“No.” She shook her head. “But he is Jay Gould's man. And Tilden has had trouble with both of them although he never speaks of it. John Flood told me. What if Williams should see Tilden and me together at the yacht club or in a restaurant? What if he begins wondering who I am?”
“What if, what if, what if.” Laura Hemmings flitted her fingers. “‘Charlotte, are you turning into one of those tiresome women who cannot bear to be happy because they are convinced that the world is and should be a vale of tears?”
“We have a great deal to lose, Laura,” she said evenly. ”I am not just being silly.”
“We're going to lose nothing.” Laura reached for her friend's hat. “Come. I won't let you become a recluse. Dr. Palmer has asked me to a picnic lunch, and you and little Jonathan are joining us.”
It had been two full years, back to the spring of 1889, since Margaret had serious cause to feel that her happiness was threatened. Her life for the most part was one of great contentment. She dearly wished, of course, that she could see more of Tilden than just on weekends, but in that respect their relationship was not unlike that of many Greenwich families. A good number of husbands spent their weekdays in the city. Her fondest wish was that she and Tilden could fall asleep in each other's arms and wake up together in the morning without having to slip away to the Claremont Inn for that purpose. But in spite of the lack of that sweet convenience, or perhaps because of it, their love-making retained all its early excitement and more. They enjoyed each other when and wherever they could, on long Saturday afternoons in Margaret's bedchamber, on starlit beaches, even in carriages. A dash of mischief and intrigue, Margaret found, made their intimate moments all the more delicious.
The worry that came those two years back was one of short duration, but so unexpected that the shock of it almost stopped her heart. It involved the Greenwich chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Several of the ladies of that organization had come to visit Margaret within the very week that she moved into her new electric home. They were fully aware of the tragedy that had befallen the Total Abstinence Union of Wilkes-Barre and had heard that the Mud Run calamity had also claimed the life of Margaret's husband. The good women offered their most profound sympathy and their fullest support, reminding her
that the Greenwich chapter of the WCTU would not permit a distressed member of a sister organization to want for anything. They'd heard and they could see that she was large with child. Once the baby is born, they told Margaret, and when she felt up to it, they would be honored to see her at one of their Wednesday afternoon teas, especially those on the first Wednesday of every month, because that is when new members are officially received. Margaret was quite moved by their kindness and more than a little saddened at the need to deceive them, one of her deceptions being that she was something less than a total abstainer. Perhaps, she decided, she had better abstain after all. She could not very well accept the ladies' invitation and then be seen in the village spirits shop, or have them call and see a decanter of sherry on her sideboard. She would abstain. Mostly. She could keep the sherry out of sight in the kitchen cabinet, along with Tilden's Scotch whisky, and Tilden could replenish the cellar wine supply from New York each weekend. As for dining out with him, well, she could always sneak a sip from his glass when no one was looking. Perhaps a bit of intrigue could do for a glass of wine what it did for making love. She would soon find out. She would also soon learn that she was by no means the only lady of the WCTU who practiced this small artifice. It was almost the beginning of May and several recruitment visits later when Margaret agreed to attend the tea for new members on the first Wednesday of that month. There was one other candidate, a dark fortress of a woman named Phoebe Peterkin, whose husband had lately bought a pig farm upwind of town. It was the custom for the new candidates to pour for the other members and, while doing so, give a brief oral biography of themselves and perhaps a word or two of their convictions on the matter of temperance. The presence of another candidate cut Margaret's pouring duties by half, and that was good, because she was becoming quite anxious about giving a speech, that requirement having come as a revelation to her when it was too late to withdraw gracefully. Mendacity did not come easily to her. It was bad enough that she had to mislead these ladies about her origins, but to do so about her principles was more than she would permit of herself.
Phoebe Peterkin was the first to pour for the dozen or so members who fell as her share as Margaret waited nervously, her eyes on her fidgeting hands. The Peterkin woman began her discourse by announcing that she spoke to them through lips that had never touched alcohol in any form and she held aloft a hand which she said had dashed the cup from many a man who had so far forgotten himself that he was about to pour a thief into his mouth to steal his brain. Margaret heard a moan. She wasn't sure whether it came from one of the ladies who sat facing her or from within herself. Mrs. Peterkin went on to say that although it had not pleased the Almighty to bless her with children, she did have a good upstanding husband although, truth be told, he had not always been so. As a young man he was seduced into an evil fellowship with rum by none other than the Union army, whose custom it was to give each man a daily ration of that horrid stew. He was drunk when we met and drunker still when we married, so much so that I had to hold him straight with one arm around his waist or he would have bolted from the salvation that was to become his once I took him in hand.
There came another moan and then a snort that had the sound of stifled laughter. Margaret lifted her eyes toward its source. Several women were smiling, others squirming. She saw one woman, very tiny, blond, whose hands were covering her face and whose shoulders were shaking convulsively. Something about her seemed familiar. Margaret dropped her eyes once more and wished desperately that she could be almost anyplace else on earth.
“Thank you, Mrs. Peterkin,” she heard the voice of the chapter's secretary, Mrs. Gannon, saying. ”I am sure we are all the stronger for having shared your story. Perhaps we might hear from Mrs. Corbin now.”
Margaret rose to her feet and began pouring from the heavy service, getting as much in the saucers and on the tea table, she feared, as she managed to get into the blue china cups.
”I think most of you know of my background,” she told them, her voice near breaking. “It is painful to repeat... for several reasons... and if you will allow it, I would prefer to speak no more of what is past.” She took a long breath, relieved to see that several heads were nodding their understanding.
“On the matter of temperance”—she threw back her head—”I fear, from what has just been said, that I do not belong in this company. The truth is that I do enjoy a glass of wine or a sherry from time to time.”
Phoebe Peterkin gasped audibly, then folded her arms and glowered at Margaret.
”I believe as you do.” Margaret continued, “that alcohol when taken to excess is one of the greatest evils of our time, and I would gladly support any effort you might make to prevent its ravages and to ease the suffering of those afflicted. But I also believe, with Voltaire, that neither abstinence nor excess ever renders one happy. I do take wine in strict moderation and I expect that I will continue to do so. I am sorry to have misled you.” Margaret sat down, her cheeks burning, and wished with all her might that the floor would open under her.
Mrs. Gannon coughed and then stood to face the meeting. “We have somehow left Mrs. Corbin with the impression that we have achieved perfection in our ideals. Conversely, we seem to have persuaded the good Mrs. Peterkin that we are a group of fanatics whose idea of a pleasant outing is to smash a saloon.”
The tiny blond woman, the one so amused by Mrs. Peterkin, also rose and quickly turned her back to Margaret. ”I for one,” she said, “applaud Mrs. Corbin's candor and would very much like to see more of her.”
That voice. Margaret narrowed her eyes. Something about that voice. And that slender little form.
”I stand with Laura on that score,” Mrs. Gannon added.
Laura?
“And as for Mrs. Peterkin”—Laura Hemmings turned toward the pig farmer's formidable wife—“since we have confessed to being less perfect than she, perhaps she should consider whether her excellent qualities would blossom more fully in some other sodality.”
My God! Margaret's mouth fell open. She barely heard the applause that followed Laura Hemmings's remarks or the ensuing fury of Phoebe Peterkin as she railed against slackers, backsliders, and compromisers. My God, it's Little Annie.
Laura Hemmings winked and smiled. Hello, Margaret Barrie, she said with just her lips. Then the two women stepped toward each other and touched their cheeks in a polite manner that was not nearly the unrestrained hug which Margaret had given her two years earlier when Little Annie left Georgiana Hastings house for the last time in her life.
She could still pass for fifteen, Margaret thought admiringly. Given the right clothing, a young girl's clothing. At Georgiana’s house she favored middy blouses and straw sailor hats and she wore her hair long and straight and brushed down so that it hid much of her face. The hair did not conceal the wide, full mouth for which Little Annie was famous most of all, for Annie's specialty was making love in the French manner, a prospect made all the more erotic to some by her apparent youth and innocence. She was also possessed of a legendary talent for muscular control by which she could constrict and release her inner parts in such a way that her maidenhead seemed to be rupturing under the thrusts of each first-time customer who was willing to pay double to deflower a tender virgin. For added effect, Little Annie often kept a tiny bladder of beef blood concealed in her palm.
Annie, Margaret recalled, was almost equally adept at saving and investing her money. She did so with Beckwith & Company through the agency of Georgiana Hastings. And she was at least as well educated as Margaret. She had told Margaret what was apparently the true story of her upbringing and downfall. Her father, still living, was a minister who had taught in mission schools all around the world. In her eighteenth year he was given a parish in Providence, Rhode Island, so that he might finish his ministry in his native country. It was in Annie's nineteenth year that she fell into disgrace and was forced by public and family pressure to remove that stain from the community. Her experience in other cultures had left Annie a worldlier girl than most, and she knew at the outset that a term of prostitution in the right sort of house and with the right sort of act offered her the greatest promise of early recovery from this personal disaster. She no sooner entered “the life” than she began planning her retirement from it. Annie's little-girl role and its attendant disguises was intended as much to assure future anonymity as it was to maximize her income. Her ultimate ambition, she told Margaret, was to open a school for refined young ladies. She had often taught in her father's mission schools and was well acquainted with the essential domestic and social arts. She was fluent in French, of course, that being the nearest thing to an international language and, also like Margaret, she played the piano with sufficient facility to be able to teach it.
Another less practical but potentially satisfying part of her plan was that upon her retirement from Georgiana's house, she would make one last visit to the community from which she'd been driven in shame. She would go there in the company of a titled European husband, hired for the occasion. She would stay in the finest hotel, give evidence of being annoyingly rich and happy for a few days, then confront both her father and the young man, now married, who had turned his back on her, announce publicly that she had forgiven him so that everyone would know that there was something to forgive, and announce that she and her husband would now and forever take their leave to his ancestral home in the south of France.
It pleased Margaret to learn, once she and Laura Hemmings had a chance to talk, that Little Annie had elected in the end to forgo the triumphant return to Providence. Instead, Annie took the name Laura Hemmings, the legitimacy of which Margaret did not bother to question, and moved directly to Greenwich, where she tested the waters for a year, laid her historical groundwork, and then announced the opening of Miss Hemmings’s School for Young Ladies in a six-bedroom house on Maple Avenue, just a few hundred feet from Margaret's famous electric house.
“Does Tilden know?” was one of Margaret's excited questions when they spoke in the ladies' convenience at the Lenox House Hotel. “Or did Tilden suggest Greenwich to you as well?”
“Tilden has no idea,” Laura Hemmings answered. “I've passed him twice while shopping on Main Street and he hasn't shown a glimmer of recognition. As long as I keep my hair out of my face and avoid middy blouses he'll be none the wiser. Tilden was never one of my Johnnies in any case.”
“Oh, then we mustn't tell him,” Margaret agreed. “You will be my great new friend from the Temperance Union— you will be my friend, won't you, Annie?”
”I will if you can stop calling me that.”
“Yes, of course. And I'm Charlotte, although that name will sound especially strange when you say it. How long have you known I was here, for heaven's sake?”
“Almost since you arrived,” Laura said, smiling. ”I saw Tilden first. Remember, you can't get to that beacon of a house you live in without driving past mine. John Flood tramped by a few times as well. Actually, I still wasn't sure it was you until you came to the door one evening to greet Dr. Palmer. I was waiting for him in his carriage.” Laura's smile widened. “Dr. Palmer and I have been keeping company this past year.’'
”I remember the visit,” Margaret said. ”I asked him to bring the lady inside, but he said he'd only stay a minute. You must have been terrified that I'd blurt out your name.”
Laura Hemmings took her hands. “Either that or I'd have shocked you into childbirth right then and there.”
”I hope I'd have been glad. You were always so kind to me. I'd have been more worried about discomforting you.”
”I was used to it.” Laura's smile dimmed, but her eyes held their shine. “Yours is not the only familiar face I've seen in Greenwich.”
Laura confided to Margaret, as she could have done with no one else, that they were not the only Greenwich ladies who were not entirely what they seemed. Carrie Todd, a dressmaker in the Sound Beach section, had probably been there longest. She was a prostitute turned abortionist, having learned that trade under Madame Restell some fifteen years earlier in New York. Upon Madame Restell's entrapment and subsequent suicide she fled the city. Laura wouldn't have known her at all but for a chance encounter when she and Georgiana were shopping for bolts of fabric at Macy's, and there was Carrie, in the city on a buying trip for her new business.
Next came Belle Walker, known simply as Spanky in her New York days because of her skill in satisfying a particular desire some men have. Spanky had married a former client, the eldest unwed son of the owner of Greenwich's largest oyster fleet. He was at least five years younger than Spanky, although he probably didn't know it. Spanky—Mrs. Walker—had been there three years and produced two children. She, too, recognized Carrie Todd, who might well have prevented several more during Spanky's early career. Belle Walker had no great fear of exposure or blackmail because Carrie had at least as much to hide, nor did Carrie wish anything more than to work quietly at her dressmaker's trade. But Belle, who was socially ambitious, had invented a past much grander than that of Laura or Margaret and despised Carrie Todd for knowing a different truth. She took every opportunity to belittle Carrie's dressmaking skills and her fashion sense in the hope of forcing her to seek customers elsewhere.
Belle recognized neither Margaret nor Laura. She was before Margaret's time at Georgiana’s and she and Laura had overlapped only briefly, a matter of days. Georgiana had suggested that Belle might be better suited to a house whose standards were less exacting. It was then that she allowed young Frank Walker to save her.
It surprised as much as troubled Margaret that there were at least three former prostitutes, to say nothing of one near miss, in such a little town. But Laura, who had a head fo
r mathematics, pointed out that if the statistics cited by various reformers were correct, there were twenty thousand prostitutes in New York and at least one in ten of these left the life each year or attempted to do so. Where did they go? Practically none, Margaret agreed, would return to their places of origin. Only a few would have gone abroad or headed west. Most would have chosen among the many quiet villages on the periphery of New York City. Laura postulated that the population density of former whores was probably greatest in the lower reaches of Westchester County, in northern New Jersey, and on the north shore of Long Island, gradually diminishing with distance. Further, the more polished among them would surely apply their arts to attracting the best of the local young gentry. That being the case, and with another two thousand retiring each year, Laura saw a day not more than a generation hence when the entire matriarchal leadership of suburban society would be composed of superannuated strumpets. The laws of statistics and of algebra seemed to require that this be so.
Margaret found the idea most amusing. Tilden laughed loudest of all when Margaret, speaking hypothetically and not mentioning Laura, outlined her theory for him.
In the end it was Belle Walker who made the smiles vanish/Belle Walker and Anthony Comstock. And Tilden would have cause to wonder whether Jay Gould himself didn't have a hand in it.
The newspapers, it seemed to Tilden, had been full of Anthony Comstock all his life. As a boy, and like many his age, he eagerly followed the often bizarre adventures of the curious figure who dedicated his being to a one-man war against smut in all its forms. And because Comstock found smut everywhere, there was always much for Tilden to read, whether in his clandestine copies of the Police Gazette or in his father's New York Times.
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