grave like your own Mam in childbed. I’ll tell you, said Mrs. B., —men have war to bring them their sorrows and pain, and we have our own physiology, so we do.

—What physiology?

She sighed very heavy. —Mrs. Evans delivers the afflicted. And I myself wouldn’t be standing here now today if it weren’t for her favors.

Mrs. Browder stopped and looked off into the murk of the kitchen. By her silence and the way her face buckled and righted itself it was plain she knew something private about the shoes of a desperate girl.

—What she does is only scraping, Mrs. B. said. —Before it’s quick. It’s only to unblock the girl and return her courses to the natural rhythm.

—Scraping?

—You’re the assistant. Ask her.

*  *  *

All through the hot early days of July Mrs. Evans did not teach me anything to do with scraping, but Mrs. Browder had, just by the force of her conviction, relieved me of the fear my teacher was a murderess, so I was free to brood on more important matters and moon about the premises preoccupied. For while Mr. Jones did not further breach my buttons, he did not cease his attempts, nor did I operate a moment of the day or night without an ache in all my parts, filled with unspeakable depraved craving and the taste of dread like metal in my teeth. One evening, when the night was thick with the smell of warmed garbage and the heat was trapped down amongst the buildings, my suitor came to the back door so handsome in his shirtsleeves, his jacket hooked over his shoulder and a grocer’s bag in his hand.

—What do you have there?

—A picnic, he says, and opened the bag to reveal twists of salted bread and a bottle of apple wine.

We sat on the back step facing the coal alley and licked salt off our lips. The wine had a hard swooning taste new to my tongue, and I can’t say I liked it but I matched him sip for sip. The moon shone in curdled light
behind the clouds, and when Charlie the wanderer wandered his hand in my direction I was not sorry, I was eager, yes I was.

—What have we here? He pulled a penny from inside the warm neck of my blouse. —And what’s this! he cried, and took a foil of hard candy from my sleeve. He put it in my mouth then retrieved it back from me with his own.

Thus our game was invented, Hiding and Seeking, tricks with sleeves and secret objects. Whether he had played it before with another I didn’t know, nor would I ask, too proud even as I doubted him. Behind my ear he found another sweet, and fed me it.

—See what you can find, yourself, he whispered, and hid his tongue in my ear, his hand under my corset.

—No.

—Axie.

I stood up, mussed and bothered, and went inside the steaming kitchen, down the ladder to the cellar where bricks of ice chopped out of lakes months before were delivered by wagon. Frost rose up when I opened the top of the ice chest, and I stabbed with the pick to crack off a bowl of frozen chips, already melting as I brought them up the ladder to find Charlie standing by the cellar door. He reached for the bowl and with a swift movement put a chip of ice down the front of my dress. I shrieked. He clapped his hand over my mouth.

—Shush.

A snail track of cold traveled along my sternum southward. —Oh Lord.

—Shh. Be quiet.

Now I placed a sliver of ice on the back of Charlie’s neck. —Ah, Mother of God, he said, his shoulders hunched up to his ears. He took another bit of ice and ran it up and down the skin of my arm till I shrieked but quietly so he stopped my mouth and sank me down to the floor where we traveled ice along the pathways and lanes of limbs and it melted in the steaming heat between us. All the while the awful force and the lure of what lay beneath our clothing had me in a panic. The words Danger and Downfall were plastered like signs on the inside of my eyelids when I closed them.

—Please Axie Jesus God. Please.

—No.

—Please God I am dying.

—No, I said.

—Have mercy I will die.

—Die then.

He held his heart like I stabbed him. He pulled away from me and his face in the dim light was the face of the orphan boy Charlie stumping down the road in bare feet, secret welts on his back.

—You wouldn’t care if I did.

—I would.

—Nobody never loved me. Nobody.

—Not true, I said.

—Who loves me then?

—Who loves ME?

—I do, he cried. —Say yes.

— . . .

—Chickenheart. You’re so beautiful.

It was finagling and flattery like I was warned against.

—Your wild black hair.

—Your wild sorry arse, Charlie Jones.

—I always loved you.

—You didn’t.

—Since the day I saw you, he said. —You are the rose of Chatham Street.

—Pshht.

It was all talk. Honey and milk.

—Please Annie. I have set you as a seal upon my heart, and safe all the days of your life.

It was blarney and quotes off the Bible he was feeding me, fibs.

—If you loved me, he whispered, —you’d believe me.

—If you loved me, liar, you’d tell your fingers to stop with them buttons.

—See what they found, though? Now he pulled from his pocket with great solemnity a shiny chain, a necklace dangling a trinket shaped like a heart. —It’s only tin. I wisht it was diamond such as you deserve.

—It’s beautiful.

—Not as beautiful as you.

I held it glittering up to the candlelight and he took and fastened it around my neck. —Nobody never gave me a present.

—You deserve it, my own beauty.

Charlie laced the strands of my hair between his fingers, combed it out long so you would think it was silk, and whispered, —A rare girl like you should have whatever she wants forever. Sure you should. Pearls and white bread. Garnets and fur.

—Oh Charlie, d*** you.

—Trinkets, he said. —Spangles and honeycomb.

The words weakened me worse than the wine.

—If I should be drafted and die in the war, I’d die happy if you only loved me.

—Don’t speak of it.

—You love me. He pulled the chain at my neck with the tip of his finger, roped me toward his mouth. —Do you? Say yes.

—Yes.

—C’mon then, he said, with just his breath. —Say it.

Yes would ruin me.

—Will you? His eyes so fevered were helpless against my answer, and sad as only an orphan’s eyes are sad. —What if I should die? Say yes.

*  *  *

I never did say it. Still there was no doubt in that minute, then. I did not care about ruin or falling. I thought only how he might die or leave me, how it was that everyone left me. I thought of
love’s sake only,
the wild red sparkles, the garnets and fur, that I was a rose of Chatham Street. The heat slicked our cheeks. The ice melted on the skin over my ribs. He spread his coat beneath me. The infernal clothes were in the way now. I did not care. I laughed. I helped him. It was a desperate hurry. He was everything I was warned against. Finagling. His hands clamped the sides of my face his knees clamped my knees. The laces of my corset snapped. His arm would not come free of the sleeve. And then it was free so fast I gasped. Son of God in heaven. The sparse pelt of his scrawny boy’s chest pressed against my skin. He pulled away. He stared at me so naked in the pale circle of candlelight.

—No, I said and covered myself from his gaze.

—Yes, he said, his breath sharp and hoarse.

—No. But it was too late.

—Closer. Like that. He shifted my hips beneath him. He never took his eyes off mine or his trousers off. —Oh my angel. My sweet love.

We had no need for instructions or expensive lessons. It was free of charge. It was abandonment to the movement of the planets such that my limbs and hips and his were matched to the tides and I had no say at all anymore, opened as I was and carried away with him.

—My darling, he said, so tender, and closed his eyes. —My sweetheart.

His cheek was wet with my tears.

—Shh there my darling love now.

There on the floor of the kitchen we was transported to a private country where we were not orphans no more, not cast off nor lost. He took my chin with his fingertip, his eyes black pools of tar. He had me. Because he found a penny in my blouse. Because my resolve was melted with ice. Because he had got me on the floor. Because nobody loved me. Because nobody loved him. Because he gave me apple wine. Because he gave me a necklace. Because he was going to die in the war. Because I would lose him. Because he ordered me. Oh my angel he said. At last the secret of the ages was revealed and it was s***** congress. He had me. It was because he said Love and I thought I saw it like a mark on him. I did not know what it meant, only that if he forsook me now I would be an even worse kind of orphan, barefoot and shamed on the pavement with eyes flat and empty like the pelt of an animal long ago run over by the streetcar.

J
ust hours after he left in the dark of the morning, the city exploded. The buildings broiled on a hot spit of weather, and for a week that July of 1863, gangs of men took to the streets in a riot. I heard them at eight that morning as I fetched water from the square, a mob banging pots running toward Bowery. I hid in a doorway as they chased a Negro down the alley. They smashed windows and set buildings on fire. The next day the
Police Gazette
and the
Herald
said the rabble was enraged over the lottery for the Army draft, the same one that had Charlie ranting. Furious cowards strung up Negroes by the neck and hung them from lampposts on Clarkson Street. If it weren’t for the Negroes there’d be no war, they said, and complained it was injustice that these same blacks didn’t have to go fight like the rest of the miserable hordes without money to buy off the draft lords. The rabble sacked Park Avenue houses where the rich boys lived, the three hundred dollar men. They burned the Colored Orphan Asylum and the Brooks Brothers store at the corner of Catherine and Cherry not five blocks from where I first drew breath. All that week, Charlie stayed away from me while livid packs of brutes stormed his workplace and mobbed Crook’s Restaurant on the corner of Chatham Street, shouting they would kill all the Negro cooks and waiters, who hid in the basement. At last on the third day, the army left the war to come and stop them, marching into town with cannons.

But I did not care one skerrick about the troubles of the world. I had my own troubles.

Four weeks passed, and my courses had not returned on time. Nor had Charles G. Jones. He was the worst form of b*****d. He’d left me so I was no better than stupid Adelaide or poor Frances, or any of the cow-eyed females who appeared on our doorstep. I was a Magdalene and fallen as Mrs. Dix had warned. Yes, these summer weeks was a time of war and riots, fire and purgatory, and not just in the streets but right there in the kitchen on my cot by the stove. Those days formed me for life as good as a blacksmith’s forge. For I saw now what force had me hostage, and how strong is the hard fast chemical rule of s***** congress. If my own orphan resolve could be overcome only by a man saying LOVE, then no body was immune. If I was in trouble as a result it was no fault of my own but the fault of a demon pooka who was a Certain Man. I lay awake, bargaining with devils, Jesus God Mary, if only I was not.