by Marge Piercy
When she figured out what they were doing, Mrs. Stone had plenty to say. “It’s no trade for a respectable woman.”
“This respectable woman wants some money. I don’t want to live my life out in darkness and bad air.”
“You’re young enough to marry again. Believe me, I would if I could. A woman needs a man.”
“I need a trade to support me. A good living so I can live good. A man I don’t need. I got a boy, that’s good enough.”
Sammy didn’t like Mrs. Stone and she despised him. He found little ways to be mean to her, hiding her sock, breaking the thread when she left a piece of work, spilling the chamber pot near her bed. In her turn, she made it clear she thought him a thug from the street. Freydeh tried to keep peace between them. Sammy had a mean streak when he felt someone disrespected him. It came from years in the street, where to overlook an insult was to invite a beating.
Sammy and she had tried going from boardinghouse to boardinghouse describing Shaineh, to no avail. Sammy shook his head. “We’ll never find her like this. We need a picture. A picture we can show people.”
“I don’t have a picture of her. I don’t even have one of me. It wasn’t like here, where there are photographers in the street ready to take your likeness.”
“Then we need to have someone draw a picture of her.”
“But I haven’t seen her since she was twelve.”
“So you got to tell what she looks like, to guess the best you can.” Sammy knew far more the ways of the city than she did.
“We’ll try it.” She clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re a good boy, Sammy. You got brains.” He also, she discovered, had lice. She had to douse him with kerosene and then pick at his scalp to get rid of them. There were enough bugs in the tenement without having lice as well.
The following Saturday, they walked to the Bowery. They had to wait in a cloud of dust and stink because a herd of cattle was being driven through the narrow street toward the slaughterhouse on the East River. “Be careful where you step,” she warned when the drive had passed. On the Bowery, in the mass of humanity and carts and trolleys and horses, they found a street artist. They were always about the streets between the hot-corn girls and the orange and match peddlers—artists who cut silhouettes and, in this case, a woman who did pencil sketches—usually someone sitting on the stool she provided. After haggling over a price and once walking away, Freydeh got the artist to agree to try to draw a picture of the woman Freydeh would describe, and to correct it as Freydeh described Shaineh.
“Light brown curly hair. No, not loose curls like that. Tight. Like ringlets.”
“Frizzy?”
“If you want to call it that. Thinner. She had a small waist. Not like me, with my hips and my tuchus. Make the chin more pointed. Triangular like a cat—make her face that way. The eyes bigger. The mouth smaller.”
A portrait was emerging. Freydeh wondered if it would bear any resemblance to her lost sister. She was just trying to guess how the twelve-year-old Shaineh would fare as an eighteen-year-old. She knew from family letters that Shaineh was remarkably pretty. She trusted her mother’s judgment, for her mother had never insisted that she or Sara was pretty, only that they were strong healthy girls and would make good wives and mothers. Freydeh didn’t have a lot of faith in the drawing, but now they had something they could show people. People just didn’t listen when she went into a long description of what she thought Shaineh looked like. A picture could hold their attention while she talked.
They began their search again farther downtown, closer to the Battery. Down here were lots of businesses and warehouses as well as boarding-houses, and to judge by the women leaning out the windows with their bosoms flopping free, lots of whorehouses as well. She wasn’t afraid of the whores. She had grown up near the whorehouse on the river. The only Jews allowed to travel freely out of the Pale in czarist Russia were prostitutes—Jewish prostitutes being in high demand. Some women like Mrs. Stone would draw up their skirts when they saw whores as if the sight of the women would sully them, would soil their clothing.
She squeezed Sammy’s callused hand. “Here things are hard, but you have some kind of a choice. Where we come from, no hope, no chance, no luck. Just hunger and danger.”
“There’s plenty of both here, Freydeh.”
“True. But there’s other things for Jews here. I know, a cart could run us down in the street, a coach could trample us. We could catch the cholera or consumption. But maybe not. Don’t we have a place to live now? Our own place?”
He nodded solemnly, eyeing a girl who was eyeing him. A young whore of perhaps thirteen. “First time in five years I get to sleep inside regular. Sometimes a bunch of us would work for Shifty Bean and he would let us all sleep on pallets in his second basement, under the place where he prints the numbers tickets. But there were rats and it was wet, really dark and drippy.” He was still gazing at the girl, who was motioning to him, wriggling her ass.
“That girl is just a child,” Freydeh said. “How can this happen?”
“Toffs like kids to do it with,” Sammy said knowingly. “They think they can’t get the clap from them. The girls know they can’t get a baby yet.” He and the girl were still making eyes.
She grabbed his arm and dragged him along. “None of that for you. You start in now and it will stunt your growth. You’re small enough. You got to grow some before you start thinking about women and getting yourself into trouble.”
“I know all about men and women. I seen it done, you know. I’m not a baby.”
“If you don’t want to be the size of a little boy your whole life long, you forget what you know till it’s time to use it.”
He was silent for a few minutes. Then he said softly, “I wish I would grow. Big guys get all the respect.”
“Not necessarily. You look at some of them prizefighters, and they aren’t always the biggest gonifs. Sometimes a little guy can take one of them by knowing how to hit where it hurts.”
The first boardinghouse, the woman lost interest when they told her what they wanted. “I got to clean up after these pigs. I only rent to men.”
The next boardinghouse took women but not Jews, never Jews. They were too dirty.
“We bathe once a week, missus. When was the last time you took a dip?” Freydeh yelled over her shoulder.
They had been at it for three hours and were about ready to give up when a woman came to the door of what had been a Federal mansion before all the carriage trade moved uptown. “I’m not running a boardinghouse, darling, but let me see that picture.” She studied it carefully. “I know her.”
“Is she here?” Freydeh clutched herself.
“She worked for me for two, three months a year ago winter. She came to me scarcely speaking a word of English and really hard up…” She read Freydeh’s face. “Not as one of my girls, darling. She was a housemaid. Sometimes it’s better if they can’t speak English. They don’t comment on what’s going on and they work for less. Come on in. I have her name written down in my desk. We can see if it’s your sister.”
The house was weirdly painted, all purple and black and with odd tin-kly curtains of beads. Whips were hung on the wall of the parlor. The madam, a pretty plump lady with auburn hair in curls around her face, sat down at a neat old-fashioned desk and began to look down a ledger. “I keep track of everyone who works for me, as well as my customers and my girls.” She was wearing a bustle that collapsed when she sat, a purple-and-black-striped overskirt and a bright green satin petticoat trimmed with black lace, a fitted velvet jacket with black frogging and green kid gloves. She removed them to lick a finger and turn the pages.
She motioned Freydeh to an overstuffed plush chair. Freydeh sank into it, her hands clasped across her belly. She tried to breathe normally, dizzy with anticipation.
“Here it is.” The madam showed her the ledger. The name was written Shayna. Shayna Leebowish. “Is that she?”
Freydeh nodded, unable to spe
ak. “But she doesn’t work for you now?”
“She wasn’t comfortable with what goes on here. She appeared to be a virgin.”
“You didn’t…You didn’t want her to work for you, I mean as one of your girls?”
“Too fragile.” The madam looked Freydeh over. “You’re more the type we can use here. We’re not a common house. We specialize. You saw the whips. Some men like to be spanked or whipped or punished. Some want to do the punishing. Either way, we need strong girls.”
“Thanks, but I’m going into business for myself. I’m going to make condoms.”
“Really. You could do worse. I hope you find your sister.”
“So Shaineh quit?”
“She cried a lot while she was here. She’d cry in her bed at night, and the other girls didn’t like it. It was depressing. And she was always afraid of the men… Now, she wasn’t a great seamstress, but she could sew. I used her to fix my girls’ costumes. There’s a lot of wear and tear on clothing in this business.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“No idea. She took her bundle and went out the door, and that’s the last I saw of her.” The madam stood. She was shorter than Freydeh by a head. “Good luck.”
They walked a few buildings along the street and then sat down on a stoop. “Well, that was odd,” Freydeh said. “At least we found her trail, no matter how cold.”
“Freydeh, what’s with those whips? I thought it was a whorehouse, but I don’t see what she does with the whips. I don’t get it…”
“Neither do I, Sammy. Maybe it’s better we don’t understand. I think maybe it’s better we just forget what we heard except for the part about Shaineh.”
“So there’s a thousand places she could be working as a seamstress. Is that what she was in the old country?”
“Mama apprenticed her to a seamstress, but she complained that she was just doing chores for the family. So I don’t know if she really has skills.”
“Well, there can’t be more places that give out piecework for sewing than there are boardinghouses—or whorehouses.” He looked back over his skinny shoulder.
“This is New York. There’s a lot of everything. We just have to find the right one.”
Sammy was silent. He had that look he got when he was upset. She knew it by now. He showed a sullen withdrawal when he was disappointed or afraid of being disappointed. She left him alone as they walked north, having decided not to take the horsecar and walk—saving money, avoiding the chaos and shoving. Once they came out of the district of warehouses, lines of wash were hung over the side streets, thicker than the tangle of telegraph wires in the main and business streets. Broadway when they crossed it, dodging among stalled carts and wagons and carriages, was a crisscross mess. Policemen were shouting at the draymen and coachmen trying to untangle the vehicles going every which way and slamming into each other. It happened every day.
Finally she said, “But things are looking up for us, no? We have a place of our own. The boarder helps pay the rent. We found cheap beds and they don’t have bedbugs. We have enough to eat. We managed to pick up Shaineh’s trail.”
“We’re never going to make the rubber right.”
“Sure we are. We have to practice some more. Nobody’s born knowing how to vulcanize rubber. Izzy, who comes to Yonkelman’s—”
“He’s sweet on you.”
“Yah, that and a cigar will get him a smoke. Izzy has a tiny brain in his noggin, shaking around like a few seeds in a gourd. If he can do it, so can we.”
“Otherwise you got no use for me.”
“Sammy, I took you in and you’re staying. That’s just how it is. I got no family now except Shaineh. You’re stuck with me.”
He squinted at her, half disbelieving, half wanting to believe. She wondered again if he had weak eyes. At some point she could get a doctor to check his vision. But not yet. Doctors cost money.
SEVEN
HORACE GREELEY WILL never forgive what I did at the New York constitutional convention,” Susan said as she sat going over the bills from printing the Revolution. They were in the offices of the newspaper in the Women’s Bureau, a large town house on East Twenty-third owned by a sympathizer who let them use the space rent-free. It was airy with thick carpets and white walls hung with portraits of Lucretia Mott and Mary Wollstonecraft. Susan managed the office, paid bills, hired the women printers. Elizabeth was editor and wrote most of the copy about everything from factory women to woman’s rights in France. “That’s why Greeley’s Tribune is attacking me.”
Elizabeth put down her pen. “It got his goat, all right.” Greeley had been scheduled to give his negative report on woman suffrage, lumping women with lunatics and idiots and felons as not able to handle the vote. George Curtis, one of their supporters, stood and asked to present a petition in favor of woman suffrage, headed by Mrs. Horace Greeley. That had seriously embarrassed Horace.
“He turned on us long before that.” Susan gave a dismissive shake of her head. Then she sighed. “We don’t have enough in our poor little account to pay half these bills.”
Elizabeth was trying to fit all the articles she had written and commissioned and that had come in voluntarily into the narrow confines of the six pages they could afford to print. They had a reasonable number of ads this time, but since Elizabeth refused those for patent medicine—the most lucrative—ads couldn’t support the paper. She had written about the condition of women tailors, about divorce reform, suffrage in Wyoming, women homesteaders. “Should we go on printing Train’s articles?”
“He gave us the money to start. The Brits still have him in prison. We should give him the benefit of patience until he’s a free man again.” Susan knew Train better than Elizabeth did and was prone to defend him from their days sharing a platform and the hardscrabble travel around Kansas, often facing hostile audiences together.
“He gave money to Irish independence and went to jail for them. That’s where his heart is now. We shouldn’t entertain fantasies about more aid from your Mr. Train.”
“He’s not my Mr. Train. I was saddled with him, but he and I made the best of it.” Susan’s mouth formed a thin line of annoyance.
When Susan had been in Kansas canvassing for a suffrage amendment, she had been set up by people she trusted from the radical Republicans and anti-slavery movement to travel and speak with an Irishman, George Francis Train, eloquent but flamboyant and eccentric, traveling around Kansas in purple gloves and top hat and frock coat. Train had a hard time keeping up with Susan, but his dedication to woman’s rights had been genuine. After their journey, he had been so impressed with Susan he had given them funds to start their own newspaper.
It had come out in the New York and Boston papers—Greeley and his Tribune were particularly gleeful—that Train was a rabid pro-slavery Democrat. Susan was tarred with Train’s views and attacked by former Republican allies. She and Susan were considered political liabilities now that the fight for Negro suffrage—Negro male suffrage, as Elizabeth kept pointing out—was close to being secured. The Republicans were running the overwhelmingly popular General Grant for president.
Elizabeth wanted to get the newspaper together and quit for the day. They were scheduled to go to dinner at the Tiltons’. They slept in the city when they were putting out the paper, but tonight they would cross to Brooklyn. “Do you think the Republicans arranged for you to work with Train to discredit you?”
“We’ll never know, Mrs. Stanton. But they’ve deserted us.”
“Deserted us, reviled us, trampled us. But at the rights convention we’re going to fight back.” Elizabeth paced to the window, her skirts swishing. Absently she picked a loose brown hair from Susan’s dress as she passed. “We should hurry it up. We don’t want to be late.”
The ferry cost two cents and ran often. At this time of night it was crowded with working people in shabby clothes. The better-off went home much earlier. Susan and Elizabeth were packed in with carts, wagons, horses, a c
offin. Brooklyn was a middle-class city of respectable families, tree-lined streets, large houses, many churches and more than its share of ambitious politicos, of whom Theodore Tilton was certainly one. Even President Lincoln had visited the Tiltons. Elizabeth and Susan often took the ferry over for a social and political evening with Theo and his wife Lib.
It was Theo who greeted them at the door, not the maid. Theodore Tilton was a handsome man, something of a poet who dressed the part with long flowing blond locks and Byronic shirts, towering over them all at six feet three. He wrote mostly for an important church newspaper—church newspapers had as large a readership as the leading secular papers. He was passionately involved in Brooklyn and national politics. Like Susan and Elizabeth, he had been stalwart for abolition for more than a decade and supported woman’s rights. He was a protégé and ghostwriter for Henry Ward Beecher, the charismatic preacher of the important Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Special ferries ran on Sunday, Beecher’s Boats, people called them, to bring Manhattan churchgoers over to Brooklyn to hear the great Beecher sermonize about the forgiving God of Love, so different from the hellfire Puritanism most had been exposed to in childhood. Elizabeth hoped to make sure Theo and Beecher would support them in the convention and not allow woman’s rights to be sacrificed. Both men were important liberal voices people would listen to. They had been bosom buddies for years, but lately Elizabeth had noticed a strain between them. She was curious but assumed it was political in origin. Theo had been spending a great deal of time in Washington of late because of the attempt to impeach President Johnson, something he had worked for.
The Tiltons occupied a double-frame row house in Brooklyn Heights. It was sumptuously furnished, although the paintings—reproductions of oils—ran to the sentimental and bombastic with Roman motifs. The furniture in the front parlor was decorated with carved cherubs’ heads. Lib was flitting about when they arrived. She greeted Susan warmly and Elizabeth more warily. Lib was also named Elizabeth, a petite attractive woman, with shiny black hair and large dark brown eyes framed by lush lashes—a good wife and mother, presumably, but an odd match for the intellectual activist Tilton, as she seemed naïve. Then, Elizabeth did not think Lib had been given much of a chance to develop her own ideas. She seemed to be mostly maidservant to Tilton, who was all for woman’s rights but treated his own wife like a wayward child and constantly complained that Lib simply did not know how to run a house in a manner he thought befitted a man of his stature—and pretensions. Sometimes he rebuked her in front of company for her lack of intellectual pursuits, but Elizabeth could not see that he gave her time or encouragement to pursue any. Lib was very involved in Plymouth Church, a respectable outlet for her interests.