The Parting Glass

by Gina Marie Guadagnino

  Afterwards, she posed me naked on the divan, unpinning my hair, arranging it carefully, and cautioning me to stay very still before taking up a chair across the room. She made me watch, unmoving, as she pleasured herself with a rapid, practiced hand until my breath came quickly and I was moaning for her again. She took her time, letting her nimble fingers tease and play with me until I was begging her to finish me. She laughed at my shocked expression when she licked her fingers clean.

  But in the perfumed arms of Liddie Lawrence, I learned as much of pain as I did of pleasure. Though she would take no coin for her services, my visits to Liddie cost me dearly, as, in her sweet and terrible way, she exacted from me the story of my great love for Charlotte Walden.

  Do you know what a whore will cost you, when you seek her embraces to quell the memory of another? It is nothing more or less than this: the tenderness of your own heart. When you are filled with need and longing, she will take it from your body, and, thinking that your body is now free of it, you will not notice that it has filled up your heart. And so, to free yourself from the need and longing, you will go to her again, that she might bring your body the warmth and solace it so craves. Sated, you shall think you are cured, but the longing in your heart, which cannot be satisfied with the caresses of another than she who inspired it, will grow. It will fester. Then, with each visit, your heart will ache and harden more quickly, until the needs of your body are a trivial thing and the needs of your heart burn and consume. A whore will fill the needs of your body until you are spent, but she cannot help you spend the longing in your heart. I paid with all the naïve tenderness that I had, and each time I kissed Liddie while dreaming of Charlotte, my heart grew more and more callused. In this way, she gave me the armor I needed to continue on in that house, watching my mistress fall more deeply in love with my brother every day.

  Do not think I was ungrateful to Liddie, or that I was not fond of her. For years, I had ached with the shame and need of desiring Charlotte Walden, and in Liddie I found the sweetness of release. But each time I visited her, I left more and more callused, for it was not her for whom I burned, and my love for Charlotte had blossomed and flowered and grew thorns that wrapped around my heart. It was not long before Liddie had the whole story from me, and I think that my pain and longing brought her pleasure, for often she would make me tell over my passion for Charlotte as she undressed me, kissing my neck and breasts so that I might continue to talk, and, when she moved my hands to her body, I would find her already wet and willing, though I had done nothing but recite my sorrows.

  Her life, as I slowly learned of it, was so different from my own in every way. Olivia Lawrence had been born in the same London brothel as her eighteen-year-old mother. It was an exclusive establishment that catered to gentlemen of “exotic” tastes, though none of the patrons seemed wise to the fact that their “Oriental Lilies” and “Abyssinian Princesses” were often Londoners born and bred. Georgiana Lawrence’s grandmother had been imported from Bermuda, and, while the current proprietress of the house would have been shocked at the notion that she considered any of her courtesans slaves per se, it was clear that she felt the residents were all her property to one degree or another.

  Georgiana Lawrence had been three years at the trade when a Mr. Arnold of the Theatre Royal struck a bargain with the Lady Abbess for Georgiana’s services backstage. Drury Lane was eager to retain its temperamental Macbeth, who, of late, seemed far more interested in taking late-night gallops through London on his stallion, Shylock, or romping with the tame lion cub he kept in his dressing room than he did in arriving for his performances on time or sober. He talked endlessly of wishing to tour America—when not half-drowning himself in the most convenient decanter of brandy. Mr. Arnold, charged by the trustees with keeping the theater’s most lucrative leading man happy, sober, and treading the boards, had decided that the surest way of ensuring that the wayward actor focused on the theater was to capitalize on one of his less reckless eccentricities and install a courtesan in his dressing room for the run of the production.

  Georgiana proved to be a perfect solution to management’s problem. Her striking looks being enough to satisfy the actor’s desires for the “exotic,” and she being creative enough in her seductions to retain his interest, the arrangement was deemed so salubrious to all parties that it continued past the run of Macbeth, and, before a twelvemonth was out, Georgiana found herself playing Desdemona to his Iago, Ophelia to his Hamlet, and Juliet to his Romeo, all from the comfort of his dressing room. By the time he had transformed yet again—this time to Timon of Athens—she was growing, as the Earl of Gloucester in Lear might have said, round-wombed, and had, indeed, a child for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed. Not that she had been expecting a husband; Edmund Kean was already married.

  “Edmund Kean?” I asked, incredulous. “You’re saying you’re the natural daughter of Edmund Kean?”

  “Oh,” Liddie said brightly. “You’ve heard of him?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of him! You might well ask me if I’ve ever heard of Shakespeare himself!”

  Liddie rolled her eyes. “Well, it’s only you’ve never seemed to notice when I mention Shakespeare at all, and you said yourself you never visit the theaters. How was I to know if you knew who Edmund Kean was?”

  “It’s my job to know what’s in vogue, and that generally means more than necklines. My mistress is very fond of the theater. Did you ever see him perform?” I asked. “I’d be mad to if it was me.”

  “I saw his Henry V at Drury Lane back in ’thirty,” she said. “And his Othello in ’thirty-three. That was his last role, you know. He was onstage with his son.”

  I covered my mouth with both hands, thrilled. “You saw him and Charles Kean? Your brother, you mean? Was there, that is, could you see any resemblance?”

  She snorted. “First of all, I was in the balcony, and not much in a position to examine features. Secondly, I take after my mother almost entirely. And anyway,” she went on as I made a wry face, “I couldn’t say with any certainty if I was his natural daughter or not. He was hardly my mother’s only patron during that time. Mr. Arnold paid her well, of course, but he never said it was an exclusive engagement. So it could have been anybody, I suppose. Though Mama always did like to think it was him. She was very fond of him, of course.”

  Georgiana had named her daughter after the countess in Twelfth Night, as Kean had hoped—in vain—that Drury Lane might let him play Malvolio. “Tragedies,” he had told Liddie’s mother balefully, “they only ever want to let me play tragedies. They never realize that dying is easy; comedy is hard.”

  Though discarded by Kean during her pregnancy, Georgiana’s reputation had been made with his patronage. “Mama,” Liddie said, “was ever after a very great favorite with the actors and the opera players. The ones who fancy girls at all, I mean. It’s not just the likes of Kean who have a taste for a bit of something exotic, you know. And the poets! You should see the lines they wrote her. She kept them all, every phrase, be they well or ill turned. ‘My dusky rose,’ ‘thou ebon idol,’ ‘oh, maiden of the moonless night!’ You’d not believe,” she said, taking a drag from her cigarette and rolling her eyes expressively, “how many ways there are to say ‘black’ when you’re a poet. Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

  Liddie had been raised as the pet of the brothel, often dressed up as a miniature lady and called upon to declaim for gentlemen waiting for their chosen paramours to become available. She could read as well as any lady, and far better than I could myself. Like her mother, she had a taste for Shakespeare, and owned a battered copy of his complete works that had been her mother’s parting gift before she had come over the sea. Liddie had joined her mother’s profession early, the stage, of course, being off-limits owing to the color of her skin. Though growing as popular amongst the patrons as her mother had ever been, Liddie hoarded her earnings until she had enough to buy passage to New York, and a fresh start, just over a yea
r ago, that she might not have to whore her entire life under the Abbess’s overbearing thumb.

  “What happened?” I asked, as we lay together by the fire.

  She shrugged, the coverlet slipping down and exposing her shoulder. “I’m willful, I suppose, and I like being my own mistress. Life was easier in the brothel, but my time—my life—was never my own. I rowed with the Abbess, and she made things harder for me, till I could not bear it. There are ways,” she said wryly at my uncomprehending look, “that brothel life can be easier or harder. Who they have you go with. What you get for it in return. I wasn’t biddable, and Lady Abbess likes the girls biddable. I thought it would be easier to set up here than in London. I’m an independent sort, and isn’t that why people come to America, after all?”

  “No, I mean, after you got here, what made you go back to stargazing?” I pressed.

  An unreadable expression slid across Liddie’s face, her features blurring for a moment before solidifying into a blank mask. She had sat up, and was looking at me solemnly. “What do you mean ‘go back to stargazing’?” she asked.

  I was sitting up now as well, and suddenly found I could not quite meet her eyes. “You’d said you wanted a fresh start . . . I thought you meant . . . that is . . .” I looked up at her, helplessly. “I mean, you never really wanted to do . . . all this!”

  Liddie raised an eyebrow appraisingly. “You certainly didn’t object to ‘all this’ a moment ago, did you?”

  “I only meant—well, but you’re clever! You could do anything you liked!”

  “And what makes you think,” Liddie said very slowly, “that I am not doing exactly what I like?” I opened my mouth and then shut it again, my cheeks aflame. Liddie snorted; it was an ugly sound. “That’s queer. I never did peg you for the sort that objected to a woman’s pleasure, seeing as you’ve no qualms about taking your own.”

  I was silent, my stomach curdling in shame.

  “Tell me, Mary, why I should prefer another trade? Even if I had the patience for needlework, I don’t much fancy going stitch-blind by the time I’m thirty. I could try my hand at maiding, but, and no offense meant, Mary” (I winced at that), “but the wages don’t seem worth all the bother. You might not care overmuch for my profession, but I can’t see how you stomach yours—running hither and thither at another woman’s whim with barely ever a moment to yourself.” She got up, wrapping the coverlet about herself and leaving me bare, pulling one of her cigarettes from her reticule and lighting it on the lamp. “I’ve no inclination for any trade at all, save the one I was born to, and, without the Lady Abbess fussing the life out of me, it isn’t such bad work. I can pick myself who I’ll have without the Abbess’s orders. I make enough to keep my own quarters and save a bit, and one day when I have enough I’ll open a brothel of my own. Keep the girls gently, too. No, it isn’t such bad work, after all, no matter what you might think of it.”

  I had always thought that no one could choose whoring if they’d wit enough to do anything different, but Liddie had turned this notion of mine deftly on its head. She sat on the divan, looking down at me, still naked on the rug before the fire. She took a drag and crossed one leg over the other expectantly.

  “Here is the part, Mary Ballard, where either you decide you’re too good to keep a whore’s company and find your way to the door, or you find a damn good way to say pax instead.”

  I took a slow breath in, pulling myself up onto my knees. “There’s another perk, you know, to fucking a lady’s maid.”

  “And what is that, might I ask?”

  “In service,” I said, uncrossing her legs and pulling the coverlet from her, “we learn to grovel very prettily.”

  After that, we hadn’t quarreled over something as irrelevant as the benefits or drawbacks to either of our professions again.

  As I had taken Liddie into my confidence, she took me into hers. In our afternoons together by the fire, she told me stories of her first few months, how dirty and rough New York had seemed after her life growing up in Mayfair, and how she’d learned the way and flavor of New York’s streets, and how she’d made do to see herself over the rough patches of her arrival.

  Liddie had ambition, and a determination to see her ambitions through, that I couldn’t help but admire. She had taught herself reckoning, and kept an account book to track her earnings. She routinely observed the better brothels in the area, and now and again bribed the porters—with coin or with her person—to tell her the quantities of provisions for that month, how many times the midwife had come, and various other daily details of running such an establishment. She had a separate account book in which she tallied the estimated costs of her own future brothel, and had calculated that she would be stargazing herself for only five or six more years before she had earned enough to cover the opening costs. For someone like myself, who had never thought to want so much from life, let alone map out the way to such achievements, her grit was impressive indeed, and, with growing respect, I told her so.

  She shrugged. “What vision I possess, I have inherited from my mother. She helped me save to come here, and it would be a poor repayment if I did not achieve everything I set out to do. She helped me put away everything she could, though she wasn’t keen on staying with the Abbess herself, either. I can’t forget that.”

  “Do you never hear from your mam?”

  “Of course, now and again. The news is always three months old by the time it reaches me, but we do write regularly. She finally left the Abbess’s house only a month or so after I came out to New York. Found a patron. A swell, a proper gentleman, who keeps her as a ladybird. Not one of her poets, but one of those who fancies himself a patron of the arts. She holds salons now—imagine!” She rolled onto her back, smoke pluming from her nostrils. “I do miss her, you know. When I’ve my establishment, I just might write and send her passage to come over to help me in the business. She’d like that, I think.”

  I lay back on a velvet pillow, running my hand absently against the nap, thinking of the people I’d left behind in Donegal, wondering if any of them ever spared a thought for Seanin and me. The house where we’d grown up, the only home we’d ever known, had come to seem so cold and alien by the time we saw the last of it. The faces we’d known all our lives, warm and welcoming, were turned against us when we left. If any of them spared a thought for either of us, it was more likely to be to mutter a curse and spit at the sound of our names. Then Liddie, with her uncanny way of sensing when I was troubling, nuzzled her lips against my neck, and slid a comforting hand between my legs.

  Yet, after I had been with Liddie, it was worse, for, having tasted the pleasures of her flesh, I could not but imagine Charlotte Walden held in such similar embraces with my brother. Would her breath catch as Liddie’s had? Would her head loll back, a lazy smile on her lips as Seanin thrust inside her? Could she, too, be caressed and cajoled into such acrobatic poses as Liddie held me? Often, I had pictured her in bed, which had been torment enough to me, but now I must imagine her pressed up against the wall next to her bookcase, bent over the ottoman, kneeling up against him in the tufted chair. The more enthusiastic Liddie became in our lovemaking, the more vividly I could imagine Charlotte’s. When next I came home, these ordinary images—a pillow askew in the chair, a book out of place on the shelf—filled me with such bitter longing that I thought I must claw out my own eyes to stop from seeing them, or else go mad. I soon grew glad I could not visit Liddie above once a month, for I could hardly bear to look at Charlotte Walden again when I would come home. Look what I have done, for wanting you, I would think. Look at what I have become. Look at me. She never did.

  What crowds of drunken men are there, who will hardly suffer a modest girl to pass along unmolested! . . . what bold and impudent women, who ought not even to be looked at but with a sigh of pity or a frown of disapprobation!

  —The Duties of a Lady’s Maid

  Ilay abed, fully dressed, waiting for the house to darken and quiet. The clock in
the square tolled eleven before I rose and slipped from the house. I tiptoed through the mews, taking care my boots should not ring out on the cobbles, and, keeping to the shadows, I made my way down to the familiar house on Chambers Street.

  It was a long way to walk at such an hour, and I took care not to be seen, for there were rough men about. I skirted west, beyond the gaslights and noise of Broadway, taking the long route west through the village, and three quarters of an hour later finally arriving down to the block of Chambers Street that Liddie called home.

  I looked up from the street to see a light burning in her rooms, and so I tossed a handful of pebbles at her window. A few moments later, her face appeared in the casement, and she looked down frowning. I caught her eye, and she gasped. I saw her turn away, and I melted into the shadows of the building opposite to wait. Presently, the door opened and I turned away as I heard a man, angry and brusque, bustle from the building, knocking over a pile of empty crates with some vigor before marching away down the block. I slipped into the door he had left ajar and made my way up the narrow stair to Liddie’s rooms.

  She was seated on the divan, enveloped in a silk wrapper with her hair set in those stiff curls upon her shoulders. She was adding leaves to a teapot, and looked up at me with a curious expression on her face.

  “Well now, Mary Ballard,” she said. “I do not know if I should be pleased to see you, for I have just sent away someone very important for your sake. I hope you haven’t come only for a taste of my quim.”

  I remained standing in the doorway. “I came because I did not know to whom else I might turn, and because it is a matter that could not wait until my next Sunday off.”

  She raised her eyebrows and motioned me to the seat opposite her, which I took gratefully after my long walk, though I left my bonnet pointedly on. She poured the tea and offered me a cup, looking at me over her rim as she sipped.