by Marge Piercy
She never permitted anyone but Tennie to accompany her to Annie Wood’s. They had struck a deep connection. She felt at ease with Annie. They confided their plans for the improvement of their lives far more frankly than Victoria shared with anyone except Tennie. Although Tennie liked Annie, when she accompanied Victoria to the brothel there was a lot of laughter and gossip but little serious discussion.
The same boisterous mood prevailed when Josie Mansfield dropped in. Victoria liked Josie, even if she was a bit simple and greedy. She would pass on what she heard Fisk say about the stock market and his machinations only because she liked the attention it brought and because she thought it made her seem knowing. That precious information meant little to her.
“I don’t have to bother with that stuff,” she said. “Jim takes care of me. I don’t need to be worrying is the market going up, is the market going down, does Daniel Drew have a corner on this or that. They sneak around behind each other’s backs. I think the only people Jim is completely open with is that weird little partner of his, Jay Gould, and me. But he’s generous to a fault. He gave his coat to a beggar he felt sorry for. Just this week, he gave me pearl earrings the size of dice. The trouble is they hurt my ears, or I would have worn them over for you ladies to see.”
“There’s a trick to heavy earrings,” Victoria said. “Place a little disk on the other side of the ear—it balances the weight and keeps them from falling off”
“I’ll try that.”
Victoria knew that Vanderbilt was extremely interested in anything Fisk was involved in. Fisk and Gould were the only players who had ever taken Vanderbilt. He had been trying to buy up Erie stock after collecting six or seven railroads. He intended to take it away from Gould and Fisk, who controlled the stock and the board. But Gould just kept printing more stock. Gould flooded Vanderbilt with Erie he kept gobbling up until finally he realized he would never get enough to control the railroad, because Gould would make sure there was always more. They had taken the Commodore for seven million—not that he would miss it, but he didn’t like to lose. She wasn’t about to let him know how she had obtained her information. She must figure out how to feed him what she learned, just a bit at first till she was sure that what Josie and Annie were telling her was accurate.
Of Annie’s sources, she was reasonably confident. Champagne flowed freely in Annie’s brothel, and the girls were encouraged to coax the gentlemen to chat about their business affairs and politics. This was no five-minute house. Often the girls were hired for the evening, and some had regular appointments with a certain man every Tuesday or Friday. After the client left, the girls were instructed to write down everything relevant they remembered. Annie wouldn’t hire an illiterate white girl—Victoria’s own mother was illiterate—and she liked them on the bright side. Of course, many of the men liked to boast and make much of their activities, but over time, often Annie could guess who was exaggerating. Some of the mulatto girls had learned to read and write illegally under slavery or had been born free. Those still illiterate, if Annie thought them smart, she would hire. Then she’d have them study with a young man who had the run of the house on Mondays—the day they were closed—in return for his tutoring the girls in the mornings before the brothel opened for business. It occurred to Victoria, and made her smile for an instant, that Vanderbilt couldn’t have gotten a job with Annie since he could scarcely read a paragraph. Anything longer than a sentence or two he would abandon. His secretary read letters to him. Tennie and she took turns reading the newspapers aloud while he lay on his couch cursing the idiocy of politicians and people in general.
“I heard it through the grapevine that you sisters have snagged the Commodore. But he’s tight as a five-year-old’s twat. You won’t get much out of him for your troubles.” Josie fanned herself.
“So far, so good,” Victoria said. “I’m consulting the spirits for him. The physical work is up to Tennie.”
“You used not to be so fine!”
“I’m not his type, Josie. Tennessee is. He likes a bit more flesh than I can offer. I hear he was a skirt chaser in his youth.”
“His youth ending yesterday, maybe?” Annie Wood laughed. “He isn’t one of our customers or any other sporting house. Usually he chases governesses. That’s a sign of great laziness or great miserliness. He never gives away a penny. Can you squeeze blood from that stone?”
Josie chimed in, “Jim told me a story about him. Some years ago he was interested in a governess. His wife wouldn’t go away for a while, so he had her committed to a madhouse. Other people say he did that because she wouldn’t leave Staten Island and move to Manhattan. But he sure did have her locked up. Finally William, the oldest, got some doctor to swear there was nothing wrong with her and got her freed. But she’s stayed out of his way since, Jim says.”
“We dine with him regularly. He doesn’t give us diamonds or fine gowns, but he does pass over cash. He’s had mediums on call for years. When he wants something for himself, he puts out the money.”
“Mediums?” Josie laughed. “Jim doesn’t believe in that bunk, and neither do I. Table-rapping. Scary noises.”
“I do believe in the spirits. I’ve felt their presence many times. Why be surprised that the next life touches at least tangentially on this one?” Victoria leaned back in her chair, a little defensive.
“So he really believes in all that?”
Victoria was very careful what she said about Vanderbilt, for she felt if it got back to him they’d lose their sponsor. She said only what she felt he would not mind others knowing. She had heard him tell several people about his communication with spirits. “He was haunted by a ghost some years ago, that was how his interest began. He sleeps with dishes of salt under the four legs of his bed to keep them away. A medium he used to consult told him to do that.” She did not add that one ghost was that of a boy his coach had run down in the street, and the second ghost was a signalman killed on his line whose family he had refused to compensate. Those were the spirits he wanted kept away.
“And everybody thinks he’s so hardheaded. Each man has his weakness,” Josie said. “I’m sure glad that Jim’s is me.”
As Victoria was leaving, Annie gave her the usual list of the chemicals and preparations her girls would need. Their business had grown slowly at first, but seemed to be burgeoning lately. One madam told another. It was a second source of income. Victoria didn’t like being entirely dependent on Vanderbilt’s largesse. Any patron could change his mind; every one did eventually. She confided in Annie that she was determined never to be forced to go to bed with a man she did not want for himself—because he was attractive to her physically or because he was intelligent, knowledgeable—a man who could teach her something she passionately wanted to learn. Love was a malleable thing; after all, she had loved some real losers, like Dr. Woodhull. Sex was too powerful to use for gain. It was an overwhelming force that linked her to deeper powers, and she intended to go only where its magnetism pulled her. She could never endure sexual contact with Vanderbilt, even if it had been her he had pursued and not her sister.
James was working for his brother, who ran a press in Newark. He commuted via the ferries, staying over several nights a week. Today Buck was out with the rest of the clan. Victoria had suggested they go sightseeing, recommending the Croton Reservoir—Fifth Avenue from Fortieth to Forty-second Street—a huge Egyptian-style edifice that resembled a fort. It had towers on the corners and granite walls over forty feet thick. It was a popular place for a promenade, strolling on top of those walls looking down on the city. The clan’s absence gave her and Tennie time to discuss how to begin slowly and gradually feeding the tips she got from Annie and Josie to Vanderbilt.
“His mother,” Tennie said. “He has enormous respect for his mother. When he had that huge steam yacht and sailed to Europe, he made the captain give a twenty-one gun salute as they passed her place on Staten Island. He thinks she was one shrewd lady. She lent him the hundred dollars that star
ted him on his career.”
Tennie rather liked the Commodore. Old boy, she called him to his face, and he preened in her attention. She felt she could handle him. “He’s falling apart, sure, everything from top to bottom is wrong with him. He lived hard and he’s paying the price. He eats as if food were going to vanish from the earth in the next hour and leave only stones to gnaw on. You’ve seen him shovel it in.”
Indeed, they dined with the Commodore regularly, when he ate more than both of them together times four. He would consume several dozen oysters, most of a ham and roast beef and pudding besides, with maybe a turkey leg or two thrown in. “You must improve his habits. We want him to last a while.”
“I’m working on it. I’ve got him to cut back on his smoking. He enjoys my scolding him. It makes him jolly.”
“As long as you can manage him. I couldn’t, frankly. And as long as you’re comfortable. I don’t want you doing anything you don’t want to.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ve been with some real oafs, Vickie, and more than one brute. The old boy’s okay. He can be really mean when he wants to be, but with me he wants to be warm and almost cuddly. I like the way he treats me. I’m not interested in being kept like Josie. I want money, not presents. I want my own life to come home to. Unless he marries me, of course. That I’d go along with.”
“Be careful. There is one very alive Mrs. Vanderbilt.”
“She’s not that alive. They haven’t shared a bed in thirty years.”
“They shared one pretty vigorously before that. Eleven children, is it?”
“She stays up in her part of the house. All the times we’ve both been there, you ever seen her?”
“Never. Are you saying she doesn’t exist?”
“I caught a glimpse of her once, going out as I was coming in. She simply nodded at me and got into a maroon landau and the coachman drove her off—visiting one of her daughters. The Commodore is a stone-cold miser with his daughters. They aren’t real Vanderbilts, he says, and he begrudges them every dollar.”
“He was crazy about George, the son he has me communing with.”
“Well, if he did love George, that was his only kid he has any feeling for. All those children, and he couldn’t care less. She’s his cousin, you know.” Seeing Victoria’s blank expression, she added, “His wife. He says that was a mistake and that’s why all his kids except the dear departed George are idiots.” Tennie shook her head. “He says his wife isn’t well.”
“They all say that. She doesn’t understand me. She’s on death’s doorstep. We haven’t been together in thirty years. She has a lover. Or she has no interest in sex and she doesn’t mind…”
Tennie laughed from the belly, that infectious unladylike bellow of amusement that always made Victoria smile. When she caught her breath, Tennie said, “Yeah, I never had a client in the old days who said, I love my wife, she understands me just fine. We get along perfectly. I just want to fuck.”
“Did Mrs. Vanderbilt strike you as unbalanced? Remember, Josie said he had her committed to an insane asylum.”
“He said he’d figured out how to get her to stay out of his way. She didn’t look crazy, but then, how does a crazy person look?”
“Be careful what you say around Buck and Roxanne and the rest of the clan.”
Tennie sighed, propping her round chin on her folded arms with their luxurious dimples showing above her chemise. Her dress lay on the bed ready to put on to dine with Vanderbilt. “I do watch my step with the old boy, Vickie, ’cause I don’t think he’s the forgiving sort.”
THE GASLIGHT WAS DIMMED and only candles were burning, the way she liked it. She opened her mind and waited until she felt a spirit approaching. She believed in communicating with those who had passed over, some recently, some long, long ago. She experienced them in visions and when their minds brushed hers. The spirits did not care for loud noises or too many people. Theirs was a more tranquil, harmonious existence. But it was possible to mentally urge the spirits to communicate certain facts or ideas. After all, the dead were not stupid. They kept up with what was happening in their families.
Vanderbilt sat up expectantly across the round table from her. She liked to use a round table and had requested one. He had this table delivered that they’d used ever since, with a black cloth over it and a candle burning in the center. Tennie sat to her left, Vanderbilt to her right but farther away.
Victoria had discovered the power of being a medium when she was still a child. Women were not supposed to speak in public. But if they were spiritualists, they could collect an audience and make a decent living, or they might be really good at it like Laura Cuppy Smith or Cora Hachen, who worked the lecture circuit. Otherwise, only actresses could stand up in front of an audience and get paid instead of punished, but mediums were far more respectable. Mediums were almost holy, vessels for the spirits of those who had passed over. People came to mediums wanting reassurance, comfort, information. They wanted to be told they were not guilty. In most families, half the children died in infancy or early childhood. Their parents wanted to hear that the children were in a good place and happy, perhaps that they were still growing up there, and that their life on the other side was better than their life had been in this world. People wanted to be told the eternal hellfire that preachers had threatened them with did not exist; that the afterlife was much like this, only better. Almost every family had lost a young man in the Civil War, and they wanted to hear that their dead were doing fine on the other side.
Victoria had learned to be skilled at reading people’s postures and small, often involuntary movements, unconscious reactions with their eyes, their mouth, their hands. She began with a kind of droning evocation, intended as much to put Vanderbilt in the mood as to do anything for the spirits. When she had him intent but relaxed, expectant, she went into what she thought of as her higher state.
“Someone is here. O spirit who wants to approach Cornelius, O spirit of a loved one perhaps, speak! Hear my voice, heed my plea, and speak to us…
At this point Tennie would make a kind of sound with a rattle she kept under her skirt. She had attached it to her leg before they sat down, so that she could make the sound when they were holding hands around the circle. Afterward, she would pass it off to Victoria while she had her intimate time with the Commodore. The rattle—filled with dry beans and sand—made an unearthly sound. It was just to create a mood. The spirits didn’t mind and it helped create the kind of quiet receptivity she needed.
Victoria altered her voice. She could feel the spirit nearing. She could feel the power moving through her. She spoke in the voice she had learned by trial and error made Vanderbilt think of his mother. “My son…my son…”
“Mother? Are you here?” He sat forward, clutching her hand till she winced.
“I am here, son. I’m glad you are beginning to take care of yourself. My son, often you take better care of your money and your horses than of your own body.”
“Well, we all get damned old, Mama. I’m no brawling youth any longer.”
“You will pass over to me in God’s good time, but in the meantime I want you to take better care of your body.”
“Do you have any news for me, Mama?”
“Yes, my son. You have been having trouble with the jackals of Erie.”
“Fisk and Gould and Daniel Drew. Damned sons of bitches, blast them to hell. I could eat their balls for breakfast, Mama.”
“You sound the same as you ever did, son. But don’t despair. Something is about to change, I can see.”
“What, Mama? Am I going to beat them?”
“I don’t see that, son, But they are going to come to you. They are going to come begging an end to the wars of Erie. I can see that.”
“When, Mama?”
“Time is not the same here as it is there, my son. I can’t tell you when. Now I’m tired. You know this is difficult. I will speak with you again soon, my son, soon.”
“Mama, don�
�t leave me yet. Don’t go.”
Victoria let her head droop. She was silent. There, she had got her message across. Vanderbilt would be prepared for what Josie had let drop, that Fisk and Gould were hoping to settle with the Commodore. They weren’t about to turn over their profits, but they were seeking some kind of compromise that would let everybody go home with a piece of the Erie pie. They were tired of the battle of corrupt judge versus corrupt judge, constant payoffs. They were tired of bribing legislators wholesale and piecemeal. They were tired of their toughs from the Irish gang in Chelsea against Vanderbilt’s gang of hired Dead Rabbits. It was time to end the Erie War. They must reach a negotiated peace. Now Vanderbilt would have time to prepare, to expect the approach of the two men who had fleeced him with watered stock for months and taken seven million of his hundred million. He could not forgive that. But he could get some of his own back.
The Commodore was extremely pleased. He bussed her on the cheek and handed her fifty dollars in gold. “If they come to me and offer me a deal I can live with, then Erie will go up. I’ll keep you posted. Maybe I’ll give you some of the wallpaper they fed to me when I was trying to gain control. Yes, if what you say comes true, I’ll give you both some Erie stock.”
NINE
SINCE HIS PROMOTION, Anthony had lost touch with Edward. Now Anthony was a salesman in women’s notions—ribbons, laces, embroideries, sewing supplies. He worked wholesale, not door to door, contracting with the new enormous stores like Stewart’s and Lord & Taylor and with many smaller shops throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Other salesmen were jealous he had been given such a choice route when usually beginning salesmen were sent off to remote regions where they had to travel from town to town. Getting that stellar route might have had something to do with his joining the same Brooklyn church as his boss. Or perhaps his boss thought he was of good character—as he tried to be.