by Janet Benton
I placed Charlotte on the stoop and stood, tears streaming down my face, emotion firing my every muscle. I took up a sturdy branch from the dirt and raised it.
“Give that back right now,” I threatened, “or I’ll smash thy head!”
The coward began retreating the way he’d come, and I despaired of ever seeing my locket again. So I pursued him and did something I’d never meant to do in all my days: I struck him. Yes, I smashed that stick with all my might into his back.
He stumbled and fell to the brick path, arms slapping down above his head. My locket went skittering into the dirt. I grabbed it and thrust it in my pocket, then collected Charlotte and my valise and rushed toward the alleyway that ran behind the building. Clutched to one side, my baby made no movement and no sound.
The beast followed, yelling obscenities, his boots slapping the bricks some thirty feet behind. I turned onto a cobblestone street and found myself in front of a narrow chapel beside a large church. Its door was ajar. I slipped in and closed the door. Charlotte whimpered as the man’s footsteps clattered by.
What a contrast to my thudding heart was the total quiet and dimness of that sanctuary. High above, its windows of stained glass let through radiant beams of sun. I released my valise and fell to the cool floor, holding Lotte to me. I withdrew my necklace and examined it; the chain was broken, but from inside the locket the tintype of Mother looked out, her pressed lips and gleaming eyes showing her perpetual concern for the human condition. Not one strand of the hair I’d clipped upon her death remained, however. Never again would I hold a fragment of her.
Crouched in the clear air of that chapel, I smelled the stench of our bodies, thick and intimate. My clothes were dirtier than I’d realized; the golden yellow of my shawl was dulled by soot and dust. Charlotte was grimy on her exposed skin and hair. My boots were caked with manure, ashes, and urine-soaked dirt. Inside them, my damp stockings had rubbed soft places raw, and the keen pain of my feet overcame me.
Thus did my illusion of being less desperate than the other vagrants die, quick as a spark. Then, perhaps sensing we’d reached a safer place, Charlotte began to squall.
I took us to a pew in the darkest corner, where she shook her limbs and cried.
“Sweet girl,” I whispered, leaning over her, my body hot and shivery. “Mother is sorry. Mother is so very sorry.”
While at the Haven, I’d believed I could live as my conscience dictated, without inviting suffering and endangering my daughter’s life and mine. Why had I believed this?
If only I could turn our world to one that welcomed us.
I kissed her wet cheeks repeatedly, shushing her, hoping a church caretaker wouldn’t be drawn by our noise. Her fingernails dug into my flesh like talons. But suddenly she stopped and slept, as if a lever had been lifted that silenced her.
A calm fell over me. And in this calm, I looked about the splendid place that humans had built to honor God. Its pews were oak, and finely carved; its walls were painted with lilies of gold and green; its brass sconces were decorated with vines. Halfway to its arched ceiling, red and green and golden light streamed through stained-glass windows, which showed the disciples and Jesus seated at the Last Supper.
The poet Whittier called such finery a distraction from the holy presence. But I let that beauty cast its spell; it soothed my roughened spirit.
Weak, thirsty, dizzied by exhaustion and hunger, I lowered my eyes. A row of Bibles sat on the back of the next pew. I took one and turned its pages to the Book of Job, wanting to remember how it resolved.
When studying the Bible at school, I’d always considered Job’s dilemma an interesting one—and difficult, yes, but theoretically. This time, though, when I read Job’s cries—“He has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths….He breaks me down on every side”—I felt my own pain recognized. And when God replied by roaring about his unmatched powers and magnificence, asking, “Hast thou an arm like God, and canst thou thunder with a voice like his?” I was appalled by his bullying. Yet Job wasn’t. Despite receiving not one word of apology from God, who’d allowed Satan to toy with him disastrously, Job surrendered his complaints. He claimed to detest himself and repented “in dust and ashes” for having protested his withering hardships. For God was all-powerful and magnificent, he echoed, and Job, nothing but limited and weak.
Was there something gorgeously profound in this? A beautiful bowing down before the force that gives life and extinguishes it? A relinquishing of our need for a sensible existence in the face of this force that can, on a whim, destroy us?
Or does Job’s response show that the human relationship with God is merely the equivalent of a fistfight or an arm wrestle—a contest that humans always lose?
Perhaps Job surrendered merely because to do otherwise would have afforded no benefit. Was Job like a child with a tyrant father who recognized the need for outward compliance?
Or—and suddenly this seemed the truest—he may have understood that the only way to recover was to accept what had afflicted him. Blame was not the part that mattered. Job surrendered not with weakness but with courage, and thereby gained the ability to go on.
A chill set the hairs on my arms to prickling. I stared up at the stained-glass windows, no longer craving my own shouting match with God.
If my spirit is pressed even harder, I wondered, will it yield something marvelous—the spirit’s equivalent to olive oil or the juice of grapes?
All at once I felt the shaking I’d felt once before, in the Haven’s makeshift chapel. The vivid stained-glass scene came to life; the colorful figures seated at the Last Supper began to move and speak together. And one of the disciples was the thirsty pauper who’d died in the train station. She turned her head outward, transforming from a flat figure to a round. She rose from her stool, every bit as feverish and desperate as she’d been that night. She reached her bony, crooked arms toward me, gaping with an undisguised, enormous need I couldn’t fill.
I knew not how long I sat, unmoving, captured by the buzzing strangeness of that altered state and seeing all my failures in her pleading. I hadn’t loved my mother well, for I had stood by while she was poisoned. I’d meant to love Charlotte; look what I’d done. Why had I failed, when all my aims were good? In time it seemed I held not Charlotte in my arms, but Mother as she died. I heard words coming through her trembling body: To love is to risk. To risk is to suffer.
Finally I became sensible of Charlotte waking, shifting. On a cloth I changed her and stared into her dark blue eyes. She stared back, withholding nothing.
A rattling of keys through the wall told of someone coming our way. Gathering Charlotte and my valise, I ran out and continued moving till I reached Broad Street Station, where I’ve given my remaining strength to this recounting.
My nerves are raw. My body trembles. I’m too tired to stand and beg—too tired to compete for food packets from the ground or even to chew—tired to the marrow of my bones.
* * *
Some days have passed—two? Four? How empty I feel. My locket with its broken chain lies nestled in the purse beneath the hollow of my throat. My baby, held upright against my left side, moves her eyes about, taking in the detritus of our homeless life. I’m still affected by the doses of laudanum I’ve been taking from the bottle in my valise. The drug brings ease. My hunger fades; my breathing slows; my suffering gives way to a welcome euphoria. But Charlotte has gotten some through my milk, and thus has been subdued and less inclined to motion.
To drug a baby is despicable—and I’ve drugged two.
Confessing makes me crave to harm myself in retaliation, which brings on more despair, which could lead me to take another dose, another.
Except that, just now, I’ve stood with Charlotte and poured the laudanum into the drain at the base of a fountain.
Who is thee, my ready friend, whom I entrust with all my secrets? Why do I sense an understanding heart, when thee is no more than paper?
There is perhaps some logic to it. I find hope and courage through this unburdening. In fixing events to a page, I can step beyond them, into the future—where I dread to go.
For my own honor is no longer a thing that I can cherish.
Was it a day ago, or three, when I changed my clothing to a cleaner set and retrieved Albert’s card from my stained and dirty valise? With Charlotte at my front, I walked through a haze of heat and dust to the building on Chestnut Street—but this time the guard wouldn’t let me past. Most likely because I held a baby and was not clean, he disbelieved that I had legitimate business with Mr. Burnham.
So I waited in the sun, against the wall of a building across the street, as the guard kept his eyes on me. My body ached from lack of sleep and the strain of holding Charlotte and the valise. When at last a clock struck noon, Albert emerged.
Not daring to speak with him in sight of the guard, I followed him several blocks to a tavern and approached him inside. After a moment’s disorientation, he invited me to sit on the next barstool.
I whispered that I was ready to take the opportunity for work and lodging that he’d offered.
“Splendid,” he said with less enthusiasm than he might have. “You’ve got sense after all. And you’ve retrieved your baby, I see.” He gave a measured smile. “I’ll bring you to the apartment. But wet your whistle first.”
I was thirsty, so very thirsty. I accepted the drink he ordered from the stern-faced barkeep. It was a beer, my first. It tasted like the smell of urine. With the valise at my feet and Charlotte in my shawl, I took several sips, not minding how the effervescence rose to my brain. I took another sip, but Albert disapproved of my timid method. Grabbing the mug, he quaffed the frothy liquid, then banged the mug onto the bar and slid it back my way.
“Don’t be dainty, Miss de Jong,” he admonished. “It isn’t a cup of tea.”
The barkeep snickered, his body half turned to us as he dried a glass with a cloth.
“All right.” I took gulps of the bitter stuff, relieving my dry throat. Albert finished his own drink. At my final gulp, I noted a wobbliness in my mind.
“Let’s get you settled,” he said, petting my shoulder with a new forwardness. “And you can clean yourself up.”
I leaned to his ear and whispered. “It’ll be ten dollars today and twenty dollars on the first of each month?” It relieved me to be making these arrangements.
He nodded. “As I said.” Getting to his feet with some care, he added, “You’ll like the apartment. Very private.”
After having not even a square of floor to call my own, much less a wall or a door to shield me and Charlotte, I told him that privacy would be quite welcome.
He took the valise from me, and we walked to a neighborhood thick with taverns, markets, and boardinghouses. His apartment was in a new brick building near the Delaware River. Slowed by the heat, we ascended five flights of stairs. He unlocked the door and we stepped directly into the kitchen—very small, but the most modern such place I’d ever seen. Against its paste-white walls sat a new stove, cupboards, and an icebox. It had an indoor sink with a faucet, so water wouldn’t need to be hauled up and down, and a long metal tub for bathing. After we huffed a moment from the steep ascent, Albert excused himself and stepped into what might have been a water closet—since a sound of urination emerged.
I stood by the tub, embarrassed, holding Charlotte and my valise, aware of the stickiness of my skin and wishing for a thorough washing. The apartment was stifling hot, but it had a dry and pleasant smell. Charlotte stared into the air, perhaps watching the dust motes that hung in the sunlight. I kissed her moist forehead. Then I looked through the doorway to the second room.
It held a middling-sized bed in a wooden frame. On its walls were an assortment of photographs, each perhaps eight inches high, that I quickly perceived to be lewd. One showed a woman from behind, leaning away from the camera; her bare bottom and thighs took up much of the picture. Over her shoulder, her eyes were saucily appraising. There were a dozen such pictures. Did Albert know these women? Would he aim to turn me into such a one?
I was appalled; yet a shred of me rose like some maggot from a rotting feast and said, Why be ashamed? Why not love pleasure?
As I observed these sensations, aware also of the swell of alcohol in my blood, Albert left the closet and exclaimed over the “dratted heat.” He opened the main room’s windows, then removed his jacket and vest and stood before me. His high-waisted pants were held up by red suspenders, and sweat marked his shirt. Soon I would be pressed against that body. This seemed less desirable than I’d imagined in those fleeting seconds at his office.
“It’s nice no one can see in,” he said, gesturing to the uncurtained windows. “We’re the tallest building on the block.” He spoke with an ease I hadn’t seen in him before. “Make yourself at home! Put down your things.” Taking note of the baby in my shawl, he grabbed a kitchen towel from a rail on the wall and laid it in the tub. “You can rest her here. Take off some clothing!”
“If thee would give me a moment.” My voice was diminished by the strangeness. “I’ll get her to sleep and clean myself.”
I was grateful when Albert stretched his body upon the bed in the next room and turned his face away. I didn’t want his eyes to watch—to corrupt the acts of caring for my baby.
I changed Charlotte’s diaper and blanket, then fed her till she slept and placed her in the tub, hoping she’d rest through whatever would follow. Fetching a towel and filling a tin pan at the sink’s faucet, I wiped all the places I could reach under my clothing, rinsing the towel several times. At last I stepped into the other room and stood before the bed.
Albert had removed every bit of his clothing. He turned to me on the bed and laughed. “You can’t mean to stay dressed!”
Though I was frightened, the sight of his lithe and muscled form did send a jolt through the place between my thighs. I removed my skirt and bodice but kept on my chemise and corset, as well as the stockings suspended from them. I lay beside him.
In seconds he was looming over me, supported by his outstretched arms, his breath more alcohol than air. He accosted my mouth with his larger one, so that I moved my face backward to reduce the pressure. Then he raised my chemise upward and rubbed his stiffened—I’ll have to write it—penis into my thighs.
“Have you ever put one of these in your mouth?” he asked.
I replied no and peered past him, searching the photographs to see if one depicted such an act; I’d have much to learn to suit my new employment. Some showed women seated atop men whose penises were visible where they entered the women; another showed several men and women joined in diverse manners through their mouths and private parts. So this was what he wanted.
“Open your lips,” said Albert. He pulled himself forward till his pink staff approached my face. He halted his buttocks upon my ribs, limiting my space for breathing. “Lift your head,” he instructed. And then, as my face came toward him, he pushed his choking length into my throat.
I did nothing but accept it. Several times he pulled his member outward, then pushed it to the back of my throat again. He laughed with pleasure. I struggled not to close my teeth or use my tongue to shove him away. Ten dollars today and twenty dollars a month, my mind intoned. I wanted to cry out. Each time my throat was hit, I fought against a retch.
He moaned, tilting his torso backward. “Ah! Marvelous!”
A bitter gorge rose from my stomach, tasting like beer. Suddenly it increased and poured over his swollen part.
He removed himself and huffed. “That’s rather unexpected!” Grabbing his shirt from the floor, he wiped the vomit away from himself and from my wet neck. His face reddened, but his member neither shrank nor shriveled. “Let’s try the usual way, then,” he said optimistically. “I’ll fetch a rubber.”
Through my raw throat I thanked him. I’d never seen a rubber, but I knew what they were for, and knew he’d likely obtained his illegally.
By the time he’d located one in the kitchen cupboard and brought it to the bedroom, he was trying to unfurl the sack over a flagging penis.
A moment of quiet followed. I lay on the bed; he stood at its foot, tilting slightly from inebriation. Gesturing with his head to his bowed member, he said, “Don’t take this as an insult. You’ve got such creamy skin. Lovely hips. Nice full breasts poking from that contraption you insist on continuing to wear.”
As if wounded vanity was my main concern. I sighed as he reached for a bottle beside the bed.
“A little brandy should help.” He pulled out the cork and took one gulp and another, shook his head at the force of the liquor, then set down the bottle. He gave a snort at noticing his suspenders on the floor and lifted them. “Bondage always arouses me,” he said convivially. “Let’s get your arms above you.”
How casually he would make me helpless! I shook my head. This I would not do.
“Your arms,” he repeated. “Simply put them over your head. I’ll manage the rest. Have you tried this? It raises my fever, I’ll tell you.” He stepped around the bed frame toward its top, his red suspenders in his hands, his face bright with an energy I’d seen in it before. All at once I perceived it as a degree of selfishness that was verging on brutality.
The ribald nudes on the walls mocked my fear. But if I allowed him to fasten my arms to the bed frame, how would I get free? What if he decided to keep me tied there a good while, to maintain his ill-gotten arousal, and Charlotte woke and cried?
What might this person do to my baby, whether now or later, when she grew?
That was a price she would not pay.
I reached an arm to the floor, grabbed my skirt, and found my small penknife in the pocket. In seconds the blade was open in my hand.
“Do—not—dare,” I intoned. I got to my knees and gestured with the knife while gathering clothes with my free arm. “Keep away. I’m leaving.”