by Judy Alter
"My niece," Fannie said carefully, "is in mourning for her late father, my brother. Young as she is, it's only appropriate that she wear clothing befitting her grief."
I'd never had anything black in my life, but until that moment I had never thought about the way I looked. Suddenly I worried that black might be unbecoming to me, but I said nothing.
The measuring was soon over, and Mrs. Carrera left with a promise—in Spanish, of course—to deliver one or two dresses within days.
"Meantime," Fannie said, "you'll stay in the house and wear wrappers of mine or the girls."
She left the room and returned in minutes with a wrapper of sheer gauze over a deep rose pique. "Here, put this on. Here's a ribbon for your hair that will match... sort of."
"I can't. It's too fine." I was absolutely thunderstruck by this magical and airy creation that she handed me.
She stared me down. "Put it on, and then come let me fix your hair. Can't have you meeting the girls looking like that."
I wanted to bristle—Mama had always told me I was pretty—but I knew that Fannie was right, and I submitted to her ministrations. She fixed my hair in a softened version of her own—more suitable, she said, for a young girl. While she worked on my hair, she told me she'd read the newspaper thoroughly and there was indeed a small article mentioning that a man near Ben Wheeler had been found stabbed to death, his daughter missing. The knife with which he appeared to have been stabbed was left at the scene, and the local sheriff suspected the daughter. "Newspaper says," she said ironically, "that Martha Baird was considered a fine young woman and no one can fathom—that's the reporter's word—why she did this terrible deed." She raised her hands in exasperation. "Damn fools should be able to figure it out. Only one thing could make a girl that desperate."
"Thank you," I said. There didn't seem to be much else to say, but if Fannie understood, maybe Mama would have too.
By then it was four o'clock, and we could hear the chattering of female voices in the main parlor. The girls had assembled to meet me. With my nervousness hidden but nonetheless present and accentuated by the unaccustomed outfit I wore, I followed Fannie through the curtains.
"Evening, ladies," she said brusquely, and I watched with admiration as the businesslike, no-nonsense woman, the woman who had first talked with me, replaced the chatty, talkative woman who had revealed herself in the last hours. Such was to be the pattern of our relationship—I knew a different Fannie from the madam who had, I would later learn, a reputation for being hard and shrewd and who ran her business with a firm hand.
"This is my niece, Etta Place," she said, without a hint of doubt in her voice. "My dear brother—Herman Place—died recently in Atlanta, and Etta has made her way to my doorstep. Of course, I had no idea she was coming, or I'd have told you before this. Etta will have a room next to mine and will attend school in San Antonio this fall. She will not entertain customers, and until I decide otherwise, she will not be present in the public parts of the house during working hours."
So I was not to get to watch for James Newsome or stare at the men who frequented the house—or watch the girls in operation. I very much wanted to do the latter—I wanted to see how women behaved with men, because I felt my knowledge about that was limited by Pa's awful nature. It didn't dawn on me that watching whores at work would be just as limiting.
"How come her name's Place, not Porter?" one asked.
Oops, I thought. She should have stayed with Porter, as was her first inclination.
But Fannie warmed to her story. "I'm a widow, Lillie. You know that. The late Mr. Porter died suddenly... of a gunshot. But I was named Place when I was a child."
"Etta," said another girl. "We used to have an Etta who worked here." She looked a little puzzled. "It isn't a common name."
Again Fannie invented as she went along. "That's true. It is a coincidence, isn't it? Now each of you introduce yourselves, please."
The first was Lillie Davis, the girl from Palestine, as young as Julie had said and very pretty. "I'm just here temporarily," she said with a winning smile, and I thought she could have been a classmate of mine at the school I was about to attend. Wearing a flowered cotton wrapper, she sat on one of the parlor sofas, her legs demurely crossed at the ankle, feet on the floor, as though my mama had told her how to sit.
"Maud Walker," said the girl next to her, obviously older than Lillie by at least five years and as dark as Lillie was fair. An angry resentment burned in Maud's eyes as she looked at me, and I made a mental note to avoid her. She sat and stared a minute, then added in a low tone of voice, "From St. Louis."
Juniper was next, the one Julie said had been with Fannie the longest. Her eyes were tired, and there was a sad look about her. She was clearly older than the others, and I'd watched her earlier shepherd the others into the room. "I'm Juniper," she said. "Been here so long I don't know where else I'm from."
The others laughed, but Lillie said, "You won't be here forever, Juniper. You wait and see." She nodded at the next girl.
"I'm Wallie," said an overweight girl with rouge high on her cheeks—Mama would have been horrified! But when I thought that I almost laughed, because Mama would have been horrified at where I was anyway. Her hair was a strange shade of red too—I didn't know about henna, of course, but it was an unnatural red with a lot of orange to it. She looked exactly like what I had thought all the girls here would.
"Wallie?" I asked incredulously, my tongue working before my brain.
Just a hint of humor flashed through her eyes. "My pa ran out of girls' names by the time I came along. I was number ten. I'm from Oklahoma." A tinkling little laugh followed, as though she had said something funny. To me, the laugh sounded forced and funny.
Last was Cassie, who looked to be not more than my age, though, remembering what Fannie had said, I assumed she must be older. I hadn't really noticed her before, but when I looked closely I thought there was some Indian in her. She had coal-black hair and eyes as dark, with dramatic dark eyebrows, high cheekbones, and pecan-colored skin. It was her manner that I most noticed, though—she held herself straight and kept back from the others a little. "I'm from San Angelo," she said, and then, unexpectedly, added, "My brothers are all outlaws. They brought me here."
Was she waiting for my reaction? I swallowed hard and managed to say, "Pleased to meet all of you," as distinctly as I could. It wasn't enough, but I was at a loss for manners at the moment, especially after Cassie's disclosure of her family background. I don't suppose I'd even seen an outlaw—or even thought about seeing one.
"Some business," Fannie said briskly. "Wallie, that Ben Coleman came in here drunk as a hoot owl again the other night. You are not to entertain anyone who is rowdy drunk, not even your favorite regular."
Wallie sniffed and raised her chin a little, but she said, "All right. I'll warn him." And then she giggled again.
"Lillie, you missed your doctor's appointment last week. See that you keep it this week."
"I don't need—" Lillie began.
"Do as I say." Fannie had almost a motherly tone in her voice.
"Juniper, I want to see you in my sitting room right after this. I... I may have found something for you."
Juniper's sad eyes lit up for a moment. "Thanks, Fannie."
"That's all," Fannie said. "Supper is on, and we open in two hours."
Such was my introduction to life in a whorehouse. That night as I lay in bed and listened to the distant sounds of a party, I puzzled over the turn my life had taken—and how I felt about it. In a way, I'd been rewarded because Ma died and I killed Pa—didn't I have my own fancy bedroom, a new wardrobe, and the longed-for chance to go to school? But on the other hand, I was in a whorehouse—clearly, to be a whore was not as bad as to murder, but both were beyond the path of respectability.
And by going—even happily—from one to the other, I'd sealed my fate. I would never, I then knew, live the everyday life of a schoolteacher or the wife of a doctor or mercha
nt. I was outside the law, if not exactly an outlaw.
Chapter 5
"What do you know about nuns?" Fannie asked. She wore another of her "respectable" outfits—a gray suit of China silk piped in black braiding, with white gloves and a small white hat with an enormous feather that swooped down over one side of her face and destroyed all the respectability gained by the rest of her clothing. We were in the carriage—she had again told Hodge she would drive, and she did it with such command that I was impressed.
"They're Catholics," I answered.
Mrs. Carrera had brought me three tailored skirts—one each in black, navy blue, and gray—and three crisp white shirts with tucked fronts. Today I wore the navy skirt—the one color Fannie hadn't specified.
Fannie's mouth twitched just a little, a sign I was beginning to learn to look for. "Yes," she said, "they're Catholics. So what?"
"They're popish. That's what Pa always said. They'll take over the country and give it to the Pope if we give them leave. Then the Pope will tell us all what to do." It was a litany I'd often heard repeated late at night in our cabin.
"I really am sorry I never had the chance to know your pa," Fannie said, clucking to the horses as they crossed Delarosa Street. Three young Mexican children ran in front of the carriage, spooking the horses with their screams, but Fannie's hands on the reins were firm.
"I don't think you'd have liked him," I said primly, and then instantly knew that I'd been gullible again.
Fannie's laughter roared to the surface. "Liked him?" she exclaimed. "I'd have cut him to size in nothing flat. Can't stand men like that—stupid but opinionated."
"He didn't like women like you either," I said. "I mean... I don't think he liked women that didn't do what men told them to."
She laughed again. "I'm sure he didn't. But look at the daughter he raised." She took her eyes off the horses and the street to look at me.
"My mama raised me," I said fiercely.
"All right. Let's go back to the nuns. Do you know how they dress? That's my real point. They wear long black gowns—lots of layers of heavy black cloth, even in this god-awful hot weather. And they've got these things on their heads—wimples, they're called—that barely leave their faces poking out. I always wonder what's happened to their hair, shut under those things day in and day out."
I simply stared at her, unable to imagine the outfits that she was describing. "Why?"
"Why? I don't know. Guess they think that's what the Lord... or maybe the Pope... wants. But I wanted you to know, so you wouldn't gape at them."
"Yes, ma'am," I said. "I won't gape."
But I almost did. When Mother Superior Theresa Alberta at the Ursuline Academy ushered us into her private office, it was all I could do to keep from asking her what color her hair was. I had to admit, silently to myself, that she had a sweet face. The kindness that shone from it was missing from Fannie's or Lillie's or Wallie's or even from my face. Mother Theresa had not known life in a whorehouse or with an abusive father, that was for sure.
"Etta?" she said. "A lovely name. Unfortunately, not related to any saint that I know of, but... Tell me of your schooling, child."
While Fannie told her our story, now firmly imprinted on both our minds, about how I was her niece, the daughter of her recently deceased brother, I took secret looks around the Mother Superior's office. The walls were bare except for a cross with Jesus hanging from it—crucifix, Fannie told me later—and the curtainless windows were high so that they let in light but you couldn't look out. We sat in straight wooden chairs, and Mother Theresa sat behind a plain wooden desk, her own chair as uncomfortable as ours.
When she asked about my schooling, I explained that until her death my mother had taught me at home. "My father... ah... he wasn't happy with the school in Atlanta," I said, with some confidence, "and Mama preferred to keep me at home with her, sick as she was."
Mother Theresa clicked her tongue sympathetically. "We'll start you in the fourth form in the fall"—she laughed a little, as though to reassure me—"though I'm sure you'll advance rapidly. But I feel that's what we must do."
"The fourth form?" I asked.
"Girls about nine or ten," Fannie said dryly. "You'll advance, Etta, don't worry about it."
And so I began to spend my days with girls six and seven years younger than I, while I spent my evenings in the company—sort of—of girls much more worldly.
Actually I didn't see Fannie's girls from day to day. The house was deadly quiet when I arose to go to school—Julie woke me and fed me, and Hodge drove me in the carriage, but Fannie didn't even stir. And when I came home from school, there was just the faint murmuring of a household coming alive for the day, this at four o'clock in the afternoon! Sometimes I had supper with the girls, but they generally clustered together at two or three of the tables while I sat alone at another. Only Lillie ever really tried to talk to me.
"Why're you going to school?" she asked casually one night. "I quit as soon as I could."
"Fannie is good enough to send me," I said, "and I want to be a school teacher someday." It was the future that Fannie had laid out for me and that we both talked about, in spite of my certain knowledge that I could not live enough within the law to be a schoolteacher.
"A teacher! Land, can you imagine going back into the schoolroom when you didn't have to!" She laughed a little and then said seriously, "I'm waitin' for some tall, dark, and handsome man to take me away from all this"—she waved a hand expansively—"and I'm gonna be a housewife. Just like my mama." She laughed nervously. " 'Course, Mama didn't start in a place like this." And then, for just a minute, I thought I saw a tear in Lillie's eyes.
"Some outlaw's gonna take me away," Cassie said. "I'm gonna ride with him and his gang, find me some adventure."
Juniper, who usually stayed aloof from the other girls and ate alone in silence, muttered softly, "Probably no one is gonna take either of you anywhere 'less you take yourselves."
Maud Walker just stared at me, her expression unfriendly.
"Well," Lillie said happily, "I didn't say he had to be honest. Just rich. That's all I ask."
They seemed to believe that life was just beginning for them and that adventure and excitement lay straight ahead. Increasingly since I'd come to Fannie's, I shared that feeling—deep inside I knew I wasn't going to the Ursuline Academy forever, and I wasn't going to live in a whorehouse. What puzzled me was what form my future would take, where the excitement would come from. Mostly I tried to tell myself that the future would sort itself out in time, and I had only to be patient... and watchful. Meanwhile, life in Ben Wheeler, even Mama and Ab, seemed increasingly remote, almost as though that had been another person in another lifetime. Only Pa continued to haunt me.
Fannie often took her supper alone in her rooms, but sometimes she joined the rest of us, and then she ate with me, which was fine except that she had a tendency to quiz me unmercifully about what I'd learned in school that day.
"Sometimes," I said one evening, "it's not easy to say exactly what you've learned. I think it all goes together somewhere in my mind, but I can't tell you specifically. Oh, maybe I learned that King Richard III called out 'A horse! My kingdom for a horse!' when he was defeated in battle, but that probably won't do me much good. Today I practiced pouring tea and serving little tiny sandwiches to the other girls. I could demonstrate...."
Behind me I heard a giggle—Lillie, no doubt. Fannie, mollified, finished her supper in silence. It was the first time I'd ever bested her, and I relished it.
But when the customers—guests, clients, whatever they were called—began to arrive, I was banished from the public parts of the house. Once in a while, when I was supposed to be studying, I crept to the door to the parlor and peeked around the curtains. What I saw excited me in a strange way. Oh, not sexually. It was the freedom and the happiness—at least, that's how it looked to me, after all those years shut up in a cabin in East Texas with a grim father and a cowed mother.
Most evenings a man played the piano that sat at the end of the parlor, plunking out lively tunes while the girls and their "guests" gathered around, drinks in hand. Frequently a girl would take her guest to one of the sofas, where they would sit in earnest conversation... or once in a while I saw a couple kissing. As I'd watch, one couple and then another would detach themselves from the group and head to the doorway. I knew they were going up those stairs, but I always had to bolt back to my room first so as not to be caught peeking.
The men fascinated me. Though none looked like Pa, they were a wild variety. There were men in business suits who looked to be bankers and lawyers; others looked like Mr. Newsome—men who owned small businesses and came to the city to escape their lives and maybe their wives. And then there were men whose dress and manner clearly indicated that they were cowboys—denim work pants, denim shirts, boots. I'd heard Fannie say that all guns had to be checked with Hodge at the door, but some of them surely looked like they normally wore six-shooters. But there were no farmers among them—Pa would not have known how to survive, let alone behave in a place like this. When I thought that, I asked myself why Pa was still the measure by which I interpreted things. Could I never put him behind me?
The girls seemed evenhanded in the distribution of their favors, making as big a fuss over the cowboys as the bankers and lawyers. And make a fuss they did—patting the men's cheeks, fingering the lapels of their coats or the collars of their shirts, laughing into their eyes and whispering in their ears, generally behaving in ways that would have scandalized Mama... and which now intrigued me. Without knowing it, I learned a lot about flirting from my secret hiding place.