Polly giggled. He took a little parcel from his coat pocket and presented it to her in cupped hands, his head slightly bowed. It was her fee, ten silver dollars wrapped in brown paper. She took it in a fist and curtsied.
TWO FLOORS BELOW, Priscilla Christmas sat in the front parlor, luxuriating in her own rosy aroma and well-scrubbed glow; in Phantasmion, the big fairy book Polly had loaned her; and in the warm macaroons and cold milk the housemaid had set out on the table for her. She rubbed her fingers over the plaits of her thick, freshly braided and beribboned black hair. Even the sounds of the room were sumptuous—the faint hiss of steam in the cast-iron heater, the whoosh and tinkle as Mary the housemaid (using one of the pewter syringes from the upstairs pantry) watered the pots of aspidistra and maidenhair ferns, the songs of the caged canaries, the pendulum swing and ticking gears of the ship’s clock on the mantel.
Priscilla had just descended to await her appointment. Each Friday by four she arrived wearing a gray gingham smock that she stripped off as quickly as she could and left in a hamper with her underclothes for the laundry. And by quarter past five she was transformed—bathed, braided, perfumed, powdered, and attired in the costume kept in the closet next to the upstairs pantry, a periwinkle-blue velveteen dress with a brocaded bodice and enormous skirts that made her feel like a woman. Thanks entirely to Polly’s generosity and this little job of work at 101 Mercer, she felt that she was enjoying much of the best of both worlds: the pleasures of a respectable childhood (sweet snacks, clothes washed every week, time to attend school and read adventure tales) as well as those of adulthood (a splendid dress, polite conversation, a decent income). And because her father was guaranteed to be dead drunk by the time she returned home at seven, she had no fear that he would start wondering why she came home so clean and sweet-smelling every Friday evening. Her secret was safe.
Although her name at 101 Mercer was Minerva Spooner, Priscilla let Mr. Prime call her by several silly nicknames of his own devising, such as “my nastypuss.” But despite his kindness and recent, rather shocking professions of love, she had no doubt that whoring was sinful. She was unconvinced by the argument, advanced by a boy she knew, that the long limbo between the statutory age of consent (ten) and the statutory age for marrying (sixteen) amounted to a ratification of licentiousness for New Yorkers of their age. But surely God himself would prefer that she sin only once a week in a clean, well-heated house, rather than giving two-minute yankums for a quarter dollar in some foul back alley, or letting newsboys pay five cents to rub and squeeze her bubbies at night in the Park. Anyhow, she preferred it.
Not long before the parlor clock struck five-thirty, Priscilla shivered and looked up suddenly from her reading. The room was still warm. She was having one of her inklings. Once a week, sometimes less often, she experienced an odd prognostic intuition—seldom specific enough, alas, to help her dad with his gambling, but a second sight reliable enough to know whether her own luck was about to take a turn for good or ill. The shiver just now had not been a happy one.
POLLY HAD TAKEN a shower bath before dressing. She was still upstairs in the third-floor bedchamber, looking down at Spring Street. She leaned against the window, staring at the snow, already striped with the tracks of carts and coaches and sleighs. She moved her face close enough to smell the glass and feel the cold on her nose and cheeks. With each warm exhalation she turned the pane cloudy. She lifted her forefinger and drew a star in the steam. As she finished she dipped her head to look out through the star and spotted a man walking down Spring from Broadway, toward the house. It was Samuel Prime, here for his Friday afternoon appointment.
She harbored no hard feelings toward this Mr. Prime. In the summer of 1837, after her father’s bankruptcy and suicide, her mother had moved with Polly and her three siblings to a drafty little three-room house leased for them by her brother-in-law in a suburb of New York. In fact, it was in a suburb of a suburb on Long Island, just north of the new town of Astoria, and on the southern edge of Hurlgate, the Prime family’s country seat overlooking Manhattan. Nathaniel Prime, Samuel’s father, had been one of the city’s great moneymen, a banker and stockbroker and founder of Prime, Ward & King in Wall Street. Samuel was in his thirties when the Luckings appeared at Hurlgate, and from the start had behaved warmly toward his unfortunate new tenants. He sat for one of Polly’s pencil portraits. He even allowed the Lucking children to play with his own three young children, and had arranged for twelve-year-old Polly and ten-year-old Duff to work a few hours a week in his family’s icehouse (Duff) and hothouse (Polly).
It was in the hothouse late on a golden September afternoon, as she paused from sweeping up bits of soil and yellowed leaves to look at the splendid view (the sky, the water, the gardens of Rikers Island), that the elderly Mr. Prime had appeared behind her. He had a big, toothy smile, a dish of vanilla ice cream, praise for her sketches, an insistence that she call him “Nat,” and—as it turned out—designs on Polly’s virtue. As she lay beneath him she had fixed her gaze on the words Nil Invita Minerva etched in the rectangle of glass over the door. It was the Prime family motto—“Nothing contrary to one’s genius.”
As he’d dusted himself off afterward, he half convinced her that she had suggested or anyway provoked the lovemaking. She had done no such thing, Polly knew now—although she had not very strenuously resisted his advances either, despite the story she told her mother. Why had she capitulated without much of a fuss? The greenhouse fragrance and humidity were always intoxicating; the ice cream tasted wonderful; he was no taller than she, which made him unthreatening; he was rich, famously rich, ten times richer than her father had dreamed of becoming; she was flattered and curious; and she knew that she was still too young to become pregnant.
Thus was Polly Lucking “devirginated,” as her mother described it some weeks later to the lawyer at the Primes’ offices—“sprawled in broad daylight on the filthy floor of a garden shed.” Polly still recalled that visit to Wall Street with exceptional clarity—indeed, more clearly than the incident that brought her there. It was her first ride on a ferry and her first visit to New York City. She thrilled at the huge new buildings—the Custom House, the Merchants’ Exchange. When she and her mother arrived at the appointed address, six men with muskets were standing in front of the building. For a moment Polly imagined they were there for her, but then she saw they were guarding a pair of vans filled with tiny kegs, each one marked “B of E.” Later that week Polly’s uncle read in the newspaper that the Bank of England had loaned Prime, Ward & King $5 million—the two hundred little kegs, $25,000 worth of gold in each one, shipped from London to New York.
When Polly told Timothy Skaggs this whole story late one night last year, not long after they had become playmates, he had laughed and laughed, and accused her of fabricating the tale. “You were deflowered on the last day of summer lying beneath hundreds of daffodils and petunias?” he said when he was finally able to catch his breath. “At Hurlgate—the gate of hell? By Nathaniel ‘Slice’ Prime himself?” She hadn’t known about the elder Mr. Prime’s posthumous sporting-paper nickname, “Slice.”
Even after she had come close to crying and finally convinced Skaggs she was telling the truth, he continued to joke about it. “Do you suppose,” he had asked her, “it was some feeling of guilt concerning you that finally provoked the old man’s suicide? I ask because I invented that very twist for a villain in one of my stories.” Polly had considered and rejected this possibility. Three years after her greenhouse encounter with Nathaniel Prime, the old man was found dead in his house at the bottom of Broadway, his throat cut from ear to ear. She remembered learning of his suicide from Duff, who had run into the Luckings’ apartment excitedly, practically gleeful, holding in each hand the articles he had ripped from the Sun and the Herald. “No,” Polly had replied to Skaggs. “When the Primes gave my mother the three hundred dollars, it was more than enough to atone on my account. It was some different demon,” she said, “that killed Mr.
Prime.”
Charlotte Lucking had used most of that money to pay her late husband’s business debts, and the remainder to move her family into Manhattan. Polly had hardly thought of the Primes again until last year, when Samuel happened to attend The Hunchback and the Dumb Belle and made his way backstage after the show to praise her performance. Polly wondered at that moment if she was about to be seduced once again by a Prime. But Samuel showed no interest—and when they next met, many months later for supper, he dismayed her by asking if she knew “of any financially needy young woman as attractive and intelligent as yourself.” Yet Prime’s wildly impertinent suggestion—she was only twenty-two at the time, and an actress, not a procurer—struck Polly as auspicious. She had just met Priscilla Christmas.
The arrangement had worked out well for everyone. Each Friday evening Priscilla went home to the Five Points with four dollars hidden among the school chapbooks in her satchel. Mrs. Stanhope spent an extra few cents a week on laundry and cookies, and earned a dollar for her trouble. Samuel Prime remained clueless that Polly herself had any professional involvement with 101 Mercer. He knew only that Mrs. Stanhope was a former actress Polly had met in the theater, and that Polly had sincere sisterly feelings for the destitute young Miss Christmas. According to Priscilla, Samuel Prime was exceptionally gentle during her weekly hour with him. “Well, it was more like a hug in the nude than a fuck,” the girl had confided after the first time, managing at once to reassure and shock Polly. “He asked that I never call him ‘Mr. Prime,’ but ‘Sammy Boy.’ And the strangest thing of all? He apologized after he had finished.”
Outside, a heavier snow was falling, hiding Samuel Prime’s tracks twenty yards behind him as he walked up Spring. Polly knew he must be in his mid-forties, but he walked briskly. She watched him stop at the corner and lean slightly forward to glance up and down Mercer. It was a neighborhood—a mile north of Prime, Ward & King, a mile south of his Fifth Avenue house—in which Samuel Prime had no good excuse for loitering on the afternoon of an ordinary business day. Exercise! was the alibi he always kept on the tip of his tongue. Sent the driver on, walking home for the exercise, sensible at my age! But right now the coast was clear, and Samuel Prime crossed the street.
Staring out at the snow, Polly asked herself for the hundredth time: Had she improved Priscilla’s lot? Yes, unquestionably. Had she also given Priscilla, at thirteen, a smart push onto a very slippery path that might end in misery as well? Yes, alas. Polly sighed deeply, trying to exhale this small agony—what in this life was not a choice between lesser evils?—and headed down the back stairs to the kitchen.
She opened Mrs. Stanhope’s new patent refrigerator and laid her hand inside on the metal for the sheer magic of the sensation—to feel the artificial chill in this warm room, a trick of shelves filled with circulating water. She took a few pickles from a jar, cut a slice of ham, buttered a roll, and ate her meal standing up, using not even a plate or utensils. As she was finishing, licking butter from a finger, the proprietress appeared.
“Polly Lucking! What in Sam Hill are you doing, gobbling on your feet like an urchin?”
Polly smiled as she chewed the last of her bun. She wiped her hands on the cook’s towel and reached for her coat. “Running late for a performance.”
Mrs. Stanhope lowered her voice to a whisper. “Polly, we must speak before long about—” She cocked her head toward the upstairs.
Polly sighed and said nothing. Mrs. Stanhope helped her on with her coat.
“You know,” the proprietress said, still whispering, “that my main consideration is what is most sensible and advantageous for her.”
A few days earlier, Mrs. Stanhope had proposed to Polly that Priscilla take on another client, perhaps two, perhaps more. She is not the prettiest girl in the city, Mrs. Stanhope had said, but with certain gentlemen I believe we could make an attractive fuss about her…her special powers. The idea, more or less, was to advertise Priscilla Christmas as some kind of young trance medium, a “magnetic whore,” and charge eight or ten dollars instead of five.
“I am very late,” Polly said as Mrs. Stanhope tied Polly’s bonnet.
IF POLLY HAD dawdled another minute inside the house, or if Fatty Freeborn had not stopped on Spring Street, he would have spotted her, and his suspicions would’ve been confirmed once and for all. He knew her by sight from Shakespeare’s, and he had once spotted her on this block of Mercer, early in the morning in front of No. 101, talking with the conceited old mackerel bitch who owned the place. But Fatty had to relieve himself right now.
He turned away from the street, pulled out his knob roughly into the cold air, and only then looked both ways to see if any pedestrians were near. An elderly gentleman in old-fashioned breeches, arm in arm with his little grandson, was waiting to cross Spring a few yards behind him. As Fatty’s stream gushed hot and noisily against some snow-covered paper trash, Fatty was pleased to imagine the gentleman’s displeasure—he’d like to squirt right on the old bastard and his little whelp, send them home to Washington Square soaked in piss. He was famous among his friends for having a doodle as thick as the nozzle on a fire hose.
Although Fatty sweated six days a week mixing and punching dough (from noon to half past five) and minding ovens (from midnight until dawn), he did not call himself a baker. He was one of seven men employed by Mr. Enggas, the owner of the big Greene Street bakery. But Fatty had never defined himself by the way he earned his dollar a day. He was no apprentice hatter when they paid him to lug piles of beaver pelts up and down stairs in Water Street and smear them with dye—“a shit job for shit wages,” he’d told the boss the day he was sacked. Nor was he really a hackney when he drove a carriage—“nigger work,” he called it after he’d quit. Nor was he even a sledgeman for the four years he worked at the ironworks, hammering pieces of metal as thick as his own legs. The only job he’d ever enjoyed had had no proper name at all: every Saturday for six months a soap factory in the block where he grew up had paid him thirty cents to sit on a big iron dish of its scale while barrels were hoisted onto the opposite dish, since by law a barrel of soap was required to weigh 256 pounds, and at thirteen Fatty Freeborn weighed exactly 256 pounds. Alas, well before his fourteenth birthday he had grown too fat to keep the job, and it had spoiled him for anything more rigorous. The only easy work he knew about was copying lists of voters’ names for the Democratic Party, but Fatty could not read very well nor write at all.
So he was now paid to mix dough and bake, but he was not a baker; he was a b’hoy, a Bowery b’hoy, meaning that the salient aspects of his life were what he did at leisure. Night after night he roamed in an unending loop among the same saloons and porterhouses on the same few blocks of the Bowery and Broadway, gadding down the street with his pals, all of them swinging their arms and shoulders like giant marionettes.
Their peculiar jargon started with their very name for themselves—boy pronounced with a little cough in the middle, b’hoy, stretched out into a syllable and a half. But Fatty and his b’hoys didn’t just speak in slang, they were themselves human slang, and like new words had sprouted mysteriously and suddenly in the less respectable city streets and cellars. Every second young man in the lower wards started, all at once three summers ago, to wear his hair long on the sides and slicked down, to keep a cigar jammed in the corner of his mouth, and to wear a checkered coat and flared trousers and heavy boots. They were foulmouthed and theatrical, scruffy as well as foppish, working-class dandies. No one had ever seen anything quite like them, which was part of the point. They were the first generation of ordinary young men (and women—the cocky, overdressed g’hals) for whom the pursuit of happiness meant only the organized pursuit of fun, the first who had decided to remain unmarried as long as possible and prance and sport like brats at twenty and twenty-five and (in a few cases, like Fatty) nearly thirty years of age.
The snow had stopped. Finished with his piss, Fatty buttoned up and reached with his dick hand into his knapsack to ta
ke a long pull from one of the two quarts he had bought at the grocery in Houston Street. It was his turn to provide the whiskey and the lamb for the Friday Night Jamboree, as he and his four oldest pals called their monthly romp and barbecue dinner. As the liquor warmed his gut he watched the old fellow in the fancy oldfangled costume shuffle across the street with his grandson. Fatty felt disgust for all the upper-tens, as appalled by the richies as they were by him. He’d have put up his fists if anyone had said that he and the other b’hoys were like minstrel renderings of the sons of Astors and Schermerhorns, living spoofs of young aristocrats. But it was true. Fatty and his chums had all the foppery and fecklessness and sniggering gaiety; all they lacked were the educations and five-figure incomes. He corked the whiskey bottle, hitched his trousers up over the lower half of his belly, and swaggered, in his oxlike fashion, down Spring.
But he stopped again at the corner of Mercer, lowered his bag to the pavement, and got the bottle back out. It was his dime that paid for the booze, wasn’t it? He didn’t want to get too loose beforehand, since he’d have to walk the last blocks from the butcher’s to Avenue D carrying the little ewe. Sally would have her legs tied, but they always squirmed and kicked. He needed to fortify himself. The second drink was always his favorite.
As he stood, feeling it begin to stir his soul, he turned to glance up Mercer. He spotted someone coming out of No. 101. One of the maids, could be? Leaving the place at this time of day, she wouldn’t be one of the whores…the whores all too fine and spiffy for the likes of a native working boy like Fatty Freeborn. One night Fatty had gone with his friend Charlie Strausbaugh to the door bathed and combed and wearing a clean shirt, ready to spend half a week’s wage for one night of pleasure. But old lady Stanhope had turned them away, would not take their good money—wouldn’t even tell them directly to clear off, had her black maid say they lacked “the required introductions.” Waved away by a whore’s pimp’s nigger!
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