by Marge Piercy
“Annie, that man is driving me crazy—” Josie stopped abruptly as she noticed Tennie and Victoria.
Annie introduced them. “The sisters are medical adepts. They were just showing me some items that could be useful to my girls. Want to try the cologne?”
“He buys me French cologne by the vat. Thanks anyhow.”
Then she looked hard at Victoria. “Victoria Woodhull! Remember me?”
“Of course! I could never forget you.” Victoria turned to Annie and Tennessee. “We met in San Francisco.” Josie was a nitwit but bighearted and without malice.
“We was both actresses. You was in New York by Gaslight and I was playing in The Robber’s Revenge. Both of us up there in corseting that pushed our tits up to our chins with dresses cut down to here.”
“And those parties with idiots pawing us afterward.”
“You could memorize a part in a flash. All us girls envied you, how you could read it once and then go pour it out word perfect.”
“I wasn’t much of an actress. You were a lot better.”
Josie giggled. “It does me in good stead with old Jim, believe me.”
“You can put up with a lot if a man is generous,” Tennie said.
Josie winked at her. “You get the picture.”
“We’ve all been there.” Tennie was ingratiating herself with Josie. Actually neither Tennie nor Victoria had ever been kept. Rather both of them had kept their families. Victoria had supported her first husband, the drunken doctor Canning Woodhull, for most of their disastrous marriage.
“He’s good to me. But ladies, when he gets on top, it’s like being fucked by a hippopotamus. He may look the dandy with his fancy clothes on and his diamonds flashing, but once he strips down, you want to avert your eyes—and I don’t mean from modesty.”
“A beauty like you could do better, then,” Victoria offered.
“Not likely. He spends money like water. I can’t complain of his generosity. He buys me jewels and clothes and furs. I have a fine house, but he lives in it with me, and that’s a little more of him than I like.”
“He isn’t married? You should marry him,” Tennie said.
“He has a wife—Lucy—who lives in Boston. He never says a bad word about the lady, but they don’t share a bed and don’t even share a roof. He keeps her in high style and they both seem to like that arrangement just fine.”
“Does he talk to you about the market?” Victoria asked.
“Constantly. Ask Annie if I haven’t helped her put away a pot of money for a rainy day Sometimes he’s wrong, but not often. Believe me, not often.”
Annie nodded. “But Josie doesn’t invest.”
“I like to spend too much. I like to live well, ladies, that’s my aim in life. I hide a little away, cash here and there where I can lay hands on it if I need it, but I’m not into the care and husbandry of money like Annie.” Josie laughed. “It’s just not my thing. I don’t breed horses or dogs or money. I just like to have it around.”
Maybe Josie could prove useful to her, Victoria thought. “What I need is to know where I can furnish a house cheaply but with some refinement.” Victoria turned to Annie. “I was hoping you could help me.”
BY LATE AFTERNOON, James had leased a brownstone on Great Jones Street, just as she had envisioned. It was vacant and theirs at once. Tennie and Victoria were so eager to get out of the boardinghouse that they moved into the house that evening, sleeping on the floor with their trunks the only furniture and their coats for beds. James sent a telegram to his brother in New Jersey telling him where he was, and they put their names under the doorbell outside.
“Central heating—hot water rises into the radiators. We’ll need someone to come in and stoke the furnace every morning,” James was explaining politely, knowing they were not accustomed to bourgeois living. “But we don’t have to think about that until fall, when we should have money in hand to pay a couple of servants and a cook. This house has two water closets. The stove in the kitchen heats water.”
Victoria was well pleased. These were luxuries she had never known, although they were a matter of common comfort to James. Even though they had to go into debt, it was important to furnish the place well—to project an air of money. Unlike Josie, she had no desire to spend for its own sake. Shopping was not her favorite form of entertainment. Yet she liked the woman for her frankness, her direct sensuality, her boldness. While Victoria preferred to maintain a certain dignity and greatly prized intelligence, what she most disliked in women was pride in what they weren’t—pride in being passive, silent, put upon, pride in having no desire they would acknowledge. A so-called good woman often appeared a cipher, defined by what she wasn’t and what she never had done and perhaps refused to let herself imagine ever doing. Josie had been molested by her stepfather, who later pandered her to other men until she ran away. Josie and she had met in the tawdry world of San Francisco theater and given each other advice and information on openings and auditions.
Victoria saw herself as a multiplicity of possibilities, some of which were surely better, healthier, more satisfying than others, but there was little of which she did not imagine herself capable. She could see herself leading an army. She could see herself addressing Congress. She could see herself leading a congregation—hadn’t she done so already in tent revival meetings as a child? She could imagine herself as Cleopatra or Joan of Arc or Queen Elizabeth or Boadicea. She felt she contained within herself a hundred vital magnificent women in potentiality. If she had taken the lot passed out to her at birth, she would still be back in Ohio doing other women’s laundry, married to a drunk. At fifteen she had no idea what she was getting into, but she had understood clearly what she was escaping. Marriage to Woodhull had seemed a step up from her family, leaving her free to try to make her way, even if she had to drag him along.
Byron went right to sleep, curled up on the floor like a puppy. They must get beds. Everything had to be done as soon as possible. They had an address, and that was a start.
THE EVENING ARRIVED WHEN the sisters had their appointment with Cornelius Vanderbilt. His foursquare house was furnished in the style of a generation earlier, with maudlin or fleshy undistinguished paintings on the walls and a row of silver and gold steamships sailing across the marble mantelpiece. The Commodore was impatient to begin, probably mistrustful. He was a hard man. No woman had ever succeeded in rounding his rough edges. His wife must be somewhere on the premises, if she had not gone off visiting relatives or to a spa. Apparently visitors seldom beheld Sophia, who was also his cousin.
Victoria requested that the gaslights be turned off and candles lit. They gathered around a table at which the Commodore usually played whist. There were certainly spirits here. Victoria could feel the tingling. “You were haunted by ghosts but they can no longer enter. I feel them just beyond. A boy and a man.”
The Commodore jerked to attention. “Don’t you bring them back. I paid good money to get rid of them.”
“Don’t be afraid. They can’t enter here. Someone has blocked them.”
“The only real medium I ever hired. She got rid of them, bless the old witch.”
“But there is someone who wants to speak with you.”
“Is it my mother? You said you could reach my mother.”
“There’s someone else who wants far more vehemently to speak with you. A man in the prime of life. Pale.”
“Pale! Is he coughing?”
“He says you are thinking of how he passed over, but now he has no cough, no disease, no pain.”
“It’s my son! George Washington Vanderbilt. My youngest son. My good boy.”
“He served in the Civil War. He is standing in his uniform now. He says he knows my husband, Colonel Blood. But he wants to ask you about…about a horse. Does that make sense?”
“He had a favorite horse. Oh, Georgie!” The big man’s voice broke. “Silversides. He’s fine, Georgie, he’s in my stable right in back. I take him out riding and I
think of you, always, Georgie, I think of you. I keep him real fine. He’s curried every day.”
“He says he knows you love your horses and you’re good to them. He says you take too many chances, however, when you are driving them on Bloomingdale Road.”
Vanderbilt snorted. “Tell him to mind his own business. I like to drive fast. It’s one of my pleasures. Nobody can handle horses better than me.”
“He says he knows that. But there’s something about a train?”
“I like to cross the tracks just in front of the five twenty-two. Nobody else can do that. The horses know me and they know I won’t let it hit us. It just gives the crowd a scare. You know, people come out there to watch us race. We have to give them a thrill. And I win my races nine times out of ten.”
“He thinks you take too many chances on your afternoon rides. He watches over you, but he can’t help you. He says to tell you he’s happy where he is. He’s advancing along a path that feels good to him and he has found a spiritual mate there. He hopes you find someone to ease your loneliness. He knows that in spite of all your other children and your wife, you’re lonely. He feels that strongly and that too worries him. That worry is holding him back on his path.”
The Commodore seemed shaken and moved by the séance.
“I’m exhausted,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just lie on the sofa and rest.”
“You don’t go in for table-rapping or the whooshing or ectoplasmic spirits other mediums have tried on me.”
“That’s all fake. I have no need for any of that. I just open myself to the voices, and if someone wants to come through and communicate with you, I listen and tell you what they say. No rapping, no Ouija boards, no materializations, no strange music. I can’t command the spirits. I can only tell you what they want me to. I’m sorry to disappoint you, because I couldn’t make contact with your mother this time.”
“Don’t apologize, little lady. To hear from my dear son was fine enough. He was my favorite and he died too young of tuberculosis he caught in the war. He was the best of a sorry lot.”
“Now it’s my turn, old boy,” Tennie said. “Let me start with your neck.”
Victoria lay on a sofa in the next room to give Tennessee privacy with Vanderbilt. She would start by massaging him and then move on from there as his responses indicated. Mesmeric healing. Her electrical hands. Victoria dozed off on the velvet sofa as she waited patiently for her sister to finish.
Tennie was flushed when she woke Victoria. “He’s going to take me in his carriage tomorrow when he goes to race his horses on Bloomingdale Road.”
Vanderbilt ordered his coachman to take the sisters home. They gathered their stuff and left. Tennie showed her a fifty-dollar gold piece. Victoria took it. “We’ll buy some furniture. I gather it went very well indeed.”
“I eased his muscles. I eased his tension. I got him up and then I got him down. All in a night’s work. He wants to take us to dinner the night after next. I don’t think the Colonel is invited.”
“He won’t mind. He wants to see his brother in New Jersey.”
“Then it’s all for the best.” Tennie stretched luxuriously. “I only wish we had a bed at home so I could sleep well instead of huddling on the floor in a coat.”
“Tomorrow. Thanks to our skills tonight, tomorrow we’ll have beds of our own.” Something she had promised herself since childhood, when she had shared a mattress with four of her siblings. “We will each have our bed, our bedroom and our privacy.” That was dignity. Victoria knew she had refined taste, for she had studied ladies and worked out a vision of what was appropriate for her new life—nothing showy, nothing overblown, just fine stuff in dress, in furnishings, in decorating. The house would not impress Vanderbilt, for likely he would never see it. No, it was for others whom eventually she would meet, artists, intellectuals, politicians, those who thought deeply, spoke well and made things happen.
SIX
FREYDEH COULD TAKE over her new apartment May 1, a traditional moving day in New York. The evening before, she sat late on the stoop outside the Silvermans’ tenement. Families were moving because their leases were up, because they couldn’t pay the rent and were leaving on the sly, because they had found a better or cheaper place. Even after dark, people were dragging their goods through the streets, over the cobblestones and wood planks, through mud and puddles from yesterday’s rain. Early the next morning, Sammy and she hastened up and down the nearby blocks for odd pieces of furniture discarded here and there. They rescued two ladder-back chairs and a kitchen table only slightly burned.
Now on the great day itself, Sammy and she moved her effects. Sammy had nothing that didn’t fit in the pockets of his dirty cutoff pants or couldn’t be hung in the patched sack he wore around his neck to keep his few coins in. She had been storing the good secondhand pants and jacket for him. Her stuff fit into a hamper and a basket. They borrowed a cart from a peddler who was laid up with a broken foot. He was glad for a few coins for the lending of the cart. They had to make a detour as two blocks were flooded a foot deep from backed-up sewage—that happened a lot after heavy rain.
They were moving to Allen Street, a fifth-floor front—always the best since it faced the street and not the privies, with a high rent of eighteen dollars a month. In layout it was like the Silvermans’—the airless bedroom just big enough for a bed and a chair, the dark little kitchen with a fireplace that had a coal stove piped into it to warm them in the winter, plus a fireplace in the largest room, the front room lit by the only windows. The flat even had a fire escape—the back apartments never did. The previous tenants had left a rickety little table and a kerosene lamp that had lost its glass lantern, plus a chair that needed fixing—one leg broken. She would have to buy a bed, a couple of mattresses and a table big enough to work on. The bedroom had pegs in place for hanging clothes. The kitchen was well equipped with shelves some previous tenant had banged up. She had her own chamber pot, some dishes and pans from when she had been married, a knife, two forks, four spoons, three glasses and two cups. The first things she sent Sammy out to buy were a bucket to haul water and a basin to wash in.
They took turns toting their effects up the four flights so that the cart or its meager contents would not be stolen. A cart was a useful thing. Somebody who owned a cart could set up as a peddler or make a little money moving other people’s belongings. People moved a lot down here. They hoped for a better place, they moved to get away from prostitution or thievery, they moved because they couldn’t pay the rent. In hope and in despair, they moved.
Within a week of asking around and putting a little sign in their window, they had a boarder, Mrs. Stone, a widowed German Jew from Bavaria. She seemed to think that counted for a lot, but neither Freydeh nor Sammy had the least idea where or what Bavaria was. She spoke German rather than Yiddish, and her English was better than Freydeh’s, although not as good as Sammy’s. She thought it was. She said that Sammy spoke like an uneducated lout. Freydeh did not like her, but she needed the money Mrs. Stone would pay her every Friday afternoon. Mrs. Stone was a seamstress, but not a dressmaker. She did alterations. She too would be working in the front room.
She was two years older than Freydeh’s twenty-seven years, but looked five years older. She was skinny as a lamppost, a head shorter than Freydeh and freckled like a trout. She used a pince-nez when sewing. She considered herself psychic and was always trying to impress Sammy or Freydeh with her powers. “Mark me well, that Mrs. Shapiro is pregnant again. And her barely recovered from the last one.” She shook her head. “That Mr. Fiedler has some bad news coming to him within two, three weeks, you wait and see.” That was a reasonable guess, since almost everyone in the tenement would have something bad to worry about in the next week, in the next month, every month in the next year.
Freydeh had not quit her job at the pharmacy. Until Sammy and she had the business started, they needed every penny. Freydeh had talked Yonkelman into hiring Sammy to run errands
and deliver medicines to people too sick to come in. It paid pennies, but it was something and it kept Sammy busy. The street still had its lure for him. His old pals would try to seduce him into schemes every few days, although it was better since they had moved.
Their first attempt at vulcanization was a disaster. The rubber got too sticky and when she went to peel it off the mold it ripped. The next batch was too runny. So far her condom business was costing her money, not making it. Mrs. Stone complained of the smell. “Go sit outside if you don’t like it,” Freydeh told her.
Freydeh was waiting on a woman in the pharmacy who needed pills for dyspepsia. The woman asked, “So are you the one who took in Mrs. Stone?”
“She’s my boarder.”
“I am wondering, is this the same woman I know? Middle-aged, maybe thirty. Skinny like a stick. With freckles.”
“Yah. A widow who does alterations.”
“Widow, my elbow. Her husband ran off with another woman. They say he may be in the South.”
“If she drove him crazy like she does me, no wonder he took off.”
“She’s a gossip, so watch out.”
So I’m well warned, Freydeh thought to herself. But we all have to get along. That’s how it goes when you share a too little space with strangers. They don’t stay strangers. You learn how dirty they are, what doesn’t work so good in their body, every little habit and quirk and tic, you learn it all.
Their experiments with vulcanizing rubber sheets they bought were costing them, but she was convinced they would master it. If it was easy, every other fool would be making condoms in their front rooms. She would not give up. It was only a matter of practice until they could produce usable items. She was convinced it was the right move, a trade a woman could carry on, one she could do in her kitchen and make a decent profit.